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The dog. This is who you are on Rubicon-3, or at least who the pilot you play in Armored Core VI is introduced as. You go by many names. Never is your character given a history, emotion, or a voice, but by god do they have names.  C4-621, Raven, G13, Tourist, The Wallclimber, Buddy. What does this array of names mean? After all, just because you're a silent protagonist doesn't mean you're not a character. Link goes by Link, Gordon Freeman is Gordon Freeman. 621 however, is less than a person. Less than a dog. Raven is a weapon, pointed at whatever the holder wants to crush.  G13 gains the respect of the Vespers and various groups struggling for power on Rubicon purely through the might of their own destructive capacity. Tourist is perhaps the most fitting of these names. The only concrete history we have on Raven is that they're an outsider to Rubicon, a pilot with unstable fourth generation augmentations that leave them essentially unable to exist as a human being, and...

I hate MMOs. Or rather, I did. I found the grind grating. I found the combat confusing. I found the stories sucked. After spending much of my youth trying to get into WoW, SWTOR, and Guild Wars 2 (to name a few) I simply decided the genre wasn't for me. This was around 2014. I was 18 years old. I have not played an MMO since, swearing off the genre in totality. That was until this year, when 26 year old me decided to embark on a quest, to play all the mainline Final Fantasy games. Originally I had gone into them expecting to write full reviews on each. That was before I stumbled into a roadblock. I finished XV first, finding it an overall pleasant, if somewhat unfinished, experience. I finished I next, appreciating what it did for RPG's as a genre and finding it still holds up. I finished XII (The Zodiac Age) and adored it's expansive world, vast class customisation, and combat.  If you've played or read about Final Fantasy XII you may see where this is going. For those...

There's something about licensed games that fascinates me. The act of translating an experience from one art form to another has made for some wild pieces of capital-infused art. Ever played the Napoleon Dynamite PSP game? What about Pimp My Ride: The Game ? Sword Art Online is a franchise that, in my opinion, is simply not very good. It's a power fantasy dressed up in conceits that try to be profound but often are just an opportunity to show off how cool and badass protagonist Kirito is. What started as a somewhat interesting exploration of speculative game design quickly devolved into Kirito being a cool badass who always saves the day by the second half of season 1. By extension, the viewer feels like that vicariously, but that power fantasy robs the series of being able to investigate the nature of the worlds created. So, if it's going to lean into the power fantasy, a game based on a show about games should work.  The strangest part of SAO: Lost Song is that it does w...