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It was late one evening as Meredith Myers was lying in bed relaxing when her sister, Jenna, walked in with an expression of shock on her face. Jenna had been taking an evening stroll in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, walking past fruit trees and over wooden bridges that connect the different parts of her town. Lolly, a friendly cat who had just moved into town, locked eyes with her and ran over.

“I didn’t realize the mechanics of the game would do this–it showed my sister the letter after Lolly had moved from my town to hers,” Meredith told GameSpot. “Lolly showed her the letter she had written to me in my town.”

The letter her sister showed her was from their other sister, Kylie, who had passed away from cancer four years earlier.

Scenarios like this, where an NPC villager moves from one person’s town to another, is normal in New Leaf, and the newcomers always bring mementos like letters with them. Meredith didn’t expect Lolly to turn up with such an impactful memory, though.

Meredith and her sisters had loved Animal Crossing while growing up, but she wasn’t playing in her own town after her sister passed away–she was making sure Kylie’s town was weed-free and full of happy villagers instead. “I picked up her 3DS to finish Link Between Worlds for her,” Meredith said. “I did that pretty quickly and then I found Animal Crossing and it became a thing. I couldn’t take care of her anymore, but I could take care of her village. That’s something.”

Meredith kept Kylieland, as her sister named it, well-stocked with yellow flowers (Kylie’s favorite) and kept sending her villager’s similarly sweet letters like the one Lolly had brought back. The Myers had always bonded over video games and Animal Crossing was something they all loved and played regularly when they were younger.

“We didn’t start playing [Animal Crossing] again until she got sick, because she was bored in the hospital and didn’t have anything to do,” Meredith said. “I didn’t know how much time, care, and dedication she had put into it until she had passed and I found her 3DS and thought I’d take a look. It was like having this connection to her, with this whole world she had created, these friendships she had with the other characters. It was neat to hang onto her in that way. I took over her town and played for years since.”

“There was probably a 10-year gap [between when she last played] until I took her 3DS and started taking care of her New Leaf town,” she added. Meredith has been able to keep a special connection to Kylie through their shared love of Animal Crossing, one she can revisit every day. It’s a place she can help grow and change, where Meredith can go and continue all the bug-catching, house-expanding, fossil-collecting Kylie started all those years ago.

“It was like having this connection to her, with this whole world she had created, these friendships she had with the other characters.”

Animal Crossing, according to Katsuya Eguchi, one of its creators, is an experience that lets families play together even if they weren’t playing at the same time.

“I’d always get home really late. And my family plays games, and would sometimes be playing when I got home. And I thought to myself–they’re playing games, and I’m playing games, but we’re not really doing it together,” he said in an interview with Gamasutra. “It’d be nice to have a play experience where even though we’re not playing at the same time, we’re still sharing things together. So this was something that the kids could play after school, and I could play when I got home at night, and I could kind of be part of what they were doing while I wasn’t around.”

Eguchi didn’t know that his game design philosophy would stretch into the afterlife. In the Myers family’s case, it’s a perfect example of how video games can help people grieve after losing a loved one.

“If not stronger, it’s a more active connection to her sister,” Portland Institute for Loss and Transition Director Robert A. Neimeyer, Ph.D., said in an interview with GameSpot. “A connection that confronts her with ongoing challenges. It’s almost a virtual expression of how we grieve in general.”

Meredith’s connection to her sister is a powerful example of the continuing bonds theory, the idea that a normal, healthy and important part of grief is maintaining a connection with those loved ones who have passed away.

The theory isn’t as clear-cut as it seems, though. As different people grieve in different ways, some are able to maintain this bond and continue living in a healthy way, while others may struggle with daily reminders of their loss.

“Grieving still happens differently, some people can still detach due to their past experiences,” Neimeyer said. “Both continuing bonds and breaking bonds can be considered healthy ways to cope.”

Sharing The Race

Michael was 6 years old when his father died, and afterward, he couldn’t bring himself to touch the original Xbox they had shared. He had to wait 10 years to build up the courage to boot the old console up to play one of his favorite games: RalliSport Challenge.

“Once I did, I noticed something,” Michael, who goes by the online tag 00WARTHERAPY00, wrote in a Youtube comment in 2014. “I started meddling around and found a ghost, literally…you know, when a timed race happens, the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver? Yep, you guessed it, his ghost still rolls around the track.”

He had found a digital copy of his father flying around that dirt track more than 10 years after his death. It gave Michael an odd comfort, even though he missed his old man. “I played and played and played until I was almost able to beat the ghost,” he wrote. “Until one day I got ahead of it, I surpassed it, and I stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure I wouldn’t delete it.”

