The Retro Game Market Problem

Something you should be aware of is that I’m an avid game collector. I collect games for almost every generation of game console, or at least for everything that is available to me. For the last five years, I’ve been in and out of game stores, garnering a collection that I can say I’m quite proud of. Every once in a while, I might purge the collection of games I can’t say I care for, but lately, figuring out emulation has opened a whole new world of demoing games before I buy them, thus perfecting my collection of games that are meaningful to me.

For this reason, I can safely ask: what the f!ck is wrong with the retro game market? (I’m gonna make it clear here, I’m referring specifically to the US region, not PAL or NTSC-J; I’m less familiar with those markets…though, if you have insight, leave a comment on this post!)

Retro game prices have been on the rise for quite some time now, give or take the last five years. Every generation has experienced a price hike. Usually, a generation of gaming will experience a price hike when a certain group of people reach an age in which they can be nostalgic for a game console they grew up with. Which, in retrospect, is all fine and dandy. But, for whatever reason, simultaneously, we are seeing a continued price hike in N64, GameCube, and Gameboy Advance games, while also seeing Wii and DS games hike up in price as well.

To put it into perspective, 3DS games are still priced around $40 consistently across the board. There hasn’t been enough time since the 3DS’ generation for 3DS games to drop in price. And yet, DS games are hitting an all-time peak. Why?

Side note: This is mainly an issue with Nintendo games specifically, as both PlayStation and Xbox haven’t really seen as much of a drastic price increase comparatively. There are, of course, outliers, but this post will be primarily talking about Nintendo games.

Generational Issues

Part of me questions if the reason why game prices are hiking in such strange manners is because of just how many games released during the late 90s to early 00s, and how that greatly affects that generation of gamers as they reach adulthood. If you know anything about Generation Z—people born between 1997-2012—you should know that this generation takes up a lot of cultural development time. Most of us have memories playing the Gameboy Color in dentist waiting rooms, checking out the GameCube at our friends house, and excitedly playing the Wii on Christmas morning, 2007 (because I know y’all didn’t get a Wii in it’s release year, be so for real). However, a lot of us also remember the Wii U’s catastrophic release, and played our first Pokemon games on our 3DS’ at the ripe age of 10-12 years old.

What’s fascinating to me as a Gen Z’er is just how much cultural advancement occurred when we were little, not mentally developed enough to properly process what was happening around us. I exist, at least, in a space where I can say I remember the roll-away CRT TVs in classrooms and those shitty old projectors with the clear pages, but can also say I grew up on social media like Twitter at its prime.

If you’re a cusper between Millenials and Gen Z, I don’t think this whiplash of culture is something you can properly say you’ve experienced, especially if you graduated high school during or prior to 2016.

In such a case, Gen Z is nostalgic for three to four generations of gaming at the least, and now that the majority of us are hitting adulthood, we can finally re-buy the games we played as children, however many generations of gaming that may be. Hypothetically, and I’m running fully on vibes here, we’re the second generation of gamers to exist in a world without ever knowing what life was like before video games. And as video games grow in popularity, especially over the pandemic, the urge to collect the games played as children grows as well.

The Internet Problem

Of course, the other issue regarding the price hiking of the retro game market is the popularity of gaming expressed through interested parties on the internet. In the modern era, we exist in a space where games can be played, reviewed, and attested to through YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok. People can see a game they may have never heard about, and through consistently watching content about that game, are recommended to play the game constantly. Thus, through the algorithm, games are shared at a much faster rate.

Now, this is more consistently true for modern games. I mean, how many of you bought Stardew Valley simply because you saw a YouTube video about it? Be honest…

Retro games are less commonly discussed on these platforms. Some popular YouTubers or Twitch streamers (cough, RTgame, Ludwig, Alpharad cough) might play an older game on stream, or talk about their favorite retro games, but for the most part, those collecting retro games and discussing them aren’t nearly as popular as those playing modern games.

While I do think that YouTube and Twitch (and reluctantly TikTok) are garnering an interest in gaming, there’s not enough hard evidence that this is the reason for the price hiking in the retro game market.

Scalpers, Scalpers Everywhere

The other issue is, of course, scalpers. Scalpers are essentially people that will buy a multitude of a particular item, and attempt to resell that item at a much higher price than it’s actual selling price online. And for the retro game market, a market where everything is limited stock and the demand is high, scalpers thrive.

Anywhere you look for retro games, you will see scalpers overpricing things to grandiose (and frankly, gross) degrees, making the market artificially rise. They buy up a bunch of copies, sell them for upwards of double or triple the current going price on the market, thus inflating the market, making other sellers up charge, and the rest is history.

Take Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for example: this game is notoriously expensive in the game collecting scene. Currently, a Complete-In-Box (CIB) copy could run you $206 US dollars. Which, considering it’s god awful history on the market, isn’t half bad. However, if you went to eBay or some online retro game selling website (I’m not gonna name any names, but you can fill in the blank here), the price would be jacked up to upwards of $280-$350, or in the worse case scenario, $400. A game that’s worth less than $200. How does that make sense.

The historical pricing of Complete-In-Box copies of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance

See, the problem here lies in reputability. Many people know Path of Radiance is hard to come by, so if they see it for a price that they deem is cheap enough, they’ll buy it, possibly without knowing that they’ve been scammed.

The unfortunate thing here is that there isn’t much else we can do about scalpers. The only thing you, individually, can do is not buy from a scalper, no matter how desperate you are. Be patient, wait for the right time, the right seller, the right price, and you’ll find yourself a deal in no time. And obviously, bite the neck off of the snake in the process. (Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if that’s a saying…oh well, it is now.)

The Obvious Other Issue: Nintendo… *waggles finger*

I think, ultimately, one of the major issues as to why these retro games are hiking in price is simply because Nintendo doesn’t make their older games very accessible. Some games, sure, are available on Nintendo Switch Online (NSO). However, NSO costs a yearly price some people can’t afford, and more specifically, the games from the generations I’m talking about (N64, GameCube, Gameboy Advance) are locked behind an even pricier yearly payment, and even moreso, GameCube games are locked behind a $450 paywall of a Switch 2 along with the $50 price tag of the NSO Expansion Pack. Respectfully, most normal people don’t have that kind of money to spend to play a 20-30 year old game.

And, with the Wii U and 3DS eShops fully gone now for quite some time, there are less means to legitimately play these retro games that people love, as those eShops had long and large catalogs of retro games (and downloadable software no longer available, which is another topic for a different day) that are just…gone. Completely vanished from the air, as if it was never there to begin with.

This leads to people either purchasing Nintendo games through legitimate means via a game store or flea market, or succumbing to emulation, which is much more convenient and costs nothing.

With less legitimate means to buy games, especially those in Nintendo’s 7th generation of games, more people are flooding to eBay in swarms to find those nostalgic games that they can no longer play, thus inflating the market exponentially.

How Do We Fix It?

Ultimately, all of these reasons coincide with one another to create the current retro game market issue. Which is, essentially, retro games being way too expensive for what they’re worth, and continuing to spike in drastic ways.

Of course, there’s no actual means of deciphering what’s going on with the market without proper research over years of studying, and that’s not what this Substack is about. I’m mostly speculating here with years of experience under my belt, and a lot of questions on my mind, hoping to bring to light an issue I’ve been experiencing first-hand for the last five years. And maybe, just maybe, you’ve been seeing those prices yourself and wondering what’s up with them.

