How has 2020 been so far?

You know that scene from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey where they're falling into an endless dark void and screaming the whole way, and then they eventually get bored of screaming and play 20 Questions instead? I'm around there.

OK, but how about in terms of games?

Well, I don't play a whole lot of new stuff and miss out on the zeitgeist frequently, which so far this year hasn't been as much of an issue as it has been in the past (Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Last of Us: Part 2 felt like two undesirable extremes on the Mood-o-meter spectrum). I've got a few 2020 releases I'd like to pick up eventually, but between some Steam/PSN sales and that enormous Itch.io bundle I'm set for video game purchases for quite a while. However, I have been availing myself of my monolithic backlog as per usual, so this year's been a busy mix of slightly aged games I've long been meaning to get around to. Like the following:

Luigi's Mansion 3

Back when I still doing my monthly round-ups, which were getting so bloated with random pop culture observations that I figured I should stop foisting them on this poor website, I talked about my expectations for Luigi's Mansion 3 going in after burning out spectacularly on Dark Moon, the second game. Dark Moon's chief issue was one of heavy repetition: to complete each of the game's many discrete mansions, you had to complete the first little area, and then get kicked back out to Gadd's hideout, then complete that first little area again and move on a bit more, then get kicked back out to Gadd's hideout, and so on in such a manner that every mansion took three times longer than it ought to. Cynically, I assumed this is because there wasn't enough content for Nintendo's liking. Oddly, this is a deterioration that hampered a completely different horror-themed franchise: Tecmo's Project Zero/Fatal Frame series, which started declining around Fatal Frame III with its frequent revisits to the same locations.

Anyway, Luigi's Mansion 3 was a return to form, fortunately, focusing once again on a single mansion with a whole bunch of thematic variation. I enjoyed my time with it, even if it felt a little more disconnected with the way its floors worked. The first Luigi's Mansion had that Resident Evil vibe with the way you might be deep within the Spencer Mansion and suddenly open a freshly unlocked door to find yourself back in the foyer, with quick access to the earlier parts of the game; I kind of missed that interconnectivity in LM3, even if this new system probably made it more convenient to get around and revisit previous locations for collectibles and whatnot.

I feel like the best way to summarize how I felt about Luigi's Mansion 3 is by doing something very unfair to it, which is to compare it to Two Worlds: a duo of CRPGs that once referred to itself as "Oblivion killers" that turned out to be anything but. The first had some... rough edges, to put it mildly, that the sequel buffed out until it resembled something you could actually compare to The Elder Scrolls without laughing. However, without those rough edges, that sequel didn't have much of an edge at all. Two Worlds II won't sit in the memory in quite the same way even if, overall, I probably had a better time with it with fewer irritations borne from its bizarre game design decisions. Luigi's Mansion 3 is the same: way slicker, way more imaginative and varied with its level and puzzle design both, and obviously a lot better looking... and yet I'll probably forget everything about it by the end of this year.

The Outer Worlds

I'm sure I went deep on The Outer Worlds in some previous monthly check-in also, but The Outer Worlds definitely had a sense of a smaller but more complete package. Something devised by a smaller team with less time to work with that instead dedicated their schedule to creating a very solid but relatively short game in lieu of something crazy ambitious and barely functional. "Barely functional" has been a persistent challenge for Obsidian Entertainment in particular, who have always had this reputation of delivering on deeply flawed (purely in the technical sense of being buggy) masterpieces.

The Outer Worlds, to its credit, ran almost perfectly throughout, and I attach this to how it had fewer moving parts than most big first-person open-world RPGs of its ilk, especially those from Bethesda. It had a fully realized late-stage-capitalism-infested zeerustic aesthetic, some well-defined companions that were equally fun to shoot the shit with as they were to shoot at shit with, and enough RPG bells and whistles to make progression entertaining enough to seek out ways to boost your XP in whatever small ways you could. It always felt like they were doing a lot with a little though, between the limited number of foes and locations to visit, like it was the prologue to something far greater that Obsidian could create with the same engine if this one did well enough.

