rexiortem

[rexiortem]

Valkyria Chronicles is Weirdly Reckless

I am a little late to the Valkyria Chronicles party. I bought it back when it first came out on Steam, but had trouble understanding its mechanics and objectives. The young depressive in me chalked this up to being too stupid to plan out a strategy. Several years later, now that I’m older, stubborn, and tired, I’ve finished the game realizing the ultimate truth: Valkyria Chronicles doesn’t value lives or strategy the way you think it would.

The initial pitch in Valkyria Chronicles sounds like catnip to anyone who is a fan of the Fire Emblem, XCOM, or Advanced Wars series. You command the scruffy militia of a small country faced against a powerful empire. In each mission, you can choose from a roster of characters who specialize in one of five classes. Each character has their own unique mixture of perks that can help or hurt them in the battlefield. If these characters die on the battlefield, they’re dead for good (unless your other troops run up and save them in time.)

Within skirmishes, each army has a set number of Action Points (AP) that can be used on one turn.  When you spend AP on a unit, that unit can move at a set distance in real time, with one chance to fire at an enemy or obstacle. If you wanted to, you could spend more than one AP on a single unit, although frequent AP usage on one unit means less movement. While a unit is active, they are also vulnerable to automatic cover fire at a certain range. Your headquarters opens up early on in the game allowing you to spend experience and money you gain in skirmishes to level up your unit classes, tanks, and new orders that give your troops temporary buffs in battle.

Add this layer of strategy with an anime watercolor art style that still holds up in 2018, and Valkyria Chronicles makes a strong impression within the first hour. In theory, this system encourages you to create a balanced team unique to each mission, spreading out AP to all your units so you can ensure a solid, reliable attacking wave. Any reasonable commander would want to build a plan that keeps the casualty count low. Valkyria Chronicles does not, however, care for caution. The game plays by a set of rules that encourages a level of recklessness that would make a Soviet general consider a career change.

Most strategy games rank you on factors like units lost, money spent, and turns taken. Valkyria Chronicles only cares about the turns, actively punishing you for moving slowly. Lower ranks mean less experience and money earned, meaning your troops fall behind in levels as enemy troops quickly ascend to new weapons you won’t see without grinding. The emphasis in speed means that one class - the Scout - has an unbalanced level of importance compared to any other unit class due to how far it can move within one turn. Whatever disadvantages Scouts have (lower defense, lower damage) can be fixed with an Order buff.

Since the majority of mission objectives involve capturing the enemy base, the winning move is to have scouts make a beeline towards the other side of the map and take out any imperial soldiers unlucky enough to stand near the flag. If any scout gets shot down, it's not really a problem since you can save them with the medic. If my scouts were real people, they would leave the war as talking brains in a jar due to how often a tank gutted them at point blank range.

Missions that don’t require capturing an enemy base usually involve a boss enemy that plays by a set of rules so arbitrary you’re bound to repeat the map just to figure out what to do. I can think of maybe two missions within the game that avoid the problem of Scout Rushing and boss rules. If you’re coming into Valkyria Chronicles ready to employ sensible, smart strategies, you won’t get far.

And yet, and yet, despite the incredibly stupid nature of how you’re encouraged to play, how unique enemy types and maps have rules that completely break everything you’ve learned up to then, I can’t help but like this game. Your units will murder a man and go “yippee!” as they move on towards their next target. Upbeat music trumpets along as your tank runs over a bunker, causing imperial soldiers to scream in terror as they jump out of the way before you tear them apart with a mortar. The capital city of your country will be surgically sliced into pieces, but at any time you can visit your headquarters (in the same city) and be greeted by the cheery local reporter about her big scoops.

Valkyria Chronicles tries to have its melancholy moments. You spend two maps fighting in a concentration camp, a sympathetic character gets unceremoniously killed due to The Terrors of War, the main character’s hometown gets burned and pillaged by cartoon villains. These moments, however, never have staying power. We are quickly taken back to the colorful world of magic women who can explode into balls of fire and a game system that makes headshots meaningless as long as you’re crouching behind a sandbag. I am usually one for mixing tragedy and comedy, but in here it feels like confused, tonal whiplash.

There is a depressing amount of wasted potential in the gameplay of Valkyria Chronicles. That might be why I kept coming back to it, to see if that potential was ever realized, to see if any of the possible interesting segments of the shallow story ever panned out (they didn’t), to see if there was some gotcha moment at the very end that tied it all together. There never was, and I now have 40 hours logged into a video game that leaves me feeling satisfied with beating it, but dirty for playing by its rules. I may have beaten the super soldier like the game asked me to, but only after sending waves of scouts after her in one turn, each dropping to the concrete from returning fire like a cheery anime lemming. I may have won, but history will not look kindly on me.

[rexiortem]

GOTY 2017

5. Metroid 2 Samus Returns

Before E3 this year, I put “Metroid” in the dead horse category. Leave it alone, stop trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of it. There’s none left. It was abundantly clear that Sakamoto, the man who apparently had the last say on what the series was about, had no idea why fans like the games in the first place and was rightfully shooed away into some corner office deep underground. Even then, Federation Force still happened.

When Nintendo announced Samus Returns this year along with Metroid Prime 4, a wave of skepticism quickly washed over my initial excitement. How are the guys who made a mediocre 2D Castlevania game going to make a good Metroid game? Why was the announcement for Metroid 2 made as a brief aside rather than a big announcement? How could they possibly win back goodwill after AM2R improved so much?

The game addressed many of my concerns relatively well, although it did bring to light new ones.

I hate the bland 3D that so many first party Nintendo 3DS games have ( Hey Pikmin, the Mario 3DS games, and to a lesser extent - the N64 Zelda remakes). This 3D does a good enough job of looking like the thing it is supposed to look, but lacks an energy that I felt older Nintendo games (and newer ones on the Switch) encompass. The 3DS remakes of SR388’s caverns are covered with bloom that does little to hide the bland textures. I found many enemies blending in with the backgrounds, and it isn’t until the back half of the game that the environments start looking different.

