#worldend syndrome | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

skaruresonic · 4 months ago

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Hey! I just read your post about creating visual novels (this one: https://www.tumblr.com/tartrazeen/759072677603524608?source=share)

I'm trying to make one right now. I'm not too sure which tool I should use - I was thinking RPG Maker so I could use the little sprites - but I figured I could do stick people or something as placeholders for actual artwork.

No matter what tools I use, how exactly did you go about "writing" it? Did you script your story out first and then learn how to program it after, or did you need to know how the program worked to tailor your story to that?

I learned to code in tandem with writing the story. It's moreso the case that the writing evolved in the process of learning how to code, began to mold itself to the medium, if that makes sense. Personally, if I had to do it over again, I would take the time to acquaint myself with RenPy's particular scripting language, as it might have made the process a lot faster and less... growing pains-y. I would recommend learning to code first, but again, it doesn't make much sense to make a test VN without a story to support it, so maybe make something small for your first test project where you get to grind for XP commit mistakes in a space where your art isn't riding on it. People make silly test VNs that never see the light of day for the specific purpose of teaching themselves coding, so don't feel afraid to do that. Writing VNs differs from writing other stories in a way that's difficult for me to explain. You have extra tools in which to deliver the story, and it takes time to learn those tools - telling stories not just with words, but with timing, animation, audio, and images as well. You'll find that it isn't enough to simply have images pop up onscreen; you'll want to make them appear with a flourish, and those flourishes also tell a story. The UI tells a story. How you make elements appear and disappear contribute to the overall story. When you think of everything as a potential contributor to the story, that opens up a lot of possibilities and gets you thinking with portals creatively. In that vein, I'd say depending on your angle (because some VNs are just straight-up text, which is valid too), VNs can function somewhat more like movies. They can benefit greatly from an understanding of cinematography.

This might sound weird, given how we naturally tend to think of writing as the most important element - and it is important, just maybe not the only important element - but I think one of the most important things you need to establish right away, even before setting down any words, is a strong aesthetic. As one half of the medium, the visual part of a visual novel cannot be neglected.

What angle are you shooting for? Romance anime? Comic book? Gritty film noir? What are your visual motifs? In addition to helping you decide how to market your VN, the aesthetics will inform your storytelling, give you some concrete image or symbol to latch on, and can serve to subtly reinforce both theme and narrative. For Doki Doki Literature Club, it was the heart and a pen. You'll notice its motif of writing is reflected in the way in which the title resembles a scrapbook:

You and Me and Her has a cell phone as its main McGuffin and so technology becomes one of its motifs. Its textbox resembles a cloud; the text also moves rather slowly, to make you stop and soak in its story. The dreamlike interface later changes into something that resembles an old-school computer UI when a character decides to manipulate your route, reflecting the artifice of the game:

Worldend Syndrome had the pinwheel as a recurring symbol for narrative purposes and is color-coded to represent each of its characters. In addition, it bears a feel-good early summer vibe that I absolutely adore.

The novel I've been reading sporadically on and off over the past year, Hashihime of the Old Book Town, reflects a 1930s Japanese aesthetic, blending traditional Japanese art and literature with Western influences. Note the juxtaposition of traditional and modern elements, like the film reel beside an ink drawing of a koi fish:

It's also brilliant imagery because the game's plot centers around the MC's frequent breaks from reality; the film reel represents exaggerated realities, while the fish reflects how he "jumps" through various parallel worlds through puddles of water.

Everything sort of "trickles down" from there. It doesn't make sense to have a UI befitting a Resident Evil game if you're writing a cutesy otome game, for instance, unless you're aiming for cognitive dissonance.

For OaS I decided early on that, because it was going to be a slapstick comedy in places, the sprites should be more cutesy and cartoonish than the subdued way Sonic characters are usually drawn:

The goofy exaggeration only served to heighten the story's comedy. A "bounce" animation I found and later tweaked served as the basis for a running gag where Sonic gets hurt and "boings" like a rubber ball.

I also liked the Advance series' checkered tiles and wanted to go for a watercolor manga-cover-esque flavor... which, in turn, fed the ridiculousness of the story:

That's a far cry from this current project's aesthetic, which is slower, moodier, more somber, and more, I guess, "erudite," as it's based on Welsh literature and a little on history. So the aesthetic has to match.

Not to say aesthetics should be the only thing going for your story, of course, but because this is a visual medium, it is significant enough to warrant my huge wall of text about it lol. If you're just starting out, I'd recommend grabbing placeholder sprites and backgrounds until you can procure ones of your own. It's perfectly fine to use stick figures, although eventually you will have to start working with finalized pieces since the individual dimensions of your pieces will impact how your code functions.

If it wasn't clear already lol, I work with RenPy. Despite my frequent moaning and complaining, it's probably the easiest program to learn for coding, as it uses its own framework built atop Python. Once you go through the process of learning the syntax, you can pretty much do anything you want with it, as it's infinitely customizable.

