COURAGE IS THE MAGIC THAT TURNS DREAMS INTO REALITY

I wasn’t expecting things to go this way. Really. All I wanted was something to play with a controller after a repetitive stress injury in my right arm made playing Pillars of Eternity 2 (or anything else with mouse and keyboard) an actively painful experience. I figured, sure, why not try the bad sequel to Tales of Symphonia? Might as well put in a couple hours, get a basic grasp for why the fanbase hates it to death, and move on. But uh, as you might guess, that didn’t happen. For as much as I enjoyed Tales of Symphonia, it wasn’t so revelatory an experience that I’d feel the need to go on some sort of nightmarish journey through every other Tales game*. Sure, I was planning to eventually give Xillia, Vesperia, and Berseria (i.e. the ones I’ve heard generally positive things about) a shot, but the ones with more mixed/ambiguous reception like Graces F, Zestiria, and especially this one were going to be worth an optional glance at best. But, uh, around 30 hours of my life later, here I am. For once, my completion of this game wasn’t entirely the product of self-loathing and morbid curiosity. Tales of Symphonia 2 might be a bad game, but it’s bad and incompetent in the most fascinating of ways.

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World is a baffling thing. As the first direct sequel to another Tales game, specifically the first Tales game to get any sort of serious cult status over here in the west, it feels like a complete misstep (thus the part where mentioning it on the internet immediately draws the same kind of seething negativity normally reserved for the Star Wars prequels.) It feels like some people at Namco had some ideas for a JRPG, those ideas were tacked onto the idea of a Symphonia sequel, and then that sequel was given to a B-team to make something for the Wii (which, need I remind you, was still pretty hot shit in 2008) while the A-team worked on Vesperia (which came out a few months earlier.) That feels evident in the removal of any sort of overworld map, the number of recycled environments, a less visually striking art style, the somewhat floatier, less-responsive combat, and the inclusion of a Pokemon/SMT-esque monster taming mechanic, which I honestly think is one of those things that proves your JRPG sequel or spinoff has no interesting mechanical ideas. If I may be so bold, however, I don’t think those are really the biggest reasons why Tales of Symphonia 2 has the reputation that it does.

The closest direct analog I can think of is Final Fantasy X-2, which is not a flattering comparison unless you take delight in the suffering of certain Giant Bomb forum moderators. It’s a direct sequel in a JRPG series without many of them, and taking place after a fairly conclusive ending without a ton of dangling threads. However, while FF X-2 is well remembered for basically running roughshod through the characters, story, tone, and world of the previous game for the sake of making a quick buck and keeping Square afloat, Dawn of the New World comes off as doing the inverse. Rather than actively go out of its way to take a J-POP filled dump on the adventures of Lloyd and friends, the game is afraid of doing anything with those old characters or environments beyond remind the player (me) of a different game I finished a few months ago.

A large portion of Dawn of the New World’s runtime is devoted to our new (idiot) protagonists conveniently bumbling their way through most of the towns and dungeons of the first game for the most basic of reasons and bumping into various members of Symphonia’s main cast (sans Kratos) for what are essentially extended cameo appearances. It’s referential fan service of the least exciting degree, treating the original game with a level of undue reverence and disconnect that prevents this new one from doing anything interesting (or transgressive) with the returning cast and world. Lloyd and his friends have plenty of cumulative screen time, but very little of it is outside the context of their interactions with Emil, Marta, and Tenebrae (who I’ll get to) and reminders of their general state at the end of the last game. As someone who liked (most) of those characters quite a bit, some of those interactions still worked on me, and I was even happy to see the likes of Colette and Regal show up. This is all made even weirder by the notable absence of most of the original game’s English voice cast, which lends a certain bizarre tilt to all of this, as if they’ve been replaced by a bunch of adequately talented doppelgangers.

For a series that I’m to understand often hits and misses based on the strength of its ensemble casts, the surreal way this game treats its returning characters as static objects has the effect of firmly putting the burden of character development on the new dinguses who we’re supposed to like. I won’t dance around: Emil is a garbage boy with a split personality who spends most of the journey alternating between quivering meekness and violent sociopathy (I’d make a joke about cucks and alpha males here, but honestly I’m sort of exhausted with that kind of stuff right now) and Marta is the enthusiastic, adoring love interest whose affection for him starts to unintentionally resemble that of a battered spouse by the end. They’re the kind of bad, adolescent anime cliches that might survive as supporting characters in another, better written Tales game, but since they (alongside the shadow spirit Tenebrae, who is totally okay at his job of being stuffy, offering exposition, and making sardonic quips) are almost entirely in the spotlight, their dumb, bad relationship is given ample screen time to make you roll your eyes and wish you had more characters to play as. This is made even dumber as the original Symphonia cast starts to play a bigger role in the plot and the game desperately tries to integrate those two as “part of the gang.” It, uh, doesn’t work. It’s not the fault of the voice actors either. Johnny Young Bosch and Laura Bailey do their darndest to earn those paychecks by delivering those lines at maximum anime, but hot damn do they have nothing to work with.

Speaking of nothing to work with, Dawn of the New World has a story. It exists. Between the comparison to Final Fantasy X-2, the way returning characters and areas are paraded around for fan service, and the unfortunate main duo, you’d be right in assuming that the plot is both flimsy and profoundly stupid. I don’t need to spend too much time on it because it doesn’t matter beyond being a way to convey the characters from location to location. All you really need to know is that Emil and Marta spend half the game cursing Lloyd because they think he murdered a bunch of people (something any player over the age of 10 would immediately know he didn’t do), there’s some vague motions towards conflict between the worlds that were united at the end of the first game (but barely any of it is shown), MacGuffins are chased after and obtained, the villains are ineffectual and cartoonish, lost memories are revealed, the final boss is a well-intentioned extremist who wants to destroy the world because he’s sad, and of course, “Courage is the magic that turns dreams into reality.” Really, I think that kind of sums it up. It’s the sort of inane, obvious JRPG nonsense phrase that probably sounds better in Japanese, and it’s repeated by the cast ad nauseum because there’s a little too much talking happening at all times.

It’s understandable if, given the words I’ve written, you’d assume I utterly hated my time with this game. Surprisingly? Not as much as you might think. For one, the combat is still alright despite being objectively worse than Symphonia and only giving you two characters to really develop and mess around with (the returning characters have locked equipment and don’t level up.) Emil eventually gets the ability to juggle foes in the air for absurdly long periods of time, and Marta’s easy, spammable multi-hit combos mean that you can abuse the generous bonus XP granted for high hit totals. The monster mechanics… are at least very low maintenance and can be shoved aside after a certain point. The incredibly linear pacing and lack of world map at least meant that I was never really bogged down. But more importantly, I hope I’ve conveyed how practically everything in Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World feels like a catastrophic misstep or a downgrade. It’s a near-perfect confluence of mistakes that loops around from weird, bad sequel to “academic poster child for everything to not do in a video game sequel.” That’s not to say any sane person should actually play this, no. There are like a bajillion other Tales games one could likely play instead to scratch that itch, and I’m led to believe almost all of them are better than this one. But, buuuuut, as far as my intentional playthrough of a bad RPG for the year is concerned I don’t hate myself and the world around me like I did after Mass Effect Andromeda last year.

* This is not to say that a “I play all of the Tales Games” nightmare scenario/feature is something that couldn’t happen. I’ve watched almost all of the Fate/Stay Night anime series this year for no good reason, so I’m not above this kind of bad decision making. I think these games are pretty fun, and if this is the worst of them then I think I could theoretically tolerate something like Tales of the Abyss’ dipshit protagonist.

Random Endorsement:

So, in a totally different direction from this whole blog, I’d like to quickly talk about a game I’ve genuinely adored my time with. A Hat in Time is the throwback collectathon platformer that I wanted Yooka-Laylee to be. It’s admittedly a much tighter, smaller, and more structured game compared to the sprawling, directionless levels of Y-L, but what it loses in scope it makes up for in charm and variety. There are only 40 hourglasses (your star/jigsaw equivalent) but each of those hourglasses is behind an unique scenario or part of a platforming challenge hidden in one of the levels. It’s the kind of zero-bullshit, low-filler experience that didn’t insult my time and genuinely delivered on the promise of making an idealized, modernized representation of a type of game from my childhood, rather than (as Yooka-Laylee did) kinda just making a prettier version of a game from 1998. It also helps that the game has tight, responsive controls on top of how good it looks and sounds. Can't really recommend it enough.

Oh hey. I guess it’s been a while since the last one of these, huh? You can blame a couple of factors for that. The first and most obvious is that, for as much as I’d like it to be otherwise, my amateur blog about video games simply doesn’t demand priority over the myriad other concerns I have to juggle in my life. I’m not going to pretend I’m some sort of fabulously responsible adult with a wife and a salary, but I think it’s fair to say that I can’t quite dedicate the time to both play a bajilliondy games and write 1500 word blogs on them the same way I could 5 years ago.

A less boring/depressing reason for me not writing anything in the last handful of months has to do with most of my dedicated gaming time in 2018 being spent on stuff that wouldn’t make for interesting reading. That’s another way of saying I don’t know if I really need to write a lengthy dissertation on something like the new God of War. It’s a genuinely great game that you probably already know is great, and/or are probably sick of hearing about. I don’t know what else I could say about it other than “I think it has some pacing issues” and “I don’t think I need stats and equipment in my character action games.” I’ll fully admit that novelty plays a certain part in what motivates me to write, which is probably a holdover from when I pretty much exclusively blogged about older games and semi-obscure CRPGs. It’s only fitting then, that my first dumb internet blog for 2018 is a Gamecube RPG from 2004.

Tales of Symphonia

You can likely find years worth of evidence of me saying some variation of “These Tales games really seem like they’d be up my alley” on this very website. I’m partial to RPGs with crunchy mechanics, I like involved combat, and if the last year and a half are anything to go by, I clearly am also a big fan of anime bullshit. After some amount of encouragement from my roommate, I finally bothered to take the plunge on the Tales game that is universally held-up by the fanbase as being one of the “good” ones, and… yeah. Yep. Tales of Symphonia is a good game that I enjoyed my time with. It has problems, but as far as introducing and selling me on Namco’s long-running cash cow, it did its job.

It probably speaks to my narrow JRPG experience that a “traditionally” structured Japanese RPG (complete with overworld map, a linear progression of towns and dungeons, and the inevitable airship equivalent near the halfway mark) managed to actually be novel in its own way. It’s certainly been a bit time since I’ve played something that starts off with plucky group of idiot kids on a fantasy quest to save the world and banish darkness or something. It’s some cliched, adolescent, anime-ass JRPG melodrama that I spent hours making fun of, but it’s at the very least earnest in a way I can respect. Even at the end, when speeches about the power of friendship are made and we learn that fantasy racism is bad, I still was having a pretty good time.

I think a lot of that had less to do with the plot (which ends with our heroes fighting an androgynous angel man from the ancient past who wants to destroy the world because he’s sad or something) and a lot more to do with the strength of Tales of Symphonia’s main cast. On paper, they’re all plucked from the JRPG manual of archetypes, but in execution are often given enough time and complexity to grow into interesting, likeable sorts. They’re not all created equal, and that doesn’t extend to the supporting cast, mind you. Protagonist Lloyd Irving is every bit the exact kind of hot blooded, idealistic dingus these sorts of stories always throw to the forefront, but even he has a coherent, logical character arc where he learns from his mistakes and becomes a better person for it. However, as someone over the age of 14, I found myself gravitating more towards the “adults in the room,” willing to temper Lloyd and Colette’s idiot optimism with a certain level of logic and cynicism. Even someone like Zelos, who initially comes off as a borderline-intolerable ladies man becomes a worthwhile addition to the group once you learn more about him and what his deal is.

It’s good that I liked the characters, because they manage to hold things up when the game’s pacing and momentum become wretchedly slow. Telling stories in video games is hard, and trying to stretch out a story over the course of dozens of hours can be exceptionally difficult. Symphonia’s story will occasionally give major plot developments barely any breathing room, then follow those up with lengthy diversions or macguffin hunts. The worst example of this might be a false climax right at the end of the game, complete with heroic sacrifices and triumphant speeches before revealing… there’s another 5 hours to go. I wonder if I’d even be complaining about this if I didn’t think the dungeons were on the sloggish side of long. They all traffick in a certain brand of inane, trial-and-error puzzle design that occasionally borders on clever but more often feels like an attempt to take as much time as possible. The only moments that reminded me more that I was playing a game from 2004 were the sheer number of weird, optional, and missable secrets and random bits. Unlike the dungeon design, that’s not an entirely bad thing, since I live in a world with easy access to a strategy guide and YouTube. Zelos gets a title if you have him talk to every single female NPC in the game! Genis gets a title if you don’t use Gels for like 20 hours! There’s a hidden affection rating for each character that determines if you get some optional scenes near the end! That shit is both really dumb and also kinda great! Oh, it’d be a nightmare if I was going for the platinum trophy, but I’m not, so it isn’t.

That leaves the much vaunted bread and butter of the Tales series, the combat (LIMB systems? You’ve got that right, there’s tons about LIMB systems!) Throwing in action-y, fighting game-esque mechanics into real-time RPG combat is basically all of my stupid checkboxes in one thing, so it absolutely makes sense that I enjoyed the hell out of Symphonia’s combat. It maybe takes a little too long to get going, but by the end I was chaining together like 4 attacks and 3 artes to stunlock bosses and was having a lot of fun doing it. It does get less challenging as things go on (Lloyd feels like a win button at points, given how fast his attacks are and how easily they combo together) but that also meant I had plenty of space to experiment and mess around with all of the characters and their abilities. If I have an actual bone to pick, I think Symphonia’s weird 2.5D combat plane feels really janky, especially if you have multiple human players trying to fight different monsters. I know they moved to full 3D pretty quickly afterward, so I guess I’m looking forward to seeing what that looks like.