I'm generally in two minds when it comes to this approach (though maybe "approach" should be in quotes, since making a game smaller in scope is often a financial reality rather than a conscious decision) of making more compact games out of engines that could allow for much more. This was the case with Saints Row the Third and Pikmin 3: sequels that you could argue benefit from having way less of everything for a more focused playthrough that won't demand 50+ hours from the more obsessive players who need that 100% completion accolade, though could also be said to have suffered from the reduced scope and ambition. If you cut Skyrim's content by a third, would it still be as good? You'd have less to see before you were finally done, but that would also mean having... well, less to see. As an adult with ostensible adult responsibilities to draw me away from gaming time, I'm appreciative of more compact video game experiences on the whole. However, when said compact games feel like smaller and lesser versions of bigger competitors it almost feels like I'm missing out. Obsidian's never going to be the kind of company that can throw many millions at a project the same way Bethesda can (though maybe that'll change now that they're property of Microsoft) and I definitely prefer the outlandish notion of an Obsidian game that actually works at launch, but despite offering a universe of infinite potential it instead felt... finite. Very finite.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter

I'm not sure when the tides began to turn on Falcom's humble Trails franchise (itself a self-contained series within the lengthy and venerable The Legend of Heroes franchise) but I started hearing a lot more about it in recent years, to the extent that we now have honest-to-goodness Trails in the Sky content on the Giant Bomb website. Granted, it appears to be just the one video of an aborted full playthrough of the trilogy that starts the whole Liberl-Crossbell-Erebonia Trails arc, but I'm thankful we got even that much.

It was due to this sudden rise into the zeitgeist that I finally opted to continue from where I left off with my Trails in the Sky FC playthrough way back in 2014 with Trails in the Sky SC (or Second Chapter). Despite a six year gap, I rejoined Estelle, Joshua, and their bracer friends having missed nary a beat, picking up on its deeply tactical turn- and grid-based combat system, its elaborate element-focused Orbment Grid character development, and mission-based structure that affords an episodic approach to the central story arc and plenty of humorous asides and tough optional encounters. Within moments I recalled who everyone was, from party members to antagonists to major NPCs, and where their characterizations and personal arcs had advanced to by the end of the first game. I attribute this to how the writers (and localizers) did such a good job fleshing out these characters and this world.

One big secret to Falcom's modest success, besides how superbly written these Trails games are, is how it's never shy about a challenge. Falcom diehards will regularly tell you to play on the next hardest setting after normal, and then tackle the unique NG+ bonus difficulties for "the true experience", and Second Chapter was where the gloves came off for this specific franchise. Because it starts where the previous game left off, it means you begin around level 30 and have full access to the range of techniques and "limit break"-style ultimate attacks you were using to clobber the last game's final boss, so Second Chapter happily tosses you into the deep end from the get-go and continues to ramp up from there. Some fights require such a specific strategy that it's easy to find yourself overwhelmed until you suss it out. Even when that's not the case, there's a lot that rides on how well you control the battlefield, and the turn order as well. The latter is a factor not only in managing how frequently you attack compared to your foe(s) - some are very fast, and you need to address that before they stomp you - but in managing certain bonuses that appear in the turn order. If there's a bonus that boosts critical damage or heals a moderate percentage of that character's health coming up on the turn order bar, you want to make sure to jiggle the turn order around any way you can so that one of your characters receives that bonus and not the enemy. One great way you can do this is by activating a character's ultimate attack, since you can do this at any point in the battle and it'll interrupt whomever was going to act next. There's a wealth of tactical options that First Chapter spent a long time building up to, for the beneficial sake of slowly acclimatizing the player, that you have full access to as soon as Second Chapter begins. For that reason, Second Chapter feels a whole lot more engaging right out the gate.