Some auxiliary programs I use are FireAlpaca (a free art program that works just as well as MediBang or Photoshop, and even supports animation), Audacity (free audio mixing; can also convert mp3 files to OGG, which is a must since RenPy only recognizes OGG file format) and Notepad for coding.

Btw, all of this stuff you can do for free. Anybody who tells you that you need to pay for fancy programs is trying to sell you something. Don't fall for it lol. As for actually making the thing... My creative process is messy and probably shouldn't be emulated. For lack of a better term, I call it the "dumping everything out on the table" method. First (and note that this step isn't always "completed", it's an ongoing process) I gather all the "raw materials," and then sift through them and play with them until the final product becomes something coherent. The material-gathering includes art, music, and sound effects, which will take some time. I count writing as a "raw material" as well since it can be edited.

From there, the writing and the coding sort of feed into each other. I have to be able to experience the story as the player will experience it, as it's a different experience than when you're staring at a word processor. What will the player feel at this juncture? Does it Hit Different(tm) when I use different wording, or change the song that's playing in the background, or employ a different sprite, or tweak the timing, or use a different animation?

The general rule I try to abide by in this regard is that if it isn't working for me, it probably won't work for the player, either. Put yourself in their shoes, because they're the ones going to be playing it.

Even something as simple as the way you present choices to the player conveys information. Should I offer a choice during this particular scene, or let the moment play out linearly? How many choices should I offer? Do I stick them in a false choice? An infinite loop? Do I hide choices, making the player feel clever for finding them or powerless to stop the narrative? Do I assign variables to choices? Do I disable rollback for choices so the player has to stick with their decisions? If I do have rollback enabled, will I do something with that? What are the consequences of making choice A first, then choice B, if at all? Many things to consider. Sometimes the sheer volume of work can overwhelm you as a solo dev and make it difficult to maintain motivation. Especially since you can't really show off a buggy game the way you would a story excerpt or a rough sketch. Making to-do lists, especially towards the end of the development process when it seems like a million things are screaming for attention, helped me stay on task and break them down into smaller, more manageable chunks. I might not be able to bang out a 20,000-word route in a week, but I can certainly fix a bug that duplicates a character sprite. This is a medium where you have a lot to keep track of, and small details do add up in the end. Crossing tasks off your to-do list provides small wins that add up over time. That's why I decide that certain days are dedicated to specific kinds of work. Some days are for writing, others coding, etc. (Also, RenPy comes built in with its own list function called TODO, although I haven't personally played around with it yet.)

Although OaS technically features choices, thus making it not a kinetic novel in the strictest sense, it's still a very linear novel with only one branching path. There weren't any persistent variables other than the flag which determined your route placement, and it functioned much like an on/off switch. Which is why I have no idea how Random managed to bypass it. xP

This new project, on the other hand, is much less binary in its structure. It tracks seven variables for three different characters and calculates ending eligibility based on the accumulation of those variables. Which, just in terms of sheer coding, is A Lot(tm) to keep track of. I struggle to scale back the scope creep out of fears that a more standard visual novel experience will bore the player. It's likely that if you're playing a visual novel, you're not expecting a hack-and-slash, but ofc that won't prevent the monkey brain from clapping its hands at you like "Your game NEEDS more interactivity or you're gonna lose them!" That's the devil talking. Ignore him.

So then you're gonna be weeks into implementing a QTE, only to realize that the version of RenPy you downloaded bears a glitch that forces repeat interactions at inconvenient times and you might have to scrap that and do something else entirely.

Based on a true story. xP

#asks #sorry for the wall of text I hope it was useful lol #vn stuff #long post

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schalaasha · 5 years ago

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Favourite Games of 2019

I don’t like making ranked lists anymore. So here’s a bunch of games old and new I played in 2019 because I was busy catching up due to not playing FFXIV as much as in previous years.

Ciconia When They Cry Phase 1: For You, The Replaceable Ones

I think going in, and even starting to play it, I felt like maybe the game would abandon the WTC mystery game conventions. It ended up not doing that, because the game leaves you with far more questions than answers at the end. The A3W World (“after World War III”) is still trying to deal with political issues and social issues that existed prior to World War III. A global stalemate exists due to the military implementation of the Gauntlet weapon. Eventually things happen where different countries need to deal with a shortage of resources, territorial conflicts, etc which sets off a chain reaction to World War IV. However, the children who grew up in the A3W era, settled into new ideologies and views of how society currently works are at odds with what the older generation wants and requires of them. Along the way, they need to deal with other groups and conspiracies in order to maintain the Walls of Peace.

