Hylics is uncommonly good

TIME TO BEAT THE ART

How many actually good JRPGs have you played? It's not like there have never been any good ones. In fact, there are actually a ton of good JRPGs, so many that there wouldn't even be any point in me reciting a list of them to you. Would you respect me more for mentioning your favorite one? Would that be better than you having a strong opinion about my wrong opinion that JRPGs are generally garbage (an opinion I earnestly hold, despite also aknowleging what I've already said about there being a ton of good ones out there)? These are questions that won't be answered today.

(Can a game be a JRPG if it isn't Japanese? Probably not, but whatever.)

Congratulations, you have read the first paragraph. *internally - and congratulations to me for writing it, we should both get a gold star⭐

DANCE! SHE STRETCHES ASTRIDE THE PRODUCT.

I hesitate to say that Hylics is one of those games that is an "experience" because usually that denotes a game like Gone Home or Flower or some other indie garbage that hardly is even a game at all. Hylics is fun, but it's also calming and intriguing and charming.

You control Wayne and his growing crew of weird and wacky dudes. I had one favorite of course. He happens to be the first guy you meet who seems to have any real sentience about him, more than the average npc you find at least; they all seem to give material matters about as much thought as plant would, if a plant was a poet (more on that later). The guy you meet has some crazy name that in 5 hours I never could remember, despite him being my favorite dude in the crew. More so than the spelling or pronunciation of his name, the peculiarity of his misshapen head was what made him unique. Also he didn't seem to wear any clothes. The rest of the crew, including Wayne, the protagonist sort of, are basically just as odd but I didn't love them nearly as much as I did misshapen frozen-yogurt-head guy. He was the worst character, but an important support in battles; it was standard JRPG fare.

It's tough to grasp what's going on at all in Hylics though. It's partially a perceptual dilemma; there's so much going on with the claymation-style visuals and pixel art that it can be hard to discern what you're even really looking at. It's also partially because a lot of the dialogue and text is procedurally generated, a term I have grown to despise since cooling off on Minecraft around 2012 (and especially after the whole No Man's Sky debacle). Here in Hylics however, the procedurally generated text and very weird and surrealist landscapes and abominations you come across on your journey make for an experience (there's the word again) that's at the very least unlike anything you've likely ever had in a game. 

What's the story like? I'm not really sure, and I don't think it's too important either. A lot of the time, text in the game would have me perplexed, going "Dang, none of that bit there made any sense, except for frozen burrito, guess that is a weapon?" The dialogue and narration forgo any pretense of being clear in order to pursue being as psychedelic as possible through basically just stringing together random neat words. Hylics' procedural text engine never produces something that reads like a cynical attempt to be more than what it is, instead it comes across as quaint, funny, sometimes even deep poetry. The headings in this post are all lifted from some of the junk that literally just one NPC said; the whole game is like this.

So while you don't really ever have much of a clear idea of what's going on, it's fine because it doesn't seem like anyone else in the game does either. At one point late in the game (and trust me, this is probably not a spoiler, not sure it's even possible to spoil anything here really) you come across this crab dude and like many other interactions in the game you end up fighting and brutally melting him/it. The crab dude didn't have any idea who you were, he was just trying to run his science lab where they select subjects based on optimal monetisation potential. You leave that area having killed a crab-dude for reasons unknown to both you and him, but you also get like 750,000 bucks 👍 (bucks being the currency in the game).

Hopefully you're getting a pretty good idea of what the heck this game even is, and if it sounds weird that's okay, it's meant to... probably.

Quickly as a final bit here, and speaking of sounds, music's also pretty important to the experience in Hylics too. As I write this, the game's idling in the background and Wayne's crew is just loitering around in his bathroom (where you recover you flesh and will, yep). This track, plays only there in the bathroom so far as I can tell and it's really nice. On the other hand, things like this track play all the time too, and then again a weird one like this accompanies your travels through the main town (this only really works if you're clicking the links man, just don't click this one). So that's the music, click the link, you'll get the point. Music's tough. I studied it for 8 years so my opinions on musical things are all out of wack and I like everything now, including this psychedelic post-rock beep boop stum noise symphony.

THEIR CRYSTAL'S OCEAN MAY AVENGE AND LARD REMEMBERS A MEMORY

Listen, just trust me: Play Hylics. It's good in a way that few games are. It's good in spite of quality and exactness. It's elegant and cool in ways that are quite frankly really tough to write about. So play it and hopefully what I've written here will make sense then. Here's a few more bits:

Should you play Hylics? Yes you should.

Is it going to give you a disease, maybe a psychic disease? It's possible and perhaps even likely. 

How long is it? Cuz I don't have any time. I finished it in 5 hours, other people did it in 2.

How much for this bitch? It's 3 bucks and please don't say bitch.

Any last words, bitch? Hylics was the coolest game I've played in like 2 years and I play a lot of cool games, like Uno.

Also the sequel is coming out this year (maybe?) and it looks even rad-er than this bitch (not me, it, as in the game, Hylics, Hylics 2 looks rad-er than Hylics 1, although it's cooler than me too, the second one, that is)

Here's the preview video for Hylics 2: