Why do people consider Bastion better than Transistor?

Played both of them. So far the only thing that bastion had over Transistor was the combat(which is highly debatable cause some ppl prefer turn based stuff). However as far as I can see what bastion did good transistor took it and made it better. The soundtrack is beyond words, it's what opened my eyes to post rock, shoegaze and the more unknown prog rock subgenres. The atmosphere is very immersive despite it being a 2d isometric game. Also the narrator's voice is just icing on cake.

And the story, man the story. It offers food for thought, made me think about it for days straight. The ambiguity that if offers bending programming terms with scifi and dystopian sutff. Now I know I may sound a little biased, and don't get me wrong Bastion had it's great points, but as far as I can tell Transistor outclassed it. A shoutout to supergiant games, hope they won't abandon their work cause they are doing good stuff.

So, why do you/other people think that Bastion was better than Transistor?

They were both great, but Bastion was a nice surprise; Transistor had lofty expectations.

I think it's the way that the narrative was delivered almost completely optionally. All the story is on terminals and in bios that you could miss completely or never unlock.

I agree with you though that Transistor is the better game of the two. Game of the Year 2014.

This and the fact that Bastion is just better. I loved Bastion. I thought Transistor was okay. I normally hate turn-based(outside of XCOM and Civ) and that's also prob why I didn't like it as much.

So it's a matter of preference after all. Mb I'm inclined more towards cyberpunk sci fi games...

The cyberpunk sci-fi genre is my favorite and I still like Bastion more than Transistor. I really appreciate how Bastion gave you just enough story to make sense of the plot and the world and then left you to fill in the pieces. Transistor went too far in the ambiguity direction and didn't give me enough to keep me interested. I thought the ending was interesting, but I just didn't care about the characters as much as I did in Bastion.

I will say the music in Transistor is incredible though.

I enjoyed Transistor way more than Bastion. Maybe because i'm a completionist and some of the bastion challenges were quite hard to pull off and eventually turned me off from the game while Transistors challenges were more logical puzzles. Story of both games were alright, but Transistor just grabbed me and made me finish it in two sittings while i never completed Bastion.

@corevi I quite liked that. I was curious about these characters and what role they had in the world, so i experimented with the skills to get the most story out of the game. I guess that means that you need to be invested in the game from the start though.If you don't care about the story after 10 minutes, you might not want to experiment to get more story.

For me, I had a lot of fun with Bastion. I just couldn't even get through the early parts of Transistor. Just didn't like it for some reason.

I actually enjoyed the combat better in Bastion. I thought the way the targeting was done in some of the skills for Transistor were very iffy and despite it being turn based I almost always can't get it to work the way I intended. That is pretty much my biggest problem with the game though the way it used functions was pretty neat but since some of the targeting was really unreliable at times to be able to use the skills effectively, it was sort of pointless and I found it really hard to keep playing through the game.

I really love both games. The combat in Transistor was pretty disappointing though. I like turn based strategy a whole lot, but it was a much less tactical game than other games with similar combat. I think part of that is because you only have the one character, and part of that is because it's got one foot in real time. It was always really annoying when I'd set up a combo with like 5 moves and everything would look perfect as I'm setting it up, then I'd tell the whole thing to play out and something I had no real control over would screw the whole thing up. So I'd run around like an idiot waiting for my meter to recharge while at the mercy of my enemies. That sucks. My enjoyment of Transistor's combat came mostly from experimenting with the different functions, but I got the same enjoyment experimenting with the weapons in Bastion.

I also prefer the more straightforward approach to Bastion's storytelling. I was a little confused by the motivations of the villains until New Game Plus when I unlocked all of their background info. I certainly give credit to Transistor for telling a more ambitious story though, even if I feel like they didn't nail the execution.

Because I thought Bastion was just a flat-out better game.

