It's finally October, which means a new month of releases and a whole lot of Halloween fun. It's often around October that I start to consider how many new games I've played this year, and whether I've used my gaming hours to the fullest. We're still three months away from the end of the year, but that just means I've got plenty of time to think about for how I approach 2017.

Concerns like the format of this particular feature you're reading right now, for example, and how despite my best efforts still manages to be overstuffed week after week. I'm considering ways of breaking it up into multiple weekly features, one for new release thoughts, one for wiki updates, etc. That all can wait until next year though; the more pressing concern is what I intend to swap Go! Go! GOTY! with - I very much doubt I'll have enough 2016 games to make that feature work this year, unless I go all out in the Steam sales or something equally spendthrift. Actually, that's going to be a major problem for my GOTY awards as well.

One last note before I begin: I jumped back into Metal Gear Solid V briefly after picking up a few tips from catching up with Metal Gear Scanlon. My intention since I completed that game back in August has been to return to write one last blog concerning those cassette audio logs, and boy do I have some statements to make about Paz's Peace Day audio diary, Zero's taped confessions or Kazuhira making the perfect burger for an ancient Native American man filled with parasites, but the reality of my brief return visit is that I'm loath to leave any game half-complete - even though to "complete" MGSV fully would be to dedicate another fifty hours to S-ranking its missions and completing any remaining optional objectives, not to mention the huge number of side ops left to resolve. Ditto for returning to Stardew Valley some time soon to see everything the new patch adds to the game; I just know that a brief visit will turn into another seasons-long stay to unlock all the fresh content.

For now, I'm going to keep playing new games instead and try not to let any of the above get to me. A forlorn hope if I ever heard one.

New Games!

Just a handful of new games that I could find for this week, but what a handful. There's at least three games here that will spur a lot of conversation on the Bombcast and elsewhere. That is, if the imminent release of the PSVR doesn't overshadow everything else happening this month. Not that anyone's particularly psyched for more VR, mind, but it will mean a giant stream from the GBWest boys and that'll give them less time to focus on the following.

I gotta say, even with the low reputation of this spin-off series in recent years, my most anticipated release this week has to be Paper Mario Color Splash for the Wii U. The last console Paper Mario game was Super Paper Mario, which is - depending on who you ask - either a half-good game in the series or the beginning of the end of Paper Mario as we know it with the ongoing de-emphasis of the RPG aspect. Sticker Star also failed to enchant anyone, but that doesn't mean we can't hope for the best with this new entry. It's not like this series has been in the crapper for years; it's seen one OK game and one fairly bad one since the superlative Thousand-Year Door. In fact, I'm going to stop worrying about it and... recall that I still have a bunch of Mario & Luigi RPGs to play instead. I guess this one can wait either way.

Wisely dropping an awkward "people of color" segue from Color Splash to Mafia III, we have the runner-up for the game I'm most curious about this week. Mafia III has been promoting an intriguing premise of a black mobster avenging his fallen crime family in 1960s New Orleans, though I've not heard quite as much about the actual gameplay stuff and how closely it'll follow the blueprint of the previous Mafia games and other open-world crime games like Grand Theft Auto V. I mean, I'd imagine it would to an extent, but we've seen so many advances to the open-world format since even GTAV that I'm hoping the developers can create a gameplay model as distinct as its setting. Not suggesting I should be able to Fulton gang members or spend hours scouring the bayou for treasure chests, necessarily, but I'd like to see the game display some kind of edge beyond casually tossing around racial slurs for the sake of period-appropriate verisimilitude.

Lip service must be paid to Gears of War 4, also out this week. Hard to say how much the general gaming audience have been looking forward to this belated time-skip sequel; while the series still has its major fans, as the salty replies to Jeff's poor rating of the remake of the first game can attest, folk seemed to be happy with how GOW3 concluded and really didn't care for that Judgment spin-off. Personally I got so bored playing the first one that I checked out of the series then and there, so this'll be one of those major releases to fly right by me like any given Halo. All the same, I hope it does right by its fanbase.

In the miscellany section we have: Frog Climbers, that QWOP style rock-climbing multiplayer game with the frogs that Dan showed off in a recent UPF. I'm not sure where I stand with games that have such obfuscated controls that no-one can really be expected to do well. Seems like the type of game invented for drunk people who have no coordination to interfere with the mayhem. We also have Rocksmith 2014 Edition: Remastered, which has a really stupid title even after I've deduced the context behind what it's saying, and the console version of that multiplayer Warhammer: End Times: Vermintide co-operative horde shooter thing. The duders seemed to like it enough on PC, so maybe it'll find new life on consoles almost a year later. Sure took its time though. Doesn't it know there's a ratpocalypse going on?

Wiki!

Not stopping for a second, I'm happy to report that we have another eleven PC Engine wiki pages in the bag. That is exactly half of 1992's paltry twenty-two HuCard releases, which in turn is half of 1991's total, and that number will continue to decline as we head further into the 90s. If you didn't see it, incidentally, I wrote a feature to mark the completion of the 1991 HuCard library. As per usual, I discussed what I figure are the ten most interesting games released on the system that year, and another ten games that may have sold well had they seen an international release. Remember, the TurboGrafx-16 barely saw a fraction of what was available on the PC Engine, and while it's hard to say why Hudson and NEC under-served their American audience I can point to several cases where they had the games to localize and sell if they were so inclined.

The eleven pages this week, then, to briefly summarize:

• Bouken Danshaku Don: The Lost Sunheart is another shoot 'em up with a weird Japanese sensibility, and I'm getting tired of writing that same sentence for half of these PC Engine games. This one skews a little closer to the surreal humor of Cho Aniki than the cutesy chaos of something like Parodius (see below).
• Chibi Maruko-chan: Quiz de Piihyara irritated me because I vaguely recall a game that had the same premise but couldn't remember its name. The premise being a trivia quiz game with an action element - in this case, the answers to a multiple choice question on the top side of the screen correspond to the colors of some robotic enemies you destroy on the bottom. Chibi Maruko-chan's a popular kids anime that saw a great number of video game adaptations, many of which went for something distinct like this, so while I have no hope of answering those questions correctly I can at least admire its moxie.
• Mizubaku Daibouken is better known here and elsewhere as Liquid Kids, and is a game that attempts to transplant the water flow physics that helped make Taito's previous Bubble Bobble and Parasol Stars memorable successes to a more traditional side-scrolling model. It doesn't quite work as well as you'd hope.
• Ninja Ryuukenden is another game that might be familiar to US NES owners: Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden. The PC Engine version has far more in common with the NES version than the original Arcade version - you might consider this to be Taito's special "home version" they rebuilt from scratch - and while the game looks generally better on the technologically superior PC Engine there's also a few spots where the graphics look cheap or thrown together, like a rushed port. The gameplay's a little off too: there's less invulnerability after getting hit, making it easy to get trapped by some enemies and bosses. It's certainly a different experience, if you're the type of Ninja Gaiden fanatic who wants to see the game in a new light.
• NHK Taiga Drama: Taiheiki is a curious one, and not because it's a yet another strategy war sim set during a tumultuous time in Japan's history - the 14th century, in this case, rather than the usual 15th and 16th where we find the Sengoku era. Rather, this is a game commissioned to be launched alongside the titular NHK Taiga Drama: a hour-long historical drama that the Japanese TV station NHK hosts every year, each time in a different setting with a new story. It's not clear if NHK's short-lived video game development branch intended to follow this with a series of game adaptations of their annual centerpiece production, but I believe this was the only one ever made.
• Cyber Dodge does for dodgeball what the Mutant League games did for their respective sports, though in many ways it's following the equally incongruously violent dodgeball antics of the Kunio-kun spin-off games, of which Super Dodge Ball was the first and most recognizable. Taking on teams of Roman gladiators, skeletons, aliens, robots or ominous floating wizards of the like seen in the background of certain Mortal Kombat stages, the game has a steep difficulty curve but is fairly solid. Shouldn't surprise anyone to hear that Compile, the creators of the equally visceral Devil's Crush and Alien Crush pinball games, was behind it.
• Parodius Da! is the second Parodius game, though for most it's really the first. While better known for its SNES port - one of the few for that system that was mysteriously released in Europe but not North America - Parodius Da! is when the series fully embraced its lunacy when spoofing the relatively dry Gradius games, giving the player the choice between the classic Vic Viper, a moonlighting TwinBee, Pentarou the son of the recurring Konami penguin hero Penta, or an octopus simply named Octopus (Takosuke, his successor in later Parodius games, is canonically his son and appears here as a baby octopus option). The character choice wasn't just cosmetic either: Vic Viper played like classic Gradius, TwinBee closer to his own series, Pentarou used the new loadout of Gradius II and Octopus represented the Gradius spin-off Salamander (also known as Life Force, which we covered last week). For all its silliness, Parodius was still compelled to deliver Gradius fans what they wanted.
• Mahjong Haouden: Kaiser's Quest is a mahjong game that frames its tile-based gambling with a RPG overworld that has the player traversing a map and ridding it of its monstrous denizens, one mahjong game at a time. The player is given a few initial starting areas, each with a different hero, but it's really just an excuse for a whole lot of one-on-one mahjong games.
• Toilet Kids is, like Kato-chan & Ken-chan before it, a game best known (if at all) for its scatological humor rather than its quality. Unlike Booby Kids, which just had an unfortunate if understandable name, there's no hidden context or mistranslation behind the title of Toilet Kids: you are literally riding around on a giant toilet bowl shooting at piles of feces and enemies that look like tiny child wangs. It makes Parodius seem the height of sophistication by comparison. (The game's mascot character, a Buddha-like figure holding two piles of coiled poop, would also become the mascot for Hardcoregaming101's recurring "Your Weekly Kusoge" feature that covers terrible games.)
• Gokuraku! Chuuka Taisen is the fourth cartoonish shoot 'em up on this list - I tell ya, the PC Engine had a type - and an adaption of a game known elsewhere as Cloud Master. The player, as the legendary monkey king Sun Wukong, rides around on his nimbus cloud shooting down enemies standing between him and his mission to protect the monk Tripitaka. The PC Engine version introduces a few enhancements, like the ability to turn around and a whole new set of bosses. In the English Master System version of the game the hero is simply "Mike Chen", who is presumably a regular guy riding around on a regular cloud shooting regular mythological thunder gods.
• Pachiokun Juuban Shoubu is a grim reminder that there's no escaping Coconuts Japan's sentient pachinko ball mascot. Though he only received two games on the PC Engine as opposed to the twenty or so (at least it feels that way) on Nintendo platforms, it's still the same old story: something goes wrong, and Pachiokun must win the day by playing pachinko. A lot of pachinko.

Dragon Quest Heroes!

After writing this piece that went up yesterday, there's not a whole lot left I have to discuss concerning Dragon Quest Heroes: The World's Tree Woe and the Blight Below (and I'm especially happy that I won't have to type that whole thing out again any time soon). However, I only briefly touched upon the game's character diversity in that piece and how, while streamlined for the sake of convenience, each character's selection of special attacks, passive abilities and stat distribution gives them a fairly distinct role in combat. You can stick to the default hero, since they're compulsory and you begin every map as them, but it's worth keeping in mind what your companions can offer. I figure I'd complete my Dragon Quest Heroes coverage with a look at these different characters and the potential they provide:

Luceus and Aurora are the two possible protagonists, one male and the other female. They are almost identical in terms of their stats and abilities, except for their elemental focus: Luceus uses fire attacks, which do a little more damage, while Aurora relies on ice attacks, which have the benefit of occasionally freezing foes in place for a few seconds. They're built to be all-rounders, excelling in neither martial nor magical power but finding a versatile middle ground. Each has a tornado designed to toss around weaker enemies to break up large crowds, a short-range move that hits several times in a short area and a chargeable lightning spell that can hit multiple foes. They're also the only characters to earn the useful Zoom spell, which allows instantaneous travel around the battlefield. The one you choose to play as will always be with you, and it's possible to develop the other in a different way - more focused on magic power, for instance - to make them a suitable companion.

King Doric defies the usual stereotype of a useless King who stays in his castle and orders you around, immediately joining the fray instead. The guy happens to be a legendary gladiator, so he's the first powerhouse "tank" character you find for the party. His best attribute is his crowd control: not only is he a heavy-hitter, but his weapon has a long reach and is able to sweep whole lanes of enemies. His best skill however is the Vimstone, which boosts the tension gain for all characters. High tension is something you'll rely on a lot after it's introduced.

Isla is the local inventor and something of a flirt, and was responsible for the player's flying fortress base Stonecloud as well as the various turrets you can use in a number of maps (though the enemies figure out how to build their own too eventually). She's your first ranged character, using her boomerang to take out enemies which would normally be tricky to hit: flying enemies in particular, though also the speedy metal slime enemies which - as per Dragon Quest tradition - also give out the best XP rewards. One quirk is that she does far more damage in turrets than other characters, because she designed them.

As for the cameo characters: Alena's a pure DPS fighter with skills that are designed to hit multiple enemies multiple times a second. She needs a little work to become truly devastating, like a means to boost how many criticals she lands, but once she's there it's hard to slow her down. Kiryl takes a defensive support role, adding to the team's magical prowess while having a few talents that keep the rest alive along with an instant death spell that, naturally, rarely ever works except on weaker enemies. Bianca is an archer and a complete DPS monster at a distance, though she can't take many hits and is less effective in winding corridors. Nera's a pure mage, also designed for the figurative back row, and is somewhat difficult to master due to her use of time-delayed bubble explosions. Lovable Cockney chancer Yangus goes full tank in this game, able to distract enemies and shield himself, and has a few talents for dodging enemy blows and quite a bit of strength behind his two-handed axe. Jessica's another mage, though also takes up the important role of healer - her hustle dance is the only reliable means of healing the party outside of one-use healstones, making her practically essential. Terry's a fast and powerful melee fighter, though is balanced by being somewhat weaker defensively than Doric, Alena or Yangus. He has a particularly broken combination attack that I tried to avoid using. The sultry dancer Maya is a hybrid mage/fighter like the heroes, except she only comes into her own once her combo meter's high as it will unlock the ability to fly around the battlefield and improves her other attacks - she's a character designed for advanced players who can reliably avoid getting hit and losing their combo chains. Finally, there's a secret character you get late in the game and starts vastly underleveled, but he catches up quick and has some of the most impressive melee range and space-clearing skills out of anyone.

Dragon Quest Heroes encourages you to try out the different characters frequently, though you can choose to infer from that statement that I'm talking about how tedious the game can be playing the same character over and over as much as I'm complimenting the way the game ensures that every one of its characters presents a feasible alternative. The game's also not strategic enough that you should strongly consider certain heroes for specific maps - there's no way of knowing what you'll be dealing with without playing the map first, for one - so it really comes down to preference. Given the amount of cameos and callbacks, it is definitely a game intended to appeal to fans of the series first and foremost. I personally rolled with Aurora, Alena, Jessica and Bianca, but it seems like any team would probably suffice. Well, until you get to the scary post-game superbosses and every tactical advantage matters.

Batman: Arkham Knight!

I've played a few hours of Rocksteady's "final" Batman game, Batman: Arkham Knight, and like many others I'm mostly torn between liking and disliking the various additions and tweaks it introduces, most of which concern the Batmobile and its larger role in the game. On the one hand, I love how entrenched this series is in both Batman's decades of comic book lore and Batman's noir atmosphere in a city perpetually kept in the dark. On the other, I think it makes too much of an effort to cover every facet of The Bat simultaneously, creating a dizzying number of different systems and gadgets and combo moves to keep track of. This is exacerbated by the usual feature creep issue common to sequels, as dedicated they are to adding enough new ideas and mechanics to justify their own existence. I also haven't played Batman: Arkham Origin, and while I recognize that it was one Arkham game that Rocksteady wasn't involved in and could safely be left behind, there's always that paranoia that there may have been some things established in that game - both mechanics and plot alike - that this one assumes the player is already familiar with. That thought occurred to me when I noticed how light the game is on the tutorializing; the only ones I've seen so far were for the new features, like the various modes of the Batmobile, the multi-person takedowns and the tweaks to the game's stealth "predator" mode, regular group combat and grapple-assisted traversal.

I don't think I've seen enough of the game to have anything definitive about the overall experience quite yet, but there's a few parts I've seen that were a little troubling. Specifically, how the Riddler challenges now seem to involve wacky race courses, how unintuitive the gliding and some of the fancier upgrades and their equally fancy button combinations can be, and how frequently the game tells me where to go next, what I ought to be doing next, what tools I need to use, etc. You could counter that last complaint by suggesting the game wants to narrow down your options due to how mechanically dense it is, or how modern games have considerably more player direction in general, or that I'm in the early hours where the game still has lessons to teach. Either way, my reservations about the game aren't particularly strong and I'm happy to go with the flow for the time being until I see enough of the many things it has to offer to crystallize or contradict my early impressions.

And that last part is what has me excited to be playing an Arkham game again. Like Arkham City, the game appears to be packed with places to explore, collectibles to find, classic Batman villains to encounter, riddles to solve (I know I'm in the minority, but I still love 'em) and some moderately fun combat, stealth and traversal to tie it all together. I even don't mind the Batmobile, and how tank battles so far boil down to using the strafe to be maneuverable and accurate, though I'm dreading future Riddler races after that first one. I also really need to get to grips (so to speak) with this whole business of hooking around the city, using the grapple to project myself upwards, diving to build up speed and pulling up to increase the distance I can glide before I find another grapple point to repeat the process. I don't quite recall if it was this fiddly in Arkham City, but then I remember a certain checkpoint ring race with the grapple hook and I suspect it's always been a mechanic I've struggled with. Eh, just gotta get gud, as the vernacular goes.

Either way, it's nice to be in Arkham again. I just wish I didn't already know the identity of the Arkham Knight; he's a curious character so far, though his armor makes him looks like a poorly-conceived hologram Batman figure from the 1980s. He's no member of the Visionaries, that's for sure.

Intro

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that Musou games are terrible and repetitive and time sinks and involve a lot of running between locations to protect things from thousands of nameless goons. After playing Dragon Quest Heroes for the PS4 I think I concur with all of those statements, except for the first. I'm not sure what it was about that game that finally won me over to the side of darkness, but I have some ideas.

Dragon Quest Heroes, or to give it its full loquacious title Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below, is Omega Force's attempt to marry their Musou model to that of Yuji Horii's long-running Dragon Quest series. Dragon Quest is doubly served by its comparatively simple model here; the series's focus on no-frills turn-based combat and dopey personality has made it a perennial favorite in its native Japan and to a lesser extent abroad, where talented localizers fill them with so many atrocious puns that even I have to dash my non-existent hat to the ground and slink off in defeat, and such a model fits almost seamlessly within the Musou frame. If anything, the Musou's series emphasis on cutting through hundreds of minor mobs is preferable to what would normally be a lot more work to clear out as many weak random encounters; rather than click "attack" on a throng of slimes, you can just send a whirling vortex their way and watch them all goo flying.

