Hey, it's been a while, huh? Over two months since my last blog. But instead of dwelling on why or how that happened, I'm just going to jump straight into it.
The Platinum Pain.
And by jump straight into it, I mean write about MGSV yet again, despite already having dedicated two entire (LENGTHY) blogs to it. But I think that I have enough to say about my experience getting the Platinum Trophy that here I am, writing about this game yet again.
I don't think that I would say MGSV was the most difficult Platinum I got this year (my hours spent fighting the lava dog in the Defiled Dungeon in Bloodborne probably makes that harder), but MGSV was the most time consuming one. And while the things that I got caught up on didn't take as much time as the lava dog, I still think they count as being more frustrating. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
The two Trophies in MGSV that were the big hurdles were for S-Ranking every mission, and for completing every optional mission task in the game. In both cases, that includes the rehash missions that open up later in the game, which all feature exactly the same mission tasks. For the most part, neither of these Trophies were super hard. S-Ranking most missions just involves speed running them and trying not to be seen, and since most missions can be beaten in under ten minutes, screwing up isn't a huge time waster. But instead of actually trying to figure out the optimal path through each one, I just watched some YouTube videos showing exactly where to go and what to do. I think it's interesting that there are a couple of missions that you can complete and S-Rank without ever leaving the helicopter, and one of them is a "Total Stealth" mission! Let me tell you, getting an S-Rank on a mission where alerting the enemy results in instant failure, and doing that by staying in the helicopter and blowing up some stuff with the helicopter's minigun was pretty great.
The mission tasks are at once easier, but sometimes more frustrating. They're easier because without needing to worry about what rank you get, you can use all sorts of items that would cancel out an S-Rank. Specifically, the stealth camo, which makes you basically invisible, is incredibly useful. While that makes some of the mission tasks exponentially easier to attain (though still not fool proof because the thing has limited battery and thus needs to recharge every once in a while), it doesn't really make them go any faster.
Some of the mission tasks involve listening to specific conversations between specific enemies/NPCs during the missions. That means you need to be in the right place at the right time, which isn't hard if you know where to go and are invisible, but having to wait for them to show up is, kinda boring. It was definitely interesting to actually hear the conversations, because there's some good foreshadowing in a lot of them, in ways that kinda bum me out because most people miss them and then think that these missions have nothing to do with the main story, but that's a totally different thing that I could (but won't for now) write about.
It's also incredibly frustrating when the conversations don't work right. Now, I should clarify and say that, by design, if the enemies are alerted to your presence, or something along those lines, that will affect what they do, and probably interrupt any conversation that might happen. That's fine, because that makes sense. It doesn't necessarily make dealing with that when you are solely trying to listen in on them any fun, though. Because I'm not sure if sitting through the entire alert phase and getting back to normal will put the NPCs back on path to have the conversations, and even if it did, it'd just be faster to start the whole mission over.
What is extra aggravating is when the game bugs out and you end up hiding in a box outside a place where the NPCs are literally just standing there forever, not triggering the conversation that you know is supposed to happen because you've done this mission before. Also aggravating is when the conversation happens, but it doesn't trigger that you listened to it. Which...I'm pretty sure happened, but now that I think about it, I'm not 100% sure that it did, but I definitely know 100% that I had to replay that mission (the one with the Viscount) several times to get them to actually go through the conversation. As best as I can tell, the reason why it sometimes doesn't happen is because I marked one of the people involved in it too early? Which is, not a thing that should cause that other thing to not work right, if that wasn't obvious. For all I know this has been patched since I played, but since it's not a game breaking bug or a way in which Konami can try to squeeze extra money out of people, I really doubt it.
(As an aside: The way that Konami has handled this game post launch, and consistently made the single player worse is really depressing to me. Outside of bug fixes, I mean.)
