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blzzzrrttt

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Game of the Year 2017+1: late arr[I]val

Hey! Long time no see.

2016 was a record bad year for me personally. 2017? Also garbage. 2018 completes the hat trick with an impressive sour turn so close to the finish line, it’s impressive really. It’s not the worst thing to happen to me over the last two years but my relationship to video games changed. I checked Steam every day combing the new releases and upcoming games for anything that seemed interesting. I played Overwatch and other games with a pretty close group of friends. Streamed games for fun and for charity. All of that is pretty hard to do when you don’t have a place to live (and also when you lose all your hardware).

With those daily routines disrupted I didn’t have much else to do. Games were a big part of my life and I genuinely did not have much else to do without them. I have a smartphone and I can (and do!) play games on it but it’s not the same. There’s Twitch and various other ways of experiencing the brand new offerings of the medium that are out there but it still isn’t the same. I played a handful of stuff in the first quarter of 2017 but the disconnect I felt then was demoralizing. I always looked forward to Goty season because it was the only time I hunkered down and managed to write something, anything at all, and feel good about it afterward. I didn’t see much point in doing it at all in 2017.

But I did promise to one person that I would try to get something out there and here I am one year later! Fashionably late and incredibly relevant, I’m sure.

I didn’t actually put much work into a list for 2017. A list of titles in a Notes file on my phone are as far as I got so while I don’t have those fresher thoughts of then I’ll do my best to articulate why I might’ve thought about mentioning them. I’ve even thrown in some games that I’ve experienced in 2018 too. I have not yet transitioned into The Mobile Gamer but I did manage to watch a bunch of and also play a handful of games worth talking about.

And speaking of transitioning: since I needed a bunch of now free time to fill I got extremely into anime and manga (again). I don’t have a good place to express my many, many thoughts about the stuff I watch and read but if that is of any interest to you then feel free to hit me up on twitter or discord (I am still not sure how you find people on discord but you can probably find me there) for that reason, or any other reason I guess. I’ve sorta drifted away from the community side of GB as well and barring any sudden change I don’t see myself really sticking around afterwards and might only check back in around this time in the following years.

So, until next time: <>!

——

Here‘s some links referenced in the entries below:

Kar98k and the Ironblood faction from Girls’ Frontline and Azur Lane respectively for the use of the Iron Cross imagery in both games as mentioned in For Honor.

Nero, Shuten-Douji & Raikou for reference.

Subterfuge post at the Discourse Zone.

List items

  • Yoko Taro’s tale of androids and humanity that seemed to enrapture so many people when it came out in 2017. I remember all the talk around the game (that wasn’t about 2B’s butt) when it first released was very hush-hush. “Just play it!” “Don’t spoil yourself!” “It’s so good!” And I did just that: played it unspoiled as I could possibly be. I also did not enjoy my time with it very much. Didn’t reach any major ending and wasn’t quite hooked by any story beats or gameplay mechanics. I did spoil myself when Goty came ‘round and I’m genuinely bummed out I didn’t have the opportunity to experience Automata’s philosophical and meta-textual narrative first-hand. It all sounds extremely interesting, genuinely moving and highly memorable. I’m sure I would’ve gotten there myself if I had the opportunity but I highly respect it all the same.

    Also, I remember when I was playing I tried to figure out how to self-destruct and just couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. I looked it up and found the info I was looking for on a ?? site. Maybe the only time I felt embarrassed looking up info for a game in my life.

  • Knights, Samurai, Vikings.

    Control Points, Creeps, Duels.

    Swords, Spears... Cudgels?

    Most of my mechanical knowledge of For Honor has faded away at this point but I so very clearly remember why this game stood out to me. It wasn’t the specificity of the combat or the deliberate game-feel but a single match.

    I was solo-queueing for Deathmatch. It’s a pretty standard deathmatch mode. You get one life each round as your team of three faces off against another team. I think the games were best of 5, first to three wins. I believe the match took place on a castle map that was under siege. It was a night map too, so the fires on the map really stood out against those deep blues.

    I imagine quite a few big multiplayer games have this but in For Honor you can make a customizable emblem that shows up near your name. You can make all sorts of stuff with the basic shapes you’re given. I remember seeing quite a few Isaacs (from The Binding of Isaac, the video game). Just a bit of personal flair to give folks a first impression of you since these are the first things you see when everyone loads into the map.

    So, 3v3. Me and two randos and three players on the other team. My icon at the time was a trans pride flag, it’s pretty easy to make. I don’t remember what any of my teammates icons were but one player on the enemy team had an Iron Cross as their emblem. If you’re not familiar, the Iron Cross is a piece of German military iconography. It’s the go to symbol when you need to, let’s say, vaguely evoke Nazi Germany but don’t want to use a swastika but it’s also a symbol with a history of use in Germany both before and after World War II. Oddly enough, two games on this very list use it for the the former purpose.