The combat in Bastion felt better and was a better example of what genre they were going for. People's personal tastes aside, Bastion worked as an action game, and it wasn't trying to be anything else. Transistor tried to be this turn-based/action hybrid, but didn't do either one particularly well. It didn't work as an action game because outside of Turn, you usually couldn't do anything except run away, which is both boring and frustrating given the greater speed of most of the enemies. On the Turn based side of things, the game didn't always accurately convey information to the player (i.e. not reflecting that an attack will move an enemy causing subsequent attacks to miss), and it was far too easy late game to come up with ridiculously overpowered skill combinations. I think the game would have been far better off had it just been purely turn based grid/hex-style combat.

Also, I really can't agree with you about Transistor's story. The world, while having nice art, felt sterile and lacked any sense of tangible history or character. Bastion had different weapons and environments that helped tell a story of the world. Transistor you had the sword, and it was pretty much noir-city all the time. The game never fleshed out the world enough to actually explore the themes it was going for. Sure, you could unlock character bios but none of those really added anything to the underlying universe. The story has the illusion of depth, but nothing more than that.

Plus, the ending was one of the most illogical I've ever seen. As nearly as I can tell, you kill the last boss to escape the Transistor, so that you can kill yourself and go back into the Transistor. It made no sense to me at all and felt like SuperGiant was going for tragedy for tragedy's sake rather than the ending being a natural extension of the story to that point.

I don't.

I still don't know wtf went down in Transistor.

I came in pulling the Transistor from a guy's chest, ran around killing a bunch of white guys, then fought the only other "person" in the game and won. But it was all apparently taking place inside a computer, so was I an antivirus program???

This is coming from the perspective of someone that likes Transistor more but I think it's the gameplay.

Looking back at the trailers I really think people expected this to just be Bastion again instead of the more almost turn based gameplay Transistor actually has. Also you have to dig more for the story in transistor. Everything in Bastion is really simple and layed out. Transistor is more up for interpretation. That's not to say Bastion's weiting wasn't good or lacked depth, that's absolutely not the case, it was just presented very differently.

Also in response to the critique that some combinations were overpowered, that's kind of the point. It's about trying to mix all these weird variables to make somethig incredibly effective.

Eiether way I think both are 5/5 games and it's a shame people shoved Transistor to the side so quickly. A lot of great games last year were so overlooked, even though it was year everyone was so desperate for good games.

Because Bastion was okay and gets a little too much hype in my opinion, while I couldn't stand to play transistor for more than an hour

I haven't played Transistor, but I imagine I would prefer it to Bastion for the combat. Mostly because everyone I know really liked the combat in Bastion, but I personally found it janky as hell. On the other hand I love turn-based strategy games so that would probably make me prefer Transistor automatically.

I'm not much of a turn-based guy, so I definitely enjoyed Bastion's combat more. Bastion and Hotline Miami are probably my favorite games I own on steam, if that tells you anything. In fact, I managed to get through almost all of Transistor without using the turn ability at all. I think I made something that put a DoT on people and also made them unable to attack and just spammed it in real time. My best friend heard that and nearly blew a gasket.

Beyond that though, I found Bastion's story a lot easier to follow and more interesting, and that's really the main deciding factor for me. I've even looked up explanations and stuff of Transistor's story and it's all a bit too nebulous for me, and this is coming from someone who loves the story in Dark Souls and The Matrix Trilogy. I love obtuse, as long as you give enough clues for people to form their own, fleshed-out theories.

With Transistor they did that thing where they make a personal story the focus and handle that incredibly well but then refuse to touch on their world building enough for people to even form real theories about the nature of where that story takes place. The "explanations" I've read about Cloudbank are just too thin to sink my teeth into. Is it a digital place? Is it a physical place? How is it connected to the country? They talk about the country as if it's an idea, or the afterlife, but also like it's a physical place. Does that mean cloudbank is all that actually exists and the concept of "somewhere else" is bundled up in their idea of "the country"? The process are coming from somwhere. How is that place connected to cloudbank? Is it physical proximity? Connected, but separate dimensions? Is everything just digital information and the process and cloudbank are separate "servers"? There's just not enough information to even lean slightly in any one of those directions, and it frustrates me.

