An Arbitrary Update in the Month of August and other excellent uses of time and money

August is upon us. There is only one month of summer left and I’ve hardly written as many blogs/reviews as I’ve wanted to. July was a weird, somewhat aimless month for me with that extending beyond personal stuff into the realm of video games. I picked up and played a lot of things, watched my roommate play some other things but didn’t actually finish a ton of stuff. I did get that review of The Evil Within out there, and I recommend you read that if you want to know what I thought about it (spoilers: It’s good when it’s not abjectly frustrating), but I figure I might as well make something of everything else that I played in July in convenient small chunks that might eventually be preludes to full-size write-ups one of these days. I figure if @mento can write multiple paragraphs of nonsense about Metal Gear Solid 4 or some weird british computerbox with old games that are rip-offs of different old games like thrice a week I can write something too now and again.

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon

The Evil Within wasn’t the only game I finished this last month. I’ve also been on a Fire Emblem kick recently thanks to the new one being released in Japan. So of course I played the one that I could play on my 3DS. Shadow Dragon is still the worst game in the series to have reached western shores, by far. I might take issue with Radiant Dawn’s inconsistent difficulty and structure, and I might think Sacred Stones is absurdly easy but neither of those games quite suffer from the weird baggage that Shadow Dragon does. Remakes are a tricky business in video games, and Shadow Dragon doesn’t quite know where to split the difference between modernization and faithfulness to the original. It adds the Weapon Triangle (not introduced until the 4th game), a bunch of classes that technically weren’t in the original (Axe users couldn’t promote, for example) and an unique “reclassing” mechanic but doesn’t quite go far enough. While the script is surprisingly sharp (The “Friends of Giant Bomb” at 8-4 did the localization), it’s still very simple and straightforward. The game is rather generous with the number of characters it gives you, but a lot of them are bad or straight up unusable (as was the case in the original) and don’t even get me started on the side chapters. If you want to see the parts of the game that are actually new and not directly based on a 25-year-old game, you have to go out of your way to kill off characters, which I’m pretty sure is the opposite of what 99.9% of Fire Emblem players do at any given time. I could probably talk about how the map design is a little suspect, with wide-open spaces of nothing between your army and the enemy, or how the game doesn’t look that great visually, but that right there is the single most insane thing in this game.

But of course, I’m also a little crazy and despite everything I just said I still think it’s alright. Turns out even mediocre Fire Emblem is still worth playing in my eyes, which probably speaks to my 100% zealous fandom more than anything else. It’s a pity that the second DS game (which is a remake of the third Fire Emblem and also stars Marth) never came to the states, because it’s much better in a lot of ways. If you’re gonna play one game in the series, Awakening isn’t the best one (It’s pretty easy and has some broken OP mechanics), but it is the most accessible and also not prohibitively expensive like Path of Radiance has become. I dunno. You can continue to expect me to talk about Fire Emblem (despite sacrificing itself on the altar of the anime waifu crowd) and Might and Magic (Despite me going out of my way to avoid anything related to Heroes VII because I can't afford to have my heart broken a second time) related things for the rest of time, that I can assure you.

I still have not finished Dragon Age Inquisition

And I’m seriously wondering if I want to. I re-bought it on PS4 for cheap because my computer is sort of a mess (again), and lost steam around the same time I did when I played it on PC. I’ve played EVERY SINGLE Bioware RPG to completion besides this and The Old Republic (which I will likely never play because MMOs aren’t my thing). Speaking of MMOs though, turns out that Inquisition wants to be one… well, inasmuch as it shares the same uninspired, meandering quest and world design that permeate a lot of Massively Multiplayer experiences. What I mean to say is that it has content and scale for their own sake rather than actually bothering to make it meaningful in any way. The stuff that actually has story and characters in it is solid, but the stuff where you’re wandering around beautiful but mostly empty environs, engaging in a less egregious version of “chase the map icon” and fighting enemies is lacking. That would be great and all if the combat didn’t feel like a half-hearted compromise. It’s not immediate and visceral enough to be an interesting action game, but your options when pausing and commanding from overhead aren’t deep or interesting enough to compare to Origins, or hell, even Dragon Age 2. Needless to say, if you don’t see a review or blog about Inquisition you’ll know that I’ve managed to break my stupid backlog completion tendencies in favor of sanity.

The Witcher 3 seems really, really, really good.

Why did I stop playing? Because I needed to finish Dragon Age Inquisition or overcome my need to finish Dragon Age Inqusition of course. Stop looking at me. Ok, I also wanted to wait for them to make the movement less unwieldy, but I guess that isn’t a valid excuse anymore. Listen, I’ll play it eventually. That game is like the inverse of Dragon Age, where even the seemingly petty side quests are interesting and I was very much into that opening tutorial area. I did make the mistake of playing on “Blood and Broken Bones” though, and I might just dial it down when I get back to the game. The combat in that game isn’t fun enough on its own merits for me to want to have to save obsessively to avoid losing progress.

