Hey everyone! It’s your favorite sporadic internet bloggsman ArbitraryWater here with another hot club banger of an internet blog. I know you were wondering, deep in your heart of hearts when I would emerge from my dark hole and start 2017 for real with an overly-long internet blog, but wonder no longer!

What I’ve been playing

For whatever reason, I spent a decent chunk of my break playing two different visual novels (both of which I was semi-troll gifted as a birthday present from some friends), likely as a counterweight to Total War: Warhammer. Va11-Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Simulator is… pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a game with that title. It’s a visual novel where your only real interaction is mixing drinks in a bar. A bar that just so happens to be in a little corner of what is implied to be an anime cyberpunk dystopia, all set with an art style and an interface meant to evoke old Japanese PC games. Va11-Hall-A works deliberately small-scale, in a very “slice of life” kinda way. Most of the game consists of reading conversations between Jill, the bartender, and various clientele, usually talking about their problems, their lives, or revealing small snippets of lore about the world. It definitely seems like something you’d hear Austin Walker waxing poetic about and wishing he had more time to play or something, though I personally found the writing a tad hit or miss. When it works, it manages to be interesting and heartfelt without coming off as overtly expository or ingenuine. When it doesn’t… it’s a little amateurish and sophomoric. Aside from some characters who I thought didn’t work all that well and some occasionally awkward lines, it also borrows from the bag of “bad anime cliches” a couple of times in a way I thought was a little lame. If you’re interested, don’t let that dissuade you. I finished the entire thing, and while I totally ended up getting the worst ending and don’t have a ton of motivation to play through the entire thing again just to see a couple snippets of dialogue, it’s worth taking a look at if the premise intrigues you. The soundtrack might be worth the price of admission alone. Just don’t expect compelling gameplay.

I also played through Steins;Gate, which also does not have compelling gameplay and is also worth the price of admission. It cannot be remarked enough that I really, really like Steins;Gate. For those who don’t know, it’s basically a VN about the metaphysical implications of time travel, otaku culture, and soul-crushing despair, all because of Japanese teens ruining the future with cell phones. To say any more would spoil the point, but it has a great plot with some great characters, even if main protagonist Okabe Rintaro’s delusional manchild antics are sort of exhausting during the early parts of the story. While I might honestly recommend the anime adaption over the original visual novel for the sake of pacing and brevity (A 25 episode series vs a 25+ hour text dump), the VN does come with the advantage of being able to stew over all of its concepts and characterization in more detail. But yeah, it’s good. The artwork has an unique style to it, the Japanese voice acting is excellent (as far as I can tell) and I definitely didn’t tear up a little at the ending. Nope.

Resident Evil 7: biohazard/Biohazard 7: resident evil

I think it’s fair to say that Resident Evil has not been in a great place over the last 8 years. While I’m sure other people are willing to debate a different number (12 years, for example) I think most of us can agree that Resident Evil 6 was some variety of trainwreck and the series hasn’t had any sort of core identity since then. Admittedly, I’m a weirdo who actually sort of enjoyed RE6 because of how much of a bombastic “swing for the fences” kind of trainwreck that game is, to the point where I’d rather play it than the gruelingly mediocre (and otherwise competent) Dead Space 3, but I cannot under any circumstances defend it as legitimately good. It has some very interesting ideas, and probably deserves a little more credit than all of the critical dogpiling would suggest, but at its core it’s still a fundamentally flawed game brought down by QTE instadeath bullshit, a failure to explain its own mechanics, and some truly wretched set-pieces that exemplified the worst of “AAA” games circa 2012.

But here we are, almost 5 years later. Capcom, after a depressing period of doing seemingly nothing but re-releasing a bunch of their old stuff for HD consoles and PC, has finally started to make big new games. Sure, Street Fighter V seems like it’s had a rough first year and Dragon’s Dogma 2 is still not a thing that exists, but baby steps, right? Well, I have good news for all of you, and it’s that Capcom has not only managed to make a good new game, they’ve managed to make a good new Resident Evil game. As a long-suffering fan of the series, this was something I was increasingly unconvinced was ever going to be possible. Revelations 2, with its direct-to-DVD budget and Last of Us-lite gameplay, didn’t really impress me, and I think it’s probably worth mentioning that Umbrella Corps was a thing that actually happened and then was immediately forgotten about. I guess there was The Evil Within, if you want to count that. I honestly liked a lot of what that game had going for it, even if I also found certain parts of it utterly infuriating. For a while, I was afraid the only good thing coming out of this once-great series was going to be that fan-restoration of the so-called Resident Evil 1.5 (which is apparently still happening and making good progress.)

No longer! For now we finally have a so-called “Survival Horror” game that understands the spirit of the original games while adding an acceptable amount of modernization on top. Ammo conservation! Anachronistic puzzles! Doors with weird crests on them! While the skeleton of RE7 is definitely based on the Resident Evils of yore (most directly the Spencer Mansion of the first game) it aims more at recapturing the spirit of those old games than entirely replicating their scale, openness, or relative complexity. It understands how to produce a similar sense of tension and scarcity without feeling like an anachronism or throwback, which is probably a good thing even if I will still defend tank controls as "A thing that works fine, guys. Shut up." Aside from getting the broad strokes right, there were a couple of nods that I really appreciated, like the broken weapons that can be fixed with a weapon repair kit (echoing the way a lot of the older Resident Evil games would have weapon upgrade kits lying around as a way to keep your handgun from becoming entirely useless against stronger enemies), or the hidden optional puzzle just hanging out in a corner of the main yard. Even new concepts, like tying one of the hidden collectibles towards upgrades, is a smart idea that doubles down on the scrounging, scavenging mentality that the best “Survival Horror” evokes. I honestly wouldn’t have minded some slightly harder puzzles or more complicated level design, but I also acknowledge that I’m a crazy person who has played all of those old games more than once, somewhat obsessively, to the point where I can beat REmake in less than 3 hours on demand and could probably do the same for the rest of them with a little bit of warming up. That’s on me. I know that.

Instead, filling in the other side of RE7’s influences equation are the “modern” horror games of the last few years. Given this game’s more straightforward “Oh shit this dude with an axe is chasing you” tone rather than slow burning psychological terror, I think Outlast is probably a better point of comparison than something like Amnesia or P.T, though I guess you could probably point to earlier games like Clock Tower or Resident Evil 3 as examples too. What all of those games have in common is the concept of a nigh-unstoppable destructive force that chases you through the environment, one that you need to evade or hide from on a regular basis. Resident Evil 7 has that in the form of the Baker Family, though bringing it back to Nemesis of old, you can try and keep them off your back for a little bit if you’re willing to put a few of your precious bullets in them. The inclusion of firearms, which you acquire at a regular clip, is a pretty crucial difference between Resident Evil 7 and something like Outlast (part of the reason I like the former and not the latter), and the game also throws in regular “moulded” enemies as another incentive to shoot things you might just want to run away from.The shooting is appropriately clunky without being useless, and everything hits hard enough that playing defense or running away are viable choices as well. It’s worth commending that the game never gave me quite enough ammo or healing items to feel entirely comfortable with my situation, at least not until the end when I was suddenly drowning in the stuff; taking hits and blowing heads off with reckless abandon in true Resident Evil fashion. Actually, speaking of the end, it’s definitely worth noting that the back end of Resident Evil 7 is weaker than its front, which is a little disappointing for a game that I managed to finish in a brisk 7 hours my first time through. Without giving any spoilers, a bit of a detour is taken near the game’s conclusion, one that feels a little out of place even if the sequence itself isn’t bad by any means.There are also boss fights, all of which I beat on my first attempt, but most of which I will describe as “pretty good boss fights.” Like the puzzles and the layout, I wish there were slightly more of them, and that there was slightly more enemy variety on top of that, but I’ll take what I can get.

It’s also worth mentioning that Resident Evil 7 is pretty dang creepy. The whole game is dripping with an oppressive, genuinely uncomfortable atmosphere. Actually, comparisons to Texas Chainsaw Massacre aren’t far off, at least in terms of “Murderously insane, potentially cannibalistic rural people torment urbanites” and a good portion game is coated with an abundance of gore, black goo, and filth. While I jumped only a handful of times, I could see the entire thing being more than a little terrifying in VR. Being a bit of a soft reboot, it actively avoids trying too hard to tie back into series lore. It makes a handful of callbacks but is otherwise self-contained, which is probably for the best even though I have a bit of a soft spot for the labyrinthine nonsense that thing turned into.

But yeah, Resident Evil 7 was a pleasant surprise. Maybe not on the same level as Doom last year, but it’s a game I recommend with few caveats. Any series that lasts for 20 years is likely to go through some ups and downs, and it’s finally nice to see this one on the upside. Now if Capcom could get around to making other good new games, we'd be golden! Whatever happened to Deep Down anyway? Did that get unceremoniously cancelled at some point, or what? Hopefully that RE2 remake will be good, at least.

Random Endorsement:

Given the way I've assaulted your eyes with a wall of nonsense text, I think it only fair that I start directing anyone who actually finishes reading these blogs to something I found legitimately interesting and enjoyable. This time I'll direct you to the episode of @thatpinguino's podcast where he and @zombiepie talk about Jade Empire, a game I still might consider to be the worst non-Sonic the Hedgehog RPG Bioware has ever put out. It seems like the Deep Listens crew agrees with me! Here's a link.

I already gave my little “Boy guys, wasn’t 2016 an endless nightmare? But at least video games were good!” preamble (that seems almost required) in my last list, so I’ll spare you from having to read it again. Here are my top 10 video games that came out in North America within the 365 & 1/4 day-long period of time as our planet rotated around the sun, representing my dedication towards the zeitgeist of having to play the new stuff when other people also played the new stuff. Early 2017 doesn’t seem like it will let up either, with a handful of games I have my eye on coming out in the first few months, though I think I might leave some of them for later and focus on whittling down my backlog a little or figuring out exactly how the hell to make good formations and execute good flanking maneuvers in Total War: Warhammer. That game seems like it could very much devour me if I got over its fairly intimidating learning curve, so I think a good chunk of the rest of my break could be spent on that.

Oh right, starting at 10 and going up to 1:

Best slightly-updated version of a game I already played a year ago: Monster Hunter Generations

Original Blog

You may recall, dear reader, that Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate was my #2 game on last year’s list, It was the first Monster Hunter game I really got into, and kind of dominated my life for a period of multiple months to the point of likely helping to tank my grades the semester it came out. Monster Hunter Generations is that game again, but with super moves and moveset variants. Don’t get me wrong, Hunting Styles and Hunter Arts aren’t little things and they do impact the way the game is played. While it definitely feels like the developers had a little trouble shoehorning all of the weapon types into 4 different hunting styles, most of them feel distinct, viable, and fun to use between “The regular one” “The one with more super moves” “The jumping one” and “The one with the perfect dodges.” Oh, and you can play as a Palico who are basically their own weapon class, though if you’re like anyone else online, you’re probably using one of the handful of viable cats capable of a respectable damage output. The rest of the game’s tweaks are less impressive, such as slightly less confusing weapon upgrade paths (that you still need to look up online) the ability to tell players what your online lobby is for, and deviant variations of monsters with super powerful armor sets and weapons (that you have to farm over and over again.)

As a whole though, it’s a weaker game than 4 Ultimate was, with a roster of mostly recycled monsters from past titles and no real G-Rank endgame to speak of. That didn’t stop me from spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 hours in the game, but that’s about 1/3rd as much time as I spent in 4U. With the announcement of this game’s “G” or “Ultimate” version for Japan early next year (Monster Hunter XX) I imagine things will be rectified a bit, though I don’t think my affection for this series runs so deep that I’m willing to get milked by another iterative sequel, unless the rumors of it coming to the Switch are true or something.

Best game everyone immediately forgot about after its release: XCOM 2

Original Blog

XCOM 2 is a pretty safe sequel to Firaxis’ reboot of the original “Turn-Based Strategy Game Featuring Aliens” and that’s hardly a bad thing, given that Enemy Unknown was my game of the year in the far-flung past of 2012. It’s a natural progression, one that fixes a lot of my quibbles with EU and moves the tactical combat forward in an even more assholish direction with its premise of “YO, YOU LOST THE FIRST GAME.” I’m more than okay with that, it turns out. Between the timers, the enemies capable of yanking your dudes out of cover, and the occasional bout of RNG bullshit. I was even okay with the ridiculous super-boss aliens that were added in one of the DLC packs. Sure, I made the mistake of playing that game on its “Normal” equivalent and reached the point of breaking the power curve and steamrolling everything 10 hours before I actually finished, but that one’s on me. The meta-strategy layer trades the overt frustration of the last game’s ridiculous satellite juggling bullshit in favor of mostly being boring, so I’d call it an improvement. Though, much like EU, you still have to pour your resources in a specific direction early on to avoid crippling yourself or outright losing on the strategic layer. It’s not great, and it probably dragged the game down a little for me.

I feel the need to mention, if only because of this game’s kinda infamous profile at launch, that I encountered very few serious bugs outside of a handful of hard crashes to the desktop and the usual janky, nonsensical camera angles and animation glitches that are disappointing but otherwise harmless. I’m not going to pretend XCOM 2 is the stablest game ever or whatever, but yeah. If that was the big reason you didn’t play it back in March, don’t be so worried now.

This should probably just be considered a mini-review of: Tyranny

As the game that held up this entire list in the first place, it should be remarked that Tyranny, Obsidian’s small-scale RPG about evil, is not a very long game. It took me slightly north of 20 hours to see the game to its conclusion, and after spending an entire month this year playing very little other than The Witcher III I think I’m okay with that. It’s a smaller RPG, taking place in a world where a purposefully vague and all-powerful evil has conquered all but the last parts of the world, and your character acts as an enforcer for their law. At its best, it’s a RPG about a particularly grim, mundane brand of evil, one less about murdering babies (though that can happen) and more about soldiers following bad orders, the gears of an uncaring bureaucracy, and things done in the name of “What’s best for you.” I sided with the Disfavored, the obvious Lawful Evil goose-stepping, honor-obsessed fascists, though it definitely seems like the game could’ve gone very differently had I sided with the Chaotic Evil screaming murder horde the Scarlet Chorus, the various rebel factions fighting the invasion, or done my own thing. It’s a compelling short-form RPG, and if not for a handful of problems, it’d probably be even higher on this list!

