This week has been one of catharsis. For me, it meant the completion of both my long-running Metal Gear Solid V reactions blog series and the Super '95 Wiki Project, which you can read more about in their respective sections of this week's Summaries below. For Giant Bomb, PAX West has allowed Dan to finally spill the beans and announce his intent to cross coasts on a more permanent basis - I guess they didn't think to try a "raised stakes" winner leaves town match - and leave the gap in GB's line-up to be filled by the West branch instead. I'm as curious as you all who might step in to complete the ensemble, though I suspect they'll be looking for someone with Dan's energy and positivity - two traits that have greatly energized GBWest's content for better and, only rarely, for worse.
But just in general, there's also the catharsis of ending another tedious Summer and brooking the always wild Autumn and Winter months and all its new releases in the various spheres of media you might consume. I'll be using my birthday in the upcoming season as an excuse to finally catch up with some of this year's endless parade of fantastic games - I especially want to try Dark Souls III, Doom, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Inside, Uncharted 4 and Zero Time Dilemma at some point soon, as well as a bunch of Indies - as well as continue plugging away at the backlog I've been letting pile up this past month.
One thing my catharsis didn't do was convince me that starting another game with a gigantic runtime wasn't a smart idea, but I'll have more to say about that in greater detail too. How about you guys? Any great weights lifted off your shoulders as we head towards more temperate weather?
New Games!
It's a great week for anime fans. I mean, I always seem to have a gaggle of anime games to present for the New Games tab week after week, but the first full week of September sees some particularly good ones. I can't decide between two in particular for my most anticipated release this week: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II.
The first is, of course, the newest game in the Ace Attorney series, which combines adventure game point-and-clicking with deductive (and dramatic! So dramatic!) courtroom intrigue. It's a great marriage of Western-style adventure gaming and Eastern-style visual novel, and I always look forward to any new games coming out of that series. Especially given how rare it is these days that Capcom puts out anything that isn't some half-assed Resident Evil project or Street Fighter sequel. I do still have this game's predecessor, Dual Destinies, to finish first though. I'm getting around to it, I swear!
The second is going to take some effort to describe: it's a sequel to a spin-off of a series which was itself a spin-off of an anthology series created in the 1980s. Actually, I suppose that's a little off the mark: every The Legend of Heroes game is part of a smaller set, usually a trilogy, each of which is tied together by its cast or setting. These trilogies have nothing to do with each other on a grander scale beyond similar gameplay systems. It's like, say, the relationship between the three Final Fantasy XIII games - which are all linked narratively and share the same cast and world - and the Final Fantasy series as a whole, which have no such narrative links to each entry. The first full The Legend of Heroes trilogy we saw was the "Gagharv" trilogy, comprised of The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion, The Legend of Heroes: Song of the Ocean and The Legend of Heroes: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch: three fine if unremarkable PSP RPGs with unfortunately lackluster translations - even the release order was wrong. The next three, all part of the serial Trails in the Sky trilogy, have seen far better translations (so far - part three, or "Third Chapter", is still on the way) and are generally better JRPGs with a focus on mission-based gameplay. Cold Steel, the newest trilogy to see English localization, looks to follow that series in translation and gameplay quality. All right, so I didn't actually say too much about the specific game (it has a military academy, I think?), but I do so love to waffle about video game history. It's what all that wiki-ing does to a person. Treat this like the cautionary tale it is.
Other new games this week include Beyond Flesh and Blood, a third-person shooter featuring bipedal robots set in my neck (mech?) of the woods; Devolver's absurdly violent Soviet-themed brawler Mother Russia Bleeds; that weird anime card-battle waifu game we saw at E3 this year Qurare: Magic Library; and the official Early Access release of bizarre communal building simulator The Tomorrow Children, which is also the second USSR-inspired game this week.
In port news: Oceanhorn, which I wrote about a little while ago, is coming to PS4 and Xbox One. If you've not played this wonderful if flagrant Wind Waker-inspired Indie action-adventure game, you have a window to do so now before the sequel shows up in a few months' time. Meanwhile, the Wii U will see Nordic boss-rush actioner Jotun and Steam users can experience the time- and punctuation-twisting visual novel Steins;Gate. I've heard enough good things about both of those to strongly consider playing them eventually.
Wiki!
If not you've heard the news or seen the newest quarterly collage, it's true: the behemoth that is the Super '95 Wiki Project has been conquered. This week, I cleaned up what was left of December 1995's release schedule for the Super Nintendo and finally put this project to rest after spending more than half a year chipping away at it. Of course, that makes it sound like I've been working away at it non-stop for seven months, rather than making the occasional incremental progress whenever I had podcasts to listen to, but still.
So then, onto the fifteen pages that saw some renovation this week. An incredible seven of those were brand new - you can peruse the usual list for more info on those - so that leaves us with the following eight to discuss:
- SD Gundam G Next is, as you might expect, a lore-heavy strategy game based on the standard "Universal Century" setting of Gundam. It features Gundams from Gundam G and Gundam Wing too, apparently, though it's not like I'm going to be able to tell them apart. Like any strategy game with interchangeable units, you build and take over facilities, produce more units and try to overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers. One big difference is that all combat in the game - whether it's fighting other Gundams or base installations - requires an action minigame. No crushing your enemies with your wits and tactical awareness alone.