So in essence, R07 still crafts a mystery for readers to figure out, but it isn’t a murder mystery. It’s an international conspiracy mystery and I am more than okay with that. I think this chapter required a lot of worldbuilding to set that kind of story up and coming out of Phase 1, I understood why the first chapter wasn’t exactly like Umineko’s. I thought that it was handled well, despite some of the purple prose (but if you’ve played a R07 game before, you’re likely used to it). I also thought he really tried to introduce and incorporate themes including gender, generational differences, societal tiers, geopolitics disguised as sports events (possibly mirroring the 2020 Olympics in Japan), etc. as well as he could throughout the story through the game’s cast. Even if the game meanders a bit (and it definitely feels that way towards the start), when it actually starts to roll, I felt compelled to keep reading.

And truly, the game has an incredibly large cast of characters. The TIPS section handles introductions well, and while some cast members don’t have as much time in the spotlight as others, I can see them getting their time eventually in subsequent chapters. Clearly Phase 1 exists to focus more on the children from the Arctic Ocean Union (the “AOU”) as evidenced by the additional stories unlocked at the end of the game so hopefully other chapters have the same amount of character backstory for the other factions. I also genuinely enjoyed that the big international cast of characters allowed for many different types of designs with characters with different types of hairstyles and hair texture or characters wearing hijabs and still managed to make them retain adorableness or a sense of style. I do not recall seeing it as often in Japanese media and I’m very happy to see it here.

I think Ciconia Phase 1 is a very good start to this subseries’ planned four episodes and I hope to see more sociopolitical commentary. It feels as though R07 looked at everything happening in Japan and social media/how news is consumed and decided to write a four-part SFF series about it. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next chapter.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

I backed Bloodstained when it got put on Kickstarter a few years ago. It was shipped to me at… possibly the worst time since Shadowbringers was coming out very shortly after. My fiancé and I played ours for a short bit, felt very positive about the game, then dropped it to play Shadowbringers. We didn’t return to it until maybe September/October? Both of us ended up getting our Platinum Trophies for it so we both played through everything the game had to offer.

Bloodstained is a good experience, but not without its issues. I played on PS4 and I’ve had a few outright crashes or some glitching into walls early enough that I couldn’t come out of them again due to not having the required skill to try to get out of it. I also felt like the game meandered or had a bit of padding in its earlier stages). Later on, you realise you have to put in the farming work to have a better and faster time not unlike its Igavania counterparts, but I did feel like the drop rates prior to actually working towards higher luck stats/drop shards were low enough almost to the point of unfair or deliberately wasting my time. I also felt as though there were too many weapon types; with adequate shard use and shard grinding eventually you can settle into one weapon type that suits your playstyle or eventually use the gun for everything when you get the special hat quest reward).

However, I’m speaking about this game as someone who platinumed it which requires a lot of farming and synthesis. As a player going through the main campaign, I think the maps are adequate. The backgrounds are very lovingly crafted, and the music is absolutely one of the best of the year. Boss design is also fun and rewarding, requiring the player to learn how all the different weapon types work, adequate backstepping and closing in, and boss patterns. If you suck, the game will show you that you suck very quickly and deliberately. Essentially towards the end, I felt as though Bloodstained tried very hard to cater to fans of the metroidvania style of game, and the classicvania style of game. I personally don’t think it completely succeeded but for a first time experience of trying to combine the two into one, it did its job with preparation for another game.

I also feel like some criticism was lobbed towards the game’s narrative for being told in library/book entries, and while I understand that (I actually couldn’t open all of the books for fear of my game crashing), I don’t think elaborate cutscenes and continuous dialogue would work well with this game’s flow. Bloodstained prioritizes gameplay elements and player exploration over anything else, and to be honest, I’d rather it happen that way than with long elaborate cutscenes. I also felt as though I got more out of the game because I’d played the 8-bit prequel as well.

Overall, Bloodstained is a passable experience. I’m glad I played it, and I’m glad I put the work in to try to make the game a better experience. I got what I wanted out of the game for as much as I backed it and I hope they try again with a similar formula because this is a very good first step.

The Touryst

Sometimes when I see a game with voxel graphics, I feel pretty compelled to pick it up because it looks so darn lovingly rendered and it usually ends up being fun. The Touryst does a good job with its graphical style and visiting new islands is a complete delight because of it. It looks like a game with style, and performs super-well on the Switch. It’s also one of the freshest games I’ve played in a while.

Basically you’re playing a blocky dude with a moustache who just wants to have a good time but when he gets to TOWA Monument, he’s told he has to find monument cores to unlock the world’s secrets. And then you can do whatever you want. The different islands have their own little personalities: there’s an island called Fijy which is volcanic, there’s Ybiza with a bunch of dudes chilling on the beach and passed out on their chairs, there’s Santoryn which is just Greece, and a few other places that are essentially recreations of real-world places.

As you explore, there’s a lot of stuff to do. A variety of things to do. There are puzzles and mechanics that don’t necessarily overstay their welcome, you can play footy, you can play spelunker, you can take helicopter rides, you can take pictures, get stuff for a museum, surf, play rhythm games…. It’s your vacation, do what you want. It’s a little like Vegas. Unlike Vegas, you can use your ever-increasing money and diamonds to get new moves for your moustached character to reach new objects.