The rest of Second Chapter's strengths reside in its storytelling, and how that narrative proceeds from the first, so I'm loath to get too deep into all that for the sake of spoilers. I'll just say that the first game gives you a very strong reason to want to jump immediately into the second, while the second feels like it ends on just enough of a final note that the third game in the game series, Trails in the Sky the 3rd, will instead mostly consist of tying up loose ends and setting up arcs for the later Trails games to pursue. I've still got a while before I reach Trails of Cold Steel III - the most recent (localized) entry, and the eighth overall Trails game where Trails in the Sky Second Chapter is, of course, only the second - but I intend to keep plugging away at this franchise for the foreseeable future. Ys will always be my sword-slashy and metal-thrashy first Falcom love, but I can't deny that there's vital RPG elements that Trails delivers on far better than Ys can.

God of War

I somehow managed to hop on angry pop just before the news broke out that the next Assassin's Creed would go from Spartans and sandals to a more Norse source, taking a route previously followed by Titan Quest (and its Ragnarok expansion) and, of course, this widely acclaimed, non-numbered God of War sequel. As one of the few remaining PS4 exclusives that isn't in the process of making its way to Steam either explicitly or in rumor only, God of War boasts an impressively detailed open-world filled to the brim with mythology based on the Jotun, Aesir, Dark Elves and many other supernatural entities that Kratos can pull apart at his discretion, and is buoyed in this by, well, a boy, but also a combat system heavily focused around Kratos's new magical returning axe. It's such a simple idea that it's a miracle that it hasn't been used to this effect before, excepting perhaps Link's boomerang, that you have a singular weapon that never leaves your side and can do damage on the throw and on the return if you time it just right.

What makes God of War such a stark comparison and contrast both to The Last of Us Part 2, to suddenly get all topical, is in the ways both try to paradoxically decry and glorify violence, especially as a last resort. It's clear the two studios are close associates in philosophy and game design both, if Cory Barlog's championing of Druckmann's pushback against both the critical response to TLOU2 (or rather, the very few outlets with anything actually critical to say) and to the growing public disdain for exploitative crunch periods alike, and both seem very set on the idea of allowing players to have their murder cake and eat it too. I realize it's a little unfair to compare the two, especially given the two year gap, but there's something about the fantastical violence of God of War and the increasing reluctance of Kratos and his part in it that rings far more palatable than the melancholia of TLOU2's world on the turn, even if mushroom zombies aren't really all that less extraordinary than draugr. I'm still not sure if I want to play a second of TLOU2, and that was before its chief designer started brigading any and all vocal critics on Twitter to shut them up, but I'd jump at another God of War in this vein in a heartbeat.

Digressions regarding more contemporary games aside, I feel like I'm always on the cusp of giving up on open-world games entirely. They all suffer from having so many different collectibles and bonus objectives strewn about their enormous maps, and I can never seem to stop myself from finding each and every one before I'm sated with the playthrough, so there's almost this feeling like I'm partaking too much in the "vice" aspect of video games where I'm only doing something out of obsessive habit and not because I'm enjoying it. Yet games like God of War or Sleeping Dogs or Marvel's Spider-Man or Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain come along so regularly, where such huge exciting strides are made with how these open-world games choose to interpret the player's freedom to go anywhere and accomplish so many different objectives, that I can't find myself dropping my association with the genre. By many metrics, it's the most important - if sadly ubiquitous - format of high-budget game development out there right now. I think I can happily excise anything coming out of Ubisoft though; they're not so keen on innovating with this genre, it seems, so much as delivering the same content to a legion of undemanding fans who want the next AC or Ghost Recon to be just like the last one so they don't have to exhaust themselves learning anything new (I'm excepting Rorie from this, because while he is the only Uplay+ subscriber I have ever known he is also way deep in that Magic: The Gathering hole and I've never been able to figure the rules of that game out). I might have a Ubisoft game coming up further down this blog though, so I'm one to talk.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Yo, speaking of open-world games that just go on and on, have you fine folks heard about Xenoblade Chronicles 2? The first Xenoblade Chronicles reinvigorated my passion for JRPGs of a certain scope. While smaller and more niche-happy JRPGs had certainly done their job keeping my interest, and the industry in general, on life-support throughout the late '00s after the end of the PS2's JRPG Silver Age, Xenoblade was the first game to come along in a while to make me feel like the genre could keep on evolving and reaching ever new heights, and not just tread water to deliver the same old familiar fanservice. That's being reductive of the handful of JRPGs actually innovating at that time as well, but they were few and far between and fairly esoteric.

