Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. Well, it was three days ago, but we're still in the extended Thanksgiving weekend so... enjoy your last day of that? I need to stop publishing these on Sundays, it's a bummer day of the week.

We're now approaching the Holiday Creep; the final month of the year where many of us gear up for the travails of the season. More important than a bastardized Saturnalia, however, is the Game of the Year deliberations happening on Giant Bomb and elsewhere. I have something of an issue with my particular 2016 list of favorites: I didn't play enough this year to fill out a top ten list. Not even close, actually. I'm now considering alternatives to my usual GOTY extravaganza as I'm unlikely to make up the numbers before 2017 rolls around, and certainly not before Giant Bomb starts rolling out its GOTY coverage.

A notion I had was to put together "adjusted" GOTY lists for the previous years. I've never been one to buy games brand new, and that's becoming more prevalent with each new year as more and more games get left behind and I'm more inclined to catch up with what I've missed than to expensively ensure I'm in on the ground floor with each significant release. The big "AAA" games all tend to be iterative open-world action fare and multiplayer-focused shooters anyway, so I don't feel too bad about missing out on those for a few months, and Indies on Steam drop in price extraordinarily quickly, especially if you wait long enough for them to appear in bundles hosted by sites like Humble Bundle or BundleStars (less said about Groupees and IndieGala these days, the better). Because games tech has more or less stalled for the time being, unless you're really intrigued by VR or 4K resolution (I am not), it's actually not such a big deal any more to be a little behind the curve. If you have a favorite genre, there's probably a dozen games to fit that niche that have passed you by. If you have multiple favorite genres, like me, then there's no shortage of wonderful games to delve into. As Vinny always says, there's never been a better time to be playing games - not just because 2016 had a particularly good output of video games, and it did by all accounts, but because there's many, many games out there that many of us have yet to discover. If only on an individual basis.

What that aside basically boils down to, circling back around to that isolate sentence about adjusted GOTY lists that I abandoned in the cold like a Dickensian orphan, is that it's less important for a guy of limited funds - who cannot possibly cover the spread of new releases that the staff of a professional video game site might - to worry about knocking together a top ten GOTY list every year that's nowhere near as comprehensive as I'd prefer. Instead, I ought to focus on collating together the many subsequent years spent playing games of a particular vintage and slowly construct a more authentic GOTY over time.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to do this with more sophisticated list creation tools on the site. I was thinking about how we could use multiple colors to reflect when new games were added to a list and how far games have dropped in ranking as new entries supplant them - so 2016 games played in 2016 would be the site's standard white-text-on-black, while 2016 games played in 2017 might have a green tint and 2016 games played in 2018 could have a blue tint, etc. - but I think for that amount of additional engineering manpower to make sense, there would need to be more than three people actually making lists. But hey, a lot of people put together GOTY lists around this time every year, so it's not that ridiculous a notion.

Anyway, this intro's gone on long enough. I'll start putting together an adjusted 2015 list, since that's definitely the year that got the most play from me of late, and consider going even further back after that's been sorted. As for 2016 games... well, a top six list is still pretty good, right? Right?

OK, fine, I guess I'll swing around the Black Friday Steam sale one last time.

New Games!

As if I wasn't swamped enough with games on the backlog to check out, this week serves to add even more to that growing pile. Well, OK, there's really just one game I have my sights set on this week, but it's a doozy:

After over a decade in development, Final Fantasy XV is getting released this Tuesday (well, unless your local store already broke embargo, in which case good for you, you dirtbag). They probably should've named this "Fucking Finally, Fantasy". I'm on total media blackout for this one - I'm even going to avoid the Quick Look, but that's mostly because no-one on staff really does JRPGs well besides Jason and his anime MonHun clones - and intend to go into it fresh as soon as... well, as soon as I feel it. All I really know about FFXV is that S-E took the complaints people had about how every Final Fantasy XIII location only allowed you to move in one direction, and spitefully made that critique more literal by sticking One Direction in this game. There's no point considering it for GOTY this year, because there's no guarantees I'll even be able to beat it before January rolls around, so it's going to have to be something to look forward to in 2017. (If that wasn't enough, I've also stacked that particular deck with a couple of 2015 JRPGs for January and February as well: Xenoblade Chronicles X and Tales of Zestiria. You know how it is with Winters and long hibernations...)

Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS is out soon as well, though I'm still scratching my head and wondering what the point of it is. I mean, I know the reason it's getting made is because dollar signs appeared over Tatsumi Kimishima's eyes (and I still had to look up who the current president was. RIP Iwata. I guess I'll get used to it) with the success of the Wii U version, and if Nintendo wants anyone to play their games they'd better release it on their far more successful handheld. I'm specifically questioning the purpose of a Mario Maker game without the level-sharing tools the Wii U version has. It's funny - when that game came out, people were not only surprised that the "make your own Mario level" conceit had legs to it, but that Nintendo had done something genuinely cool with online functionality for perhaps the first time since the Satellaview. But now it seems more like it was pure serendipity; that they had no idea what they did right and are obliviously backpedaling on it. I'm sure this 3DS version will appeal to those who have been pondering a Wii U console purchase just for that game, and possibly Bayonetta 2 and a handful of other exclusives (see Xenoblade Chronicles X above as well), and are now grateful that they don't have to go through with buying an expensive doorstop that has more or less died on its ass at this point. For everyone who already has the game, though? Ehhh.

Steins;Gate 0, the prequel/sequel/spin-off to Steins;Gate, is also coming to both current Sony consoles this week. It's considered one of the better visual novel series out there, with a time-looping game mechanic that allows for multiple endings and a whole lot of convoluted sci-fi time-travelling goodness. Non-coincidentally enough, the original Steins;Gate is also coming out for PS4 around the same time in Europe (it's already out here, in fact) and North America. The original game was first released as far back as 2009 in Japan, but it wasn't until the fairly recent PS3 (late 2015), iOS and Steam (both in September) releases that folk got to play an official English version. At any rate, this is one of those visual novel series like Danganronpa that I've been meaning to jump into for a while, so it's firmly on my radar. Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Radiant Historia were Japanese games that did some interesting things with the concepts of time paradoxes and adjusting a narrative through tinkering with the past, and I can only imagine both were inspired by Steins;Gate to some extent.

The Dwarves is the newest release from King Art Games, the guys behind the superlative graphic adventure series The Book of Unwritten Tales. This RPG looks a mite more serious than the parodic pulp of TheBUT, and is apparently based on a novel that I imagine was only big in King Art's native Germany (though that didn't hurt the international appeal of The Witcher and its similar Poland-centric start). It still looks incredible and appears to have something of a Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance flavor to it; as in, a bridge between the mindless hack and slash of Diablo and something with a little more tactical flair to it such as the original Baldur's Gate titles - it even has the same tactical pause feature for its real-time combat. Plus, it's fantasy Dwarves. Who doesn't like those guys? Beer and gold and axes and shitting on the elves. I guess I'll reserve judgement until a few critics get their hands on it, but King Art Games has given me plenty of reason to trust them.

Last one this week, Ubisoft's Steep is out just in time for some Wintery fun on the slopes. And by fun, I mean horrific injury-inducing falls and spills. You will believe even the powderiest snow can break bones with Ubisoft's extreme Winter sports game, the first of theirs I believe where the mandatory climbing of the tallest structures around actually makes some sense. I'm not holding out a lot of hope that the game will be something I want to play - this genre peaked, so to speak, with Amped 3 - but I am anticipating a lot of enjoyable footage in the vein of Skate 3's wipeouts and crazy glitches. If nothing else, creating the douchiest rich kid snowboarder you can imagine then have him realistically shatter every bone in his body by jumping off cliffs sounds like... why are you all looking at me like that? It's been a rough year, we all need some release.

Wiki!

Right, turns out that the Nintendo Entertainment System had quite a busy year in 1987 after all. Thankfully the majority of the Japan debuts appear to be Famicom Disk System games, and I completed that wiki project some time ago. Even so, there's a huge number of releases in the latter half of the year that I wasn't anticipating, and the progress for this little catch-up project has slowed to a crawl: I only muddled my way through July '87 to the first half of October '87. All the same, it's highlighting a lot of work that was originally left on the table, and I'm especially thankful that I'm able to fix the mistakes that I myself made years back. I'd be glad that no-one seems to be visiting those pages and seeing the errors, but that also puts a damper on the work I'm doing now. Well, someone out there appreciates it. Jeff, possibly.

If it doesn't look like I'm going to finish the 1987 list by next week, I might just stick it on the back burner and move onto the GDQ wiki project. AGDQ 2017 starts on January 7th, and with everything in December taking my attention I imagine it'll just appear out of nowhere. So far I've taken the list from the GDQ site's schedule and am taking a preliminary glance through to see which pages need work. That schedule is always subject to last-minute changes, though, so I'm going to try to be vigilant as we get closer to the date. Feels like it's too early to celebrate the coming of another big days-long charity stream so soon after Extra Life though, you know?

Hitman: Episode 1: Paris

It took some amount of willpower to resist buying the rest of the first season of the new episodic Hitman, so impressed was I with the first episode, but this might actually be a case where I want to plug through each episode individually with some time separating them. When it comes to episodic games I nearly always want to play the next episode immediately after completing the prior, but I realize that's because they've all been heavily narrative-driven. I childishly resent having to wait months for a cliffhanger to be resolved, and so I tend to buy them in bundles when the "season" is complete.

With Hitman however, it does a disservice to the game as a whole to give you too much to delve into at once. Each setpiece episode is built with so many mechanics to explore, so much diversity in how you might take down the assassination targets and so many bonus objectives and additional modes (like the Escalations) to complete. Each episode needs time and space to breathe, as opposed to the more straightforward graphic adventure serials like Life is Strange or anything from Telltale, and this feels like one of the first cases where the episodic format is both beneficial to the developers - they can keep the lights on with the proceeds of the previous episodes as they work on the next - as well to the player.

Of course, once you've bought the entire season you're free to play it as you like. If I were so adamant about the above approach, I could easily just buy the whole thing and limit myself to one episode a month, let's say, and thoroughly immerse myself in that single zone until I feel like I've seen everything it has to offer and can move onto the next. At the same time, I sort of don't trust myself to do that, and jumping between the various episodes - perhaps to net an elusive target unique to that region - for the content tourism seems counterproductive to understanding and appreciating each level's deeper workings. These are quibbles, honestly, but it might be better in the long-run to pick up the episodes individually as breaks in my 2017 gaming schedule open up to accommodate them.

As for Paris, you can read how I got on with this "Putting the Sassin' into Assassin" play-by-play over here. I didn't find a good spot to talk about the two tutorial missions though, and both offer a far more streamlined version of the game in comparison to the immense size of the Paris map (and, from what I've heard, even larger maps for areas like Sapienza).

The boat mission test is fun because of its artifice: the fake boat is surrounded by canvas and wooden walls, with the missile silo-like exterior visible throughout. It's surreal to look up and see a huge cylindrical metal tunnel to the sky from behind the backdrops - it takes a moment to process what you're seeing. The goal is to "assassinate" a jetsetting thief who calls himself The Sparrow, and the tutorial part teaches you all about disguises and how each one has certain allowances for where they can go, the disposing of bodies to elude attention, the suspicion trackers of the more eagle-eyed NPCs who are generally those who are likely to know that you don't belong like those in the same profession or supervisors, acquiring and concealing items from the environment, and using the common tricks and tools of the assassin trade to approach and eliminate the target without getting spotted. Curiously, the game also creates the somewhat unrealistic but recurring element that is the "important VIP that apparently no-one knows well enough to figure out that it's just 47 wearing their clothes", which leads me to believe that the game is set in the same universe as Superman. Just needs a pair of glasses, and 47 suddenly vanishes with nary but a bespectacled stranger where he once stood. I also like that you're allowed to toss people off the boat: presumably there's something down there to soften their fall in lieu of seawater, but 47 doesn't seem particularly concerned either way.

The Russia exam map recreates a classic Cold War black op with the narrative reasoning that the head of the ICA based it on a mission he himself narrowly completed back when he was an agent in the 1970s with the intent of giving this untrustworthy new rookie an exam so challenging he couldn't possibly complete it. It's another relatively small level: a single aircraft hangar with offices on the first floor, and a surrounding car park and guard station. The whole stage puts you in trespassing mode - while you're often harmlessly escorted out of such areas if you get spotted, in here they just shoot you because it's meant to be a Russian military base in Cuba - so you really need to be fast in procuring a disguise and finding the target. Fortunately, almost any disguise gives you free reign of the base. The target, an obnoxious American chess grandmaster, is usually escorted by a guard and the local KGB Colonel. This level introduces Opportunities - guided tours for certain showy assassinations that are really designed to give you an idea of the mischief you can get up to - and so there's a lot of options. You can dress as the Colonel and escort the target to a secluded area for a sneaky execution, find some expensive vodka and poison him with it, mess with the slide projector and electrocute him, or - and I believe every Giant Bomb staff member took this approach the first time playing this map, as did I, as it's almost impossible to miss the NPC conversation that inspires it - set up an ejector seat test and rig it so the chair actually goes off and drops the target from a great height. While this is meant to be a simple map to get players confident enough to try the real thing, it can be challenging if you're trying to avoid using disguises or attempting the restrictive Escalations: you don't earn any mastery XP like you would on the regular missions from going out of your way like this, but it helps bring out the inherent challenge of the level.

I'll be playing more Hitman in the future, for sure. I imagine the next season will begin before I'm done with this one, such is the speed that they've been putting them out, but at least I can now take part in the zeitgeist that seems to have wrapped up the entire site. If it doesn't make GOTY for Giant Bomb, I'll honestly be surprised.

Axiom Verge

You know, I'm not sure what I was expecting from Axiom Verge. The internet collectively went a bit nuts for this pixel-based SpaceWhipper last year, to an extent I rarely see for an Indie pixel game of this genre. I love them to bits - see last week's Sunday Summaries on Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, a similar case to this - so I was going to dive into this one regardless, but it seems very... well, ordinary. In a giant crowd of ordinary.

Don't get me wrong, it's a well-made one of these. The game presents a huge number of weapon modifications that modify the spread of your core weapon's output, though it doesn't quite get into crazy mix-and-match combinations. The music's fine and atmospheric, though the sound effects are a bit grating with their low-fidelity drills and boops. The aesthetic is particularly striking; it recalls a lot of H. R. Giger's less famous work with serene female faces surrounded with black-tinged biomechanical gubbins, which you might also see in something like Cyberdreams's Dark Seed graphic adventures or the PC Engine game Jaseiken Necromancer - such was the Swiss master of the macabre's widespread appeal that his influence can be seen in both Western and Eastern games, even beyond the usual xenomorphs. The story's on the philosophical side, and deals a lot with the role of the protagonist and the nature of the alien world he finds himself in after a lab accident, not too dissimilar to the plot of Another World (and I want to say that was one of Axiom Verge's more deliberate references).

One significant aspect is how the game allows you to "glitch" reality. It's where the deliberately old-school presentation - hovering between 8-bit and 16-bit, depending on the area - works to the game's advantage. Graphically, everything could feasibly appear on an old console, except for the glitch effects: these might also be seen while playing an old game tape that hasn't been cleaned in a while, sure, but it wouldn't be intentional like they are here. The game plays with its biomechanical world by suggesting that the setting - an interdimensional pocket named Sudra, claimed by its inhabitants to be poised between our universe and one that has seen much greater technological advancement - is actually sitting between a physical world (ours) and a digital one. That the line between physical flesh and blood and digital code is blurred in this place, and that the "breach", which is essentially static white noise made manifest as damaging airborne particles, surrounds this world like a maelstrom of inscrutable chaos. The glitching also makes a strong impact on the gameplay, with the player eventually collecting a type of weapon that can glitch enemies and the environment for various beneficial effects. A glitched enemy might move slower, fire less frequently, float around harmlessly or simply cease to be corporeal. Likewise, glitchy platforms and walls will impede exploration, until they are turned "off" (or "on"). The player picks up a few other means of travelling through areas they couldn't reach before - it wouldn't be much of a SpaceWhipper without this element - but none of them are as noteworthy as the idea of fiddling around the with the nature of reality, as a scientist who might visualize this strange world as being part machine code.

Overall though, the game follows the Super Metroid template to a T, more than any other Indie SpaceWhipper I've played in recent memory. The dark and claustrophobic atmosphere, the hostile alien lifeforms that populate the planet, the equally alien and occasionally fragile structures that surround each room, the mysterious sapient beings that appear to help and hinder the player in equal measure, and the gameplay's focus on firepower and the drive to improve it in order to weather the hazardous distances between checkpoints, or boss encounters.

Like I said, this is a great game. It has a number of wonderful surprises both mechanical and narrative in nature and controls fluidly with a brisk movement pace that increases as you procure more traversal power-ups, with the few button-specific commands never growing in number to the extent that you can barely keep up with which button does what - an issue that plagued Guacamelee and a handful of others. Keeping genre fare like this simple is essential to the lasting appeal of the format, which should be obvious when creating a game in a sub-genre made popular back when there were fewer buttons to worry about, and Axiom Verge handles that paradigm without having to sacrifice any of its novel twists to the formula. But formula is what it sticks to, more or less, and while I can concur with the richly deserved appeal it garnered from the mainstream, I'm still left slightly perplexed by it. It's an Indie SpaceWhipper, guys. You know these things are everywhere, right? Or am I overstating just how much everyone was talking about this thing last March? (It didn't make Giant Bomb's top ten, so perhaps so.)

Bonjour mes amis, and welcome to this little feature I threw together to celebrate finally getting my gloved hands on what might be Giant Bomb's 2016 GOTY, IO Interactive's Hitman: No Subtitle (It Was Assassinated). I only have the intro pack currently, though I'm enjoying the game enough that I might start picking up the other episodes whenever there's a sale on, or if they hugely discount the whole thing to promote Season 2.

What surprised me about Hitman, as a total series neophyte who only had vague ideas of what to expect, is how much the game relies on classic adventure game puzzles and timing, rather than something more stealth-based and action-y. Those are still prevalent elements, for sure, but if you're playing the game "properly" (like Dark Souls, the game is built in such a way that no ideal solution ever presents itself) there's not a whole lot of sneaking around and dodging behind enemy patrols that needs to be done. Generally speaking, there's almost always an easy-to-get disguise that will allow you free reign of any given region in a level, and you're better served going that route than relying on the game's deliberately inscrutable spin on the usual guard sensory cones and the like. Combat's also a no-go: almost everyone's armed, and you die relatively quickly once you've been made and the goons start showing up in larger numbers. Instead, the gameplay prioritizes spending the time to set-up and execute the perfect murder and cheerfully eluding blame as you make an unhurried exit from the crime scene. Coin toss distractions and sneak attacks from behind have been my go-to, since I'm an impatient sort, but there really is a breadth of options available for imaginative manslaughter, many of which can be viewed in the game's own "collectible" menu of opportunities, discoveries and assassination methods scattered across each level.

Yet, the game only gives you sensible choices to make with these challenges. To find some of the truly creative methods, which is to say the insane ones that would never work, you either have to look to the game's multiplayer aspect or take matters into your own hands. The multiplayer aspect, the Contracts, operate like a game of "H.O.R.S.E.": a player runs around the level, marking and murdering various targets in various disguises in various ways, and then uploads that chain for others to try. You can make it really difficult on yourself, and subsequently those following in your footsteps, by going for the most ridiculous and loud kills imaginable. I'm still a little too wet behind the ears to dig too deep into this mode - I had a heck of a time just figuring out how to take down this week's Elusive Target, which might be another topic for this feature to cover if I continue it - but I've been picking up little clues and notions about these levels that I'm curious to try out.

