The "Isekai" format has existed in fiction since the concept of fiction has existed. While many works are unique in many ways, with there being worlds of difference between Inuyasha, .hack//, The Wizard of Oz, or Ready Player One, there is a similarity between works that I've noticed. That similarity being how quickly the main character gets accustomed to the new world they inhabit. Language, culture, customs, social norms, all mastered in minutes. Suddenly finding yourself in a whole new world wildly different than the one you've known your entire life would at least be confusing if this were the real world, right?

The protagonist of Digimon World is a kid who is abruptly warped into a digital world full of digital monsters and, with little direction given, is instructed to raise and train a Digimon, while also being tasked with recruiting more Digimon to move into the city he's suddenly found himself in. There's no map, at least not in-game. The chart that shows your Digimon's growth and path to further "Digivolutions" is barebones and not particularly informative. Some of the steps you need to take to recruit a new Digimon to File City are obtuse, to say the very least. Any progress you make is in spite of the game, and not because it provided a guiding hand. Better learn how to take notes and draw up your own maps, because you aren't getting shit otherwise. You are lost in the world of Digimon. This is a game that takes the standard Isekai formula, and does something a bit unique with it.

Or it could just be bad game design capped off with a bad localization.

Either way, Digimon World is an awesome game. Intentional or not, the lack of direction leads to some very satisfying moments. Raising your little monster, and watching as it becomes something really cool, like a guy made entirely out of fire, or Robocop if Murphy was even more of a rotting corpse, or the massive skeleton dragon. I'm finding out very late in life that Digimon designs are fucking amazing, and I'm invested in seeing and raising as many variations of Digimon as I can. Not just making them look cool, but making them stronger. Digimon World can be a hard game beyond its lack of direction. Enemies can be downright brutal, and going from barely surviving encounters to making Ogremons and MetalGreymons fall at your feet like overgrown weeds never really gets old. Something I really love about RPGs and the various growth and experience systems they have is they act as a real-time measuring stick showing how far you've come in your journey. Digimon World does this really well, despite not being a "traditional" RPG.

Some of the quests in the game are pretty ridiculous in their methods, at times feeling like older obtuse games like Castlevania II or The Tower of Druaga. You probably wouldn't immediately figure out that you have to find a plant that only grows on the 15th day of the year in order to recruit a Vegiemon to File City. You probably wouldn't know about the secret island that can only be reached by fishing for a Seadramon that only shows up at two very specific times of day that you need to catch with a fishing rod that you trade for with trading cards that you can only buy from a secret shop that's only open for a specific time of the year. I think most people would read those previous sentences, and think that this game is a bunch of bull shit. I, on the other hand, love this kind of thing. This is the kind of game design that keeps me up at night, thinking about the amount of thought and effort that goes into meticulously hiding these things.

Digimon World is a very old school kind of game. A solo experience that is somehow also a community-driven one. I already mentioned Castlevania II and Druaga, but there's also Zelda, Mortal Kombat, or Dark Souls. Games with secrets buried deep within them that lead to a community of players trading information with one another, thinking outside of the box in order to solve a mystery presented to them by the developers. Digimon World fits perfectly into that particular style of game, turning the adventure of a single Digimon Tamer and their Digimon into a group project with a multitude of Tamers talking to one another.

This all goes back to my original point. A normal isekai sees its protagonist getting their bearings very quickly due to helpful people within that world. This particular isekai sees you slowly, awkwardly getting your bearings by having to find people outside of the digital universe that were thrust into the same position you were, but we're all still figuring it out together. From playground rumors and sketchy tips in gaming magazines, to message boards and fan-run wikis, we have also Digivolved. Literally growing and changing along with our digital monsters. Hopefully, we can continue to grow in the ways that we help one another, pulling each other through both the metaphorical and real digital worlds that can feel so isolating and hostile.

I try to avoid covering shovelware on here. It's too easy and low-effort to dog on a game made solely for a paycheck, with no artistic merit, that will be quickly forgotten about by the world at large. On top of that, I don't get anything out of playing games like that; there is no reason to waste my time on some half-assed game starring the Olsen Twins or the VR Troopers or whatever than investing time into any other game I have covered on this site. But WWF Betrayal is a piece of shovelware that I had to cover.

Betrayal is a Game Boy Color game by WayForward Technologies, made a couple of years before they hit it big by trying to convince you that no, Shantae is totally a good game, for real. And made before you were browsed a ROM site and remembered that time The Electric Playground recommended Sigma Star Saga, then you played it and got a harsh reminder that there was a reason you never, ever, believed a word that came out of the mouths of Victor Lucas and Tommy Tallarico. I don't like WayForward's games, is what I'm getting at.

