2026-4 - Contact - ★★★☆☆

★★★☆☆
Playtime: 13 hours (on game file, with judicious use of cheats and fast-forward)

Contact is noted for being a JRPG by Grasshopper Manufacture (No More Heroes, Killer7), and it might still be their only RPG? I'd have to check that more thoroughly and it isn't important for this post in the first place. If memory serves me right, it got (a perhaps undue amount of) attention from press at the time because of its Earthbound-adjacent aesthetic and because Suda51's name was technically attached.

The last time I played this game was in high-school, and I remembered it being a strange, enigmatic game unlike anything else I'd really played. Now that I'm an adult, I can see more of the seams and get more annoyed by the tedium. If you play normally, the game time is hugely padded by grinding out stats and curatives so you don't die every two rooms. That also means you don't notice how every area is like 3-5 screens of town and 20-30 screens of dungeon maze.

Contact's still an interesting game. There's far more weapons, food, and weird collectibles than could ever possibly be relevant. Your skills go up to 100 and you might reach 50 if you stick solely to one weapon type the entire game, learning maybe 20% of the total abilities. The systems feel outsized for the actual content on offer. You never quite have a handle on what you're doing or why.

On some level this disconnect is intentional. The plot, when it actually gets into gear for the first 5% and final 10% of the game, is largely about how the player is just messing around in a video game while all the characters are living their own lives and striving towards their own goals. No normal person would put on the Thief Costume and go around getting Really Good At Thievery by robbing entire towns blind unless some obsessive gamer was forcing them to. Terry would really prefer to just go home but is stuck being puppeted across five-ish biomes by some goon with a Nintendo DS.

Is it good if a game makes me question what I wanted to get out of the act of playing a video game in the first place? Maybe, sometimes. But I don't think I really found much deeper meaning in life on this go-around.