Felled By Kung Fu Kenny
The most ruthless Grammy-decorated emcee of our generation is still riding the waves of his Super Bowl performance, but a lot of the gaming elements are going overlooked.
If I was in a burning building and could only flee with either the last physical copy of Dark Souls ever or a barstool, I’d be seated watching it all scorch from the front yard.
However hyperbolic I’m being, I can’t treat the cultural impact FromSoftware and Bandai Namco have had on the video game industry as a pedestrian thing. They’ve introduced a formula in Soulsborne games that works—it’s colloquial for games that have made content creators break more controllers than any one adult should be allowed.
And Soulsborne in-game bosses have provided ample ass whooping’s saved across the digital VOD-o-sphere for your kids’ kids to watch.
Though I’ve mostly come to dislike Soulsborne style games by way of their formerly gatekeep-y community, there is one game of the same vein I haven’t been able to put down lately: The First Berserker: Khazan.
It’s got all the trappings of an overly difficult game I’d bring Player Haters’ Ball levels of hate to, but over the last 48 hours its demo has sunk its anime-styled clutches into me and hasn’t let up.
The visual design is stunning, its enemies are fiercely unforgiving, and its protagonist has aura for days.
I don’t dislike these games for their difficulty—I will openly brag about the platinum trophy I earned in God of War III on the PlayStation 3. Sifu still remains installed on my PS5. I survived Geometry Dash, damn it.
Khazan is one of the few titles in that genre of aggravatingly difficult games that roped me in visually. The Lovecraftian horrors and emo-tier dark aesthetic of the Souls series never once did it for me. But I will absolutely ride for Khazan. What’s more, the boss fights were brutal but appealing enough for me to learn, adapt, and lose again without too many bruises.
Defeat in the digital space is always a matter of “when”, and it happened often as I played through the Kazan demo, but it reminded me of how deep defeat can cut when it’s generational.
It’s the kind of defeat not unlike the one Drake faced after Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half-time performance, where K-Dot capped off the near year-long victory lap following their one-sided rap feud with a stadium hanging on every verse of every track Lamar giddily rapped.
Black culture and poetry were on full display then, with a black, tinted out 1987 Buick GNX that housed countless performers centerstage—it’s an artifact that belongs in a museum now. What’s more, Lamar and his team intentionally designed the set they performed on to look like a PlayStation controller, down to the X and O buttons seen from afar.
In a recent interview with WIRED, Shelley Rodgers, the show’s art director, said “I think the [video game theme] was symbolic, his way to reach young people. A lot of it is showing his journey, traveling through the American dream.”
Video games couldn’t be a more appropriate medium to communicate the journey Kung Fu Kenny has been on. It’s a constant contest of proving your worth, either through a grueling final boss fight in Khazan or through getting the right items to die only half as many times as you did the day before in Cuphead.
Between the abundance of levels and expanse in some of today’s most popular games, the medium can accurately reflect the pitfalls and successes of anyone’s personal journey.
Think of Super Mario 64, one of Nintendo’s seminal titles, and the way several levels are locked out to our titular character unless you’ve collected enough stars. Lamar’s rise to preeminent emcee was not without his being locked out of conversations over who had the most potent pen, or who took home the most Grammy awards.
Despite hip-hop having roots in a subculture of anti-establishment, anti-corporate, “imma do my own shit” spiritual energy, today’s scene is heavily influenced by streams and record sales, but Lamar still carved a path that successfully married philosophical wordplay with expertly produced club bangers.
The journey of a gamer is also a narrative one—any number of enemies or hordes of monsters and beasts could easily smite the hero we control yet we persevere. If not for potions, enchantments, shields, and heavy armor, we’d quickly fall victim to the preternatural, digital world.
For Lamar, his pen and his wit serve as some of the greatest defense he could have in an arena of other equally ferocious competitors. His penchant for making statements as acts of civil resistance work as a “buff” for other players around him, a rallying cry strong enough to revive anyone caught off guard by an assault.
Kendrick Lamar’s life as a video game is multiplatform. It reaches anyone willing to load up, plug in, or press play. The way he’s been able to overcome each new obstacle or meet any challenge is akin to Link building up his strength until he can finally wield the Master Sword in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
In the context of the “American Dream”, video games serve as an appropriate metaphor for how and where you can advance as a Black artist and creative.
Too ghetto, and it’s “You Lose.” Kneel at the wrong time? “Game Over.” And yet, with the skills Lamar’s gained from leveling up, there is something transcendent in knowing that regardless of the ferocity of the challenge, he, like the rest of us hip-hop gamers, still chose to stay headstrong and proceed forward, to forever “Continue.”