But as disgruntling as that mission not working as intended sometimes was, it still pales in comparison to the actual crime against game design that almost broke my will for this Trophy: Mission 45. Now, I'm not going to describe anything story related with this mission (I did that before in my spoiler blog, but be forewarned, it's end game-ish mega spoiler-territory), but I am going to describe this mission mechanically, because that's the only way to convey the pain I went through.
So, Mission 45 tasks you with defending a location against an onslaught of enemies on foot (not a big deal), a helicopter (toward the end, not a huge deal), and literally 14 or 15 tanks and APCs. Not all at once, they come in waves of four or five, which is still too many to deal with when they are automatically alerted to you, and there's no stealth option. In terms of just regular mission design, that's this level's biggest sin. Namely that you have to engage them directly, and if you don't happen to already have unlocked one of the game's best rocket launchers, the mission is incredibly difficult. Especially since it's also the one mission in the game where you can't leave it to do something else, without any justification for why (especially when there are multiple times in the story when it says "To be Continued" and puts you in the helicopter despite that not making sense in the story). And even with that rocket launcher that was recommended online, it's still pretty hard.
Getting through Mission 45 on its own is hard enough, though I did somehow manage to get the S-Rank on my first playthrough (not counting my numerous, repeated deaths). I think it might be one of those missions where just skipping the cutscenes makes your playtime low enough to get it, so long as you don't dawdle. But one of the mission tasks involves Fulton-ing every ground vehicle, rather than destroying them. When I first read that, I thought that would be easy, because I would just turn on the stealth camo, and be done in a couple minutes. Trouble is that the game arbitrarily decides that the vehicles still know where you are with the stealth camo. Even if you also call in a literal sandstorm to cover you while you have stealth camo on, unless you are crouched and stick to the side of the vehicles, they'll still see you. If there was some sort of explanation for why the tanks could see a cloaked Snake through a sandstorm, I wouldn't mind it so much, but there isn't, and it's totally inconsistent with the rest of the game in terms of how enemies know where you are.
I actually ended up dying so many times that I realized the game actually has two different Chicken Hats. There's the first one, which didn't do anything at all in this mission, and then the Li'l Chicken Hat, which I was so disgusted at the mission that I didn't actually read what it does, I just hit X on it and kept going. But I think it basically makes it so that you can't die, because every time I would have died, it put the game into slow motion and gave me a chance to use a healing spray. I dunno, maybe it only triggers so many times with that hat, but I wouldn't have gotten through that mission without it. I mean, with the Fulton the tanks mission task, like I said, I got the S-Rank on it, which you can't do with chicken hats.
And that was the worst of the Trophies in the game. The other stuff was either time consuming (like developing 300 different weapons/items or developing a "thing" in the game that takes a literal 24 in game hours to complete), or somewhat dependent on luck. The second being the one for catching one of every animal in the game, which depends too much on random luck. Even when using a guide showing exactly where to go, a few of the animals took way too many attempts to catch. But on the other hand, I caught 6 Tsuchinokos on my first attempt, so maybe I still had better luck than I otherwise could have.
But, you may be wondering, was it all worth it? I mean, is any Platinum Trophy worth it? I do like that I can say I achieved 100% completion in one of my favorite games, so yeah, I guess. I dunno, it's not like I had anything better to do with my time, after all. I wouldn't recommend anyone else do it, because Mission 45 is just so bad. Like, it's supposed to be this huge, climactic thing, both in terms of what you do, and what is happening story wise (despite it being optional for actually finishing the game), but it fails on all fronts. Forcing you into combat in a stealth game that thrives on providing you with a large variety of options for tackling situations how you want to is usually bad design. I think the game gets away with it once, during a certain boss fight against a certain robot, but aside from that, the times the game forces you into combat are widely regarded as the worst missions in the game.
And while I'm on the subject of MGSV, I should mention Metal Gear Online. I did end up playing a fair amount of it, and I quite enjoyed my time. I think the game play of MGSV translates quite well to online play, and there's some neat spins on established multiplayer modes in this game. Being able to Fulton enemies to restore your team's tickets (for respawns) in the team deathmatch mode is brilliant.