I watched my roommate play through most of Dying Light

It seems a lot better than Dead Island. Like, a LOT better. Maybe I’ll play it when I work through all this other stuff.

Ziggurat is a quality roguelikelikelike FPS that goes out of its way to evoke Heretic.

Heard it here first!

Destiny is… well, it has good shooting.

This is cheating, because I actually did most of my Destiny playing this week (which is in August). I’ll keep this short, since this game has been a topic of contention for the past 11 months and my opinion doesn’t really break the mold in that sense. Having played up to the end of the main “story”, Destiny is a fantastic shooter and a questionable everything else and I somehow doubt leveling myself for the raids would alter that fact (nor does the announcement that they’re going to make the leveling less stupid with The Taken King really give me any incentive to play more until September). The “story”, if it can even be called that, is baffling and when the game bothers to have cutscenes it feels like they were ripped out of a different game. Peter Dinklage’s voice work is sorta bad, but the material he has to work with is the most vapid nonsense exposition I’ve ever listened to, something that no amount of Nolan North is liable to fix. The shooting is REALLY GOOD. It feels like a repeat of my Devil May Cry 4 quandary from last month, but with even more caveats. I guess I’ll pick Destiny back up next month and go from there, I haven’t been scared off yet.

And that’s a blog! Gee, I should do more of these. With Etrian Odyssey Untold 2 out, you can expect my review of… Persona Q, one of these days. Because that's how things work. Here, have a speedrun from last week’s SGDQ:

I had fun with Ziggurat. You could almost say I got Ziggy with it. It is a ridiculously better gwme than Tower of Guns or Rogue Shooter. Mind, I think Rogue Shooter could be the best of the three if it had better controls.

As for DA:I, I liked the political aspects and I thought the gameplay was rock solid, but after the Witcher 3, I have little desire to return to it. I hope the sequel provides a stronger, less generic narrative. In your case, I'd say just push through the main story stuff. I bet the game could be ripped through fairly quickly that way.

And yeah, okay, Dying Light is better than Dead Island, but I still love the hell out of it and Riptide.

Well FE:SD should be the worst right? I mean it was also the first ( a remake anyway)... One would hope a series gets better with subsequent iterations.

Which one do you think is the best FE game? I still like Path of Radiance best myself, but I haven't played all the ones that haven't come west.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Tower of Guns is hot trash. That and Styx were the games that reminded me "Oh right, not all PS+ games are winners". You'll notice I didn't even bother writing anything about Styx. That's because it was bad and I didn't want to play any more of it and I liked the Thief reboot. Know what else is hot trash? Dead Island. Ok, maybe not that bad, but I didn't last very long playing that one.

It just so happens that I made a list to answer this very question! Like, 5 minutes ago!

I have to agree that Shadow Dragon sits very firmly at the bottom of my list of western Fire Emblem games. Sacred Stones can be devilish if you avoid the grinding and play on hard, and making use of the save function takes a lot of the bite out of Radiant Dawn, but nothing can help Shadow Dragon. Weirdly enough I think the graphics are what annoy me the most about it, how is it that the GBA games look better! It's so bad! I'm still inclined to believe that 7 is the best, but my recent experiences with If/Fates indicate that may change (I'm trying to write a blog about that).

As for Inquisition, I would advise you to skip all of the side content except The Inner Circle, or you will hate yourself more? They hide all the well designed encounters in the main missions. I understand all of the decisions that led to them being the way that they are, but the open world battles just didn't work in that game.

@arbitrarywater: Dead Island is a treasure! Pistols at dawn!

@sparky_buzzsaw: Dead Island is a treasure, but it's a treasure found in the back room of an especially tourist trap-y pirate-themed restaurant in the middle of the UK Virgin Islands.

@hunter5024: Wait, you imported Fates? Now I'm legitimately jealous. What I've seen of that game looks really good and addresses a lot of my gameplay issues with Awakening.

I... might just critical path Dragon Age as much as I can if I'm going to get that out of the way. I don't think looking for shards or getting every single campsite in an area is healthy for my already terrible time management skills.

The more I've thought about Inquisition the more I've only solidified my position of it being a bad game - the worst DA game by far. I find it to be truly baffling as to how it received such near-universal praise and GOTY awards and what have you.

@arbitrarywater: I had the opportunity to buy it and couldn't resist, but held back and only purchased Nohr so that Hoshido would be new to me when it came out in English. It's been really great so far, but I almost want to stop playing because its only making me want the real version worse. I think Nohr will appeal to older fans like you and me. It's fuckin hard. Though part of that is probably the language barrier, I'm sure I could be getting more out of the castle.

