Heya folks! Here at the end of October, I've finished three fantastic games, and felt the need to blog about them. I think a lot of what I have to say about each requires that I discuss the story, so be warned - I will thoroughly discuss lots of content that won't shy away from endings or twists. You have been warned!

But first, let's get a little music going, shall we?

Disgaea 5

Stay! Please! Shit, there goes half my readership skipping ahead to MGSV. Fine. Fine!

I'm not here to sell you on Disgaea 5. It's a batshit crazy series for batshit crazy people with diminishing returns in every entry. That said though, I don't think the market has ever been stronger for this type of game, particularly as more and more people fall in love with big numbers games like Adventure Capitalist or the like.

Disgaea 5 boils down to two parts. The first is a pretty straightforward story, told in 15 "episodes" of five or so levels apiece. This is far and away Disgaea 5s weakest point. The Disgaea stories have always been about crazy anime demons fighting with each other and celestial beings for a chance at happiness and power. That doesn't change here. It's almost yawningly dull in comparison to the insanity of every Disgaea game to date, and fails to interest me in pretty much any way. There are two great wrestling themed characters modeled after Hulk Hogan and the Rock, but unfortunately only one of those has much to do with the story. Of course, given the way Hulk Hogan has completely let down the entire universe, it's probably not a bad thing that the character modeled on him only figures prominently in one tiny mission.

The big problem here is that the basic premise of demons and angels has become the writing equivalent of a dog vomiting, eating said vomit, vomiting again, and repeating the cycle for six games (including Disgaea D2). It's time to ditch the cliche of a powerful, aloof hero, the vapid female love interest, and the same old same old companion characters. It doesn't help much that the post-game characters, usually the most interesting parts of a Disgaea game, wind up being just as boring, with many of the best characters from prior games locked behind a steep $35 season pass. You read that right - $35 for characters from past games. It's nuts.

The other half of the game (I say half, but honestly, it's more like 90%) is the post-game content and Item World exploration. While the game's story ends with that fifteenth episode, there are a lot of smaller post-game missions to wrap up. These usually involve exploring some unfinished storylines or further expand upon characters who really didn't have a moment to shine, though in Disgaea 5 these seem to primarily involve villains from the story. It's a fascinating idea, but unfortunately, the villains' stories really aren't given enough time to be of much interest.

The Item World exploration though is as fantastic as it's ever been. They've tweaked the difficulty to make it much easier to do deep item exploration while throwing in some nasty surprises for people in the Mystery Rooms, which are areas that can help the player or lure them into a trap. Back to is Item Pirating, which doesn't have as much of an impact this time around. It's sort of disappointing to see some of the features from D2 disappear like that, including the beast riding. it's a small sacrifice to make though for what amounts to the best meta-game content in terms of gameplay the series has seen.

The game is easily accessible, about as equally so as D2 was. The game is generous about giving the player opportunities to increase stats from an earlier point in the game by breaking down captured enemies and turning them into permanent stat-boosting items that can, thankfully, be used anywhere, not just in combat like certain prior Disgaea games. The Cheat Shop, a cool feature added in Disgaea D2 that allows for easy tinkering with the game's difficulty and experience/money bonuses, makes a very early return.

Easily the best new adjustments to the game come from the Chara World and the Senate. The Chara World in Disgaea up until now has been a bit of a convoluted mess, with unclear goals. This game completely reworks that from the ground up, turning the Chara World into a board game not entirely dissimilar to something like Life. A single character has a certain number of turns to reach a goal line, and must roll the dice and move throughout a maze of sorts to reach that end. Along the way, each square the character lands on either benefits them or harms them, factoring in the amount of leveling and equipment. It's a great way to break up the sometime monotony of the Item World and the story, and I hope like hell it's a theme they expand upon in the future.

The Senate is a way for players to unlock special levels and other goodies in the game. Prior to D2 and the Cheat Shop, it was also the way to adjust the difficulty, leading to a lot of annoying time wasting. Thankfully, all of that is still relegated to the Cheat Shop, leaving the Senate for fun, fringe stuff not really necessary to the game but still fun to dick around with. Of particular note are the sub-classes, which allow powerful characters to quickly unlock all the various classes in the game without having to power level an entire party of characters. These also teach characters new evilties (permanent bonus-granting skills that can be swapped out), but I haven't really figured out how to do that yet. I'm not sure it's possible to do it with story-based characters, only created characters. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure.

