#if you can appreciate *what the game is saying* in nier by the easy gameplay doing just about everything to get you to the end

[jessielefey]

One should play the Drakengard/nier games in reverse publishing order in order to get the most out of them. Like how Bloodborne can be said as to "teach you how to play Souls games", Automata followed by Drakengard 3 followed by Replicant teaches you how to read Drakengard as a metacommentary in a way that conceptually proves "just starting from the first game in the series" is doomed to leave you confused and angry and heartbroken; in this essay I will...

[gothamcityneedsme]

I saw this bouncing around my dash and decided to fill it out myself for fun :)  I decided to not double-list any games, and I tried to mix up the companies I used too so that the list would be more unique.

Long post, so I’m doing a readmore for my longwinded part lol.

(read more)

Favorite Game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords - I could talk about this game forever.  How it tears apart the Star Wars universe from within, how it creates a compelling story while challenging the usual themes, etc.  I could talk for ages about the characters and how their motivations slot in place, and how this game lends itself to interpretation and analysis alongside roleplay.  It’s just a wonderful game, one I deeply love and will always love.  It’s a game that isn’t afraid to have you talk to other characters for twenty or thirty minutes at a time and honestly I’m always riveted at every line.  This game deserves the cult fanbase it has, but I think there’s a lot the fanbase misses in appreciating this game.  (Note...gameplay is a little janky and a community made mod restores a lot content that was cut before shipping-the game wasn’t properly finished).

Best Story:  Fallout New Vegas - It’s the setting that makes the story here, and all the moving pieces and factions alongside the main conflict really make this game stand out.  There’s so many little pieces to find along the way in the world and the way the main quest splits based on who you want in power feels important--and you are choosing a future for this whole region.

Favorite Art Style: The Witness - This game is peacefully wonderful with its visuals.  There are wonderful nature scenes and nests of wires and panels spreading in various parts of the island that are fascinating to look at.  The environment is half of the gameplay in most areas, so it’s important to look around even though exploration is not really the gameplay.  You find puzzles in the world, even in nature, and it’s fascinating.  The colors are bright and beautiful.  There is even a map in the middle of the island inside of a lake that helps you track your progress if you notice it (it isn’t like a normal ‘map’).

Favorite Soundtrack: Shin Megami Tensei IV - I love video game soundtracks, but SMTIV is something special.  The music booms in ways that make you really understand the atmosphere of the world, and there’s a great mix of different kinds of tracks for different places.  I love the tracks for the other worlds you enter, and the themes of the different routes are done so well.  Some of the music draws from past SMT games, but the remixes done for this game really are stunning to me, and there’s so many fantastic original tracks.

Hardest Game: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream - I love this game but I literally never touch it without a walkthrough, which is why it gets to be the hardest game on the list, despite being a point and click adventure game lol.  Also just emotionally this game is challenging too, but I definitely mean this more in terms of getting a ‘perfect run’.

Funniest Game: The Stanley Parable - Trying to make this list has taught me that I don’t really play many ‘funny games’.  I don’t know if a game where multiple endings demand that you kill yourself should count as a ‘funniest game’, but it is also a game where the narrator tells you to stare at a fern and memorize its features, so....it counts.

Game I Like that is Hated: RWBY Grimm Eclipse - I’ve been playing this game since it was in early access and have loved it the whole time.  I find the gameplay soothing and fun, and I like playing the different characters.  It’s a game I play to chill out and just enjoy some fun battle mechanics.  It’s a fun game and I’ve spent over 100 hours in it, so I hope I like it, lol.

Game I Hate that is Liked:  Nier Automata - Neither this game’s gameplay or story impress me, and the fact that you have to replay basically the same stuff from a more boring-to-play-character’s pov in order to SEE all of the plot is a huge damper on the experience.  The story, to me, someone who engages with a lot of robot-focused fiction, is far from impressive or new, and it hardly engages with genre specifics at all, let alone in a new or interesting way.  I view this game as ‘a story with robots in it’ rather than ‘a story about robots’, which, to me, is a detriment.

Underrated: Nevermind - This game is amazing and very unheard of--and when it is heard of, it has been marketed incorrectly.  Nevermind seems like a horror game, and does market itself as one a bit, but it’s much more than that.  It’s more about trauma, recovery, therapy, etc.  This is a game that is so mindful about the topics it engages in that I am impressed by it every time.  It’s heavy with symbolism and character, despite lacking conversations or other similar game mechanics.  This is a lovely game that I really wish more people knew about-`p5-all of the patients are so interesting, and the focus on recovery and mental health is impressive.

Overrated:  Fire Emblem - I sort of mean this as the series as a whole really.  I have enjoyed the entries I have played somewhat, but I overall consider the series much less impressive than I was led to believe by others.  The gameplay especially is not impressive to me in any regard, even though I sometimes do find myself enjoying it.  The stories are alright, but many of them are weighed down by the gameplay and as a writer and person who likes to analyze writing, it’s very hard to do so when it isn’t able to fully exist under the chains the gameplay forces on it.  There are ways to mix gameplay and story well, Fire Emblem has not really done that in any of the entries I’ve played.  That being said, I don’t regret playing them, and I will occasionally replay, but I consider them mediocre games at best.

Best Voice Acting: Devil Survivor 2 - I love the voice acting in this game.  I feel like all the characters are really suited to their voices, and it’s really easy for me to visualize their voices.  They really bring the game to life and make both the dramatic and the funny scenes more enjoyable.

Worst Voice Acting: Jedi Knight Jedi Academy - I love this game, I really do, but some of the voice acting is janky.  Some of it is okay too--I think Kyle Katarn’s voice actor does fine, and some of the others I like NOW but hated when I was a kid, but the male protagonist voice in this game is just awful.  Which is bad when Jennifer Hale is the female voice actress lol.  His performance is passable though unless you’re playing darksided--the darksided ending to the game lacks all punch when you’re playing the male protagonist.

Favorite Male:  Battler Ushiromiya from Umineko no Naku Koro Ni - He’s the protagonist for most of the visual novels and I adore him utterly, especially once you move past episode 2.  He’s a wonderful character who I care about deeply.  I love his drive and how he fights--he’s someone who is easy to cheer for.  He matures well throughout the series and his character development is just wonderful.

Favorite Female:  Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4 - I really like how Naoto fits so well in the game, especially for being a final recruit--oftentimes the final recruit of Persona games (post 3) have a bit of a more difficult time feeling right with the group.  Naoto works really well though, and I love her struggles and story as well.  I think the difficulties she has concerning living as a woman in her field hit very deep to a problem that has existed for a very long time.

Favorite Protagonist: Connor of Daventry from King’s Quest 8 Mask of Eternity - I’m like, one of four fans of this character in the world, lol.  KQ8 is not a very well liked game and it does have a lot of issues, both with age and with how much of a departure it is from the series prior to it.  It’s strange to take a puzzle adventure game and make it a hybrid with what basically is a shooter, and it doesn’t really work.  Add to that the fact that you spend most of your time in the game without anyone around to talk to and it leads to this really polarizing and weird experience.  For me, Conner goes through what I would consider to be the ‘Ultimate Nightmare Scenario”.  Everyone in the world is turned to stone except him (and he survived out of mere chance) and so now it’s up to him, practically alone, to save the entire world.  There is no game lonelier than this.  I adore him for his bravery in the face of it, and how he just picks up to do what must be done because someone should do it, and if no one else can, then he will.  I also really love how he apologizes to people who are encased in stone while he takes money from their houses to help him on his journey.  I really do think he went back after the game was over and gave everyone heaps of gold to pay them back with interest lol.

Favorite Village:  Oakvale from Fable - The first Fable is the only one I really like, and it was one of the games I played when I was little, so the hometown in the game always meant a lot to me.  I like how you grow up there and how your tragic backstory is there--and then how you get to return to the town years later after you’ve come into your own, and you can see it completely rebuilt.  I like to spend a lot of my time in this town, just wandering around it and playing the minigames.  Even though I have a house in every town, Oakvale is where my hero calls home.

Most Hated Character:  Merril from Dragon Age 2 - I don’t really want to lay into how I feel about Merril, but what I will say is that it was suggested to me that I totally ignore her when playing, and I did so.  I only met her for her quest, dropped her off in town, and literally never spoke to her or interacted for the rest of the game.  I had a much better experience for it, honestly.  She appeared after I made my choice in the end of the game, which felt weird since I hadn’t spoken to her in several ingame years, but other than that, the game was totally fine without her.  I sort of just wish you could kill characters in DA2 the way you can in DAO, then I’d just do that, tbh.  It doesn’t suit very many (or any) of the characters I rp in DA2 to keep her around or support her in any way.

First Game I Played: Mixed up Mother Goose Deluxe - I’m not actually sure if this is the FIRST game I’ve ever played or not, but it’s one of the first I played alone as a kid.  I really loved it--this is probably what created my love for point and click adventures, and the game was very silly and fun.

Favorite Company: Bioware - I’ve always been a sucker for Bioware games, ever since Knights of the Old Republic 1 was my favorite childhood game.  I love how they do stories and party members, and while I’m not a fan of all of their games, I really love what they’ve made and their style of storytelling and character driven plot.  Even though sometimes their stories get cliche, I think the suit video games well and most of my early gaming was within their games.

Hated Company: EA - Bioware truly only started to go to shit after the EA acquisition, so I fucking hate EA.   I know Bioware had issues before EA too, but I definitely don’t think EA has helped the situation whatsoever.

Depressing Game: The Beginner’s Guide - I relate to this game as a creator and a writer, and it affects me deeply because of the story it tells and the questions it raises.  It makes me reflect on how I think of myself as a creator, and it reminds me of friendships I used to have.

Creepy Game:  The Path - God, I love this game.  It’s just aimlessly wandering around and finding symbolic scenery and watching your current character comment on it.  Then, you go off to find your girl’s wolf, and each one is different and unique to her, and you watch it ‘kill’ her--and facing her wolf is the only way each girl can truly mature.  Whenever you get to grandmother’s house, the camera switches to first person, and your eyes keep closing, so you can only see while clicking to move.  It forces you to keep moving so that you can see, but since you are moving, you only get to see things somewhat vaguely.  It’s got a great atmosphere, and I love the symbolic storytelling.

Happy Game: Eastshade - This game is so sweet.  There’s some drama around to with many of the quests, but I like this as an rpg without combat, and I think this would be a really good kids game.  There’s a lot to see and explore, and the game was made to be really pretty so that you want to paint several aspects of it.  It’s really lovely to just wander around in this game and bike around the area, painting anything that suits your fancy.  As long as you don’t finish the main quest, you’re free to wander, and materials do respawn, so you essentially can infinitely paint once you get far enough.

Favorite Ending: Virtue’s Last Reward - I love the questions this game asks and where the ending goes.  It thematically ties together--the whole reason the game itself exists is to get the attention of a ‘higher being’--the player, essentially.  I love how it plays with that concept, and even though the final game in the series doesn’t entirely pick this idea up where this game left it, standalone this game is stunning in how it comes together.

[xb-squaredx]

Astral Chain Review: Popo’s Bizarre Adventure

Life can be funny sometimes; I started out 2019 hoping that I could play a certain PlatinumGames-developed Switch exclusive, and while I did eventually get such a thing, it wasn’t Bayonetta 3, but instead Astral Chain. The last time Nintendo and PlatinumGames worked together on a brand new IP we got The Wonderful 101, one of my favorite games of all time, so I was pretty pumped about Astral Chain from moment one. A game where you control Stands like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, but you’re a hot anime cop! The kinda game you didn’t know you needed! Now that it’s finally here I can definitely say with confidence that I really love…like half of this game.

C.O.P.S: ANIME EDITION

The world of Astral Chain is in a bad way. Set in a future with Earth on the brink of collapse, most of the planet has been corrupted by the Astral Plain, an alternate dimension. With the remnants of humanity confined to a man-made island, an elite police force, Neuron, investigates the invisible cause of the world-ending corruption, Chimeras. Armed with enslaved Chimeras of their own, Legions, Neuron fights back against Chimera attacks, all the while searching for a way to save the world before its too late. Players take the role of a newcomer to Neuron, rising up the ranks alongside their twin sibling, mastering their Legion as various villainous factions seem intent on bringing about the end of the world.

I’ll be blunt here: Astral Chain’s story is passable, but didn’t do much for me. It’s not exactly bad, but predictable and doesn’t really take many risks. The game has an anime aesthetic, and in many cases seems more content with paying homage to various sci-fi anime than telling a unique story, so I’d say it’s quite by-the-numbers. That’s certainly fine, but what really shines in most Platinum titles are their larger-than-life characters, and I find them lacking here. Most of Neuron gets the shaft as time goes on, with only a scant few characters getting much development. Maybe I’m a tad spoiled by the likes of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but the fact that so little of the incidental dialogue is voiced also keeps most of the Neuron officers from sticking out to me. Some characters, like Hal, Marie and Kyle, DO stand out and are pretty great, but that’s about it.

Thankfully, everything else about the game’s presentation is stylish. From the UI to the enemy intro cutscenes, to the sound design and battle animations, Astral Chain is a delight for the eyes and ears. The futuristic setting allows from some sleek visuals, and the lighting and particle effects stand out among most Switch titles. I’d daresay that at times, Astral Chain is Platinum’s best looking game. This does come at the cost of performance though. The game is locked to mostly 30 FPS, though you’ll see some dips in some frantic moments, but not too often. Resolution can also dip in some instances too, the performance at its worst in bigger areas with tons of NPCs around, but most combat sections cut down on clutter and the performance remains solid when you need it, so it mostly works out. Music’s also pretty stellar, and completes the anime-aesthetics with legit opening and ending themes too. Looks can only do so much though, but Platinum is never one to get by purely on outward appearances.

CHAIN PAIN

Combat is where Platinum shines, and that’s definitely true for Astral Chain, though you do have to wait a lot longer than usual to get a good feel for what the game’s trying to do. The first few hours leave a pretty bad first-impression honestly, with lackluster combat options and clunky movement, but once the game shows it’s hand everything starts to really click. By the endgame you’re drowning in options, to the point where it would have been overwhelming if the game threw it all at you right at the start. Best to ease players into the game, but it’s risky to not start the game off on the right foot.

