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posted: 2026-01-01

Voltage's Media Report for Quarter 4 of 2025



Hello and welcome to the final media report of 2025. I know that it’s coming to you a few days after the year’s turn, but consider: How could I report in complete accuracy my goings-on of the final three months of 2025 in 2025? Yes, I am working on this in 2025, but this won’t get posted until like January 2 or 3 if I had to guess. Why? Because I work up to the bell! I will do my best to pack something into every single day if I can. I learned on December 27th that Sin and Punishment on the Nintendo 64 is no more than 5 hours, and that wouldn’t be too hard to include in this report if I could actually get around to sitting down for 2-4 hours to blast through that sucker.

This report will be generally shorter1 than the previous three reports because of the things I was doing beyond media. Truth is that my final three months of this year were quite busy! Between preparing for travelling to Japan, travelling to Japan, and coming home from travelling to Japan (October, November, and December), I was pretty busy! There were only a few things that I really committed to in this period, but these pieces of media are quite distinct and impactful. Because of the gravity of this Japan trip, anything, and everything I did is anchored around November 2025. When I think back on what it was like playing games like Hollow Knight, The Legend of Zelda, and Freedom Planet 2 (all games I will be discussing here), I will also be thinking about what it was like in our hotel room in Shibuya, or what it was like to ride the subway all around Tokyo, or the melancholy I felt while watching the city get smaller and smaller out of my airplane window as we returned home, respectively. So, for this report, please consider the value in Quality of Quantity (not that these reports go through any more rigorous review than anything else I put out).

This report is going to be structured a little differently. I think going chronologically really is the most effective way to do this, given that each month ties each bunch of media together.


But first, some more thoughts on Pokémon Emerald Seaglass.

Pokémon Emerald Seaglass, My Phone, and Digital Autonomy Going into 2026



Beyond my playthrough write-up I posted shortly after returning from Japan, I want to briefly return to this playthrough from October to talk about its lasting impact. As I noted in the “playthrough report”, I played the game at breakfast and before bed as a means of removing my smartphone from the equation. In the time after finishing Emerald Seaglass, the smartphone has returned to my clutches, my Pokémon Emerald nicotine patch seemingly not having worked. It makes me think that whatever issue I tried to solve by introducing Pokémon Emerald Seaglass into the equation was more deep rooted in my habits than I thought. It also means that I might have to play Pokémon Lazarus as well in 2026. If I can make this into a longer habit, then I might be able to break from the magnetic pull of my phone. I also think that my return to my personal mobile device is more rooted in the truly addicting nature of the smartphone and social media. Yes, that includes Discord for me. I think it’s reasonable to state that I am at least somewhat addicted to my phone, and the digital dopamine donors that lurk within it. “Is it me? Or is it the phone?”. Only one way to find out, I suppose.

One of my primary goals in 2026 is to reduce how much I use my smartphone. I am unsubscribing from many conveniences. I want to experience the warmth in an experience that comes from the friction of doing something. I do not need to have everything at my fingertips when everything includes things I’d never reach for under any circumstances. Touch the machine and you might burn the fingerprints from your fingers. I want to be able to direct my reach with my brain. I recognize that this makes me sound like a bit of a crazy person, especially when I have these conversations in public over a beer. I sound like one of those sovereign citizens who claim “I don’t want the government taking away my rights as an American” when I make the claim that “the government choosing which video games you can even pay for with a credit card is bad actually”. Obviously, the electrical link between these two talking points and smartphone usage is over a loose wire at times, but current can travel through a conducting material so long as voltage exists to give it a “push” through the resistance so to speak. This forced analogy is just to say that I don’t want to be the only person in my general surroundings recognizing the perils of smartphone addiction. If I can at least get other people to start thinking about just how much we use our phones for anything and everything, maybe we can start to work towards a future where we aren’t as addicted to scrolling through the same five social media feeds.

If I can request to you, reader, a goal: wait 30 minutes to use your phone after waking up in the morning. Get out of bed and look out your nearest window. Wash your face, brush your teeth, drink some water. Take it as slowly as you can. Adding a torrent of stimulus immediately after opening your eyes will only exhaust you. Maybe you can play a simple video game while you drink your coffee? Whatever you do, please try to use your phone less. I’m going to try to do it, so you won’t be the only one doing so.