As a follow-up to my GOTY of last year, Pillars of Eternity, it doesn’t quite reach the same level of quality and execution, and even reeks of (dare I say?) Obsidian games past, complete with a bug that made one of my stronghold areas impossible to leave and a rushed anticlimax of a third act that just screams “We didn’t have the time or money to flesh this out.” This assertion feels more justified when considering some of the game’s systems seem built around something that was going to be much longer. Be it spell creation, stronghold building, the ability to send missives to other characters, or the apparent presence of a bunch of concept art pertaining to nonexistent acts 4 and 5, it definitely seems like Tyranny was kneecapped and scaled down at some point during its development, though if its real conclusion will take the form of DLC or a full sequel I don’t know. The combat lowers the number of controllable characters to 4 and focuses more on MMO-style cooldown timers rather than PoE’s “X per encounter” or “X per rest” is similarly a step down, and by the end I regretted dialing the difficulty up to hard, especially given the pretty questionable companion AI. It seems inexplicably watered down, as if the developers were attempting to aim the game towards an audience who wouldn’t run at the mere sight of an isometric camera and the words “Like Baldur’s Gate” Still, even with these problems I enjoyed Tyranny a lot, and certainly think it stands as an interesting side venture for Obsidian before the inevitable sequel to Pillars of Eternity comes out.

Most Dark Souls: Dark Souls III.

Dark Souls III stacks firmly in the back-middle of my personal Soulsborne tier list, with the secret curve that I think they’re all great games to some extent or another. It’s another excellently crafted “one of those games” with some of the best boss fights in the entire series and some really fun callbacks to DS 1 and 2. It doesn’t take as many risks or turns as Bloodborne did last year, kinda by its nature as the concluding game to a trilogy, but it turns out that’s fine and I still enjoyed playing the game the entire way through. I think it manages to explain itself the best of all of the games in the series, and I’d honestly argue it’s the one someone could play the most of without missing some vital piece of content. It’s good, often great, in a way that is difficult for me to quantify, mostly because it probably tries to rock the boat the least out of all of the Souls games, at least from a level design perspective. It’s linear for sure, though that linearity doesn’t feel constraining

Where I will mark Dark Souls III down is that it kinda backtracks on the number of interesting or viable builds to something resembling Bloodborne levels. As someone who enjoyed running around that last game dual wielding greatswords like an idiot or investing heavily in hexes, the changes to poise and the generally gimped nature of magic meant that running around with a regular straight sword and a shield with light armor was usually the best option, which is a little disappointing. Maybe they’ve changed the game balance since March and April, but I was put off from doing a replay precisely because magic seemed borderline useless when I dabbled it it during my first playthrough. Still, I imagine once the second DLC pack comes out I’ll give this one another go.

Dan Ryckert and Brad Shoemaker Present: Best Murder Sandbox: Hitman

I honestly haven’t watched most of the staff’s misadventures in Hitmanland, but I watched enough of them to know that this was a game I should probably get, and the second it went on sale I did. That was a smart decision. Well, I mean, it was a bad decision because it was right before finals, but I can confirm that Hitman’s brand of clockwork simulation is something that I’m very into. It’s not just the goofy disguises, the weirdly self-aware NPC dialogue or the ridiculous ways you can inflict murder upon your foes, it’s also good map design and the puzzle-y elements of figuring out how to commit said murder in the most creative way possible. It gels well with my inner stealth perfectionist, though I do feel like some of the more obscure opportunities or killing setups feel like they require inordinate amounts of time or a guide to figure out, though I’ve been disciplined enough to avoid the lure of looking up too many suit only/silent assassin runs and ruining things for myself by repeating a script to the letter. The game’s format is something I can’t really comment on too much, since I got it when it was already done, but I’m looking forward to experiencing it with their next season. I’m a pretty big fan of Elusive Targets, for as much as I’ve tried to resolve most of them by shooting the fool in the head with a sniper rifle.

Best J-Pop: Tokyo Mirage Sessions # FE

As the last good Wii U exclusive before Nintendo unceremoniously puts a bullet in that thing’s head with Zelda, Tokyo Mirage Sessions surprised the hell out of me. It’s an infectiously cheery, exceptionally silly and super anime RPG about the Japanese entertainment industry, and leans into that shit in a way that makes Persona 4 look like Gears of War. Also there are Fire Emblem characters hanging out for some reason. I kinda love it. Oh, the JRPG part of it is pretty good, being built on the basic Shin Megami Tensei foundation but with way more focus on chaining follow-up attacks, but it was the prospect of another ridiculous choreographed J-Pop performance or weird skit that kept me going through the game. TMS knows exactly what it is and acts accordingly, which is why the supporting cast all fall into recognizable anime archetypes but are executed on with confidence and enthusiasm. Did I mention that everyone in the cast sings at least one song? It’s pretty great. Oh, the plot is fluff, but it’s enjoyable fluff.

You’ll notice I haven’t talked about the Fire Emblem connection, which is because it’s tenuous at best. While there are Fire Emblem characters acting as the persona equivalents to the anime teens, they and all of the FE imagery could probably be removed without much loss. There are a couple of easter eggs and references for crazy people like me (Did you know that Cath from Binding Blade is the clothing shop girl? No you didn’t, because that one only came out in Japan) and a rendition of the series’ opera theme right before the final boss battle, but the only real gameplay concession is the inclusion of the Fire Emblem weapon triangle into the usual SMT brand of weakness exploitation. It’s probably best to think of this game as less of a crossover and more of its own weird thing. I think it does quite well in that sense.

Game most likely to show up on this list: Fire Emblem Fates.

Original Blog

Feel free to read the blog linked above if you want to read my exhaustive breakdown of exactly what I think of this game and its 3 campaigns. Fire Emblem Fates was a weird one to place on my list, mostly because I think 1/3rd of that game is fantastic, 1/3rd is passable and 1/3rd is kinda bad, and being the nut that I am I decided to count them all together. I ended up compromising and shoving it towards the middle, and that’s why it’s where it is on this top 10. Of the three campaigns that comprise Fire Emblem Fates, Conquest is the best of them by a wide margin. As someone who found Awakening to be a little too easy and simple, Conquest’s range of tactically demanding murder maps (without the crutch of grinding) was exactly what I wanted, and I think it probably has some of the best scenario design in the series. It might not be what the person who played Awakening once on Normal/Casual wanted, but for them there’s Birthright, the human-friendly, grinding-allowed, straightforward one… which is good at that, but is probably not as good at doing that as Awakening was. And then there’s Revelation, the DLC/Special Edition-only “Golden Route” that you’re supposed to play after messing with the other ones. It’s meant to be a compromise between the other two, which means it borrows a lot of its map gimmicks from Conquest, but instead of making its maps challenging, it just makes them time consuming and annoying. It feels like a bad, unbalanced ROM hack for a better Fire Emblem game, and should probably be avoided by anyone who isn’t an insane fan of the series like me.

Oh right, also the stories for all 3 of the campaigns are terrible, with special attention going towards Conquest’s disastrously bungled attempts at creating any sort of grey morality. Also they took out the waifu face rubbing and I don’t care?

Best Giant Robots Dropping from the Sky and also Time Travel Level: Titanfall 2

While everyone else is apparently all about Overwatch and its off-Pixar brand of inclusive, Rule 34-friendly Team Fortress-ish shooting funtimes, I was spending my time with Titanfall 2, which is the first online shooter that I’ve fallen for in a very long time. The campaign alone probably would’ve propelled it to somewhere near the bottom of this list, actually. For what could’ve been yet another disposable 5-7 hour shooter campaign about generic white dude and robot buddy fighting war, Titanfall 2 succeeds by making each level as varied and distinct as possible, with the obvious standout being “A Crack in the Slab” and its time-shifting insanity. The plot is perfunctory, but the robot buddy is at least a cool buddy to have talking the white-bread protagonist’s ear the entire time.

And yeah, the multiplayer is great. I never played the first game, so the crazy fast wallrunning and the giant mechs are pretty great, and the entire thing has a layer of polish around it that shows that the people making it know what they’re doing and have honed that brand of twitchy “left-trigger, right-trigger” first-person shooting to a science. I’ve already prestiged twice, and there’s a decent chance I’ll prestige again before I put this game down. And then maybe I’ll start playing Overwatch.

Best Sneaky Sneak “Find the Vent” Game: Dishonored 2

Despite a handful of minor design hang-ups, I think I’m probably one of the more vocal advocates for the original Dishonored as the good and true successor to the throne of the original Deus Ex (and maybe Thief too,) especially given how Deus Ex is going right now (more on that in a bit.) Dishonored 2 takes that game and refines it to the point where most of my caveats regarding the first game aren’t an issue, and it’s a sterling example of a big open sneaking sandbox with crazy teleporting ninja powers and a great sense of place. Yeah, so the opening 10 minutes of the game should be a textbook example of how not to do story setup and exposition, but there are still a bunch of random diary entries that I can run around and read, so it’s all good as far as I’m concerned. It’s also a little more difficult as a stealth game, which I appreciated as someone who plays all of these sorts of games with a dangerous level of OCD perfectionism, though I’ve also found the combat to be entirely enjoyable on its own. It’s more Dishonored, yes, but it’s also more incredibly refined Dishonored, and I couldn’t be happier about how it turned out. Even if the time-shifting level isn’t as good as Titanfall 2’s.

Best: DOOM.

I let a friend borrow my copy of the new Doom, and I’ve been browbeating him to finish it so I can have it back so I can play some more Doom from time to time because it’s my Game of the Year and one of the single best shooter campaigns I’ve played in a long, long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if you get to hear more praise about that game from the Giant Bomb crew tomorrow, but hot damn is every part of this game great. It’s fast as hell in a way that evokes the original Doom and Doom II, but has enough modern trappings to not feel like a throwback. It’s also winkingly stupid between the portrayal of the Doomguy as a demon murdering force and the sinister robot voice talking about using hell for energy in a way that is so, so good. I got the platinum for this game, and I never get very far when I try and go for a platinum trophy. But yeah, if you haven’t played this game, you should play it. It’s real real good.

Alright, now time for a couple of honorable mentions

Game Number 11: Pokemon Moon.

It definitely seems like a trend that the new Pokemon game that shows up on one draft of my list inevitably gets cut for something. Honestly, I think Pokemon Sun and Moon are probably a touch weaker as games than X and Y, even despite their infectiously cheery attitude and finally getting rid of HMs after only 20 years of having to sacrifice move slots and roster spots so you can cross damn whirlpools or something equally asinine. At this point I’ve kinda embraced the comfort food angle that these games are stupid easy and for kids, though I wish this one wasn’t so naked with its railroading of the player and had better side-activities and subsystems. For as tedious as super training was in X and Y, at least it was easily understood and straightforward. The way to mess around with your pokemon’s EVs in this one seems way worse by comparison, and it’s definitely turned me off from the idea of getting competitive as a result.

Though, I should mention this game’s story, if only because there is one and it gets weird and crazy in a way that I wouldn’t have expected out of one of these. Between implications that the original pokemon games and their remakes are set in parallel dimensions to the part where the final battle is against a lady fused with an alien squid parasite pokemon in weirdo space land, it’s better than it has any right to be?

Other honorable mentions:

Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice is a game that I didn’t like as much as its predecessor, Dual Destinies, despite popular opinion from the fanbase seemingly swinging the other way. While I’m always down for that particular series’ brand of anime courtroom nonsense, this one kinda emphasized how much the entire thing is beholden to its own continuity in a way that definitely can’t be healthy. While the twists and turns are as weird and ridiculous as they’ve always been, and the 3D models look a lot better, I’m definitely hoping they get to take a few more risks with whatever the next one is. Or, they should just release The Great Ace Attorney over here so I can get my Meiji-era anime courtroom nonsense on… yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

Salt and Sanctuary is a 2D simulacrum of Dark Souls that makes no effort in attempting to hide its influences. While the concept itself is an interesting one and the game itself very well made, I found its execution to be a little less consistent than From Software’s own, exemplified in the way I spent the last few hours of the game stunlocking every single boss to death by swinging a two-handed katana with the interrupt charm attached. For all I know they’ve nerfed that particular tactic in the months that it, but my point is that Salt and Sanctuary doesn’t quite nail the landing when it comes to imitating Souls, at least as far as grueling difficulty and existential sorrow are concerned. It’s not half-bad though, and I’d be interested if they ever did a sequel or something.

Darkest Dungeon is a game that is drenched in its own oppressive style and atmosphere, minimalistic dungeon crawling mechanics, and sanity management juggle, which would’ve been all great had I not run into the realization of how grindy the entire damn thing is and how ridiculous the RNG screwage potential gets after a certain point. But hey, those first 15-20 hours? Solid.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided might’ve made its way onto my list if I didn’t feel like I was getting swindled as the credits rolled. It’s a competent sneaky sneak “find the vent” game on its own merits, but it doesn’t feel like a huge progression from its 5-year-old predecessor Human Revolution. On top of that, it definitely feels like the story (which makes motions toward saying something meaningful about society but never does) ends at a 2/3rds mark and a good 75% of the game’s content happens in the Prague hub world, rather than the painstakingly hand-crafted level design of something like Dishonored 2, its closest analogue. If one were to believe conspiracy theories (and not the dumb ones present in this game) it’s almost like the game was originally going to be much longer but they decided to cut it down and pad out the hub area with a bunch of (admittedly interesting) side content to hide the fact that there isn’t as much going on as the hour count would suggest.

Games I’m looking forward to most in 2017: Persona 5 and Torment: Tides of Numenera

After a good 7-8 years of Atlus milking the hell out of Persona 4 (and to a lesser extent, Persona 3) I realllllly want to see what Persona 5 looks like. Other than knowing something about the game’s basic premise and hearing vaguely from people who know Japanese that it’s good, I’m planning on going in as blind as possible.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is attempting an even ballsier feat by attempting to be the spiritual successor to the single best interactive novel masquerading as a D&D game ever made, and the damn thing is finally coming out only 3 ½ years after I backed it on Kickstarter. I played just enough of the early access version (approximately the first two screens) to know that it’s going for it in the “walls of text” and “inscrutable alien world” department, but I’m going to have to see for myself come February if it succeeds.

Game from my RPG backlog list most likely to be played in 2017: Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, or Underrail.