The defining feature of this game is controlling two characters at once, your officer and their Legion. At the start, your officer’s options are limited, and Legions mostly attack on their own, but over time you gain more Legions to swap between on-the-fly, as well as more manual actions you can perform alongside them. Sync Attacks, for one, require you to tap the Legion button at specific points after attacks, which will have the two of you team up for big damage. Your officer gains a shape shifting “X-Baton” weapon that can take a few different forms to vary up their own combat, but the five Legions you gain are your most important tools. Sword, Arrow, Arm, Beast and Axe; each Legion has their own uses in and out of combat and in many cases feel like extended nods to Platinum’s entire back-catalog. Sword can enter Raiden’s Blade Mode from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance to cut enemies on a specific axis, or sever connections between specific doors or objects. Arrow can take out enemies from afar, or be brought in for an over-the-shoulder shooting experience right out of Vanquish. Arm is like an extended nod to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, pounding foes with a flurry of punches, as well as being able to pick up and throw objects. Beast is just Bladewolf from Revengeance, letting players ride atop it for mobility, and digging up items or following scents like a real dog. Lastly, Axe is a powerhouse that also grants players a powerful barrier that can protect them from various hazards. Certain enemies require specific Legions to take out, and with all five at the press of a button, things can get hectic, but in a good way and advanced players can do a lot with all of these tools.

Each Legion has their own skill tree that can grant them special moves or increase stats as well, and similar to the chip system from Nier: Automata, players can equip special passive skills onto each Legion, provided they have enough slots open for them. The chain connecting officer and Legion also comes into play too, being able to move the Legion freely and bind enemies up (bringing Wonderful 101’s Wonder Liner to mind), or send a charging enemy flying back with an Irish Whip straight out of wrestling. Legions can’t stay out forever though, their Sync Gauge slowly draining as they fight, huge chunks of it taken out if they get hit by attacks, but it recharges pretty quickly, especially if your officer stays aggressive. Compared to past Platinum titles, there’s a lot more emphasis on using items and having “builds” when going into fights too. Healing items alongside combat-oriented items like drones or shields are encouraged rather than penalized, as is the standard. There’s more I could go into, but this hopefully gives you an idea of how much is going on in this game’s combat. Comparing the first few hours to endgame is night and day, more so than almost any other Platinum title.

Generally, the combat is up to the Platinum standard, but unlike most games by the developer, there’s actually a LOT of gameplay that isn’t straight combat, making this Platinum’s most varied game yet…for better or for worse.

STYLISH BUSYWORK

Here’s where things get kinda tricky. On the one hand, it’s good for a game to have at least SOME variety, right? If a game is nonstop action, it risks becoming stale, so having some slower moments makes the bigger moments more impactful. It’s a question of pacing more than anything else, and unfortunately the pacing in Astral Chain leaves a LOT to be desired.

To say it as succinctly as I can, the levels in Astral Chain drag on far too long. A typical level in Platinum’s catalog is roughly 20 minutes, give or take a bit of backtracking or some story bits. In Astral Chain, a full level, or “File”, can take four to five hours by comparison, and when you lay it out like that, you realize there’s an awful lot of filler to sift through to get to the good stuff. You have investigation sequences that are laughably easy for one. Using discount Detective Vision from the Batman Arkham games, you “find” clues and then fill in the blanks to form a lead, but these sequences are impossible to fail. Solutions are highlighted and even if you come to the wrong conclusion, the game will just correct you and you’ll move on regardless. Then you have platforming sequences that are mostly fine, though hampered by being unable to use the camera most of the time (since the right stick can also manually control your Legion). At times, honest-to-God sidequests can be found that are usually not combat-focused, and we can throw in some awful motion-controlled minigames for good measure. On their own, these extra bits aren’t too bad, kinda boring in some respects but otherwise fine, however for someone who just wants to progress the story and get to the next fight, they become barriers you’re forced to contend with before you can get back to having fun.

Now, a lot of this stuff IS optional, but you’re heavily encouraged to do them all anyway. You get locked out of getting good end-of-File ranks if you avoid optional ranked missions, and you’re given rewards for all of this stuff anyway. They’re mostly cosmetic rewards, but the game still seems to expect you to engage with this “extra” content…to the point that it’s clearly not seen as extra but a part of the whole Astral Chain experience. If you stripped out the non-combat portions, that’s like 2/3s of the game gone and it feels kinda messed up to skip out on so much of it. Rather…maybe the game should have made a point of having this stuff be engaging to do in its own right.

MAKING THE GRADE

I want to stress that there’s a lot I liked about Astral Chain. There’s plenty of charm hidden throughout here, and the prospect of a Platinum game that strives to do MORE isn’t a bad one. I enjoyed having NPCs to talk to, larger areas to explore that weren’t just combat areas, and little touches like getting points for recycling or being unable to jaywalk were appreciated. One thing I never touched on was its ranking system, which seems more emblematic of the issues I had with the game. Rather than rewarding and ranking one’s own play, it awards high ranks more so for variety than anything else. It doesn’t matter how poorly you play (to a point), as long as you do a lot of different stuff it’ll all work out. Thus, the game threw a lot of stuff at the wall regardless of how hard it stuck, and as such there’s a number of great ideas mixed in with some really, really weird ones.

Astral Chain is in many ways an experimental game for Platinum. They seem to be trying to move away from niche action games and offer up more for the consumer, but in doing so I fear they might be diluting their games. I’ve been quite a bit more critical of this game than I expected to be, and in the end I’m more just bummed that I didn’t enjoy it more. This game is the directorial debut of Takahisa Taura, and I can practically feel the passion he had for this product; he likely loaded this game with a lot of things that he personally liked, and it’s clear everyone involved worked hard to deliver the best game they could. The results vary a bit, as we have crisp visuals and unique, deep combat mixed in with some plodding segments that seem thrown in for variety’s sake. Astral Chain is ambitious, but maybe this once Platinum bit off a bit more than they could chew. I’d also petition that this game is a victim of certain expectations of what I think a PlatinumGames title “should” be. It’s possible Taura felt pressured to put in aspects of Platinum’s past output and was afraid to go further and make this game truly something new. I’ll also wager that if Astral Chain is someone’s first Platinum game, they’ll be able to come in with a fresher perspective and might end up enjoying it more than a diehard fan like me. There’s a solid foundation here for any future titles though, and I think this game’s issues could be ironed out if given the chance. At its height, the combat really sells this game for me, and action fans will find a lot to love…but there’s a lot in here that might not scratch that particular itch. I wouldn’t quite call this game the weakest link in PlatinumGames’ chain at any rate, and I remain a fan of the company and their future output.

Shine on Platinum.

-B

[journaloftomfooleryandjapery]

All the TOP 10 OF THE DECADE posts made me want to make one of my own, so here’s my 10 fave games this decade:

Yakuza 0  Shovel Knight  Nier Automata  Metal Gear Rising  Gunvolt Chronicles Luminous Avenger IX Final Fantasy XV   Scott pilgrim vs the world the game Undertale Persona 5  Doom

Danganronpa 2, New Vegas, Touhou Luna Nights, Katana Zero and Mario Odyssey all only barely missed out, and it was a tough decision not to include them. I loved the shit out of those games but thinking it through I decided they were just slightly less loved by me than the above.

Below the cut are some extended thoughts (of varying length) on the games included:

Just CTRL F if you wanna find a specific one

Yakuza 0

Every Yakuza game is delightful and this is definitely the best one, in my opinion. The Yakuza games appeal to me for a lot of reasons: the combat, the story, the variety of activities, the look of it all and the music. I feel like its a very unique game experience with its blend of weird in-depth side activities, serious crime drama, manly man masculine combat friendship melodrama, metal gear-esque convoluted conspiracies and a surprisingly compassionate view of the world it takes place in. 

The combat is what drew me in initially because it just feels good, the feedback of stomping on a dudes face in yakuza is delivered perfectly, and the attacks are brutal, hard and flashy. Its a very solid and satisfying combat system and in 0 its the best it has ever been. The ability to switch between 3 different and equally fun fighting styles on the fly really lets you mix things up and adapt your approach, every style feels fun and useful. If i had to pick a favorite it would be slugger, but its a tough choice, and they are all very viable and FUN.

Yakuza 0 also gets big points for having the best story in the series. The protagonists feel much more interesting in this era, the fights feel more earned in this game than others, the relationships are incredibly touching (I’m almost mad majima didnt stay with makoto) and the substories (and some parts of the main story) are the funniest they’ve ever been. Stuff like the quasi-stealth mission where you have to make sure women don’t see you buying a porn magazine for a child, and the extended scene of kiryu trying to guess the right business manners for a meeting had me laughing so much i was i was almost in physical pain.

The extensive business and host club substories get you tons of extra game content and are good enough to almost be there own game. The other games in the series have extended side activites of varying quality, but i think 0 had a rare case of all of these being, basically, perfect. The team obviously agrees since host club management came back repeatedly, but never as good as it was here.

Being set in the 80s elevates almost everything in the game because of the outfits, money flying out of every enemy you attack, the classic sega games you can play at the arcade (Outrun is so much fun and I’d have never have given it a proper go otherwise) and the disco minigame everyones made a meme out of (that music is so catchy).

As a final note this game has the best boss fights and music in the series, which is a very high standard to surpass when you look at the rest of the series. The dual final boss fights, the recurring boss for kiryu and almost every majima fight are highlights of the entire series for me. 

0 is going to end up being one of the few games I’ll never sell my copy of because i want it available for me to play forever, its a complete delight.

Shovel Knight

This game has been analysed to hell and back, so i wont have much original to say i suppose. Admittedly i did enjoy the first campaign but it didnt completely win me over, plague knights campaign and beyond was what really made this an all time greats for me. It’s one of very few games that gets the NES+SNES platforming appeal 100% right and essentially surpasses most games of the day, with almost perfect pacing, challenge and level design. IT helps that the whole world and story and look is charming as all hell. It’s an easy game to love and the more you play it the more that feels justified. Being PACKED with great content is also a plus. If you liked the first campaign you can just keep going through a set of campaigns about as good that only really rehash some level assets. I would say its one of the best 2D platformers ever for me, if not quite my true number 1.

ALSO JAKE KAUFMAN KNOCKS IT OUT THE PARK WITH THIS SOUNDTRACK

Since i have little else to add to the shovel knight discussion, here’s my ranking/thoughts on each campaign

Plague of shadows. BEST storyline, great levels with a really cool gameplay gimmick, the characters are all cute and the ending really makes me feel for him. both sorry for him at first and then a very real AAAAAAAWWWWWWWWW for LOVE

King of cards. king knight is just fun as hell to play as, he doesnt have that many tools but his movement is just crazy fun and i love the flair in all his animations. also has that rad final boss. joustus is ok i guess.

Shovel of hope. uuuuuuh what can i even say about this. its good, and the melancholy dream bits add a lot to the mood of the story. we’ve already analysed this campaign within an inch of its life i dont think i can say anything new. wish we could fight the battletoads on pc.

Specter of torment. still fun and i appreciate the tone change, but i didnt care as much for the characters and the mega man-esque level select doesnt suit shovel knight imo. specter knight has a lot of fun movement options though. mainly i just love GRINDING and the diagonal slash. i dont give a fuck about reize

Nier Automata

I feel a tiny bit ashamed i have so little to say about this considering it is one of the most emotional experiences i have ever had with a story. If i lsten to the final version of weight of the world i still cry just from remembering this game and how it made me feel. i think its one of the greatest narratives of the century but i can barely get across the appeal to anyone who hasnt already played it. its a story about hope, despair and the nature of the human race that never feels like its preachy or pretensious or taking on more than it can handle. it made me feel all kinds of emotions deeply and intensely, it genuinely made me burst into tears about 10 times, maybe more. even putting aside the ggrand narrative, theres so many cool character moments and bits of world building and visual eements and tragic little side stories that you would need a whole book to talk about them all while doing any real justice to them. i loved it so much that im paying £70 to see an orchestra do the soundtrack live. I want to hug and kiss 2b and 9s better. i just love it deeply and i find it hard to explain why it makes me feel that way, but its a dark beautiful and hopeful story where every moment feels earned. the despair of the story giving way to genuine hope with the rest of the world helping you fight for it is such an intensely emotional moment that you could never replicate outside of this kind of story and medium. how the fuck do i explain that to anyone that doesnt already get it. I’m glad this game exists

Metal Gear Rising 

Well, complete tone shift here. Platinum made a lot of great action games in the last decade that all dig into that same itch for DODGE SLOW MOTION BANG BANG BANG alongside great soundtracks, visuals and awesome set piece moments. Just intense, flashy, awesome combat. Picking a favorite of the decade was the hard part, because a platinum game had to be one of my faves of the decade. The closest was transformers, but mgr has a couple of things about it that put it above the rest of the platinum catalog for me.

The story actually works very well at still being metal gear while in the platinum formula, its about the cycle of violence and FINDING YOUR OWN PURPOSE and it works weirdly well. The strangest part is that it feels like a legitimate sequel to metal gear 4 tonally while still being the crazy action game it is

Raiden is just super fun to play as, while I’ll always miss the DODGE SLOWMO in a platinum game parry and zandatsu give a great flow to fights and there’s real exhilaration to parrying a hard chain of attacks and tearing out a bunch of enemies spines at once every time

raiden is also just  a fun protag, it truly allows me to embrace that kind of stereotypical edgy cool anime swordsman he embodies

BEST PLATINUM SOUNDTRACK DO NOT @ ME

Bosses just rule

one of the best final bosses ever, in my opinion? maybe that’s controversial, but armstrong gets an insane amount of characterization and pure PRESENCE out of such a small amount of screen time and the fact he feels like such a perfect rival to raiden so quickly is kind of nuts to me. within about half an hour you are ready for the ultimate final showdown with everything at stake, and then the gameplay 100% delivers on that with a fight that is challenging as hell and just feels climatic and intimidating. its a little thing, but having this dude just smack you around with his hands and almost no fighting skill after a game filled with crazy flippy cyborg ninjas makes him feel TOUGH and the way you finish him off? it just rocks, plain and simple. I don’t think i need to justify slices a massive dudes chest open and ripping out his giant still beating robot heart as the music climaxes and our cool edgy protag literally says WE’RE DONE HERE. truly, it has to be this way.

Gunvolt Chronicles Luminous Avenger IX 

For fast twitchy 2d platformers this barely beat out Katana Zero and Touhou Luna Nights, but i think its just a little better. The skill ceiling on this game is high as hell and once you really get to grips with it, its an experience you cant find anywhere else. its just satisfying as hell to be able to get through the point where you can ZOOM  through these levels by making use of copen’s dash and lock-on and weapons well enough. once you get good enough to get through a hole level without touching the ground, you just cant go back. I liked this enough to get an S rank on almost every level. this game just rules, man.

story, art and music are all great as well. but they pale in importance next to zippy jetpack zoom zoom fun time.

also great for having a cool twist that i genuinely did not see coming at all

Final Fantasy XV   

For context, my experience of FFXV was not the base game so i cannot personally address the concerns of the version at launch, which i hear from others was a total mess! The game has been updated and changed so much that it is probably almost unrecognizable aside from the absolute base aspects of it. The version i am talking about is, as far as we know, the “final” version released right before Episode Ardyn. There was of course an update after this, but it only added DLC compatibility and a few items, so it means very little in the grand scheme. I also played all of the dlc and watched all the periphery material to get the full, messy disjointed experience. it is also worth noting that the only other FF game i have played is the classic title Mario Hoops 3 on 3 Basketball. I feel it important to tell you this before getting into things so that you can have a full idea of the perspective i come at the game from.

