All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-11-11: Tiers for Fears Edition

Jeremy Parish, previously of USGamer.net and now mostly freelancing and working on a few video series as part of his Patreon-funded service, recently provided Polygon a list of his favorite Mario games in order of preference. As someone who's been writing about retro games for nigh on two decades now, he's a person with a significant amount of reverence in that arena, so his list carried an appropriate degree of weight. However, his decision to put New Super Mario Bros. U at the top of that list appears to have irked a fair number of people, prompting a lot of discussion and counter-listicles across the internet.

Rather than create my own list of preferred Mario games, which I'd rather hold off on until I've had the opportunity to check out Super Mario Odyssey at the very least, I've been pondering why people get all out of sorts with listicles that are very explicitly designated as subjective. There's a tone that many website editors insist upon where you lose wishy-washy modifiers like "I think" or "in my opinion", adopting instead what sounds like a more assertive demeanor that is ultimately easier to take umbrage with, but I also think there's something inherent to our sense of competition that encourages us to explain our own rankings in such a rational and measured way that they approach an objectively true standard. The fact that these ranking lists so readily attract dissension and discussion is almost certainly why they're so popular with article-based websites that depend on the traffic of the aggrieved to stay solvent.

I've found that I'm becoming more enamoured with the tier system of late, beloved of the fighting game community, which doesn't so much put a list of games (or fighter game characters, as the case might be) in a discrete order but categorizes them into equivalent groups of quality. For as aggressively antagonistic as the FGC makes itself out to be, the tier system is actually a much fairer means of dividing a group of games by their comparative quality levels, as it allows the list-maker to group games together which might otherwise too close to call. Instead of trying to pick between Super Mario World, Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Bros. 3 as the greatest Super Mario game for example, all three can simply be "S-tier" Mario, with no further arguments necessary. You'll no doubt have your own preference out of those three (or perhaps Odyssey, since it sounds like a good one), but it's harder to argue against all three being put into the top category with the rest to follow behind. It's what I've been doing with my Tales of Tiers list of characters across Bandai Namco's RPG franchise (and one I really should update now that I've played Zestiria), and it's a far easier and less conflict-inciting means of creating a list. But, as I said before, maybe that's not always the author's goal.

Talking of S-tier, here the week's blogging:

• The Top Shelf returns to your screens this week after a month off with an exhaustive compare & contrast of Final Fantasies X and XII. There are going to be seven of these "Battle Royales" - where I decide a winner between two or more games from the same franchise that I considered too close to call in the original elimination rounds - and the Final Fantasy one was by far the showdown I was most invested in resolving. Future Battle Royales should be briefer, though there's at least one coming up that has four games to sort through that could get messy. At any rate, I put the two Square RPGs through their paces by breaking them down into the seven major categories I value the most and then seeing which game performed best in each one. It came down to the wire, as I suspected it would, with a four-to-three victory. What won? Well, you'd have to click the link to find ou- OK, sorry, it was Final Fantasy X. But it's still worth reading to see the science in action.
• The Indie Game of the Week this time saw another quick substitute after unsuccessfully trying to get David O'Reilly's Everything to run, instead opting for Casual Labs's picross game Paint It Back! for what I figured would be some low-key picture puzzle shenanigans. Instead, what I found was a picross game that already ranks among my favorites, in part because it opts for a slightly more obscure method for dealing with player mistakes - which is to say, doesn't auto-correct and penalize the player for them, at the cost of letting their errors accumulate to become a chaotic unsolveable mess - but also because of its great sense of humor. It's really challenging too: some of the grids get as big as 30x30 and can take close to an hour of your time to solve. Like Flinthook, I suspect I'll be dipping in and out to make incremental progress in the game for the rest of 2017 and potentially beyond.

Addenda

As always, there's a smattering of games I've been playing beyond those described in more detail in the blogs above. In particular, I completed a great game this week and started another just recently that I have some mixed feelings about. So, in that order:

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Hours before its DLC became available to buy, which I'll probably skip because the game had plenty of content already, I managed to complete Guerrilla Games's excellent post-post-apocalyptic open-world robot-hunting game Horizon: Zero Dawn. And by complete, I do mean complete; as is my usual obsessive-compulsive pattern with these games, I'd almost reached burnout point after scouring the map for collectibles, side-quests and other progression-advancing activities such as clearing out bandit forts or removing packs of "corrupted" robotic animals before the strain could spread further. Now, after hitting that glorious 100% completion rating and picking up a Platinum trophy for my efforts, I can put the game aside and work on the rest of my 2017 GOTY contender shortlist while I still have some time left.

It's difficult to single out a particular quality of Horizon: Zero Dawn I liked the most, because the game coalesces together as such a wonderful package in part because of the way it's paced (side-activities aside). One moment you're hunting a colossal robotic dinosaur using every tool in your stockpile and cutting off its own space-age ordnance to use against it in a pitch battle for survival, the next you're poking around the silent ruins of the "ancient" (which is to say, the near-future from our perspective) metal world for hints about solving the current machine rampancy predicament facing the world. I derived an equal amount of enjoyment from both, if I'm being honest: all those audio logs and messages from the old world about people's hopes and fears with regards to their impending demise was poignant and told a great story with twists and layers that was almost entirely irrespective of heroine Aloy's own journey and the peril facing the various tribes occupying what was once part of Colorado and the surrounding Rocky Mountains.