As a little game where you can do whatever you want little by little, and makes for a smooth experience, I’m glad I picked up the Touryst after asking another person what they thought of it. It has great puzzles, lots of stuff to do and explore and see, and ton of minigames for whatever mood you feel like you’re in. The game is fairly short, but I’m very glad the holiday doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A Short Hike

A Short Hike places you in the shoes of a bird who is utterly determined to walk to the top of Hawk Peak to get signal for her phone. I totally understand; sometimes you’ve gotta do what you gotta do.

But the game allows you to undertake that journey however you want to. You can go right away and finish up and get that darn signal. Or you can take your time and we’ll build that bridge when we get there. There are different types of terrains to explore if you opt to take the scenic route… and it’s rewarding to do so. You can find treasure, you can water a flower, you can talk to the Animal Crossing-esque characters to do some sidequests, you can do whatever you want.

I’m sorry to say that when the game introduced fishing, I spent a lot of my time doing that. Fishing ruins me. The completionist in me wanted to fish. But the whole thing is that you don’t have to do any of this. If you want to finish the game, you can absolutely positively focus on that and the game doesn’t pressure you for it.

And that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s just whatever about the whole ordeal. I don’t feel like I’m completely and utterly missing out if I don’t decide to do something. Even the task of getting Golden Feathers to progress is fine since you only need eight for it, and the game easily gives you enough rewards to get four or five before sidequests or exploration is factored in.

Sometimes you just need to take a walk and kind of think of nothing just to clear your head. And A Short Hike accomplishes that very well.

Worldend Syndrome

In my effort to try to find other games to play in 2019 because I’d fallen a little out of love with FFXIV, I realised that taking baby steps with visual novels and bite-sized games would be the best idea to try to get back into traditional games (particularly since I was, and am, still questioning whether I like games as a hobby or not). On a whim, I decided to download a boatload of visual novel demos one night and tried a bunch of them out. Worldend Syndrome’s demo didn’t exactly grab me until perhaps halfway through the demo when I a) realised that this demo was long af, and b) nothing appeared what it had seemed as I kept going through it and the characters were enjoyable.

So I decided to get the game and dragged my fiancé along for the ride. It’s one of those standard decision-making/pick which girl you want and go down her route VNs but it didn’t really feel skeezy or ecchi other than one particular point in each girl’s story where you get confessed to. You go through the VN as an unnamed protagonist who is visiting his cousin over the summer, and you and your friends get dragged into a school club whose focus revolves around folklore. The town the protagonist finds himself in is haunted by the Yomibito, spirits of the undead who look exactly like regular people but are eventually driven mad enough to kill.

One of the things that drew me to this visual novel was its assortment of animated backgrounds. They colourful and gorgeous. Every CG looks nice and coloured well, and the backgrounds for each area you visit are so beautiful and makes every single location easy to settle into. The cast is also surprisingly decent, where I expected to hate a few people but I ended up being okay with them because they were written well and weren’t as tropey as I had expected. I was also very pleased that the character that you were roleplaying as wasn’t skeezy when put into situations where he could have been, and that he treated the girls very well (though I won’t deny that there are some spots where behaviour was questionable but it doesn’t happen as often). Because the characters were written adequately enough, the game’s true ending route comes together very well and very naturally to a point where I could seriously believe that every character got along with one another to make sure the emotional impact of the mystery was satisfying.

In order to finish Worldend Syndrome, you have to do each route. A few characters’ routes don’t get unlocked until halfway through the game or even until the very end. The game also remembers everything you’ve done when it autosaves the system data on the world map, so if you need to reload a save to figure out someone’s schedule or if you mess up, it’s relatively easy to come back to something you’ve missed. I’ve played a lot of multiple route VNs before and Worldend Syndrome is easily one of the better VNs that allows the player to skip through to something they’ve missed or skip through previously-viewed text for another route.

As it is, Worldend Syndrome doesn’t really try to do anything spectacular, nor does it try to stand out like other visual novels of 2019 have (ie: Ciconia, presumably AI but I only tried the demo and I hated parts of the script, sorry). It does its job and tells its story which has a very good payoff in the end.

Judgement

I bought my fiancé Judgement earlier this year, as I had retired from playing Ryu ga Gotoku after Dead Souls/Ishin, and he was still playing the series religiously. I watched him play through part of it and I felt compelled to get my own copy because the combat looked nice, and the characters were compelling enough that I felt comfortable picking it up.

Judgement follows former lawyer Takayuki Yagami who is now a detective. His tale is one of redemption and conspiracies, reminiscent of some Phoenix Wright games (which this game gives clever nods to when the protagonist is in the courtroom). Yagami is more serious and down-to-earth than Kiryu is so the tone of the game feels quite different than other RGG games (or at least the ones I’ve played).

