Unfortunately, that earned momentum doesn’t last long. After the intriguing opening, you’re forced into a glacially-paced flashback/tutorial. Here, you flip back and forth between awkwardly climbing cliff faces and *checks notes* dragging a big vacuum around and getting your ass handed to you by the game’s complex combat system. It’s here the game’s biggest sin first appears: during exploration or combat, you are constantly interrupted by text tutorials, forced camera movement, and the chatter of your companions—often happening all at once!

The flashback/tutorial ends with Cloud limping through a burning village, and I cannot emphasize how slow and boring this sequence is. The chaos of the fire and the bombastic music—not to mention the liberal use of slow motion—try so hard to hammer how important and epic this moment is, but what’s actually happening is completely drama-less. It’s the Zack Snyder-fication of video game storytelling: big moments, no feeling.

Finally released from the tutorial’s clutches, we catch up with our party in the present day, on the run but free of Midgar. But wait, didn’t we see them all incapacitated and captured by Shinra? I’m currently 12 hours into the game, and this alternate universe/timeline/whatever has not been explained.

After another hour of forced tutorials and a stealth sequence, the party escapes into the wilderness, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth actually starts in earnest. The wide world of the planet is ahead of you, villainous hotboy Sephiroth is somewhere out there, and the evil forces of Shinra are in pursuit. What kind of new adventure does the immortal Final Fantasy have in store for us?

It’s a goddamned open-world game. There are little clusters of monsters to fight, and sidequests to complete, and crafting materials to gather. They even have towers. Towers! That reveal more icons on the map! It’s 2024!

Needless to say—which is part of the problem—dumping you into an open world sequence completely kills the game’s momentum. Despite narrowly evading Shinra forces in the town of Kalm, you can just… go back there to play a useless card game, take on a photo mode challenge, or accept a sidequest where you repair a pipeline. Didn’t we spend the entirety of the last game trying to blow those up? Who cares! Numbers go up!

This is Rebirth‘s biggest problem: it wants to be the only video game. Not just the only game you are playing, the only game, period. Members of the development team have said a few times that Rebirth is a great starting point for the series. Which is ridiculous! This is a sequel to a remake of a portion of a game that came out in 1997! 

The characters and environments are lovingly recreated based on our memories of the original Final Fantasy 7. The story assumes familiarity with both the original and Remake, and the combat system basically requires some affinity with other action games, but all the tutorials and handholding treat the player like it’s the first time they’ve ever picked up a controller. Who is the audience for Rebirth other than “PS5 owners?”

Let’s get real basic for a second: What are the motivations of this story? Why is Cloud pursuing Sephiroth? Vengeance, I guess—we see in the first scene that Sephiroth killed Cloud’s mom—except, because of the weird glitchy video thing, maybe he didn’t. Why is Aerith following Cloud? Because she has a crush on him? What about Red XIII? He seems to want revenge for what Shinra did to him, but he’s also pretty chill about it. In fact, everyone is pretty chill about everything, because any sort of driving force might distract the player from visiting all the little icons on the map.

Do you ever notice how, in a book series like Harry Potter, the books get longer as the series continues? As writers become more successful, the role of the editor falls away so that “the fans”—that nebulous, angry, wallet-burning glob of Twitter usernames—don’t feel robbed of the divine genius of their current favorite creative. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is in desperate need of an editor, someone who can evaluate the project as a whole and say, hey, maybe we don’t need a crappy Mario Kart ripoff in the middle of our 100-hour-long melodrama. It’s like the entire development process of this game was just that webcomic of that guy getting chucked out a window over and over again for 6 years. 

It’s an interesting time to release something as bloated and directionless as Rebirth. Entertainment is in a weird place: the gaming industry has seen a brutal wave of mass layoffs and streaming services keep upping their prices while pumping out more and more mediocre content, and both have impossibly high standards of profitability that are only getting higher. 

On the other hand, the movie industry is thriving: 2023 was one of the best years for movies ever, with big movies by big directors that lived up to the hype critically and made a ton of money. 2024 has already seen the release of Dune Part Two, a thoughtful and intelligent blockbuster that also happens to totally kick ass. Hopefully, video games take the right lessons from this era of high-budget films with art house souls—before we’re all buried in the content sludge.

Storycraft is a column by Colin Munch that dives into storytelling in video games and other media. You can read his other work here.

There’s a lot of entertainment out there. Eleven major streaming services, over 400 movies a year, and hundreds of video games across three major consoles and PC — and that’s not counting sports, music, dance, theater, Christmas markets, D&D live playthroughs, and wasting the time of the guys who cold call you offering to clean your air ducts.

All of this *shudder* content doesn’t just sit there — there are millions of dollars of advertising directing you to it all, and it isn’t just a matter of keeping up with the times. Did you watch both Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day? Congratulations, you participated in an event that was not only culturally significant but also marked you as both a feminist and a historian and someone interested in interrogating the stories we’re told about our culture, our history, and ourselves. Wow! All that in 5 hours!

It’s not just exhausting — it’s deafening. And it’s a tough cycle to break. What you watch is part of your identity, and brands have seized on this to keep you paying, playing, and complaining. 

So, here, I’m gonna give you a gift:

It’s okay to stop caring about stuff that doesn’t make you happy anymore.

Here’s how.

Step 1: Pick the TV shows or video games you’re not enthusiastically enjoying and drop them. TV shows change writers, actors get bored, and executives push for bigger and more dramatic storylines. All these things are out of your control; no amount of whining about it online will change that. 

Video games change, too. Characters get rebalanced, patches screw things up, and scopes change. I play Destiny exclusively single-player, something the game hasn’t been built for in years. We broke up. It’s fine.

Step 2: Admit you’re a victim of marketing. I thought Tears of the Kingdom looked like a boring rehash of Breath of the Wild. I bought it anyway because it’s The New Zelda, and I’m supposed to care about The New Zelda. After eight hours, despite all the cool new stuff, it felt like a boring rehash of Breath of the Wild. I just played too much of the first one to enjoy it. That’s a me problem, and that’s okay. Trust your instincts.

Step 3: Cancel your streaming services. Limit your options to improve your sanity. My wife and I keep Prime Video because we order enough stuff from Amazon to make it worth it. We also have Shudder because we watch a lot of horror, and it’s like $6/month. A few times a year, I’ll pay for the Criterion Channel for a month, especially when they do something cool like the Japanese Noir showcase they did last year. Supporting Shudder and Criterion feels like helping a small business. Rotating your subs between the Big 3 is elite behavior.

Again, this applies to video games. Do you need both GamePass and PlayStation Plus? How often are you actually using these? Do you require all three Mafia games to be accessible to you at a moment’s notice?

Step 4: Acknowledge that characters aren’t real. I hear it all the time. “I stuck with Game of Thrones because I needed to see what happened!” Reader, nothing happened. None of this is real. Those people don’t exist. And, hey, you get to give a friend the experience of telling you what happened at Clegane Bowl. Remember Clegane Bowl?!

Step 5: Watch the first episodes of TV shows like they’re movies. Watching Season 1, Episode 1 of a show is a commitment to anywhere from 6 to a hundred hours. Watching a 60-minute movie called Reacher is easy and fun. Plus, if you really like that movie, they made like 12 more of them! Wow!

Step 6: Ignore stuff. Do you know what the most powerful words in the English language are? I don’t care about that. Next time a Starfield NPC asks you to scan a bunch of trees or whatever, you don’t have to do that. If someone asks you what you think about the state of the MCU, just shrug. You’ll get some resistance at first — we are supposed to care about everything — but you don’t have to. Care more about fewer things.

If you follow these steps, you’ll gradually, consciously uncouple yourself from the pop culture morass. Now what? Reader, it’s time to start healing.

Step 7: Follow creators, not brands. Disney isn’t Star Wars, DC isn’t Batman, and the people making the new Dragon Age game aren’t the same people who made Dragon Age: Origins. The reason Andor was so good wasn’t because it was a “darker” Star Wars story – it’s because it was made by the guy who wrote The Bourne Identity. 