This was chosen over Mario Odyssey and someone will probably kill me for that. I just think its a great emotional story that does a fantastic job of making you care for all the characters, and the world feels massive and full of cool stuff to see. It’s my favorite open world game and i love The Boys.  its not the kind of thing i usually play but i think it genuinely had a great story and its a very fun game to just explore and spend time in. ffxv truly understands the emotional bond between The Lads and it is fun to kill big monsters with your party

(they kinda ruin the last cutscene in english, in japanese he says I LOVE YOU GUYS and it makes me cry but in english he goes U GUYS ARE THE BEST which just isnt the same. a small nitpick though. a lot of this game made me cry regardless, its just great at creating an emotional bond)

I admire the insane level of ambition in the visuals and scope, and i bought every dlc for it because it was just that good. the ifrit boss fight and all the giant monsters are just amazingly epic in scale. the “found a cool rock” post is what i truly admire about this game summed up. 

all the ancillary material for the game is great and worth getting into, with the exception of the Comrades multiplayer expansion. Everything else adds depth to the story and the world without being entirely necessary for you to get through the story. the anime and the dlc all really feel worth getting into without being something you have to see to get The Full Experience

the giant monsters are cool

Scott Pilgrim vs the World: The Game

Being from 2010 this game only just makes it in, but it was my favorite beat em up this decade and a source of great nostalgia for me. It had a pretty big impact on music and art tastes in regards to games, and in retrospect this games existence was very much a dream team scenario. Paul Robertson is a great sprite artist who does a lot of good work, Anamanaguchi have gone on to become one of my favorite bands (another winter is still one of their best tracks imo) and at the time this came out i was obsessed with scott pilgrim. That plus the beat em up gameplay makes this kind of a perfect blending of a lot of my specific tastes. Playing this brings me back to the time in my school life that i played it very distinctly, a more comfortable time in my life for sure, and i think the game still stands up excellently. I hope that someday it will get a rerelease so others can enjoy it. I give this another play through every year or so, but i wish id gotten the dlc while it was still available

Doom

ITS VIOLENT ITS FAST ITS FUN ITS METAL

i like this game because of the intense adrenaline rush and violent catharsis it gives me, essentially a constant dopamine rush

fun game good

Undertale

I’m glad i got to this before the massive wave of spoilers and popularity came about. It’s a great story with some fun gameplay, and i think SANS UNDERTALE was one of the best boss fights this decade. Its a shame that for so many new players this experience is going to be ruined by spoilers

Persona 5 

Danganronpa 2 and fallout new vegas were close contenders for this last spot. I actually made a post about my thoughts on this game before https://journaloftomfooleryandjapery.tumblr.com/post/184341270554/nue-is-great-love-his-goofy-design-when-life-will but essentially 

Essentially, its got a great cast of characters, a cool slick look, great monster designs, a fun gameplay loop of collecting monsters and grinding stats while waiting for the next big event, and a surprisingly good story

No idea if royal is any good, but its on a pretty small list of games that i might actually take the time to replay

[aretherelesbians]

Are There Lesbians? Yes

What Happens: Androids are built by YoRHa to fight the machines and take back earth for humans. In this JRPG you play as androids 2B, 9S and A2 as they battle for earths future.

The Verdict: I think it’s safe to say that NieR: Automata is now one of my favourite games. It was certainly the best I played (read, started) in 2017, and I played Life is Strange: Before the Storm and I love that series, so you know it’s serious.

The gameplay in NieR: Automata is really interesting. For the most part it plays like a reasonably standard hack n slash RPG but the gameplay changes depending on who you play as. I also enjoyed being able to combine ranged pod attacks with melee attacks. For this reason I liked playing as 2B and A2 the most. Many of the hacking minigames involved when you play as 9S are required to beat enemies and I was incredibly bad at them. In fact, I would often change my difficulty level to easy (thank goodness you can do that in battle) because I just got so frustrated with constantly dying. That being said, the hacking minigames where there were only static blocks to break were very satisfying. Basically any time I'm being shot at and not on the ground was a stressful time for me. I really like being able to hack and slash and shoot and then cartwheel away.

I did find some of the set controls a bit difficult - a lot of the buttons are close together and I often accidentally changed weapons when I just wanted to heal myself! In long battles, holding the trigger down to shoot while also jamming on the light and heavy attacks did make my wrist hurt. I'm planning to play it again and might try reconfiguring the controls, there are a few forums which recommend it, in fact.

I know this because I loved NieR: Automata so much that when I finished I immediately went and looked through the wiki. It turns out its actually part of a series and now I want to track down the previous game, however I am annoyed because apparently there were two versions and the "real" version was only released in Japan?! It's so rude. I didn't know this until I finished the game, however, so I very much enjoyed trying to find out as much backstory as I could through talking to people and discovering certain records scattered throughout the map. Speaking of the map, I really like a nice detailed map and I was disappointed to find that the map actually expands further than where you can explore - why is it there if I can't go visit? I'm a total completionist so this was very frustrating for me. In the same vein, before/after certain story events you can no longer do some of the quests unless you go back. After you finish the game you can unlock "debug" mode and chapter select which allows you to go back to each chapter, but for reasons which shall remain  untold, I no longer have any of my save files and don’t have this feature any more. I don't have any real regret to be honest as I am already looking forward to playing through the entire game again! I'm in such a slump having finished it – NieR: Automata is all I want to play, but also I want to have a bit of time away from it to think about it, and also play other things because... I finished the game? And I have so many games to play?

With the gameplay discussion over let’s get to the real stuff - representation. There were a good amount of lesbians in NieR: Automata, although the representation of women in general was a bit… eh (2B pantyshots I’m looking at you… wait, that came out wrong…). This isn’t to say that the women in the game were particularly helpless or that they suffered from the sexy angry stereotype. The majority of characters in the game are women, and I greatly appreciate that. It’s just that a lot of the outfits felt like they came straight from male fetishes. Why does the split in 2B skirt have to go so high and why does she flash us every time she jumps? I’ve played Bayonetta and I can respect a lady who likes to dress sexy, but the appearance of many of the androids like 2B and A2 doesn’t make them look particularly… old, and that bothers me a little. Especially when you just know there’s got to be a lot of porn of them out there.

While NieR: Automata leans towards objectification of its leading ladies, the lesbians were strangely untouched by this trope. They were so good!!! My favourite is the conversation between 2B and her operator 6O where 6O is sad because a girl she liked rejected her, it was so cute! There is also a very moving quest that you can do where you have to go and find out what happened to an androids girlfriend! I strongly suspect that there is more to the A2 and Andromeda relationship that isn’t explicitly stated, but there is enough explicit wlw romance that I don’t mind just keeping that as a headcanon (though I also really want more of that back-story, GIVE ME THE BACKSTORY). As I mentioned, the representation of women has a lot to be desired but I really liked the handling of the wlw relationships, they were romantic without being gratuitous, and didn’t feel like they were being shoe-horned in to increase sales or anything (wow, the bar is so low). Like the rest of the game, the characterisation and storylines of the wlw characters was near perfect.

Despite the GF dubbing it “The Loud Panty Game,” NieR: Automata has earned a very large place in my heart, to the point where my obsession with it may soon rival that of Kingdom Hearts. It is a beautifully made game and ticks all my boxes – gameplay, aesthetics and storyline. If you only play one game from 2017 (sorry LiS: Beyond the Storm), make sure that it is NieR: Automata.

[bahamutgames]

Afterthoughts S: Definitive Edition

Game: DRAGON QUEST XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age Definitive Edition (September 27, 2019)

Console: Xbox One (Via Xbox Game Pass)

Hey, it’s me again! It feels like it’s been forever since I last beat a big game with a lot of stuff to talk about. But the last time was actually only a month ago with New Super Lucky’s Tale. In the mean time I’ve been playing a couple of smaller games, tiny indie titles, a few fighting games. But nothing that I couldn’t summarize in a small twitter thread (which you can follow my twitter here if you want to see my art or just support me shilling my other accounts.)

Anyway! Just got done with another major RPG! After Nier Automata, I knew this was a game I really wanted to play before my Game Pass subscription expired. And after toiling away at it for the past month, I’m finally ready to give you all my thoughts on Dragon Quest 11!  As always, this isn’t meant to be review. But just a general throw up of my thoughts and feelings after beating the game, because I love talking so much. As such, this shouldn’t be taken as a serious critique of the game, and shouldn’t be expected to be well written or thought out. Please do check out the game if it interests you at all!

SPOIL WARNING FOR DRAGON QUEST 11 AHEAD! GONNA TALK ABOUT THE WHOLE PACKAGE HERE, AS A FAIR WARNING

Opening

Prior to this, the only Dragon Quest game I had played was DQ 8: Journey of the Cursed King on Nintendo 3DS. I liked it, and thought it was pretty good. But wasn’t perfect and felt a little unnecessarily tedious to get through. But when 11 came out, I saw a ton of people saying it was an amazing RPG. People I followed who weren’t really into RPGs (as far as I knew) were raving about it. So I was really interested to give it a shot myself, but didn’t have the chance until I got game pass.

Stuff I liked

Where to begin? This is a 60 hour game so there’s a lot to talk about. I think first and foremost I just wanna gush about how pretty this game is! The graphics are amazing, I love how the environments are realistic but super brightly colored and saturated, making for ton of gorgeous areas that I couldn’t stop myself from taking pictures of. And Akira Toriyama’s just being placed in these beautiful worlds look so good and amazing. Without a doubt, especially considering its more on the realistic side, this is one of the nicest looking RPGs I’ve played.

Speaking of which, I really loved the character designs. Toriyama does fantastic work that I really like with pretty much everything, but his work on RPGs always tend to be my favorites. The designs for all the main teammates looked super good and all the monsters were really cool looking too. He really knows how to design cool looking dragons, this guy just gets it. On the same not of characters, the characters are fantastic. I really love everyone on the main team (my favorite was probably Serena.) They’re all super fun and I love the way they interact and really seem like a group of good friends. It was great to see how they all interact and work together. A scene that particularly sticks out is when they all forge a new sword of light together, which was fantastic.

I also thought the story and world was cool. Similar to my thoughts on DQ8, the story is pretty simple and easy to follow, but that doesn’t take away from it. It kind of feels like a fairy tale told on a grand scale. I love the idea of the Luminary, and Serenica being reborn into twins is awesome, Erdwin’s Lantern was a cool idea. And of course, Yggdrasil being a huge ass tree flying in the sky is absolutely the best thing ever, that’s so cool. ALSO, I have to give special shoutouts to Mordegon’s Sword of Darkness, coolest thing on the entire planet, I love swords with freaky giant eyes frantically looking around on them.

Lastly, I really liked the gameplay and combat of this game. I thought the way battles are set up as still being traditional turnbased combat but with the ability to freely walk around the field and look at the arenas was awesome. And getting to walk up to teammates to see their thoughts mid battle is super cool. Of course I loved all the different spells you can learn, and all the abilities you get through level ups. A new feature in this one (at least it’s new to me) is the Pep Up state, which is also cool. Particularly because it allows for Crossover Attacks between teammates, which is always the best thing an RPG can include, but most RPGs just choose not to. But DQ11 has it in spades and it ROCKS, there’s so much cool and genuinely useful crossover moves I didn’t even get to see all of them. And a final cool piece of the battle system was the ability to actually change equipment and teammates mid battle. I’m unsure if I’ve ever played a game that allowed for this (though I know they exist) but I thought it really made it feel like you could make use of your whole team and all your equipment. Being able to change teammates and what weapons they use for appropriate strategies was super fun.

Stuff I didn’t like

And, I did really like DQ11. I think I might even like it more than 8. There’s a ton of improvements. I feel like it’s less stingy with EXP, I feel like it was all around just easier to navigate and handle. But I still had a fair amount of issues with the game. Particularly in the- say it with me if you know what’s coming- post Yggdrasil content!! Prior to Yggdrasil, the game was buttery smooth. I flew through the whole thing and loved every second of it with minimal roadblocks (as opposed to DQ8 which roadblocked me at every boss.) And by the time I reached Yggdrasil, I realized I had been playing for 30 hours and didn’t even realize it! That’s awesome and pretty impressive considering I’ve played shorter games that felt like double that.

So, the game starts to crawl a little bit before Yggdrasil in my opinion. Once you have to start looking for the orbs, the game just kinda teeters for a bit there randomly. Like, the orbs are meant to be kind of a big deal, and yet the purple and whichever one you find in the bird dungeon thing (lol) basically get no fanfare. It felt like they were forgotten about and just had to be thrown in at the last second. Now, you could argue that the whole mural thing and the bird boss were those orbs’ fanfare. But it still felt so odd to me. Then, Yggdrasil falls.

I liked the post Yggdrasil stuff, I really did. I thought it was all pretty great from a story and character point of view. And getting to see the world that was so beautiful be corrupted and filled with powerful monsters was neat. I loved Sylvando’s whole parade thing, and every one else’s was cool too. But that’s kinda it. The whole section just drags along as you play with most of your team just gone and it goes so slow. And a lot of it really felt like it could have been condensed down a bit, I mean they don’t even show you what happened to Serena. Which I guess was because of what happened to Veronica but, still?

Again, it’s good story content and I don’t necessarily want any of it removed. But damn man, it really grinds to halt. And I also felt like it got really brutal during this part for no reason, kind of out of nowhere. The skeleton spectral sentinel, Gloomivore, and Booga were MASSIVE hurdles for me to get over randomly. And it got so bad I genuinely considered dropping the game because I just didn’t have the patience. It felt like an NES game again out of nowhere. Now, I do want to blame this on maybe not use the character builder right, or something. But still it was just so annoying out of nowhere. Thankfully I found the perfect strategy of Oomphle on Hendrick, Sap on the enemy, then have Hendrick spam Unbridled Blade, which was foolproof and beat every boss after that.

