Sunday Summaries 17/01/2016: Fallout 4 & Citizens of Earth

Hey, all, to another Sunday Summaries. I think I have the structure down pat at this point, though that isn't to say this feature won't morph and change as the weeks go by. It does seem to get longer each time, which is a troubling development because I'm spending that much more of my Sundays to produce them. My chief regret this week is that I neglected to write anything else beyond the regular "List of Beaten Games" for this year. However, now that I've escaped the irradiated clutches of Bethesda's Fallout 4, I'll be playing some new games which in turn will hopefully inspire new topics of discussion. If nothing else, I won't have the Commonwealth sitting there distracting me with its promises of looting garbage from ruined dumps. The garbage; it calls to me.

I've been meaning to watch the last two episodes of Heroes Reborn - the series finale is this Friday - but I just can't seem to muster the motivation to do so. I've been recapping the episodes over on my Tumblr, which is a kinder way of saying eviscerating them, but the primary issue with the show is that it's sort of dull and predictable. To be a fun terrible show, it has to surprise you in ways that make little sense cohesively and/or contains wonderfully terrible and misguided ideas that go against everything the show has established about its characters, their journeys and general standards of basic human decency and decorum.

Everyone wanted to talk about Undertale after they played it, and it ended up being a ubiquitous presence for a while, for better or worse. Helping get the word out for such a worthwhile game is kinda what makes the internet great. Or at least less awful.

We're also getting to the point now where there's simply too much good TV that I'm missing out on to crack wise about the bad, and that factors into something I was pondering on Twitter the other day about video games as well: we almost have too much of a good thing right now with the competing AAA and Indie markets and we really lack the time to subject ourselves to media that doesn't deserve it. We're in an era where, and I feel the emergence of the oft-maligned and ever-effusive YouTubers and Twitch stream game coverage corroborates this, one could feasibly focus their whole "discussing games" careers talking positively about the games they enjoyed and feel could use the friendly promotion to boost their profile. It's when when there's a lot of money behind the promotional pushes of big AAA games that, were one to be a little cynical, could connect a positive review to some sort of media blitz if not a paid endorsement outright - the recent Rooster Teeth debacle over Jeff's firm but fair Fallout 4 console review is one of the uglier instances of this. On the other hand, the Indie market is proving itself the new bastion of innovation and giving players what they want instead of telling them what they want (like consumable DLC cards for multiplayer and season passes) and will continue to outpace the increasingly desperate and less scrupulous corporations, and they need all the help they can to stand out. A decent YouTube channel - as in, the ones that don't resort to shrieking histrionics while playing terrible horror games crapped out almost entirely for such videos - can really get the word out about some cool shit. Ditto with Giant Bomb and other gaming sites that have gone the personality route: we're reasonably assured that the enthusiasm for these under-the-radar games is genuine, because we know what the hosts are into.

The giant bummer that is THPS5 would've been even more so if you'd bought it at face value without first hearing the thousand online voices making throwing up noises in unison with their coverage.

It's equally important to get the word out about terrible and broken games too, of course, if only to save folk from an unwise purchase. The critic's job is to sort the chaff from the wheat for the sake of those who don't have the time or money to do so themselves. If your online persona isn't towards tearing things down or creating similes about how much of a garbage fire a game might be, however, there's venues and opportunities for rising critics now where they can be eternally positive and ebullient when talking about games without falling into the trap of coming off like a weighted IGN-style "8-to-10" point scoring system that no discerning consumer would take seriously. Just as long as we don't ignore the "accentuate the negative" critics either: if those terrible games aren't given the withering limelight from time to time, then it's the publishers themselves that end up controlling the message.

Oh yeah! One last thing before I move onto new releases for this week: the first ninety minutes of the Gaki no Tsukai New Year's No-Laughing Batsu ("Punishment") Game have been translated. If you're unfamiliar, it's a big annual event on Japanese TV where a group of five comedians have to go an entire day without laughing, or they'll get their asses beat with giant foam weapons. It's a TV institution over there equivalent to Dick Clark (or posthumous replacement) dropping the shiny New Year's ball over Times Square and worth a watch, even if most of the cameos and jokes tend to go over the heads of those not fully entrenched in Japanese pop culture. I've been a little disappointed with how formulaic and gross it's been in recent years - they regularly introduce a fake game show segment where someone's ass is gradually pushed into the trapped faces of the comedians, among other scatological humor - but it can be hilariously inventive in how it traps and surprises the comedians in equal measure too. If you've never seen a Batsu Game, check out one of the fully translated shows from previous years on the site I linked to. They're a bit on the long side, but it's one of those things I treasure experiencing every January.