Step 8: Watch, read, and play what those creators do. One of the few good things about social media is the access you get to writers, directors, and actors. Nobody creates in a vacuum, and all art is a conversation. Did you love The Batman? You should watch Se7en. Did you like Se7en? You should watch The French Connection. Most creators don’t “rip people off” — they learn how to apply what they like to their own work. Martin Scorcese is an awesome resource for this.

Step 9: Find critics you trust. If you read a review online that you agree with, go to the top of the page and see who wrote it, then follow them on social media. For the love of God, ignore Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, and anyone obsessed with box office numbers or other sales metrics. Once you let go of caring what “the majority” thinks, you’ll be truly free.

One last thing: do not feel shame about what you fill your brain with. As the great philosopher Sheryl Crow said, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” Just don’t forget the next line of that song, “If it makes you happy, then why the hell are you so sad?”

Storycraft is a monthly column by Colin Munch that focuses on the stories we love. You can check out all his previous work here.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Final Fantasy XVI producer Naoki Yoshida was asked about the game’s obvious Western fantasy influences. He offered the following: “(W)hen we saw how Game of Thrones, and before that the Song of Ice and Fire series, has really resonated with players, we knew that this was something that we wanted to do as well.”

Basing your high-fantasy video game off one of the most successful IPs of all time isn’t a bad idea. Still, anytime I hear about how a paradigm-changing piece of art has “influenced” a creator, I wonder what specific part of that thing they are taking for themselves.

Remember when Batman Begins came out and kicked off a whole generation of “dark” superhero movies? Forget the incredible cinematography, the verisimilitude of the world, the A-list actors, and the exploration of the toll being Batman has on the psyche of the people Bruce Wayne loves and the city of Gotham as a whole. The only thing many superhero movies, and movies in general, took from Batman Begins was this vague mandate to make everything “dark.” What does “dark” mean? What makes a movie “dark”? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does, either. It’s an executive note that has no creative juice behind it.

In the above quote, Yoshida doesn’t say what about Game of Thrones resonated with players, only that something did. After playing Final Fantasy XVI, I wonder if his team understands Game of Thrones at all. I know one thing for sure: Whatever the narrative team’s intent, Final Fantasy XVI does not possess the courage or the patience to dig deep into what it purports to be inspired by.

In short, Final Fantasy XVI’s story is as shallow as a tide pool. This is broad blockbuster storytelling, where characters speak (or scream) instead of feeling. The action is loud, flashy, and without consequence. The characters are narrative cudgels who exist only to bash you over the head with the story’s themes. It’s pure “tell, don’t show”: We know what characters want because they constantly remind us, but why they want these things, and the toll the pursuit takes on them, is left to us to create. It’s like watching a YouTube video of a roller coaster.

Let’s compare two big moments in Game of Thrones and Final Fantasy XVI: the destruction of the Sept of Baelor in GoT and the death of Cid in FFXVI.

At the end of season 6 of Game of Thrones, Cersei is censured, arrested, and shamed. All the horrible things she’s done have finally caught up to her. She is irrevocably changed. Even if you watch the show on mute, you can tell something is different: Her signature golden hair has been roughly cut short, and her bright red Lannister clothes have been replaced with severe black and silver dresses that look more like armor than gowns. We know she’ll get back at the people who wronged her, but not how. That tension of knowing the why but not the how pulls us along like a raging river.

The threat of wildfire had simmered through the show since the end of season 2 when Tyrion used it to destroy an entire fleet. The genius of Game of Thrones was that watching it felt like playing the Game yourself: You know vaguely who has what in their arsenal, but not when they’ll deploy it.

In season 6, two of Cersei’s biggest enemies are in the same place at the same time: Queen Margaery, Cersei’s biggest obstacle to taking the throne, and the High Sparrow, who, as the realm’s religious leader, is the only person who is arguably more powerful than she is. We know something is going to happen. When it does, it’s spectacular: Cersei’s entire wildfire stockpile goes off underneath the Sept of Baelor, incinerating many of her enemies and leveling the building. It’s not just a political move; both of these characters have deliberately hurt Cersei, and people who do that don’t tend to survive.

The scene is scored with a version of the show’s theme that is somehow even heavier on the cello, underlining that a major moment is about to happen. There’s no doubt that these characters are about to die. We see the wildfire, we hear Margaery figure out Cersei’s plot, and we feel the inevitability of the action, that pit-in-your-stomach feeling the show was so good at. Cuts, music, writing, and acting are all deployed to build tension that explodes along with the Sept in the biggest boom of the series.

It’s also a resolution of a personal vendetta. The Sept of Baelor represented Cersei’s public shame. By destroying it, she destroys that shame. That’s a lot of character payoff built into a single event. In the end, the how and the why are crystal clear.

(Damn, this show was good!)

The event would be effective on its own, but at its best, Game of Thrones was about consequences as much as action. The consequences of Cersei’s mass murder are immediate and devastating: King Tommen, Cersei’s only living child, knowing his wife has just been incinerated, throws himself out his bedroom window.

We know all these characters, their backstories, and their motivations. We know the tools they have at their disposal. Nothing is kept from us to build tension artificially. We know exactly what will happen and are powerless to stop it. Game of Thrones‘ best moments encapsulate the message that the ruling class will do whatever it wants to, and the masses (i.e., us) are caught in the middle.

Now to Final Fantasy XVI. At the end of Act One, Clive, Jill, and Cid infiltrate the Holy City of Sanbreque to destroy the city’s Mothercrystal. They reach the Mothercrystal and break it… somehow, leading to a cutscene of the whole thing disintegrating and random people in the city fleeing in terror. We never see any characters we know, like the Dame who runs the brothel in the next town over or the leader of Sanbreque, react to this event, and there seem to be no consequences or collateral damage.

The Mothercrystal was concealing a portal from which a monster of ambiguous origin tries to emerge. Cid shoots some lighting at it and is severely hurts in the process. Clive gets sucked into the portal, a big kaiju fight happens, and he reemerges. But, oh no! His really good friend Cid, who has used, lied, and manipulated him from the moment they met, is now mortally wounded. This makes Clive sad/angry.

There’s a melodramatic death scene filled with empty talk of fate and purpose. Then Cid lights a smoke, a thing that he does, and dies. Clive then screams at the ceiling, because God forbid we have one second of quiet. Then they’re attacked by the monster Clive had defeated in the portal. Or maybe it’s some other monster, or maybe a god? Is it the voice in Clive’s head? Cid seemed to know what it was, but we sure don’t, so the threat is totally inert.

It’s all how and no why.

But this is about halfway through the story, so the revelations keep coming! Clive and Jill are rescued from this new threat by Joshua, Clive’s brother, who was presumed dead at the end of the prologue but whom the game has teased was still alive about a dozen times. Joshua saves Clive and Jill by screaming nonsense about “who he is” and conjuring a massive wall of fire in a perfect metaphor for the game’s drama: It’s all flash, no consequence. Is the fire Joshua conjures hot? Does it burn you? Or does it just knock numbers off your health bar? It certainly doesn’t skeletonize you as the wildfire does in Game of Thrones. These aren’t people. They’re action figures.

Clive and his brother don’t even reunite. Clive and Jill pass out, punting this reunion a few more hours down the field.

Wait, there’s more unmotivated drama! We cut to the Hideaway, Cid’s super secret rebel base, being raided by villains. A minor bad guy, acting on behalf of a larger bad guy, had discovered the location of the Hideaway by just following the heroes back there and then told the other bad guys where to attack.

At least Final Fantasy XVI should finally be able to deploy the most blunt instrument in the Game of Thrones arsenal: killing off named characters. So long, Sassy Old Lady Merchant. Sayonara, Aloof Herbalist. Arrivederci, Mysterious Blacksmith. Except, no, nobody important dies. A lot of NPCs get sliced up, one guy gets his eye cut, and that minor bad guy is stabbed, but everyone seems to get away just fine, even when the massive Titan arrives to flatten the Hideaway. That should be cool! Except we cut away before we see it do anything.

Maybe we’ll learn of the consequences of this massive loss when we take control of Clive again?