Thankfully once Serena joins your team again, and everyone is there (minus one aha) the game really picks up steam again. Everything after that was a breeze and went by without any issues. I think I hit one roadblock afterwards and it was pretty easy to just grind past. So I don’t know what happened there. The only other part I have a problem with is I do feel like the game ends rather abruptly. Like, not majorly. But I wouldn’t have minded seeing more about what happens between Eleven and Gemma or something. But that’s what the post game content is for I guess!

Some other nitpicks are that, I didn’t care about the music again. I think I liked more music in this one than DQ8, but still I’d be hard pressed to actually remember any songs from this game. I’m listening to the OST as we speak and other than the battle theme, I feel like I don’t remember what they sound like at all. And that’s probably cause I hate the composer but hey what can you do? I also wish it was easier to find Metal Slimes. I know they’re meant to be rare but I would’ve appreciated some appearing in the overworld just anywhere outside of the dragon chase scene? Weird to me you have randomly encounter them on the side of other enemeis.

Outside of that, uh. I think the Tockles were SUPER tick-tocked onto the game? It seemed like they were going to be massively important, but they just weren’t? I felt like you could’ve removed them and it would have made no change. I also thought there was gonna be WAY more time travel stuff. The scenes where you see the past are some of the best imo. Meeting Chalky from the past, playing as Rab in his kingdom, helping Eleven’s dad pass on. But these don’t feel enough to name the game “Echoes of an Illusive Age” if that makes sense? It just felt like there was supposed to be way more stuff with the Tockles and Time Travel stuff that just didn’t happen. 

Now that I’m remembering it, it felt like there was TONS of stuff built up that just didn’t really go anywhere. Another big one is the whole deal with Erdwin’s lanter? Who was the guy who cut it in half? What was the deal with the lantern? Why did it fall? What was up with the dark Tockle? Wanna give any information on that? No? Okay. But if I had to guess, these all are explored heavily in the post game content, which is cool but sadly I did not have the time to play it. Maybe one day I’ll pick up a copy of the game and play through it fully.

Final Thoughts

Yeah it was good.

I am a huge fan of RPGs, but Dragon Quest just hadn’t fully clicked with me. I played 8 and liked it, but wasn’t blown away. I wouldn’t say I was blown away by this one either, but I am certainly very impressed and am eagerly anticipating whatever Dragon Quest 12 ends up being. This series is super founded in tradition (even if that tradition is detrimental to the gameplay imo?) but this game felt like a true evolution of that tradition while still holding onto it in the right ways. Are there ways to improve the game? Oh yeah, tons! But this is already a good step in the right direction. I will certainly be visiting the series more eventually (particularly 3, 4, and 5 are ones I’m curious about.) But I will probably emulate them to cheat when I run into roadblocks again.

After playing this, I also went back to play as Hero in Smash. They are still one of the best, if not my favorite character in the game. I think they are so fun and I love the randomness element that comes with them. Their stage is great too!

Also, seeing this gorgeous RPG with Akira Toriyama art in it made me REALLY want a new Blue Dragon. Like, REALLY bad. Please Microsoft if you’re listening PLEASE give us a new Blue Dragon. I don’t care what genre of RPG it is just give us a new one please I’m begging. Make it look like DQ11 and it will be the best game of all time.

Okay but enough of that. Thanks for skimming through or just letting me talk for a bit. For some reason the longer I held this one off, the less and less I felt like talking about it? Which is strange cause it’s a big game and I felt like I had tons to say during it. The only reason I even finished this and decided to post it was cause I already started it. Basically what I’m saying is that don’t be surprised if I just start making REALLY teeny tiny posts here instead of big rambles like this one.

But until then, I have work to do. I played through the Ty 2 HD remake on Switch recently and loved it all over again. I will maybe talk about that later. At the moment I’m playing Tales of Vesperia. Thanks again for putting up with me ramble about games, see you next time! Play something you love that puts you in an adventurous mood!

[nullset2]

Modern Japanese Action Game Design

I'm currently playing through Platinum Games's Nier:Automata (which, by the way, it's a fucking masterpiece holy shit I love you Yoko Taro) and I can't avoid but notice a trend in the Gaming industry and the AA/AAA games it's produced as of late and I wanted to talk about them here.

First, I reiterate, I'm in love with that game. It has layers upon layers upon layers of depth. Of meaning. Its characters, its gameplay design, the lore, the world, the numbers, Mason! What do they mean!?!?!?, HOT DAMN! I love it... it may actually be a better Death Stranding than Death Stranding ever was (by the way, Kojima, you cheeky dude! I can see that you played Nier Automata and you got inspired by it ;)!) --AND it has a cute robot babe!.

(Say it with me: CUTE! ROBOT! BABE!)

Not to say that this is something inherently bad by all; you know what Ebert said, on the subject of everything being a repetition of something else: it's not about the "what", it's about the how, in storytelling.

How many stories in total does humanity have in its aquis? Like, for real, when you actually boil them down to the archetypes? You got the hero's journey, rags to riches, comedies, tragedies... all other stories are just permutations of these, aren't they? What matters is the values with which each of them are presented to you --I can watch Snow White 10,000 times, if there's a new, cool directoy behind it every time, right?

But anyway.

Since FROM SOFTWARE's Demon's Souls (yes, with an apostrophe) came out and souls-likes became popular, I think it set a trend and we've entered a new era for the Japanese action game and I wanted to discuss their aspects in this article, briefly. Cue the game journo saying it's the Dark Souls of...!. Yadda Yadda, right?

Japanese action games since Demon's Souls have the following elements, in my opinion:

Strong emphasis in Single Player design

This, I actually really like! Because, as much as multiplayer-only games are great, sometimes you need a fucking break. I want to be immersed in a Creator's vision of the World. I want to be told a great story. I want games that will still be amazing to play --not to mention, actually playable-- 20 years from now. I want to see speedrun communities form around new games.

The Single Player game must not die!

An element of pseudo-"permadeath".

Modern games use "permadeath" with small benefits, borrowing from rouguelikes, to engross the player. There's more at stake if losing to an enemy means that you lose all of your progress (even if this is superficial, like in Nier, where losing means that you have to collect your previous items and Experienve Points from your old body). It is usually rather easy to restore your previous condition, so the game implements this as a "minor penalty" to the player for not understanding its mechanics instead of a full blown game over.

Focus on hard, unforgiving enemies

Which leads me to the next point. It is very common that Japanese games have several different OHKOs, or enemies that can spawn on you unpredictably and without warning, which can work as a very ~bullshit~ succint way of setting up player expectation and direction/conveyance for the game. Don't go that way if there's a horde of skeletons waiting to fuck you up in one hit, until you're stong enough to bear it, capice?

Uncancellable animations that leave you open for long periods of time and for which you have to plan ahead

Which means that the player has to not be a superman who can take tons of bullets on a whim. Movement has to be slow and demand attention from the player. Triggering the right or wrong movement can make or break the current run. You have to be mindful of your stamina/estus flask/Mana at all times and plan ahead. The game demands dedication from its players and asks them upfront to learn its mechanics and play by its rules.

Hybrid, Internet-powered "multiplayer" features

Let's not forget that people do want Online games, but maybe... let's not do what everyone else is doing! Dark Souls' Signs and invasions, Death Stranding's Structures, Signs and Likes. You can drop a poem when you die in Nier, for the enjoyment of everyone! Wow! Emergent play is the name of the game.

Can I just mention tangentially, by the way that Nintendo actually implemented the memetic "Green Demon" stuff in Super Mario Maker 2? Japanese game designers are well aware of the Internet, my dudes.

Open world design with few, if ANY, instructions as to where to go

This one is very important and --as I'll elaborate about in a bit--, I think this was created as a direct response to modern game trends. Players want to feel like the game respects their intelligence and is not just a covert Rollercoaster ride of a single player game, of which, all of us have already played a ton of in the PS2 era. Allow people to discover the game world on their own terms, at their own pace, however they see fit. If they can sequence break --great! Allow them to do so, makes for cooler speedruns anyway, and keeps people talking about your game more, right?

"Environmental Storytelling"

And since players want to take charge and take things into their own hands, present the story in small nuggets scattered through the game world. Make them connect the dots and go online to talk about it instead of subjecting them to 80 hours of cinematics that try way too fucking hard to play like a Hollywood movie but end up feeling like cheesy deviantart fanfiction written by a 16 year old (Kojima games, for example). Make them go on message boards and talk to other players about it.

Progressive uncovering of the game world by "chunks", usually triggered by visiting a landmark or completing a mission

(This is totally borrowed from Assassin's Creed, by the way)

Focus on big, bombastic enemy design that cover the whole screen

You gotta showcase your tech at some point! Let people see how far games have come since Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo!

Fun mechanics for traversal, emphasizing engagement with the player inherent to the movement itself

Finally, make movement interesting in some way. Give the players a really cool car, make every step be physically simulated in painstaking detail, let them ride their shield like a snowboard down a mountain or let them glide beautifully down sand dunes. There's probably something very Zen and phillosophical in the middle of all these instances of great movement in games.

My thesis is that the Japanese industry started developing games like these in direct reaction to the American game industry and its production values. Games that exhibit traits of the previous at least in a couple ways: Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, Xenoblade, Zelda Breath of The Wild, Final Fantasy XV, Nier, Death Stranding, Sekiro, Bloodborne, et. al.

It's not that American (British? European?) games are bad, I love GTA and Red Dead and I got Fallout in the backburner. I have heard tons of great things about the Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls, The Witcher series. I am totally going to play Cyberpunk 2077 and Sleeping Dogs and Saints Row got me curious. Supposedly Just Cause is the best shit ever. I can appreciate very deeply narrative games, like The Walking Dead, The Last of Us and new experimental ideas like The Order (not very hot about that one).

But as of late and as I grow older, I get the feeling those games have been made more for the aesthetic value of it rather than the game design value, to put it some way, and to be blunt about it, American games are optimized for easy play. Don't think I'm being pedantic. On the contrary, variety is the spice of life, my friend.

Western games have a different strategy for design. They fill hours for the sake of filling hours with cinematics and exponential expansion of its game world rather than to seeking engrossment from the player in the form of, deep, highly skillful games to play.

The reason why this happens, is that now more than ever, the American game sees single-player as a nuisance, or a boring obligation at best --perhaps, merely a way to present a tutorial for newbies, to get them into the Multiplayer ASAP (where the real $$$$$$$$$ lies). Therefore, you shouldn't hold the player back or keep them in the SP for very long. You should make it so the players derive enjoyment from the game from its flow, its fast succession of change, and from the formation of online communities rather than from intricacy.

When you actually want intricacy, you give players................... fucking crafting. Just copy Minecraft, fuck it. Just add a skill tree and a million random classes to make players feel like they're progressing by filling up bars. Trying to appeal to everyone's internal MMO gamer.

And the ultimate concretion of the previous: most games let you skip entire sections if you wish.

Tired of retrying a certain section in Red Dead? Just hit SKIP. Booyah! No obligation, no demands from the game.

Case study: Red Dead Redemption plays itself.

Hahahaha.

Rockstar has used the same loop in all of their open world games for the last 20 years. Every single fucking GTA mission to have ever been releasedfollows the same structure: you drive around to a spot in the game world, watch a cutscene, then drive to another fucking point on the game map while listening to characters blab, watch another cutscene, go through a shooter/stealth section, then watch another cutsccene, and you're done. Wash rinse repeat.

And I think someone sort of confronted them and told them the truth, that nobody really likes just driving around and doing nothing else but listening to rants, if you just want to watch the story unfold. Might as well just "cut to the (literal) chase", right? Or might as well just start shifting GTA into an always-online game at this point, right? (Which they've done kind of majestically with GTA:O btw).

And what was their answer?

"How about... when you start a mission, um... just hit X button to go into "Cinematic Mode". Voila! You don't have to drive anymore!!!!!!!!!!!! Wow! Just take in the sights! And remember you can skip the game if you want! Just watch the cutscenes! Please play GTA:O please!"

Most other games have variations of this. A "super easy" mode that just emphasizes the storytelling experience.

Some Japanese games do this too, though (particularly Nintendo games). Maybe it's just a sign of the times, of gamers being old enough that they have families and responsibilities to attend to, and whose time should be respected by the video game.

In conclusion, this is definitely a trend to watch. Souls-likes have definitely become influential like no other, for the better. Great games they are. I get the feeling that this is the anthithesis to the "game that plays by itself". It's like they wanted to "come of age" and deliver robust games like their counterparts in america were, but they'll be damned if they lose the soul. The soul which gave us Famicom games. The soul of the arcade game, if you may, with several degrees of derivation, adapted for a new era.

[kronecker-delta]

Cage Zone Thoughts

(Or some attempted guesses about upcoming Android Hell. While making numerous comparisons to Nier: Automata. And a little bit of Nier too. As well as considering some of Cage’s faults, particularly in sexual themes and bad writing.)

As such, spoilers and long, long post discussing such matters below.

I’m not what one would call a fan of David Cage’s work. I’d even say that I think his games are generally just kind of bad, and bad in a way where I’m not sure how they could be fixed.

Because ultimately they’re narrative experiences that have bad narratives. It also doesn’t help that I feel like Cage doesn’t have a central theme a lot of the time. Not a plot, he’s got too much plot in some cases, but an idea as to what the story is supposed to say.

What exactly is the point of Beyond Two Souls? What is Jodie’s life supposed to instruct the player about when they see it through to the end.

Or Indigo Prophecy. Or Omikron especially.

(Heavy Rain is more coherent, if deeply crippled by some parts because it manages to have a point that is sometimes self-sabotaged by other components.)

I bring this up as David Cage has given some... interesting interviews of late as to the direction and story of his next project. In once instance he tries to be clear that there is no political inspiration or greater point he is trying to illustrate. (Kotaku)

Yet in another he claims that the violence that will be an option for the Android rebellion is meant to draw the player in with similarities in real world incidents. To have a message regarding the nature of violent action in protest and revolutionary movements. (The Verge)

Obviously these two statements stand in some measure of opposition. A narrative can’t simultaneously have no authorial message it intends to impart and a clear one meant for the audience. There are further worrying elements. Such as David Cage first saying that it was about Androids and science fiction content as a focus and then later talking about how the story was about humanity.

While still avoiding a ‘big message.’

Perhaps it’s prejudice on my part, but I’m not sure one can write about themes like this, or really anything that might attempt for deep emotional investment from the audience, if there isn’t some fundamental core idea to your attempt.

This fear is what has brought about this essay. Since I’m now concerned that David Cage is going to handle this plot in the same way as his earlier works, which have quite a creative fingerprint to them, I think I can make some educated guesses on the likely direction and potential missteps that will follow.