Prior to this, WayForward had developed a version of WCW Mayhem, also for the GBC. It was a pretty generic game, with a small amount of liberties taken (example: Bill Goldberg doing Zangief Spinning Piledrivers). It was also really fucking bad! It looked terrible, sounded terrible, had terrible controls, it was just a rotten experience overall. Rotten, but also forgettable; no different than any other Game Boy shovelware you would have been gifted by an uninformed family member. I bring this game up because, despite the fact that WayForward did not give a fuck about this game, only giving enough of a fuck and having enough fun to (poorly) animate a Spinning Piledriver, it was simply a licensed wrestling game on a handheld. WCW Mayhem was a job that they did to get paid. Sometimes a job is just a job. WayForward were asked to make a game where two wrestlers wrestled in a wrestling ring, and that's what they did. Nothing more, nothing less. No need or desire to innovate, with the lone exception being the ability to fight in the backstage areas, much the same as the console version of Mayhem.

I bring this up because that leads to the actual subject of this piece. WWF Betrayal is also a terrible shovelware game for the GBC. It has the same problems that WCW Mayhem had, now with the added bonus of whatever spritework that wasn't hastily edited from that game being some of the worst I've ever seen on the Game Boy. Now, I'm not against making all of your sprites off of one base model, I do it all the time, but it would help to not have the base be the worst looking shit possible.

So why do I care? This is a terrible game based on a sports entertainment promotion I don't like made by a company whose work I don't care for. I care because WayForward cared enough to actually give this game something of an innovative concept. WWF Betrayal is not your average terrible American-developed wrestling game. No, Betrayal is a side-scrolling brawler where you pick one out of four possible WWF Superstars™️, beat up referees and security, on a quest to rescue Stephanie McMahon, who has been kidnapped by the other three WWF Superstars™️ that you didn't pick. Rescuing Stephanie will result in Vince McMahon awarding you the WWF championship.

It's a basic plot, sure, but it serves a greater point that I would like to reiterate. When I wrote about Wrestlemania XIX on the Gamecube, I made a point that I would like to see more non-wrestling games featuring pro wrestlers. CM Punk, before he killed his legacy forever, had talked about wanting to see a wrestling-themed version of Cannonball Run. The concept of taking the personalities and characters of pro wrestling, and introducing them to a non-wrestling ecosystem has some legs to it. It's not something that happens that often, and it especially doesn't happen all that often in games. If AEW were to suddenly announce a blatant rip-off of Pop'n Music with Mina Shirakawa and Harley Cameron, I would want to play that. Or maybe a management sim where you have to regulate the volatile alpha male mentality of the Don Callis Family. But we don't get that. We just get a bad WWF-themed brawler.

Your chosen WWF Superstar™️ moves incredibly slow and has small hitboxes, while every enemy in the game moves quicker, hits harder, has better range, and can stunlock you. There are no combos, not even a punch-punch-bigger punch. Levels are a straight line of two enemies at a time, because the Game Boy can't handle that many sprites that large. Weapons are terrible, barely doing more damage than a regular punch, and have shorter range. Desperately needed health pick-ups oftentimes will only restore a single point of health. The game is at most twenty minutes long, and you will not enjoy a single second. There is nothing here to get into, other than the concept. What is most frustrating is that there is a unique concept here: taking the over-the-top WWF Superstars™️ into the real world, using their particular brand of problem solving, and it's in a shitty game that doesn't utilize this concept to its fullest.

Something that other games like Wrestlemania XIX and WWE Crush Hour (don't play this either, it's not even bad in a funny way, but a really boring way) had was this sort of full-circle moment where all of the nonsense your chosen WWF Superstar™️ had to go through was orchestrated by one man, and you always ended that particular game by beating his ass: Vince McMahon. The WWF became a massive cultural phenomenon in the late 90s specifically because people wanted to see Vince McMahon get his ass kicked. In [CURRENT YEAR], people still want to see Vince McMahon get his ass kicked. WWF Betrayal gives you the indication the Vince McMahon is the final boss. Guess what? You don't! You don't even get that! You simply beat one of the other three WWF Superstars™️, and then you are presented with a fucked up recreation of the WWF World Heavyweight belt, before going back to the title screen.