The Showstopper

Paris, the game's first episode, tasks Agent 47 with eliminating two targets: Viktor Novikov and Dalia Margolis. The duo cooperatively run a spy ring collecting information on the rich and powerful by using attractive fashion models to honeypot their way into positions of trust where they might glean a gem or two, which I believe is also the plot of Zoolander. (It has been a while since I saw that movie, though.) The former target is schmoozing downstairs with fashion icons, the press and a few incognito government contacts, while the latter target is upstairs monitoring an auction of state secrets with a group of insidious global movers-and-shakers. Because they spend almost the entire time separated, barring a security lockdown spurred on by something loud and dumb you just did, the various opportunities and challenges generally only involve one or the other with few exceptions.

Because this was my first proper episode, I've spent quite a bit of time casing the joint and following the built-in opportunities each level provides, which act as guided tours for the level's quirks and geography. These have been instrumental in my understanding of the mansion's layout, the location of various important items like the master key that unlocks every door and the IAGO invitation that allows me to skip straight to the third floor without needing a disguise. It's also introduced me to a rogue's gallery of bit-players: the blogger who is trying to get an interview with Novikov, Novikov's contact from the Russian national security agency FSB, Dalia's accident-prone assistant Hailey, the reclusive Sheikh al-Ghazali whose wealth is matched only by his fondness for shimmying around window ledges, the delicate head fashion designer Sebastian Sato, and - I'd say inimitable if it wasn't so easy to imitate him - Helmut Kruger, the trashy gothic fashion idol with whom Agent 47 shares a certain bald likeness. These guys are like the characters in any adventure game: they can be window dressing that adds flavor to the narrative, or they can end up being actively if obliviously involved in your schemes.

Here's a few of my favorite ways I've completed the Paris mission:

• One of the big set-piece murders involves dropping the entire catwalk's lighting rig on Novokov as he strides out to make an ingratiatory speech to the collected fashionistas in the audience. It's pretty much the least subtle way to complete the level, short of sticking a mine on a propane tank and rolling it into a pack of NPCs like they were the shark from Jaws. It's an opportunity that requires a great deal of prep too: you need to overhear the security goons talking about how unsafe the lighting is, you need to remove Sato from the event (you can just spike his drink with rat poison and be his emesis nemesis) so Novikov is forced to appear in his stead, and then you need to find a crowbar and to physically climb up there to get the ball rolling. Worth it though.
• I booby-trapped the blogger's camera and exploded it outside the entrance to the mansion mid-interview with Novikov. I was the Sheikh at the time. Just prior to that, I won the secret auction as the Sheikh (I assume I stole his tablet) and was congratulated by Dalia in her office. I didn't let her finish her effusive piece, though, as I had better things to do and just dropped a chandelier on her head. This mansion has a real problem with insecure light fixtures.
• I poisoned Novikov twice, since I had both poisons on me. That opportunity involves mixing up his favorite cocktail, which requires a quick scout around in the basement. There's a few documents like that lying around which become necessary for some plans to work, and the game helpfully tracks them for you in the "intel" screen (though unless you're using the guided opportunity tracker, you still have to find them again). I first tried the cyanide I was given by Dalia while disguised as Kruger, since all of IAGO's "agents" are given some, and he dropped dead mid-schmooze. The second time, I gave him an emetic and followed him to the bathroom, whereupon I drowned him in his own vomit. It's a delightful game.
• One of my favorites, if perhaps a little straightforward, involves setting off the duo's big fireworks show early and taking a vantage point where I can snipe them both as they come outside to investigate. The sniping controls aren't exactly ideal, but if there's assassinating to be done in a modern setting I'd better be able to Duke Togo that shit.

Here's a few discoveries I'd like to capitalize on at some point:

• There's a battleaxe in the cafeteria. I have no idea what it's doing there, and there's no way to conceal it, so I can only imagine that a weapon that size kept so far away from the two targets is meant to be an expert-level assassination tool. Challenge accepted.
• One challenge has you drop Dalia onto Viktor from high enough that they both perish. I noticed when I did the sniping mission that Dalia's third-floor balcony overlooks where Viktor walks out on the ground level. That sounds like it might be hilarious. And super efficient too, come to think of it.
• Another has you eliminate both of them simultaneously in their underground panic room. I suspect the best way to get them running is to either set off the fire alarm or use Novikov's bodyguard's phone to trigger an alert. Either way, it can't be difficult to complete that mission with them paired together, provided I can find and enter the panic room before they lock it up.
• I've killed Novikov and thrown him into the Seine before, but it didn't occur to me to cut out the middleman and just push him in when he's taking in the view. I'll have to rectify that, but I am concerned about any screaming drawing attention. The game has a great challenge-unlocking system where it won't actually force you to complete the whole mission for them to count. Rather, they stay unlocked even if you reload to an earlier save, and you merely have to complete the mission once to get all the score benefits.The first time I completed the Paris mission, I earned around twenty unlocked challenges and gained enough XP to be halfway to "mastering" the level because I kept reloading and trying different approaches. The game manages a fantastic balance of being simultaneously challenging and super lenient that I admire. Specifically, it does this by making the truly challenging gameplay completely optional, like the Elusive Targets and the Escalations (more on those in another update; gotta get better at them first).
• I kinda want to poison Dalia with the cyanide she gives you. I'd need to be Kruger for that, and getting his suit isn't as easy as the Giant Bomb boys make it seem. It's hard to choke him out and keep that body undetected if you don't want to kill the guy, since the security patrols are relentless. It would also require dressing up as a member of the auction staff to actually spike the drink, and because the auction and fashion show waiters have different colored waistcoats it's much harder to find the former.
• Two words: Vampire Magician. Found the suit once, already had a different opportunity underway and left it behind. Apparently the game has a whole bunch of magic trick-related assassinations unique to that costume, but I have no idea how you're supposed to pull them off while wearing the least conspicuous outfit imaginable. Could it be possible that the Vampire Magician can turn invisible...?

Although I didn't get around to it this week, I'm excited to try out Hitman finally. I must've seen at least three Giant Bomb staff members go through the early sections now, discovering the projectile prowess of the modest fire extinguisher and learning what you can and absolutely cannot get away with while trying to be inconspicuous. Getting through those early tutorial missions and the Paris map myself, finally, will seem all too familiar. All the same, it feels like this was the game to watch this year, along with Doom and a handful of other surprises.

2016 has definitely been a year of surprises in the grander scheme of things, almost all of them bad to potentially apocalyptic. I'm glad the video game industry reversed that trend, with the surprises as the highlights and the straightforward sequels and certain overhyped games slightly underwhelming in comparison.

I'd still love to try Dishonored 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Watch Dogs 2 and Uncharted 4 at some point next year - or maybe slightly earlier, depending on what I get for Xmas - but 2016 belongs to the games no-one saw coming. I'm eagerly anticipating the GOTY discussions next month: it's going to be hard to choose a list, and it's going to get heated.

New Games!

It's been an incredibly busy month for releases, and this week is no excep- just kidding! There's nothing coming out this week. Well, almost nothing.

• There's a remastered version of the original Darksiders called Darksiders: Warmastered Edition. Y'know, because it has a character called War in it. It's no "Deathinitive Edition".
• Dragon Ball: Fusion is yet another Dragon Ball Z game, this time for 3DS. For an anime series that ended twenty years ago, it sure is an active IP.
• The Amnesia Collection is coming to PS4, which bundles together Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. It's sort of like that Tales of Symphonia Chronicles set, where you're buying a stone-cold classic and getting the sub-par sequel thrown in for free.
• Samurai Shodown VI is out this week on PS4's PSN, the first time a home version has been made available in English. The original Arcade version came out in '05, apparently, and it was ported to the PS2 in Japan early the following year. I didn't even know the Samurai Shodown series went all the way up to VI, but that's what I get for underestimating SNK's propensity for sequels. Just goes to sho, I suppose. I do think it's rad that we're getting freshly localized PS2 games for PS4's PSN - their PS2 Classics selection has been pretty great so far.
• Aqua Moto Racing Utopia certainly sounds like a blast from that title. Can't say I have much experience with the Moto Racing series, but if they're still producing them then someone must be buying them. Look at me, with my fancy book-learnin' knowledge of how supply and demand works. Jetski racing games and their water physics should be one of those litmus tests for the graphical/physics hardware of new console generations; like Triple H's (old) hair, but even more wavy.
• For Steam, we have... a new Dragon Knight game? For real? It doesn't seem to be related to the infamous eroge RPG series though, just cribbing off its uninspired name for a dull looking anime hack n' slash. Oddly, the Steam page has tags for nudity and the like, but there's nothing to suggest that in the screenshots (its heroines don't appear to be wearing much, but that's every anime game). Maybe the person who added those tags assumed it was a sequel/remake too.

I was going to look for other Steam games, but then I noticed there were three anime visual novels being put out by the same company on the same day. You want an update on what Steam is like presently, there's your answer.

Wiki!

Current Wiki Project: NES 1987, general clean-up and header images. I've theoretically processed this year already, but there's a few gaps that needed filling in.

1987 is proving to be a busier year for the NES than I remembered. It was a significant twelve months for the console, make no mistake, with its European launch (well, for the half of Europe that matters) and the introduction of major franchises like Final Fantasy, Metroid and Mega Man - though Alex will be the first to tell you that the original Mega Man had room for improvement. In my head, though, I have this weird idea that the NES was still testing the waters for its first few shaky years and only hit its groove around 88/89. Yet I suppose that wouldn't make much sense given how close the SNES would be at that point.

It's still a relatively modest list of releases compared to something like the recent SNES projects, but I'm getting sidetracked by games with multiple Virtual Console releases, since I'm probably going to be adding those eventually and might as well bash them out now. With some of the more popular games in particular, we're talking four separate region releases for all three consoles that support their own Virtual Arcade: Wii, 3DS and Wii U. And then there's all the fussiness inherent to the currently busted release editing tools. So that's taking some time.

All the same though, I hope to have this catch-up task completed before December sneaks up on us and it's time to knuckle down with GOTY stuff and holiday-related chores, and then AGDQ shortly into the new year. Not that I'll have much to write about for GOTY given I've barely played any 2016 games, but I'm sure I'll throw something together. Like a "2016's Best of 2015" feature, maybe.

Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight

For whatever reason, my gaming this week was dominated by two challenging 2D platformers. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, the first of these, is an unfairly overlooked Indie SpaceWhipper from a small studio who have been putting out these anime-inspired action games for a while but have only recently entered the big leagues. Well, the Indie big leagues, which is getting a game added to Steam with a $10 price tag. I realize it sounds like some janky Touhou Project doujin, but it's legit. Honest.

I've said my piece about this game in the review I wrote last week, but the skinny is that while it's not the most elaborate Indie SpaceWhipper ever made nor the longest, there's a great deal of craft and attention put behind it. Its Souls-ian flair wasn't something I anticipated, and the game is fairly rough from the offset due to how much damage you take and how few healing items are available at the start. It becomes far more manageable as your stock of curative increases, though you still have to be on your toes throughout.

I'll sweep up games of this genre every so often because I find it relaxing to comb an ever-increasing map of squares and backtrack for collectibles and the like, and Momodora is a fine one of those. I'm tempted to try some of its freeware predecessors at some point.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

This one was just a bummer. When Donkey Kong Country Returns came out, there was plenty about it I loved as a fan of the SNES trilogy of Donkey Kong Country games. I loved the music, which celebrated the great compositions of David Wise (even if this site's owners seem to have a beef with him) with many a modern remix, and I loved its colorful presentation with the various non-2D flourishes - like how barrels would launch you into the background and foreground - or how certain stages would be rendered entirely in silhouette. Unfortunately, the game also carried over some of the faults of that series too, in particular its inkongruous difficulty curve for such a cheerful series. I've no problem with platformers being challenging - there's a time and place for masocore, but even something traditionally soft like Mario needs to throw you for a loop now and again - but DKCR was unnecessarily so, to the extent that its developers appeared to believe that the appeal of the original games was in a large part because they were so difficult. That was more the result of Rare being a developer unused to crafting a family-friendly 2D platformer and the awkward, sluggish movement of its giant simian hero, both of which were apparently kongsidered sacrosanct by Retro Studios and transported over wholesale instead of any attempt to alleviate them.

With Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze, the developers have doubled down on both the wonderful presentation - now in HD! It really does look incredible - and this underlying user-unfriendly gameplay. Companions are now simply upgrades for Donkey Kong: they sit on DK's back and assist him with his platforming. Diddy expands the amount of horizontal distance DK can travel with his backpack, Cranky can use a Scrooge McDuck-style pogo hop with his walking stick to increase DK's jumping height and allow him to safely move across spikes, and Dixie provides a middle ground between the two with her Yoshi flutterjump-enabling helicopter hair. The player can collect Banana Coins and spend them for single-stage power-ups too, like a health increase or hiring the secret-finding acumen of Squawks the Parrot to find certain well-hidden collectibles. You would think with all these bonuses that the game would be challenging but fair, right?

Well, no, not really. What the game is really fond of doing is forcing you to start levels over from the very beginning. It either does this by having a collectible right at the end be impossible to reach without a companion, and then refusing to put any companion barrels between the collectible in question and the last checkpoint you hit. Ditto for secret exits, of which the game has many. Another fond trick is to take all the checkpoints away, or ensure there's no healing items or companion barrels to give you a reprieve at any point thus forcing you to complete the entire level nigh perfectly. Without a companion to aid his leaps, Donkey Kong moves and jumps like molasses on a Monday, and it's rarely adequate for some of the game's trickier precision jumping sequences. Tropical Freeze will do this with the hardest stages it has just to make them even harder. Why? Well, I can only surmise it's because the designers aren't copacetic on how to make the game more challenging without mean-spirited artificial methods like the above.

But it gets worse. There's another gameplay hurdle that was carried over from the previous game: the way each stage has exciting dynamic events that create obstacles that are almost impossible to predict ahead of time. Floors start collapsing, lava starts erupting, or rubble kongstantly drops down from above in some levels, and others resort to the Flappy Bird rocket barrel or minecart all too frequently. In those fast-paced auto-scrollers, this "cinematic unpredictability" issue is exacerbated severalfold, and you'll often sacrifice lives by the dozens to memorize what happens and when so you don't crash into something you couldn't possibly have anticipated. The game is generous with 1ups, at least, though that does nothing to mitigate the forfeiture of your finite time on this Earth.

Even boss fights, which are often the highlight for this series, go on far too long. Rather than figuring out a boss's moveset and hitting them the traditional Nintendo Three times, or a more reasonable five times, bosses take anywhere between nine and fifteen hits before they finally give up. The only reason they take this long is to chip away at your very limited health. Again, this feels like something preserved from the originals, but was never necessarily an aspect worth keeping around.

Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze is a fantastic platformer in most respects, easily the rival of Super Mario 3D World, Shovel Knight or Rayman Legends. If you just intend to play it casually without worrying about KONG letters or puzzle pieces, have at it with my blessing. However, if you were to make an earnest attempt to beat every stage with all collectibles and unlock all the secret levels, you'd soon be tearing your hair out over how patently and deliberately unfair it all is. It's not just difficult for the sake of channeling the SNES trilogy - its reputation for ape murder makes the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden seem like a safe haven in comparison - but done so with a level of cruelty so callous that I'm not entirely sure what was going through the heads of Retro's designers. Maybe they're resentful that they were stuck working on another Donkey Kong sequel when the Metroid Prime series, easily their magnum opus, grows stagnated. It's not good form for a critic to dwell on kongjecture though, so I'll just warn folk ahead of time that while this game has a bright and colorful facade, inside beats a heart of the coldest, blackest night.

Hey, guess what happens if you beat the game with 100%? Hard Mode! No items, no companions, only one hit point. Go fuck yourself, Tropical Freeze.

Another short one this week, since I'm writing this in the midst of a 24 hour Extra Life charity stream hosted by Jeff. Yeah, that guy. It's been a particularly rough week for most of us otherwise, so I'm just going to get on with what I have here and try not to think about it too much. I'll be back to my usual level of verbosity next week, I hope. Or maybe I'll stick with the whole brevity thing and start writing more non-Sunday stuff. Seems a bit late in the year to start tweaking this format, but hey. It's not like there hasn't been a lot of changes of late.

New Games!

It looks like everything got out of the way for the two big releases this week. The first of those, Watch_Dogs 2, is an open-world game that... I'm sort of optimistic about? I'm getting a lot of inFamous Second Son cringe vibes from the totally right-on activism angle, but Watch_Dogs was a game that seemed to go down badly because it was far too po-faced and generic with its protagonist and story. If nothing else, this colorful new entry seems to be attempting to address those shortcomings. Well, besides the generic story, but I guess time will tell with that. Either way, I've been sitting on the original Watch_Dogs for a while now - it's the last of my PS4 backlog to tackle, though I've plenty of other games on other systems to look at - so I'll wait until I've played that before discussing my hopes for how the second one will fix its myriad problems. How's that for unclouded optimism?

The other big launch this week, which I erroneously reported as coming out far sooner, is Pokemon Sun/Moon for 3DS. I'm tempted to just copy/paste what I said last time in the 14/10/2016 Sunday Summaries update, but let's make an effort here. I'm generally in three minds about video game genres: I'm either into it, in which case I tend to consume as much of it as I can; I don't care for it, in which case I generally ignore it; or I've accepted that I no longer have the patience or time for it, which is where a lot of long-winded RPGs and open-world games are starting to end up. I still love those two particular sub-genres, but I'm being far more judicious with them given how much of my gaming time they've monopolized this year. Pokemon, and monster raising sims like them, are especially demanding of your time with the amount of grinding involved. That's cool to some extent; Pokemon was built to be played on the go, in small bursts for long stretches, but it's not how I consume games. This is a long-winded way of saying that I don't particularly care for Pokemon, but I think it's fair if I spend a few sentences to say why without falling back on anything more immediate and dismissive.

There's other stuff out this week, but it's fairly minor. An Assassin's Creed compilation, for instance, or some Star Wars Battlefront GOTY edition (which they called something else, because who considered that to be GOTY?). A sequel to the Whispered World? Something called Runbow coming out for Steam? I think everyone's going to be fine hacking and Pikachu-ing.

Wiki!

Managed to get quite a bit of wiki work in this week after the utter dearth last time, though it's still mostly meta data entry and not so much probing the weird and wonderful world of Japan-only video games that makes for slightly better reading. I did, however, complete that ongoing task of the past few weeks of ensuring that we have all the releases for TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine games that have since been rereleased on Wii Virtual Console, Wii U Virtual Console and the PS3/PSP PSN store. There were even a few 3DS eShop releases in there too, but the TG16 has yet to make much of a splash on there. Much like how it failed to make a splash pretty much anywhere else. I still love it though.

The second task, which I'm going to try to fast-forward through to prepare for January's Awesome Games Done Quick event, involves going through the list of NES games released in 1987 and ensuring the pages are in an ideal condition. When I first processed the early years of the NES (and the Famicom, its Japanese equivalent) I wasn't yet a moderator, so many of the more obscure pages don't have their aliases or header images yet. Really though it's just more sprucing up, and I might once again recommend the Chrontendo documentary series if you want to know everything there is to learn about the Famicom/NES from its 1983 launch in Japan to the end of 1989, which is where the video series is currently at. For the record, episodes 14-27 cover the breadth of 1987, which is really where the NES picked up momentum both natively and abroad - that's almost half the videos in that series (at that point) spent dissecting the releases of that year alone, even though it was the fifth year of the system's existence.

