Another short one this week, since I'm writing this in the midst of a 24 hour Extra Life charity stream hosted by Jeff. Yeah, that guy. It's been a particularly rough week for most of us otherwise, so I'm just going to get on with what I have here and try not to think about it too much. I'll be back to my usual level of verbosity next week, I hope. Or maybe I'll stick with the whole brevity thing and start writing more non-Sunday stuff. Seems a bit late in the year to start tweaking this format, but hey. It's not like there hasn't been a lot of changes of late.
New Games!
It looks like everything got out of the way for the two big releases this week. The first of those, Watch_Dogs 2, is an open-world game that... I'm sort of optimistic about? I'm getting a lot of inFamous Second Son cringe vibes from the totally right-on activism angle, but Watch_Dogs was a game that seemed to go down badly because it was far too po-faced and generic with its protagonist and story. If nothing else, this colorful new entry seems to be attempting to address those shortcomings. Well, besides the generic story, but I guess time will tell with that. Either way, I've been sitting on the original Watch_Dogs for a while now - it's the last of my PS4 backlog to tackle, though I've plenty of other games on other systems to look at - so I'll wait until I've played that before discussing my hopes for how the second one will fix its myriad problems. How's that for unclouded optimism?
The other big launch this week, which I erroneously reported as coming out far sooner, is Pokemon Sun/Moon for 3DS. I'm tempted to just copy/paste what I said last time in the 14/10/2016 Sunday Summaries update, but let's make an effort here. I'm generally in three minds about video game genres: I'm either into it, in which case I tend to consume as much of it as I can; I don't care for it, in which case I generally ignore it; or I've accepted that I no longer have the patience or time for it, which is where a lot of long-winded RPGs and open-world games are starting to end up. I still love those two particular sub-genres, but I'm being far more judicious with them given how much of my gaming time they've monopolized this year. Pokemon, and monster raising sims like them, are especially demanding of your time with the amount of grinding involved. That's cool to some extent; Pokemon was built to be played on the go, in small bursts for long stretches, but it's not how I consume games. This is a long-winded way of saying that I don't particularly care for Pokemon, but I think it's fair if I spend a few sentences to say why without falling back on anything more immediate and dismissive.
There's other stuff out this week, but it's fairly minor. An Assassin's Creed compilation, for instance, or some Star Wars Battlefront GOTY edition (which they called something else, because who considered that to be GOTY?). A sequel to the Whispered World? Something called Runbow coming out for Steam? I think everyone's going to be fine hacking and Pikachu-ing.
Wiki!
Managed to get quite a bit of wiki work in this week after the utter dearth last time, though it's still mostly meta data entry and not so much probing the weird and wonderful world of Japan-only video games that makes for slightly better reading. I did, however, complete that ongoing task of the past few weeks of ensuring that we have all the releases for TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine games that have since been rereleased on Wii Virtual Console, Wii U Virtual Console and the PS3/PSP PSN store. There were even a few 3DS eShop releases in there too, but the TG16 has yet to make much of a splash on there. Much like how it failed to make a splash pretty much anywhere else. I still love it though.
The second task, which I'm going to try to fast-forward through to prepare for January's Awesome Games Done Quick event, involves going through the list of NES games released in 1987 and ensuring the pages are in an ideal condition. When I first processed the early years of the NES (and the Famicom, its Japanese equivalent) I wasn't yet a moderator, so many of the more obscure pages don't have their aliases or header images yet. Really though it's just more sprucing up, and I might once again recommend the Chrontendo documentary series if you want to know everything there is to learn about the Famicom/NES from its 1983 launch in Japan to the end of 1989, which is where the video series is currently at. For the record, episodes 14-27 cover the breadth of 1987, which is really where the NES picked up momentum both natively and abroad - that's almost half the videos in that series (at that point) spent dissecting the releases of that year alone, even though it was the fifth year of the system's existence.
Dark Souls III!
I don't have much more to say about Dark Souls III that I didn't already cover in the past two Sunday Summaries and three huge Bosswatch blogs that detail and review all the regions (except Irithyll Prison, I guess missed that one. Eh, it's just Tower of Latria again) and bosses of the game. However, I did probe a little into the new game plus, so let's talk about that for a spell.
Many RPGs have their own distinct takes on NG+. A lot of them don't have any sort of options whatsoever, besides simply starting over from scratch. A great many, though, have allowed players to carry over certain elements from their previous run to subtly change the experience the second time through. The Souls series is no exception: they'll regularly drop you back at the intro at the experience (or "soul") level you had at the end of the game, with all the stats and equipment carried over but lacking the quest items and keys that allowed you to make progress. The enemies are tougher too, of course, because Souls isn't going to hold your hand even if you've managed to defeat it once. The health and damage boost is barely noticeable for the weaker enemies and bosses at the front half of the game, but it won't prepare you for the tougher late-game content.
This is largely because you aren't really getting that much stronger any more, at least nowhere near at the same rate as before. If you beat the game at Soul Level 90-100, which I did, your most useful stats are probably close to their "soft cap" - the point where the stat returns aren't worth the XP investment. You might then put more points into less essential stats, like health or equip load which still help to a degree, yet you'll regularly find that you're doing the same damage but the enemies are taking more hits in stride. NG+ is designed to be a lot more difficult in Souls specifically because it takes away the "safety net" of being able to grind a few more levels or upgrade weapons to overcome the difficulty of the next boss. At the end of your first game, you're almost certainly rocking close to max damage with your stat scaling and fully upgraded weapon, and there's little you can enhance from that point if you hit another boss roadblock.
NG+ tends to be where "the true Dark Souls" begins for many players, having enough experience with the game to know how to explore its areas and fight its bosses with a level of efficiency that hopefully offsets the increased difficulty. Dark Souls 3 goes one better than its predecessors by populating its NG+ world with new, stronger versions of pre-existing rings. The game increased its emphasis on the many passive bonsues rings can give you throughout the series, with four slots for equipping rings and almost 100 unique ring types in the game to find, and grabbing these enhanced versions is the best advantage a player can have when meeting the enhanced challenges ahead.
At any rate, I'm not sure how much further I intend to get. New Game Plus is an investment on two fronts: the time consideration of getting through the entire game again, even if you can just run through areas once you know where all the traps and ambushes are; and the investment of wanting to see all that content again, even though there's not a whole lot different about it besides a few numerical tweaks. In particular, the way the game starts very easy - even with their health and damage boosts, the enemies in the first half of the game are complete pushovers - and then gradually reaches a hellish end point with bosses you struggled against plenty at the end of the previous game suddenly getting even harder. That's mostly on me and how I play games though; I'd rather play ten new games that I'll have mixed opinions on than spend an equal amount of time on a single game I love.
Speaking of which, I want next week and the rest of November to be marked with an increased amount of variation in my gaming experience. There's a few platformers I wouldn't mind tackling, and a few adventure games that I've been sitting on for a while. Neither of those game types take particularly long to complete, so I hope to have some diversity with next week's gaming rundowns. Until then, look after yourselves everyone. Give someone at risk from this scary new regime a hug, too. But, like, warn them first. They're plenty jumpy right now.
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