Heya folks, and welcome once again to another award-winning Backlogtoberganza, wherein I play a lot of the games in my back catalog and pretend like I'm not trying desperately to get back to Disgaea 5 or Metal Gear Solid 5.

We've got an interesting batch of games this week to cover, running the gamut from RPG-for-babies to storybook snoozer to hardcore masochistic platforming. And then there's Disgaea 5, glorious Disgaea 5, which deserves a blog entry of its own. Or ten. Hm. Foreshadowing, people!

I should also mention I've been playing a little bit more of Elder Scrolls Online with buddies and a fair bit of Metal Gear Solid V, which continues to be a blast. I did have to finally use the chicken hat, due to some checkpoint tomfoolery that left me protecting assets in the middle of a firefight waiting to happen. To be honest, I don't particularly care, as I knew it would probably happen eventually. I've already been liberal with calling in my helicopter for air support, because raining death upon my enemies is nothing short of badass.

I do have some very minor niggling issues with that game, but man, is it good. I'm simply not a good enough gamer to 100% it, but I do plan on going back through every mission and trying to complete as many goals as possible along with a few S-Ranks. We'll see how that goes.

Ok, let's get on with the recapping. DJ, play my jam!

Super Meat Boy

Hard games aren't my thing. Next.

Oh, you want details of my misery? Fine. Fine!

Look, I'm kind of terrible at video games. I play a lot of them, but honestly, if it doesn't have some sort of awesome leveling system or ways I can just brute force myself past hard parts, I'm pretty well done. Sure, I like hardcore games like Disgaea 5, but those are simply dense games, not hard. Even Metal Gear Solid usually affords me enough opportunities to cheese the systems in play to work to my particular ineptness.

I shouldn't have even bothered with Super Meat Boy. I didn't buy it on the 360 because of the steep difficulty, and only picked it up on PS4 because it was free with PSN. It was one of the bigger gaps of my indie game collection, and I thought I'd give it a go. Like I suspected, this game isn't for me.

Let me be clear - my problems with Super Meat Boy are my own faults, not those of the developers. The game controls pretty well, as has been said by roughly 90% of the gaming population before. The soundtrack - while not the original - has some awesome tracks. The whole thing is blazing fast, with instantaneous restarts and the like. It's a very solid game.

That said, I reached my limit very early with Super Meat Boy. There's a difference between a game offering relief and joy. For me, SMB only offered the former and none of the latter. Every map I beat led to me dreading the start of the next even more. The game doesn't hate players, it just hates bad ones. And I'm a bad one.

Completed? No. Not even through the first forest area. I barely scratched this one's surface.

Time Spent - An hour, maybe a little more than that.

Percentage finished - Enough.

Play Again? Unfortunately, no. I do plan on looking up some later levels on Youtube out of morbid curiosity.

Unfinished Swan

I'm not sure I feel anything but mild irritation with the Unfinished Swan. It's not a bad little idea - a boy makes his way through a nearly abandoned world, learning of its king and his obsession with monochrome aesthetics. As the boy travels, he finds his path by throwing out globs of paint, highlighting the world in stark contrasts (and sometimes shades) of colors. Neat premise, right?

The only problem is, it lacks the sort of story-telling depth or charm that a game like this needs. Much like the other walkie talkie I played this year - Everybody's Gone to the Rapture - there are tons of neat ideas lined up but the execution is lacking. The story swings wildly in tone, sometimes aiming for a dreamy storybook quality while then dipping down to talk about sewers. In something like Fable 2, this mostly works because of the scope of the game world. Here, the switches in tone and storytelling quality happen so rapidly that it leaves me wondering what the storyboarding process must have looked like, if there was one.

The gameplay is definitely far more intriguing than something as straightforward as Rapture or Dear Esther, though not by much. The painting mechanic is clearly the game's highlight, but there aren't enough variations on the idea to keep me interested for long and some of it gets very tiresome. I never want to grow vines with paint again.

Overall, this is a tough one to recommend, but it's certainly quirky enough to say that a purchase might not be a bad thing. It approaches beautiful, gives it a few furtive looks, and then runs away to make implied poop jokes with its buddies. It's a weird one.

Completed? Almost. I think I just started the last area.

Time Spent - About two hours.

Percentage Finished - 75% or so.

Play Again? Yeah. I'll probably finish this one off in the next week or so. I've blown through the rest of the game and I'm just curious enough to finish it, though I doubt I'll bother with some of the trophies.

Costume Quest 2

I've talked before about my disappointment with the gameplay of most every Double Fine games on this site before. It's a common theme for me - I love the heart and charm of their projects, but I've always found the gameplay to be shallower than a mud puddle. It seems like they're constantly held down by a design philosophy of making games targeted at people new to genres or games in general, which is a shame because anyone following the Tim Schafer name is going to be aware of games on a much more intimate level. Broken Age is a diet adventure game. Massive Chalice was turn-based tactical gaming missing almost all the guts and longevity that would attract any sort of gamer interested in the genre. Trenched is tower defense, which in itself is a pretty basic genre.