@hunter5024: I've been watching LPs of people who imported and (other than the OCD part of my brain going "I wouldn't do that" every few minutes) the Nohr campaign looks great. The Hoshido stuff looks a tad easier by comparison, and I haven't watched a lot of Invisible Kingdom. As for My Castle, you clearly just need to do more face rubbing to solve your problems.

@yummylee: I feel like I could probably say some sort of smug comment about the games press and how they're disconnected from their audience or whatnot, but I'm not quite sure what kind of basis that statement would have. Something something "flash over substance?" People who like those sorts of games are the most likely to review them? I dunno. That game gave me a great first impression but the non-story stuff is so dry and trite that it kills my enthusiasm for everything else.

Dragon Age is pretty good, fun gameplay and solid exploration. It might be the 2nd or 3rd best modern Bioware game (which isn't a particularly notable distinction) The problem is better games keep coming out so there's not much reason to play it for long periods of time when you could just play the newer games.

I'm looking at you.

You got something to say about my weird British computerbox?

I'll say the same thing about DA:I (and possibly already have) that I said about Xenoblade Chronicles: developers are finding ways to artificially boost the amount of stuff to do in their game by this kind of tiered content delivery system. Which is to say, some content is considerably more meaningful and considered than others. You learn very quickly not to go around collecting every Elfroot you see in DA:I, for instance, when you understand that it's put there only because it's extremely easy for the level designers to click and drop a thousand of those things on any given map. You then move up to simple-to-implement fetch and item-farming quests, then to side-quests with a little bit of narrative depth to them and then the core missions which have entire areas dedicated to them. It becomes the player's task at some point to pan their quest logs for gold and ignore the rest.

I say that, but towards the end of DA:I I was trying to find all the missing codex entries I could get by searching for all the loose notes I missed. I really need to start taking my own advice; especially as I hear Witcher 3 is even bigger. Whatever, I'm going to spend 150 hours on that game too and then go get all the orbs in Crackdown 3. I already know I'm a monster.

I really liked Dragon Age Inquisition when I was playing it and when I finished it, but unlike most BioWare games (and DA:Origins and Mass Effect 2 in particular), I have almost no desire to go back and play a second time through. I replayed Mass Effect 3 more than Inquisition. It also doesn't help that the multiplayer horde mode in ME3 was more interesting than the Dragon Age version. I don't know if you have, but I'd suggest playing it on Hard, because Normal is a snooze.

The Witcher is extremely good, and I didn't even go into it all that pumped up. I was going to be skeptical and maybe a little prickly but that game just proves itself.

I totally agree with you about Destiny. For me, the most annoying part of Destiny is tied to that obnoxious, simple exposition; everything is about a philosophically blasé war between Darkness and Light. You aren't a person with meaningful opinions or perspective, you're just another tool of the Light, fighting another tool of the Darkness. There's no ideological concerns, nothing that could possibly stoke dissonance, it's just Darkness and Light and yay, you happen to be the Light. I'd rather have the macho jingoism of Call of Duty. Add to that, I in no way buy the pre-mission chatter about "if we fail, it means the end of Earth". If so much is riding on this, why are they sending one idiot with a gun instead of their entire combined military force?! They have all the technology and manpower it takes to run the Citadel and equip all these different Guardians running around, but when it comes down to it, it's all up to my fucking robitman to do the impossible. Ugh.

@brodehouse: Destiny is very much going for an epic "Space Opera" feel, low on technobabble and high on platitudes and proper nouns (The Darkness, The Vex, The Fallen, etc). Of course, because the story is practically nonexistent, that just means it comes off as cold and hollow. Some people in a PM I inhabit can attest that I wrote a much longer rant about how Destiny has some of the worst storytelling I've ever seen in a modern video game, but given that's what most of the bombcast conversations circa last September and October were about, I thought it better to keep it brief.

@mento: My (now former) roommate was the worst at that sort of naked completionism. He did every single possible side quest in Fallout: New Vegas and still told me it wasn't a fantastic game, and this was on his third character because the other two didn't suit his playstyle. I'd like to consider myself sane by comparison, but I can totally fall under the spell of "gotta fill out everything".

@claude:How's it going Claude?

@fredchuckdave: I mean, what are we considering "modern"? Mass Effect 1 and onward? Or Mass Effect 2 because that's when Bioware gave up on trying to make actual RPGs and instead started going for some vague "mass market" audience?

@jesna: That's the spirit! Show your defiance through the power of Super Famicom games you can't play or read! (though if you had a retron or something you could play it with a translation patch).

@arbitrarywater: KoToR and onward. I have a lot of respect for the Baldur's Gate games but can never get into them so /shrug Mass Effect 2 is by far their best game in that period, it's not even close.

