Man, it's due time to calm down a little. Summers always end up busier than I anticipate, and between the E3 daily series (and moderating the nightly shows) and the ludicrous amount of time required to review every E3 trailer, June's been kinda stacked. That's on top of the other regular weekly blog features I'm doing this year. Obviously, this is all a nightmare of my own design; very much a "hoisted by my own petard" situation. I'll have to factor in these busy periods when I consider what next year's content mill will look like.

Now, though? All the E3 business is behind me and SGDQ is winding down, which means I'll have all my free time back. I really want to make more progress in Tales of Zestiria and maybe finish off a few of the outstanding Indie games like the mysterious Wuppo before I add even more to the docket. I've still got a list of shame to work from, though I'll have a lot more to add to it with the amount of great games released this year. So far, the only 2017 game I've played is Yooka-Laylee, which is going to make for a very sorry GOTY list unless I do some last minute catching-up with a particularly good Halloween/Holiday sale.

As for The Top Shelf, I'm really going to need to step up the pace. There are 34 games on my "Refresher" pile to play through for the feature, and 25 more Tuesdays left in the year. I'm either going to have to start turning the Tuesday blogs into double-bills or begin increasing the number of blogs posted in a week. Or I could surreptitiously drop games from the list if need be, but with a handful of possible exceptions I'd rather at least give them all a few hours in the test chamber. The majority are games I've never played and have always meant to, since I bought them and all, and the rest are games I never completed but badly want to revisit before I'm done with the PS2 generation.

At least on the Wiki side, things are looking up. With a handful of SNES Virtual Console releases left to add/edit and whatever I can make of the confusing morass that is the Satellaview and its "broadcasts" (how do you add releases for a game that was distributed in eight parts? Plus, all these weird competition mini-games...) I should be just about done with the SNES forever. It's been long enough since I wrapped up the TurboGrafx/PC Engine too that there's been a few more Virtual Console releases in the meantime, so that'll be next. After that, I'm going to use my podcast-listening time to play some grindier games that better suit that quiet downtime, like the various JRPGs and open-world games on my backlog. Whatever my next project covers (I'm vacillating between the N64, the Genesis and the rest of the PC Engine CD library - all three of which are going to involve significant screenshot-gathering issues) it's probably going to have to wait until Summer is over.

Anyway, that's enough ruminating on the state of the union, as it were. Time to check out this week's content:

• The Top Shelf covered the third stealth action game in a row, Oni. I remarked that Oni feels better constructed than either Headhunter or Nightshade, but there's still a few significant issues I had with it that prevented me from seeing it through to the very end. In particular, it's weird they made the hand-to-hand combat so fun and elaborate and then insisted on more than half of its enemies having guns who can quickly murder you if there's a sufficiently large amount of space between them and you. I either have to return fire, which means quickly pulling out a gun and start darting around the screen to strafe their fire, or to run away and find a wall to hide behind so I can jump them when they stroll over to investigate. At any rate, I'm sure I would've enjoyed it more in its day - I try to stay objective about older games, since I care more about level design and gameplay than worrying about framerates and polygon counts, but some games have definitely aged better than others.
• The Indie Game of the Week was The Room Two. I notice I keep picking Indie games with short runtimes for this feature, and that's a bad habit for a number of reasons. Mostly, because it means all the Indie games I want to play that'll take 20 hours or more to complete (I have at least five of those on the "I wanna play this for sure this year" pile) are starting to get bunched together. The Room Two itself is a perfectly enjoyable environmental puzzle game, of the type where you're given one of those Victorian puzzle boxes with all sorts of sliding panels and hidden compartments that you can spend an afternoon poking away at. The Room Two's big difference over the original is how the individual chapters keep changing the setting for more thematically divergent puzzles, but as a few commenters pointed out the game has a distinct lack of actual "puzzle" puzzles, of the Layton/Mensa sort, and is almost entirely instead about finding hidden buttons. I'll have to keep an eye out for The Room Three when it eventually hits Steam, as I hear that's a return to form.
• Just bringing up Trailer Blazer: E3 2017 one last time because it's now complete. There were 177 E3 trailers spread across 145 games plus the Xbox One X, new Avatars and the Xbox One Indie montage, and all 148 of those items are now accounted for. (Because I add extra sidebars about the games themselves, it wouldn't really work to review multiple trailers for the same game separately.) It's one of those features I always have a lot of fun writing, not to mention all the ideas for future game purchases I pick up from the lesser-seen trailers on the site - JRPGs, for instance, rarely get a look in by either the conferences or the Giant Bomb team, but Marino usually remembers them regardless. I tend to exaggerate how much I'm being put through the wringer by faking RSIs or casually dropping wordcounts (22,000+ this year), but I enjoy creating those lists more than I let on. And hey, watching and writing about them has gotta be easier than uploading them in multiple file formats with pithy captions, so all respect to Marino for doing the hard part.