    Anyway, I’m on edge now. Prepared for a mildly awful experience at best and some slurs at worse. The match begins without anyone acknowledging it and it proceeds pretty normally until I end up fighting this player with the Iron Cross.

    In the deathmatch mode you spawn pretty close to an enemy so you can fight it out. Close enough to feel each other out before either of you strike and far enough away to where faster characters can slip away and help an ally overpower someone else. There’s no enforceable code of ethics in this game. People generally seemed to stick to 1v1s until they don’t but again, there aren’t any actual rules to going 2 or 3v1.

    I’m fighting the Iron Cross. We’re trading hits, blocks and counters. Long enough to where our the Iron Cross is only player left on their team. My teammates rush over, both of them are alive, and immediately start wailing on the Cross. I join in and we win the round. The Iron Cross makes a remark in the chat that ganging up isn’t fair. No one responds.

    Another round starts. I’m paired up with a different enemy the Iron Cross is somewhere else and is the first to die that round. The rest of us play it out. No teaming. “Oh so now you have honor?” No one responds. The final round starts, it’s a similar situation to before. The Cross is the final player remaining and as soon as we get a chance our team pummels them. That was the last round we needed to win.

    “Oh cmon”

    “Stop whining” one of the players on the enemy team, one of the Cross’ teammates actually tells them to stop complaining.

    There’s no way to know if that player was actually unsavory or not but there’s something deeply funny to me that every single other player in that match managed to silently collaborate in an effort to not give this person any honor whatsoever.

    I don’t think about this game much beyond this moment but that’s a-ok with me!

  • A Big Demon shows up in Hell and has 1,000,000,000,000 (a trillion) hit points. You play as Satan, ruler of hell and you are tasked with killing this god before it can destroy hell. A trillion is a very large number, much larger than a billion, or even a million. You’d think Satan would be able to handle something like this pretty easily but the first battle in this game is against Trillion and you get a taste of how daunting it is. It’s moves are telegraphed and cover a sizable portion of the battlefield. Turns are spent figuring out the best way to get hits in while also positioning yourself to avoid Trillions forthcoming attacks. Trillion is also coated in a thick and powerful armor. The small dents you’re able to make will be rewarded once you can cut it down but, if I remember correctly, the first encounter ends here as the god of destruction puts Satan out of commission by gravely wounding him.

    This is where the game truly begins. From here you choose one of Satan’s vassals to enter your tutelage so that you can train them to defeat Trillion. They’re all various archetypes of anime lady based on the seven deadly sins. The gamplay at this point is a familiar raising sim structure. You assign a schedule for you vassal to undertake in order to raise her stats, learn skills, collect items and earn money. All while Trillion is causing havoc by devouring entire parts of hell. Eventually your training stops and you square up against Trillion.

    The thing is though, you aren’t meant to win. Your vassals are weak and Trillion is Trillion. If you spend to long fighting, Trillion advances and you lose. And when you lose your vassal dies but you can pass her strength on to the next one and the cycle continues until either side emerges alive.

    I probably wouldn’t have bought this game if I had known that it involved this certain type of permadeath in it. It’s why I steer clear of XCOM and Fire Emblem. It’s also a part of why I really, really dislike Valkyria Chronicles. It does a pretty good job of inducing a very grim feeling in the lead up to your first Trillion rematch. The feeling of the inevitable death in the face of a seemingly undefeatable foe. I think it works even better than you’d expect because most of the game is fairly light-hearted. You’d almost forget that you’re training a sacrifice in what could be an arduous war of attrition if you go into things unprepared. I stopped playing this game once I realized what was up with the core loop. It’s possible that the deaths get reversed once you beat Trillion but who knows if I’d ever find the motivation to get there.

  • Bugs! And I’m talking about the good kind!

    Hollow Knight is a video game I’m sure most people have heard of at this point. I was both surprised and not at all surprised to see the game get an extra burst of popularity once it hit the Switch. Hollow Knight is an extraordinary example of a game that takes inspiration from Dark Souls not (necessarily) in the form of combat but in terms of unobtrusive but rewarding lore and world building. It’s a joy to explore, with the sorts of tucked away interactions and events that make you wanna compare travel notes with someone else. Even the way the game presents your discoveries on the map, by having you manually take a rest so the Hollow Knight can scribble it out does so much to communicate how essential discovery is to this genre and how it makes it feel like your own. Just an incredibly charming game all around.

  • Of all the games on this list HackyZack is probably the one I am the least ‘freshest’ on. It’s a game where you juggle a ball around like a hacky sack throughout various puzzles while your character platforms about. I remember the controls being analogous to all my attempts at trying to control a hacky sack in real life. A bit confusing on the first few tries but very satisfying once you’ve got it down. Although, I’m definitely way better at this game than the physical activity.