Okay, enough of this pleading, let’s go and talk about Halloween stuff!

Halloween! (October)


Since starting graduate school, I have never been able to celebrate Halloween properly due to travel for conferences. As a result, it has always been exceedingly difficult for me to celebrate Halloween in a way that feels meaningful and fun. One of the biggest lessons that I learned this summer (that I neglected to report in the Q3 media report) is that the world will not celebrate special moments without your help. If you want to get into the spirit of celebration, you need to buy a little bit. So, this year, more so than previous years, I attempted to embrace the spookiness of October, to minimize the fact that on Halloween proper I’d be on a plane flying to Japan.


House of Necrosis



First and foremost, if you are arachnophobic, this is not the game for you. There are spiders, everywhere in House of Necrosis. I would not blame you for choosing not to play this game for this reason. If, however, you’re like me and have grown used the idea that not only are spiders all  around us, but that they also might be in your bed at the same time as you, among other unsettling facts of life, then House of Necrosis might just be the game for you.

House of Necrosis wins the distinction of being my Halloween game of 2025. I stumbled into this one, having found it in the Bunker’s “Interesting Indies” thread in early October 2 . In short, House of Necrosis is Mystery Dungeon meets Resident Evil. It is not like House of Necrosis is subtle in its inspirations. I think we could say “House of Necrosis steals like an artist” with how brazenly it lifts aspects from elements from both games. You navigate a series of procedurally generated mazes to navigate deeper into the not-Spencer Mansion to find a way to escape. Along the way you will find various monsters hell bent on destroying you, ending your run. Every few floors you reach a checkpoint safe room where you can access your item storage, where you can deposit any treasures you may have accumulated, and withdraw any resources you had been saving for later. Amusingly, in these rooms, rather than adhere to the cartesian grid-based movement intrinsic to Mystery Dungeon, you instead move with a polar coordinate style of movement, just like in the initial Resident Evil game.


"Monster House" has a different feeling when it's not Pokémon.


It’s up to you, the player, to be as cunning in your movement as possible. This is par for the course with Mystery dungeon games, sure, but in House of Necrosis, I found myself developing new strategies I would otherwise not consider in other Mystery Dungeon games. One of the most important strategies I developed while playing was learning how to lure a foe down a corridor so that I could hide behind a corner and bash them over the head with a blunt object when they entered the room in which I was hiding. This and other strategies were absolutely crucial in navigating the final few floors of the final area of the game. The goal of the game is to make it to the end of the maze. You do not need to be the strongest creature in the mansion, in fact you will not be, but you can be the smartest. It is better to get to the end of the maze than not, after all.

This is a Mystery Dungeon game through and through, and I would love to write a whole-ass piece for the website, but I think it might be best to hold off on doing a more complete discussion of House of Necrosis for another day. I have been writing a lot about Mystery Dungeon, and House of Necrosis has afforded me a lot of new perspectives on what it means to play through a Mystery Dungeon game. I’m excited to have another Mystery Dungeon game in my wheelhouse- these really are some of my favorite games. I think there ought to be more Mystery Dungeon games as a whole. Slap a whole new coat of paint on the formula, add a new mechanic or two, and bam, you’ve got yourself a real cool game. If you’re someone who likes their games to be tense, but patient, Mystery Dungeon games are for you. Is it any wonder that the anxiety present in the Resident Evil games pairs perfectly with the stressful chess matches of Mystery Dungeon?

This game has my whole-hearted recommendation.


Paranomasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo



After playing Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy for more than quite literally five days of our lives 3, my wife and I pivoted into a new visual novel for the futon game: Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. This one had always been on our respective radars. It was on her radar because her sister recommended it as one she might like. It was on mine because I bought it in like 2023 and it had been burning a hole in my Steam pocket. We expected this to be a fun horror visual novel for the spooky season, but were pleasantly surprised by a more grounded, artistically stunning, Japanese drama with horror elements. More than anything, this is one of those games that makes me wish I had more context from Japanese film and TV Shows before going in. I think this is from the fact that the story isn’t just a ridiculous exploitative guilty pleasure tale in the way Hundred Line is. It’s contrast to this previous story does wonders.

