Elder Scrolls and Changing Things Up in RPGs 

Both Morrowind and Oblivion are my favorites of the Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim truly modernized the mechanics of the franchise to where you could actually do things and shape a character even if you’re new to action RPGs or RPGs in general.  

Prior to and beyond Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, RPG mechanics such as skill trees, allocation of points, building towards skills, and understanding your character’s stats had been simplified over time to accommodate new players while keeping genre veterans engaged. Of course, you’ll have some complaints of the game being dumbed down early on but this was one of those cases where I welcomed it. 

Some games simply play as if they’re from a different time in gaming. Morrowind is a prime example of this. As player (and for developers themselves), I feel that you want that big leap in gameplay between games. Especially if they’re released years apart. Sure, you have players that don’t mind a game playing almost identically to the previous installment, just look at sports titles in general, but you to feel like “Hey, maybe this new entry is worth picking up”.  

A new experience is great but I’ve always enjoyed a new take or new ways to navigate and interact with a new story in a familiar setting.  

Oblivion 

This brings us to Cyrodiil, the setting for Oblivion. A very different locale compared to the mostly grim setting of the Morrowind province. While I spent most of my time either in the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood but I’ll dabble in the Magic Guild and Arcane University. I might get busy with the Fighter’s Guild. 

Actually, in every playthrough, I get busy with the Fighter’s Guild. They’re hard to avoid. Occasionally, I’ll get into vampirism. Oblivion is my first introduction to vampirism in Elder Scrolls and it’s pretty basic. You get the dark gift and that’s pretty much it. Sunlight wreaks havoc on your health but you get bonus and spells which are fun to use. 

While it can be a hindrance to your adventuring, moving at night or when night is getting ready to fall is an immersive way to include vampire gameplay in a game with a day-night cycle. The sun is treated as one of your character’s greatest foes. Or rather, it’s your most unbeatable foe. 

The problem I have with the mechanic (which is solved in a Skyrim expansion) is that there’s little much of an overarching storyline that comes with being a vampire. There are adventures that part of larger storylines involving a few vampires but nothing that centers the vampires. This could simply be down to vampire hunting efforts in Cyrodiil being especially effective and the existing vampires mostly having their sh*t together to where they can exist among the living. 

Skyrim 

That isn’t to say that vampire hunting is a lost art in the northern province of Skyrim. Vampires seem more plentiful but that’s aided by stronger hardware, better writing to explain why they are so many still around, and a larger world to explore. Vampires in Skyrim exist similar to their kin in Cyrodill. 

They dwell in caves, abandoned forts…anywhere not frequented by the living outside of adventurers. At their sides are usually their thralls, living henchmen who are pretty much equal to any bandit or ne’er-do-well you might encounter in the world. What Skyrim does differently with vampire mechanics is focus more on of vampirism is a virus that can be contracted by the living. 

From there you have mechanics that are easier to utilize such as feeding (thanks to improved stealth in Skyrim) and the sun not being as much of a foe. It weakens your character but it doesn’t attempt to actively kill your character off.  

I was mixed on this when I first played as a vampire in TES V but I remembered how violent the sun could be in TES IV and figured “I can actually do adventures during the day, at least.” It was that simple, folks. Quality of life from the sun. Being weakened during the daytime presented its own challenges but they were manageable. 

It made being a vampire and interesting path to explore. Yes, it could get boring quickly but that’s where the Dawnguard expansion comes in. Dawnguard presented a storyline centered on becoming a vampire and joining an ancient clan of the night stalkers or joining the Dawnguard, an order of vampire hunters. Each had their advantages and you could join the Dawnguard as a vampire. 

Now, you couldn’t stay a vampire the whole time in the DG but you could use some cool silver weapons and they had my favorite faction armor in Skyrim. Meanwhile, you could join the vampires and wield vampire lord powers. 

But that’s a lot of talk about bloodsuckers, what about the murder mutts? You can be a werewolf in Skyrim but I always found being a werewolf boring after a while. I mean, it’s fun initially and it ties into The Companions storyline and career line but I just found playing as a vampire more enjoyable and beneficial when playing as a thief or assassin. 

Did you enjoy playing as a vampire or werewolf in TES? Did you enjoy Dawnguard? Let us know in the comments.

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Let me rewind a little.

If you came up on dubbed kung fu flicks during Saturday broadcasts, you know the kind. A wronged student retreats to a mountain temple, suffers through a brutal training montage, then comes back down to settle accounts. Those movies left you chasing a certain sensation ever since. Call it the exchange. Two bodies reading each other, trading strikes, the shot holding steady while limbs do things limbs should not. The medium has flirted with that rhythm for ages and mostly whiffed. This one does not. It connects flush to the jaw.

You play as Soul, an elite assassin framed for murdering his master. He has only 66 days to live, a tidy excuse for the story to keep you sprinting toward one duel after another. The studio calls the whole aesthetic “Kung-Fu Punk,” a label that earns its keep. Picture wuxia elegance smashed into gothic grime, silk stained with blood, incense mingling with rust. The world resembles a fever dream somebody had after watching too much Shaw Brothers in a leaking basement. I mean that as high praise.

Here is where the magic actually lives, though. Underneath the gorgeous dressing sits a fighting engine obsessed with flow instead of attrition. There’s no gauge nagging you to back off and catch your breath. What you manage instead is Sha-Chi. You spend it on your nastiest techniques. Absorbing hits drains it too, so offense and defense drink from the same cup. Hang back and play timid? It runs dry on you. Get in there and commit. The meter keeps topping itself off.

Reading your opponent is the whole game. Big attacks arrive in two flavors. A blue flash means a Brutal strike, something you can stand up to, steel on steel, before flipping their momentum into a riposte that leaves them cracked wide open. Red is a nastier story. That flash marks a Killer strike, no parrying it, and it drops you cold if you got greedy. Your out is Ghoststep, a precision maneuver that rewards perfectly timed dodges and parries by slipping you behind your opponent, a backstab window yawning open like somebody forgot to lock up. Blue, you stand your ground. Red, you vanish and reappear somewhere meaner. Telling them apart under pressure is the entire conversation, and the moment it becomes second nature is a genuine rush.

