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Saturday Summaries 2018-03-17: Made and Remade Edition

As with Hollywood, video games have been a little remake-happy of late. I've been looking ahead at the releases for a Q2 round-up (that should drop on the Saturday Summaries for the 31st) and there's a lot of familiar games coming to Switch and enhanced remasters for PS4 and Steam. There's even a few upcoming Japanese games that are actually remakes of games we never got the first time around: games like Shining Resonance Refrain, based on a Japan-only 2014 PS3 game.

I'm pleased everyone's enjoying Burnout Paradise again, but let's be real: there's only one remaster worth following this year.
I'm pleased everyone's enjoying Burnout Paradise again, but let's be real: there's only one remaster worth following this year.

We see these remakes and remasters so often that it's made me a little apprehensive about some of the older games on my backlog. While I'm glad to have the opportunity to play games I was unable to previously - I'm particularly looking forward to finally getting my hands on The World Ends With You - there's plenty more unplayed games from the last generation sitting in my collection about which I'm almost dreading hearing any news about a remaster on the way. It means I'm split between sticking with the version I have or waiting a little longer to double-dip on a better version with more extras, rendering my previous purchase a pointless waste. Of course, the wise choice would be to dance with the one you brought with you, proverbially speaking, but it's a heck of a thing for a game to suddenly re-enter the zeitgeist and hearing about all the improvements the new version has made in the interim. Last thing you want to hear is how some new feature or addition has elevated a B- game into an A+ when you're still knee-deep in that old and busted B-.

I suppose the lesson to take away here is to never sleep on games you've bought for too long, lest they come back bigger and better than ever, but neither should you go out of your way to pick up older games when a shiny and chrome version is just around the corner for the benefit of Johnny-Come-Latelys like yourself. There's a certain cynical way you could look at this - that games lose their value far sooner these days with the promise that anything could be remade or remastered one or more years further down the road, and to always buy and quickly thereafter play new games instead (or the even more cynical take which is that nobody has any new ideas and just remakes everything instead). As a fan of retro games, though, I'm choosing to take the glass-half-full option and will simply be glad that a lot of these classics are getting a second lease of life.

Talking of retro games I've only just got around to playing for the first time, here's a few blogs dedicated to blasts from the (recent) past:

  • The Indie Game of the Week on this occasion was Volume: a streamlined, boiled-down-to-its-fundamentals top-down stealth action game from Mike Bithell, the developer of Thomas Was Alone. I'd been putting this one off for a while due to my general distaste for stealth games and the mixture of repetition and tension they tend to engender, but Volume proved to be unexpectedly appetizing to my palette. It's a smartly designed game that mitigates the usual frustrations I have with the genre and frames it with a fairly intriguing (and witty) story that pops up ever so occasionally. Highly recommended, even for those like me who don't usually truck with the sneaky stuff.
  • Our Tuesday feature once again rolls back around to finding junk in a bigger pile of junk as our HOPA quest continues with Rainy Days and Mundis: Episode 5. This fortnight's episode covers Fairy Tale Mysteries: The Puppet Thief, wherein an agent of the supernatural detective agency set up by the magic-slinging Brothers Grimm investigates the kidnapping of children by a sinister puppeteer. This one proved to be the worst yet, though mostly due to its age: the blueprint behind these games is so rigid that you can track the tweaks and improvements to the formula over time if you were so inclined. That's a little outside the scope of what I'm doing here - not without buying another dozen HOPAs and taking more notes, at least - so instead I'm drawing this feature to its conclusion on March 27 with the newest (and, coincidentally enough, one of the better rated) HOPA in my collection for the grand finale.

Addenda

Movie: The Nice Guys (2016)

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I love Shane Black's work and it's criminal it took me this long to finally watch his newest movie, The Nice Guys. Set in the 1970s, it's one of those shaggy dog detective stories that seems to meander from one scene to the next, sort of similar to The Big Lebowski (I feel like there was some inspiration, given that a conspiracy revolving around pornographic movies is a major plot point in both), and is buoyed by the great central performances of Russell Crowe as embittered enforcer-for-hire Jackson Healy and Ryan Gosling as the hapless and injury-prone private eye Holland March. Gosling in particular is hilarious as March: the kind of sadsack loser that nonetheless manages to persevere through a considerable amount of adversity, no small amount of which he manages to inflict upon himself.

