Alternate Title: writing stuff is hard, but I did it anyways.

EDIT: Wait, why did it cut my thing off halfway through? Should be fixed now.

Remember when I said I was going to write a group of blogs about the Heroes of Might and Magic series in commemoration of its 20th anniversary? That’s… been harder than I thought it would be. Turns out that writing an overview of something I have a disturbingly encyclopedic knowledge of just sorta means that I have trouble distinguishing details that would be interesting to the reader and extraneous nonsense. If I ever do get around to finishing that half-written google document, I will post it, but I might just try for a more truncated overview than an exhaustive game-by-game series of posts. I’m aware that Heroes VII has come out, though I can’t help but feel unenthused given how much of a mess Heroes VI was. I’ll wait for some sort of fan consensus before figuring out if it’s worth a look. On one hand I should probably just be glad the series has any sort of life at all. On the other hand, I can’t help but feel like I’m watching an earnest but misguided pantomime trying to recreate the glory days of a series no longer controlled by the original creators who made it great in the first place and no doubt crippled by its corporate overlords. So… like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 then.

Oh right, September! Where did this month go? Down the toilet? Up the toilet? Through the toilet? Not sure. I certainly played games, maybe even games you’ve heard of, though I’m certainly in a bit of a lull right now, both in terms of Vidjagaems and personal stuff. It’s probably telling that the game I’m most anticipating for the rest of this year is Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition, mostly as an excuse to actually play that game the entire way through after computer troubles last year prevented me from finishing the vanilla version. Yes, I’m aware Fallout 4 exists. No one makes games like Bethesda does, but you’ll have to excuse me if I keep my expectations in check. I liked Fallout 3, but my memories of that game also mostly consist of running through grey subway tunnels and Liam Neeson being there for slightly more time than Patrick Stewart was in Oblivion. I’m not quite willing to hand them my preemptive Game of the Year award quite yet, though if they improve the writing and make the shooting tolerable it might just end up that way. September? September.

Metal Gear Solid V is a popular game I’m to understand

I feel like half the reviews/impressions of Metal Gear Solid V I’ve read start with or include the phrase “I’m not really into stealth games but…” if not “I’m not really into Metal Gear but…” before showering it with lavish praise. I am not in either of those groups. I like stealth. I will forever be the weird guy sitting in the corner who actually enjoyed last year’s attempt at rebooting Thief. I also like Metal Gear, to an extent. Hideo Kojima’s epic of serious military intrigue crossed with anti-nuclear pacifism crossed with batshit anime crazy times is such a landmark in the realm of video games that it almost excuses the part where all of them up to this point haven’t actually been any fun to play so much as watch. Just ask Drew Scanlon. The Phantom Pain is the weird inverse to the rest of its kin, a superbly-playing game that also just so happens to not have a lot of story for how long it is. That works out pretty well, though I can’t help but feel some reservations after thinking about it for a while.

I’m a little hesitant to even call MGS V an open-world game. It’s a big dumb stealth sandbox that just happens to have all of its areas interconnected, but the mission structure itself is a grander and more ambitious take on what Peace Walker already put down. Mechanically it’s far superior for reasons I’m sure you’ve already seen discussed ad verbatim. It’s a remarkably flexible game that gives the player a ton of tools to sneak around with and allows for a lot of experimentation therein. Being the sort of weirdo obsessed with no kill/no detection in mah sneaky games, The Phantom Pain offers a lot of stuff to facilitate that style of play between the various nonlethal options, the way you can use buddies as a distraction and the constant need to fulton people in order to hide the bodies, it’s straight up one of the best playing games of this year. It goes on for maybe a little too long for its own good, and I could go on for a while about how messed up some of the meta-level management stuff is on top of the microtransactions and FOB mechanics, but essays have been written and threads have been started already. I don’t need to elaborate in too grand a fashion because chances are you’re probably tired of MGS V talk. But please indulge me a moment more.

The way the story is presented is super weird, even without the context of every other Metal Gear Solid game being cutscene-heavy and super chatty. It’s pretty sparse on story for the first dozen or so hours and only begins to ramp up to a MGS level of crazy by its (true) ending. Snake doesn’t talk that much, (though that makes a little more sense after the reveal) leaving Miller and Ocelot to do most of the chatting. After mulling about the game’s story for a while, I feel like I’m probably closer to the side that considers it to be disappointingly sparse than the side that considers it a fitting coda to the story. I enjoyed specific scenes quite a bit, and was surprised how well some of the weightier stuff actually worked out, it’s just a little too dry for a series that thrives on self-indulgent anime crazy (which probably isn’t helped by most of said story being in cassette tape form). Even the ending twist doesn’t quite re-contextualize the series quite as much as it seems to think it does. I’m sure you’ve already had this discussion too, so I’ll lay off. Suffice it to say, I’m on the side that says The Phantom Pain is a fantastic game but a middling Metal Gear Solid game. I’ve never been invested enough to call it a “betrayal” or a massive disappointment, but I will say that I put this game in the same category as Resident Evil 4. It’s fantastic, groundbreaking, amazing, etc but I can’t in good conscience directly compare it to previous installments because it’s so different. At the very least, we don’t have to worry about Konami making terrible Metal Gear games and trampling upon the reputation of this one anytime soon like Capcom has with Resident Evil. Maybe a pachinko machine.