Now add the arsenal, because this is where the whole production tips over into pure action cinema. You haul around four armaments at once, two main weapons and two secondary tools dubbed Phantom Edges. Swapping between them is not a menu chore or an occasional flourish. It is the beating heart of every bout. Switching weapons helps restore Sha-Chi, though a short cooldown means you cannot rotate carelessly. One stretch of a combo pours out of the Soft Snake Sword, built around parry rhythm, the next erupts from the Outlaw Warblade, a brutish slab of iron that eats your own health on heavy swings and hands it back when you land clean hits. The White Serpent and Crimson Viper pair even lets you send a blade sailing across the arena and catch it on the return. More than 30 main weapons and 25 Phantom Edges, each bringing its own moveset, techniques, and special attacks. You are not picking a weapon so much as choreographing a style.

Choreographing. That word is pulling real weight, and it should, because S-GAME brought in Donnie Yen as a creative consultant, with the martial arts legend also providing facial and motion capture for Mó Yuan. And yeah, the actual Donnie Yen, Ip Man himself. His influence fits a game this committed to making every exchange feel cinematic. The spacing feels deliberate, the weight lands where it should, and a counter snaps shut with the thrift of a guy who has faked lethal violence for a living since before some of us were born. These animations aren’t just eye candy sitting there pretty. They talk to each other the way footage of a real brawl talks, that rhythm of hold, hold, then everything at once that a stunt coordinator carries around in his body without thinking about it. String a couple of exchanges together without fumbling and the thing quits passing for code. It reads like footage.

Bosses are where that footage becomes a whole feature. Forget health sponges you whittle down over ten dull minutes. A Lion Dance Grandmaster, or Huangxing the Kunlun Renegade, comes at you like a rival choreographer checking whether you did the homework. Sloppy play gets punished hard. Patience and a little nerve get you somewhere. I lost to that lion more times than my thumbs appreciated, and it never once made me want to quit. Each beating showed me a beat I’d been whiffing, so the next run felt like a tighter take of the same scene, the one a director keeps reshooting till it clicks. When you finally drop one, the satisfaction is not “I overpowered that.” It is “I performed that.”

On a PS5, Phantom Blade Zero pulls you even deeper in through the DualSense. Haptics thrum differently depending on the iron in your hands, triggers push back with their own resistance, and a precise deflect sends a jolt up your palms that lands somewhere between feedback and applause. The hardware is in on the fantasy.

And look, there is always a risk with titles built around spectacle, which is that the flash swallows the substance. Plenty of pretty brawlers hide hollow mechanics under slow motion and sparks. This production sidesteps that trap. Strip away the heavy metal riffing, the absurd arsenal, and the outrageous set pieces. One even sends you hurtling down a crumbling bridge in a sequence a Hong Kong studio would mortgage its building to afford. Beneath all that spectacle sits a fighting engine that demands patience, spacing, and real practice. None of that beauty is a costume thrown over a hollow frame. You earn it.

That is the thing nobody tells you about those old flicks we loved. The hero was never the strongest man in the room. He was the most disciplined, the most precise, the one who turned savagery into something closer to dance. S-GAME understood that assignment completely. For once, a game hands you the lead role, then dares you to earn it frame by frame. The moment it clicks, you realize the beautiful figure on screen is only moving because you are.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

To understand why that question won’t leave me be, you’ve got to ride back a minute. 1998. The television I played it on wasn’t even mine, some hand-me-down set wrapped in that fake wood paneling every house down here seemed to own back then. That cartridge, though, I guarded like it was gold. The title screen would fade out, Link would take off galloping across Hyrule Field, and I swear the whole room would go dead quiet behind me. My nephew froze mid-sentence. Open space stretched wider than anything we’d touched before. Z-targeting rewired how a generation swung a sword. Turning night into day with a tune, calling a horse, unlocking the Door of Time with a melody, all of it read as straight witchcraft to a boy raised on side-scrollers.

Here’s what nobody young enough to miss it truly grasps. That adventure wasn’t merely good. It rewrote the rulebook. Countless 3D action titles that followed owe it a debt, whether the designers cop to it or not. Combat, puzzle rhythm, the sense of a place that breathes while your back is turned, every piece helped shape a blueprint that developers would study for years. People still argue it’s the finest ever made, and I won’t stand here calling them fools.

Which carries me to the sweaty part. Nintendo says they’re rebuilding the whole thing. Richer models, lighting that behaves like actual sunlight, and the bold gamble of performers lending voices to characters who spent decades communicating through text boxes. My eyebrow climbed the second that last detail hit.

Think about our boy in green for a beat. Link still isn’t talking, and that’s important. His silence lets you pour your own breath into the adventure, your own grit, your own reason for storming the final castle. A champion who stays quiet becomes a mirror. You slip inside him. What has changed is the world surrounding that silence. People who once lived inside dialogue boxes now have performers giving them voices. Maybe that makes Hyrule feel more alive. Maybe it crowds out some of the imagination we supplied ourselves. That’s the gamble that worries me, and if you were there, odds are it worries you too.

Then again, picture Navi shrieking in my ear every twelve seconds, and a slice of me wonders whether a genuine performance might sand down some jank we all quietly tolerated. Nostalgia lies to us, fam. We cling to the wonder and conveniently bury the aggravation.

The controls, though? Right there sits my hope. That old three-pronged controller was an alien relic, a gadget dreamed up by someone who’d never shaken a human hand. Camera movement amounted to a prayer. Aiming a slingshot meant wrestling plastic that fought back. Proper sticks, responsive buttons, and a camera you can actually steer without cussing, none of that tampers with a landmark. Nintendo is even adding dedicated jump and dash commands, giving players more freedom to move through Hyrule. It finally hands the thing the body it always deserved.

History hands me reasons to exhale, if I’m honest. The company has walked this stretch before and mostly treated us right. Wind Waker in high definition looked like a canvas come alive. Twilight Princess got its flowers. Ocarina of Time itself received a remarkable makeover on the Nintendo 3DS back in 2011, complete with improved visuals and updated controls. Even that Link’s Awakening redo from 2019 spun a Game Boy gem into a toy box you wanted to crawl inside. These creators know the material carries weight. They’ve brought enough classics back to life over the years to earn a sliver of faith.

Faith, though, isn’t a blank check. See, a gulf separates polishing a jewel from swapping it for a flashier fake. A redo can pile on resolution and misplace its spirit. More pixels, less heartbeat. I’ve watched cherished properties get the glow-up and limp out the far side resembling a wax dummy, technically dazzling and stone dead inside. Nobody craves a Hyrule that gleams yet forgets why we fell for it.

