#kinda. its a work in progress. maybe i'll do an actual design for my version of him someday... | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whining-ylthin · 9 months ago

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I kinda screwed up as Tumblr won't apply the "keep reading" edit to the 1st post in this chain but fuck it, we ball.

3. Darksiders: Warmastered Edition (Steam version, THQ Nordic/KAIKO 2016, original THQ/VIgil Games 2010)

It's a video game I sincerely wanted to like since I first played it at 14, and now that I've beaten it close to my 30s... yeah, I'd love to like it more than I actually do.

Darksiders gets dragged down by two things: the scale and ambitions of its creators, and their relative inexperience with game design. On paper it's a competent, if derivative 3D Zelda clone with DMC/God of War-inspired combat and gritty, hyperbolic fantasy aesthetic straight out of a late 90s comic book, but in practice it's plagued by a host of small but increasingly jarring design issues, bad number balancing and severely bloated runtime.

Maybe a fifth of the 20-ish hours you're going to spend with it are dedicated to overly weighty and overall kind of shallow combat where two of your weapons are nearly useless (they either don't deal enough damage or just don't work within this combat system, and the hit-based leveling up system is... uh, bad) and your dodge will usually get you locked into an enemy combo instead of taking you to safety. The rest is mostly decent, if occasionally a little janky or tedious platforming, puzzle-solving or (mercifully short) TPS/rail shooter sections... and unfortunately all of it tends to overstay its welcome due to the stages simply being too long and too big to traverse.

Yes, you get a horse. Three dungeons and TWELVE STAGES into the game. That can't be used in half the areas (I assume due to either weird load zone shenanigans or developer oversight bordering on active malice) and for some godforsaken reason the damn thing can't jump even over the tiniest of ledges, making it officially just as bad as Kaithes in Warframe, my go-to example of bad steeds in video games. For those of you who haven't played Warframe - they're basically one step above being the Mass Effect 1 Mako of video game horses, and that's only because they have marginally more weight and you can't flip them upside down on a slightly more steep hillside.

This game also had the misfortune of coming out after Devil May Cry 4 and Bayonetta, both games that not only featured shorter, snappier (if not necessarily great all the time, I'll readily admit there're Some Fucking Bullshit-tier stages) levels with less dragged out metro tunnels and ruined highways to run across, but also a truly revolutionary feature: a way to make your character haul ass faster. In DMC4 you can buy an upgrade that makes your run speed increase after X seconds of going forward, and Bayonetta unlocks a fast-running animal transformation early within story progress. Darksiders, meanwhile, effectively leaves you stuck with War's dainty tippy-toes, unchainable dashes with slow-as-balls recovery and very limited vertically crippled horse for its full runtime.

You know what DMC games also had? And since the PS2 days at that? Better checkpointing/store placement and healing mechanics! A game series that emphasizes not dying or getting hit gives you: special powerup mode that heals you, better access to Statues of Time (they are both checkpoints and store in which you buy moveset/character upgrades and items), as well as doing this little convenient thing of converting excess healing orbs to currency - compared to Darksiders' Chaos Mode doing nothing for your health, life-leech weapon augments being downright useless, Abyssal Armor being a late-game upgrade that (for a change) absolutely trivializes the combat, and several dungeons locking you out of Vulgrim's little emporium for most if not all of their duration which forces you to rely on manually placed chests (the devs must have noticed this was an issue in testing - but it was probably too late to implement extra spots for Vulgrim's store with fast-travel option disabled), as well as green/yellow souls getting completely wasted if your health/Wrath bar is already full. Also, while some upgrades could be grindy to get, DMC games from at least 3 onwards gave you the convenience of freely replaying missions on one save, which allowed you to get that 20.000 Red Orbs (or however many Proud Souls it was in 4-- 2000, I think? And Special Edition massively boosted all currency gains just to make the catchup faster) for that optional double-jump within maybe 10-20 minutes of rerunning one short mission. By comparison grinding in Darksiders is a slog, with enemies dropping absolutely pitiful amounts of souls (from 3 to 400) compared to how much is required to upgrade your moves or buy items (cheapest healing item is 500 souls if you already have an empty vessel for it, otherwise it's 2000+500; weapon moves stay below the 3 thousand souls mark but some optional upgrades required for a 100% run charge you for as much as 10-12,5 THOUSAND souls), and the best (and by that I mean "the only one that won't make you crumble to dust and waste hours of your life") soul farming technique being a goddamn exploit taking advantage of unrestricted enemy spawn and bad AI/limited enemy moveset.