The game's cycle is one that regularly balances its "maps" - action stages where one or more goals need to be met - with periods of recuperation in a hub area filled with all the amenities you might need: stores for every type of item; a desk to accept and report completed side-quests; another desk to get rewards for milestones like monster kill totals and achievements; an alchemy pot for crafting accessories; a place to exchange hard-earned mini-medals for alchemy ingredients, recipes and unique equipment; a church for saving the game and filling up healstones, one-use party curatives for when you're in trouble; and a tavern that facilitates the changing of party members. The game's emphasis on convenience doesn't end there either, as the player is allowed to retain all gold and XP earned after losing a map or getting a total party wipe, with the option to immediately start over or head back to base for more preparation. The game also eventually unlocks a means of teleporting around the playing field, provided the player has "unlocked" the waypoint destinations, and an ability called high tension - a Dragon Quest mainstay that operates similarly to limit breaks, and specifically the Trance system of Final Fantasy IX - where you turn bright pink, are entirely invincible, can cast spells without using MP and can use a powerful Coup de Grace skill that usually kills everything in sight. The game isn't exactly easy however, in a large part due to how easy it is to get swarmed - even weak monsters can be a pain with status effects and the like - and how often you're required to guard a fragile target from harm. The flow of any given map tends to follow the creation of "nightmaws": ominous portals from which enemies ceaselessly pour out until a nearby "mawkeeper" enemy is slain. This forces the player to balance offense and defense, as they cannot hope to weather a huge influx of enemies bearing down on their location without thinning their numbers at their source(s), but nor can they afford to leave the target alone for too long. The game counters this again with a system that allows the player to recruit monsters, some of which appear for a single special attack though most will stick around and guard the area near where they were summoned.

Why Dragon Quest Heroes Works

I think the true strength of DQH is how both franchises complement each other, rather than sit awkwardly side by side. The Musou format loses a bit having to conform to a typically Dragon Quest narrative - every map is sequential, barring a handful of bonus areas, side-quests and some post-game challenges, and the gameplay is frequently interrupted with cutscenes and exposition as new characters appear and story-critical lore is explicated. You're railroaded from one location to the next, as per Dragon Quest's usual linearity, and map goals rarely stray from the "defend a location from endless spawns" template. Sometimes your protected target moves around, sometimes there's several targets, and occasionally - mercifully - you simply have to sweep the map of enemies and there's no guarding to be done whatsoever. There are no enemy generals to fight, only larger monsters who present a bigger threat, and the game instead has the fairly un-Musou convention of event-style boss fights at the end of each of its major areas.

The boss fights are where the game shines, I feel, and not just because very few ask you to guard something: each boss is built in such a way to offer a different type of challenge, the variation of which allows for some of the game's ingenuity to emerge. A fight against a Gigantes - the enormous cycloptic horror you can see on the box art - requires the use of turrets to reach its central eye, which doubles as its only effective weakpoint. A tag team battle against a slow-moving Troll and a faster Cosmic Chimaera is complicated by the fact that the weaker Chimaera will spend half its time flying around and shielding itself though will, on occasion, fly over and heal the Troll. Even the first boss fight of the game, against a standard dragon, requires that the player focus their attacks on its head even though that's where all the teeth and fire are at, presenting a defensive quandary where you're at the most risk in a position where you're doing the most damage. Even Souls games struggle to create boss encounters with that degree of calculation.

But even when you're knee-deep in the routine of cutting through swathes of incoming enemies, the game has a striking moment-to-moment excitement to it. I feel the effect is less pronounced in regular Dynasty Warriors because of how absurd it is that a guy dressed flamboyantly in blue feathers is tossing around regular soldiers like they were Autumn leaves, but the disparity between the player character's martial and magical ability and the many weak fodder monsters in their path is a better fit in a traditional JRPG universe like Dragon Quest. Near every character has at least one ability that does a moderate amount of damage to a wide area of effect, designed to clear out the riff-raff to create more space to take on the more formidable foes. The sheer pace of the game is refreshing enough, but exponentially so when you compare it to standard Dragon Quest, and even if you grow tired of sending out freezing tornadoes or bolts of lightning, you can switch to another character and find a whole new suite of options. Each character has four special attacks as well as various combos of normal and heavy attacks, and it's through experimentation that you discover who works best in which roles. For instance, the heavy-hitter King Doric is an unexpectedly good support character because of his "Vimstone" talent that increases the speed at which tension builds for the whole party, and Yangus makes the perfect tank due to two abilities that attracts enemies and makes himself temporarily invincible, respectively. The effort to make every character a feasible contender is even reflected in clever little touches such as how Isla, the stylish inventor that built the various turrets you can use on certain maps, will do considerably more damage with those turrets as a result of her expertise.

Ultimately, however, what Dragon Quest Heroes impressed on me is just how flexible a framework "Musou" actually is. I recall watching the recent Quick Look on the Attack on Titan Musou game, and how it was both simultaneously unmistakable as a Musou game - the slow-mo motion blur effects for kills appears to be a recurring stylistic feature for Omega Force - but also a far different beast than the many other Musou games I'd seen, to the extent that Jeff was even enjoying (kinda) its bizarre giant naked dude visuals and aerial balletics. Musou can be adapted to fit many different licenses if the developers care enough to figure out the distinguishing characteristics of those franchises and how to capitalize on that by modifying the engine and format they have already. I don't see how they could ever fix the universal issue of being repetitive slogs, but at least the variation between games, and in how they handle characters, how combat tends to unfurl, etc. counts for something. Perhaps to Musou purists games like Attack on Titan or Dragon Quest Heroes seem too gimmicky and too superficially beholden to the license holders to allow for any significant story risks, but I can see the range that is possible in what I previously perceived as a rigid and flawed framework that wouldn't ever be "right for me". I look forward to seeing what they do with the upcoming Berserk; while Guts can cut a bloody swathe through legions of faceless soldiers like the best of them, it's how the game handles fights with the demonic Apostles that I'm the most curious about.

Further Reading

Despite the misleading title I'm not actually a stranger to Musou games, or even Dragon Quest spin-offs. The first Musou game I genuinely enjoyed - to the extent that I played it for over 50 hours and beat the "story", or what little it had - was Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War for the Xbox 360. That game puts the player in the greaves of a 14th century fledgling mercenary who somehow manages to participate in every major event of the titular century-long territory fracas between England and France, and usually on the side of whoever won that particular battle due to the flexible loyalty of a merc. Thus, you can join the English longbowmen for a decisive victory at Agincourt while following it up by charging into battle with a banner of French chevaliers alongside Joan of Arc and her confidantes La Hire and Gilles de Rais.

I'd tried Dynasty Warriors before and since then, of course, but the completionist side of me always balked at how the game would task you with completing the same scenarios with a hundred different characters. The way Bladestorm was set up meant you only had to worry about the development of one character - your protagonist - and compromised for its lack of character diversity by introducing various troop types you could master. This helped keep the game focused and palatable, as I could drop out and join different units to keep battles interesting and adjust my position on the battlefield as the prevailing strategy would mandate. About to reach a base? Join some shock troops like spearmen to rout the sword and shield infantry guarding it. In the middle of a field filled with soldiers? Grab some cavalry and charge through the enemy ranks like tissue paper. Likewise with regards to this "conservation of character development" - though Dragon Quest Heroes has multiple characters to choose from, each with their own array of abilities and individual skill trees, they fall into a natural JRPG party format. You take three characters into a sortie with your protagonist, who is compulsory, and can switch between them whenever you wish. All see an equal share of the experience, though the ones left behind only receive a fraction.

As for spin-offs, I may have actually played more Dragon Quest gaiden games then I have core ones. Of the core Dragon Quest series, in which there are presently ten games, I've only seen the end of the fourth and the eighth. I played the ninth for a long while, but the sheer size of the game caused me to eventually drop out; I've never believed the portable format to be ideal for long RPGs. Elsewhere, I've played and completed the wonderful Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, slashed my way through the curious Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, got a few dozen hours into the first Dragon Quest Monsters (whose protagonist Terry is also in Dragon Quest Heroes, though I understand that the character originally came from Dragon Quest VI) and dabbled with the Super Famicom game Torneko no Daibouken, which starred my favorite character from Dragon Quest IV and was the inaugural Mystery Dungeon game (another "time sink" series I'm only vaguely familiar with). Due to Dragon Quest Heroes being heavy on the cameo side - the player can choose to use the four new characters, or switch it up with some old favorites - I was happy to see at least six legacy characters appear in Dragon Quest Heroes that I was already acquainted with, and spending time with the others gave me more reason to seek out the games they pertain to as well. I especially want to throw down with Bianca in Dragon Quest V now, given how powerful she is in this game (and her adorable West Country accent). I'm also very curious about the upcoming Dragon Quest Builders as I'm sure are many of you, and I'm secretly hoping Square-Enix pulls their finger out and localizes Theatrhythm Dragon Quest soon as I loved the advances made with Curtain Call and Koichi Sugiyama's tracks have always been on the right side of earwormy (it figures the guy was best known for his commercial jingles before creating Dragon Quest's famous theme). Oh, yeah, and I guess there's a second Dragon Quest Heroes floating around too. It's been a busy year for all the slimes and platypunks out there.

So while I have some experience individually in the two worlds that have collided to produce Dragon Quest Heroes, I'm not particularly devoted to either. In general I appreciate Dragon Quest more than I actually like it, and I've regularly been perplexed by Musou games and the approbations they seem to garner. I think it was the combination of a low price, some mild affection for the license and our own @unastrike's recommendation that finally pushed me over the line. In the end, I'm glad I took a chance on the game. Now I'm eyeing Hyrule Warriors on Amazon and wondering how my life went astray...

I've been lost in a Super Famicom fugue these past few months, but I've finally found my way back to the PC Engine to continue the work I began at the start of the year (and earlier, if I'm being technical). Feels kinda redundant to begin each of these Wiki Project rundowns with the same few paragraphs of exposition, so here's a few refreshers to get you up to speed on what the PC Engine is and the type of games we've seen on this system before now: Turbo Time (HuCard), Legend of the PC Engine '89 & Legend of the PC Engine '90.

1991 was an interesting year for the PC Engine overall, though hardly a positive one. The system was battered by both the NES and the Genesis in its lifespan, despite some moderate success in its home nation and its innovative CD-based format which would eventually become the de facto standard for video game consoles for the following generation (well, besides portable systems and the stubborn N64). 1991 saw one more competitor take a large slice of the home console market: the Super Famicom, our old friend, which debuted in Japan right at the end of 1990. The PC Engine's HuCard output,, which was already getting marginalized by its CD successor, saw only forty-four releases total in that year. Certainly makes it easier for a wiki project like this, at least.

Just to recap the specifics here, if not the whole spiel about Hudson and NEC's console: this Wiki Project only covers games released exclusively in Japan on the HuCard cartridge format. The reason being is that previous Wiki Projects have already fully investigated the North American TurboGrafx-16's entire HuCard library (see above), and CD-format games require a lot more finesse to properly extract screenshots and the like. I'll get around to it eventually.

What follows are a list of ten games I consider to be the most "interesting" released during this period, as well as another list of ten well-regarded and/or better known games, many have been released on other systems in North America and PAL territories, that could well have shifted some stock had they seen an international release. I'm sure there's more than enough valid reasons why those releases never came to be, but all the same the TurboGrafx-16 sorely could've used more games.

Top Ten "Interesting" Games

	Aldynes: Quick recap on the SuperGrafx, since it's important here: the SuperGrafx is to the PC Engine/TurboGrafx what the PS4 Pro is to the PS4 - a slightly more powerful system built to accommodate and potentially enhance the games you already have, as well as a handful of games that would only really work on the improved hardware. The Pro (and XB1 Scorpio, come to think of it) doesn't quite fit the latter, but I think we all suspect that Pro/Scorpio-only games might come if the install base is big enough. That was the SuperGrafx's issue: it started producing games for the system before they could convince anyone to shell out for a slightly better PC Engine, even though they'd already shelled out for the CD peripheral. Aldynes was one of three games unique to the platform - there were seven total, but four were Arcade conversions - and designed to be a shoot 'em up that would show off the SuperGrafx's enhanced parallax scrolling, which was very close to what the Genesis, SNES and Arcade could pull off in 1991. It ended up being a game no-one bought for a system no-one bought, despite its caliber. (2/22/1991.)
	Zero-4 Champ: The Zero-4 series, which began with this entry, marked two big divergences from the racing game norm. The first was how it focused entirely on 400m drag races, which took away a lot of what normally makes a racing game click - how you handle turns, the diversity of the course geography - and instead doubled down on player reflexes when gear shifting (there's no auto transmission) and vehicle customization. The second divergence was how it introduced a more elaborate storyline than most games of its genre, presenting a rags-to-riches story about a young gearhead trying to win fame and wealth through illegal street racing, with various seedy characters and dramatic turns along the way. Though one could argue how much influence it actually has, it could be seen as an early pioneer for what became a prevalence of driving games that tie together its set-pieces with a story about making it big in some kind of illegal street racing scene. (3/8/1991.)
	Obocchama-kun: I feel that, when perusing a Japanese video game console's library for games that fit a qualifier as ambiguous as "interesting", there's a certain flavor that collectors and peripheral fans of Japanese games tend to seek out. I would define it as a very bizarre and intrinsically Japanese personality. Obocchama-kun, a middling platformer based on an obscure gag manga and anime about an obnoxious and oblivious rich kid - think Richie Rich, but without any semblance of altruism - does at least bring the Japanese crazy, referencing a dozen sight gags from its manga and its anime adaptation. This actually translates to some interesting ideas too, as various button combinations can produce a multitude of results, some of which are of more use than others. A goof where Obocchama-kun transforms into a giant peach a la Momotaro is also an enhanced jump, operating in a way similar to the crouch-to-charge super jumps of Super Mario Bros. 2. Most licensed games feel like an excuse to shoehorn a popular character and their foibles into a generic platformer, but at least this one tries. It's not great, but it tries. (3/15/1991.)
	Moto Roader II: I only bring up this top-down racer because it and its predecessor did what Micro Machines would find great success doing before the toyline racer ever came out. Moto Roader II adds a new curious wrinkle with its inclusion of different vehicle types - a hoverbike that could clear over obstacles and other racers and a tank that would plow through them, but both were harder to turn than the regular car. There weren't a whole lot of racing games to go full sci-fi back then. Still aren't, really. (3/29/1991.)
	Hana Taaka Daka!?: I think people have a certain idea about what the TurboGrafx-16 in particular was all about, and to a lesser extent its far busier PC Engine equivalent. It's a mixture of cute-looking side-scrolling platformers like Bonk and fast-paced shoot 'em ups like Blazing Lazers and the Star Soldier games. Naturally, it follows that the system has its fair share of cutesy shoot 'em ups too, like those pioneered by the likes of Konami's TwinBee or Sega's Fantasy Zone. Hanata-Kadaka is one of these; a goofy horizontal shoot 'em up featuring a long-nosed tengu (like the boss of Dead or Alive 2) and a bunch of cartoonish youkai enemies to blast through. I'd liken it to a version of Pocky & Rocky that was more of a standard horizontal shoot 'em up. Writing this as I am just days away from the launch of Yo-Kai Watch 2 in North America, I'd say the repurposing of Japan's mythological monsters in a cute and wholesome way for the sake of kid-friendly video games is a time-honored tradition that continues to this day. (8/9/1991.)
	Dragon EGG!: Another cute platformer, Dragon Egg stood out for its combination of Wonder Boy style platforming with a very mild RPG element, and the conservation of power-ups that is often key to the shoot 'em up genre. The player's dragon companion continues to grow as the player moves around each stage, collecting little growth power-ups to feed it. At later levels of development, this dragon greatly changes how the player approaches the game, giving them higher jumps and a greater amount of firepower to use against their foes. However, it all goes away the instant the player loses a life, so while the game gets easier with a stronger dragon, it's also conversely very difficult because of that harsh penalty for death. I'd liken it to Volgarr the Viking - that game's nominally easier when your bearded hero has an invincible shield and a flaming blade, but it's all too easy to lose either if you get careless. (9/27/1991.)
	Monster Pro Wrestling: While certainly not a good game, Monster Pro Wrestling is at least entertaining and very distinct from anything else going on at the time. Adopting a sort of luck-based combat system that is determined by dice rolls and the player's stats - not too dissimilar from old school RPGs - the player's mutant wrestler and his opponent are given a few seconds to spam the attack button to reconfigure the balance of power in their favor before a canned animation plays out based on a secondary roll that determines what type of move the wrestler will perform. The game is fairly hands off but for this button-mashing charge, and the player's only major contribution is distributing the new stat bonuses after each bout. It's a ridiculous and limited game, but a distinctive one. (11/22/1991.)
	Coryoon: Coryoon is another example of a cutesy shoot 'em up, one of a large number for the system. It's also one of several games in this and the following list that has you play as a dragon, or at least with a dragon accompaniment. The game begins with a weird premise: an evil wizard demon shows up and transforms the hero's princess friend into... a smaller, chibi princess. This sort of disrespect towards royalty won't stand, and Coryoon flies into action. The game adopts what was becoming a frequent power-up system where subsequent power-ups of the same color would lead to stronger variations, while collecting a separate color put you back at square one. You'd also lose any power-ups you had if you got hit, serving as a lifeline in a manner similar to Sonic's rings. Last was Coryoon's powerful charge attack, which only requires that the player stops shooting for a few seconds. If nothing else, the game had some ideas to go with its colorful presentation. (11/29/1991.)
	Bubblegum Crash: Along with its predecessor series Bubblegum Crisis, Bubblegum Crash was one of the more popular animes of the late-80s and early 90s, to the extent that it was part of the first batch of OVAs - original video animations, which bridge the gap between serial TV and movies in both application and runtime - to see localizations for the West. The anime, and the game, concern a near-future Tokyo devastated by an earthquake some years prior that split it into two entities, corporations with too much power who create biomechanical humanoids by the hundreds which all too frequently fall into the wrong hands, and a team of highly skilled exosuited female mercenaries who step in whenever the beleaguered police are unable to help. Even so, the license didn't get much play in the video game world. The only two examples I'm aware of include a PC-88 game called Crime Wave and this game, which is a story-driven graphic adventure that alternates its protagonist between the four main heroines of the series. I couldn't get too far into it given its large amount of Japanese text, but there are translation guides out there. (12/6/1991.)
	Genji Tsuushin Agedama: Another anime license, one that liberally borrows and parodies a lot of existing tokusatsu and sentai shows, Genji Agedama is an animated series sees the eponymous youth transform into an armored hero whenever the need arises. The game is fairly distinct for combining an endless runner with a shoot 'em up - in a sense, the game auto-scrolls like a shoot 'em up would, and the player is very reliant on a series of power-ups to ensure they can win the battles of attrition against the many foes they face. However, the game still has the hero on-foot, so there are occasions when the player needs to complete some platforming sequences to avoid damage. Most of Agedama's power-ups add extra levels to his charge up attack, each more powerful than the last, so players are often best served building up as full a gauge as they can manage and clear the screen with the resulting blast. (12/13/1991.)