Introduced too is a quest system, which gives some neat items and gold for completing goals ranging from the banal (bringing a very basic healing item to the quest store) to the grindy (up a character's attributes to 20,000, for example). It's a neat system and adds a bit of fun and flavor to the game. I'm curious how much more there is to it, though. Right now I'm at level 1300 with my main character and I'm not seeing a lot of new variety to the quests. More post-game quests would be a great addition, though this could also just be that I haven't reached the prerequisite levels to unlock some of the quests. I hope that's the case.

Anyways, yeah, I think Disgaea 5 could have been a great entry in the series. As it is, I think the gameplay is as strong as it's ever been, but the story and characters need to be reexamined and rebuilt from the ground up. Interestingly enough, that same sentiment applies to...

Metal Gear Solid V

Let's get this out of the way first - yes, MGSV is a pretty amazing game. You should definitely play it, even if you haven't liked prior games in the series or don't like stealth games at all. I don't, and I had a blast with it. The gameplay is solid, going full lethal is stupidly fun and do-able in most cases, and the few parts of the game where stealth is pretty much a necessity can usually be cheesed by smart players.

Now, let's get to what doesn't work. MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD.

Hideo Kojima leaving is the best thing that could've happened to Metal Gear, creatively speaking.

Yeah, you heard me right. Metal Gear's weakest points have always come from the dire need for someone to edit and hammer out Kojima's bizarre, dumb story excesses and constant retconning. Ocelot's triple-quadruple-super-double-secret backstabbing, Liquid Snake being revived via a fucking arm transplant, and the wildly unnecessary moments with women in the series are matched and then some in the lackluster story of MGSV.

The most egregious part of MGSV's story comes from the double Big Bosses bit. It's stupid and unnecessarily convoluted. All that needed to be done to portray Big Boss as a sympathetic villain was to expand upon the idea that he's a man doing what needs to be done for the sake of his organization and his men. Say, perhaps, by expanding upon the game's most horrifying moment when the Boss is force to walk through his quarantine zone, killing member after member of his crew simply because they were at risk of being infected. It's a terrific scene, the sort of thing that would clearly break just about anyone's mind, and could have easily been expanded upon to make Boss into the villain he needed to be for the events of the original Metal Gear.

Instead, the villainy of Big Boss is explained away by the convenient, poorly told excuse that there are actually two Big Bosses, created flawlessly from the doctor in the Ground Zeroes helicopter explosion. This isnever hinted at. It's never called into question whether or not this is THE Big Boss. The loyalties of Kaz or Ocelot are never called into question until after the tapes are played, giving them both dubious reasons to betray either Boss for the sons. It's convoluted storytelling at its absolute, most unnecessary worst.

It doesn't help matters much that the best elements of the game are reserved for fucking Bioshock style audio tapes. If you're a creative writer and you've ever been told "show, don't tell," stay the holy fuck away from those tapes and pretend the story of MGSV doesn't even exist, because it will piss you off to no end how much good crap is locked up behind a cavalcade of telling and not showing. Half this shit could have easily been done with conversations between the characters involved on trips to Mother Base, even without cutscenes. Just have the character sidle up and talk to Big Boss. Go ahead. No? OK, fuck it, let's dump it all on endless numbers of poorly organized tapes and let the player try to find time in between doing immportant tank fultoning to listen to them. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck that.

And fuck any game decision that yanks a companion character like Quiet out of the game and forever leaves her out. That's dumb fucking game design. If it's post-game, who gives a shit if it doesn't make any sense that she's dead? Give me some Kojima-ass reason she's back. A clone. He certainly seems to love those.

Anyways. MGSV is a great game regardless. It doesn't beat out Witcher 3 in my opinion, because Witcher 3 managed good gameplay and an astounding leap forward in video game storytelling. MGSV manages near flawless gameplay but good grief, that story rankles me.

Oh, hey, at least there's...

Tales from the Borderlands

Holy shit. Hoooooooooooly shit.

Yeah, I'm a little crazy about the music choices in this series. I'm a little crazy about everything in Tales from the Borderlands.

Along with the afore-mentioned advances posed by the Witcher 3, Tales from the Borderlands does wonders for the overall quality of video game storytelling. Every episode is chock full of great characters, interesting stakes, and moments that had me laughing one minute and subdued the next. Say what you will about Anthony Burch's writing in Borderlands 2 - this knocks it out of the park and I salute him and the rest of the writing crew for it. Gone are the stupid memes and references. In their place is a heartfelt story of greed and camaraderie.