The good thing is that these prices have been going down recently. A lot of games that hit a spike in 2020-2023 are finally, finally going back down to a regular (or, well, more regular) price for the game, and I’m at least thankful for it, however long it takes to drop.

While there may be no means to make the prices drop, hopefully, as time goes on, less people buy overtly priced games, making the sellers with egregious pricing have to drop their prices to actually make a sale. Patience, unfortunately, is the only answer here. At least, that I can think of.

The Japanese Retro Game Market

Actually, I’m lying. There’s another answer to the high prices, and that is to look to the Japanese retro game market (I know, I know, I said that I didn’t know as much about it, but that is still true, I don’t know as much about it as the US region of games).

This, of course, isn’t something everyone can do. International shipping is no joke (especially these days…), and often, people don’t live in areas where Japanese games are being sold outright. Or, more notably, not everyone has the ability to learn enough Japanese in order to play these games. However, after having spent the past two years looking into this market, there are a couple of tips I’ve come by that might be interesting to you if you’re looking to start collecting retro games.

For one, Japanese games are cheaper. Significantly so. If you’re looking on the right websites (cough not Amazon cough), a lot of the most popular games here are selling for half the going price or more. Games notoriously expensive in the US market—for instance, Pokemon or Zelda, games that go for upwards of $100-200 generally—only cost upwards of $60-80 comparatively. Take Pokemon Emerald, for example. A loose copy of Pokemon Emerald in the US can run you up $218, whereas a loose copy in Japan is only $67. You might ask, what’s the difference? Truly, just the language. That’s it. I don’t know how well it sold in either region, and I don’t know how well Pokemon sold as a concept by the third generation, but what I do know is that that’s an insane price drop.

And for what it’s worth, Pokemon is a fantastic game series to start learning Japanese through. So, if you’re desperate, the Japanese market is an option.

For two, not every Japanese game is solely written in Japanese. Specifically with older games, say the NES and SNES era, there wasn’t a lot of text to begin with in these games, so it wouldn’t be that much of a challenge to play through and grab Google Translate for certain words. You’ll eventually learn what “accept” and “continue” and “cancel” all are in Japanese, enough to play the game. Of course, this isn’t true for every game, especially JRPGs, but for you’re Zelda’s and Mario’s, it’s a breeze.

However, some modern games give you a language option to change the language back to English. Specifically, with the DS Ace Attorney games, there’s an option as soon as you boot the game up where you can choose the English version and be able to play the entire game in English. There’s multiple lists of Japanese games that have English language options for modern games here.

There’s not that many games total, but a good resource to have if you’re hunting for an expensive game and just don’t want to pay those high prices (cough Chrono Trigger DS is on that list cough).

Finally, some consoles aren’t region locked, so you might not even need to buy a full new console to play these games. Some come out of the box unlocked, but others aren’t fully without cracking the system open, so it’s good to do your research before you buy a bunch of games for a console that won’t work. For instance, the entire Gameboy line of consoles are region free, along with the original DS and DS Lite. The DSi and 3DS line of consoles, however, are region locked. The N64 can be region unlocked by opening the top lid, removing the gray piece under the cartridge slot, taking a Dremel tool to it, and popping it back in. Modern consoles outside of Nintendo have been region free since Gen 7, though in some cases, the region-locking is tied to your account. Like for the Switch, you can just make a Japanese Nintendo account, set the region to Japan, and have access to the Japanese eShop and NSO apps if you have an NSO subscription. And much, much more.

Though, I have heard that the Japanese market has been climbing lately due to more and more foreigners buying and reselling their games, so as great as it is that the games are so cheap, in the future, that might not be the case. I’ve seen it myself with the 3DS; I’ve been looking into getting a Japanese New! 3DS because the 3DS is region locked and I want to collect every Ace Attorney game, but since it’s been posted about online a bunch about how much cheaper Japanese 3DS’ are, the prices have hiked for a New! 3DS in good condition and it isn’t much cheaper than a US one. Ah, how the curse of knowledge ruins so easily, and thus I continue the cycle. But, oh well, I think it’s good knowledge to have.

ROMs and Emulation

The other obvious option is to emulate games. I can’t fully condone this because it is a legal gray area, but you know *wink wink*. It’s unfortunate that we even have to depend on emulation as an option for playing retro games, but that is the reality that we live in. Of course, you can do your own mental gymnastics of ethics, like buying a physical copy and then downloading the ROM, if that makes you feel better about the situation.

If playing on official hardware isn’t a concern, and prices are far too egregious to even seek out official means of playing, you can’t really blame people for trying emulation out. I think it should be a final resort thing, but ultimately that’s up to the individual person.

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And that’s it! Thanks for reading my break down on the retro game market as it is today, and what we can do to fix it (which, ultimately, isn’t much). This is something I’m super passionate about, and wish more people were aware of because it’s quite annoying. Lemme know you’re thoughts on the manner, if you collect games, your own horror stories of up charged games, and the like.

I will be starting a new mini-series this weekend where I quickly review games and books that I’ve recently read, and don’t have enough to say for a full post. I’m thinking about calling it “Sunday Mini Stackin’” or SMS, so look out for that! They’ll be posted every other Sunday at 7 PM EST (unless I change my mind). First post will be about Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, funnily enough, so stay tuned!

And as always, see you next week!

NaNoWriMo 2025 Is Over! How'd I Do?

This year, I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, or NaNo for short) because I finally had the time to dedicate a full month to writing. Now, the official NaNo page is no longer available because they did shitty business practices and went under, as they should. However, without an official site, how do you track your word count?

Well, I did it the same way I track most things: Using Google Sheets.

Each day, I would track how much I wrote during the day and for how long, which gave me good insight into how long it takes me to write 100-3000 words in a writing session. However, I didn’t just stick to working on my novel draft, as the name of the writing sprint suggests.

If I wrote the same thing every day, I would have gotten increasingly tired of what I was writing, and get incredibly burnt out. I know because I’ve done NaNo like that before, and I couldn’t manage it well. So, instead of working solely on a novel draft, and instead of aiming for 50k words, I gave myself the goal of 10k words and to write whatever I felt in the mood to write on that particular day.

So, depending on the day, I might’ve written a Substack post, worked on one of my novella drafts, continued drafting out the first draft of my novel, planned out my fanfiction projects, or cooked up an essay idea that I’ve been sitting on. Each of these were vastly different projects from the last, in an array of genres, which kept my writer’s block on its toes perpetually.

Did it work out? Did I write everyday? Did I successfully reach my goal? How much did I manage to write? Well, let’s see…

What I Worked On This Month

I had many draft ideas coming into the month of November, as I hadn’t really written much in the last few months at all.

Most of the time, I worked on my Substack posts. These are easy enough thought-exercises that stretch my brain in just the right way that kept me engaged in my work. As you’ll see below, the last month of Substack posts were all counted toward my word count goal, and even the upcoming month of Substack posts were drafted as well. I had a pretty steady plan of action for my upload schedule coming into the month. I was working weeks in advance, so when a post finally uploaded, I had been done writing it weeks ago, so it was kinda hard to keep track of what I had actually uploaded and what was still in the drafts (i.e. I’m starting this post on 11/12, the day my save scumming post went live, which I finished writing on 11/3. Crazy, right?)

Outside of that, I also had a couple of novella drafts I started working on and a novel draft that’s been in the works for so long, the folder of planning is starting to fall apart due to how many pages of paper are in it.