Dark Souls III!

I don't have much more to say about Dark Souls III that I didn't already cover in the past two Sunday Summaries and three huge Bosswatch blogs that detail and review all the regions (except Irithyll Prison, I guess missed that one. Eh, it's just Tower of Latria again) and bosses of the game. However, I did probe a little into the new game plus, so let's talk about that for a spell.

Many RPGs have their own distinct takes on NG+. A lot of them don't have any sort of options whatsoever, besides simply starting over from scratch. A great many, though, have allowed players to carry over certain elements from their previous run to subtly change the experience the second time through. The Souls series is no exception: they'll regularly drop you back at the intro at the experience (or "soul") level you had at the end of the game, with all the stats and equipment carried over but lacking the quest items and keys that allowed you to make progress. The enemies are tougher too, of course, because Souls isn't going to hold your hand even if you've managed to defeat it once. The health and damage boost is barely noticeable for the weaker enemies and bosses at the front half of the game, but it won't prepare you for the tougher late-game content.

This is largely because you aren't really getting that much stronger any more, at least nowhere near at the same rate as before. If you beat the game at Soul Level 90-100, which I did, your most useful stats are probably close to their "soft cap" - the point where the stat returns aren't worth the XP investment. You might then put more points into less essential stats, like health or equip load which still help to a degree, yet you'll regularly find that you're doing the same damage but the enemies are taking more hits in stride. NG+ is designed to be a lot more difficult in Souls specifically because it takes away the "safety net" of being able to grind a few more levels or upgrade weapons to overcome the difficulty of the next boss. At the end of your first game, you're almost certainly rocking close to max damage with your stat scaling and fully upgraded weapon, and there's little you can enhance from that point if you hit another boss roadblock.

NG+ tends to be where "the true Dark Souls" begins for many players, having enough experience with the game to know how to explore its areas and fight its bosses with a level of efficiency that hopefully offsets the increased difficulty. Dark Souls 3 goes one better than its predecessors by populating its NG+ world with new, stronger versions of pre-existing rings. The game increased its emphasis on the many passive bonsues rings can give you throughout the series, with four slots for equipping rings and almost 100 unique ring types in the game to find, and grabbing these enhanced versions is the best advantage a player can have when meeting the enhanced challenges ahead.

At any rate, I'm not sure how much further I intend to get. New Game Plus is an investment on two fronts: the time consideration of getting through the entire game again, even if you can just run through areas once you know where all the traps and ambushes are; and the investment of wanting to see all that content again, even though there's not a whole lot different about it besides a few numerical tweaks. In particular, the way the game starts very easy - even with their health and damage boosts, the enemies in the first half of the game are complete pushovers - and then gradually reaches a hellish end point with bosses you struggled against plenty at the end of the previous game suddenly getting even harder. That's mostly on me and how I play games though; I'd rather play ten new games that I'll have mixed opinions on than spend an equal amount of time on a single game I love.

Speaking of which, I want next week and the rest of November to be marked with an increased amount of variation in my gaming experience. There's a few platformers I wouldn't mind tackling, and a few adventure games that I've been sitting on for a while. Neither of those game types take particularly long to complete, so I hope to have some diversity with next week's gaming rundowns. Until then, look after yourselves everyone. Give someone at risk from this scary new regime a hug, too. But, like, warn them first. They're plenty jumpy right now.

I wish this final Bosswatch entry came to you all in more auspicious circumstances. I spent all of Tuesday night whacking away at the worst monsters From Software could throw at me, but could do nothing to stop the one that just won the Presidency of the United States. I hate to make things political, especially when so many are so sensitive right now, but just know that I'm sorry about what happened and that I hope you all look after yourselves and be an ally for the minorities most at risk.

With that, I suppose I'd better get on with these bosses. This entry's going to go on a little longer than expected; I didn't quite anticipate the amount of content the game still had left after the third Lord of Cinder - of four, though there's technically five - and the various optional areas the game had in store. For spoilers' sake, we're starting directly after the second and third Lords of Cinder all the way up to the final boss, including every optional boss along the way. If you missed the earlier entries in this series, the first part is here and the second part is here.

Dancer of the Boreal Valley

The Dancer announces herself (she's one of the few overtly female bosses in the game) immediately after the player takes down the third Lord of Cinder. Up until this point, the game's bounced between linear and non-linear. There's been a few splits in the path, though only one was truly optional: the Smouldering Lake. When you complete the various branches that lead to the second and third Lord of Cinder, you are immediately warped to a church area found early in the game - right before the Vordt fight, the second boss - and given an item to proceed further into the Castle areas above the city. However, as soon as you try using this item, the Dancer ambushes you. Hence why we start this Bosswatch immediately with a boss instead of a new region.

The Dancer, like Vordt, is a wandering knight of the Boreal Valley that has since turned into a mindless animal through a process that isn't really explained, but could be contributed to Pontiff Sulyvahn's knowledge of forbidden sorceries; however, like Vicar Amelia of Bloodborne, this particular bestial curse seems to affect women differently. Rather than the charging beast Vordt was, the Dancer - true to her name - moves with far more graceful, almost vulpine motions. Her design accentuates her femininity without necessarily going the full boobs and butts route that would be fairly ridiculous for a ten foot tall stooped monster, with the sole exception being her helmet. The helmet has both an intimidating grille, which routinely emits cold foggy breath, and a wispy veil that underscores her dancer-like combat style. It's a neat design, and a good set to purchase if you want gender-appropriate armor for your female protagonist and don't want to resort to the paper-thin dresses of the prayer maidens or Dusk of Oolacile (or just stick her in unisex heavy armor, because what does it matter ultimately? Pfft, Fashion Souls, am I right?).

Which is partly why this boss is so disappointing. She starts strong with that stealthy first impression, but the fight itself feels like a carbon copy of the Pontiff Sulyvahn encounter - she even pulls out a second sword midway through, with matching fire and magic damage - that had way less thought put into its difficulty. In the first half of the fight, she has a poorly telegraphed lunging command grab which is very likely to hit you, and it's instant death. Even while embered, I couldn't figure out how to survive it (though in fairness I haven't really been prioritizing the health stat Vigor). And she'll do it constantly. You can't rely on ranged attacks so much in this one, because she's a large foe in a fairly enclosed space and she's fast enough to close any distance quickly. When she has her second sword, her grab thankfully goes away, but almost all her attacks at this point involve swinging both swords at once in multi-stage combos. It's highly unlikely you'll survive the whole thing if you didn't evade the first hit, since it doesn't take long for those double slashes to deplete your stamina, and she has two variations which usually result in an early demise. Unlike the Pontiff, where you could sort of see how he could be feasibly be recovering stamina between swings with his deliberate tempo, the Dancer seems to have no such barrier when it comes to unleashing devastating combos one after the other. She's a less human opponent, granted, but it felt like a pale shade of the far better structured and tactical Pontiff fight.

Add that with the fact that she appears out of nowhere, has very little plot relevance and appears long after you've already dealt with the Boreal Valley and its leader and you have a boss that feels thrown in because there was nowhere else to put her. In my headcanon for the development of the game, I imagined a scenario where two groups of designers were working on the major set-piece Pontiff fight, and one came up with the incarnation we faced in Irithyll while the other, lesser creation was left on the wayside until someone decided the game needed an extra boss and just shoehorned it in at an otherwise quiet lull. At least she looked cool?

Lothric Castle

After the Dancer, you are allowed to place the new key item you received to activate a grisly self-beheading statue which opens a staircase to Lothric Castle. The Castle eventually leads to the final Lord of Cinder, who is situated in a throne room at the very top not unlike Dracula in the Castlevania series.

The Castle's perhaps one of my biggest issues with Dark Souls 3, and something I discussed briefly in last week's Sunday Summaries. A lot of the enemies have been brought back from the High Wall region that begins the game after completing the Firelink tutorial area, and all of them have been buffed to remain a threat for the player at their much higher soul level. That means the same weak zombies, masked thralls and slow armored knights, only they're now doing much more damage and their usual tendency to come at you in groups has become far more dangerous. To be clear, they're a greater threat to you at this level than they were back when you first encountered them in the Great Wall as a weakling, even considering the amount of time the player's had to learn their patterns and just generally grow more adept at the game itself.

Design-wise, the external half of the Castle strongly recalls the last area of Boletaria in Demon's Souls or the latter half of the Undead Burg in Dark Souls. There's a lot of masonry that needs navigating around, and you'll be accosted by several more wyverns along the way, who follow the Souls tradition of sitting tight on a piece of rampart and napalming the same area over and over. These particular wyverns (there are two) had a curious trick to them, however: you can resort to a whole bunch of arrows to defeat them, but their bodies will remain present until you destroy their demonic possessors - the same weird blackish serpent things that infected the first boss, Iudex Gundyr, and a few zombies afterwards - which causes the entire wyvern's body to then vanish. I went the arrow route like a coward, but I suspect you could destroy these Las Plagas parasites and remove the dragons that way too, avoiding their firebombing to get around them and remove the real threat. The other enemies are simply variations on what we've seen before, including the overweight halberd knight in the bonfire area of the High Wall and the many other types of Lothric soldiers and knights. The only new type was a robed sorcerer that buffed and healed any knights in the area, and made himself incredibly unpopular (to me) by doing so.

Dragonslayer Armor

Before you reach the boss of Lothric Castle - specifically, he's the boss of the first half that makes up the entire Castle - you have an alternate path to take that sends you to two new optional regions and equally optional bosses. I should make it clear that I only came back around to this guy once I had exhausted that route, but it wouldn't make sense to stick them in here between this boss's region and the boss himself. The optional bosses will be covered below this one.

The Dragonslayer Armor, rather than simply resurrecting Ornstein again, instead merges him with his burly companion Smough to create a heavily armored knight with a strong lightning affinity. The game doesn't cheat here, and manages to make this boss move as slowly as you'd expect from one with so much heavy armor (and a heavy shield). His design is kinda neat, something akin to a variation of Havel the Rock's bulky presentation but with an Ornstein-style lightning spear and his iconic draconian helmet. There's not a whole lot of lore about the guy, but you could feasibly conclude that he was built to resemble one of Gwyn's knights of old: the ones that were equipped for taking down the ancient dragons alongside their king. Curiously, however, the dragons seem to be supporting him this time, with several oddly skeletal dragons hovering around the battlements during the fight.

The boss hits hard, but his range is short and his speed leaves a lot to be desired, and so it becomes the sort of fight where cautiously picking your moment to strike wins the day, rather than the ugly battle of attrition many fights of this type turn into. You could make it out of the fight without a scratch if you spent enough time studying his moves, and it's a satisfying battle because of this strategic interplay. At least, for the first half. As I came to dread for many of the bosses in this game, the second half of the fight adds some nonsense that serves to derail my appreciation for the clever boss design by adding a new wrinkle that makes it far less enjoyable and/or survivable. The halfway switch-up occurs with every boss in the game too, though the switch itself can vary between annoying and interesting. It's nuts that they never feel the need to break away from this particular design crutch of "get them halfway down, then a thing happens and the boss is harder". There's not even a case where there's a three-step process, like the Bloodstained Beast of Bloodborne; the only variation is that it sometimes activates at 60% or 70% of the boss's health instead of 50%. With this fight, the new wrinkle involves the previously passive dragons who now, at random points in the fight with little fanfare, either pepper the bridge with fireballs close to where you're standing or simply send a huge explosion your way. You don't hear or see it coming, because you're focusing too much on the Dragonslayer Armor, and all too often the explosions or fireballs will take you by surprise and wreck you. The best bet is to keep moving throughout the whole fight and hope the odds are in your favor.

This boss is introduced as one where it's all about the art of the duel: reading your opponent and taking advantage whenever possible to get in a few hits. Being insta-killed by a dragon farting on your back at random intervals is like taking part a heavyweight belt match and having the other guy's manager jump into the ring to whack you with a folding chair from behind. It's heel behavior, and it makes me so mad that A) the fight is cheapened because of it, and B) I cheapened myself by using a pro wrestling analogy.

Consumed King's Garden

This small area breaks away from Lothric Castle, creating a mini-swamp like the Farron Keep region - though this one imparts the far more damaging "toxic" status effect - and packing it with a handful of tough enemies. The region itself is tiny though; it's two courtyard areas one after the other, and the boss appears immediately after. If you didn't mind missing a bunch of stuff, you could sprint from one side to the other without incident.

I wish I could say that this region was interesting, that it spoke to some aspect of the boss that explained why he lived in a garden that had been corrupted so thoroughly that walking through it meant certain death, but it doesn't, really. It's an excuse to force the player to pass through yet another venomous environment and suffer a bunch of status effects they can't easily (or cheaply) cure. There's also a large number of the parasite serpent creatures here too, which I've yet to determine is related to the next boss. You'll see.

Oceiros, the Consumed King

So the reason that Lothric is ruled by a Prince instead of a King is that the King went a bit crazy and was locked away for his own protection. The King has since turned into a reptilian hybrid, the result of his dragon obsession and years of research and study into obscure sorceries, and this is a theme that would recur a little later and was somewhat prominent in Dark Souls 2 as well with the lava dragon boss that was himself previously a human King. He's another boss that feels like an afterthought, or perhaps an idea for a sub-plot that wasn't entirely fleshed out. The game will delve back into dragon worship and the process of becoming a dragon a little later, but Oceiros stands out as being an unusual non-sequitur at this stage of the game. There are no dragons besides the feral wyverns that are feasting on the zombies of the kingdom - a recurring Souls element - and Oceiros speaks frequently about a child named Ocelotte. Ocelotte isn't seen during the fight, but it does appear that Oceiros is cradling something invisible with his non-dominant hand. Far as I can tell, having now beaten the game, the game never expands on this mystery child. The King doesn't talk about his two sons, the Princes, at all either. In fact, I only really assumed Oceiros to be the present King of Lothric: he could well be a distant ancestor that's been locked away in this wing of the castle for centuries.

Oceiros's design recalls that of a human transformed into a dragon, as stated, which was a feature of Dark Souls 2 that appears to have carried over. Through forsaken sorcery, the focus of the experiments of the mad dragon Seath, it is possible for a human to transmogrify into a dragon, if only in part. Oceiros is quite clearly a dragon when you fight him, but he carries himself in an oddly bipedal way that suggests his lower half didn't quite as transform as well as his top half. It's an odd design, but one that definitely hearkens back to Seath and his own unusual top-heavy form. Likewise, Oceiros doesn't appear to have eyes, but doesn't have any problem figuring out where you are.

The fight's a curious one. As both a sorcerer and a draconian beast, Oceiros balances ranged magic attacks and fast charging attacks that make him an unpredictable opponent, which perhaps suits his entirely insane disposition. He's a chatty guy too; he rarely stops ranting throughout the whole fight, creating another layer of distraction to deal with. His midway boss upgrade isn't particularly drastic; he simply loses what is left of his marbles and his dragon sweeps and charges become a lot more vicious. Still, he was definitely one of the easier bosses I've fought in the game, thanks in part to a dearth of random back-attacks and instant-kill command grabs. I can appreciate the fight for that much at least.

Untended Graves

Talking of non-sequiturs, Untended Graves brings back a trippy favorite from Bloodborne: an identical clone of the hub area, but far more darker and more dilapidated. It wasn't until the end of the game that I recognized this area's significance, and until then this felt like a weird incongruity. Bloodborne's "Abandoned Old Workshop" became the template for the metaphysical Hunter's Dream due to the first hunter Gehrman, who occupied the real workshop. The powers that created the endless night created the dream, and based it on the memories of Gehrman who became its guardian in the process. However, the Hunter's Dream wasn't a real physical location, and seeing its real-life equivalent after years of abandonment was an interesting tidbit that lifted the veil ever so slightly from the vaguely ominous hub world and its secrets before the end game delved into it in more detail. Conversely, we already know the Firelink Shrine is real, because the NPCs we meet can travel to it and is connected to the bonfire system. It exists, but so too does the Untended Graves.

So what's the deal? Well, there's a hint in the soul description of the next boss, but it doesn't adequately explain how both Firelink Shrine and this place can exist simultaneously. Essentially, this is an aborted cycle where the flame was never kindled and the world fell into darkness, a la the other ending of Dark Souls. The shrine is abandoned, but appears to be a carbon copy, even down to the empty thrones for the named Lords of Cinder. The only NPC present is the elderly Shrine Handmaid vendor, who is hanging onto the last vestiges of her humanity. To talk more about the boss soul item, I'll have to cover the boss himself:

Champion Gundyr

The enemies of the Untended Graves are taken from various areas of the game, creating no real rhyme or reason to their presence: you have the dual-sword-wielding priestesses of the Deep Cathedral and a few black knights that were once scattered across the world, but have been largely absent from this game save for one in the Road of Sacrifices. Gundyr, however, is largely unchanged from his appearance at the start of the game, only here he wasn't brought low by a parasitic serpent, but foiled by darkness conquering the land before he even had a chance to fix it. Both our and this Gundyr, it turns out, is a Champion of Ash just like the player, who happened to start his journey many years earlier. His quest, like yours, was to head to Firelink Shrine, and from there reach the Lords of Cinder and bring them, or their remains, together to ignite the first flame. In the "real" chronology, he was possessed by darkness and pinned to the ground, either by his own hand or by another party, until the player disturbed him and caused his long-since hollowed form to lash out. In this one, the same thing happened; except he was never defeated in battle. Rather, the flame went out before he could help reignite it, and just stayed in the same spot once he realized he had failed, allowing himself to become hollowed in the interim. At least, this is how I'm choosing to interpret it. What fun is Dark Souls if you don't try and put your own spin on the narrative?

Gundyr wasn't "killed" in this timeline, and so he didn't suffer any detrimental affect to his combat prowess. He fights with a similar ferocity as his doppelganger, but does far more damage and has a few additional attacks, like a badass "Duke Boot" kick. However, when he drops to half-health, we discover something unsettling: Gundyr had been corrupted by the darkness after all, as his eyes suddenly light an ominous red and his attacks become far stronger and faster. There's no weird tentacled monstrosity growing from his side this time, but he's even more dangerous with this upgrade. I couldn't tell if this was something he was hiding for the first half of the fight, or if he had the mental discipline to resist the darkness this whole time until the player forced his hand with the prospect of a losing battle. With the tale I spun above, it'd make sense that he'd have a lot of resentment about his failure, and a desire to avoid another one at all costs by falling to this attractive and awesome interloper.

In pure technical combat terms, if not mechanical numerical terms, this was one of the hardest bosses in the game. There was no trick to it, no way to resort to ranged attacks or get him stuck on a corner (the game's generally been very good about not being able to cheese bosses, I should point out). It's just you, Gundyr and a whole lot of aggressive attacks that you either weather with a shield or learn to evade. I appreciated the fight's simplicity, even if it did recall how often Dark Souls 2 would lean heavily on humanoid knight enemies, but it wasn't half difficult to pull off. I think if I could do it all over again, I'd leave Gundyr until after I had the last Lord of Cinder soul. That boss wasn't easy either, spoilers, but at least it didn't feel quite as brutal.