The word better keeps shifting on me the deeper I dig. A fresh wave of Black kids who never gripped an N64 controller is about to meet the hero for the very first time, and they’ll meet him through this window, not mine. For them, voiced scenes and silky movement won’t register as betrayal. They’ll read as the floor, the baseline, the norm. The weight of my memories means nothing to a twelve-year-old discovering the Water Temple raw. Maybe that’s the actual point. You don’t restore a monument for the crowd already in love with it. The rebuild exists for the next wave, so they get to tumble just as hard as we did.

I keep settling into an odd spot, somewhere between a believer and a bouncer guarding the door. One half of me wants to shield what we held, to protect the 1998 version like a family recipe nobody better touch. The other half knows art frozen in amber eventually quits breathing. A song gets covered. Stories get retold. Each generation earns its own doorway into the greatness we take for granted.

Will this one clear the bar? Honestly, I can’t say, and anybody swearing they’re certain is peddling something. Every piece looks right on paper. Nintendo knows this world better than anybody. But the soul of that original lived in more than its components, in a current you can’t bottle or patch in later, and that current is exactly what I’ll be hunting the moment I press start.

Come November, I’ll be posted up with the lights dimmed, just like ’98, ocarina within reach. Should my chest tighten the way it did when that open plain first unfurled, they’ll have done the impossible. If it plays like a stranger wearing my childhood’s face, well, we’ve got our answer right there too. Either way, I’m copping it day one. Some legends you simply have to witness again, flaws and all.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Here is the part folks skip past while they are busy celebrating. Anticipation stacked this high can flatten whatever it finally falls on.

Grand Theft Auto V landed back in 2013, when a lot of us were younger, broker, and tearing through Los Santos instead of answering emails. That one did not just sell well. It turned into a thing cousins hauled house to house, the reason certain friendships outlasted winters they had no business surviving. Now Rockstar aims the camera back at Vice City and stamps November 19 on it, and suddenly that date is dragging around more than any video game should. Thirteen years of memory. Inflation. Grown folks with mortgages still chasing the feeling of being seventeen.

The buildup has been its own strange saga. First footage dropped in December 2023 and shattered records before most people finished their lunch. A second look arrived in 2025. Then came that extended presentation this past August on Netflix, which felt less like marketing and more like the developer flexing in slow motion. Each delay, and there were several, got met with groans and then quiet acceptance, because deep down we remembered how Red Dead Redemption 2 made us wait too, and how it showed up damn near perfect.

That is the card the company keeps playing, and so far it keeps winning the hand. Make everybody sweat it out. Deliver something that justifies the ache.

But can lightning strike twice when half the planet is standing there holding an umbrella, daring it to?

Let me talk about what actually has me curious, because the neon and the explosions are the easy part. Two leads this time, Jason and Lucia, running together like a Florida fever dream of Bonnie and Clyde. A partnership at the center changes the whole rhythm of how a story like this breathes. Rockstar has done solo drifters and full crews before. A ride or die duo, though, where the tension lives between two people who need each other and might wreck each other, that is fresh ground for them, and it is the detail I keep turning over at night.

There is also the sheer size of what they are promising. Leonida, their fictional version of Florida, looks absurdly alive in every frame they have shown. Water that moves right. Crowds that react. A coastline soaked in that pink and teal glow that makes you want to drive nowhere in particular with the radio up. Speaking of which, the soundtrack alone could carry this thing. Justice’s “Flower in a Hurricane,” featuring Tame Impala, SZA, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, has already given fans plenty to talk about. Music has always been Rockstar’s secret weapon, the invisible hand that turns a drive across town into a whole mood.

Now the hard questions, the ones I ask as somebody who loves this medium too much to just clap on cue.

Can any single release really hold the weight of being the biggest entertainment event of the year, maybe the decade? The expectation machine online has gotten vicious. People are not just hoping for a great product anymore. Some of them want salvation, a cure for every boring night since 2013, and no video game on earth can carry that kind of prayer.

And yes, I already cleared the calendar for launch night. Go ahead and judge me.

Will the writing land for us? GTA has always traded in satire, poking the American dream square in its soft spots. Handled sharp, it is brilliant. Get lazy with it and the thing curdles into the same tired stereotypes the culture has spent decades fighting off. I want Lucia to be a full person, not some Latina accessory draped over the plot. Give me comedy that punches up instead of sideways. The series has stumbled there before, and a lot of us are watching closer this round.

And here is the one that keeps the blerd in me up late. Will it respect our time, or quietly become a second job? The online economies attached to these worlds have a way of turning joy into a grind, dressing up slot machines as fun. I loved roaming Los Santos back in the day. What I did not love was feeling nickeled toward a shark card every time I wanted a nicer ride.

So where does all that leave us, just over a month from launch, nerves buzzing like a bad fluorescent light?

Somewhere between faith and flinch. The track record says the studio delivers, and that extended footage did not look like a company about to fumble the bag. Yet more than a decade of dreaming has turned November 19 into something almost spiritual, and spiritual expectations have broken plenty of good things that were only ever meant to be very, very good.

My gut tells me this. The release is gonna look incredible. Years ahead of anything out there, pretty enough to shut the doubters up for a month, maybe two. Does it turn into the generation marker people keep swearing it will be? Too early to say. That part lives in the stuff we have not seen. Its soul is the variable. Those jokes. How it treats the people inside its own story, and the ones gripping the controller.

We find out soon. Preorders are already open, the countdown is real, and for one night in November plenty of us who should know better will be up past midnight, controller in hand, seventeen again, praying the magic holds.

Which leaves the real verdict with you. Does Rockstar clear a bar set this impossibly high, or are we lining up for heartbreak? Be honest with me down in the comments. What has you most hyped right now? The return to Vice City, the chemistry between Jason and Lucia, or the radio stations bringing it all to life? Sound off and let us hash it out like family, because thirteen years of waiting ends either way.

Staff Writer; Greg Tucker

GT is an old-school blerd who loves anime, comics, manga, video games, and collecting indie Black comic books.

Contact him at: GregT@AfroGamers.com.

The term “conduit” is used for any being that can use super powers. Initially, you had Cole and a few others in Empire City who utilized these powers but with the Department of Unified Protection (think S.H.I.E.L.D in Marvel Comics) being formed and getting their hands on important information, their high-powered death squad and director can wield powers as well.

A Lost PlayStation Hero: Cole MacGrath

Listen, I enjoyed electricity conduit Cole’s adventures in Empire City (NYC) and New Marais (NOLA). Being able to determine if he would be a hero, villain or anti-hero of sorts was a fun mechanic that directed impacted your gameplay.