It still feels like a regular RGG game where you’re still wandering through Kamurocho, you’re still getting into fights with randos and Yakuza dudes, you date girls, you go to buy food, you play minigames, etc. But it isn’t as big as a standard RGG game; because you stay only in the one area, the cast is smaller, you get a job board to get your sidequests from, and the story itself is fairly short and sweet. I actually prefer that as a lapsed RGG player since it’s easier to get back into the games this way.

Judgement, however, disappointed me just a little in how little you spend in the courtroom. You’re given opportunities to present evidence, do some suspect tailing, use your smartphone to catch a cheating husband, or use a drone to search for evidence. I felt like when you had to use the drone to search for evidence, it ruined the pacing a little. The tailing missions are also reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed, and no that isn’t a good thing! Due to this, I felt like Judgement was not necessarily a great detective game but it did a decent job of trying to mold the RGG experience to a different main character.

Yagami can… fight… for some reason so he can beat up whatever randos come up to him on the streets. He’s actually more acrobatic than I remember Kiryu being in previous RGG games. He can kick off objects, he’s hard to back into a corner, he can do wall-flips, etc. It’s also much easier to earn XP where it’s all in one bar so you can do whatever you want to fill it up like play darts and just put stuff into his lockpicking. As a lapsed fan, the streamlining feels okay. The streamlining for combat also feels good because if you fights go on too long, the popo can come for you and you’d get fined, so emphasis is on finishing fights cleanly and quickly.

Overall, as a lapsed RGG fan, the way Judgement looks and feels and wraps up its twists and turns was really exciting for me. It may not have as many things to do as other RGG games, but honestly I think being a leaner experience was better and thus didn’t make the game overstay its welcome. I also am eagerly awaiting RGG7 since I enjoyed the demo a lot and I think the new protagonist can carry the series the way Yagami carried Judgement.

Cadence of Hyrule

Sometimes, after my fiancé and I bought our Switch, I’d wake up, go brush my teeth, and return to bed just to see my fiancé awake and playing Cadence of Hyrule. I was perplexed as it’s been ages since he’d willingly played a Zelda game, and his hands are super-huge for the joycons so he doesn’t like using them much.

You can easily say that Cadence of Hyrule is just a Crypt of the Necrodancer reskin with Zelda stuff all over it, but feels pretty clever in that it uses stuff from roguelikes and a rhythm game and makes the A Link to the Past world feel incredibly fresh. Bosses, especially, feel very fresh. Enemies move according to the rhythm and have a unique pattern that’s easily memorized so you can fall into the rhythm and take advantage of. If you’ve played Necrodancer, you’ll probably feel at home in this aspect, especially since the maps are also randomised (which leads different playthroughs feeling fresh).

The Zelda feels comes from recreating tunes from older Zelda games in puzzles, the magnificent sprite art, the great Zelda remixes, a simple-enough story, and a standard set of things to find in each procedurally generated dungeon. You also find a variety of traditional items like the bow, the bombs, boomerang… and a spear? It’s a nice blend of Zelda and Necrodancer.

The caveat is that it takes a little getting used to, since you’re not exactly used to not being able to freely move in a Zelda game. But when you do get used to it, it feels good. Everything is pretty expendable and if you die, you don’t feel like you necessarily lose a lot since you can accrue it all easily enough again. It’s unpredictable and that random roguelike nature is something that makes the Zelda experience feel fresh.

Spirit Hunter: Death Mark

My fiancé and I were trying to find spooky games to play for Halloween that wouldn’t make me squeamish because despite my profession dealing with analysis of body parts and human body fluids, I can’t see that kind of stuff on TV or in games in a realistic sense. It grosses me out. At least when it’s in front of me, it’s already out and off someone’s body and in a fume hood/biosafety cabinet and I didn’t have to see how it happened. My fiancé picked up Spirit Hunter: Death Mark on a sale we went through it together.

Death Mark is a tale about horror-themed urban legends and a curse that needs to be broken. People get marked with a crimson bite mark in the game’s H City and they eventually develop amnesia and die. A group of people live and gather at a spirit medium’s mansion (who is dead upon arrival). The only hint to break the curse in this mansion is a little talking doll named Mary. The protagonist eventually goes through several mysteries in an effort to break his curse and stop others from dying.

Death Mark does some surprisingly well-crafted worldbuilding. Each spirit you deal with has a well-told backstory, sometimes especially ghoulish (particularly the bonus post-game episode, the first episode, and the one episode with the telephone booth). The game excels with psychological horror and the enemies involved in each boss battle assist in making the player feel that way as well. The backgrounds also lend well to this as while they are simplistic, the shading and colours used help to execute a sense of dread. One particular chapter harkens back to Japan’s Aokigahara, and the backgrounds used connect very well to that particular location so that it feels super-eerie.

Regardless, Death Mark relies a lot on its text to establish its atmosphere and as someone who reads stuff like R07 VNs and other regular VNs with a lot of text, I was okay with that. The localization was well-done, albeit with some issues that would have been caught in editing but overall it carried the story very well.