Novella draft one, for instance, is my work called “To the End.” It follows the story of a woman who realizes her life isn’t as she thought, and how she handles such a truth (think Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan if it was speculative fiction). Novella draft two, on the other hand, is my work called “Undulating Waves,” which is a title that’s still in the works. It follows the life of a downtrodden woman in the 1900s and how she eventually cracks under the pressure of expectation. This is a character I created for a Call of Cthulhu TTRPG oneshot that I played with my friends, but I wrote such an extensive lore for her that it ended up birthing this entire novella.

The novel draft I worked on, which is entitled “FFW” on my tracking sheet, is a work I wrote for NaNo 2020, and have been trying to rewrite for genuinely five years. It’s called Fires From Within and it’s a fantasy story about a mercenary named Astra who learns her childhood best friend, Vivia, became the emperor and is starting a political campaign to take control of the entire continent. I have had so many alternating ideas of how I want this book to pan out, many times thinking that I could just write the story in one novel, but ultimately coming to terms with the fact that no, it’ll probably end up being a trilogy. If a war’s involved, it’s gonna take a couple of books to resolve it. Also, having read more fantasy/sci-fi war novels, I’ve realized what I enjoy in these stories and how to make it work, so hypothetically this draft should be the one.

And that’s about everything I wrote in the month!

The Ups

I decided to not focus on one work at a time, primarily because I knew that if I spent an entire month writing the same thing, I would get incredibly tired and/or stuck. So, luckily, I had this Substack to work on in between my creative fiction works, especially for days where I really didn’t feel like writing fiction. This ended up working phenomenally for me, as I always had something to work on, and always managed to write something in the day.

Out of all of the NaNos I’ve done this way, I ended up writing the most during this NaNo. Past NaNos, I could barely write everyday creatively, often barely hitting 500-1000 words in a day, and thus burnt out very quickly. This NaNo, I gave myself a lot of room to work on projects outside of fiction so I never ran out of things to write during the month.

This plan was working quite well for me for the first few weeks, but during the third week, I started losing steam drastically. To combat this, I shifted the focus on my second novella draft, “Undulating Waves,” panning the scene out from a specific moment in the character’s life to her entire life, and it ended up working phenomenally for motivation toward the final week.

Honestly, that final week working on “Undulating Waves” was some of the best writing sprints I’ve done in a while, including sprints during this month and previous sprints for this novella earlier in the month. Anneliese’s story is something that I’ve been envisioning for the last couple of months, and getting to write that story down was a breeze. I knew fundamentally what each plot point was going into it, how Anneliese interacted with the world and how the world formed around Anneliese, and what the ending was that it made a lot of the writing process much, much easier. Sure, some things were still a surprise while writing, but the writing process flowed much easier than my other drafts.

The Downs

As a chronic headache-haver, I often found that sitting at my laptop for hours on end did not help with headaches, so I had to take constant breaks. There were some days were I couldn’t write as much simply because I had a migraine, and couldn’t sit for that long to write. I lost a lot of motivation in the second week because I started the week with a migraine, and couldn’t work as much as I wanted to.

There were other days were I simply didn’t want to write for a full day, choosing to write in the morning, and work on some other project in the afternoon, or vice versa. I posted about this at one point, but I found that I rarely had time to study Japanese or coding, and it kind of sucked to not be able to do something else outside of writing. As someone who’s always had multiple hobbies, sticking to one hobby for a full month was a little draining. There were a couple of days in there were I wrote for like an hour, and decided to study instead.

Also, I’m learning that I really don’t like doing anything important on weekends, which is a fact of my life that I’d rather not change. It’s like my break days, where I actively use my brain during the week as much as possible, and then reward myself without conscious thought for two straight days. I did get some work done on these days, but not nearly as much as the week.

Toward the middle of the month, I started spending too much time focusing on how much time had passed and how little words I had written, and got frustrated with how little I was writing in the day. In the chart, you can see the decline in word count over time, but once I refocused my second novella draft, the line spikes back up. It’s honestly a very interesting case study in how my motivation shifts throughout a month.

The Overall Stats

For the month of November, I wrote 50,353 words, spending a total of 54 hours writing. Which, for anyone counting, is five times my original word count goal for the month. I told myself the goal was 10k because I didn’t think 50k was feasible, and I ended up hitting it anyway I would, in fact, say that this was a rounding success through and through.

Word count chart showcasing my word count per day

This chart essentially showcases how many words I wrote on a given day. For the most part I wrote under 2k words a day up until the 21st, where I started spending more time writing “Undulating Waves.”

Breakdown of what exactly I wrote on each day and for how long

And this essentially is the proper breakdown of everything I wrote in a given day and for how long, just to showcase what writing everyday looks like; sometimes, even when you dedicate an entire month to writing, you can’t write everyday or your brain isn’t working in the way you want it to or sometimes you want to do literally anything other than writing, and that’s okay.

Plus, I think it’s kinda fun to see what Substack posts I was writing when, especially when you compare it to when they actually got uploaded. Like, damn! If you want to post weekly Substack posts, then you gotta write like two weeks in advance! Which, frankly, when you’re doing a month-long challenge like this, is incredibly annoying because this post has to go up at the end of the month and you have to write about things you haven’t fully experienced yet. I had to put my upload schedule in my calendar so I knew what posts went up when. It was a bit of a mess, but I got used to it!

Will I Continue Writing Everyday After November?

Honestly, no. It’s not an easy expectation to put on yourself and you end up in your head a lot about word count and goals and timeliness, and that’s just not the spirit of writing for me. It’s a fun challenge for sure, but quite stressful for something that’s mostly fun.

I do want to write more, and this did show me that I have a lot of time on my hands to write if I carved it out. But, I also really wanted to study coding and game design, and I didn’t have time to do that and write. Hell, a lot of my writing time ended up cutting into gaming time, so I almost didn’t play Metroid Prime 3 at all this past month (which is going to be so ass to get back to).

If I didn’t have any other hobbies that I wanted to fulfill, or if I didn’t have to take a break every hour because sitting that long hurts my head, I probably would spend all of my waking hours writing. However, I’m just not built like that.

I will continue trying to upload on here weekly—I should be able to post the next month of uploads weekly for sure. And, now, I’m close to wrapping up two novellas, so I can start spending more time editing those for publication. But, more than anything, I am so incredibly excited to be able to write and not have to count every single word I wrote in the day. I can’t wait to start drafting and editing things again, good lord.

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And that’s it! Definitely an interesting month, to say the least. I feel like I simultaneously got a lot of work done and none whatsoever, which is an awesome feeling.

If I get the opportunity to do this again, I will probably try to spend more time drafting before the month starts, because I really didn’t prepare anything, and ended up running out of things to work on without having the time to draft anything new.

Did you do NaNo? What were your stats for the month? Lemme know what worked and what didn’t for writing every day in a month!

Next week, we’ll be getting into December properly, which means the end of the year is coming up quick. Gonna be interesting not feeling required to write everyday, but it might also be interesting to see what things from this month I end up bringing into the next.

And as always, see you next week!

How Of the Devil Does the "Dark Age of the Law" Better Than Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies

Ah, yes. My continued “play of the Devil” propaganda posting.

I want to put a disclaimer at the beginning here for the “Ace Attorney 5” (AA5) fans in the chat: I don’t hate AA5. I have a lot of qualms in AA6 in particular, but I think with time, I’ve come to terms with some of the aspects I disliked in AA5 and ultimately decided that it’s not as bad as I initially thought.

