yeaaah yeah this has a lot of Microsoft's Very Bad Copilot AI in it (it was sponsored by them, but it's only used on a text parser. no AI art at all here). yes, it breaks a bunch... but i couldn't miss a full experimental videogame collab from James Ferraro and bladee, right? i'm a stan, i played it day one, whatever.

Sanctuary is a dark comedy journey through an especially depressing Babylon Tower-like city struck by a plague that comes from the soil. it contaminates people and worms through wine made by little devilish jesters that feed themselves from the sickness. the distinctively fleshy hungry wormbeings strongly contrast with the skinblobs who wail about their connection to a network. they too, suffer, but they feel more lost than sick. their cries are more direct, and for me it was hard to pinpoint exactly their place in this world.

at least that's what i could gather, because most of the bladee-written dialogue has to be extracted from the NPCs by asking questions and making affirmations, all parsed by Copilot. even though that's an awful and very breakable way to do dialogue, i think it's used in a way that makes at least a bit of sense. all these sick beings babble almost incoherently when you ask them questions, and worms almost always default to saying "i am hungry" after talking for a while, so the AI doesn't fully break the atmosphere by saying nonsense from time to time. it fits.

what helps this work is the very limited range of lines and emotions each NPC is designed to mutter, so you actually can't just force it to make up whatever nonsense bit of storytelling. it also feels like a lot of bladee's deadpan humor and style still bleeds through the dialogue, so it's at least decently authorial. it's interesting to contrast this with that unplayable Portopia Remake where Square also shoved in an AI text parser. in Portopia your progress can be gated simply because of the inability of the AI to produce something that makes any sense. in Sanctuary, if you get bored of an NPC repeating your question 10x like it's mocking you, you just get a bit scared and move on.

guess all this still makes the AI use pretty futile. the same atmosphere could mostly be achieved (and better done) by a randomizer à-la Hylics. at least they probably got some decent cash out of this shit, though i appreciate the effort gone into not making the game insanely gauche. no AI art, no AI sounds, not even the actual words in the dialogue, just the bad text parser.

as usual with Ferraro's work, the soundscape and visuals are incredible. droning industrial rust is paired with thin corridors filled with paintings depicting many kinds of suffering and oddities. small old timey villages are laid out between loud, whirring fans and wriggling worm people thingies. an incredible commitment to despair, stained in wine as it is.

listen to Cold Visions by bladee after playing this (there are some Ferraro credits in there), you will probably not be disappointed.

this stupid ass game man, it really is just a Kingdom Heartsian (non-derogatory) shitshow of mashed up mechanics, aerial combos, and nonsense story, just with a lot less flair. at least i appreciate the lighter tone since Gaiden had this really ugly contrast between the super serious heartwarming moments and the filler arena and awful side stuff in general. this game also probably got more than 6 months of dev time, so it feels less like padding is there and more like padding is the whole point.

the side stuff still sucks here (especially the substories, but they were already awful in Infinite Wealth) but since everything is a soap opera shonen fever dream it just works better. guess this series' vacation era is defined by endless map markers and facebook friend-adding aloha keybinds. getting your pirate crew together is at least fun enough, and actually makes every optional bit of nonsense merge together pretty well.

it's great that they made ship navigation and combat possible in the Dragon Engine but damn, i wish this game cared even a bit about moving through places. the abundance of fast travel points in recent games already made me a little sick, but you are made to fast travel constantly in ship sections, since none of the maps are connected. also, when you're done exploring them, every story scene that leaves you on the ship becomes a menu. not even a second of movement is needed after you complete the Devil Flags story and clean up treasures and the very boring ship drink links.

i like the arcadey and thrown together feel of the ship combat and the non-commital narrative. it makes small Majima moments feel so true - the vacation he needed after all the bullshit he went through. love the musical numbers too.

*as a final aside to this mess of impressions after going for all achievements, i should say that something very dear to me about this series is deteriorating: it's commitment to humanizing marginalized people of all walks of life. for some incomprehensible reason the combat bounties you do in a game called Pirate Yakuza are to do vigilante justice for the Hawaiian Police. what the fuck is up with that?