Paranormasight starts off with the makings of a Killing Game story: nine people want to resurrect someone from the dead and lean into the surrounding legends of the Honjo area to conduct the Rite of Resurrection. To do so, these people are given a “Soul Stone”, which must be filled with “Soul Dregs” which is only done by killing others with the curse associated with said Soul Stone. For example, one stone kills a target should they attempt to walk away from an encounter. Another stone kills someone should they have a source of flames on their person. The game initially presents itself as a battle of wits amongst the holders of the Soul Stones. The first hour or so is spent navigating conversations, changing in-game menu settings, and warping through the “time” in game to come out on top in each scenario.

But then the game takes a fascinating left turn, killing off the supposed protagonist in favor of a story split amongst three other characters. In doing so, the game becomes much more like a mystery drama. Sure, there are plenty of fantastic elements, what with its curses and serial killers with supernatural motives and all that jazz. But there are also plenty of story beats that are grounded in reality in a way I never would have expected. As much as this is a story about ancient curses, it’s a story about families and friends. It’s a story about how far people will go in order to obtain justice for those who cannot obtain it for themselves. It’s a story about the fruitless nature of revenge. It’s a story about what it means to love a person who cannot love you in the same way.

We managed to finish the whole story just before I left for Japan. In the credits sequence we noticed that the game was sponsored by the Sumida City Tourism Bureau, and, well…



Of course, we went and checked out a few of the places from the game in real life. With our final day in Japan that we had left flexible for ourselves, before we returned to the States, we hit up some of the places that were still open in the evening as a final walking day on our trip. We visited two primary points, Kinshibori Park (as seen previously) and the Ho’onji Bridge (the Gardens were unfortunately closed by the time we got to Sumida City area), snapped a few pictures and marveled at the notion that, yes, we had in fact gone to a place in Japan because a video game suggested we do so. It was a lot of fun though! It was a wonderful time going off the beaten path to find a place that we had found interesting, and exist in a space that had inspired another person to memorialize it in fiction. Trust me when I say that these areas are shockingly similar between their physical and virtual presentations. We did not meet any curse bearers, thankfully.

We would recommend Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo supplemented with a subsequent trip to Japan.


On The Futon Games



Across 2025 we spent our evenings playing Visual Novels and Story-heavy rople playing games on the futon. We eschewed the notion of watching prestige television in favor of getting into one of these literary works that would be a hard sell to your average married middle American household. We aren’t better than anyone else for playing through games like 1000xRESIST, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, or Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo, it’s just that we do that would be considered “different” to those in our demographic. It’s a practice that we really started this year that I’m really grateful for. I think it’s been a remarkably effective way to play through some of these medium-sized (and XTRA Large-sized) games together. I have complete confidence that this method of playing through visual novels and story-heavy games will continue into 2026. More on this in the like 2025 Superlatives Post coming eventually.


Japan (November)



On Halloween proper, I got on a non-stop flight from Detroit to Haneda. The fourteen-hour flight flew by very quickly, though I can attribute this to my melatonin knocking me out for six of those hours, and House of Necrosis runs occupying almost four. I had intended to play plenty of House of Necrosis on the trip, expecting that the Mystery Dungeon formula would be fun to play during the evenings of my conference in the same way that I had played through Fire Emblem in 2022 in Milan, Super Mario Bros. Winder in 2023 in Vancouver, and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in Tampa.  But alas, I finished House of Necrosis on the plane! What a dilemma! So then, what did I play instead?

Hollow Knight



I made the terrible decision to first start playing Hollow Knight on stream in October of 2024. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy playing this magnificent game with my good friend Katastrofreee, it was that I wasn’t able to play it without being behind a camera. When we’re behind a camera, we do things that we don’t necessarily do as an unobserved person. In this way, we are quantum phenomena, we only behave in predictable methods when we are observed 4. As I noted last year, streaming made me feel specific ways that were counter intuitive to my own play. This uncomfortable pressure to never linger and marvel at the craft of a moment actively made my experience of playing Hollow Knight worse. It sure didn’t help that I managed to slay the Mantis Lords and then proceeded to get really stuck* in Deepnest. I committed time off stream to getting out of that miserable crawling pit, but I had lost so much steam from the affair. I had set the game aside shortly after reaching the City of Tears. I knew that I would eventually return to Hallownest, but it would take time and proper circumstances.