I’d say it influenced the gameplay more than the story itself. Depending on your actions, the story would head in whichever direction but the combat options and benefits open to you by either saving hurt pedestrians and risking your own well-being or snuffing out ops and leaving civilians to their fate was very interesting.

It also helped that the people of these open-world titles varied between support for Cole MacGrath or fear and resentment of this perceived menace. Mind you, this was despite what heroic or nefarious actions you took. Because Cole was such a stock late 2000s-early 2010s action game (gruff, tough, athletic, possibly got parkour skills), the world itself and the people could have the player’s opinions towards these grateful or ungrateful citizens and act out of them.

The World of Infamous

Honestly, it was like playing through a living world versions of the Spider-Man games post-PlayStation. In these Spidey games, the city is rocking with the Web-Slingers and it’s mostly their ops and J.Jonah Jameson who have some animosity towards them.

In Infamous, it was more like you had this new super-powered person doing stuff around your city during a crisis and the news is telling everyone they’re a menace. The city forms individual takes on this new force and it’s routed in respect and hope or fear and desperation.

All of this is on top of gangs taking advantage of the crisis and the military’s super special task force shutting down the city and shutting it off from the rest of the world. For the PlayStation 3 era, this was some primo world-building! Sucker Punch Productions borrowed the morality system from games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Fallout 3, mixed it in with the world around the protagonist as well as the powers system and it worked.

When the Cole’s adventures ended and the PS4 dropped, the story followed Delsin Rowe (who can absorb the powers of conduits) and later Abigail Walker (who utilizes neon). Their story takes place in Seattle. I always found it odd that Seattle was good as a setting but New York and New Orleans in name? Better avoid that piece of business. The aforementioned D.U.P organization makes it’s appearance as the primary antagonist for most of the Infamous: Second Son game on PlayStation 4.

The Best Part of Infamous’ Gameplay

Infamous was very much like other open-world action games from the PS3 era. You got a big city to run around in, plenty of powers (or weapons if you’re playing a Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause), and plenty of enemies to fight. Just go nuts and have a blast, the story isn’t timed or relies on an in-game clock and schedule. It’s not going anywhere.

Because of the decent amount of side quests, you always had something to do if you didn’t want to invest time in the main story’s nonsense. What really helps in getting players to indulge in the side missions is turf.

I love a game with territory conflict. Always have since GTA San Andreas and GTA Vice City Stories introduced and built on that mechanic. The Infamous games have maps featuring a few major parts of a city under control of the ops. They’re enemies flood the areas of these territories and to gain control, you have to do side missions or take out checkpoints and holding centers.

Once the territory objective is completed, you’ll notice the enemy presence in that area goes away and it’s safe to navigate. Very simple in execution and I spent most of my time in the Infamous games clearing out territory. Of course, I wish more came from doing so but there’s no currency or equipment to get in the games and no one tries to reclaim turf.

Maybe that will be explored more if Sucker Punch ever returns to the world of Infamous. However, with their Ghosts games being so successful that might be unlikely.

Were you a fan of the Infamous games? If so, share your memories of playing the game or if you think we’ll see another title in the series. Where will it be based?

Let us know in the comments!

Staff Writer; M. Swift

This talented writer is also a podcast host, and comic book fan who loves all things old school. One may also find him on Twitter at; metalswift.

Vice City is back. The palm trees, the neon, the swampy Florida heat rendered so clean you can almost feel the humidity through your screen. Rockstar built a machine that prints money, and much of the fuel that machine runs on has always come from us. Our sound, our slang, that swagger nobody else can bottle. The way we move, talk, dress, and joke gets scanned, copied, and sold to the world at $79.99 a copy, plus whatever monetization follows down the line.

I have been gaming since the Genesis days, and I say all this as somebody who will absolutely be in line for GTA VI. That is the trap, honestly. I love these worlds. I poured hundreds of hours into San Andreas riding around Grove Street, feeling seen in ways few titles bothered to attempt back then. So this is not a boycott sermon. This is a grown conversation about depth, and whether the studio treats our people as human beings instead of cultural scenery.

Think about what fuels one of these maps. The radio stations are the soul of many entries, and those dials lean hard on hip hop, funk, and R&B that we created. Someday a writer will do the math on how much franchise appeal rides on the shoulders of Black artists who look like me. Fashion follows the same road. The durags, the chains, the fits pulled straight off the block get modeled onto characters who too often exist just to shoot at or run from. Neighborhoods sculpted after where we actually live become playgrounds for chaos, then the credits roll and nobody seems curious enough about the folks who breathe there daily.

Humor is where it gets slippery. Rockstar writing has always leaned on satire, and satire cuts both ways. When the joke punches up at power, at cops and billionaires, at the rot festering under the American dream, it sings. Aim that same jab at a caricature of somebody from the hood talking loud and acting a fool, though, and the whole thing curdles. That line between commentary and minstrelsy runs thinner than people want to admit, and past titles have stumbled over it more than once.

Here is my worry laid bare. A culture can be everywhere in a product without receiving equal care in the writing. Rockstar has given us important leads before. Carl Johnson carried San Andreas, and Franklin Clinton stood alongside Michael and Trevor as one of the three protagonists in GTA V. Franklin later became a family man and the owner of a legitimate business in GTA Online. Those characters mattered, and pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. They also proved the studio knows how to place a Black man at the center when it chooses to.

Lucia gives me another sliver of hope, I will admit that much. She and Jason Duval are now confirmed as the two central characters, a criminal couple forced to depend on each other after a score goes wrong. That relationship changes the formula and gives Rockstar room to tell a more intimate story than another tale about one man climbing through the criminal world. Representation on the marquee matters. Still, a face on the box art does not guarantee a soul in the script. I have been burned before by companies waving a diverse cast like a flag while the writing underneath stayed shallow as a puddle.

What would real depth even look like? Rockstar has already introduced several promising Black characters. Boobie Ike turned his years in the streets into an empire spanning real estate, a strip club, and a recording studio. Dre’Quan Priest wants to become a music mogul, while Bae-Luxe and Roxy of Real Dimez are chasing another hit record. Those ambitions are a start. Now let their bonds with the neighborhood feel lived in, not looted. Let the dialogue sound like folks I grew up among, penned by writers who know those communities instead of people approximating them from a distance. Show us ambition beyond the next crime, family obligations that matter, private fears, old wounds, and dreams that survive past a mission. This company renders skin pores and rain puddles with obsessive care. Applying that same obsession to inner lives would change everything.