However, you and I both know that the way they handled the “dark age of the law” concept in AA5 could’ve been handled so much better. It’s like a mystical concept that is nothing more than a jester in a wolf’s costume, dancing around like it means anything more than it does because what do you mean it’s the dark age of the law now? HOW is this different from previous games?

But, I digress. I will try not to spoil any of the events in of the Devil for those interested in checking the game out after reading this, however, I will spoil many events of the Ace Attorney series as a whole, as it’s hard to talk about the plot of the 5th game without understanding the plot of every game prior, including and not limited to Ace Attorney 1 through 5 and Ace Attorney Investigations 1 and 2. If you haven’t played any of these games and want to remain oblivious, I suggest skipping this post.

What is Of the Devil?

Let’s start simple. I’m sure if you’re coming here as an Ace Attorney fan, you might not even know what of the Devil is (or maybe you’re more locked in than me). Of the Devil (also stylistically written “of the Devil”) is an up and coming visual novel, point-and-click adventure game in a similar vein to Ace Attorney, where you play as a defense lawyer trying to get your clients acquitted. It’s set 60 years in the future, where all crimes are recorded and the culprit is easily found and jailed accordingly.

Of course, when all culprits are easily caught, what purpose does a defense lawyer serve? When a string of murders committed with an old-fashioned pistol occurs, the first serial killer in generations is born named the Heartbreak Killer. No one knows how to handle this information, and fear is elevated in the public. The player, playing as the killer defense attorney Morgan, must acquit a man accused of the murder of his girlfriend and the accusation of being the Heartbreak Killer.

There’s only two episodes out as of this post, with a third episode releasing on December 18th, 2025, so it’s a great time to get into the series right now, if you’re interested (and if you’re an Ace Attorney fan, you should be interested). The entire first episode, Episode 0, is free to play right now. So, what are you doing here? Get playing!

Of the Devil’s Dark Age of the Law

Now, of course, in such a setting, it’s easy to see how law and legal proceedings have entered a “dark age” so to say. Out of obligation, an individual’s right to a lawyer still exists, though most defense attorneys in this world don’t really find defending their clients—fighting tooth and nail for their acquittal—fully necessary. Many simple trials in court are overseen by android judges and are quick to come to a verdict.

In many fashions, this future of court proceedings seems very realistic. Nth Circle Studios does a phenomenal job crafting a futuristic world that doesn’t feel far off from our own, and in many ways, expresses the high stake nature of defending a client in such a world.

One of the ways such high stakes are expressed in of the Devil is through the gambling mechanics of the game. For starters, there’s many opportunities in the game to garner credibility, visually expressed through “credits” you achieve through various conversations, articles, and exploration. This credit system functions as a point system, and if you don’t have enough points by the time trial rolls around, you won’t be able to properly acquit your client.

You can lose credits if you make the wrong push in a statement or gamble on the wrong points to bring up in a cross examination, thus creating a situation where you’re gambling your credibility as a lawyer. Ante up on a point you think is right, and it ends up being wrong, and you could lose up to 10 points of credibility, and no longer be able to continue the trial. This mechanic is crucial to the game, occurring in various manners throughout the entire game, and expresses the “dark age of the law” that the world in of the Devil experiences.

On top of this, the story’s plot is crucial to of the Devil’s “dark age of the law” as well, contextualizing the gambling mechanic of the game and the general air of corruption in the legal system. Like I said above, of the Devil’s story surrounds a concept of a corrupt legal system, in which having a lawyer virtually doesn’t matter because your every waking moment is recorded, or accessible by a camera in some capacity. Not only that, but even the weaponry purchasable in such a state is tagged and can be easily connected to the culprit when shot. This dystopian society claims that it helps keep the streets safe by being able to watch a crime happen and convict the correct criminal nine times out of ten, but what happens ten percent of the time when a person is convicted of a crime they didn’t commit?

That’s the question that of the Devil seeks to answer. It’s ingrained in every question of morality in the game, every conversation you have, and the game fundamentally wouldn’t make sense if this corrupt system was not put into place.

Comparatively, “Ace Attorney 5: Dual Destinies” barely creates a realistic or high stakes world for such a “dark age of the law.”

AA5’s Dark Age of the Law

Over the course of AA5, players are introduced to the idea of the world of Ace Attorney being in the throes of a “dark age of the law.” Supposedly, the “dark age” started after Phoenix Wright presented fabricated evidence to the court at the beginning of the seven year gap, losing his badge in the process.

This “dark age of the law” consisted of the time period of 2020 to 2027, where lawyers and prosecutors no longer cared about finding the “truth” of the crime committed, and rather sought out winning by any means necessary, which included fabricating evidence and resulted in many false charges.

The Flaws of AA5’s Dark Age of the Law

If you’ve ever played AA5, hell, if you’ve ever played the trilogy, you should know exactly what I’m about to say. How is the period after Phoenix lost his badge considered a “dark age” when winning by any means necessary was Von Karma’s entire shtick in the first Ace Attorney game?

I cannot stress this enough: the “dark age of the law” that AA5 claims to have begun at the beginning of the seven year gap—after Simon Blackquill was falsely proven guilty of murdering Metis Cykes—has been the state of affairs in the Ace Attorney world for many, many years prior to this event.

Hell, if you’ve played the Ace Attorney Investigations duology, you should be more than aware of the fact that the “dark age of the law” where trials only occur for three days and lawyers are dedicated to winning by any means necessary started after the events of IS-7! Which is bonkers to me because Ace Attorney Investigations was written before AA5, and written by the same writer! Why did that writer essentially retcon his own writing only two years after writing it? I truly don’t think we’ll ever fully understand.

By creating this new “dark age of the law,” the plot of AA5 manages to make its own “dark age” essentially pointless. It makes everything we know about the Ace Attorney judicial system up until this point unnecessary, creating Phoenix this messiah of justice when in actuality, Phoenix Wright was a defense attorney for a measly three years. What does this “dark age” matter if the judicial system has been like this canonically for 20 years up until this point? How did Blaise Debeste, or whatever his name is in the official English release, gain control of the Prosecutorial Committee? How did Von Karma manage to have a 40 year reign of perfectly won cases? How did Gant manage to become the Chief of Police?

Do you think they did it legally? NO! Then what the F!CK is AA5 talking about when it claims that the “dark age” only began after UR-1? (censoring because I’m not sure if Substack likes swear words). And the worst part? You still have to understand the plot of Ace Attorney 1-4 to understand how we got here, which is exactly what the developers of AA5 wanted to avoid!

I cannot stress this enough: the insistence on calling the seven year gap in AA5 the “dark age of the law” not only makes the plot of AA5 annoyingly stupid, but retcons the existence of a “dark age” prior to AA5. If you’ve played any of the previous Ace Attorney games before AA5, the entire plot of AA5’s “dark age” is nothing more than a long-winded, overused joke. Which, frankly, I don’t think is very fair to the plot of AA5! The plot of AA5 is such a unique story with such interesting characters that have such intense backstories on par with the main trilogy cast. It’s a story that hasn’t really been appreciated by the fandom in the last few years. Yet, it is so incredibly unfortunate that its story is bogged down by annoying attempts to make AA5 a game you can play separate from the rest of the series.

Should You Play Of the Devil?