  • Fate as a franchise has always existed in various forms adjacent to all my interests. It’s a series that has entries in anime, manga, visual novels and all sorts of other various game genres. I’ve always known of it due to its popularity but never quite knew what was going on in it exactly. I tried playing the PSP RPG, Fate Extra, many times but never managed to get past the intro before losing interest.

    But then along game the English release of the gacha game! I jumped on board to see if I could finally figure out what was going on in Fate. As it turns out, Fate is about characters from across history, myth and legend being summoned as Fighter is various battle royales for the Holy Grail(s). In this instance time is broken and things are all messed up and you summon various characters to help you correct history. It’s a pretty easy gateway to the series.

    It’s still the only real experience I have with the various incarnations of the franchise but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more interested in checking out more of it. I can attribute it mostly to a single character/historical figure, Nero Claudius. She (quite a few men from history are just ladies in Fate for various reasons) shows up in the early parts of the story and she’s just so incredibly charismatic that it makes even her reasoning for wearing a puzzlingly see-through dress make sense for her character.

    Although, Nero isn’t originally from this game but she’s the sort of character that FGO has plenty of that are highly endearing embellishments of historical figures that are generally fun to see interact with each other. The story scenarios are often pretty well written, they strike a balance between humorous character interactions and self-serious enough about this universes strange lore to keep things interesting.

    But as much as I enjoy the characters and stories in FGO, I quit after playing the game consecutively every day for a year because the gacha element is genuinely awful. Most of the good characters are available for a limited time and are so rare that you’re hardly likely to get them unless you’re very lucky or drop a lot of cash or save up as you slowly accrue the premium currency for free. There aren’t really any guaranteed or reliable ways to get any really good characters either so you can be left in situations where some of the later missions are difficult just because you didn’t get lucky enough to get a good drop for a certain class. I did get lucky plenty of times pulling characters but the last straw for me was when I didn’t manage to pull either of the two limited characters I desperately wanted (Shuten-Douji & Raikou) back-to-back.

    I probably won’t ever return to it anytime soon but FGO sure was fun while I could handle it.

  • Here marks the start of the 2018 games!

    Girls’ Frontline is another gacha game where you collect guns that are girls (they are also robots)! I’ve been playing this since it launched in English and it’s my go-to podcast game now.

    The method for acquiring characters is a lot more lenient than in FGO, and even the other gacha games on list, so that’s nice. But it’s still mostly left up to chance but sadly, that’s the name of the game. They’re very few limited characters though, which is nice. And speaking of characters... the designs are pretty nice? Girls’ Frontline is seriously lacking in the personality department. At least as far as writing goes, the character design do actually communicate quite a bit about the era and ways the guns they’re based on were used very well. The problem for me is that the story focuses on a small selection of the guns(girls?) and pretty much everyone else is a neat design, combat barks and quips. I’m also not too fond of the main storyline, it’s a little too dry and dense with mil-ops jargon for my taste.

    Although, it’s probably for the best that the anthropomorphic guns aren’t too humanized or sympathetic?

  • Another gacha game, another game about girls that are also other non-girl things. They’re boats in this one. Also, somehow not the first gacha game where the girls are anthropomorphic naval ships.

    I dropped this game pretty quickly after picking it up because the characters are a bit too pandering and fetishistic for my taste. Make no mistake, the other gacha games on this list are pretty horny but it seemed like every other character design in Azur Lane was very blatant fetish bait. That and I found the writing around the events to be pretty boring! No use playing one of these games if the extra-special stuff doesn’t do anything for you!

  • I’ve regaled my tale of deception and skullduggery beneath the seas elsewhere online. It’s linked above so check it out if you’re interested!

    Overall, Subterfuge is a unique experience even if my takeaway was that I absolutely never wanted to play it ever again.

  • The most recent game I started playing on this list since I just got into it a little over a week ago. I’m still very much in the early phases of figuring out Granblue Fantasy. Inundated with free items and comparatively generous complimentary rolls, I’m currently unsure of what the typical play experience is like but from here I can see a lot of things that pique my interest.

    There appears to be a whole lotta story content with new stuff added on a frequent basis. I haven’t seen much of it but the characters are very quickly endearing. Plus, there’s a lot of unique characterization for all of the many, many party members have individual storylines to go down once you unlock them and level them up. The localization seems especially top-notch too, whoever’s working on this seems to be having a lot of fun with it. The combat system is pretty simple but is built on a mountain of dense upgrade mechanics. Not quite sure how most of it work but I’m looking forward to digging into it all.

    JRPGs, especially those of the common fantasy type, when done well have always had this comforting feeling for me when I play them. I didn’t have much experience with them as a kid, they were the games I saw in magazine but couldn’t play. I’d say it’s a bit nostalgic whenever I see something with a job system or a myriad array of adventurers embarking on a grand quest. I think Granblue operates in that field, painting with the same general brush strokes but with enough stylish distinction to separate it from being generic. I can see myself spending tons of time with this game and I’d really like to!
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