The money angle deserves a hard stare too. GTA VI could generate billions over its lifetime, and Take-Two expects the launch to help produce record company performance during its fiscal year. Much of the title’s appeal rides on music, language, fashion, and aesthetics shaped inside Black communities. Nobody outside the individual contracts can honestly say what every musician, actor, or performer receives, so reducing those arrangements to a check and a handshake would be unfair. The larger question concerns where the greatest rewards eventually settle. Corporate owners and shareholders stand to collect enormous wealth, while the neighborhoods supplying so much of the cultural texture rarely receive anything comparable. That is an old American story that predates any console.

I keep circling back to a comparison from my Blerd bookshelf. The best anime, the kind that stays with you for years, rarely treats every side character as furniture. A seemingly minor villager in a strong series may have a name, a desire, or some wound carried beneath the surface. That craft is available to anyone willing to invest in it, and Rockstar can absolutely afford the writing hours. The real question is whether the studio considers all these characters worth that care, or whether some of them remain flavor used to season a world built for somebody else to dominate.

Do not misread me as some grump who hates fun. I will cop the Ultimate Edition. I plan to get lost in that reborn Vice City for a month straight, arguing with my boys online about the best station and the fastest ride. My critique lives right alongside my love, because that is what caring about a medium demands. You hold the thing you enjoy to a standard precisely because you know it can reach higher.

Which puts that standard squarely on you, since you are the one holding the controller. Do you believe Rockstar gives Black characters the same range and interior depth it gives the worlds built around them? Will Boobie, Dre’Quan, and Real Dimez develop into people we remember, or will their style and music carry more weight than their stories? Is that too much to ask of a crime sandbox built for mayhem? Sit with that honestly, because your answer decides how much you shrug off once the reviews start rolling in.

So consider this an open letter to a developer I respect and side eye in equal measure. You gave us CJ and Franklin, which means you already know Black characters can carry the drama instead of decorating its edges. You have also borrowed our shine for decades and gotten rich from grooves we helped invent. The least you owe in return is a cast of people who breathe, ache, and want something, who get to be more than target practice with a nice playlist behind them. Give us humanity instead of props. Manage that and every dollar is earned honestly. Keep phoning it in, though, and all the technical polish money can buy will not cover the hollow spot underneath the surface.

We have been watching the whole time. What feels different now is that plenty of us stopped whispering the critique and started saying it at full volume.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

You slid the gold cartridge into the Nintendo, watched the title screen shimmer beside that trickling waterfall, and then there you were. A tiny figure in green, dropped onto a screen holding a cave mouth, a few gray rocks, and a whole lot of nothing tugging at every edge. Nothing hovered above your skull telling you which way salvation waited. No chatty sidekick cracked wise to fill the silence. Not even a sword sat in your hand yet. Just a kid, a controller, and this heavy quiet that seemed to know something you did not.

I circle back to that feeling more than I probably should. Especially now, sitting decades deep in a franchise that grew into one of the finest things Nintendo has ever put its name on. The recent entries look stunning. Breath of the Wild rewired what a wandering adventure could be, and Tears of the Kingdom piled invention on invention until the clouds themselves turned into a sandbox. Came up dreaming about exactly that kind of scale. Yet something slipped off that old gold cartridge somewhere along the road, and all the processing muscle in the building has not managed to catch it again.

The thing that slipped away was solitude. Genuine, unpretty, slightly unnerving aloneness.

Understand me before the faithful sharpen their knives. This is not a claim that the first quest holds up better under a thumb. It does not. Swinging that blade feels stiff. The collision detection tells bald faced lies. A good chunk of its secrets hide behind reasoning that could break a grown person, like torching one particular shrub in a spot crowded with identical shrubs because a bearded man mumbled a riddle at you an hour earlier. Newer design sanded down most of that meanness, and I am grateful it did.

Sanding down the meanness, though, also swept out the isolation that gave the meanness its weight.

Think about who you actually met out there in old Hyrule. Old men. Tucked into caves lit by a single torch, saying things that barely qualified as sentences. “It’s dangerous to go alone.” “Eastmost peninsula is the secret.” Half of them wanted your rupees before they would part with a candle. None of them followed you. Not one remembered your name, because you did not have one worth speaking. They were not characters so much as smudges of purpose, little flickers of language in a land that otherwise refused to talk to you at all.

That refusal did something to a young brain. You were carrying the entire rescue on your own shoulders, and the country you were saving could not be bothered to acknowledge you. There were no villages full of grateful folks. Festivals never happened. No princess sending encouraging notes between dungeons. Zelda herself was almost an abstraction, a name in the story, a reason more than a person. She sat somewhere past nine labyrinths worth of danger, and getting to her meant crossing miles of terrain that felt indifferent to whether you made it.

You mapped that terrain by hand. That part matters. My cousin and I kept graph paper next to the console, sketching every square we crossed, marking where a wall crumbled to a bomb and where a Moblin lurked behind a tree waiting to hand us rupees. The land did not remember our progress for us. We had to remember it ourselves, pencil scratching, arguing over whether we had already checked the burnable bushes near the graveyard. Getting lost was not a failure state the machine warned you about. It was just Tuesday.

Compare that with strolling through the newer versions. And I love those versions, understand, this is affection talking. But you are never truly by yourself in them. Towers light up the landscape and hand you the layout. A slate in your pocket maps the world and helps you identify points of interest. Ghostly champions murmur guidance. Sidon hypes you up. Memories bloom in soft focus flashbacks so the past keeps you company even when nobody living is around. The recent ruined kingdom aches with a curated melancholy, beautifully composed, deliberately sad. Somebody sat in a room and engineered that sorrow so you would feel it at the right moment.

Some of that old cartridge’s emptiness came from hardware that could barely hold more, but the game also trusted players with uncertainty in a way few modern adventures dare to. That barrenness produced something the series has never quite replicated. When a screen held only sand and a lone enemy and that unforgettable overworld melody looping into infinity, the loneliness was not being performed for you. It simply was. You believed, at eight or nine years old, that this small hero really had nobody. That the fate of everything rested on a figure the size of your thumbnail, and that figure had no friends coming.

Koji Kondo understood the assignment even inside those limits. The overworld theme marches ahead sounding brave, but listen close and that loop never actually lands anywhere comfortable. Step into a labyrinth and it goes cold on you. A pulse in the dark. All that swagger from the surface just evaporates. That contrast built dread out of a handful of channels. No orchestra. Nothing swelling in the strings to tell you exactly how to feel. Just a few notes and your own imagination doing the heavy lifting in the gaps.