The "Why Was This Not a Thing" Round-Up

	S.C.I.: Special Criminal Investigation: As in, Chase HQ 2. It doesn't add much to the original game's blueprint of driving into a perp's car a lot until it bursts on fire, though it does now also let your partner shoot at them from the sunroof. Either way, Taito could've shifted a number of copies of this in North America, where cops shooting at bad guys along busy highways is a far more common sight. (I mean in movies and stuff. Jeez.) (1/25/1991.)
	Puzzle Boy: While not the hottest seller in a very busy marketplace for puzzle games, Kwirk for the Game Boy at least did well enough to be a recognizable name amidst the Tetrises and Dr Marios and I think a full-color console adaptation would've done as well as the NES Tetris/Dr Mario adaptations. If nothing else, having the larger screen would've been more conducive when clearing the bigger rooms. If you've not encountered Kwirk before, it's a puzzle game where you have to push pieces around to create a path to the exit, combining the likes of Sokoban/Boxxle with a maze game. (2/22/1991.)
	TITAN: TITAN's one of a handful of European computer games - in this case originally developed by France's Titus Interactive for various home computers popular on the continent - that saw a Japanese console adaptation that never left Japan. Given the TurboGrafx-16 never actually saw a European release, barring a few limited runs in very specific regions, it's perhaps fair enough that their games weren't deemed tenable to localize in the States. Even so, there's not a whole lot of challenging nuance to this top-down variant of Breakout to stump language barriers, and weirder stuff managed to cross over just fine. (3/15/1991.)
	1943 Kai: Capcom's WW2 vertical shoot 'em up 1942 and its sequels were popular enough on other systems, and the PC Engine's 1943 Kai - which reimagines the original 1943 with more lasers and other anachronisms - wasn't an exception, though critics tended to rate it lower than its forebears. For the longest time, this particular variation on 1943 remained Japan-only - it wasn't until the various Arcade-perfect Capcom compilations in the PS2 era that North America and Europe would get to try it out. (3/22/1991.)
	Columns: We've spoken before in previous "Why Wasn't This a Thing?" round-ups that certain Sega titles like the antiquity-themed match-3 puzzle game Columns were jealously guarded by Sega in territories other than Japan, so while Columns saw both a PC Engine and a Super Famicom port in its native land us folk overseas had to settle for the Genesis version. It might also have something to do with its status as a Genesis pack-in game for some regions, which increased its value as an exclusive. (3/29/1991.)
	Populous: Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog's own original God-sim was another European home computer game to receive a PC Engine port. The game uses a specific type of tech to expand the original system's resolution to better fit the entirety of the game's isometric UI, so maybe that has something to do with its lack of a localization. HuCards didn't really have space to include fancy enhancement chips the way that NES and SNES carts did, though, so I'm not entirely sure how this was done. (4/5/1991.)
	Hatris: Hatris was a moderate success on the Nintendo Entertainment System, where it garnered both ironic and genuine appreciation for its unusual premise of building stacks of hats on unsuspecting haberdashery customers. The PC Engine mixed things up by introducing new heads every round, though I haven't play the NES version enough to remark on all the differences with any authority. Either way, it's the sort of silly puzzle game that can add some personality to a console, and being designed by Tetris's creator Alexey Pajitnov would've helped its sales pitch anywhere. (5/24/1991.)
	Skweek: Skweek is the European version of Q*Bert, building an action game around painting every tile on the level a specific color, and yet another example of a European home computer game that was recreated by a Japanese team for a region-exclusive audience. There is one extra wrinkle in this case, however, in that this exact version was later adapted for the Sega Game Gear as well, and that version did see an international release under the name of Slider. Little reason why its console sibling couldn't also make the journey. (8/2/1991.)
	Gradius: Probably goes without saying why Gradius, Konami's best-known shoot 'em up, should've seen releases in more territories when it came out on the PC Engine. For one, it was one of the better Arcade conversions of the game out there, which is probably why it was chosen to be part of the Wii's Virtual Console over its lacking NES port. I mean, it's Gradius. Why didn't Konami think they could sell a better-looking home version of Gradius overseas? It's not like it ever saw a Genesis or SNES version (though the SNES did get Gradius III around this time). (11/15/1991.)
	Salamander: Likewise, Salamander - or Life Force, as it was known in the US - is a Gradius semi-sequel, semi-spin-off that did well enough on the NES. This version isn't quite as gooey as its visceral NES port, having been based on the original Japanese Arcade version rather than the modified version that leaned hard on the organic aesthetic that the NES saw (and Japan would later receive in a weird bit of recursion), but that just adds to the game's distinctiveness in the US game market. "You've played the NES spin, now try an Arcade-close version of the Japanese original on our system!". All right, fine, I guess as marketing taglines go it could use some polish. (12/6/1991.)

Anyway, that's going to do it for this update. I'm going to combine the next three years - 1992, 1993 and 1994 - for the next Wiki Project round-up because even with all three years joined together it's still a very small amount of releases. The PC Engine was on the way out at this time, CD and HuCard platforms alike, and besides the occasional late aberration like Motteke Tamago in 1997 or Dead of the Brain 1&2 in 1999, its release schedule more or less dries up in the mid-90s. If it couldn't compete with the SNES and Genesis, it sure as heck didn't stand much of a chance against the PlayStation.

Still, though, it's often the case that the greatest games for any given console are those released late in its life cycle, where multi-year projects finally conclude and developers have become savvy enough to wring every last drop of processing and graphical power from the console, so let's hope we see a few worthy swansongs next time. See you then.

It's fair to say that, so far at least, this year has been heavy in open-world games for me. Not just small ones either, but the type that were built to last months. I'd liken a few of these to the Bethesda model of creating far more content than the core story thread requires and letting players "find their own fun", as it were, in a world full of possibilities. We've also learned this year that such lofty pretensions can come crumbling down if that inessential optional content fails to entice - we see it in GBEast's playthrough of Sega's Shenmue, which pioneered a lot of both positive and negative aspects to what was then a burgeoning format (I spoke more about it with this article), and in the response to Hello Game's No Man's Sky which, for all its braggadocio about having quintillions of planets, basically had you repeating the same handful of objectives over and over.

So far this year I've played through the following open-world games: Fallout 4, Citizens of Earth, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, Bloodborne, Oceanhorn, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, InFamous Second Son, The Talos Principle, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, Tales of Xillia, Stardew Valley, Metal Gear Solid V, Divinity: Original Sin and Gravity Rush: Remastered. Though they have significant gameplay differences, there's no getting around the fact that they all drop you in gigantic open worlds and let you poke around its content with a central line of plot missions that only occasionally interferes with your aimless peregrinations.

What's curious about this format's current prevalence is the amount of extra effort it must take developers to create a game of that type. It's a two-part process that adds a significant boost to their workload: the creation of the open-world in question, which requires studying architecture, historical settings and urban geography if the game's based in a city or cities, with some additional creative effort for those worlds that exist in a fantasy universe where the rules can be tweaked in various directions. Then there's filling that world with enough additional content to make it worth wandering off the beaten path and taking advantage of the format, not to mention justifying the amount of effort that went into creating all this geography in the first place. And yet, despite all this extra effort, this format has become the de facto means of presenting a video game in this generation.

I'm not necessarily saying we need to go back to creating games with a very rigid storytelling structure that railroads you from one set-piece to the next. We all learned our lesson from Final Fantasy XIII. However, I'm sure a happy medium can be found in there somewhere. I've yet to play the new Doom reboot (it's on the list, I swear), but its return to smaller enclosed levels that still offer enough nooks and crannies for secrets and the like isn't a particularly outdated notion for other games, including those not explicitly invoking the past, to revisit.

I'm not really sure what I'm saying here. The obvious and non-confrontational way to fix this little problem of playing too many gigantic games this year and next is to... well... not do that. At the same time, it seems like every big game this year that has some cool ideas or a neat premise or a lot of acclaim or has otherwise appeared to be way up my street has been an enormous open-world game too, and I can't really do anything about the part of my brain that wants to complete as much of a game as possible before I'm able to leave it behind satisifed. It's the "can't just sing part of Come Sail Away by Styx" syndrome. Maybe it's time to make a more concerted effort to explore the Indie scene for a while, because right now the next three retail games I intend to play have a collected average run time of about 150 hours, according to HowLongToBeat.com. (Though, granted, most of that is Xenoblade Chronicles X.)

Mento problems! Am I right? Let's move onto the usual Summaries:

New Games!

It's not a particularly exciting week for consoles in general, but the 3DS is having quite an eventful few days. For Nintendo's soon-to-be-defunct double-screened wonder, we have Million/Arc System Works/Natsume's Kunio-kun reboot River City: Tokyo Rumble coming to North America. Released to coincide with the series' 30th anniversary, which started with 1986's Renegade, River City: Tokyo Rumble is an adaptation of River City Ransom with a whole lot more goofy in-jokes and extra modes to celebrate the many years of Kunio-kun hitting people in the face and making them say BARF, occasionally using dodgeballs instead of his fists. We only saw a barest handful of Kunio-kun localizations in the West, so I imagine a lot of those references will fly over our heads like a thrown garbage can, but it should still make for an interesting throwback for RCR fans.

The 3DS also sees the English localization of Level-5's Yo-Kai Watch 2, coming in both Bony Souls and Fleshy Spirits flavors. The series expertly bridges the gap between the cartoonish and pun-friendly Dragon Quest and the monster collecting/raising fun of Pokémon, which may well be the two biggest franchises in Japan that don't involve carving out dinosaur butts to make leather armor, and the first game did reasonably well over here too. As an avowed wordplay pundit, I'm also curious to see what new examples of terrible portmanteaus the localization team have come up with for this sequel's many new spooky additions.

Our third big 3DS release is another sequel: Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 from Inti Creates, the developers behind many of the final Mega Man games like the Zero series, ZX duo, and the reboots 9 and 10 (and IGA's Bloodstained, coming soon). I haven't been following this series too closely, but its marketing at the time made it feel like the warm-up act for Mighty Number 9, and I think history has proven that the Gunvolt games were ultimately the better Mega Man successors. Both this sequel and its predecessor will be bundled together and sold as the Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack, which seems like the best option for those like myself who have yet to try either of them. Well, as long it turns out all right, at least. I trust that Yacht Club Games - the Shovel Knight developers who are publishing the compilation in North America - know 2D platforming quality when they see it.

Speaking of quality platforming, the 3DS will also see Sonic Boom: Fire & Ice this week. Fire and ice is, of course, a prime example of two things that don't combine particularly well, sort of like Sonic the Hedgehog and 3D. The first Sonic Boom game's well-earned reputation for being a completely broken mess should mean that Fire & Ice has nowhere to go but up, but for every bouncy spring in Sonic's world there's a wall of spikes to fly directly into at mach speed. I don't think anyone's hopes are high, so it'll be curious to see if Fire & Ice can somehow break the Sonic cycle and produce a decent... yeah, I'm not really convinced either. Maybe its focus on younger audiences will mean that the kids will learn some valuable life lessons, at least. Well, besides "caveat emptor".

Rounding off the new games this week, beyond the ports I'll talk about in a moment, we have the annual soccer game FIFA '17 coming to everything, including last-gen systems. Its primary competition, Pro Evo Soccer 2017, did EA a solid by completely bungling its PC launch for the second year in a row (thanks Konami) so I imagine this'll be the video game soccer fan's pick this year. I'm more concerned that the very busy freelance documentarian Danny O' Dwyer won't find the time to teach the apathetic GBWest boys the right way to kick a ball around again.

Port news, to round us out: The erstwhile PC exclusive XCOM 2 is coming to current-gen consoles, which might be where I finally jump in. Ditto for Darkest Dungeon. SteamWorld Heist is also hitting Wii U this week, almost a year after its initial 3DS launch and after ports for the PS4, PS Vita and Steam back in June. That's... kind of devastating for Nintendo's second-best system. Good thing it's a video game console and not a person, because that is some harsh "getting picked last for the team" business to deal with. Finally, Freud fans can take on the not-at-all-worrisome fun of blasting schoolgirl animes in the face with their love bullets in the Steam release of Gal Gun: Double Peace this week.

Wiki!

Happy to report that 1991's PC Engine library, at least the games released on HuCard, are now all accounted for in our wiki. I'll be moving onto 1992 presently, but I also want to update my Wiki Project series of blogs for this new milestone. With that in mind, I'm just going to super briefly summarize the fifteen pages I worked on this week for the sake of leaving something for that eventual blog to cover:

• World Circuit: I was in two minds about adding this as a new page, as World Circuit is simply Family Circuit with a new name. I think I've brought this up before, but Namco created a series of sports games for the Famicom that had the simple naming structure of "Family [Sport]" - the Family part coming from the name of Nintendo's console in Japan, the Family Computer. Those same sports games were called "World" on every other system. Besides that tidbit, this is just another top-down F1 racing game, albeit one created by Namco. Expect it to be a little more Arcade-y than the norm.
• Gradius: Konami's famous side-scrolling shoot 'em up saw a belated PC Engine port as well, and it's a fairly solid one as far as early home conversions of the Arcade game go. The PC Engine version would also be the one to make it to Wii Virtual Console.
• Monster Pro Wrestling: An utterly bizarre turn-based and largely luck-based wrestling game featuring mutant wrestlers beating the crap out of each other with absurd moves. While an objectively terrible game, something about its Looney Tunes attack animations is endearing.
• Coryoon: A cutesy shoot 'em up, following in the likes of Ordyne, Parodius and Magical Chase. The player's baby dragon protagonist can adopt different elemental disciplines as their power-ups, and hold in their breath for a charge attack. The look and vast amount of fruit everywhere makes it feel like an Adventure Island spin-off.
• Shogi Shoshinsha Muyou: it's a shogi game, so I have no idea what's going on. I wasn't able to decipher the title - it literally translates to "Shogi Beginner Useless". Maybe it's suggesting it's shogi training for complete no-hopers?
• Super Metal Crusher: Odd robot-raising sim in which you pump points into your robot buddy's stats and let them fight other robots automatically. Imagine Custom Robo without the gameplay.
• Fighting Run: More mechanical weirdness with this cyborg racing battle thing. Two buff androids sprint down a corridor, bashing each other into the various traps and obstacles in the way. Does not play well.
• Salamander: Following right behind its forebear Gradius is Salamander, the game's half-sequel, half spin-off. The game's better known in the US as Life Force, but it began in the Japanese Arcade without much of the gooey viscera that made Life Force distinct. This is a conversion of that original Salamander.
• Doraemon: Nobita no Dorabian Night: I kinda figured I wouldn't be done with Doraemon platformers after switching from the Super Famicom to the PC Engine. Dorabian Night was one of a rare handful of PC Engine games, along with the Bonks, to be released on both CD and HuCard formats.
• Bubblegum Crash: As far as I know this is the only Bubblegum Crash video game adaptation, barring a PC-88 game that wasn't named for the show but featured its all-female exo-suited Knight Saber mercenary team. Despite using a license all about anime ladies kicking ass, the game's a story-driven graphic adventure with a handful of action mini-games.
• Genji Tsuushin Agedama: I covered this licensed licensed endless runner/platformer/shoot 'em hybrid back in TurboMento. I guess I was lying last week when I said Dragon Egg was the last of the HuCard games I exhibited. Actually, we still have the PC Engine version of Tower of Druaga and that weird photography game Gekisha Boy to go as well.
• Spiral Wave: I was temporarily excited to work on this one, until I realized it wasn't a game based on the TV show Spiral Zone. Instead, it's an open-world-ish space sim that has a lot of Z-axis combat between dialogue scenes with aliens.
• Niko Niko Pun: A platformer for babies, based on an anime that was in turn based on a kid's TV show featuring actors in animal costumes. It's an extremely gentle game: it doesn't even have a health bar.
• Super Momotarou Dentetsu II: One of a few PC Engine games to see a crossover with the Super Famicom - the two systems were a few years apart, barring a brief overlap in the 90s, and most of the PC Engine's library (and the Super Famicom's library for that matter) were exclusives. Wouldn't stop this wildly popular railroad board game sim from appearing everywhere, though.
• Dragon Saber: The last HuCard game of 1991 was this Arcade conversion of the sequel to Namco's Dragon Spirit, once again dragging dragons into a shoot 'em up. Dragon Saber was released on a few systems, and rereleased a few times on Virtual Console as well, but it was never localized for the West.

Gravity Rush: Remastered!

With the final adventures of Kat in the floating village of Hekseville, Gravity Rush: Remastered paradoxically both sticks to its guns and goes completely off the rails. Unfortunately, I can only remark on the former, as the latter requires going into the game's late plot. Actually, I still want to talk about it, and I imagine enough people have seen through the game back when it was on Vita. I'll just put that behind a spoiler block a little later on, then.

Gravity Rush, as we discussed last week, builds the entirety of its gameplay around the gravity switching mechanic. Kat can temporarily divorce herself from Newton's universal force and realign herself to various surfaces regardless of how the pull of gravity might suggest otherwise. She can also extend her powers to include other objects and people, using a power named the stasis field. A lot of the gameplay involves moving around rapidly through a sort of gravity-alternating flight and fighting various monsters by floating around to where their vulnerable spots are visible and plowing into them with devastating dive-kicks. It's not a perfect system, but you get a lot of practice with the game's general strategy of dumping a large number of enemies on you and tasking you with defeating them all before the plot will advance. Gravity Rush is not a particularly long game, fortunately, so it doesn't quite wear out its handful of ideas. Certainly gets close though, and its central idea of escalating the game's difficulty by making bigger monsters with more weak points to crush isn't a particularly gratifying one.