Suddenly Ensouled

I suspect that the emergence of Android consciousness will not be planned or desired. While there remains the potential that there is some supernatural cause (and given previous stories some element of that being outright or left on the cutting room floor is quite likely) I think even in the case of a mundane malfunction being the origin it will be seen as a problem.

The Android Markus is supposedly ‘special’ for being able to free androids. What this means is entirely speculative at the moment, but I will guess that this ability is not common or easily understood. Cage likes mystery plots, particularly blunt ones where the question the audience has it upfront and with them for a long time. More over the trailers for the other character Kara point out an even stronger trend towards spontaneous intelligence.

This isn’t bad really, even if it’s common. The issue is, at least to me, that its been done enough times that if that’s all you’re doing with it you should really shoot for more.

Take Nier: Automata. There’s an outright robot rebellion plot in it. That is risen and dropped in the span of thirty minutes. That the Machine Lifeforms killed their creators isn’t the important part. The questions is why they did that and what they will do now.

(Much like the background of humanity’s death in that game is a footnote. The story is about what is supposed to be done after that point.)

I’m not too certain about what to expect give his previous games. I’m not optimistic that he’ll be able to swing it into something novel and interesting.

*Kill* and *Fuck*

Especially given how gratuitously exploitative his use of sex and violence has been before. A lot has been said about unneeded shower scenes and female characters placed in peril. I’m not of the mind that this comes from a place of sexualized degradation or some such, but instead cheapness.

It’s cheap and easy to make the audience care about a character by making them a young, attractive woman, and having her almost get killed or sexually assaulted (or both, as is not entirely a unique incident in David Cage games). There’s something schlocky and fake about the way those scenes are used though, that makes them not feel right for the stories they appear in. The serial killer and the dance club strip scene don’t really fit well in Heavy Rain (especially not one after another) and those aren’t the only offenders.

The birthday party torment in Beyond Two Souls is especially egregious in how far and how radically it shifts into tormenting the main character in order to draw out emotions from the player. It’s also not earned yet, as Jodie simply hasn’t been around long enough for that scene to have the weight that is desired. It’s simply assumed that the player will care as it’s about a vulnerable teenage girl crying.

Compare that with the slow descent of 9S. His emotional destruction takes the better part of the last third of Nier: Automata and while shocking, does not come across as unrealistic once it begins. Further it is not played as heavy handed. His love/hate (fuck/kill) relationship with 2B is symbolized by events that occur during gameplay, and not merely stated outright to the player. As I said, Heavy Rain does have a central theme and message (how far would one be willing to go to save the life of one they care about) but said theme is amazingly blunt in realization.

(Or ever better, Pascal. Making the player care about an obviously non-human lifeform grieving over even less human like creatures to such an extent is far beyond what I expect to see in Detroit Become Human.)

Not bad, but definitely worrying to me if David Cage is going to approach social issues. Especially given how extremely cliche, if not outright stereotypical his stories have become when they did such things before.

Added in that he will now be working with characters that are outright meant to be exploited by definition, and I’m extremely wary. I can only contemplate the potential (highly emotionally manipulative) scenes of coerced sexual activity that I see has highly likely in Detroit Become Human. It fits his previous work too well at this point. Once might be called a fluke, but David Cage has defaulted to such scenes for their emotional weight multiple times in the same game at this point.

Furthermore I doubt David Cage is going to play too far from his comfort zone. Kara is likely the designated subject for such roles, and I doubt I will see a switch up in how this works. The switch of support and physical action as seen with 2B and 9S is unlikely to be part of the story. So no Markus being rescued from military androids or Kara being the first to take a human life to save him.

(I suspect the opposite is more likely.)

Railroads End

I don’t think a story driven game necessarily needs choice. Or more correctly, not all narratives need to care about what the player would prefer to happen. Sometimes that works, but sometimes a tighter, more consistent story can be told without trying to fit different endings even if differing routs may be used to get there.

I bring this up as David Cage has had some rocky attempts at choice based gameplay. Omikron really doesn’t have any, as the central plot and ending is immune to any open world shenanigans the player might get up to. Beyond Two Souls barely has any meaningful choices. There is one centrally narrative choice (at the end) but it doesn’t change the post-game epilogue in a meaningful manner. The world’s still doomed to get Ghost Boned in the Ghost Zone.

Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain have more, with Heavy Rain being the standout by far. Given that Detroit Become Human is going back to the trio of player characters again (or almost quartet that Heavy Rain had) we might have another case where differing endings that allowed for player characters to die while the plot continues on despite that point. I found that to be quite a bit of fun in truth, if not enough to overcome the other story issues and such.

So while I’m hopeful that this might be a return to better elements, I’m none the less alarmed that David Cage’s decision to shoot for a more cerebral plot than just a mystery/thriller about a serial killer might not play well. Indigo Prophecy is barely coherent past the halfway point.

Which is one thing I haven’t brought up. Even Heavy Rain has cut content involving an inexplicable psychic link between the serial killer and the main character. Every David Cage game has some rather clumsy mystical elements thrown in. Like the multiple factions of Indigo Prophecy and Omikron or the Navajo part of Beyond Two Souls. I think it’s impossible to guess about this right now, but it’s not at all impossible if the real reason Markus can give other Androids free will is some kind of techo-magic Apple of Knowledge or that Kara might be a actual re-incarnation of a dead woman and/or possessed by a ghost from the Infraworld.

We’ll have to wait and see on those points I suppose.

 Final Note: I haven’t mentioned gameplay at all because it doesn’t matter. David Cage’s games play like ass. They just do. Telltale is better. I don’t even like them and they still are. The complicated quicktime events don’t add an appreciable investment most of the time as they just plain don’t work.

More conventional controls for the majority while saving the weird ‘artsy’ stuff for specific scenes would be better in my opinion and give more weight to them when they happen.

Or, there’s a reason the visual novel stuff in the forest of myth is the my favorite part of Nier. It’s not anywhere else in the game really. By being used sparingly it has more of an impact.

(Had another essay, but it wasn’t focused on Cage material so I wrote this one up instead. Hopefully I can finish that one too eventually.)

[u23art]

A LOOK AT NIER AUTOMATA

This one was another 40 hour campaign or at least 34 hours, yet this time there was so much more context to fill out all the tasks I performed, at least compared to Final Fantasy XV. Out of all the games revealed at E3 2015, this one particularly stood out to me. An abstract RPG installment made by the Platinum folks, sign me up. So finally the game released and I had a go at it.

So this game is the furthest thus far in the chronology of Yoko Taro’s wackydoodle brainchild timeline of games after the Drakengard games from the PS2 and Nier from the PS3. Humanity has been long since driven from the Earth, and in its stead have sent the humanoid androids of the Yorha organization to fight off threats. Specifically robots, and before that were some Aliens but they’re not here anymore. You will play as 2B with her sidekick 9S, and proceed to search and destroy just about every machine you see with a sidequest or two or three on the side.

Gameplay here is your typical hack and slash affair, square for light attacks, triangle for heavy attacks and a trigger button with lay out a volley of shots from your floating pod assistant. A small complaint I had was I couldn’t find the combinations of joystick direction and button presses like I would in Bayonetta, Revengence or other Platinum games in general to achieve different moves. Handling 2B on the other hand feels cool, it feels real how they convey forces acting against her. Controlling her became a welcome learning curve. Eventually though, you’ll come to control 9S, and in the place of the triangle heavy attack you have a hack attack. It’s quick, it’s relatively easy to use and it makes enemy or boss encounters a minor inconvenience. But eventually you get back to hacking and slashing as A2 and you feel cool again.

And honestly, as simple as the gameplay may seem, my true concerns with the game lie in the story structure.

To experience the full scope of the game’s story you have to make the credits role a total of 5 time. These are endings A through E, endings F through Z are joke endings achieved through failing certain missions or performing menial tasks you would think twice to do. I can appreciate this structure to an extent, switching between these perspectives all at once in one playthrough might have come to be jarring and maybe a little confusing to view them all.

But despite this, this structure doesn’t explore the characters enough. We know the scope of the situation, yet the villains feel so ill defined. Adam and Eve had very little weight to them. Heck they barely do anything villainous.

Not to mention the protagonists of the game. Yorha itself is very ill defined, the story never really goes into detail about how long it’s existed, notable achievements, where are the androids created, ect. The same goes for 2B and 9S, there’s little to go off of about their pasts or even if they’ve been alive for very long in the first place. A2 has a little more context going for her, we’re at least given small bits of exposition into the supposed betrayal at the hands of Yorha, it wasn’t much but it was enough to make A2 more likable in my eyes. She has a past, regrets, emotional moments, something that 2B and 9S sadly do not have.

This next point is a bit of a tangent but I’d like to say some words about this game’s hub world.

The hub world is simple and you’ll quickly learn how to traverse it more efficiently. Yet at the same time it can feel bare bones, sure side quests help to liven up the reasons you visit each area. Yet exploration will only bring you so far. there are maybe two instances I can think of where I found “secret areas”. There seem to be secret dungeon areas, but those require a key. I couldn’t figure out how to trigger a quest to get it during my playthrough, and I would have preferred these areas be rewarded through exploration rather than triggering an event.

Also, the map is suspiciously small, the menu has a large amount of blank space outside of the visited areas that I can move my cursor over. This might lead one to believe there is more to discover or this map is unfinished. This was especially pesky when a side quest rewarded me with a giant space port to look at over the horizon of the amusement park but I simply can’t visit it. Even in the huge desert area, the sand storm that acts as a sort of invisible wall feels like it’s masking a wider area to potentially explore.

Bosses here were a bit of a let down, I liked the bosses that I fought on foot for the most part. Engel at the beginning posed a bit of a challenge before I was shifted to the mech portion of the fight. And the opera singer gave me an enticing bullet hell fight on foot and a cool arena to fight in as well. The rest of the boss fights with huge enemies simply take the form of a bullet hell shooter in a mech, these are slow, and they’re kinda boring. It’s just waves of enemies against a blue-ish background rushing past me, nothing really going for it in the ways of creativity.

The ending for this game leaves me conflicted, more specifically, ending E. This was the final canon ending out of the 26 endings. It was fitting, yet it robbed me of a big loud climax. I need something huge to fight for the story to lead up to. Yet it was fitting for the bleak world I was given.

Lastly music, it’s haunting and atmospheric for the beginning portions of the game. Although the music will intensify for boss fights, random encounters on the regular map will be accompanied by the same overworld track I’ve heard for the past 30 or so hours that is droning at this point.

There was a point I was going to give this game a 9 out of 10 to get back at Final Fantasy XV, I tried telling myself that the coherent story was a grand step up, but this game simply is not a 9 considering what it amounted to. This game is one of the most unique I’ve played in a long time and it’s story was coherent and full of personality and food for thought. I only have the concerns that I have because I like what the game gave me, but it left me wanting more that it can provide.

I give Nier Automata a 7 out of 10.

P.S this game takes place 10,000 years in the future, I’d be interested to see if there’s a chance this game could be followed up by another installment.

[kaorei-endgame]

So without spoiling stuff... how's that nier treating ya?

Y’know, it’s good! Finished it yesterday! If you’re going in for the story and the narrative quirks, I’d really recommend it.

Without getting into spoilers, I’m just gonna meander. So bail now if that’s not your thing. ‘coz I’m not sure how much concrete I can say, except that it’s fun enough, but also extremely easy, and I suspect I’m getting a little tired of the Platinum gameplay model–or at least, in so far as it being universally applied to any game as a bandage for “better gameplay.” 

Don’t get me wrong, I likes my dodge counters and the LOOK of the combat is plenty slick (cool mirages dodges, and that thing she do with a big sword where she basically handstands on it during the second hit), but as a whole, it was never remotely challenging. I didn’t go out of my way to grind, but even doing a decent amount of sidequests had me always several levels above all plot enemies. Thus, the combat could be smooth and fun, but its balancing never really pushed me hard enough that I felt like I needed to get invested in learning how to actually play it well (y’know, not spamming healing items as needed, practicing/mastering dodge timing instead of just taking my lumps, etc). It could be that my time for “No Items Ever In Devil May Cry Because They Mess Up Your SSS Rank” has passed, and that’s okay, but I also suspect there’s just a fundamental lack of depth here vs. DMC and Bayonetta. As a result, I slotted “move speed up” and other utility chips into my skill layout–and “utility” or “support” is my preference 100% of the time anyway, so w/e–and never felt my damage was suffering or combat took too long for it.

Some cool things I noticed, or had told to me: 1) immediately after a perfect dodge you can hit R1 to do a big AoE counter (the animation for this is superlative) and 2) once you get more than one pod, you can hold the special move button down to charge the attack between all your pods (the animation for this is just the normal animation x3 but that’s still good)

There’s a bunch of dumb pickups that serve an rudimentary, pointless crafting system (but isn’t that pretty much all crafting systems???) So the best moment in the game is when you can buy a chip that automagically hoovers that crap up off the ground as you sprint past–crap that you don’t really want in the first place because all the weapons are more or less the same anyway. And giant gauntlets are super super fun to punch with, even in this easy game (especially if you plug in a chip that creates “a strong shockwave with every attack”), but every gauntlet is pretty much within a standard deviation of every other gauntlet; tho, remember, you do get cool short stories when you level them up:

Automata pulled back a bit from Nier’s kitchen sink gameplay mechanics, which disappointed me, such that I wonder if the Platinumification of it wasn’t a net loss. They leaned more on their polished, pleasing combat, and the rudimentary, half-baked stuff that populated the first game was in shorter supply. Obviously I don’t know how much interplay there was between Platinum and Cavia, and who’s responsible for what gameplay system or what snippet of text or what pacing decision, but I felt as if a lot of things that I considered emblematic of the first Nier were present here in a much more superficial way. Same with a lot of the genre bending–there isn’t a part in this game where you shift from 3D action to text adventure to survival horror in rapid succession. While text adventure stuff still exists, it’s more like set dressing than a game mechanic. This is true of gameplay elements as well. Transitioning from 2D to 3D exists, but it hit me more as flourish than function. Not that the original Nier was Gameplay King, I think that’s pretty well known, but this one swung the pendulum a bit too far towards Ease of Use.

Then again, there were moments in Automata where I thought “well that’s some really inconsistent character writing,” and somehow I let myself be fooled by that, even having played Nier 1, even knowing that these moments of contradiction would exist and be reconciled later–they got me. 

And that’s p. great, because my favorite experiences with art is when I am “got” by it. Often–and I think this mostly about horror games, but it applies here to–I feel like either video games or I have lost their or my capacity to even fool or be fooled in the first place. So that they tricked me in ways I was already ready for them to trick me about…  how many extra points does that get on a review score, when compared to the frame rate, or the latency on the perfect dodge?

