on twitter i used to do yearly highlights of a bunch of videos i really enjoyed that year, and so since i'm not on there anymore (am on bluesky though) i thought it'd be nice to continue the tradition here but also expand it to just creative works in general (because wow am i in my movie arc).
time bandit is a block-pushing puzzle game (a sokobanlike as i like to call it) with animal crossing-esque life sim and real time systems and farmville-style time-gated progression as it takes at minimum half an hour to push a block or perform other actions within the block-pushing gameplay. it also features metal gear-inspired stealth sections as you steal time crystals from the corporate overlords who are quite literally stealing time from you in order to make themselves immortal and even just a tad bit of bullet hell dodging if you're unfortunate. if that sounds disjointed and nonsensical, you will have to trust me that the sum is greater than the parts.
a very unique quirk from the interlaying of these different genres and systems is that because pushing a block takes so much time, there's a incentive to just really sit and think through and optimise for a solution. most people playing any old sokoban block pushing game would just kinda fiddle around and "vibes" out the solution, me included, but here, any move costs a considerable amount of time and thus warrants more consideration to see if you can find something more efficient. thinking of questions like "should i maybe spend 15 more minutes coming up with a more elegant solution that could possibly save me half an hour?" is such a novel thought to have in a game, and that's just really neat to me. and the time mechanics actually makes it a pretty laid-back experience for me where i would get on in the morning, set up some movements, check back around at lunch, do the next couple of movements, check at the end of the day, and do it over the next day (and i'll maybe sneak in a few more checkins during my work day too hehe). for the month i spent playing it, it was nice to have this little sort of routine.
there's an energy system also present that's expended as you amble around the town, including your workplace, that gets replenished through either a consumable you can purchase, or by literally sleeping and waiting a certain amount of time. if you run out of energy, you get imprisoned (because why not) and have to wait several hours before you are freed. it adds a neat additional factor of planning where you have to consider how much you can stretch your current energy to maximise the number of crystals you can steal and bring back before you collapse from exhaustion. combine that with the stealthing around security drones and also the time-gated block pushing that you also go out of your way to set up while performing your heist, it all just makes for some very involved and engaging multi-tasking gameplay.
i'd be remiss to not mention that this game very clearly offers a critique on life and work under capitialism. now i'm not really a person well-read on theory, but still the overarching theme i've been enraptured with while playing this game, if not obvious, concerns time. i started playing this game at the start of the year, a few months into my new full time job, and i feel it is precisely this timing that allowed this game to make such an effect on me. i've had a lot of concerns entering this new part of life where i may just become a servant to capital, working away at my 9-5 and effectively being halted at this point with my character development. a little melodramatic maybe, but genuine concerns nonetheless. and this game actually helped me process a good bit of thoughts and concerns i've had with regards to how much time i have and on making use of it. in the game you meet the character "longtail duck" who lets you in on the conspiracy around the time crystals and devises a plan to steal them from the bourgeois CEOs, offering to pay you a rate much higher than if you were to turn them in normally. as you're doing this, you have several conversations with him about the efficacy of the work you're doing and the difficultly in seeing tangible results, and in truth, he tells you that this work is going to be slow to show anything. it's an obvious truth but the reiteration of it still instills me a lot of comfort. like, it is difficult to grant myself grace for not quickly seeing results for the things i'm doing and at times it's hard to grasp whatever character development i'm shooting for without any immediacy, so then this game is able to give me a microcostic look at putting work in slowly to eventually reach an end goal, the game's end, (which is a cliffhanger because it is just part 1 but still satisfactory). maybe this talk of working slow and taking time would have seem repetitive if i had played through this game over the course of some hours but the repetition of this idea that's experienced through this day-by-day routine reinforces this message and produces a much stronger harmonious poignancy: day in, day out, even in my stagnation, i must find solace.
i've always been a sucker for art about art and creating it and the struggles in doing so. one of my favorite creative works is dina kelberman's Unfinished which details the spiralling mindset of an artist desperately trying to put so much into making art and facing the very material obstacles in doing so. alex bale's DON'T FEED THE MUSE series is another work that comes to mind where a film-maker goes to extreme lengths just for the shot of maybe being able to create what he is most passionate about. time and time, i've always been so moved by these depictions of artist sacrificing so much and giving their all, trying to pour everything into their art.
but what does it mean to put everything into your art? what does everything cost?
ok, i'll have to talk about yugioh a bit now.