I had more fun exploring the districts, ultimately. The game's free-floating mechanics lent themselves better to stress-free scenarios where you weren't forced to fight or fly as quickly as possible, instead letting you chill out by hovering around and gently spinning on your axis while scanning the horizon for the telltale pink gleam of collectible gemstones, which could then be spent on upgrades - health, damage, etc. - to make the more hurried portions of the game more palatable. I generally liked the game's comic book interstitial cutscenes, its characterization of its central character as a lonely girl with no history and plenty of moxie and, well, where the story unexpectedly goes about midway through the game. Spoiler time:

Hekseville is presented as being a city not only fragmented by the same interdimensional portals that summon the nebulous yet hostile Nevi creatures, but governed by one or more creator deities that brought the entire city into being and are struggling to hold together. The most prominent landmark of this world is an immense central "tree" that is visible almost everywhere in the city. This column-like structure is about as wide as any one district of Hekseville and stretches endlessly both up and down, indicating that the world is far bigger than just the horizontal slice that Hekseville sits on. At a certain point of the game, Kat is given the throwaway task by a random NPC to fetch a letter from her deceased loved one, which she accidentally dropped over the edge of Hekseville. This letter turns out to have fallen very far indeed: past the lower limits of the city and deep beneath the cloud of darkness that blankets the ground. The following few episodes sees Kat descend through this cloud, passing in and out of the tree as she goes, until she discovers a lost settlement of schoolkids who fell off Hekseville some years prior. Being down here, where the fauna and flora suddenly look very alien, and the passage of time is such that the few days she spends down here equates to a year in Hekseville, raises a lot of questions about the nature of the world that the game briefly threatens to answer but backs off for a more conventional conclusion concerning the malicious but entirely human villains taking power in the town. One of Gravity Rush's biggest strengths, though could easily be a weakness for the less patient, is how it creates such a bizarre setting and normalizes it for the sake of its traditional central plot, leaving the bigger questions about the world's tenuous fabric of reality for another game to explore. It'd be like if there was a performance of Hamlet set entirely underwater or in space, with almost zero attention given to the setting besides a few incidental events.

Anyway, it's definitely made me curious to see what Gravity Rush 2 will be like. There's so much for a sequel to look into, whether that's delving more into the big narrative questions outlined in the spoiler section above, finding new implementations of the gravity-switching mechanic beyond the handful of powers in the original, and exploring ways to improve the game including but not limited to having less emphasis on bashing weak points over and over. If Gravity Rush has anything, it's potential for greatness. As it is, it's a fine if somewhat repetitive open-world game that has an compelling central mechanic that it just doesn't find enough to do with.

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below!

Though that isn't to say that repetition doesn't have its own appeal in the right context. I'm surprising myself with how much I'm enjoying Dragon Quest Heroes, given that it's both a Dragon Quest game and a Musou game. I bounced off Dragon Quest IX because it was so densely packed with optional material (see my diatribe at the lede about open-world games and their effect on my psyche) and I've generally felt that most Musou games are built to wring 200 hours of game time out of a gameplay model that would be fun for about 1% of that length.

Yet, the two game series somehow complement each other here. By having the fast-paced bashing of a Musou game, the slow turn-based Dragon Quest series suddenly adopts a more palatable tempo, allowing you to plow through the hundreds of slimes and drackys you'd usually encounter in any given DQ game in a matter of seconds instead of hours. Likewise, the RPG hooks and usual DQ mechanics like an alchemy crafting system, the limit break-style tension, and creating parties that feature a diverse array of talents and fighting styles that the player is free to alternate makes the usual crowd-control combat more enticing than the cast of Chinese Melrose Place that is the drama-wrought Dynasty Warriors universe. Like many Musou spin-offs, the game is simplified to only focus on the core tenets of its particular series, in this case Dragon Quest's traditional role-playing model.

There are some universal issues with the Musou format that are still prevalent here, though, the most significant of which is the over-reliance on the "protect a thing" mission. In the history of video games, "protect a thing" has never been fun, because you're relying too much on a third party staying alive while you're more inclined to move at your own pace and do your own thing. Dragon Quest Heroes is built in such a way that every map will inevitably generate an object or person you have to protect and have enemies warping in from every angle. The goal of almost any given map is to find these portals that monsters are pouring out of, each of which is guarded by a "mawkeeper" enemy that needs to be defeated before the portal will close, and then hightailing it back to the thing you have to protect before there's enough breathing room to go after the next portal. The game makes this slightly easier by giving you a means to warp around the battlefield, as well as the ability to command "sentry" monsters that protect the immediate area after being summoned, but all too often you're balancing dashing to these portals to close them and running back to, well, protect a thing.

Despite this, the game's fun in the moment, using your various powers to smash hundreds of smiling blobs into goo and it's an especial treat for long-time series fans due to its many cameos. Alena, Kiryl and Maya from Dragon Quest IV, Bianca and Nera from Dragon Quest V, Terry from Dragon Quest VI, and Yangus and Jessica from Dragon Quest VIII are some of the peeps I'm rolling around with presently, along with four great characters created for this game - the two protagonists (you can select to play as either, and the other becomes your first party member), the boisterous King who delivers every statement like he's Brian Blessed, and a boomerang-flinging flirtatious inventor who is responsible for your airship base and various other useful tools. The localization has been top-notch too, filled with suitably Shakespearean inflections and prose and a gamut of accents that cover the entire British Isles toe to tip (and, in the case of Alena and Kiryl, a vaguely uncomfortable pidgin Russian).

I'm sticking with it because unlike many games of its genre I don't think it'll last forever, and despite the repetitive mission structure it's still fun to throw down against huge hordes of goofy monsters using the various combos and specials at your disposal. The boss fights have been a particular highlight, as each has its own quirks and mechanics to exploit. Makes me wish that same level of ingenuity could've been applied to the rest of the game, but Musou has always been a glorified form of tower defense so I ain't buggin' too much. Still, if I can find enjoyment in a Musou game linked to a franchise that I only sort of like, that makes me more curious to try out those that employ a franchise I'm very much into - Hyrule Warriors and the upcoming Berserk and the Band of the Hawk come to mind. Man, I'm fully crossing over to the dark side now, aren't I?

Like many of you, I've been watching Giant Bomb East's Shenmue Endurance Run with rapt attention. I was already somewhat familiar with the game before this run - I've seen LPs of the first and second game, including 2015's SGDQ Shenmue II speedrun, and tried the first for a few hours myself after buying a haul of Dreamcast games off eBay about a decade ago - but seeing the GBEast boys have at it and the type of comments the videos received (it's fun being a moderator), it's clear Shenmue means a lot to a lot of people, in both strongly positive and negative terms.

I won't extrapolate too much on Shenmue's history here. Yu Suzuki's visionary adventure game has such a lofty profile in the video game critical community that countless others have gone deep into the game's lore, the backstory of its development and the influence the game has had in the industry. Throw a dart at any random site that collects or aggregates video game writing, and you'll probably hit an effusive article on the Shenmue series and its importance to the medium. I fall more closely on the "rudderless, dull and bloated" side of the critical equation, and that was before the Endurance Run spent over half an hour staring at Ryo's Timex watch to wait until the story could be continued, but I can at least respect the game's ambition.

Shenmue's goal, I think is clear, was to create a living breathing world that the player could immerse themselves in whenever the demands of the plot were temporarily at bay. We've seen this in many open-world games before and since, most recently (at least for me) with Metal Gear Solid V. In that game, there are points in the story where the player is expected to "waste time" - though there's a hundred different things you can be doing to improve your character, your base, etc. - before the next story-critical mission kicks into gear, usually as some sort of emergency alert. These lulls in the plot are somewhat deliberate: they're intended to free the player to explore a while, poking into the game's immense amount of optional content that the designer worked hard to include for the sake of verisimilitude, albeit the sort of verisimilitude one often encounters in their day-to-day lives when they have a few hours to spend before a pressing engagement occurs or their workday resumes. We've been conditioned since we were children to find productive (or entertaining) ways to pass the time during these situations, and I feel that's what games like Shenmue are hoping to recreate.

Shenmue, depending on your perspective, succeeds in creating this all-too-frequent real-life scenario, but doesn't quite execute on finding attractive enough distractions to pursue when there's waiting to be done. Training to fight, acquiring new moves and practicing them, is necessary to increase Ryo's skills for when he is forced to fight for real - it's going to be interesting to watch the GBEast crew suffer for their lack of discipline when they'll have the Mad Angels and Chai to deal with - but at the same time is fairly tedious and offers slow, incremental progress with no immediate gains to show for it. Purchasing collectible items you don't strictly need like music cassettes and capsule toys is also a hard sell to the player, so to speak, because they aren't yet certain that they'll need their funds for something more crucial down the road - an uncertainty that becomes all the more pressing once the plot moves to purchasing a means to leave Japan for Hong Kong in the game's second half. Everything else - the mini-games at the Arcade, the vacuous circular conversations with NPCs, the underdeveloped sub-stories with Nozomi and Chibi the Kitten - aren't enticing enough to present worthwhile pursuits when there's a gap in the schedule.

Yet in spite of all this, Shenmue's heart is in the right place, and many other games would take the acclaim and ambition of the game and meaningfully evolve them. In cases like Yakuza, this means streamlining the less story critical "life" elements for side-stories that frequently involve more "substantial" material like mini-games and fighting. The designers of Yakuza, Toshihiro Nagoshi and the team at Sega's Amusement Vision, clearly felt that Shenmue offered a particularly rich vein of video game storytelling where distractions from the plot would in turn enhance it by making the world feel more real and its various secondary and tertiary characters more fully fleshed-out. Yakuza simplifies the adventure game elements - it's always clear exactly where Kazuma Kiryu needs to go, who he must talk to, or who he must throw a couch at - but still offers a huge world to explore and interact with. Each Yakuza game often brings with it a multitude of mini-games from homerun derbies, to Arcade games and claw machines, to darts and pool, to traditional Japanese board games like shogi and mahjong, to various gambling games like blackjack and cee-lo, to even whole golf courses in the third game onwards. Far from suggesting that Yakuza is objectively superior to Shenmue - I think you'll find an equal number of proponents on either side of that debate - Yakuza is one of those cases where a developer sees what another game is doing, and chooses to amplify which aspects they consider vital to the experience while diminishing other aspects considered less worthy. This is entirely to the discretion of the designers, who in turn manage to create a game that better reflects their take on what works in Shenmue and what doesn't, and in doing so creates a game that is more distinctly their own.

Which leads me to another point: That Shenmue being imperfect is one of the most prevalent reasons for its importance as an influencer. If it was perfect right out of the gate, we'd see far too many pale imitations that didn't want to mess around with the game's perfect balance of combat, adventure game intrigue and life-sim "distractions" but couldn't deliver an equally sterling package. Because it isn't perfect, just a compilation of very impressive accomplishments, that allows the developers it influences to take their successive projects in differing directions in order to compensate for or extract what it considers flaws in the original blueprint. Likewise, games could take pieces of Shenmue - using Quick Time Events to punch up their own otherwise non-interactive action cutscenes, for example, or incorporating mini-games as open-world side-activities - without necessarily feeling that they left the choicest cuts on the butcher's block.

I now move onto another ambitious if flawed project: Swery and Access Games's Deadly Premonition. Disregarding for a moment the game's "Silent Hill" sequences, which features a lot of repetitive combat that the game's developers didn't really intend for the game but were forced to include, Deadly Premonition builds on Shenmue's model in creating a living world filled with NPCs that operate on their own schedules irrespective of the player's influence. This wouldn't be the first game to lift Shenmue's "NPC itinerary" format - both The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and Gregory Horror Show made this feature a cornerstone of their gameplay, to the extent that both of them have an in-game NPC schedule timetable that the player can fill out through observing the NPCs in question. However, Deadly Premonition sets itself up as a mystery game first and foremost: the killer is met early and frequently, but everything about them - their motives, their methods, their true identity and the links they have to the town's supernatural history - are left in the shadows. The player, as well as follow each new - though, again, rigorously scheduled - story directive, can spend time getting to know the locals, partake in side-quests and mini-games, or just waste a day following an NPC around - including looking through their windows, if a locked door happens to block their view - to observe any suspicious behavior. The game, like Shenmue, has far more ambition than it knows what to do with but, like Shenmue, manages to turn this flaw into one of the game's most endearing traits.

It's worth keeping in mind that an open-world game with this much consideration put into its NPCs and living world is extraordinarily difficult to pull off: not only in the sense that you're corraling many NPCs, incorporating a huge amount of optional content including different gameplay modes, and tying it all together with a narrative that keeps the player's attention throughout, even with added wrinkle of giving them plenty of reasons to ignore that same narrative for long spells, but juggling all those many aspects to create a collective whole that still has an acceptable level of cohesion and player enjoyment, including for players that will make a beeline for the story events and leave a majority of the game's content in the dust, as GBEast has been doing for Shenmue and the duders did for Deadly Premonition before it. An open-world game with a lot of stuff in it is one thing, and one thing we tend to see a whole lot these days, but one where the world feels real and lived-in and its citizens feel like autonomous beings is a whole different beast. For this reason, I can admire games like Shenmue and Deadly Premonition (and Gregory Horror Show, to a lesser extent) for their emphasis on creating some semblance of a character-focused ensemble narrative in an open-world that lets its many cast members breathe and follow their own agendas, even if I ultimately prefer playing open-world games like Yakuza and Metal Gear Solid V for their emphasis on gameplay and plot.

How about you all? I'm sure I'll get a few Shenmue defenders jumping on this, but to them I ask whaich of Shenmue's many "life sim" elements appeals to them most, and whether they can name other games that follow a similar philosophy. I didn't get into games like Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon, The Sims and Animal Crossing, which perhaps take this "life sim" aspect to a whole new level by not incorporating much of a "story" at all, but they definitely exhibit some similar mechanics regarding NPC schedules and finding stuff to do in your downtime. (I also just kinda didn't want to write any more about Stardew Valley. Feels like that well's as dry as a bone now.)

Completing Divinity: Original Sin this week, I was ratiocinating on what I've come to accept as a preference for games that enable what I'm tentatively dubbing "the reckless adventurer" stratagem - those games that don't scale their encounters to the player's level, but create an open-world where, say, the left path will grind you into paste due to its absurdly high-level encounters with the implication being that you should probably go right instead. While these games are often disheartening due to the frequency of taking the wrong road to Pulverization City (not that there's necessarily a right road to Pulverization City...), some of them offer the opportunity for a particularly stealthy (or fast (or foolhardy)) player to dart into a location where they absolutely should not yet be and possibly get away with a few high-level items at the risk of their own utter annihilation.

Like practically every video game analogy, at least of those that don't compare a game to a certain Orson Welles movie, Dark Souls and its brethren are some of the more visible examples of this particular world-building methodology in recent years. Right when you touch down at the Firelink Shrine after the extended tutorial dungeon, the first Dark Souls directs you towards two destinations: one above the town and one below. The player will then bash their head against the skeletons on the lower path for a few fatal encounters before opting for the preferential top route into the Undead Burg. Yet, there are regions which are all but marked "bad times ahead" with a bloody signpost that a less risk-averse player might choose to poke their head into for a powerful item, such as the upgrade-enabling embers or a particularly good weapon or armor set. Speedrunners will spend hours figuring out ways to pass through entire high-level areas without incident, ditto for the equally tough boss encounters, but even a novice player knows that while death is inevitable in the Souls series, and with it the loss of any souls they might be carrying, you will always keep any item you manage to find before ol' Grimmy Reapz catches up to you and delivers the foregone conclusion to your audacious daredevil antics.

But this has been a reliable if precarious tactic in many RPGs for years, albeit the few of those that don't have random encounters (because you can't tiptoe around those), crowds of enemies that always know exactly where you are (so Diablo's out), or enemy-scaling (like the Bethesda games). The original Risen had a lot of cases where you could sneak around one-shot murder skeletons for some wonderful loot, which in turn was a hazard-filled holdover from the development team's work on the Gothic series. The Baldur's Gate series let you Bilbo your way past gigantic screen-filling demons and dragons for the treasures they were half-heartedly guarding (Icewind Dale, meanwhile, was too linear to allow for much "sequence breaking" of this type).

Obviously, there's some pushback to games including a possibility like this, to the extent that we get any of the above deterrents or just more observant high-level bad guys who won't be quite so accommodating to a particularly sneaky rogue party member. But then we're talking about a world that threatens to squish neophyte adventurers simply on the basis of a single unfortunate coin-toss in front of a fork in the path. In cases like those, you need every boon and lucky break you can get your hands on, even if it means potentially breaking the game for yourself in the process. It's situations like those, where the odds are against you unless you make your own luck, that endears the RPG experience as a whole to me. How about you all? There's gotta be someone out there who still thinks random encounters and level-scaling is preferable. I promise I won't throw shade.

New Games!

Kind of a quiet seven days, though maybe I'm not looking hard enough. For my MegaTen brothers and sisters, I gotta give Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse the top spot for what I'm looking forward to most out of this week's releases. While I don't imagine I'll be playing it myself any time soon, I always admire the level of challenge and consideration that goes into each SMT game, and I've heard a lot of promising things about this sequel including its improvements to the story and setting of SMT IV and various other revisions. In my eyes these games are still hardcore Pokémon though, and no amount of rad post-apocalyptic demon wars can sway me. Add a few teenage thieves and a talking cat, though, then maybe we're talking.

In other enhanced anime JRPG remake news, we also have the 150% spookier (not a real statistic) Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters: Daybreak Special Gigs coming out for PS3, PS4 and PS Vita, based on last year's middling horror-themed RPG/visual novel Tokyo Twilight Ghost Hunters. This also marks the debut of the series on PS4. Gotta say that this one passed me by, and I very much doubt we'll see anything on it from the crew, but maybe it's no big loss? There are a lot of RPGs out this year, is all I'm saying.

Backing away from spooky animes for a moment, I suppose I'd better acknowledge the first of two big releases this week for the "norms": Forza Horizon 3 for Xbox One. People really seem to take to the Forza Horizon games for finding a happy balance between the rambunctious open-world racing games of a Need for Speed/Burnout bent and Forza's more simulation-heavy car fetish enabling. Me? I've only really enjoyed the games of this type that let me crash into people a lot, which probably says a lot about where my mind is at with regards to our noble, sleek metal couriers. When is the ghost gameplay of Driver: San Francisco making a return?

Talking of big metal things that blow up a lot, we're getting even more Warhammer business this year with Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade. What is becoming a recurring worrisome element to these rundowns is another acknowledgement that I don't have a whole lot of familiarity with this universe - my WH40k knowhow begins and ends with Space Crusade for the Atari ST - but I know Vinny digs anything coming from the God Emperor and his metal boys. Then again, we're talking about a massively multiplayer shooter, so maybe it won't be in Vinny's dreadnought wheelhouse after all.

And then there's that other big release I can't exactly avoid: Destiny: Rise of Iron, the newest expansion to Destiny. As in, that one game that apparently won't be getting a sequel anytime soon because they keep putting out content boosts for it instead. I'm sure those it has ensnared in its loot grind cycle will be ecstatic for the few extra light levels it provides, or whatever elite-tier reward system that game doles out now. More likely, they're presently busy trying to convince their old crew, who have all moved onto better games, to come back for a brand new ten-hour long raid dungeon. Excelsior, I say unto them.

Rounding out the rest of the week's releases, we have the last stop for Drinkbox's Severed as it makes its way to the Wii U this week; TheChineseRoom's Scottish tourism simulator Dear Esther from heads to the new consoles for some high definition Hebridean fun walking; and Firewatch makes a belated debut for the Xbox One after its launch at the start of this year, allowing Xbox One owners to finally answer one of humanity's greatest questions for themselves: "Why did I buy this console?" "What is Firewatch?". And, yeah, the second episode of that Batman series from Telltale is out this week too. I said on the last Sunday Summaries that I'd probably mention it again but have nothing else to say, and here I am fulfilling that promise. I am, if nothing else, a man of my word.

