Although this game came out in 2001, I should give a general spoiler alert if you dont want the story wrecked for you. Additionally, if my interpretation of the story differs from yours, feel free to share in the comments.*

In 1987 Hironobu Sakaguchi, game director for Final Fantasy, decided he was more suited to storytelling than action, and so began one of the longest running roleplaying game franchises in the world. Twenty-six years and dozens of games later, Final Fantasy X stands out as the deepest and bravest of the series. Why brave? Because it puts religion, a topic usually (and loudly) ignored in video games, smack at the center of its story.

Just how taboo is religion in games? There is a long list of titles, including the originalFinal Fantasy, that were forced to remove all religious references such as churches and crosses before they could be sold outside Japan, where religion isand Im simplifying heretaken less seriously than in many other cultures.

Writing about religion is a real minefield in any medium, mainly because no one has any sense of humor about it. Whatever you say, someone will hate you for it, maybe enough to kill you (ever hear of Salman Rushdie?). My former dentist chastised me when I carriedThe Da Vinci Code into his office, not because it was woodenly written or intellectually insulting, but because he felt it unfairly maligned the Catholic church. I might have pointed out that the Catholic church didnt need any help maligning itself in the mid-2000s, but he was already going to be using needles and drills in my mouth and I didnt want to give him an excuse to do something even worse.

Final Fantasy X dodges some of the danger by inventing its own religion. Its mythology goes that a thousand years ago a creature named Sin appeared in the form of a giant flying whale monster and began indiscriminately slaughtering whole cities full of people all over the world. Only a single Summoner, a woman who could call upon spirits to fight for her, was able to vanquish Sin at the cost of her own life. However, Sin came back a generation later, only to be quieted by the self-sacrifice of yet another Summoner.

Obviously this invented religion has a LOT in common with the story of Jesus, the main difference being that each generation in Final Fantasy X needs its own new Jesus to keep Sin at bay. By the time the game begins, this pattern has played out so many times throughout history that there is a specific pilgrimage every Summoner must make across the world in order to have any hope of defeating Sin.

And that pilgrimage is the first stroke of genius in Final Fantasy Xs storytelling. Conveying a living and functioning fantasy world to readers is always a tricky proposition, with a common tactic being to open the story with a wild action set-piece and then spend the next several chapters on exposition and backstory before getting back to the meat of the story.

Final Fantasy X employs this tactic too, but through the perspective of a character who knows exactly as little about the world as the audience does. Once again, a common trick here is to give the lead character amnesia so that it doesnt seem strange for other characters to offer patient and detailed exposition about the storys world. Final Fantasy Xditches the amnesiac in favor of a character from a different world. A serviceable if uninspiring substitution.

OR IS IT!

Tidus, the main character, meets the young Summoner Yuna at the beginning of her pilgrimage to defeat Sin. She is quiet, devout and competent, but you also get the sense that she has lived a sheltered lifean obedient lamb raised only for slaughter. Perhaps it is this sheltering that makes her so interested in Tidus. He represents the first companion in her life who knows nothing about her destinysomeone who is interested in her as a person rather than a savior. Dammit if that idea doesnt give me chills even as I sit here writing about it.

So Tidus becomes one of her guardians on the dangerous pilgrimage, happily unawareas is the audience!that each day he is marching his new friend Yuna ever closer to her death. When he does find out, he is understandably furious. He vows to find a way to break the cycle while Yunas other guardians share guilty glances. Their job is to keep her alive, sure, but only until its time for her to die.

And next comes the masterstroke. Predictably, there is a way to save Yuna, but it comes at a terrible cost. Ill do my best to explain. Sin, as its name implies, is a physical manifestation of the negative spiritual energy from all previous generations. Each generation a single Summoner uses the pilgrimage to gather enough positive energy to absorb Sin, thereby becoming the next Sin, on and on in a never-ending cycle. But the souls of the dead Summoners persist, unable to move on to the afterlife. All they can do is dream of a world that will provide someone who can break the cycle.