Ah, who knows. 

There is just one absolutely crazy thing in the desert, though, that I don’t think is ever involved in a sidequest. I just found it by accident, without context, and I was like… oh hello, you are being very “Nier” right now, game.

Geez, that one song:

But also all the other songs.

In the end, Automata’s messages and themes were a lot more straightforward than I expected, but many of them hit me in this hard, strange way that few games have been able to replicate, and I appreciate this feeling that the vibe of the game has more weight than its plot twists. I love the serene, melancholy nature of Nier’s post-apocalypse, where even “The Resistance” seems to spend more time just living their daily lives than shooting robot guns. While I acknowledge that I’m still basking in the afterglow, it’s hard to think of another recent game that took me like this; certainly I don’t often blitz through 50+ hours of game in less than a week, these days. I wanted something greater from Automata, but how much of that is some instinctual insatiation? I can’t deny that it offered me so much more than almost anything in its class.

It came out at one of those points where I’ve spent a lot of time feeling nothing but aimless/detached/disassociated, and the thing I hate/dread most about these periods is the sense that I am existing on auto-pilot and just doing what’s convenient and/or easy instead of doing things I want to do, but that require effort. I try to be circumspect about my ability/proclivity to use games as simple, low-brain-usage escapism, but there’s also a kind of peace in being able to drown yourself in distraction to cleave off the worst of things. I don’t know. Having Automata be a mirror, a dead world just going through its low-activity cycles, while I feel like I’m just living my life autonomically, it gave me some kind of respite.

Here’s a part I think all should notice (don’t know if this counts as SPOILERS spoilers): http://targetcombo.tumblr.com/post/158342893201/this-happens-in-nier-automata

Finally: I hope someone sees my name, when the time comes :

[oblivianclassic]

Game Ramble: Furi

Furi, by The Game Bakers. Available on PC and PS4.

Come to think of it, I haven’t actually finished all that many video game stories in my lifetime. It wasn’t until I began to deliberately set out to finish games that I realized this. Half-Life 2: Episode 2 sat fallow for months before I finally picked it up to see why everyone wanted Valve to make Half-Life 3 so badly (other than the fact that the Half-Life games are still a high standard of single-player shooter design). Mass Effect 1 and 2 were a pair of rare titles that I played straight through because Shepard/Garrus is my perfectly-calibrated OTP, but I still haven’t gotten around to importing my save into Mass Effect 3. I’ve played through the opening bit of Dragon Age: Origins twice now as two different characters, and stopped shortly after. My Planescape: Torment playthrough is forever stuck at the bit where I think I’m supposed to join one of Sigil’s factions. I got caught up in some massive conversation trees instead. I almost finished all 4 of Warcraft 3’s Reign of Chaos campaigns, but I lost my saves shortly before the last stand against Archimonde. I still feel bad about not seeing Dishonored through to the end. Dark Souls… I might actually return and finish that one day. Playing a Souls game is like riding a bicycle--more muscle memory and mental approach than remembering the plot--and I’m not ready to go Hollow just yet.

There’s just something about playing a game with a linear story that makes me loath to actually finish. Maybe it’s a fear of endings, of seeing something finished and put away, or maybe it’s my tendency to get distracted by new and shiny things promising innovative game mechanics.

So please understand that when I’m saying that Furi defeated me, there’s actually a lot of precedence.

That all said, Furi has defeated me. This isn’t to say that I don’t like Furi, or that I don’t appreciate its challenge. Far from it. But when it comes to Furi’s mix of bullet hell and character-action hack-n-slash, I seem to have run into a wall, figuratively speaking.

Furi is an indie attempt to make an action-y character action hack ‘n slash game - the kind that normally gets made by a Japanese studio and features a lot of physics-defying, animation-cancelling and enemy-juggling action. Furi is a little different, in that it’s made by a French studio called The Game Bakers, and it doesn’t have the bits you’d find in your average Devil May Cry where you fight groups of weaker enemies. Furi is a boss rush game, which is to say that the entire experience consists of a string of big single-enemy set piece boss fights, with bits in between where you walk slowly through some pretty environments while a man wearing a purple rabbit helmet exposits angrily at you.

All you know in the beginning is that you’re some kind of prisoner, fated to be repeatedly brought to the edge of death. You’re then released by the aforementioned purple rabbit-head man, given a sword and a gun, and told that the jailer is the key. Kill him, and you’ll be free. Of course, in a plot twist nobody saw coming, things aren’t quite that simple. You’ve only escaped your initial jail cell, one section of a whole sky-bound prison. There’s a gauntlet of floating islands to traverse, each housing their own jailer, each with their own reason for wanting to keep you locked up. Or perhaps they’re fellow inmates? The story of this game turns out to be fairly straightforward despite a few twists and turns crossed with the rabbit-man’s best attempts at keeping things vague. That said, I will give the game credit for taking risks with one late-game boss and committing to a theme. That as well as taking a page from Spec Ops: The Line and giving the player a not-entirely-obvious choice in a situation where most video games wouldn’t risk it. The story obviously wants to be great, but only manages to be pretty good.

The visuals are much like the story in this respect. The character design work of this game was done by Takashi Okazaki, the man who gave us Afro Samurai (the manga, not the video game), and the game bears a strange but distinctive sci-fi look as a result. Everyone has long, lanky limbs and our main character bears a stream of wavy white locks that drift like seaweed in a gentle current. He also doesn’t seem to wear shoes, which bothered me for a while, though I’m really not sure why. Unfortunately, low-res texture work and model clipping issues don’t do the concept art justice. Judging by the shaders, Furi is attempting to take on a smooth and stylized aesthetic similar to that of something like El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that the limited budget and small team are to blame for the stiff animation work. I understand just how time-consuming animating a game of this type can be, but that doesn’t change the fact that the striking, memorable, and distinct visuals could do with a lot of polish. Then again, considering the size of the dev team, this category could probably be given a pass. Perhaps it was in all in service of the framerate, which stays at a smooth 60 no matter what; an essential part of any fast-paced action title. If so, it was a worthwhile tradeoff. I’ll take a smooth framerate over shinier graphics in a game like this.

Fortunately, both the soundtrack and the gameplay are exceptional. The soundtrack probably deserves its own article and easily stands on its own as something worth buying. Right now. I mean it. Composed by Carpenter Brut, Danger, The Toxic Avenger, Lorn, Scattle, Waveshaper and Kn1ght, it’s a thumping tribute to retro electronica and the perfect accompaniment to energy-ball-dodging, pew pew pew-ing, and laser-sword-swooshing. Whatever atmosphere was lost when I saw an awkward animation was more than made up for by whatever music happened to be playing at the time. My favorite tracks are probably “A Picture in Motion” by Waveshaper, and “What We Fight For”, by Carpenter Brut.

Furi is built around a core set of abilities. The player can dodge, string together up to four strikes with his sword, and make rapid-fire shots with his energy pistol. Each of these moves can be charged up for greater effectiveness. The dodge will go further, and the charged strike and shot can interrupt certain enemy attacks. The player also has a parry move that if timed properly will block melee attacks, reflect projectiles, and open up opportunities to unleash a counter strike on their opponent. It seems like a simple enough system at first glance, but there is a lot to master once the player has a basic grasp of the controls. Parry timing is critical, not only because your health is healed a small amount with every successful parry, but a perfectly timed parry will stun your opponent and allow you to carve off a chunk of their health. Timing charged strikes to interrupt certain boss attacks and knowing when to charge a dodge become important too, though not absolutely essential. The controls are snappy, precise, and perfectly tuned for the sort of exacting and demanding game that Furi is.

With mastery of the controls, I’d imagine that this game will become appealing to speedrunners. Absolute mastery of all the various attack timings and patterns isn’t required to beat the game. Rather, cutting down a boss’s health bar becomes much faster once you figure out a few tricks, and I’m sure there are a lot of people who will make it their mission to go through each boss as quickly as possible.

There are nine bosses total, plus one optional “secret” boss, each with their own theme, arena, gimmick, and twist to the formula. I’ve heard that Furi plays a bit like a last-gen cult-classic game called NieR, and this is true to a certain extent. Like in NieR, each fight is a blend of character-action/hack ‘n slash and bullet-hell gameplay. Each boss fight goes through several phases, indicated by blips below their health bar. Each phase of the fight requires the player to work through two health bars. Two sections to the fight, essentially. Generally speaking, in the first half of a phase the boss will engage the player with a mix of bullet hell projectile patterns and melee attacks, while in the second half of the phase the player is locked into a small area around the boss and the fight becomes melee-focussed. That said, each boss after the second one will start mixing things up, each one with a twist to the formula. The third, for example, has no melee section to the first phase of his fight, instead putting up a series of rotating shields that the player must shoot through, but saying much more will definitely ruin a fair amount of the experience for you.

The difficulty curve from boss to boss is, unfortunately, rather uneven. The third fight seems to be a common difficulty spike for many. He’s not exactly tough, but seems designed to test the player’s patience to a breaking point, while the fifth fight is a breeze after the quick reflexes and more precise positioning required by the fourth boss. While I never made it quite so far on the default difficulty level, the ninth fight is apparently quite easy after the extremely tough seventh and eighth bosses (though I’d argue that in this case it’s necessary for thematic reasons).

Fortunately, the game is actually quite forgiving in terms of allowing the player to learn while keeping up the pace of each individual fight. The player themselves has three lives, and losing a life only resets whichever phase of the battle they’ve currently reached. Successfully finishing a phase will restore a lost life and replenish the player’s health. The player must lose all three lives before being forced to start the fight from the beginning. The game may be demanding, but it has a fair amount of tolerance for mistakes.

Unfortunately, my own tolerance for the game was worn down by just how demanding later fights were. Taxing melee combat, that I can handle. I’m even okay with the occasional bullet hell game, though I can’t say I particularly appreciate the genre. Furi’s blend of both, on the other hand, seems to be geared to break me down into incoherent rage. Switching between the two modes of action on the fly simply proved too taxing for me. It might be argued that I had ruined the experience for myself by getting fed up at one point and switching the game to “Promenade” difficulty so I could essentially skip ahead and finish the story, thus removing a lot of my motivation for continuing the game. That may be true, but I do feel that by that point I’d already seen most of what the game had to offer, mechanically speaking. I’ve got a good look at what Furi does, and, frankly, I’ve got a lot of video games on my plate here.

This isn’t to say that Furi is bad, far from it. It’s an admirable effort, something that’s striving for greatness and bumping right up against the hard limitations of a small team and budget, especially for the kind of game it’s trying to be. To achieve Devil May Cry 3 levels of polish, you need much bigger teams of animators and software engineers, but the core of Furi, the fast and challenging combat mechanics, is rock solid. For those who want a precise and demanding series of fights, where a neat art style and kickass soundtrack are bonuses, Furi is definitely a game for you. Though lacking in terms of visual fidelity, Furi has tough boss fights where good reflexes and patience will win the day. No filler, just your character and your opponent. The experience wore thin for me about two thirds of the way through, though, for more or less the same reason. Furi knows what it wants to do and does it very well, but the things it does ended up driving me up the wall.

I will say this, though: playing the deceptively hardcore Hyper Light Drifter after bashing my head against Furi feels so much easier. Situational awareness? Dash timing? Juggling ranged and melee combat? I’ve got it covered.

Tune in next time when I drift on blades of the hypest light.

-Taihus “Enough talk, let’s fight!” @raincoastgamer

[fatal-potato]

NieR: Automata - Demo Impressions

So after what was two hours on a single run of normal mode (from about 12:15 to 2:15 P.M. EST, 20th of January), I finished it while trying to experiment as much as I could (without outside help/research.) In all my years of interacting with action games, I have to say, I’m easily the most impressed I’ve been in years with this genre. Above all else, I want to stress that I acknowledge this is just a demo. I’m not expecting a single assumption here to assuredly be the case with the full product. I’m merely posting impressions based on what the demo thus far implies. We all played MGR’s demo and the release itself, I know not to overhype final expectations on first impressions. Frankly I hope nobody else does either. Obviously I’m not going to go over the most sheer basics of gameplay anyone that even touched the demo would know, so below are my thoughts on everything else.

POSITIVES (GAMEPLAY) Fundmentals of Design As soon as I started the game, it was easy to notice that whoever designed the gameplay got their fundamentals down to a dot. The attack cues from enemies are clear, have distinct visual and audio tells, and give plenty of time to react.

Though I’m not inherently opposed to the use of Quick Time Events, more often than not they’re done in terribly uncongenial methods. Kamiya had a massive raging hard-on for them, so it seems others wanted to follow his lead without knowing what can make QTEs good, natural, or even fun. Such “small” but jarring design elements are absent from this demo (hallelujah) so there’s no reason to believe there will be anything close to an abuse of them this time. Even if there was a Space Harrier portion (covered more in Setpieces), the demo hints that we should largely be free of any “that segment”s.

AND FINALLY, CUSTOM CONTROLS! I’ve always been a fan of default but goodness gracious, this should seriously be a standard. It was nice of them to give us three different schemes as it was but being able to customize one is something a fair number of their past games could have done super nicely with. Better late than never I guess.

Movement Movement (in my opinion) is one of the most underrated and untapped concepts of not just action, but games as a whole. Automata integrates movement through simple but versatile and exceptional means; to the point of creating a definitive crux for gameplay on its own.

I won’t waste time complimenting what good features of the dodge were already accomplished years ago in Bayonetta. What matters here is the straight dash that comes after.

Some of the most important assets to this dash are its free manual activation, cancel window, and wide ranges of direction. Free manual activation provides means for the tool to be much more universally applied. The ridiculous cancel window is probably its most unique aspect, as this helps positioning your moves to extents that would otherwise be impossible. Mixed with the wide ranges of direction, it completes your capacity to dance around your target freely during both combat and combo construction. The dash also goes and lasts quite the distance without being too slow to boot, giving further benefit to how the player can interpret the dash to their own playstyle, whether it’s basic or advanced. The fact you can apply all these perks both on the ground and aerially the same really makes the dash feel worthwhile. It’s an easy, but vital mechanic, and for one you’re going to be using a lot, Platinum made sure to make this one tool feel as exhaustive as can be.

Throw in attacks that can also affect your vector in similar ways, the game’s overall fast pace, and in unison with your moveset, Automata lends itself to likely be one of the speedier action titles ever made, bringing about what may be some of the coolest catering to movement ever wrought in the genre.

I will admit this part may be tooting the horn early (because even with all this I can still imagine even the most creative uses boiling down to essentially the same past results), but I’ve hardly come across singular movement options being able to cover so much on such a basic level, so do excuse me.