Wiki!

Well, then, let's talk about the PC Engine some more. I've been hammering away at the remaining HuCard games - those are the TurboGrafx-16 games that were released on little SD card things, rather than CDs - and have made a little more progress with 1991's output. To put it in more accurate terms, I processed another ten pages this week. Might as well go through them all quickly, as there's nothing too substantial here:

• Racing Damashii, or Racing Spirits, is a motorcycle racing game that borrows Hang-On's behind-the-biker perspective. It's one of those games that is configured for a two-player view whether there's a second player or not, so often the bottom screen just shows you how your CPU opponent is doing. This is actually an Irem game, and so it's a little out of the ordinary for the company that was mostly focusing on Arcade shoot 'em ups at this time.
• Every week where I'm working on some Japan-exclusive smattering of Super Famicom or PC Engine games I run into a case like Skweek. Despite this being a Japan-exclusive port, Skweek is actually a European game - from French studio Loriciel who you might know for... well, not a whole lot besides maybe Best of the Best: Championship Karate or Jim Power - and it plays like Q*Bert but without all the hopping. The goal is to run over every tile in each stage, coloring them all pink in the process. The game never seems to stop throwing new enemies and obstacles at you either, including arrows that force you to move one direction and teleporters and many more besides. Oddly enough, the game only saw one release in North America, and it was for the Game Gear of all systems. If you had a Game Gear or followed that scene back in the day, you might know it better as Slider. That particular port was put out by the same Japanese company that worked on this PC Engine version, and you could reasonably infer that the two are identical but for some necessary resolution squeezing.
• It took some searching to figure out which is the correct way to write the title of this next game, Hanata-Kadaka!?, but I think I got it right based on the punctuation used in the box art. This is one of those cartoony shoot 'em ups that actually resembles Kiki Kaikai (a.k.a. Pocky & Rocky) as if it was instead more of a traditional horizontal shoot 'em up than the dual-joystick sort of affair it actually is. The player, as a helpful long-nosed tengu (of the sort that shows up as the final boss in Dead or Alive 2), is helping a kitsune rescue his girlfriend from an evil tanuki. I'm not sure if it necessarily fits that the tengu is a good guy and the tanuki a villain, but it doesn't strike me as a particularly serious game. It's tough though, in part because one of the major power-ups also increases the size of your hitbox, and it has a few of those Gradius stages where you have to carve a path through some destructible environments or get crushed.
• Power League 4 is some regular-ass Japanese baseball, and Hudson presumably felt it was prudent that the PC Engine had its own version of an annual baseball series to rival the Famicom's. It doesn't really add a whole lot to the previous game's formula though, and I'm not sure it even has real team and player names to update for a new season of professional baseball to use as an excuse, so I kind of wonder what the point is. It does have nighttime versions of all its stadiums now, at least, including for whatever reason the one with the dome roof.
• We saw 1943 Kai last week, and this week sees another Capcom Arcade WW2 shoot 'em up conversion with 1941 Counter Attack. Considered one of the better games in that series, 1941 also has the special distinction of being the fifth and final game developed for the enhanced SuperGrafx system. It's as close to Arcade perfect as PC Engine games would get in a while.
• Power Gate, meanwhile, represents the other side of the PC Engine shoot 'em up spectrum: one that was developed for the PC Engine exclusively, and is kind of terrible. It's an indication that people were flocking to the PC Engine for its many shoot 'em ups, and that desperate lesser developers were throwing together whatever they could make to get a piece of that action.
• For such a wrestling-friendly site, it's weird that I have to keep adding Fire Pro Wrestling games to the database. Surely someone right at the inception of the Giant Bomb wiki would've created all those pages, if not filled them in with all the in-depth puroresu techniques and references that the series is known for. Fire Pro Wrestling 2nd Bout makes some small progress following FPW: Combination Tag, adding a few more match types and fictional (but you know who they are) wrestlers to the mix. It'll take a while longer before it becomes the powerhouse of the 16-bit era that its fanbase knows it as.
• World Jockey is Namco's take on the horseracing genre that would become inexplicably popular on Nintendo systems, but makes a slight detour by focusing on the racing itself rather than the simulation elements going on around it. Except for a mode where players bet on automated races, you're racing those horses directly in most cases, balancing speed with stamina to ensure you end the race as the winner.
• It was nice to see Dragon Egg again. I looked at this game a while back as part of Octurbo, and it is the last of the HuCard games I covered in that series to show up in these TurboGrafx/PC Engine wiki projects. It's a fairly standard platformer of the Wonder Boy model - that is, you earn money from killing enemies that you can then spend at stores for power-ups, but that's as "RPG" as it ever gets - but you also have something of a shoot 'em up system of incrementally stronger power-ups that last until you lose a life. The power-ups are for the titular ovum you're carrying around: initially, all you can do is bonk enemies with the egg itself, but then it becomes a baby dragon able to breathe fire before eventually becoming a winged dragon mount that makes the platforming substantially easier. As long as you don't die, the game's a breeze. Sorta like life?
• I'll sign off with Morita Shogi PC, a shogi game that - like anything attached to the Morita name - was developed by a small shogi development company called Random House, not to be confused with the book publisher. This game's one big distinction is a graphical setting that turns the shogi board into Battle Chess, except instead of animated knights and bishops it's all JRPG monsters like rock golems and slimes. It's weird that the Dragon Quest people never reached out for a version of this game with their own monster designs - a lot of them are faintly familiar.

Divinity: Original Sin!

While I am glad that my impulsive drive to start yet another giant game so soon after the last one (or two, or three) didn't lead to yet another whole month dedicated to a single game, I was sad to see Divinity: Original Sin eventually end. I think it's one of my favorite RPGs in a long time because of how complex it was willing to get with its strategic combat. Now, while I'm someone who will regularly tout story and characters as a significant component to an RPG's overall quality, I will always, always point to a well-considered and well-realized combat engine and a smattering of player-convenience features as the most important qualities of a game from this genre. The sole exception being, so far, Planescape: Torment, which almost deliberately shied away from giving players anything resembling a traditional difficulty curve or a conventional set of character progression mechanics - both of which better served the game's oblique and wonderful story and setting than something more traditional would have done.

Divinity's story, meanwhile, does some fun stuff with the nature of its world and specifically how it formed in the first place and how it threatens to come undone before its due time. This sort of meta-narrative has been done plenty of times before, as is often the case for games where the stakes apparently need to be raised from "save the world" to "save all of existence" (consider the ridiculous final act of Final Fantasy IX, as another example), but at the same time I appreciated how weird the game was willing to get with its hub world hovering at the end of time. Again, I can think of at least two RPGs that offered a very similar hub environment with which to rest and recuperate - Chrono Trigger and Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal, in case you were thinking of calling my bluff - but it served to introduce a deeper mystery behind the game's events occurring concurrently with what was happening on the surface. Needless to say, I won't get into any more details on it here for the sake of spoilers, but it's always brave when a developer takes the time to create a whole fantasy world and then lifts the veil to see its inner-workings. Or maybe it's getting trite. I guess that's all in the eye of the beholder and how tired folk are getting of RPGs getting all metaphysical on you. All it needed was to peel back the onion one more layer and we'd see a giant Dungeon Master's screen surrounding all of creation.

The combat, then. I spoke at length last week about the game's use of elemental and environmental hazards, putting more emphasis on using the battlefield to the player's advantage beyond the usual RPG tricks of creating bottlenecks and the like. What impressed me to an equal extent was how the game managed a level of complexity while simultaneously streamlining what would normally be a dizzying amount of options available. Consider many RPGs of the D&D mold, where mages have a thousand spells to call upon for the sake of mirroring the table-top's equivalent degree of versatility. In Divinity's more considered mage library, it's all killer no filler - every spell, even the basic tier ones, retain their usefulness long into the game. Maybe that speaks to how ineffective I am as a mage in more overtly D&D-inspired games, but having about ten to twenty spells with various distinct applications was just enough to wrap my head around. I didn't need to stumble over finding the absolute perfect spell for any given situation - since there were fewer to keep track of, I'd always remember which one would work best in the moment. Rather than worrying about mana or spell charges, the game does the MMO thing of putting every spell on a cooldown - the most powerful of which opting instead for a "one and done" deal for any given combat encounter - that not only didn't freeze you out of using the same spell type based on an arbitrary limitation (though I guess the cooldown is also that) but motivated you to try out the spells you used less often while the mainstays were on timers, which in turn helped you discover how useful some of those "forgettable" spells could be. The spells that do no damage but caused status effects with higher probability turned out to be incredibly useful for some battles - the low-cost "Bitter Cold" spell in particular, which could freeze enemies and take them out of the battle for two turns, was frequently a godsend against opponents who seemed to summon half a menagerie every turn. Hell, I think this was one of the first games that helped impress upon me just how vital mages could be as their repertoires filled up. I guess after twenty-five years of playing games like this, it had to happen eventually.

All the same, it was my tank and my archer that ended up being the most damaging. The game pulls a reverse balance of RPG hero power here, making the elemental mages less powerful than the physical classes as the game heads towards its conclusion, in part due to the heavy presence of undead enemies at the beginning of the game. These undead were resistant to slashing and piercing weapons - swords were a bad choice - but really didn't like fire a whole lot, but towards the end of the game more and more of the enemies were demons resistant to practically every element, and far more susceptible to getting wanged on the head with something sharp. My archer picked up an ability called "rain of arrows" which did absolutely broken damage, to the extent that I wonder if the designers or myself did something wrong somewhere. As someone who usually relies on the burlier classes when playing the table-top game (or RPGs with single characters), I appreciate that the game gives them their due rather than letting them be glorified meatshields for the bookish nuke-hurlers in the party.

To finish, I just want to give a shout out to one of the game's unspoken heroes: its vibrant presentation. The game looks great in general, though it's happy to take a certain last-gen model of a distant, top-down Diablo/Neverwinter Nights-style perspective which complements its tactical combat but does considerably less for its character models. Additionally, however, the game is colorful and bright and its characters distinct to an almost cartoonish extent. The game has plenty of humor, for better or worse, and while it delves into some pretty dark material with regards to human sacrifice, torture, gleeful nihilism, gross poison-spewing undead creatures, at least one implication of incest, and a lot of moral relativism with its personality-based "trait" system that lets role-playing gamers justify a lot of really iffy decisions, it is in general a lighthearted game and a tonic to the more serious and dramatically wrought Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I feel was its biggest competition in the year of its release.

At any rate, I think I'm ready to play its sequel whenever it comes out in the next few yea... wait, it's out in December? And the Early Access beta went live a few days ago? Good lord, this RPG backlog never ends...

Gravity Rush: Remastered

You might be wondering if the decision to play the two games I'm discussing this week was in any way motivated by their imminent upcoming 2016 sequels, and to that I say "not really, but maybe subconsciously?". Gravity Rush is best known as one of the earliest Vita games to grab attention as being its own, uniquely Vita thing. Naturally, that meant that it was due for an improved console port eventually, and that's what Gravity Rush: Remastered is.

Gravity Rush is an open-world game with distinctive traversal mechanics that also factor into its combat, similar to, say, InFamous or Crackdown. It's a bit more compact than most games of its type, however, presumably due to it starting life as a portable game. The traversal mechanic in question is gravity manipulation, as you could probably surmise from the title, allowing the player to release themselves from gravity's clutches and float through the air. The player can hover around, but to get anywhere they merely have to look in a direction and hit the trigger button to whoosh away in that direction. Hitting the side or ceiling of a structure allows you to walk along it as if it was the ground, which is a little vertiginous at first but quickly becomes second nature. A lot of the time you'll be using this gravity manipulation as a form of flight, moving through the air quickly rather than sprinting across the side of a building. It seems about as fast at least, and not nearly as bewildering. Combat's been fairly basic so far too, but then I think the game is treating me with kid gloves for these early parts - it does take some time getting to grips with all the floating. Beyond that, it has a level progression system tied to purple gemstones that allows you to increase the power of your attacks, your health and how long you can stay in the air, but presently the emphasis seems to be on the story and gameplay rather than tossing too many collectibles on a map for you to find. Not that I really believe there's such a thing as too many collectibles, but we all know I'm weird about that stuff.

The game's aesthetic is all over the place, though not necessarily in a pejorative sense. The game's initial setting of Auldnoir is very definitely of French origin, with characters speaking in a language at least adjacent to French and the gentle melodic background music also reminiscent of that big ol' hexagon of a country. Now, even with my intrinsic enmity of the French as a citizen of the United Kingdom, there's a lot of games I love - especially Japanese ones - that have a French affectation; Dark Cloud 2 being on the top of that list (where, indeed, it belongs on most any list). The game has a gentle carefree nature to it with this influence, as you gracefully - or not so gracefully, depending on how well I'm wrestling with the controls - float around looking for gems or "nevi" creatures to divekick. There's two other major visual influences competing with that one, however; the game's distinct washed out cel-shaded characters, possibly to make a statement about the city's present lack of vitality (pun intended?) with the issues it's facing from troubles both foreign and domestic, and the unusual decision to use a type of font - and a cutscene presentation style - reminiscent of comic books. The font in particular is very familiar to me, though I couldn't name the specific typeface: it's one often used by Marvel, and frequently appears in stylish comic book games like various recent Spider-Mans, or XIII from a few generations ago, which elect to generate big onomatopoeic speech bubbles whenever you hit something. Yet, this style of action comic isn't what I associate with France or francophonic countries at all, with the single exception of the aforementioned XIII - I always picture them more in the style of Asterix or Tintin (which is Belgian, admittedly, but as we say on the continent "that's close enough to French to not matter". See also: Luxembourg, Switzerland). Kind of jarring, but the game makes it work.

I'll be continuing this game in the week to come, and I hope it continues to be a breath of fresh air from the huge, engrossing games that I've been burying myself in of late. At the very least its gravity-switching isn't making me want to throw up after a few hours, so that's a good omen.

I watched The Martian over the weekend (great movie, though I suspect it got overrated somewhat) and it occurred to me that the connecting tissue between any, let's go with "present-to-near future", space-faring adventure involves a lot of troubleshooting. That is to say, that astronauts are often genius scientists in peak physical condition because they need to handle any of a thousand things that might go wrong with the rocket they're strapped into or the many unusual and unexpected quantities of space travel or space itself.

Similarly, any good genre piece about space travel or space habitation in a realistic, contemporary setting will often follow a similar "troubleshooting" narrative. In The Martian, Mark Watney (Matt Damon's character) wakes up on the surface of Mars and is immediately faced with a dozen or so problems he needs to fix in order to survive, and in varying degrees of urgency. Fixing the hole in his chest caused by a flying piece of debris is priority number one, of course, but then he has to consider his supplies of oxygen, water and food and the stability of the "Hab" habitation tent he and his fellow astronauts resided in during the mission as violent storms continue to batter it. In a lot of space-faring games, this task-by-task troubleshooting will either frame the central narrative or be an ever-present aspect in the background to whatever else might be going on. It's odd that it didn't occur to me until now that the space games that bother to integrate that hook read more true than those that don't - which isn't necessarily a knock against, say, Doom that it doesn't spend a sufficient amount of time worrying about Mars's atmospheric conditions and the structural integrity of Doomguy's marine uniform and oxygen supply (though I think all that became an issue in Doom 3, so maybe someone at id Software did take that stuff seriously at one point).

A smattering of games that are built around, if only initially or tangentially, troubleshooting various issues with a space vessel or installation include: Mission Critical, an adventure game I LPed a while back that spends the first half of its running time dashing around a spaceship fixing immediate problems like hull breaches and unstable engine cores; Dead Space, where the player is specifically sent in as a space engineer to troubleshoot the functionality of a floating space wreck to restore power and possibly salvage the craft if no survivors were found, and many of the stages are built around the various decks and systems he has to repair tout de suite in spite of the monster infestation; Kerbal Space Program, which is entirely this sort of incremental scientific problem-solving; an old-ass first-person dungeon crawler I covered for ST-urday called B.S.S. Jane Seymour, which has multiple ships that you have to fix with the same routine of restoring power and fixing systems with coolant; and to a lesser extent games like Mass Effect and Metroid Prime where the protagonists respond to distress calls and spend a few tense minutes in a derelict ship before the action kicks in.

Kerbal more or less proved that a game that was purely about "sciencing a situation" could do well with a certain crowd of NASA buffs and explosion appreciators - with Giant Bomb East falling somewhere in the middle (of the ocean (because their dumb ship fell to pieces before leaving the atmosphere)) - but even as a regular guy with two "B" GCSEs in high school Science I like when sci-fi video games use this sort of high-stakes troubleshooting as a framing device. It's what the best space-faring movies and fiction (and non-fiction, I guess where Apollo 13 is involved) tend to fall back on a lot, so in some ways it's entirely expected, but it creates an interesting and intelligent set of problems that don't require giant guns to solve. Well, again, unless it's Doom. Man, I really need to play that new Doom...

New Games!

Doom! No wait, that's already out. ReCore! That's a game that hasn't come out yet, but will on Tuesday. I recall ReCore briefly being the hottest "oh shit!" game trailer at E3 that featured a female protagonist surrounded by robotic animals on a post-apocalyptic world until Horizon: Zero Dawn came along, but I'm still cautiously optimistic about it. From gameplay I've seen since then, it has a strong Ratchet & Clank platforming vibe crossed with early images of Rey from the new Star Wars movies - self-sufficient scavenger girl on a desert planet with a cute robot companion - and I'm allowed to be excited about any game that borrows a few pages from the playbook of either of those properties. That said, it feels like there's a whole lot I don't know about the game, so I'll have to wait and see.

I'd be optimistic about Dragon Quest VII for 3DS as well, except for two things: I already have some idea of what it'll be like, as a game that was first released 15 years ago that belongs a populous series that rarely changes too much from iteration to iteration. I've not played DQVII, but I have played its immediate sequels, so I can be reasonably certain of what to expect. The second thing is that, because I still have the DS remakes of DQV and DQVI to play through, it's not a game I have a strong compulsion to play for the foreseeable future. I've been neck-deep in RPGs this year (I'm counting Stardew and MGSV, shut up) regardless, with new ones joining the pile at alarming frequency, so I'm all set for now. DQ is still a series I check in on every so often though; can't really call myself an avowed JRPG fan without a solid knowledge base of the genre's grand-daddy franchise.