News!

Releases are picking up again, though it'll be a long while before I buy anything new. Still, it doesn't hurt to review what's on its way for future purchasing ideas. Fortunately, I can talk about the new games of this week with some authority because half of them are rereleases.

First is the A Boy and His Blob rerelease: one of the Wii's handful of worthy third-party exclusives. Well, exclusive until now, anyway. I've written about the Wii's hidden treasure trove of exclusives twice before now - hidden if only because they're buried under piles of shovelware or overshadowed by Nintendo's first-party output - and I'm happy to see a lot more of those games find a wider audience. I didn't play the PS Vita version of Little King's Story, but if has anything like the quality of the original than it's one of the Vita's most essential games. I'm sure the same will be true for this A Boy and His Blob remake as well: it has astoundingly smooth art and animation (WayForward can do non-pixel art just as well as pixel art, it turns out), some really diabolical puzzles and a whole lot of heart. Y'all remember the hug button, right?

More important than that in rerelease news, however, is the PS4 PSN release of Dark Cloud 2: one of the many links in Level-5's chain of fantastic JRPGs for the PlayStation 2. Dark Cloud 2, or Dark Chronicle, happens to be the best of these for reasons I hope to go into at a later time. It's genuinely my favorite game of all time, and it's through a combination of gameplay mechanics, diverse modes and side activities, its gentle and chill presentation and is one of those JRPGs that I can get 100 hours into and still wake up eager to play more of it. I intend to buy it as soon as possible, if only to support the choice to release it on the PS4, and whenever I can make a space in the backlog I'm thinking of jumping right back into it again with abandon.

Holy crap will I relish any opportunity to play this again.

We also have the "final" 1.0 release of Darkest Dungeon, which looks to do to roguelike dungeon crawlers what Papers, Please did for bureaucracy simulators; Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, the newest Mario & Luigi RPG and one that features Paper Mario, which I hope ends up being a great combination of the two brilliant and long-running Mario-related RPG series; and Atelier Escha & Logy Plus: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky, part of the very expansive Atelier franchise - and another "revamp" of an earlier PS3 game in the series - for PS4 and Vita. I actually feel bad every time a new one of those comes out, because I only got as far as Atelier Iris 2: there's been approximately twelve new games in the series since then. It sounds like the "Plus" games are the ones to go for, though, as they include the enhancements and gameplay additions introduced in the intervening games for an incrementally improved experience. It'd be like Capcom remaking Resident Evil 1 to be bigger and better with the knowledge they'd garnered from creating Resident Evil 4 which... I guess they sort of did that, huh.

Wiki!

I generally pick my time to work on the wiki when there are podcasts to listen to. Most wiki work involves taking screenshots and data entry for dates and stuff, which doesn't require a lot of deep thinking, so I amuse myself with whatever the two Bomb Crews or the Brothers (and Dad) McElroy might be talking about that week. Recently, however, my podcast time has coincided with my Fallout 4 time, since playing that doesn't require a whole lot of focus either unless I suddenly find myself in a quest line with NPCs to whom I have to pay attention. Now that Fallout 4 is over, I'm back to my hobby of cleaning up and crafting new pages for twenty-plus-year-old games. Here's a few highlights:

I'd say it has nothing to do with Dynasty Warriors, but... well, there's plenty of similarities.

Dynasty Wars and Last Duel: Inter Planet War 2012 are a couple of Arcade games I covered in the very last ST-urday feature of 2015. I've been sprucing up games pages simultaneously with writing the ST-urdays they pertain to, but I've fallen a bit behind with no small blame going to the fact that I featured a whole five games in that final week for my ongoing love-letter to the Atari ST home computer. I'm intending to finish off the other three this week. Dynasty Wars also put me on a tangent building up the Tenchi o Kurau franchise page - the game's Japanese name and the name of the historical manga the game is based on - because it turns out Tenchi o Kurau (which translates to the badass title "The Devouring of Heaven and Earth") was also the inspiration source for Capcom's Three Kingdoms Era NES RPG Destiny of an Emperor. Both Dynasty Wars and Destiny of an Emperor saw sequels: the CPS-1 Arcade brawler Warriors of Fate and the Famicom RPG Tenchi o Kurau II: Shokatsu Koumei-den (the one game in this set of four to not see an international release) respectively. I hadn't realized there was a connection until now beyond being Capcom games, but I guess if you bought the license why not use it as much as you can?

If I knew what a drop kick was called in Japanese, I'd be throwing them every which way.