I'm probably always going to be the guy who talks about how Baldur's Gate 2 is Bioware's best game, but I see what you mean. Those two are on a totally different level from everything else they've made besides Dragon Age Origins and every game they've made since KotOR has had a bigger emphasis on story and characters over mechanical complexity. Even the first Neverwinter Nights was more about the multiplayer and mod scene than the kind of crazy 6-man party funtimes that I associate with the Infinity Engine

Still, I'll fully agree with you about Mass Effect 2 being their best "modern" game. What would you consider the worst? Is it Jade Empire? Because I didn't like Jade Empire at all.

@arbitrarywater: Probably Jade Empire yes, I sort of like the (relatively simple) gameplay and admittedly the last time I went back to it (actually sold my original X Box since then, though the only thing I didn't play to the fullest was Dai Senryaku VII so that's okay) I still thought it looked really nice. The problem is that it has almost the exact same plot setup as KoToR and at the time I wanted my games (well RPGs at least) to be 40-80 hours not 15-20 so that really sucked for me. I will say I am hopelessly bored by the original Dragon Age so that's definitely a contender, but I might eventually suck it up and actually play through it. Just as soon as I beat Inquisition... some day.

The customization and crafting in Inqyisition got its hooks into me a lot more than I ever expected it would. That on top of some solid gameplay and expedient quest design made me sink a lot of hours into that game to the point of collecting all those shards - lord only knows why. Like most I agree that it's a game I had a lot of fun with at the time but have no urge to go back to. Right after I beat it I would have instantly bought any story DLC just to keep going. Alas enough time has gone by where I don't really feel like going back to that world anymore.

Don't get me wrong, it absolutely deserves to be on all those GOTY lists for that year. The games press if anything are most easily swayed by smaller games these days as they so fervently wish to experience anything "new" that they'll forgive the most glaring of issues to promote unique gameplay. If anything Inquisition wasn't on enough GOTY lists as that was truly a weak year for gaming, and Dragon Age was a solid RPG.

I had just played through a bunch of Halo and was having a conversation with @yummylee where I was talking about maybe, possibly playing Destiny at some point. I managed to try and convince myself I might like it and that I don't need it in my life in the space of about five minutes.

Also, you mentioned Styx. I gave it a shot. I spent two hours playing it, not really having any fun at all. It has a bunch of graphical weirdness and some god awful acting. I really hate when these Medieval-ish games have a bunch of swearing that seems really out of place. Yeah, that game (and Tower of Guns) are no fun whatsoever... I did do this in Styx though.

I'm super interested in Ziggurat... is it bad that I'm just waiting for it to end up on PS+ or Gold?

Agghh I wish I had the motivation to finish the billion blogs I started and never finished.

@gunstarred: Destiny is okay! No, really, I don't get when people act like it's single-handedly responsible for the decline of video games and has violates our most basic human rights. But... Get some podcasts or some audiobooks or some friends to play with because it's not like anything said in the game is of importance.

Ziggurat was on sale for $6 last week on PSN, which is why I bought that. I also bought that Platinum Legend of Korra game that apparently isn't so great for $6 this week. I figure if I support Platinum's obvious mercenary work they'll stay in business long enough to make another Bayonetta or something.

Thats the big problem with Destiny right there: it's a game that requires some auxiliary form of entertainment on the side to be enjoyable. Thats not the best endorsement really. Of course there are some parts that truly are exciting, but large swathes of it fall under Podcast required playing. Also while it doesn't violate the Geneva Convention there are plenty of really gross tactics employed by Bungie to make you worry about what would happen if this trend become more popular in the industry. I honestly believe that they are very aggressively working against the playerbase, trying to counteract anything that may even slightly deviate from their carefully laid out style of gameplay. It's a game that requires an enormous time commitment in order to get anywhere and see anything of importantance, and Bungie isn't afraid to change things with complete disregard towards the community if it will serve their long term goal to keep this money train rolling. Worst of all it's their attitude in delivering any announcements as if they are doing you some huge favor, when in fact more often than not they are introducing new grind treadmills or negating dozens of hours of hard work through some arbitrary change in mechanics, usually with the purpose of making obtaining something take even longer than before.

The game is OK, the business practices are most definitely not.

@humanity: I don't think "podcast game" is the most damning descriptor in the world. That just means to me that you aren't going to miss a whole lot by zoning out the audio part of said game. That Marty O'Donnell soundtrack is alright, but it's not the soothing, dulcet tones of GBeast.

As for Bungie's shady business practices, I've definitely heard that a lot. However, for new players such as myself they're making the grind treadmill less absurd, if anything (assuming they don't ramp it back up again when they change stuff for Taken King). It's the veterans who are seemingly getting screwed over every time they issue a new update. I cannot personally speak to any part of the game past level 20 however, so I'll cede to you in that department.