A game I was touched to see on the release schedule this week is the big Chunsoft-developed Mystery Dungeon-style revamp of a little Indie game called One Way Heroics, dubbed Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics for its English localization. One Way Heroics was a pleasant surprise I came across during my May Madness feature for 2014 - an unusual roguelike that, instead of sticking the player in some dungeon to see how long they could last, the player was instead sprinting across a world that was disappearing into the void behind them. The challenge was to stay ahead of the yawning vacuum that beckoned them, defeating monsters and collecting treasures along the way. The risk vs. reward dynamic was that fighting monsters and collecting treasure and going into buildings would slow you down, and potentially even cause you to get trapped. However, if you had any hope of defeating the tough opponents that appeared at certain distance milestones, going out of your way for all that extra equipment and monster-killing XP became necessary. Mystery Chronicle has rebuilt the game from scratch with additional features, though they worked closely with the One Way Heroics dev to make it happen. It's genuinely pretty cool to see a moderately well-established company choose to adapt an Indie project from a developer who was clearly inspired by and (I gotta assume) a fan of the output of the company in question. Its English localization launches on PS4, XB1, PS Vita and Steam this week - it's getting itself out there, and I'm happy more folk will get to experience a more polished version of One Way Heroics for themselves.

There's a few more exciting releases this week. Now that we're back to something approaching a regular influx of new games, I'm going to have to reduce a lot of release news to a brief bulletpoint list:

• Telltale's Minecraft: Story Mode concludes with Episode 8 just as their Batman series launches a physical disc version for PS4 and XB1. Owners of this physical disc will still need to download the episodes digitally as they come out, so I'm left wondering what the point of it is. Surely the physical edition can wait until the whole game is out and available to stick on those Blu-Rays? Anyway, the actual next Batman chapter release is next week, so I'll have more to say about it then (though it's probably just going to be "Telltale's still churning these episodic games out, huh?").
• NHL '17 is out on practically everything next week, including the last-gen consoles. Figures that it's out on a week when Jeff Bakalar is taking a vacation, though I'm sure he'll have plenty to say about it on the Beastcast once he comes back. Now I'm wondering if those two scheduled events are related...
• In the interest of fairness, I'll also say that another big sports franchise - Pro Evo Soccer - also sees its annual iteration this week. This is better known as the one franchise Konami has yet to throw under a pachinko bus or worse, but I suppose I should bite my tongue in case it comes to light that this 2017 edition also has headless zombies in it.
• I'm moderately excited for Pac-Man Championship Edition 2, though I'm not sure how many more original twists they can wring out of the original yellow pizza-man formula. Namco themselves gave up pretty quickly back in the day, literally putting a bow on his single-screen adventures before moving onto the platformers and party games.

There's some relaunches and ports too:

• Noitu Love: Devolution, Indie dev Konjak's love letter to wonderfully animated SNK and Treasure run-and-guns like Metal Slug and Gunstar Heroes, is coming to Wii U and 3DS as part of their Nindies range. The game's been around a while, but I feel like the Nintendo platforms were always meant to be their spiritual home.
• Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 2: Off the Record are all getting current gen rehashes. I guess the original turns ten years old this year? My, where does the time fly? And you can ask yourself the same question as you play those games with the very stringent time schedules they demand, but in fancy new HD graphics. Hopefully that boost will fix the tiny font problems of the first game.
• Similarly, fans of very old 360 games can rejoice in revisiting the full BioShock experience in HD with BioShock: The Collection. That includes the first three games with all DLC, like Minerva's Den for the second and Burial at Sea for the third. PC owners get something of a raw deal, since they won't be seeing a HD-ified BioShock Infinite, but can be content with the fact that they will receive the HD versions of the first two games for free if they already own the originals. I believe the official explanation for a non-"HD" BioShock Infinite for PC is that it already looked amazing on a rig with the specs to run it at full blast, rendering a new version moot. What a weird way to go about doing that.

Let's just cut the releases there, this section is getting long enough. I didn't even get to talk about Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness!

Wiki!

Completed Super '95 last week, so it was time for a new Wiki Project to focus on. I've chosen to saunter back to the PC Engine for a spell, continuing from where I left off after running through the HuCard libraries of the TurboGrafx-16's better-regarded Japanese cousin for the years of 1989 and 1990 at the start of this year. Right now I intend to finish off the rest of the PCE HuCard games - that's every single one released exclusively in Japan between the years of 1991 and 1995, after which they ceased production.

That's actually not as big a project as I'm making it sound, however. The PC Engine adopted its CD-based sibling (how many more family member metaphors can I squeeze in here?) around the very end of 1988, with developers and publishers quickly taking to the low production costs and superior memory storage of the optical media format over the old and busted HuCard cart format. Between 1991 and 1995, the back half of the PC Engine's effective lifespan, HuCard releases slowed down to a trickle. We saw something similar with the NES and the Famicom Disk System way back when: the cart technology managed to catch up so quickly to what FDS floppies were capable of - without the load times, even - that Nintendo didn't even bother releasing the peripheral overseas.

The rub, since I'm beating around the bush here, is that there were only 73 recorded PC Engine HuCard releases in the above time frame of five years. The Super Nintendo, in comparison, saw more releases than that in just one month in 1994. The PC Engine was popular in Japan, sure, but it was never that popular. And its fiddly HuCards certainly weren't popular after CDs showed the world what they could do in... uh, a terrible port of the terrible first Street Fighter game and an adventure game where the player dates an underaged teen idol. (Better PCE CD games showed up eventually, like Rondo of Blood and Lords of Thunder.)

Anyway, I took a big chunk out of 1991's PCE HuCard catalog this week: 19 out of the 44 games released that year in that format. Five of those were new pages, but since I'm not tracking those with a separate list on the site, I've thrown them in with the others below:

• OverRide: A semi-decent vertical shoot 'em up that was Sting Entertainment's first known project. You might know those guys better for their Byzantine strategy RPGs like Yggdra Union or Knights in the Nightmare. OverRide is very similar to the excellent Blazing Lazers, right down to its upgradable power-up system.
• S.C.I.: Special Criminal Investigation: This is actually just Chase HQ 2, but they dropped the franchise name for the PCE release for some reason. It's a very middling port of the Arcade game, and an indication that the PC Engine would not be a viable platform for such conversions in the future. Well, not until it could get the Super CD/TurboDuo's extra oomph.
• Aldynes : A horizontal shoot 'em up that was created specifically for the SuperGrafx, otherwise known as one of the least successful consoles in living memory. The game itself isn't too bad though; it showed off what the enhanced SuperGrafx could do with some fancy 16-bit parallax scrolling, but since it was one of only five games released for the system it couldn't do much to save it.
• Puzzle Boy: As in, Kwirk, that Game Boy puzzle game where you push walls around on pivots to make a path to the exit. The PCE version is functionally identical but for the whole, you know, "having colors other than puke green" deal.
• Final Match Tennis: Human, the creators of Fire Pro, made a few of these Final Match tennis games for various systems. This one's well-regarded for its simple, approachable arcade gameplay and four-player functionality. If I'm able to play a sports game without making a fool out of myself, it's doing something right. Or I am, but that's far less likely.
• Zero-4 Champ: I've worked on two of these Zero-4 game pages for the Super Famicom, so it's a little odd to suddenly bump into the series originator. The goal of Zero-4, which is a shortening of "0-400m", is to compete in illegal drag races for cash and underworld fame. If you've seen the Fast and Furious movies before they completely lost their minds, you'll know it involves a lot of supercharging things and in-depth talk about car parts. I'm in your face.
• Obocchama-kun: I'd never heard of this anime/manga license before this week, but one of the few English-language sources on it was from a Ranma 1/2 fan site that apparently has an ancient beef with Obocchama-kun because the success of its animated adaptation, with whom Ranma 1/2 had a competing time slot, would be a factor in the Ranma 1/2 anime's eventual cancellation. It's about some ludicrously rich and obnoxious brat who represented Japan's naive complacency in their economic bubble of the late 80s. The game version, a dull platformer, is an excuse for a lot of goofy sight gags and in-jokes from the show. Apparently its NES brother is an early example of Mario Party's gameplay model of "chase a thing halfway across the board, and then follow the next waypoint".
• Titan: Not to be the giant naked dude who has to attack on Titan, but this Breakout variant just isn't all that compelling to me. Instead of being stuck to the bottom of the screen, blocking the bouncing ball from flying down into the oblivion below, you are instead moving around with full 2D mobility, reflecting the ball around a maze instead. Titan's one of those games that made the rounds on European home computers before someone in Japan was curious enough to adapt it for its home audience.
• Pro Yakyuu World Stadium '91: Well, it's a baseball game from Namco. They couldn't call those games "Family Stadium" though, as that was a Nintendo-specific brand (due to being on the Family Computer, or Famicom). World Stadium is essentially what the Family Stadium (Famista to you or I) games are called on non-Nintendo platforms, which include the PC Engine, the Arcades and the Sony PlayStation.
• 1943 Kai: Talking of Arcades, Capcom released their 1943 "revision" on the PC Engine, and was one of the few consoles to see that particular version of the game. 1943 is of course the sequel to 1942, which is one of the better WW2 shoot 'em ups out there. Or at least the most prominent one.
• Columns: Sega didn't give two hoots about first-party exclusivity for some of its earliest games, like the famous Antiquity-based Genesis puzzle game Columns. Columns also saw a release for the Famicom too, though both that version and this one were only available in Japan. Still, it's not like you need to know a lot of Japanese to play Columns. It's Match-3, dogg.
• Moto Roader II: Top-down racing game, not unlike Micro Machines. As with that toyline licensed racer, you have to stay with the pack as getting left behind incurs harsh penalties. The one big difference between this and its predecessor is that you could now also be a hovercraft or a tank, though they had their ups and downs compared to the standard car.
• Populous: Yup, Peter "show 'em mah balls" Molyneux's original god-sim got its own Japan-exclusive PC Engine port. It never stops being weird to see UK-developed games on these Japan-only lists. This game is the only one I've seen that comes with a default widescreen mode, stretching the normal horizontal resolution value of the PC Engine to fit in all the buttons.
• Circus Lido: It's Circus Ride, but since the title screen spells "Lido" out in English that's the name we've gotta go with. It has nothing to do with circuses, naturally, but instead has the player climbing around single-screen stages feeding bugs to Venus flytraps. It plays like a charmless and kinda cruel variant of Bubble Bobble.
• Eternal City: A side-scrolling mech game with some artistic input from Ghost in the Shell creator Masamune Shirow. For all its credentials, it looked (and is) extremely dull to play. Like an eternity, even.
• Hatris: Hatris really did come out on everything. The Tetris developer's haberdashery follow-up has something of a cult following, thanks in part to its nutty premise of storing many, many hats on top of unsuspecting shoppers. I forget if the NES version had different heads, but this one switches them around every level.
• Power Eleven: It's a soccer game. I don't have much to say about this one, other than it's part of Hudson's "Power" sports line which also includes Power League. Because of its vintage, it's one of a few 16-bit sports games to let you play as the Soviet Union or West Germany, so that's something.
• F1 Circus '91: So sick of F1 Circus games. They all play the same, but there were so many of them for the Super Famicom and it looks like the PC Engine has at least one more to go as well. Lord help me, I just don't understand what Drew and Danny see in this motorsport.

Expand!

Yeesh. I figured I'd try Expand because it was free in the same Humble Bundle that offered up Regency Solitaire and it seemed like a breezy puzzle game with a neat gimmick - and it is neat! - but I wasn't prepared for how it'd make me feel. I'm still sitting here nursing a bout of motion-sickness-induced nausea and a headache, and it's rare that any game can make me feel that way. I'm speaking as someone who can play hours of head-bobbin' FPS games in single sessions without incident, but Expand wiped me out in thirty minutes.

The game looks on the surface like every other minimalist Indie action game: you're a cube, you have to float around a lot of monochrome level design while avoiding getting trapped or touching any hazardous red surfaces, both of which will bump you back to a "safe" checkpoint. However, the levels are built around a circular core where right and left are actually clockwise and counter-clockwise, and up and down are "away from the center" and "into the center" respectively. This results in a lot of controller confusion, especially when you're at the bottom of the screen and the controls appear to be reversed - going clockwise from 6 o'clock would make you go left, not right. Add to this the way that the stage elements quickly scroll into and out from the center of the circle rather than scrolling left or right and it really starts to mess around with your visual acuity before too long.

In addition, the game makes the fatal error of conflating increasing challenge with a frugality of checkpointing, with difficult sections often going on for minutes without respite and demanding a high level of concentration. That's barely acceptable for most puzzle/action games that adhere to a strict difficulty curve, but the game doesn't account for the fact that the above traversal is so off-putting that it never normalizes through practice the way most control schemes do - the game simply assumes that you'll get used to the idea of "right as clockwise" eventually and roll with it, using that logical fallacy to justify its ramping up of the difficulty level at a steady rate. This makes the game very obnoxious to play, in addition to nauseating. Sometimes you see an indie puzzle-platformer with some cool new paradigm-shifting concept and wonder why no-one had ever thought to build a game around it before, and then you get those like Expand where it's all too obvious why no-one would seriously consider it, despite the cool effects it can produce.

Music's all right, though.

Divinity: Original Sin!

I feel like I'm making good progress with Divinity: Original Sin, and I appreciate how much it resembles the first game in the series despite the many welcome advances to its combat and character progression. The first game, Divine Divinity, had a top-down open-world that resembled a Diablo game. You'd be placed in the middle of the screen and you'd explore the contours of the huge area you're in for various treasure chests hiding in nooks and crannies, discovering new side-quests and waypoints along the way as more of the fog of war becomes uncovered. Exploring the first region of Divinity: Original Sin, Cyseal, felt a lot like that. Some areas would be gated off by well-meaning Legionnaires (a world-encompassing peacekeeping force who established a presence in Cyseal due to its undead horde problem) until the player's party had hit a certain experience level, but the rest would be free for an inquisitive band of heroes to investigate.

The game builds its encounters in such a way that, rather than attempting to scale them all to the player's present level, creates encounters of a specific level of challenge and it's down to the player to encounter them in the right "order", as it were. Some areas are far more dangerous as a result, and there are many ways those areas can deter a low-level band without just massacring them. What complicates matters is that the player is seeking the source of the undead in this opening chapter, and they might quickly find the culprit if they started poking around the higher level areas accidentally. They might even bump into the "boss" of that region if they happened upon the specific route. Fortunately, the game does corral you a little without too much railroading, offering you a selection destinations to check out first before it naturally guides you to the more challenging locations and quests. It also makes it clear that you'd be best served spending an hour or so completing tasks in the starting town before setting out and getting into battles with the large groups of undead monsters surrounding the walls. If nothing else, the resources gained in these early quests would ensure your mage has plenty of decent fire-based area-of-effect spells, and your warriors have some blunt weaponry to use on the skeletons.

On the whole, I much prefer when games build their encounters with some deliberation, rather than hamfistedly scaling every encounter or having endless random battles to grind your way through. It means more work for the designers of course, which is why it's understandably not as common as I'd prefer, but I appreciate that every single battle in the game has some thought behind its creation. That's also made apparent when you factor in the game's great sense of environmental hazards and elemental dissonance. That's kind of a buzzword-y way of saying that every element has more to it than simply enemy resistances - the usual scenario where you'd have a fire monster that was weak to water or ice magic, say - and can create all sorts of effects depending on the state of the battlefield. Fire can cause a burning effect, which produces damage over time; earth spells tend to create pools of oil, which can be either be left to slow enemies down as they move across it, or ignited with fire to make it very painful to stand in; water magic can produce pools of water, which are harmless on their own but will cause enemies standing in them to be stunned if shocked with electricity or fall over if frozen with ice. Barrels and destructible fixtures are scattered around many battle encounters, allowing the player to make use of their oily or watery contents in lieu of spells that produce similar effects. Certain elemental pairs have complementary effects, so earth and fire is a great early combo for that burning oil pool scenario (you can also ignite clouds of poison), as is the electrified pools of water that air and water produce. There's also a huge number of status effects to fall back on, both positive and negative, and it makes the game far more tactical than other RPGs. Between the rules-heavy turn-based combat and all the above, it feels like the truest modern successor to Troika's sophisticated but flawed The Temple of Elemental Evil. I could say the same thing for last year's Pillars of Eternity too, of course.

At any rate, I imagine I'll be done with Divinity: Original Sin before another week is over, and I'll put together some final thoughts on the game come next Sunday. For now though, I'd better call this edition of Sunday Summaries here. This was definitely a long one...

This week has been one of catharsis. For me, it meant the completion of both my long-running Metal Gear Solid V reactions blog series and the Super '95 Wiki Project, which you can read more about in their respective sections of this week's Summaries below. For Giant Bomb, PAX West has allowed Dan to finally spill the beans and announce his intent to cross coasts on a more permanent basis - I guess they didn't think to try a "raised stakes" winner leaves town match - and leave the gap in GB's line-up to be filled by the West branch instead. I'm as curious as you all who might step in to complete the ensemble, though I suspect they'll be looking for someone with Dan's energy and positivity - two traits that have greatly energized GBWest's content for better and, only rarely, for worse.

But just in general, there's also the catharsis of ending another tedious Summer and brooking the always wild Autumn and Winter months and all its new releases in the various spheres of media you might consume. I'll be using my birthday in the upcoming season as an excuse to finally catch up with some of this year's endless parade of fantastic games - I especially want to try Dark Souls III, Doom, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Inside, Uncharted 4 and Zero Time Dilemma at some point soon, as well as a bunch of Indies - as well as continue plugging away at the backlog I've been letting pile up this past month.

One thing my catharsis didn't do was convince me that starting another game with a gigantic runtime wasn't a smart idea, but I'll have more to say about that in greater detail too. How about you guys? Any great weights lifted off your shoulders as we head towards more temperate weather?

New Games!

It's a great week for anime fans. I mean, I always seem to have a gaggle of anime games to present for the New Games tab week after week, but the first full week of September sees some particularly good ones. I can't decide between two in particular for my most anticipated release this week: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice and The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II.

The first is, of course, the newest game in the Ace Attorney series, which combines adventure game point-and-clicking with deductive (and dramatic! So dramatic!) courtroom intrigue. It's a great marriage of Western-style adventure gaming and Eastern-style visual novel, and I always look forward to any new games coming out of that series. Especially given how rare it is these days that Capcom puts out anything that isn't some half-assed Resident Evil project or Street Fighter sequel. I do still have this game's predecessor, Dual Destinies, to finish first though. I'm getting around to it, I swear!

The second is going to take some effort to describe: it's a sequel to a spin-off of a series which was itself a spin-off of an anthology series created in the 1980s. Actually, I suppose that's a little off the mark: every The Legend of Heroes game is part of a smaller set, usually a trilogy, each of which is tied together by its cast or setting. These trilogies have nothing to do with each other on a grander scale beyond similar gameplay systems. It's like, say, the relationship between the three Final Fantasy XIII games - which are all linked narratively and share the same cast and world - and the Final Fantasy series as a whole, which have no such narrative links to each entry. The first full The Legend of Heroes trilogy we saw was the "Gagharv" trilogy, comprised of The Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion, The Legend of Heroes: Song of the Ocean and The Legend of Heroes: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch: three fine if unremarkable PSP RPGs with unfortunately lackluster translations - even the release order was wrong. The next three, all part of the serial Trails in the Sky trilogy, have seen far better translations (so far - part three, or "Third Chapter", is still on the way) and are generally better JRPGs with a focus on mission-based gameplay. Cold Steel, the newest trilogy to see English localization, looks to follow that series in translation and gameplay quality. All right, so I didn't actually say too much about the specific game (it has a military academy, I think?), but I do so love to waffle about video game history. It's what all that wiki-ing does to a person. Treat this like the cautionary tale it is.