Those gaps were the magic. Modern storytelling fills the gaps, and it fills them beautifully, but a filled gap stops being a place where your mind can wander and get scared and feel small. The first adventure trusted the blankness. It let the void sit there and let you populate it with your own unease. Ganon barely existed until the last room. He was a name in a manual you read under the covers, and honestly the version your head cooked up scared you worse than any 8 bit sprite ever could. Your fear did the work the graphics could not.

I have watched younger heads pick up that original now, and mostly they bounce off it. Fair enough. It is obtuse. It gives you nothing. But once in a while one of them stays with it, long enough to hit that odd frequency where the silence quits feeling broken and starts feeling deliberate. You can see it land. The noise falls away, the little green figure stands alone at a crossroads with no marker telling him which way, and the kid holding the controller finally gets it. Nobody is coming. It is just him out here.

That is the sensation I chase and rarely find in the polished present. Not difficulty for its own sake. Not nostalgia for worse tools. It is the honesty of being truly alone in a place that does not care about you, tasked with something enormous, armed with almost nothing, guided by no one. The series gained the whole world after that, gained beauty and warmth and characters I genuinely love. Somewhere in the trade, it set down the loneliness, and I am not sure any budget can buy that particular ghost back.

That hush probably belonged to a moment when the machines just could not do more, and demanding a modern epic feel that abandoned would basically be asking it to fake something. So maybe leave it be. Still, I load that old Zelda up in an emulator, the opening loop kicks in, all that empty ground rolls out with nobody reaching back toward me, and it hits again. What it felt like to be small and by myself, holding up a whole kingdom that never once bothered to thank me.

And nothing since has landed quite that lonely.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

You remember how it went down. Twitter, or whatever we call it now, lit up overnight. Screenshots of cuddly critters holding assault rifles. Somebody captioned it “Pokémon with guns” and that was that. The phrase spread faster than the actual gameplay ever could. In less than six days, the Steam version had sold more than eight million copies. Palworld’s online infrastructure struggled beneath the traffic. Everybody and their cousin had an opinion, and most of those opinions came from folks who never once touched the launcher.

I get why the label stuck. It’s catchy. Does the marketing job in three words, no trailer required. Nintendo built a multibillion dollar empire on pocket monsters, and here comes this scrappy studio out of Japan flipping the formula on its head, tossing your fluffy little buddies into a factory line or handing them a shotgun. The joke writes itself. Shock value sells, and Pocketpair rode that wave straight to the bank.

But here’s my issue, and I’ve been sitting with this since I put a couple hundred hours into it. That nickname stopped being a doorway a long time ago. Now it’s a wall.

See, the folks who dismissed this title as a cheap knockoff never stuck around long enough to figure out what they were playing. Underneath the memes and the viral chaos sits a design that has almost nothing to do with catching creatures in tall grass. What you’ve got is a survival sim with real teeth. You spawn on an island with nothing. No inventory, no shelter, no plan. Cold nights that’ll drain your health bar. Hunger meters. Resources you have to swing a pickaxe at. The early hours feel closer to Valheim or Rust than anything Game Freak ever shipped.

And that’s before you even get to the base building.

This is where it all clicked for me. Your Pals, those creatures everybody keeps reducing to a punchline, they aren’t just fighters or trophies. They work. Assign one to a mining node and it chips away at ore while you sleep. Put another on a ranch and it produces eggs. One’s watering crops. Another’s smelting ingots at the furnace. You’re basically running a little sweatshop of adorable monsters, and I mean that with love, and the automation hooks into your brain the same way Factorio does. Suddenly you’re up at 2 a.m. optimizing a conveyor of labor, muttering about efficiency, wondering why your electric type keeps slacking off near the generator.

Nobody warned me about that part. The label sure didn’t.

Let me talk about the crafting for a second, since it runs deeper than most give it credit for. Tech trees stretch out in every direction. You unlock stations, weapons, saddles, gear, structures. Everything feeds back into the grind loop. Want a better weapon? You need refined metal, and refined metal means a furnace, fuel, and a Pal with a fire skill standing there doing the labor. It’s interconnected in a way that respects your time and your intelligence, and that philosophy has zero to do with a franchise about gym badges.

Once your base hums along on its own, the itch to leave it kicks in, and the map gives that itch somewhere to go. It earns the wandering, too. Towering bosses guard the corners of it, hulking Alphas that hit like trucks and force you to actually build a loadout instead of button mashing. You glide off cliffs on a flying mount. Caves hide the rare materials worth the climb down. And the breeding pen quietly turns into an obsession, letting you pair partners to pass traits down the line until you’ve engineered a worker who mines twice as quick or a bruiser tuned for one nasty raid. That’s genetics, basically. In a game people wrote off as a shallow gag.

Then multiplayer enters the chat.

Roll with friends and this whole thing transforms. Dedicated servers let you and your crew build a shared settlement, split up the responsibilities, and raid tough enemies together. One homie handles combat, another manages the supply chain, somebody’s off exploring dungeons for loot. It becomes a cooperative sandbox where your collective base grows into a stronghold none of you could pull off solo. Some servers run dozens of players at once. That’s not a creature collector. It’s an ecosystem.

So why does the “Pokémon with guns” thing still dominate every conversation?

First impressions calcify. We do this as a culture. Slap a shorthand on something so we can file it away and keep scrolling, and once that label goes viral it becomes the truth whether it’s accurate or not. Half the discourse around this title never moved past the launch week jokes. People argued about whether some designs borrowed too heavily from Pokémon, whether Nintendo would sue, and whether any of it was even ethical, and they kept arguing about the wrapper while ignoring the gift inside.

And look, the Nintendo lawsuit is real. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company accused Pocketpair of infringing gameplay patents, and Pocketpair has acknowledged that the case led it to alter certain summoning and gliding mechanics. I am not here to pretend the visual similarities are imaginary, either. Some of those Pals do look suspiciously familiar. Fair criticism. But the patent case and the arguments about creature designs are separate conversations from what the finished product actually is when you sit down and play it for a week straight.

Here’s the frustrating part for me as a person who loves this hobby. When you reduce a piece of work to its most viral comparison, you rob it of the chance to be judged on its own terms. Imagine if we only ever talked about Hades as “that roguelike.” Or called Elden Ring “Dark Souls but bigger” and left it at that. We’d be flattening years of intentional craft into a bumper sticker. The nickname did its job, got butts in seats, moved units, and now it lingers like a smell that won’t leave the room.