The new melee mechanic is a step in an interesting direction, but requires more tweaking. To stop and wait for the smallest cannon fodder enemies to attack harms the game’s flow, and I didn’t feel like I was having fun exploring the world until I got the Screw Attack and Plasma Beam two-thirds into the game. I think there is something there, though.

The aeon pulse needs to go. I get that bombing every tile or whatever is annoying, but that’s not a Metroid problem. That’s a level design problem. Level designers must create organic worlds with hints that players can look at and naturally intuit their secrets. Hollow Knight was a much bigger world, with way more secrets, and did fine without an aeon pulse. You could buy things in Hollow Knight that basically show you where the secrets were, but these were mostly endgame things that were also present in past Metroid games. The Aeon Pulse, as it stands, allows lazy level design that relies on the player to mash the circly blue light that makes the bad beeping sound.

The robot sucks too.

Is that a lot of bad stuff? Sure is! Why is Samus Returns in my top 5 then, beating games like Wolfenstein: The New Order and Sonic Mania? Samus Returns, to me, represents a welcome return to form that I thought would never happen. Exploring new spaces - even if the spaces are samey to me - is still a joy. I love discovering new powerups and metroid-y spaces by myself. I got to relive that childhood time of playing a portable metroid game late into the night, headphones on max while shooting down aliens.

Most of the metroid fights are redesigned for the better - better than AM2R - and I personally like the secret last boss fight as a closer. The last third of the game when you get the Plasma Beam and Screw Attack is so much more energetic, fluid, and exciting than the relatively more plodding pace of the game before then. I am, at the end of the day, a complete sucker for anything that has Samus Aran in it.

Also, that 100% ending you unlock? I’m psyched to see where that goes.

4. Persona 5

I don’t have as many words to say about Persona 5 - because I put them in a separate article - but I’m interested in seeing how time treats this game. Personally, I found myself having much more fun with it when I stopped caring about its hypocritical narrative about rebellion, and decided it wasn’t a big deal if I couldn’t max out my social links with everyone.

The social links I did do - most of them being the adults - were engaging and made me wish this game centered around an older cast of characters. The kids were written well enough, but for a main cast they seemed one-note and forgotten after their introductory arcs.

Persona 5 is a celebration of catchy music, engaging battle mechanics, and a deep understanding of how gamefeel can improve a JRPG. As I mention in my persona 5 centered post, the UI’s accomplishment isn’t that it looks all cool and sharp, it’s how snappy and responsive it is to your input. The way the camera jumps to and from scenes within battles, how menus click into place, and how you can move in and out of battle in seconds is something all JRPGs should learn from.

3. Nier: Automata

Nier struck a chord with a lot of people, but I don’t know if it struck the same chord with me. Rather, it may be more appropriate to say that moments I found especially heavy or affecting don’t get brought up as much within podcasts and videos. Ending E is a wonderful sequence that literally cannot be done in any medium outside of video games. Even though I technically had it spoiled for me before I played it, that same spoiler can’t express just how weird and unique the moment is. Still, that wasn’t what did it for me.

Nier’s soundtrack is well documented as something unlike anything we’ve heard in games before. A mixture of Japanese and French if those two languages were mixed together thousands of years into the future. Many people seem to like the more bombastic soundtracks and, hell, I like Birth of a Wish as much as the next guy. It is in Nier’s quietest tracks and moments, however, that I find the game’s underlying despair and hope mixing together in a confusing, yet engrossing mechanical miasma.

Nier got me in its clutches the first time it takes you to the YorHa base in space. The Fortress of Lies had me put the controller down and just listen. It was only my first hour within the game, no idea what I was going into, but this track combined with the base’s stark, empty hallways floating within the black void of space - a void we later learn is far more encompassing than anyone could have expected - and I knew I was in for something special.

I suppose game critics who are paid to write these lists need to criticize Nier’s boxy environments, low resolution textures, and “shallow” gameplay. I don’t understand any of these complaints, and I guess that’s why I’m unemployed right now. I had fun with the combat, and the “ugly looking environments” represented the world’s decay to me. The boxy design reminded me of old Xbox games, bringing out a weird, unintentional nostalgia I didn’t know I had.

2. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky 3rd Chapter

Hey, while we’re talking about video game music and how it sticks with us, let’s talk about how good the regular battle music is in Trails in the Sky 3rd Chapter.

Dude!

You want to talk about a song that made me put the controller down and really sink it in? This is entirely my jam! Hermit Garden? Also my jam.

Before it’s release, I mostly heard of Trails 3rd as a sort of side story. The reality couldn’t be farther from the truth, introducing characters who would later play significant roles in both entries of later Trails arcs, while bringing to end the arcs of characters from as early as the first chapter of Trails in the Sky. It is a game where the designers seemed to think - “Forget about all the ‘designing a world’ business, let’s just make some dungeons and put in plotdumps every 5 minutes” which is exactly what I signed up for.

Do I miss some aspects of the world from Sky First and Second? Sure. We don’t get nearly as much NPC chatter this time around, and there’s no bracer guild board to get sidequests from. The Sun, Moon, and Star doors instead act as MORE plotdumps for characters that are or will be significant later on. Trails might be one of the few game series that can pull this off thanks to the world and characters.

An interesting aspect of 3rd’s release is that America gets it after Trails of Cold Steel’s first and second release (whereas in Japan it came long before Cold Steel.) This means the Western audience is introduced to certain characters in an order different than intended, giving us much different… first impressions.

Outside of plot stuff, while most people call the battle system in Sky slow and plodding, I find it relaxing. Maybe I just like bad game mechanics, who knows, but for a good two months I enjoyed sitting down and slowly going through a little bit of 3rd’s story after a long day at work. The boss fights are easily the hardest in the trilogy too. You know a story sold you on how imposing a certain character is when just the idea of fighting them makes you anxious.