The list, for reference

I didn’t say Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, because I’m kinda in the process of playing that already. But yeah, if I’m going to whittle down my RPG backlog with something, it’s likely going to be something on my PC right now. Thus, two very different games. Lightning Returns out of a dark obligation to see that trilogy through in case Trump really does end the world, and Underrail because it’s been a while since I’ve messed with an overly-ambitious low-budget RPG developed in Eastern Europe. Or maybe I’ll play neither of these and you’ll hear all about Tales of Symphonia next year. Whatevz.

Oh hey, guess it’s this time of year again, huh? Hope you all had a good Christmas, or whatever alternative floats your boat. I have to admit, 2016 was actually a pretty alright year for me personally even if, in a broader context, it was kind of a horrific trainwreck that I don’t think we have seen the end of. It also was a good year for Video Games! But WHOOOOOO CARES about this year’s bounteous crop of quality interactive entertainment when we can talk about old shit some more! We’re all about that, right?

So… here’s the thing about that. Much like last year, I haven’t played as many old games as I used to. Hell, if you compare my list of games I played “a significant amount of” this year versus last year, I’ve played fewer games in general. Blame it on me deciding to take school a little more seriously, me focusing a little more on individual titles rather than my usual scattershot approach, or because I’ve already played most of the damn CRPGs that came out in the late 90s and early 2000s (see my backlog for details), but this list is gonna be a top 5, just like last year. You can expect my top 10 list of 2016 games to be out sometime this or next week, basically whenever I finish Tyranny and figure out where I want to slot it. In any case, from 5 and going to the top, my list consists of:

5. Kingdom Hearts

When it comes to things that are Final Fantasy or Square-Enix related, I think I might be dangerously close to being a mustache-twirling hipster bragging to you about how much deeper and cooler Final Fantasy V is because Job System, and your nightmare journeys through Final Fantasy VII-IX kind of emphasize how little I want to deal with the oft-revered PS1 era of that franchise. And then there’s Kingdom Hearts, which I played for the first time this year and enjoyed quite a bit. For both genuine and ironic reasons.

Let me be clear: The first KH game is, mechanically, a pretty straightforward action-RPG with mashy combat, stiff controls, and an abominable camera that was bad in 2002 and is unforgivable 14 years later in the HD update. I played the game on the highest difficulty, (“Proud”) which forced me to engage with some of its systems a little more and play the game more intelligently, but the demo I just played of Nier Automata it is not.

I think as the series has become something of an unfair punchline for everything wrong with the last decade of Square (and mainstream JRPGs in general) we’ve all started to gloss over the part where Kingdom Hearts is batshit insane. As someone who still has an affinity for Disney and even Final Fantasy, watching Tetsuya Nomura’s officially-sanctioned fan-fiction play out, with most of the original Disney voice actors reprising their roles and a lot of big-names filling out the Square side of the cast, is a deliriously fun experience. Did you know that Billy Zane is the voice of Ansem, the entirely disposable villain who is only revealed in the last act in true JRPG fashion and has like 10 lines? (well, he’s Terra-Xehanort’s heartless or whatever, but we don’t need to get into that) What? Why? BECAUSE THE MOUSE LORD DEMANDED IT. Obviously, it wouldn’t have worked for me if I didn’t have some level of affinity for Disney (especially the stuff that made up my childhood, unsurprisingly) or Square, but the entire thing is weirdly sincere and plays itself 100% straight in a way that really appeals to my broken, empty heart. I also like Simple and Clean too, if we’re going to go there.

While Kingdom Hearts 2 is a much better playing game and represents the series’ departure from being a pure crossover fan-fic into its own insane, retcon-fueled, zipper-filled acid trip of a saga, it’s disqualified from this list because I totally played it around the time it came out on a friend’s PS2 over the course of a few months. Did I remember anything about it? Turns out the answer to that is NOPE I DID NOT. But I did get as far as the Tron level before DOOM came out and stole my attention, and I’ll probably get around to finishing that when I have some free time. Gotta get caught up for KH3. You just wait.

4. Undertale.

Original Blog Here. Also for #3.

I have an immediate suspicion and aversion to any game that comes out of nowhere and gets people to talk in hyperbolic “changed my life” or “moves the medium forward” sort of ways. When the Gone Homes or the Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons of the world pop up I am inclined to shrug my shoulders and go back to playing whatever inscrutable tactical RPG or mechanically demanding action title I’m probably dealing with. It’s probably unfair, and definitely has to do with the way I’m wired and connect with video games, but I’m not the most touchy-feely person, at least when it comes to the media I consume.

Undertale, GameFAQs users’ 2015 Greatest Game of All Time, did not change my life, nor am I convinced it moves the medium forward (to whatever "forward" actually is.) However, I’m still an advocate for clever writing and good storytelling in any form, and in that sense Undertale succeeded for me. It’s charming and genuine without being cloying or twee, probably because it’s also willing to get weird as shit and act as a pretty funny parody/deconstruction of old JRPGs and games in general. I only played the game once and got the True Pacifist ending, but it’s the stuff I watched from the Genocide playthrough that cemented it in my memory as “a clever thing.” Still, once you get past dating the skeleton man, telling the fish lady that anime is real, and saving the world with the power of being nice the hard and fast truth of the game is that I didn’t like the parts where I actually had to play it. I’m not a bullet hell kinda guy. At least the music is great!

3. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D

I already wrote most of what I had to say in the blog linked above, but Majora’s Mask’s strengths ultimately come down to it being actively weird, experimental, and downright moody, involving Link running around and solving people’s problems before the moon falls and kills everyone. The Legend of Zelda game part, with its 4 okay dungeons and barely-existent item progression, almost feels like it was included out of obligation, and can be held in stark contrast to something like the dungeon-centric Link Between Worlds or (if you want to be less flattering) Twilight Princess. I’m still not convinced the N64 original with its lack of hard saves, less-helpful bomber’s notebook, and inability to progress time in set intervals deserves my praise as much as the 3DS remake with its quality of life improvements. You people who claim this is the best Zelda are still crazy, but maybe not as crazy as I used to think.

2. Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition

I finally finished Divinity Original Sin. It only took me two years, a lost save, a special edition, and a broken computer to finally get there! I’ve already sung this game’s praises enough, between its involved tactical combat, systems-level interaction nonsense, colorful presentation, and jaunty soundtrack, though now I can speak to the game as a whole. Well, at least the Enhanced Edition, which made a bunch of incremental to significant mechanical balance changes, added a handful of new skills, added full voice acting, and touched up the script with special attention given to the conclusion. The story and writing, which oscillate between “charmingly goofy,” “trying too hard to be charmingly goofy,” and “generic fantasy sludge” aren’t exactly its high watermarks, though the addition of full, decidedly cornball voice acting helped move it a little closer towards the “charming” end of the scale for me, especially when the NPC party members were concerned. Unfortunately, like most massive RPGs, it overstayed its welcome a little bit too long in the third act, which coincided with the game’s power curve tipping in my favor towards bulldozing for the last 5-10 hours.

1. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Original Blog here.

It might surprise you, but The Witcher 3 is a fantastic game that deserves most of the praise hurled its way, from the quantity of quality RPG writing to the cast of characters and clear delineation between worthwhile and grindy side-content. The DLCs are arguably better than the main game, with Hearts of Stone being the tight 10-hour package and Blood and Wine being the 30-40 hour refined take on the main game’s open world. Given the amount of accolades this game has already received, I don’t feel the need to get super in-detail, but it was definitely worth my time to pick up this year.

Some other mentions: I replayed a few games this year.

It turns out I still really like the original Baldur’s Gate, even when someone pulls a Star Wars Special Edition on it and shoves in the NPC equivalents of a bad CG Jabba the Hutt getting his tail stepped on into the mix. While my quest to play through Beamdog’s bizarre and kinda insane midquel expansion/reunion special and then through the “enhanced edition” of BG 2 didn’t quite happen, I have a morbid need to see that stuff for myself that demands I get around to it in the near-future.

I figured it had been a few years, so I also played Ocarina of Time again. In the process, I realized that game is hardwired into my brain in a way that makes it really hard for me to make any sort of serious qualitative judgement on it. While I’m still pretty sure it’s one of the greatest games of all time, I feel less like I rediscovered that game on 3DS and more that I’m read a script that I already wrote the last few times I replayed it. The Water Temple sure is terrible, but how terrible is it in the grand pantheon of Zelda dungeons? I can’t tell, and I think if I do replay OOT again, it’s going to be with the Master Quest dungeons so it will actually be fresh. I wonder if I’d feel something similar if I seriously sat down for a full Might and Magic VII replay, given the number of times I’ve played through that game as well.

I also played through Resident Evil 5 with my brother-in-law via split-screen co-op. That game is still good, but perhaps less amazing than I remember it being. It takes a lot of its cues from RE4 and then doesn’t do them quite as well, shoves in co-op, a little Black Hawk Down, and some questionable end-game sequences where they give the enemies guns in a game not designed around those mechanics. It also has something kinda resembling a story, that you’ll mostly remember for D.C. Douglas having far too much fun with his performance as Albert Wesker and that part where Chris punches a boulder. Still, I imagine the New Game + stuff is as good as it used to be, and that The Mercenaries is still fun. While the game’s pacing is relentless in a way that removes tension and slow moments, it also respects the players’ time and the demands of cooperative play, which is more than I can say when we moved on to Leon chapter 1 in Resident Evil 6. I… haven’t been able to convince my brother-in-law to play any more with me, weirdly enough.

And that’s it for old games. Expect recent games soon! I didn't like Rogue One very much. Just thought I'd throw that in there.

Summer is over, and with the end of summer comes the tide of new, exciting AAA video game releases. I also have a new (functional) computer with some fairly decent graphical specs, which means I can partake of this new and exciting wave of games from my PC instead of my PS4. In fact, I’ve already done so in the form of two modern, fairly-safe sequels to successful reboots of old PC games from 4-5 years ago! Weirdly specific? Absolutely. Convenient? Yes.

XCOM 2

2015 was not a good year for me and turn-based strategy. Of the multiple new turn-based games I played last year, I think the only one I really enjoyed was Disgaea 5, and even then I didn’t get anywhere close to finishing it. The rest… I’ve already talked about. In detail. By contrast, 2016 has been a venerable cornucopia of tactical junk to fill my need for moving things around on squares or hexes in a turn-based manner, and by that I mostly mean that I liked ⅓ of Fire Emblem Fates a whole lot and I think this new XCOM is pretty solid too. Hey, remember how XCOM 2 came out this year? Well, it did, and I think it’s a marked improvement on Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within (a game I probably like a little less in retrospect than I did in 2012 when I gave it my GOTY) even if I have some of the same problems with it.

If I wanted to get all reductive, I’d say that XCOM 2 is “XCOM but more” and I’d probably get away with saying it. The core and fundamentals present in this game are the same as the ones that were in Enemy Unknown. You still fight aliens in a turn-based manner, equipping your various soldiers of various classes with different abilities and weapons, hiding behind cover and taking overwatch every other turn. However, the devil is in the details and in the details there are 4 years worth of refinements present in the way XCOM 2 handles things. The addition of concealment is a neat mechanic, fitting in with the game’s theme and giving the player some leeway when scouting and setting up ambushes. The way the classes are set up allows for a lot of interesting trade-offs on paper, though there were a couple of trees I found to be far more dominant than others (I found the pistol stuff for the gunslinger to be a lot more useful than the sniping stuff, for example.) In general, I found the added layer of complexity or depth to a lot of the game quite welcome, given that EU strayed a tad too close to simplistic and straightforward at times, substituting raw difficulty and RNG garbage for interesting early-game mechanics. XCOM 2 is also asshole hard at the beginning, but the hit percentages lie far less (in fact, they lie in your favor on lower difficulties) and there are more sources of guaranteed damage than just grenades, like the ridiculous sword toting ninja soldiers who do impressive amounts of damage early on. I know some people had serious problems with the time-limited nature of a lot of missions, but I actually enjoyed the time limits. It forces a certain level of aggression from the player and gives a nice layer of tension to the entire thing. That tension was probably a good thing too, because I made the mistake of playing the game on “Veteran” (Normal) the first time through. It’s fair to say that every XCOM game ever made has a murderous early game, but eventually reaches a breaking point where the player’s power curve vastly exceeds the game’s difficulty curve and you just start steamrolling everything. In my case, I feel like I hit that point somewhere around 10 hours before I actually finished the game, around the time my investment into psychic soldiers was paying off (psionics are very effective in this game) and I started getting plasma weapons. That might be as much a length thing as a difficulty thing, but even the (poorly designed) final missions didn’t cause me too much of a problem. This is obviously a very personal issue and one that is definitely going to differ from person to person. I’m not going to pretend I’m some super-pro strategy god (I took one look at The Long War mod for Enemy Within and said “This doesn’t seem like something I’d enjoy,”) but I know my way around a square grid. If I ever play this game through again, I think I might install a few mods and tweaks, possibly go for a couple of Commander/Ironman attempts and see how far I get. The tactical combat is still sharp enough and fun enough that such a thing could presumably happen.

I can’t give the same level of praise for the strategic meta-layer, which is a progression from the last game in that it’s significantly less irritating than EU’s satellite coverage focused “you can only go to one of these 3 countries and the other two will have a panic increase” bullshit, but instead is just kinda boring. Admittedly, I almost got a game over because I let the avatar project meter get a few ticks away from filling up, but it turns out that’s because the game does a bad job of telling you what to prioritize early on. You still have to focus your resources and attention on one stupid thing to the expense of everything else early on (increasing the number of radio contacts you can have at one time and expanding your influence) but once I nailed that down the rest came pretty easily. That might also be a difficulty thing, but even if it was more difficult I don’t think cruising your ship around scanning things would be any more fun or interesting.

It’s worth mentioning that I played the game with both of the major DLC packs; Alien Hunters and Shen’s Last Gift. Both have special, obviously unique scripted missions with a weird focus on story (like I really need more story details in this XCOM game) and some really neat, but maybe not game-changing, additions. Alien Hunters adds a weird wrinkle to the game in the form of superboss aliens who run away if they take too much damage and also get free reaction moves every time one of your troops take an action. They’re actually sort of ridiculous, and if I had encountered them early on instead of doing that mission fairly late I’d probably be more inclined to call BS. You also get some unique items, both in a random event and from beating the bosses, and while these items are neat and powerful, they’re not exactly significant in the grand scheme. Far more significant are the addition of SPARKs, who are just MEC Troopers from Enemy Within under a different name and without the goofy cyborg stuff. I didn’t invest much into them on this playthrough, but I get the impression from looking at the high level abilities that they’re similarly effective to MECs. Neither of these DLC packs really compensate for a full expansion, and I might question if they’re worth the extra $20 or whatever for the season pass. Of course, if you’re starting the game for the first time at this point, you might as well, right? Just wait for a sale.