There are boss battles prior to the end of each chapter, where you must use each item you find in your exploration segments. You need to use specific items in a specific order (even with the correct party setup) in order to achieve a good ending for that particular chapter (and thus eventually the game). I thought this was an interesting mechanic and while it got a little tired depending on the spirit, it showcased how creepy some of them can be on your screen.

Unfortunately, Death Mark does not have a variety for its soundtrack and it’s almost disappointing that the same piano tunes and boss themes played repeatedly as I felt it detracted from the experience.

Otherwise, I felt like Death Mark was a short and sweet horror experience that played into urban legends and folklore experiences. I loved the little vignettes that eventually ramped up to a central story point. I hope the sequel is good when we get around to it.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

So my fiancé and I are doing this thing where we’ve started buying one copy of a game so we’d both own it together and go through it together. Sekiro and Man of Medan were two of those games this year.

Sekiro isn’t really like Souls. Eventually you’ll come to learn that very quickly when the game throws a boss at you and if you try to play like Souls, you’re not going to get the job done. It will show you that you never learned how to parry properly and you’re going to have to go back and learn it. Or if you didn’t grab a prosthetic that will make the job easier, you’re gonna have to do that too.

The game is interesting in that you aren’t exactly whittling down health bars all the time; you’re striking properly so you can overwhelm their posture bars, find an opening, and go in for the kill. Enemy health bars are essentially secondary to that posture bar. You have your own posture bar so you’ve got to learn how to parry properly. Sometimes you need to parry complete combos in order to deliver posture damage back to an enemy. It’s all about getting into the flow and rhythm of combat. And you must beat bosses in order for you to get a stat boost, so being able to beat a boss lies in your skill, and not necessarily your level/equipment.

Sekiro is Souls-like in its storytelling and worldbuilding. You can run around rooftops and areas to find secrets off the beaten path. You go back and forth between areas and speak to different NPCs to find out their backstories. The plot is also told via NPC conversations with the main characters. At first it’s a little dry but the story opens up eventually. It also has some great voiced NPCs for quests (one quest in particular had voicework that made me feel so sorry for the character that I was like “we need to get the proper item for this guy please don’t make him suffer”).

It feels rewarding to put in the work in order to beat the bosses, make it so you don’t resurrect as often to make people sick, and meet whatever standard Sekiro is throwing at you. It lets the player know that they’ve met that standard, and then throws another boss phase at them so you have to get even better.

Owl I’m looking at you.

Super Kirby Clash

My fiancé and I bought a Switch together this year (which, outside of dinner and movies and clothes, etc. was one of our major purchases together). We downloaded a few demos to try the control scheme out, including Super Kirby Clash. I am aware that this game is probably old, but hey it’s still going and it’s still being supported and I’m catching up.

I’m probably putting it here due to bias, but I think It’s really cute and the hats are super-adorable. I love getting new hats and new weapons for my little Kirby. It’s fairly standard as far as a “mobile experience” is concerned and playing it a little when I have the time to and hacking away at it little by little is rewarding when I get a new hat or new gear. My fiancé and I played it in multiplayer as well, which felt a lot like Kirby’s Return to Dream Land.

It’s pretty inoffensive and I haven’t paid real-life money for anything in it, and I still feel like I’m progressing. So as a Kirby game with light RPG elements (ie: something I’ve wanted for years and years), it’s nice to finally see realised.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

An artist I commission very often from convinced me to move this game further up in queue than I originally had it when we were talking about games we were playing after finishing Shadowbringers’ main campaign.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is the spiritual successor inspired by Wonder Boy III, with the formula being modernized for a new era. It feels fast, and it looks soooooooo pretty. The tracks are bumpin’ too. It’s also a little tough but with every difficult section successfully platformed through, you feel really good about it.

You play as a plucky boy named Jin whose uncle is an insano who turns everyone in the kingdom into animals. After you experience sweet freedom as a human boy platforming across things easily for like 15 minutes, Jin’s uncle turns him into a pig. Whoops. From there the platforming gets a little harder and you need to learn how to manipulate different forms and different spells in order to get across various sections.

Different animal forms give you different skills. Pig form allows you to sniff out secrets literally, snake form lets you cling to walls and go through tiny passages, frog has a sticky tongue for swinging, and lion form lets you go through obstacles. You need to use these forms well to platform well enough to get through each area and finish the game. Being successful at platforming in this game feels good and fulfilling and satisfying. As you unlock more, platforming experiences get more and more complex with more obstacles put in your way, so in essence it feels like the opposite of a standard metroidvania. Playing both Bloodstained and this in one year felt like playing polar opposites. That said, the checkpointing in Monster Boy is really good. Game Atelier knew what they were doing.