Tales of Zestiria

I'm going to be playing this game for a while, so I'm going to have to compartmentalize (compartmentolize?) these Tales of Zestiria rundowns a little. For this week, I want to talk more about Zestiria's combat, and how distinct it is from the other Tales games I've played.

Tales has a reputation for a certain degree of over-familiarity between entries - I made a comment myself along those lines in last week's Saturday Summaries - but the truth is that the games are distinguishable on a more micro level that would hard to properly elucidate in casual conversation. From a general standpoint, every Tales game has an anime artstyle, involves teenagers saving the world, has an active real-time combat system that is reminiscent of fighter games, reuses a lot of similar themes such as the way two alternate worlds can influence each other or the chaos that ensues from disrupting the balance of natural forces, has an eclectic cast of oddballs that begin as anime archetypes but eventually develop distinct personalities as the game progresses and you learn more about them, and each game shares a lot of stylistic similarities such as the names of healing items, enemy types and certain recurring combat styles.

If you rewind a bit to the part where I talked about how every Tales has a combat engine reminiscent of a fighter game, however, you might start to understand how each one can have enough subtle disparities to feel completely separate in practice. If you aren't acquainted with the Tales series, you probably know enough about fighters to know that playing Street Fighter feels completely different from playing Guilty Gear, or Mortal Kombat, or Soulcalibur, or Killer Instinct, or Marvel vs. Capcom. Even if that last series happens to share a lot of cast members with Street Fighter, the way the mechanics work and how much you need to understand about the importance of supers or spacing or air juggles is paramount to moving from the button-masher bush league to something approaching hard-earned competence. Tales is a bit like that in a microcosm - you won't need to spend hundreds of hours perfecting your style, but each one is just different enough that it often feels like you're starting over from scratch.

The most significant differences between Zestiria's combat and those of previous Tales games (though I ought to point out I've yet to play all of them) is the aforementioned rock-paper-scissors dynamic of its artes, and also how the secondary "SC" stat operates. The first involves how some attack types are stronger than some but weak against others, and remembering when to use the right ones is paramount. If an enemy is about to slap you with a normal physical attack, interrupt them with a special attack (i.e. a stronger physical attack that involves some wind up, say like a hadoken or shoryuken if we're sticking with this Street Fighter analogy). If they're launching a magical attack, interrupt them with a quick physical attack. If they're casting magic and you hit them with a special attack instead, it'll not only do minimal damage but will actually speed up their casting: this is very bad, as it then you leaves you open to take the brunt of whatever that spell is. Because there's a way to interrupt bigger attacks before they happen, they also hit way harder than usual, and I've been wiped out a few times because I used the wrong attack at the wrong moment.