I've also gone back to my PC Engine '90 to-do list, fixing up the pages for the Osamu Tezuka anime license platformer Aoi Blink (which I covered in an episode of TurboMento-12 years ago) and the rotational shoot 'em up Barunba while creating new pages for soccer game Formation Soccer: Human Cup '90, which began a series that would later take off on the Super Famicom/SNES as Super Formation Soccer, and Maniac Pro Wrestling, which looks to be an entertaining (if you can read Japanese) pro-wrestling game that focuses largely on menus and dramatic cutaways of sweet wrestling moves. Four games in a week is very slim progress, but I hope to get back into the swing of things soon and endeavor to complete the rest of the PC Engine's 1990 library by the end of February. Then it's back to Super Nintendo games for probably the rest of the year. Fun!

Fallout 4!

I've exhausted almost everything I want to say about Fallout 4, but there is a significant part of the end-game that is based on the world's factions. As with Fallout: New Vegas, the are a few groups vying for control over the game's region that the player can choose to ally with. During the early stages of these faction helping quests, you can pull a Yojimbo and play both (or all four, in this case) sides against the middle and decline to kill or firmly align with anyone, but that only gets you so far. To discuss what happens after that point of no return would be to get into end-game spoilers, so I'll continue that in just a little bit with a spoiler-blocked section for those squeamish about such things.

I think they spent more time on customizable Power Armor than they did writing entertaining and relatable characters. Can't blame 'em though; Power Armor's cool as shit.

Instead, I'll talk about the factions themselves in more general terms. The chief issue is that the four factions aren't necessarily ideologically opposed to one another. The game tries to set it up that way, but there's a considerable amount of guile and wiggle-room that it refuses to account for because it demands the player make a choice between the four of them as the game lumbers towards its conclusion. I was someone who managed to resolve the New Vegas conclusion with very little bloodshed in part because I'd garnered a lot of respect from the factions in questions after helping them with story and radiant (the game's word for repeatable quests that randomly selects from a pool of locations to either clear our or acquire items from) missions and because I'd increased my speech skill. I love mediating my way through problems in games like this, using my wits and charisma (or that of my character, at least) to find a peaceful solution, or at least a solution that is more gratifying than a giant gunfight followed by what often feels like an arbitrary and incongruous final boss encounter. Fallout 4 is very much set on the latter scenario, alas, though I'll not go into details yet.

What's worse is that there's no "faction affinity" rating in Fallout 4: if you perform radiant quests for a group, it earns you practically nothing but the XP and whatever you found there. The important faction quests are triggered purely by where you are in the story instead. Like the settlement crafting, it feels as if Bethesda had hurried through that aspect of the game quickly to get Fallout 4 shipped as soon as possible, but unlike settlements - which have an excuse for being underbaked as they were an almost entirely new feature for Bethesda's open-world games, the Skyrim Hearthfire DLC notwithstanding - there's no excuses for why this pre-existing aspect felt so lackluster. You're almost better off ignoring all the factions until they become integral to the story for what little they offer, and there's no quest line you can follow for any one of them that won't eventually permanently block off another - while it might be a little hard to swallow that your Dragonborn can be Skyrim's Archmage, Thief Guild Master, Harbinger of The Companions and Listener of the Dark Brotherhood at the same time, at least you could pursue all those quest chains in a single game.

So let's get a little more in-depth here. The faction-based stuff really kicks off when the player first encounters and joins the Institute: the shadowy organization that has been responsible for most of the game's events thus far, chief of which is the kidnapping of your son, Shaun. Once you discover a way in, some rare circumstances puts you in a trusted position within the Institute, which obviously opens a lot of doors for the various factions that seek to demolish it. You can opt to work with the Brotherhood, the Railroad or the Minutemen here to bring the Institute down, or stay with the Institute and help it achieve its goals.

The game's intent here, from what I can surmise, is to give you four options that each has their pros and cons. Each faction has sympathetic characters (and less sympathetic ones) and something of value to offer the player in a gameplay sense, but each has a fundamental ideological issue that is meant to cause players some consternation when choosing to throw their lot in with them:

The Institute doesn't realize the harm it's causing, or perhaps doesn't care, in creating human-like synths and replacing them Body Snatchers-style with the humans above. While they never come out and say it, they have an almost Nazi-like perception of the unwashed, uneducated, partially-irradiated civilians trying to eke out a meager living on the surface. They had tried to control them through a proxy government, only to be scorned by in-fighting and aggressive outside influences like raiders and the militaristic gunners (which are just raiders with fancier gear) and decided that the general population are scarcely worth saving. When talking to them, you realize that they think of themselves as a "Noah's Ark of humanity": the only rational people left alive after the war and the only ones capable of restoring humanity to where they left off before the bombs dropped. Doesn't help that their subterranean utopia looks a lot like the pristine space station from the James Bond movie Moonraker; which was also created to host what was considered the most worthy humanity had to offer while the rest of us earthbound types were to be exterminated like vermin by the eugenics-obsessed Hugo Drax. That their advanced technology and hostile intentions that may well lead to an identical nuclear catastrophe is apparently lost on them.
The Railroad mean well, but there's a certain amount of naivety in what they're doing. The synths are treated as mere machines by the majority of the Commonwealth's citizens: the Institute is probably most keenly aware of the presence of any burgeoning sentience, but either knows full well that the machines are purpose-built to trick people by seeming as human as possible, or because they'll be darned if morality gets in the way of their grand schemes and simply chooses to ignore any potential nascent self-awareness. The Brotherhood treats all technology religiously, which means they either believe that it should stay in the hands of the righteous - i.e. themselves - or be destroyed. The synths are, alas, part of the latter category as far as they are concerned. The Minutemen are meant to represent the common folk, and so are mostly kept in the dark about what the synths are - all they have to go on are the horror stories of a human synths going berserk due to a glitch, or the equally hostile non-human synths that raid dilapidated buildings for materials and power sources the Institute can't manufacture themselves. The Railroad want to save the Synths, as they perceive them to be indentured servants with wills of their own, but the game offers no real argument to be made in that favor. The two synth companions, after all, would be the first to admit that they're robots playing as humans, though it's really down to the player whether they agree or not. The Railroad do have the moral high ground, if nothing else, even if their methods can be a bit extreme.
The Brotherhood are depicted as little more than fascist thugs in this setting, which the game explains as being due to the leadership of their new leader Elder Maxson. Maxson is a very "letter of the law" sort of guy when it comes to the Brotherhood's centuries-old doctrines, and generally won't listen to any detracting opinions as he believes - as does Paladin Danse, your first contact within the Brotherhood of Fallout 4 - that all his soldiers need to follow orders rather than question them. Working for the Brotherhood as its upsides - they're the faction most likely to give you superb weapon tech and power armor, and their ending involves the fantastic Liberty Prime who has been mothballed after his star-making role in Fallout 3 - but it's also a giant bummer. These guys are little better than the Gunners with regards to their absolutist authority and selfish philosophy regarding technology, and they insist that you resolve every problem they face through force. That's fine if you go into Fallout treating it like a middling FPS game with lots of ugly people to shoot at, but it lacks the nuance you'd want from a story-driven RPG.
The Minutemen, as previously stated, are left in the dark about a lot of the finer details about the plot, the role of the Institute and the goals of the other factions and can therefore be a little misguided and reactionary as a result, but at least you know that they genuinely have the happiness and safety of the Commonwealth's citizenry in mind. Their post-Institute infiltration faction quest line is the shortest, due in part to the fact that you performed the majority of their faction missions early on in the game after rescuing Preston in Concord. The Minutemen faction quest line is also distinct because it doesn't necessarily involve utterly destroying the Brotherhood or the Railroad: both can exist after the Minutemen's version of The Nuclear Option - the last quest for any faction besides the Institute - though it takes some cunning to pull off.

Which leads to my biggest issue with how these quest lines resolve: the Railroad and Institute insist that you blow up the Brotherwood's enormous airship The Prydwen and/or kill all their ground units and/or the scouts in the police station that you assist in the early game. Both those paths therefore also insist you murder the player companion Paladin Danse, unless you completed a certain late-stage Brotherhood quest that involves him. If you choose to continue the Railroad quests, it means murdering both the the stalwart Danse and the perky and idealistic Scribe Haylen - two characters I liked a lot. Likewise, opting to help the Brotherhood or Institute absolutely guarantees the deaths of every Railroad leader including the eccentric conspiracy-theorist inventor Tinker Tom, the amusing wiseacre player companion Deacon and the badass synth-turned-avenger Glory - more characters that I really liked. Most of the Institute's staff escapes when you blow it up in any ending that isn't the Institute's, but each path still involves murdering folk who would otherwise be friendly with you and are some of the better written and more sympathetic NPCs in the game. I sort of wish the developers spent a little more time creating outcomes where they all stay alive.

Citizens of Earth!

I won't miss the game's deliberately off-kilter take on "Hail to the Chief". It's a funny idea for theme music, especially sinceI'm fairly sure the Presidential fanfare is public domain, but it really messes with your head after a while.