And I mean that literally. The world Tidus comes from is the DREAM of the dead summoners, and through their combined spiritual effort, Tidus has become real and crossed into their world to help break the cycle. Still with me? So when Tidus helps Yuna end Sin once and for all, the dead Summoners souls will be free, thus ending the dream. Thus ending Tidus himself.

Now the tables are turned; Tidus is the one hiding his own inevitable demise from Yuna so that the world might exist without Sin. The elegance of it all makes me want to put my head through a window because Ill never be able to duplicate it in my own storytelling.

Anyway, throughout the pilgrimage there are the requisite religious zealots who first encourage and then try to stop Yuna and her band when they realize she means to stop Sin for good. The religious leaders of the world make a good living on the cycle of Sin, after all, and we get a cathartic Jesus-clearing-out-the-temple scene about two thirds of the way through the game. There is also an evolving love story between Tidus and Yuna, who are each in their own way endearingly clueless about the world, but also determined actors in the story. And I dont mean actors as in performers, but as in effective protagonists who are not passivecharacters who act when the situation calls them to do so.

To be fair, some elements of Final Fantasy X are less successful. The game devotes waaaay too much story time to this weird sport that is like rugby but played underwater (some characters can breathe under water; this is never explained). Furthermore, the crossover between Tiduss and Yunas worlds seems to break its own rules whenever doing so is convenient for the story. And as an audio-visual medium, the character design and voice acting can be completely bonkers.

Still, there is much to learn from Final Fantasy X as an exercise in storytelling. For example, the game proves that clichés like a fantasy protagonist who needs every detail of the world explained to him for the audiences benefit can still be interesting and successful. Another is that it is possible to write about the strengths, weaknesses, and quirks of organized religion without veering into the danger that Mr. Rushdie found himself in after he wrote The Satanic Verses.

But more than either of those things, the simple existence and enduring popularity of Final Fantasy X teaches writers all over the world that any idea, no matter how ambitious, how grand, how bananas it may seem on the surface, can be polished into a story that is widely appealing, compelling, and beautiful.

A glooming peace this morning with it brings. The Console War looks like it might end in a cautious truce, and as the dwindling flamewars of last gen burn themselves to ash, I can only hope that the divide between the new generation of console fans will be so broad that the different camps wont even bother fighting anymore.

With Microsofts unveiling of the Xbox One, all of the Big Three console makers have officially gone in different directions. Microsoft is about multimedia and dominating your living room entertainment; Sony is about high-horsepower gaming; and Nintendo is firmly about doing its own thing, even if it isnt quite sure what that means.

I remember one of the first shots fired in the console war, back in 2006. When Alex Navarro (who is consistently my favorite contributor on GB and was a highlight of the now essentially defunct Screened.com) posted his Madden 2007 review for PS3 on Gamespot, he opened by insisting that there was NO REASON to buy the PS3 version over the already-existing Xbox 360 version, and made several more similar comments throughout. Writing his review this way was perhaps inescapable due to two very similar consoles launching only a couple months apart and with many of the same games. However, that one otherwise innocuous review offered a nearly prophetic glimpse into a console cycle dominated by picayune graphical comparisons, comment section flamewars, and the worst thing by far to come out of the console war, Metacritic.

If you cant tell how a professional game reviewer feels about a particular game without looking at the number at the top of the review, one of you isnt trying hard enough. More importantly, with all due respect to said professional reviewers, their aggregate review scores should NEVER determine whether a studio lives or dies, or whether developers get paid adequately for their time.

This gen was just as defined by brand loyalty as the old Nintendo/Sega days, except that back then video games really WERE played mostly by children, who could be forgiven for being so childish. But as fundamentally silly as it is, brand loyalty sold a lot of boxes this gen, and was often the only real distinction gamers had between high profile releases. That is unless you count the graphical comparisons, which always made mountains of graphical traits no one would ever see without high-tech recording equipment, such as: The PS3 version has a slight blurring effect from the QAA but runs with full v-sync, while the 360 version has sharper textures but suffers from screen tearing. And then 250 comments would follow, full of bile and a few unconsciously xenophobic remarks, occasionally broken by an equally moronic PC is the master race post, another unfortunate trend of the console wars.