Nope. Instead, we get a time jump. The game jumps ahead a laughable five years. Do you remember the person you were five years ago? How many moments have you had, how much growth have you undergone, and how much heartbreak, triumph, joy, sadness, anger, failure, and success have you had in the last half-decade? I bet it’s a lot! We see none of this. Clive and Jill appear to be pretty much the same. They haven’t even changed their goddamned outfits!

We are shown absolutely nothing of the consequences of our character’s actions. The five-year time jump completely deflates whatever the emotional impact Cid’s death or the destruction of the Hideaway may have had. We don’t see anyone mourn Cid (then, at least), and there seem to have been minimal consequences to the Sanbreque Mothercrystal’s destruction. The Resistance’s new Hideaway seems pretty rad, and all those memorable characters are still alive, ready to sell you slightly better swords and slightly better potions. Worse, Clive is still a miserable asshole complaining about his dangerous “power,” which we, the audience, are no closer to understanding.

Final Fantasy XVI has none of the patience of its supposed influence material. You can definitely make the argument that Game of Thrones wasn’t very emotionally mature either, but at least it understood that those indelible, culture-grabbing moments only grabbed the culture in the first place because there was space and time in-between the big battles and betrayals for breath and reflection. FFXVI does give its moments space, but that space is filled with Clive effortlessly kicking the shit out of monstrous plants or sidequests about people getting lost 100 meters away from the person looking for them.

It’s why people are still salty over the ending of Game of Thrones. The show’s internal consistency over alliances, motivations, and even geography was discarded in favor of big set-piece moments and end-of-episode twists, and even those were poorly handled. Daenerys Targaryen’s turn to evil didn’t come out of nowhere; it was very deliberately set up through the run of the show, but the actual moment she flips is terrible. All her scheming, planning, and benevolence fall apart when she realizes the people of King’s Landing aren’t stoked to have a conqueror flying over their city on a dragon, and she just sort of snaps. They don’t even give her a line! Emilia Clarke was pretty good at playing Dany, but asking an actor to communicate all that with just her face is borderline cruel.

Just like Diablo IV, Final Fantasy XVI uses the iconography and cultural connection we have with a piece of art that it has neither the patience nor the understanding to emulate properly. It’s not for lack of trying — it’s obvious a lot of money went into the game’s story — but when that story is as shallow, unmotivated, and ignorant of human behavior as this one, I’d rather it not have one at all.

Peele, Eggers, and Aster’s movies are well made, with high storytelling ambitions. There is real work, craft, and thoughtfulness to these pictures. Everything is carefully assembled to tell a singular, contained story that serves as an allegory for a significant issue. They’re also scary as hell.

Diablo always goes big with its storytelling ambitions — there isn’t anything bigger than the battle between heaven and hell. While the original Diablo story is modest, the franchise has consistently escalated the stakes from basic beginnings. No matter how many times the player kills Diablo himself, the journey to get there always feels epic and earned.

But for a game series whose namesake — and main antagonist — is literally the Lord of Terror, Diablo isn’t scary. The first game comes the closest to true horror. All the games have frightening imagery, but the series never reached the level of oppressive dread captured so well by the original. Descending into the depths of Tristram Cathedral, peering through inky darkness for skeletons and zombies, remains chilling even at low resolution. Diablo II’s fourth act, set in the jet-black fortress dimension of Pandemonium, comes closest to the gloom of the original, but it comes after several hours of wide-open swamps, deserts, and jungle.

Keeping things scary while the stakes rise is something horror franchises have always struggled with. Alien, The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The sequels to these classics go big and expand the universe and characters but usually lean into action or cheap thrills over scares. No one is going to make the argument that Jaws 2 is scarier than Jaws!

Often, it takes a full-on reboot to bring a horror franchise back to its roots. Evil Dead Rise and Prey are good recent examples, and early screenshots of Diablo IV, with its spindly demons and dank tombs, looked to be taking a page from those decades-long stories: Go back to a more straightforward story, and borrow filmmaking techniques from modern horror masters like Eggers and Aster.

Like its predecessors, Diablo IV starts with a spectacular opening cutscene. It’s grimy, epic, and legitimately scary, with the demon Lilith emerging from a lattice of flesh conjured by human sacrifice. The atmosphere carries into the character selection screen, which is presented Diablo II-style, with the potential heroes gathered around a gloomy campfire. Your first steps into the game are preceded by a portentous in-engine cutscene cut like a Denis Villeneuve movie, and your first combats against hungry wolves are slow and deliberate, with little of the flash we expect from Diablo.

Your first foray into a dungeon, ending in a battle against a massive demon on the same altar from the opening cutscene, is subdued. There are giant blood pentagrams and conjured hellhounds, but the fight feels both focused and bombastic. Most Diablo titles start small like this — the better to sell the power fantasy. Diablo IV is still Diablo, just with a veneer of elevated horror.

When you return to town, the game does something remarkable.

The townspeople drug your character. You pass out, and the camera floats into a long, slow aerial shot of our hero dragged through town on the back of a cart. The sweeping orchestral score and choral chanting give way to a mournful, ominous drone overlaid with the throaty hums of your captor. It’s very different from what we’re used to from Blizzard, which, as far back as Warcraft II, has deployed broad, colorful storytelling to great effect. This moment isn’t broad or colorful: It’s grim and gray, and that’s before the ominous prophecy slithers onto the screen:

I saw my corpse, and from my mouth crawled Hatred,
A father burned his children on a pyre,
and a mother molded a new age from the ashes,
I saw the weak made strong,
a pack of lambs feasting on wolves,
Tears of blood rained on a desert jewel,
and the way to Hell was torn asunder,
Then came a spear of light, piercing Hatred’s heart,
And he who was bound in chains was set free.

I mean, damn. That’s cool as hell! With this cutscene, Diablo announces itself as part of the current horror conversation.

It’s an arrival Diablo almost immediately walks back. The problem is that Diablo is not a slow-burn, arthouse horror movie made by an auteur director. It’s one of the biggest video game releases of the year, probably of the decade, a tentpole blockbuster produced by a legendary developer-turned-entertainment-juggernaut, one whose reputation has suffered greatly in the last decade. Diablo IV has a lot riding on it, and as much as I’m sure the art and narrative team wanted to make something that played like The Northman, we got a blockbuster action game with an A24 skin.

The vast divide between story and gameplay is a common problem in AAA games. Games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, where storytelling and gameplay are intertwined, are few, and I don’t blame Blizzard for producing the Diablo IV that we got. The gameplay is really fun, but the artistic side of the game has so much potential wasted on a game where you punch monsters until they explode into clothes and money. In fact, I think the art direction hurts the gameplay: The monsters are all so horrific and “realistic” that they aren’t as readable as the colorful demons and ghosts of prior games, to say nothing of the enemies you fight that are just, like, dudes or the ghosts of dudes.

The Witch and Hereditary use horror tropes like witches and cults as a lens to examine complex ideas like religious isolation and generational trauma. Hereditary uses dollhouses and miniatures to illustrate how the characters have no agency in the story. Does Diablo IV’s isometric perspective illustrate that the characters are puppets fighting a war between heaven and hell they have no choice but to wage? Or is it because it was the most efficient way to render hordes of monsters in 1997? Why did they keep that perspective for all four games? Is there a creative reason? Does it speak to the story being told? Or is the answer the same as in 1997 and avoiding the apocalyptic outcry if they ever changed Diablo into an FPS?

The true center of video game criticism will always be the balance among tech, art, and business. Movies have a 100-year headstart over games on navigating this balance. As long as big-budget games prioritize tech and business, we’ll get more games like Diablo IV, where artistic integrity is nothing more than an arthouse skin pulled tightly over a shallow skeleton.

Related: All Diablo Games Ranked, by Twinfinite 

Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order is one of the bleakest Star Wars stories in the Disney era. Young Jedi Cal Kestis is only 18 years old, living in hiding as an indentured scrapper on a junkyard planet. He suffered an immeasurable trauma at 13, and although Fallen Order is sometimes a rollicking adventure story, it’s also about a young man haunted by horrific loss. His final decision at the end of the story, to spare other kids like him the same horror, is much more mature and complex than Star Wars usually allows. There’s no big explosion, no medal ceremony, at the end of Fallen Order, just a small found family standing over the shattered remains of a holocron, wondering if they made the right decision.