If you want a good wrestling themed brawler, Toaplan released Knuckle Bash in the arcades. I'm pretty sure the sound has finally been properly emulated in MAME at this point. If you want a good official fish-out-of-water wrestling game, keep fucking waiting. If you want me to never play a terrible WayForward game again, give me a hell yeah!

And that's the bottom line.

There is something of a shared experience with people who grew up in my generation, maybe some younger ones, as well: sitting in the passenger seat of your parents/guardians car as they took you to school or some other similar place, staring out the window, and imagining some person or creature is running along the rooftops of the houses passing by. No reason, no context, just our imaginations placing a nondescript character in a situation that lasts less than a minute for the purposes of livening up a boring car ride to somewhere you would rather not be.

Koichi Kawamoto was a programmer at Nintendo, before working his way up to becoming the guy who oversees the production of the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. A game/program he worked on early in his career was Mario Artist: Polygon Studio for the late, lamented 64DD. Specifically, he was in charge of creating a series of bonus mini-games called Sound Bomber. I bring this all up for a couple of reasons. One, because this was the direct inspiration for Wario Ware's development. Two, because in all of the Kawamoto interviews I've read, nobody has ever asked him what his thought process was when coming up with these games, so now I have to speculate. I want to know if Kawamoto ever looked out the window during a long train ride, and if his mind created a little guy running along the rooftops of the homes and buildings in the city. I would like to ask the same of the directors who were actually involved with the creation of Wario Ware, Hirofumi Matsuoka and Goro Abe. What do their imaginations create during their travels?

Wario Ware for the Game Boy Advance is a collection of small games that are played for seconds at a time. There's not much of a plot or overarching goal: Wario wants to make a popular video game so he can make money, and does this by stealing mini-game ideas from people. These mini-games are all nonsensical, and feel like the creations of children retreating into their imagination to cure a case of boredom. Everything is a game in Wario Ware. It's maximalist in the most chaotic sense. It has a consistent art style in that it is completely inconsistent. One game will be presented in 1-bit white sprites on a black background, and the next one will have very detailed, well animated sprite work, then the next one will use digitized photos for graphics. The games themselves range from wild fantasy stuff like flying through a cityscape or fighting aliens, to mundane things like brushing your teeth or picking your nose.

There is nothing that is not treated like a game, except for one thing: there is no mini-game about a guy running across suburban rooftops. The one thing you would think would have been the first game developed is not present at all. It's why I want to ask the dev team if they ever had that same imaginative time waster that so many of us have also had, because even though that isn't in the game, they managed to make a game that was essentially about that on a spiritual level. Being so fucking bored and not being able to do anything about it because you're stuck in a classroom or a long line, to the point that your mind has to create situations involving the objects around you. As such, Wario Ware is this anomaly of a game; it is a game essentially about nothing, that contains everything. Just pure, unbridled imagination facing you in such quick bursts that you don't really have the time to comprehend it.

Much like other GBA titles like the bit generations series, Wario Ware is designed to be played in short bursts. It's simple, it's not particularly complex, but it's still a game that I keep coming back to. I guess because it cures my boredom by turning everything into a game. Yet another example of Nintendo at their creative peak. Too bad there's no guy running on a rooftop.

Sega made so many games in the late 90s and early 2000s that shared a common theme: Peace. Harmony. Dreams of a better world. And having this dream in the coolest, most stylish way possible. January 2001, the last time you could feel positive about the world ever again, Sega released Cosmic Smash. Cosmic Smash is a game about a sleek digital being in a sleek digital world playing a sleek digital game of Squash. Or Breakout.

There is an extremely simple premise here: you have a racquet, and you have a ball. You hit the ball with the racquet to hit colored panels along the back wall of the court. Sometimes the panels move. Sometimes they're protected by indestructible panels. Things don't get much more complicated than that. The only thing that poses any threat to you is time. Time is constantly ticking down. It ticks down even faster when you use a Trick Shot: a special ability that can destroy an entire column of panels, and gives you a nice score bonus if you finish a level with one. So this otherwise relaxing one-person game of Arkanoid Squash is now a game about resource management. Trick shots cause you to lose time, but they take down panels faster than regular shots, so you might be good enough to use just enough time to get through a level, and get that time back when you start the next level (you get 20 seconds back on the clock by default). Or maybe you'll just play it safe, maybe even forgoing a bonus if things aren't going well, just to make it to the end of a route, giving up the 10 million point bonus you get for finishing every stage with a trick shot.