Of course, for a time Xenoblade was relatively obscure too. For a long time it was a Japan-exclusive RPG for the Wii, despite being produced by second-party Nintendo studios and with an enormous budget, until the hardworking weebs of Operation Rainfall convinced Nintendo to first publish it in Europe, which is more or less the global game industry's testing grounds for weird shit, before an eventual North American release. Since then it's been a premium item for Nintendo fans, and I know a lot of folk were excited for its recent Switch remaster. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, meanwhile, could skip all that grassroots petitioning and become one of Nintendo's flagship properties in various Nintendo Directs. It was frequently in the conversation when it came to the Nintendo Switch's early library, along with Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (if perhaps hyped to a lesser extent). Turns out Xenoblade 2 wasn't quite the masterpiece that the original was, but still exhibited many of the same qualities. Those include an expansive open-world that the player could explore at their leisure, revisiting to take on higher level mobs in riskier areas for the treasures to be found there, and taking on dozens of side-quests that they could resolve at any time. The suite of quality of life features crossed over, including changing the time of day and instantaneous fast travel, and some very involved character progression systems to get lost in for hours at a time.

However, it also felt like every new addition had some kind of caveat attached. The Blades, for instance, which combined character weapons with personalities you could build story arcs and dialogue scenes around were an ingenious invention; however, the method with which the game doled these Blades out often relied on gachapon mechanics which have no place in games in general (in my view) but especially those that don't have any kind of commercial "free to play" aspect that might warrant boosting the rarity of desirable loot. Having many different titans to visit instead of just the Bionis and Mechonis of the first meant more variation with the scenery and with their denizens, but I missed being able to stand in a field and spot a different part of the same colossal creature ahead or below, or another titan eerily looming large across the horizon. I might even prefer the "black sheep" Xenoblade Chronicles X to XC2, just because it had so much sci-fi weirdness going on and a soundtrack that was less orchestral than it was intensely stupid Japanese synth hip hop. XC2 isn't bad at all - I wouldn't have dropped almost 160 hours into it if it was - but it certainly didn't capture the same sense of playing something crucially reinvigorating to the ailing JRPG genre that the first did.

The Surge

Strap yourselves in, because The Surge protector has logged on. The Surge is part of a mini-series of game picks I've been playing this year, or will play, because their sequels have since come out and are approaching a reasonable price. (Another 2020 example is Wasteland 2, since Wasteland 3 is due to launch sometime in August.) The Surge, for the uninitiated, is an action-RPG built very deliberately in the FromSoftware Souls style and comes to us courtesy of Deck13, a German developer who had tried their hand at this format before with the mediocre Lords of the Fallen. Changing venues and thematic genres from a grim medieval kingdom to the smouldering remains of a technology and engineering focused corporate headquarters gives them a bit more of an edge in the wider market of these "Soulslikes," as does a few intriguing tweaks to the usual character progression formula which, in some cases, directly tie into the new opportunities presented by the setting.

In Souls games and most like them, you build your stats by collecting a resource dropped by enemies which you can lose if you happen to die and then fail to recover them from where you died. This resource is used to pump up stats, from damage-dealing variables like strength and dexterity to life-preserving vitality or magic-enabling intelligence and "arcane." The Surge eschews a lot of that traditional character-building for what turns out to be a very versatile system of power-ups called "implants", some of which can be switched on the fly but the majority only assigned at rest points (instead of bonfires, these are heavily signposted "Operations Rooms" - there's one per region, and each map has ample shortcuts to get back there in a hurry). What you are buying with your level up resource is simply a higher cap for these implants, allowing you to equip stronger versions of them and - though you need to upgrade your cybernetic "rig" to accommodate them - more slots for implants in general. While it means that your character never really gets stronger in the conventional sense, the diversity in which they can improve their fighting prowess or survival abilities is truly vast, and there's no end of optimal combinations to find and work towards.

