Thoughts on the game?

Loved it.

Played really well, I enjoyed the story once everything started to come together near the end, and really ended up preferring the Transistors active participation in the narrative over the Narrator in Bastion. It's also a game that ended really well and that's apparently become something very difficult to do of late.

As someone who thought that Bastion's gameplay was too clunky to enjoy, I have no idea how to parse people's opinions here into something that would inform my own decision.

I haven't played the game, but having your follow up to Bastion look a lot like Bastion, with very similar qualities, when it isn't actually a sequel to Bastion, is just lazy design.

I grant that it looks great just like the original game they did, but they seemed to make the game in the vein of, "hey, you guys liked the announcer, and visual style before, so... here it is again?".

I'm enjoying it a lot at present, reminds of Valkyrie Profile 2.

@freakin9: Considering the studio is only 12 people, 2 of them being artist I believe, it is not hard to understand why they have a similar visual style because it is the same artist creating both games. But really the worlds feel very different, but the way they are drawn/rendered/painted feel similar because it is her style.

Just finished it.

It's a bit early for grand proclamations, but I think I like Transistor more than Bastion, and Bastion was a hell of a game already.

I'm having a bit of trouble parsing my thoughts. It really is beautiful, and I don't just mean that in a visual sense, the story, the music, it's all beautiful. Unfortunately I was left sort of unsatisfied when all was said and done. Maybe that will change after I play Recursion Mode.

Freaking amazing, got 100% achievements yesterday. Thinking of doing all limiters recursion, but that sounds a bit rough.

@freakin9: The studio is tiny and the artists are fully on staff, so yeah the games will look similar. The voice actor for Rucks/The Transistor is also just a dude on staff, so there's no reason for him not to be in it, hell he was apparently roommates with the composer.

This goddamn game. I want to be all douchey and label it a work of art. Everything about it is just so goddamn exemplary, gameplay, narrative, art, music, world. Supergiant Games are amazing.

A lot of people are proclaiming it has an amazing world. But I just don't see it. It looks nice, sure, but I don't see it as a great world. The world doesn't look like something liveable. It doesn't feel like a city, it just looks like a bunch of very nicely drawn backgrounds stuck together. I got no sense of who lives there, what the city is about other than the impression that it's something a kin to Rapture.

God, this is 100% right. Finally got around to finishing the game, and man, it really should let you select a slot, then cycle through the options of what to put in it. To alleviate the way they actually did it, they give you a "help" page for each function that shows all the different secondaries on that function, but that actually wasn't what I wanted. I found I knew what I liked my primary functions to be, so I was mostly filling in secondary slots and wanted to know how they would affect what I current had equipped, but there's basically no way to do that without backing in and out a million times, OR unequipping my primary function, then before I reequip it I could check the "help" page to see what all the permutations were. I really wish the function menu was "choose empty slot->put a function in it" instead of "choose a function->put it in an empty slot".

*WICKED AMOUNTS OF SPOILERS*

Anyway, I finally got around to finishing Transistor last night, and I'm really underwhelmed. I did enjoy the combat, though man, that first 90 minutes is incredibly dull because the system doesn't shine until you have at least 7 or 8 functions. It is a pretty neat system, all things considered, though I think a couple are way too narrow in their uses and just not worth using a slot on (looking at you, Ping and Get).

I actually thought the in media res (barely) start of the game was an interesting hook, even if all you really missed was a cutscene of Red singing, followed by the Camerata coming in and swording mystery boyfriend, and then Red discovering his body. I actually think that cutscene right before you fight Cybil (with Red's song, and you finally see all the Camerata) was also a really good hook for the story, even if they do eventually subvert your expectations and two of those villains kill themselves. Also, somehow mystery-boyfriend-impaled-by-Transistor is able to teleport himself and Red like dozens of blocks away after getting hit, which I thought was never satisfactorily explained aside from "the Transistor is magic".

So yeah, I thought the opening was quite good. But the eventual payoff to the story just didn't grab me. You kinda don't learn anything about Red or mystery boyfriend, aside from what little you learn from the info in Red's function, and I guess the credits finally shows you Red and mystery boyfriend, and *SHOCKER* they were in love and made a cute couple. If you didn't see that coming (which some people apparently didn't), you must've not read Red's function bio, and also not noticed the part where mystery boyfriend SUPER OBVIOUSLY loved Red because he jumped in front of the Transistor to save Red. The function backstory was an interesting idea that fleshes out Cloudbank a little, but the vast majority of those characters just excelled in their field, and then the Camerata duped them into going alone somewhere and killed them with the Transistor. Kinda the same story over and over. So basically nothing happens in the story (aside from The Process eating away at the city) until the last 20 minutes where you finally meet up with Royce, and to his credit that voice actor delivers a pretty cool villain monologue. Red using the Transistor on herself was a fitting end for the story, but I just didn't care as much compared to the ending of Bastion, because I wasn't nearly as attached to Red and blank-slate-no-idea-who-he-is-mystery-boyfriend as I was to The Kid, Zia, Zulf, and Rucks. I feel like they're lucky they have Logan Cunningham and Ashley Barrett and some beautiful environment art and background music, because those at least gave a little weight to a story whose script just doesn't give the player enough to care about. Sunkrish Bala deserves particular praise for giving the final sequence an interesting, eccentric villain.