Yeah, so I guess I should say Tales of Symphonia left a positive enough impression that I’m absolutely interested in seeing what else the series has to offer. While I’ve seen recent JRPGs with better stories (i.e. watching my roommate play through Xenoblade Chronicles 2) and would have probably preferred this one ending 10 hours earlier than it did, I’m all down to add yet another pile of lengthy-ass games to my already depressing RPG backlog. I already own Symphonia’s universally detested sequel and both Xillia games, so I think I’ll end up checking those out sometime before the heat death of the universe. But, uh, Pillars of Eternity 2 comes out on Tuesday, and I’m sorry, but my RPG heart will always be with mouse and keyboard, D&D-ass isometric computer bullshit when push comes to shove.

Random Endorsement:

Hey, perhaps you’ve heard that I like the Heroes of Might and Magic series? Oh, you haven’t? Well, you’re in luck, because I finished the campaign for Heroes of Might and Magic III: The Restoration of Erathia recently, something that I’ve never done despite being “that guy with the Might and Magic avatar” for something like 9 years. It was a good reminder for why Heroes III is often considered the high point of the series (something I might be willing to debate depending on the day of the week) and also helped remind me of some of Heroes III’s minor nitpicky shortcomings, from the uselessness of certain skills (Air Magic is king, Eagle Eye is not) to the AI’s predictable quirks, to the way that offensive magic scales poorly into the late game.

In that vein, I’m giving away a GOG code for this game, partially because I need to start offloading these GOG codes I've acquired over the years and partially because I think this game is good and people should play it. I'm not going to ask for any sort of weird contest, just have at least 100 posts or a Giant Bomb premium membership (so I can tell you're not some weird carpetbagger or key reseller) and leave a comment. I'd prefer if you put some effort into it (maybe commenting about your favorite Tales game or something! Childhood favorites that still hold up? Start an edition war discussion between Pathfinder and D&D 5e?) but I'm not picky. I have a couple of other GOG codes if Heroes isn't your forte. I know all of you are itching at a chance to play Wizardry 8 as we speak.

Alright, so here’s the thing: I’m not doing a “Best of 2017 that didn’t come out in 2017” list. That came about for various reasons, the most obvious being that I didn’t play a ton of noteworthy older games for the first time this year. Aside from Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma 2 and a handful of visual novels it wasn’t an especially great year for new, old experiences (I still intent to finish Lightning Returns at some point.) I did replay some of my favorites this year, but other than being able to confirm to you that Resident Evil 4 is still great, I’m not all that sure what I can say on that front.

Instead, because I hate myself and don’t have anywhere else to vent, I’ve decided to write up a little summary of the other dumb entertainment garbage I’ve been into this year. Anime. It’s from Japan*! I’ve dabbled for years, watching a handful of series every year whenever I had the inclination (I’ve seen Gurren Lagann, I know what’s up), but it wasn’t until now that I decided to venture beyond casual fandom into a deep, dark nightmare hole that, quite frankly, was both a great and terrible use of my time. I couldn’t tell you why this year was the tipping point, maybe it was simply watching a number of really good series back-to-back that finally made me decide to go further. Maybe it was because a large chunk of my social circle sort of disintegrated as friends graduated or otherwise moved on with their lives. Maybe it was because I played my share of anime-ass video games and figured I might as well continue with the real thing. Who knows? Point is, I watched a shitload of anime this year, and need to talk about it somewhere. However, dedicated anime forums scare me, so I guess the number one source for Naked Cartoon Pussy™ on the web will have to do. That’s what anime is, right?

*I tend to lean more towards the essentialist argument that only stuff from Japan counts as “anime” as far as the dark holes of the internet are concerned. You’re free to say otherwise, just know that while I enjoyed that Netflix Castlevania thing, I didn’t count it as part of the “anime” I watched in 2017.

In any case, I’m not going to give a lengthy dissertation about everything I watched this year, because that would take too long and I don’t feel like going insane. Consider these to be the series I had strong opinions on.

Serial Experiments Lain (Triangle Staff)

There’s some really smart, prescient commentary about the internet and the way it changes human interactions (made even more impressive when you consider that this series was made in 1998) in Serial Experiments Lain, but hot damn if I didn’t spend most of my time watching it in a state of mild-to-moderate confusion. Lain is, to be perfectly blunt, some seriously artsy avant-garde philoso-wankery with a love of symbolism and little regard for coherency. Not everything needs to be accessible, and not everything needs to be for me. I understand that. But also, it would be great if I understood more than like… half of what it was putting down. Definitely seems like the kind of thing that would benefit from a rewatch, and I didn’t… hate it? Yeah. I didn’t hate it.

Code Geass (Sunrise)

If I was 14 or 15 and I watched Code Geass when it was relevant, I think it’d be one of my favorite anime series of all time. Watching it now, as an adult, I can’t help but admire its ambitions, even if they don’t always pan out incredibly well. It’s a show trying to be all things for all people, between deep and involved international intrigue, ridiculous strategy porn, giant robot fights, abundant fanservice, yaoi bait, ultra-tropey anime high school antics, and not especially subtle commentary on George W. Bush-era American foreign policy. If that sounds like a lot of things to juggle, you’d be right. I found a certain amount of ironic appreciation in Code Geass’ share of exceptionally stupid anime bullshit, but that still doesn’t really excuse the part where a lot of the high school stuff feels pandering and pointless to the extreme. When the show hits, like in the moral/philosophical dynamic between the ruthlessly utilitarian Lelouch and the Lawful Stupid, honorable to a fault Suzaku, it hits hard. But boy, does it whiff on a lot of that stuff, especially with some of the plot points in the second season.

At least it ends incredibly well, so you know, definitely not something that could be cocked up with an entirely unnecessary continuation almost 10 years after the fact. Oh wait.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Kyoto Animation)

I might as well get all of these older heavy hitters out of the way first, right? I liked Haruhi enough to buy the damn series and movie on Blu Ray, and that’s even including the part where a large chunk of the second season is maybe the single most insulting thing I’ve watched all year. (Holy shit, Endless Eight is SO BAD). The weird supernatural/sci-fi antics of the SOS Brigade are intensely likeable, and the show gets a lot of mileage out of the group dynamic between the characters as they all attempt to keep a 16-year-old girl who might be God from accidentally rewriting the universe by playing along with her crazy schemes. Also at one point there was a pretty direct reference to Phoenix Wright and I was grinning like an idiot for the entire scene. I understand why it was as popular as it was, and that makes it more unfortunate that a good 1/5th of it is borderline unwatchable. NO SERIOUSLY THEY LITERALLY MADE THE SAME EPISODE 8 TIMES IN A ROW WITH SLIGHT VARIATIONS BUT ENTIRELY NEW ANIMATION WHYYYYYYYYYY.

At the very least, the movie helps make up for some of that sting. It’s a little slow, maybe twenty minutes too long, but it adds a surprising amount of pathos and poignancy to what is otherwise a pretty lighthearted series. It’s also Kyoto Animation on a movie budget, which is to say that it looks very good.

Ghost Stories (Studio Pierrot)

Honestly, I was half-tempted to just put “ADV Films” in the parentheses, because of how much Ghost Stories is defined by its crazy-ass English dub. Essentially given free reign to do whatever the hell they wanted as long as they kept names and basic plot details intact, the dub team at ADV created what is basically a proto-abridged series, filled with as many random-ass jokes and circa 2006 pop-culture references as possible. It’s a slow build of insanity, one that starts by playing things mostly straight with a handful of goofs here and ends with constant f-bombs and a bunch of flagrantly offensive jokes that, quite frankly, probably wouldn’t fly super well today. I highly recommend it.

Monogatari Series (Studio SHAFT)

Actually, maybe I should've used this one instead.

I don’t think I’ve ever liked something as much as the Monogatari series while also being completely unable to recommend it to anyone who hasn't already made the same poor choices that I have. Part of that comes from the part where it’s borderline inexplicable (Like, it’s sort of a supernatural show, but one with a bunch of weird, mundane conversations? And it’s intentionally kinda confusing? And super horny?) and the second part comes from how it’s maybe one of the most self-indulgent, trashy things I’ve ever watched. No other anime this year made me feel more like a deviant sex pervert than the infamous toothbrushing scene in Nisemonogatari, which is impressive given that a lot of Nisemonogatari feels (and was written) like a parade of author Nisioisin’s very specific fetishes. While that particular bit is kind of the worst, it’s not like the rest of the series cuts down on some of the loli and incest stuff that I find genuinely repulsive. It’s one thing to have fanservice in a show that very much has things to say about sex and relationships, even if a lot of that stuff is indulgent to an extreme. It’s another to make me want to take a damn shower every time (ostensible protagonist, ex-vampire, and occasional blood geyser) Koyomi Araragi “comedically” molests a character who looks like she’s 10 as part of a running joke. That might actually be the worst, considering you can’t show that stuff to your friends out-of-context to mess with them the same way you can with the toothbrush scene.

I’m not excusing that stuff, and I would not blame anyone for being put off by it (It’s had the knock-on effect of making me unfazed by all but the most egregious of fanservice in anything I watched moving forward) but I really like everything else that Monogatari has going for it. Namely, the part where it’s just really fucking weird. And I’m not talking “weird” in a “Lol anime is weird! panty shots and giant robots amirite?” sense, but weird on a fundamental level where I cannot for the life of me say there’s anything else out there quite like it. There’s a whole episode that’s more-or-less the protagonist and his girlfriend engaged in the single most awkward car ride imaginable and it’s somehow my favorite thing. The dialogue has a hypnotic, surreal quality to it; rich in wordplay, shit-talking, and subtext. It’s honestly the closest thing to an undubbable anime I’ve ever seen and even with subtitles it definitely felt like some of the nuance was going over my head, but in another way that’s fun because of how distinctly Japanese the entire experience is. That’s not to say it’s all immuto toothbrushes, weird cinematography, and untranslatable puns. It’s also kind of a deconstruction of harem anime tropes (albeit one that wants to have its cake and eat it too?) And sometimes it’s genuinely sweet, or gets into really heavy shit about love, learning not to hate yourself, and growing up as a person. I’m not even getting into the part where the entire series is chronologically out of order, in a way that works to its benefit but is also occasionally frustrating and more than a little confusing. But yeah, I kinda love it even though it thoroughly earns the all-encompassing label of “problematic” and I basically can’t recommend it to anyone. I think that makes me a trash person, but I hope I’ve at least been able to express a sliver of… whatever the hell it is I feel for this series. I watched most of it back in January, and it’s still managed to stick with me through all of these months.

Special mention should be given to Kizumonogatari, which despite having zero real justification for being split into three one-hour films instead of one 3 hour film, has perhaps some of the most striking animation I’ve ever seen in my entire damn life. It’s not as straight-up beautiful as something like Your Name is, but after hearing that these films were apparently in development hell for something like 8 years, I went “Oh, that makes perfect sense.”

Boy, those were more words than I thought I’d have to say. Oh right, in case you were wondering, best girl is Hanekawa. FIGHT ME.

Gintama (Sunrise and Bandai-Namco Pictures)

I decided I had room for one long-running shonen series this year, and I ended up going with Gintama. 340+ episodes later and… that wasn’t a bad choice actually. Sure, the amount of time it takes for Gintama to get through its awkward early episodes and “actually get good” is longer than some of the other series on this list, but the great thing about it is that once it becomes good, it stays consistently good for its entire run. To be fair, Gintama isn’t so much a shonen action series as it is a comedy series that occasionally takes itself seriously. I don’t imagine its sense of humor will be to everyone’s taste (It relies a lot on the traditional Japanese comedy setup of “Character does something crazy, straight man reacts”) and I’m not going to pretend that some of the obscure anime or Japanese pop-culture references didn’t fly over my head, but man does it have excellent comedic timing. It’s a mix of crude/juvenile humor, parodies, character quirks, and outright trolling that worked incredibly well for me. I can rattle off multiple mini-arcs off the top of my head, from the one where everyone fights over JUMP popularity poll rankings to the arc where they go inside the Robo Maid and it's nothing but Dragon Quest references. Hell, even the serious and semi-serious arcs work, which might be the craziest thing of all.

Still, it's an investment, and I wouldn't blame anyone for being scared away from the episode count. Despite being a comedy, Gintama also loves the hell out of continuity, with minor characters and running jokes being called back on a regular basis, sometimes years worth of episodes later. Part of the reason you still have to watch (or at least skim through) the first handful of episodes is because they introduce a lot of the core cast, and while they aren't particularly funny, they do give a pretty good indication of Gintama's style of humor. If nothing else, you can at least rest assured that there won't be much more, as it seems like the final arc is going to air this year.

Robotics;Notes (Production I.G.)

As a fan of the Steins;Gate, I’ve always been curious about the other installments in the “Science Adventure/Unnecessary Semicolon” series of visual novels. Unfortunately, only a handful of them have been officially translated into English, and I’ve heard less than great things about the anime adaptations of stuff like Chaos;Head. However, at the urging of one @zombiepie, I watched Robotics;Notes, a story that asks the fun question: “What if a bunch of Japanese High School students actually tried to build a Giant Robot?” If the entirety of the anime had been aimed at addressing that subject, I’d be able to recommend it without reservations. It has a likeable cast of characters, some fun talk about both persistence and failure, and a handful of crazy, incredibly resonant scenes that, quite frankly, made me need to take a walk outside after witnessing them. AND THEN IT THROWS THAT ALL AWAY.