- Super Chinese World 3 comes from one of those series that - given how inherently silly and Asian it is - only ever seems to get localized very occasionally. North America and Europe saw five Super Chinese games: Kung-Fu Heroes and Little Ninja Brothers for NES, Ninja Boy and Ninja Boy 2 for Game Boy, and Super Ninja Boy for SNES. Suffice it to say, in Japan it's a much longer and more involved series that also includes RPGs (like Super Chinese World 3) and fighter games (like Super Chinese Fighter).
- Tengai Makyou Zero is a JRPG prequel for a series, known to us as Far East of Eden, that enjoys full CD audio and voice acting on its native PC Engine CD. They presumably felt it was prudent to establish a foothold in the vastly more popular Super Famicom market, though that also meant losing a lot of the benefits of the CD format. I don't think Square was the only developer unhappy with Nintendo's obstinacy with cart-based systems. There's some impressive tech used in the Tengai Makyou Zero cart to scrabble back some of those lost features though: specifically, the SPC7110 chip. Not only does this greatly expand the game's memory storage - it doesn't need to repeat enemy sprites, for instance, and contains a lot more music than its JRPG contemporaries - but it has a real-time clock that can be set beforehand and is reflected as the in-game time of day, like Animal Crossing. Only a handful of games have SPC7110 chips in them, none of which were released outside of Japan.
- The Great Battle V would be yet another uninspired Compati Hero Series 2D licensed quickie side-scroller, but for its Western theme which allows it to take the occasional detour into Sunset Riders/Wild Guns territory with big third-person shoot-out levels. The game has some fun imagining its various licenses - Ultraman, SD Gundam and Kamen Rider - as rootin'-tootin' cowboys, and I feel like I'd appreciate this ubiquitous licensed series if it had done silly stuff like this more often.
- Saikyou: Takada Nobuhiko - I couldn't tell you who Nobuhiko Takada was (I mean, I could, because I had to research him for the Overview text), but I can tell you that this is one of a handful of MMA games for the Super Famicom. Not just in the usual fighter game sense where every character uses a different martial art, but that it's based on a genuine, early MMA promotion (UWFI) and ruleset and helps to demonstrate that such organizations were starting to build in popularity alongside the standard Pro Wrestling circuits. It does the Fire Pro thing of having fictionalized versions of other UWFI talent besides the eponymous Takada, but anyone in the know can look right past the made-up names to tell who is who.
- Sangokushi: Eiketsuden is a spin-off of Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, one with an idea that would inspire the dry strategy sim developers create similar spin-offs later on. That idea is to follow around a single major character involved with the conflict - for this game, that would be the Shu warlord and all-round nice guy Liu Bei - and split the game's time between his strategizing on the battlefield in the usual Koei war-gaming style and his running around looking for allies and recruits in the down-time between battles alongside his buddies Guan Yu and Zhang Fei in sequences which work more like an adventure game or RPG.
- Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin, the final game to be released on the Super Nintendo in 1995, is also the fifth game in Falcom's series of rockin' action-RPGs that feature perma-protagonist Adol "The Red" Christin. It's distinctive for being a Super Famicom exclusive: Falcom usually creates their games for the PC platform first and then later ports them to consoles, so this was an abnormality. To reflect its new home, the action RPG gameplay was slightly modified to more resemble The Legend of Zelda, with a top-down view that had players using buttons to swing swords, hold up shields and use items that assist in traversal. Because the game was made a bit easier for a console audience, Falcom took to heart the negative fan reactions and released "Ys V Expert" a few months later. It's also presently the only major Ys game without an official English localization, as neither the SFC version nor the 2006 PS2 remake ever saw a North American release. Aeon Genesis have got you covered with a decent fan localization, however.
Anyway, that's the last you'll be hearing about SNES games for a while. Super '96 beckons in the far distance, and I'm going to far more enjoy its comparatively meager 180+ releases compared to the 400+ bad boy I just went through, but I like to keep things varied. My intent is to head back to the PC Engine to finish up the rest of its HuCard games, and then I've got some clean-up to do ensuring pages related to older projects are up to snuff.
I guess that just about wraps things up for this week's wiki section and... wait, what's this???
It's a wiki emergency! If you're not aware, I started getting heavy into GB wiki editing after being inspired by the research-heavy Chrontendo video series from the mellifluous Dr. Sparkle, and whenever a new Chrontendo video makes an appearance I drop everything to transfer its many knowledge gems to the Giant Bomb wiki.
Chrontendo Episode 50 saw the dissemination of fifteen NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk System games in total, along with a round-up of where computer gaming was at in 1989, and I'd recommend you carve out the ninety minutes it'll take to watch it. Hey, that's the average length of a GBEast Quick Look, so it shouldn't be too hard to find the time. Rest assured, those fifteen NES/FC/FDS games all have full pages now, but I'm not going to bother explicating on them here when the video does a much better job.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!