I think there’s a bigger current running under all this, a truth about how we let virality define worth. A title blows up for one reason, and that reason becomes the ceiling instead of the floor. The creators built a full survival, crafting, automation, and multiplayer beast, poured real systems into it, and the internet handed them a meme in exchange. Moved a ton of copies off it, sure. Can’t knock the bag. But the identity got hijacked by the gag.

What would it take to see it clearly? Time has already started doing the work. Palworld officially reached Version 1.0 in July 2026, expanding its world with new regions, additional Pals, a fresh threat, and the long-awaited World Tree. Pocketpair announced that the game had surpassed 40 million players before the full launch. Every major addition pushes it further from the original joke and deeper into its own lane. Eventually the gap between reputation and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

Maybe this one’s already earned it and we’re just slow to catch up.

Because when I fire it up now, the gun angle isn’t even in my head. My focus lands on the base layout. Which Pal to breed next for better stats. Whether my defenses can hold against the next raid. How to squeeze more output from my production chain before the sun comes up. That’s the real game. It was always there under the noise.

The comparison opened the door. I won’t deny it. Millions of us walked through the moment somebody made a clever joke about beloved monsters carrying firearms, and curiosity did the rest. Respect where it’s due. But a door isn’t a house. You can’t keep standing in the entryway describing the knob while a whole mansion waits behind it.

Palworld deserves better than the sentence that made it famous. It grew up. Maybe it’s time the conversation did too.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Yet on the very morning the ship sets sail again, a quieter question keeps surfacing. Is this a genuine celebration of one of the finest pirate epics the medium ever produced, or is it evidence that a struggling giant reached backward because it could no longer trust itself to move forward?

Let me tell you where my head is at, because the answer is not as simple as either side wants it to be.

You already know the backstory if you’ve been paying attention. The French publisher has spent the last two years bleeding. Star Wars Outlaws face planted. XDefiant got taken behind the barn. Whole studios shuttered, thousands of positions disappeared through layoffs, attrition, and restructuring, and a €1.16 billion Tencent investment helped shore up the company’s new Vantage Studios structure. Shadows sold fine, sure, delivering the second-highest Day 1 sales revenue in the whole series, but “fine” don’t erase a €1.3 billion operating loss on the books. When a company that big starts leaning on advisors to “extract value for stakeholders,” that’s corporate speak for the wolves are circling. My guy, they were prepping lifeboats.

Now here’s the part that stings if you love this hobby. Their answer to all that pressure was to reach backward.

Think about it. Reportedly, 15 Ubisoft studios contributed to rebuilding a title that already exists, representing a wide slice of the company’s talent and resources. A title people already adore. The safest bet imaginable. Ubisoft looked at their mess and decided the smart play was to hand you the thing you loved when you were younger and hope you’d feel warm enough to open your wallet again. And you know what? It’s working. According to estimates from Alinea Analytics, Resynced’s pre-release Steam sales ran more than five times higher than Shadows did at the comparable point before launch. Nostalgia sells. It always has.

But sit with that for a second, because it says something heavy.

The reason this remake lands so hard is the same reason it worries me. Kenway’s voyage came from an era when this developer knew exactly who it was. Back then the maps felt hand crafted instead of algorithm stretched. The naval combat, those swivel guns and shanties and the whole rhythm of chasing a Man o’ War across a storm, none of that existed to check a box. Somebody dreamed it up because it was cool. There was a confidence baked into that 2013 disc, a swagger, a point of view. That pirate fantasy wasn’t buried under seventeen menus and a battle pass. It just was.

Somewhere along the way the machine got bigger and the vision got smaller. Every open world release started blurring into the same checklist. Climb the tower, clear the icons, grind the loot, repeat until numb. The soul that made those older joints special leaked out slow, one bloated sequel at a time. Which is exactly why going back to Black Flag feels so good and so sad in the same breath. It’s a reminder of a version of this company that felt more alive.

I keep thinking about something a Kotaku reviewer wrote, about basically being two people at once while playing. One dude just floating around the 4K ocean having a ball, and another dude staring at all that gorgeous new animation asking a colder question. What could they have built if they aimed all this money and muscle at something brand new? Man, that split lives in my chest too. Sailing the Jackdaw is pure joy. What guts me is that sailing the Jackdaw was the boldest move a struggling giant felt safe enough to make.

And the new stuff they layered on top honestly slaps. There’s a fresh endgame chapter called A World Without Gold that gives Blackbeard a whole eight mission arc. Stede Bonnet gets a proper epilogue, which, if you watched a certain pirate comedy show, hits different now. New shanties, including a Woodkid version of Leave Her Johnny that I’ve had stuck in my head since the trailer. Crouch anywhere, dive anywhere, hood up or down as you please. Little quality of life fixes that make the old bones move smoother. Real care went into this. Nobody phoned it in.

That’s what makes it complicated. This isn’t a lazy cash grab. It’s a lovingly restored classic. Those two things can be true at once, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

Still, I can’t shake the bigger picture. When one of the clearest symbols of your recovery strategy is “remake the last thing everybody agreed we did right,” you’re admitting something out loud whether you mean to or not. You’re saying the well of new ideas has run low. There’s a wager being placed on three brands, a hope that the crowd’s affection for the past will cover for a present you couldn’t quite figure out. That’s not villainy. It’s fear. And fear is a rough thing to watch from a place that once felt fearless.

Here’s the part that keeps me from writing the whole thing off, though.

Plenty of people playing Resynced right now never touched the original. Think about how wild that is. The original landed 13 years ago. There’s a grown adult buying this today who was in elementary school when Edward first raised that flag, while some younger players weren’t even born yet. For them this isn’t a remake at all. It’s simply the newest Assassin’s Creed, the one with pirates, and it’s dope. No baggage, no melancholy, no old head sighing about what used to be. Just a great game they get to meet for the first time.

And there’s something almost beautiful in that. Art gets to live again. A masterpiece that was slowly aging out of relevance gets dusted off and handed to a whole new crowd who’ll fall for it the way we did. If you strip away all my industry hand wringing, that outcome is a genuine gift. Preservation matters. Letting a classic breathe again matters.

So which is it? Celebration or symptom? Honestly, I’ve landed on both, and I think refusing to pick is the only honest answer.

Resynced is a real celebration of something wonderful, executed with skill and affection, and it deserves to be enjoyed by anybody who likes a good yarn about swords and sea legs. It’s also, unmistakably, a flare shot up by a company that lost its nerve and reached for the past because the future felt too expensive to risk. Both readings are correct. The tragedy and the triumph are welded together, and you can’t melt one off without losing the other.