Aside from a few issues, like not being able to make more than three characters, or change what class a character is after you've made one, I had fun with it. But, given the relatively low number of maps and modes, and my not really having many friends playing it to play with, I didn't stick with it more than a week or two. I don't really remember at this point, you know how those things go. But for a thing added for free a month after release of one of the best games of the year? Pretty good!
Undertale.
Undertale is kind of a hard game to write about. Not because I don't have things to say about it, but because most of the "interesting" things to say about this game would involve spoiling massive parts of the story, which is absolutely not what I want to do. And most of the mechanical things I have to say about the game will probably come off as pretty negative sounding, which is not the vibe I want to give at all, because I really loved Undertale. I'm still going to write about and criticize the parts of the game I think don't work as well as the others, but please keep in mind that I love this game and cannot recommend it enough. Which I'm sure I'll beat you over the figurative head with again after I finish criticizing it. That said, I'm not going to spoil anything story related in the game.
So, Undertale is kind of a weird game. It presents itself as being this throwback to old timey JRPGs with its SNES-ish graphics, random battles, and mostly olde timey sounding music and sound effects. Even then, the game still does some different things with the combat. Should you choose to actually attack an enemy (not something I was big into, but more on that later), you have to time a couple button presses on some lines that move through the screen. Get them in the middle, and you do more damage. Or, maybe missing does no damage? Like I said, I didn't not attack much, and timing it seemed pretty easy.
More difficult is when you are being attacked. Then it goes to this mode where you control a heart in a box and have to actually dodge the enemies' attacks. These can vary from just moving around a frog whilst it lazily hops about the box, to dodging dozens of projectiles at once in a bullet-hell-esque fashion. And some of these can get really tough, especially when the game starts dramatically changing how some fights work. For example, eventually there are blue and orange colored projectiles. If you stay still, blue ones will pass through you without doing damage, and if you are moving, you can pass through orange ones without taking damage. And there are other ways in which the game plays around with how this stuff works, but I shan't spoil any of that.
The thing that made these encounters so difficult for me was that, since I was playing through the game without killing anything (something I am fond of doing when I have that option), I hadn't leveled up at all, so I still had a max HP of 20. Yes, you can rest at an inn to get a temporary 10 HP on top of that, but most of the time you don't have access to that inn, so it's not something to be relied upon. Even with that, I still think playing the pacifist route is absolutely worth doing. Partly for story reasons (if you're only going to play once, that's the ending to get (which is probably already more than I should have said, but whatever)), and partly because I think the fights are a lot more interesting to tackle this way.
Rather than just timing a button press to attack, you have to try to puzzle out how to put each enemy in a state in which they no longer want to fight. Some of them are pretty simple, and only require you to say a specific thing, or do a specific action, like hug them. But some are a lot more involved, and the encounters become a lot more challenging when suddenly you're dealing with two or three different enemies, all of which require a different approach.
But this also brings me to my biggest issue with the game. Namely, that there's way too much combat in it. Each enemy is fun to figure out how to best them once. And I do pretty much mean once. The problem is that, especially early on, there are way, way too many fights, and there's no way to avoid the fights. So far as I could tell when playing, they're just random encounters that happen, you know, randomly (I should state that I really don't like random encounters in general, and that I much prefer being able to see the enemies before).
I should also state that I was later informed that the fights aren't actually random, and that they are apparently all preset and happen in specific spots. I definitely got that vibe later in the game, but in the first couple of areas, there are just way too many fights. And it's not just me, I've definitely seen this same exact complaint from some other people. I dunno, maybe the intent was to make you think this game is just another JRPG-alike, but I still feel like the game would have been better off with less combat throughout. Not no combat, because, well, BECAUSE, but less of it.