The combat is this incredible combination of Monster Hunter and a more archery-focused shooter like Far Cry Primal or Skyrim, where you're building an arsenal through crafting ammunition from natural ingredients and those found in the corpses of other robots, and then exploiting an enemy's weakness by either aiming for critical areas of their bodies with your arrows or taking advantage of a particular elemental vulnerability or, as was frequently the case, both simultaneously. You can acquire a large number of weapon types through commerce and trading valuable materials to sell, including several types of bow for different scenarios, a pair of slings to fire grenades in an arcing trajectory, a ropecaster to tie down faster creatures like the aerial Glinthawks or the panther-like Scrappers, and the ever-useful tripcaster for creating tripwire traps for enemies to stumble into whether they're obliviously prowling around on a set patrol (which you're able to see through Aloy's useful Focus, an augmented-reality device taken from the ruins of the old world) or in active pursuit of the human in their midst. Rather than being frozen with indecision with the amount of weapons and tools at your disposal, you soon come to learn that most every mechanical creature you'll face has an ideal take-down strategy, and building a versatile arsenal just means knowing that you'll have the right tool for the job once combat becomes an inevitability. Even so, the game expands these options further with its emphasis on stealth and subterfuge: as well as powerful stealth melee attacks for use against unaware foes, Aloy eventually gains the means to temporarily (though you can make it permanent with an upgrade) "corrupt" machines with her own code, forcing them to fight on her side. A favorite strategy of mine was to hide in tall grass, call a tough-looking robot over with the lure, override them, and let them deal with all the other robots in the vicinity. Some of the most fun I had in that game was watching two colossal foes "Robot Jox" themselves to exhaustion, after which I'd congratulate the winner with a critical hit to finish them off.

While I have a handful of minor reservations about the game, such as the way that climbing traversal doesn't always "click" to handholds in the way you'd hope leaving Aloy to tumble to her demise because the run-up to the leap wasn't quite sufficient, for the most part I thought Horizon: Zero Dawn was one of the most solid and rewarding open-world games I've played in a long while. It also looks great, from the characters' expressive facial animations (though it took a while to warm up to some of its uncanny valley quirks) to the breathtaking vistas to watching the robotic animals operating in an eerily close approximation to their flesh-and-blood equivalents. The way herd-like machines would run away from explosions, allowing you to set up traps beforehand that anticipate this behavior, or how you could prepare an entire arena full of tripwires and landmines before agitating the challenging mark before you and letting them fall for every one in their dogged pursuit of you. How each new skill you acquired after spending currency earned after levelling up would make a significant difference to the game and opened up different approaches to taking down enemies faster, sneakier, or in a way that would grant greater rewards. In many ways Horizon feels like a composite of what many other open-world games are doing, but when the end result is so satisfying it scarcely matters.

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon

I swept up Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon in the recent 3DS eShop Halloween sale, having a great deal of affection for the GameCube original. I soon learned after an hour or so that my own perception of Luigi's Mansion's strengths is significantly different than that of this game's designers, which in many ways is a bummer but maybe not one major enough to chase me away.

To elaborate, the original Luigi's Mansion felt like a very Nintendo take on Resident Evil, where you'd slowly learn the secrets of this sinister mansion you were trapped in through exploration and solving puzzles, every so often finding a new piece of equipment or key that would open a route some ways further back along the path you had taken. Returning to old areas to find new secrets, using Luigi's vacuum-like Poltergust 5000 to pull at curtains and tablecloths or uncover objects and clues behind a loose roll of wallpaper or a painting's canvas, and just generally being allowed to explore at your own pace to find all the hidden riches and special encounters: these were every bit as central to the Luigi's Mansion experience as trying to lasso colorful ghost opponents and getting whomped by a fake door.

Instead, the sequel has prioritized a mission-based apprach where you'll enter the same mansion several times for very specific purposes, with parts of the house either inconsequential to your immediate goal or otherwise locked away. Every time you find a new upgrade that might expand where you could visit or allow for new discoveries to be made in the rooms already accessed, the mission would be over and you'd be summarily whisked back to Professor E. Gadd for a mission rundown and a rank based on how quickly you completed it before jumping back into the newly reset mansion. I don't play Luigi's Mansion to be ranked on time taken and health lost - for me it's always been a chill exploration-heavy haunted house simulator. I realize it's a thing with Resident Evil that you're eventually supposed to be able to beat the game in a matter of hours to unlock an infinite ammo grenade launcher or a block of sentient tofu or what have you but I never really saw the appeal of playing those games, which traffic so heavily in suspense and discovery, as quickly as humanly/tofuly possible. To build the whole game around timed challenges just seems kinda bizarre, when really it should be the post-game focus after you've already seen what the game has to offer. I've been told that the mission-based structure was introduced because this sequel was custom-built for the portable 3DS, which benefits from play sessions that could be broken up into shorter vignettes, but I'm still not sure it's doing the model any favors.

There's enough of the old Luigi's Mansion in here that I'm planning to stick with it as my occasional-play portable game, replacing the likes of Picross 3D: Round 2 and Professor Layton and the Last Specter from earlier this year, but I'm still left haunted, so to speak, by the apparent huge divide between what I liked about the original and what Nintendo's developers thought people liked about it.