Why can't I stop watching PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds? At this moment I'm chilling with lunch and Will Smith's (not that one... wait, you're probably thinking of the same one) archive of last night's matches playing alongside musician Danny Baranowsky, whom he apparently knows because sure why not. I'm also a regular watcher of Giant Bomb's Murder Island - obviously, since I gotta be around to moderate chat when Dan hides in a bathtub to annoy everyone - as well as Waypoint's regular weekday morning PUBG stream Breakfast & Battlegrounds, and occasionally Polygon's Awful Squad which has been experimenting with custom match loadouts. Much has been written about PUBG's surprising second life as a spectator game, creating mini-dramas of one (or two, or four) versus an island of hostiles and the ever-present environmental hazards of red bombing zones and the relentless blue wall, corralling everyone to a tiny doomed spot in some godforsaken field.

Its appeal can be strange though, when considered objectively. It's not an exaggeration to say that 90% of any single session involves poking through buildings for an identical set of desired equipment (high level backpack, body armor, and helmet; the streamer's preferred rifles and SMGs with all the accoutrements; health kits and "boosts"; and as much ammo as they can carry) and "combat" can often boil down to a single fatal headshot from a sniper you can't see lying prone on a hill 300 yards away. I liken the game to that of watching soccer; soccer is 90 minutes long, excepting injury time, and 80 minutes of that is unexciting back-and-forth as teams alternate possession, get halfway into the opposing team's side of the pitch before they're dispossessed of the ball and forced to run back to their designated positions. Every so often, though, they get close enough to the opposing net, and that's when there's a chance - not a great one - of a game-changing goal. Soccer fans live for those moments, and everything else serves to build the suspense: I've never been a particular fan of the beautiful game myself, but I've always understood the appeal in the abstract. Now, I suppose, I have my own version of it to appreciate.

It'll be interesting to see what the eSports community makes of the game. Any competitors, even in teams of four, have a monumentally small chance of winning especially if they're playing against opponents of a similar skill level. It'll nearly always come down to luck: lucky enough to be the first to find a gun in a populated "spicy" zone like the southern military base or a town like Pachinki; lucky enough to be near or within each of the circles, rather than madly dashing for the next one and exposing yourself to great risk; lucky enough to spot the very last guy with your x4 scoped SKS before they spot you with their equivalent insta-death gun. I'm not sure you could craft the same kind of celebrated hero story about PUBG competitors that you could about a small team from Eastern Europe sweeping the DOTA International or some fifteen year old winning her first fighter game tournament. Yet, PUBG remains accessible to newcomer audiences in ways other competitive games can't replicate - all you have to do for a new viewer is explain that it's Hunger Games except with more bald adult men and rifles, and you've done all the groundwork - and remains utterly engrossing to watch, for whatever reason.

Talking of engrossing(?), here's the week's new blogging content:

• The Top Shelf covered yet another game I bounced off relatively quickly: Kuri Kuri Mix, a.k.a. The Adventures of Cookie & Cream. As fiendish as you might expect from a puzzle game developed by the Dark Souls guys, this co-operative puzzle-platformer is ideally played with a second human being. That's not just because the multi-tasking involved is too much for one person to bear alone, but how the game incorporates a means of punishing the inactive side of the screen with an annoying enemy that makes it unpalatable for single-player. Still, should the time arise when I have a second person of comparative skill to team up with, I don't want to dismiss the game entirely. It's the rare case of a pre-Souls FromSoftware game that's actually worth revisiting. (In other The Top Shelf news: I recently discovered six new games that I forgot I owned, and did the math recently to determine that I'll need to start going twice a week if I hope to conclude the series before the end of the year. I'm not sure when that'll happen - I suspect I'll dedicate an Autumn month to plugging through a lot of that backlog at once.)
• The Indie Game of the Week is the excellent Salt & Sanctuary, which I'll be continuing shortly after this edition of Saturday Summaries goes up. Every bit the Souls experience contained in a 2D platformer framework, Ska Studios definitely did their homework getting the tone and occasional obtuseness of that series right, and I've been enamoured exploring its systems and combat so far. The recent discovery of traversal-expanding "brands" - which work similarly to other spacewhipper progression enhancers - means that the game appears to be combining two of my favorite video game genres. I'm looking forward to seeing more of it, even while dreading how much harder the game will no doubt become. I've only met one boss so far that didn't take more than five tries to vanquish...