Costume Quest was problematic for me for all those reasons, not to mention that the fonts were fucking ridiculously small, to the point where I thought I'd set up something the wrong way. Thankfully, with the PS4's zoom feature, this became a non-issue and I picked up the sequel when it came up on sale.

Unfortunately, the zoom feature can't fix the boring combat mechanics and the non-existent RPG backbone. Apart from picking costumes to wear for each character, there's absolutely no depth to any of it. Fights are extremely protracted and tedious affairs, even after you learn the combo ability, and there's a dire lack of depth to literally everything in the game. At no point in this series do I think anyone on board actually said out loud, "Are these the mechanics that draw in RPG fans?" Combat is a button timing mini-game. Sounds great, until you get stuck in a snore-inducing five minute battle with basic creatures that you've seen a dozen times before with almost no options as to how to differentiate up your moves or attacks.

It doesn't help that the story lacks the charm of the original. It's still a cute game, but having been released four years after the original, it's hard to see where, if any, improvements were made. I can't recommend it to anyone. With the glut of RPGs we're seeing on new consoles, there's just not much point to playing something as spineless as this.

Completed? No.

Time Spent - About three hours, almost an hour and a half of which was needlessly boring combat.

Percentage Finished - No idea. Feels like I've got infinity left and infinity behind me.

Play Again - No. There are just too many better options out there.

Disgaea 5 and the State of RPGs on the PS4

Disgaea 5 marks the beginning of a fascinating month for RPGs on the PS4. Take a look at this list:

Disgaea 5 - Oct. 5th

Wasteland 2 - Oct. 11th

Tales of Zestiria - Oct. 18th

Divinity: Original Sin - Oct. 25th

Fallout 4 - Nov. 10th

Apart from the short gap between the 25th and the 10th, that's a solid month of RPG releases each and every week. And we're not talking bizarre little mini-RPGs like Citizens of Earth (which, by the way, you should definitely play if you liked Suikoden). It's also ignoring the release of the PS1 version of Final Fantasy VII, which is in itself certainly one of the greats.

I cannot remember a month more loaded for RPGs on one particular console. Maybe RPGs on the PC have had a similar month, but I've been thinking about this for weeks now and I can't come up with a period of time quite like it. True, Wasteland 2 and Divinity are rereleases, but they're still new to consoles and that's an amazing feat considering the complete lack of PC-ass RPGs on the last batch of consoles.

Between the stellar MGSV, the great Disgaea, and the upcoming Fallout, there's simply no way I can get to all those RPGs anytime in the foreseeable future. But all of those seem like no-brainer purchases unless something goes completely wrong with the launches. I look forward to some sales and seeing what the PC RPGs look like on the PS4. Can't wait.

Tales of Zestiria looks like a bit of a wild card at the moment. I'm not sure I like the art style - ok, so I'm very sure I don't like the art style after having loved Xillia and Vesperia's (and to a certain extent that rerelease of Abyss on the 3DS). But the gameplay looks solid and with the eception of Abyss, I can't recall a single Tales game I've actively disliked. Even Graces f, with all its flaws, was at its core a very good RPG. I hope Zestiria falls firmly in the league of its brethren Symphony, Xillia, and Vesperia, but time will tell.

As for Disgaea 5, I figure I'm about halfway through the story. To people unfamiliar with the depth of the gameplay, this means - and I kid you not - that I'm only about two percent of the way done with the whole game. Maybe even less than that. So far, the characters haven't grabbed me like 4, but there's a ton of smart gameplay additions that more than make up for the lack of personality. This still hasn't seen the updated roster graphics I'd like (you're still essentially seeing tiny variations on character models dating back as far as the original), but they've upgraded a lot of the menus and general appearances of the game. The menus are delightfully streamlined and understandable this go around. They've ditched the bizarre two bag system in favor of just one, character portraits and skills are now in a bigger, more legible font and neatly laid out, and there's a general sense that everything is just cleaner and easier to navigate. Thankfully, they've expanded upon the ease of use introduced in Disgaea D2 with its cheat shop by reusing that idea along with a few other minor tweaks to help get the player into the meta-game.

It helps too that they've made a lot of that meta-game much more accessible and rewarding. Almost right off the bat, you can start assigning characters to squads with easily understandable roles and bonuses, which was a friggin' chore in Disgaea 3 and 4. Capturing enemies and interrogating them actually serves a suitable purpose now, as you can boost your squads' powers with the essences of captured troops, or distill them into permanent stat-boosting items, super handy for getting new characters up and rolling even faster.

It's the least tooth-gnashingly obtuse game of the series, but that's not to say it isn't still very much Disgaea. If you can tolerate batshit crazy storylines and severe cases of Japanese-ness, and you love watching numbers tick upward or really, really deep tactical RPG combat with loads of depth, this might be the game for you. But if you're sane and recognize that all of those things are for crazy people, steer clear at all costs.

I have no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this will suck another two hundred hours of my life. Yay?

Thanks for reading, folks. What are the big holiday season releases you're looking forward to the most?