The Dredge of Seventeen Rising: Redredgence (Part One)

Though we've arguably seen many equally strong years for games since, I still find myself holding a candle for the superlative release schedule of 2017 and its particular focus on many of my favorite game series, including Ys, Xenoblade, Yakuza/Like a Dragon, Nier, Trails, Tales, Divinity, and Persona, not to mention a new Mario and Zelda. With few exceptions, each of the new 2017 entries for those enterprises also happened to be their respective peaks, at least in a recent sense: Persona 5 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 you could certainly make a case against, but I don't think anyone's quickly dismissing the claim that Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Tales of Berseria, Nier Automata, Divinity: Original Sin 2, or Yakuza 0 weren't the best games those series had produced in a while. Since it becomes that much harder to see the twinkling of hidden gems with so many floodlights around dropping mad lumens, I got it into my misshapen little head a while back that the year had no end of treasures if you only looked hard enough. After eventually assembling a truly excessive Top 100 GOTY list after the original Dredge of Seventeen run, it'd be easy to rest on my laurels and assume the year's veins had been thoroughly mined: quietly, however, I've still been accumulating more potential 2017 highlights for an eventual encore.

Goal here is to find candidates capable of breaking into the top half of the list, and ideally the top 40. It's a murderer's row up there so I've been side-eyeing most of the backlog items I've still got left with some degree of skepticism. Y'see, in order to break into the top 40 they would have to be better than everything, which sounds like a pretty tall order. What I actually mean, in a Wario64-esque ruse, is that they have to be better than David O'Reilly's Everything: the contemplative collectathon about finding our place in the universe by being everything else in the universe first. That's a solid 4 out of 5 game with some amount of bonus approbation for its novel gameplay and thoughtful commentary so it's going to be a high bar to pass; even so, I'm hopeful for a few of these candidates, some of which I've been sleeping on for far too long.

If I'm being honest and in the interest of keeping things somewhat focused over the next few weeks, there's a trio of hopefuls in particular I'm banking on being able to break into that top 40 and shake things up a bit. Given I'm only dedicating a single month to this project, for now, my intent is to roll credits on all three before April is through. Just so it doesn't seem like I'm dropping tantalizing clickbait all over the place I'll go ahead say what those three are:

• Week 1: Dragon Quest Heroes II! I enjoyed the first musou spin-off based on the Dragon Quest setting despite usually not being too hot on Omega Force's frantic mass-murder simulators, but it just goes to show that occasionally one comes along that I find myself drawn to because of some property-inspired feature or other. Whether the sequel will hit the same heights will remain to be seen but I'm hoping for plenty of series cameos and slime-bashing while I'm here.
• Week 2: Metroid: Samus Returns! A conspicuous gap in my Metroid career—it's the only one I haven't played, outside of spin-offs like Federation Force—which I'd initially avoided because it was just Metroid 2 again and it's never been reduced in price beyond a tiny 20% or so discount. Now that I've finally got my hands on it, and might be feeling some renewed Metroid fervor after the Prime 4 trailers, it seems like a good time to finally rank it against the year's other highlights. (Part Two can be found here.)
• Week 3: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider! The Dishonored 2 expansion from Arkane that is presently, as far as I know, the last anything attached to the Dishonored universe of whale oil phlebotinum and vengeful magic assassins. The campaign's a little shorter but I assume that also means there's a bit more focus to it and it looks to get into the background lore of the world and its most enigmatic character in greater detail. (Part Three can be found here.)

I've certainly more 2017 games laying around but as they're all a bit on the formidable side—some 20-hour-plus Indies like Seven: The Days Long Gone or Tokyo 42 as well as a few other B-tier potential top-halfers like Layton's Mystery Journey or Mary Skelter—there's no guarantee I'll have any time for them left over after the main three above. I'll do my best though, since I'd still like to get this 2017 GOTY list as definitive as possible; I suspect I'll revisit this notion again once its tenth anniversary rolls around in a couple years regardless. Given the devastating economic reality of our present era it's not like I'll be playing much new for a while, I'm sure.

