Welcome, all and pre-Sunday sundry, to another episode of ST-urday. I usually fill this top part with ramblings about what I've been up to this week, but I've really not been up to much. I've been intending to play the presently final Ratchet & Clank game in its series (that would be Ratchet & Clank Nexus) as something to fill the gap between now and December 1st, upon which date I intend to relaunch Go! Go! GOTY! and bash through as many unplayed 2015 games as possible. It's presently a meager list of three - The Suikoden-sorta comedic RPG Citizens of Earth, the cute but deadly action-platformer throwback Castle in the Darkness and the amusing graphic adventure game The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 (really enjoyed the first) - but I'm hoping to add to it when the Thanksgiving Steam sales start sometime next week. I received some birthday Steam vouchers that have been burning a hole in my digital wallet, and I have my eye on more than a handful of possibilities: Axiom Verge, Titan Souls, Ori and the Blind Forest, The Magic Circle, The Beginner's Guide, Divinity: Original Sin (though that might wait until I have a current-gen console), Life is Strange, Rebel Galaxy, Technobabylon, Cradle, SOMA, and so many more. 2015 was definitely a good year for Indies.
Needless to say though, my GOTY list will be interesting without any PS4/XB1 console games (or their PC equivalents, which are a forlorn hope on this system) on it. We're talking a Wii U game and a bunch of Steam Indies at the moment. Maybe I'll get to shine a spotlight on a few smaller titles that were otherwise overshadowed by the big releases of this year. The alternative is to focus less on new releases and just rate the games I finally got around to in 2015, which include a lot of fantastic games like Yakuza 3, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Burnout Paradise, Shantae: Risky's Revenge and a whole bunch of other stuff I should've played years ago.
On the Giant Bomb Wiki front, I'm happy to announce that I completed my last project: sprucing up the game pages for the infamous kitty-litter tray that was the Atari Jaguar. Most of the work had already been done long before I started - largely by a user named xdgx, who did most of their work around the inception of the wiki in 2008 - but there were a few skeleton pages and header images to fix up. My present stopgap project is to go back and revamp all the NES/Famicom pages from 1983-1985, some of which I created or added to but years before I started getting serious about the wiki. There's various style issues with those pages and, of course, the ever-present (non)issue of them not having header images. After that it'll be some time working on the early PC Engine library and then, finally, the launch of Wiki Project Super '95. That's another 400+ page project that won't be done overnight, to say the least.
Drakkhen
I was apprehensive about covering this one. As with Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, which I looked at on ST-urday a little while ago, it's a continental European RPG that didn't feel like playing ball (or couldn't, due to licensing issues) with the various games building on the D&D ruleset and decided to go its own way. Drakkhen might be one of the least intuitive RPGs out there, but it's also packed with a deep amount of lore, some clever ideas, a very efficient if chaotic combat system and a lot of mysteries that would be more fun to explore and solve if the interface hadn't already created so many extra question marks to deal with on top of that. It's like trying to solve a murder case with the QWOP guy: you want to puzzle out the whodunnit, but first you have to puzzle out, like, basic movement. Drakkhen was definitely a game that continually bamboozled a younger me, even if I eventually figured a lot of it out. The controls, at least.
Drakkhen was developed by Infogrames, back when they were a moderately-sized French developer who, like their contemporaries Delphine Software and Silmarils, would often take a lot of risks on high-concept ideas. Nowadays, of course, they're playing it safe to a fault trying to relaunch numerous Atari properties as Atari SA to varying degrees of critical disdain. (Whatever did happen to that weird Asteroids base management reboot?) Drakkhen was a minor hit for them, and was fortunate enough to see a Japanese-developed SNES conversion from Kemco-Seika that confused and frustrated an entirely different audience of players.
To succinctly summarize the story of the game: The last great dragon is slain by a particularly foolhardy knight, plunging the world into a post-magical apocalypse, as the Dragon Gods were the ones responsible for the creation of the world and left their scions, the great dragons, as custodians of its magical power. The various peoples of this world have been dependent on magic over technology, since one was a lot easier to figure out than the other, that the sudden lack of it had some unfortunate repercussions. A boat-load of pilgrims were swept off course when their wind magic suddenly ceased, leading them to a hidden land full of half-human/half-dragon folk named Drakkhen. The Drakkhen have an ancient prophecy that dictates that they will conquer the planet and exterminate the humans once they are no longer protected by magic. The humans that are in the land of Drakkhen, however, discover that their magic is working again. It's up to a small band of adventurers to prevent the spread of the Drakkhen forces and possibly restore the world's magic in the process.
Drakkhen's one of those games where half the reward is in figuring it out. It's brutally unfair, even if you know how the game's systems work, and the UI leaves a lot to be desired. It's fairly singular in its genre though, and that went a long way back then when every other CRPG was either Wizardry-inspired dungeon-crawler or a D&D Gold Box turn-based strategy game.
There are also precious few games as intimidating as Drakkhen. A game where you get attacked by enormous panther heads by bumping into gravestones, or colossal flying space caterpillars by having the temerity to look up while walking around at night. The land of Drakkhen really isn't for the faint of heart. Maybe that's why it appealed to so many; there's definitely something to challenging the insurmountable. Or maybe people just liked it because it looked incredible for 1989 and had a wide range of novel features they hadn't seen before. Or maybe because it has giant dragons with laserbeam eyes, who knows? That last one alone was probably enough for tiny baby Mento.
This looks like a European-ass RPG, in that it looks super interesting and incomprehensible at the same time. Looking forward to your inevitable Realms of Arkania ST-urday to continue that trend.
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