Of Black's many earlier works as a writer, most of which take the buddy-cop dynamic in various directions, The Nice Guys reminded me most keenly of The Last Boy Scout: one of his more underappreciated scripts. Neither of the titular Nice Guys is quite as competent as Bruce Willis's Joe Hallenbeck (or as quotable), but they each personify a core aspect of his character: Healy has the muscle, the world-weariness and the self-loathing, while Holland is a constantly drunk screw-up in the eyes of his precocious teen daughter, who can't stop getting involved in her dear old dad's dangerous work if only to keep an eye on him. While the plot of The Nice Guys is somewhat less important - it's a pulpy detective story concerning all the participants of a blue movie suddenly dying off in mysterious ways - it's a great comedy for its procession of farcical situations and the kind of mordantly witty dialogue that Black excels at. The action is somewhat less remarkable, usually boiling down to old-fashioned shoot-outs rather than big elaborate set-pieces, though it has some inspired physical comedy with Gosling's character as he tumbles off roofs and down hills in an inebriated stupor. Whenever the movie threatens to get too broad with that type of slapstick, however, it draws you back in with its well-written repartee.

Suffice it to say, it joins the rest of Shane Black's various script masterpieces - Lethal Weapon 1 and 2, The Last Boy Scout, Last Action Hero, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang - on the shortlist of my favorite action-comedies, and I hope to watch it again at some point with other people.

Game: Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

Worth saying that, though I'm getting used to playing as Dana, I've yet to get used to her outfit.
Worth saying that, though I'm getting used to playing as Dana, I've yet to get used to her outfit.

I'm about... halfway? through Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana and I feel confident in saying that - barring some huge drop in quality in its late-game - that it's one of the finest RPGs I've ever played. It's made me consider how adept Japan has become at creating open-world games in recent years: The Xenoblades, Metal Gear Solid V, Tales of Xillia/Zestiria/Berseria, NieR: Automata, Monster Hunter: World, Yakuza 0, and now Ys VIII. It seems Japanese developers have taken to heart the harsh lessons of Ubisoft's various Map Icon Vomit Simulators and learned that the best open-world game is one that keeps it content varied and impactful (that is to say, a minimal amount of filler) across its many varied environments.

In Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, recurring Ys silent protagonist Adol (pronounced like "atoll", I've only just discovered) Christin is once again shipwrecked and wakes up on a forbidden island, in this case the Isle of Seiren in the Gaete Sea (like most Ys geography, the Gaete Sea corresponds to a real-life European location, in this case the Mediterranean). However, rather than just washing up alone or alongside his old friend Dogi, he finds himself helping an entire community of shipwreck survivors in a little shanty town on the coast - one of the game's ongoing quests is to find more survivors from the same shipwreck, who have been scattered across the island. Each new face means a new helper in the village, whether that's a vendor or a blacksmith or even a new party member. The rest of the game prioritizes exploration, as you work together to get the lay of the land while figuring out how to keep the villagers safe and - ultimately - find a way off the island. Each zone has various percentage completion rates, one for general topography and the other two for harvest points and treasure chests, and you'll frequently hit roadblocks that force you to explore elsewhere for a while until you have the resources to overcome it. That can mean having the right traversal item - like a spacewhipper, there are pieces of equipment that lets you climb walls of ivy, or walk across swampy terrain, or double-jump - or simply having enough manpower in your village to clear out landslides and other enormous obstacles. You always have a story destination to head towards, but most of the game's core is in exploring Seiren's many regions.