Routes. Much like another classic Sega arcade game, Outrun, Cosmic Smash has branching paths for you to take throughout the game. Each level takes place on the Cosmic Bus metro system. Unless you've memorized the system map, you won't actually know where you're going. The in-game map is incredibly zoomed in, only showing you a small number of locations at a time.

After a few runs of Cosmic Smash, it finally hit me. This game is a lot more similar to Outrun than I had realized. Probably more than Sega themselves realized. Cosmic Smash is a game about moving forward, going nowhere in particular, all while time itself threatens to end your experience prematurely. It is once again all about escapism, only it is now updated for a new era. Gone are the fancy Ferrari's and scenic American highways. In its place are anonymous avatars and digital networks. I'm not losing myself in an idealized United States anymore, I'm losing myself in the Internet. A silhouette of a human being in a facsimile of a subway tunnel playing a loose adaptation of a sport. It's cold, it's lonely, the time limit makes it stressful, and yet it is also oddly comforting. My time in the virtual world has me lost in gorgeous visuals and incredible music. For a while, I am cut off from the rest of the real world. Just me, a racquet, and an increasingly challenging series of rooms to test my physical skills in. A short burst of escapism on my Dreamcast.

Much like with Outrun, I have to ask myself what I am escaping from in this game about escapism. Why am I so at home retreating into this digital realm? Is it because I miss the old Sega? You know, the Sega that wasn't doing vibe-coded sequels to Crazy Taxi or making a game with a digital recreation of Tupac Shakur, a man who was murdered almost 30 years ago, and included in that game without the consent of his family, who have been trying to wrangle control of their dead brothers' name from executives and sell-out rappers?

Is it because I am desperate for this whole "Y2K" artstyle to come back? I mean, probably, given how often I say just that in so many other entries on this site. Or is it because I long for the time when I looked forward to what technology could do in the future, being too young to understand just how all this shit could be used for evil?

Or maybe I'm just fucking depressed again because everything sucks. Who knows?

The final act of Sega as an independent entity was their strongest. Their various development teams delivered creative highs, while the company itself was suffering financial lows. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this, so many of the games released during this time were all about hope. Games like Sonic Adventure that were all about friendship. Games like Phantasy Star Online, which encouraged people from all different walks of life to work together to accomplish a common goal. Then there was Cosmic Smash, a game that is just as bright and as colorful as the rest of Sega's output, but a far lonelier experience if you think about it for more than a few minutes. The Dreamcast really was this spectrum of emotion and humanity.

I just wish I had more time to experience it all.

There is a particular sub-genre of games that I cannot get enough. I don't know if there's a common term for it; "platformer" isn't really good enough for it. Single-screen, eliminate all enemies, platform-based game with mild puzzle elements. A Bubble Bobble-like. A Snow Brothers-like. Whatever that's called, I love those kind of games. Love them enough that I even made one a couple years ago. I should probably make another some day. Cheap plug aside, I randomly ran across one a little while ago on a system that I don't have a whole lot of experience with: Chip-Chan Kick! on the PC-FX.

What is the PC-FX, you may be asking? It was the follow up to God's Favorite Gaming Console, the PC-Engine. The fact that I have to introduce the system shows that it didn't do very well. It had the misfortune of coming out after the Saturn and Playstation, didn't have any 3D capabilities, and didn't do 2D as well as the Saturn. The one thing it did do well was display full-motion video at a resolution and frame rate better than both the PSX and Saturn, but that was about it. So while the system wasn't setting the world ("the world" being "Japan only") on fire, it had a few good games in its small library, with Chip-Chan being among them.

Chip-Chan Kick! is a game allegedly developed by a company called MetroVG, and it was allegedly based on a property that was going to be an anime, but was downgraded to a three-part audio drama. I'm emphasizing allegedly because there is quite a bit of misinformation surrounding this game, which I'll be getting to later.

In any case, this is a cutesty little game with brightly colored anime girls in brightly colored environments fighting against brightly colored mutant animals and inanimate objects given life. It's pretty standard fare. You play as one of two characters: Chip and Chap. I bring this up only because the latter is voiced by the same actor (Satomi Korogi) who would go on to play May in the Guilty Gear series. You're armed with little blobs that you throw at enemies, stunning them, then you can kick them while they are stunned, where they become a fast moving projectile that can take out other enemies. It doesn't get any more complex than that. It is like Bubble Bobble, but it is also very much not like Bubble Bobble, this is not a game that requires you to master your character's movement and abilities to get through otherwise impassible or unreachable parts of a level. Chip-Chan Kick! is basic, you slap enemies with slime, kick them, then fight a boss every ten stages. There's no secret movement tech or any advanced scoring systems at play here. But it doesn't really matter if it's basic, because the game itself is pretty damn fun to play.