Actually, let me backup for a sec. I was told to watch “The first 16 episodes of Robotics;Notes” and continue at my own peril. Unlike Steins;Gate, which brings in its crazy underlying conspiracy almost from the beginning and has a fairly even split between “dicking around with time travel” and “trying to undo the horrific consequences of dicking around with time travel” the underlying conspiracy in Robotics;Notes is almost a B-Plot. When said conspiracy comes to the forefront, it is revealed to be: A. Super Dumb, and B. Almost entirely irrelevant to the previous 16 episodes worth of character development and emotional build-up. And then there’s a dumb giant robot fight and it’s all mildly disappointing. Still, those first 16 episodes? Pretty great!

Konosuba (Studio Deen)

You know, despite hearing that Issekai is a very hot thing these days, the only way I’ve actually experienced the current fixation on “Some Otaku Loser gets stuck in a fantasy-ish world clearly inspired by old RPGs” is through parody and subversion. Konosuba is probably one of the funniest anime series I’ve watched, thanks to a likeable cast of complete idiots and an incredibly strong sense of comedic timing. It's very sitcom-ish in its structure, with a lot of the humor being driven by the characters putting themselves into dumb situations over and over again and bouncing off one another. Humor is always going to be mad subjective, but given this show's popularity on the internetosphere, I'm guessing it's worked pretty well for most anime people.

Re: ZERO (White Fox)

Re: ZERO makes for a fun comparison to Konosuba, if only because they might as well have the exact same setup and vastly different results. Re:Zero takes the “repeat a time loop until you break through it” concept to the logical extreme. Namely, one of profound suffering. It’s okay, because ostensible protagonist Natsuki Subaru is kind of a white knighting dingbat who you don’t feel too terrible about every time he dies in an awful, horrible way, but not detestable enough that you aren’t rooting for him to ditch Emilia and hook up with Rem, who is clearly such a better choice, man he’s the worst triumph. Honestly, it's probably the most concentrated, potent version of "break the main character" I've seen, and should be commended for how far it goes in that direction.

It's kinda unfortunate that all of that suffering doesn't add up to a whole lot in the end. While I don't think we need to worry too much about there being another season, the actual conclusion to this one is "And then they fight a Moon Whale and save the day" and it kinda feels disconnected from the setup of the main plot. Not to mention, it all goes a little too smoothly for a show about putting Subaru through as much horrible shit as possible. Ah well, if the people who have read the light novels are to be believed, there's plenty more of that coming his way.

Re: CREATORS (Studio TROYCA)

It looks like the intro has been scrubbed from Youtube, so you'll have to suffice with just the music.

Re: Creators has the interesting distinction of being the one series that had me actively angry after I finished watching it. Not since Metal Gear Solid 4 have I said “Oh, piss off” to my screen multiple times during a conclusion, and if you know my feelings on MGS4 that’s not a great comparison. Certainly, if Robotics;Notes is any indication, there’s still plenty of merit to be found in something even if it doesn’t nail the ending, and that’s true. But maaaaaaaaaan does Re:Creators’ last arc try way too hard to be *smart* at the cost of being entertaining or satisfying. It’s a show that has a lot to say about why people write stories, the relationship between a creator and their work, and how things are “accepted” by a wide audience, often doing so via non-infringing versions of iconic characters or archetypes (seriously, the kid in the giant robot might as well be Shinji Ikari) interacting with each other and their creators. Sometimes with violence. If that sounds like a rad premise, that’s because it is, and for most of the series run it manages to balance between high-minded commentary and “Hey, what if an off-brand JoJo’s character fought an off-brand version of Saber from Fate and some sort of hard-boiled cyber-detective? Wouldn’t that be cool?” (the answer is “yes”) I’m even willing to forgive those early episodes, despite a plague of exposition that sometimes infects entire episodes with scenes of people just sitting around and talking.

And then the climax happens and it’s baaaaaaad. Not just because the previously mysterious villain is revealed to be plain overpowered and boring, thus removing any tension from the multi-episode battle, but also because the show has the gall to use a deus ex machina to beat her and openly acknowledges it. It’s infuriating, and I wish it wasn’t (legally) restricted to Amazon’s Anime Strike service so I could badger people into watching it in order to validate my opinions. At least Made In Abyss was worth the free trial. I could’ve written a whole thing about that, but honestly everyone and their dad has already talked that show up and I tend to agree with most of it. You should watch Made in Abyss. Also watch Re:Creators so you can understand what the hell I’m talking about.

Mob Psycho 100 (Studio Bones)

Mob Psycho 100 is raaaaaaaaad. Okay. That's really all I wanted to say. This blog is already long enough. You should watch Mob Psycho 100.

Some other things I wanted to mention, in short summary:

Cowboy Bebop: I don’t need to write a damn paragraph to tell you that Cowboy Bebop is really, really good. It’s maybe one of the few series I could genuinely recommend to people who aren’t already weird anime nerds.

Your Name: A beautiful, wonderful film that people much more eloquent than me have already ruminated on. I bought it on Blu-Ray pretty much immediately after it came out and then forced members of my family to watch it.

Dragon Ball Super: I eventually fell off of DBS after getting sick of its lethargic pacing. It’s not bad by any means, but maybe I’ll just watch that Boku no Hero Academia the kids are all into these days if I want my shonen battle fix.

Watamote: A fun, light anime about a high school girl comedically trying to overcome crippling social anxiety! As someone who posts a lot on internet forums, some of the situations the protagonist found herself in hit surprisingly close to home. It’s also pretty funny.

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Another one of the hot series this year. Honestly, I found it cloyingly sweet in a way that didn’t work for me. Call me a heartless bastard if you wish.

Toradora!: However, I’m not entirely heartless, since I found Toradora to be a surprisingly sweet little romantic comedy thing. I watched it dubbed and thought said dub was quite good.

Parasyte: The Maxim. A pretty fantastic horror anime that I highly recommend to those who aren’t squeamish.

Geez, did you read through all of that? Why would you do such a thing? Anyways, I think I’ll end by giving a vague suggestion of what’s probably on the docket for Anime Nightmare Hole 2018, barring any surprise seasonal hits that I watch to keep up with the zeitgeist and all the cool kids. Violet Evergarden? That’s a thing people are excited for, right? The trailers look very pretty.

• Nichijou
• As much of the Fate/Stay Night series as I can watch without going mad (I’m like 7 episodes into the 2006 Studio DEEN adaption and the answer might be “Not that much”)
• That JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure thing all the memes are about
• Mushishi
• Hunter x Hunter
• My Hero Academia
• Uh, Cardcaptor Sakura? Maybe?

With that, I will wish you all a happy new year, and maybe not post this one to the forums. Fun fact, this is actually longer than my Game of the Year blog. Bury me in my sins.

Video games! They came out this year! Honestly, I could probably switch some of these around and still be totally fine! Screw the preamble, descending order, let’s GOOOOOOOOOOO!

10. Most Surprisingly Good Game from a franchise I had all but written off: Resident Evil 7 Biohazard

I make no secret that I’m a Resident Evil 6 apologist. Oh, don’t get me wrong, that game is a damn trainwreck, but like a trainwreck I cannot help but be fascinated by it. The aggressively bad, QTE-filled set pieces, the ridiculous, self-serious story that cannot help but have an explosion every 5 minutes, the surprisingly alright shooting that doesn’t know if it wants to be a Japanese action game or a straight clone of its western counterparts, all of it is an amazing test case of everything wrong with big-budget AAA video games circa 2012. That said, I would be lying if I thought that the series would ever recover from it. Revelations 2’s low budget Last of Us imitation didn’t exactly put my hopes up.

And yet, Resident Evil 7 exists, and somehow manages to nail the essence of what a Resident Evil game used to be before it got all shooty shoot. Ammo conservation! Inventory management! Dumb, esoteric puzzles! Honestly, I think my biggest problem with the game is that it doesn’t go far enough in that direction for my liking (as a lunatic who will swear up and down that tank controls and fixed camera angles are just fine.) The puzzles are brain-dead, the Baker estate is quite small, and the game itself is actually super short (It took me about 7 hours to beat it my first time around, and the current speedrun world record is at about 90 minutes, including cutscenes.) Throw in a fairly underwhelming last area and RE7 moves from “Exactly what I wanted” to “Excellent foundation.” But what a foundation it is! They made a new Resident Evil game y’all, and it was actually good.

9. Best Comfort Food: Etrian Odyssey V Beyond the Myth

Etrian Odyssey V is more Etrian Odyssey, no more and no less. As a fan of Atlus’ old-school dungeon crawling franchise, I was just happy that they finally made a completely new installment after two remakes, a Mystery Dungeon spinoff, and a middling Persona crossover. I will be frank: I don’t think Etrian Odyssey V is as good as IV, which had an overworld map and somewhat more flexible character development, but V’s race skills and forced specialization allow for plenty of its own weird and crazy party compositions, backed up by some neat quality-of-life changes and maps that manage to be challenging without being frustrating slogs. I don’t really know what else to say; it’s a good, well-made “one of those” and that’s all I really wanted.

8. The anime hell award: Doki Doki Literature Club

I’m often not one for short, concise “experiences” as part of my end-of-year video game lists, and I’m also someone who thinks that most visual novels (even ones that I like) are only *barely* definiable as video games in the first place. Doki Doki Literature Club managed to overcome both of those prejudices by being one of the most batshit crazy things I’ve seen in a long time and got to me in a way that I did not expect. I cannot speak to your own reaction, but I highly recommend you give it a look if you have the inclination. It’s not for everyone, and the warnings at the beginning are NOT A JOKE, but even if you haven’t gone down both the VN and Anime nightmare holes this year like I did, it still might be worth the 2-3 hours of your time it takes to reach the conclusion.

On a related note, I was thinking about writing an anime blog in the next week because I need to vent somewhere about that. Is that a bad idea? I think that’s a bad idea. Maybe look forward to that.

7. The “Obligatory Fire Emblem Game” award for being a game in the Fire Emblem series, but not that shit mobile game or that okay Musou one: Fire Emblem Echoes Shadows of Valentia

Fire Emblem Echoes benefits greatly from keeping most of the original Fire Emblem Gaiden’s weird mechanics intact, with only a slight amount of modernization and quality-of-life improvements to fill the 25 year gap. It’s a weirdly refreshing change of pace from the waifu-pairing, stat-optimizing emphases of Awakening and Fates, even if the map design doesn’t quite hold up as well and the post-game dungeon seems designed to persuade you to buy the $45 season pass.

However, the thing that surprisingly got me the most about Shadows of Valentia was its quality of its presentation. As you can tell from my avatar, I think the art style is fantastic, and the addition of full, surprisingly good voice acting adds a lot to what is otherwise a fairly standard Fire Emblem JRPG plot. That might be relative in the face of Fire Emblem Fates’ absolutely DIRE storytelling, but it’s also a good example of the way high production values and a quality localization (courtesy of “friends of the site” 8-4) can elevate what is otherwise straightforward material.

6. Best Styyyyyle. If it doesn’t win on Giant Bomb, at least let it win here: Persona 5

I think I'm increasingly realizing that what I want out of the modern JRPG genre is mostly just "Shin Megami Tensei spinoffs", "Etrian Odyssey", and "The ideas behind Bravely Default put into a better game." As something that meets one of those criteria, I enjoyed the hell out of Persona 5. It’s a stylish, bombastic game with an amazing soundtrack, some clear mechanical improvements over its forebears and arguably the best social links in the entire series. Its story isn’t without problems, and it definitely feels like some of the lines could’ve used another localization pass, but a lot of that was acceptable in the face of what is otherwise an excellent installment in the series. Makoto best girl.

5.The “I like turn-based combat and grids ‘n shit” award: XCOM 2 War of the Chosen

War of the Chosen is a marked improvement over XCOM 2, which was itself a marked improvement over Enemy Within, which was a marked improvement over Enemy Unknown (which was a marked improvement over not having a good modern XCOM). It does this by… mostly just adding a bunch of shit. Almost like it’s an expansion, or something. The 3 new classes are a lot of fun, as are the abandoned city missions and the interference of the Chosen themselves, who like to teleport in to cock up whatever mission you have running at the time. It’s honestly a little much to juggle at times, but once I got a handle on everything it became my favorite strategy experience of the year.

4. Best Sad Existential Robots: Nier Automata

It’s actually kind of heartening to see this game has gotten big enough to facilitate a backlash. You didn’t see any of that shit when the first Nier was coming out, and that game somehow seems way crazier and way less fun to play than this one!

Nier is, like a large chunk of the games on this list, not for everyone. It’s bonkers crazy existential anime storytelling that plays with the format in a way that few other games do, and it doesn’t bother showing its full hand until actual tens of hours into the story. Along the way, there’s some fun but repetitive combat, weird bullet hell portions, and a very, very good soundtrack. I get why some of those things wouldn’t resonate with people, but they absolutely did for me.

3. Most Looking Glass: Prey

Even moreso than most of the stuff on my list (which I think adequately reflects my eclectic weirdo tastes) I think Prey is the kind of game that works for a very specific audience. I can’t imagine anyone coming in expecting a shooter, or even a successor to Bioshock (which is a shooter wrapped up in a philosophy 101 lecture on Objectivism) would necessarily have a great time with it. I don’t mean that to sound elitist, rather I’m saying that Prey is weirdly niche for a big budget AAA video game and I kind of love that. In other words, it’s probably the closest thing you’re going to see to a new System Shock game until Night Dive releases their remake of System Shock 1 (or Otherside releases System Shock 3. Whichever one happens first)

The combat might be a bit messy, the story’s meta-meta conceits might be a turn-off (I kinda loved that too), but in terms of “giant, cohesive location for you to scrounge around, picking up every piece of garbage and sometimes an audio log” I cannot think of a game that does it better than Prey, including Arkane’s own Dishonored series. There was clearly an obsessive amount of thought put into the design and layout of Talos 1, and the game benefits greatly from its relative mundanity in a way that Rapture and Columbia’s amusement park designs never could. Also you can navigate areas by turning into a stupid coffee cup and then slipping through small gaps. It’s great.