The new characters are the highlight of the show. Aspiring Hyperion executive Rhys is played well by voice actor de jour Troy Baker, and makes for a fine bumbling companion to the more straight-faced con woman Fiona. Fiona in particular is written terrifically well. She's given a strong character arc, going from a fresh-faced con artist to budding Vault Hunter in training. I really hope she's made a permanent part of the Borderlands universe, along with Rhys (either as an NPC or as a fellow Vault Hunter with Fiona). Sasha plays a bit of a tough but sweet love interest, and makes a great companion to both Fiona and Rhys.

The biggest negative is the amount of Borderlands fan service. It's fitting, I guess, but it doesn't make it any less irritating when character shows up for five minutes to help out, then doesn't make another appearance until the very end. That said, though, some of the characters are given a bit more flesh, particularly Janey Springs, Scooter, and Athena, all of whom have mildly deeper character arcs than any of the other returning characters.

And in a shocking twist I hope is canon, Scooter is actually killed off in a suitably heroic fashion. The serious, dark turn was wildly unexpected and made for the series' biggest "holy shit" moment. There's no denying it was a smart move, even if his inclusion in the series was a bit of fan service.

The story, while great, also wound up ending with a fairly stupid moment involving a largely unnecessary deus ex machina. Sasha is gravely wounded, and lies apparently dying in her sister's and Rhys's arms in a touching, tender scene. It's well written, both funny and immensely sad (I was really attached to Fiona and Sasha by this point as I love a good sibling story). And then it's entirely shit upon when a gift from their mentor turns out to have magic healing powers and revives Sasha. It's a stupid turn of affairs that goes to show you that no matter how well written the game might be in comparison to other games, we still have a ways to go before game stories reach the level of movies, let alone novels.

But you know what? I'm not sure I wanted it to end badly. I wanted Sasha to live, just not with a watch hovering above her chest and magically fixing broken bones and internal bleeding. I wanted Tales to end happily, as it did. I wanted it to end with questions and hopes for the future. It did. I know Gearbox's attention is fully on Battleborn at the moment and that Telltale is committed to whatever three hundred projects they have going on, but I sure hope it isn't too long before we see a return of Tales from the Borderlands' characters, either in Borderlands 3 or more Tales from the Borderlands.

And that does it for me, folks. Have a great Halloween.

I have yet to play Disgaea 5, besides dabbling with the demo, but reading what you wrote leaves me pretty conflicted on whether I should. Even considering it being a relatively small part of these games, the story is usually what makes or breaks them for me. It's why I enjoyed 1 and 4 the most and never even finished 3. If I don't enjoy the story and/or characters to some degree I usually can't bring myself to care about the post game once I get there.

On the other hand, I do like what I'm hearing about the changes to how the post game works. Easing up on the excessive grinding in favor of a more user friendly experience is definitely something the series has needed for a long time. Making uber powerful characters is fun, but grinding for the sake of grinding usually isn't.

I just wish the series didn't continue to play it so safe. I understand why, as the games don't exactly sell like gangbusters, and their recent experiments outside the norm haven't exactly caught on either, but a big reason that first Disgaea was so special was because was so crazy and unlike anything I had seen before. And then games like Makai Kingdom took the formula and did even crazier stuff with it. But Disgaea has turned into purely an iterative franchise, which doesn't make them bad, but it's a little sad to see it become so...normal.

@zeik: Exactly right. They've been treading water in terms of creativity. I hope they turn it around, because it's such a fun series of games, but I just don't see it happning until they've drivn the series into the ground. This one's story and characters are even worse than 3, so do with that what you will.

I almost wish zIt wasn't so damned fun. Crazy, right?

@sparky_buzzsaw: My biggest issue with 3 was that it just felt like complete nonsense...in a bad way. They tried to lean too heavily into the craziness and meta humor of the series without taking the time to consider if it actually worked. I eventually just stopped caring.

What did you think of D2? I never got around to playing it, since the idea of going back to make a direct sequel to a game that has already had 3 sequels since seemed way too much like a desparate cash in, but I feel like the reception ended up being relatively positive and I've been meaning to give it a shot.

@zeik: It was mostly fine, but there's little to draw me back with 5 basically using all its best features, particularly the Cheat Shop. The story lacked any real substance, but it was kind of fun to revisit those characters.