Five years later, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor gives no clear answer. Cal seems to have lost his way. Though now a capable and confident warrior, he puts himself at considerable risk conducting high-risk strikes on Imperial targets for Saw Gerrera, the man who, by the time of Rogue One, is considered too extreme for the Rebel Alliance. It’s interesting that Saw never actually appears in Jedi: Survivor, but his shadow looms large. The game doesn’t spell it out, but when Cal’s found family disintegrated, it’s clear that Saw stepped in to take advantage of Cal’s skills — and his rage.

When Cal’s mission to Coruscant goes horribly awry, his team killed or scattered and his ship neatly destroyed, Cal flees to the one person he knows will accept him no matter how far he’s fallen: Greez.

I loved Greez in Fallen Order. You’re supposed to love him. Played with effortless charisma by veteran character actor Daniel Roebuck, Greez is the dad of the story. In Jedi: Survivor, Greez is in full-on divorced dad mode: He’s sunk all his cash into a crappy bar in a crappy town and is content to drown his sorrow there.

The in-game encyclopedia entry says the only thing Greez wants is a family. He’s rendered completely inert by a lack of one, but even alone, he can’t help but create space for a family that may never come. In running Pyloon’s Saloon, Greez is trying to gain some control over his life. But Greez doesn’t need control; he needs a family, and even as Cal fills Pyloon with life, Greez doesn’t hesitate to leave it all behind and pilot the Mantis again. As long as he gets to cook for his family, Greez is happy. He learns that a family’s presence might be fleeting, but love doesn’t have to be — and home is where you make it.

Cal’s other mentor is Cere Junda, the Jedi Master who cut herself off from the Force. In Fallen Order, Cere learns to accept her failure. Jedi: Survivor is about her protecting others from making the same mistakes she did.

Cere seems to have left the warrior side of her Jedi skills behind. Wearing modest robes, a shaved head, and ritualistic tattoos, Cere has transformed into a mentor for many, not just for Cal. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is set roughly the same time as the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV show and borrows one of its better ideas: a galactic underground railroad for victims of Imperial tyranny. Cere is searching for other Jedi but accepts that her role is expanded to be a mother for all those seeking a better life away from the Empire.

When the Empire invades her Archive, the player takes control of Cere, and you get to see how powerful a Jedi Master really is. I always hated how the prequels handled Yoda and Mace Windu. These supposed ultra-Jedi didn’t seem much more powerful than anyone else. Cere absolutely tears through the invading Imperial forces. The only thing that slows her down is Darth Vader.

In Fallen Order, we learn that Vader broke Cere, leading her to betray her Padawan and a small group of Jedi younglings to the Empire. When she found out, Cere turned to the Dark Side. Cere is faced with a similar situation in Jedi: Survivor, but this time she fights, going toe to toe with Vader in the game’s hardest mainline boss fight. Cere’s sacrifice allows many others to survive.

Sharp-eared gamers will figure out Bode Akuna will be a major character pretty quickly: He’s voiced by Noshir Dalal, who played Charles in Red Dead Redemption 2. Dalal doesn’t just have a super cool action-hero voice; he brings a lot of vulnerability to his characters. Akuna constantly talks about how his daughter is the reason he’s running around the galaxy strapped to a jetpack. Initially, I figured we were in for a lame “twist”: Bode’s daughter is actually dead, and he’s doing all this for revenge. I was partially right, and the real twist plays into Survivor’s theme of long-term trauma.

Bode was secretly a Jedi all along. He worked for Republic Intelligence during the Clone Wars, learning how to hide his Jedi skills to infiltrate, exploit, and disrupt Separatist forces. After the Purge, he used his skills to go into hiding, where he eventually fell in love and had a daughter. When the Inquisition found and killed his wife, he made a deal with his old Republic Intelligence boss, now a director in the Imperial Security Bureau: The Empire would spare his daughter if he helped root out other Jedi in hiding.

If the main cast of Jedi: Survivor is learning to live with trauma, Bode has succumbed to it. He uses his daughter as an excuse for everything he does, even the mass murder of refugees. At the end of the game, Bode is given multiple opportunities to surrender; even his daughter begs him to stop. He does what he’s spent the whole game doing: using his trauma as a shield and a weapon. Ultimately, it kills him.

As an aside, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor has another antagonist, the fallen Jedi Dagan Gera. Gera is certainly a victim of trauma, but his inclusion in the story feels more like an excuse to bring the High Republic era out of the novels and into the mainstream Star Wars canon. His story is ultimately not as interesting as Bode’s.

On the whole, Jedi: Survivor takes what worked about Jedi: Fallen Order and improves on every aspect. The world is bigger and more detailed, the combat is tighter and more varied, the story is richer, and the characters are more complex. Fallen Order‘s examination of how trauma affects us all, young and old, trained and untrained, was more mature than Star Wars usually allows, but it was a common Hollywood version of trauma with a facile solution: Even if bad things happen to you, grit, determination, and heroics will see you through to the other side. Trauma as a story driver is way overused, and I was worried Jedi: Survivor would fall into the same trap as other stories that use it as an anchor.

Jedi: Survivor presents a much more realistic portrayal of trauma. The writers know that true trauma, the kind of horrific events like the ones experienced by Cal, Greez, Cere, and Bode, don’t ever truly leave you. You carry them with you, like stowaways on a spaceship, where they can sabotage your journey, or you can acknowledge them, bring them into the light of your family, and blunt their power.

When Cal gets in over his head at the beginning of the story, he quickly works to get his crew, his family, back together. The Jedi series isn’t about saving the galaxy. Both games are about protecting a small group of people, hiding them from an enemy too powerful for one young Jedi and his friends to take on alone. At the end of Survivor, Cal seems to have found his safe place, but it cost him dearly to find it.

About three-quarters of the way through the story, Cal reaches his breaking point and taps into the Dark Side. This is a plot-driven moment, but it isn’t a one-off: It replaces the Slow ability and functions exactly like God of War‘s “Rage” mode. By this point in the story, Cal’s Jedi mentors are dead, and the only person who sees him use it is Merren, the Dathomirian witch. Merren doesn’t have the same issue with using the darkness as his former Jedi Masters did, and she doesn’t caution Cal against using it. Loving someone with trauma sometimes means accepting the scars they bear because of it, but Merren’s indulgence of Cal’s anger could destroy them both.

Star Wars loves a trilogy. It’s clear that Jedi: Part 3 will tackle Cal’s dip into the Dark Side head-on, likely with his new apprentice, Bode’s daughter Kata, along for the ride. Will Cal fall, and will we play as Kata to take him down? It would be a brutal, depressing end for one of modern Star Wars‘ most interesting characters, but trauma is a beast. If you feed it, it grows.

Initially, I had been skeptical. Actually, I thought this game looked terrible. The first gameplay reveal video of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was everything wrong with Star Wars in 2019 — flashy, stuffed with references, and derivative. It was honestly a bit of a relief. In 2019 I was underemployed, living alone, and desperately single. I needed to set boundaries for my habits, and being able to ignore the big new Star Wars video game was a major step for my self-control.

When the game came out, the reviews validated my choice. The Escapist’s own review was particularly scathing and confirmed what I suspected: Five years into the Disney era, the franchise was lost in the weeds, bloated with nostalgia.

Then I got a DM from my friend Alexis: “So this game is Jedi Dark Souls.”

Friends, I am but a humble videogamesman in my mid 30s. There is a combination of words that can unlock untrod paths in my brain, like pop culture ASMR, secret even to me. I am a cultural sleeper agent waiting to be activated.

Turns out JEDI DARK SOULS is one of my trigger phrases.

I know, I know, cue the eye rolls. Nonetheless, Jedi Dark Souls is a fucking killer idea, and marrying that proven, tasty gameplay loop to a Jedi power fantasy is killer still. But Respawn’s writers went further: They explored the trauma of the Jedi living in the immediate aftermath of the Empire’s rise with more care and nuance than you would expect from the people who made Titanfall 2.