The secondary aspect concerns the SC ("Spirit Chain") stat. I've heard this was an element of Graces F too, but since I've yet to play that one I can't corroborate. It replaces the usual Tales stat of TP, or "Technical Points", a catch-all that includes mana and skill points for stronger magical and physical attacks. In previous Tales games, the player would spend TP to perform stronger attacks, or artes, and then use basic physical attacks to replenish their stock of TP: the idea being that the player would discover and string together workable combos of common physicals and stronger specials that would be able to sustain themselves indefinitely, and only occasionally resort to a strategy of using just specials until their TP ran out when the chips were down and/or a boss needed to be beaten in a hurry. The SC system is subtly different: every type of attack drains your SC bar by varying amounts, and the way to regenerate it is to either stop moving for several seconds, successfully block incoming attacks, or perform split-second evasions where you use the game's quickstep dodge right at the moment the enemy is about to strike. These all replenish SC quickly (the evasions most of all), letting you get back on the offensive, but that also means leaving the enemy alone to perform their stronger attacks in the downtime which can sometimes prove fatal. The idea, then, is to pick your moment to recuperate SC, ideally when another teammate is applying the pressure. By observing not only what the boss is doing, but how your own SC and that of your teammates is faring, you can distribute an even amount of aggression across the entire party to keep a stronger foe's deadly charged attacks in check. Because of the fast pace of the game, this isn't always as easy as it sounds. I haven't played a Tales game that requires this level of situational awareness in combat in a hot minute, and it's both refreshing and exhausting.

The other major element of Zestiria's combat is "armatization". The player's party is comprised of humans and seraphim. Seraphim are similar to spirits in previous games: sapient beings with an elemental affinity and an inclination to protect humans from a nebulously-defined shadowy force of "malevolence" that threatens both humankind and seraphimkind alike, transforming them into dangerous monsters in worst case scenarios. The game has a bit of fun with the idea that most humans besides the protagonist Sorey (pronounced "so-ray") are completely incapable of seeing or hearing seraphim, which leads to a number of situations where Sorey is kind of standing there reacting and talking to nothing. In combat, seraphim that have bonded with Sorey can be merged together with him, creating a much stronger gestalt that has combined stats and a particular elemental focus. Joining together with a seraphim of an element that a boss happens to be weak to, for instance, lets you completely wreck shop when you've merged together. Armatizations require a finite resource called "Blast Points" to use, and the armatized form's strongest attacks (and a really useful heal for emergencies) also use this same resource, and because this stat can only be replenished from doing a lot of damage to enemies it's sometimes best to use these armatizations sparingly in protracted fights. However, you can almost use it in every random battle if desired because you gain so many Blast Points back from schooling weaker monsters. It's a system rife for experimentation, and gets around the idea of inhabiting a "MVP" character in your party to exploit a boss's elemental weakness: rather than go to the trouble of switching over to that character and trying to keep them alive, you simply combine with them DBZ style to direct the punishment yourself. Of course, this works better for me because I generally stick to a Tales game's sword-wielding protagonist with few exceptions (Innocence and The Abyss both had side-characters that were way more fun than the hero), so being able to combine the protagonist with a seraphim team member of my choosing and retain most of his old fighting style makes for a preferable alternative.

Anyway, I could keep going about the combat in Zestiria and its many distinct rules and mechanics, but I think I've made my original point that the combat in Tales can vary considerably from game to game, even if they're all superficially similar from an outsider's perspective. I've never been a particularly big fighter game fan, but I can definitely see the appeal in tinkering around with a bunch of new systems that you can practice and eventually master. With an RPG like Tales, where you're gradually given new abilities and techniques to factor into your repertoire as you level up and become stronger, it creates a more inviting variation of this journey towards mastery where you can incorporate new elements as they come rather than suffer the intimidation factor of having all those tools at your fingertips right away and not knowing where to begin. It's a big part of why I love losing myself in a new Tales game every twelve months or so.

By next week, I hope to have met more of the game's cast and unlock more of its non-combat related features, like "Lord of the Land" bonuses and general exploration stuff. Until then, I'll see you all again with the usual blog features next week.