It's been one heck of a weekend over here in GBLand, though I suppose the following week will be more chaotic for many in the US. If you weren't aware, Giant Bomb's Extra Life streams have been running since Friday and I'm taking a quick break before the Jason and Lang streams begin to pen a short Sunday Summaries. I know, I know, nothing about the word salad you're about to read is "short", but I'm already fairly exhausted from streams and words ceased to make sense some time ago. Should be a good one.

New Games!

My absolute definite pick for this week has to be Dishonored 2. Even if it wasn't one of my most anticipated AAA games for this half of the year - far more than all the shooters we've been getting - it's pretty much the week's only major release regardless. I'm always down for some more teleport-enabled stealth and exploration, and I'm hopefully not going to let myself be swayed by trophies that prevent the use any extra powers this time around. In retrospect, that was probably a trophy I should've left for a second playthrough, but when I can see a route to get a Platinum in one run I usually take it. Anyway, I'll hopefully get a chance to play this sometime next year. You know me, always fashionably late.

Tyranny is the newest CRPG from Obsidian, and while I've not heard too much about it I absolutely loved Pillars of Eternity from the same developers last year. Enough to make it my GOTY, even, narrowly beating out Super Mario Maker. (I've actually played a whole lot of 2015 games this year, playing eternal catch-up as I am, so I've been considering re-ranking last year's bangers...) It's been a year of gigantic games for me, so this'll also be one to enjoy in 2017 sometime as well. Man, I'm so glad we have so many CRPGs coming out, but it is getting difficult to keep up the pace with them...

It's been quite the year for cutesy farming/life sims. As well as Stardew Valley, which is still very much in the running for my GOTY, we also saw the hybrid JRPG Return to PopoloCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytale, Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories and the currently Japan-only Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. Harvest Moon: Skytree Village is the most recent one, and yet another Harvest Moon game, which is giving fans of this particular sub-genre a whole lot of crops-plantin' and anime-romancin' to do.

Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers takes the scrolling brawler Castle Crashers mold and squeezes various Cartoon Network characters into it. Looks like there'll be six playable characters, including the Adventure Time duo, the sassy animals from Regular Show and Steven Universe, so I'm sure Tumblr will love this game at least.

Let's stop by the anime zone real quick: Trillion: God of Destruction! The mediocre time-based, demonic waifu-raising RPG from Compile Heart is coming to Steam. But hey, I'm all for the trend of Vita games on Steam, so I hope it does well. Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization! Like the hollow realization that Sword Art Online sucks? High five, everyone. Root Letter! That's a visual novel about a mysterious girl and a letter and talking and stuff! Odd to see it localized for consoles, but if there's demand for it...

Wiki!

No wiki work this week! I usually work on the wiki while busting through a week's worth of podcasts on Friday, starting with the new Beastcast and moving onto Monday's MBMBaM, Tuesday's We Hate Movies and Thursday's Adventure Zone (if it's the right week, since it's fortnightly). That is, when I don't have some grindy game I could be playing in the background.

Given Extra Life started Friday, though, I've not had the chance to listen to them. Expect a double-helping next week? I'll probably have a lot to say about some old Famicom games by then.

Dark Souls III!

If you weren't aware, I've been writing all about my travails through Lothric and the surrounding environs in the Dark Souls III Bosswatch series: Here's Part One, which covers all the bosses up to the first Lord of Cinder - the story-significant bosses; and Part Two covers the next two Lords and all the bosses in-between them and the first.

Dark Souls 3 has been giving me a mental exercise in figuring out how any of these bosses can be reliably defeated by a non-tank. I've tried to stay away from the tank route myself, since you can render these Souls games pretty easy with one - a large part of the reason why Bloodborne reconfigured itself to avoid tank builds - but I can't for the life of me figure out how you're supposed to evade a lot of the bosses where I'm at. Many of them are using these grand sweeping attacks that make it very difficult to stay close and use evade rolls instead of shield blocking - besides exploiting i-frames, and that seems very challenging even with the ring that increases the window - and many of them have been in small arenas and/or move quickly to close the gap on anyone hoping to get enough space to pull out a bow or their magic and go to town. The boss of the lava area Old Demon King - I'll spoiler-block names, just in case - was the only one I could see that happening with, and maybe the one I just fought in a "rampart-y area with dragons" Dragonknight Armor. It could be that I just have a tank-build mindset and have given myself a bit of a hurdle to overcome by focusing more in dexterity and less in equip load and strength regardless, and I'm sure the many pros who can beat this game in their sleep can figure it out no matter what build they have. I guess what tends to happen is that you find a solution through practice and experimentation, and I've not really been going through that process with other builds so I don't know how they'd work. Simple as that, really. Makes me appreciate the kind of replay value these games have too.

I can't say I've been enjoying the second half of this game as much as the first. One of my issues, and I guess this is minor spoilers even though it has nothing to do with the plot, is that the late-game opens up in an area which you visit very early on. It also means that the enemies in this area are more or less the same as those in the early area, but made considerably more powerful. More damage taken, more damage received. It actually feels like fighting the same guys on NG+, like in Diablo where everything's 50 levels higher. It's disappointing on two fronts: the first is the game is nakedly recycling content, after flirting with the idea with all its references to earlier Souls games, and that means enemies that I've already "figured out". Very few seem to adopt new attacks and skills, and while there's a few new faces mixed in there, it still feels very lazy considering the great variation in the monster design we've seen so far.

The second disappointing thing is that it despoils the ever-present appeal of RPGs where you feel more powerful the further into the game you are, and for Souls in particular that's a potent combination of your own aptitude with the game and the various stat and equipment upgrades you've acquired. Running through that early area I mentioned to reach the late-game meant breezing through enemies I was avoiding before - including a few special enemies that drop resources/items I could've used a lot earlier - which felt great. But then I immediately had to fight enemies I didn't even have an issue with first time, including basic-ass zombies and those little hooded thief guys, and they were taking half my health bar off with every hit. And those guys are fast! They're designed to be a nuisance in the early levels, hitting you with ambushes but not outright killing you so you're forced to take a precious swig of Estus and plan better next time. Seeing them come at me with their pathetic little rusty knives and having my high-level character just die in two hits has been very discouraging. When I've been taking down enemies as impressive as those horrible bird-people, enormous rock gargoyles or the silver knights of you-know-where, coming back to these absurdly buffed small-fry is a bummer.

Anyway, I'll keep at it. The game's easily my least favorite of the series, even though I'd concur that its bosses are at least better than those in Dark Souls 2, but it's still a Souls game and I think I could happily play another dozen of these (y'know, with enough time in-between). I just wish this one was a little more imaginative. Still, this is why Miyazaki wants to move on and I don't blame him. I only hope they keep later Souls iterations steeped in horror, since they know how to create some fantastic disturbing-looking monsters. Makes me wonder if they could pull off a good contemporary-setting survival horror, albeit one that still allows for some creative world-building and enormous monstrosities to face. For now, though, the last Lord of Cinder awaits. And so do plenty more Extra Life streams, for that matter. See you there.