2. Alright, you should’ve expected this: Super Mario Odyssey

Honestly, how much do I really need to say about Super Mario Odyssey? It’s a joyful, gleeful example of Nintendo’s first party development putting on their A-Game and making a fine-tuned gameplay loop of quality platforming, exploration, and possessing the bodies of your enemies. No, seriously, it's a new Mario game and it's amazing.

1. My Game of the Year: Nioh

At this point, I think you can probably notice a trend in my Game of the Year picks in that they are either: A. Dense RPGs/Strategy Games or B. High Intensity Action Games. Nioh falls into the latter category with ease, and is probably one of the most satisfying action games I’ve played in a long time. While it owes plenty to Dark Souls, there’s also a lot of Ninja Gaiden DNA in Nioh, and both of those things together work incredibly well once you get a handle on mechanics like stance changing and the ki pulse. Adding to an already impressive skill ceiling, there’s a lot of variety between the 7 different weapon types (two of which were added in DLC!) and two different forms of magic that I really appreciate. It’s not quite Dark Souls II levels of crazy build variety, but I’d imagine there’s enough out there for anyone to find what works for them. Much like DOOM last year, I enjoyed the mechanics in Nioh enough to power through and earn the Platinum trophy, which is something I’ve only attempted to do with one other Souls-ish game (I’d totally have gotten the Bloodborne platinum if not for the stupid chalice dungeon where your health is cut in half.)

If the game has a noteworthy flaw, it’s that the main story is probably a tad too long and the late-game is a tad grindy. The additional DLC chapters are all pretty great and meaningful, but the way they’re scaled means that you either have to fight stronger, more durable versions of the same enemies from the last 20 hours, or play through early game chapters on Way of the Strong (the New Game + equivalent) until your numbers are high enough to not lose large chunks of your health on an errant hit. These are ultimately drops in the bucket though, because I still ended up playing Nioh for a good 80+ hours and will probably play a little bit more before I’m totally done. It’s an impressive start to a series that I hope will continue onward into the future.

Alright, with that out of the way, Special Acheivement Awards:

Game Number Eleven: Wolfenstein II The New Colossus

Wolfenstein II was on an early draft of this list, but after some consideration it got bumped off for the simple reason that I don’t think I ever really enjoyed the act of *playing* it. Oh, don’t get me wrong, Wolfenstien II’s story goes for insane pulpiness in a way that needs to be seen to be believed. However, the parts in-between the cutscenes, when I was attempting to use bad, rudimentary stealth to sneak my way through a bunch of grey Nazi bases before getting discovered and immediately losing half my health, were not so great. It also ends on a fairly muted cliffhanger, one that screams “Come back in 2-3 years!” which underwhelmed me a bit. Still absolutely worth your time if you’re interested.

Honorable Mentions: PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Dishonored: Death of the Outsider.

Like a lot of people on the internet, I was pretty hot on PUBG for a decent period of time, with its ultra-tense shooting and looting offering some of the highest highs I’ve ever had playing a multiplayer game. Buuuuuuuuuuuut I also got my fill after a little more than 30 hours. I think a lot of it for me comes down to how much of those 30+ hours was spent wandering around for 20 minutes before getting shot in the back by someone I never saw. I’m sure the solution to that issue would be to “git gud” but I have enough other things on my plate that I’m fine with leaving things then and there.

Honestly, if I wasn’t absolutely sick to death of the modern open-world action-adventure game format, I’d probably have loved Horizon. As it stands for me, it’s an incredibly well-made “one of those” that makes up in execution what it loses in originality. But yeah, after a certain point I decided to start beelining my way through the main quest because I could not give less of a shit about any of the side activities. Robot dinosaurs are cool and all, but cleaning out bandit camps sure isn’t.

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is more Dishonored, even if it’s pretty middle-of-the-road Dishonored. Aside from a pretty great bank heist mission with a lot of different possible approaches and opportunities, most of the maps are only so-so, made a bit less exciting by Billie Lurk’s powerful but boring ability set. That didn’t stop me from happily sneaking through the game, mashing F5 and surgically choking out every guard I came upon, but it did do a really good job of reminding me how much I liked Dishonored 2.

Guiltiest Backlog Additions: The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild and Divinity Original Sin 2

I’ve played a fair amount of both games, but not enough to have felt comfortable putting them on the final list. In Zelda’s case, I’m not entirely sure it’d make it onto the list in the first place (I really like the shrines, but I find the actual overworld exploration to be… a little dull) but Divinity Original Sin 2 is absolutely something that could’ve made it if it kept up a similar level of quality to the initial 30 hours I spent with it (before being distracted by other things.) I’ll probably give both more time during this holiday break, but I didn’t want to put off making this list until then.

Worst Game I Played to Completion This Year: Mass Effect Andromeda

I don’t think it’s fair to call Mass Effect Andromeda “Most Disappointing” because I had adjusted my expectations well before I started playing it. That didn’t stop it from being a depressing wreck, mind you, but more that I more-or-less knew exactly what I was getting into and still managed to be underwhelmed. You can read the blog I wrote if you want details, but Andromeda’s hackish, C-tier sci-fi writing and uninspired open world design were the last straw for me and Bioware, and I think I’m probably done with them for good.

Most Disappointing Game: Torment Tides of Numenera

Unlike Mass Effect Andromeda, I don’t think Tides of Numenera is a bad game, but I do think it’s not anywhere near as good as its cited influence, Planescape Torment. I don’t envy any developer trying to recapture something as singular and iconic, but that doesn’t stop ToN from feeling like a manufactured simulacrum of Planescape, with a lot of dense prose, an alienating world, and attempts at deep philosophical questions. I could get really granular in explaining why it doesn’t work as well, but I’ll suffice by saying that the prose is a little too purple for my tastes, the world is so alien that it’s hard to feel grounded at all, and the actual philosophical underpinnings behind “What does one life matter?” aren’t nearly as interesting or relevant as Planescape’s “What can change the nature of a man?” It has its share of good bits too, but among the pantheon of recent old-school RPG revivals, I think it falls short of both its modern counterparts and its classic influences.

Old Game of the Year: Ninja Gaiden Black

I’m not doing an old games list, for various reasons (i.e. I didn’t play enough of them this year, probably because I was too busy watching anime.) but of the few old games I played through to completion this year, Ninja Gaiden Black stands out as a fantastic, exceptionally cruel action game that was immensely satisfying to complete. Its difficulty was even more pronounced after I played through Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and kinda breezed through it. While still mechanically tight and a lot of fun to play, I almost felt like I was cheating by comparison. I think I’m still probably on the Devil May Cry side of the Japanese Character Action Game fence, but given how few of those are actually coming out anymore, I’m more than willing to take Ninja Gaiden along for a ride.

And I think this is it for me this year. I don’t need an outro either, thanks for reading!

Hey all, it’s November, and all the video games have apparently come out. Now I can spend the rest of the year actually playing them, or in the case of Divinity Original Sin 2, Zelda, and The Evil Within 2, going back to them after getting sidetracked by other hot 2017 releases. Like you all, I have been riding that zeitgeist wave and playing only the hottest, most relevant things.

Super Mario Odyssey

I don’t really feel like I need to get into exacting detail about why Super Mario Odyssey is a stand-out title in a year filled with stand-out video games. Likely, you’ve already played it, intend to play it, or have zero intention of playing it and are kinda tired of everyone talking about how good it is. (or you’re one of those contrarians who will deride this as “another” Mario game, as if it hasn’t been 3 years since the last big one of those and a good 7 years since the last one in this style) But still, even with that preamble, I feel like I need to say that Super Mario Odyssey is fantastic. Some of the most fun I’ve had this year has involved running around the game’s densely-packed environments, stumbling over platforming challenges, weird puzzles, and moons every few minutes. Not every world is a total winner, but there’s a sense of calculated, crafted precision underlying every facet Mario Odyssey’s design, made even more impressive by how natural and effortless the entire thing seems, and like Mario Galaxy 1 it feels like the developers have only scratched the surface of what is possible with this game’s design and mechanics. Even if there isn’t an Odyssey 2 (which, I would be willing to bet there will be) I am more than happy and satisfied with this one.

Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth

Etrian Odyssey is the definition of “comfort food” in regards to video games. Looking from the outside, they’re all kind of the same game: an intentionally old-school series of dungeon-crawling RPGs where you draw your own map and create a party of characters filled with a bunch of cutesy-looking anime lolis. Honestly, that’s not far off, though it does undercut the improvements the series has experienced through the years, both in terms of cutting down on frustrating, punishing garbage and increasing the number of interesting player options when building a party. Etrian Odyssey IV, which came out like 4 years ago, represented the high point of that trend for me and remains one of my favorite 3DS games to this day. There’s a pure quality to these old-school blobbers that modern RPGs often lack, and that is a distillation of the idea of building up a team of complete weaklings who can barely take a hit on the first floor of the dungeon and turning them into highly optimized death machines. That’s ostensibly something that most RPGs have in one form or another, but Etrian Odyssey and its ilk take that idea and concentrate it into a particularly potent form of crack.

Etrian Odyssey V is no different in that regard, and it’s a very good “one of those.” The new hooks in this one, revolving around racial skills and the ability to choose between one of two subclasses (Do you want a Botanist who specializes in healing or status effects? Do you want a Dragoon who is good at tanking damage or one who can deal a lot of damage with gun skills?) aren’t quite as interesting to me as Etrian Odyssey IV’s more flexible system of multi-classing, but it still seems like you can create some pretty crazy, diverse party setups from these choices. That’s always been my favorite thing about these sorts of RPGs, so in that sense Etrian Odyssey V works out quite well. The Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack is still fantastic, the dungeon floors themselves are nice and sprawling without being filled with obnoxious puzzles (at least, not yet. I’ll see about that final post-game Stratum when I get there.) and it’s more or less exactly what I want from one of these games. So, comfort food, basically.

Ninja Gaiden Black

For the thing that started my blogging “career” in the first place, I have been remarkably lax on the whole “playing old games” schtick this year. If you check my list of games played in 2017, you’ll see a couple of older titles (some of which were replays, some of which were entirely new to me) but I’m seriously wondering if I can even muster together a top 5 list of games this year. You can probably blame a combination of factors on that (having disposable income to buy new stuff when it’s actually relevant, sacrificing some of my free time to the Anime hole, the part where I’ve already played most of the major CRPGs from the late 90s/early 2000s, etc) but in any case I finally have something to talk about that fits the parameters of my old blogs from so long, long ago. (hey, just a side note, but maybe don’t go back and read my old blogs. It’s, uh, been more than 8 years since I started doing this thing and I’d like to think I’ve improved as a writer and a person in that time.)

It was actually the addition of backwards compatibility on the Xbox One (which I don’t own, but my brother-in-law does) that caused me to give Ninja Gaiden Black another shot. I say “another” because Ninja Gaiden was one of the games present in my first-ever Giant Bomb list discussing games that I liked more in concept than execution (It’s fair to mention that a lot of the games on said list are titles that I’ve long since come around on in one form or another.) That’s because, to put it frankly: Ninja Gaiden Black is a cruel bastard of a video game. While the Souls series, the current poster children for “Hard” video games, reward patience and caution, (alongside some good old-fashioned pattern memorization) I think Ninja Gaiden’s difficulty is best categorized as demanding nothing less than raw execution from the player and punishing them harshly if they are not on the ball. Certainly, I can think of other character action games with similarly rough default difficulties (Devil May Cry 3 comes to mind) but Ninja Gaiden stands out to me because it doesn’t give a shit about your technique (in the same way a DMC or Bayonetta does) so much as it cares about your ability to murder things as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s a bit semantic, since it’s not like Devil May Cry 3 doesn’t also care about the player’s ability to murder things as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, it does explain the adjustment I had to make in order for Ninja Gaiden Black to “click” for me. Once I realized I had zero reason to play fancy and could very much get away with using the Flying Swallow over and over again, I was able to finally make progress.

Pretty much all of the enemies in NGB are fast, evasive, and more than capable of taking out large chunks of your life bar with a couple of attacks, to not even discuss some of the game’s infamous boss fights. It’s a two-way street however, and Ryu Hayabusa just so happens to be fast, evasive, and more than capable of taking out enemies with a couple of attacks (to not even discuss some of the game’s less infamous boss fights, where cheese tactics are more than welcome) I wouldn’t call it “fair” so much as I’d describe it as “Equal Opportunity Bullshit.” None of that would be worth mentioning if the combat didn’t feel good (seriously, the Izuna Drop is dope as hell) and the weapons didn’t feel powerful but I’d hope that was a given, considering this game’s reputation among the pantheon of both the original Xbox and the character action genre as a whole. It’s very satisfying to chain together a bunch of ultimate techniques to defeat a large group of enemies… or just spam the lightning ninpo over and over again because you can get away with it and it’s not like you’ve used those devil elixirs until now. Unsurprisingly given the pedigree, it reminded me a bit of Nioh, which definitely feels like it takes some of its cues from Ninja Gaiden alongside the overt Souls influences.

Where the game falters for me a little is when the bullshit stops being fun and just starts being punitive or cheap. The game’s camera, which is fiddly and not great in the best of circumstances, is sometimes used to obscure enemies or traps to get a free shot at you. Sometimes, when you’re surrounded by enemies, it’s more than possible to get yourself stuck in a damage loop of getting grappled over and over, as anyone who has dealt with “Ghost Fish” can attest to. And yeah, I had trouble with some of the game’s bosses (though not Alma’s first fight, weirdly enough,) some of whom have absurdly damaging attacks with dubiously large hitboxes and one of whom asks you to engage with the utterly terrible ranged weapon controls. Any time the game asks you to platform is a moment of pain and regret, owing to aforementioned camera, the fixed distance of Ryu’s jump arc, and the rather touchy nature of some of the controls outside of combat. Oh, and the puzzles are boring, but I kinda expect that from this genre. These things weren’t enough to sour me on Ninja Gaiden, but they did feel like a crossed line from “fun” difficult, to a certain brand of “Git Gud Scrub” posturing that just makes me think game director Tomonobu Itagaki might be kind of an asshole.