Grand Archives

The second half of the greater Lothric Castle region, the Grand Archives is a classic Duke's Archives exercise in confusion and disorientation. A largely vertical library, the goal of this location is to reach the very top where the final Lord of Cinder awaits. However, between the various staircases, ladders, switches and elevators, it takes some time to get used to the place. Often, you'll need to drop down to a different area in order to make upwards progress. It's a very unintuitive location, and I imagine it must've been a lot of fun to design. Like the Deep Cathedral, the elevators are given the shortcut duty of ferrying the player between the bonfire on the ground floor and various unlocked locations higher up. The roof of the Castle is littered with some of the strongest normal enemies of the game, such as the gargoyles of the Profaned Capital, three golden winged halberd knights (the fat guys), a trio of Bloodborne hunters for some reason, and a whole gauntlet of soldiers and knights that recalled the final staircase of Boletaria. Perhaps most significant, though, was the presence of a second Crystal Sage: the soul of the first, which was fought as a boss all the way back in the Road of Sacrifices, indicated that it was one of a pair of twins. The second is less dangerous, given how strong you were then compared to how you are now, but the large amount of space it can hide in meant it could pepper you with those sorceries without you being able to do a whole lot about it, teleporting further up the Grand Archives to escape your wrath. It required climbing up to the halfway point of the area before you could finish him off and halt the constant overhead crystal magic attacks.

I really enjoyed the design of this place, and some of the oddities it included. One such oddity was the vats of wax that the player could dip their head into, which created a temporary shield from curse-inducing ghostly hands that emerged out of bookshelves in several areas. The mage enemies in this region, too, had wax-covered heads and looked fairly ridiculous. The area was also swarming with the small thralls from the Lothric Castle and Deep Cathedral areas, using their hidden locations to hit you with ambushes. Their weapons looked enchanted here, which might explain how they were able to kill you in two or three hits (unless they jumped on you from behind, in which case you're done, son). A lot of hard-to-spot switches would move bookcases around, opening secret areas and shortcuts, and it felt like a lot of work went into its intricate level design.

Younger Prince Lothric

"Younger Prince Lothric" is sort of a misnomer for this boss. The real target is indeed the younger of two Princes, who was brought asunder due to his own blood - it's implied that a lot of in-breeding in the royal family caused some genetic abnormality, which is a bit on the nose for a Brit - but the boss fight is actually against his older brother Lorian, a powerful knight. Lorian, in sharing his brother's "curse", is apparently crippled and mute. I wasn't sure if by curse the game meant that both brothers had various disabilities due to their recursive family tree, or if the elder brother chose to sacrifice some part of himself to keep his frail twin alive.

Lorian isn't an easy opponent. While his attacks are slow and predictable, because he can't really move around much, his tendency to teleport after every other swing added, let's say, a touch more mystery to how he was going to slice at you next. This could either mean a physical swipe from your immediate behind, or teleporting some distance away so that he could hit you with a devastating charged downward slash that created a wave of energy. Even while embered, this attack still took off almost my entire health bar, meaning I had to stay at full health if I intended to survive it. Or, I could dodge out of the way, but that wasn't always feasible due to the wave's surprising width.

The fight doesn't have a traditional halfway point. Rather, you keep fighting Lorian until he ignites his sword and comes at you with a stronger fire-tinged attack, and then after that until his health bar has completely drained. At this juncture, the younger brother comes down from his bed and joins his brother in the fight, draping himself on his back and resurrecting him. The pair together suddenly generate two new health bars, one each, and come at you with renewed vigor. I really did not care for this development: the Abyss Watcher fight resembled this, but a single Watcher wasn't a particularly challenging opponent, and Lorian was plenty difficult just on his own. Worse, however, is what happens when you focus on Lorian and don't hit Lothric on his shoulders - which requires an overhead swing, since he's higher up. If Lorian dies before Lothric, Lothric simply resurrects him again. You have the best shot at Lothric you could hope for while he's doing this, but you're more than likely to have to face Lorian for a third time even if you try focusing on attacks that hit both brothers together. Fortunately, if Lothric dies the fight is immediately over, so it could feasibly be possible to just avoid hitting Lorian and focus entirely on Lothric. He doesn't make it easy though, not with his homing arrows and other sorceries, which he irritatingly fits in after his brother's combos to add to their length.

I can't be too mad at this fight though, regenerating health bars aside. It's a smart way of demonstrating that it's the younger, weaker brother who actually has all the power, and that the elderly brother is so devoted to his sibling that he suffers death over and over to defend him. It's a plot-significant boss that is able to highlight the backstory behind its characters in a gameplay congruous manner, and those are rare and precious occurrences. A fitting fourth Lord of Cinder fight.

Archdragon Peak

Archdragon Peak, the final of the optional areas, took some sleuthing to reach. The only hint was a corpse sitting in a particular Yoga-style sitting pose in the Untended Graves which matched that of a series of corpses lined up across a cliff path back in the Irithyll Prison. By learning the gesture from the Untended Graves corpse and sitting alongside those in the prison with the same pose for a certain amount of time, you end up being transported to a mountain temple you can just about see off in the distance. It is every bit as abstract as ducking with a red crystal until a tornado takes you away in Castlevania: Simon's Quest, right down to there being a moderate delay until the cutscene activates that's just long enough to make you wonder if there's any purpose to this completely ridiculous thing you're doing.

The Peak is fairly nondescript, really. It's a shattered shrine high up in the mountains, and it's quite a bit brighter than the rest of the game. At some point, the designers thought they'd reintroduce the red sky and creepy moon of Bloodborne after certain events in that game's story made the world a slightly less sane place, but it makes far less sense here in Dark Souls 3 (much like the copycat Untended Graves, too). In comparison, the ruins of the Peak have a lot more sunshine, though it serves as a stark reminder just how badly the structures up here are decaying, and are therefore presumably that much more ancient. Almost all the enemies here look like Yoel - the first NPC vendor you meet in the wild, who reintroduces hollowing back in the Souls series as a sinister shortcut to power - only the cowls are hiding serpent heads that snap forward with devastating attacks. It's not quite the man-serpents of Sen's Fortress, but it's close enough. The goal of this isolated bonus area is to pledge your allegiance to dragonkind by completing a pilgrimage to the altar at the very end of the location and praying there with the same gesture you used to reach the area. It's not easy though, in part due to a vast number of powerful man-serpent enemies and two bosses.

(Also in this area? Havel and Ricard! It's been a long time since I saw those two, and they're both just as nasty as I remember them.)

Ancient Wyvern

The first boss of Archdragon Peak, the wyvern fight initially resembles that of the Ancient Dragon of Dark Souls 2, which can be aggroed into an optional battle that's extremely difficult to win - indeed, even the names are similar. However, while attempting to fight the wyvern directly is folly and will get you torched by its fire attack, there is a means to run past the wyvern and enter a series of passageways filled with enemies. It's here that the true fight is situated.

The Ancient Wyvern doesn't offer much new with its visual design. It is almost literally an upscaled (so to speak) version of the wyverns you fight in Lothric, down to the white coloration and jagged natural armor. The idea being that, while you could feasibly cheese those lesser wyverns with arrows due to their limited mobility and fire breath range, this Ancient Wyvern has no such limitations. It's not an opponent you can hope to destroy from a safe distance, and stays well out of reach for a more melee-focused approach. Even if you did assault it while it was on the ground by hacking at the feet, all you're doing is giving it a pedicure until it gets bored enough to sit on you.

After eliminating a gauntlet of tough enemies, all the while dodging the fire breath of the wyvern, you eventually reach an overcrop that lets you drop attack it directly on its head. Which kills it instantly. Kind of odd, but it's a badass way to finish a fight and hearkens all the way back to Demon's Souls where you had to eliminate an immense dragon opponent through largely indirect means, making the fight all about dodging breath attacks until you could activate the win state. Many fans of this series don't care for the requisite "puzzle boss" fight in these games, but I don't mind the change of pace.

Nameless King

The other boss is truly optional: a bell can be rung close to the end of the area, and in so doing it summons a pack of stormclouds that blankets the entire region. By stepping out onto the stormclouds close to the bell, the player can actually walk on top of them and find a long corridor in the sky that triggers the next boss. It's an event as impressive as the boss himself: The King of Storms.

The King of Storms doesn't so much refer to the knightly character in this fight than the blue wyvern he is riding, and the duo attack like a Dragonlance villain. The wyvern takes damage hard, but he's also very maneuverable and the rider is taking potshots at you the entire time with his immense lightning lance. The goal of this fight is to close the distance before he can swat you with a powerful bolt or a lance thrust and get in some damage before he moves again. Once the wyvern is down - no mean feat - the boss health bar regenerates and you're faced with the Nameless King himself.

The subsequent fight is very deadly up close. The Nameless King fights like Gundyr, only most of his attacks come packed with lightning elemental energy which is hard to mitigate effectively. Your best bet is to use range against him and draw a bow - this is both effective during the wyvern stage and the on-foot stage, since the Nameless King strolls unhurriedly towards you like a complete badass (I've used that word a lot, and yet it never stops being applicable...). Even with the bow and his gait, however, there's a lot of dodging to be done. Of particular note is a two-stage attack where he sends a horizontal wave of energy your way, which you actually have to evade roll over to effectively dodge, and then an immediate second wave follow-up that is far more narrowly focused, like Lorian's. The fight was an endurance contest, where the number of times you could mess up equaled the number of Estus flask swigs in your possession.

The coolest part about this fight is the Nameless King's backstory, however. Rather than regurgitating the lore of Dark Souls 1 and 2, in a "see what this NPC/region is like now!" referential sense, the Nameless King fills in a dangling plot thread: he is the eldest son of Lord Gwyn, who mysteriously disappeared long before the events of that game and is only referred to in passing. The backstory from that game paints the Nameless King has an unequalled god of combat that nonetheless lost his way due to some "folly" and was excised from the history books. That folly seems to have involved throwing his lot in with the dragonkind - it makes sense that Gwyn would disown him over this, given dragons were his (im)mortal enemy. Super cool boss, and one of the most fun to fight, even if I did cheese him with arrows. Like I was going to go near that guy...

Kiln of the First Flame

After restoring the four dead Lords of Cinder to their thrones in Firelink, they and the friendly NPC Ludleth disintegrate and pass their essence onto the player character, giving them the power to reignite the first flame. In so doing, the player is transported to another "dead" Firelink Shrine: one where the walls have all collapsed and looks even more ancient than the one in the Untended Graves. I think this was supposed to be the first Firelink Shrine, since it connects directly to the Kiln of the First Flame.

The Kiln is weird. Whereas in Dark Souls it simply resembles a giant bowl sitting over Izalith, in this one it resembles an interdimensional location that is adjacent to a maddening cube of random architecture from the various regions of Lordran, Drangleic and Lothric. It's a hodgepodge formed from many millennia of kingdoms rising and falling in service to the first flame, suggesting that the three cycles we've seen in the games were just three drops in the bucket. It's an awesome sight, but it's also the only thing here besides the boss arena at the very end: there's no last-minute attempts to troll you with black knights and precarious walkways before reaching the boss. I suppose such a stage would distract from the importance of this final battle, and presumably why every game since has had a clearly demarcated final boss arena that requires no effort to reach. It wants you to save all your energy (and Estus) for its final encounter.

Soul of Cinder

If you've been wondering about the guy on the box art, as I have, he's actually this guy. The final boss. The amalgamated Lord Souls manifested into one entity that challenges you to ensure you're prepared for the momentous task of linking the first flame. Either that, or they're sore losers who want to see you fail by uniting together. Either way, he looks like a regular knight enemy, but hardly fights like one.

The Soul of Cinder's whole gimmick is a versatility borne of his disparate parts. That means that at various points in the fight he'll suddenly adjust his fighting style and come at you with a different approach. He jumps between a standard broadsword fighting stance that resembles those of the knights you've been fighting for the whole game; a sorcery-focused build that peppers you with magic from a distance; a pyromancy-focused build that alternates between a dervish-inspired curved sword fighting style interspersed with random pyromancy spells like fireballs, strength buffs and poison mists; and a faith-focused build that uses a lance to hit you from range and miracles that allow him to heal himself or create large concussive bursts that send you flying. The versatility works both for him and against him: the unpredictable nature of his attacks keeps you guessing, but some forms are easier to deal with than others. Once you drain his health bar, though, the game throws another spanner into the works.

Digression: I actually sort of hate this particular development in DS3's boss fights, and I don't know why it comes at the late game instead of used for the entire length. I realized I just decried the game's use of having bosses change the game at the midway point, but this isn't really anything different; instead of a large health bar that triggers the change once it is half drained, we get two smaller health bars that appear consecutively. It's done purely for the sake of a single surprise; because of course, once you've seen them regenerate their whole health bar once, the trolling effect of seeing them come back again is lost. I guess my only real issue with this is one of consistency. At a certain point, instead of having every boss change their approach because their health bar was half gone, they do so because... well half their health is gone, but in a less obvious way. It'd be like if the health bars suddenly started draining in the other direction, or had multiple colored bars that you had to drain. I'm all for variation, but it's just odd when it changes absolutely nothing about the actual mechanics of the fight, just the visual feedback for how much progress you're making. Weird stuff.

Anyway, the second half of this fight, or the second of its two consecutive fights depending on how you choose to unwrap the mess above, involves the Soul of Cinder resorting to a single combat style: that of Lord Gwyn's. Now armed with a flaming ultra greatsword, the Soul attacks very much like Gwyn did, including a devastating five hit combo that is almost impossible to evade unless you see the warning signs and get the hell out of range. He also has the same command grab that Gwyn (and the Dancer) had, though the resulting unavoidable attack is fortunately far more survivable. This mode has slightly less health than the previous, but the attacks are far more damaging and it requires a great deal of caution. Seeing that combo is a good time to roll back about five times, and then draw a bow and give him some arrow-y business while he completes the ridiculously long chain.

The boss is a good one: it's all about pattern memorization and reflexes, like any good Souls boss, and while "the gestalt entity comprised of everyone you've slain" is kind of an ass-pull for a final boss, especially since these Lords presumably still want someone to link the flames and keep humanity going for another eon, it's a neat idea and a cool looking nemesis to stand between you and your destiny. Sometimes a good boss doesn't need to be a gigantic skeleton sliding into the abyss or a dragon-riding king in a sea of clouds, it just needs to have enough variation and danger to give you a run for your money.

That's going to do it for this episode of Bosswatch, and the series itself for a while. For what I believe is the first time, I've reached a point like many of you where I have no currently available Souls game left to play. Well, besides the NG+ of those I've left behind and the many DLC campaigns I don't feel like shelling out for. I don't think I like Dark Souls 3 enough to give it another turn; I've spoken about how the game reductively recycles its enemies and locations for the sake of some big lore-unifying process, and while the overall boss quality is higher than DS2 it felt a lot more "safe" than that one did in every other respect. More by the numbers. It's like the Jurassic Park movies: the first will forever remain a timeless classic, the second was weird and divisive but at least had some distinctiveness to call its own, and the third just treads water by reusing many of the same old surprises and turns of the previous two to the extent that it basically does fine but is unlikely to be anyone's favorite.

Of course, I'm open to more thoughts on how the game compares to its predecessors, or any of the bosses I've written about above. Anything I'm missing? (And, man, I apologize for the length on this one. All that extra content really snuck up on me.)

It's been one heck of a weekend over here in GBLand, though I suppose the following week will be more chaotic for many in the US. If you weren't aware, Giant Bomb's Extra Life streams have been running since Friday and I'm taking a quick break before the Jason and Lang streams begin to pen a short Sunday Summaries. I know, I know, nothing about the word salad you're about to read is "short", but I'm already fairly exhausted from streams and words ceased to make sense some time ago. Should be a good one.

New Games!

My absolute definite pick for this week has to be Dishonored 2. Even if it wasn't one of my most anticipated AAA games for this half of the year - far more than all the shooters we've been getting - it's pretty much the week's only major release regardless. I'm always down for some more teleport-enabled stealth and exploration, and I'm hopefully not going to let myself be swayed by trophies that prevent the use any extra powers this time around. In retrospect, that was probably a trophy I should've left for a second playthrough, but when I can see a route to get a Platinum in one run I usually take it. Anyway, I'll hopefully get a chance to play this sometime next year. You know me, always fashionably late.

Tyranny is the newest CRPG from Obsidian, and while I've not heard too much about it I absolutely loved Pillars of Eternity from the same developers last year. Enough to make it my GOTY, even, narrowly beating out Super Mario Maker. (I've actually played a whole lot of 2015 games this year, playing eternal catch-up as I am, so I've been considering re-ranking last year's bangers...) It's been a year of gigantic games for me, so this'll also be one to enjoy in 2017 sometime as well. Man, I'm so glad we have so many CRPGs coming out, but it is getting difficult to keep up the pace with them...

It's been quite the year for cutesy farming/life sims. As well as Stardew Valley, which is still very much in the running for my GOTY, we also saw the hybrid JRPG Return to PopoloCrois: A Story of Seasons Fairytale, Harvest Moon: Seeds of Memories and the currently Japan-only Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. Harvest Moon: Skytree Village is the most recent one, and yet another Harvest Moon game, which is giving fans of this particular sub-genre a whole lot of crops-plantin' and anime-romancin' to do.

Cartoon Network: Battle Crashers takes the scrolling brawler Castle Crashers mold and squeezes various Cartoon Network characters into it. Looks like there'll be six playable characters, including the Adventure Time duo, the sassy animals from Regular Show and Steven Universe, so I'm sure Tumblr will love this game at least.

Let's stop by the anime zone real quick: Trillion: God of Destruction! The mediocre time-based, demonic waifu-raising RPG from Compile Heart is coming to Steam. But hey, I'm all for the trend of Vita games on Steam, so I hope it does well. Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization! Like the hollow realization that Sword Art Online sucks? High five, everyone. Root Letter! That's a visual novel about a mysterious girl and a letter and talking and stuff! Odd to see it localized for consoles, but if there's demand for it...

Wiki!

No wiki work this week! I usually work on the wiki while busting through a week's worth of podcasts on Friday, starting with the new Beastcast and moving onto Monday's MBMBaM, Tuesday's We Hate Movies and Thursday's Adventure Zone (if it's the right week, since it's fortnightly). That is, when I don't have some grindy game I could be playing in the background.

Given Extra Life started Friday, though, I've not had the chance to listen to them. Expect a double-helping next week? I'll probably have a lot to say about some old Famicom games by then.

Dark Souls III!

If you weren't aware, I've been writing all about my travails through Lothric and the surrounding environs in the Dark Souls III Bosswatch series: Here's Part One, which covers all the bosses up to the first Lord of Cinder - the story-significant bosses; and Part Two covers the next two Lords and all the bosses in-between them and the first.

Dark Souls 3 has been giving me a mental exercise in figuring out how any of these bosses can be reliably defeated by a non-tank. I've tried to stay away from the tank route myself, since you can render these Souls games pretty easy with one - a large part of the reason why Bloodborne reconfigured itself to avoid tank builds - but I can't for the life of me figure out how you're supposed to evade a lot of the bosses where I'm at. Many of them are using these grand sweeping attacks that make it very difficult to stay close and use evade rolls instead of shield blocking - besides exploiting i-frames, and that seems very challenging even with the ring that increases the window - and many of them have been in small arenas and/or move quickly to close the gap on anyone hoping to get enough space to pull out a bow or their magic and go to town. The boss of the lava area Old Demon King - I'll spoiler-block names, just in case - was the only one I could see that happening with, and maybe the one I just fought in a "rampart-y area with dragons" Dragonknight Armor. It could be that I just have a tank-build mindset and have given myself a bit of a hurdle to overcome by focusing more in dexterity and less in equip load and strength regardless, and I'm sure the many pros who can beat this game in their sleep can figure it out no matter what build they have. I guess what tends to happen is that you find a solution through practice and experimentation, and I've not really been going through that process with other builds so I don't know how they'd work. Simple as that, really. Makes me appreciate the kind of replay value these games have too.