Other new games this week include Beyond Flesh and Blood, a third-person shooter featuring bipedal robots set in my neck (mech?) of the woods; Devolver's absurdly violent Soviet-themed brawler Mother Russia Bleeds; that weird anime card-battle waifu game we saw at E3 this year Qurare: Magic Library; and the official Early Access release of bizarre communal building simulator The Tomorrow Children, which is also the second USSR-inspired game this week.

In port news: Oceanhorn, which I wrote about a little while ago, is coming to PS4 and Xbox One. If you've not played this wonderful if flagrant Wind Waker-inspired Indie action-adventure game, you have a window to do so now before the sequel shows up in a few months' time. Meanwhile, the Wii U will see Nordic boss-rush actioner Jotun and Steam users can experience the time- and punctuation-twisting visual novel Steins;Gate. I've heard enough good things about both of those to strongly consider playing them eventually.

Wiki!

If not you've heard the news or seen the newest quarterly collage, it's true: the behemoth that is the Super '95 Wiki Project has been conquered. This week, I cleaned up what was left of December 1995's release schedule for the Super Nintendo and finally put this project to rest after spending more than half a year chipping away at it. Of course, that makes it sound like I've been working away at it non-stop for seven months, rather than making the occasional incremental progress whenever I had podcasts to listen to, but still.

So then, onto the fifteen pages that saw some renovation this week. An incredible seven of those were brand new - you can peruse the usual list for more info on those - so that leaves us with the following eight to discuss:

• SD Gundam G Next is, as you might expect, a lore-heavy strategy game based on the standard "Universal Century" setting of Gundam. It features Gundams from Gundam G and Gundam Wing too, apparently, though it's not like I'm going to be able to tell them apart. Like any strategy game with interchangeable units, you build and take over facilities, produce more units and try to overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers. One big difference is that all combat in the game - whether it's fighting other Gundams or base installations - requires an action minigame. No crushing your enemies with your wits and tactical awareness alone.
• Super Chinese World 3 comes from one of those series that - given how inherently silly and Asian it is - only ever seems to get localized very occasionally. North America and Europe saw five Super Chinese games: Kung-Fu Heroes and Little Ninja Brothers for NES, Ninja Boy and Ninja Boy 2 for Game Boy, and Super Ninja Boy for SNES. Suffice it to say, in Japan it's a much longer and more involved series that also includes RPGs (like Super Chinese World 3) and fighter games (like Super Chinese Fighter).
• Tengai Makyou Zero is a JRPG prequel for a series, known to us as Far East of Eden, that enjoys full CD audio and voice acting on its native PC Engine CD. They presumably felt it was prudent to establish a foothold in the vastly more popular Super Famicom market, though that also meant losing a lot of the benefits of the CD format. I don't think Square was the only developer unhappy with Nintendo's obstinacy with cart-based systems. There's some impressive tech used in the Tengai Makyou Zero cart to scrabble back some of those lost features though: specifically, the SPC7110 chip. Not only does this greatly expand the game's memory storage - it doesn't need to repeat enemy sprites, for instance, and contains a lot more music than its JRPG contemporaries - but it has a real-time clock that can be set beforehand and is reflected as the in-game time of day, like Animal Crossing. Only a handful of games have SPC7110 chips in them, none of which were released outside of Japan.
• The Great Battle V would be yet another uninspired Compati Hero Series 2D licensed quickie side-scroller, but for its Western theme which allows it to take the occasional detour into Sunset Riders/Wild Guns territory with big third-person shoot-out levels. The game has some fun imagining its various licenses - Ultraman, SD Gundam and Kamen Rider - as rootin'-tootin' cowboys, and I feel like I'd appreciate this ubiquitous licensed series if it had done silly stuff like this more often.
• Saikyou: Takada Nobuhiko - I couldn't tell you who Nobuhiko Takada was (I mean, I could, because I had to research him for the Overview text), but I can tell you that this is one of a handful of MMA games for the Super Famicom. Not just in the usual fighter game sense where every character uses a different martial art, but that it's based on a genuine, early MMA promotion (UWFI) and ruleset and helps to demonstrate that such organizations were starting to build in popularity alongside the standard Pro Wrestling circuits. It does the Fire Pro thing of having fictionalized versions of other UWFI talent besides the eponymous Takada, but anyone in the know can look right past the made-up names to tell who is who.
• Sangokushi: Eiketsuden is a spin-off of Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms games, one with an idea that would inspire the dry strategy sim developers create similar spin-offs later on. That idea is to follow around a single major character involved with the conflict - for this game, that would be the Shu warlord and all-round nice guy Liu Bei - and split the game's time between his strategizing on the battlefield in the usual Koei war-gaming style and his running around looking for allies and recruits in the down-time between battles alongside his buddies Guan Yu and Zhang Fei in sequences which work more like an adventure game or RPG.
• Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin, the final game to be released on the Super Nintendo in 1995, is also the fifth game in Falcom's series of rockin' action-RPGs that feature perma-protagonist Adol "The Red" Christin. It's distinctive for being a Super Famicom exclusive: Falcom usually creates their games for the PC platform first and then later ports them to consoles, so this was an abnormality. To reflect its new home, the action RPG gameplay was slightly modified to more resemble The Legend of Zelda, with a top-down view that had players using buttons to swing swords, hold up shields and use items that assist in traversal. Because the game was made a bit easier for a console audience, Falcom took to heart the negative fan reactions and released "Ys V Expert" a few months later. It's also presently the only major Ys game without an official English localization, as neither the SFC version nor the 2006 PS2 remake ever saw a North American release. Aeon Genesis have got you covered with a decent fan localization, however.

Anyway, that's the last you'll be hearing about SNES games for a while. Super '96 beckons in the far distance, and I'm going to far more enjoy its comparatively meager 180+ releases compared to the 400+ bad boy I just went through, but I like to keep things varied. My intent is to head back to the PC Engine to finish up the rest of its HuCard games, and then I've got some clean-up to do ensuring pages related to older projects are up to snuff.

I guess that just about wraps things up for this week's wiki section and... wait, what's this???

It's a wiki emergency! If you're not aware, I started getting heavy into GB wiki editing after being inspired by the research-heavy Chrontendo video series from the mellifluous Dr. Sparkle, and whenever a new Chrontendo video makes an appearance I drop everything to transfer its many knowledge gems to the Giant Bomb wiki.

Chrontendo Episode 50 saw the dissemination of fifteen NES, Famicom and Famicom Disk System games in total, along with a round-up of where computer gaming was at in 1989, and I'd recommend you carve out the ninety minutes it'll take to watch it. Hey, that's the average length of a GBEast Quick Look, so it shouldn't be too hard to find the time. Rest assured, those fifteen NES/FC/FDS games all have full pages now, but I'm not going to bother explicating on them here when the video does a much better job.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!

In the interest of time and the fact that this week's Summaries is getting long enough without a whole mess of talk about Divinity: Original Sin to follow, I'll just point you towards Part 8 of the Mento Gear Solid reactions series - which conveniently links to every previous entry - and move onto the final progress tally for the game.

When I decided that I had seen enough of Metal Gear Solid V, my progress tracker was at 77%. I'm still missing two core missions - #48 EXTREME Code Talker and #50 EXTREME Sahelanthropus. I've also only earned half the S-ranks in the game - that's 24 out of 48, since two of the missions don't rank you - and I have bonus mission objectives to complete for pretty much every single mission in the game, since a lot are counterintuitive and will make it much harder to get the S-rank, which I prioritized instead (I'm talking about objectives like "rescue the prisoner in this random-ass location miles away from the mission target"). I'm about two-thirds done with the side ops; I really wanted to complete all the mine-clearing ones since they have a trophy attached to them, but the game has an odd system where whenever you have two side ops in the same location one takes priority over the other, and you need to complete that before the other will show up. Since I don't know where the mine-clearing side ops will be, I therefore don't know which side ops I need to complete first to activate them. Finally, while I did capture every animal, I'm still missing one music tape. A few of the key items you earn from milestones are missing too, like the certificate you get from Fultoning 1000 people (I just hit 700 by the time I finished, with no room left for new people) and the ones you get from S-ranking everything.

However, I did complete the Paz storyline and forgot to include it in the last part, so here's my (spoiler-blocked for those who haven't played MGSV) thoughts on that as a little epilogue to that whole series:

Don't worry though, as I will return for that bonus tape entry eventually. Not sure when, but I'm certain there'll be a week soon enough where I have nothing better to write about than my reactions to a whole bunch of heavy MGS exposition delivered slowly via audio.

Divinity: Original Sin!

I'm only a few hours into Larian Studios's 2014 RPG Divinity: Original Sin, one that came out of nowhere and threatened to dethrone Dragon Age: Inquisition as the best CRPG offering for that year. I have some experience with the Divinity series: I played its inaugural game Divine Divinity many years ago, and witnessed a lot of Divinity 2: Ego Draconis/The Dragon Knight Saga in passing, but Divinity: Original Sin made a big splash with its refocused approach to tactical RPG combat. I'd heard a few disparaging things (mostly from Rorie) about its minimal amount of player-created characters and its open-but-not-really world, which is a carefully regulated series of dungeons and encounters that will pound you if you don't do them in something close to the right order, due to how disadvantageous it can be if you're just a few levels lower than the enemies you're facing.

Presently, though, I'm enjoying the game a lot. I can appreciate why there's only two player-created characters - you create personalities for both of them, and often that means having them disagree on how to complete quests or communicate with an NPC, and adding more voices to that dynamic would just be a complete mess. Various personality types are in stark contrast with each other and offer different benefits - Pragmatic vs. Romantic, for instance, will provide a bonus to the Crafting skill or the Lucky Charm skill respectively, the former needed to make items and the latter making it possible to occasionally find really good treasure when searching through containers. You might have your main character searching containers a lot while the second does all the crafting, so you'd focus on opposing personality types for the two: this leads to arguments, which in turn leads to determining which path to take with a rock-scissors-paper game. The minigame itself doesn't add much, but I like that I'm building a partnership that still has room for friction and bickering on certain matters. My two characters will always be united when it comes to choosing the Altruistic path, or being Independent enough to run off and do side-quests instead of their main task, but they'll argue over almost everything else due to how different personality quirks affect their different skillsets.

My one big thing when it comes to game design, which I've reiterated ad nauseum, is player convenience. You can put players through the wringer emotionally, you can force them to get better at the game with obscene challenges, but never give them more busywork or tedium than is necessary or have them repeat large swathes of the game if it adds nothing to the overall experience. Different designers (and players, for that matter) have different ideas and limits for how much they want to spend running back and forth when better options exist, but Divinity: Original Sin makes several strides in the right direction by having a "get out of jail free" flee system in combat and a fast travel system that can be activated anywhere at any time. As long as I've gotten close enough to a waypoint to put it on the map, I can warp directly to it. I also have a pair of pyramids that lets me warp between them after placing one of them on the ground somewhere, which also makes traversal far more palatable.

The PS4 version of the game does have some awkward UI - you can tell how much of this game is predicated on clicking and dragging objects with the mouse, which the console doesn't reproduce too well - that can drag the game down a bit as you figure which of the PC version's many buttons correspond to which buttons on the controller, sometimes unintuitively, but I'm doing all right with it so far. I just need to get out the habit I always have with these games where I can't leave the first town because I'm too busy stealing everything and finding a place to hock it. One of the few bits of advice I listened to before playing was that the battles get very tough once you leave the starting town, so I'm making sure I can sweep up all the non-combative quests for the XP before I ever need to fight anything - it's a strategy that served me well in The Temple of Elemental Evil and Baldur's Gate 1, and I hope it does so here as well.

It's a big game, so I'll have to save my other thoughts for future Summaries. As always when I take up gigantic games, I'll try and fit in some smaller Indie stuff to keep these blogs varied.

Seven months later, and here we are: there were 411 (we think?) games released on the Super Nintendo Enterainment System/Super Famicom in 1995, and the Giant Bomb wiki has (mostly) complete pages for every single one. The fourth quarter was by far the busiest of that year: November braced itself for the US holiday rush of new releases, and December saw Japan respond with their own. Combined with October, we're talking a total release count of 125 games in that three month window. That's more than most systems see in a year. In fact, that's thirteen less than every game for the TurboGrafx-16 and the TurboGrafx-CD put together. In three months.

Marathons are always the most difficult at the end though, and I'm happy to announce that this one is over. The Super Nintendo would see its last big year in 1995: it spent the whole duration competing with the technologically superior and developer-friendlier (due to the relatively cheap CD format) Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn, and yet still clowned the two in number of total releases. Once both those systems hit North America and Europe, however, it was the beginning of the end for the once-unconquerable Super Nintendo. The SNES 1996 release schedule will see a greatly reduced number of new games - less than half of 1995's - and with ever-diminishing returns every year after that until the new millennium, when the SNES was finally put to rest. It's at least a little gratifying to know that I'll never have a Wiki Project as immense as this one or last year's Super '94 (which, oddly enough, also ended on a September).

Thanks to everyone who has supported this project with comments and the like, either on these quarterly collages or via my weekly Sunday Summaries wiki updates, and I hope to see you soon for more PC Engine and SNES Wiki Projects down the road. And, as always, be sure to check the "key" in the spoiler block below for every page/game in the above collage, along with a brief description.

Right on time, at the cusp of the first day of Autumn and the rest of the year's big releases, today we see the end of the Mento Gear Solid V observations series.

I've had my ups and downs with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, especially with the missions in this final entry, but I feel a lot of that is due to the huge amount of content on offer: there's no way you could possibly create almost a hundred hours of gameplay without a few fumbles. In spite of my negative tone at several points, I do think the game is genuinely spectacular. It's a true realization of what Kojima had always wanted a Metal Gear game to be: lore-rich, cinematic like his beloved action movies, and as mechanically dense as anyone could feasibly expect a game to be. There's just so much versatility on display with the various weapons, tools and gear at Snake's disposal, the multitude of clever little touches to discover, and an endless amount of predictable but still intelligent enemy forces to outwit. Even if you boil away all the great base-building elements, the recruiting, the typically labyrinthine plot about secret paramilitary wings of the CIA, a resurrected parasitic lifeform bred for chaos and death, a hundred different literary applications of the term "phantom", and a really determined soldier of fortune, you'd still have one of the most impressive stealth games that has ever been made. Whenever I get addicted to a game of this length, it's usually because I can fall into a relaxed rhythm with its simple gameplay - take, for instance, the mindless farming/grinding in RPGs or running around collecting orbs and other sparklies in an open-world game like Arkham Batman, Assassin's Creed or InFamous - but MGSV had me on my toes at almost all times throughout its illimitable runtime. Though I am somewhat relieved to leave it behind, this might've been the game I've played the longest for a single playthrough. Out of everything I've ever played, even (though Terraria comes very close). That it kept my rapt attention - and my concentration! - so long is the biggest compliment I could give this game. I honestly do believe it's the finest work Kojima has ever created, and it shames Konami to have let him go immediately after its conclusion.

At any rate, we better get to the meat of these final missions and the revelations they contain. I'm sure the handful of you that are already well-acquainted with the game have been following along and looking forward to my reactions to the game's big reveal, so I won't keep you. (And, probably needless to say, if you haven't beaten Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain yet I recommend you go do that instead of reading a whole bunch of spoilers for its ending.)

Part 8: The Mento Who Told the World (That He Was Done With MGS)