I mention Itagaki, former head of Team Ninja and “Guy who went on to do exactly nothing of consequence after leaving Team Ninja” if only because I’m reminded of him and his outspoken attitudes while playing his video game. Not just in the game’s difficulty, but also in the almost hilariously juvenile nonsense story (which, thanks to the part where you can’t skip cutscenes the first time you watch them, I vaguely paid attention to) the game subjected me to. It manages to cram together fights with Demon Samurai, large-boobed demon ladies, a giant phallic lightning worm, and a helicopter all in the space of a few hours in a way that says “VIDEO GAME.” And then there’s Rachel, who I have to mention because she comes off as a parody of bad, embarrassing female character design in 2017. You don’t have to be Anita Sarkeesian to say HOLY SHIT. Like, it’s everything. Not just the giant, larger-than-head DOA boobs or the creepily perfect Barbie doll face, but also the ridiculous leather stripper outfit, the way she is introduced as a badass and then immediately spends the rest of the game getting captured or put into “compromising” situations, or the way the camera fixates on her boobs and ass, it’s all… ah, something. Yes, something entirely minor, but also a reminder that maybe we have made progress in the last 12 years.

But that aside, I was glad to see Ninja Gaiden Black manages to mostly live up to its reputation as a tough-as-nails, mechanically satisfying murder game. It’s not my favorite character action game by any means, but in a world where that genre is on life support most of the time I’m more than happy to find any new avenue to get my fix. That does lead me to ask if I should play Ninja Gaiden 2 on the Xbox 360 (or, Xbox One, I guess) or Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 on my PS3 should I get around to it. Also I guess if Ninja Gaiden 3 is worth looking at, even in its enhanced Razor’s Edge form. I’d love to hear some opinions.

Random Endorsement:

As someone who currently runs a Dungeons and Dragons group (or attempts to run, depending on the week) I have occasionally solicited advice on doing so from the entity known as “D&D Youtube,” which like all subcultures on the internet has its share of useful and obnoxious. It’s not all just attractive, talented voice-actors giving unrealistic expectations of player investment and RP ability, however, there’s also a legion of bearded grognards who make videos explaining how to effectively corral one’s friends in the weird “group improv, but with dice rolls” thing you have going on.

My favorite of these grognards is game developer and writer Matthew Colville, who can frankly be a bit overbearing with his rapid fire line delivery and strong opinions (also he liked 4th Edition, which makes him one of the few people on the internet brave enough to admit it.) However, he’s also quite entertaining, and has a wealth of experience in both old-school and modern D&D that I’ve found useful or interesting, even if I don't always incorporate it into my game.

Also, in anime, I thought Haruhi Suzumiya was pretty great. That Endless Eight arc is probably the worst thing I've seen in anime all year, but at least the movie almost makes up for it.

Hey, wassup. Summer has basically ended, leaving us with the oncoming torrent of new releases that won’t let up until the end of the year. Personally, I’m excited for Divinity Original Sin II next week. That game, alongside Etrian Odyssey V and Mario Odyssey are probably my most anticipated games of the year, though honestly I still have a lot of Zelda that needs playing somewhere along the way too. In any case, I thought I’d start off the new school year off right, not by extolling the virtues of something good like Zelda, the XCOM 2 expansion, or Nioh (which I got the platinum trophy for because it’s so GOOD) but instead by exorcising myself of one of this year’s most notable failures.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

If you had asked me around 7 years ago who my favorite game developers were, I think Bioware would’ve probably topped that list. Alongside Nintendo and the long-defunct New World Computing, it’s fair to say that few other individual development studios are as responsible for my tastes in video games as they are. I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic when I was 12, which then led me to Baldur’s Gate II and (by proxy) numerous other role-playing games, including the old-school ones that I’m still a weird lunatic about to this day. Before KotOR, Dungeons and Dragons-style mechanics, and the concept of “player choice” were both foreign ideas to me. Certainly, it’s easy to look back on that game now and pick apart its binary morality, shallow mechanics, and occasionally goofy writing, but that doesn’t change the fact that it (alongside the Paper Mario games and the Might and Magic series) was a formative experience for me and RPGs.

But of course, things change. I’m willing to acknowledge that my tastes in video games have changed in the past few years, often contrary to Bioware’s own changing (corporate-mandated) design ethos, and a lot of that simply has to do with the part where I like the kind of crunchy, mechanics-heavy RPG that simply does not exist in the AAA space. If you’re wondering why I said “7 years ago” in the last paragraph, it’s because Mass Effect 2 came out 7 years ago and was probably the last Bioware game I’d consider to be “great.” I will defend Dragon Age II as an interesting failure and I still like Mass Effect 3 overall in spite of how utterly stupid its original ending was, but both of those games represented a slip in quality that the company has never quite managed to recover from. Critics liked Dragon Age Inquisition a lot, but personally it left me (and seemingly a lot of other people) rather cold with its faux-MMO world design and bad combat. It’s one of the few single-player RPGs from them I've quickly dropped, alongside such stellar epics as Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, and the pre-built campaigns for Neverwinter Nights (note to self: I should check out Hordes of the Underdark at some point.)

I think there’s also a part of me that has gotten a little tired of Bioware’s writing style. I could accuse them of simply getting worse at writing and really digging into the pandering, adolescent power-fantasy aspects of their games, but that’s something that’s hard for me to personally quantify. It’s been a hot minute since I played Mass Effect 2 or Dragon Age Origins, and while the nostalgia voice in my head tells me those games were much better written than their successors, I’m not sure how true that is. Let’s just say that I’ve found myself relating more to Obsidian’s slightly more complex, slightly more adult brand of writing over the past few years. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention a general fatigue with the overarching, encompassing “Bioware Formula.” It varies slightly from game to game, but is epitomized by their love of making the player protagonist “the special,” fighting against a decidedly bland world-ending threat alongside a quirky cast of archetypal characters (an increasing number of whom you can bone down with) with the occasional *IMPORTANT CHOICE* along the way. That’s certainly a gross oversimplification, one that ignores nuance and the basic fact that most stories are kinda the same, but I hope that you have an understanding of what I’m saying. Bioware is unique in their devotion to their particular template, one that they’ve arguably been using in one form or another arguably since Baldur’s Gate II (and inarguably since Neverwinter Nights.)

So yeah, now that you know where I stand, let’s talk about Mass Effect Andromeda. Chances are, you’re already aware of the game’s lukewarm critical and word-of-mouth reception, the story of its troubled development, or the part where EA wants to bury it as quickly as possible. I would love to say that these aren’t reflective of my experience, that I could offer something positive or contrary to the current prevailing deluge of negativity surrounding this game, but… I really didn’t like it. It’s bad, and I find the “Direct-to-Video” analogy a lot of people have been throwing around to be incredibly apt. The only reason I finished Andromeda, rather than dropping it like Inquisition, was a combination of morbid curiosity and masochism (the same masochism that made me stick with Bound By Flame until it broke me, in case you were wondering.) It’s a bad, bizarrely inept game that can be bad and inept for a very long time if you so choose, though I had my fill after slightly more than 25 hours. Someone who beelines through the main quest could probably do it in less than 15, but I felt the need to check out a decent chunk of the noteworthy side quests, including all but one of the crew loyalty missions. Unless you have a concerted interest in seeing the franchise commit seppuku, I would recommend you stay far away. There have been so many great games this year; you don’t need to spend your time on this one.

As someone already fatigued with most open world games, Mass Effect offers the worst kind of take on open world design. It’s a bland series of large, mostly empty zones filled with trivial trash mob encounters and a bunch of repetitive, boring side activities that aren’t all that fun the first time you do them, alongside the occasional NPC fetch quest and the even more occasional NPC quest that’s actually involved (which, it turns out mostly involves running between the handful of inhabitable planets in order to talk to one NPC or go to a random spot and fight a handful of mooks.) None of it is all that great, but at the very least the shooting is surprisingly decent. Certainly, the AI is dumber than a pile of bricks and the way skills are laid out actively discourages you from too much experimentation (I mostly stuck with the same 3 for my entire playthrough) but that doesn’t really change the fact that jumping in the air, dashing backward, and shooting an enemy in the head with a sniper rifle while hovering in the air is pretty fun. It would be more fun if it was remotely challenging or tactical on the default difficulty, or had more variety in its encounters, but it’s the best thing in the game by far. Yes, they removed the tactical pause and therefore the last vestige of classical RPG-ness that the series was hanging onto, but I think expecting the RPG mechanics in a modern Bioware game to be remotely interesting is probably asking too much at this point. It’s a decent shooter, and that’s honestly not the worst thing in the world.

Of course, the only reason the adequately entertaining combat asserts itself is because of how it contrasts to the rest of the game… which does not come off all that well. I know I spent the first 3 paragraphs setting up my feelings on Bioware as a developer, but I should really emphasize that Andromeda is even a step below their previous disappointing output. I might’ve bounced off of Dragon Age Inquisition for various reasons, but I’m not going to pretend it didn’t have its charms or merits. They certainly cocked up the open world design and combat, but I still liked most (not all) of the supporting cast and found the writing (mostly) decent. Comparatively, there is an amateurish, hackish quality to Andromeda’s writing that I think can be most closely be compared to something like a SyFy channel original series or a particularly bad episode of Star Trek (probably Enterprise, or something.) Even at its best, Bioware’s writing isn’t exactly the complete works of Shakespeare, but it usually works as pulpy sci-fi or fantasy fare, and for years there wasn’t exactly much better out there. To give a broad summation: most of the dialogue in Andromeda is either super on-the-nose attempts at exposition or exceptionally bad attempts at snark. It’s as if the writers were big fans of something like Firefly, but didn’t understand how to write Wheadon-esque dialogue and tone it down in more serious situations. As a result, everyone is either constantly (and unfunnily) cracking wise all the time or rattling off super obvious character or plot details in a way that tends to violate the rule of “Show, don’t tell.” There was a brief period early on where the writing was stupid enough to take on an ironic quality, and I was enjoying it in the same way I enjoyed the writing of RPG masterpiece Bound By Flame. That didn’t last very long. Unfortunately, for all its faults the quality of the writing and voice acting wasn’t bad enough to sustain those feelings for more than a few hours and after a while I mostly just wanted everyone to shut up.

The quality of dialogue is further aggrieved by the situations you are put in and the characters involved in those situations. Andromeda’s core themes of going to a new place, exploring the unknown, encountering new species, dealing with the challenges of colonization, etc, are all squandered one by one as the story takes on the challenge of carving out a new space for more Mass Effect via the most generic and tired storytelling tropes possible, justified in the sloppiest manner possible. Ancient Aliens and their brand of inexplicable space magic are a bad, lazy plot device, something I thought we learned pretty well in 2012. There are fewer alien races to interact with (The Quarians, Hanar, Volus, etc all seemingly saved for a DLC mission that never came) but the returning aliens have had all of their edges sanded off. I’m not just talking about lore inconsistencies, I’m talking about the Asari, Turians, Salarians, and Krogan all becoming far more bland and straightforward than they were in the original trilogy. That’s okay, because at least they’re still more interesting than the new alien races, the Angara and the Kett, both of whom are as boring as their C-tier, rubbery designs would suggest. The Kett especially make for poor main villains, with their incredibly played out motivations and mustache-twirlingly evil behavior. The main quest doesn’t have a whole lot to redeem itself, actually. There are a couple of side quests that offer a glimmer of much more interesting scenario writing, but those are often few and far between.

I don’t really know how much more of my disappointed rambling you need to read, so I’ll end on this: The supporting cast is usually a pretty safe bet in any given Bioware game, assuming you’re on board with their style of companion writing. There will always be always be a handful who don’t resonate depending on one’s tastes, and there will always be those who everyone kinda hates (your Anders and your Mission Vao types) but in my personal experience I think most Bioware companion writing is more hit than miss. In Andromeda…? After doing almost everyone’s loyalty mission (unfortunately for Liam, I’d have to do too much work to see what his is like) I like Drack, and I think Vetra’s probably alright too. They’re both archetypes you’ve seen before, done better in other Bioware games, but in a game where most of the writing is tee-balling its way to the finish line, those two stand out as actually being able to hit the ball unassisted. The rest of the cast seems to confuse being snarky or acting like a sycophant with having a personality or being likeable. I could probably go on about every single member of the Tempest’s crew, about how much I dislike or am indifferent to most of them, but this thing is already 2,000 words long and I’m sure you can read or watch half a dozen other breakdowns that can explain exactly why Peebee is the worst. I’ll just say that they’re a pale simulacrum of much better casts and move on from there.

I can’t really express to you how much of a bummer Mass Effect Andromeda is. I will be that weirdo who still claims that Baldur’s Gate II is Bioware’s best RPG, but the original Mass Effect trilogy holds a pretty high place in my personal estimation (ME2 especially.) It’s a close fight between Andromeda and Jade Empire for the bottom of my list (let’s be real: Sonic Chronicles is barely a Bioware game), but I think Jade Empire emerges slightly better if only because it came out 12 years earlier and is only like 15 hours long if you decide to do everything. I don’t think people would be nearly as harsh on this game if it was developed by someone else (like, if this game was published by Focus Home Interactive and developed by some B-tier European studio, I think people would be way more forgiving), nor do I especially relish being one more thumbs down condemning this game to the pits of hell. But endlessly negative, potentially hyperbolic reception or not, I will stand by saying that you should not play Mass Effect Andromeda (unless, like me, you really need to know for yourself.)