If you're gonna have a story take place in an unusual setting, I wanna know something of the nature of that setting, because setting is a really freaking important part of storytelling. The setting informs the character's values and biases. It determines the conflicts, and their history. I don't need everything given to me on a silver platter, but tell me something. Give me some idea of how, why, and where this place exists and how it connects to other places that exist in this universe. If it is the only place that exists, then maybe you should just say so. That's interesting enough in it's own right (Dark City anyone?).

I think the character development is complete garbage in Transistor. It's just not good. The character bios give you some interesting insight into the Camerata and why they took the actions they did, and that's the only nice thing I have to say about the story. Most of the bios you unlock through functions are just kinda interesting side characters that have no relevance to the story and are just the loose theme of each function (the star football player creates a function that bashes things with one really hard hit, etc.). Red and Transistor boyfriend are just ciphers whom I never cared about because you never learn anything about them, aside from Red leaving some cheeky comments on news stories on the terminals and Transistor boy prattling on about nothing because since both he and Red have lived in Cloudbank and know each other, there is unfortunately no conceit that would require Transistor boyfriend to give any exposition whatsoever. Royce has a good voice actor and some OK dialogue, Asher was kinda meh, Grant is not really a character and I suspect was cut for time/budget reasons, and Cybil was kinda interesting only in that you don't learn the significance of her character until well after you defeat her. Actually, the Cybil thing is kind of dumb, because Red knows why she wants to kill Cybil (and the Camerata) but you, the player, don't know, which is a weird player/character disconnect because the whole thing is in media res.

In Bastion, you get proper character descriptions since Rucks, the narrator, kinda describes everyone and their demeanor to you. Plus if you do the arenas, each one gives you a pretty in depth explanation of the backstory of The Kid, Zia, and Zulf that I thought were really interesting.

As for the overall story, too many things are just never explained. Why does the Spine exist? You unlock all these fucking files on the Process, but there couldn't be one that speculated on the existence of the Spine and what its purpose is? Why does the Spine make the Transistor drunk and slow? Why is there a second Spine later in the game that you never fight? Why did the Process turn Cybil into a weird Process hybrid, but everybody else hit by the Process just gets "erased" back into like a white cube? Why didn't Grant and Asher just go back to that mysterious district Royce went to that is seemingly a sanctuary that the Process never attacked or Royce still had some minor control over them? How did Red's boyfriend use the Transistor's powers to teleport himself and Red away during the couple of seconds he was being impaled by the Transistor, a device he has never used before? If you entirely lose control of the Process when the Transistor gets a new owner, why would you throw the Transistor at somebody to kill them? Also, I have certain lore quibbles, like if you leave Cloudbank, is it certain death, or just the great unknown since Cloudbank is this well-controlled city state?

I didn't like the combat as much as Bastion. In Transistor, you just alternate between "doing fun stuff in Turn, except some times the game lies to you and it doesn't line up because Turn doesn't take into account knockback or enemy movement" and "doing nothing because Turn is recharging and that part is no fun at all". So like, half of each combat encounter is you running around like an idiot as dogs bite the shit out of you, or just spamming the one move you put Jaunt on so you can do anything. In Bastion, I much preferred being able to do things at all times. If Transistor had just been turn-based all the time it would've been better; the part where Turn recharges is just not fun.

Bastion had three distinct areas (the city, the wilds, the terminals) with different enemy sets that I can distinctly remember. Transistor just has a bunch of different districts of this one city, and they didn't look different enough, and I found none of the areas memorable except for the final area where you catch up to Royce because that seems like the only area where they actually tried something cool. Transistor has more art, instead of a bunch of tiles floating over an expanse of nothing like in Bastion, but Transistor has less evocative or interesting art.

Bastion had cool weapons cobbled together out of whatever materials, because the whole setting of Bastion was like weird sci-fi American frontier alternate universe thing. Also, each weapon was associated with a guild, which was neat. Every weapon in Transistor is just a different coloured energy blast or AoE energy blast, so I found them really bland.

Both games have kinda bad enemy design and enemy behaviour. Bastion had no permanent animator on staff so you may notice that NPCs are always static and there are like a million stationary turret enemies in each zone and they had to contract out animation work for the handful of enemies they could afford to animate (and for the Kid I guess). There aren't really any turret enemies in Transistor, but I didn't like the mechanic/unique trait of any of the enemies, and there were too many fast melee enemies that can just bum rush you whenever your Turn is on cooldown.