But the real draw of Undertale is the writing, and the story. It's because the characters are so memorable. It's because of all the funny and silly little moments throughout the game (quite a few of which happen in battles, to be fair). It's because this game managed to go from "oh another weird olde timey pixel graphics indie game that I'm playing because @rmanthorp gifted it to me on Steam and everyone else is talking about it," to, "This game is fantastic and going to stick with me for a very long time." Like, I don't want to be hyperbolic and say one of the best games ever made, but...
You should play Undertale. It might not grab you at first, because it certainly didn't grab me at first. But the farther I got, the funnier it became, the more attached I became to the characters, and the more invested I became in the story once it gets serious and dark, it was all I was thinking about. Still thinking about it now, actually. I mean, obviously I was thinking about it whilst writing it, I mean more in the general sense of the word now.
If nothing else I say can sell you on this game, then let me try this: This is a game that reminded me of the best parts of both Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (one of my all time favorite games), and Metal Gear Solid 2. Yes, I know I usually invoke the name of MGS2 in negative or critical ways, but like I said, the best parts of that game. I'm not going to say, what, or why, but I hope I've piqued your interest enough so that you at least try Undertale. Play it and find out why Moosey is making these weird comparisons!
Give it a shot. It's only $10, or the equivalent in your part of the world. And unless that $10 is money you need for food or other necessities, or you literally don't have a PC (my garbage computer ran it), you should play Undertale. And if the game hasn't grabbed you by the time you get some time with the skeleton brothers Papyrus and Sans (both of which are amazing, as are a lot of the characters in Undertale), then, well, I don't want to say something like, "you're dead to me and probably soulless," but you'd be dead to me and probably soulless. Not really, but you get what I mean.
Also, thank you again, @rmanthorp. I owe you a hug and/or $10 for getting me to play Undertale.
Oh, and one more thing. The music is really good. Like, let's say that if I was to do some sort of end of the year Game of the Year Extravabonanztacular Special, this would be a very strong contender for Soundtrack of the Year. And for other "of the Year" awards...
Bloodborne: The Old Hunters.
If you recall from earlier in the year, or can infer from what I wrote in this blog, I liked Bloodborne a lot. I wouldn't have beaten it almost three times and gotten the Platinum if I didn't. As you might then expect, I was pretty excited for the first, and apparently only expansion for the game: The Old Hunters. And thankfully I was not disappointed. I wanted more Bloodborne, and that was exactly what I got, for better or (not so much) worse.
But that sounds more reductive than I mean it to be. I think that so far as Bloodborne based content goes, this is still really good stuff. I think the areas are well designed, I love the new art and stuff as much as I did the stuff in the base game (a lot), and for the most part, I think the new enemies are fun to fight. I think some of them do more damage than they should (as do some of the bosses), but overall, I really enjoyed my time with the DLC. The new music is also just as great, and helps make the boss fights even more dramatic and epic than they already are.
I won't go into specifics so I won't spoil anything, but I think the lore-related stuff in the DLC is pretty cool. I don't think there's anything in there that completely changes the meaning of anything in the game, but it shows some cool stuff that gives some more insight (pun) on what is going on in that world, but while still leaving just enough unanswered. I would also say that if you are going to play the DLC but haven't finished the main game yet, you should get close to doing that before starting (it's pretty obvious when you are about to get to the ending). Both in terms of what the DLC deals with story wise, and how it's balanced difficulty wise, you should be at the end of the game, or in a new game plus before starting The Old Hunters.
It's not without its faults, though. Like I mentioned above, I think some aspects of it are a bit too hard. Not because of anything like too many enemies, or the enemies being unfair in what they do, I just think they do way too much damage per hit. Originally I thought that was just me not having enough health or something, but after watching the Quick Look, and watching a friend stream the game, it definitely seems like the game is doing some weird damage scaling that makes it seem like having a ton of extra health doesn't actually let you survive many, or any more hits. But also Brad was playing on new game plus, and my friend was on new game plus plus (plus?), whereas I was using a character from the end of a first playthrough, so I don't know. That said, I played through the whole game and got the Platinum without needing to summon for help, but I did end up summoning for help with all of the bosses. Take that however you will (my being rusty after months of not playing didn't help).
