videogames season!?
2025/06/04
i'm very excited for the switch 2.
the part of me that wrote that article upon its reveal about how strange and unusual its existence feels remorseful that i'm getting such a console at its launch. hauntingly, i hit the nail on the head -- it's more switch, an upgrade not dissimilar to the PS5 or XBOX SERIES where it just runs games with bigger numbers, bigger resolutions, bigger controllers even. i don't need to tell you what it does differently, but it's made me feel especially strange about it at a time when i should be looking forward to new games and new movements in an industry that's mostly been stagnant. regardless, i'm gonna have a good time with it, and for my own sake i wanna be more optimistic lol.
last month i played the first two METAL GEAR SOLID games and naturally their impact has reverberated within me since -- i cannot help thinking that videogame culture is haunted by its own past, that everything is repeating itself and each console generation is more and more cyclical. this was made worse when i continued to play through this series and reached MGS4, a game so unabashedly hateful of its own existence and a mockery of long-spanning soap drama esque character developments because there's no way to make a narrative followup to MGS2
this is all i'll write on the series for now, that its messaging has stuck with me at a time when many things are repeated and relied on by audiences and creators alike. it validated my worst feelings on gundam gquuuuuux (a show that's still airing and i'm not ready to fully write about) from a couple months ago and it validated my unease surrounding the launch of the nintendo switch 2. are we just stuck?
and then this GOOF shows up.
the next two chapters of DELTARUNE are launching later today (as i write this) to coincide with the launch of the switch 2, news revealed in the original switch 2 direct that was surprising to me but also, like, it's really gotten to that point hasn't it. DELTARUNE, along with UNDERTALE, is pervasive and filled everyone's brains with some kind of worm. it's one of the most popular games in general right now, and one that gets speculated upon with such scrutiny and impatience by fans obsessed with finding out what happens next because of its episodic format. it's been seven years since the release of chapter 1 and it persists with an alarming amount of cultural relevance, at least for my generation -- i am speaking from firsthand experience, i study videogames, the majority of people i meet have at least played DELTARUNE and at worst shaped an entire chunk of their personality around it.
really, i'm one of these sicko fans. UNDERTALE has been with me for so long that the realization of how much time it's been is concerning. DELTARUNE has cultivated an audience around its underlying mysteries as an alternate followup to UNDERTALE, featuring a pretty straightforward storyline but with easily-missable secrets that are paradoxically the most popular parts of the game. the fanbase present for DELTARUNE is unignorable as a side effect of its heavily-speculated intrigue, and in the current moment i fear what will happen once these new chapters are unleashed on this earth.
replaying chapters 1 & 2 in the leadup to chapters 3 & 4 got me to recognize exactly the kind of work that goes into it, how precisely relevant it is to a culture born of the 'net and especially as queer videogame literature in an age where weird wrinkly bald men can't process the thought of two girls holding hands without getting unfathomably angry. for something this openly for the homos to catch fire with this generation and especially for it to be as accessible as it is is significant, and it's messed up because this has gotta be one of the silliest RPGs out there.
i cannot ignore that DELTARUNE is a symptom of the same cyclical culture i complain about, that it somehow stems from a pocket of 2000s web culture obsessed with the MOTHER series, but i really need to stop worrying about it. i'm partially writing this to remove the stress i feel over things being cyclical because i don't think there will ever be a genuinely solely original piece of art, like that's just impossible suck it up, in the wake of major moves in videogame culture that'll affect me and my friends.
anyway! i'll post again soon to discuss deltarune and the switch 2 launch and also furuhata ninzaburo again probably. stick around!!!