Music was pretty good in both, though I still favour the variety found in Bastion.

Transistor had a hum button it's clearly the better game.

One has a dude in it one has a chick. easy math. sexist pigs!

@bigmess said:

Hum button all day every day

Because it is.

Because it is.

Just looked up the recently posted sales numbers. Bastion sold over 3 million and Transistor sold over 600,000, but Transistor has sold at a faster pace out of he gates. I'd call both games a success and since they're considerably different in gameplay and style, if someone prefers one over the other, it probably boils down to those areas, as previously mentioned. It will be interesting to see if SuperGiant games continues to vary this much for it's next release.

Because opinions. Speaking of which here's my opinion of Transistor, which I like a little less than Bastion despite Transistor being what I'd say is more my sort of thing, I'm generally more a fan of turn based rpg type things than a 2D action game.

The game looks great and has a fantastic soundtrack. The story and presentation are cool but not quite as impactful as Bastion's because they're using some of the same tricks, only it's a lot more vague and not as fresh this time around, plus the emotional payoff that Bastion has just isn't there due to a slight lack of investment in the characters this time round. Perhaps a result of the details of the story and main characters being tucked away in optional documents made it not resonate with me as much.

The mish mash of real time/turn based rpg mechanics is really quite brilliant, however the generic enemies you fight over the course of most of the game didn't take full advantage of it. I found the challenge rooms more fun than any combat scenarios in the story itself (save for the final fight) because those required strategy and forced you to try different things. The story combat encounters were quite mindless. Spamming your moves of choice until the enemies are dead worked just fine. There was fun to be had swapping various functions around and trying out different combinations of abilities, but there wasn't really any requirement to do so and it really didn't make up for the uninteresting enemies you're fighting for most of the game.

The final boss fight however was a much more satisfying use of the cool mechanics, if there had been more fights like that throughout the game it very well could have ended up being one of my favorite games of all time. As it was it was still a pretty cool game, if slightly disappointing with just how close it was to being an all time favorite.

I vastly preferred Transistor. Perhaps it was because I played Bastion well after the fact and, after hearing all the raving (especially from the GB guys), I didn't think it nearly lived up to its reputation. Still, I love Transistor's atmosphere, the combat had tons of depth and options, and that music, so good.

At the end of the day Transistor didn't have a really strong story and a lot of it was really poorly communicated or left up to speculation - and thats something really tricky and hard to pull off. The combat may have offered you numerous options but there was never any real incentive to try those options once you found something that worked well all the time. So by the end you kinda auto-pilot through the battles hoping for this big ending reveal which turns out to not be that great or concise or anything for that matter.. and you're sort of left with that.

People easily throw words like "amazing" or "beautiful" when talking about Transistor, and then turn around and critique the hell out of some other releases which really confuses me. Transistor was a pretty decent game. I even hesitate to say "good" because there honestly wasn't all that much to do in it apart from entering combat arena after combat arena, and unless you absolutely loved that combat system there wasn't much else to enjoy about it. Was it amazing? No, but it was pretty good. Bastion was pretty good also, hyped beyond all heavens by Giant Bomb, it also wasn't an amazing game. Then again it's hard to compare Transistor to something like Dragon Age: Inquisition for instance, or X-Com, because it's just not the same ballpark. So as a small indie game yeah it was pretty good, Bastion did everything Transistor did first though.

I have a theory that Transistor is less enjoyable than Bastion because the combat is better. Bastion had very simple, uninvolved combat that let most of your brain sit idle and think about how good the aesthetics of the game are. I think Transistor scores on the same qualities Bastion did, such as the art style, music and story. However because the combat requires more focus, you don't have the free processing power to appreciate it.

Beats me. Only advantage Bastion has is its soundtrack. In all other aspects, Transistor is equal or better.

Because Bastion is more fun.

I played Transistor front to back three times, %100'ing it.