Tales of Zestiria

I went a little overlong last week talking about Tales of Zestiria's combat so I'll do a nice, short and breezy rundown of the game's non-combat exploration features. I've made it evident in the past that what largely brings me back to the JRPG genre again and again isn't so much the characters and story - though I'd ideally prefer those components to be high quality, since I'll be spending a long time watching these people react to twists and turns and each other - but how inventive the mechanics chugging away behind the scenes tend to be. Even Bamco's Tales, which is one of the more homogenous JRPG franchises out there, will mix things up from game to game to the extent that you really need to pay attention to the tutorial explanations it gives you on how to set up your characters and what you should be looking out for while running around its regions.

Let's start there. The world of Zestiria is contiguous, similar to Xillia's and - for a well-timed non-Tales example - Final Fantasy XII. That means that there's no big "overworld" map to traverse in the traditional sense. In most JRPGs, you'd find the exit to a town or a dungeon, be transported to a greatly scaled down version of the world map with your tiny avatar running around, and besides the occasional random encounter there'd be nothing out there besides the next town or dungeon entrance. These maps served to separate locations with a realistic amount of distance, but weren't in of themselves particularly exciting besides perhaps for a handful of secret locations or a high-level encounter zone on some obscure, remote island. A recent trend in JRPG world design has each location separated by a handful of dungeon-like zones, whether they're plains or forests or deserts or what have you, and not only does this retain the realistic distances between population centers but gives players all these new areas to explore. These areas occasionally have story scenes or other critical goals, while others simply sit between your current location and the next destination and need to be traversed, and others still are simply optional dungeons that the player can poke around in for extra treasure and experience. Zestiria's world feels more non-linear than even Xillia's, closer to Final Fantasy XII (which based itself partly on the MMO world design of FFXI), and gives the audience something approximating the experience of a Todd Howard joint and how often they put distracting bonus locations in your periphery. A world map, which can't be traversed but simply observed, gives you an idea of all the paths not travelled should you ever decide to change your mind, and a useful fast travel system - one that unfortunately charges you for the privilege, but at least bases that price on a small percentage of your current wealth and can be reduced even further - lets you quickly return to these earlier locations. This is often desirable because optional dungeons tend to have tough monsters at the end of them - you're unlikely to beat them the first time through, but defeating them gives the player some useful treasures, not least of which is a key item that increases everyone's maximum health. In addition, the protagonist learns "world skills" which can let them explore areas previously blocked off - a "wind-riding" skill, for example, allows them to cross over chasms and pits - as well as special keys that open silver and gold chests scattered throughout the world. If you're the type to assiduously note what and where is currently inaccessible, there's great dividends in store for backtracking.

In addition to chests and monster encounters, which are fortunately of the type that you can see on the overworld and run away from if you're not up to fighting that moment, there's also monoliths - each of which imparts one of the game's many rules and game features, and there's a lot - and "points of interest", which operate sort of like discoveries found in Skies of Arcadia and each come with their own fun little skit as the team discusses what they've found. Both monoliths and discoveries grant "AP", a resource used for the game's Battle Actions (which are beneficial combat actions like aerial recoveries that you can toggle on if you have enough AP left over), and are therefore invaluable. So too are patches of herbs, which provide permanent stat-boosting items. These all give the player more reasons to canvass a new area, checking every nook and cranny on the map while keeping track of its various exits and the zones they lead to.

Last, I want to talk about a feature which I believe is exclusive to Zestiria: Lords of the Land. These are characters you rescue as part of the story (though there's at least one optional one) who stick around in cities to become their "guardian spirits". While active, these guys give you boons for as long as you're in their domain, and earning grade through combat - a Tales mainstay currency acquired through battle prowess that can be spent after completing a game to unlock New Game+ bonuses like double money or XP, or retaining inventories - or selling items directly to the Lord will also unlock new boons. These boons tend to involve increasing the global drop rate for items, better healing, having chests eventually recover their contents after enough time has passed, showing enemies on the map, and so forth. It's a good excuse to reduce inventory clutter if you don't need the money, and some of the boons can really help out if you're in the process of upgrading equipment for a difficult upcoming boss. Best of all, the grade you earn in a region before rescuing its Lord of the Land is added to their total when they eventually become active, so nothing is wasted.

I might say that a lot of Zestiria's new features tend to highlight how much more grindy this game is - the best way to make new equipment is to find several instances of the same piece and combine them together to create stronger versions - and it's uncommon to see a Tales game so loot-focused. They normally do the JRPG thing of having about a dozen weapons total per character, each incrementally stronger than the last and often found in new dungeons or sold in new towns, but here there's a lot more emphasis put on players crafting and customizing gear to best suit their needs. I'll get more into that whole business next week, since progress in this game has been glacial so far - I'm blaming that on all the PS2 and Indie games I'm playing concurrently for those respective blog features.