And then there's the combat. That glorious, high-octane Ys combat. I was worried that the move to full 3D - rather than the polygonal fixed top-down view previous games employed - would diminish what has always been a core strength of the Ys series, but it's just as chaotic and measured and fast as always. Combat is all in real-time, and you have a single attack button that can be modified with the jump button for air juggles, as well as an evade roll and a guard button. The guard button also doubles as your special toggle: by holding it down and pressing a face button, you activate one of four assigned special moves. These specials require a mana stat, so you can't just spam them, but mana recovers quickly enough with normal attacks and kills. The key to doing well in Ys's combat is mastering the Flash Move and Flash Guard: the former is when you evade roll at the precise point an enemy attack would've hit you, and likewise the latter is for guarding at the same exact moment. Flash Moves grant you a period of invincibility and slows down the enemy, allowing you to quickly unload on them in relative safety. Flash Guards, meanwhile, provide the same invincibility and make every strike a critical hit: you can do some insane damage in the brief window it gives you. By using either of these techniques, or both, you can make mincemeat of practically anything in your path. Of course, it does mean learning the enemy's attacks and knowing when best to trigger the flash - not always an easy task, especially if you're surrounded or in a boss fight where every botched evade strips your health bar by a significant fraction. When you're passing through a low-level area where such tactical concerns are unnecessary, you can really plow your way through without breaking a sweat, which has its own visceral appeal. When you're in its flow, there's nothing that really comes close to the alacrity of Ys beyond perhaps character action games, and that's as thankfully true for Ys VIII as it has been for any other recent Ys game. (I took the liberty of recording one of my boss fights in a Twitter video clip over here. Should demonstrate all the above, though perhaps at a speed that's difficult to follow.)

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Ys VIII has its boss name/title combos on lock (though I do wonder what these names were like before the big localization patch earlier this year).
Ys VIII has its boss name/title combos on lock (though I do wonder what these names were like before the big localization patch earlier this year).

But as any true Ys fan knows, the franchise has another strength that perhaps even supersedes the combat: the music. Ys VIII's soundtrack is incredible. I adore it to pieces, and it's one of the few games where its environmental background music is every bit as rad as the boss music. I had a real problem last year picking out a favorite between Sunshine Coast, Deadly Temptation, or Crimson Fighter for GOTY purposes and since playing the game I've accrued another half-dozen tracks that have become some of my all-time favorite VGM. Take the frantic music that plays during the game's "interceptions" - tower defense sequences where you're called back to the castaway village in order to protect it from waves of normal enemies (and maybe a previous boss or two) - or the genre-incongruous but still awesome track that plays during the "nighttime explorations": essentially new dungeons that repopulate existing maps to create far deadlier night versions with far greater rewards.

Unexpectedly, I'm even enjoying the story of Ys VIII: traditionally the weakest part of any Ys game. Without getting too deep into spoilers, the titular heroine Dana has been playing more and more of a major role. Thing is, she doesn't exist in Adol's timeline, but rather many centuries in the past: Adol instead witnesses her life through dreams. However, Dana is also now getting visions and dreams of Adol... and it's starting to freak me out a little. I'm invested to see where this plotline goes, and whether it has anything to do with the abundance of Primordials: the name the game gives to its many prowling dinosaur enemies across the island, which until recently have been impossible to kill and necessitated a speedy retreat. I'm digging getting to know expanded cast of shipwreck survivors, trying out new party members (like Ys VII, the game gives you a number of different characters to play as if you ever needed a change from Adol), discovering the many mysteries that the island contains, angling up new breeds of fish (as well as chests and the occasional tough monster mini-boss), collecting new pieces of "adventuring gear" (the aforementioned traversal items) and backtracking to where I can use them, improving my scores by replaying interception events for the various bonus items obtained on the higher ranks, and - most recently - performing tasks as Dana to affect some change in the future with Adol, like fixing a waterway in Dana's era to restore a river in Adol's era. Like any good open-world game, there's always plenty to do and less-beaten paths to explore, and right now I'm having a ball. I'll definitely be sad when it's over, so I'm planning to stick around for as long as possible and try to do and see everything.

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