Can't disagree with you about Disgaea 5's story. Character-wise this is probably one of the weakest casts in the series, with only two that I really enjoyed - those two being Usalia, who I found sympathetic early on, and Zeroken who grew on me and became one of the more likable characters. The story takes some darker turns but it leans so heavily on that anime trope of relying on allies to overcome adversity, just the same as they do in pretty much every other one of these games, that I had to kind of force myself to finish off the last five or so chapters and not let myself get distracted by Item/Chara Worlding. It didn't end very well either, as I found the main villain's motivation to be completely ridiculous. Maybe since a good portion of the fanbase just considers the story to be more of a tutorial they've gotten too comfortable retelling the same story beats with different faces. It's a shame because this still ended up becoming my favorite in the series, just on the strength of the actual gameplay alone and then the QOL improvements on top of that.

Innocent Farms, man! I got two stacks of 900 Statisticians without even trying! I remember in D4, having to reverse pirate and soft reset a dozen times just to get one of those suckers to show up.

So I have D2, should I just play that or get Disgaea 5 when that inevitably goes on sale? I know we briefly chatted about this during a livestream a few weeks ago, but are there any significant improvements to 5 that you could not go without at this point? Can I speed up or skip animations to make grinding faster?

I don't entirely agree with you about Metal Gear. Half the reason I come to that series is Kojima's brand of overwrought anime bullshit and there wasn't nearly enough of that in The Phantom Pain. What did they replace it with? Not much, and that's arguably the bigger problem. I won't get into too much detail, but the more I think about that story, the more of a bummer it becomes knowing that this is the last "true" MGS or whatever before it becomes something slapped onto a pachinko machine. The game part is, as you mentioned, totally fantastic even if I was kinda done with it once I got the "real" ending. Still gotta get to The Witcher III, though I probably will after I'm done with Fallout 4.

Given the praise leveled at Tales from the Borderlands and the ambivalence leveled at Game of Thrones, I think I know which of those two I will inevitably pick up and play once they become cheap enough. I'm not totally jaded about Telltale yet.

I don't think Metal Gear would be Metal Gear if it's story didn't make people angry and confused.

Instead we'd get more lackluster cringe-fests like Metal Gear Rising. Give me a break.

@arbitrarywater: You're fine playing D2. It's an accessible Disgaea and you wouldn't be missing much in terms of upgrades. You can definitely skip animations. I turn them off completely in the options menu and play at the fastest speed once I am done with the story.

I put the decline of the MGS series down to the exit of Tomokazu Fukushima after MGS3. There was a sharp turn in the quality of the writing, and it has only gone downhill. MGSV is only an amazing game if you're not a hardcore Metal Gear fan, and that sucks.

Or Dan.

..........I stand by my words.

@berserker976: I don't see any reason to doubt that Dan is a hardcore Metal Gear Solid fan. That doesn't make him a representative of the fanbase. You can't have one extreme without the other.

The annoying this is that Big Boss was going in the right direction til we're told its not him we're looking at. He doesn't need to be a sympathetic villain either. The US pick sides out convenience all the time and, as the vanquisher of Skullface, he'd be right back on Cipher's side without the need for the switch. Zero sets up Boss at Foxhound, gets ill and in the resulting power vaccuum, creates Outer Heaven on the sly.

Of course, all of this doppelganger stuff is in service to a 1987 plot twist which, otherwise would not make sense so, I dunno. He likes his old fiction too much to throw it away so he has to retcon.

@zeik: I would say Metal Gear Scanlon as a pretty compelling reason to think Dan is not a hardcore Metal Gear fan, despite his claims otherwise. Pretty much every single thing he says about the series is objectively wrong (at least in MGScanlon 1-4, my membership expired so I haven't seen 5).

Also I'm only half serious. :P

@shindig: That's something I don't get either, why do people think Big Boss needs to be a sympathetic villain. Big Boss is just another asshole in a series full of assholes.

@jesus_phish: Regardless of what kind of villain he is or should be, there didn't need to be two of them to write that in.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Venom is just another character, one that gets sold out by Big Boss. It's just another switcheroo like in MGS2 only this time you spent the whole game playing before they pulled back the curtain.

Well, there's more to the V switch as it does kind of acknowledge the player's role in this. The kind of stunt you would pull if you found out this was the last in the series. Like putting an "... And you!" in the Special Thanks sections of the credits but with more implications on the series as a whole. Sort of neat but ultimately not elegant.

Disgaea 5 quickly became one of my favorites in the series. I enjoyed the cast quite a bit, been a long time since I didn't read ahead and skip past most of the voice acting in a Disgaea game. A lot of times I would set it on autoplay so I could listen in while I tinkered around the apartment.

I guess the story did seem a little more toned down and personal compared to some past games, but I think it had a humorous enough of an edge to keep it interesting.

Those streamlined systems too, and allowing x4 battle animation speed was a friggen gamechanger for me.