I can't say I've been enjoying the second half of this game as much as the first. One of my issues, and I guess this is minor spoilers even though it has nothing to do with the plot, is that the late-game opens up in an area which you visit very early on. It also means that the enemies in this area are more or less the same as those in the early area, but made considerably more powerful. More damage taken, more damage received. It actually feels like fighting the same guys on NG+, like in Diablo where everything's 50 levels higher. It's disappointing on two fronts: the first is the game is nakedly recycling content, after flirting with the idea with all its references to earlier Souls games, and that means enemies that I've already "figured out". Very few seem to adopt new attacks and skills, and while there's a few new faces mixed in there, it still feels very lazy considering the great variation in the monster design we've seen so far.

The second disappointing thing is that it despoils the ever-present appeal of RPGs where you feel more powerful the further into the game you are, and for Souls in particular that's a potent combination of your own aptitude with the game and the various stat and equipment upgrades you've acquired. Running through that early area I mentioned to reach the late-game meant breezing through enemies I was avoiding before - including a few special enemies that drop resources/items I could've used a lot earlier - which felt great. But then I immediately had to fight enemies I didn't even have an issue with first time, including basic-ass zombies and those little hooded thief guys, and they were taking half my health bar off with every hit. And those guys are fast! They're designed to be a nuisance in the early levels, hitting you with ambushes but not outright killing you so you're forced to take a precious swig of Estus and plan better next time. Seeing them come at me with their pathetic little rusty knives and having my high-level character just die in two hits has been very discouraging. When I've been taking down enemies as impressive as those horrible bird-people, enormous rock gargoyles or the silver knights of you-know-where, coming back to these absurdly buffed small-fry is a bummer.

Anyway, I'll keep at it. The game's easily my least favorite of the series, even though I'd concur that its bosses are at least better than those in Dark Souls 2, but it's still a Souls game and I think I could happily play another dozen of these (y'know, with enough time in-between). I just wish this one was a little more imaginative. Still, this is why Miyazaki wants to move on and I don't blame him. I only hope they keep later Souls iterations steeped in horror, since they know how to create some fantastic disturbing-looking monsters. Makes me wonder if they could pull off a good contemporary-setting survival horror, albeit one that still allows for some creative world-building and enormous monstrosities to face. For now, though, the last Lord of Cinder awaits. And so do plenty more Extra Life streams, for that matter. See you there.

As we continue part two of our look at Dark Souls 3's bosses, and to a lesser extent the regions that they occupy, I've been considering how readily I've fallen into DS3's self-harming trap of having encounters and areas that can be so comparable to those that have come before. DS3 definitely trades in nostalgia - a certain area coming out quite overtly so - but that's no excuse to treat these newcomers as amalgams and homages of those that have come before. It's occasionally inescapable, but I hope to make more of an effort to explore this particular game's iteration of the Dark Souls world and the novel distinctions it brings.

But man, do some of these guys feel familiar.

Be sure to catch up with Part 1 if you haven't, and to likewise check out the previous Bosswatch features at the start of that article. Oh, and for spoilers' sake - if, like me, you're only partway through the game - we're covering everything that appears between the first Lord of Cinder (whom I ended Part One with) and the second and third Lords.

Catacombs of Carthus

The catacombs aren't so much distinct on their own, but distinct for being a combination of areas that have come before (yep, I'm already breaking my promise from the intro). Every Souls game thus far has an ominous network of chambers that once housed the dead, whether or not the dead in question were satisfied to rest in their tombs. The first Dark Souls had the umbral Tomb of Giants, made memorable by Vinny's ventures into the dark unknown, but these Catacombs more closely resemble the labyrinthine Undead Crypt of the second game and a touch of Sen's Fortress with its various traps, the most notable of which involve a few rolling balls of skeletons.

Carthumari Damacy shenanigans aside, however, the best part of this confusing and largely vertically descending dungeon is a cave-like area at the end close to the fog gate that leads to the boss. Here, the game surprises you two times in quick succession, and you can either fall afoul of one of these traps, both of them, or come upon an ideal scenario where you use one to neuter the other: a large throng of skeletons appear after moving into this cave area, and the bridge that leads to the boss will take a single hit before it lurches to one side and collapses. You can get in some classic Temple of Doom action by crossing the bridge, waiting for the skeletons to approach the other side and then cut the ropes, sending several of them falling to their doom. It's a cool moment, and demonstrates that - for all your nobility in attempting to save the world via kindling the true flame (or whatever) - the game offers you enough occasions where you can feel like the sneaky bad guy for a change.

High Lord Wolnir

What Wolnir represents to me is that of the spectacle boss; the one that takes you into another dimension to fight them, which gives the designers and artists free license to imagine something either utterly absurd geographically-speaking and/or a realm that seeks to unnerve you as soon as you arrive. This was certainly the case with the Four Kings fight of the original Dark Souls: the battle was set in pitch darkness in every direction, with only the ghostly forms of your foes to break up the omnipresent pitch black. That disturbing eternal darkness, as it were, is an evocatively powerful if graphically simple trick. I remember the old trading space-sim Elite spooking the heck out of me whenever my hyperdrive failed and I was momentarily trapped in Witchspace: a region of perfect darkness, the stars having all vanished, and only the motherships of the deadly alien hivemind species of the Thargoids to keep me company. At any rate, Wolnir's "arena" is darkness in all directions but for the ground, which sloped ever downwards towards what could easily be imagined as an abyssal destination that I didn't want to visit. Neither did the boss himself I'd imagine, who was a fifty foot tall skeleton of which you could only see the torso that was also sliding down this incline along with you. The lore around this guy suggested that, after abusing the powers of darkness to become the sole tyrannical warlord of his people, he sought ways to avoid the Faustian fate that his gleaned knowledge would inevitably invite. While an enormous and fearful presence, and one that commands skeleton followers from beyond the grave, this fight is one borne of desperation to avoid the abyss at all costs - for him and for you.

The fight wasn't too difficult, for all its symbolic spectacle. The boss's obvious weak points were its upper arm bones, given that they were the only parts of the guy you could reach, and each arm had a number of golden bracelets which shone brilliantly in the darkness. Didn't take long to put two-and-two together, and while the boss could still surprise you by suddenly clamoring up the hill and leaving you trapped in the dark - which was an instant kill, naturally - the sheer size of the guy meant it was easy to predict and evade his sweeps and magic attacks. After all three bracelets were gone, Wolnir was dragged into the darkness forever, and I awoke back in the boss room.

Which is where the Bloodborne comparison comes in. A lot of the samey corridors of the Catacombs reminded me deep down of the identikit Chalice Dungeons of that game, but it wasn't until I activated the Wolnir fight - which literally involved walking up to a Chalice and being teleported away - that the allusion became clear. Wolnir was one of those really cool looking bosses that developers tend to put into their trailers, but he underwhelmed when it came time to devise a sound strategy to defeat him - it would've been pretty hard not to figure it out immediately. I feel that's been a recurring issue with some of DS3's bosses, especially the larger and less human ones.

Smouldering Lake

Smouldering Lake would be your Izalith level: deep beneath the ground, where demons and lava make things incredibly uncomfortable for anyone without sufficient fire damage reduction. It begins as a gigantic open area where you're constantly pummeled by ballista fire from somewhere high above, all the while contending with some more giant crabs - in a stronger cinder mode, no less - and at least one enormous burrowing worm that can kill in one hit if you're unfortunate enough to be standing near where it just unearthed itself. There's a couple of paths down here: one leads to the basin beneath the last area of the Catacombs, above the bridge, while the other leads to the area's boss and a nearby upper route to the ballistae and the rest of the area.

While the Izalith connection is the most overt, there's also something akin to the Ash Lake area of the same game; the "exit" to the boss is obvious enough, as you can see it from the entrance, but it's simply a matter of running over there without getting killed by the enormous obstacles in the way.

OId Demon King

The Old Demon King is, like the Stray Demon, a callback to the pot-bellied hellspawn of Dark Souls. He looks impossibly old, and his arena is filled with the corpses of other demons - most are of the same portly genus, though there's a few dead Capras strewn around as well - and you get the sense that, like the humans above, the demon "race" is on its way out as well. That is, that they are as dependent on the flame for sustenance as the more civilized races, with just a handful left behind to cause you strife. I'm not certain that's what the game is going for - I see piles of corpses and just assume the worst, which I think is a rational enough response to a pile of corpses - because the demons were always part of the whole "Izalith witches summoned a cursed fire and bit off more than they could chew, or rather that they were chewed on by demons" mythos, which is a different flame irrespective of the sacred flame of the Cinder Lords that fuels human civilization. But hey, I figure if humanity's in its twilight years, the rest of the world's denizens are probably on the wane also.

As for the fight, the Old Demon King relies on many of the classic demon tricks. That is to say, fire, and a lot of it. Almost all its attacks revolve around creating flames, pools of lava or firey meteors, or hitting you with its gnarled club if it doesn't feel like being fancy. This creates a problematic boss fight in the same way the Fume Knight did - there's little you can do to mitigate the constant fire damage you'll receive, besides a handful of armor sets that offer any decent fire resistance and a few consumable items that provide a temporary boost to same. Getting in close is a bad idea, even if you intend to rely on the "get between its legs to avoid its reach" approach to larger bosses because the Old Demon King has at least three strong AoE fire attacks that it centers on itself. It becomes a battle of attrition at close range that you're unlikely to win; at least for me, each of these attacks did 60-80% damage to my health bar even when guarding, which meant an Estus after every one to avoid a fatal follow-up. So instead I took my bow out and made this a ranged battle. Let me tell you, at a distance it was far easier to avoid the guy's various AoE attacks, since they all had the same reach as its club. A fire breath attack and the aforementioned meteors were the only ones to get close to hitting me, and they both moved slowly enough to be easily avoided. It felt a bit like cheesing, especially since I didn't bring any special damaging arrows to the fight - the bow thing occurred to me mid-battle, hence the lack of prep - but I can't say it didn't work. I didn't need a single Estus after the bow came out.

I felt sorry for the guy, actually. Not just because I was peppering him with weak arrows and he couldn't do a thing to counter it, but how at multiple parts of the fight he'd get tired and have to catch his breath. He looked extremely old, even for a demon, and it recalled Lord Gwyn in Dark Souls and how he was willing to put up a strong fight despite visual evidence that he was barely holding together. The Old Dirty King "ignites" someway into the battle - fortunately, this doesn't produce an ongoing proximity burning effect like the Fume Knight, but just makes his fire attacks stronger - but as soon as it wore off near the end of the battle, the Old Demon Bastard didn't look like he was going to get back up. He had a small amount of health left, but I half suspect that he would've stayed there crouching and wheezing until I eventually deigned to TKO the ODK no matter how long I deferred.

Irithyll of the Boreal Valley

I loved this place. While Cainhurst Castle had a snow-covered tranquil European mountain chateau feel to it, and the crystalline caves of Seath's domain were a rough approximation of a winter wonderland, the idyllic burg of Irithyll looked like something out of a Thomas Kinkade painting. That's not a knock against its visual design, just that the city was unusually picturesque for this series, and one of the few that might've been a cozy place to live before the streets were filled with ghosts and sinister magic-wielding church knights and other monsters. It reminded me of a town in Tales of Symphonia named Flanoir: another vaguely Alpine town that looked like a wonderful town to reside in, even with the year-round cold.

Irithyll eventually gives way to a less picturesque lake full of mold and weird, gross spider monsters, which in turns leads to the town's prison and sewers. Just goes to show, we can't ever have nice things in this series. The enemies are the coolest part though: the patrolling knights have this otherworldly fey quality to them, like elves. It actually kind of felt like wandering through Myth Drannor of the Forgotten Realms universe, itself an eerily beautiful location filled with the graceful, mournful shades of an impossibly ancient and alien civilization.

Pontiff Sulyvahn

Send me to the accursed darkness if this wasn't one of the most exhilarating boss fights yet, if also one of the more frustrating. The classic Souls boss experience, in so many words. Expecting something like the feral knights of the Boreal Valley I'd met in Lothric, I was surprised to discover that the Pontiff is essentially the same as the wispy tall patrol guards throughout the otherwise deserted city. Moving with the same elegance, the Pontiff proved to be exceptionally fast and exceptionally difficult to block or evade, using two swords of fire and magic to ensure that you were ill-prepared to withstand either unless you spread out the resistance rings. We even got a Gwyn moment to begin the fight, as he strolls slowly towards you, his swords suddenly igniting before he gets close enough to close the gap with a massive sweeping lunge. I may have fired a few arrows at him as he slowly made his way over, but that's his fault for showing off with an intimidating slow boss walk right out of a SNK fighter.

The first half of the fight was initially tough to survive for the sheer speed of his blows, as well how unpredictable certain combinations could be, and how relentlessly each blow struck one after the other with no pause in-between. It was then I realized that, rather than some bullshit boss-exclusive infinite stamina bar, the Pontiff was cleverly attacking with such deliberate pauses between each swing to recover the stamina lost from the previous, or at least enough of it to maintain his pace. In so doing, he created what seemed like impossibly long chains through this clever rhythmic recovery system. These pauses generally weren't long enough to allow me drink an Estus or roll out of the range of his impressive reach, but they did impart on me a lesson: I could match his rhythm and drop my guard between his swings, allowing me to recover some small amount of stamina for further blocking in much the same manner as he was preserving stamina for the next attack. The few times he ended a combo with a showstopper, as it were, I was able to sneak in a few hits before going straight back on the defensive. I imagine this boss would've been far easier with a tank who could deflect it all without flinching.

At any rate, we get the compulsory mid-battle switch-up, with the Pontiff summoning a shade that effectively doubled his combat prowess. I noticed a curious thing with this shade, however; it always struck first, with the real Pontiff following about a second after. This gave me some forewarning which attack would follow next, and as some manner of mercy to the player the duo didn't fight with the same tenacity that the Pontiff did alone. The shade also had as much HP as the regular enemies outside, and the process of resummoning it took the Pontiff a good few seconds - ideally, then, I'd narrowly block the shade's blow, evade what would be identical attack coming from the Pontiff and use the short gap to hit both with a sweeping R2 attack. This is how I eventually won the battle: by focusing on removing the shade (or hitting both, when I could) and playing defensively the rest of the time, I was able to get in a fair few hits on the Pontiff as he spent precious seconds bringing the shade back again, and kept that pattern going to the fight's end.

It has been a while since I met a boss this vicious. They've all been aggressive, sure, but they weren't nearly as relentless nor did they refuse to give me a moment to fall back and heal/take a breather. The weirdest aspect to the fight was the hit detection; there were times where he'd jab forward with his magic blade and hit me despite me being at his flank, while other times the model for the swords would clip right through me at the ends of their arcs for no damage. From what lore there is about the Pontiff, he seemed to be the chief cleric for whatever passes for the official religion of Lothric, though there's no clear indication what assocation he has with the Cathedral of the Deep. Almost always an issue when you have two religions sharing the same space. Anyway, I'm glad I was able to return the favor after he sent Vordt to come greet me. I suspect that we haven't seen the last of his Boreal Valley minions, even now that the good Pontiff himself has passed from this world.

Anor Londo

Of course. Of course. It wasn't enough that we have a handful of locations that closely resembled Dark Souls, but also one that comes straight out of it. It's not a perfect one-to-one of the Dark Souls Anor Londo; the geography around the spiral lift is a bit different, as is the fact that the cathedral in Irithyll apparently connects directly to the elevated balcony of Anor Londo that once overlooked Duke's Archives. It does have a few iconic visual callbacks, however: Gwyndolin's long boss corridor is still there, if you remember where the secret illusory wall is located, as well as that enormous staircase that leads to the foyer of the main palace and the palace itself. Upon entering the palace, you find that it's been some time since anyone last occupied the place. Well, anyone with any degree of sapience or decorum at least. It's kind of a mess in there.

Unfortunately, the giant blacksmith is deceased. None of the firekeepers are still around. There's only one Anor Londo occupant that should be here if his proclamation of eternal vigilance still stands, and... well, he sorta is. Sorta.

Aldrich, Devourer of Gods

When looking for the Dark Sun Gwyndolin himself, who swore to look after the seat of his father Lord Gwyn and his sister Gwynevere for the rest of his infinite days provided the player didn't kill him, we discover what happened to him: he was eaten body and soul by a hideous blob-like creature, semi-resembling those found in the foyer (now covered with debris and dirt), who gained the powers of a Lord of Cinder after munching down on the deity and absorbing his power. Its upper half is poor Gwyndolin's head and torso, used like a puppet for its still-prodigious magical talent. I suspect Crossbreed Priscilla, who was ensconced away in a magical painting within Anor Londo for her own safety, might have been devoured as well: that looks like her scythe that the torso is wielding, and Aldrich makes a similarly devastating opponent up close because of that weapon's hard-to-gauge cyclical range.

The fight resembles that of Gwyndolin's to an extent: the boss will fling magic at you, then teleport out of range once you get into melee proximity so that it might continue to safely pummel you with homing soul arrows, soul spears and a particularly nasty spell that summons a huge number of arrows that rain down from above. Another unpleasant trick is the way that it creates a damaging portal whenever it gets ready to bail, moving to whichever corner of the room happens to be the furthest away from you while you recover from the damage. The room that once housed Ornstein and Smough is now unrecognizable with the level of putrid filth covering the floor, but the pillars still serve their noble purpose of blocking most of the worst that the boss can throw at you.

At the midway point, the boss enters its "embered" form. I would later understand that this was a state common to all Cinder Lord bosses, not to mention the player character themselves, and the newly smouldering look was a telltale sign that the boss is about to pull out some cheap bullshit for its last stand. True enough, the boss became far more difficult to handle at this point, with its previous attacks doing far more damage - some instant kills - and a trail of fire left in its wake which served to damage you and knock you off-balance. Worst, however, was how the arrow storm - already the most powerful attack in Aldrich's arsenal - now lasted for somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds and followed you around the room. Getting caught in its path meant getting hit several times a second from some highly damaging magic arrows, which was more or less certain death. And if they didn't kill you, the boss continued to fling magic at you as you focused intently on avoiding the arrows for as long as your stamina held out. So many times I'd be madly rolling around the room like Captain Kirk's stunt double only to be hit from the side by an instant-death scythe swing I wasn't looking out for.

Overall, while this trip back to a prominent Dark Souls location was presumably meant to be a nostalgic throwback, it was actually kind of a bummer. Not just because an area was recycled wholesale, but because of all the maladies that befell it in the interim. It was like strolling through the destroyed Tristram near the start of Diablo 2 and catching a glimpse of Wirt's body, or being forced to put down the demonic living corpse of the humble blacksmith Griswold. I even went up to see Gwynevere's location, but all that was there was a ring and a tattered old chaise lounge (albeit a gigantic one). At least all those wonderful Silver Knight dragonbow archers were still alive...

Profaned Capital

I was expecting something like Dark Souls 2's The Pit for this area: a subterranean location deep beneath the Earth that housed the third of the four Cinder Lords I was sent to "convince" to come back to their thrones at Firelink Shrine. Really, though, this was an oddly compact location that split at its first bonfire: one went to an optional swamp area and a church filled with what I can only call Giant Hand-Faced Babies, which was some messed up shit, and also led to a new vendor for Firelink and my old pal Siegward the Onion Knight. The second path lead down a ladder to a small area filled with fireball-tossing nuns and the boss door. In fact, Anor Londo felt deceptively short too. I wonder if the game just ran out of ideas when it came to extending these locations via shortcuts and the like?