But yeah, as a whole I liked XCOM 2 a lot. That might have something to do with the fact that I’ve played it with 6 months worth of patching, while those who bought it at launch had to deal with myriad technical issues, both small and serious. The game only crashed a few times for me, though I assure you all of the weird, janky-looking graphical issues were still quite present, be it the camera focusing on walls, models behaving in odd ways and plenty of other things that you probably remember if you played the last one. Hardly a game-breaker, but if Firaxis could fix that for whatever Terror from the Deep-themed sequel/possible expansion they’re making, that would be great.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

If I wanted to get all reductive, I’d say that Deus Ex Mankind Divided is “Human Revolution, again” and I’d probably get away with saying it. If XCOM 2 feels like a safe, but natural progression from Firaxis’ first attempt at rebooting the franchise, then Mankind Divided is an exceptionally safe, incremental progression from Eidos Montreal’s first attempt at rebooting the franchise. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy playing the game, far from it, but when the credits rolled I felt a little hollow about the whole thing. Make no mistake, on a base mechanical level Duce X: Medical Doctor is a better game than its 5-year-old predecessor. If you want a game whereupon you can sneak through a vent or shoot everything (and why would you shoot everything?) they made it, and the shooting and sneaking feel a little tighter than they did in Human Revolution. I sure did beat the game without killing anyone, and I would’ve beaten it without setting off any alarms too if I wasn’t careless with my saves. All of the augs you know and love are back, alongside some experimental ones of dubious usefulness outside of the remote hacking and the mid-range mass nonlethal takedown. Like everyone else on the internet, I initially invested in all the stuff that would let me sneak or talk around things (a decent level of hacking, poison resistance, high jump, conversation module, cloaking) and by the end of the game I had more than enough points to do what I wanted. Being that I went obsessive quicksave-heavy no kill/no detection, I didn’t engage in the gunplay all that much, but based on the little that I did, I get the impression that reaches a level of tolerable competency with a decent variety of firearms and mods for said firearms.

I think that was enough for most of the game. While I did give the Director’s Cut thing a look when it came out in 2013, I hadn’t played Human Revolution the entire way through since it came out, and I feel like the developers might’ve taken advantage of that. These sorts of games don’t exactly come out very often (It’s basically these games and Dishonored on the list of “Games vying for the throne of the original Deus Ex”) so I was willing to excuse Mankind Divided for being a super iterative game with an underwhelming main story because the side quests were pretty good and the gameplay itself was still solid. But somewhere around the game’s final act I turned on it a little, cemented after it ended on a bland note with a bunch of super obvious plot strings dangling in the wind for the obvious sequel to pick up. I think where it broke for me was the realization that I spent something like 75-80% of my 23 hours with the game in the Prague hub area, doing mostly B-tier side content in the same groups of alleyways, sewers, and apartment complexes, made even worse in the third act by making you sneak through everything like it was the hub area from the Thief Reboot (which, as the one weird person who actually liked that game, I am more than willing to admit isn’t great.) There is a distinct lack of the kind of big, sandbox-y handcrafted levels that help make Deus Ex what it is, and I have to wonder how much shorter the game is if you decide to beeline through all of the story content and avoid the (admittedly interesting) side stuff. There has been some conspiracy talk that parts of the game were cut to use in the sequel, and I might be willing to believe that’s the case. The plot certainly doesn’t go anywhere interesting, and even if I have a soft spot for video game protagonists with dumb gruff monotones, there’s definitely some… questionable voice acting going on.

All of this led me to reinstall the original Deus Ex with the revision mod, which it turns out required a bit more patience and concentration than I was willing to give at that time. I also haven’t played the original game since 2011, it turns out, and my memories of the original Deus Ex being simultaneously super impressive and janky-as-hell still hold up quite fine. I dunno what that has to do with anything, but if nothing else, this all has the side effect of making me very excited in seeing how Dishonored 2 turns out. As an ardent fan of that first game, I don’t think it will be very hard to please me, but after Mankind Divided left me ambivalent, I’m more than ready for a “Find the Vent” game to succeed beyond a basic level.

EDIT: Stupid website ate half my blog.

Hey, it’s been a bit since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it? I’ll be honest, I haven’t felt a ton of motivation to write long-form stuff like this for a while. There is an almost complete blog on Might and Magic VI-VIII (written as a follow-up to that Baldur’s Gate blog I posted back in late May) that is lurking on my google docs folder and may eventually get posted, but otherwise I’ve been mostly blogging free for the entire summer. That ends now! I’ve been playing stuff, and now I’m going to tell you about it.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

What the hell was I doing last summer that I missed The Witcher 3? Wait, I’ll answer that: Pillars of Eternity, a lot of Monster Hunter, catching up with that year’s other big PS4 games, watching my roommate play through all of Dragon’s Dogma and Fallout New Vegas, a second failed attempt at playing more Dragon Age Inquisition, a little Devil May Cry here, a little The Evil Within there, at one point I played Massive Chalice and found it to be a mediocre, charmless lump, etc. Regardless, I’m pretty glad I got to play The Witcher 3 now after only dipping my toe in last summer. Finally playing it a year later, it turns out that game is just about as fantastic as I had been led to believe. After a few years of being underwhelmed by the watered-down, focus-tested, idiot-proof big-budget RPGs from Bioware and Bethesda (and being fully onboard the retro throwback train of stuff like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin) it’s good to feel good about a big open-world AAA RPG again. I thought I’d have to be one of those angry people huddling on the RPG Codex forums (don’t go there if you value your faith in mankind), talking derisively about all the stupid peasants with their stupid plebian RPGs and yelling at the sky about how old shit was sooooo much better. It turns out sometimes new stuff can still be great.

It turns out the secret for me is mostly just “Have good writing” and “Don’t make your shit boring.” Indeed, The Witcher 3’s greatest strength is that it’s a game with a quantity of quality writing. The combat I could really take or leave, even after dozens of hours and on the “Blood and Broken Bones” difficulty. (It’s acceptable. I wish there was less of it.) I’d argue the RPG progression mechanics, on the other hand, are straight up uninteresting and I’d struggle to tell you why you’d ever want to invest in the green talent tree when you could just make your swordy sword attacks do more damage or give all of your signs extra functionality. The loot isn’t even that good because the Witcher gear you can craft is usually a lot better than everything else you find. Gwent is kinda great, but becomes a bit of a joke once you get enough powerful cards. Those things are tolerable and even occasionally entertaining in the face of the world, story and characters presented in The Witcher 3. It’s like the inverse of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where instead of being plagued by “Single-Player MMO disease” and “Generic Fantasy World-itis”, even the throwaway Witcher contract quests usually have something interesting to them. Not every side quest is a winner or especially memorable, but enough of them are that I’d say it’s usually worth the player’s while to pursue them. Admittedly, the main game has some serious pacing problems in the form of Novigrad. I get that the developers wanted an urban area to contrast with the wide open expanse of Velen, but the quest to find Dandelion drags on for a seeming eternity before you’re done, running back and forth on the same handful of streets over and over again. By contrast, you spent barely any time in Skellege before being swept through the rest of the main quest, which is a bummer.

I think the secret stars of The Witcher 3 might honestly be the DLC expansions though. In the grand tradition of Dishonored’s two DLC mini-campaigns and basically nothing else, I think Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are on-par with, and perhaps even better than, the main game. Hearts of Stone’s short story is incredibly sharp, with the 3 way conflict between Geralt, Gaunter O’Dimm (who is basically the Faustian devil crossed with Q from Star Trek) and Olgierd von Everec giving some really good excuses for some fantastic goofiness. If you haven’t seen the one where Geralt goes to a wedding while possessed by an asshole ghost, well… you should look it up. I think Vinny might’ve played through it on one of those GBeast streams. Blood and Wine is a little more standard by comparison, but Touissant is a fun setting (a twist on a more standard “high fantasy” world) and has plenty of great side stuff on its own, including the Skellege gwent deck and Geralt’s valiant battle against bank bureaucracy. There are some attempts to improve the gameplay in both expansions, but I didn’t find most of that stuff especially useful beyond the mutation that makes the aard sign ridiculously overpowered. I guess it’s not a total surprise that almost every member of the Giant Bomb staff bounced off of this game in varying states of completion (given their relative indifference to fantasy stuff and RPGs as a whole) but if you do have a predilection towards fantasy RPGs and are willing to spend a lot of time tolerating okay gameplay, I cannot recommend The Witcher 3 highly enough.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

I’m still playing this game and could theoretically write something more expansive about it later, so I’ll keep it relatively brief: Tokyo Mirage Sessions is great as both a delivery mechanism for unbridled, straight-faced J-POP insanity and as a Shin Megami Tensei-based RPG to tide me over until Persona 5 comes out next year. Comparisons to Persona are warranted, especially in the game’s earnestly Japanese tone, but TMS is even breezier and lighthearted than Persona 4 It’s also first and foremost about the Japanese entertainment industry, and it’s kinda amazing? If you want a game that owns not only how anime it is, but how J-POP it is, I don’t think there’s anything else like it. There are something like 14 or 15 performed songs in the game, many of which have their own elaborately choreographed music videos and if the performance from the quick look appealed to you in any way, there’s a lot more where that came from (also, a pretty good justification for why there’s no English voice acting). The characters themselves are a tad on the cliched side and the story is pretty fluffy, but it’s all handled deftly by Atlus’ localization and is executed well enough to be entertaining. I’m really digging it, if that wasn’t clear. It’s all enough to almost make you forget that there’s also some Fire Emblem stuff going on… because the FE stuff is pretty surface level. Admittedly, this is the kind of thing that would only irritate a longstanding Fire Emblem fan such as me, but I think that stuff is just a little too surface to serve what I want, even despite the occasional bit of fan-service (as opposed to fanservice, which the game also has plenty of). Maybe I’d feel differently if there was a broader representation across the series instead of just characters from the original game and Awakening (With the exception that Ilyana from Path of Radiance is totally the cafe girl and that’s pretty great) but if you changed all of the mirages’ names and messed with some of the iconography, you could get away with not calling this a crossover in any sense. Well, at least Chrom, Thraja, and Virion are all recognizably those characters even if their design as mirages is pretty far from their designs in regular Fire Emblem. I dunno, throw Leif in there or something. Where are my hot Thracia 776 references?

The other side of the crossover is far more obvious: it’s a Shin Megami Tensei RPG. While the idea of chaining together session attacks is this game’s bread and butter, the fundamentals from all of those other SMT games still apply. Buffs, debuffs, and status effects are critically important, as is making sure your own characters elemental weaknesses are covered. I’ve been playing on hard and have found it to be a decent challenge most of the time, though some of the bosses I’ve encountered thus far have felt a little too much like DPS walls (which is to say if you don’t murder their minions fast enough you’re doomed) but otherwise it’s been a perfectly good time between all of the anime and J-POP. I'm mostly here for the J-POP.

Monster Hunter Generations

Really, if not for the nightmarish specter of this game falling from the sky and destroying everything in its path, I would’ve probably finished Tokyo Mirage Sessions by now. Remember last year when I compared Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate to crack multiple times? Well, Monster Hunter Generations is still definitely Monster Hunter and therefore akin to hard drugs in terms of devouring my free time and actually coming dangerously close to actual full-blown addiction. Buuuuuut… its pull isn’t quite as sinister as it used to be, and that comes from Generations feeling more like a standalone expansion than a full game. As a “Best of Monster Hunter” sort of thing, it draws in elements from the series’ 10-year history… which is secret code for “There isn’t actually a ton of uniquely new content in this game,” falling in line with Capcom’s current depressing modus operandi as a developer and publisher. I never played Freedom Unite and didn’t play much of 3 Ultimate, so admittedly a lot of the returning monsters are new to me, but other than the introduction of Hunter Arts and Hunting Styles it sure is a lot like that game I spent 370 hours playing last year, but with less overall content (there’s no real “G Rank” content, outside of the higher level deviant monsters and a handful of super bosses.) For that reason, I don’t think my time with Monster Hunter Generations will be quite as long or destructive as my time with 4U, thankfully. That said, I’ve had a lot of fun playing with other GB folk in the discord group, so I think getting over the 100 hour mark is more than possible.

So I guess I should actually talk about what’s new? There’s some tweaks to the way some of the weapons handle that won’t be apparent to anyone who hasn’t spent serious time with the game (the third thrust on the lance is now a stronger, slower attack that hits 3 times, the Gunlance has a new heat gauge that you have to maintain if you want to do max damage at all times, the charge blade got hit with the nerf bat, etc) as well as a new upgrade system that is slightly more intuitive but still requires you to look stuff up online. In terms of actual new stuff, the Hunting Styles and Hunter Arts are legitimately cool. Essentially each weapon type now has 3 super moves associated with it, alongside 4 different variant playstyles that determine your moveset and how many of those super moves you can equip. There’s Guild style, which is your vanilla + 2 Arts, Striker, which lets you use 3 Arts at the cost of a simplified moveset, Aerial, which focuses on mounting monsters like you were using the Insect Glaive all the time, and Adept, which gives you a perfect evade/perfect guard move if you correctly time dodges/blocks against a monster (which can then be followed up with a strong attack of some sort.) Some of the weapons fit more snugly into those styles than others, depending on the trade-offs of each individual weapon/style combo. The Longsword, for example, is pretty viable for all 4 styles, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why you would pick an Aerial style for any of the gunner weapons unless you just want to mess around, or why you wouldn’t always pick Adept style for the bow because of how good it is. Oh right, you can also play as a Palico, which is something I haven’t messed with all that much. I’ve seen other players do quite well with them, but I get the impression there’s exactly one kind of Prowler build for doing maximum damage and the rest aren’t as great. I imagine I’ll put more time into using them before the time is through, because I like every weapon in these games… with the possible exception of the hammer.