Random Endorsement

My dark descent into the anime hole this year naturally was also accompanied by me taking a look at the magical and mostly questionable world that is “Anime Youtubers.” I’ll be blunt in saying that I find most of anime youtube just as insufferable as video game youtube, but there are a couple of big name ones I find decently entertaining or informative. Among the best of the lot is probably Super Eyepatch Wolf, who makes very thoughtful, very well-reasoned videos without coming off like he has his head up his own ass. Bonus points for the accent.

So, August huh? Welp, shit. There goes my summer. I guess I could tell you about video games that I’ve played, or something.

Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

One of the reasons I haven’t written as many video game blogs in 2017 (aside from the usual issues of life, school, work, a lack of motivation, etc.) is because I’ve been spending my ever so precious time watching far too much anime. Before this year, I’d probably best describe myself as a “casual” fan of Japanese Cartoons, occasionally dipping my toe into the pool here and there with a small handful of series per year. However, for whatever reason I’ve gone all the way down that dark hole this year and am unlikely to emerge unscathed. I’ve seen suggestive toothbrushing, dubstep body horror, two very different light novel adaptions about some otaku loser getting stuck in a generic fantasy world, and a significant amount of Gintama, to name a few. I might eventually write something about this act of self-ruination as part of one of my end of year blogs, but I’ll spare you the details now lest you come here for all of the hot takes on video games as long as those video games are ancient CRPGs, old Resident Evil, or Fire Emblem.

Okay, I lied. Danganronpa is a visual novel, which is like an anime except with more reading and sometimes you interact with it. It is also not an ancient CRPG, old Resident Evil, or Fire Emblem. I sincerely apologize. It's about 15 anime teens (the decidedly bland main character and a bunch of quirky weirdoes such as “Rich Asshole Guy,” “Mysterious Cool Girl,” “Girl who dresses all Gothic Lolita and speaks with a vaguely French accent,” and “Basically Chie from Persona 4, but she’s obsessed with doughnuts instead of meat”) who are all trapped in Hope’s Peak Academy by an evil robot bear named Monokuma. They are free to stay in the school as long as they want, but the only way to escape is to murder someone and get away with it. To get reductive, it’s the murder game aspect of something like a Battle Royale crossed with the investigation and trial segments of an Ace Attorney and the social interaction of something like Persona. As previously mentioned, I’ve watched a lot of anime recently, and if that premise doesn’t sound like the most anime-ass shit out there, then I don’t know what does.

In a gameplay sense, most of Danganronpa is spent reading through text. Generally you’ll have some time to hang out with the other students for a bit between large story sequences, before someone is inevitably murdered and you proceed to investigation (which consists of clicking on everything and sometimes talking to people) and the class trials. In a seeming attempt to distinguish itself from Phoenix Wright and include “actual gameplay”, the trials are a little more active, dramatically requiring you to shoot “Truth Bullets” (i.e. Evidence) at the statements they contradict while the discussion plays out in real time. Sometimes you need to use one statement to contradict the other. Sometimes you have to shoot around “white noise” that blocks the bullets. Sometimes you have to play hangman or a rhythm game. It’s tolerable, but never feels necessary or engaging, and I’m half-tempted to turn everything down to easy when I play Danganronpa 2 just so I don’t have to deal with it.

Needless distractions aside, the writing and story are what matters in a VN, and in this case I think both of those are solid. There’s a bit of a Lord of the Flies or Werewolf vibe to the entire thing, with an increasingly paranoid cast alternating between trying to cooperate and being at each other's throats. While I ended up correctly guessing most of the mystery behind the cast’s confinement pretty early on, the game still does a good job not telegraphing most of the individual twists and turns. There’s a weird juxtaposition between some of game’s more stereotypically “anime” moments (including a bit where you peek in on the girls when they’re bathing because fanservice) and the unflinching brutality in which it executes its premise. Special shout-out to the ending, which is deliciously ambiguous and messed-up in a way I can fully get behind. It’s pretty good.

But is it great? Honestly, I don’t know about that. Aside from the actual act of playing the game, I have a couple of qualms. It took me around 15 hours to finish, which felt a little padded. The school doesn’t really need to be a fully explorable environment, and I don’t really need the characters to re-summarize information that was just presented 10 minutes ago. Speaking of the characters I… don’t think I liked most of them. Maybe that’s by design, since like half of them end up being murderous sociopaths or intentionally annoying, but only a fraction of the ensemble ever really develops beyond their initial archetype to anywhere interesting. It should also be mentioned that there’s some anime-ass English voice acting. That’s not so much an insult as it is an acknowledgement that there isn’t a whole lot of nuance or subtlety going on alongside the occasional dubious line-read. It was effective enough for me, as someone with a very loose preference for dubs over subs, but it was also enough of a thing that I felt the need to mention it. You have been warned.

Even despite those (mostly) minor gripes however, Danganronpa was definitely a weird thing worth my time, even as it also represents yet another step in my inevitable descent to anime hell. I’ll likely play the second game before the end of the year is through, and I’m interested in seeing how it compares.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

It’s a testament to the strength of Horizon’s premise and finely polished gameplay that I still mostly enjoyed it despite the part where I’m more than a little sick of the kind of game it is. I could go on for a while about my disillusionment with the modern AAA open world action game, but I’ll keep it brief because I don’t really think there’s much to be gained by me complaining about how much I never want to climb another damn tower for multiple paragraphs. It’s not a grudge against open worlds, per se, so much as it is my dislike of using open worlds to fill your game with a lot of C-grade filler content, superfluous upgrade systems, and bad mission design. It was around two years ago when Dragon Age Inquisition and Far Cry 4 broke me on a lot of that stuff, and barring a couple of noteworthy exceptions (The Witcher 3) I haven’t fully recovered since. For all of its quality of execution, Horizon doesn’t break that mold. It’s unfortunate that no amount of robo-dinosaurs or quality world-building shifted my perception, but I liked it enough to beeline through the main quest after the halfway mark. That counts for something, right?

You’ll note that I said “premise” and “world-building” when applying praise to this game, rather than “story.” Horizon has a pretty straightforward video game plot told effectively and uplifted by quality writing and voice acting. It’s only when you add in an attention to detail in the post-apocalyptic tribal societies and the bonkers insane exposition dumps explaining the nature of the world that it becomes noteworthy. It’s not exactly Planescape Torment, but for a pulp tale about a bunch of superstitious tribals fighting robot animals it’s far better than it has any right to be. It’s a little disappointing that the best parts of Horizon’s story involve the player spinning Aloy around in circles as you listen to audio logs detailing things that happened centuries prior, but the smaller arcs that make up some of the sidequests and main quest were good enough to keep me interested. It’s also worth praising the simple fact that Horizon sets up and resolves a mostly self-contained plot in one game, with only the briefest flash of sequel bait after the credits. That’s a low bar, and maybe I’m a little cynical. However, I could easily envision an alternate reality where some of this game’s crazier plot revelations are teased out over the course of 2-3 games.

The actual game part of Horizon is… well, it’s basically a better Far Cry. If you still like Far Cry, I bet you’ll enjoy it even more than I did. I mentioned some of my issues with the Ubisoft open world template, why I don’t really feel a huge desire to do things like use Batman detective vision to follow tracks or clear out bandit camps by engaging in rudimentary stealth (or whistling and drawing guards into the bushes one-by-one so I can shank them) over and over again, so I won’t repeat myself. That said, I still enjoyed the combat in Horizon quite a bit when I was walking from main quest waypoint to main quest waypoint. Being a modern video game, it’s not all that difficult on Normal difficulty, but I still had quite a bit of fun engaging in its particular brand of chaos. Shooting the turrets off of some of the more dangerous robots, then using said turrets to blow them up is an incredibly satisfying thing to do, as is aiming a bunch of tearblast arrows at something and watching all of its parts fly off. Sure, if you boil it down you’re using upgradable varieties of three different bows, two grenade launchers, two different things that make tripwires, and a highly inaccurate machine gun, but that also means that there’s no filler in Horizon’s arsenal. Each weapon has a distinct role and can be called upon to do its own variety of stupid thing, be it crowd control, raw DPS, sniping, status effects, and so on. I found some of them more useful than others, but none of them seemed useless. I didn’t really engage in any of the hunting trials, but I got the impression that

I don’t really know what else to say about Horizon. I enjoyed the 15-20ish hours I spent with it but it’s not going to be anywhere near whatever end of year list I’ll write in late December. I came in with a built-in disconnect between my desire to see the story to its end and my desire to run around a mostly empty open world chasing like 18 waypoints, and I think that probably blunted a lot of the criticisms I can make about it. I can’t exactly go after something I didn’t engage in, right? Besides, I’m saving my vitriol for Mass Effect Andromeda, which is probably next on my docket, barring the loss of my sanity or the possible chain of events that ends with me taking the disk out of the PS4, shoving it back in the box, and then putting that box in my closet forever. It’s that, or I pick my Lightning Returns playthrough back up.

Random Endorsement:

It’s been a few years, so I’m due for yelling at you people about how great Temple of Elemental Evil is for the eleventy-thousandth time. If I end up setting Mass Effect on fire because I need a to play a RPG-ass RPG with dice rolls ‘n shit, and Grimoire doesn’t actually come out tomorrow, I’m considering giving ToEE a replay. This is due in part to the emergence of Temple Plus, another fan-mod that fixes and tweaks a bunch of stuff on top of the already obligatory Circle of Eight Modpack (which is basically necessary if you want to play Temple of Elemental Evil in the first place. Seriously, don’t ever play any of Troika’s games without some variety of fix pack.) What makes Temple Plus exciting is that it not only fixes a few of the issues left in the final version of Circle of Eight, but also that it opens the door to a bunch of additional nonsense. They’ve already added most of the Prestige Classes that were in the 3.5 core rulebooks (Assassin, Blackguard, Arcane Archer, etc) and are apparently messing around with other, more complicated stuff (The Archmage class! The possibility of someone modding in Psionics!) therefore inching ever closer to my ideal D&D CRPG. Well, maybe that Pathfinder RPG will fill the void, but until then…

It’s… been a while, hasn’t it? There are no less than two half-finished blogs on Google Docs that I abandoned for various reasons, but this time I think I’ll manage to drag myself over the finish line. It seems like my drive to write stuff has been low lately, but that’s not because there aren’t games to talk about, far from it. It seems a little ironic that I have less time during the summer with a full-time job than I did when I was taking classes, but hey, that’s life I guess. Instead of keeping you through any more preamble, I’ll start this one with a couple of rapid-fire opinions on some of what I’ve played since my last blog.

HOT (or, at least lukewarm) TAKES

• Nier: Automata is one of the most batshit crazy, thought provoking games I’ve played in a very long time. While the actual gameplay is “passable” or “decent” at best, that doesn’t really matter because the story is a truly insane meditation on existentialism via robots who dress up all gothic lolita. Absolutely worth taking a look at if any of that sounds vaguely interesting, because it’s pretty amazing.

• While comparisons to Dark Souls are warranted and obvious, they also don’t give Nioh enough credit as its own thing, nor do they really emphasize how satisfying of an action game it is. It turns out adding a little bit of Ninja Gaiden to the mix, speeding things up, and raising the execution ceiling are all things I am very much into. It took me a bit to get the hang of Nioh’s mechanics, but once I did it quickly cemented itself as one of my favorite games this year (which, admittedly, is a phrase I’ve been using a lot recently.) The core gameplay is so good, I’m willing to overlook some of the drab environmental design that permeates most of the game’s levels.

• It’s weird, I feel like I need to be defensive about Persona 5? I enjoyed the hell out of it, which is why I feel a disconnect when people talk as if it’s somehow a disappointment. I dunno if it’s just because of how Persona 4 is viewed, especially on this site, or if I just fall on one side of a divisive main cast but yeah. It’s great. The dungeon crawling is significantly better, the S. Links are sharp, and the main plot is… well, it choreographs some really obvious twists and then expects you to pretend to be surprised, but I think it’s probably better about delivering its themes than Persona 3 and 4 were.

• PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds isn’t the most fun I’ve had playing a shooter recently (that award goes to Doom and Titanfall 2) but it is the most fun I’ve had playing a shooter with other people. I do sometimes wish it was more killer and less filler, or involved less of me getting shot in the back from halfway across a field, but it’s become my current default “don’t feel like doing anything else” game of choice. I’ve managed to win once in duos, but have only gotten into the top 10 a few times while playing solo.

• Honestly, I could probably write a whole blog about Prey, but for the sake of me actually finishing one of these I’ll relegate it to a bullet point. They made a new System Shock and actually managed to nail it. The combat might be a little messy (especially if you play it like a straight up shooter), it might be a couple of hours too long, and the difficulty curve might be weird, (I died a lot at the start, but by the end of the game I was dispatching the Nightmare with zero problems between an abundance of medkits, psionic powers, and a fully upgraded shotgun) but I honestly think it’s one of the most impressive “lived in” environments I’ve ever seen. It goes for the mundane and the subtle, rather than the fantastical and nakedly symbolic environs of your Bioshock and friends, but that actually worked to my favor when I was crawling through every single room, listening to audio logs and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. I’m not sure if it’s a game that will please everyone, but as something geared towards my specific tastes it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Yooka-Laylee

I’ve had a pretty good track record of backing Kickstarters, inasmuch as I’ve yet to back a scam, a failed project, or a Mighty No. 9 level trainwreck. I’ve even backed some winners between games like FTL, Divinity: Original Sin, and Pillars of Eternity. However, it turns out that, like video games at large, the majority of my crowdfunding adventures have fallen somewhere in the middle, quality-wise. I’ve already said my pieces about Wasteland 2, (entirely competent, if somewhat boring, ugly, and in need of serious UI overhaul) Torment: Tides of Numenera, (Honestly, after thinking about it for a while, I think I’m just going to label this one as a straight disappointment on all levels.It’s okay, but Planescape: Torment it is not.) and even something like Xenonauts (They made a depressingly close simulacrum of the original X-COM, but stripped out all the fun broken shit.) Joining those hallowed halls of mediocre-to-okay crowdfunding projects is no less than Yooka-Laylee; a game I enjoyed far more when I gave up any sort of high expectations and just accepted that I might as well be playing something from 19 years ago.