Also, I hope you don't intend to 100% the game without using a guide - the number of collectibles, combined with the slow traversal and vast maps that you'll have to return to several times to grab everything, makes it a genuine chore even with the modern convenience of YouTube playlists and numerous written guides. In case you do go insane (like I did), keep in mind that the game lies to you a little - the only points of no return are two of five boss rooms (Tiamat's and Strega's) which contain nothing of value anyway, Azrael is full of shit and you can return to the endgame location he tells you you can't come back to.

Speaking of - the story! The writing is honestly middling - pompous and trying (but failing) to come across as something more profound - and the cutscene direction is noticeably rough around the edges, with awkward camera angles and shot transitions. While the core idea for the setting is yet another very 90s "loose Bible fanfic", I'm willing to give it a shot and not immediately knock it for unoriginality - shame that there's not much going for it in this game. The characters are hardly memorable, mostly acting to move the pieces of the story and not much more, and the story itself sways from "go to a place and kill some goon" to "guys, I think you forgot to write these characters enough for this big twist to make sense in the game's own context (and make me give a damn)". Its decisive-yet-cliffhangery ending sure didn't help with writing the sequels.

The voice performances are baseline-good across the board, but they often fit into a specific, repetetive mold of "raspy, drawn out and 'epic-sounding'" (think the delivery style of Dawn of War games, but with weaker script and less Scott McNeill, for better or worse). Liam O'Brien certainly did get his fair share of aggressive grunts, to the point that I'm genuinely worried if he didn't strain his vocal chords with his role as War. Mark Hamill is unfortunately wasted on The Watcher - good performance for a nothing-character. Phil LaMarr's Vulgrim is fun to listen to, but could use a better variety of barks and voicelines, and for what little Samael I got to hear, Vernon Welles' voice is definitely on point. Sadly the direction for the bosses is just "generic demon voice", with Tiamat and Silitha sounding almost the same to my ear. Straga isn't much different to larger demon mooks, and two of the bosses (Griever and Stygian) don't even talk.

Moving onto the bosses - they're a low point, unfortunately. Most of them are either gimmicks, poorly designed or some combination of both, with Stygian taking the cake (why yes, I'd love to run in circles around a large arena waiting for the boss to expose its weakpoint so I can deal a tiny amount of damage to it with my plinky peashooter of a handgun instead of hitting it with my sword in the SWORD SWINGING GAME), and Destroyer earning the developers a retroactive slap on the wrist for introducing two annoying button-mashing QTEs in a game that previously featured them only once (for mashing out of a this game's Barnacle stand-in's grab). Tiamat is annoying as she relies on this game's jank aiming mechanics against a fast-moving target, Griever is a forgettable damage sponge, Silitha is a tedious wait-and-dodge game which often makes you feel like you're playing the game wrong, Straga is an easier gimmick fight than the PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT ASS FUCK THIS SHIT FUCK OFF golem minibosses in his dungeon, and Destroyer is hardly a fight if you figured out how to ride the horse (then dodge/block his decently telegraphed attacks).

Other enemies aren't really shining points, either - most of them end up being forgettable demon fodder or mildly annoying range-based Angels who get trivialized by AoE attacks and the Abyssal Chain. I genuinely despise two mook types, though - the overly tanky, uninterruptible armored undead types and the big titty ghost enemies who keep phasing in and out of reality while ignoring half of your own attacks, making them needlessly obnoxious to kill. This kind of enemy design sucked when DMC3 did it in 2005, and it sucked just as much five years later.