So that’s basically my summer summed up in 3 games. I also speedran some Resident Evil, played a surprising amount of Ziggurat during the Giant Bomb E3 live shows and probably messed around with Street Fighter V, but I don’t really have a ton to say about those games. As for the future: I finally bought a new computer with stuff like a 970 and a i7 and it should be here next week. In addition to finally being able to run things other than internet browsers and word processors again, you can expect me to re-enter the magical world of PC gaming and play such hot mainstream hits as Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Underrail, and Serpent in the Staglands. I guess I could also get that new Deus Ex game on PC too, maybe that XCOM 2 game that nobody talked about the month after its release. The possibilities are endless!

Oh hi there Giant Bomb and friends, how is it going? It’s going okay right now, thanks for asking. I was working on a blog about Dark Souls III when I realized that, honestly, I didn’t have much to say about that game that hadn’t been said elsewhere. It’s a really good game that becomes better as it goes on, but I think its nature as a very reflexive, self-referential conclusion to the Dark Souls trilogy prevents me from ranking it as high as I would otherwise have. For those, and many other reasons, it sits firmly in the middle of my extremely legitimate Souls tier list, with the secret curve being that I think they’re all great games. Even the worst Souls game in the series is still better than Salt and Sanctuary (which I thought was alright) and Lords of the Fallen (which I only played a few hours of before going “nah, I’m good”). I also played that hot new Doom game that all the kids are talking about now and it’s kind of amazing? Like, I got the platinum trophy for it, which admittedly isn’t super hard as far as platinum trophies are concerned, but if you have any sort of affinity for video game-ass video games and shooters of the first-person variety, the single player campaign for that game is more than worth your time.

But I digress. I’ve been writing blogs “for fun” in this community long enough to know when the motivation isn’t there, and I haven’t had a ton of motivation to write much of anything the past few months. It turns out the game that motivated me to actually write something was Baldur’s Gate, which I finished another playthrough of in order to import a character directly into the new Siege of Dragonspear expansion. The discussion around that game has been sufficiently poisoned by angry internet folk complaining about “SJWs ruining muh video games” for me to get much out of it, and in any case it was always going to be a Thief reboot/The Evil Within scenario where I had to play it for myself regardless of outside opinions. Instead of writing about how much I like Baldur’s Gate for a third time, I figure it would be a fun idea to write about all of the old-ass CRPGs I’ve encountered along the road in a way that acts as both a primer for the game and as a summary of my thoughts about it. The intent is to make this into a series of some sort and cover some other classics of the genre, like Fallout or whatever, but since Baldur’s Gate is so fresh in my mind, I might as well start with that first. I imagine I’ll get to the rest of the Infinity Engine games in due time, though I guess I should wait and see if this actually turns out to be a series or not.

The Infinity Engine (not to be confused with the EA football physics engine of the same name) is responsible for 5 of the best Computer Role-Playing Games ever made. Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Icewind Dale 1 and 2, and Planescape: Torment. You’ve probably read some of my ravings about these games before, given that I played through most of them for the first time recently enough to have blogs on the site. All of them are Dungeons and Dragons RPGs (mostly using AD&D 2nd Edition, though Icewind Dale 2 uses D&D 3.0) focused around large parties of characters (up to 6) with real time combat that you can pause at any time to issue commands to your characters. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the mechanics because that would take me all day, and because I assume anyone who cares about reading this at least has a baseline understanding of how Dungeons and Dragons works. If you don’t… well, all you really need to know is that a lower THAC0 is better, only Humans can be Paladins, a Fighter/Mage/Thief splits their experience gain between the three classes, and 18/00 strength is way better than 18/01 strength. The esoteric and convoluted rules that govern AD&D are half the story though, because it turns out that translating Dungeons and Dragons to an isometric perspective real-time with pause format brings its own weird quirks to the table. All of these games, with the possible exception of Planescape, demand a heavy amount of micromanagement when it comes to combat, which can sometimes veer dangerously close to the realm of “chaotic mess”. The character pathing tends to get a bit messy itself, and it’s more than possible for one of your party members to accidentally get separated from the rest of the group when crossing large city maps or cramped dungeons. Detecting traps can be and usually is a pain in the ass. Inventory works on both a slot and encumbrance-based system, which really speaks to the nature of what these games actually are. Over the years I’ve answered a handful of threads asking “Where is a great place to get into old CRPGs?” and honestly I don’t think there’s a great answer to that question. All of these games have their own caveats, their own special brand of old-school bullshit that the player needs to overcome or accept to enjoy because these games were made for grognards by grognards 15+ years ago. Despite being a little young to have played any of these when they were new, my tolerance for that stuff is pretty high and I’ve been playing them long enough that I can’t fully project what might be a hang up for someone who has never played one of these sorts of games before.

Baldur’s Gate

I’ve always thought it a little sad that Baldur’s Gate has the misfortune of sitting in the shadow of its legendary successor, because it’s a great game in its own right, if perhaps the roughest of the Infinity Engine to just sit down and try to start in 2016. The first half, if not the first two-thirds of Baldur’s Gate involves a lot of wandering around the wilderness of The Sword Coast (picking up quests and having encounters with monsters or weird NPCs) in a way one could generously describe as “deliberate.” While the game’s main quest (involving your rag-tag group of adventurers investigating an iron shortage and greater threats to the Forgotten Realms while also discovering your character’s heritage) is straightforward and rarely off the beaten path, low-level D&D is sufficiently deadly that you probably don’t want to touch the Nashkel mines until everyone is at least level 2, if not 3. Thus, you gotta explore and adventure and stuff. There’s a certain lackadaisical pace to the whole thing that I find pleasant when combined with the game’s “generic D&D” tone and haunting soundtrack, and it’s important to note how ambitious and important Baldur’s Gate was at the time, encompassing a more whole and accurate simulacrum of the tabletop experience than the games that came before it. But... at its worst the early hours of Baldur’s Gate involve a lot of quicksave abuse, a lot of shuffling party members in and out looking for ones with good stats and a lot of giant wilderness maps with one or two interesting things. You don’t have to go as far as I did in my last playthrough and do almost everything, in fact you could probably ignore a lot of stuff and still turn out alright. The game picks up more around the halfway mark, and once you get to the titular city itself it’s a lot easier to find quests that are interesting, even if the NPCs you can recruit at that point almost seem like an insult (I’d love to find someone who used Tiax and Alora legitimately).

One thing that is probably worth expanding upon is that Baldur’s Gate 1 is far less interested in character development or area-specific vignettes than you’d expect from a Bioware game. There are a lot of NPCs to recruit into your party of 6, most of whom don’t talk much outside of their recruitment speeches and their various barks when you select them, which makes it super weird when they will go out of their way to talk in a quest or a quest will directly acknowledge them. There are some roots of what is to come, like special NPC banters when you have certain combinations of party members, though most of them probably won’t show up unless you’re really committed to having two characters who hate each other in the same group. The writing similarly goes for a “Generic Forgotten Realms Adventure” feel, with an almost refreshing lack of pretension towards “Choices and Consequences” compared to the modern obsession for them. You’re playing a D&D adventure. You do D&D adventure things. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not all goofs all the time like Divinity. I find this low-key, swashbuckling tone a nice change of pace from the self-serious, player character-focused writing of more recent RPGs, but I could also totally understand if someone found it boring. Luckily for that hypothetical person, that's what BG II is for.

That brings me to the game’s expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast, which I had never actually played through until this last playthrough. TotSC (to clumsily abbreviate it) adds a handful of high-level quests to the game (bringing up the experience cap to allow for another level or two for most classes), all of which are accessed or started through the small town of Ulgoth’s Beard located at the top of the world map. In a lot of ways, the Durlag’s Tower mega-dungeon (a tower with a 6-floor trap and puzzle-filled monstrosity of a basement that served as the inspiration for the even bigger Watcher’s Keep in BG II) and the Werewolf Island quest feel like stepping stones to the more complex writing and dungeon design of Baldur’s Gate II, even if Durlag’s Tower sometimes feels like a slog and the Werewolf Island quest is brought down by enemies who can only be damaged by +3 weapons or higher (which are more than a little rare in BG1). At most, this stuff is like an extra 12-15 hours, though I was skimming a guide and it didn't take me quite as long.

Last, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the Enhanced Edition. 3 of the 5 Infinity Engine games have gotten the “Enhanced Edition” treatment from Beamdog (a small studio that was founded by ex-Bioware employees) all of which have added a bunch of engine-level improvements, bug-fixes and additional content, which sounds alright on paper but is less exciting in reality. Thanks to more than a decade of fan-mods, it’s quite possible to play Baldur’s Gate 1 with many of the improvements of its sequel, like class kits, higher resolutions, pressing the TAB key to highlight interactable objects and so on and so forth. The Enhanced Editions go a step further than the likes of the Baldur’s Gate TuTu or Baldur’s Gate Trilogy mods, with stuff like a quick loot bar and a couple of other small but appreciated tweaks, though from the outside I always thought they seemed unnecessary at best. Now that you don’t have a choice and have to buy the vanilla and Enhanced versions together (a dickish move on Hasbro’s part that probably makes sense from a brand confusion standpoint) it’s probably the best way to play the game and save yourself the hour or so it would take to track down and install a bunch of mods. It’s not just all bugfixes though, there’s also some dire new content which is thankfully ignorable. To put it lightly, the new NPCs added in the Enhanced Edition stick out in the same way the added effects in the Star Wars Special Editions stick out, and not just because the voice acting was clearly recorded at a higher audio quality. While I only kept the Wild Mage Neera in my party (Rasaad being a monk in a game where monks are hot garbage until they reach higher levels and Dorn being evil as evil can be even if he seems like the most useful of the three. Neera's wild magic mostly just means that sometimes her spells don't work and it sucks) their introductions, their mini-quests, and the fact that you can romance them make them all clashes with the tone of Baldur’s Gate 1 that I mentioned earlier. It doesn’t help that the new areas made specifically for their quests look worse than the rest of the game, or that the actual quality of the writing sometimes dips into amateurish territory. They’re easily ignored once you get past their introductions, but… yeah, they’re basically the equivalent of that deleted scene where Han Solo steps on Jabba’s tail. Not “Han Shot First” or “Ghost Hayden Christensen” bad, but my hope is that they’re a little more at home and better written when I encounter them in Baldur’s Gate II Enhanced Edition. Oh, and there’s also an arena mini-campaign called The Black Pits that seems like it exists mostly because the developer didn’t want to make any more new art assets, and the original CG cutscenes are replaced with marginally worse looking hand-drawn/slightly animated ones (a mistake they did not repeat in BG2 EE).

Final Verdict in bullet points:

• Baldur’s Gate is a great game, but it’s hard to recommend to someone who hasn’t played a game like it before.

• A lot of the game involves walking around wilderness areas. I’m into that.

• The game goes for a deliberate “Generic D&D” tone and feel alongside its low-level adventuring.

• The content in Tales from the Sword Coast is alright, but mostly interesting in the context of how it reflects the sequel.

• The Enhanced Edition is okay, but the new NPCs feel out of place and are a little cringe-worthy.

• I can’t comment on the new Siege of Dragonspear expansion yet, but I’m attempting to play through it right now assuming my stupid computer cooperates. If I do get through it, you can almost certainly expect a review or blog.

And that’s a wrap, I think. Don’t worry, I imagine I’ll cover more than one game in subsequent blogs now that the introduction is out of the way, but I hope this has been… enlightening? Useful? Entertaining? If you have any suggestions for stuff you’d like to see covered, feel free to ask. I’ve played a lot of RPGs. Maybe I’ll give you one of those GOG gift codes I have lying around for no good reason. Maybe I'll also do that Kingdom Hearts blog I've been writing in my head for the last 3 months.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows my tastes that I have an opinion on Intelligent Systems’ newest entry in the Fire Emblem series. It’s one of my favorite long-running video game series of all time, which likely explains why I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 130 hours playing this one over the last month between the game’s three separate campaigns. Did I just say three? Yes. A vital factor for understanding Fire Emblem Fates is to understand that it’s split into three complete and separate campaigns: Birthright, Conquest, and Revelation. I’m crazy, so I bought the $80 special edition with all three of them on the same cartridge, otherwise Birthright and Conquest are sold separately and Revelation is DLC. The closest analogue I can think of is The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons, which are two games with identical general gameplay mechanics but different goals when implementing them. Anyone who wants a lot of Fire Emblem can rest assured that the three campaigns are stylistically distinct from one another, but I can assure you that might be too much Fire Emblem and not all of it is great Fire Emblem. I personally found a pretty clear gradation of quality between the three campaigns: Conquest is fantastic, Birthright is decent, and Revelation is... less than decent.

The way Fates is split between the three campaigns makes talking about it as a whole a little difficult, but it’s worth mentioning that I think all of the changes to the nuts and bolts mechanics are smart. They're mostly aimed at tackling some of the more OP tactics in Awakening, but they also address and tweak some longstanding Fire Emblem mechanics. The removal of weapon durability in favor of giving weapons different effects, the changes to pair-up, updating the weapon triangle, and the introduction of shuriken and debuffs are all great additions. On this basic level, Fates is a far more interesting game than Awakening was, though it’s stuff that is probably only super noticeable if you’ve been a long-ish fan of the series. I guess the castle building stuff is another part of the new features and that’s a bit more of a “whatever” kind of thing for me. The only truly important buildings you need to buy are the armory and staff shop, the rest seem to give minor buffs or exist mostly for flavor or if you get way into the castle invasion stuff. I guess you can hang out with people and not rub their faces or something? That sounds like a dumb feature. I’m sure glad that’s optional. It’s no base menu from Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, I’ll tell you that much.