The Weapon System Not a lot to say here. The concept of weapons making different movesets entirely based on what button you equip it to has never been done before (to my knowledge, if done well at all), it’s moveset customization and instant moveset switching in the same package, and you get four different weapon types. The glory of this scheme only does itself justice.

Unorthodox Potential from Recycled Systems If there’s one thing I especially love about Automata’s gameplay thus far, it’s how it has the trademark Platinum setup (Dedicated jump button, X/Y = Light/Heavy, Dodge), but unifies the mechanics in such an unusual manner contrast to the rest of its peers; all in ways which point to nothing but positives.

The way the dodge and jump work in tandem with your moveset is without a doubt unmatched in exclusivity. Whether you’re paying attention or not, it’s easy to notice that many of 2B’s attacks revolve around throwing her swords akin to boomerangs. This is expanded upon when you realize this can be done with not just static dials, but with the use of jump and dodge cancels. For example, the AY dial (which is to say, jump off the ground then immediately pressing Heavy) gives the conventional Platinum Rising upper. When done using Virtuous Treaty, 2B stays suspended in a sword-spinning animation unless canceled. But when canceled in its startup window, you’re free to move again as the sword goes on to carry the rest of the attack without 2B having to do anything. Combined with what was mentioned above about dodging, you can see where I’m going with this. For reference, I believe I may have found around a couple dozen attacks that can be canceled the same way, and those are using the demo’s provisions alone. I haven’t seen this named anywhere, and though I’m not calling any dibs, for the sake of convenience I’ll be referring to this technique as Kara Canceling for the rest of the analysis.

Admittedly I am lost on the logic of what makes a move Kara Cancelable (as what research I’ve done yielded no such results for Fists), but I suppose it’s just something that will require the full game to conclude. I may not have time for it today but I’m considering a returnto Hard Mode and trying it again soon before release. There’s still a lot I have to test that I could neither confirm nor deconfirm on my first run.

Though I haven’t been able to (de)confirm this, I also have reasons to believe (mainly due to different animations) that dependent on the timing of your Kara Cancel, you can change the property of said Rising attack. Doing it in one half of the startup window (I believe) causes Virtuous Treaty to carry the enemy a set vertical distance while cutting the animation (and thus damage) short, as the other half of the window may cause Virtuous Treaty to go even higher while expanding on damage and lastability. Even if this theory on different Kara Cancel properties may be wrong, it scarcely matters, because the application of jump and dodge cancels is so ridiculously large due to their inherent necessity, that there will be plenty more tools to work with the same way by default. Added in with the fact we didn’t get to use any polearms or different weapons of the same class only holds a world of implication by themselves as it is.

I very much doubt Kara Canceling is a glitch either, provided how easy it is to discover. Complete with sprinkles of “nuanced” details (land into jump cancels for Helm Breakers having different timings dependent on weapon, Kara Cancel window timings for different dials, etc.), call me a man with reforged faith that Platinum is finally heading the right direction with technical creativity.

Altogether I appreciate the way these mechanics cohesively cooperate with eachother, because they spell a possible univese of long-awaited innovative advances for the genre.

Setpieces The first Nier has always had some funny schizophrenia between a Berserk-esque tone to its fights, and then sometimes just having Kaine run around as if she was outta some anime. Given that Platinum’s providing gameplay assets, but Taro is calling other shots, it’s easy to see the latter has come to embrace the former’s insane side in compatibility with their own. Unfortunately, said insane side has shown in the past to interfere with the better parts of gameplay when that love becomes an unhealthy obsession. But as far as setpieces go, giant brainless bossfights, such as the one at the end of the demo, can at least be justified to some logical extent.

It’s not too far off from how bosses played in the original; it just enhances what made them spectacles in the first place, with lots more interaction to boot. Additionally, the Space Harrier section at the end if anything shows that Platinum is learning quite well from their past sins. I personally would prefer if it wasn’t a part at all, but that doesn’t mean having to go through it is intrinsically as offensive just because past instances were borderline intolerable. It ended quickly, gave more freedom than most infamous minigames from the company tend to, wasn’t jarringly out-of-sync with the controls used for main combat, and was a decent, fast-paced extravaganza, placed at the absolute end of the level boss.

For something that lasted only a couple of minutes, I think this marks an unprecedented level of humility and restraint for Platinum’s record, compared to if they weren’t to add it at all. It shows their capability to learn from and fix previous errors, whereas not having the STG would have been a fix too, but would have shown less ways in which they learned.

NEGATIVES (GAMEPLAY) Enemy Variety Because this is just a demo, and because I didn’t expect it to, I won’t slaughter it for not impressing me in this regard. But it doesn’t. Based on the normal difficulty, I’ve only been provided the four most common enemy types ever-present in action games (based on properties and weight, of course). The mook, their elite version, the flying enemy, and the big bad boss that doesn’t undergo hitstun. As it should go without saying, there’s a high likelihood of way more types being present in the full game. It’s just nothing about these enemies stand out to me as particularly fun to fight. Hopefully that will change.

Technique Conveyance If there’s a recurring issue that plagues the best entries to this genre, it’s conveyance. It’s not that they lack tutorials, or don’t teach the bare minumum you need to beat the game. But when it comes to advanced techniques, you’ll be hard pressed to find any action game that teaches those good at all.

Maybe the devs just don’t care. But I’m going to go off on a limb here and say that maybe this to deliberately add a layer of longevity by giving its playerbase a period of experimentation. There’s a charm in that kind of thing no doubt, and for certain games that idea really does work. As a matter of fact, I used to lean towards the opinion that this route was more ideal. Yet over the years, it started dawning on me why that opinion wasn’t quite right, seeing the downsides that come with it.

1) It’s bad for the genre as a whole The greatest games continue being played even years after their release. But games that have the deepest gameplay will continue having the same dedicated playerbase for just as long. Why is that? It’s because those playerbases have found something worthwhile and lasting that keeps them coming back for more. Many multiplayer games retain this same attribute, mostly due to their innately infinite skill ceilings. A division of action games have contracted a similar kind of following, thanks to the countless different ways to express personalized play through ostensibly never-ending boundaries. However, what separates these two is that quite the number of multiplayer games are built to be competitively lasting, as even devs there know and support it. Action game developers give off the notion they don’t know how, or just don’t care to support the fraction that wants to take their titles more intricately. And with less advertisement to all directions, the audience receives less encouragement to participate in a characteristic unique to only a few, if not strictly this one single player genre.

2) It could easily be bad for some of the audience Straightforward and self-explanatory. Some people just aren’t labbers, but may totally be interested in playing at a high level.

3) Any intentions and priorities devs may have for longevity are in reverse Suppose Devil May Cry 4 had ChaserTech’s tutorials built into the game, or something similar. Do you think the playbase would’ve cut any noticeable fraction of the lifeline they provided it up until today? The answer is no, and that’s because in truth, longevity doesn’t come from experimentation to find the more general techniques; it comes from finding the nuances they may bring in and of themselves. Take DMC4′s Enemy Step as a very basic example. You don’t master it just because you know of its existence and can pull it off in succession a few times. There’s different move cancel timings, enemy hitboxes, other techniques it can help make a reality (Star Raving, Side Raving, Guard Flying), and so on. From the ground up, there’s an absurd quantity of things for you to master, or even get to grips with, based on this central, defining technique to the series. In no way was a large part of DMC4′s lifespan consumed by merely testing to try and learn of its existence. But maybe this isn’t a fair comparison, as it can be bought in the game’s shop and carried over from DMC3, which refined it from DMC1. Bayonetta as a more widely known example, has Dodge Offset (and its many variants) as the only game to do it right its defining Advanced Technique. It is somewhat taught to you in the game, but kinda cryptically through searching texts that only gives a description on how to execute it. In any case, you still have to come to terms with its dozens if not hundreds of its nuances, in fashion not too dissimilar with many deep games. If you have to center a significant chunk of your combat system’s lifespan in finding the general techniques, you’re probably either not setting your priorities straight, or are trying to hide how little your game truly offers if finding a normal AT creates a relatively big era for it. Or again, maybe you just don’t care.

As for those that like labbing, nuances will at some point require some form of testing or accidents to begin with, so these decisions mostly appear to shoot oneself and a good amount of others in the foot. Then again, maybe I’m just overthinking a relatively small problem that doesn’t matter. Who knows. I mean would it have killed to at least have a movelist or two?

Balance Concerns Again, not much to say here. I’m somewhat uneasy that the line between “I wanna do technical things” and “I wanna grind and mash” may lose its equilibrium in favor of the latter with its RPG elements. This is frankly a small concern though, as balance can easily be adjusted to the hardest difficulties. Or you could just be provided a skill that mitigates damage, so...?

QUICK POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES (OTHERWISE) +Music +Beautiful aesthetic +Great level design +Voice Acting is steps up from the original +Dual Audio +Superb kinesthesia +2B’S GREAT ANDROID BOOTY, STEP UP BAYONETTA -Didn’t get to ride a moose

CONCLUSION Even if every last one of these assumptions end up being wrong, I doubt I can sincerely be disappointed at this stage. The only thing I wanted at the very least with this sequel was “A well-written continuation to Nier with that isn’t a slog to play.” The well-written bit is gonna have to require some patience to judge obviously (not new with Taro). Even after all this, I still don’t think it needs the extra layers of refinement and depth, and am keeping standards as low but realistic as they initially were. Yet the madmen at Platinum went the mile to give us a grander experience anyway. So yeah, I can’t think of any plausible way the game could come to somehow brutally let me down .

According to a friend, Taro has always been a very wild card with his narratives. Ranging from what are essentially confusing comedies to heartbreaking adventures, so I don’t know what to expect in that regard for this game. But I do hope that it goes the route of and lives up to the emotional style that the original Nier bedazzled me with.

All in all I easily estimate from this that Automata has the surefire potential to be one of Platinum’s best releases (and one of Taro’s on virtue of actually having good gameplay). Even the idea of just merging Taro and Platinum is nothing short of a match made in Heaven. Taro’s games are known for great writing, scenarios, and music, at the cost of mediocre gameplay and necessary reruns. Regardless of what you may think of their lineup, Platinum has always been able to boast their unmatched strength in creating some of the best replay value in the industry, despite everything they made that isn’t called “Infinite Space” being pretty short. The two entities naturally seem to cancel out eachother’s flaws and bring about the best of eachother’s strengths at the same time. Furthermore, through the whole development process, they’ve had absolutely zero qualms or conflicts with eachother (as opposed to Kamiya against Microsoft), suggesting this will be top quality in every regard.

So consider me the most excited I’ve ever been in my life for a game based on a demo.

[recentanimenews]

Why Bayonetta and Vanquish Prove PlatinumGames Are the Best at Action Games

  When PlatinumGames first appeared in 2009, gamers didn’t know what to expect, but we knew to expect something wild. Over 10 years out, that legacy continues to live on, as PlatinumGames has become one of the foundations of modern takes on quirky action games, with titles like Bayonetta, Vanquish, NieR: Automata and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance standing out amongst their library of titles for being unapologetically frenzied and challenging. Building on many of the staff’s history with games such as Okami and Devil May Cry, it’s easy to see where the pedigree comes from, and for a time, PlatinumGames were the only people on the block willing to dip their toes into the single-player action adventure genre (can you believe that it was ALSO 10 years between Devil May Cry 4 and 5? Crazy!). 

While PlatinumGames has continually pushed the envelope and explored newer takes on action games, Bayonetta and Vanquish remain memorable as two of their first major forays into the game market (with the Wii’s weirdo Mad World being the third, seemingly lost to time part of the founding trio of games). In time for the 10th anniversary of PlatinumGames' founding and the creation of Bayonetta and Vanquish, our friends at SEGA sent us an early copy of the dual re-release for the PS4, and it was an interesting trip down memory lane, warts and all. 

Starting with Bayonetta, players find themselves again in the tall, tall shoes of the Umbral Witch herself on her first ever adventure. Something that stood out immediately in this version of Bayonetta is that the load times are essentially non-existent; I barely ever found the ability to use the loading screen practice menu at all, actually, which honestly surprised me. What this really did was create the fast, action-packed pace that Bayonetta seems to desire, allowing you to seamlessly attack chapter after chapter, challenge after challenge. 

Visually, the game didn’t get much of an upgrade, but it did get a bit of a facelift, with 4k visuals and 60fps enhancements that really help the game “pop." Even on a regular PS4, though, it still looks and plays great with no slowdown to speak of. While the visuals look cleaner and sharper, the textures do show their age a bit, but generally the game looks and plays smooth, which is where the real focus of one’s attention is likely going to be; it’s probably easy to say that Bayonetta’s never looked as sharp as she does right now!

Control wise, Bayonetta still has that focus on timing-perfect dodges and combo-focused combat, both of which work well and that I generally had little trouble with. I actually found that some of the quick time events were a bit easier too, either because I’ve played the game so many times and just expect them now, or they’ve been retooled to be a little less sudden and game ruining. The camera is, well, still the same camera, and that has all of the frustrations of mid ‘00s era design choices one might expect. 

Obviously, as an update and not a remake, that’s to be expected, but getting used to the fixed-angle perspective in Bayonetta after games like DMC5, Revengeance, or Automata certainly took a little readjustment. In the end, it isn’t a big deal at all, and I never felt like the camera was getting in the way of my succeeding or failing at a section of the game, just that occasionally I’d find myself in fairly inopportune views that I would work quickly to get out of (and, honestly, that first fight with Jeanne and the Witch Walking is still… probably one of the worst parts of the game, mostly due to camera issues). If anything, I found myself surprised at just how clean and snappy the controls of Bayonetta were on the PS4 version, and I started to remember that they were always like this; PlatinumGames has always known how to make great controlling action games, and Bayonetta feels fresh and easy to control in a way that makes it fairly timeless.

Other than that, though, this is basically the same game as it was in 2008; Bayonetta never got any form of DLC, so there isn’t really anything new here. If you’ve played and mastered the game before, you may want to keep that in mind; there are all new trophies to get, however, and as most Bayonetta fans know, the real fun of the game comes from mastering various difficulties and getting the coveted Pure Platinum trophies, so just look at this PS4 version as a brand new way to get your chance to do that all over again. 

As far as a definitive version of Bayonetta is concerned, there are a few things I’d probably offer: this is probably the best looking and best running version of Bayonetta on the market right now, but… Bayonetta 2 and 3 are Nintendo exclusives, meaning if you want the full Bayonetta package, you may want to track down the Switch copy of Bayonetta 2 that comes with the first game, as well. Really, that’s depending on what you’re looking to get out of this game; if you want a gorgeous steelbook and 2 great games, this is a fantastic choice, but if you are looking to get into Bayonetta and play all of it, you may be better off directing your attention to the Switch copy of the game (depending on availability, anyway). Personally, I found myself getting sucked into trying to get my score juuuust a bit better, getting that trophy I didn’t get, trying to push myself against difficulties of a game I’ve played four times now, so, you know how it is!