And then Silksong came out, and everyone started playing it. I decided that it was time to just gird my loins and play some more Hollow Knight, even if I didn’t enjoy the level of difficulty I was facing around this section. So, I played a few times before going to Japan on call with a few friends. I just had to get back into it a bit. It was a good warm up. I am glad that I downloaded it onto my Steam Deck, “just in case”.

The first few times in Japan I decided to boot up Hollow Knight after a full day of working and networking, my eyelids would drop within a half-hour of play. I would be jumping around in the Kingdom Waterways when I’d feel a cold snap in my vision and a twitch that suddenly brought me back to a state of alertness. I’d hear voices talking about nonsense5 and I’d decide to call it a night the moment I found my next save bench. But progress is progress. I’d find myself bouncing about the entire kingdom, going wherever my heart desired, and where my little legs would take me.

Slowly but surely, I found new movement items and got into a rhythm of play. I began to understand the ways in which the game guided me towards the ultimate goals of the game. I respected the difficulty in a way that forced me to play patiently and conservatively. I played knowing I could retreat and tackle a different goal if I wasn’t quite prepared for the barrier I had been challenging. I found the Watcher Knights shortly after getting the double jump, but I found that I was entirely too weak. After an evening in Shibuya spent dying over and over to the six creatures, I decided to take a tactical retreat, and go get stronger elsewhere. I figured that I could stand to get at least another full mask of health and some other pins that would make the fight more straightforward.

In this retreat, I found a sense of peace, I could just go wherever I wanted and as long as I had a plan in mind, I would be having an enjoyable time. I knew where I should go, generally, and I encountered plenty of interesting diversions along the way. These diversions also allowed me to practice new attacks and patterns of movement, which in developed in me an ever-greater confidence in my own gameplay skill.


The view from our hotel in Shibuya. Video is HM08 by Arpy G


I beat Hollow Knight on the airplane ride home. I have not gotten its true ending, and I’m alright with that. I don’t think I’m going to, and that’s fine with me. Maybe when I replay this game6, I’ll hone my skills to get enough soul to unlock the other side of the conditions required to slay the true villain.


The Legend of Zelda NES


Hey, remember how in the Quarter 2 Report I said I’d do it?


The way I balance my gaming is that I usually have one game per console in rotation. That said, I have a lot of consoles, so I often find myself with many “open” games all at once. Naturally, this created quite a dilemma in choosing which games I would want to play while on Travel, as it meant I would have to bring its respective console. Naturally, this was a major dilemma. “Which one should I bring? My Anbernic, my Steam Deck? Both? Neither?” I decided I wouldn’t bring my Nintendo Switch 2; it was a little too new and expensive to warrant an overseas trip. I had brought my Steam Deck with me to Italy and Greece before, but I remembered the inconvenience of having to explain to Spanish airport agents that “este es una computadora. Yo puedo jugar juegos de video en lo”. My Anbernic, while new, cost quite literally fifty dollars, and if it got damaged in transit, well, these things happen. But the Anbernic didn’t have House of Necrosis, which made it difficult to choose to bring the Anbernic by itself.

I brought both to Japan with me. This was the correct decision.

I played Zelda when I had pockets of time. If I was riding the subway and had fifteen minutes, I’d open up the Anbernic, and bonk around Hyrule for as long as I could. I would die, GAMEOVER, lose all my health and return the starting map screen with just a little more knowledge than before, and then make a save state as I approached my station. I know that at least one fellow passenger caught a glimpse of my playing Zelda and smiled at themselves. I wonder if they knew that I knew that they were watching me. The Tokyo Train system and The Legend of Zelda are forever fused with one another. I cannot recall one of these without the other also coming to mind. I think that it’s beautiful in a way that one of my primary memories of playing the Legend of Zelda happened to be on the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Kyoto. When I wasn’t playing, I was peering out the window at the countryside flying by. This landscape was enough to inspire someone to make an entire video game about getting lost in the world. It was a beautiful revelation to have in the moment. I will carry it for as long as this text exists.


The shy girl came out for us!