I started with Conquest, which ended up being my favorite by a significant margin. I don’t think that should be much a surprise, since I’m someone who isn’t afraid of a little sadism in his strategy games. If you haven’t heard the pitch, Conquest is essentially the campaign aimed at longtime fans of the series who thought Awakening was too simple and easy. In that aim, the developers succeeded, maybe a little too well. The biggest difference is that there’s no option to grind, outside of DLC maps (you can grind supports in online castle invasions if you want a roundabout way of getting all the child paralouges). The scenarios in Conquest are often tactically demanding by design, with a lot of maps whose win conditions are something other than "Rout Enemy" or "Defeat Boss". Freed from the shackles of needing to be for everyone who likes Fire Emblem, Conquest doesn’t mess around. Enemies aren’t necessarily that much stronger than they are in the other two campaigns, but they do tend to have nasty skills on top of some really devious map design. I was really into that, and I found Conquest to be one of the most satisfying tactics games I've played in a long time (not that I've played a lot of great tactics games in the last year. Steamworld Heist is alright.) How hard is it? I played all three campaigns on Hard/Classic, and Conquest is the most difficult by a fair margin. Even I, as someone who has finished most of the games in the series, had serious trouble with a handful of maps (Chapters 10, 17 and 25 are especially rough. Ninjas man, ninjas.) It’s not quite Thracia 776 hard (it’s more fair and lacks that game’s gleeful propensity for bullshit), but it’s up there. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a segment of the audience who doesn’t care for Conquest at all, even on the likes of Normal/Casual. For me, this might as well be a Fire Emblem game with my name on it, and you’ll probably see it rather high up on my Game of the Year list come December.

By comparison, Birthright is the campaign aimed at newer fans of the series. Map design is more open and simple, while resources are more plentiful even without grinding. In short… if you liked Awakening, this is more of that. That’s not a bad thing. Listen, I probably like Awakening more than it deserved, fully as a time/place sort of thing. It was the first Fire Emblem game to come out in the US for 4 years after the lackluster Shadow Dragon (the far superior New Mystery of the Emblem staying a Japan exclusive) and I was desperate for anything from this series. Does it have problems? Yes, absolutely. But the marked increase in production values and “best of Fire Emblem” slate of features were enough for me at that time. Birthright doesn’t get away with quite as much. It was a nice change of pace from Conquest, being able to finish maps on my first try and all that, but coming off of the much harder campaign, I found it fairly easy and I kinda wish I had played it on Lunatic instead of hard. Keep in mind that this comes from the perspective of someone way into tactical turn-based whatever. I’ll be the old man who yells at you for playing on Casual mode (please don’t), doesn't much care for the Fire Emblem series’ increased focus on visual novel-esque anime pairing funtimes, thinks Massive Chalice is mediocre, and will probably make a snarky remark whenever a game journalist compares anything with turn-based combat on a grid to the XCOM reboot (because apparently no other turn-based games existed before 2012). That’s my perspective, but if you aren’t insane like me, Birthright will probably do you just fine. The new Hoshidan classes are a lot of fun, and just because I gripe about the difficulty doesn’t mean I didn’t have to reset every now and again. It’s only a cakewalk in comparison to Conquest and I still enjoyed it just fine.

That leaves me with Revelation, the “Golden Route” DLC campaign for either version meant to explain everything about the story and act as a compromise between the other two campaigns (It has grinding and complex level design), set in a version of the world where your character doesn’t side with either nation. It’s also the worst of the three. Revelation feels like a half-assed compromise, where the maps are still complex like Conquest’s without being difficult. Instead, they’re usually gimmicky and take forever to complete, like a map that requires you to clear out snow to uncover a path (and enemies) or a late-game one with a lot of waiting around for elevators. Regular enemies usually don’t have any skills (something that even Birthright can boast of) and a lot of your own units come under-leveled to the point where you’d have to grind if you wanted to use them (not that you would use most of them, given that you can’t deploy as many characters in most of Revelation’s maps and you have access to both sets of royal siblings. Are you really going to tell me that you’re not going to deploy Ryoma and Xander?) The flipside is that you do get almost everyone aside from Yukimura and Izana and Scarlet, sort of. That means all of the regular units, all of the children units, and even a single Revelation-exclusive character who isn’t half-bad himself. Oh, and access to both armories and staff stores. If you’re interested in whatever crazy post-game DLC that will inevitably be released, or one of those people who wants to ship all of the pairings and doesn’t care about the nuances of the strategy (you are not me), this is the route to play. But I cannot emphasize enough that if Revelation was its own Fire Emblem game, it’s kind of middling and would be near the bottom of my personal tier list. It doesn’t feel like it was as balanced or playtested to the same extent as the other two, but the most critical thing I can say about it is that it’s honestly dull in a way the other two campaigns aren’t. Oh, it’s still Fire Emblem, so I still played the entire thing and got every kid, but if you weren’t crazy and didn’t get the special edition, I might recommend against getting Revelation unless you really want closure to the story, or really like these mechanics (they’re good, don’t get me wrong). Otherwise, I’d recommend the campaign you didn’t buy (be it Birthright or Conquest) and then a long laundry list of almost every other game in the series.

You’ll notice a deliberate omission from my overview of all three campaigns; the story. Yes, believe it or not, Fire Emblem is more to some people than just a turn-based tactical RPG. If I had to judge based off of the three separate stories for Fates, I wouldn’t quite know why. Listen, Fire Emblem has never had the greatest stories. I think those games have their moments (and some have more moments than others), but even when the quality of the writing is good the plots are usually stock and standard JRPG fare (I couldn’t tell you if I have high or low standards for JRPG stories, given that I liked Final Fantasy XIII’s story well enough and am both genuinely and ironically enjoying going through Kingdom Hearts now). Fates is sub-standard JRPG fare, but with the advantage of being bad in three different ways. Conquest bungles its morally grey premise by, among other things, feeling the need to tell your player created avatar that they’re still definitely the good guy despite siding with the obviously evil invading kingdom, though it does have the advantage of a very unorthodox final boss for a Fire Emblem game. Birthright’s story goes the opposite direction and is so straightforward and boring to the point of being forgettable. The main hook of Revelation’s story (namely that the avatar character can’t explain who the true enemy is because of a curse) is exceptionally sloppy writing, and once that gets resolved it sort of muddles its way to the obvious “Best End” conclusion where everyone tells your avatar character how great they are. The presence of the avatar character as the main protagonist (instead of a secondary protagonist like Robin was in Awakening) leads to some really dumb hero worship stuff on the part of everyone else; it doesn’t help that Corrin is kind of a naive dupe with a bland good-guy personality and Azura is a mysterious waif whose main job is to be mysterious and deliver exposition (while praising the avatar character, naturally). Remember how I said I don’t much care for the waifu stuff? I’ll be honest, it’s fine, it’s whatever, it’s not totally the death of Fire Emblem as we know it even if it's also clearly pandering towards an audience that I'm not part of. But the thing about that that really puts the nail in the coffin for me in regards to Fates’ stories is the ability to marry your siblings. Yeah, it pulls the “We’re not actually blood related!” thing with both families, which is cowardly, but I can’t help but feel it subverts one of the game’s main themes? Like, the whole thing with the game is that your character has to choose between his blood family and the family who raised him, so then making the blood family turn out to just be step-siblings and making all of your siblings fair game on the bone train (Westermarck effect be damned, I guess) gives me a pretty good idea of where the developers priorities were. Awakening’s main plot was kind of a mess, but at least it never tripped over its own themes. The grand irony of all of this is that it’s revealed that Azura is your cousin in Revelations and you can marry and have children with her no problem. Well, with real incest I guess it’s a real Fire Emblem game after all.

As for the rest of the writing, it’s usually good, though I think the general quality of supports is a little more inconsistent than Awakening. I dunno if that’s a script thing, or if it’s because 8-4 handled that game and Nintendo Treehouse handled this one, but there are a couple of character interactions that don’t fly at all, especially when you add in the part where everyone can marry everyone else (As a result, I tended to like the kid and platonic supports more, because they don’t need to end in “Hey, let’s get married!” every single time.) I imagine you’ll have your favorites, perhaps a waifu or three (I’m not gonna pretend I married Odin, Hana, and Shiro for their sweet, sweet pair-up bonuses but also I sorta did) but I think it would be cool if Nintendo didn’t feel pressured to have as much marriage or kids in the next Fire Emblem game. I guess there’s a group that’s totally into that now or something, but if that’s what they’re after there are far more consistent options out there that don’t have that pesky strategy game to slog through.

But hey, as a whole I like Fire Emblem Fates a lot. Revelation might’ve taken some of the wind out of my sails, and some of my internet friends can attest to the angry rants I’ve written in regards to the story, but as a complete package it’s a super neat thing that I appreciate exists in multiple forms for multiple types of fans. Obviously, my grognard sensibilities will always prefer Conquest the most, but Birthright is the Fire Emblem game for the rest of you and Revelation is the Fire Emblem game for people who really, really want more Fire Emblem. Now I feel kind of Fire Emblem’d out, to be honest. I might have to take a bit of a break from the series for a while. You know what that means… you don’t? Okay, fine. I’m going to finish that Kingdom Hearts blog I was writing before this madness even started. Expect it. Cherish it.

2016 is here. It’s been here for a bit, actually, but now I’ve finally played some video games I feel like writing about. All I have down here at school with me are my PC (which works, sometimes), 3DS (which I’ve been using the most) and PS3 (which I haven’t hooked up yet). Don’t expect my hot take on Xenoblade Chronicles X or The Witcher 3 anytime soon, is what I’m saying. I do have some stuff in mind to occupy my attention in the coming weeks before Fire Emblem comes out and I write some lengthy treatise on that, but that’s a dark road that will be more fun for you, the reader, if you happen upon it without any direct forewarning for me. Let’s just say that I’ve made some... interesting HD collection choices for my PS3. But enough teasing, here’s the stuff I’ve spent the last month chipping away at between work and school.

Undertale

I think you should consider playing Undertale, if you haven’t already. While the king indie darling of last year has already had a bit of a backlash from all the hyperbolic praise it has accrued from various game publications and its weirdly zealous fanbase, I’ve found that having your opinion of a game be colored by the people who like it is a good way to hate everything. Do you think I’d like Fire Emblem as much as I do if I let the loony elements of that community affect me? Because right now I’m reading a thread where people are flipping the hell out over the removal of face rubbing in the US version of Fire Emblem Fates and it’s a good reminder that for as weird as it gets here on Giant Bomb sometimes, I don’t think we get that crazy. Where were we? Oh right, I enjoyed Undertale quite a bit. Best game of all time? That’s a stretch. Undertale is a charming, decently funny parody/deconstruction of 8/16 bit RPGs (and a little bit of games in general) that unfortunately is best experienced the first time with minimal spoilers. As a game, it’s almost perfunctory. The game’s vaunted concept is the ability to spare your foes instead of kill them, but a pacifist run will consist mostly of figuring out how to spare your random encounter RPG enemies while dodging their attacks. Do you like bullet hell shooters? I don’t. It’s never hard enough on a normal playthrough to be much of an issue, but if you are looking for thrilling moment to moment gameplay or deep and interesting RPG systems, that is not what Undertale is going for. It does some interesting things with the bullet hell concept here and there, and a few of the boss fights, but I still would classify the actual part where you play Undertale as “workmanlike.” That’s not really its goal, nor do I hold it against the game in any major way.

The point of Undertale is that it’s a genuinely funny, aggressively weird, but entirely heartfelt take on NES and SNES era RPGs with some Metal Gear Solid 2 levels of meta-commentary thrown in for good measure. There were parts of it that actually reminded me of The Stanley Parable, but with less condescending sneering at the player and more dates with skeleton men. By the time you get to said date, you should have a pretty good idea if this game if your jam or not, though I should also mention there’s a pretty good parody of the Final Fantasy VI opera scene. Getting into more spoilery territory, the game goes full crazy mode if you were to attempt the Genocide (Kill Everything) route, which acts as a giant middle finger towards completionists both in writing and in gameplay, calls out people watching it on youtube (myself included) and then ends with you being called a terrible person and a dark empty void after an absurdly difficult boss fight. I really like that. I have no regrets not doing it myself because it sounds like the opposite of fun. I can totally understand why some people love this game a ton, though I don’t think I’m one of them. It’s good, possibly great, with some quirky, likeable characters and a soundtrack that is more than just “Lol chiptunes like the old school chiptunes”. While I remain skeptical if it will actually be one of those games we cite 5 years from now as some sort of landmark, I recommend it nonetheless.

A short interlude on Steamworld: Heist

Hey, remember how I bemoaned the quality of all the turn-based tactical stuff that came out last year? Well, I did that. The only turn-based strategy thing I really enjoyed from 2015 was Disgaea 5, which for whatever reason clicked with me the way that previous games in the series didn’t. Well, I have great news: There was another pretty good tactics game that came out at the tail-end of 2015. That game is Steamworld Heist. If you don’t know what it is already, it’s a pretty dope, pretty light 2D take on a XCOM-ish, Valkyria-ish turn based shooter thing with steam-powered robots and plenty of styyyyle. I found the game to be more than solid, well worth $20, and a perfect length at 8ish hours. While a tad repetitive, there are a lot of different ways to tackle missions, mostly determined by the squad you bring with you (all of whom have different abilities and all of whom seem totally viable). I played on the “Challenging” difficulty, one step above normal, and found the game to be acceptably challenging right up until the last third where I sorta just steamrolled everything (ha). The story, while bare-bones, has some charming dialogue from your hearty crew of robot space pirates I’ll be totally honest here and say that it doesn’t quite give me what I want out of a tactics game. As I found with some of last year’s disappointments, I want a certain level of mechanical complexity to my turn-based strategizing. I want numbers ‘n shit, maybe a few subsystems, and a little more variety in enemy encounters to go along with that. That’s why the likes of Massive Chalice and its sub-XCOM reboot depth was such a turn-off. It turns out I don’t want a tactics game aimed at the person who played Enemy Unknown once on Normal. I want a tactics game for crazy people. Sadly, Steamworld Heist is a tactics game for the rest of you, and it’s a great one at that.

Let’s talk about Majora’s Mask

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is a… divisive game, to say the least. Saddled with the burden of being the follow up to one of the greatest games of all time, to say that Majora’s Mask is experimental (supposedly the result of a challenge from Shigeru Miyamoto to Eiji Aonuma to make a new Zelda game in 18 months) is an understatement. It has no interest in being a follow up to Ocarina of Time, nor does it have much interest in expanding upon already established series conventions. That’s why Wind Waker and Twilight Princess exist. After playing the game through to completion, getting every mask and a decent number of heart pieces, I have something to say: the 3DS version of Majora’s Mask is great. After years of absolutely hating this game from my youthful attempts at playing it on N64, I’m glad I gave it another shot. That said… you people who think it’s the best Zelda game are still crazy. Talking to you, Patrick Klepek. Majora’s Mask’s strengths have very little to do with it being a Zelda game and a lot more to do with it being effin’ weird.