The bosses by contrast were really easy and it’s nice to take the time to look at the art for each boss. All of the effects are also super-nice. Playing Monster Boy on a 4K TV is quite a visual treat for its boss sections, its town section, and its platforming sections. The colours are off-the-charts. Each animal sprite has its own set of unique animations: the piggy farts and looks like >_>, froggy looking at flies, etc. And the music is so good. If this game were a 2019 game I’d definitely put its soundtrack on my list, but it isn’t. It’s a nice blend of new and old stuff and it’s a delight to hear in-context as encouragement to keep going when you fail a platforming section.

Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a faithful representation and homage of the old Wonder Boy games. It’s filled with references and secrets and awesome art, and I’m glad to have been convinced to move it up my queue for this year.

Most Disappointing Game: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

I love Final Fantasy XIV. It’s brought me closer to so many people in recent years and I’ve met so many more through it. Playing this game means so much to me and I want the best for it for years to come. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so critical about it. If I hated this game, I would stop playing and honestly, I wouldn’t care about its future. I will say this before getting started: I like Shadowbringers’ story so far (we aren’t going to be finished with its story until 5.3). I don’t think It’s necessarily as consistent as Heavensward, but I think Shadowbringers’ story is the most Final Fantasy story we’ve gotten since perhaps FF10. Truly, it’s the best we’ve seen for the series this decade.

I had a lot of hopes and hype for Shadowbringers. I hated Stormblood, for a myriad of reasons: social reasons, gameplay reasons, and narrative reasons. The direction Shadowbringers was going and all the trailers made it seem like it was going to be fresh and exciting and new. My fiancé and I (and a few others) swapped servers+data centers in advance of the expansion for a fresh start, to boot. I watched the Job Actions trailer over and over and tried to decide what I was going to eventually main and gear up because I didn’t really have a main in Stormblood due to the combat changes and how easy things became for certain things.

During a live letter, they mentioned that they’re changing how things work in battle, and that’s when I became a little cautious. I was hoping for the best leading up to release and then I saw the scholar/healer changes and got very worried. I changed mains in Stormblood because playing Scholar was freaking horrible at the start of Stormblood.

I eventually had to change mains at the start of Shadowbringers because I was not having fun playing Scholar. For people who didn’t bother to level a healer at all, the writing was on the wall for healers during Stormblood. Essentially, it introduced an age of healing where you barely ever used your GCDs to heal. You mostly used OGCDs and preplanned shields. 90% of the time if you wanted to be a good healer, you’d mostly DPS. I don’t think I’ve cast a GCD heal at all in SB and ShB content unless things were going super-wrong.

The healing changes introduced in Shadowbringers made us think that things were going to change, that things were going to be harder to heal. I had my doubts, however, because all fights are scripted and if they were to introduce a substantial change to incoming damage, they would have to make it so most people (casual, midcore, hardcore, less experienced newbies, experienced folks) would be used to It and could handle it. There was no way they were going to introduce more difficulty given that subscription numbers were increasing.

And so, healers during Shadowbringers got some damage skills taken away, but in their place, they were given more tools to heal with:

- White Mage came away from this as a very well-rounded healer at launch. It had its damage spells, it had a damage spell with a stun, it finally had long-standing and easily useable mitigation, it has substantial MP recovery, and it has a damage spell that rewards you for using three GCD heals to make up for damage lost. White Mage still making out like a bandit in 5.1.

- Scholar felt dramatically different and didn’t feel as solid as it used to be. It had most of its damage tools taken away, the usefulness of its fairy was decreased because let’s be honest it was super-overpowered, it got one of its fairies and its AoE esuna taken away, and it was given its PvP move to act as an AoE that doesn’t have another effect. I had to completely unlearn everything I did as scholar in the last 5-6 years in order to play current scholar. Current 5.1 scholar is overpowered as heck and I don’t feel as satisfied to play it in SB/ShB content.

- AST LOL. All the cards are balance. MP regen is what. Heals are what. Everything is just what. Other fun skills were removed. That said, I really like AST just because it feels like I have to work twice as hard to achieve the same effect the other healers bring to the table.

So eventually with all of these changes, we had assumed that healing was going to be harder. It wasn’t. It’s the same experience and all we’re doing is pressing one single button all the time. I barely have to heal in dungeons. I barely have to heal in raid unless my party members step in stupid. I just can’t bring myself to play healer every single day anymore, and I love healing in this game. Or I loved it back when it was more dynamic. I just press one button over and over and over and over and over and maybe sometimes another but I just press one button a lot. It’s really sad and it makes me miss old Cleric Stance of all things.

I like Shadowbringers’ story. I felt rewarded playing through it as someone who’s played the game for years and did everything when it was in-content. So for me, it was like a good reunion. There were a lot of points where the story dragged or felt rocky. I felt like the start of the 5.0 campaign was utterly boring and poorly paced. It picked up again, then slowed down again, then picked up again, then got REALLY BAD, then picked up again for a good finish. I don’t think it’s as consistent as Heavensward’s 3.0 campaign, but it was very solid and made up for the 4.0 campaign.