Anyway, the Profaned Capital made an impression as an ancient city crumbling away into nothingness, almost in the literal sense as it amounted to a handful of buildings and bridges floating over an abyss,, but I did wish it was a little longer.

Yhorm the Giant

This fight was messed up with its level of challenge, but also presented one of the cooler nostalgic throwbacks in the series: the return of the Storm Ruler. Before that, though, some boss design pre-amble. The game's masterstroke when it comes to describing how bosses came to be the unbelieveable badasses you're meant to cut down, is that it hides all this lore in items you typically earn only after the boss has been defeated. That means that there's little room for sympathy in the moment, unless the boss or its music has been created specifically to evoke a sorrowful feeling. Yhorm the Giant has a semi-tragic backstory as a belvoed war veteran who was elevated to a position of power, and volunteered to become a Lord of Cinder even though he knew that it would alienate him from his friends and subjects and eventually corrupt his soul.

He's also an immensely tall giant who vaguely resembles the giants of Dark Souls 2, only with a face. It's the face part that makes me wonder if he wasn't some kind of half-breed. The guy has a sword and shield, the former being the same evil-looking saw that the large villagers hit you with back in the Undead Settlement. Likewise, Yhorm has an attack variant where he double-hands this saw with a second grip further down the blade and chops down with a frightening amount of force. Naturally this, and really almost all of his attacks, are effectively an instant kill if you get hit by it and aren't blocking. He also has an immense amount of health - about ten times that of any other boss faced so far, I'd roughly say - and if you tried to fight him normally, you'd be in for an hours-long battle of attrition. That's even accounting for how easy it is to avoid his attacks by running through his legs or moving to his flank, since in an endurance battle it's more a matter of time than skill.

Yet there's a special condition to this fight and it involves the aforementioned Storm Ruler. Once used to cut an enormous demonic manta ray out of the sky all the back in Demon's Souls, the Storm Ruler is capable of producing a massive vertical slice of wind that does incredible damage to Yhorm and to no other enemy in the game. The weapon's mechanics have been altered slightly though; you have to prep it for several seconds before it becomes charged, and during this time your stamina doesn't recharge and nor can you defend yourself. You can't even move, really, at least not at a rate that makes it possible to evade attacks. The trick to this fight is to find opportunities to charge the sword and then find an opportunity to use that power, as it is the only realistic way to win the battle. This forces you to adopt a very specific strategy of evading attacks and sitting there for a few tense seconds to get the wind slash prepared, all the while needing to stop charging for a moment to evade whatever one-hit-KO swing is being thrown at you by your burly opponent. I kind of liked the dynamic this battle created: both you and your opponent had a hell of a time trying to hit the other with a critical blow, but if either of you pulled it off it would be devastating.

Sadly, while I did have my good friend Siegward for the first attempt at this boss, between trying to figure out how Siggy had found himself a Storm Ruler and where I could get one - the chip damage I was doing with my otherwise reliable halberd suggested that the Storm Ruler was my best bet - he was defeated after keeping the boss busy for too long. There's only so much abuse a tank can take before being battered into submission. He ultimately gave me the strategy I needed to defeat Yhorm, but the cost was far too great. He's toasting and napping with Onion Jesus now. I'll be sure to pour out a Siegbrau in his honor.

That's probably a good place to stop for Part 2, since the game just decided to take over for a major cutscene. I've no idea how many more bosses are left, though there's at least two if the usual story route is any indication: the last Lord of Cinder, and then some giant end of game boss fight that opens up once all the Lords have been put in their place. Hopefully I'll have enough for another entry, but then it's not like these couldn't be a little shorter. See you next time, Ashen Ones.

Welcome to a new series of Bosswatch! With this series I like to examine the various boss encounters of the Souls series, which I generally consider to be the highlight, and discuss the design behind them and the strategies involved with their defeat. The ingenuity of the meticulous design that accompanies this series is always at its most evident with these bosses, at a stark contrast to the often shoehorned-in nature of the modern boss fight.

If you've yet to jump into Dark Souls III and would prefer its centerpiece struggles to maintain an air of mystique, or simply want to read more rantings of a wayward soul who has embraced the abyss many times before, by all means check out the previous two times I brought this series out of mothballs:

• Dark Souls II Bosswatch (Parts One, Two and Three)
• Bloodborne Bosswatch (Parts One and Two)

Please keep in mind also that I've yet to get much further than the last boss fight on this list (though I did fight the next guy, and he is a doozy), so please keep spoilers to a minimum in the comments. This also goes for NPCs, lore stuff and other informational tidbits coming up. Discussion about the bosses here, though, are absolutely welcome as long as you don't go overboard with the overshadowing.

Cemetery of Ash

This cheerful place is where your character wakes up, and pretty much resembles a lot of other opening sections in Souls games. Actually, it kind of does a half-and-half thing with that, as if to prepare the player for what's to come: the first half resembles a sheltered waterlogged shrine that resembles the first Firelink Shrine of Dark Souls, while the second half is more like DSII's Majula in that it's situated on a cliff, allowing you to take in a vista that includes a number of locations you'll eventually visit, and the bright daylight is a welcome change to the dark and dingy locations that invariably make up the rest of the game (at least, what I've seen so far, though some other places are plenty sunny as well).

The game throws you into the deep end too: the hooded hollows around here aren't particularly tough, but they're fast and there's a lot of them and they all pack various weapons, necessitating some consideration for how you approach them - a recurring theme with the humanoid enemies in the game, who will frequently switch up their tactics to suit the weapons they wield. There's also a giant crystal lizard in one of the side passages; a pissed off older sibling of the speedy little guys who'd rather run off cliffs with their treasures than let you have them. Just like the Ogre behind the waterfall in DSII, this is one of those early game challenges for the particularly daring.

Iudex Gundyr

Dark Souls III continues its "beginners are chumps" running start with the knight boss Iudex Gundyr, who sits inert in the center of his boss arena located just before the Firelink Shrine waiting for the player to pull out the coiled sword - an important artifact necessary for the game's fast travel system - pinning him in place. Of course, there's no way I would know any of that Firelink or fast travel stuff; what I did know is that I couldn't pass through this area, the only area in this linear introductory zone, without first activating the ominous crouched figure and bracing for a battle. So that's what I did.

Iudex fights like a halberd black knight from the original Dark Souls, taking full advantage of his massive reach over you and having a few tricks to deter anyone trying to move around him to flank his side after he thrusts. Once you know to look for those nasty shoulder charges though, the first form isn't so tough. It's when he drops to half health and suddenly adopts a large serpent-like growth out of his head like an even more messed up Las Plagas zombie that he suddenly becomes a greater threat, and this is where it took me a while to get around the new attacks and unpredictable nature of this accursed form. Its reach is even longer than before, and what's more is that when you get close to Iudex, who was already fairly tall, you can no longer see far enough up to observe what the snake head is doing. In addition, the snake-like appendage also had a skeletal arm of its own, which was able to stretch out and swipe you if you were too busy watching the snake or Iudex's halberd. I'd encounter a few more enemies like this in the game - all of whom simply appear to be normal enemies until you get close - and I generally found it to be a good idea to get the hell out of there when it revealed itself. Well, unless I had some fire-based weaponry handy, since they don't seem to like burning much.

Anyway, it's been a while since I've encountered a "baptism of fire" boss in one of these games: the type that you can't prepare for, because you haven't unlocked the means to buy new gear or level up or even try a different path for a while, and I'm glad Iudex didn't stonewall me completely. Certainly the toughest boss I'd face for a while.

High Wall of Lothric

A recurring theme for the early areas of any Souls games, where you enter a medieval urban district seemingly moments after an enormous battle that has taken the lives of countless knights and left the local buildings in various states of disarray.

The undead remnants cling to what they have left by charging at you, and there's a great variation of humanoid enemies here, from emaciated peasants to sneaky rogues to armored knights with a great deal of martial prowess at their command. Plenty of skeletal dogs too. I didn't care for the dogs.

Vordt of the Boreal Valley

Named in honor of the Swedish Chef, Vordt Vordt Vordt's your classic quadruped Souls fight, which meant the old strategies still worked: get in behind it or underneath its legs to be shielded from half of its attacks. It reminded me a bit of the Darkbeast Paarl fight from Bloodborne - and despite this being a Souls sequel, expect most of my comparisons to be Bloodborne related since I only played it eight months ago - as the beast appeared metallic and skeletal-like, and throbbed with an energy that I believe was more chill-inducing than electrical. That would make sense, given the "boreal valley" appellation, which I can assume is another location in this game (in fact, I fought a tough creature like it in the subsequent area which dropped a sword of the Boreal Valley, which also had ice powers, so the chances are good I'm going to bump into a frozen location at some point).

Anyway, this was one of those rare cases that the boss didn't have much in the way of big surprises and I managed to beat it in one go. It actually felt more like a tutorial fight than Iudex did, though perhaps that's not the right term. "Veteran advantage fight", perhaps, since it was a foe that could be easily beaten by those familiar with the series and its previous boss designs. After about a dozen of these giant dog bosses between Souls and Bloodborne, there's not a whole lot of guesswork needed.

The Bloodborne comparisons continue: the mythology around the Boreal knights, as I would soon discover from the boss soul items, involve knights giving in to bestial urges and turning into immense, berserk hound-like creatures. That's why this particular dog was fully armored and swung a mace around in its hand; it was still vaguely humanish, even when it was leaping around on all fours. This lycanthrophy was also the fate of the Healing Church members in Yharnam, who invariably turned into big dogs as soon as you got near them. I half expect the next one I bump into to be Louis Tully. Actually, I'll probably have to fight a Slor too. Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

Undead Settlement

Quickly moving from a large population center (or used to be) to the rustic outskirts village beneath, the undead settlement is a confusing maze of hovels and bridges and rooftops that actually felt more like the Forbidden Woods area of Bloodborne, especially in the way it sort of loops back into itself at various height levels. It was an interesting area to explore, at least.

The enemies here are all undead serfs with pitchforks and the like, albeit particularly tall undead serfs, though I did meet a few of these unpleasant "evangelist" enemies that barrage you with magic as well a giant mace. I'd learn later that these were evangelists of the Cathedral of the Deep, which presumably sends out these corpulent messengers of their Deep Lord to acquire new converts. Perhaps worst of all were these basin-carrying brutes that thumped you with their tubs (and you don't get up again after that, regardless of what Chumbawamba might purport) before pulling out a nasty-looking woodsaw to hack you into furniture. When you have enemies that are both fast and able to shrug off most blows, it can be hard to avoid damage.

Curse-Rotted Greatwood

So this was an odd one. When I first encountered this boss, it was animating ever so slightly in a corner of a large courtyard with a whole mess of the villagers prostrate before it. The villagers became hostile when I got close, and after killing two or three of them the tree itself woke up and a hit bar appeared. Seems like ol' Exdeath over here was the deity of these people, or at least the closest approximation to one in their hollow-addled minds, and wasn't prepared to let me leaf alive for my trespasses. Maybe they were Branch Davidians?

The fight's a common enough one seen in Souls: the boss has a handful of weak points but is invulnerable everywhere else, so the goal is to focus on the weak points and the rare opportunities to hit same. Some of these were on the ends of limbs, which required that the boss stay still long enough for me to hit them - it was very fond of a butt stomp technique that caused it to raise its arms and feet, and did it over and over whether I was in its line of sight or not. The weakpoints appeared to be monstrous eggs tucked away in its branches like nests, which were just about obvious enough from up close to prevent too much confusion. However, after removing all the obvious weakpoints and dropping the tree's health to just under half, which also caused the arena to collapse and drop us into a catacombs-like cave, I suddenly ran out of areas to attack. There were still eggs, but they were protected by brambles and impenetrable. I resorted to using my bow to see if I could hit any of the higher up ones, or the tree's fruit. The fruit, turns out, is what the tree uses for its bombardment attacks and isn't related to the boss's health bar. I eventually got worn down by its enormous sweeps to kill me, and I picked up a few more arrows and firebombs to prep for round 2. When round 2 occurred after a brief jog back to the boss room, the tree fought differently: it started with a massive rolling attack that knocked me on my back, and after taking out a few of its weakpoints a gigantic hand appeared out of its abdomen that was far more human than the branch-like limbs I'd seen so far. What's more, the eggs I couldn't attack before were now vulnerable, and I managed to sweep up the remaining weakpoints I couldn't hit last time and finish the fight.

The tree wasn't a challenge whatsoever; if anything, the villager mobs around it during the first stage of the fight were causing me more problems, sort of like the bugs around Rom the Vacuous Spider in BB or the spiders with The Duke's Dear Freja in DS2. The fact that the first fight either apparently glitched out, or only caused more weakpoints to appear after that special rolling attack the boss didn't do once in the ten minutes I spent fighting it the first time, made it a little unsatisfying.

The guy's design was a bit run-of-the-mill in most respects. Essentially a giant rotting tree with arms and legs, the sheer bulk of it meant that it could barely lift its trunk-like center mass with its stubby arms, so it spent most of the fight in an odd upright crawling position. The only freaky thing about the fight is that aforementioned monster arm it suddenly grows from deep within, indicating that the "curse-rot" had infected it from the inside out. I sort of wonder if it wasn't just a regular tree, then, with something utterly unholy growing inside of it.

Path of Sacrifices

The requisite open forested area. As with the forests that came before it, woe betide anyone who wanders in too deep without a clear escape route. Alongside even more tall zombies now with pointed sticks for chargin', we have very loud frenzied creatures with a crosses on their backs, some indomitable and extremely fast giant crabs that I wasn't a fan of, more hooded enemies from the opening area but now accompanied with sorcery-flinging ringleaders, and a not inconsiderable number of hostile NPCs with their own strategies to learn. I'll admit to dying a lot here, if only because I was trying to comb the place for valuables and got frequently waylaid having to retrace my steps to where I last got clobbered by something large and angry, usually contending with a mixture of the above on the way.

The path actually splits here - one towards the area's boss, and the other towards a venomous swamp. You better believe I put off visiting the latter for as long as possible.

Crystal Sage

Here we have another old chestnut: the teleporting, cloning, magic-user boss, first encountered as the Fool's Idol all the way back in Demon's Souls. The Crystal Sage pops up far from where you enter its arena and starts laying on the sorceries tout de suite: regular soul arrows, the soul arrows that hover above the character's head in groups until someone's in range, a larger and more tenacious homing shot, and one that shot along the ground like a power geyser. They're all fairly powerful if you're not equipped to mitigate magic damage, and even the Sage's physical attack has a magic tinge to it that will cut through shields with low resistance. However, despite teleporting and reappearing around the arena after a few hits - leaving a few crystal mines that are easy enough to avoid - there's not much to the fight, as you can easily reach the boss before he casts anything and interrupt him with how incredibly easy it is to stunlock anyone in this game. However, as if to respond to this specious sense of security, the battle suddenly takes a sinister turn around the halfway health mark.

This is the point where the clones show up, and the fight is curious because it would appear to present these clones as a puzzle - can you figure out which is the real one? - but in reality is more like a hurried struggle for survival as you suddenly have four or five times as much magic being flung your way from all directions, making it far harder to find cover and pick the right moment to make an approach. Instead, you have to eliminate as many of the clones as possible - even though you know that they're not part of the fight - before whacking the real one a few times to make any progress. If you try going for the real one first using your keen powers of deduction, you'll get hit in the back with four greater soul arrows, since the clones aren't just for show. In a sense, it's like the boss fight was designed to trip up those who try to be smart about picking out the right opponent. Fortunately, after the second one of these clone waves, the guy stops teleporting or producing any more copies (or he did for me) and it was simple enough to finish him off.

The design for this guy was kind of neat: he didn't look human, unlike the undead sorcerers you'd met so far, and more closely resembled a wraith that had possessed a giant wizard hat. Sort of like this guy. I guess this was some of commentary on how the sorcerer hats have been getting bigger and bigger in each game? There's even the option to buy the same enormous hat for a steep 10k souls from the Firelink merchant afterwards.

Cathedral of the Deep

A graveyard located around the base of the titular massive place of worship, Cathedral laid on the body horror early and often with its emaciated and endlessly respawning pale zombies. Many of these zombies had been taken over by the maggots feeding on them, creating various humanoid hybrids of writhing mounds of icky bugs. What's worse is that, upon hitting you, the maggots would stick around and cause the bleeding effect until you figured out a way to remove them (not for the first time, fire solves everything). Inside the church were immense giants, more evangelists, moody dark bishops who silently sent fireballs your way and some more tough armored foes who used miracles - the series' equivalent to cleric spells - to make themselves even more formidable.

The Cathedral also brought back a personal favorite in Souls level design: one where you're making vertical progress rather than horizontal, with many shortcuts that involved opening a path to an elevator that took you back down to the first bonfire in the area. We last saw this with the Nightmare of Mensis in Bloodborne, but it's popped up in a few Souls games too.

Deacons of the Deep

Another old favorite, the mob boss. That is to say, bosses that require you to focus on a crowd of disposable enemies, rather than some mafiosi concerned about Valentine's Day. The Deacons are a collection of minor enemies that endlessly respawn, the only distinguishing aspect is that one of them is glowing with an eerie red energy. This energy is the real boss, as you might deduce, and for the first half of the fight you simply need to force your way through the throng to reach the enemy it is possessing and quickly eliminate them, causing damage to the red energy as it is forcibly ejected out of its dying host. This red flame will occasionally leave enemies of its own accord as well if the player takes too long, so time is of the essence.

In what is already becoming a trend for this game, at the 50% health point the fight changes. The red energy finds a permanent host in a frail-looking Pope type character called the Archdeacon - befitting the whole cathedral theme - and is flanked by a number of new enemies which, like the rest, respawn continually after dying. Reaching the correct enemy is now even harder with a larger amount of bodyshields in the way, and if Jean-Paul II is left alone too long he will start to gather dark energy from the praying minions around and throw it at the player, causing immense damage. Even if you hide behind the large monolith structure in the center of the arena, this ball of dark energy - one very reminiscent of those fired by the enemies of the Astoria DLC back in Dark Souls 1 - will find you regardless. It's imperative to disrupt this ritual, but it's also important to constantly cause damage to the frail red boss since it'll regenerate its health a lot too. It's an irritating fight, all told, but at least it offers something new to the "find the guy with the health bar in a crowd of lookalikes" dynamic that doesn't involve too much guesswork but still offers a moderate challenge.

Design-wise, this boss is eerie because it involves a whole crowd of people suddenly turning towards your direction and strolling unhurriedly towards you as soon as you enter the room. They look mostly like the rest of the undead in this area, though there seems to be even less color; each is a drab dark grey in complexion and dress, but for the piercing red eyes they all share. I simply assumed that red eyes meant a stronger foe, as that had been the case with the various red-eyed enemies I'd met so far in this game and the series as a whole, but I think this fight tried to contextualize this particular ocular condition as being touched by "the Abyss" in some form. Everything in the Cathedral of the Deep indicated some allegiance to darker forces, from the "dark" magic to the whole "of the deep" business. It's like a church built to honor Manus.