Yes, plain and simple, regardless of who you are, but especially if you’re an Ace Attorney fan. If you liked AA5 and what it was trying to convey with the “dark age of the law” and a corrupt legal system, I definitely think you should give of the Devil a chance. I think it handles the corruption much better than AA5, and makes it much more integral to the plot of the game. If you disliked AA5 or found the “dark age” annoying, then obviously try of the Devil out.

I think it’s definitely worth trying out the free case to see what it’s about, especially if you are interested in the game but want to wait until it’s fully released. It gives a great insight into how the game will play going forward, and leaves enough room for you to question how the plot will progress from that point onward. And, it’s free. Can’t go wrong with that.

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And that’s it! Thanks for reading my simultaneous review on of the Devil and rant on why I struggle to like AA5. Lemme know your thoughts on the manner in the comments to this post, I’m super open to other opinions on AA5. Maybe you can convince me to rate AA5 higher.

And I know I’ve been mostly game posting lately, but I’ll have more book/writing posts coming up soon. Very hard to come up with opinions on books that people haven’t already said comparatively. Plus, if you’re coming from my Bluesky or Tumblr, I pretty much only post about games there as well, so I feel like my audience gets it.

Next week should be an update on how Nano went for me (can you believe it’s almost December already?). Into December proper, I’ll have another post on Ace Attorney, specifically the community and its silly holidays, so stay tuned for that.

And, as always, see you next week!

Metroid Prime 2: An Unexpectedly Bad But Good Game

I’ve spent the better part of the last two years catching up on most of the Metroid games I can. It’s a game series I can confidently say is one of my favorites, despite it being so vastly different from the other game series I enjoy. Having played all of the 2D games through various means, it was only a matter of time until I started the Prime sub-series.

At one time, I had the first “Metroid Prime” for GameCube. However, the controls for that game are some of the worst controls imaginable. Generation 6 in gaming (a topic I will delve further into at some point) is such a funny time in history because you have the PS2 and Xbox, both of which figured out dual-stick controls for 3D environments within the generation, but then you also have the GameCube which had absolutely no idea what it was doing in a 3D space. You would think that the yellow C-stick would refer to “Camera-Stick,” but much like the Nintendo Switch 2’s mysterious C-button, it isn’t ever what you expect or want out of Nintendo.

If you aren’t aware, the way in which you control the camera in “Metroid Prime” for GameCube is with the analog stick, and aiming outside of it requires you to hold the R shoulder button, then aim. Essentially, you can’t move and aim at the same time. Now, experienced Metroid fans will tell you that this control scheme is perfect for the game because there’s a lock-on for a reason. However, I’m going to tell you that this control scheme sucks and is not worth anyone’s time.

So, once I sold “Metroid Prime” for “Metroid Prime Remastered,” and completed that game without any qualms, the question for how I would get through “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes” became a concern. I definitely didn’t want to be stuck using the shitty GameCube controls, and as of now, there isn’t a re-release on Switch 2. The only other way to play “Metroid Prime 2” is with Wii-mote controls on the “Metroid Prime Trilogy.” And let me be the first to say, yikes.

The Pros of “Prime 2”

Now, I want to start with some of the pros of Prime 2, because I do really enjoy what Prime 2 had to bring to the Metroid series. As a Metroid game, it stands out along with titles like “Metroid Dread” and “Fusion,” with eerie atmosphere and world-building.

While I may have my gripes, I can’t deny that these aspects of “Prime 2” are phenomenally done, and genuinely can be breathtaking at times.

World-Building and Atmosphere in “Prime 2”

One thing that the Prime games continue to be good at is the world-building. The narrative design hidden in scanning the environment and the creatures you run into, along with the tidbits of historical information, continue to be done in such a flawless manner. The subtly of world-building is something that Prime excels at, especially when you enter an area and see a bunch of corpses scattered about, and can only wonder what took them out.

A lot of the time, the world-building is told solely through scans. It incentivizes you to scan the entire area to achieve more lore, specifically with certain doors and messages locked to a particular translation that Samus can’t read without the correct modules in place. These translation modules can incentivize you to continue on, much like the other upgrades within the game, as without them, you can’t explore the entire world. Along with that, oftentimes, you won’t immediately know how to attack a boss until you scan it, which requires quick thinking on your feet to avoid attacks while the scan visor loads. While in the scan visor, you can’t lock on to the enemy to dodge out of the way, so you might have to account for losing a bit of health during the scan sequence.

While the world-building in this game is phenomenal, the atmosphere in Prime 2 is show-stopping comparatively. One thing in particular that continued to impress me was how, in the cut-scene where you save the game, Samus noticeably slumps her shoulders forward, as though the weight of the dread that follows her throughout the game is finally relieved in a moment of reprise at a save station. Deliberate narrative design choices like this help not only with expressing the air of dread and tension within the game, but also help bring the world and characters within it alive. The stress you feel exploring Dark Aether, and the relief when you return to Light Aether aren’t feelings you experience alone, because the player character—Samus—also feels that tension.

There are a lot of aspects of Dark Aether that made the atmosphere so incredibly tense. For one, the entire world is much darker than Light Aether, so traversing around has to be intentional or else you’ll run into one of the many types of Ings unprepared. The air itself is poisonous as well, so each step has to be deliberate or else you will die. There are deceased Luminoth—native creatures of Aether—bodies scattered about that, when you scan them, will tell you that they died to the toxic air in the atmosphere. As such, the atmosphere and world-building work together flawlessly to express such dread and tension while playing.

The Intricacies of the Light World versus the Dark World

Another thing I really liked about Metroid Prime 2 is the general aesthetics of each area of the Light World and how the Dark World played off of that. There are four major areas of Light Aether: Temple Grounds, Agon Wastes, Torvus Bog, and Sanctuary Fortress. Out of these areas, it was really only Agon Wastes and Torvus Bog that felt kind of similar to areas in Prime 1, like Agon Wastes felt very similar to Prime 1’s Temple Grounds on Tallon IV and Torvus Bog felt very similar to the watery areas of Prime 1, yet were quite distinct enough that I never felt like I was walking in the same areas I already had been before.

One thing to keep in mind about Metroid games, particularly the Prime games, is that the planets you explore often tend to have a much more rustic and historical feel to them, like the areas and mechanisms within the different areas will often look dilapidated and worn down, as though no one had lived on the planet in centuries. This world-building aspects makes it incredibly easy to forget that Metroid, as a series, is a sci-fi series (despite the fact that Samus is wearing an advanced space suit and travels around in a gunship). I think it is this reason why Sanctuary Fortress completely shocked me when I first arrived, and is one of my favorite areas in a Metroid game thus far.

Sanctuary Fortress is the last area of the game, and so if you don’t want to be spoiled about the specifics of the area, I would recommend skipping to the section entitled “General Game-Play Loop.” I’m not going to be super spoilery on boss fights and upgrades obtained, but if you want to go in completely blind, then you’re free to skip.

Alright, for those who’ve stuck around, Sanctuary Fortress is essentially this high-tech fortress that the Luminoth created as a last line of defense against any intruders. Essentially, it’s a bunker. There are machine guns posted outside the doors to prevent anyone from entering the area and all of the enemies in this area are essentially robots. There’s even an enemy called the Rezbit, which is essentially a computer virus that frantically attacks you on a protection protocol, and has an attack that will completely shut down Samus’ suit, forcing you to input a code to reset. As annoying as Rezbits are, they are truly one of the most interesting enemies to fight in Prime 2 as a whole. I absolutely love games that have sequences that visually affect the screen, like I’m incredibly fond of Nier: Automata for the exact same reason.