On that cheerful note, let's get into this week's choice:

Dragon Quest Heroes II (Omega Force, 2017)

Dragon Quest Heroes: The World's Tree Woe and the Blight Below was a big surprise for me, having a generally low opinion of musou games based on a handful of encounters and plenty of venomous rhetoric from this site and elsewhere, as it proved the musou format to be palatable under the right conditions. Having played several hours of the sequel, I can say that the first game's charming mish-mash of gameplay styles wasn't just a one-off fluke. DQH2 didn't get localized with a subtitle—the direct translation of the Japanese one would be "The Twin Kings and the End of Prophecy" but they'd probably flower it up with something that rhymes like the first, such as "The Twins of Yore and an Omen of War"—but we're pretty much in a similar ballpark. DQH2, if anything, goes even further in the direction of making it seem more like a DQ spin-off than a musou game with more dedicated to open-world exploration and the reintroduction of DQ3's "Vocation" system (not Job system—though it's worth pointing out that DQ had the idea of switching careers mid-game first) as a means of giving your two protagonists, if not the vocation-locked guest characters, a great deal of versatility in their builds.

As in DQH1, the idea is that this is a new game with a novel world and story but one that is probably familiar enough to long-time DQ fans for some consistent details and the usual bevvy of terrible puns and globally-sourced accents for its localization. In addition to the game's own original cast of characters, the player can also recruit those from mainline DQ games: DQ4's Torneko Taloon, the jovial shopkeep with a penchant for finding weapons to sell at his store, shows up soon after the game is underway and provides a useful support role to an early party in dire need of additional healers (he also has an Irish accent now: kinda figured from all his parsimony he'd be rocking a Scrooge McDuck brogue instead). I've since recruited some cats from DQ6 and DQ7, neither of which I've played, but I know a couple of DQ8 characters are right around the corner (Angelo and Jessica again, who I believe were in the previous DQH too) as well as some more DQ4 types. Guests are pretty immutable in their builds, as are the game's non-protag original characters, so their inclusion in the party as the third and fourth members is often to fill gaps that the main duo's current arrangement leave open. For instance, if you're rocking two ranged/squishy vocations for the heroes you'd probably want someone like DQ6's meaty martial artist Carver or the game's original axe-wielding maiden Desdemona drawing aggro up front in the vanguard role.

As is often the case with anything DQ, everything's deceptively simple and straightforward but deeply intelligent from a game design perspective. You're constantly incentivized to switch weapons and vocations despite the setbacks of resetting your proficiency because the former can unlock "party skills" with enough affinity in a weapon type (usually divisors of 5) that apply to everyone, including some useful passive buffs, while the latter lets you earn various passive boosts that then applies to all your other vocations too and thus strengthens them. By switching both on a regular basis you end up creating a stronger baseline character overall, though the effect is negligible until you're far enough into the game where you can quickly level up with tougher enemies. Even if a new vocation puts you back at level 1 with the stats to match, the equipment you can buy at that stage of the game will probably be enough to prevent you from being completely stomped. Naturally, that also means a lot of grinding is involved—as well as farming, since you can really power up accessories through alchemy powered by monster/field drops—but then it wouldn't be a musou game without it. Thankfully, those not in your party seem to level up at a moderate rate so you don't run into too many occasions where you have to drop the main story thread temporarily for a training montage. Plenty of bonus objectives to go boost yourself with though, between the game's side-questing system and its online-ready (but with solo as an option) "dimensional dungeons".

I'm drawn to DQH2 because, as I said at the lede, at its core it's an action-RPG made in the Dragon Quest aesthetic more than it is a traditional musou game. You still have those battles where enemy reinforcements show up out of nowhere and you're making tactical decisions about wiping out the current crop of enemies or fighting your way to a more pressing objective, especially if there are VIPs to protect, but the Wild Zones where you're just poking around at your own pace wiping out hordes of monsters and looking for hoards of treasure (so easy to mix those two words up) feels closer to an Ys or Tales in practice. Omega Force, for all the accusations it gets about sticking to a formula, does tend to accommodate whatever license they're playing around with at any given moment and so even if the Three Kingdoms or the Sengoku era aren't your thing there's a good chance that if they're dipping their toes into a franchise or license you have some affinity towards they're going to do right by it: not just in terms of characters and aesthetics but incorporating mechanics and ideas that matter most to that fanbase. Like, they're very conscious that they're guests in another land and are on their best behavior as a result. I was never too drawn in by the Hyrule Warriors series because there's not a whole lot of Zelda's loop of dungeons and traversal upgrades that can be reflected in this model but I did appreciate that an attempt was made. Heck, I can't be the only one if they're already working on a second sequel. Dragon Quest, conversely, is one that is far better served by this musou treatment and this sequel even more so than the first.