Unfortunately, those of us in “The West” are now on a Trails hiatus. There’s a fan translation project in the works for the first CrossBell game, and I hope that turns out well. Throughout 2017, I’ve had several odd weeks where I wondered how possible it was to learn Japanese myself and just play those games like that before the next Cold Steel game is brought over. How hard can it be?

1. Hollow Knight

Hollow Knight completely took me by surprise. I heard it was good from several outlets: friends, Youtubers, games journalists, and so on. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for how much it got me. This is the first Metroidvania since the last, well, Castlevania, that gets one of the most important aspects of these games: The character of the world you explore.

Hollow Knights maintains a balance between a dark, aggressive world and a cute, hopeful one. It’s a world where careless cartographers hum jaunty tunes across the train stations as, on the other side of the map, an innocent little miner bug slowly loses her mind and sense of self. For one thing, this balance is hard to pull off. Go too far in any direction and it can feel like tonal whiplash, tipping the line towards edgy Newgrounds flash videos or overly melodramatic shlock. Hollow Knight never leans too far in either direction, making me much more invested in its world.

The amount of variety in terms of enemies, characters, and worlds you explore are the closest any of the indie successors have gotten to matching Symphony of the Night. In Symphony of the Night, places felt lived in. You could sit in the chairs, pray at the confessionals, and find hidden rooms that had a clear purpose to them outside of video game mechanics. In Hollow Knight, sitting down doubles up as saving, little bugs fix the signs you break when you’re not looking, there are entire sections of game that don’t fulfill any game achievements outside of just doing them! If you were so inclined, you could even piece together little bits and pieces of what people tell you to learn about the history of the world!

Yes, that last part is like Dark Souls. Whatever. My point is, even when an indie Metroidvania can capture tight mechanics (Momodora) or the looks (Axiom Verge, Environmental Station Alpha) I had often felt that the worlds and those who lived in them were not considered as closely as they should have been. Hollow Knight took the time to consider the world and characters outside of their mechanical use, and in doing so every other aspect of the game is greatly enhanced.

What about the mechanics? Swinging the sword is fun. The bad guys are neat. You get more powerups and moving around is easier which is all well and good. These things make up the parts of the game and the game would certainly suffer without them, but without the world they happen in Hollow Knight would simply be… an empty husk.

[rexiortem]

Persona 5 Thoughts (spoilers for everything)

I didn't have high expectations when buying Persona 5 several months after its release. Many of the Twitter games people I follow had already expressed mixed opinions, the common thread being a strong opening that doesn't last after the first dungeon. For me, it is a JRPG with enjoyable mechanics that is bogged down by a disappointing story.

I never played a Persona game before, but I have a fair amount of Shin Megami Tensei experience under my belt. When other reviewers complained about the game's difficulty, I came in with a good idea of what was to come. Insta-kill attacks, paralyzing status effects, and random encounters that went poorly due to bad luck were all commonplace in old SMT games, and Persona 5 never turned out as difficult as those. Building a team of personas mixed with the Phantom Thieves party members was a fun puzzle for each new dungeon; every time I made it through a difficult boss it was with a sense of accomplishment rather than relief that I could move on.

Persona 5's UI needs no introduction, it may be one of its most popular features. While it looks cool, I hope that isn't the only takeaway other JRPG developers get from its praise. Persona 5, like many SMT games, has a very snappy menu. The simple act of pressing X to attack an enemy or use an item has a tactile feel that many other JRPGs lack. Its largest accomplishment is that you don't feel like you are just using a menu. You never have to wait too long, and rarely any attack animation lasts too long. The only exception I can think of is when one particular enemy was only weak to physical attacks, which meant that every normal attack led to the several-seconds-longer critical hit animation. Many JRPGs that I enjoy significantly more than Persona 5 - such as those in the Kiseki series - could benefit from faster fights.

Beyond the fighting mechanics, running through the dungeons and fast traveling between maps kept the game moving at a brisk pace. The detective vision that Joker gets early on in the game is a welcome addition - highlighting items and environments you can interact with - although it also felt like a band-aid over a larger design problem that plagues most RPGs. I still haven't decided whether I like the safe room system. On one hand, having limited windows to save your game is a classic method of retaining tension when playing through a dungeon - if you could save at any time this game would be too easy. On the other hand, like most people who have graduated from college, I don't have much time to play video games, and losing 30 minutes of progress can ruin a night. While it never turned me away, I can see why other people would get frustrated by Persona 5's harsh battle penalties combined with a limited save system.

Persona 5's story and characters, unfortunately, fizzled out quickly for me. Kamoshida was a highlight villain in terms of personal involvement, and is a great choice as the first big bad to fight. Part of this is how believable he was - this was someone that could be in your neighborhood, that could be in charge of your kids. He carried himself well around the adults, and often manipulated the kids enough that they would feel like the bad guys, and he the victim. Making him confess to all his crimes was rewarding to me personally, not just because it was a goal that the game laid out for me. After Kamoshida, the villains quickly devolve into cartoon territory. Not every bad guy needs to have ten layers of depth, but the lack of any made going after them feel much more hollow than Kamoshida.

What I found especially disappointing was how Persona 5 handled the concept of Palaces. Early on, Morgana explained that palaces are a result of a person's distorted desires. This explanation was vague enough that the writers could have dived into what exactly a distorted desire entailed. Desires are not inherently bad things. While this concept is somewhat explored in Futaba's and Sae's palaces, it never goes far enough to ask how a desire that could have been born with good intentions could hurt the person and others around them. Instead, we get cookie cutter bad guys that want money and power because... they are bad guys.