the basic thing here is that yugioh, to the unaware, is a trading card game where new cards are released in sets every couple of months. the game is split up into two different regional formats, one for the asian and oceanic countries and one for the european and american countries, called the TCG and OCG respectively. the OCG receives the cards first while the TCG lags behind by a number of months. lots of discussion in the TCG surrounding the release of new cards is supplemented by the fact that we can look at how those cards are being played in the OCG to predict how they'll perform in the TCG. i say "predict" because one other stark difference between the TCG and OCG is the implementation of differing lists of banned cards, which does mean that how the game looks in the OCG with a set of cards will not necessarily be reflected in the same way in the TCG.
this brings us to the "Everything You Need to Know" series by Jaxel aka The Kuribandits. in this series, Jaxel aims to provide a comprehensive overview of major cards coming in a new TCG set and cover just about everything there is to these cards. this is a tall order and while often times in the general sense, what cards are good or bad will roughly line up with the OCG, it is the specifics of how a card is used that are much muddier. so it is understandable that there may be certain interactions gone unnoticed, power levels not quite properly assessed, or just flat out mistakes in explanations from sifting through the sheer number of cards. again, completely understandable errors and misjudgements, but insofar as making the claim that this is "Everything You Need to Know", well what does it take to do everything ?
on september 10th 2024, Jaxel uploaded the video POWER OF THE ELEMENTS: Everything. for context, power of the elements is a set that released in 2022 of which Jaxel had already produced an "Everything You Need to Know" around the set's release. this new video seems to follow the formula initially but very steadily and apparently devolves into something more ruminative and self-destructive. i really want to recommend watching the video for yourself, but it is still in of itself a ton of yugioh talk, so i won't fault you for not sticking around. nevertheless, the main thing you'll see once the yugioh starts peeling away is that common obsessive perfectionism in creating art. Jaxel's initial stab at power of the elements is, of course, bound to have faults in it. power of the elements itself is an incredibly monumental set which upended everyone's conception of what playing yugioh entailed, and so it's no wonder that one may possible lacking in noting down everything you can do with these cards. still, what we find in the video is a fervent desire to right the errors of the past. even with cards that are currently banned and thus can not possibly carry a presence in the competitive scene, Jaxel feels the need to provide extensive coverage on what they would have been able to accomplish then. in a conversation between Jaxel and the personified "The Kuribandits" who challenges Jaxel's perfectionism, there's a line from Jaxel mid-descent into a corrective editing spiral that really struck me.
Jaxel: Maybe you're just being complacent, huh? You don't care about doing better, you don't want to be the best.
The Kuribandits: You mean the strongest?
Jaxel: Don't fucking say that word to me, you don't even know what that means... it means I'm the only one who can do the things that I do. So yeah, I have to keep putting everything into them. Or they're worthless. Or I'm worthless.
there's a saying i always hear in making art, that you are the only one who can make what you make. it's a message meant to motivate burgeoning artists and remind them that they'll be putting their own creative vision in their work. but within the lenses of a perfectionist, the logical conclusion from this is that "i am the only one who can make this perfect". Artists wield a power to move and influence others, and so with such a power, does it not warrant absolute perfection to be wielded properly? no one else can make the things you are making, and so no one else can take the blame for what you have done. perfection then is essential. yet here we see it's a perfectionism that does not bear much fruit: an artifact polished to remove mistakes only noticed by some and bothered by fewer. and even if such artistic missteps were egregiously apparent, it all washes over come round the new set. no one is going to care about some incorrect lines of play featured in a video covering the cards in power of the elements in a month let alone years after the fact. so then does it matter to be perfect in something so transient? in this world of yugioh content creation, unless you are farming nostalgia points (though funnily enough, this video is tinged with a nostalgia for both the game at the time and the position Jaxel was in earlier with regards to his content creation ventures) the newest cards are all what people care about and stuff in the past can fade away from the public consciousness pretty quickly. maybe this adds to the drive of being perfect, getting it right at the get go because it'll be worthless to address and update it later down the line, so the only time you can truly be perfect is now.
truth be told, i don't know. this videos just leaves me rolling around so many questions in my head about what it takes to be perfect and the video definitely does not romanticise this self-destructive pursuit. i've heard plenty of times the warnings of not getting too caught up in perfectionism, but still, it's insightful to really genuinely consider this path down perfection, and especially when such perfection does seem to be barely within reach, it becomes all the more tempting to ask "what would i have to give up to have everything?"
i spent a lot longer on the previous two entries than i anticipated so i'll just dish out the rest of these