The Legend of Zelda for the NES is a game that is not nearly as difficult to play as the majority of “internet gamers” would lead you to believe. Now granted, I should make my biases immediately clear: I am good with mapping out spaces in my brain. If I visit a place and wander through it enough, I can travel through the space without needing a map. I know some folks enjoy making their own maps of Hyrule on paper, but I frankly didn’t really need to do so. I started with the map in the manual from the American release, consulting it only when I wanted to look where the manual declared a secret might be hiding. Beyond this, I was never playing as someone who required looking up exactly how to get from one place to another. The hardest part of the game was finding ways to ensure I didn’t bite the dust every few minutes against those godforsaken Wizzrobes. I genuinely believe that if you play The Legend of Zelda with intention and you use the manual to chart your initial course, you will be able to beat the game. It will not be easy, especially if you’re prone to getting lost, but I promise that The Legend of Zelda is not a punishingly difficult game. The reality is that, like Hollow Knight, the Legend of Zelda is a game that does not punish you for retreating to restock and get stronger. In fact, thanks to a key player I intend to acknowledge in greater detail shortly, I would go as far to say that Hollow Knight directly lifts this design approach FROM the Legend of Zelda (even if this is an indirect one in some cases). Regardless, the games are both about non-linear progression with a focus on resource collection as a means of survival. I like that a lot.

I would recommend this game with a quick note that you really should make sure to have the USA manual on hand while playing.

And How Did We Get Here?

I would like to personally thank one Game&Burger for their incredible ability to break down these large, complex games into something that I can understand and appreciate. They spent the better part of this year posting detailed breakdowns of maps from the Metroid franchise, The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Hollow Knight, among others. In doing so, they single handedly made these monumental games far more approachable. When I know how something works, I can take a moment to appreciate its design before eventually going about “handling it”, whatever it is. This is true of my research and its true of my gaming hobbies. It is because of them that I was able to have an immaculate time with these games.


Okay, but what did you ACTUALLY do in Japan?

Well, I worked. I went to a conference. I got a blood blister on my hand from playing Taiko no Tatsujin in an arcade with my dear friend skitty h. bitty. I did nerdy shit. I went to Akihabara and Ikebukuro and bought Linda Cube Again at a used game store. I went to the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto. I went to Dragon Quest Island at Nijigen no Mori on Awaji Island. I did a lot of stop over the nearly three weeks I was there. But this report isn’t really for that. I’m sure I’ll write up something about the whole experience sometime in the future. Just know that it was my honeymoon, and I spent it with my wife doing things together. We had a wonderful time.


Just a few photos of the trip :]


Freedom Planet 2

And then on the plane ride back, I started Freedom Planet 2.


The best Saturday Morning Cartoon game you'll play this decade (so far).


Freedom Planet 2 may be my favorite Sonic game of all time, beating out even Sonic Advance 2. There’s something about the way that it manages to combine the joy of moving quickly with the joy of executing technical movement, all while being in a space that is absolutely gorgeous. Let the record show that I am an unapologetic Sonic Advance 2 fan for the way that I can hold right to win and have a fun time while doing so. Obviously, Freedom Planet 2 is a little deeper than Sonic Advance 2, but it flies at a similar velocity. Like looking out your car window as you drive down the highway, watching as the individual highway markers start to blur into a single, continuous barrier.

If I had to pick a definitive word for Freedom Planet 2, it’s “memorable”/ Freedom Planet 2 manages to make every single one of its levels feel distinct, and exceptionally fun. Even in the levels where the two most annoying characters in the game yelled back and forth at each other, I was enjoying myself. “Every time it’s about to lose me, it pulls me right back in”, I found myself writing to myself again and again. Freedom Planet 2 is far from a perfect game, but it does manage to be an extremely fun game, and I think that any game like that deserves its flowers.