“Bliss,” he wrote.

Michael’s interaction with his father’s ghost racer is another impactful example of the continuing bonds theory at work, except it illustrates how maintaining a virtual connection after a loved one has passed can be dangerous.

“Continuing bonds theory, you don’t just move on and forget about [loved ones who’ve died]. You have to figure out a new way to maintain that connection with them,” Sienna College professor of Social Work Carla J. Sofka, Ph.D. told GameSpot. “Before technology, [mourners would] go to the gravesite and have conversations with them.”

“What happens if that technology goes away? How likely is the game a permanent thing?”

The problem comes with the concept of secondary loss, the idea that a primary loss, the death of a loved one, can lead to secondary losses like losing your job or home due to circumstances caused by the first loss. “What happens if that technology goes away? How likely is the game a permanent thing?” Sofka asked. “The concept of second loss, which would be the grief that someone experiences if that virtual reality disappears, then that person is going to grieve all over again. It’s a blessing, but what happens if it’s discontinued?”

Debra Bassett, a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department of the University of Warwick, studies the new phenomenon of second loss, which is the idea that these digital remnants of our loved ones can themselves be lost and is a different concept from secondary loss. “This fear of second loss is a new phenomenon for those grieving in our digital society,” she wrote in an article on Fast Company. “While images of the dead stowed away in boxes of photos in attics may well fade or perish over time, they don’t form part of people’s everyday lives in such a socially active way as digital memories do.”

For example, if Michael crosses that finish line before the ghost racer left behind by his father, the ghost time disappears, overwritten by Michael’s new best time in the race. That remnant of his parent would disappear and Michael could experience the pain of losing him all over again. The same can be said about Kylieland in Animal Crossing. It’s a blessing that can potentially lead to more pain down the road.

Visiting An Altar

Susan Rivers was finishing up a course she was teaching high schoolers about identity and mental health last year. She used playthroughs of What Remains of Edith Finch, a game about a family who believed they were cursed, to talk about how we view the people closest to us.

What Remains of Edith Finch is a game about death, one in which you explore the lives of lost family members through individual vignettes. Each one is presented with a different shrine, a collection of items left behind by that person.

“It helps them think about the people around them, how they view them. One of the interesting things about Edith Finch is, you can dig into a slice of the artifacts these people left behind in the shrines of each level,” Rivers said in an interview with GameSpot. “It gives people a different perspective about who people are.”

Rivers is the executive director of iThrive, a non-profit organization with operating in Atlanta, Boston, and New York that explores the intersection of games, mental health, and education. The organization uses different forms of interactive media to create a curriculum that teaches students about mental health, depression, grief, and other related topics.

“Grief naturally comes up with Edith Finch,” she said. “What do we remember about the individuals and what they leave behind?”

What Rivers didn’t expect was to go through her own experience of grief during one of the first times she taught her curriculum. Her mother died, pushing her to use some of the same ideas she taught in how she grieved the loss of someone she was incredibly close to. “The notion of curating our own space to reflect our identity. I didn’t really think deeply about that concept until we did our work with Edith Finch. The final project is to create a museum of me,” Rivers said. “I was curating the things from my mother’s life.”

“What do we remember about the individuals and what they leave behind?”

Playing through What Remains of Edith Finch helped give Rivers the idea to focus on her mother’s letters, which were much like the letters that told the story of each individual vignette in the game.

“One of the things I connected to is the traditions we held and repeated,” she said. “Since she passed away, I’ve started to collect her letters, even thank-you notes she sent to others.”

While Rivers’s experience didn’t contain an in-game memory of her mother, What Remains of Edith Finch’s family home perfectly represents the idea of an altar–a collection of items gathered in one space, a table or a box, for mourners to visit and grieve. Creating physical altars are a century-old practice, used in holidays such as Día de Muertos to honor the dead.

Video games are becoming a prominent platform for digital memories and experiences, where players can create an altar, either on purpose or by accident.

“There is a potential for a digital altar to be infused with life, it’s dynamic,” Joanne Cacciatore, Arizona State University Director of the Graduate Certificate in Trauma and Bereavement, explained in an interview with GameSpot. “Altars are a living ritual, they’re a way in which we ritualize our dead by creating a physical space, a tangible connection, an artifact that connects us to them.”