I also didn't find myself caring much for Persona 5's cast of social links and party members. I definitely have favorites, with Yusuke, Sojiro, and Hifumi being my top 3, but the story rarely takes a dive into any character's motivations or goals. I'm not the first to write this criticism, but it feels as if once each new character's introductory segment is done, they are reduced to flat character tropes. I liked everyone well enough, but I also don't see myself missing anyone from that universe. I longed for the world building that I've come to expect from other series like the Kiseki games. Talking to NPCs in Persona 5 is a chore, no one says anything interesting nor does it go anywhere. Again, not every RPG needs 50,000 lines of dialogue to achieve a meaningful plot or world, but Persona's Tokyo feels routine and lifeless compared to other, quieter settings.

For all the relevant commentary Persona 5 has - public apathy, a predatory older generation, the effects of corporate greed - it has a distressing lack of self-awareness. Any time I turned on the game, my Playstation 4 eagerly reminded me that I couldn't record footage for most of the game. While I didn't care to record myself blankly staring at fusion screens for an hour, the simple fact that I couldn't decide for myself thanks to a corporate decision made me feel like a lot of the commentary fell flat on its face. Criticisms of Persona 5's social commentary go much deeper, but I don't have the vocabulary to voice them. Other writers much more learned than me have done a better job already.

My time with Persona 5 clocked a little under 100 hours, and I don't regret the time I spent. The dungeons were fun, the music is amazing, and while the characters were nothing spectacular I did enjoy their company. It's not a game that I see myself replaying anytime soon, but if I did, I would be interested in trying with a harder difficulty while skipping over most of the story.

Some random points:

- I love most of the soundtrack, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be Madarame's palace. I can put that music on loop for a whole day and not get sick of it.

- While I liked (and relate to) Kawakami the most out of the romance options, the circumstances around her social link were so off putting that I couldn't stand it. I ended up going with Hifumi.

- I was aware of Shido's palace being the infamously bad one, but I didn't feel like it was as long as other people said. Then again, I've already been badly burned once by Trails of Cold Steel 2, where finishing the "Final Dungeon" meant you had 15 more hours of game left.

- Gating social links behind Guts/Kindness/etc is lame.

- Mementos sucks

- what if it wasnt akechi who betrayed you but like if mishima was getting freaked out b ythe cops and so he ratted you out and its like a whole thing. just asking questions

[rexiortem]

Why is Resident Evil 4 Still Good?

Resident Evil 4 and I didn't mesh when it was new. Demo versions of the game stood at every Best Buy, Gamestop, and Target. I tried playing through the opening village countless times and left frustrated. The controls were too weird. Shooting was too hard. The enemies were too fast. I decided it wasn't the game for me. These feelings only cemented as time went on. Games that got their inspiration and design philosophy from RE4 like Gears of War bored me to tears. Resident Evil 5, a game I owned, felt so dull that I never got through the first act. I would have never given RE4 another chance if it didn't go on sale this month, over a decade after its first release.

But I did give it a chance, and it grabbed me in seconds.

RE4 oozes confidence with its opening cutscene. A spanish guitar jams out while gloomy Leon stares into a dark forest. Energy courses through each shot as the camera jumps around the scene. The game transitions from a cool detective story into a creepy, quiet trek into a village. Once you enter the first house, the world goes hog wild and never let's up. Capcom delivers on scenes that never overstay their welcome.

Every room holds its own unique identity, story, and strategy. Many people fondly remember the opening village, one of the best first impressions of any video game. The enemies are smart, you have tons of options, and secrets are plenty. But we should give more credit to what happens after the honeymoon phase. How many games have promising beginnings, only to lose steam after the first hour?  We should appreciate the castle with its creepy monk whispers and decorated hallways, the underground ruins full of traps and secret passages, and the labs where the awful regenerating creatures wheeze deadly chuckles into your ear. The final area is the only weak link. The military island's drab, gray walls and ammo sponge enemies remind me too much of Gears of War.

The living, breathing enemies make up so much of the game's strength. It's not a hot take to say that Capcom avoiding zombies in their zombie series is a risky move, nor a hot take to say it pays off. It's more interesting for Leon to battle bloodthirsty villagers, flying monsters, and a tiny man. These enemies are out to murder you, and that makes them more frightening, more of a presence. They plot against you, set traps, and try to catch you off guard. Zombies, by contrast, are dumb and hungry. RE4 got me to jump more than I care to admit.

Yet with all the detail, the craft that goes into every encounter, RE4 still slips. The controls, though I am better with them now than I was as a kid, still make my hands tense. You can lull many of the giant bosses into easy AI patterns that make them act like dumb puppies. While the game succeeds in keeping Ashley out of the way, so much as shooting her in the foot kills her. The game also can't help but be goofy. Bad guys yell their guts out as they fall down a short cliff. Important looking characters die as soon as they're introduced. The merchant exists for some reason (though we love him.)

It's okay though, because checkpoints and save spots are plenty, the merchant offers generous prices, and the game keeps moving forward. That's the main thing from RE4 that is important. I've read a couple of other pieces on why this game made an impact to design. It made an impact because it changed the action game formula. It made an impact because of its unique camera perspective. It made an impact because it built a decent escort quest. I don't agree with any of that. Everything I mentioned above is something that other games have done before RE4. Other games have had cool enemies, cool environments, and confidence.

RE4 gets that the player wants to keep seeing new things, and needs reasons to see new things. This need is why each act has its own bad guy (the chief, the tiny man, krauser). That's why the environments change often. That's why gimmicks like escorting Ashley or riding a mine cart never stay for long. Even if it trips along the way, it keeps running to the goal like a clumsy jock. I feel like I know every room in the game, because there was always something to wonder about or look forward to.

Why does Resident Evil 4 hit me so much now in a way that it never did as a kid? Why do I bother with the controls in this game when more refined versions of them turn me off right away? Maybe its energy stands out even more today than it did back then. While game developers today understand that players like drip fed progress - usually through loot crates or higher numbers - many still struggle with emotional attachment. Getting stronger and finishing RE4 was secondary, the real joy lay in discovering a new world full of odd characters.