Majima has an honest-to-god pirate bounty on his head and is searching for a pirate treasure while slaughtering people in a pirate arena - why aren't these combat encounters pirate bounties as well? the idol quest also had the balls to be even worse than previous times the franchise talked about this line of work, and Majima beats up a homeless guy for stealing a stray animal's food the kid had just given it. why not give him some too instead? the fuck is this, when did these guys become some run of the mill conservative assholes instead of open minded ones? my guess would be at around Yakuza 6. thank you. i still like this game. i dolled Majima the fuck up.

i know this game is one of the most torn to shreds things of the last 10 (!) years but even then, i think i never heard some of the points i'm about to make:

Pro Skater 5 is a rush job done as fast as possible so Activision could squeeze the last drop out of Tony Hawk's name in videogames before they stopped renewing the license, which lost popularity mostly by their own hand after forcing Neversoft to spam annual releases both for this series and Guitar Hero. they got dissolved into yet another COD support studio.

now, the new and very out of the loop studio Robomodo had been developing these games, namely the weird Pro Skater HD remake and the motion sensor failures Shred and Ride. i'm not gonna go the gamer route and shame the people working there for this mess (they were a tiny new studio and always got dealt an awful hand [did you know THPS5 had only 3 QA testers, one of them being Tony Hawk himself?]), but god, the problems with Pro Skater 5 go way beyond the development time and budget.

first off: this game does not just return to the regular PS2 Pro Skater 4 formula - it actually follows that game's PS1 version. this means no NPCs or narrative at all, just quest markers dotted around barebones maps which can also be ignored by just selecting objectives in the menu.

oh, menus. they make this shit 10x worse. there's a useless View Map button above the Retry one, which you always have to navigate through when frequently retrying the more unbalanced missions. mission selection also defaults to the now dead co-op mode, so you need to scroll to single player every time you do anything in this game.

when retrying something, the game kills the UI and lets you freely skate while the challenge loads again. then, you get a 3 second timer to actually get started, which is annoying as hell and wasn't a thing in previous games.

after a while i figured out that the timer helps the PS4/XONE player to not be caught off-guard because of the insane loading times (which were also never a problem when retrying in previous games). since i played this through retrocompatibility on a PS5, i always got only about 2 seconds before it loaded, so the 3 second timer functionally becomes a 5 second wait to retry any challenge. great.

ok. what else? you gotta, for some incomprehensible reason, go back to the main menu to upgrade your stats. what? you constantly get skill points by finishing any mission with at least 2 out of 3 stars. imagine how fucking long that took for people playing this on the PS4. plus, to create your own skater, you have to overwrite a pro. what's the point? every character plays the same anyways.

one final thing about menuing: this thing does not let you end a mission early once you got the needed score. this is the worst decision they made in the entire fucking videogame. in every single Tony Hawk game i remember you being able to end any run early, and in a Pro Skater 4-like structure where you only do 1 challenge at a time, this becomes quickly insufferable. since the missions lack any balancing at all, some can be finished in mere seconds (sometimes less than 10) while you have to now wait 2 minutes before it ends so your run can count. this by itself makes Pro Skater 5 take way, way wayyyyy too long to beat and also fills 80% of this awful game with dead air, if you also count all the other loading and menu problems.

we're off to a great start. i haven't even touched the moment to moment design of the game yet... man, all of these (aside from the loading issues) are not related to budget or dev time, just conscious awful decisions for a fast paced arcadey game.

the tricks and combos are now all neutered to hell - not only are double taps, flips and transfers all gone, but all specials are confined to a god awful special mode. previously you could use motion inputs to do unique special tricks for each character, which were kept in check by a special meter that you could fill up anytime and use until you bailed - now, when you activate special, all your regular tricks are replaced by specials for a short while. apart from sucking a huge part of the joy from building a unique combo, the bar is also horribly set up. you charge it up by doing a bunch of tricks but, when it fills up, you can't use it until the next combo. what??? i figure the intent was to prevent this very spammable special mode from getting endlessly spammed in big combos, but why not let me use it right as i fill it up the first time?