Sanctuary Fortress is such a vastly different vibe from the rest of the areas, almost on par with the vast difference between the E.M.M.I. rooms in Dread compared the rest of the map, except Sanctuary Fortress has so many more enemies that help set the area apart from the rest of the areas in the game.

Comparatively, Dark Aether takes the mirrored versions of these areas on the planet, renaming them to make more sense to the Ing that rule over the area. For example, instead of Sanctuary Fortress, Dark Aether’s mirrored version of that area is called Ing Hive, which functions very similarly to a fortress as a centralized hub. Many of the Dark Aether versions of Agon Wastes and Torvus Bog are renamed similarly, mostly to further the tense and dreadful tone of Dark Aether compared to Light Aether.

General Game-Play Loop

Finally, the general game-play loop of Prime 2 is one of the best within the series. There’s a bit more direction and intention in Prime 2 compared to Prime 1, where you have to obtain the three Dark Temple Keys in each area, unlock the Dark Temple, usually defeat a boss, and take the energy from the Energy controller to return to the Light Temple where it belongs. It’s a simple goal to achieve throughout the game, giving you a bit of direction when in the Dark World, instead of just expecting you to explore and find the upgrades on your own.

I also felt like the Dark Temple Keys helped with the world-building within the game, because the goal of returning the energy to Light Aether is to be able to help the last surviving Luminoth from the horde of Ing in Dark Aether, and eventually destroy the Dark World. You, as Samus, are actively exploring the Dark Aether to achieve these keys in order to save Light Aether from ceasing to exist, and in doing so, the Ing are attacking you because they also don’t want to cease to exist. It helps give the game purpose and meaning outside of just being another game with Space Pirates and Ridley as the enemy, which worked for Prime 1 but of course can’t be the main enemies for every game in the series (or else it’d be boring). And while Space Pirates and Metroids are present within the game, they function as side enemies for the most part, secluded to only a small section of Temple Grounds.

I found that I would forget the main goal of the game being to collect the Dark Temple Keys while exploring, as exploring continues to be the priority of Metroid games, but one thing I did like about the Temple Keys is the size and placement of them. The Temple Keys were roughly the size of Samus, so they were never easy to miss, and on top of that, they were consistently placed in areas where, if you entered the room, your eyes would be immediately drawn to the key. While it wasn’t always obvious in how to obtain the key, it was still placed in a way so that you never truly forgot about collecting them while exploring.

This loop of opening a new area, exploring and collecting the Dark Temple Keys, gathering upgrades along the way to defeat the final boss of the area, only to be granted a new upgrade to explore more of the area and open a new area, was quite enjoyable, and gave a twist to the usual formula of a Metroid game in a way that didn’t feel too demanding or annoying. Literally, a situation where you stumble upon the Dark Temple Keys and are like, “Right, I forgot about that,” collect it and continue exploring in the way that you were previously exploring. Unimposing, I guess, would be the best way to describe it, and yet it surprisingly fits well into the Metroid formula without making the game feel overwhelmingly linear.

The Cons of “Prime 2”

While that’s all fine and dandy, there are aspects of the above sections that are mind-numbingly annoying that a lot of that atmosphere is forgotten. Like, genuinely, some of the most annoying mechanics and level design choices that still irritate me a month after finishing the game.

These are general things I’ve found annoy me about Prime 2 that are exclusive to Prime 2 (as far as I’m aware).

Save Stations and Ammo Refill Stations

My first gripe with Prime 2 is the placement of save stations and ammo refill stations. Within the four areas of Prime 2, there’s only around two save stations per area, which is pretty paltry, to say the least.

I think the work around here is that the save stations are the same in Dark Aether, so technically each area has four save stations, but I don’t consider Dark Agon Wastes and Light Agon Wastes to be the same area, and I don’t even think the game itself considers the Light and Dark World versions of areas to be the same.

With limited save stations, you end up saving in the same spots over and over again, making it challenging to remember where you planned on going when you return to the game. If you return to the game, and the save station is exactly the same one you started in last time you played, a lot of the nuance of exploration and figuring out where to go gets diminished. The amount of times I saved in the exact same save station in Light Sanctuary Temple toward the end of the game man…yikes.

And since the save stations are so spread out, I found myself rushing to the closest save station after any major boss fight just so I didn’t accidentally die and end up having to do the boss fight all over again. I missed a lot of exploration in that manner (which I talked about in my previous post, hint hint wink wink).

Not only that, but there are even less ammo refill stations. There is only one ammo refill station in each area, which isn’t too different from any other Metroid game, but the refill stations are only in inconvenient places in Dark Aether. And maybe that’s not super shocking, because I don’t know about you, but I’m never super pressed to refill my missiles or power bombs. But that’s the problem: it’s not just missiles that need to be refilled.

In Metroid Prime 2, there’s two other beams you can get in the game: light beam and dark beam (and a secret third beam that uses the power of both light and dark). These are limited like the missiles, and you only get fifty shots with either beam when you first get them. And if you play the Prime games at all like I do, you shoot as freely as you can to survive. Keeping track of how much ammo I have of light or dark beam was dreadful and annoying to say the least.

Also, if you want to go to Dark Aether to recharge, you have to use a dark beam to enter the portal. And while there is a fail-safe just in case you run out of ammo for entering portals, I still think that’s a massive fumble on the development team’s part for limiting the ammo and/or having so few ammo refill stations.

Or, if you want to refill in Light Aether, the only location to do so is Samus’ ship. That’s right, you would have to trek your way all the way back to Temple Grounds where Samus’ ship is located, recharge and save while you’re at it, then trek all the way back to where ever the hell you were before.

The Waiting in Dark Aether

Another aggravating thing in Prime 2 is the waiting game you play in Dark Aether. Now, maybe I was the only one that did this, but in Dark Aether, there are little bubbles of light you can sit in and refill your health. These are mainly here to recharge health while trekking through Dark Aether because the atmosphere of Dark Aether is toxic to Samus. You will rapidly lose health if you’re not in a bubble. In the standalone Varia suit, this goes up one point of health for every one second in real life.

And, if you’re anything like me, you cherish any opportunity to receive health.

I found that if there was an area around a portal without any of Dark Aether’s enemies—Ing—I would sit and wait in the bubble until my health was full again before trekking further into Dark Aether or returning to Light Aether. That way, I didn’t have to worry about running out of health as I crept closer to a boss fight.

However, sitting and waiting for your health to go up, point by point, second by second, is so incredibly tedious. And, if you’re health’s really low later in the game, you could sit there for a good 20 minutes.

I ended up getting into calls with my friends to chat while playing Prime 2 because that at least helped the time pass. I would sit my Wii-mote into my lap and have a laugh, while Samus spun around in circles due to the positioning of the Wii-mote when it last saw the sensor bar being at an angle.

Now, obviously, this is more optional than the save station situation. But, I still think it’s a huge nuisance that should be mentioned if someone wants to play Prime 2. You can’t tell me you didn’t sit in those light bubbles for at least a little bit at some point in the game, especially since the crates and containers containing refills gave such paltry amounts of health.

Aggravating Boss Fights

I will state right now, this section will be a bit spoilery, because a lot of the annoying boss fights within this game happen later in the game. So, if you want to go into Metroid Prime 2 as blind as you can, I would skip until the section “Do the Pros Outweigh the Cons?”