In a world with Undertale, Stardew Valley, and Overwatch, developers need to look into how emotional attachment makes a player stick. Resident Evil 4 did not age well because it revolutionized action games. It aged well because it had a forward moving energy and earnestness that we often crave out of life in general. We can all learn a little bit about Leon running face first into a flesh monster, so long as we don't lose our heads like him.

[rexiortem]

Finding All The Animals in a No Man’s Sky Planet

Yesterday morning I landed on a green planet. Normally I wouldn't stay on one with acid rain, but it had wildlife, which was a rare combo. There's a mechanic where if you scan all the animals on a planet, you get a lot of money. It seemed like the closest thing to a challenge that No Man's Sky had to offer, and it didn't seem that hard, so I figured I may as well. The planet wasn't bad to look at either. It had big mushrooms for trees, which reminded me of Morrowind. Morrowind and No Man's Sky have a lot in common for me: I like walking around in them, I don't know what to do with the stuff I find, and there's a lot of places with big mushrooms.

I didn't play that much in the morning, the real hunt began at night time, after I did all my important stuff. I had a frustrating day at work. The office computers were slow and disconnected from the internet a lot. My entire job relies on the internet, so my face had gotten a little pink by the time I left. The planet's name was Peacock Tail. It's named after a Boards of Canada song. Every planet in that system was, because I had been listening to Boards of Canada for most of my No Man's Sky playtime. A lot of people say the music in the game is beautiful and ethereal, but none of it really sticks with me. There's a lot of moody synthesizers? Sometimes a slow guitar?

I made a little goal for myself to leave my ship behind while searching for animals. My theory was that people get bored of No Man's Sky because it's too comfortable, and it's too comfortable because nobody ever gets far away from their ship. I chose a direction and walked. I scanned a lot of big mushrooms, and small plants, and rocks. I wondered why the developers let players scan rocks. Who cares about rocks? Real scientists? Would there have been a player base peeved off because the rocks were left forgotten? I think No Man's Sky is the only game that made me pay attention to a rock.

I found my first batch of easy animals in a wide open field. Peacock Tail is mostly jagged cliff-sides, so maybe the game saves all the spawns at the flat points where the wildlife can move around easy. I want to say that I bought No Man's Sky knowing exactly what it was. You're reading the words of a guy who didn't think Spore was all that bad when it came out. I scanned two animals that looked exactly the same but, according to my weird space encyclopedia, were not. The only difference I could tell was that one had a male gender, and the other's gender was a long science word that I don't remember.

I named them Sonic and Shadow, after the popular video game Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.

After about fifteen minutes I left the game to get a glass of water and take my melatonin. My dad was watching the Olympics and wanted Uzbekistan to win the boxing tournament. When I came back to the game I found a new animal that was, by far, the ugliest thing I had ever seen. It was a ball with a shell on it, it had four thin bat wings that struggled to carry its weight. For some reason there were feathers on its wrist too? I named it "This is Me" and ignored its pleading cries for death.

Sometimes I was harassed by a lone bug that went up to my hips. The only animals that have attacked me in this game have been these bug looking things. They burrow out of the ground, slice at me, and then burrow back in. Killing them doesn't feel as satisfying as it should be. One of the animals I had to scan was a bird, and birds are impossible to scan because they keep moving around in the air. You have to murder a bird so you can scan its corpse after it falls. Maybe the developers intended this? I think this is how old school bird watchers used to identify birds. But I'm not an old school bird watcher. I'm a featureless space man with a space ship and a space gun. Why can't my space scanner just scan a living space bird?

There were two abandoned buildings in the middle of my encyclopedic journey of Peacock Tail. The Boards of Canada system was inhabited by the Korvax, who were really sensitive robots. Half of my interactions with them involved them dying in some way. I'm not surprised when I walk into one of these domes and all the chairs and pots are flipped over. Maybe one of those big bugs that  were always harassing me found its way into the hut, and nobody knew what to do about it.

I covered a lot of Peacock Tail's ground by using the jetpack glitch. You do it by running, hitting the melee button, and then jetpacking soon after. It let's you travel distance a lot faster than using your regular jetpack. The jetpack glitch is the most exciting thing to happen in No Man's Sky. Your gun starts vibrating really fast and it feels like you're breaking some sort of rule. I want to break a lot of rules in this game, because the worlds look like they are kept together by plaster and tape, begging to be split open like piñatas. My head started to hurt. I only had one animal left and I kept straining my eyes for it, maybe it's because I was a fifteen minute walk from my ship, maybe the melatonin had hit really hard.

My encyclopedia said I was 88% finished with my exploration of Peacock Tail. Once I hit 100%, I would be awarded 225,000 credits. I don't really know why I would need that many credits. I liked the ship I had, my gun seemed alright, and ever since I got my atlas pass I haven't had to buy any resources for warp cells. I started thinking about if discovering everything on a planet had any bragging rights, and why I spent what few hours I had to play video games with No Man's Sky when I had Shin Megami Tensei: Soul Hackers just an arm's reach away from me.

Have you ever played Soul Hackers? It was first released on the Saturn but it's on 3DS now. I think it's the only cyberpunk JRPG from the late 90s that hits the setting the way I always wanted. The gameplay is a little rough, but if you know what you're getting yourself into its pretty manageable, and the music is great. What if you could talk to the animals in No Man's Sky like you could talk to the demons in the Shin Megami Tensei games? That would be cool.

Somewhere down the line I found a cave. Caves feel like they should be a lot more than they are in this game, like they should lead to somewhere, but they don't. I learned to avoid most of them, but at this point the yellow-green filter of Peacock Tail's atmosphere had started to burn, so a change of scenery was fine. The cave had a bunch of four legged animals that I discovered earlier. A romantic person would call this place their home. I shot at them, hoping it would make things interesting if they all attacked me. But all they did was cry out of their baby faces, running around in circles, and I felt bad.