Not that Zelda isn’t always a little weird, but Majora’s Mask has the central conceit of being a Groundhog Day-esque 3 day cycle that you have to repeat over and over again to stop the nightmarish moon from crashing into Termina and ending everything. For a E-rated game, MM is surprisingly morbid at times, as the various citizens of Clock Town and its surrounding environs confront the misery caused by Skull Kid and the potential end of the world. It does mood in a way most Zelda games don’t. A lot of the best things about Majora’s Mask come from that increased focus on random side characters and their problems (which you will have to inevitably solve if you want masks or pieces of heart.) But along the way Link learns a creepy dance, defends Romani Ranch from aliens trying to abduct cows, sells Deku flowers for profit, engages in a freestyle sesh with a zora guitarist and plays a bunch of inane minigames. Oh, and it’s the first game to have the eternally hated Tingle in it.While minigames and trading quests are a staple of the series, no other game goes quite as extreme as Majora’s Mask does, so extreme it required the N64 Expansion pack’s extra RAM to be able to run, alongside such late N64 hits (“hits”?) as Perfect Dark and Donkey Kong 64. It might go too far in some places, actually. The infamous Anju/Kafei quest that nets you a handful of masks (which in turn net multiple pieces of heart) seems like something no one would’ve ever figured out without a guide, and it’s one of the more interesting side quests in the game. I’m not really sure how it got away with that 16 years ago, but I guess 2000 was a different time. We’ll touch on that a little later.

It’s a good thing that stuff exists, because if you were to play Majora’s Mask straight through without touching any of that stuff, you’d probably hate it. As an actual Zelda game whereupon one enters a dungeon, gets an item and uses said item in the dungeon, it’s passable. The critical nature of the game’s time limit (which is something like less than an hour if you don’t play the Song of Inverted Time) means that each of the 4 major dungeons feel a little small and limited in a way that the best Zelda dungeons usually don’t (it doesn’t help that you have to fight the same miniboss wizrobe in each one). I found the highlight to be the Stone Tower Temple, which does some neat stuff with all 3 of Link’s transformation masks and flipping itself upside down. Since the masks are the focus, the actual dungeon items you get are literally just the bow and 3 different types of elemental arrows. There are areas that would qualify as “mini-dungeons” but I frankly don’t think those are all that great either. Maybe I need to replay some of the other 3D Zeldas for a more direct comparison, but I feel pretty good about saying that the dungeons in Majora’s Mask are as middle-of-the-road as they come. The Zelda parts of this Zelda game are not its strongest aspect.

In some ways, putting the most interesting parts of your video game in a series of optional side quests seems like bad design. And know what? I think the various quality-of-life improvements in the 3DS version make that argument a lot less valid. While the 3DS remake of Ocarina of Time was more or less a straight port, this MM remake had a lot more done to it to the point where I might say the controversial statement that the original N64 version is still not a great game. It’s not just the little stuff that adds up, like a more transparent game clock, moving the bank to central clock town, making the bomber’s notebook more useful, and redoing the boss fights to make them more interesting; it’s also about allowing for hard saves at owl statues and then increasing the number of statues in the world (The Japanese N64 version of MM didn’t even let you make suspend saves at owl statues, you had to play the song of time to record your progress in any fashion) and letting you move time forward as much as you want with the song of double time. I don’t think I would’ve enjoyed the game nearly as much (Or certainly had the patience to get every single mask) without some of those changes, which leaves me in a bit of a weird spot when it comes to me placing Majora’s Mask in my hypothetical and entirely objective Zelda tier list. I guess I’ll say this: Majora’s Mask 3D is a great game and you should consider playing it even if its original incarnation did nothing for you. Even if the dungeons are a little “whatever”, the various improvements to this remake help the weird and unique aspects stand out a lot better. Say what you will, there isn’t anything else quite like it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some homework, which isn’t an euphemism for anything. I actually have homework.

Okay, now it’s time to party. Game of the Year is over everyone, get ready to pack up and leave because I’m here to drop the last GOTY list of 2015 that you need to care about. Well, besides the site-wide overall top 10. And maybe the lists of people you like more than me. And your own list, if you haven’t gotten it out yet. Regardless, 2015 was a great and generally productive year for me and video games, even if it continues the trend of not being a great and generally productive year for a lot of other things. I bought a PS4, so I was finally able to play modern games at worse framerates and resolutions than all the cool PC kids out there, which has since been further compounded by 2015 perhaps being the death knell for my stupid laptop’s ability to play anything vaguely recent, but of course I can’t really afford to build a half-decent PC. I just hope it can run Torment well when that comes out. You might notice a certain Witcher-sized omission from my list this year, but that’s only because I haven’t gotten around to playing enough of it. What I did play of it was good enough that it will likely get its due in 2016, probably in the spring after this next semester of school. We’ll see. But for now, let’s take a look at and celebrate/occasionally deride some of the games I did play in 2015! Starting from 10 and working my way up to the top:

Most Improved: Destiny The Taken King

I don’t know what idiotic impulse led me to pre-ordering the digital super duper version of Destiny: The Taken King, but as a “bonus” I got to play the vanilla (Dinklebot) version of Destiny for a little bit before the expansion came out. Boy, if I had bought that game last year I would’ve been so angry at the infamous Shoemaker Destiny Breaker of 2014. The Destiny of 2014 was a cold, charmless game with the single most baffling non-story I’ve ever seen in a piece of interactive entertainment. I know there have been essays written, exposes published, but allow me to chip in that, yes, the story of Destiny was that bad. The shooting was so damn good though, and The Taken King implements the radical idea of taking that shooting and making everything around it far more acceptable. It has something resembling a story! With characters (like “Snarky Nathan Fillion”) who do things! And missions that involve more than having your Northbot buddy scan things while you hold off a wave of enemies! And loot that is occasionally worth using! I spent a decent amount of time grinding my character up to 290 light, and uncharacteristic of most grinding experiences, I actually enjoyed doing it. Not enough to actually try and find a group willing to do the raid with me (because people are scary), but at least I have this sweet heavy fusion rifle that shoots ricocheting death lasers.

The second-best From Software game I played this year: Dark Souls II Scholar of the First Sin

This is sort of cheating, but as a member of “Team Pro-Dark Souls II” I think it fair to remind everyone that the remixed version of this game also came out this year and is still great. While I didn’t see the game the entire way through again, I did watch my roommate do everything, including the DLC (which I found impressively dickish) though minor tweaks and improvements to this remixed version of the game can’t really change the fact that there are too many bosses and too many of those bosses are giant dudes with giant swords. Whatever man. Dark Souls II is still great and if you don’t think so you can respectfully disagree with me using evidence and polite discussion.

The “Eff it man, I’m putting it on the list” award for game I should probably play more of: Xenoblade Chronicles X

Last year, I made the mistake of putting Dragon Age Inquisition on my Game of the Year list despite only putting a “mere” 20 hours into it. When I tried to go back to it this year, I found the first (non-Sonic, non-MMO) Bioware RPG I couldn’t force myself to finish, an approximation of everything I dislike about modern big-budget RPG design and likely a future candidate for me to make fun of when I relapse and force myself to play more. I’m hoping that doesn’t happen here. But yes, I’m around 20ish hours into Xenoblade and still haven’t gotten my mech yet, but in a year when I thought I’d gotten tired of open world stuff I still want to play more of this one. I also don’t play a ton of JRPGs and found the stuff in this game refreshing, psuedo-MMO structure be damned. But if you want the real reason why Xenoblade is on this list, it’s a positioning trick to deny Fallout 4 a place. We’ll talk more about that one later.

Best Surprise: Tales from the Borderlands

I’ve talked about Tales from the Borderlands already and recently, so I’ll keep this brief: If you haven’t tired of the Telltale formula yet, you should play Tales from the Borderlands.

Best unnecessary revision to a game that perhaps didn’t need to be revised: Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition

Original Blog

Did Capcom really need to update Devil May Cry 4? That is a question that has confounded our greatest philosophers for centuries, but I guess after the Ninja Theory-developed reboot flopped as bad as it did they had no other option than to return to the white haired bishonen anime version of Dante we all know and love(?). What better way to return to form then add 3 full new playable characters and some minor gameplay tweaks to a 7-year-old game whose fundamental problems had nothing to do with the quality of the combat? What? Are you saying that’s somehow weird? Are you saying that Capcom has been in a weird position for the last 2 or 3 years? Listen man, if I yell “MAKE DRAGON’S DOGMA 2 AND ALSO MAKE SURE THAT RESIDENT EVIL 2 REMAKE HAS FIXED CAMERA ANGLES” loudly enough, it will eventually happen, trust me. Oh right, Devil May Cry 4 is really fun and the new characters are cool even if it’s all still stretched over half a game’s worth of content.

The real “Spookin with Scoops”: Super Mario Maker

Super Mario Maker is the story of a hero named Patrick Klepek, who much like Sisyphus before him must push a rock up a hill only for it to fall all the way down again. Except instead of rocks it’s weird nightmare levels hand-crafted by Dan Ryckert (and to a lesser extent, Jeff Gerstmann) as foils. But Patrick always pushes back, in spite of Dan’s endless capacity for evil. It’s a triumph of the human spirit in the face of futility and one of the greatest stories ever told.

Ok, so Mario Maker is also a game where regular humans who aren’t big-time internet personalities can theoretically make levels that aren’t designed to be the worst thing ever. Like me! I’ve had a lot of fun crafting my own interpretation of Mario levels, and while I’m not going to say I’m fantastic or anything, I think the levels I have uploaded are alright (no seriously someone please play them and tell me if they’re any good or not). As someone who wasn’t raised in a cave (or Europe, where I guess they had egg games and Giana Sisters instead of Mario or something), I’m a fan of the Super Mario and I’ve run across lots of great levels in my time with the game. Really, with the strength of the premise alone this game could almost be perfect, if not for the part where it’s hard to filter the good levels from the bad. As Sturgeon’s law rightfully predicts, I’ve run into more than my fair share of crummy Mario levels. Nintendo set up that bookmark site, and that’s a start, but it’s out of game. I don’t want auto-playing levels, I don’t want bad musical renditions and, sorry Dan, I don’t want exercises in sadism that test my patience. You aren’t making Mario levels, you’re making nightmares. (Jeff also makes nightmares, but his are of a different cloth.) Still, beyond frustrations about getting anywhere in the expert version of the 100 Mario Challenge, making my own levels has been fun enough that I’ll probably keep on doing it.

Best-Playing Metal Gear Solid Game; Worst Metal Gear Solid Game: Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain

Original Blog

I am a fan of Metal Gear Solid. This is true even after not enjoying MGS 4 when I played (“played”) it for the first time last year and thinking Peace Walker was kind of boring the year before that. Hideo Kojima’s batshit crazy, long-winded series about the worth of soldiers in the modern world, nuclear deterrence, control, nanomachines, poop jokes, possessed arms, and stupid giant robots is exceptionally self-indulgent and anime as hell, but it turns out that’s also what I like about it. It certainly wasn’t the gameplay, which has never been good in that entire series. That first Metal Gear Solid becomes a far less impressive stealth game even in context when you recall it came out the same year as a little game called Thief: The Dark Project. But I digress. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain is one of the best playing stealth games ever made. I might prefer the more hand-crafted likes of a Dishonored or Deus Ex, but MGS V controls amazingly and allows for so many dynamic player solutions to any given scenario at hand. It’s really, really, really good, even if I’m to understand that some of the base building mechanics have become less player friendly thanks to Konami’s post-launch “support”. It might go on for a little too long, be a little too repetitive in those two environments that you spend too much time in, but the variance in how you can tackle those missions is impressive and vast and only started wearing on me when I was almost done anyway. So, it’s with some amount of regret that I say if this game had a better story, it could very well be number 1 or 2 on this list, full stop. When you put the words “Metal Gear” on your box, you give me certain expectations for how your story will turn out. Perhaps fittingly given how good the gameplay is, maybe even intentionally given the way the story is about a counterfeit Metal Gear Solid protagonist, it doesn’t give me that at all. I won’t get into too many specifics, because then we’d be here all day but I’ll say that there are individual moments that are great. It just too bad they’re near the end when the game actually remembers that it has a plot that needs dealing with outside of cassette recordings and it all culminates in a cheap, unnecessary twist that didn’t necessarily sour what came before it, but didn’t improve it either. It’s not the postmodern anime insanity of MGS 2’s story, nor is it the more reserved (relatively speaking), poignant tale of MGS3. It just sort of fizzles out, which is almost a pity given that we all know this is going to be the last “real” Metal Gear Solid game. Still, the pain in my heart is eased quite well through the surgical and systematic abduction of entire enemy outposts via fulton. That tends to work well.

The Sky and the Cosmos are One: Bloodborne

Original Blog

Bloodborne might’ve been lower on this list if not for me replaying the game when the DLC came out, which has led to me going deep into the chalice dungeons in a desperate attempt to get the Platinum trophy before I start school again. I’m currently on the same boss that killed Brad a couple thousand times. Bloodborne is pretty great yo. I reject the notion that the Souls series has somehow become stale, but BB’s emphasis on speed and offense is certainly refreshing, as are the Lovecraftian horror elements that start innocuously but end with the moon turning blood red and a giant indescribable horror of tentacles descending upon you. It helps that the DLC areas are really good and add a bunch of fun new weapons and bosses, though the lack of build variety in Bloodborne isn’t really the most suspect part of the game. The chalice dungeons, on the other hand, might just be that. While not terrible or bad by any means, they trade on one of Bloodborne’s (and Dark Souls’) greatest strengths, hand-crafted environment design, in favor of randomly generated labyrinths for the purpose of uninteresting loot to help you make more chalice dungeons. At least there are unique bosses and enemies who aren’t in the main game. That certainly helps.

The “Heroin Addict” award for game most responsible for tanking my grades: Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate

Blog 1 and Blog 2

Listen, while your favorite games personalities might put 2 hour games about “feelings” and “personal experiences” (likely delivered in a way that panders to their nostalgia as 30-somethings) on their lists, I’m here to tell you that the True and Holy path for this medium are games that are as mechanically satisfying as they are unacceptably arcane, wastelands that you pour 365 hours into and only stop because you broke the damn L button on your 3DS and didn’t really need to grind out that Silver Rathalos bow anyways. I’m talking about Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, a game that, among other poor life choices, is part of the reason why last winter was a disaster for me academically and socially. I’m so glad Monster Hunter X hasn’t been announced for the west, because I would die. If you want actual reasons why I liked MH4U, read the blogs. I’ll be over here, not thinking about how now that I have a New 3DS XL, I could finally do that G-Rank White Fatalis fight that was released as DLC after I stopped playing.