I’ll wait until the skippers have skipped.

Have you skipped yet?

Yes? Great. Let’s talk about these boss fights.

There’s a couple of boss fights that really bothered me while playing, and a few aspects of the boss fights that I found quite annoying. For one, the development team introduced these new beams—light, dark, and annihilation—but you didn’t really have to use them in the boss fights. They weren’t required like all of the beams in Prime 1. What made Metroid Prime, the boss fight at the end of Prime 1, so unique to me was the forced usage of all of the beams in order to defeat it. You had to quickly change beams when the color matched that of a particular beam in order to attack. This felt like the accumulation of everything you learned and obtained throughout the game, making for a perfect final boss of a Metroid game.

In Prime 2, the only fight you had to have the light or dark beam for was the Emperor Ing. At that, it wasn’t even needed for every stage, only the very last stage of the final boss. If anything, it felt less like a reward and more like a last-minute requirement. None of the other bosses required the use of dark or light beams, and comparably, super missiles seemed to do an equal amount of damage. At that point, I can only guess why they would decide to limit the dark and light ammo, because it clearly stopped them from requiring the beams used in boss fights.

In the same vein, the Dark Samus 3/4 fight at the end of the game also had no requirement for the dark or light beam. In fact, Dark Samus at this stage can’t be attacked by any other beam other than a charged power beam. Why? Shockingly, I don’t think there’s a reason outside of the fact that this fight happens during the escape, and the developers couldn’t guess whether or not the player would have enough light or dark beam at this point. Instead of using the dark or light beams, this fight requires you to get hit by Dark Samus’ phazon attacks in order to charge up enough phazon to attack Dark Samus with it. For the final boss fight in Metroid Prime 2, it feels like a very lackluster fight, stuck only using the power beam and echo visor without getting to use all of the upgrades you’ve achieved throughout the game.

Fundamentally, because light and dark beams are used so infrequently in the game, the annihilator beam ends up serving absolutely no purpose outside of using it with the echo visor for a couple of puzzles. Puzzles that, by the way, only unlocked a few more missiles and maybe one (1) power bomb upgrade. For all the hype that climaxed into this final achievement, the final beam upgrade, it flops incredibly hard once you achieve it and can’t really use it to its full potential without running out of both dark and light beams.

Now again, I do want to bring up that despite the flaws in the limiting of ammo, some of the boss fights were really cool, specifically the ones that had you fighting against and upgrade. These were intense and challenging, sure, but also done so specifically so that you can see how valuable the upgrade you’re about to achieve is going to be. For all of the anguish the Spider Guardian caused, it was incredibly convenient to be able to traverse that boss fight arena with the spider ball upgrade afterward. It made the challenge worth it, and incentivized continuing on, even when the timing of the Spider Guardian made you want to pull your hair out.

Do the Pros Outweigh the Cons?

I finished Metroid Prime 2: Echoes on October 2nd, 2025, so as of writing this post, it’s been a little over a month. In that time, I have started playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in my quest to complete the Prime games before Metroid Prime 4 releases. Now, as a review of just Prime 2, I don’t want my opinions of Prime 3 to sour or enlighten this review (that will be for a review I write up after I finish Prime 3). However, as a sequel game, you kind of have to compare Prime 2 to at least Prime 1. And, to be honest, I think I like Prime 2 better.

Now, when I first finished Prime 2 and experienced the shitshow that was that ending (courteously, I will avoid mentioning specifics for the skippers), I had a lot of negative thoughts initially. A lot of the annoyances that I discussed in the cons section outweighed the pros, and ultimately, the game left a sour taste in my mouth. I was fully convinced that the game I had just played was quite bad comparably, that Prime 1 was much better, and I had concluded that Prime 2 was the worst Metroid game in the series.

That’s kind of harsh for this game, in hindsight. It might not be my favorite Metroid game, but it surely isn’t the worst by far.

Honestly, for whether or not the pros outweigh the cons, that’s a conclusion that only a player can make. If you play through Prime 2 and think it wasn’t that bad, then great! Rate it highly and leave it at that. However, if you have a hard time with getting easily frustrated at a game, I would say watching Prime 2 would be a better experience than playing it. Or hell, wait until a re-release comes out and then give it a shot, because that will likely be a much better experience than playing it on GameCube or Wii.

Compared to the novelty of Prime 1, Prime 2 wasn’t as enjoyable of an experience, to me. But, in hindsight, I think the atmosphere and world-building of the game brings the score of Prime 2 up for me. Ultimately, I would have to say that the pros and cons weigh evenly with this game, so while it is enjoyable, it’s not as enjoyable as Prime 1.

My General Rating for “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes”

In my humblest opinion, and basing my rating on my rating scale in my Google Sheets rant, Metroid Prime 2 is a solid 7/10 game for me. It is an easy game to recommend to people, though with some caveats that it might be a frustrating experience for others. It really truly is an experience that you have to play for yourself to fully know whether or not it’ll be a fun game for you.

I think for that reason, it’s not a 5/10. There’s too many pros that bring the score higher than an averagely rated game, but it can’t be too high because so many of the cons brought me emotional (and at times, physical) pain.

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And that’s it! Thanks for reading my first review on this blog! This is the general formatting that I will use for game reviews, with specific sub-categories for each game that I review. My brain wants to write this so much more formally, but I also want to keep this informal, and I feel like that fight is kind of obvious. I’ll keep working with tone for future reviews. I’m also not sure if this exact format would work well for a book review, like pros and cons is not something you look for when you’re reading a book, so I’ll also work that out when I write my first book review (whenever that comes out).

If you have any further opinions about Prime 2, or any suggestions about my reviewing format, please leave a comment on this post!

And as always, see you next week!

Why More Games Should Have Save Scumming

 Something I’ve never understood about video game culture is the idea that save scumming, or saving repeatedly and restarting a game when you make a wrong choice or die, is a bad thing. Sure, it might sound like an inauthentic experience where you’re not going through the game blindly, and might even be against the creator’s desired way of playing the game. But, I don’t think it’s that bad of a thing. I don’t even think it’s a cheap tactic to get 100% in a game. I believe it promotes exploration in a way that not a lot of people care to talk about.

Now, I’m not talking about saving your game before a boss fight. This should be an expected practice in all games, and frankly makes for great game design so that if you die, you don’t have to climb your way back to this spot, however long it took to get here. I’m talking about being able to save the game wherever you are, and explore whatever options are given to you.

Save Systems That Irk Me (and why I’ve come to this conclusion)

Certain games have phenomenal save systems, while others have poor excuses of saving systems. Maybe I’ve been burned by playing too many Metroid games over the last year or so, but having a dedicated save spot, where you can only save the game at that location, is one of my least favorite game design aspects ever made. I’ll be honest, I don’t have all day to play games. I think most people don’t. So, forcing a player to sit and play until they get to save the game feels like being chained to the TV. I don’t get to be done playing until the game tells me I can be done.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Metroid. I think “Dread” has the best pacing of save stations in the entire series by far, making it much easier to save and be done with the game on your own terms. But, having recently beat “Metroid Prime 2,” there were many cases where I had to stop exploring and backtrack to wherever the last save station was to save. It was often the first thing I did after a boss fight, which meant missing a lot of hidden upgrades, most infamously the second Dark Temple key in Torvus Bog after defeating the Alpha Blogg (respectively, I’m not going to explain these words. If you know, you know). And in these cases, when I booted up the game in the exact same save station over and over again, I ended up forgetting what I had done previously and where I had explored, which, I feel, defeats the entire purpose of an exploration game.