Is there something I can praise? Well, the visuals are neat, even without the Warmastered upscaling the textures and bumping some graphics options up. The 3D models hold up really well, and while a chunk of the game is spent in gray- or sepia-colored tunnels and wastelands, the level of detail is still impressive even in the most boring of location and there are some absolute standouts - Anvil's Ford is an absolute treat even if the location itself first holds a rather annoying enemy gauntlet setpiece, then becomes an abridged shortcut to a dungeon you should have little reason to revisit. The aforementioned dungeon, The Hollows, also stands out to me as surprisingly pleasant despite large amounts of overlong tunnel exploration, train cart puzzles and the middling boss at the end of it all - better than the mega-corridor of Ashlands, sepia-and-orange dungeons of Twilight Cathedral, samey-looking spiderweb maze of Iron Canopy or dark and obnoxious Black Throne.

Overall Darksiders is... okay. It has a solid enough foundation, but it's also stretched too far and too thin. It tries to swing for some really tall fences while doing the run-up on legs that are clearly too short to make the jump. It takes clear inspiration from some really big names, but fails to learn all their lessons. And all of it comes together to form a game that will embody "seven out of ten on a good day" in my memory. Now I'm obviously a bit jaded and overly negative from 100%-ing it in one go (because if I drop a game for even a little bit, I'll forget most of it, lose the muscle memory and ultimately won't be coming back to it), but talking to other people who'd played it closer to recent memory, it seems to be a shared sentiment - the game is just a good few hours too long and merely "okay" at best even without tedious treasure-hunting and soul grind.

Ylthin's Media Thread thingy for the tail-end of 2023 and 2024:

Normally I'd do it on Twitter but I fully expect that site to collapse in 6 months.

Glen Cook, "Czarna Kompania"/"Cień w ukryciu" ("Black Company"/"Shadows Linger") (Rebis, 2009 Polish edition, 2022 reprint)

I'm starting this list somewhat off the curb - I've finished the 2nd novel from this omnibus release just now, but I've also read the first one earlier this year... and I don't have much to say about either, honestly. The prose is kind of clunky and awkward in a way that takes a moment to adjust to, and without directly comparing the Polish translation to the English original I can't tell how much of this unwieldiness is due to poor translation job and how much of it is just inherent to Cook's style. You're not reading this book for its characters, either - most of them are memorable only because of constant exposure, as names that you eventually learn to map to a broad role in the story or one, maybe two vague personality/appearance traits. What carried me through was what I can broadly describe as "vibes" and long-term significance of Black Company books - or maybe the wave of genre-fiction they were a part of. It certainly wasn't the first grim and gritty fantasy series out there, and the backside blurb's boasts about how Cook "brought the fantasy genre down to the level of common men" are very overblown (the books are literally about an evil sorceress' plan for world domination clashing against her messy divorce with her Dark Lord husband and a prophecy about the "divine savior" figure coming back further pissing into her breakfast), but I can still notice the seeds of interesting ideas being planted here and there (thank you MandaloreGaming for making me aware of Myth games, shame that they're downright impossible to legally obtain anymore), and the grit (while going for a very predictable "everyone is utterly miserable and the whores will give you all the STDs" route, and feeling more like catnip for 14-year-old boys rather than genuine "maturity") fortunately doesn't cross the line into unbearable edgelord territories yet. It was a part of the same wave of dark fantasy that either molded me directly (through Sapkowski's The Witcher novels and "Berserk"), indirectly (through a thousand imitators years down the line, from local fantasy authors of the 2000s to video games - Heroes of Might & Magic 5 in particular was retrospectively very blatantly inspired by Warhammer Fantasy), or infected me with sudden-onset brainrot in my mid-20s (Warhammer 40.000), and I can definitely feel and appreciate it even if I find these books to be rather mediocre so far.

I just wish I could get my hands on Moorcock's Elric books without going through a dozen hoops, but I guess I'll make do with Cook, Erikson and the odd Warhammer novel for the time being.

Oh, and this cover art? That tattered "dashing rogue" look, that borderline fractal leather-and-cloth patterning, the random spiky structures in the background? The long bob hair and goatee look straight out of the music video for "Imperium" by Machine Head? A cover that makes you think not even of actual early 2000s buttrock, but of Stuart Chatwood emulating it for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within's soundtrack? Hillariously mismatched with the actual novels. I haven't seen a choice this baffling since reading my dad's faded mid-90s pulp booklet edition of Ursula LeGuin's "Rocannon's World" paired up with either Vallejo or Frazetta sword-and-sandals artwork.

#ylthin media thread

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