I found my last animal an hour and a half after my search started. It was a hippo with backwards duck legs. If that hippo was the first animal I found, I would maybe wax a little more poetic about it, but I didn't care anymore. I wanted to scan the hippo and leave the stupid acid rain mushroom planet. I named it something uncreative like "Hippo Time" and ran off looking for the nearest shiny thing that would magically call my ship next to me. My brain felt like a slug in my skull and the closest outpost I could find was one of those useless shelters that got overtaken by green goop. You could hang out in the green goop and the acid rain won't affect you as long as there's a roof. The goop is evil but I didn't really care. It was time for bed.

[rexiortem]

Dark Souls 3 is Brainless, in a Good Way

This is another article about why Dark Souls 3 is good. A lot has been said about the third game, and the whole series, that it's difficult to think how throwing another voice into the mass would mean anything, but I will do my best. I would like to focus on what it is about Dark Souls 3 that has surprised me. As I enter into the triple digits of my playtime, there are subtle things about how it plays, that clicks in a way few games ever do. These subtleties can only really come after putting so much focus into one single thing, aspects that go beyond the eye candy of graphics, control, and general gameplay.

Still, I want to chew on some of that candy.

Dark Souls 3 is a very scary game. Even in my replays, areas like the Irithyll Dungeon or the Undead Settlement make me sweat through my shirt. The odd, hissing silence before fighting a boss, the otherworldly gurgling of hopeless zombies, make it easy to fall into the world yourself. It's also a beautiful game. I stopped many times through my first playthrough, just to get a good look at things. The Boreal Valley is a good, common example for most players, and I am no different. Even the gross, nasty stuff has an accursed beauty to it. When you're walking through ageless corpses and hear their gooey parts squish under your boots, flies buzzing into your ears, faraway nuns mumbling their evil chants, that is just as entrancing.

I came into this game fresh from Bloodborne, I imagine most players did. It feels like Bloodborne is a game designed to prepare you for Dark Souls 3. Shields are still an aspect of the game, but feel much more - unreliable? - than they ever did in the first two Dark Souls games. Enemy attacks have a choreography that, if you pay the slightest bit of attention, you can easily roll through their attacks. Several bosses in the first half of the game are designed to drive this point home, much like the Blood Starved Beast in Bloodborne was made to teach you that it's okay to dash towards an attack.

Unfortunately, this makes some fights feel samey. For many humanoid enemies, I followed a routine of circling to their sword-holding arm, waiting for them to strike, and rolling behind them for one or two hits. Some enemies have attacks to counter the strategy, mainly shield bashing as a punishment for timing your rolls wrong, and these mistakes usually end in losing a full health bar in seconds. Still, I would have liked to have been forced to try other strategies. The only humanoid enemy I could think of that managed to do that were the pudgy angel warriors.

All that said, my favorite boss is still the Pontiff.

I grow self conscious when other phantoms show up in my game, swinging greatswords in flashy, gaudy armor. With my style of play - whatever that is - the broadsword felt like the most comfortable option. Putting that to a +10, while carrying through most of the game with my beginning armor set, was always good enough. Even in PvP, maybe the people that I fight are just bad, but most don't seem to have a good counter for, "Wait for the other guy to waste all his stamina before ruining their day." I'm experimenting with other weapons in repeat playthroughs: a greatsword warrior with fancy clothes in one run, a naked knife wielding lunatic in another. Both have their own challenges, and are fine enough to experiment with, but don't sit as well as my generic hero man.

The fact that I'm even willing to experiment with other builds is what surprises me about Dark Souls 3. Repeat playthroughs for games, those that aren't roguelikes, have become a rare thing for me. Any game you catch me replaying is most likely something on the Super Nintendo. These are platformers so ingrained to my brain that there is a clump of neurons dedicated for the level design and mechanics. It's putting my fingers on autopilot as I listen to a podcast, or cool off from a long day. It's rare for new games to do this for me, because I feel like I need to be paying so much attention whenever I turn one on.

Let's take Metal Gear Solid 5: Phantom Pain as an example. An open world game where you can do what you want, and it isn't particularly hard, but I still feel like I need to put far more of my focus into it. That focus being: What is my goal? I've heard many people say they're fine with just running around and seeing what happens, but my personality doesn't allow for that, I need to get something done. With MGS5 being as open as it is, the conflict of too much choice comes into play, and I wonder if I couldn't be doing something more productive with my time. Forget any story driven games, you won't find me playing Last of Us to kill an hour of my day.

Dark Souls 3 - and the Souls series in general - achieves that perfect balance of mindlessness and goal setting that older games contained. Everyone knows there's lore in Dark Souls. I love the lore, but I can tune it out. Much like how there's story in a platforming game, but you can easily ignore it and focus on going right, Dark Souls only has the goal of "get to the next bonfire" with some modification of doing it with a new weapon, or on a harder difficulty. I'm no master at the game, but at the very least I feel like I have a solid, subconscious grasp on how to expect my swings, rolls, and hits will go. Sometimes not hearing enemy cues can mess me up, but the understanding of game mechanics makes up for it.

I'm sure there's plenty of other games right now that can fulfill this role. Either I haven't played them, or the gameplay just isn't for me. Hearing about how often people talk about the Dark Souls gameplay experience as this intense, hyperfocused climb up a mountain, I'm surprised to see how it's turning into the opposite for me. Obviously, even on my repeat playthroughs, I still make dumb mistakes, get frustrated with certain enemies (the dungeon caretakers...), and have to turn the game off. I'm not as confident at PvP because I'm sure I'll get destroyed within seconds, compared to when I played within the first month the game was out. If I want something immersive, the design and structure of Dark Souls 3 can suck me in within seconds. But if I just want to have a nice, brainless game to play through that doesn't have the words "Donkey Kong Country" in the title, the last(?) title in the series fills that niche just as well.