The other aspect of your build that your "Core Power", as this upgradeable limitation is called, is to equip stronger armor. Armor with higher defense usually means suffering a few setbacks, like slower attack speeds and higher power costs. If you wanted to tank it, which is a viable strategy here as it was in the Dark Souls games, you'd be decreasing your ability to recover quickly or the number of healing items on hand (as they too are part of the implant system). It's a pretty decent risk vs. reward system that sacrifices the complexity of an advanced character build in the standard sense of stats and numbers for the sake of one with more skills, both passive and active, and more agency in how they prioritize for certain situations. For general exploration, for instance, I'd equip implants that boosted how much tech scrap (the souls/currency equivalent) I earned from enemies as well as increased movement speed and a really handy gizmo that bleeped when hidden items were in the vicinity. When it came time to gear up for a boss, I'd go all in for defensive skills and health items; I'd usually need about two or three times the amount of the latter than I did for general exploration.

I could go on and on in this vein, as The Surge proved to be deceptively in-depth with its systems. I could talk about an infinite-use healing implant that instead draws from your "energy" bar: a stat that usually governs finishers and special attacks, and only builds up when you hit enemies. I could also talk about the way you could have character builds based around absorbing a lot of energy fast and holding onto it for the sake of these energy-based heals. I could talk about how you acquire a drone and can fit yourself with tons of drone damage-boosts, moving them from what is the equivalent of a thrown rock (basically no damage, but will distract an enemy and pull them away from a pack) to a weapon that can reliably clobber even bosses and, again, runs from your easily-manipulated energy reserves. There's the large amount of audio logs and environmental storytelling; the game is less dependent on item descriptions for its mostly hands-off narrative and instead feeds it in through these logs and looping video screens instead. There's of course the most famous aspect of the game back when it was still getting shown around, which is how you acquire new cybernetic limbs by severing broken versions of them from enemies with brutal finishers, and then spending crafting resources to build your own. I was surprised by how quickly it drew me in and I'm looking forward to trying The Surge 2, hearing about how it fixes a lot of problems folks didn't like about the previous (despite its many innovations, it can be a bit buggy and awkward at times). Sometimes when a non-Souls Souls game comes out and people are talking about it, it's only because they're starved of that sweet loop of death and more death and willing to try any alternative, but in The Surge's case it's a legit piece of software, definitely on the same tier as a Nioh or a Salt and Sanctuary.

Picross S and Picross S2

Jupiter's Picross S series, which is simply what they call their Switch picross games to distinguish them from their Picross E series for 3DS eShop, finally went on sale for the first time a few months back. Granted, it was a modest 25-30% off, but I took the opportunity to grab a couple of them to see if they were as slick as they appeared.

The thing with picross games is that they only demand a certain low bar of competency for how they control and the UI, and then beyond that it's more about the gimmicks and puzzle variations they present. A new picross game that offers some 100 or so standard puzzles isn't all that exciting given that this is an industry that has existed in Japan for over 30 years (or about 25 years in terms of video games, starting with Mario's Picross and Mario's Super Picross for the Game Boy and SNES respectively).

Unfortunately, Picross S doesn't have much in the way of frills. It might not need them, granted, but the sole uncommon addition of Mega Picross - which uses a ruleset wherein numbered clues might cross over to two lines instead of one - is marred by the fact that the Mega Picross set is identical to the standard one, the only difference being the clues you're given. Picross S2 fares slightly better due to adding what they call "Clip" Picross: much larger images comprised of multiple smaller puzzles. However, there's only five of these jumbo-sized picross puzzles and they're not all accessible from the outset: you have to complete several pages of the regular puzzles before you unlock all the Clip Picross components.