Farron's Keep

This would be the aforementioned poison swamp. It's not easy getting around, especially where parts of the swamp get deeper and it takes longer to move through it, but the goal here is to find three flame beacons and snuff out the light. That means that you need to become fairly well acquainted with this large, circular area. In the middle is a ladder up to a new area featuring an old wolf - part of a covenant loosely based on Sif, I'd imagine - and a tall bridge structure that seemed to tower over the rest of the game's geography and seemed far more ancient as a result. Up here was a mini-boss of sorts, the Stray Demon, which greatly resembled the recurring rotund demons of the first Dark Souls - the Asylum Demon, the Stray Demon (natch) and the Demon Firesage.

Back on the ground, we had all sorts of fun monsters like the venomous slugs of Blighttown, the oddly-horned Ghru creatures which resembled those found in the Artorias DLC, some large tree-like demons that looked and fought like the powerful Leshans of The Witcher 3, and our old friends the Basilisks, who took advantage of the torpid quagmires to hit our hero with a whole of curse gas before they could escape out of it. It wouldn't be Dark Souls without sludging through some gross poopwater with an omnipresent poison guage.

Abyss Watchers

The first Lord of Cinder, the four significant story bosses I've been told to defeat, is the collective Abyss Watchers. From what I've been able to tell thus far - recall from the lede, if you would, that this Bosswatch goes up almost immediately after its last discussed boss, which would be this one - is that these guys were meant to guard the way forward into the depths from those coming in (or perhaps, coming out) and belong to the same old wolf covenant I discovered earlier. I've also been able to determine that the power of a Cinder Lord was spread between them in the form of blood rituals, and given their Victorian monster hunter-like appearance I figure this was one big shout-out to Bloodborne - the whole hunter coalition and blood transfusions angle seems lifted wholesale from that game's gothic fantasy aspirations, though I also noticed a lot of allusions to Artorias too: their steadfast battle against the "abyss", their swirling greatsword fighting style and their allegiance to the first of their kind, the "wolf knight" - who may have been Knight Artorias himself. When you enter the room, the last two Abyss Watchers - of what was apparently close to a hundred, judging by all the identical corpses littering the ground - are fighting to the death, with one dying just as the other notices your presence. He takes up a practiced stance and strides towards you.

The lone Abyss Watcher fights like any other hostile NPC, albeit one that's a little taller than most and thus has a vicious long reach to keep an eye on. He's also capable of some Orstein-esque unexpectedly long lunging jabs, making it hard to judge a safe distance for a cheeky Estus sip. As could be feasibly expected by anyone who has played a Souls game before, he is soon joined by another Abyss Watcher and then a third in a group battle reminiscent of the three Ruin Sentinels fight in Dark Souls 2. The goal here, like in that fight, is to try a divide and conquer strategy of splitting one off and doing as much damage as possible to them before their back-up arrives. Curiously, the third Abyss Watcher to arrive has red eyes and draws the ire of the other two: they'll happily carve each other up and leave you alone until the red-eyed interloper is dealt with. This is another sign that the red eyes mean more than simply an upgraded enemy; that it's an indication that something darker has taken over, causing even these insane guardians to momentarily remember their duty in keeping the darkness beyond at bay. When all three are dead, the collected blood of the Lord of Cinder pools into one Watcher, and the real fight starts: the Watcher now has a flaming sword and a lot of damaging fire attacks to avoid, its previous whirling flourishes now accompanied by plumes of flame.

Design-wise, the fight's more interesting for what it reveals about the game's lore than the actual creature design, which - as I said - is mostly that of several identical larger-than-average humanoid NPC enemies in gear that is half trenchcoat-and-wide-brimmed Victorian hunter garb, of the like seen in such hit movies as that 2004 Van Helsing movie (or Vampire Hunter D, which is where I assume Miyazaki got the idea for the Bloodborne designs, since gritty gothic anime is kinda his whole aesthetic), and more serious armor. It's a familiar fight, and it's weird that the game chose to turn it into a big set-piece "Lord of Cinder" story boss, but I can't fault it too much for how cleverly it builds the lore without a single spoken word - what Souls frequently excels at.

And here's where I throw my credibility under a bus and ruin Bosswatch forever. Just outside the boss room is a summon sign. Now, since I'm not one to fork out a monthly fee for PlayStation Plus for god-knows what they might happen to make gratis that month, I've been blocked from all of the online stuff: no summons, no PVP, no helpful soapstone signs on the ground even. This summon sign, therefore, is one left by the designers for a specific NPC phantom buddy - one that teaches the player a gesture when he arrives. I've not been using a guide for the game, except where it concerns missables and the like - NPCs with plotlines to follow, gestures and spells you can miss, etc. I've never particularly cared for how Souls will allow you to irrevocably ruin one of its smaller ongoing stories through some easily missed detail or unintuitive decision, nor do consider it "essential" to the game's normally charming refusal to hold your hand at any point. Obfuscating menus and terminology is one thing - I enjoy puzzling that stuff out - but removing one the game's enjoyable optional narrative threads for an arbitrary missed trigger is something else entirely. Anyway, I bring this up because I only summoned the guy in for that gesture - I figured AI-controlled NPCs have never been particularly strong as companions, and I didn't imagine I'd beat such an important boss on the first try, so when I inevitably died I'd come back and try again without bringing in any assistance. Well, let me tell you, a second person helping you out - even a computer-controlled one - is incredibly handy in a fight that is built around overwhelming you with numbers. With my new buddy causing a distraction, I had zero trouble with this boss: I barely used half of my Estus Flasks, and my companion survived in good shape too. The regret isn't that I cheesed the boss fight; it's more that I didn't get to experience what it was like solo. Well, I guess that can wait for NG+, if I ever get around to it.

On that note, the first Lord of Cinder is probably a good spot to call this first episode of Dark Souls 3: Bosswatch. I'll be sure to keep you appraised on any of my future conflicts, warts and all, as well as focusing on how each seems to be keenly recalling the lore or strategies of those that came before. I've yet to determine if it's necessarily a good thing that a game can be so steeped in nostalgia for a series that has only been around for seven years, but I'm enjoying the game too much to really quibble about its over-familiarity.

Happy Halloween, everyone! Well, it's still All Hallow's Eve Eve by the time this goes up, but I imagine most of us are getting our spooky reveling out of our system during the weekend.

There's always this unspoken obligation to play survival horror games during this period of the year, to get into the spirit of things. While the survival horror genre is stronger than it's ever been thanks in a large part to Indie developers, it's been a while since one really grabbed me. I played Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Among the Sleep earlier this year for May Mastery, but both felt sorta surface-level with their mechanics and linearity. But that got me thinking about what a good survival horror game needs to be.

When we consider the genre, we think of the obfuscated puzzles of the genre originators: Infogrames's Alone in the Dark and Capcom's Resident Evil. There were plenty of other games prior to these that had a horror theme, many of which were adventure games with a similar focus on puzzle-solving for progression (like ICOM's Uninvited or Capcom's Sweet Home, both of which also involved escaping a haunted mansion), though Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil were the first to truly the establish the genre with their jump to 3D environments and use of fixed cameras. Subsequently, every major survival horror game since has had players running around a mansion or some equally ominous location searching for keys and special objects required to progress further, all the while contending with various supernatural foes by gunning them down, whacking them with blunt objects, or just staying out of their reach. Even my favorite survival horror series, Fatal Frame/Project Zero, has an awful lot of backtracking and object hunting involved, largely so the game can funnel you towards the same ghost attack encounters over and over.

These days, survival horror is less focused on backtracking and obtuse puzzles and more on presenting a linear spookhouse ride and doubling down on the scares and narrative than headlining any kind of more elaborate gameplay. It's attempting to boil down the horror genre - in literary terms rather than its loosely-defined video game terms - to its necessities, scrubbing away what was essentially a holdover from an era when these games were more point-and-click-like in construction. We've also, as a whole, relaxed a little on what constitutes a necessary level of gameplay - the arbitrary inclusion of enemies and a combat system in something like Deadly Premonition or SOMA was reviewed as unnecessary to the appeal of those games, and we're less likely to see new horror games shoehorn in something like that to ensure that the game's detractors can't dismiss it as a pointless "walking simulator" with jumpscares. At the same time, with no fear of an early demise, how terrifying could a survival horror game potentially be? I mean, there'd be no real "survival" aspect to worry about.

Anyway, the horror genre's popular enough that there'll never stop being a horde of Indie devs working on the next big evolutionary leap for the genre, even if the grand majority of them are content to push out generic spoopy pap to appease YouTubers who make a lot of business through face cam reaction hi-jinks. Still, if those guaranteed sales can act as a safety net for some wild ideas from a particularly imaginative designer, I can't begrudge that little industry much at all.

Before we start with the usual sections, just want to give a hearty "good luck" to everyone streaming for Extra Life this week and next. I'll be moderating the GB streams as much as possible, though I unfortunately cannot partake myself due to a lack of bandwidth and/or computing power. I did consider an "Extra Life Blogging" marathon, but I risk RSI enough already with these 3000-5000 word Sunday Summary behemoths every week. I'll extend that "good luck" to the Waypoint stream too, if it's still going.

New Games!

My highlight for this week is Owlboy, which is actually coming out for realsies y'all. The Indie community's Cuphead before Cuphead was a thing, we've been waiting on this glorious-looking 2D action-adventure-platforming-possibly-a-Spacewhipper for what feels like a decade. It's been getting rave reviews from the press outlets with early copies, so it seems like it will be worth the wait. That we're getting this and The Last Guardian this year (though that's still very much a "wait and see") seems almost unreal. A good year for long-delayed games with feathered heroes, though perhaps a bad year in almost every other respect.

Xanadu Next is my obligatory JRPG pick for this week, a sequel to one of Falcom's earlier RPGs in its Dragon Slayer anthology series. The Dragon Slayer series would also go on to spawn the first The Legend of Heroes games, best known by their more recent Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel entries. Xanadu Next is a bit more archaic; the original version was first released in 2005 and played a lot like Falcom's Ys series of action-RPGs. Even if it is just a Ys game in disguise, though, by all means sign me up. I need something to hold me over until I can get my hands on the new Ys VIII.

Mario Party: Star Rush will unfortunately be out of the running for Mario Party Party, since they enacted a "no portables" rule, but it's also one that takes after the more recent two entries in the series in prioritizing expediency. Whereas in MP9 and MP10 the whole squad moved around the board as one unit, in this game it looks like they all take their turn at once, each in a mad dash towards the Star - hence the name. I'm sure the duders will still feel obligated to Quick Look the game, even if it turns out to be Dan and whomever drew the shortest straw, so I look forward to that. (If not, perhaps, actually playing the game myself.)

Let's get this out of the way: Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is out this week too, completing the trifecta (quadfecta?) of Autumn shooters alongside Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2. I am curious to see more of the zero-gravity space stuff that was shown off during E3, but I've long since stopped caring about the single-player campaigns of Call of Duty. I'd say the same about the multiplayer aspect, but I never cared for that in the first place. This might be the year that Call of Duty's competition finally buries it, between the two aforementioned releases, Gears of Four and Overwatch in full Halloween dress-up holiday mode, or maybe it'll be the one to draw the online crowds through its unexpectedly high quality and/or series reputation. Definitely a tough call to make. So to speak.

As for the round-up, we have Hitman Episode 6: Hokkaido to complete the first "season" of IO Interactive's piecemeal assassination sim, and that new graphically enhanced The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition for modern consoles and PC. I've heard the new remake doesn't have the mod support of the original, so I'm not particularly inclined to jump back into Tamriel just yet. Others might be waiting for that portable version that Nintendo hinted at with the Switch teaser, though I somehow doubt that. Skyrim's definitely more of a "sit in one place for so long that you fuse with the couch" sort of RPG than one conducive to short plays on the bus.

Wiki!

Still working on those Wii Virtual Console releases for PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 games. It's been a dream of mine, ever since I was a young boy, to ensure that anyone who wished to write a review on Giant Bomb about a TurboGrafx-16 rerelease on the Wii's Virtual Console could attach it to the appropriate release information, regardless of region. I'm up to V on the alphabetical lists, so I don't imagine it'll take another week. At that point, I'm moving onto something marginally more interesting: NES header images.

In the slightly more long-term, I'm prepping for another GDQ event and the wiki work that entails. As per usual, I'll be scrubbing through the GDQ schedule to find games that we might not have represented on our site. The intent is less to fill out the pages for the more obscure games that get covered during the event - usually 8-bit/16-bit forgotten licensed dreck as part of the "Awful Games Done Quick" block, but there's a lot more lesser known Indie games popping up too - but to ensure the pages are there in the first place, since the event uses Twitch for its streams and Twitch in turn uses our wiki database for its "now playing" algorithm. We've never been entirely copacetic on how Twitch actually processes that information through the API - we frequently get frustrated devs emailing support or the mods because Twitch decided one of our pages didn't "count" - so the best bet to cover our bases is to create the page, add some general info to the side-bar, write a basic synopsis for the text portion and attach at least one release. The event starts about a week into 2017, so I'll want to start that project at the beginning of December ideally.

Beyond that, I've got the shadow of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System looming over me. The relatively sedate 1996 will be the last year the SNES will see a significant number of releases, and I'm eager to finish the console off after several years of researching and wiki work that it's taken so far.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow!

Though I didn't play any survival horror games this week, the two I did play definitely have a spooky edge to them. In fact, they both involve killing monsters and absorbing their souls to become more powerful, so that's a curious throughline.

My Aria of Sorrow playthrough, which snips at the heels of last year's Dawn of Sorrow revisit, was very much the result of watching Vinny progress through Symphony of the Night for the site's Vinnyvania premium feature. I doubt Vinny will extend the feature to cover all the open-world Castlevania games that IGA is best known for, but seeing him pass through the inverted castle and all its secrets got me pining for a playthrough of my own. Since all the Castlevania games on the Wii Virtual Console are presently on sale, I snapped up Aria for a song (so to speak) and completed Soma Cruz's inaugural adventure for what I believe is the third time.

Aria of Sorrow's big defining feature is the aforementioned soul-stealing, where Soma absorbs the souls of fallen foes and uses them for his own profit. They essentially act like a versatile power-up system, a greatly expanded variant of the Belmonts' sub-weapons, with the souls falling into four basic categories: red weapon or "bullet" souls that allow Soma to bust out an attack for a certain number of hearts per shot, blue guardian souls which provide an ongoing boost for as long as the active button is held down, yellow enchanted souls which provide a passive benefit, and grey ability souls which act like the progression-enabling relics in previous games and are always active.

The issue with these souls is that they don't automatically drop whenever a new enemy type is slain. Rather, their drop rate is defined by a certain percentage chance, often dependent on the quality of the soul and the assistance it provides. An early example are the zombies right at the start: as in many Castlevania games, you being by passing through a corridor with endlessly spawning weak undead enemies, but the chance of one of these zombies dropping a soul is incredibly slim. The Peeping Eye enemy, a frequent Castlevania mainstay, has a soul that gives you the very useful ability of detecting breakable walls, behind which many of the game's items - including the best sword in the game, the Claimh Solais - are hidden. The chance of it actually dropping its soul, however, approaches one in infinity.

I'd imagine this makes Aria of Sorrow an exciting game to speedrun, because you can't depend on any of these souls happening by chance and nor can you afford to wait around to farm them. You either devise strategies based on what you can rely on - the "assured" items/drops - or you hope to strike it lucky with a particularly useful soul for speedrunning that'll give you an edge over everyone else attempting a world record. I'd imagine almost all runners would opt for the former and mitigate any element of randomness as much as possible as a matter of course, but you gotta imagine there are folk out there going with the latter with a slightly revised route past some particularly juicy souls and hoping the RNG is on their side.

At any rate, the story's a fun one with an abundance of characters to meet and a few surprising twists, and while the map's not quite the size and scope of Symphony's it's still substantial enough for a portable game. Having all those souls and weapons to play around with definitely adds some replayability to the game - I tried daggers for the first time, since Vinny's presently having a ball with them - and I have the Boss Rush mode to try if I feel like another challenge. It's not Symphony, but it's perhaps the next best thing.

Dark Souls III!

I'll be going into more detail with Dark Souls III when I start writing up the "Bosswatch" feature that tends to accompany any new Souls/Borne playthrough, but I've played enough at this point for some general early impressions.

What's been notable for me is how this game has chosen to balance its difficulty between bosses and general exploration. The series has been playing around with this dynamic for a while, but they usually lean towards difficult boss encounters and moderately challenging exploration. With Dark Souls III, it feels like they went the other way: I've been having far more trouble passing through the mostly linear levels filled with traps and vicious enemies than I have with the game's boss encounters so far. The forested Path of Sacrifices, which I've just passed through, is filled with these pointy branch-carrying zombies that can you kill you very quickly if you aren't paying attention, and if you wander away from them you risk bumping something worse. Something like those really strong, tall zombies with crosses on their back who frenzy swipe at you, or the powerful giant crabs in the watery area of the forest, or the handful of NPC hostiles roaming around that fight like other players, or yet another venomous swamp. One passageway even had one of the black knights from the original Dark Souls guarding it. We're back to Dark Souls 2's healing system as well - a fixed number of Estus Flasks that the player can increase by finding items, as well as another type of item that increases each one's potency - that's been expanded with a system where you can designate some of your Estus Flasks as MP restorative items instead, giving players one less reason to pick a magic-based class. Would anyone be that eager to go all in on pyromancy, sorcery or miracles if it means giving up half their healing items to keep their mana up? I mean, it's Souls, so the answer is no doubt "absolutely".

Speaking of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2, that would be the other significant element of the game: the increased amount of callbacks and references, both visual and narrative, to the previous games in the series. The landscape is vaguely reminiscent of certain areas of Dark Souls 1 and 2 - not so much in a lazy retread sort of way but a calculated attempt to link the geography to those places for the sake of the game's deliberately cyclic lore. The insinuation is that the Souls games are always hundreds of years apart, to account for various geographical changes and new characters, but the same old names and locations tend to keep popping up: Vinland, the home of sorcery and uppity mages; Izalith, the seat of pyromancy that has since been scourged by the same chaotic fire it sought to harness; Catarina, a land of noble if buffoonish knights who walk around in oddly onion-shaped armor. The NPCs too, of which there are many, are reminiscent of earlier cases. Siegward of Catarina reminds me of the similarly-named onion knights from Dark Souls 1 and 2. I've found pieces of Solaire's armor, suggesting that the SunBros are going to show up later as a covenant. We're back to Firekeepers and rekindling. Andre's back, apparently having not aged a day. There's a friendly hooded pyromancer vendor, a terse sorcerer vendor, a doomed maiden willing to impart miracles and yet another crestfallen sadsack sitting near the bonfire. I've no doubt Patches will show up eventually too.

That the game leans so hard on familiarity could be seen as either a strength or a weakness. Being familiar with the game's lore and tropes does not in any way prepare you for the game's surprises; if anything, you're likely to drop your guard with something that appears familiar and then becomes anything but. However, it does serve to highlight an ongoing issue with the series: it's running out of new features and ideas to incorporate, and by relying so much on what has come before it feels less like a bold new direction for the series than simply giving fans what they want and expect for another game in a row. As with Dark Souls 2, I can't fault the game for its many minor gameplay improvements and visual upgrades over the original PS3 games, but a lot of what made Dark Souls such a singular experience (if you temporarily forget about Demon's Souls, anyway) becomes diluted more and more with each subsequent retread.