But now that all three consoles have been revealed, I have real hope that the console war will just moodily piss itself out. Because there is no reason to fight anymore. No two consoles are going for the same slice of the market. Lets take a little quiz to demonstrate.

1. I want my games to...

a. make my eyes bleed with more pixels than there are grains of sand in the Sahara and let me play as spunky/disconsolate teens with inventive clothing and ever-more impossible hairstyles. Also, Japan is f*%@ing awesome.

b. showcase new twists on the formulae that continue to make games great after 30 years, coupled with perfectly tuned controls. Also, Japan is f*%@ing kawaii.

c. star shiny mo-capped versions of the same dudes I watch on ESPN, except that when IM playing, my team always wins, plus America wins every war it starts. Thanks to me. Also, f*%@ Japan.

d. be pretty much the same as a. and c., but further justify my $1200 SLI video cards with a super-kewl physics engine that individually renders each strand of Lara Crofts hair. Also, why the f*%@ can you not buy Dark Souls on Steam in Japan?

Okay, so Im having fun with stereotypes, but note, there was a lot more crossover between answer a. and answer c. with the PS3 and 360 than there seems to be with PS4 and Xbox One, at least so far. Sure, there will be sports games on PS4, and there will be flowy Japanese games on Xbox One, but neither camp believes thats who they really ARE anymore. In fact, everyoneMS, Sony, and Nintendohave dug very clear trenches between themselves and their competitors coming into the next gen, giving us all hope that the console war can, at last, go away.

So lets have no more snarky tweets from Major Nelson and Jack Tretton. No more Sega does what Ninten-dont! Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are all doing something different now. Lets, as gamers and fans, be glad such rich diversity exists in our shared hobby. If the big dogs have matured enough to realize and admit who they really are, then we gamers can do the same.

In short, the war is over, and the only losers are people who want to keep fighting.

Pacing: The Clones Horror

Every article or review youve ever read about Okami most likely mentioned Okamis amazing art style and Celestial Brush, a play mechanic which allows players to draw symbols on the screen to alter the game world in some way. Need a gust of wind? Draw a loop. Need it to be day or night so a character will appear where you want him to appear? Draw a sun or moon in the sky. Great stuff. But you already know about that, so Im not going to talk about it here. Playing Okami for the second time, I was struck with how it both is and is not a Zelda clone, and how so many aspects of the game should have broken it before it even got started.

Okami is THE game on everyones Best Games No One Played list. I dont know whether most people still havent played it now that it has appeared on the PS2, Wii, and most recently PS3. But if Okami truly is still largely unplayed by the gaming masses, I only have one question: How? Because its too Japanese? Because its a Zelda clone? While I agree its undeniable that Okamis gameplay structure owes basically everything to Zelda, I still feel that calling Okami a Zelda clone sells Okami very, very short. The word clone in the context of game design implies inferiority or unoriginality.

The hallmarks of a Zelda game are: huge, varied open game world with plenty of chances to explore off the beaten path; clever environmental puzzles; simple but entertaining combat; fetch quests of varying length and quality; steady collection of unique weapons and tools that are both fun to use and necessary to progress to the end of the story. Im sure a hardcore Zelda fan could name more, but that seems like pretty thorough list to me. And within that framework, there are certainly Zelda clones out there. Beyond Good and Evil, Nier, and Darksiders spring to mind, and each of those does indeed share the clones fate, falling short in some fundamental way of the template Zelda created. Lets have a look:

Beyond Good and Evil This game was, in my opinion, absolutely wrecked by its mandatory stealth sections. They werent fun or intuitive and they broke the games pacing. After all these years I remember BGE less for its touching story and brilliant game world, and more for laser alarms and pacing guards. Maybe thats just me.

