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October 2024 media

• Metaphor: ReFantazio: I’ve never really connected with the Persona or Shin Megami Tensei games, but Metaphor is really working for me despite its similarities. Maybe that’s thanks to the charmingly overwrought fantasy setting, which pairs well with the maximalist aesthetic; maybe they’ve just finally sanded off enough rough edges for me to find my way in. Whatever the reason, I’m hooked. (And while I usually don’t have the problem some game developers describe where they can’t turn off their work brain when playing games for fun, in Metaphor’s case I can’t stop thinking about how expensive that UI looks…)

• Ys X: Nordics: The naval combat is not very good, the upgrade system is tedious, and the pacing is uneven. Most of the cast is two-dimensional at best, and after around thirty hours I can only hum one melody from the soundtrack. And yet, despite all of that, I’m really enjoying Nordics! The Ys sense of adventure is much stronger here than in the somewhat claustrophobic Monstrum Nox, and the two-character combat is a massive improvement over the recent games’ party system. If I look too closely at the individual elements they don’t always hold up, but it manages to be more than the sum of its parts.

• The Wonder of Stevie: Hosted by New York Times critic Wesley Morris, this podcast covers the albums from Stevie Wonder’s so-called classic period: Music of My Mind through Songs in the Key of Life. There are interviews with collaborators, friends, and fans, from Janelle Monáe to the Obamas. With only one hour-ish episode per album the show has to be painfully selective, so some of your favorites will inevitably get short shrift, but I really liked what they did cover. (The show isn’t exclusive to Audible, incidentally, despite appearances—look for it wherever you get your podcasts, as they say.)

September 2024 media

• Celebrating 40 years of Dragon Slayer: In this month-long series of features, Retro XP writer Marc Normandin covers the history of the seminal and multifaceted action RPG franchise. There’s a lot to cover; games as diverse as Xanadu and Sorcerian and The Legend of Heroes all are or were grouped under the Dragon Slayer umbrella, and all get their due here. There are plenty of influences to trace as well, from internal titles like Ys to external ones like The Legend of Zelda. This was a fun read for a late-era Falcom fan like me!

• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: After Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, it was oddly refreshing to return to a more modestly-scoped Zelda game. And Echoes of Wisdom is a great one! To be honest, I’m glad they’re still making space for smaller, weirder things like this and not attempting to build one enormous generational masterpiece after another. My two complaints: performance is pretty rough, and I wish they’d made a more thorough break from Link and eschewed the “swordfighter form” business.

• Set!: “An inside look at the world of competitive table setting,” reads the subtitle, and that alone was enough to send my mind reeling. The competitions feature the meticulous utensil placement you’d expect, but they also have themes, and the entrants have big personalities. We meet a woman who wants her table to be a commentary on animal poaching in Africa, and a man who enters a cosplay competition in hopes of winning prize money to fund a Dr. Seuss homage. If this were a Christopher Guest mockumentary, I’d think they laid it on too thick.

August 2024 media

• O Brother, Where Art Thou?: With how few movies I see rewatching something almost seems like a waste, but I couldn’t resist after the recent Remap Radio podcast episode. Still holds up, still one of my all-time favorites. I remember when the soundtrack sort of broke containment and became a success all on its own; if you only ever listened to that, give the film a shot!

• Ys IX: Monstrum Nox: I bounced off of the demo for Ys IX when it first released, but I figured with X on the horizon it might be worth another shot. After a somewhat slow opening, it’s working for me this time! The verticality makes exploring a lot of fun—still unsure how I feel about its effect on combat—and I always like to see a game with a large city. (Long live Crossbell and Kirkwall!) I don’t know if I’ll love IX like I did VIII, but I think it’ll stick.

• Genshin Impact version 5.0: This is among Genshin’s largest aesthetic swings yet; I imagine the designers looking longingly at Honkai Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero and wanting some of that contemporary flair for themselves. The upshot is that your new dragon-possessing powers are set against a backdrop of tribes in the new Latin America-inflected nation of Natlan that specialize in graffiti, breaking, DJing, and extreme sports. It doesn’t all hold together perfectly, but it works better than expected!

Existing in an area

Recently, when I visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I’ll often decide where to go based on the spaces instead of the art those spaces contain. I’ll go to gallery 241a, a period room from Hamilton Palace in Scotland, or gallery 218, a small church-like space with a stained glass window, because I like the way they’re lit, or they way they sound, or the way they’re shaped. I’ll go see the ancient coins in gallery 212c because I like the way they’ve organized the space with sliding drawers—and then I won’t open the drawers to look at the coins.

In fact, I’ll barely process anything that’s on display during these visits. On some occasions I’ve sat outside in Calderwood Courtyard and looked at the ivy-covered walls for longer than I spent at the actual exhibits. Maybe this all suggests some latent fascination with architecture or museum planning that I’ve never pursued, but I think of it as wanting to focus on the aura of a museum more than its actual contents. “The medium is the message” but for places, maybe.

I thought about this new behavior of mine while at the final XOXO Festival, held last week in Portland. I’ve been lucky enough to go to all eight iterations of XOXO, and on this trip I felt the main appeal for me was simply being there. When asked who I was excited to see while making small talk with other attendees, I didn’t have a ready answer; in fact, I never even internalized the lineup. Part of that was trust in the organizers, who have always done an excellent job with curation, but another part was that I realized it did not matter to me anymore: I wanted to be at XOXO more than I wanted to see anything in particular.

(I should note that none of this is a criticism of the programming. If anything, I thought 2024 was one of the stronger XOXOs! The festival was shorter this year, which may have helped—with fewer speakers and presenters, perhaps they were able to be choosier. I enjoyed everything I saw there; I’m just navel-gazing about my own reactions.)

I’ve only ever been to Portland during XOXO, so this year I got into town early to do the tourist things I typically have to either forego entirely or carefully squeeze in around the edges of the festival: street fairs, rose gardens, Powell’s, Forest Park, Pittock Mansion, the arboretum, that sort of thing. Mainly, though, I was excited to spend more time at the Portland Japanese Garden.

In my experience the worst thing about the Japanese Garden is that it’s too good—its popularity means the crowds can prevent the sort of reflective, meditative experience it wants to provide. I bought an annual membership so I could visit during the quieter early-morning member hours, and spent so much time there that it’s already paid for itself. Going there, doing nothing in particular in a space designed for exactly that, was a highlight of my trip.

July 2024 media

• The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak: I’m a huge fan of the Trails series, so the excitement over the big changes in Daybreak spooked me; I wasn’t sure if I really wanted a new battle system, or moral choices, or a change in tone. But they executed pretty well! The core appeal is thankfully still there. If I rank my favorite games in the series, I even bet this one makes the top half.

• Montreal International Jazz Festival: I’d never been before, and I had a great time even though I was only around for a few days. The variety of music was impressive—I ended up seeing much less straight-ahead jazz than I expected, interestingly—it all seemed very well-run, to the point where I could practically set my watch to the stage times. And the vibes within two blocks or so of Place des Arts are immaculate.

• Saving Time: This book, from How to Do Nothing author Jenny Odell, is really remarkable but also difficult to reduce to a summary. I guess I’d say it’s about how to value time and resist its commoditization—the “saving” in the title is closer to rescuing than preserving—though that sounds too much like self-help boilerplate. If this is self-help, it’s the kind that can rewire your brain.