[rexiortem]

8 Bit Armies Review

There are two types of people who likes RTS games. There is the type that enjoys the mental challenge of growing a base, smartly managing resources, while learning the best counters to an opponent's strength. Then, there is the type that builds a bunch of tanks to make things blow up. I am among the latter, and like many of my kind, I have flocked to Command and Conquer. 8 bit armies - on a fundamental gameplay level - satisfies that scratch of brainlessly steamrolling the enemy's base. Unfortunately it lacks the aesthetics of its older, FMV laden siblings. While 8 Bit Armies plays much like Command and Conquer would back in the early 90s - with some quality of life tweaks - I can't help but think: Why wouldn't I just play one of its spiritual ancestors?

8 Bit Armies' campaign is stripped down to the essentials. The first time you launch the game, there is a tutorial and first mission available. Paragraphs replace cutscenes to give you some idea of what you're supposed to do. Each mission can be completed within three ranks: Bronze, Silver, or Gold. Instead of your rank being determined by your performance (How long you take, how many resources you spend, how many units you lose, and so on), the game works off an achievement system. If you fulfill the primary mission, you are awarded only the bronze. If you do the secondary objective, which consist of training a certain unit, or blowing up a certain building, then you are awarded the silver. Gold missions are usually time based, meaning if you don't achieve both bronze and silver within a certain limit, then the gold is lost. The achievement system encourages you to do your best, since winning more stars means having more starting resources and units - no matter what map you choose in the campaign.

Unfortunately, having the gold stars be time based feels like wasted potential. Many of the early missions I played seem impossible to Gold until you unlock certain units later on. For example, you don't get access to tanks until the end of the fifth mission, which makes the once difficult Gold for the second mission a breeze. On one hand, this encourages players to replay maps, but locking players out like this makes the difficulty artificial. Why bother trying for Gold on the first time through when you can make it easy later?

On the maps themselves, they're as symmetrical and balanced as you expect modern RTS maps to be. I get why this is a standard practice for the RTS genre, especially in the competitive scenes, but it makes the missions themselves sterile. Worlds that are neatly made in the most chaotic circumstances. Command and Conquer maps always felt lived in to me, more than Starcraft ever did. Civilians would drive their cars and try to make by in old, run down towns. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was mouse over billboards in Tiberian Sun and seeing what flavor text they had.  This doesn't do anything for gameplay, but that extra layer of small detail brought more of a meaning to my actions. It feels right for NOD (the bad guys in C&C) to blow up buildings and shoot civvies, but not when the goodie GDI troopers do it.

Crates do return, and are spread around the battle field. Taking a squad of infantry out to explore can lead to your army getting a financial boost, or getting a unit far earlier than you're originally supposed to. You can't dawdle too long, though. The AI is programmed to rush you, in many missions I found myself harassed by small squads of enemy units. They would start as infantry men, but let it last long enough, and groups of tanks will start attacking you every minute. I'll admit, I was never good at RTS games. My instincts lead me into turtling habits, so while I do find the attacks annoying, it's probably for the best to push players into faster play.

For those who liked the idea of Co-op missions in Red Alert 3, 8 Bit Armies brings them back as a separate campaign. When I tried to play them, there was no one else online to play them with me. Which is a shame, since they seem far more interesting than any of the single player missions I have done so far. When I dared to peek my head into the competitive online, there were a handful of lobbies open for play. Most of them being team games, my ally and I would keep in touch on what we were building, planning out tank and chopper rushes. Everyone I played with has been friendly, maybe because we're all in the same boat: testing the waters, unsure on best strategies. A month from now, I expect online to be empty except for those that took the time to master the mechanics.

In the past year it feels like there's been a handful of RTS games being released, trying to recapture the Westwood magic. Westwood being the brains behind Dune II, the Tiberian Games, and the Red Alert series. Besides 8 Bit Armies, Gray Goo is the another that immediately comes to mind, a game that left fans of the old CnC games wanting, due to borrowing too much from Starcraft. Of course, any RTS game that tries to be anything like Starcraft doesn't last long. The Scifi saga has a strong foothold on RTS E-sports, and any loose holes it may have left behind are filled by MOBAs. There is no place for a Starcraft-like game in today's space, at least not right now. Besides, Command and Conquer RTS games were rarely remembered for their competitive online play. The scene was there, of course, but most fond memories go to the campaigns. Tanya single handedly sabotaging a base, Soviet troops storming the White House, Tim Curry taking Communism to space. The games reveled in their goofiness, except for Command and Conquer 4. We don't talk about that one.

8 Bit Armies still has shades of that goofiness. Stiff, blocky men straight out of Minecraft hustle their way across maps carrying rail guns and cube grenades. Flashy orange and red squares cover buildings as they explode. A giant, cartoon hazard sign covers the ground, marking where a nuke is going to drop in seconds. There's no pathological musing about death, no generals telling you how serious the situation is, and not even a real sense of who you are and where you are. 8 Bit Armies has no grounding to it, but that may be its biggest downfall. I was disappointed to find that none of the units had speaking lines. They all answer to commands with blips and blops, as if I was typing on a smartphone. The creative vehicles of Command and Conquer don't see any return here. Gone are the Devil's tongues, the War Blimps, and the Ghost Stalkers. Now they're just tanks, artillery, commandos, attack choppers.

8 bit army's look makes one think of a game you would play on a tablet, which shouldn't be a bad thing, but combine this with the forced "A Winner is You!" (or, if you lose, an "All your Base" joke) at the end of every battle, as well as the handful of rock and roll chiptune tracks from Westwood's own Frank Klepacki, and 8 Bit Armies comes off as a cry to stay relevant. An old school RTS game birthed into a world that could care less about them. It can't decide whether it wants to open itself to a new generation of gamers, or cater to the fans of old. What else am I supposed to think when I hear "Welcome Back Commander" every time I launch the game? At the end of the day, though 8 Bit Armies pulls off the classic RTS feel on a mechanical level, the lack of an identity leaves me wanting to download Command and Conquer, which is a free game now.