My Game of the Year: Pillars of Eternity

Original Review

I was a backer on Obsidian’s “Project Eternity” back in the olden times when horseless carriages were all the rage and “Crowdfunding” had not yet become a dirty word. Now, roughly a century later, I can claim with some confidence that it’s as good as I hoped it would be. Obsidian has one of the best writing teams in the business, more subtle and less inclined to pander than Bioware, and their interpretation of a modern Infinity Engine game is suitably different from Baldur’s Gate and its sequel. The story and characterizations are more subdued and it works to their benefit most of the time. While I’ve seen complaints from the dark, inhospitable, grognard-y corners of RPG fandom claiming the real-time with pause combat and RPG systems are terrible and bad and for babies, they worked out pretty well for me. The combat is a tad messy, but it’s messy in the same way the Infinite Engine combat was messy, so at the very least it’s accurate. Of all the RPG revivals that have happened within the past few years, I’ve found Pillars of Eternity to be the best of them, and once that second expansion comes out I’ll probably give it another playthrough.

Oh, you thought it was over? IT’S NEVER OVER. Special Achievement Awards!

Honorable Mentions: Mortal Kombat X, The Age of Decadence, Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance

Mortal Kombat X was another Mortal Kombat game, but this time with some neat character variation stuff and more aggressive DLC garbage. However, I fell off it harder and more quickly than I did with MK9 in spite of probably being a better fighting game. Certainly my circumstances are different than they were 4 years ago (I don’t quite have the friends to play against like I used to), but I think it probably also comes down to there being less interesting single player stuff. The story is fine for what it is, but the Living Towers are a lame substitute for the crazy tower stuff from MK9. I’m not good enough at fighting games to want to compete online regularly, so that fizzled out pretty hard as well.

The Age of Decadence is a game I didn’t love, but I have to mention it because of how ambitious it is. The weird romanesque, indie-developed RPG is yet another attempt at being the “True Successor to the Most Holy Crown of Fallout 1 and 2”, a crown I might have more respect for if I thought more highly of Fallout 1 and 2. It doubles down on the exclusionary elements of RPG character building, where a diplomatic character and a combative character will likely have very different experiences. The crazy thing is, it almost works. Its obsession with dice roll-free skill checks works as long as you accept you’re being railroaded down a specific path with no chance for switching tracks. If you play as a merchant, you’re going to need to shove all of your points into speech skills almost exclusively because any sort of major hybridization will gimp you in the long run. It’s the kind of game I could see a very specific audience loving, but it turns out even with all of my RPG street cred I am not part of that audience.

Disgaea 5 was originally on this list, but I figured I needed to play more of it before I put it on this list. Instead, I played more Xenoblade and put that on the list. Expect to see it on next year’s old game list, because I think it’s pretty good.

Most Disappointing Game: Fallout 4.

I haven’t played a lick of Fallout 4 since I wrote my blog about it last month, and I’m still sticking to what I wrote. There is a marked lack of improvement in Fallout 4 and in some cases even a regression from the Bethesda RPGs that came before it. The shooting is better, but the RPG elements are even more consequence-free. The writing still isn’t great, but now there’s a voiced protagonist with a predetermined backstory and motivation to ensure that you can’t make something out of him, and boy, boy is the main quest really bad. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t had fun exploring the wasteland, shooting things in the head and attempting to sneak everywhere. But this is the first Bethesda RPG I’ve made the concrete decision to put down, not because I was distracted by something else, but because I was tired of playing it.

Runner up: Hotline Miami 2

Worst game I played to completion this year that wasn’t Bound By Flame: Code Name S.T.E.A.M.

Just read my review. It’s not a very good game. Runner up is Massive Chalice, which I also thought wasn’t very good.

Game I need to play most next year: Serpent in the Staglands

If you are one of the approximately 3 other people who bought (and didn’t play much of) Whalenought Studios’ retro throwback RPG, you’d know why I need to get around to this game next year. It’s like if someone made a new Baldur’s Gate, but in 1993 and instead of the pleasantly generic Forgotten Realms it’s this weird, grim fantasy setting based on Romanian folklore. Also it seems hard.

Most Anticipated Game: Fire Emblem Fates

No, really, did you expect anything different? I’m also excited for Dark Souls III and Torment: Tides of Numenera, if that means anything.

Best Game I watched someone else play: Contradiction: Spot the Liar

2015 also marked the year that Giant Bomb East went into full operation, and what an operation it was. Between the surprisingly real, occasionally awkward but undoubtedly genuine Life is Strange, the sadism of Castlevania III, and the delightfully campy interactive teen slasher Until Dawn, it’s been a good year for the new branch of Giant Bomb, but one game stands above the rest. If I did this, would it mean anything to you??? \m/

And that’s it for 2015. Hopefully 2016 is better!

You can’t start a show with a showstopper, which is why this blog is coming first. Feel free to expect the proper Game of the Year blog thingy in the next day or two. Unfortunately, the side-effect of 2015 being a great year for new games was at the cost of me playing old stuff to completion, which is why this is a top 5 instead of a top 10. There are probably multiple reasons for this, likely involving the purchase of a PS4, computer problems, and the existence of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, but I still think this top 5 is a fairly strong pick of games even from the limited pool of what I played this year.

The “Exactly What I Expected” award for competence and predictability: King’s Bounty: Dark Side

Listen, Heroes of Might and Magic is easily one of my favorite video game series of all time, alongside its RPG counterpart simply known as Might and Magic. It’s also been bad for a while. While I will stridently defend Heroes of Might and Magic V with expansions (the first game made after Ubisoft bought the rights from the corpse of 3DO) as being a fun, well-made installment in the series, I thought Heroes VI wasn’t great and I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Heroes VII, which came out this year and is apparently still a hot smelly garbage fire even after months of patches. I had some optimism for the future of the franchise after enjoying last year’s Might and Magic X: Legacy (likely more than it deserved, but shut up that game was still good), but between that selling poorly and this current fiasco, I think it’s fair to say that the Might and Magic brand might well and truly be put on ice after 8 years of disappointment.

What does that have to do with King’s Bounty? It’s pretty simple. Katauri Interactive’s King’s Bounty is the modern incarnation of an old game from 1990, also called King’s Bounty. King’s Bounty was developed by New World Computing, who 5 years later made a spiritual successor to it with the little name Heroes of Might and Magic. See where I’m going? In essence, KB is Russian bootleg Heroes of Might and Magic, but since the series it “borrows” (the same way every 3D platformer of the 90s “borrowed” some ideas from Mario 64) from has been bad for so long, is has actually become the better series despite iterating from game to game about as much as your average annualized sports franchise. King’s Bounty: Dark Side came out last year and is no different on that front. It’s a game that takes few deviations and zero serious risks from the other 3 King’s Bounty games that came before it and I don’t care because it’s 100% bullshit-free comfort food and doesn’t try any more than that. Sure, you play as an evil character in this one and thus get to use “evil” units far more than you did in the past, but that’s icing. I got distracted and burned out on it before the end, (all of those games are a little too long for their own good) but I’ll have little problem picking my save file back up if/when I need a fix again. Sometimes I want games to surprise me. It’s okay that King’s Bounty is the most unsurprising a series of turn-based tactical fantasy RPGs can possibly be. I’m not going to convince you that these games are actually great, but they’re good enough.

The ZombiePie Memorial Award for Heroism in JRPGs: Final Fantasy XIII-2.

Original Blog

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes on the entirely unnecessary burden of continuing the story of Final Fantasy XIII via time travel, non-linearity and pokemon-esque monster mechanics. That wouldn’t be so weird if Final Fantasy XIII didn’t already wrap itself up pretty nicely by the end, but I guess Square needed to get some more use out of that engine they spent forever building, and thus XIII-2 exists for all the world to see. It’s alright! While the time-traveling hijinks of Serah Farron and Noel Kriess are ultimately a weird left turn from XIII’s story about cursed individuals fighting against destiny (and ancient computer gods) for the future of a giant floating moon thing, it works out to be enjoyably goofy, complete with an utterly insane ending. I didn’t hate the way FF XIII played, so expanding upon its concepts while (sort of) addressing its weaknesses sounded alright, and yeah, it works out even if it doesn’t go far enough in some areas and its pair of protagonists are a little bland in the way the ensemble cast of XIII wasn’t. But I enjoyed it, even if it was really just pretense for me to play Lightning Returns. I still need to play Lightning Returns.

Best Resident Evil game I played this year (because it sure as heck wasn’t Revelations 2): The Evil Within

Original Review

I can’t think of a recent game I’ve run as hot and cold on as The Evil Within. In some ways, it’s totally the grand return to Survival Horror and true successor to Resident Evil 4 we all wanted it to be, demanding smart ammo conservation, precise aim and constantly being on your toes, all within oppressive, moody environments. In other ways… it’s infuriating, cheap and clumsy, between absurd boss encounters with foes who can one-shot poor Sebastian Castellanos, poorly-designed set pieces (occasionally filled with insta-murder) and a bad rudimentary stealth mechanic. Also the story is bad and not in a funny way, but that’s almost beside the point. It’s a good game when it’s not being bad, essentially. I found the balance to tip slightly more toward the “good” end of the spectrum, though the game is weird enough and range of opinions on it are wide enough that I’d almost recommend anyone with a vague interest play it for themselves.

Most likely to be the product of what a 14-year-old would think is cool but also still kind of cool in spite of that: God of War

Original Blog

God of War is a video game-ass video game and sometimes you want one of those. The decade-old PS2 title is almost refreshingly pretense-free in a way modern games aren’t. Story? What story? I know the series is the poster child for why video game narratives are terrible, but the story in this God of War is “Angry man needs to murder Greek mythology and sometimes push blocks.” It turns out, even with some weird difficulty spikes and reminders that this game is a decade old, both of those things are still pretty good. We’ll see how long these positive feelings last once I get around to playing the rest of the series....

Best thing I imported from another country: Puyo Puyo Tetris

Remember how Giant Bomb was super hot on this game for like a week (before going back to that old mainstay: Tetris Battle Gaiden) and we all imported copies? I sure did that. Puyo Puyo Tetris is great and has made be better at random japanese puzzle games as well as Tetris itself. It also features a story mode that is entertainingly incomprehensible because I can’t speak or read Japanese, and several weird variations on Puyo Puyo-ing and Tetris that allow me to beat my friends when straight Tetris playing doesn’t work out. While it’d probably be lower on a list that had more big games played on it this year, the extremely scientific maths and processes that determine my old game of the year have put Puyo Puyo Tetris at the top.

Honorable Mentions: Fantasy General, Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Hearthstone.

Fantasy General is apparently a re-skinned version of Panzer General, but with Fantasy units. Makes sense, I guess. While I didn’t stick with it for super long (before… playing more Monster Hunter, or something) it was a solid chess-like turn based strategy game about moving dudes on hexes and making them fight other dudes with a rock/paper/scissors setup. Bonus points for having a soundtrack that’s basically just choir music.

Persona Q made it onto the list in an earlier draft, but I eventually cut it because I ultimately don’t think Persona Q is a great dungeon crawler. As an avenue to deliver Persona 3 and 4 fanservice in concentrated amounts, it’s really good even if some of the characterizations are reduced to one-note gimmicks (No, I get it. Chie likes meat.) As a game from the Etrian Odyssey people though, the dungeon crawling in question is a weird half step between that and a regular SMT game, leading to a messy path where you just have Naoto kill everything with Mahamaon or Mamoodon because seemingly 75% of the rabble enemies in the game are weak to Light or Dark. There are also some really obnoxious trial-and-error puzzles in the later dungeons and making a mistake tends to end with you running into a mini-boss F.O.E. and getting half your party murdered before you can escape. I’m close enough to the end that finishing it almost seems like an inevitability, though that’s what I’ve been saying for the last 6 months.

I was seriously into Hearthstone for a period of like two weeks before realizing that if I was going to get anywhere serious with Blizzard’s “Magic the Gathering, but for babies” CCG in any reasonable amount of time, I was going to have to spend real, actual money. And, much like actual Magic the Gathering, I was not going to do that and deleted it off my phone. But those two weeks before I had that realization were alright.

Dishonorable Mentions: Bound by Flame, The Legend of Korra

Original Blog

This is just my continuing reminder that I played through almost the entirety of Bound By Flame, which is best described as what would happen if you let a developer with little money and talent try to make a Bioware-esque RPG. The results are equal parts hilarious and terrible, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who isn’t already broken inside.

Original Review

However, I can't really recommend The Legend of Korra to anyone. It might have the tight controls and format of a Platinum character action game but without anything resembling a soul (or a budget) and somehow manages to be exceptionally boring for all of its 3-4 hour runtime. If you want a half-decent Platinum game based on a licensed property, play Transformers Devastation.

Best Game I replayed this year: Fire Emblem Path of Radiance

The catch with my old games blogs is that they focus on the stuff I played this year for the first time, but what about the stuff I replayed this year? Well, I have great news: Fire Emblem is still good. I ended up replaying no less than 4 games in the series this year, and I enjoyed them all to varying degrees. Shadow Dragon, the DS remake of the Famicom original, is the closest a game in the series is to "bad". Despite having a surprisingly well-done localized script courtesy of 8-4, it's still the script for a NES game and the quality of the maps in the game present are a little weak. It's a pity the second DS Fire Emblem never came out over here, because it's much better even if it has some of the same problems. Then I replayed The Sacred Stones, which was the third GBA game in the series and the second to come to the West. It's alright, even if my memories of it being really easy still hold up. Then we come to Path of Radiance, which is just as good as I remember it being. While I could probably go on for far too long on why it's the best game in the series to come out over here, I won't. Because I've probably already written such elsewhere. Its follow-up and direct sequel, Radiant Dawn, could've been a better game but is hindered by its multi-act structure and the way it splits up your armies.

Alright, I got the obligatory Fire Emblem reference in there. It's time to pack up and go ho.... Oh right. There's still one more blog from me coming your way. Expect great things.