There is a slight concern about starting this month with a game that could potentially devour the rest of April if I let it so I figured I'd get a start on it now and continue to chip away at it between playing the others. While I've no doubt that I'll see the end of the main story before April is over—it feels about half done already, given the game has seven kingdoms in it and I'm on my way to visiting the fourth—the same cannot be said for the vast amount of post-game and optional content the game has in store. I'll probably just glut myself on it for as long as it takes to eventually burn out, such is my pattern with most open-world and open-ended RPGs these days. From what I've played so far though, this is making my top 40 easily if not squeezing into the top 20.

[To Be Determined]

This is a little bonus feature I'm putting on the end of each of this month's Dredge updates: an additional trio of 2017 games that have so far eluded my limited purchasing power but will one day be joining that Top 100 list if I can help it. Since we're only talking eight years ago most of these games are still available and I just haven't bit the bullet yet on picking them up. It's getting clearer to me these days how "directed" I am to certain Indies that find themselves receiving huge discounts or else frequently making their way into bundles: the two avenues through which I (and most others, I suspect) acquired most of my Steam library. Not for the first time I find myself amazed by the marketing acumen of what are often small teams of people with other, more important jobs to worry about.

• Snipperclips: Cut it Out, Together!: Odd coincidence that we're now contemplating the Switch 2's launch library when the Switch 1's launch library was very much a hot topic of conversation back in 2017. One such notable early release was this cute little Switch-exclusive Indie game about a pair of saucy goobers made out of construction paper that could modify their appearances to complete a series of creativity-based puzzles, like cutting a cup-shaped indentation in their heads to carry a ball around. It had co-operative two-person multiplayer as a selling point but I don't think it was strictly mandatory either. As with anything Nintendo-exclusive, it never felt the need to dip in price and sits with the system's many first-party offerings in this permanent state of "all our games are timeless, so why let them depreciate in value?" which I can at least half-agree with, for as parsimonious as Nintendo can be these days. Snipperclips was developed by UK outfit SFB Games, which also put out the amusing adventure game (and recent IGotW subject) Tangle Tower—also a game that was included in that Itch.io California Fire Relief bundle from a few weeks back, if you weren't aware and/or just haven't tried navigating the nightmare that is the Itch.io site to find out what's in it—and have more recently released the pitch-perfect PS1 horror game throwback Crow Country. I've liked all the stuff they've made so far so maybe I can hold out hope that Snipperclips will get its first greater-than-25% discount once everyone's moved onto Switch 2.
• Echo: I recall this stylistic sci-fi action game getting a lot of buzz because of the adaptive behavior of its CPU monsters, effectively changing their tactics to foil the player's own typical routines. Avoiding them made them more alert and eager to search for you, using traps made them more likely to find alternative routes like crawling along the ceiling, using guns to take them out made them more resistant to small arms, and so on. Well, I can't guarantee that those are all actual adjustments the game might make, but it had that sort of "oh shoot, the old tricks don't work any more" escalation in its central cat-and-mouse approach. I definitely liked the look of this game even if it didn't sound like it performed all that well (its developer, Ultra Ultra, was sadly a one-and-done) and, man, I can't say the idea of a stealth game that gets ever harder to sneak your way through sounds particularly appealing but for its aesthetic and innovative qualities alone I'd like to give it a shot someday.
• Rime: Spaniards Tequila Works were on a tear in 2017, putting out the divine time-looping assassination game The Sexy Brutale, the VR murder mystery whodunnit The Invisible Hours, and this game, Rime, which started as a PlayStation exclusive but eventually saw a multi-platform release after Tequila bought back the license. Rime's sort of riffing on ICO with its boy lost in a picturesque but deserted world with only a small fox buddy for company. It sounded like it could go blow-for-blow with its inspiration in terms of its presentational chops but the simplistic environmental puzzles and lack of deep gameplay may have hurt its critical reception a little. As a fan of Fumito Ueda's works (and who isn't?) I'm curious to see an outsider's take on that sort of chill, atmospheric worldbuilding and I trust a group like Tequila Works to pull it off. Speaking of whom, Tequila most recently put out a League of Legends side-game, Song of Nunu: A League of Legends Story, which despite my general aversion to anything MOBA-related might be something I'll have to look into since I hear it's a pretty passable Zeldersatz. (Maybe if I get over that aversion I could also check out that Arcane show everyone likes too.)

Well, that's all for now. Or, as we used to say in 2017, "Jeez, the Nasdaq is disintegrating! Why is everything on fire?!". Oh hey, we still say that now. Man, some things never change, huh.