Freedom Planet 2’s story never really struck me as something I should really care about beyond as a means of moving the plot forward. I did the modern equivalent of throwing fifty dollars into the garbage by sitting through an hour-fifteen video “essay” discussing how Freedom Planet 2’s story is poorly written7. All I took away from the video was the notion that people really need to ease up on children’s media criticism. The story of Freedom Planet 2 is not Dostoyevsky, but it does not need to be. I have no issues with people offering potential alterations to the story to make it more literarily cohesive, but I think I’m disappointed in my own sentiments that I watched this video for its entire run length only to come away thinking “this person put in a lot of time for something that’s a glorified plot summary on a story that kind of stinks”. There is nothing wrong with the process of making a video like this, but I felt it was misguided. Freedom Planet 2’s story is on par with a Saturday morning kids cartoon show, like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Hell, you could even say Freedom Planet 2’s plot has the same level of maturity as Sonic Adventure 2’s plot. These are fine plots for the kind of audience they are targeting, and there is nothing wrong with asking for plots in children’s media to be well-written, but at some point we have to ask ourselves, “does this matter?”. Maybe it matters to you, and that’s great if it does. I did not care about or for the preteen youth cartoon-like story, and that did not ruin my experience playing Freedom Planet 2. I think that literary analysis of Freedom Planet 2 is not a particularly meaningful exercise. Rather, I think the ludic prose 8 is far more interesting.

Freedom Planet 2 manages to meld together many different modes of gameplay and level design into a blood-pumping breakneck sprint through various locales, all while requiring the player to have an exact plan of movement within a split-second’s notice. The first Freedom Planet game did this to a reasonable degree, but focused more on using the speedy sections as a reward for careful and technical execution through difficult passages. Freedom Planet 2, in contrast, intends its moment-to-moment experiences to be one of rollercoaster-like hyper-stimulation with pockets of clarity. There are quite literally stop-and-go enemies that you can punch, dodge, or otherwise ignore to keep your forward velocity moving forward. In all of these moments, I felt a jolt of electricity course through my body, timing my button presses to maintain my velocity through these technicolor courses. It had the snappiness of a well-tuned fighting game, mixed with the friction that comes from using momentum tone’s advantage while running. In short, Freedom Planet 2 knows how to utilize speed to its advantage to create exciting moments in gameplay.

The music in Freedom Planet 2 is ultimately what ties everything together. With multiple composers (Leilani “Woofle” Wilson, Sabrina DiDuro, Jason Lord, Will Bowerman, Nicole Frishe, Falk Au Yeong), and mixing done by Falk Au Yeong9, the soundtrack makes every single stage pop. Tidal Gate, the beach level that comes after the “mid-season finale” level, feels so much more like an exhalation because of its ethereal and tropical sound. The music makes dashing across the sand and gliding through the water feel like a jubilant celebration of the player’s own skills. They’ve reached the halfway point, they understand how movement in this game works, and now they can demonstrate it as such in a space where there isn’t an immediate pressing issue. It’s a wonderful moment. Another example: Bakunawa Rush, the first stage in the final zone for the game feels appropriately exhilarating for how the level starts: You kick off the level by jumping off of your own space shape to land and grind on a rail that sits in space with the titular “Freedom Planet” in the background. You can jump between rails and run along asteroids as smaller celestial bodies whiz by, with their tails giving you the sense of anti-parallel velocity. You do all this while also dodging and destroying enemies with attacks that you can combo with a couple rapid-fire button combos. This is all supplemented by a pounding electronic tune that carries the gravity of the situation in its mix of determined and melancholic A and B sections and its industrial percussion. The sentiment is grandiose and climactic; it’s a perfect kickoff to the final stretch of the game. I love it.


The two songs I mentioned. They're but a subset of the excellent music in Freedom Planet 2.


Freedom Planet 2 is great. I would hesitate to say that its story is anything more than “fine”, but its gameplay is a blast. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who looks to scratch their 2D sonic itch.


Christmas (December)

Terranigma



I do not expect to return to Terranigma "the game" anytime soon. I think its systems are balanced in a way that is ultimately unsatisfying. If you are under-leveled you are doing single-digit points of damage. If you are over-leveled you destroy the boss in three hits. The magic system is an afterthought., You can only use your magic in specific areas, and only on certain bosses. One would think that the best time to use a healing spell would be when a boss has you on the ropes. Terranigma counters this notion, “you can’t use your magic here!”. It’s a baffling decision, especially when the primary overworld collectible in this game are “Magirock”, items that allow you to hold more spells. Magirock are rewards for finishing small side quests which “progress the human race”, so they come naturally in the process of exploration. It’s not like I necessarily went out of the way to collect every Magirock in the game 10, this wasn’t why I chose to play Terranigma in the first place.