That these puzzles are all the usual pictures of animals and flowers and household items is disappointing too; I guess at some point Jupiter dropped the pretense of including puzzles based on Nintendo characters for the sake of their console exclusivity. I don't know if I'll ever pick up Picross S3 and Picross S4, or even that newly announced Sega-focused one, though I may change my tune when they drop in price in some far-flung year and I find myself bitten by the nonogram bug once again.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+

Falcom, the developers of Ys and Trails, has been around for a very long time. At least, in terms of a video game company: they started at some point in the early '80s and have been developing weird action-RPGs for as long as I've been alive. One of their earliest was Xanadu from 1985: a game that was the second in their Dragon Slayer anthology series (which also includes the first The Legend of Heroes game), and one of their first big hits. As a way of honoring their past, they've taken to creating a new Xanadu reboot every ten years since. I go into more detail on this ritual of theirs in this retrospective from last year (when E3 was still a thing, even. Remember E3?) but Tokyo Xanadu is the most recent iteration of this process, having originally launched in 2015 for the PS Vita, and was later enhanced (as "eX+") for PS4 and PC/Steam. I'd also never played it before.

So it's immediately obvious what Falcom chose to do with this particular version of Xanadu: make it a Persona game with some Ys-style twitch action-RPG gameplay. Set in Tokyo and following the usual somehow universally-adored but half-asleep self-insert dipshit Kou Tokisaki (who I kept confusing for the similarly nothing-hero Aoi Itsuki, from Tokyo Mirage Sessions, another Persona-like that invokes Japan's capital that I played this year), the game is split between its dungeons - the game has a lot of terminology about these inter-dimensional labyrinths and how they unerringly seem to target future party members by preying on their insecurities - and life-sim elements including hanging out with friends and helping the local citizenry with their problems.

For the social sim aspect, Tokyo Xanadu eschews Persona's calendar/day-planning for a more streamlined "free time" block every chapter, during which you can buy and upgrade equipment, pick up side-quests, and spend a finite number of "Affinity Shards" getting to better know your party members and major NPC allies. Kou even has three stats based on his personality - wisdom, courage, and virtue - that increase with certain accomplishments, though you fortunately don't have to go out of your way to study your ass off ("wisdom" instead increases when you read books, or answer the occasional multiple choice question correctly in class or during investigations). This part of the game feels very "Persona-lite" in that there's no real challenge involved trying to balance a social schedule and is more to do with establishing the world and its characters and giving you some breathing room between what I'll admit are some kinda intense dungeons.

Let's talk about those: Tokyo Xanadu's combat and dungeon exploration is definitely styled on their Ys franchise, which are real-time action games that move at a dizzying pace and require some fast reflexes to quickly take down enemies and evade their attacks. The latter involves a dodge roll with very generous i-frames, while the former is done through melee attacks, ranged attacks, flying attacks (basically just an air dash, which also comes in useful for the platforming (oh yeah, there's platforming in these dungeons too)) and at least three different types of special which all run off their own individual gauges. What's more is that Tokyo Xanadu is based on the more recent Ys games, each of which allow for three-person teams and are built towards exploiting elemental superiority. When fighting through dungeons, it's prudent to switch to the character that has an element superior to the enemy you're engaging, and to keep switching like that for every combat encounter. It eventually becomes part of the rhythm of dungeoneering, quickly switching and attacking and switching again to take on any other nearby enemies. Not only do characters embody an element (and, eventually, two elements each to make it easier to build a suitable team for the immediate dungeon and its inhabitants) but they'll also prioritize certain approaches: Kou's the all-rounder, deuteragonist Akira is more magic-focused and better at a distance, their karate prodigy underclassman Sora is a glass cannon who is very agile and great at flying attacks, hacker otaku shut-in (and male Futaba) Yuuki is an excellent defensive ranged-attacker due to the way he can fire while moving, and so on.