What I want, more than another remaster, is for this publisher to remember why we loved them in the first place. Not the icons. Not the towers. Confidence, plain and simple. A willingness to build a whole pirate simulator inside an assassin franchise just because somebody believed it would be magic. Spirit like that is what Resynced is really selling back to us, and I hope, somewhere in those offices, folks are taking notes on why it resonates instead of just counting the receipts.

Go play it. Enjoy the ocean. Sing the shanties loud. Just don’t let the warm glow fool you into thinking a company can sail forward forever by staring at its own wake.

Because a wake is beautiful. But it’s still behind you.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.

Understand where I stand before you write me off. I gave both games a full treatment. Scaled every cliff worth scaling, glided off ledges I had no business leaping from, cooked enough questionable meals to worry any health inspector. So this is no drive by from somebody who bounced after an hour. This is a lifelong Zelda fan who invested deeply, admired plenty, and still finished with a strange sensation of having eaten a gorgeous plate that somehow left him wanting.

An older Hyrule never left me wanting. It ran smaller, and that was precisely its strength.

Rewind to my N64 days for a second. When little me stepped out into that field in Ocarina of Time, it looked like an edge of our earth. It was not. You could jog across it in a few minutes. Yet every stretch of it sat there on purpose. Roads bent so your eye caught a drawbridge. A lonely tree hid a hole in dirt because some designer decided a secret belonged right there. Nothing was padding. That land had an author behind it, like a record where every track had to scrap for its slot.

And because it stayed compact, it lived in me. I can still sketch Kakariko from memory. That well you drain to crawl into a nasty little crypt underneath. A graveyard where Dampé drags you racing through pitch dark. That windmill spinning a looping tune that squatted in my skull for a solid decade. Zora’s Domain hidden past a waterfall that opened when you played Zelda’s Lullaby. Malon singing on her ranch while you hopped fences on your horse. Those weren’t pins on a screen. They were neighborhoods, and I knew exactly who lived on each block.

Then Majora’s Mask took that whole idea and got downright freaky with it. Its adventure crammed itself into one doomed town and fields hugging it, all of it ticking down on a three day clock while a grinning moon leaned in like it owed you cash. Because space stayed so tight, Clock Town became a most alive setting Nintendo has ever shipped. You learned its mailman’s route. You chased a heartbroken couple across seventy two hours, sprinting to reunite them before sky came down. That whole quest only lands because a town runs small enough for people to keep habits you can memorize. Squeeze that sandbox and suddenly its grains grow faces.

Somebody in back is already hollering about Wind Waker. Big ocean, endless sailing, gotcha. Nah. Look at how that adventure actually breathes. Its sea is just a hallway. Islands are its rooms, and each one carries its own swagger. Windfall with its shops and gossip and that auction. Dragon Roost pounding its drums. Forest Haven glowing green. Outset, your home, a spot you keep drifting back toward. All that blue water existed to frame a handful of handcrafted destinations. You recall doorways. Never a corridor.

Now here comes a part that really gets folks heated at me.

Old Zelda temples had a soul. That Forest one twisting in on itself with those haunted paintings. A Water one that sent grown men into early retirement over rising tides. That Shadow one, straight nightmare fuel, invisible floors hanging over a pit of bones. Each was a puzzle box built around a single towering idea, capped by a beast that could not have breathed anywhere else. You limped out with a new gadget and a war story.

Hold that up against a hundred and twenty shrines, most of them beige closets, same jingle, same tiny chest waiting inside. I cleared them and forgot them before a door even slid shut. Nothing is wrong with a quick brain teaser here and there. But do not sit across from me and claim a four minute puzzle carves itself into you like a full temple does. Those Divine Beasts tried to be a real thing and landed as fancy party tricks. Cool once. Gone from my head by next Saturday.

Which drags us straight to a bill nobody wants to pay for all that open sky. Its liberty is real. Standing on a summit and gliding wherever your heart aims is gorgeous, and I would be lying to say otherwise. But an ability to go anywhere and an ability to remember where you went are not one currency, and newer games spent that second gift to buy a first.

So answer me honest. Can you name a single road in Breath of the Wild? One specific path like you can trace that walk down from Kakariko into open field? I bet you can picture a mountain shape or a whole region, but individual spots smear together because there are simply too many holding too little meaning apiece. When everything is allowed, nothing gets underlined. That team stepped all the way back to let you write your own legend, which sounds noble until you clock that they stopped writing theirs. A blank page respects you. It also forgets you a second you close it.

Classic Zelda worked like a great mixtape with an order somebody agonized over at three in the morning. Friction was a feature, not a flaw. You could not scale that cliff, so a trail had to wind around it, and that forced detour is precisely why a trip stuck. Limits are no enemy of wonder. Limits are how wonder gets a shape. A grotto only thrills you because a wall was telling you no half a beat earlier.

Twilight Princess grasped this even while chasing a wider canvas. Ordon had chores and neighbors and a pulse before you ever drew a blade, so when darkness rolled over that land it actually cut. A long showdown down an empty street of its Hidden Village hits because its setting was engineered to hit and nothing more. Intention. That is a word I circle back on. Old places stayed tiny because a person decided every yard of them owed a game a job.

So let me put it flat before anybody misquotes me at a barbershop. This is no rose tinted glasses fogging up truth. I do not want blocky textures and stiff controls back. Keep its physics, keep those jaw dropping views, keep letting me ruin a perfectly good pot of stew. What I want is that gorgeous canvas packed back up with a density Zelda used to carry like it was nothing. Hand me a Hyrule I can memorize again. Fewer copy pasted enemy camps, more towns where folks have names and routines and beef. Bring back dungeons with personality. Put a reason behind every fork in a trail.

Because when it is all said and done, a biggest world I ever explored is not one my feet actually crossed. It is one still squatting rent free in my skull nearly thirty years deep, and that little land earned its lease by being compact enough to love top to bottom. Open air handed us somewhere to wander. Old design handed us somewhere to belong, and belonging is what Zelda always did best. Force me to pick and it is not close. I am taking one I can still walk with my eyes shut, every single time.

Staff Writer; Jay Baker

An older blerd with a lifelong love for anime, comics, manga, and gaming… Writing for fans who still believe great stories can come from a screen, a page, or a controller…

He can be contacted at JayBaker@AfroGamers.com.