Neimeyer regularly works with people who are close to the ends of their lives to gather items and construct legacy projects to help bring them peace. “In this, people share their stories in a way that can be captured and passed on to their survivors,” he said. “[Kylie] did that herself–left her a little world where she would always be there.”

Kylieland and the RalliSport Challenge ghost racer are both altars; places for Michael and Meredith to rekindle relationships with lost loved ones, and places to maintain a connection that wasn’t lost, but transformed. Altars can be beautiful in how they preserve a part of someone’s life, and painful in how second loss can bring grief all over again. Video games, whether they be life simulators in which you send letters to quirky animals or dirt road racers where you compete against lap time, can create serendipitous memories that help us grieve.

For Meredith, Kylie’s Animal Crossing town is a perfect way to keep her memory alive by continuing what she started.

“I know she wanted to expand her house, so I’m going to pay off her debt,” Meredith said. “I can build off what she started. That’s part of the beauty of Animal Crossing.”

We’re back again to ask about and discuss the games we’re currently playing right now. The GameSpot team is usually busy keeping up with the biggest releases, but other times we’re catching up on games we missed, replaying old favorites, experiencing classics for the first time, or just dabbling in odds and ends for a spell. Below you can see a sampling of the games that we’re playing, the reasons we’re playing them, and what we love about them so far.

But don’t just stop at reading our responses; we also want to hear from you too! Tell us all about what you’re playing in the comments section and what you’re diggin’ about them.

So please, join us and ramble on about all the super cool video games you’re playing! We know you need to get it off your chest as much as we do. And if you’re playing the same games from previous weeks, that’s fine too! You’re more than welcome to talk about why you still love it!

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore — Tony Wilson, Video Producer

I missed out on this crossover RPG’s original Wii U release, but I’m happy to get another chance to play it on Switch. I’m not well-versed in Japanese idol culture (the basis of the game’s plot), but I am a massive fan of the two series that combine for this adventure: Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE pulls from the SMT spin-off Persona, but in this case, the “personas” are Fire Emblem heroes from throughout the series’ history. I love seeing how each one is interpreted by the developers–the same team that thinks Norse god Thor looks like a Dragon Ball Z villain.

Turn-based battles fuse the two series, too, combining SMT’s elemental affinities with Fire Emblem’s weapon triangle. It leads to a deep rock-paper-scissors-like system where striking an enemy with an attack they’re weak against lets the rest of the party dogpile with immediate follow-up attacks. I get such a thrill out of totally wiping a party of multiple monsters before they even get a chance to act. That’s the high-level experience I grind for (and live for).

I’ve got maybe one or two dungeons left to conquer before I finish my adventure, but all I want to do is see more Persona-fied Fire Emblem characters and test my might against them in battle. | Twitter: @chaingunpope

Syberia (Switch Port) — Matt Espineli, Editor

While I spend time playing all sorts of games every week, there’s one that I realized I’ve been consistently booting up every night: Syberia. This 2003 point-and-click adventure game isn’t blowing my mind, but its Switch port is helping me fall asleep at night. Don’t get me wrong; that doesn’t mean it’s dull or that I hate it. Aside from nostalgia, part of the appeal of the point-and-click genre in general for me is how it helps me relax and put me at ease at night after a long day–similar to an easygoing bedside novel. And Syberia is so pleasant in how it demands little of me other than a basic intellect to connect the dots of its mostly straightforward puzzles. (Sorry, Grim Fandango, your puzzles stress me out and keep me up at night. I genuinely still love you and hope to complete you one day.)

As American lawyer Kate Walker, you need to solve a gripping mystery afoot in France around the inheritance of a family-owned spring-automaton toy factory. The premise’s intrigue is more than enough to push me forward. But it’s the whimsical, dreamy qualities of the Art Nouveau-inspired reality presented in Syberia’s world that captivates me the most (and lulls me to sleep). It’s a place where people rely on and use rusty, clockwork automatons to help them do domestic work, and buildings are massive and excessively ornate. The sprawling scale always inspires me to explore–though my excitement to look around every corner is occasionally derailed by my diminishing cognizance as I run Kate into a wall for 15 minutes.

After an arduous, stress-inducing day, Syberia is the exact kind of point-and-click adventure game I need; it’s fascinating, relaxing, and nostalgic. I hope I can remain awake long enough every night to beat it someday, though. | Twitter: @MGespin

Terry Bogard (In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate) – Edmond Tran, Senior Editor & Video Producer

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has started becoming a regular thing again in the Australian CBSi office–at least for me, a couple of the folks at CNET, and others when their bosses are out of the office. I’m not sure what sparked the fever again other than a couple of us thinking that was a good idea. Still, the thing that is motivating me to keep it going through this latest phase is wanting to get really good with a new character that I’ve had a 20+ year affection towards: Fatal Fury’s Terry Bogard. The Power Wave Prince. The Burn Knuckle Boss. The world’s No. 1 Crack Shooter… that last one doesn’t play so well.