I talked about how Aria of Sorrow and Dark Souls III are linked by soul absorption mechanics, where it's key to the character development in both, but really the better link would be how they're both chasing an immensely popular and critically acclaimed forebear - Symphony of the Night and Dark Souls, respectively - and coming up short when attempting to replicate the impact of that antecedent, despite the wonderful ideas and beneficial gameplay tweaks they've implemented in the meantime. I've heard tell that Dark Souls 3 will be the last of its particular series - at least with the current dark fantasy medieval world it has spent three games building - with new games either riffing on Bloodborne or creating a new universe whole cloth, and I think that's the smart plan. I'll reserve any critical thoughts on Dark Souls III until after I've completed it, of course, but while I'm always down for more Souls I can't say it's standing out too much.

I was all ready to clean the palette and leap into Dark Souls III fresh and focused, but I'll be darned by the Lords of Cinder themselves if I can't stop thinking about the way Final Fantasy Type-0 ended. The game's final act contain a series of non-sequitur curveballs that almost scream "well, we gave you all the hints that this was coming from incidental NPC dialogue and optional codex entries, so it's on you if you're completely flummoxed". As with everything else going on in Type-0, from its in-depth and varied gameplay mechanics to an underlying structure built around replays, there's a lot more than meets the eye with its plot and by ignoring a lot of its lore - I simply assumed it didn't have a whole lot worth reading, since most of it is locked away in the aforementioned optional codex entries (kinda like a Souls game in fact) - I let myself get nonplussed by a series of out-of-left-field twists towards the game's conclusion.

But let's rewind a bit.

I'll be discussing the game's plot in detail here, with my own interjections, for an article that's half to assuage my own peace of mind so I can better focus on the no doubt equally dense and labyrinthine mythos of Dark Souls III, and also to provide empathetic support to my fellow mod @zombiepie who is equally at odds right now attempting to dissect the plot of an entirely different Final Fantasy. (I'd ask him not to read this article though, since I slipped a few FFIX spoilers in here. Just stop here, dude. "Giant Bomb mod Mento writes about the confusing ending of Final Fantasy Type-0" if you need a blurb for the GBDuder Twitter account.)

Naturally, there will be plot spoilers aplenty after the initial "setting the stage" section up to and including how the game concludes and some post-game revelations, so I'd strongly advise you skip it unless you've also beaten the game or don't particularly care to play it but still want to wallow indulgently in some bizarre JRPG storytelling. The chances of anyone caring too much about how a modern Final Fantasy game ends is slim enough, but if you're in the same boat and feel like you can clarify a few things, or just want to register your own confusion, be sure to respond in the comments.

It's kind of nuts that this is the second time in a row that I've had to try to explain the plot to a Final Fantasy game to myself, after an incredulous multi-part feature on Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns. Remember when these games ended after identifying a clear bad guy and casting Meteor on them enough times?

Zero Hour

The most disarming thing about Type-0 is how it sets up a world very familiar to Final Fantasy players. The world of Orience is controlled by four nations: The Rubrum Dominion, the Militesi Empire, the Lorican Alliance and the Kingdom of Concordia. The names were deliberately chosen so you'd understand that whenever someone said "the kingdom", for example, they were referring to Concordia, or to Rubrum when they mentioned "the dominion". Each of these nations has a crystal, which not only protects their particular domain but is more or less the cornerstone of their technology, philosophy and culture. Concordia's crystal, for instance, also belongs to a nearby race of intelligent dragons and so Concordia's military is largely comprised of dragons and dragon riders and they're generally chill long-lived folk in touch with nature akin to Tolkien's elves (but a lot shorter for some reason). Rubrum's crystal allows its citizens to use magic and summon eidolons (the ever-present Final Fantasy nuke button), while Militesi's crystal produces a type of electricity which allows them to create and empower various technological wonders like Magitek Armor mechs and airplanes and bombs and other modern tech for civilian and military use. These crystals are all themed around the four symbols of Chinese mythology, which show up a lot in Japanese pop culture: Byakko, the White Tiger of the West (Militesi); Suzaku, the Vermillion Bird of the South (Rubrum); Seiryu, the Azure Dragon of the East (Concordia); and Genbu, the Black Tortoise of the North (Lorica).

The whole "building domains around elemental crystals" conceit is a holdover from Final Fantasy IV, while the idea of a kingdom that predominantly trains and rides dragons as its core military wing is more a nod to Final Fantasy V's Kingdom of Tycoon. An Empire that has an overpowering technological advantage over the lands it aims to conquer has been a recurring Final Fantasy trope as far as back as Final Fantasy II, though most of us are more familiar with the Gestahlian Empire of Final Fantasy VI, the Shinra Corporation (a more contemporary spin on a global superpower) of Final Fantasy VII and the Galbadians of Final Fantasy VIII. Armies that predominantly rely on technology fighting armies that predominantly rely on magic is a big Final Fantasy mainstay too, seen most keenly in Final Fantasies IX and X as well as the above. Type-0 doesn't shy away from recalling tropes from previous Final Fantasies and, as I discussed in a piece that went up last week, it almost relies on that familiarity to help ground its otherwise out-there plot twists.

Type-0's plot specifically revolves around "Class Zero"; a paramilitary group of twelve teenagers (later expanded to fourteen) that comprise one of several classes of Rubrum's capital of Akademia, specifically its same-named academic facility. Because Rubrum's military is so dependent on magic, and magic comes more naturally to the young than the old - it's explained that, like many sensory-based talents, you lose the knack for it with age - the magical students of this university also constitute a significant amount of Rubrum's military might. Rubrum is all but conquered by Militesi in the opening hours of the game, having been pushed back to the capital city by the sudden and enormous momentum of the Empire's mechanical forces, but the cadets of Akademia become instrumental in changing the tide of war just before Rubrum loses its capital city to a magical-jamming device. That's in a large part due to Class Zero, whose magic is mysteriously immune to the effects of the magical-jammer and are able to destroy it, bolstering the rest of the Rubrum military into staging a comeback. This intro raises some questions about the nature of Class Zero's powers and their patron Dr. Arecia Al-Rashia the Archsorceress, whom the entirety of Class Zero refer to as "Mother".

Despite the fact that Class Zero are the protagonists and you're introduced to three of them in the opening tutorial mission, and the rest shortly thereafter, there's some early detachment between them and the player. Secrets kept from the player for a long time involve Class Zero's relationship to their "mother", the nature of their magical abilities, their power over "phantoma" which is drawn from deceased enemies and used for spell upgrading and customization, and their place in the hierarchy of the rest of the school and the military. Class Zero are officially enrolled in Akademia at the start of the game, but they were raised and educated in an external facility governed by Dr. Al-Rashia and as a result many of the other students treat them with a mix of awe and apprehension. They're grateful that Class Zero more or less saved the entire dominion of Rubrum at the eleventh hour, but don't quite trust them due to their outsider status and the classified information behind how they're able to do the things they do. Because the game even hides this information from the player, at least initially, it has them acclimate to this mysterious squad of misfits via the new Class Zero transfers Machina and Rem, two talented but otherwise conventional students at the academy that work well as player ciphers.

One more slightly melodramatic facet about the world of Orience is that the crystals will magically erase the memories of the deceased. Ostensibly, this is so soldiers can continue fighting without the distracting negative effects or demoralization that comes from mourning those that have fallen. This becomes a significant element of Machina's plotline, as his brother dies shortly into the game's intro and he becomes determined to find out why, despite not remembering anything about him. It also speaks to the game's emotional intelligence that it has to spend so long convincing the player that remembering the dead is perhaps a good thing. I suppose that sentiment has a more profound effect on a country that frequently tries to forget its involvement with the last great war.

From Zero to Hero

The majority of the game's missions revolve around Rubrum's push to take back all its territory from Militesi, often involving Class Zero infiltrating a vital tactical location while the orthodox armies run distraction, or Class Zero assisting the armies directly with RTS-style missions (which actually feel more like dumbed down MOBAs, since you're helping automatically-controlled allied troops take locations by whittling down the enemies in their path).

While the player is doing this, the war continues on various other fronts both military and political. The Lorican Alliance is eradicated entirely by an "Ultima Bomb" that leaves an enormous crater on the world map where the Lorican territories once stood, because Japan loves overt allusions to the misguided application of grotesquely powerful weapons of mass destruction. Concordia initially joins Rubrum in helping to repel the Militesi in the same nominal, standoffish manner that the US did in the early stages of the two World Wars, offering volunteer troops and resource support but generally staying out of the way. At the game's mid-point, Concordia attempts to enact a peace treaty based on a historical pact between the four nations, which inevitably results in the assassination of their Queen and the blame placed on Rubrum and on Class Zero in particular - the Empire hoping to install a sympathetic monarch in the Queen's stead and vilify their greatest threat in the process - which then turns the war into a two-way battle with a united Concordia and Militesi on either side of a beleaguered Rubrum.

This is when Rubrum's big guns come out.

The game spends a long time teasing the wild card presence of the "l'Cie", a holdover from the Final Fantasy XIII universe. As in those games, an l'Cie is a mortal chosen by their nation's crystal to complete some divine task for its sake, taking on the immortality and incredible power that comes with being the crystal's agent and guardian. Each nation's crystal has a handful of l'Cie, and most are highly independent and are left alone by the governments of those nations - they're much more interested in completing their Focus, as these tasks are called, than getting involved with the meager political struggles of their countries. The war threatens the crystals directly, however, so most of the l'Cie are drafted in and used to counteract the l'Cie of the enemy. One such early encounter between two l'Cie manages to vaporize a fortress the player just spent a good hour or so attempting to liberate, and another encounter sees a cloudy sky completely frozen solid by Concordia's draconic l'Cie, forcing the Rubrum military to disembark their now trapped airships and fight on the solidified clouds. Whenever the player is forced to fight one of the enemy l'Cie, they invariably lose; the only way to succeed is to survive long enough until something calls the l'Cie away, or otherwise flee. (Or, if you're on new game plus and several dozen levels stronger, stand your ground and get some dang payback.)

Rubrum's ace in the hole, however, are its Eidolons. Eidolons are depicted as they usually are in Final Fantasy; deities and other mighty creatures temporarily summoned from another plane of existence by a particularly powerful mage. However, each summon requires the life force of the summoner - this means that the Eidolon Corps tends to include a lot of short-lived mages and students. With the majority of the Rubrum forces attempting to wipe out the Concordian front, the remainder placed along the Militesi border are soon overwhelmed. This leads to the strongest Rubrum l'Cie, Lady Caetuna, and a whole class of summoners sacrificing themselves to summon one of the "Verboten Eidolons", in this case Alexander. If you've played Final Fantasy IX, you probably know what kind of effect summoning a mountain-sized mecha packed with lasers and missiles might have. Alexander completely annihilates the Militesi vanguard, leaving a hundred-mile scar in the land where their forces once stood, which greatly demoralizes the remainder of the Militesi army just as Rubrum manage to deter the Concordian offensive. With both nations reeling from the power of Eidolons, Rubrum quickly conquers the two with desperate coordinated attacks on their capitals. War won.

Zero Out

This is when the plot goes way off the rails. At several points when discussing the repercussions of the war and the possibility of a Militesi total victory, the students talk about Tempus Finis - a prophesized end of the world scenario that is meant to occur when the balance of the crystals is so off-kilter that one manages to dominate the other three. The game doesn't put too much narrative emphasis on this situation in the core story progression, however, and were it not the sort of predictable video game end-point you'd probably think nothing of it actually happening. Tempus Finis does indeed occur after the war is won, and the immediate consequences are dire: the sky turns red, the seas turn black and eerie humanoid creatures called the Rursus start appearing across the world, murdering every living creature in sight. The Rursus, like Class Zero, are able to damage and draw out phantoma directly, which the game had only recently revealed to be the life essence, or souls, of living beings. Anyone struck by a Rursus weapon either suffers lasting damage to their life essence that cannot be healed, or is simply killed outright. In addition, the Rursus will constantly come back to life regardless of the damage done to them, as their phantoma are strong enough to regenerate from any injury. They quickly overwhelm the remaining Rubrum units, even eliminating the powerful Rubrum l'Cie Lord Zhuyu. It is revealed that Class Zero wasn't just conditioned from an early age to effectively fight Rubrum's battles, but to fight the Rursus should Tempus Finis ever happen by using their own phantoma-drawing methods against them.

The final chapter of the game sees almost the entire staff faculty and student base of Akademia reduced to corpses and rubble, including the vast majority of the named NPCs, and Class Zero are taken to where the leader of the Rursus, the Rursan Arbiter, is waiting for the being known as Agito to show up. Agito is another poorly-explained facet of the game's world - a mythical entity that a chosen human being will evolve into with enough dedication, which is also the final goal of every student at Akademia. To become Agito is to become divine, to have the magical power to shape reality as they see fit, and to enter an unknown realm adjacent to that of the world where the creation gods are thought to lie (or maybe some fantastic treasure, at least). The four crystals brand their l'Cie in the hopes that they become Agito, or facilitate the emergence of same, and the ominous shrine-like location of the Rursan Arbiter - Pandaemonium, another recurring final dungeon in the series - can be only be accessed by l'Cie for this reason.

If this all sounds confusing and chaotic, I think it's meant to be to some extent. It's like the equivalent of Ragnarok or the Biblical Armageddon happening today, and almost no-one having any idea about what is happening, how it could be averted or how they might even survive it. The game has some in-world lore about Tempus Finis and the rules that govern it, but the particulars are only known to a select few scholars and the rest simply know of it by reputation, where it's more a fearful religious event meant to spook them and keep them in check. This is, of course, a massive departure from the far more conventional warfare the game has contented itself with up until this point, and simply involves Class Zero travelling from the ruins of Akademia to Pandaemonium to face their destiny.

A few more tidbits before we discuss the final dungeon: Until now, Class Zero had been saved by the occasional deus ex machina of Dr. Al-Rashia, either through the unique and hideously powerful Eidolon she commands - Bahamut ZERO, making a welcome return from Final Fantasy VII - or through her own life-giving magic. Dr. Al-Rashia also gives them Life Armlets on their first sortie, which endlessly cast Re-Raise so that players don't get ganked during the tutorial, and has been helping them whenever possible albeit in an indirect manner. Machina and Rem, meanwhile, have been embroiled in an utterly ridiculous dramatic arc right out of a very special Degrassi High episode that eventually culminates with them both becoming l'Cie in secret to protect the other. Unfortunately, Machina was coerced into becoming an l'Cie of the Militesi's crystal, the White Tiger, and uses a mask to disguise this fact from the other Rubrum students. He ends up accidentally killing the new Rubrum l'Cie, Rem, and chooses to crystallize early - the ultimate fate of any l'Cie after their Focus has been completed - with her preserved eternally in his arms.

When Class Zero reaches Pandaemonium, they discover the missing instigator for the entire war - Marshall Cid Aulstyne, the ruler of the Militesi Empire - has already entered the Rursan Arbiter's court to become Agito. Cid then punishes Class Zero with a series of difficult challenges, eventually deciding to simply murder them all once he grows bored enough. They're saved at the last second by the l'Cie Machina and Rem, who have somehow figured out a way to assist Class Zero from beyond the gave in Al-Rashia's stead, and empower them enough to destroy the Rursan Arbiter, who is also Cid Aulstyne somehow, and save the world from total extinction. Drawing the Rursan Arbiter's phantoma, the only effective way to destroy him, turns out to be fatal, however. Class Zero then returns to their home room in Akademia worse for the wear and, without exception, succumb to their injuries. When Machina and Rem are magically brought back to life by a grateful Al-Rashia for their part in Class Zero's success, they find all fourteen bodies of their former classmates peacefully slumped under a Rubrum military standard. However, the effect of the averted Tempus Finis means that the dead can be remembered again, and Machina and Rem ensure that Class Zero are honored forever more as the heroes that saved the world.

A Zero-Summation Game

Things are never quite as they seem, of course, and I think Type-0 manages to pip Metal Gear Solid V in the convoluted behind-the-scenes, post-game exposition dump stakes. Dr. Al-Rashia is, of course, not a human being. Rather, she's one of several divine agents hoping to create Agito. Agito is the only means to open the passageway between the mortal world and the unknown realm, which she and others of her kind are very interested in reaching in some way for unknown reasons. Her particular method is by empowering certain humans with the power of the Rursus, and in doing so giving them a fighting chance to reach Pandaemonium and become Agito. Her opposite, a mysterious masked man known as Gala, triggers Tempus Finis and finds a worthy vessel for the Rursan Arbiter, and then through them commands the Rursus to exterminate all life in order to use that enormous influx of souls/phantoma to open the gates to the unknown realm through sheer force (there's a similar scheme concocted by the Terran administrator Garland in Final Fantasy IX too, and Gala almost resembles him).

It's also revealed that when Cid reached Gala in the center of Pandaemonium, he was instead aghast at what Gala intended to do and ended his own life in defiance to Gala's plans, which unfortunately did not stop Gala from possessing his shell for the Arbiter and enact the genocide regardless. Turns out Cid's plans to conquer the world were really intended to weaken the arbitrary rule of the crystals and ensure humanity would govern itself, due to his mistrust of inscrutable higher powers pulling the strings of destiny. Instead, his body becomes a literal puppet of the Gods in a gruesome ironic twist.

Two other hooded students, revealed to be "defect" Class Zero members, reveal to Al-Rashia that this cycle has succeeded where so many others have failed before. Al-Rashia is poised to begin the cycle anew, allowing the four nations to be restored to their "factory settings", as in every previous cycle Class Zero had chosen to become l'Cie to fight the Rursan Arbiter and lose their advantage in the process. By instead choosing to remain mortal in this particular timeline, Class Zero are slain but eliminate the Arbiter in the process. Al-Rashia decides to let this timeline continue instead, resurrecting Machina and Rem from their crystalline tomb to ensure her "children" are honored as the heroes they are before swanning off to do whatever it is immortal divinities do when they're forced to rethink some plans.

We're then left with a whole heap of questions. Whatever happened to the plan to create Agito? What's the deal with the other realm, and why does Al-Rashia and Gala want to open its doorway so strongly? Is Al-Rashia rewinding time to avert the total extinction of all life on Orience, or is it just to spite Gala and his more direct solution? If there truly has been six hundred million cycles, why did it take this long for Class Zero to reject becoming l'Cie? Is the reason why the entirety of Class Zero have names that are numbers on playing cards because Al-Rashia got tired of coming up with anything more inventive after that many cycles? What would happen if Militesi or Concordia or Lorica won instead of Rubrum and/or Class Zero were killed in combat, or would that get rewound too? Where the hell did all the faculty heads disappear off to when the Rursus showed up? Why are the Rursus so terrifying? (I think I know this one - because they're the monsters that show up at the end of the world to kill everyone. Doy.)

The thing about Type-0's structure is that you're meant to start over with higher level characters going on higher level versions of the old missions and taking on the "Expert Trials", which are optional missions that were too high level for a party on their first playthrough. This expansion of content would no doubt be accompanied by an expansion of lore to be gleaned from various new sources, which would help explain this otherwise inexplicable final act of the game and fill in a lot of important plot details after the fact. You might even be in a situation where you completely ignored all this optional story stuff and become motivated to dig it up in a subsequent playthrough to make sense of what you just saw. For that reason, I'm not sure whether to fault or praise the game for its Byzantine narrative, because it seems like it was deliberately put on the periphery for the sake of players who want something a little more hands-off and mechanical. On the other hand, this sort of clemency perhaps exonerates too much of the game's poor and overly abstract JRPG storytelling, and doesn't at all excuse the weepy melodrama of Rem's incurable disease or Machina's angsty tantrums.

As I'm sure ZombiePie would attest if he hadn't already bounced from this article due to its copious amount of spoilers, you can always depend on a Final Fantasy plot to leave you confused, irritated and intrigued in equal measure.