I still don't have a clear idea of exactly what went on. I could take a pretty good guess but that's not good enough. I don't know really why Red lost her voice, I don't really know what the white dudes were, what the hell was the Spine? I don't even know why neither main character felt weird AT ALL about what was going on; almost like they had seen something like this coming. Worst of all: I'm not comfortable not knowing all of these things. I love not knowing things in stories. But you have to know SOME things and Transistor dropped the ball big time on that stuff.

Bastion just clicked

But I quite liked Transistor, just exclusively for the gameplay and ambiance.

@bluefish: Did you read the Camerata's bios, listen to any of the audiologs leading up to Asher and Grant, or listen to anything Royce says before you fight him? They all explain pretty much everything (except the Spine, which I'm pretty sure is just a super elite Process).

Bastion was new and exciting. Transistor felt way too much like they were trying to hit Bastion's highs again. Bastion's story was told in an interesting and refreshing way. Transistor's story was told in a confusing, muddled fashion. Bastion's world felt strange and different. Transistor's world just feels like a generic cyberpunk setting that never really changes.

This last point is especially subjective, but for me, Bastion's soundtrack is in my top 5 video game soundtracks of all time. Transistor's was merely decent.

Bastion was an incredible gem that I just happened upon with zero expectations (I wasn't following GB at the time). Transistor was my most disappointing game of 2014.

I like Transistor way more. Maybe that's because I played the first half of Bastion a year before playing the second half. Transistor felt like an experience and Bastion felt like a game I had to play because of what people were saying about it. I really dug Bastion but I love Transistor.

I didn't play too much of Transistor, so I can't make any "objective" (lol objective) statements about the quality in comparison to Bastion. What I can tell you though, is that I loved Bastion start to finish. It grabbed me from the first second and didn't let go until the end. Transistor however I just felt bored and indifferent for the 75min or whatever I put into it. The music was nice and it looked pretty good, but I didn't find anything about it engaging at all.

EDIT: Oh and Bastion has one of the best soundtracks in games. I want another soundtrack in that style soooo baaaad.

I didn't think the combat was that great in Bastion. It was functional, it mostly worked. It wasn't that fun though. I never completed any of the challenges for instance. Had no fun with that at all. What I liked about Bastion was that I found it to be pretty innovative. The narration while progressing through the game was very neat. I hadn't experienced that before in a way that worked so well. The narrator's voice is sexy as hell too, which made me question my sexual preference. People go on about the story, but I barely understood what was going on. To this day, what I understand from Bastion is this: there once was a world. There was a catastrophic event, possibly a war, that destroyed everything. Now collect these stones so you can rebuild the world. Also, you should probably destroy what you rebuild, because cycles are cool game stories. So it's not that either. I do really like how it looks though. And I actually dig how the game is short. It is the right length for what little it offered.

So yeah, Bastion was great, but mostly because of the new narration it had and it looked really cool and distinctive.

Transistor doesn't look as good I think. Less distinctive. Also, the narration has changed a bit, but I know that trick now. It's not special anymore. So that leaves yet another story I don't get and okay gameplay. I do think the gameplay is better in Transistor, but everything else I didn't care about. It couldn't hold my attention for me to finish, and as I understand it is also a short game, so that's saying something.

"Transistor was my most disappointing game of 2014"

If this was so disappointing then what about the ubi's bullshit fest? I agree for some ppl mb transistor didn't live up to it's expectations, but I dont think you can call it the most disappointing. But then again it is your opinion so I can't say much.

Also for the people that didn't get the story(which confused me at first) here's the explanation(s):

• https://www.reddit.com/r/transistor/comments/26kj4u/ending_analysis_massive_spoilers/
• http://transistor.gamepedia.com/The_Story

@raspharus: Can't be disappointed by Ubisoft when you were expecting the worst to begin with. :P

Disappointment is reliant on hope and expectation. Which is why my GotY and biggest disappointment were the same game last year.

The combat in Bastion wasn't amazing, but it worked 100% of the time. The same can't be said about Transistor. When you're not in Turn there's very little to do, most of it just running away and when you are in Turn you're likely to cause enemies to be knocked away and then the rest of your turn actions get wasted because they target a spot and not an enemy. And the game can't really be played without using Turn. It tried to be two things at once and did neither particularly well.