However, that doesn’t really cover my feelings on the game, which are conflicted and probably have a Stockholm Syndrome-esque twist to them. Yooka-Laylee is a monkey’s paw wish or a Faustian pact of a video game. In a world where seemingly every major Kickstarter is breaking promises or falling down an endless hole of feature creep, the team at Playtonic managed to deliver exactly what they set out to make: A new 3D platformer in the style of Rare’s N64 offerings, most obviously Banjo-Kazooie. The dark ironic twist to this tale is that Yooka-Laylee is a fairly underwhelming one of those games, one that copies the style of something like Banjo without fully understanding why people liked those games in the first place… and I still enjoyed most of it. It turns out I’m still a sucker for collecting random bullshit, even when the end product is a pale imitation best approached with a healthy dose of nostalgia and low expectations.

I could go down a laundry list of why it’s the textbook definition of a 3 out of 5 game, from the temperamental camera that would’ve been acceptable in 1999, to the controls that can’t decide if they want to be precise or loose, or the utterly terrible and inane minigames that are featured in all 5 of the game’s levels. But a lot of that ultimately boils down to “They made it exactly like a N64 game, warts and all” which isn’t an especially exciting argument to make when half of the solutions are “Make the game I remember, not the game that actually exists.” I’m also not going to fall into the trap of saying that this is proof that those old games don’t “Hold up,” for whatever that empty phrase means. If I’m going to nail Yooka-Laylee anywhere, it’s the level design, which is a surprsing combination of simplistic and incoherent and significantly worse than anything featured in Banjo-Kazooie. The worlds in Yooka Laylee are all a bunch of mostly flat, open spaces with different obvious “Pagie” locations segregated off from one another in a manner that feels utilitarian and budget. There’s not a whole lot of cohesiveness to any of them, and in general anything between those points is boring filler. In a seeming admission that making assets for HD games is expensive when you’re running with a small team, there are only 5 worlds in Y-L, but they can be “expanded” once each. That usually just means another chunk of the map opens up, but it also has the side effect of making the levels more sprawling in a manner that just makes them more like Donkey Kong 64, which is not a comparison you want to make. I really don’t feel like looking for new pagies when most of the level is indistinct from one part to another and I don’t remember where I’ve gone. It’s not a coincidence that the one time that feature worked for me was the ice level, where the new environment is contained to a single puzzle-filled ice castle that makes effective use of its space.

Straight up, I think Yooka-Laylee would be a better game with half to 2/3rds as many pagies and more interesting challenges to get them. Maybe not the elaborate, multi-stage, level-hopping Jiggie solutions of a Banjo-Tooie, but something at least more interesting and creative than “Get to point using Power X.” It’s unfortunate, because for as much as I’ve been dumping on this game, there was just enough charm and just enough creativity to get me to the 100 pagie minimum needed to finish the game. In general, the dialogue is more hit than miss, even if I could’ve used fewer meta-jokes about how old games are old. The character designs are colorful and generally charming, with the incredibly shady “Trowzer” snake calling back to some of the better Banjo-Kazooie supporting characters and old Rare’s habit of throwing in filthy double entendres wherever they could. That Grant Kirkhope soundtrack is great and Grant Kirkhope as hell. But it doesn’t really add up to anything grand or impactful. I still believe that a good spiritual successor to those old Rare games could theoretically be made, and I don’t really regret seeing my name pop up in the credits. As far as revival Kickstarters go, however, Yooka Laylee falls firmly on the low side of “acceptable” and is likely only worth one’s time as a cheap, dirty hit of nostalgia.

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia

What were you expecting? A Fire Emblem game comes out and I don’t comment on it? Oh please. Video_Game_King hasn’t been on these forums for years, so someone has to talk about the series like a foaming lunatic whenever it comes into the public consciousness. Oh sure, it’s easy now because Fire Emblem has seemingly become one of Nintendo’s main pillars between the success of Awakening, Fates, and that stupid mobile game. At the very least, I can still be one of those salty old fans who can complain endlessly about how I liked a thing before it was cool and all you damn kids with your anime eugenics and your casual modes don’t know how good you have it. If that hasn’t scared you away, I guess we can talk about Shadows of Valentia, if you want.

It’s worth mentioning that, as one of my favorite video game series period, I’ve dallied around with and even completed most of the series’ Japan-only installments. While I never got around to actually beating it, it turns out I did play most of 1991’s Fire Emblem Gaiden, which is why I can say with a decent amount of authority that Echoes is a mostly straight remake and that’s kinda awesome. FE: Gaiden easily falls into the category of “Weird NES sequels” alongside something like Zelda 2, in that it features a bunch of one-off ideas that were passed over in subsequent installments. Some of those, like an overworld map, split promotions, the opportunity to grind, and monster enemies eventually made their way back around to the series proper in The Sacred Stones, which definitely was a spiritual successor to Gaiden. The aforementioned Tear Ring Saga borrowed a couple of those ideas as well, although those are probably the least crazy deviations from the core FE formula that TRS experiments with.

When I say that Shadows of Valentia is a mostly straight remake of Gaiden from a core gameplay perspective, I mean it. A lot of the NES original’s rough edges have been sanded down, a couple of modern concepts like forging and skills have been thrown in, and the story has been expanded upon greatly, but all of Gaiden’s more unique, weird-ass ideas are intact. Archers with 5 range, character spells that cost HP, or a single inventory slot that can be filled with a weapon, shield, or ring. It’s a nice contrast to Shadow Dragon, the generally dull remake of the original game that can’t decide if it wants to be a throwback or a modern Fire Emblem game and isn’t great at either. Echoes avoids that problem by firmly planting its flag in the “throwback” category, which in a weird twist actually makes it a bit of a fresh breath of air after Fates seemed to have turned some people off.

Where that backfires occasionally is that Gaiden’s NES-quality map design has also made it over, which coincidentally makes level design the main gripe of both of the titles discussed on this blog. Given how much I enjoyed the Conquest campaign of FE: Fates for its constantly surprising, borderline sadistic maps, the constant, mostly open fields of Echoes are a definite step back, as are the cramped dungeon skirmishes. It wasn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it does make Echoes a bit of a pushover by series standards, even without throwing in Mila’s Turnwheel (which I actually enjoy using as a crazy perfectionist) or Casual mode. Playing on Hard, I can think of like two maps that gave me any sort of momentary trouble, both of which were near the end of the game and involved large swarms of enemy units. Though, getting back to the dungeon crawling for a second, it’s a decent change of pace from map to map until the end of the game becomes one big, long dungeon crawl (and the new post-game content is mostly one big mega dungeon) and you realize that the dungeon controls are kinda clunky and bad. Even as someone who loves him some Fire Emblem, it wore itself dangerously thin near the end.

Luckily, I found Echoes production values helped pick up the slack more often than not. I’m not going to pretend that its story is some sort of grand, revelatory tale, but after the burning trash fire that was Fire Emblem Fate’s story (a game that betrays its own core premise of “Fake Family vs Real Family” for the sake of letting you bone down on your siblings) the story of Shadows of Valentia was a pleasant surprise. It probably helps that the localization was an 8-4 joint (also responsible for Awakening and Shadow Dragon) instead of NOA’s internal Treehouse team, but the script is sharp and the inclusion of full voice acting (it’s pretty good voice acting too) adds a hell of a lot. Supports are limited and trimmed down, but each character gets their fair share of base conversations a la Path of Radiance which fill in the gap well enough. Given my new avatar, it’s also worth mentioning that I’m a pretty big fan of the art style, which is more subtle and less overtly “ANIME” than Yusuke Kozaki’s work on Awakening and Fates in a way I can get behind.

I think I’ve prattled on enough, but I do hope that Echoes represents a fun little sub-brand for Fire Emblem and that we’ll see remakes of Seisen no Keifu and Thracia 776 if things go well for this one. In balance, I think it’s probably still somewhere in the middle of my entirely legitimate Fire Emblem tier list, but in a year of already great games I can still see this one ending up somewhere on my top 10.

Random Endorsement:

I'm glad that someone like Matt Barton exists. The dude could not look more like a guy who Youtubes about old-school CRPGs, not to mention his ale section at the ends of his videos, which is why I found his interview with Tim Lang about his time at New World Computing and the development of Might and Magic IX to be a fascinating thing. It's a little long, but this video and the ones after it are neat for me, as someone whose other favorite series is Might and Magic.

I’m currently not playing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for as much as I wish I were. Unfortunately, the Wii U is currently at my parents’ house, where my younger brother regularly uses it to play Smash Bros and there’s no chance in hell of me getting a Switch at launch. I know my tastes well enough to know the dozen or so first party exclusives any given Nintendo platform accrues over its lifetime will be worth my while, but that doesn't mean I can't wait for some of those games to actually come out. I waited a year to get a Wii U, and I'll probably wait that long to get a Switch, just in time for whatever new Fire Emblem game they're making for it to come out. Welp, in any case, I guess I’ll just be over here, playing Nioh and watching weird anime.

Halo 2 and Halo 3

Speaking of first-party exclusives, since my last blog. I’ve managed to get through both Halo 2 and Halo 3 in my quest to play through (almost all) of the Halo with my brother-in-law. While that is honestly a lot of Halo, I find myself still itching to get through the rest of those games, with ODST next on the docket. For as interesting as Halo Combat Evolved is as a piece of history, it was nice to get back to the games in the series I actually have nostalgia for. The anniversary remaster of Halo 2 in particular was a nice surprise, given how long it had been since I played it and how nice the Master Chief Collection version of it looks and sounds. It’s a weird thing to point out, but the new weapon audio, in particular, actually made me go “Holy shit the Magnum sounds so cool” a couple of times. It doesn’t really help Halo 3, by comparison, is mostly untouched from almost a decade ago and looks the part. Wait, did I just say “almost a decade?” Now I feel old.

But, as it turns out, they’re both still plenty fun to play, which I guess is a nice surprise after not seriously playing either in almost a decade. For as much as the campaigns of Halo 2 and 3 have bled together in my mind over the ensuing years, I actually remembered more specifics about both than I thought I would, right down to a couple of the hidden skull locations in Halo 3 and when the shitty flood levels would happen. Between them, the quality of the gunplay and the vaunted “combat sandbox” is more or less equal, though I think Halo 3 is better paced and has the best vehicle sequences in the series, though maybe ODST or Reach will challenge that assertion when I get to them. Either way, it’s actually really hard to talk about Halo when you assume your audience already knows what Halo is. Like, I don’t think getting into small mechanical differences, like how the lunge range on the Halo 2 plasma sword is redonkulous, is really the kind of subject I’d be well-versed in talking about. This Haloventure thus far has been a good reminder that, for better or worse, Bungie got very good at making these games follow a very specific template they only had to tweak slightly over the course of 9 years.

Ultimately, the biggest differentiator for me between Halo 2 and Halo 3 are the Arbiter levels, which are the closest thing Halo as a series has to “good worldbuilding”. It was actually surprising to see the way they managed to explain how The Covenant views things and operates without any sort of ridiculous expository dialogue. Where was that kind of storytelling in Destiny? Of course I can’t really talk about the story for either of these games without mentioning Halo 2’s ending, huh? Even with the caveat that I only superficially care about the story of the Halo series, it’s a textbook example of a bad cliffhanger, a cocktease of a conclusion which would’ve left me a little livid had I actually needed to wait 3 years to see its resolution. Halo 3 does, in fact, finish the fight in a decent enough manner, though it’s hard to talk about the way it ends without thinking of how 343 managed to squander the wide open door left for them. But the Halo 4 talk will have to happen another time. For now,

Torment: Tides of Numenera

Hey guys! This game is finally out only 3 ½ years after I backed it on Kickstarter! Torment: Tides of Numenera is InXile’s attempt to make the spiritual successor to Planescape Torment, one of the greatest walls of text CRPGs ever made. On that front, it mostly succeeds. Going down all the checkboxes, it’s a densely worded RPG with a strong emphasis on talking over fighting, set in an intentionally alienating world, with a smaller-scale personal story surrounding its amnesiac protagonist. Of course, it’s one thing to follow a checklist of features from a beloved classic and another entirely to do it well. In that case, my feelings are a little more complicated, and while I think Tides of Numenera is a fascinating, well-written RPG, I don’t think it quite resonated with me as much as it could have. It’s been a difficult process laying my thoughts out as to why this is the case, but I think I’ve finally managed to get a handle on them.