Nier Although this game had one of the deepest stories and best soundtracks of this console generation, it relied much too heavily on same-y fetch quests that brought the game to a crawl. (I should point out that I loved Nier, warts and all.)

Darksiders The worst of the lot, stealing from Zelda AND God of War and failing to do either genre much justice. The last dungeon in Darksiders is so absurdly padded to make the game artificially longer that, when I finally finished it and was awarded with one more game-world-spanning fetch quest, I gently set down my controller and asked my computer monitor, Are you f***ing kidding me? When I finished that game the game clock showed around 15 hours of play, but I could have sworn it was actually 40.

It seems like the biggest stumbling block for Zelda clones is pacing. In these otherwise good and interesting games, some poorly executed aspect of gameplay comes along and frigs up the whole works. Then again, pacing problems may just be built into the Zelda architecture. How about the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time? Thats where I almost threw in the towel. Or the fetch quest at the end of Windwaker that actually did grind the game to a halt for me (I do plan to finish it someday. Lord knows why I persevered with Darksiders, which in my opinion was a much worse game than Windwaker).

How does Okami fare in the pacing department? On paper, Okami looks like an absolute disaster. The first 20 minutes of the game are an unskippable (on PS2 and PS3) cutscene that lays out the story of a powerful warrior and a white wolf who came together to defeat an 8-headed serpent demon called Orochi. The whole cutscene is drawn with a Japanese calligraphy brush in real time on a scroll that slowly unrolls across the screen. For 20 minutes. What a terrible idea, right?

Still, the cutscene sets up Orochi as a truly fearsome bad guy and gives some backstory as to why NPCs react the way they do to the only playable character, Okami Amaterasu, another white wolf with striking similarities to the heroic wolf who died fighting Orochi.

**MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**

Ten to twelve hours into the game you defeat Orochi in a grand and lengthy battle, having met scores of memorable characters multiple gorgeous locations, each more stunning than the last. The game is over! A dozen hours is a goodish length for a modern game and all of those hours were supremely entertaining. Handshakes all around.

Except its not over at all. After the battle with Orochi, the game introduces new villains, new characters, and throws open the world map you thought youd already explored. This SHOULD break the story in Okami, dooming it to the same pacing problems of other Zelda clones and Zelda games themselves. How can any game reestablish the same intensity of story and drive to explore that brought you to a long prophesied final boss battle?

Okami does it the way any good story does it: by raising the stakes. In the first 10-12 hours, you are working essentially working to save a single village. By the end of the game, you are working to save the entire world of Nippon (which is just a slightly altered map of Japan), all life in it, and the very realm of the gods themselves. Once again, on paper this scenario is nothing new for any RPG, but Okami personalizes its story by telling it through unique, likeable characters whom you really do want to help.

Lastly, Okami employs a silent protagonist. This has worked before, of course, with Half-Life being my favorite example. But it shouldnt work here. Since Okami Amaterasu cant speak for herself, you basically learn ALL of the backstory from chatty NPCs who speak in bizarre Hrmble hrmble hrmble noises while their dialogue appears on the screen for you to read. There is a LOT of reading in Okami. However, the writing is so goodand the quality of the localization so highthat the emotion and frequent humor come through without the need for voice actors.

Plus the silent protagonist isnt silent at all for two reasons. First, Okami herself is very expressive, often wagging her tail, scratching herself or falling asleep when NPCs dive into especially lengthy bits of backstory. (You also have the option to head-butt, bite, pee or poop on, and dig up the gardens of other characters who annoy you throughout the game.) Second, Okami Amaterasu has an insect-sized familiar named Issun, who is labeled from beginning as a Wondering Artist. Issun is a cowardly, womanizing scoundrel who is obnoxious at first but becomes a wonderful companion by the end of the game. It is truly shocking and sad when he and Okami are suddenly forced to part ways before the final dungeon.

So does Okami, a 40+ hour game that seemed like it was supposed to end after 12, never stumble? Sure it does. Every game that has a heart stumbles somewhere. Okami was directed by Hideki Kamiya (of Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, and Bayonetta fame, among others), meaning that you are going to see the same bosses over and over again. The first battle with Orochi is a sprawling thing with many different tiers and styles of combatand so is the second battle with Orochi. And the third. At the very least, each time you face bosses a second or third time, your new abilities and weapons make the battles feel a LITTLE different than the last time. They go by more quickly for sure.

There are also a few times the game flatly refuses to tell you what to do next or where to go. Nippon is absolutely huge, and most of the time your next destination(s) is/are marked on the world map. However, sometimes you just have no clue. Often this is because there is an NPC somewhere you have to talk to three times before theyll tell you how to move the story forward. Like I said before, its fun to talk to the NPCs, so this isnt as much of a chore as it sounds like. But it does harm the pacing (gasp!) of the game.

And lastly, the battle against the final boss is so ridiculously drawn out and frustrating that it leaves a slightly bitter taste on the whole experience. Its nothing so enraging as Darksiderss final hours, but an irritating cap on a long and marvelous experience.

And thats it for problems. Niggles, really. Nitpicks. Okami was in my top five games of the last console generation, and now that Ive played it again on PS3 and earned that Plantinum Trophy, it is still in the top five games of THIS generation too (Okami really is a new experience on PS3). It is a Zelda clone that defies the nature of cloning and becomes something larger, grander, and, to me, unquestioningly better than the games that inspired it.

You know what would be great? If the internet could learn from its mistakes. When my preordered copy of Final Fantasy XIII arrived in the mail last March, I had already been on gaming media blackout for a couple of weeks. Not because I was worried about spoilers, but because the internet had already decided Final Fantasy XIII sucked. Linearity, voice acting, too many movies, 2 discs on the 360, being on the 360 at all, not as good as Mass Effect...pick your poison. The hate began with anonymous Japanese Final Fantasy "fans" who were supposedly outraged by the game.

I can't speak to any of the Japanese complaints, but I can tell you very confidently that once the complaining reached English speakers, it was so desperate and nonsensical that it could only come from the internet. Let's relive some greatest hits, shall we?

Q: "XII was so awesome! Why did you wreck it?"
A: XII was awesome, but you hated it because it wasn't X...which you in turn hated because it wasn't VII.

Q: "FF has always been about exploration! Why is XIII so linear?"
A: Final Fantasy has never been about exploration. With the notable exception of XII which, once again, you hated when it came out.

Q: "This is too much like old JRPGs. Have these guys even played Oblivion?"
A: Really. You're upset that Final Fantasy, the series that popularized the JRPG in the West, is still a JRPG. That's like complaining that Halo should be a strategy RPG instead of a shooter...hang on, you hated that too.

Q: "How can a game take 25 hours to get good?"
A: It doesn't. You just can't fully level up or choose your party until the last two chapters, as is the case in most FF games. In fact, FFIX made you wait even longer, and that game didn't level your whole party at the same time the way XIII does.

Q: "Who cares if it has good graphics?"
A: I do. And so do you. It's a video game. Video. Visual. This is a game that asks you to stare at your screen for 95 hours to finish everything there is to finish, and each locale is more impressive than the last. Not only that, the music is even better than the graphics. I listen to the soundtrack every day at work, and there's maybe five irritating songs in over 4 hours of music.

Q: "Why can't you talk to NPCs? Why aren't there any side missions?"
A: You can, and there are. However, instead of pressing X to hear whatever nonsense every NPC has to say, you just walk up to them. And the side missions are based on item collection and creature hunts. You know who loves item collection and creature hunts? Japanese gamers. And this is a JRPG. Also, have you ever played Diablo?