• You know what's awesome? When a tutorial locks you out of the iDroid menu to tell you something you already know about how an online feature works, and then tells you it can't connect to that online feature and just forget about the amazing thing it had to tell you about for the time being. And then when you come back later and open the iDroid, it does the whole thing again. Thanks game.
• Mission #41. Speaking of forcing poorly-conceived recurring detestations on the player, MGSV has decided that it wasn't enough that we had a timed mission to destroy vehicles coming from every direction in a fairly large mission area apparently designed to necessitate several restarts in order to roll with the punches, or that the player would enjoy nothing more than an even harder version of that same stage to enjoy, but that they needed at least one more except now destroying all the enemy vehicles is mandatory - including a non-extractable gunship, so that's fun for stealth-focused players - and tanks and armored vehicles can somehow still operate and seek you out even when they've been electromagnetized to shit, including turning their weapons directly around to face you even though the back is conventionally a tank/vehicle's blindspot.
• I'll toss this little thought exercise your way: You are a tank operator working for an African-based Private Force. Your vehicle suddenly gets hit with a mysterious electrical current that disables all your tank's controls, including forward trajectory and weapon systems. What's more, the stunning power of the electricity coursing through the solid metal body of the tank was enough to send you and anyone else inside the vehicle into convulsing unconsciousness for several seconds. With this in mind, do you: A) lie on the floor of the tank twitching slightly until it passes, and then perhaps seek what enemy caused the issue and why before continuing to your mission objective? or B) shrug off the charge, justifying your immunity because of... I dunno, rubber boots? then get on the cannon, ignore science telling you that the cannon doesn't work with 50,000 volts passing through it and force it to work with your latent telekinetic powers that the shock managed to awaken from its lifelong dormancy, immediately spin the barrel of the cannon to face the rear of the tank, assuming that danger is more likely to come from the direction you were just driving away from as fast as a tank could go rather than the sides or front of the vehicle, and then blow the shit out of a surprised saboteur who thought the game's tenuous grasp on reality meant none of the above could possibly apply. If you answered "A", Kojima is very disappointed with your words and deeds.
• Let me pause my own vitriol for a moment to direct it elsewhere. The game checkpoints missions fairly regularly though it is still governed by a few rules, some obvious and some less so. For instance, approaching an outpost or guard post will often prompt a quick save, which makes sense because getting close to an outpost can often lead to a lot of danger and the game's programming can easily account for triggering a checkpoint save within a certain proximity to one of its major locations. That's one of those serendipitous aspects of game design: when something convenient for the player corresponds to something that is convenient/possible for the coders to implement. Then you have situations where, in order to make the game more convenient for the player, more checkpoints have to be added: let's say for those missions that take place entirely within one large outpost or outside of outposts, and thus there's less opportunities for the outpost-based checkpointing to apply. With the above mission, the game will checkpoint after extracting/destroying certain vehicles, in other words making the logical leap of checkpointing the game after completing one of your mission objectives. What this can result in, and did for me several times, is a situation where you'd extract the first of two tanks moving in formation and then get made by the electified second tank due the above idiocy, and when you restart from the checkpoint because you're trying to be stealthy it puts you immediately after you extracted the one vehicle but immediately - and I mean within fractions of a second - before the other one spotted you and opened fire. The game's checkpoints also have this fascinating property of occasionally loading you in a few seconds after the point it saved, and then a few more seconds after that for every subsequent reload. So, hypothetically for instance, if you were dashing to a marked location to drop some EMN mines in the path of the next vehicle before it can enter an outpost full of guards that would absolutely spot a giant tank floating off into the sky, it's likely you might not make it there in time and get spotted by the vehicle before the mines could be placed, which would either mean triggering a battle alert or getting instantly murdered by its shells. One reload later, and you now have even less time to get there. At this point, you can either keep risking an increasingly smaller and smaller chance of success or just start over, since your only available options are the last checkpoint or the very start of the mission. Which, of course, also includes the thirty seconds of moving to the LZ in the Pequod and listening to Miller describe the basics of the mission you just almost completed in an inadvertently mocking manner. Every time. Hey, guess who has two thumbs and is getting pretty sick of this game's bullshit? (b^_^)b
• Eli's in a similar rageboat right now, getting himself and his kid army out of Mother Base by having them hijack one of our support helicopters while he uses Psykid to steal Stopdropandrollopus. The game confirmed earlier in a tape that Psychic Mini-tis latches onto particularly strong wills exhibiting negative emotions, and allows himself - though probably not willingly - to act as a psychokinetic conduit for that rage and resentment to power things like enormous battle mechs or ambulatory burned corpses. It also had some line about how children create a stronger effect than adults due to an underdeveloped myelin sheath, which is actually a real anatomical thing and not something Kojima read on a condom wrapper once. Thus, when we were attacked by the Schadenfreude, it was actually the nearby Eli who forced it to break out and rampage across Afghanistan after us, rather than the immediately squished Charizard. Anyway, the kid duo managed it again here, and they all leave for good with the vague concern that out there, somewhere, some punk-ass brat is taking an enormous Gundam out for a joyride. So glad I bothered to complete all those side ops to bring those kids back. Time well spent. (There's also confirmation that Eli isn't Liquid Snake, or at least he's in no way a genetic clone or even related to Big Boss. Hmm. Could be two ways to interpret that.)
• Mission #42. What's curious about this one rehash mission is that it appears to be essential? There's no gold marker over it, but I have no other available missions right now, nor any "critical" side ops that usually go on to trigger the next story mission. Predictably, it follows the Extreme variant of the "boss battle" Quiet mission with an Extreme variant of the second boss battle; that is to say, the airport encounter with the armored Skulls that forces you to fight them all off with the most powerful lethal weapons in your arsenal, and it sucks to be you if you've developed nothing but tranq guns. Now that the Skulls hit harder and take more to defeat, I've been putting more development work into our robotic buddy D-Walker, using the time to complete a handful of other side ops that keep popping up. (This isn't really the plan; I wanted to blast through the remaining story missions today (08/30) and start writing up a finale piece tomorrow (08/31).) Anyway, this mission was pure torture, but in a way that I can be less mad about. Here, you will quickly die doing absolutely any of the strategies that worked with the first version of this mission: the Skulls simply damage you too much too quickly, even with the battle dress gear. Actually, given this is a fight of attrition, the bigger issue is that I wasn't doing nearly enough damage to them in return; I haven't been upgrading my lethal rocket launchers, assault rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers to a competitive level (let's say 5 or 6, where the development costs get considerable), and so they were all lacking against these powerful foes. Discovering a nearby anti-air gun turret, I used all eight of my active decoys to keep the Skulls nearby but distracted, and simply destroyed them all with that instead. The level 4 gatling gun on D-Walker - which I figured would be a safe bet, but nope - did peanuts compared to the output of one of those turrets. The last Skull didn't get fooled, alas, and destroyed the turret with me in it. Yet, I managed to hobble away and create enough distance that he got attached to one of the remaining decoys and I was actually able to sneak in and start dropping C4 around his feet and won that way. A close one - I was definitely worried that I'd have to leave it until I'd got in a few hours (and a few million GMP's worth) of high-level lethal weapons R&D, making it harder to complete the game by the deadline.
• Mission #43. The game was really cagey about starting this one. After the previous mission, which probably wasn't essential after all, I completed a few more side ops and suddenly got an emergency alert that another parasite epidemic had broken out on Mother Base; I figured this was Eli's parting gift for the Diamond Dogs. Snake decides to go into the Quarantine Platform alone, without his high-level equipment even, to root out the source of the parasites. I'm on the clock here, since at least hundred of my soldiers are displaying symptoms (sorta? Code Talker seems less sure of what the symptoms are). The mission turned out to be... very depressing. There wasn't much in the way of nuance or tactics here, and there was certainly no evident "non-lethal" alternate strategy to take: its role was entirely narrative, an interactive massacre of the many infected soldiers that looked up to you and trusted you. After being convinced that any infected escapees would spread the parasites to the birds circling the platform, which would then spread it to the entire world, I was forced to shoot each of the infected in the head before they could escape. The game pulls a mean trick by giving you a means via modified night-vision goggles to identify which soldiers were infected and which were not, as every single soldier was infected. With each shot, my heroism would tick down and I'd lose another R&D or Security staff member. It's a brutal way of impressing the value of your personnel on you, and the heartbreak of eliminating them; any staff members on Mother Base will display their codename after you scan them, and that was retained here as you checked them all for the parasites. A lot of adjective-animals lost their lives this day, and someone will have to pay.
• Specifically, forty-nine people died, including nine S-ranked R&D people. I'm going to feel that one if I ever need something built.
• The following scene is one of the best the game's spat out so far, a quiet moment where - rather than spread the ashes of the deceased Dogs into the sea - Snake chooses to have them turned into diamonds and incorporated into the soldier's equipment, that they might always be with them on sorties. The game is also focusing on Snake's "horn" more, and how continuing to do evil (but unfortunately necessary) deeds might transform him into a literal demon. It's taking an idea from Fable and Mass Effect 2 and making it a little more on the nose (or forehead, I suppose), but I get what they're going for here in how Big Boss's legacy as the ultimate soldier often doesn't take into account how ruthless he may or may not have been to earn that accolade. I didn't realize this game had any kind of meta-narrative that changed depending on how often the player chose to perform good or evil actions, in the same way something like Dishonored did, mostly because I deploy everywhere with a weapon that can make people unconscious.
• Of course, now that my Diamond Dogs emblem sparkles with the added diamonds, I gotta wonder if this won't make me more visible. Couldn't have gone with something less showy, perhaps?
• For a bit of levity, I spotted a certain side op that piqued my curiosity before I realized what it was. You see, most side ops have twenty different variations on the same goal - rescue a guy, extract an enemy guy, take out a team of armored guys, clear mines before they blow up a guy, etc. - so a unique "rescue an intel agent" side op must have something significant going on, I figured. It was after the second time the game impressed upon me the "importance" of this particular agent that clued me in: Why, it's none other than myself, Mento. I guess Konami thoughtfully decided to immortalize me in their game for so eruditely journalizing my many rollicking adventures with the previous Metal Gear Solids. It's Kojima! This particular mission is a parody of the initial rescue mission involving Miller, with identical details like the location he was being kept and a cutscene of Snake handing him back his glasses. "Hideo" (couldn't have gone with the animal theme? "Fired Fox", maybe?) actually has an S-rank in Intel, so even if this is mission was an elaborate goof it's still one I can put to good use.
• Mission #44. We once again have a situation where, though this is a Total Stealth variant of a previous mission and thus completely optional as I understand it, there's no obvious way to continue the story right now. Might as well see if I can earn a lot of money repeating the first mission in Africa. That, for the record, would be mission #13 with the oilfield facility sabotage. The difficulty of the original mission, which this variant amplifies considerably, is that you have to sneak through two major outposts, the latter of which requires you perform two actions at different areas. You can either try to sneak past everyone on your way inside the base, then to the first location, then to the second location and then back out of the base, or you can try to slowly eliminate all the personnel with a combination of heavy sleepytime drugs and Fultons to make it easier on yourself but suffer a minuscule time bonus. Either way, it's a dangerous prospect with no allowances for getting spotted - the Mfinda Oilfield is absolutely crawling with guards and once the oil separator whatsit explodes, it's immediately surrounded by walkers. I still had that crate Fulton extraction riding trick to fall back on, fortunately.
• Mission #47. Another Total Stealth variant, this time for that one mission in the airport area where I had to extract a weapons dealer and his PF contact (#21). If you recall, I happened upon an ideal solution for this mission last time: wait until their inspection route takes them far away from the central control tower area where all the guards, snipers and the gunship can see you, and quickly extract the duo and the vehicle they're in. I ran into a little bit of a snafu due to wanting to capture the truck inside the nearby hangar - there was a mission task for it, and I have the incredibly useful wormhole addition to the Fulton (the extra deployment cost is worth being able Fulton anyone, anywhere, with 100% reliability). Once they entered the hangar, though, they suddenly got off the truck and started looking around - I never saw them reach this far in the route, so it's presumably part of the scripted inspection. What's more, both of the nearby walker guards had entered the hangar on the other side to escort the VIPs back to the tower area once they were done, so I was between a rock and a hard place in a Total Stealth mission like this. Or so I thought: I managed to get away with bloody murder, because I extracted all of the above without incident. Took some of the precious metal crates in there too as a souvenir. Cocky, sure, but I'll take my little victories where I can after the game deemed it necessary to take fifty soldiers away from me.
• There was something new in that last mission: gun cameras. Now, I'm aware that I can craft these for my FOB/PvP base to deter would-be griefers, but I'd never seen them in the wild before. The game waited until mission 47 to introduce them to the single player?
• As I knew it would, the plot finally showed up kicking and screaming directly after that last mission, with the Diamond Dogs just about ready to tar and feather Emmerich for being the one who, inadvertently, triggered the deadly mutation of the vocal cord parasites. The final straw taken, the mob descends upon him and... well, Snake decides to let him float off in a solitary lifeboat. I mean, it's not like we don't know for a fact already that he survives, remarries and sires Emma Emmerich, the pintsize hydrophobe who gets penetrated by a sexy vampire, but not in the Twilight sort of way she was probably hoping for. Throwing a lot of shade at the dead, huh? At any rate, I'm not sure if we can still upgrade and use D-Walker or not, but then he hasn't been a huge help if I'm being honest. Bye forever, Emmerich family. Maybe I'll see one of you as a headless zombie in Metal Gear Survive (and you can forget about a reactions series for that one, by the by). (In another astonishing example of covering his narrative ass in an optional tape, Kojima makes it clear that Emmerich left enough notes around that maintaining and upgrading the D-Walker won't be an issue for the R&D team.) (Also, I guess this means Eli still has the last vial of English-activated parasites, then.)
• With the elder Emmerich exiled, all the rest of the game's missions suddenly become available. All bar one, that is. In addition to what sounds like a revealing story mission - Mission #46 "Truth: The Man Who Sold the World" - we also have an Extreme difficulty variant of Code Talker (#48, based on mission #28) which should be fun with all those sniper Skulls, a Subsistence variant of Occupation Forces (#49, based on mission #8) which had you hijack a colonel and his escort vehicles though I imagine it'll be harder without any EMN mines, and an Extreme variant of, you guessed it, the big climactic mano-a-mecho fight with Sandalwood (#50, based on mission #31). The missing mission is #45, and I suspect it has something to do with the disappearance of Quiet. A side op relating to her just opened up, so before I start on what I imagine will be a revelatory Mission #46 (I suspect we'll finally find out who Ishmael is), I should tie up this loose end.
• Mission #45. "A Quiet Exit". This mission isn't just unfun to play, it's lazily put together. Quiet let herself get captured by the Soviet army and got taken to the Lamar Khaate Palace, but managed to free herself quickly enough without my help. However, the entire Soviet army has decided she must be annihilated with you in the crossfire, and deploys about a bazillion heavy vehicles and tanks to your location. They just keep pouring in too; this is a mission where you put on a pure offense, rather than one involving strategy, or tactics, or guile, or stealth, or non-lethal approaches, or nuance, or grace, or enjoyment, or an appreciation for the game's many versatile options for combat and the avoidance thereof, or really anything that makes this game stand out against its mindless whiz-bang contemporaries. No, in order to see off Quiet properly, we need to have a gauntlet of unavoidable tank shells and goons teleporting in from various spots in the desert over and over and over, like the Emperor's Sardaukar at the end of Dune. I seriously spent over an hour on this mission once I realized I wasn't allowed to quit it or respec my gear for something more suitable for the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and I'd have to say it's the least fun I've had with this game yet.
• What follows is an "ending" of sorts, at least for Quiet. After I finally completed the mission without dying from an explosion I didn't see coming - I hid on the palace roof, mostly - we make plans to vamoose but Quiet takes a hit to the side by an errant tank shell. Navigating a sandstorm, we make it to cover and Snake gets bitten by another snake while trying to hide from the searching party of an entire second battalion. Snake passes out, the Pequod can't find us without directions in English, and so Quiet finally breaks her silence to get Big Boss the help he needs. I'm not entirely clear on the dire implications of this, whether it means that Quiet will die from the now activated parasites or that Snake was also infected, or what. What we do know is that Quiet is gone for good: she left us a goodbye message for us to find and disappeared like a desert sirocco. Hey wait, I still need her for some of these... oh fine, I'll just use the dog.
• We aren't done yet. I still have to complete Mission #46. Here's a telling piece of subtext with regards to how much patience I have left with the game: depending on how I feel, what follows are either the descriptions of more bonus missions and/or side ops, or me cutting straight to discussion of Mission #46 and the game's (other?) ending.
• ...
• Mission #46, then. As the title suggests, we're back to... OK, fine. One more bonus.
• Mission #49. I didn't want to do any of these bonus missions due to time constraints, but I found an ingenious solution to this one online that I just had to try out. As a Subsistence mission, you have nothing in your arsenal with which to distract or barricade the tank column you need to extract/destroy for this mission. However, there is one thing that can keep a couple of tanks occupied long enough to get Fultoned: the Pequod. Now that I've upgraded its defense, it was simply a matter of calling in an extraction a few minutes ahead of time, waiting near where the chopper hovers expectantly and then let the tanks try to take potshots at it while I sweep them and the colonel up. Of course, at that point I had to figure out a way to quickly exit the hot zone, so I wasn't... right, the extraction chopper. Doy! (To reiterate: I did not conceive of this brilliant solution, it was found on the PlayStationTrophies board. Thanks PST user stoicjin!)
• Mission #46, then. As the title suggests, we're back to in the hospital mission at the start of the game. However, we get to see an additional scene just after the explosion from Ground Zeroes that puts the whole game into a different perspective: as paramedics struggle to keep Big Boss alive, they manage to stabilize him but in the process he slips into a coma. The game then pans the camera around to us. "Oh, this one? He has shrapnel embedded in his head." We are not Big Boss. We never were Big Boss. We're some Grandma Base schmuck who got caught in the explosion in the chopper, and surgically altered to resemble Big Boss to keep Cipher and Zero guessing. That create-a-Snake face we created at the start of the game? That's what we used to look like, before the surgery. The mission is more or less identical to the long, deliberately-paced (i.e. boring, because I spend half of it crawling as quickly as a snail) prologue mission, only it's been tactically edited to include all the references to my character's surgery and his resemblance to Big Boss. Ishmael? Well the game all but confirms his identity almost immediately after he fights off Quiet: he's the real Big Boss. With those new facts in mind, there's certain moments that add more clarity to the prologue. Like how, after emerging from the elevator, Firebert turns to deliver his wrath to Ishmael and not you before the sprinkler system scares him off. There's a distinct feeling of gaslighting too: did Ishmael always have Keifer Sutherland's voice? Did he really mention the part about how he and I are the same person the first time through? The mission ends with the reveal of what happened to Big Boss: he and the protagonist switched places, the latter becoming Big Boss's "phantom", presumably so he could bide his time with the creation of Outer Heaven incognito while Cipher and Zero still believe their target is the very visible leader of the Diamond Dogs.
• The game then switches to a timeline, showing us various events that have occurred in the MGS universe since War World II. It includes many revelations: Eli is indeed Liquid Snake - they tested his compatibility with the fake Big Boss, hence no genetic match; Zero put Big Boss in that Cyprus hospital, and had Ocelot keep tabs on him, rather than Miller who was only brought into the fold later; and after Code Talker had completed his work Pious Augustus attempted to assassinate Zero with the parasites, but left him brain damaged.
• Now that there's two Big Bosses running around, I have to wonder: is this how Kojima justified the death of one them during the original Metal Gear games? We can assume that Big Boss, the Sean Connery lookalike who betrayed Solid Snake and created Outer Heaven, is this player-created one and the real one could continue dismantling Zero's plans until his fateful encounter with Old Snake in the graveyard? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, and the fake Big Boss died at some point between this game and Metal Gear Solid 1, but it would be one hell of a meta-twist that the big reveal in the last (legitimate) Metal Gear game was simply intended to spackle over a plot hole from the very first. That's Kojima for you - you can never be completely sure whether you're overthinking some aspect of the Metal Gear Solid mythos, and I'm sure there's lots of other little twists and reveals that I missed. I suppose that's what the tapes are for.
• Well, a post-credits timeline just confirmed that for me. That'll teach me to get some writing done while the credits roll. Big Boss's "phantom", as the player-character is referred to, was indeed the Big Boss of the first MSX/NES Metal Gear and was killed in action by Solid Snake, leaving the real Big Boss to become the antagonist of the second. That does indeed tie that up. A post-post audio scene with Miller and Ocelot, where the latter fills in the former about the real Big Boss's plan, also sets up their roles in Metal Gear Solid - Ocelot taking Liquid's side (nominally), and Master Miller training Solid. A lot of retrospective table-setting, huh? I wonder how many people will play this series and go the chronological route: 3 - 5 - 1 - 2 - 4 ...? If so, that's some hell of diminishing returns (excepting 4, which I liked quite a bit).

Anyway, that will have to be it for this season of the Mento Gear Solid observations blog series, and for the series itself. I've no doubt there's spin-offs I should be playing - the Acids, the Onlines, the Peace Walkers, the Risings and... sigh, the Survives and the Pachinkos - but my intent from the beginning was to follow the Metal Gear Scanlon series that I might enjoy the games in my own time before seeing how Drew reacts to each game's story twists and mechanical differences from a place of experience. I believe he and Dan are done now, and thus so am I.

Thanks again to anyone who took the time to respond to my various babblings with trenchant observations and reactions of their own. It's been a fun series to write, and while I won't preclude an additional bonus tapes episode down the road (I've added to the below table, after all, so that's a statement of intent of sorts) I think I can happily move on from Metal Gear Solid, certainly in less acrimonious terms than Kojima himself did, and finally get to some other games this September. See you around.

(Originally posted 23:58 GMT 08/31/2016.)