Like Planescape, the “game” part of Tides of Numenera is easily its least important aspect. While yeah, it’s a RPG based on a pen and paper ruleset, the mechanics mostly exist to facilitate lengthy blocks of well-written text as you wander around the game’s two main hub areas alongside a handful of smaller environments talking to and interacting with every single person and thing with a name or an icon when you press tab. There are combat and skill checks, yeah, but the combat is boring and after a certain point in the game I found the skill checks to be mostly trivial. Said combat is, thankfully pretty uncommon, and can be made rarer still by talking your way out of everything, which is what I did when possible. The encounters themselves are hand-crafted in a way which in theory gives the player a lot of options on how to approach things. In the first fight, for example, you can rewire a piece of old technology to attack your enemies, intimidate them for a debuff, use a Cipher (1-use unique disposable items) or just hit them in the face. It’s a strong proof-of-concept, one betrayed by the reality that the first encounter is going to be the one that gets playtested and tweaked the most. The remainder is left with mechanically shallow turn-based encounters with a handful of interactive objects to make the paltry set of skills and tools at your party’s disposal seem less underwhelming.They’re also balanced around the tacit acknowledgement that you’re probably not going to make your main character a Glaive (the “Fighter” equivalent) in a game where combat is the least important part. The combat itself is based around the exact same mechanics as any given skill check, and the idea behind them (having a limited “pool” of Might, Speed, and Intellect which you can spend to increase your chances of success) seems like it would make perfect sense in the context of the Numenera P&P rules. In the context of a video game, you can reload and you can rest without much consequence. One of the loading screens seemed to suggest some quests might be unresolveable if you rest too much, but I didn’t encounter anything like that. In any case, the only truly irreplaceable skill that you should invest in is Amanesis, which like investing in Wisdom in Planescape, gives you the ability to remember things that might be useful.

With the trifling matter of “gameplay” out of the way, I should probably talk about the story, right? Well, your character, The Last Castoff, is the recently evacuated body of a long-lived, body hopping entity known as The Changing God. With nothing but a vague goal to fix something called “a resonance chamber” and the threat of an ancient destructive force known only as “The Sorrow” on your trail, you find yourself wandering the 9th world of Numenera, a setting where the world is built upon the ruins of ancient, unknowable technology from eras long past (think Clarke’s 3rd law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”) and said technology might as well be as common as dirt. If that premise sounds even headier and weirder than the story of an immortal amnesiac on a quest to figure out what his deal is, that’s because it is. “Heady and weird” is indeed the tone of choice for Tides of Numenera, and unlike Planescape it doesn’t have the pre existing tropes and concepts of the D&D cosmology to fall back on. Without fail, every single quest and every single NPC you encounter has some unique quirk, some alien aspect which makes for good speculative sci-fi. To just give a couple examples from the first real area of Sagus Cliffs, there’s a woman who is slowly turning into an insect because of the way her ciphers are interacting with one another, an adoption agency where the kids are actually from the past, and a solitary armored figure who has been forced to recount his failure (at the hands of your sire, no less) for centuries. The endless amount of flexibility that comes from a setting like this allows for a lot of creativity from the writers, and it shows. It’s good enough that I’ll even forgive the “Adahn” callback that was thrown in because reference.

The danger which comes from an intentionally alienating setting is the risk of being unable to ground the reader in any sort of consistent reality. I think Torment has this problem a little bit, where I found myself disconnected from caring about anything happening outside of the more meta goal of getting as much interesting dialogue as possible because everything is always crazy and abstract all the time. There’s a bit of a je ne sais quoi to this whole thing, where I can’t tell you specifically where and why I shifted from feeling like a participant to an observer, or why this game triggered that dissonance but the original Planescape Torment didn’t. I think a strong factor has to do with my utter lack of interest in the supporting NPC companions I dragged along with me. Castellige’s aloof, condescending demeanor grated, I never felt like I got a great handle on Matinka, and while it’s hilarious that Rhin is literally a 10-year-old girl with no special skills (other than the rock in her pocket being “a god”) she’s a little too precocious for my tastes. Maybe if I ran around with Aligern, Tybir, and Erritis I’d think differently, but unless I give this game a replay in a couple of years I won’t know. Another piece of that puzzle is the game’s conclusion, which felt like a bad, rushed cop-out that actually surprised me when it came around the 17 hour mark (keep in mind I’m a very fast reader and YMMV) and ended in a confrontation where I didn’t feel like any of the choices I was given were the right ones. It’s the strongest piece of evidence that Tides of Numenera was going to be a far more ambitious game at one point, but due to the realities of development was eventually pared down to its current state. To be fair, when people talk about how much they love Planescape Torment, they’re usually not referring to its combat-heavy last third, but even that slog didn’t leave me cold at the end.

I can’t help but compare Torment: Tides of Numenera to Tyranny; another flawed RPG, running on the same Pillars of Eternity tech with boring combat, a similar focus on dialogue, a comparatively short running time by the standards of CRPGs, and an underwhelming, seemingly truncated conclusion. It’s ultimately a comparison that leads me to believe I liked Tyranny more, even despite the fact that it took me like a month to finish it compared to the handful of days I spent with Numenera. Neither stands among my favorite CRPGs, but maybe that just means I prefer Tyranny’s ruminations on a particularly grim, mundane brand of evil over Torment’s more high-minded sci-fi and philosophy, or maybe I think Obsidian has better writers than InXile. Regardless, I think I’m done supporting crowdfunded RPGs for a while.

Random Endorsement:

It’s my pleasure to say that the My Brother, My Brother, and Me TV show manages to successfully translate the McElroy brothers’ style of humor into a visual medium without losing anything. This episode is free on Youtube, but if you want to watch the rest you have to sign up for Seeso, a streaming video service that seemed like it didn’t have much else that I wanted to watch. Soo… maybe just do what I did and take advantage of the free trial before unsubscribing.

Hey everyone, it’s me, ArbitraryWater. I’m not as busy with school as I was last semester, and as a result I’ve had more opportunities to make poor choices with my free time and disposable income in the form of video games. 2017 has already been a surprisingly good year for that stuff, and I’ve already gone back to Resident Evil 7 to speedrun it in under 3 hours (very doable) and start a playthrough on Madhouse difficulty and am still occasionally putting some time here and there into Yakuza 0 (which definitely seems like it’ll be a slow burn for me.) I even played some of that other thing too. But I’m not here to talk about those games, I’m here to talk about a trio of disparate titles that I spent my time with because I don’t have anything better to do with my life.

That stupid Fire Emblem mobile game

Aside from a brief flirtation with Hearthstone (one that ended the moment I realized how much I’d have to pay or grind to be even remotely competitive) I’ve never been the biggest fan of Free-to-Play mobile games. However, I’m a sucker and an idiot, and it turns out all it took to snag me was to slap the name of something I cherish deeply on an insidious Japanese gatchapon-style game, give it a Nintendo level of polish, and make the core gameplay short and disposable enough that I can briefly engage in it whenever I’m doing other junk with my cell phone. Fire Emblem Heroes is not so much a game I enjoy so much as it’s an easy thing to fill time when I’m waiting for water to boil or class to start that reminds me of games I enjoy. Certainly, it’s well-made, has some great art, and requires a basic level of strategy, but… maybe I should just play those DLC challenge maps for Fates instead. Right after I get a 5-star draw better than Marth.

If nothing else, FE Heroes should be commended for successfully translating the core gameplay of that series into a bite-sized, watered-down mobile game that still remains recognizable as intrinsically Fire Emblem. Perma-death and waifu-ing are out, but square grids, skill triggers and the weapon triangle are intact and squeezed onto a single-screen map. I’m legitimately impressed by how many of the tactics I use in regular Fire Emblem games still apply, but the loss of depth is still apparent in the way stuff often boils down to simple rock-paper-scissors and numerical advantages far more than the main series does. This becomes nakedly obvious in the arena, where you fight other players’ (AI controlled) teams, and can lose your winning streak if you run up against a team accidentally suited to taking your dudes out… especially when it’s filled with overpowered 5-star characters. In a game where very few units have 1-2 range, Takumi stands out as broken for that reason alone.

There’s a vapid, borderline unnecessary story as an excuse to have all of these Fire Emblem characters fight together, but you will miss exactly nothing of value should you just slam your finger on the skip button every time it appears. Indeed, the main story chapters released thus far do the slightly underhanded thing of being absurdly easy until the last set of levels, at which point things got serious and I actually had to grind up my team. It’s to be expected, I guess, but it’s worth emphasizing that Heroes is structured and paced like a mobile game. Once you finish with all of the levels on Normal difficulty, the stamina costs noticeably increase. It doesn’t seem as sleazy or egregious as it could be, (which is probably why I’ve stuck with it as long as I have) though the cost of upgrading a 4-star character to a 5-star one is ridiculous enough that I doubt I’ll be playing Fire Emblem Heroes for much longer… well, that’ll probably happen if I say it enough times, right? I need to save my Fire Emblem-ing this year for that Gaiden remake.

Halo: Combat Evolved

In a fit of madness, my brother-in-law and I decided to play through most of the Halo campaigns cooperatively over the course of this year via his copy of The Master Chief Collection. While it’s quite possible that I’ll be sick of Microsoft’s slightly-faded flagship series by the time we reach Halo 4, my experience with Combat Evolved was a promising enough start to an objectively questionable idea. It’s worth mentioning, though, that before this playthrough I had never gotten especially far in Halo 1’s campaign. My nostalgia has always been more for Halo 2 and 3 than the original… and after playing through it I think I understand why. Don’t take that the wrong way, Halo CE holds up remarkably well for a game that is now more than 15 years old, but it also betrays its age and status as an unproven launch game for an unproven console in a way that made me very excited to move onto Halo 2.

The biggest thing that stuck out for me in regards to CE was that the quintessential Halo “combat puzzle” loop is entirely intact and still the biggest draw. Sure, the Halo 1 assault rifle is a ineffectual bullet hose that I switched for just about anything else, but the Halo 1 magnum lives up to its reputation as a headshot murder machine juuuuuust fine, and most of the other weapons feel appropriately powerful as well. For as much as subsequent games in the series have improved upon and refined this formula, the comparatively simple, slightly raw incarnation found in Combat Evolved has its own appeal. Grunts will flee if you kill their Elite commander, enemies with shields are more easily taken down with energy weapons, the flood are shitty and terrible, etc. If I had a true qualm with Halo 1’s version of Halo combat, it’s that everything is noticeably sluggish in a way that reminds you that first-person shooters on a console weren’t a totally tried and true thing in 2001. It’s not just Master Chief’s walking speed, it’s reload speed on a lot of weapons, it’s the recovery frames on a melee attack, it’s the time it takes for a plasma grenade to explode, and it’s the time it takes for your shield to recharge. I know Halo has always been a fairly deliberate brand of shooter, but as someone who immediately moved onto Halo 2 after this one I can confirm that the difference in speed is stark.

The structure of Halo 1’s campaign is also easily recognizable as the structure of a Halo campaign. There are levels with wide-open arenas, levels with more claustrophobic corridors, levels with the obligatory Warthog or Scorpion sequence, and terrible flood levels that are equal parts tedious and annoying. The story isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s coherent and doesn’t go up its own ass in lore, which I guess hasn’t really been the case after 343 took over. All you need to know is that Master Chief is a faceless space marine, Cortana is a sassy AI lady, The Covenant are crazy religious aliens, and the Halo is actually a superweapon made to kill weird parasite plantbugzombie things. The “Silent Cartographer” level remains a standout for the right reasons because it’s big, nonlinear and ultra-impressive for something from 2001. In contrast, the “Library” level remains a standout for the wrong reasons because it’s a never ending sequence of identical hallways where you fight the most annoying enemy type for 30 minutes straight and can only find your way thanks to glowing arrows on the floor added in the Anniversary remaster. While none of the other levels are as bad as that one, there are a few too many sequences where you walk through identical rooms for my liking. I guess it can be excused, given Halo’s status as a launch title, but… it’s fair to say that the level design improved greatly in subsequent games. Really, that captures my attitude about Halo: Combat Evolved as a whole. It was good, I enjoyed it, I understand why it’s so important, but man am I enjoying Halo 2 so much more. You can likely expect to hear about that in the near future.

Steins;Gate 0

Listen guys, Nioh was (and still is, as of this writing) sold-out on Amazon and I was bummed, so being the responsible adult that I am I instead impulse bought the sequel to that visual novel I played last month. You know, the one about Japanese teens sending text messages back in time? I think it’s worth emphasizing again that I kinda love Steins;Gate. Like, I’d consider buying a figurine of one of its characters or something, and I’m not the kind of person who buys figurines. So yeah, Steins;Gate 0 is a semi-direct sequel to that, and while it’s not quite as great, it’s still pretty great. I say semi-direct because it essentially takes place in a timeline where protagonist Okabe Rintaro fails during the original game’s true ending, which in turn means that the main plot of Steins;Gate 0 cannot be discussed in specifics without entirely spoiling Steins;Gate. I’m not willing to do that (Funimation has the entire subbed version of the Steins;Gate anime adaption on their youtube, legally. I think I might prefer the dub and I think you might have to be in the US, but just watch it already.) though if anyone wants to talk to me about the plot of this game with spoiler tags, I’d love to do so.

So instead I guess I’ll talk about generalities. Like the first one, SG0 is a visual novel where your only real form of interaction comes in the form answering or not answering phone calls and texts. Unlike the first one, which was basically a linear story with a handful of opportunities to get alternate endings, 0 branches pretty hard early on and then branches again for each of the 5 endings (with a 6th true ending acting as an epilogue to one of the other ones.) As a result, it’s not quite as cohesive, but aside from the truly unsatisfying bad ending and a couple of dangling plot threads, as a whole the story manages to justify itself quite well. Everyone from the original cast gets a moment in the spotlight at some point, and most of the new characters are likeable and fit in snugly. The translation was apparently done by a different team than the first one, so I found a couple of inconsistencies that bugged me, like how names are presented western style instead of Japanese style (it’s never not weird to read “Kurisu Makise” when the voice actors are clearly saying “Makise Kurisu”) or how “Moe” and “Kawaii” are both translated as “cute.” It’s probably also worth mentioning that the artwork, while still great, lost a bit of the first game’s unique style, something that’s plainly obvious whenever old versions of character portraits show up. Neither of those things really dampened my enjoyment, however, and if you happen to like Steins;Gate I think 0 is a worthy sequel. Honestly don’t know how they’re going to do the anime adaption though.

Random Endorsement:

Yo, just watch Steins;Gate.