Trauma is way overused as a story motivator, and Star Wars has stumbled in conveying the horror of the Jedi purge many times, as recently as this season of The Mandalorian. Usually, this is a problem of tone. The Star Wars people have to show kids getting gunned down by soldiers, but they don’t want to traumatize anyone — so they let some teens do awesome flips with their laser swords before they get shot to death.

That these scenes are set in the prequel era, which is wrapped up in childhood nostalgia for many people, is even more problematic. It’s no wonder The Mandalorian crammed the guy who played Jar Jar Binks into a Jedi purge scene: anything to take a little pressure off the horrific corner they wrote themselves into.

But video games still live in this weird negative space where their stories often aren’t taken seriously. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was in development during the sequel trilogy, so you would expect Respawn to take its cues from those breezy, nostalgia-heavy blockbusters. But instead of some Force Awakens Jagermeister, Respawn took inspiration from the single-malt scotch of the franchise, Rogue One, in that Cal Kestis and Jyn Erso both have their lives destroyed by the Empire but try to live by their mentors’ noble ideals.

Unlike Jyn though, Cal has no community except for his scrapper buddy Brof. One of the aforementioned Jedi kids, Cal watched his father-figure Jedi Master get executed and fled to the horrifying planet of Bracca, where starships from the Clone Wars are cut into pieces, the defeated breaking down the tools of their lost war to make weapons for their oppressors. Rough stuff! Cal went into hiding and cut himself off from the Force.

It’s easy to imagine Cal living his life in the scrapyards, terrified of discovery and execution. One of the bleakest things about Fallen Order is where it sits in the timeline: Only four years after the end of the Clone Wars, the galaxy has a long wait until Luke kills the Emperor.

Luckily, Cal is discovered by former Jedi Cere and requisite loveable non-human Greez, who whisk Cal away on a galaxy-spanning romp. However, Cal gets used a lot, first by Cere, then by Saw Gerrera, and finally by the Empire itself. In the desperate times of the early Empire, loyalty is brittle and angry, and many people see a 20-year-old kid with a lightsaber as nothing more than a key. Cal goes along with it all less out of a sense of duty and more because he’s so achingly lonely, so frantic for someone to take care of him, he’ll endure anything to keep what he has.

A lot of people don’t like Cal Kestis. They think he’s boring, just another white male protagonist in a universe full of colorful alien species, literally. I agree Cal being human is a missed opportunity, but actor Cameron Monaghan gives him a depth of soul that is key to why his journey is so engrossing.

Monaghan’s enthusiasm for being in a Star War is infectious. He brings a genuine sense of wonder to what he’s seeing and doing, something the movies and TV shows have mostly failed to deliver. With exceptions, Disney Star Wars is pretty flat. The “John Williams” of it all makes moments that should drop our jaws and blast our eyeballs out of our sockets feel more like expected elements than soul-stirring moments. Monaghan’s performance sells it. It’s even more impressive when you remember he’s acting in a big motion-capture box with no sets or fancy LED walls to inspire him.

Monaghan has good, occasionally great, writing getting him there, but the narrative team knows when to let scenes breathe. The writing in Star Wars is pretty broad — characters say what they’re thinking out loud — but Fallen Order lets characters think and feel in silence.

Monaghan is supported by none other than Deborah Wilson, the Viola Davis of video game actors, and Daniel Roebuck, an all-star “That Guy” with over 250 credits going back to 1985. The scenes among Monaghan, Wilson, and Roebuck feel almost theatrical at times, with long takes and generous dialogue — not to mention interjections from space cutie BD-1, the droid friend so adorable they brought him back for The Mandalorian.

I know it’s not a perfect game. It was plagued with technical problems at launch. And even playing the spiffy modern PlayStation 5 version, there are moments where Cal’s animations will glitch out, or he’ll sink into the ground, or any number of graphical problems like bad bokeh and uneven lighting. It’s obvious the game was rushed out the door to help promote The Rise of Skywalker, and the fact the quality of this far superior experience was compromised to help make more money for a movie so vapid and careless is corporate art at its worst. If you can play it on PC, do; it’s a lot more stable and polished.

It’s not just the gameplay that has problems. The narrative is stretched a little thin, a common problem in too-long modern games, though Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is pretty lean. The Dathomir sequence could be cut in half at least, and even then, its storytelling foundation is shaky. Taron Malicos, the fallen Jedi, serves the same narrative purpose as Trilla, Cere’s fallen Padawan turned Inquisitor, but with much less emotional impact and character connectivity. The planet’s inclusion feels like an excuse to have a bunch of Clone Wars references.

Dathomir does provide a major story beat: the destruction of Cal’s lightsaber. The lightsaber is one of those indelible movie symbols that whole marketing campaigns are built around, like Indiana Jones’ fedora or Captain America’s shield. Fallen Order is no exception: The image of Cal’s busted lightsaber, blasted in half by the clone trooper that killed his master, is Fallen Order‘s central icon. It represents Cal’s journey from broken, frightened Padawan to full Jedi, culminating in his master’s saber being destroyed and building his own.

Narratively, it’s pretty tidy and something we’ve seen before: Luke and Rey build their lightsabers as metaphors for their self-actualization, to say nothing of Kyle Katarn or Corran Horn or any other Jedi from the vast multiverse of Star Wars. Lightsaber as rite of passage is potent.

Too bad the game totally blows its own narrative tidiness apart.

See, you can customize your lightsaber in Fallen Order. That’s not a fact. It’s a command. Imagine the clickbait rage headlines and angry Reddit posts if they hadn’t allowed lightsaber customization! I have no problem giving players the option of ignoring the narrative reason for Cal clinging to his master’s battered weapon. Though it pains me, I know a lot of people don’t give a womp rat’s ass about the stories in games.

But someone at Respawn made the call to force you to fuck with Cal’s lightsaber. At the top of the highest tree on Kashyyyk there is, for no reason at all, a workbench. You can’t walk by it, jump over it, or avoid it. As soon as you approach, Cal plonks his lightsaber down on the table, makes a couple of quick welds, and voila, he’s made himself a double-bladed lightsaber. How? Where did the parts come from? Why is that workbench at the top of a friggin’ tree? From a gameplay perspective, it doesn’t make sense because you use the double-bladed saber to fight groups of enemies, and you’re given it right before a one-on-one boss fight.

The worst part about this choice is the game bakes the double-bladed saber into the narrative. Cere gives Cal her old lightsaber. In a wonderful moment, Cal welds both sabers together, literally melding his old master with his new one, creating a symbol that represents them both. But that moment comes late in the story, because that’s how stories work, and we can’t withhold the Mega Cool Darth Maul Double Lightsaber from players for three quarters of the game!

As annoying as the narrative awkwardness and bugs can be, Fallen Order has a charm to it that makes it all bearable. Would I love this game so much if it weren’t Star Wars? Probably not! But that’s been true of the franchise since the ‘80s. We accept the jank and weirdness because we love the feel of this universe. The jank has always been part of the appeal, as far back as Industrial Light and Magic blowing up model spaceships with firecrackers in 1977.

That shaggy charm is what poor Star Wars projects, like The Rise of Skywalker and The Book of Boba Fett, are missing. It’s what saves Solo from being a cynical cash grab and keeps Rogue One from being a joyless slog. Cal racing BD-1 up the hill to the temple is charming, and because they nail that moment, you forgive careening off an ice slide into the abyss for the fifth time in a row.

At the time I’m writing this, we’re less than a week away from the release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the sequel to Fallen Order. It certainly looks like EA gave Respawn the time and money it needed to get the game where it needed to be, and there’s no terrible tentpole blockbuster it has to rush to promote. In fact, the way Star Wars has changed since 2019, Jedi: Survivor is the big tentpole blockbuster! I just hope, with all the time and money, the team hasn’t lost that essential, elusive charm that makes these stories worth experiencing again and again. I hope, among all the lightsabers and blasters, there’s still time for a race with your little buddy.