Moving to Vanquish, I personally feel that this is the real star of this release. While Bayonetta achieved success in a cult classic way that’s helped it get 2 sequels, Vanquish feels like a bit of a forgotten gem of a game. When it was initially released, a lot of reviewers didn’t seem to know what to make of the game, with it’s seemingly short playtime being a fairly large complaint against it. Vanquish remains a bit of an odd bird, but with time comes wisdom, and many gamers may now appreciate the game for what it really is: one of the most frantic, score based shooting games ever made. 

Vanquish is not a game that is going to win you over with a good story, developed characters, or really anything else other than what it presents you: tough as nails shooting galleries based around the slide/boost mechanic and limited bullet-time power. Ostensibly a game about a future in which military battles are fought in space, players take on the role of Sam and his DARPA created super-suit, giving him amazing reflexive abilities to zoom around battlefields, shooting guns in all sorts of crazy poses, and giving you one of the greatest set of “wow did you see how cool I was” gameplay segments possible, mixed with countless, countless deaths and retries.

For those who are new, Vanquish is indeed a game you can “beat” in maybe 5-6 hours, if you’re good, but that isn’t really the point of Vanquish. The point is to constantly get your score up, to get better at each gallery, to try new weapons and strategies while looking as stylish as possible. If Bayonetta and Devil May Cry were games in which melee combat was made to look stylish and crazy, Vanquish is the cover-shooter equivalent of that, and honestly it still feels fresh and exciting ten years later, as very few games present an experience remotely close to what Vanquish does. 

Much like Bayonetta, Vanquish has almost no load times, making the blisteringly fast pace of the game even faster, and between the two titles, seems to have benefitted the most from the next-gen facelift; while cutscenes still look very early PS3, the in-game action looks and feels great, with no slowdown (other than the bullet time feature in the game), and really helps smooth out the crazy firefights going on all around. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t a huge fan of Vanquish when it originally came out, but this updated re-release won me over, making me appreciate a game I maybe didn’t give enough attention to, and hopefully now we’ll see even more fans give this hidden gem the appreciation it deserves on newer platforms.  

For the price tag ($39.99 USD), the physical copy of both of these games is an amazing bargain, essentially $20~ per title with great new graphics and smoothed out load times and gameplay. Even if you’re considering getting them digitally, both games are great, but Vanquish feels like the real star here, a game that maybe most people didn’t give a fair look back in 2009 that would certainly deserve a second chance today. Personally, I’m curious to see what types of crazy combo vids and score based runs people are going to post, but in the meantime, I’ll be upping my own game. As I typed this, I got the PlatinumGames bug again, so it’s time to go work on my scores!  

REVIEW ROUNDUP

+ Great package of 2 classic PS3-era games with new graphic updates.  

+ Modern tech means lower load times, and both games play like a dream now.

+ Controls in both are smooth and responsive, and feel great. 

+ The start of PlatinumGames' charm, these titles really do hold up to newer games still. 

+/- That said, there isn’t really anything “new” here, so don’t buy in expecting new content. 

  Are you a PlatinumGames fan? Got any challenge-based stories from your time with their games? Let us know what you think of these two and more in the comments! 

  ----

Nicole is a frequent wordsmith for Crunchyroll. Known for punching dudes in Yakuza games on her Twitch channel while professing her love for Majima. She also has a blog, Figuratively Speaking. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[thomasroach]

Sekiro Review: Shinobis Die Many Times

The post Sekiro Review: Shinobis Die Many Times appeared first on Fextralife.

In this Sekiro Shadows Die Twice Review I’ll explore FromSoftware’s new Action game and answer some burning questions you have such as: Is Sekiro like Souls? Is Sekiro worth buying? and Is Sekiro a good game?. Please be mindful that this review contains mild gameplay spoilers of mechanics and an early game area.

Important: To understand our score, read the Fextralife Review Guidelines. Sekiro falls between “Great” and “Brilliant”. Every reviewer has their own “compass” for what numbers mean, so for reference I gave Dark Souls Remastered an 8.8, Nier: Automata an 8.7, and Bloodborne a 9 and I love them all.

Sekiro Review: Shinobis Die Many Times

Genre: Action-Adventure Developed by: FromSoftware Published by: Activision (Int) FromSoftware (JP) Release date: March 22th, 2019 Platforms: PS4 (review platform PS4 Pro), Xbox One, PC. Review code provided by Activision. Price at the time of the review: $59.99

  Sekiro Story & Setting

Sekiro takes us to a fantastic version of Sengoku Japan. Sengoku is a famous period of Japanese history, during which war ravaged the entire country for over 150 years. The strife and unrest was fueled by political cues, led to the extermination of prominent Japanese families, and completely reshaped the power structure of Japan.

Given the enormous scale of the battles, Sengoku is a popular time for both historians and fiction writers, which usually focuses on the Battle of Sekigahara and the surrounding main actors.

Sekiro does not follow this path, instead creating a fictional version of Japan and the Sengoku period, and adding mythical elements such as an ancient Dragon Bloodline to fuel the plot. This is likely a good choice, as the gaming world is saturated with Nobunaga and Tokugawa references by now.

Unlike previous works, Sekiro delivers the story in a more straight-forward manner. With a set and even voiced protagonist, the world moves in a much more coherent story than Souls games might have done for others. Everything is explained quite clearly and dialogue options can be revisited as many times as possible. This does not mean that Lore hunters won’t have anything to do, as there is plenty of folklore and FromSoftware’s own interpretation of Yokai to find and talk about. It is just a lot easier to access for the average player that might skip reading item descriptions.

So how is the story, then?

The protagonist is a well realized character, and it is clear from the get-go that you will find story twists that challenge the initial world view. This does not detract from the plot and the decisions the player must make, and you will find yourself intrigued by the many characters you meet and want to see their tale through. I very much enjoyed talking to NPCs as I explored the landscape, and the concept of revisiting memories and advancing the story through trips to the past was well executed. All in all, FromSoftware has successfully made their storytelling more accessible, and whilst I miss some of the quirkiness of the old ways, many will appreciate this new approach.

The Wolf is a dedicated Shinobi, following the “Iron Code”, but what twists and surprises await will test the limits of your devotion

Sekiro Gameplay

Action games live and die by gameplay, and Sekiro has delivered a fine-tuned and glorious realization of a Shinobi fantasy. That said, and before I go any further, I must disclaim that we just came out of playing DMC5, and that has the best gameplay possible for an action title, so Sekiro is against some really tough competition in this regard.

Gameplay focuses on the optimization of the skills of your main katana, the Kusabimaru. You will also gain access to special Prosthetic Tools that allow you to grapple onto ledges and enemies, as well as throw Shurikens, Firecrackers, a flame thrower of sorts, and much more. This sounds really enticing but players soon discover that, like many action games, you aren’t going to get your toys for a while. This is an understood concept, however I personally felt that the initial progression (say the first 5 hours of the game) dragged on in specifically keeping my toys away from me.

This was likely done to encourage you to learn how to use your katana properly, which will challenge players with its complex deflect, counter and posture systems. However it had the strange effect of making me ignore the prosthetic completely, as its effects on enemies were sub-par, and instead focus on stealth to get by, with an overly-cautious approach. Why did this happen? Well because:

Death is truly horrifying

With Souls, I learned to not care about souls. If I died and lost all my souls, I would go co-op a boss I knew and make them back, or simply focus on upgrading my weapons instead. Sekiro’s death penalty is extremely punishing when you start the game, taking away 50% of your experience and gold each time you respawn. This is mitigated by something called Unseen Aid, which negates the loss but has a measly 30% chance of triggering and then goes down from there. You can keep Skillpoints you have earned (meaning you filled a bar and it turned into a 1), but anything after that is going to slowly disappear as you attempt a hard section. Further, since you have no easy access to merchants, your gold will most likely be gone too if you don’t have the mechanics down.

But wait, there’s more! If you die a lot, you will also spread Dragonrot, which sickens NPCs and actively blocks their questlines. A completionist like me is thus extremely alarmed right from the get go: I don’t want to miss out! So the game’s start saw me being overly-cautious and wasting time with stealth because I didn’t want to risk my lack of familiarity with the controls deleting half a bar of experience gained and ruin NPC quests.

But why do you care about XP?

The game’s main attraction comes in the form of Skills and Skill Trees, that players can unlock to improve Sekiro’s arsenal of moves. Some of these skills are passive and make a large difference in the core mechanics, whilst others are active and perform extraordinary feats. But they all cost Skillpoints, and if you’re dying a lot you’re unlikely to fill up that bar. So you’re stuck in this strange place where you really don’t want to die because there’s no chance to regain your losses, which means you might want to go farm to fill the XP bar and spend all your gold before running into any boss room.

Git Gud!

The essence of any souls game is to overcome a challenge, and people will say “Just Git Gud“. Elitism aside, this is valid commentary, and it is extremely important for veteran souls players to truly discard their previous muscle memory when approaching this game. Players who struggle with quick reactions will also want to fully explore the Stealth mechanic and focus on gathering those skillpoints to unlock important perks. But most of all, you’ll want to be specific about progressing the game in an optimal order, as the Prosthetic Tools you find can be key to success in certain fights.

So, is the gameplay good?

Sekiro’s gameplay is the most refined FromSoftware work to date, taking it a step further than Bloodborne went. The split-second execution of amazing maneuvers and counters is flashy and satisfying, and the many skills and prosthetic tool upgrades available complement the light RPG “Stats” upgrades the player can pursue. All in all, players might be disheartened during the first few hours by the extremely punishing adjustment period, but there’s a specific wall that “lifts” if you progress in the right order, and after that you will get in the “gud” zone of “git gud” and flow through the game with great enjoyment.

Gameplay includes fan-favorite Builds, as you have limited points without farming and could create great combinations.

Sekiro Audio & Visual

Fromsoftware began conceptualization of Sekiro in 2015, and this unfortunately shows. The game’s graphics are good, but they are nothing amazing and the PS4 pro visuals are not necessarily outstanding. The rendering of backgrounds and locations is quite scenic, however, and the level design and enemy concepts are fantastic and very enjoyable.

That said, when you go into the “Action” line you start to compete with games like God of War, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Devil May Cry, and FromSoftware is not at the top of that game (yet). We are quite looking forward to their next engine and the visual upgrades that will come with it, but for now Sekiro sits at a very comfortable “Good graphics” veredict. They are scenic and set the mood, they won’t blow your mind away.

*Note for PC players: You will likely see better graphics than console users, this is a score for PS4 users.

Performance is of course an important factor, and we found that the game’s performance is stable, and have experienced no crashes or glitches. The framerate is not locked so it will fluctuate wildly, but we have not encountered any Blighttown-esque slideshows so you can go forth and slay with precision.

Level Design is a strongsuit of FromSoftware and they successfully delivered an intriguing and interconnected world with plenty of hidden areas to explore. The sheer size of some areas, like Ashina Outskirts, is rather daunting for any completionist. The world building truly delivers in this area, and brings up the overall score.

The music score for Sekiro was rather underwhelming to me, but it might be more impactful to those unfamiliar with Japanese tunes. There’s a definitive tempo to the combat sequences and each area has their own idle and action scores that ramp up the intensity of your play. In this regard, FromSoftware is competing with itself and has a difficult task in attempting to match or surpass the fantastic work of their previous titles. Since none of the songs stuck in my head after playing for hours and hours, I would say they have fallen just short of the task, but still delivered a great score.

Finding all the hidden corners of the world is really fun, and exploration is very much a thing.

Sekiro Replayability

This is the biggest question on the internet, and one that is extremely difficult to answer: What’s Sekiro’s Replayability? The honest answer is: we don’t know because it all depends. The game is extremely challenging to start, which will add a lot of hours to your playthrough if you aren’t a skilled player, but even beyond that there are many nook and crannies to explore if you want to obtain all the upgrade materials, special tools and rare quick items. This means that a skilled player with little interest in exploration is likely looking at 20 hours of gameplay for one playthrough, whilst a less skilled player or completionist will instead get at least 40.

But what next? Why keep playing?

Sekiro has intriguing NPC questlines as well as several endings: that alone would likely encourage most to go onto NG+. But there’s more, in NG+ you will get to face enemies with a fuller arsenal of skills, and since there are so many trees and you can only (without farming) fill up about 2 of them in one go, you will probably want to revisit and become even more flashy.

The motivation to go to NG+, to me, was always about getting more things, or facing a boss again. With Sekiro, you can do both of these things and I feel FromSoftware has done a good job in this department, so that you are happy to continue your adventure because you want to make your Wolf even more amazing.

Character Progression provides plenty of reason to keep looking around for things

Sekiro Pricepoint

As with all our reviews, Pricepoint covers the contextualization of a game, to see if you should buy it now or wait for a bargain, or skip it altogether! In Sekiro’s case, clocking in 20-40 hours minimum, it is rather comparable to other action games in the market such as Last of Us or God of War.

What Sekiro lacks in graphics, it makes up in replayability as you continue into New Game Plus to unlock more skills and try different endings, which would net a good 20 hours added to both skilled and unskilled players.

Relative to the market, there are not many releases this Spring, besides DMC5 which you really should have bought already, so Sekiro is a good investment for your gaming dollar as it will certainly entertain you for a considerable amount of time. The game has no microtransactions or announced DLC, meaning that at the time of writing you’re getting a full experience for your money, so this is a big plus to the score.

The lack of multiplayer is certainly to the detriment of both Pricepoint and Replayability, but I feel that Fromsoftware’s unique touch and approach shines through the game and makes it a day one buy for any Souls fan ready to let go of RPG and get fully into Action.

The Price is Right!

Sekiro Review Final Thoughts

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has been a roller coaster for Souls fans, who were initially thrilled, then disappointed at no multiplayer or customization, then reassured by a skill tree and upgrades, then concerned at possible ease from resurrection, to now horrified of actually dying.

This emotional rollercoaster matches the game’s story and setting well, and should fuel your thirst for deathblows, as you annihilate everyone that stands in your path. The Wolf is a surprisingly well-realized character, following a convincing story path, with challenging gameplay that rewards the bold.

Sekiro is not souls, and might not surpass souls, but it is an excellent side-step and a worthy journey for FromSoftware followers as they wait for their favorite developer to deliver more RPG content, hopefully incorporating some of the outstanding action of Shadows Die Twice.

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