I was ecstatic when he was announced late last year, but he was released during a super busy time for video games, and Smash is no good if you’re playing by yourself, right? So instead of getting back into Smash then, I made The King Of Fighters ’98 (one of my favourite fighting games of all time) my Switch commuting game for a little while. That was fun. But now that other people want to get back into Smash too, I’ve put my former main Lucas on the bench in favour of a different blonde orphan–one that is old enough to buy beer, has a cool cap, and hits hard.

It’s been fantastic. I’m stoked over how faithful a representation Terry has in Smash–his moves are all there, his hilarious Engrish barks are all there, I’m rewarded for knowing his inputs and flow, and he’s got an excellent fighting game-style strategy to him that is super satisfying to play. I could tell from his reveal video that game director Masahiro Sakurai loves the character, and it really shows.

It’s really changed my mindset of how I approach Smash, too. I’m using Terry as I would in a KOF game, and it’s working out well. I’m focusing on hit-confirming special moves and supers, getting more confident in aggressively chasing and juggling opponents, and just playing in a completely different style than I used to. That’s not to say that this style of play didn’t exist in the game before Terry; it’s just not how I was used to playing Smash. I like goofy, unorthodox characters! But now that I can just convert my years of gung-ho KOF play into it, well, it’s working out super well– I’ve got Power Geysers and Buster Wolves popping off all over the place, and it makes me smile. When Terry asks, “Are you okay?” I can only shout an enthusiastic “YES.” I’m going to start wearing a cap to work. | Twitter: @EdmondTran

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 — David Ahmadi, Video Producer

The Division 2‘s upcoming expansion returns you to the setting from the first game, and combined with the recent absurd price cut on my favorite platform, I deleted my file on my Playstation 4 and eagerly bought the game for the Xbox One X. Although I haven’t played the expansion yet, I certainly want to complete as much as I can in the base game before that time comes. Maybe it’s the time I had taken off from the game that has encouraged me to return, or perhaps it’s that despite all the upcoming content for my loot shooters of choice like Destiny, I just needed a change of scenery.

I’ve enjoyed getting my feet wet with a cover shooter that incorporates a solid loot progression, and even though it had an initial rocky start for me when the game released last year, I’m finding my return to be a lot more enjoyable. Despite being playable solo, these games are always more engaging and entertaining when played with friends or with online matchmaking. I’m usually pretty shy, but beyond a few griefers in the Dark Zone, my time going through side quests, story missions, and online PvP with strangers I’ve met online has been enjoyable.

Ever since starting this job at GameSpot almost a year and a half ago, I’ve grown better at juggling multiple games at the same time. Since I finally got all the Xbox Achievements for Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, I’m more than happy to swap in The Division 2 in its place, and continue progressing for the foreseeable future (or maybe until Half-Life: Project Alyx comes out!) | Twitter: @Roshby57

Disco Elysium — Dave Klein, Video Producer

I’ve been trying to catch up on the major games of 2019 I missed, and with GameSpot (hey, that’s us!) awarding Disco Elysium a 10/10, it seemed like a must-play game. I’m all for indie games doing something fresh and new, and some of the most creative titles come from smaller teams with fewer cooks in the kitchen.

So, I’ve been immersed in a choice-filled adventure role-playing game, in a genre I would love to see developed further–that being the detective mystery. The game is wonderfully over-abundant with dialogue options and offers something unique to my collect-everything, click-everything mentality, picked up from a lifetime of gaming: clicking all of the dialogue choices can have severely negative consequences. You’ll need to be careful about what dialogue you choose, as it’ll have positive or negative repercussions at later points in the game.

Disco Elysium is a game in which you can reinvent your drug-addled character into whomever you like, with a right RPG mentality of every stat point being meaningful among a large number of traits you’ll invest in your character. That said, if I’m honest, I find the writing to be pretentious, and it has pulled me away from the game on more than one occasion. I’m sure the writing will be right up some players’ alleys, but I’ve found my eyes glazing over regularly as the game goes into yet another self-important political diatribe. | Twitter: @TheDaveKlein

Game Boy Advance – Peter Brown, Managing Editor

Yet another vintage hardware mod has more or less dominated my last week. This time, I installed updated screens in two old Game Boy Advances–an original GBA and a GBA SP. GBA display upgrades have been around for years, but it’s only recently that IPS displays have come on the scene. They are practically the endgame for GBA upgrades, and it feels great to finally get there.