Horror video games have mostly kept pace with Hollywood’s new horror, with titles like Amnesia scaring the player with a more measured approach than just dumping monsters on them. Many modern horror games are terrifying but take themselves very seriously. Any hint of humor is banished, lest the game be lumped in with “kiddie” horror games like Five Nights at Freddy’s. The divide is clear: Adult horror games are about mental illness, and Twitch-ready horror games are about spooking kids.

Movies like Hereditary and The Lighthouse are sold on their art house bonafides, heirs to high-class shockers of the ‘70s and ‘80s like The Shining and Possession, but they’re not completely jokeless. Many modern horror games have missed the note that high-art horror doesn’t have to take itself 100% seriously all the time.

Enter Capcom’s revitalized Resident Evil. After a major reset with Resident Evil 7, which cribbed from the best in horror media circa 2017, Capcom has led the charge in making big-budget modern horror games that are well-designed, scary, and don’t take themselves too seriously. Resident Evil 7 and Village strike that balance nicely, but the remakes really impress.

The original Resident Evil 2 isn’t very scary, but its oddball charm and unique gameplay make it one of the most memorable games on the original PlayStation. Raccoon City is a bizarre place: an American city designed by a Japanese art team, and the strangeness seeps into the whole experience.

The remake of Resident Evil 2 updated the city’s design to make it feel more authentic to a small midwestern city circa 1998 — but kept the ridiculous name. The remake has amazing graphics and animation and a new third-person camera that makes everything feel realistic, but you’re still munching on green herbs for health and running around a place called Raccoon City. A terrifying giant invincible man chases you around the police station, but you can shoot his little hat off.

Manufacturing camp is tough. The original Resident Evil 2 found it through cultural osmosis. The remake took the initial concept and made it scarier and more modern — without losing the essential weirdness at the heart of the story.

Even before the remake of Resident Evil 3, anyone who knew anything about video games was thinking the same thing: Are they really going to remake Resident Evil 4? One of the best, most celebrated, most influential games of all time? And if they do, what do they change? How do you update a formula that modern action-horror games, and even their remakes, are still iterating on?

The plot of Resident Evil 4 is so absurd it could only be a video game, so the remake doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Right off the bat, you get an absolutely ridiculous exposition dump. After nuking an American city, the president of the United States hires Resident Evil 2 protagonist Leon Kennedy to work as a super-secret government agent. When the president’s daughter, Ashley, goes missing in the Spanish countryside, Leon is called to investigate and single-handedly rescue “Baby Eagle.”

It’s ridiculous, but the game plays it totally straight. There’s no obvious “wink” here; the wink is implied. Capcom knows the setup is stupid. The creators aren’t telling the player what to think of a 15-year-old video game plot. The player is in conversation with the storytellers.

When the intro is over, Capcom leans into the spectacular graphics of the RE Engine to deliver the expected dark, realistic, gory visuals, this time with a rural witchcraft vibe that is very Blair Witch. Within the first five minutes, you’re descending into the basement of a creepy old house in the woods festooned with hanging stick figures.

The first half hour or so of RE4 is pretty horrific. You watch a cop get burned alive, you brutally execute a few dozen villagers, and if you’re unlucky, you might get eviscerated by a chainsaw man. The beats are the same as in the original GameCube game, but the excellent graphics and a few new combat options keep the game feeling as fresh as it did in 2005.

Just as in the original, Capcom uses the Merchant character to break up the tension. Signposted by a bright purple flame, the inexplicably Aussie-accented merchant cracks jokes, buys treasure, and encourages you to upgrade your guns. This time, he has more to say beyond, “Is that all, stranger?” but what he’s really saying is, “I know you know this is a video game. We’re all in the joke together.”

People who aren’t horror fans don’t get that horror is fun, especially with a group. It’s why Twitch is stuffed with horror games and co-op ghost hunts like Phasmophobia. Resident Evil 4 is a single-player game, but supporting characters like the Merchant and Ashley, the president’s daughter, bring that midnight madness movie theater experience to the couch.

Let’s talk about Ashley. Though technically a college student, Ashley reads more like a teenager in the original. She’s in a very silly schoolgirl outfit, and the game can’t resist giving you a peek at her underwear. In the remake, she’s aged up considerably and behaves more like the daughter of the most powerful man in the world, someone who has been media-trained and has some leadership experience. They didn’t overcorrect and make her a karate expert or anything — Ashley is still useless in a fight — but she’s pretty cool under pressure.

And the pressure is ridiculous. Resident Evil games are known for packing a lot of variety into their locations. RE4 goes from village to lake to castle to mine to military camp. It’s a remarkable achievement in pacing: In the span of half an hour, you storm a castle under catapult fire, trade barbs with a deranged member of the Spanish aristocracy, fight a bunch of guys wielding tower shields and morningstars, and then hide from a blind torture monster in a dungeon. All the while, you’re hunting for treasure and doing other video game bullshit. It’s ridiculously pleasing.

It’s not quite a horror comedy, but it balances the tension among scary, gory, and funny with the best of them. Like Drag Me to Hell, it knows when to scare you and let you laugh. It doesn’t have anything to say; there’s no lofty underlying theme, but there could be in the parasite infecting the villagers.

Leon and Ashley are both infected, and an interesting angle could be in the player controlling a character infested with a parasite that controls your actions. Capcom isn’t interested in interrogating its plot. The plot is there to drive you from set piece to set piece, and it does a fine job.

Resident Evil 4 is a masterpiece of blockbuster storytelling. There’s just enough there to hold onto as the game sweeps you along on a bloody, funny, violent ride. Even if you haven’t played RE4, you’ve been on this ride before and will probably ride it again. No matter how often Resident Evil 4 is remade, remastered, and re-released, it’s always a ride worth taking, and when the game winks at you, it’s fun to wink back.

A warrior. A princess. A sorcerer.

Courage. Wisdom. Power.

Earth. Water. Fire.

Since The Legend of Zelda was released for the Famicom Disk System in 1986, nearly every game in the series has involved these elements. You’d think a series that relies so heavily on remixing and repeating its core elements would get stale, but every new Zelda is a major event, a defining title for its console.

Why are we so captivated by a series whose fundamentals barely change across 40 years? Nearly every Zelda follows a similar structure and gameplay loop: travel to a dungeon, find an item, use the item to progress in the dungeon and defeat the boss, repeat. The mechanical differences between games are subtle and often revolve around a pivotal adjustment to the formula, e.g., turning into a 2D painting, controlling the wind, or shifting between two different time periods.

The significant changes are visual. The Legend of Zelda on the NES is primitive but colorful and easy to read. Its sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, flips the perspective from top-down to a sidescroller. The series returned to top-down with A Link to the Past on the SNES and a handful of Game Boy games. The next major installment, Ocarina of Time, featured the most dramatic shift yet: the jump to full 3D.

Lots of franchises jumped to 3D in the ‘90s and never looked back, but Zelda would continue to mess around in 2D up to the Link’s Awakening remake on Nintendo Switch, a beloved and super weird title that had been trapped on the Game Boy.

If you’re reading an article on Zelda, you smiled somewhere in those paragraphs. Or you’re disappointed I didn’t mention your favorite — but I bet you have a favorite. It’s like having a favorite food or Ninja Turtle, something that was declared when you were younger that you’ve carried around as a fact your whole life.

I’ll also bet that your favorite Zelda is the first you played for any length of time. I was a PC kid. I played A Link to the Past and Ocarina of Time at friends’ houses for a few minutes here and there, but Zelda is different from Mario Kart or Halo. It takes time to get its hooks in, but once it does, it sticks with you for life.

The Zelda that I first played on my own, the one that got its hooks into me, was The Wind Waker.

I can’t pin down what I love about Wind Waker like I can’t pin down what I love about my childhood bedroom. It’s ethereal, beyond fact. I can show you the expressive characters, the lighting, the music that plays when the sun rises on the open ocean, and hope you appreciate it the way I do, but there’s so much of it I can’t show you. I can’t show you why Wind Waker makes me feel safe or why I still find it exciting even though I’ve been playing it consistently for 20 years.