My other complaint is that while the DLC has a bunch of cool new weapons, none of them come upgraded at all, which makes them basically useless against the enemies in the DLC. I totally get why they didn't want to go the route that most other games do with DLC weapons (namely making them instantly better than the original weapons), but it would have been nice if they were at least +5 or +6 to start (+10 being the max, for those who haven't played Bloodborne). If you're going into the DLC with a ton of the items needed to upgrade weapons it might not be a big deal, but I didn't, so I only really ended up having enough to upgrade one thing. I went with the Whirligig Saw (such an amazing name!!!), but ended up not liking it a whole lot in actual combat because it was a bit slow for me.
That said, some of the new weapons are really cool. Aside from the aforementioned saw, there's the Boom Hammer. What is the Boom Hammer? The Boom Hammer is a hammer that you can ignite, after which the next hit LITERALLY EXPLODES on contact. And you can get a minigun. Yes, a MINIGUN. I didn't actually find it (my friend who I was watching stream did), and I don't know how useful it actually is, but I just love that they added that. And there's some other, wilder stuff that I refuse to spoil, but just know that Bloodborne is a weird and great game. I love it.
If you liked Bloodborne and want more Bloodborne to play, I heartily recommend The Old Hunters. It's not super long, and I totally get why they put it out as one piece of DLC instead of as two parts (if my guess as to where the split was is correct, the latter part would not be large enough to sell on its own), but it's really good, and definitely worth your time. And if you do play it, make sure you poke around a lot. There's quite a bit of hidden stuff in there, including a "secret" optional boss. Which reminds me that I still haven't beaten that boss, or found all of the weapons. Both of which I have to do to get the last couple Trophies in the DLC. I'd definitely like to beat that boss, at least. Dunno about those weapons.
That's about all I have to say about it without going into more detail. Well, I should briefly mention that the first boss in the DLC is one of the most grotesque things I've ever seen in a game, and man, do I just absolutely love the nightmares that the people at From Software can come up with. Just truly horrific, incredible, disgusting stuff. I love it.
Looking ahead?
While I certainly have plenty of things to say about Fallout 4 after the 70+ hours I've put into it thus far, but I haven't finished the main story, and I think this blog is probably long enough as is. There's a couple of PS+ games that I've played but not written about as well that I probably should at some point, so maybe I'll do that. I also started playing Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and have Mad Max on the docket.
I got both Syndicate and Mad Max on sale on Black Friday, though I should say that I did not wake up super early, wait in line, or anything like that. Instead I went to the local Wal-Mart at about 8 am, and had zero difficulty getting the games. The place was only a little more crowded than usual, and they had plenty of everything in stock, at least in terms of games. But, they hadn't actually marked any of the games with their sale prices, so we had to double check the flyer and make sure those games were actually on sale before buying.
We also bought pants. Only one of the pants was on sale.
As for upcoming releases? I doubt I'll play Just Cause 3 or Xenoblade Chronicles X in the near future. Just Cause 3 looks fun, but it looks like shallow, forgettable fun to me, and that's not worth $60. I had the same reaction with Just Cause 2, which is why I didn't play that game until it was free on PS+ a couple years after. I dunno that I'll wait that long on JC3, but who knows.
As for XCX? While I really liked the first XC, the things I liked the most about that game were the characters and the story. I didn't hate the combat, but from what little I know about the characters in this one (namely that one of them is a thirteen year old girl and that sounds dumb and like bad anime), I doubt I'll enjoy that aspect as much. That, and knowing you don't get the mech until 30+ hours into the game kinda killed my interest in playing it. Not entirely, I'll probably get it eventually, if it ever goes on sale or something. But for now? Unless I hear that the physical copies are going to be pretty rare like XC was, I'll wait on it.
And that's all for now! Hopefully it won't be another two months before I blog again, but if it is, then, oh well! See ya next time, and thank you for reading!
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