Destiny: The Taken King

In some ways, I feel like I’ve reached a bit of an existential crisis with Destiny, even as I continue to play it. I’ve never been a MMO guy and I’ve never been the world’s biggest fan of color-coded loot, and yet Destiny continues to compensate by having excellent shooting. It doesn’t matter that I have trouble justifying to myself why I’m grinding for better loot when I totally hate other people and am weird about organizing with strangers to ever do the raid, the simple counterpoint is that “Yo, you shot that guy in the head and loot came out. Also, there isn’t any sort of grating Borderlands humor to ruin things” It probably also helps that The Taken King addresses some of Destiny’s more obvious problems, like the part where it didn’t so much have a story as it had a non-story and endless bored Peter Dinklebot exposition. Now it has a story, with characters like “Nathan Fillion” and whimsical Nolan Northbot. I’m not gonna call it the works of Shakespeare or anything, but I actually paid attention and have some sort of basic understanding of how the world of Destiny works without going to the website and reading those stupid grimoire cards. The other improvements are probably a little too minor for me to have noticed them from the dozen or so hours I spent with Destiny pre-TTK, but I’ll probably keep playing it when I need to listen to a bunch of podcasts but don’t want to think to hard while doing so. That probably isn’t the greatest endorsement, is it? Hey, it’s the best I’ve got.

King’s Bounty: Dark Side

I’ve mentioned it before, but Katauri Interactive’s King’s Bounty series is basically the closest thing I have to video game comfort food or an annualized sports franchise alongside Etrian Odyssey. There have been 4 KB games since 2008 and they’ve all been slightly tweaked versions of the same basic framework, which is to say a not-so-subtle Heroes of Might and Magic clone, but with more RPG and less broad strategy… so like the original DOS King’s Bounty then. You aren’t capturing castles or flagging mines or whatever, but you are moving a character around a map, fighting neutral armies of creatures in tactical battles with your mad stackz of creatures, collecting gold and levelling up so you can distribute skill runes and field larger armies of creatures. Despite my affection for this series, I’ve actually only beaten one of them; Armored Princess. The last one, Warriors of the North, had Vikings and was victim to the “Exploding Computer Incident of 2014” where I lost a decent amount of progress and gave up, but this newer-ish one has you playing as the “bad guys”, either an Orc, Succubus or Vampire who conveniently line up with the Warrior/Paladin/Mage class templates previous games have enjoyed. Given the current state of the Heroes of Might and Magic series, I might just prefer these ultra-safe King’s Bounty sequels to anything that Ubisoft does, even if they all just recycle the same assets (and like half of the same music) and could really use a new coat of paint by now. That probably has something to do with lowered expectations, but Dark Side is still really solid for as much as it doesn’t reinvent the wheel. There’s a certain amount of “This game was made in Russia” jank that comes with the territory, but the script doesn’t take itself too seriously and there’s still quite a bit of depth in the tactical combat. I’m not gonna claim I’ll finish it immediately, these games are like 40-50 hours long easily and I tend to burn out on these before picking them back up months later, but as something I’m currently filling my time with it’s not a bad prospect at all.

Other stuff

I beat Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance again after finding a save file that was a little more than 2/3rds through the game. I will say that PoR isn’t super difficult, even on Hard, though there was a higher difficulty (Maniac) that was cut from the western release in favor of an Easy difficulty that I imagine just plays itself at some point. Contrast that with its sequel, Radiant Dawn, whose western localization merely renamed the Japanese difficulties (though it made other random tweaks to the game, such as allowing for hard saves mid-battle and not requiring Master Crowns for characters to promote to third tier classes), which is to say that the “Normal” difficulty in the western version is “Hard” in Japan. And yo, the first part of that game is already sort of ridiculous. I actually wrote a blog about it a few years ago and I doubt my opinion has changed that much so I won’t waste space here.

Did you know they’re making a (sorta) new Baldur’s Gate game? I didn’t until I made the wiki page a few days ago. Certainly, I’m to understand that reviving your classic franchise or style of game is hot these days, but this Siege of Dragonspear thing is super weird. It’s an expansion to the 3-year-old “Enhanced Edition” (debateable if those versions were ever any better than just installing a handful of mods on the original games) of a 17-year-old game that takes place between Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. I’m not fully confident it will actually be great, given that I’ve been told the new characters and areas in the enhanced editions are a little “Fan Fiction-y” in their writing quality, but they got Chris Avellone in some sort of advisory role and that guy can write RPG stuff! I figured screaming about this on my own blog would make more sense than making its own topic on the forums, at least not until it comes out “when it’s done”. Speaking of done, this blog certainly is!

And I'm done now with this. I might join @dankempster and @sparky_buzzsaw in their ridiculous BacklogBlogtober Initiative things, so keep your eyes peeled for that. Maybe I'll make some sort of list of games that aren't 50 hour RPGs and see if I can complete any of them.