So at the end of the day: I guess the Camerata just wanted to use the Transistor to more permanently change the world, since everything kept "changing" then changing back in basically the same way because all the poll results were cyclical? I think the story was really vague about their final goal, but fine, I'll buy that; however I still think the story was incredibly vague on why the Transistor had to eat up all these shining stars of society to be able to do that, or how Royce even knew to try killing people with the Transistor, and just how many essences they even had to absorb (when was the Transistor going to be sufficiently "charged" to give the Camerata full control of Cloudbank?). And then it feels like Supergiant just arbitrarily decided that Transistor (the game) was going to have a silent protagonist, but instead of having the conceit of Bastion where every character is "silent" but Rucks kinda just gives you an impression of how conversations went, instead of that setup, you have just Red as the silent one, and I don't understand how the Transistor stole her voice, especially if mystery-boyfriend took the hit for her. It feels like they wanted another silent protagonist game, but didn't come up with a good reason for one. And then the result is that Red is this wildly underdeveloped character I know nothing about, aside from some initially sassy comments on the OVC terminals, then some concerned ones when the Transistor is drunk, then she offs herself with the Transistor.

Also, what was the point of the Spine, other than somewhere in the design doc it said "we should put a boss fight here"? It seems like they never justified that thing. It really feels like the final Limiter you get should've explained the Spine. Instead, the Spine just appears, makes the Transistor-mystery-boyfriend drunk, then you kill its face and destroy the heart, which does...what? Then another one hounds you later on, except you run away and never fight it. I can't tell if that second one was supposed to indicate the Process getting strong enough that they generated another one of those things, or the script needed another excuse for the Transistor to get drunk and say some stuff, or it was just a cut boss fight.

I know some things were ambiguous on purpose, but I really would've liked to know the nature of Cloudbank versus The Country. If you leave for the Country, is that a euphemism for dying? Or is it just that it's wild and uncontrolled compared to the order of Cloudbank, and if you leave Cloudbank, you're exiled and you can't ever come back and it's sort of a death sentence unless you're an insane risk taker? I think the game says it's a one-way street, but it's a pity they didn't expand the mythology a tiny bit more to clarify what that means.

I'm liking it ok. It's nothing amazing or anything. I'm only a couple hours in. The story is doing nothing for me, but the combat is pretty fun.

@tennmuerti said:

Yeah, I also felt like the Process just weren't interesting enemies. I know it was like, thematic, that they all had the same colour palette and everything since they're draining the life/colour out of the city, but they just ended up being kinda lame and forgettable. Surprisingly enough, I also made the connection to the super bland robotic enemies in Defense Grid.

And yeah, some of those Limiters really are not worth the trouble. The one that takes off 6-10 memory (for 4%), the one that overloads more functions when you fuck up and they take longer to recover (for 4%) and the one where any time you want to unequip something in your loadout, it overloads when you unequip it (for 4%) are just way too much of a hassle when they're all on at once.

Bastion had those too, in that the Idols that made enemies regen HP, occasionally turn to mist instead of taking damage, or occasionally reflect an attack instead of taking damage, were all just complete RNG bullshit. When you have all 3 on some fights take FOREVER as you kept rolling away, desperately hoping that you'll get super lucky and actually have 4-5 attacks all hit an enemy in a row without stupid mistform and reflecto-matic triggering and letting them regen some HP.

Sorry for the post in an old topic.. just finished it.

Oh my god. This game. So much potential. So much wasted potential.

Whoever thought it would be a good idea to take away functions when you 'die' (so you don't actually die) is a bad game designer. I'm sorry. It didn't feel hard.. just wrong. A lot of fights against those enemies just devolved into spamming the same attack, because one of my other attacks had been disabled.

Why couldn't they just implement a regular death/checkpoint system?! Fuck, what happened? Bastion was such a great game, driven by mechanics that just worked. This.. everything just 'sort of works'. Holy crap, what a letdown.

Edit: Credits just went by. What a beautiful game. If only the gameplay would have held up.