While I'm not going to consider its simplicity to be a negative, I will say that this game's difficulty can be. After a point, enemies just seem to always be in the right spot to kill you. Bosses can be brutal, even when you've got the pattern down. Losing a life causes you to lose all of your power ups, so you can be stuck in a situation where enemies and projectiles straight up move faster than you. But on the plus side, lives and continues are pretty generous, and the game isn't so long that you can't memorize enemy patterns and get better, but it'll be a pain in the process.

I admit that I've been struggling a little bit in writing about Chip-Chan Kick! Not writing about the game itself: this cute, slightly rough thing on a system that could have used more games like this. Rather, games like this leave me with a feeling that is very hard to describe. As a young, weird child, I played games on my Mega Drive like Valis, El Viento, and thanks to the Sega Channel, Pulseman. When I became a sophomore in high school, the internet had built a bridge to connect American and Japanese cultures. I had always had a bit of an Otaku attitude growing up, but this period of time was like my Imperfect Cell phase of loving Japan. This was when I got introduced to Visual Kei, anime that wasn't aired on Cartoon Network, manga that wasn't sold at Borders, and lots and lots of ROMs. Valis and Pulseman would be joined by the Sailor Moon Mega Drive game, Rondo of Blood, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Princess Maker 2, and Vampire. I guess it's just because these games are Anime as hell (complimentary), they directly appeal to some part of my weird brain that I struggle to articulate. These Otaku-centric games that you can play while listening to Malice Mizer on WinAmp, taking a break to some high school or college student's Final Fantasy VIII fanfic. Anyways, Chip-Chan Kick! has a similar appeal to me. Hopefully someone understands what I'm trying to say here. It really did a lot of heavy lifting for me to think of Chip-Chan Kick! as more than a decent game that worth a playthrough.

Let me get to the real juicy stuff now. So you may have seen me talk about this game's alleged development history. This is all bull shit, complete misinformation. Chip-Chan Kick! was actually developed by a company named Custom, which only ever developed three games. The soundtrack was done by a couple of guys named Hitoshi Sakamoto and Masaharu Iwata. Yes, as in the two men who would later go on to do the music for games like Baroque, Opoona, and a little something called Final Fantasy Tactics. I bring this up because, for whatever reason, there is a guy who is filing false copyright claims for retro gaming music on YouTube, and has chosen Chip-Chan Kick! as a hill to die on, to the point of threatening a lawsuit due to a vinyl re-release of the game's soundtrack. I'm sorry for linking to the war crime apologists at Time Extention, but they have a pretty good article covering all this. If you try looking up any information about this game, you will get a fan wiki maintained by this guy, filled with all of his false claims. Just a little something to add at the end of all this.

The original Parasite Eve was a certified classic. Arguably the best game to come from Squaresoft's post-Final Fantasy 7 financial boom, a period of time where a number of unique, experimental games were getting released. A genuinely chilling horror RPG beloved by everyone who played it, a love that continues even to today.

There was also a sequel that people don't talk about as much, so I thought I would.

When the first Parasite Eve came out, there was a constant comparison to Resident Evil. It didn't matter that the two games were wildly different from each other, with their only similarity having you shoot biological horrors with a gun, but the comparison was still made regardless. Squaresoft must have heard this, because when it came time for a sequel, they said, "oh, we'll give you a Resident Evil game!" and made PE2 a survival horror game with light RPG elements (read: numbers go up after you kill things). So now you have a greater concern with conserving ammo and magic, and limited inventory space forcing you to make tough decisions on what valuable items to keep and which ones to toss out.

Parasite Eve 2 does a fantastic job of combining narrative with those mechanics. The first Parasite Eve saw its protagonist, Aya Brea, discovering herself. Learning the secrets of her childhood, gaining her mitochondrial powers, and stopping the titular Eve from causing further havoc. Now, in Parasite Eve 2, Aya is not the same rookie detective thrust into a bizarre situation. She's a much more experienced, bolder woman who has begrudgingly accepted the responsibility thrust upon her to stop more incidents of biological terror. The human aspect of her character from PE1 is falling to the wayside in favor of a detached being that occasionally shows compassion. Even when she discovers that humans are now susceptible to the same mitochondrial mutations as the animals she fought in the previous game, she'll deal with this revelation by putting a bullet into the nearest mutant and crack a joke to maintain that cold facade. Of course, in trying to hide her humanity, Aya falls into that great narrative trap: being the most human character of all.