The story in Bastion is better. It's not hidden away and it's not fluffy. Yes I unlocked everything and read all the bio's in Transistor. Most of the bio's are pointless. The delivery of the story in Bastion is also much better. You're being narrated it by Rucks. In Transistor, they manage to make someone with a great story voice incredibly annoying by having him never shut up. The ending of Bastion is also a lot more satisfying.

I can't remember a single song from Transistor. I can pretty much remember the entire Bastion soundtrack from start to finish. Bastion used music to great effect (finding Zia and Zulf). Transistor had a hum button which is nice and all, but when I'm humming I'm just standing there and nothing else is happening. When Zia starts singing Build that Wall and it slowly fades in as you get closer to her, that's a great musical moment. When you're carrying Zulf and being endlessly assaulted with Mother, I'm Here playing, that's a great moment. When I'm standing around holding L1 to hum, that's not that great of a moment.

So thats why I think Bastion is a better game than Transistor. It's why I'm going to rebuy Bastion when it hits PS4 and Vita so I can play it on those again. I'll likely never play Transistor again.

@raspharus: Transistor was my most disappointing game. It tops Destiny and Watch_dogs. I don't play Assassins Creed so I was spared all that. I can't be disappointed by something I don't care about. Watch_dogs is a close second, but honestly I didn't expect much from Ubisoft and I had some fun moments with it. Destiny had no story and little content but it was the best playing game of the year. If that game had more content to it that I didn't have to pay half the asking price of the original game to see, then it would've been game of the year for me. Transistor was for me, hopefully, going to be the next step in Supergiant proving themselves to be an incredible studio. It was a day one buy for me. Their next game will not be a day one buy.

I liked Transistor more than Bastion. It was a brilliant mix of turn-based and real-time combat. And using abilities to modify other abilities made for very expressive decisions on how to spec your character. In most games, when i'm spec-ing a character for RPG or Tactical combat it only really appeals to the Spike side of my gaming personality. But Transistor really appealed to me from each Johnny, Timmy, and Spike standpoint in different ways.

The art style of Bastion (in general gameplay) was more to my taste. Also the pacing of the game and the narration element really helped the development of the world and gave a nice progression and sense of discovery for the player.

Transistor was designed with a lot more ambiguity and left the player to figure things out/come to their own conclusions about the world. It felt confusing at times, but slowly grew on me, to the point where I can't really say which is the better game at this stage.

Although, if someone asked me which game they should play first, I'd say Bastion, because it's a more welcoming, familiar game.

I prefer transistor , myself .

@raspharus: A game being bad does not mean it is disappointing. A game being disappointing does not mean it is bad. Most disappointing says nothing about the quality of a game. It's all about the gap between expectations and the finished product. I had pretty low expectations for something like The Crew, which is why, when it turned out to be pretty bad, I was not disappointed. Coming off of Bastion I had very high expectations for Supergiant's next game. When Transistor turned out to be middling, I was extremely disappointed. I probably haven't been that disappointed in a game since Dragon Age II.

EDIT:

@jesus_phish said:

Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself.

@drbroel: That's a pretty fun Tropes article. haven't seen that before. :P

I'm like 90% Timmy.

Didn't like the combat mechanics, death mechanic or narrative in Transistor at all unfortunately.

I loved literally everything about Transistor. Bastion to me was just pretty good. I really don't know why people prefer it.

Pretty simple really, I hate turn-based combat, therefore I prefer Bastion.

Cuse folks be crazy, Transistor was a better game and it really isn't close from playing both. I think at the end it's still no one expected anything from Bastion but people expected tons from Transistor. On top of expectations they'e completely different games.

Transistor having less mass appeal being more of a turn based style to Bastions more action packed gameplay played another roll into people's thoughts on the game as well. At the end of the day different strokes for different folks still applies here. Though I do think people are a bit crazy to hate on Transistor as much as they do. :p

BECAUSE DIFFERENT PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT TASTES IN THINGS.