In the interest of time and the fact that this week's Summaries is getting long enough without a whole mess of talk about Divinity: Original Sin to follow, I'll just point you towards Part 8 of the Mento Gear Solid reactions series - which conveniently links to every previous entry - and move onto the final progress tally for the game.
When I decided that I had seen enough of Metal Gear Solid V, my progress tracker was at 77%. I'm still missing two core missions - #48 EXTREME Code Talker and #50 EXTREME Sahelanthropus. I've also only earned half the S-ranks in the game - that's 24 out of 48, since two of the missions don't rank you - and I have bonus mission objectives to complete for pretty much every single mission in the game, since a lot are counterintuitive and will make it much harder to get the S-rank, which I prioritized instead (I'm talking about objectives like "rescue the prisoner in this random-ass location miles away from the mission target"). I'm about two-thirds done with the side ops; I really wanted to complete all the mine-clearing ones since they have a trophy attached to them, but the game has an odd system where whenever you have two side ops in the same location one takes priority over the other, and you need to complete that before the other will show up. Since I don't know where the mine-clearing side ops will be, I therefore don't know which side ops I need to complete first to activate them. Finally, while I did capture every animal, I'm still missing one music tape. A few of the key items you earn from milestones are missing too, like the certificate you get from Fultoning 1000 people (I just hit 700 by the time I finished, with no room left for new people) and the ones you get from S-ranking everything.
However, I did complete the Paz storyline and forgot to include it in the last part, so here's my (spoiler-blocked for those who haven't played MGSV) thoughts on that as a little epilogue to that whole series:
Don't worry though, as I will return for that bonus tape entry eventually. Not sure when, but I'm certain there'll be a week soon enough where I have nothing better to write about than my reactions to a whole bunch of heavy MGS exposition delivered slowly via audio.
Divinity: Original Sin!
I'm only a few hours into Larian Studios's 2014 RPG Divinity: Original Sin, one that came out of nowhere and threatened to dethrone Dragon Age: Inquisition as the best CRPG offering for that year. I have some experience with the Divinity series: I played its inaugural game Divine Divinity many years ago, and witnessed a lot of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis/The Dragon Knight Saga in passing, but Divinity: Original Sin made a big splash with its refocused approach to tactical RPG combat. I'd heard a few disparaging things (mostly from Rorie) about its minimal amount of player-created characters and its open-but-not-really world, which is a carefully regulated series of dungeons and encounters that will pound you if you don't do them in something close to the right order, due to how disadvantageous it can be if you're just a few levels lower than the enemies you're facing.
Presently, though, I'm enjoying the game a lot. I can appreciate why there's only two player-created characters - you create personalities for both of them, and often that means having them disagree on how to complete quests or communicate with an NPC, and adding more voices to that dynamic would just be a complete mess. Various personality types are in stark contrast with each other and offer different benefits - Pragmatic vs. Romantic, for instance, will provide a bonus to the Crafting skill or the Lucky Charm skill respectively, the former needed to make items and the latter making it possible to occasionally find really good treasure when searching through containers. You might have your main character searching containers a lot while the second does all the crafting, so you'd focus on opposing personality types for the two: this leads to arguments, which in turn leads to determining which path to take with a rock-scissors-paper game. The minigame itself doesn't add much, but I like that I'm building a partnership that still has room for friction and bickering on certain matters. My two characters will always be united when it comes to choosing the Altruistic path, or being Independent enough to run off and do side-quests instead of their main task, but they'll argue over almost everything else due to how different personality quirks affect their different skillsets.
My one big thing when it comes to game design, which I've reiterated ad nauseum, is player convenience. You can put players through the wringer emotionally, you can force them to get better at the game with obscene challenges, but never give them more busywork or tedium than is necessary or have them repeat large swathes of the game if it adds nothing to the overall experience. Different designers (and players, for that matter) have different ideas and limits for how much they want to spend running back and forth when better options exist, but Divinity: Original Sin makes several strides in the right direction by having a "get out of jail free" flee system in combat and a fast travel system that can be activated anywhere at any time. As long as I've gotten close enough to a waypoint to put it on the map, I can warp directly to it. I also have a pair of pyramids that lets me warp between them after placing one of them on the ground somewhere, which also makes traversal far more palatable.
The PS4 version of the game does have some awkward UI - you can tell how much of this game is predicated on clicking and dragging objects with the mouse, which the console doesn't reproduce too well - that can drag the game down a bit as you figure which of the PC version's many buttons correspond to which buttons on the controller, sometimes unintuitively, but I'm doing all right with it so far. I just need to get out the habit I always have with these games where I can't leave the first town because I'm too busy stealing everything and finding a place to hock it. One of the few bits of advice I listened to before playing was that the battles get very tough once you leave the starting town, so I'm making sure I can sweep up all the non-combative quests for the XP before I ever need to fight anything - it's a strategy that served me well in The Temple of Elemental Evil and Baldur's Gate 1, and I hope it does so here as well.
It's a big game, so I'll have to save my other thoughts for future Summaries. As always when I take up gigantic games, I'll try and fit in some smaller Indie stuff to keep these blogs varied.
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