What happens after a biological horror beyond human comprehension occurs? Well, this is a Playstation game, so it's only natural that a major corporation buys up a bunch of land to try and recreate the horror by experimenting on the surrounding population for the same reasons all evil corporations do: make a lot of money in a completely nonsensical way, and because they love eugenics. PE2 adds a bit of a wrinkle to this, in that in addition to the usual underground lab found in these kind of games, there is also a giant underground museum or zoo. The monsters that you have been fighting throughout the game are treated as wildlife exhibits, living in an artificial habitat like animals. These exhibits exist for wealth investors to view, and then tell the execs and scientists doing these experiments which one of these lifeforms they wish to be reborn as. Stripping away what makes them human for a taste of extreme power. Or as the game so eloquently puts it:

The corporate money is all a front for an unnamed secret society. The lab/zoo/museum is referred to as Neo Ark, an obvious reference to Noah's Ark, with the mutated CEOs as the animals Noah led out of the flood. However, in the Japanese version, this area is called Shambala. Shambala is the birthplace of the deity Matreiya, who is said to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga, an era of conflict and suffering. You might be thinking that that is a strange localization change to make, well, let me present you with something. Shambala is one of many Buddhist concepts appropriated by the nazis as a part of nazi occultism during the Third Reich. No longer is this the birthplace of Matreiya, but rather, some unknown progenitor of the master race. Unfortunately, this ended up getting lost in translation due to restrictions put into place that meant you could not portray hate groups like nazis in any way on consoles (see examples: Bionic Commando, the SNES version of Wolfenstein 3D, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Maken X), so it had to be changed.

So what we have here are bunch of facists giving money to other facists, turning themselves into all sorts of fucked up looking shit, because it means that have power, no matter how horrific it may be, and also because they really don't want to live in a world with any black people. Like I said, Aya, a literal super-powered woman that tries to hide her humanity, is the most human character, both in appearance and deed.

Getting back to how this all ties into how the game actually plays. At the beginning of this, I mentioned that original Parasite Eve was compared to Resident Evil by the press and by other players. The thing about Resident Evil, is that you're not meant to fight every enemy that you see; running away in order to save resources or get a better completion time when unlocking the meta rewards. Parasite Eve 2 is different, in that it judges you on how many monsters you kill. If you want money to purchase new weapons and equipment, if you want to earn more "Parasite Energy" to gain new magic abilities, and if you want better post-game rewards, you need to kill everything you see.

But also, you need to explore every inch of every room multiple times, often within a limited time frame, so as not to miss out on items to add to your end-game score, or even items that will give you access to important areas later in the game. For example; there's a chapel you enter at the beginning of the game. The game's plot encourages you to immediately leave and chase down a large monster. However, there's a door off to the left that leads to a small garden outside. Going to that garden, you'll find a keycard on the ground. Now, if you leave the chapel before going to that garden, the keycard will no longer be there, and you won't be able to get it later. This keycard unlocks an armory in the last area of the game, which provides you limitless ammo boxes and a new shotgun. Or if you miss a small detour in the game's final area, you won't be able to back to the previous town, which gives you new sidequests and access to better weapons that won't make you want to pull your hair out during the game's finale, where every enemy becomes a bullet sponge that tests your patience.

Aya's objective is to Kill. Kill monsters, find better weapons, and kill those monsters more efficiently. Revisiting previous areas after every plot development, no matter how minor, will either respawn or introduce more enemies to kill. Kill, and get those points. It does not matter if they were innocent people who got infected by nazi scientists, don't think, just shoot. No emotion, no remorse. You aren't a human anymore, if you even were to begin with. It's all about becoming numb to the violence, until it becomes too much. The mutilated bodies of humans being attacked by mutants that take their time in their act of butchering. Finding an innocent child who had been cruelly experimented on. It's too much for Aya.

In an act of cosmic convenience, after that point, the remaining enemies are nazi scientists fallen prey to their own experiments, mutant shareholders, and genetically enhanced commandos that Aya can direct her murderous intent towards. The violence becomes righteous. No need to numb yourself anymore. Every gained experience point is another person in this world who will be spared the wrath of this greedy, eugenicist bullshit. Ending this nightmare and obliterating a secret lab in Nevada is no guarantee that this won't happen again, but Aya will be ready if it does, as brutal as she has ever been.