No, I chose to play Terranigma for its presentation. I played Terranigma to experience this story, one that manages to convey a story that doesn’t strictly adhere to modern storytelling forms. This is a story that comes in the form of legends and myths. Characters are archetypes that take on simple portrayals to demonstrate the fleeting nature of our own existence. For as bombastic as SNES RPGs can be with their attempts at maximalism in narrative and pixel art designs, Terranigma chooses instead to be quiet, contemplative, and reflective. The first dungeons of Terranigma culminate in the protagonist, Ark, bringing forth the creation of the continents on Earth. These scenes are beautiful given the hardware limitations. They last for lengths longer than your average gamer would care to wait. It’s creation. Everything afterward flies by. First you resurrect plant life, and then the birds, and then the beasts, and then finally, humans. In this way, time in Terranigma itself is something far less literal. As someone who hasn’t gotten a formal education in how to tell a darn story, I struggle to explain how everything feels like a blip, in a sense. Ultimately, Terranigma wants you, the player, to consider the amount of time it took for the world to come to be in its present state. It’s truly a beautiful game.

The further away I get from it, the more I realize just how effective it is at telling its whole cyclical story. I see how now video games can be excellent vessels for telling these kinds of grand myths. When I am in the bulk of the game, yeah, there’s a lot of friction. I did not care for much of the boss fights, even if I really enjoyed the dungeon design. I was a little put off with the opacity surrounding the requirements to develop the cities in the game, but I see now that this is to ensure that if someone were to replay the game, they might make a different world, much like how no life cycle is truly identical. Does this mean I will return to Terranigma? Again, no, I don’t think I need to replay it for a very long time. But I cannot deny that this game will continue to grow on me as I let it rest. I can understand why people rave about it as a work of literature in video games.

I would recommend this game only to those who are looking to experience an entry in the “canon” of interesting and deeply compelling SNES JRPGs. This ain’t one you can tell your buddy who’s really into JRPGs because they got hooked on Expedition 33 to play. Let them discover Terranigma for themselves. The people who seek out Terranigma will eventually come around to liking it, I think 11.


A strong new candidate for the awarf for "Favorite NPC text box".



Other Things I’m Into Right Now:



Games have been asking me for personal information since Russell Grant's Astrology.

What? Did you think I was joking when I said I played Russell Grant's Astrology?


What Next?

I like authoring these quarterly reports, though I also recognize that they sort of lump in a lot of smaller stuff into one big pile every three months. I think in 2026 I’ll have similar things, but maybe not in this exact structure. I like writing about the things I enjoy! I want to make more articles like this! I’m proud of myself for making one of these reports every three months! I’m flattered that you all have been willing to read these things every so often. They’re a lot of fun!!

I will be putting forth a Superlatives of 2025 post sometime in early January. I want to cover 2025 as a whole, and I have plenty of things to acknowledge and appreciate. Please be looking forward to it!

Thanks for reading!

footnotes!

  1. Hello from me in post. lol this is still over 6,500 words.↩︎

  2. Amusingly, I was going to try and embrace Luigi’s Mansion as my Halloween game, but then I found something far more in line with my sensibilities.↩︎

  3. Our total play time at time of writing is approximately 132h.↩︎

  4. I can make this flimsy physics analogy as I am less than a year from being an expert in photon interactions in matter.↩︎

  5. I experience auditory hallucinations when I am on the verge of sleep. This is pretty common, as I understand it, especially when one’s sleep schedule is thrown off of its usual routine.↩︎

  6. Because this is a when and not an if,↩︎

  7. Please do not take this the wrong way, it’s a well-made video and all credit to DrDubz for putting words towards their experience with this game. I’m the dickhead here.↩︎

  8. Jade Britzman's Lightning Talk on the Subject. ↩︎

  9. The absolute GOAT, I should do a piece on them at some point, they’ve been making bangers since the Sonic Fangame days.↩︎

  10. Building off of the RetroAchievements discussion from earlier this year, I found that there is a counter of Magirock collection in RetroAchievement. This was really useful for me to know if I had missed any Magirock in the first few chapters, but by Chapter 3 I found that there were like 76 Magirock or something? I threw up my hands at the idea of ever collecting them all lol.↩︎

  11. Emphasis on “like” not “love”.↩︎