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.