The real bastards are the bosses, which start exceedingly strong and very capable of handing you your own ass with their large-range AoEs and fast movement, and grow increasingly deadlier throughout the game until it oddly plateaus around a certain witch antagonist around the mid-point of the story. I don't mind admitting that these guys caused a number of premature game overs even on Normal difficulty, and were the one obstacle in the way of raising the difficulty as per some recommendations I got from others who had played the game; after all, it's the case in Ys too to play as high difficulty as you feel like you can tolerate because the challenge is often key to the appeal of these games. If I ever decide to take on my NG+ run, which will be on the highest difficulty setting for the sake of the few remaining trophies I've yet to earn, I'm sure I'll be hitting some serious brick wall bosses in no time. Even so, the normally abrasive "git gud" attitude certain character action games seem to have - Tokyo Xanadu rates on the success of each dungeon run based on time taken, the amount of damage taken, and the % of treasure found and monsters slain, for the maximum result of a "S-Rank" - is somehow oddly compelling here in a way that, I think, was Falcom trying to address Persona's and SMT's legendary high challenge levels in an arcade-ish format more germane to what they're all about.

One last odd little thing about Tokyo Xanadu: while the standard gameplay is derived from Ys, the majority of its mini-games (fishing, swimming races, an addictive card game named "Blade") come directly from the Trails series, and Trails of Cold Steel 1-3 in particular. I guess I've got them to look forward to in the near future?

Watch Dogs

Final game update, and one that I'm still playing, Watch Dogs is - like The Surge above - something I only picked up because of its sequel. I realize the two Watch Dogs games don't share a lot in common besides the prominence of a hacker collective known as DedSec and the general open-world gameplay and its focus on remotely operating electronic systems, but I have that same brain thing Vinny has where I don't like to jump into a series anywhere except on the ground floor.

What I've noticed about Watch Dogs is that I actively dislike about half of it, but really appreciate (if not fully love) the other half. A very strong sense of ambivalence has followed me in this playthrough, as I despair of the overly dour tone (another TLOU2 parallel this year) and the way the driving and stealth are complete ass, to put it diplomatically, but I enjoy the little wire-tracing puzzles involved with the collectibles and jumping between camera feeds to find the right angle on whatever I'm searching for. I sort of like the personalities of the world and major characters around protagonist Aiden Pearce, if not the man beneath the Iconic Cap™ himself, and it's amusing the way the game randomizes its Chicagoan citizens and their various personality quirks as determined from your "Profiler" app that automatically targets random passersby for phishing scams and other hacks. It does this odd thing where it challenges your sense of empathy: would you steal from a guy who was undergoing chemo? What if it was something as banal as watching anime or having a stamp collection? If you've answered no so far, what about fundamentalist Christians or people who post on eugenics websites? The game is ever probing for your moral event horizon, and you're going to need some kind of income to buy the better guns the game has to offer. Personally, I had no problem whatsoever stealing from Aisha Tyler, even if I didn't think her work hosting Ubisoft E3 conferences was all that bad.

But yeah, I've heard a lot about how grim and cynical this game becomes in its later chapters and I fear for the safety of many characters that aren't called Aiden Pearce, so I'm taking it slow and enjoying the open world before I get too deep into the story missions. That said, I don't intend to be playing this for more than a week because I've got plenty of better and more recent games I'd like to jump into, one of which is another major open-world game: Yakuza 6. As long as it doesn't demand too much of me with its driving missions - there seems to be a lot, alas, and the skill tree upgrades for driving can only improve it so much - I'm looking to see the credits roll on Watch Dogs, even if I might be ready to bail at any moment.

The End!

That's going to do it for this mid-year check-in. I'm sure I'll keep myself distracted with many more big titles I'm late to the party for, and of course the usual weekly Indies, and I'll try to do these rundowns more regularly so they don't all pile up like this. I just bought Danganronpa V3 and Timespinner, so I'd like to have an excuse to write about those before the year is out, as well as more Falcom stuff (I've been eyeing Trails in the Sky the 3rd on Steam for quite a while) and maybe a few other older games that didn't see much coverage by the otherwise meticulous staff of this website. Until then, just... hang in there everyone. Second half of 2020's gotta be better than the first, right?

...Right?