Last weekend I celebrated my 42nd birthday. My partner rented out a private dining room at a nice restaurant and I partied late into the night with loved ones. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, but I do something similar for my birthday. I try to push myself to do things that I know matter to me but that I sometimes have a hard time getting up the activation energy for. For instance, I hate submitting my work to journals and publishers. This past year I set a goal for the number of rejections I wanted to get from submitting my writing. I aimed for one rejection per week, which proved to be overly ambitious. Ultimately, I was rejected 22 times across 12 pieces. Each rejection sucked (especially the one that came less than two hours after I submitted), but the goal itself served its purpose. I submitted far more in my 42nd year on the planet than I had in prior years.
This year, my goals are similar. I’ve set objectives that, by the nature of their existence, will move me in the direction I want to go. I want to meet or exceed my number of rejections this year. I’ve gotten back into lifting and want to hit a 225 bench press once more before the ravages of time take the opportunity away from me. (The last time I could put up that much weight I was in my early 20s.)
Even if I don’t hit those exact goals, their existence will hopefully compel me to get over the immense barriers to sending my writing into the void or getting my ass to the gym.
Doing any of those goals will probably require me to play a lot less video games than I have the past month or so. One of the major culprits has been Nioh 3. My love for the Nioh video game franchise far oustrips the quality of the actual games. They’re confusingly plotted, overly complicated, and stuffed full uninteresting, yet plot-critical, characters that I have a hard time telling apart.
So it’s a testament to developer Team Ninja that I have sunk over a hundred hours into all three games of the franchise thus far. They feel good play and have a mechanical richness that supports a variety of play styles. That richness blends into maddening levels of complexity as changing your build can mean effectively re-learning how to play the game. Switching from one weapon to another can drastically change the timing, attack combos, and strategy. Deciding to move from a combo-based approach to a consumables based approach can trivialize some fights and make others maddeningly difficult.
Nioh 3 feels like the apotheosis of this choose-your-own-action complexity, with dozens of different mechanics and weapons interleaving to give you an infinite number of different ways to play the game. At the same time, not giving any thought to your build and just trying to “go with the flow” will make the game intractably hard. It is, more than anything, a game that rewards intention and knowing what parts of the game you’re good at.
Being old and of poor reflexes, I relied heavily on ninja arts and positioning to see my way through. Other than a few extremely aggressive boss fights (which I usually beat by bringing someone in for co-op and letting them single-handedly obliterate the boss), this ended up making large stretches of the game mostly about carefully positioning myself and making sure I’d come fully stocked. The actual fights themselves were basically a formality. The action was still there in bursts, but it ended up feeling far more strategic than I’d expected.
It’s definitely a game for existing Nioh fans. Team Ninja has leaned hard into the core DNA of the series. The open world aspects of this game are a fine departure, but I don’t feel they really added all that much to the formula. I wouldn’t recommend it for newcomers to the series, but if you’ve already played either of the others, then you can just expect more of the same, with a whole new goofy plot-line and new cast of almost-indistinguishable characters.
When I heard that Massive Attack and Tom Waits were putting out a single together, I could hear it in my head before I ever actually heard the track. Both artists are sui genera but somehow the way in which their sounds would merge was obvious to me. The stomp-clatter percussion over haunting synthesizers works perfectly. Waits’ profane grizzle lays over top of the elegance of Massive Attack’s refined, meditative groove like a bloody human heart on a silver platter.
It’s been described in some quarters as a “protest song” but I think that’s selling it short. It’s certainly timely. The current administration is disavowing “boots on the ground” in Iran and Venezuela while sending troops in to both places for search-and-rescue of a downed pilot and a little light presidential kidnapping respectively. Meanwhile it’s invading US cities and murdering some civilians while mass disappearing others.
This track, though, has a timeless quality. It will be resonant as long as fascists use one disenfranchised underclass (the sons of the poor working class) to oppress other disenfranchised classes (immigrants and civilians in the global South). That situation is likely to continue as long as the American Empire does, so I suspect “Boots on the Ground” will, regrettably, resonate just as well in ten or twenty years as it does now.