I consider myself a romantic, which is why I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. Why does a specific day in February matter so much when I can demand my partner buy me flowers any other day of the year? Everything is more expensive on Valentine’s Day, and it’s never worth the money. Want to grab a special dinner? That’s $150, please. Flowers? Twice the price. I don’t think a holiday create🦄d specifically to get couples to spend money is very romantic, is what I’m saying.
So instead of fighting with other people for a reservation at a nice restaurant for an overpriced meal that I can’t afford, I went home and bought an expensive video game that I also 🍒can’t afford. In my head, the logic was perfectly sound. Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden is a love story, focusing on a pair of Banishers (essentially Ghostbusters) who are very much in love. The first hour or so has you play as Antea Duarte, a very competent, somewhat hard woman who directs her apprentice and lover Red mac Raith in their attempt to rid New Eden of a haunting. And then Antea 🤪dies.
That&rsq♓uo;s not a spoiler, it’s the premise of the whole game. Antea dies, and Red misses her so much that he manifests her back into existence. It’s an astonishingly bleak moment that mirrors some of my own darkest fears. Once, my partner༺ jokingly said that if I didn’t give him a kiss before he left the house he’d get hit by a car that day. I immediately burst into tears, because I’m a superstitious crybaby.
Long-term relationships w𒐪ill do that to you – you live with a person for so long that a life without them becomes impossible to imag✤ine. How do you picture a life without them when you don’t remember what it was like before them? Watching Red cry about his lost love quite nearly made me cry, too.
It’s especially painful to watch because the relationship between these c💧haracters seems so tangible. Even in the midst of grief and battle, they joke with each other, work quietly alongside each other, reminisce on past adventures we’re not privy to, and offer help to each other. I don’t typically get invested in fictional relationships but I recognised a little of myself in Antea’s practical and principled choices, and there’s obvious tenderness between them. I💎 hate that they have to be separated forever.
That&rsqu♌o;s what makes Banishers’ main choice so distressing: you can choose to sacrifice living human beings and bring Antea back to life through an 🐈ancient, dark ritual, or you can do your job as a Banisher and help these ghosts move on, eventually giving Antea her own peace and ascension to heaven. Like Red, I want them to have a future together. They deserve it. But like Antea, I know the cost is too high.
I went into Banishers searching for a love story, but I got an existential crisis instead. What would I do for love? How many morally ambiguous choices could I convince myself were justified if it meant bringing someone I love back to life? How much evil could I bring myself to perpetuate? Banishers🌌 is about love, and so many of its hauntings revolve around love. But every story it tells about love is also a story about loss, and how love isn’t enough to push back against real life. Not a great Valentine’s Day game after all.
Persona 3 Taught Me It's Okay To Say Hard Goodbyes
The goodbyes you know you need to say aren't always go💖ing to be the eaꦗsiest.