this breaks every combo challenge, because in some you don't get special tricks at all (which really makes it evident that the new system is broken), and in others you first need to do a voided small combo to get special to then start a completely new one in order to use special. in short: it's useless and only meant to decimate the fun in regular timed score challenges, which now require you to split your points into multiple combos, each with their own use of the stupid spammy special.

with this in mind, it starts to make sense why this game mainly moves away from the usual rhythm of the series. the previous games really flourished in mixing high combos with different kinds of exploration or gap challenges. you ran through levels like a maniac with multiple objetives in mind at once, some with a precision platforming appeal. even when Pro Skater 4 got more linear, you still had to do a variety of challenges themed to different situations - it even had some more grounded ones!

in Pro Skater 5, almost every level has the exact same kinds of objectives, and most stray away from even the most basic of combos. clear pools of balls (seriously); follow a colorful line with awful hit detection that dictates what kind of state your skater should be in; race through hoops like it's Superman 64; destroy things in a line. these end up turning this game into a weird and very linear timed precision platformer. but wait... they kept the stat system. so you're expected to do a specific line with ever-changing physics and never fully getting if there even is a perfect combination of ollie, vert and speed stats that would make these challenges not a complete waste of time.

somehow, the worst of all are the manual/grind/air challenges. they add your current trick multiplier to the distance you cover while doing the required trick. the actual points of the other tricks don't matter, only the multiplier. now every one of these will revolve around you spamming short grinds and kickflips to get a 50x combo and then just spamming the required move 'till you get 3 stars in less than half the required time. they could have been an interesting way to make a combo challenge that highlighted a specific part of your moveset, but they became as homogenized as the scoring system itself.

the last thing i want to touch on is the overall structure. you gotta unlock each level by completing goals. do okay and you get a star, do good and you get 2 and a stat point, do great and you get 3. by completing a bunch of missions with 3 stars, you end up unlocking the very last level before you even get through half of the game, which is okay by me - it was also the case in past entries as well, but it makes me wonder: what does it mean to finish this game?

previous Pro Skaters had an ending with credits rolling,
and that includes the narativeless ones. hell, even the PS2 classic modes let you know when you were done with them. you didn't need to do every single objective, and that... seemed to be the case with Pro Skater 5? but no, after i did every single mission in every single map (the vast majority with a 3 star sick rating), including the free skate ones, the game just did nothing. at all. you don't get a pro skater video to enjoy and get inspired, a credits roll, or even any kind of ending screen. not that i care about endings, but man... the pro skater videos were such an important part of the series, and even the DS games had them!!!!! considering how repetitive everything here is, it sucks to see how you don't even get anything that would at least elevate it a bit beyond it's lifeless presentation.

it's crazy that, even beyond the initial Activision-related restraints, every conscious choice Pro Skater 5 makes ends up making it worse. an already perfected formula getting mangled and reshapen into what became an ugly and boring game with a lot of downtime. the OG Tony Hawk games have this odd, very appealing interpretation of what an arcade game made for a home console should be. you have 2 minutes to do a bunch of objectives, but you can repeat the level as many times as you want while keeping your progress. that's why i never got people who complained a bunch about the time limit: it's there to spice things up. provide a self imposed 1cc challenge for each map; they're mostly unobtrusive for any other kind of player anyway! you do tricks that reward variety and even get to properly use the map by doing level-specific gaps to boost your score.

that's all achieved with a masterful dedication to the places you skate and their atmosphere and traces of culture. i'm the kind of Pro Skater player that could even get behind a more straightforward or arcadey look (though i would vastly prefer one as stylish as American Wasteland or Underground) just because i love playing whatever has some variation of this damn scoring system. i'm, of course, always open for large changes, but it's very clear Activision created a fence that barred this series from ever trying those.