EDIT: Stupid website ate half my blog.

Hey, it’s been a bit since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it? I’ll be honest, I haven’t felt a ton of motivation to write long-form stuff like this for a while. There is an almost complete blog on Might and Magic VI-VIII (written as a follow-up to that Baldur’s Gate blog I posted back in late May) that is lurking on my google docs folder and may eventually get posted, but otherwise I’ve been mostly blogging free for the entire summer. That ends now! I’ve been playing stuff, and now I’m going to tell you about it.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

What the hell was I doing last summer that I missed The Witcher 3? Wait, I’ll answer that: Pillars of Eternity, a lot of Monster Hunter, catching up with that year’s other big PS4 games, watching my roommate play through all of Dragon’s Dogma and Fallout New Vegas, a second failed attempt at playing more Dragon Age Inquisition, a little Devil May Cry here, a little The Evil Within there, at one point I played Massive Chalice and found it to be a mediocre, charmless lump, etc. Regardless, I’m pretty glad I got to play The Witcher 3 now after only dipping my toe in last summer. Finally playing it a year later, it turns out that game is just about as fantastic as I had been led to believe. After a few years of being underwhelmed by the watered-down, focus-tested, idiot-proof big-budget RPGs from Bioware and Bethesda (and being fully onboard the retro throwback train of stuff like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin) it’s good to feel good about a big open-world AAA RPG again. I thought I’d have to be one of those angry people huddling on the RPG Codex forums (don’t go there if you value your faith in mankind), talking derisively about all the stupid peasants with their stupid plebian RPGs and yelling at the sky about how old shit was sooooo much better. It turns out sometimes new stuff can still be great.

It turns out the secret for me is mostly just “Have good writing” and “Don’t make your shit boring.” Indeed, The Witcher 3’s greatest strength is that it’s a game with a quantity of quality writing. The combat I could really take or leave, even after dozens of hours and on the “Blood and Broken Bones” difficulty. (It’s acceptable. I wish there was less of it.) I’d argue the RPG progression mechanics, on the other hand, are straight up uninteresting and I’d struggle to tell you why you’d ever want to invest in the green talent tree when you could just make your swordy sword attacks do more damage or give all of your signs extra functionality. The loot isn’t even that good because the Witcher gear you can craft is usually a lot better than everything else you find. Gwent is kinda great, but becomes a bit of a joke once you get enough powerful cards. Those things are tolerable and even occasionally entertaining in the face of the world, story and characters presented in The Witcher 3. It’s like the inverse of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where instead of being plagued by “Single-Player MMO disease” and “Generic Fantasy World-itis”, even the throwaway Witcher contract quests usually have something interesting to them. Not every side quest is a winner or especially memorable, but enough of them are that I’d say it’s usually worth the player’s while to pursue them. Admittedly, the main game has some serious pacing problems in the form of Novigrad. I get that the developers wanted an urban area to contrast with the wide open expanse of Velen, but the quest to find Dandelion drags on for a seeming eternity before you’re done, running back and forth on the same handful of streets over and over again. By contrast, you spent barely any time in Skellege before being swept through the rest of the main quest, which is a bummer.

I think the secret stars of The Witcher 3 might honestly be the DLC expansions though. In the grand tradition of Dishonored’s two DLC mini-campaigns and basically nothing else, I think Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine are on-par with, and perhaps even better than, the main game. Hearts of Stone’s short story is incredibly sharp, with the 3 way conflict between Geralt, Gaunter O’Dimm (who is basically the Faustian devil crossed with Q from Star Trek) and Olgierd von Everec giving some really good excuses for some fantastic goofiness. If you haven’t seen the one where Geralt goes to a wedding while possessed by an asshole ghost, well… you should look it up. I think Vinny might’ve played through it on one of those GBeast streams. Blood and Wine is a little more standard by comparison, but Touissant is a fun setting (a twist on a more standard “high fantasy” world) and has plenty of great side stuff on its own, including the Skellege gwent deck and Geralt’s valiant battle against bank bureaucracy. There are some attempts to improve the gameplay in both expansions, but I didn’t find most of that stuff especially useful beyond the mutation that makes the aard sign ridiculously overpowered. I guess it’s not a total surprise that almost every member of the Giant Bomb staff bounced off of this game in varying states of completion (given their relative indifference to fantasy stuff and RPGs as a whole) but if you do have a predilection towards fantasy RPGs and are willing to spend a lot of time tolerating okay gameplay, I cannot recommend The Witcher 3 highly enough.

Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE

I’m still playing this game and could theoretically write something more expansive about it later, so I’ll keep it relatively brief: Tokyo Mirage Sessions is great as both a delivery mechanism for unbridled, straight-faced J-POP insanity and as a Shin Megami Tensei-based RPG to tide me over until Persona 5 comes out next year. Comparisons to Persona are warranted, especially in the game’s earnestly Japanese tone, but TMS is even breezier and lighthearted than Persona 4 It’s also first and foremost about the Japanese entertainment industry, and it’s kinda amazing? If you want a game that owns not only how anime it is, but how J-POP it is, I don’t think there’s anything else like it. There are something like 14 or 15 performed songs in the game, many of which have their own elaborately choreographed music videos and if the performance from the quick look appealed to you in any way, there’s a lot more where that came from (also, a pretty good justification for why there’s no English voice acting). The characters themselves are a tad on the cliched side and the story is pretty fluffy, but it’s all handled deftly by Atlus’ localization and is executed well enough to be entertaining. I’m really digging it, if that wasn’t clear. It’s all enough to almost make you forget that there’s also some Fire Emblem stuff going on… because the FE stuff is pretty surface level. Admittedly, this is the kind of thing that would only irritate a longstanding Fire Emblem fan such as me, but I think that stuff is just a little too surface to serve what I want, even despite the occasional bit of fan-service (as opposed to fanservice, which the game also has plenty of). Maybe I’d feel differently if there was a broader representation across the series instead of just characters from the original game and Awakening (With the exception that Ilyana from Path of Radiance is totally the cafe girl and that’s pretty great) but if you changed all of the mirages’ names and messed with some of the iconography, you could get away with not calling this a crossover in any sense. Well, at least Chrom, Thraja, and Virion are all recognizably those characters even if their design as mirages is pretty far from their designs in regular Fire Emblem. I dunno, throw Leif in there or something. Where are my hot Thracia 776 references?

The other side of the crossover is far more obvious: it’s a Shin Megami Tensei RPG. While the idea of chaining together session attacks is this game’s bread and butter, the fundamentals from all of those other SMT games still apply. Buffs, debuffs, and status effects are critically important, as is making sure your own characters elemental weaknesses are covered. I’ve been playing on hard and have found it to be a decent challenge most of the time, though some of the bosses I’ve encountered thus far have felt a little too much like DPS walls (which is to say if you don’t murder their minions fast enough you’re doomed) but otherwise it’s been a perfectly good time between all of the anime and J-POP. I'm mostly here for the J-POP.

Monster Hunter Generations

Really, if not for the nightmarish specter of this game falling from the sky and destroying everything in its path, I would’ve probably finished Tokyo Mirage Sessions by now. Remember last year when I compared Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate to crack multiple times? Well, Monster Hunter Generations is still definitely Monster Hunter and therefore akin to hard drugs in terms of devouring my free time and actually coming dangerously close to actual full-blown addiction. Buuuuuut… its pull isn’t quite as sinister as it used to be, and that comes from Generations feeling more like a standalone expansion than a full game. As a “Best of Monster Hunter” sort of thing, it draws in elements from the series’ 10-year history… which is secret code for “There isn’t actually a ton of uniquely new content in this game,” falling in line with Capcom’s current depressing modus operandi as a developer and publisher. I never played Freedom Unite and didn’t play much of 3 Ultimate, so admittedly a lot of the returning monsters are new to me, but other than the introduction of Hunter Arts and Hunting Styles it sure is a lot like that game I spent 370 hours playing last year, but with less overall content (there’s no real “G Rank” content, outside of the higher level deviant monsters and a handful of super bosses.) For that reason, I don’t think my time with Monster Hunter Generations will be quite as long or destructive as my time with 4U, thankfully. That said, I’ve had a lot of fun playing with other GB folk in the discord group, so I think getting over the 100 hour mark is more than possible.

So I guess I should actually talk about what’s new? There’s some tweaks to the way some of the weapons handle that won’t be apparent to anyone who hasn’t spent serious time with the game (the third thrust on the lance is now a stronger, slower attack that hits 3 times, the Gunlance has a new heat gauge that you have to maintain if you want to do max damage at all times, the charge blade got hit with the nerf bat, etc) as well as a new upgrade system that is slightly more intuitive but still requires you to look stuff up online. In terms of actual new stuff, the Hunting Styles and Hunter Arts are legitimately cool. Essentially each weapon type now has 3 super moves associated with it, alongside 4 different variant playstyles that determine your moveset and how many of those super moves you can equip. There’s Guild style, which is your vanilla + 2 Arts, Striker, which lets you use 3 Arts at the cost of a simplified moveset, Aerial, which focuses on mounting monsters like you were using the Insect Glaive all the time, and Adept, which gives you a perfect evade/perfect guard move if you correctly time dodges/blocks against a monster (which can then be followed up with a strong attack of some sort.) Some of the weapons fit more snugly into those styles than others, depending on the trade-offs of each individual weapon/style combo. The Longsword, for example, is pretty viable for all 4 styles, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why you would pick an Aerial style for any of the gunner weapons unless you just want to mess around, or why you wouldn’t always pick Adept style for the bow because of how good it is. Oh right, you can also play as a Palico, which is something I haven’t messed with all that much. I’ve seen other players do quite well with them, but I get the impression there’s exactly one kind of Prowler build for doing maximum damage and the rest aren’t as great. I imagine I’ll put more time into using them before the time is through, because I like every weapon in these games… with the possible exception of the hammer.

So that’s basically my summer summed up in 3 games. I also speedran some Resident Evil, played a surprising amount of Ziggurat during the Giant Bomb E3 live shows and probably messed around with Street Fighter V, but I don’t really have a ton to say about those games. As for the future: I finally bought a new computer with stuff like a 970 and a i7 and it should be here next week. In addition to finally being able to run things other than internet browsers and word processors again, you can expect me to re-enter the magical world of PC gaming and play such hot mainstream hits as Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, Underrail, and Serpent in the Staglands. I guess I could also get that new Deus Ex game on PC too, maybe that XCOM 2 game that nobody talked about the month after its release. The possibilities are endless!