But these complaints were all just being parroted by internet morons who don't realize who actually gives them their opinions. Their opinions come from ****. Now, for those of you who have never heard of ****, first of all, welcome to the internet. **** is a vast online repository of image-themed forums that essentially have no rules and whose denizens create all internet-culture from their basements.**** is owned by 2chan, an immortal white cat that lives in the ceiling of a kimchi restaurant somewhere in southeast Asia and whose brain actually houses the sentient half of the internet. Don't believe me? This entity is so powerful that Gamespot won't even let me print its name. Further proof that **** is the internet's version of Lord Voldemort.

Anyway, the only thing **** users hate more than Final Fantasy is other **** users. But since they create everything of note on the internet, they get to decide what is awesome and what is not. Incidentally, the only two things **** users actually like are nihilism and angrily masturbating to ****.

So enough gripes, enough questions. Final Fantasy XIII is easily in the top five most polished games of the generation in every aspect of production. Ever had the game crash or freeze or glitch on you? Me neither. The amount of content that works perfectly in this game is absolutely staggering.

More importantly, Final Fantasy XIII is fun. I personally enjoyed the story, but I at least understand why some people didn't. It's bubble gum, Chocobo fluff, and saving the world. In other words, it's Final Fantasy. What I don't understand is how anyone could complain about the battle system. Just mash X? Are you kidding? This is the hardest FF since the original on the NES. And even in that game, you could level up the point where you could kill anything by using the Attack command over and over. Try that on an Adamantoise in FFXIII, even with a maxed out party and ultimate weapons. You'll survive maybe two turns. Strategy abounds, and mastering FFXIII's battle system makes you feel like a badass the way only a video game can.

So if you're a fan of the series but dodged XIII back in March because of all of the negative hype, I hope you give it a shot now. I'm going to get back to earning my second Platinum trophy for this game, which I will unlock in the Japanese PSN account I created last year so I could download more trailers for, you guessed it, Final Fantasy XIII.

The other night my dad, a Baby Boomer who has been having back problems, was telling me about some exercises his doctor had suggested to him, and a Kinect commercial came on TV. In the commercial, a 40-something lady was sliding around her living room, saying, "Boy I'm loving this Kinect." My dad pointed at the screen and said, "That's what I need: a Wii."And he went on to tell me about a friend of his at work who bought Wii Fit and thinks it's awesome.

Now I'm not suggesting for a second that he wants a PS3 or is interested in Move. In fact, he knows I have a PS3 and thinks it's a ridiculous waste of time and money. And to him it would be, because he's not a gamer and he doesn't own any Blurays. That's not the point. My point is that Kinect, with party/fitness games and Avatars leading the charge, seems to have blurred the line between itself and Wii to such a degree that the casual audience can't even tell the difference. But even the casual audience still knows what a Wii is, and they either have one and don't use it or kind of want one so they can host Wii Bowling parties for their work friends.

I initially figured that Kinect would sell boatloads with Microsoft's relentless and formidable advertising budget behind it, but now I wonder. Kinect may be nestled so firmly into Wii's shadow that it will be invisible to its target audience.

Some games used to suck. And I don't mean they had some screen-tearing or "slightly floaty" jump mechanics. I mean they were boring, catastrophically glitched, or just plain unplayable for any number of reasons.

This problem scarcely exists anymore. Like the film industry in the late 70's, gaming has been changed by the phenomenon of the big-budget blockbuster. Retail games simply can't afford to suck at the same level as older games used to suck. Complaints about games like Final Fantasy XIII or more recently Castlevania are so nitpicky and ridiculous that I'm surprised any thinking person could take them seriously. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction gets a 7.5 on Gamespot for having too much variety?...WHAT?

Why do the gaming media do this? Because they have to, and there are a couple reasons why. One, because games are technology-based, gamers immediately become acclimatized to--and therefore expect--constant improvements in technology, production values, etc. That makes sense. Plenty of games that were considered outstanding 10 years ago now seem run-of-the mill or downright lousy compared to current "average" games. That's just the nature of the beast, whether the beast be the gaming industry, technology, or humanity itself.