As with Fallout 4, I've all but exhausted every discussion topic about Eden Industries's Indie JRPG throwback Citizens of Earth already thanks to the three rundowns I penned during Go! Go! GOTY! last month. I do have one last element to discuss in how effectively the game gives each of its forty recruitable characters their own personality, combat style and exploration ability - some of which begin to play around with meta elements of the game's UI and mechanics - but if you'd rather they remain surprises then I'll recommend you read those spoiler-free Go! Go! GOTY! entries or watch the site's early-game Quick Look and decide for yourselves whether or not you want to play it before reading any further. I will say that, after completing the game, it is absolutely worth the time investment and is still worthy of its top-ten position on my GOTY list for last year. I'd rate it as highly as Zeboyd's best for how inventive it can be and how evident its love is for the JRPGs that inspired it.

Speaking of its inventiveness, let's quickly run down that list of recruits and what they can provide you in the field. For the sake of brevity, we won't go into their combat style or recruitment methods, but even if the game scales down Suikoden's 108 Stars of Destiny to just 40 civic-minded citizens, it still finds a considerable number of applications for them:

Many of the characters are vendors: by using them enough times in combat, you increase the size of their shop inventories. I guess you're inspiring them to become better merchants? With the exception of the protagonist's brother, you can't actually buy items from them in the field: you need to return to their store before their services can be used. There's a Bakery Chef (healing items), a Barista (energy-restoring items, essentially the game's version of mana), a Pharmacist (status effect curatives), a Sushi Chef (buff consumables) and a Soda Jerk (items that buff some stats but debuffs others after a delay). The protagonist's brother, meanwhile, will mail order any items you purchase but each requires a length of time to pass before they arrive.

The next group are the SpaceWhipper style progression characters. Some are necessary for roadblocks in the game, some are used to quickly move across the game world if you aren't in the mood for avoiding encounters on the field, while others can be used to remove obstacles blocking treasures and other non-essential desirables. These include the Bodybuilder and his ability to lift giant weights, the Gardener cutting down thick brambles, and the Handyman fixing broken doors. The Architect can spend money to build bridges which expands the number of locations you can reach. The Lifeguard opens up the underwater areas of the game - she apparently just breathes enough air into your lungs for you to stay down there indefinitely - and the Sea Captain lets you ride around on the ocean. The Pilot also lets you fast travel to a number of fixed helipad spots, and the Used Car Salesman allows you to drive down roads at greater speed without worrying about enemy encounters. Finally, the Psychiatrist lets you move around your dream world, which acts as a teleporation hub for many of the game's areas: you simply choose a bed inside the dream world to wake up on, and it corresponds to a real world bed many screens away from where you went to sleep. As long as you don't think about it too hard...

A handful of characters offer additional side-quests to the player for some extra experience. The Cop, the Exterminator and the Photographer all have a number of sidequests, more of which become available as you level up their skills.

Finally, you have characters that actually mess around with the game world. These include the Weather Lady, who changes the ambient weather for certain situations where it becomes necessary, and a Scientist that will change the time of day for the few areas of the game where that's important. The Beekeeper can zoom the game's camera in and out, the Musician changes the background music, the Conspiracy Nut lets you read the bestiary, the Artist lets you see the game's concept art (whee!) and the High School Mascot will increase or decrease the game's difficulty, with various rewards and penalties attached: like more skill experience and guaranteed item drops if you choose to make the game more challenging. A late but valuable addition is a character that can actually speed up the game, allowing you to blast through encounters a lot faster. You can also choose to slow down the game to make the enemies easier to avoid.

I'd say the emphasis on distinctive characters - if only in a gameplay sense, as most are one-joke archetypes built around their particular occupation - are the game's greatest strength: where Suikoden's cast of characters might offer useful services back at the player's headquarters or become valuable members of the player's party during battles, rarely do they perform both functions. Every character in Citizens of Earth, meanwhile, offer something to the player's three-person party should it be configured in such a way to need a linchpin tank, healer, buffer, DPS or what have you as well as non-battle abilities that range from vital to convenient to treasure-hunt enabling to providing extra questing to messing around with the game's settings. I'd like to see what a sequel might do with its next group of eccentric nine-to-fivers.

That's another breezy Sunday update in the bag. What are you guys looking forward to playing this week? I feel like my gaming palette's been cleansed with Fallout 4 and Citizens of Earth finally complete after spending weeks on both. Right now, I'm thinking of playing something a little more active...

Citizens of Earth

When Earthbound meets Little King's Story, you get Citizens of Earth. An RPG in which the player inhabits the Vice President of Earth who has to recruit citizens that fight battles for him. The game was published by ATLUS.

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Sunday Summaries 17/01/2016: Fallout 4 & Citizens of Earth

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