However, story is only 20% of the experience for me. The rest of the time, I need to actually play the game. I actually liked the levelling and crafting changes and new skills they brought in during 5.0 because leveling a crafter never felt easier. I felt like I still had to work hard but the payoff came quickly and my macros still worked as well as they did from during Stormblood. I also used my Stormblood melds and Stormblood equipment for the entire levelling experience and had to make concessions for some of my macros as time went on. I still had to know what my skills did, basically. The 5.1 crafting/gathering changes kind of make me want to craft less since I don’t feel like I have to solve a puzzle anymore and to be honest, everyone crafts now so you make far less money than you previously did. The desynth changes also made it so that most of my markets tanked since what’s the point of gathering half the materials when desynth makes those materials easily accessible. I’m not saying to gatekeep at all, but I feel like the experience should have been a little harder (ie: like the Ixali experience where you had to learn what your skills did or desynth shouldn’t be this easy to keep the market fairly balanced). My server is a crafting server so I am more impacted in general from this. That said, I don’t have anything to spend gil on so it doesn’t matter, I guess. I just feel far less inclined to participate in what was one of my favourite pastimes in XIV.

I mained Ninja which got killed in 5.0. I was already dealing with the servers moving from East Coast to West Coast, so adding a bunch of stuff to squeeze into your TA window in 10 seconds in Shadowbringers utterly killed the job for me. 5.1 Ninja throws me off as someone who played this game since the time Ninja was introduced, and I can’t make myself play it. The current opener is the Doton opener (which is something I didn’t like in SB at all) and I can’t always rely on my tank to bring the thing to my Doton. That, and making it so you do different things per every other or every third TA just makes the job a little unpalatable for me at 80. I’m one of those people who wants TA to go. I don’t like that Ninja’s become the TA bot in recent years. I can still do well with it. People still throw buffs at me, but I don’t find enjoyment in the job anymore and I hope we get a proper retool in 6.0.

I switched back to ranged. Thankfully Bard hasn’t changed as much since SB (though I still prefer HW Bard like a weirdo), and Dancer is one of those “I worked too damn long today and I just wanna do the mindless brainless rotation” jobs. I miss old Machinist oddly enough. It felt really good when you played it well and pulled off a decent wildfire. Now it’s a little easier and I don’t feel as fulfilled playing it. That said, it’s probably the best incarnation of the job since it’s sad little introduction in 3.0.

Even tanking is substantially easier and that’s a mostly good thing. It sucked going into a low level dungeon and having trouble keeping aggro due to the level syncing and your DPS’ stats. Now you can just turn your stance on and go to town without losing any damage potency like you used to. I kind of miss swapping stances after I’ve established aggro though, because you could tell the difference between a good tank and a bad/less practiced tank if they didn’t bother to swap stances in a fight. Tanks came out of this expansion very balanced, though. They might need some work here and there (warrior I’m looking at you), but overall, they came out the best out of the three roles.

Other than that, you have monks not knowing what they should be, samurai continuously getting buffed and nerfed, black mage staying consistent, red mage being lol, summoner getting changed to the point where now it’s overpowered, among other DPS changes. DPS overall don’t have as much synergy so you can take any job you want to into raid and it’ll get the job done. That said if you want to do as much damage as possible, you’re generally going to take the same few classes into the raid if you’re less educated about them. And I feel like the lack of synergy or utility between classes or even the loss of something like mana shift makes the whole experience a little boring. It’s very “f you, I got mine” or the onus is on the player for their own personal burdens and no one’s really helping each other unless you’re a dancer, trick attack bot, dragoon or bard.

I really hope the other pieces of content are substantial but what I’ve seen aren’t exactly what I had in mind. Boss refights with an alternate version is really neat but I didn’t really want that for this raid tier. I wanted something more original given what we had to deal with in Omega. I don’t really care for the Nier Automata crossover because, again, I wanted something original to the XIV lore and the First. I think doubling down on Blue Mage is a bad idea and while some folks like its party-based content now, I can’t bring myself to keep doing the content given that it’s clear they don’t know what to do with it (or didn’t know what to do with it). With one dungeon coming per patch I have to question what’s happening internally or what they’re working on. I know SE is weird internally and I really hope that the kind of stuff I’ve read in previous postmortem articles isn’t happening.

Either way, I’m really disappointed that I want to stop playing XIV so much when it’s the most popular among my friends and followers because it’s so dissatisfying to me and it’s the most accessible that it’s ever been. I hope things get better eventually but going by what I think they have in store and their old reliable formula, I don’t have hope. I’m tired of the formula and I feel like it needs a shakeup. Overall, I’ve been less happy playing FFXIV than I’ve ever been and it makes me feel really sad.

#goty 2019 #ciconia when they cry #bloodstained #the touryst #a short hike #worldend syndrome #judgment #cadence of hyrule #spirit hunter death mark #sekiro #super kirby clash #shadowbringers

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