The other reason is far more problematic. Like television news networks that must fill a 24-hour news cycle, the gaming media are under tremendous pressure to keep their readers coming back hour after hour, day after day. We gamers, as an audience, are truly insatiable, and you could argue that the constant flood of information and opinions coming from gaming sites only makes us hungrier. For example, Tetsuya Nomura tweets that FFVXIII has a new hair-rendering system that allows for 6% more waviness? Every gaming news outlet in the world rushes to repost this "story" and suddenly N4G has 20 new Top-Tens about the best/worst haircuts in video games.

And you know what? WE CLICK THE LINKS. Because we are insatiable. Also like television news, positive information is a hard sell. All of these new games that five years ago would have been game-of-the-year contenders are now "too linear," only have 2x AA instead of 4x, or suffer from occasional online lag (usually prior to launch, so the complaint is even more meaninless). The gaming media MUST complain about these things because we gamers would quit reading reviews if every single one read, "Well, doggone it, THIS game is great too. What a golden age of bounty we live in when every game works and is pretty fun right out of the box. See you tomorrow!"

Gaming has been my favorite hobby for over 20 years now, and I continue to be relentlessly positive about it. I can't afford to buy every new game that comes out, but the ones I do buy I consistently enjoy. Which is more than I could have said even ten years ago. It's just too bad that being positive doesn't generate more hits.

*Note: Portions of this text also appear in my review of Dante's Inferno

The mainstream gaming media's reaction to Dante's Inferno highlighted what is, in my opinion, one of the most curious facets of Western entertainment.

But before I go into more detail about that, let me take you back to the summer of 2000, when I spent three months living in Germany in college. My host parents both worked about 80 hours a week, and as a result I spent a lot of time alone in their house watching movies in German. (This is not a complaint, by the way, I'm a pretty solitary person by nature.)

If you have ever watched a movie on American television, you will know they are typically edited for time and content. The same is true on German television, but where American networks edit out mostly curse words and sexual content, the Germans leave those things in while editing out scenes of violence. This difference implies that most Americans find profanity and sexuality morally more distasteful than violence.

I found that to be a strange concept then, and I still do. Sure, swearing is uncreative, and most forms of entertainment overuse it to the point where it's more boring and tacky than outright offensive. But without sexuality, our species wouldn't last long enough to teach future generations that sex is dirty and shameful. Compare that to violence, which constitutes not only our justice system's most heavily punished crimes, but also the greatest tragedies in human history.

Now, with that background information in place we can return to today's game, Dante's Inferno. Virtually every online reviewer panned the game for its "gratuitous" nudity and sexuality, while at the same praising the "creative," extreme, and often misogynistic violence. Apparently, shoving a scythe through the face of a pleading sinner is great entertainment, but the presence of nude men and women crosses some line of good taste.

Not that I am advocating Dante's Inferno's depictions of nudity any more than I am advocating its use of violence, mind you. In my opinion, MOST of this game is in poor taste. Not because of the mature content, but because of the decidedly immature manner in which that content is presented. Despite its high production values and reasonable level of polish, this game feels like it was made by a group of snickering high school boys.

Designer 1: All right, we need something disgusting for gluttony.
Designer 2: Let's do a huge fat thing that barfs and poops when it attacks.
Designer 3: Wait, let's also give it big old gross boobs.
Designer 1: Bewbs!
Designer 2: (High-fives Designer 3)

Dante's Inferno had so many chances to explore culture, philosophy, and the human condition in general. Instead they went for the shock value of relentless (often woman-hating) images of violence and nudity. Nier's swearing, lingerie-wearing bunny Kaine seems positively thoughtful in comparison (indeed, Nier's story is both more interesting and more mature than that of Dante's Inferno).Considering that the source material for Dante's Inferno has stood the test of time by being studied for longer than the works of Shakespeare and shaping the view of the afterlife for most of Christendom for 700 years, such a juvenile game seems like a missed opportunity on all fronts.