It’s not just nostalgia. Everyone has a video game golden age, usually in your teens and early twenties when you have a little disposable income and a lot of free time, and Wind Waker came out right in the middle of mine. But so did Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Halo, Splinter Cell, and Psychonauts. I love all those games. They’re some of the best games ever made, but they’re not Wind Waker.

Wind Waker nails the feeling of adventure, and a big part of this is because you’re playing a younger character. The Link that appears in Wind Waker has “come of age” at the beginning of the story, which suggests he’s about 12, but his design skews much younger; I always think of him as 9 or 10. His excitement, his curiosity, and his courage are infectious. What was the last game you played with a main character who was flat-out stoked to be going on an adventure? It’s rare.

At the time, there was a lot of backlash against Wind Waker‘s cartoon look and focus on a young Link. After Ocarina of Time, and a famous E3 video that showed an adult Link squaring off against Ganon with GameCube graphics, fans expected Zelda to grow up with them.

But Zelda doesn’t age. It evolves, and that evolution is as non-linear as its famously convoluted (and irrelevant) timeline. It’s a perfect way to approach a game that is as close to a storybook as video games get. Each Zelda has big changes but also many things that stay the same. Bedtime stories don’t change. The details change, but the fundamentals remain the same — nostalgia as design.

That storybook quality, high stakes but low seriousness, is what I go to Zelda for. The calls for a “darker, more mature” Zelda never made sense to me in a world stuffed with “dark, mature” action adventure games, some of which, like Darksiders, gleefully riff on the Zelda formula.

Someone has probably made a “what your favorite Zelda says about you” quiz. Each one has its vibe, sense of humor, and personality. There are repeated elements, but each has its flavor, like how every comic book artist’s interpretation of Batman is unique to them within the classic silhouette.

Does my love of Zelda‘s more boyish tone stem from Wind Waker being my first experience with the series? Maybe, but it’s always felt right to me. Wind Waker has some bleak stuff: The gods created the overworld ocean when they drowned the world to stop Ganon. That’s pretty dark! Something about exploring this world as a kid who never loses his sense of joy and wonder, despite the post-apocalyptic setting and the massive responsibility on his shoulders, is very compelling.

Does Wind Waker inform what I value in stories now? Look at the contemporaries mentioned above: Knights of the Old Republic has a grand sense of adventure and colorful characters, Splinter Cell manages to poke fun at itself despite its political technothriller ambitions, Halo is bursting with personality from chatty Marines to cowardly Grunts, and Psychonauts is about a young boy stoked to be going on an adventure! One of my favorite games of the last few years, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, is high-stakes and high-drama but still finds moments of levity and wonder.

The key to Zelda‘s ability to redefine itself is never better explained than by Wind Waker‘s very first line: “This is but one of the legends of which the people speak…”

The Legend of Zelda isn’t about history, lore, or complex politics. It’s about whatever it needs to be about, whatever story the creators want to tell at that moment. It’s a bedtime story about an adventure, and every adventure needs a hero. Who better than a young boy dressed in green?

There have been just under 50 major films based on video games since the original Super Mario Bros. movie in 1993. They are pretty much all bad — even the ones that aren’t tax schemes! The ones made by fans of the games, like Silent Hill and Warcraft, can be fun, and a few get a pass for being kids’ movies that adults can enjoy, like Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog. But they’re not Citizen Kane.

Despite the consistent box office failures and critical hatred of video game adaptations, studios are always looking for franchises with built-in fanbases. There are dozens of TV and movie video game adaptations coming up — a new Mario movie is right around the corner — so how do we get more adaptations like The Last of Us and fewer like Max Payne? Let’s consider a few upcoming video game adaptations for discussion.

Horizon Zero Dawn TV Series Adaptation at Netflix

The obvious choice: Very little “Aloy vs. robot dinosaur” action, mostly terrible sub-Game of Thrones “intrigue” to keep the budget down

The more interesting choice: The story of how the world ended

The first Horizon game is just too much of a video game to work in any other medium. The concept — cavewoman in the distant future battles robot dinosaurs — is so unbelievably goofy that the creators’ insistence on taking it deeply seriously is baffling. A show about a woman in dreadlocks shooting a bow and arrow at crummy CGI robots for nine hours would get boring and expensive fast. So I’d expect a show that directly adapted the first game’s plot to stuff it with long, boring scenes concerning the politics of the different tribes.

The best storytelling moments in Horizon Zero Dawn have Aloy delving into ruined corporate offices and doomsday bunkers to uncover the cause of the apocalypse. The mystery works and the boardroom politics are actually pretty interesting. The most interesting and affordable option would be to set the show entirely in “the past” of 2064 and show the boardroom battles between Elisabet Sobek and Elon Musk-alike Ted Faro that eventually lead to the apocalypse. A show about an evil sci-fi corporation that didn’t take its premise too seriously, sort of Succession meets Westworld, could really work.

There were rumors that Netflix was thinking the same thing and that the upcoming show would be called Horizon 2074, but “Horizon 2074” is confirmed as the working title for season 4 of The Boys. Get ready to spend nine hours with actors dancing around the appropriation of Native American culture, explaining the difference between “the Carja” and “the Shadow Carja.”

Metal Gear Solid Movie Adaptation

The obvious choice: Solid Snake infiltrates The Rock.

The more interesting choice: Get weird.

Oscar Isaac’s dream project has been in development limbo for years, which might be a good thing. While the original Metal Gear Solid is a relatively straightforward military fetishist simulator, especially compared to later games in the series, part of the immortal charm of the franchise is the weirdness hiding in the margins. What starts as a plot ripped right from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie — terrorists have taken over a military research facility and seized the hyper-advanced walking nuclear tank stored there — is stuffed with colorful characters like a psychic in a gas mask named Psycho Mantis.

Metal Gear Solid is a rare video game with cinematic ambitions that could adapt to a movie pretty easily. The setup is tasty and could be a refreshing action thriller throwback, like 2022’s Ambulance.

Leaning into the weirdness of Metal Gear would certainly set the movie apart, but what if they parodied the game’s obsession with military hardware and interminable live-action cutscenes explaining nuclear proliferation? The currently attached director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, has a track record of subverting expectations in military-focused movies with the excellent Vietnam War allegory Kong: Skull Island.

Both Isaac and Vogt-Roberts have been protective of their vision for Metal Gear Solid: something that sticks to the game’s anti-war message and psychedelic “descent into darkness” storytelling. It will probably never come out, but it’s a fun idea.

Duke Nukem Movie Adaptation

The obvious choice: A cheap action flick starring Dwayne Johnson

The more interesting choice: Austin Powers with John Cena

Duke Nukem isn’t a character as much as a collage of references, a deeply dated slice of ‘90s macho bullshit that, in small doses, is pretty fun, especially when he’s along for a kickass retro FPS ride. Duke Nukem 3D is the only reason anyone thinks of making a movie with the character in 2023. Duke’s attitude made him a superstar in 1996, but subsequent releases forwarded Duke as a character and lost the sense of fun. When Duke Nukem Forever was finally released in 2011, he’d become a full-on creep.

Thinking Duke Nukem is cool is a mistake. Duke Nukem isn’t cool; he’s a sexist loser who also happens to be very good at killing aliens, and the idea that the earth is stuck with him because he saved the planet is deeply funny. A movie about Duke Nukem, a raging roidhead jerkoff forced to face up to his own failings as a human being now that there are no aliens to kill, is a tremendous opportunity to tackle misogyny in general and misogyny in video games specifically.

Yes, this sounds a lot like Peacemaker, but great artists steal and Duke Nukem‘s whole thing is there’s nothing original about it. Taking the Austin Powers route while still having a lot of action with the iconic Duke Nukem 3D weapons would be rad as hell.

There are so many upcoming video game adaptations. The potential for one of them to be truly daring and do something more interesting with its source material is possible. Or they’ll make Mario into Minions 7.

This article contains spoilers for The Last of Us for episodes 1 – 5.