Where previous screen upgrades gave old GBA systems a chance to shine using the SP’s backlit screen (the sought after AGS-101 model), they are relatively dim compared to the stop-you-in-your-tracks brightness of an IPS panel–which also comes with 10 intensity settings. Colors pop like never before, and because the panel is at a higher native resolution than the standard GBA screen, everything is extremely crisp. The inherent motion blur of old GBA screens is also made a thing of the past thanks to the IPS’s higher refresh rate. The viewing angle then seals the deal, allowing you to see colors and values, as they should look, no matter your perspective.

With the refreshed hardware in hand, I’ve enjoyed revisiting old favorites like Advance Wars, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. Having both models also gives me the chance to pick a GBA that works for me in specific moments. If I’m headed to work, I pack my GBA SP since it’s collapsible and can take a bit of knocking about in a backpack. The standard GBA? That stays at home, on my desk, waiting for dedicated play on the couch. It’s also been upgraded with a new shell and new buttons. Do I want Nintendo to release a Game Boy or Game Boy Advance Classic? I do, and I’m also very interested in Analogue Pocket that’s due later this year. For now, though, I’m more than happy using the handhelds I know and love now that they’ve been souped up to modern standards. | Twitter: @PCBrown

Alien: Isolation — Phil Hornshaw, Editor

It was recently my birthday, and even though I’m a grown man in my 30s, I always receive toys for such occasions: specifically, Alien toys, because I am a big, stupid Alien fan. The new lunchbox adorning my office shelf got me thinking about Alien: Isolation, so I re-downloaded it and fired it up again this week, intent on making what is probably my fifth or sixth run through the entire game.

Alien: Isolation is one of my absolute favorites, and I can’t think of any other video game adaptation that has so thoroughly captured the essence of its source material. Slipping through the cluttered, dirty, analog tech-ridden Sevastopol station is ridiculously true to Ridley Scott’s 1979 movie, and a significant achievement of research and recreation in its own right. But then there’s the creature, an eight-foot-tall monstrosity that seems smart and angry as it chases you around. It’s been almost six years, and I’m still impacted by the straight-up malevolence of the alien and the ingenious ways developer Creative Assembly has made the thing seem so clever.

I’m not usually one to push people to play games on high difficulties, but when it comes to Alien: Isolation, I do think that the true, intended experience is conveyed by playing it on the hardest difficulty you can manage. It isn’t about personal challenge or the thrill of “beating” the game; the higher the difficulty, the smarter and more deadly the creature. I’m running through Nightmare Mode (again), which makes the experience even tougher by taking away your map and messing with your motion tracker, but what makes the difficulty mode interesting is that the alien learns how to kill you. Really, really quickly. Blast it once with the flamethrower, and it’ll be sure to stay out of range the next time you aim the weapon in its direction. Throw a noisemaker once, and the next time, the creature will know to ignore it. You can craft a whole bunch of tools in Alien: Isolation, and on Nightmare Mode, you can use each one once or maybe twice before the AI adapts. It’s terrifying.

It’s not just impressive to see the creature paying attention to your actions and anticipating them–it makes the damn thing feel horrifically real. And that’s exactly what I want out of an Alien game and a horror game. The alien is something that has always really frightened me, which is what has made me such a fan, and Alien: Isolation captures the nervous discomfort of seeing the creature and the rising terror when you hear it scream and break into a run in your direction. I can’t wait to sneak back into the shadowy corridors of Sevastopol, straining to hear the sounds of something moving with frightening speed through the vents above. | Twitter: @philhornshaw

Doom (2016) AND Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus 😀 — Kurt Indovina, Host & Writer

Every night for the past week, I’ve laid in bed either ripping demons limb from limb with my demon-slaying mitts or dismembering Nazi scum while dual-wielding machine guns. It calms my bones, slows my heart rate, and makes it easy to drift to sleep. It’s like meditation, especially Doom (2016) in particular, which I think is comparable to Tetris for some people: it’s a calming game about putting pieces in the perfect place–even when it speeds up and gets a bit chaotic, there’s a trance-like flow to it all. That’s how I feel about playing Doom, but set to brutal metal music and with excessive amounts of gore, and instead of putting things in place, I’m obliterating an imp’s face with my fist. Same thing.