In these games, I felt pressured to save and stop playing at a save station, to not explore too far without a nearby save station, instead of continuing because I didn’t know how much time I had until the next save station. It could be 30 minutes of gameplay, or an hour and a half. And when you’re just gaming for fun, the stress of not knowing when you’ll get to save next seems unnecessary.

A Not-So-Bad Example of a Save System

Comparatively, I actually kind of like the save systems in a lot of Fire Emblem games. Since I’m currently playing “Path of Radiance” (FE9), I’m going to primarily talk about that system, but for the most part, the system is the same across the board.

In FE9, you can really only save before a battle and once you’ve returned to base camp after a battle. Sounds kinda similar to Metroid’s save stations, right? Well, not really. The only thing that happens between these moments are cut-scenes. You watch a 20-minute cut-scene, then you get to save. Then after the battle, you watch another 10-20 minute cut-scene, and you get to save. Simple! Easy! Not stressful at all!

On the other hand, in battle, you can’t really save whenever you want. There’s a separate save mode implemented for mid-battle saving that’s deleted as soon as you return to the battle (most likely to prevent save scumming). Essentially, you get to save once, return to the title screen, and once you return to the game where you left off, that save is deleted. For a tactical RPG like FE9, this is not a bad system to have, and I also understand why save scumming wouldn’t be ideal. It’d kind of be like save scumming a chess match, like you should probably own up to your mistakes.

For older Fire Emblems like FE9, not having a means of save scumming makes sense. There is no casual mode; if the characters die mid-battle, they’re gone for the rest of the game. Having a means to save scum would defeat the entire purpose of that game mechanic. But for newer Fire Emblems, I don’t see a problem in save scumming if you’re playing casually.

The Best Save System in Gaming

One genre of gaming that I’ve noticed has the best save system implemented is visual novels. Obviously, I mean, why wouldn’t it? The entire game-play is reading a book, and like a book, you can stop and “save” whenever you want. It would be strange if that wasn’t the case.

Now, the visual novel genre also encompasses point-and-click adventures as well. These are, for the most part, the same genre, except there’s more game-play in point-and-clicks than a visual novel. However, like visual novels, point-and-clicks also allow you to save whenever you want (for the most part).

Some examples of this include: Ace Attorney, Zero Escape, Professor Layton, and more recently, of the Devil.

Perceived Cons of Save Scumming

In a lot of these listed games, perceived cons of being able to save whenever you want leads to the question of experiencing the game authentically. Can you really say you experienced “Ace Attorney 3” properly if you save scummed your way through most of the cases?

When the puzzle of the game so heavily depends on game dialogue, like Ace Attorney, it’s hard to justify saving the game and reloading into the game to choose the correct answer. If you make a blunder, choose the wrong answer, or make the wrong argument, it should be expected as a part of the game’s game-play. You solve the puzzle by thinking through the logic of a character’s argument and chipping away at it through cross-examinations. If you save scum through the answer, then the concern becomes whether or not you’re following the logic or puzzle of the game. It’s essentially considered “cheating” the puzzle.

This concern of cheating follows through for most games. If you’re allowed to save scum whenever, then that allows you to cheat through the exploration and follow an “intended path” instead of allowing the game to happen. For Metroid, if you could save scum, there would be less intention to explore and find the upgrades naturally, and instead, always choose the correct path.

However, I don’t think this is a concern for most games. Even in Metroid, save scumming seems mostly pointless because regardless, you still have to explore the map to find the upgrades in one way or another. Getting to save whenever you want doesn’t remove the immersion of the game, and it doesn’t negate basic features of the game-play, like in older Fire Emblems. And in older Fire Emblems, the save system works well-enough so you don’t really need to save mid-battle. If you get to save whenever, you just get to stop playing whenever you want, which should be in the control of the player anyway.

In the case of Ace Attorney, you can save scum whenever you want. Sure, you might not be following the puzzle to a T, or maybe you’re struggling to see how a point of logic connects to another and you want to play down all of your options, but I don’t consider it cheating, and neither should you. Honestly, save scumming lets you explore your options. Maybe it’s the wrong choice, but there’s always unique dialogue you wouldn’t get to see if you only ever made the correct choice. In some cases, there’s even hints as to what the correct answer would be in the wrong answer, so you can realign yourself and reconfigure the positioning of the puzzle.

Or, in the case of Zero Escape, there’s already multiple endings to the game, so save scumming would just save time for later routes to explore your options and see the different endings, rather than having the solve the first puzzle over and over again. In fact, this system encourages save scumming, as when you choose a dialogue option, the next time you play through that scene, the previously chosen option is grayed out. That way, when you return to that point in the game, you know what choices led you to the ending you received.

In these cases, it’s not a matter of perfectionism. It’s seeing what other dialogue occurs when you purposefully choose the wrong option.

What If You Could Choose Not to Save Scum?

One example of exploration in save scumming that I’ve really come to appreciate recently is the save system in of the Devil. Of the Devil is a up-and-coming Ace Attorney-like game where you play as a defense lawyer in the year 2086, defending clients from murders they didn’t commit. However, you’re essentially gambling on each dialogue option you have. It only has two episodes out as of this post (Chapter 0 is free on Steam, by the way), but I can tell from just two episodes that this save system works phenomenally.

In the game, you can save whenever and wherever you want. And frankly, the game really wants you to save as much as you can, because you’re given three pages of nine save spots. Much like other games, save scumming allows you to freely explore your other options and gives hints as to what the correct answer is. However, what makes this game unique is in it’s trials and conversations.

During certain conversations, you might have to dance around a topic to get the information you want out of the character, and choosing the incorrect option would lose you credits, or essentially “credibility points.” If you don’t have enough credits by trial, you might not be able to properly defend your client. These moments play like Blackjack, where certain topics provide higher points, and the goal is to reach 21 points by the end of the conversation. These discussions are great for exploration as it helps show why certain topics are Aces versus others that are only 3 points. Save scumming and seeing where the logic lines up to get 21-points also helps for later conversations about the crime, as you know which topics didn’t work previously.

In trial, there are sequences much like the cross-examination of Ace Attorney where you have to disprove a point the prosecutor made with evidence. You can essentially “Ante-up” certain points of evidence to get more credits, depending on how confident you feel about the solution.

And while all of this is wonderful and makes a lot of the slower parts of an Ace Attorney game much more enjoyable, you can choose not to save scum. That’s right, once you get through Chapter 0, you unlock a mode called the High-roller Mode, where you’re only given one save slot, so every decision counts. It’s a completely optional mode, and you can turn the mode on whenever you want. This, I think, is the best answer to save scumming by far. Not only does of the Devil allow and, frankly, promote save scumming, but gives hardcore players an option to not have the option to save scum. Those players get to play in the means that’s most comfortable for them, giving them the challenge that they desire, while also not making it the default option for those who just want to play the game for fun.

I wish more games did their save systems like Nth Circle Studios did for of the Devil. It makes it so that everyone can play the game how they want, and aren’t tethered to their choices. Players can stop playing whenever they please, explore what other options might bring them, and provide hints to put the player back on track in a way that doesn’t feel demeaning.

Hopefully, this convinced some people that save scumming isn’t the end of the world. Regardless, thank you for reading! Stay tuned next week!