Before HBO’s The Last of Us, was there a video game adaptation that was “good”? Not fun, authentic, or perfect, just good.

For me, the closest we ever got was Christoph Gans’ 2006 movie adaptation of Silent Hill. A fan of the games, Gans’ love of the series’s iconography hurts the adaptation. Including the monster Pyramid Head doesn’t make sense in Silent Hill‘s story, but he’s the series mascot so he’s gotta be in there.

Adaptation is a tricky thing. Charlie Kaufman wrote a whole movie about it. Don’t change anything and the work feels inessential; change too much and you risk losing what made the original text worth adapting in the first place. The best adaptations keep the essential elements of the original but make modifications that suit the new medium of the adaptation.

A great example of this is Zola, which turned an outrageous Twitter thread into one of the first great movies of the 2020s. Zola, the movie, takes the bones of a viral story, written in first-person, and blows it all out into an uproariously entertaining crime comedy while exploring the underlying thread of the original story: that sex work can be rife with danger.

A video game is not a Twitter thread or a novel. It’s not one person’s vision. Many video game adaptations feel assembled by a committee, like a group of producers and marketing people got into a board room and wrote down everything on a big whiteboard that an adaptation of Halo must have. In an effort to not alienate the hardcore “fans,” who are often encouraged and even rewarded for toxic behavior when a property they feel connected to “betrays” them, everything on that whiteboard has to go into the movie, no matter if it actually helps the story or not.

And, hot take alert, the stories aren’t good! Video game stories are usually pretty bad, even the good ones. A movie has three pillars: story, acting, and image. If one is weak, the whole picture is weak. But games have, like, a million pillars. They have to worry about story and acting, too, but “image” in a video game includes things like visual design, graphical style and fidelity, cutscene direction, etc. And then they also have to worry about game design, which has its own pillars.

It’s not that games don’t care about story. Many people spent thousands of hours crafting the absolute reams of story in the modern Assassin’s Creed games — but to what end? Is Eivor’s story as memorable as The Godfather? Hell, is it as memorable as Con Air? At least I can tell you what happens in Con Air!

The best “video game movies” aren’t based on games at all but are inspired by them. Movies like Scott Pilgrim, Edge of Tomorrow, and John Wick take the themes of video games as a medium and apply them to well-known movie structures. In 2015, Mad Max got a new movie and a big-budget open-world video game. Fury Road feels like all the good parts of a video game crammed into one of the best action movies ever made, but the game is an over-long scrap-collecting slog with some decent car combat.

So, why does The Last of Us succeed where other video game adaptations fail? Theme. Yes, they took the recognizable characters, designs, and plot of the game, but just like with Zola, they looked deeper than “what happens” and used the medium of an HBO prestige drama as a canvas to explore far beyond what the games allowed.

I’ve already covered my thoughts on the first episode of HBO’s The Last of Us, so I won’t relitigate all that here. But I thought the pilot was a wasted opportunity so worried about setting the table that it forgot to cook a meal.

Episode 2 discards all the awkward plot injection and weak character moments to lean all in on video game bullshit. Collapsed stairwells stopping the characters from going back? Check. Boosting a character over an obstacle so they can unlock a door? Check. Stealth sequence with clear rules? Check.

Episode 2 adds some really interesting things to The Last of Us, like ditching spores for the mycelial network connecting large groups of infected, but it also gives us Tess’ terrible death scene, where she panics, hyper-fixates on a broken lighter instead of all the grenades she has lying around, and lets herself be kissed to death by a mushroom zombie. It’s a much-needed jolt of action and video game silliness after the self-indulgent first episode, but it doesn’t expand the ideas created by the game so much as it takes them in different directions. It felt like another video game adaptation — and at least Mortal Kombat was fun!

Then episode 3 happened.

Episode 3 takes the bones of the Bill and Frank story and deepens them in every conceivable way. In the game, the player, as Joel, runs afoul of Bill by setting off several of his traps. Game Bill is more like Show Bill at the beginning of the episode: prickly, distrustful, obsessive, and borderline sociopathic. The game gives you a fair amount of Lincoln, Massachusetts to explore. It’s pretty dense, and Bill has filled it with traps and overlapping barricades. The show’s version of Lincoln seems more accurate to the real thing: a spread-out town connected by small streets that have stayed relatively unchanged since the American Revolution. Bill’s stronghold in Lincoln appears to be little more than one block, comprising his house, a few shops, and a church. And Frank.

In the game, we never meet Frank. We hear about him through Bill’s dialogue and notes lying around, but he’s not really a character — he’s a storytelling device that serves two purposes: firmly establish that Bill is gay, a very rare character trait in a video game in 2013, and that Bill is a pain in the ass to everyone. In Frank’s suicide note, he confesses to Bill that living with him is too hard, and in attempting to run off, he was bitten by an infected and hanged himself to avoid hurting Bill when he turns. It’s pretty grim, and while the evidence is certainly there that Bill and Frank were lovers, the game doesn’t make a big deal of it. It also makes perfect sense that someone would get fed up living with Game Bill, who does nothing but insult Joel and Ellie and express annoyance that they’re in his space. He’s a real prick, and by the end of the hour or so you spend with him, you’re ready to move on from him too.

Bill was an extremely richly developed and presented character by 2013 video game standards — hell, by modern video game standards. To be sure, he was a prepper stereotype, but the added text of his relationship with Frank was Naughty Dog’s secret sauce that makes their characters so compelling. Ultimately, he was still a device used to teach the player a few tutorials and send them on their way. He was not a person.

It is a textbook example of how to write an interesting character: take an archetype, the weirdo survivalist with tons of guns and a huge beard, and give them an unexpected twist — in this case, his homosexuality. You only get a hint of it because the game isn’t about Bill or the lifestyles of the post-apocalypse; it’s a power fantasy about being the ultimate badass with a heart of gold, making Molotov cocktails out of alcohol you find lying around, and smashing dudes in the face with a pipe.

What made the game The Last of Us so compelling was how it balanced that power fantasy with a thematic and narrative exploration of violence, but it was still a video game made for PlayStation 3 owners, who were mostly 20-38-year-old men — so the exploration was superficial. The game’s story doesn’t present any answers, and you are forced to commit horrific acts of violence to see its conclusion. But it does slow down at times to present the consequences of that violence, however superficial.

HBO does not create content for 20-38-year-old male gamers, and the prestige drama television format is not a YouTube “Let’s Play” of a zombie apocalypse power fantasy. While the game has more than the usual amount of dialogue for an action-adventure game, you still spend most of your time running, hiding, hunting, and killing. The characters in the show spend most of their time talking, which allows for the stereotype-with-a-twist caricature of Kooky Old Secretly Gay Survivalist Bill to become a real human being.

But the magic of episode 3 isn’t just that it’s a beautiful short film: It also advances Joel’s storyline. With Bill gone, finding Tommy is much more important, as he may be the only person Joel knows who is still alive. If episode 3 had only been a little detour of a story, it would still have been lovely and lauded, but the fact it serves a greater purpose in pushing the season’s story forward is just good writing.

The show did it again in episode 5, when Henry, Sam, Joel, and Ellie discover the children’s refuge in the sewers underneath Kansas City. This is another effective gut-punch moment in the game about how horrible the apocalypse is, but the show uses the opportunity differently. In Henry, Joel finds a kindred spirit: a hard man who has made tough choices, even committed murder, to protect his family. With Tess and Bill gone, Joel needs a little extra push to care for Ellie. After talking to Henry, Joel is fully committed to looking after her.

The Last of Us was an obvious contender for adaptation. It was massively successful, critically beloved, and created specifically to bring more sophisticated storytelling to video games. It shouldn’t have taken this long to make something interesting out of the raw material of a video game story, because many games have good storytelling bones.

We should have had a sick Halo war movie by now, instead of a bloated, confusing, self-serious TV series. We should have had a whole series of Saturday morning cartoon-stupid Mortal Kombat movies instead of the overly complex mythology wrangling of the recent film. And with superfan Christoph Gans back in the director’s chair, we may finally get the Silent Hill movie more concerned with scaring the crap out of us than explaining itself.