When I’m looking for something more story-driven and not as hectic, but still super violent and satisfying, I switch over to Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus. Strangely, both games are made with the id Tech 6 engine, and feature a Mick Gordon soundtrack–not sure what that says, but there’s a unique formula here, like listening to Enya while getting a massage. It just works.

Anyway, these games are a few years old, I know, but after finishing Kentucky Route Zero, and Disco Elysium three times in a row (both of which are slow-paced, action-free games), I think I just needed a little controlled chaos in my life. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to prepare for my nap and to shove my fists through a Cacodemon. | Twitter: @KURT_INDOVINA

Pokemon Home — Kevin Knezevic, Associate Editor

I know you can’t really “play” Pokemon Home since it’s more a service than an actual game, but I’ve been fiddling around with it compulsively since it surprise-launched earlier this week. I’d been eagerly looking forward to bringing my precious pocket monsters over from 3DS to my Switch. While that’s a significant draw of Pokemon Home, it’s the service’s other functions that have kept me coming back to it.

It initially seemed strange to me that many of Pokemon Home’s features were divided between the Switch and mobile versions, effectively forcing you to use both to get the most out of the service. In practice, however, this seems to have been a smart decision, as each version is tailored around its respective device. I expected to use Home primarily on Switch, but I’ve found that version is only really useful for transferring Pokemon or organizing which boxes my monsters are stored in.

Meanwhile, I check the mobile version every few hours, mainly because it’s the only one that offers the ability to trade Pokemon. Since I rarely take my Switch out with me, having that functionality on my phone is great because of how quick and convenient it is. I can check the status of my trades or put a Pokemon up on the GTS at any point during the day, which is a boon when you have as many spare Pokemon clogging up your boxes as I do.

Of course, there are some valid issues with the service; those who don’t have a smartphone will be missing out on some of its most useful features, and the it doesn’t seem to be particularly worthwhile if you aren’t as invested in the series as I am. That said, I’ve been pleased with Pokemon Home thus far. It’s a much more robust service than Pokemon Bank on 3DS was, which helps justify the higher subscription fee. I’ve been putting off transferring my entire Pokemon Bank collection over because the process is a little confusing, but this weekend I think I’ll finally get around to it.

By 2000, I was playing a lot of Squaresoft games. I’d become a die-hard Final Fantasy fan, I’d loved the horror-RPG combo of Parasite Eve, and I’d gotten lost in the weirdo religious underpinnings of Xenogears. Square’s action-RPG Vagrant Story hit me harder than any of them, though, because it felt so different from the Square RPGs I’d been playing for years. It dropped you into a medieval fantasy world that was grounded in realism–early portions of the game focus on struggles between a powerful church and an aristocratic state, which felt closer to the real world than most of Square’s more out-there games, like Final Fantasy VII and VIII. Vagrant Story was heavy on political intrigue, imagining a world full of armies with divided loyalties, cultists with strange powers, and spies trying to maintain the status quo, like Game of Thrones through the lens of Final Fantasy Tactics.

In the center of it all was Leá Monde, a storied city rendered into ruin by earthquakes but surging with a dark, strange power. While you spend the game trying to figure out what the opposing forces of the world all want with the ravaged city, you’re constantly contending with a supernatural force that literally raises the dead. Though Vagrant Story is full of magic and monsters, the people of its world spend the game confused and frightened by those things, facing powers they can’t understand but still hope to wield. Even in broad daylight, Leá Monde is oppressive and foreboding, both for the player and for the characters they encounter; even the rank-and-file soldiers following orders in the city fear what they might become if they fall in battle.

Vagrant Story’s world and narrative are dark and compelling, and they’re bolstered by gameplay that mixes in a bunch of RPG systems to make a tough-as-nails game. Attacks and defenses are based on timing, making combat into a dance, and a dense system of elemental affinities and magic abilities add a whole lot of strategic thinking to any enemy encounter. Yes, a lot of it is tough to deal with–I never did quite master the weapon system–but it leads to intense, difficult boss battles that feel like RPG cousins of encounters in modern games like Dark Souls.

Okay, one last thing: like the writing, Vagrant Story’s presentation is phenomenal. For a PlayStation game, it’s often beautiful and colorful, pushing the hardware of the time to the absolute brink with incredible art direction, and its soundtrack is unmatched. It’s probably my favorite game of its era, easily in my top five of all time, and if ever a game from the height of Squaresoft deserved a remake or a remaster, it’s Vagrant Story | Phil Hornshaw, Editor