For what it's worth, the developers are active on the Steam forums, gathering player feedback. The last time I checked, it looks like there is going to be workshop support for things like voice clips and skin packages. Maybe this is why 8 Bit Armies takes a Minecraft heavy look - it wants to be the Minecraft of RTS games. That's fine! However, if you're looking for a solid RTS with an imagined world and fun characters, this might not be the game for you. As it is right now, 8 Bit Armies is a cute puppy with no personality.

[rexiortem]

Fire Emblem: Awakening Is Ok I Guess

I've been trying to figure out my thoughts on Fire Emblem: Awakening for a month now. I'm on the last mission of the game, and all I have left beyond that is hooking up my unmarried units and seeing what all the conversations are like. Apparently there's DLC that is designed horribly, and while I'm curious to see what the super hard stuff is like, I'm not curious enough to spend three dollars for it. Somehow, Awakening has succeeded in being a game that I enjoy spending my time with, yet I wish every single aspect of it was pulled off better. It may be the ultimate video game example of being a jack of all trades, but master of none. With the release of its sequel, Fates, it feels a little unfair to judge a game that is obviously dipping its toes in a lot of new features. However, when Awakening was fresh and new, my Twitter feed erupted with excitement. Fans still praise it to this day, and I can't help but feel a little conned.

At first, Awakening's gameplay felt like a good balance in difficulty. I didn't wrap my brain around the fact that pairing up units would turn them into powerhouses, and spent a good deal of time planning moves in advance to have my soldiers take up adjacent tiles. With RPG levels and grinding in play, though, I couldn't help but be conflicted between two questions: Am I bad at strategy, or is the enemy just too high leveled? Wouldn't it make sense to have the opponent by at least one or two levels above me, for challenge? But if I'm able to grind a little and match - or blow over - their levels, why shouldn't I take that option? This rabbit hole made my failures - and victories - feel hollow, as I wasn't sure how much of the result came to brainpower.

Near halfway into the game, a mission requires you to storm the castle of a ruler on a war path. There are plenty of troops blocking the way, and I found myself failing the mission halfway through because I would always forget about one stray enemy, or didn't expect one of my units to be targeted as much as they did. For those who may not know, when units in Fire Emblem die, they're gone forever. Having any of my units die at this point sucked, if not for their personalities (more on that in a bit) then for their usefulness as soldiers. Especially my Pegasus Knights, who were hyper mobile glass cannons. This one mission made me stuck for a week, and with it taking as long as it did, I ended up complaining on Twitter.

Then I was told that pairing up units was, in fact, a good thing. I gave it a shot, pairing up all my married couples together. Tharja and Henry, Lon'Qu and Cordelia, Anna and Robin. The way they shot straight through to the objective, easily countering and attacking whatever came their way, was so efficient it was almost pathetic. From then on, I had zero trouble with any of the following story missions. The only maps giving me trouble were the paralogues protect suicidal NPCs, and even then, there was little point to getting that perfectly. Great, I got another legendary weapon that I could throw into the pile. Everything in Awakening's mechanics, from stats to inventory, is so inconsequential that the writing has to carry the load.

Except it doesn't.

I should preface this next part with saying I came into Awakening hot out of the Trails series. Trails in the Sky, along with Trails of Cold Steel, is some of the best character writing I've eaten up in a long time. Falcom, the developers, weren't satisfied with just lifting the bar a little, they raised it to the cosmos. Awakening, in comparison, reads like a picture book. There is a bad country, there is a good country, and a totally evil dragon behind everything. There are some questions about the validity of pacifist leaders, about the citizens of Bad Country having internal conflicts, and Chrom living up to his sister's legacy. All of it only skims the surface, mentioned but never explored. This isn't saying that every video game plot needs to have Dostoevsky-like exploration of the human condition, but Awakening's storyline went through all the expected motions, a skeleton plot with just enough muscles to move the joints.

But no one remembers Awakening for the plot, right? It's all about the characters, seeing their conversations evolve as their relationships do. Ironically, the writing team seems to forget about these people as fast as the plot does. Save for their brief story introductions - those who have them at least - the characters barely show themselves in the main quest line again. I get it, all of them - save for Chrom and Robin - can die. But why bother giving the illusion of relevance in the first place? They may as well wander into my army like the units you can hire in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. When these characters are put on the spot light, they linger on their stereotypes to an annoying degree. Yeah, Sumia is really clumsy. No one ever notices Kellam. Lucina came from a really bad future. Is that all there is?

What floors me is how nonchalant parents are about finding their future kids. Most units in Awakening can't be older than their mid to late 20s, hardly the age group of people who have their act together. In the conversations that I've seen so far, not one is ever having a moment of doubt when advising someone who isn't even a decade younger than them. I suppose a suspension of disbelief should be applied, but if the characters are what I'm coming to Awakening for, shouldn't they have a bit more complexity? Again, there's more conversations I haven't seen than I have, but the idea of grinding relationships up (and there must be a better way to phrase that) isn't my idea of a fun time.

But I do it anyway, because the game does surprise me at some points. I'm surprised at how Lucina and Cynthia bond as sisters, or at how Libra's past slowly unfolds between multiple characters. I want to be surprised more, and despite everything I've thrown in the last couple paragraphs, I have no issues recommending Awakening to people. It's an accessible entry to a series that was infamous for being ridiculously brutal. I'm interested in dipping my toes in one of the older games to see what the challenge was like, and even trying out Conquest down the road. I can't help but be attached to some of the characters in my game regardless of my complaints, maybe because they stuck with me throughout most of the journey. There have been many mornings before work where I flipped my 3DS open to play a quick skirmish, just for the fun of it. Winning in Awakening scratches some sort of itch, and it's cool to see my ragtag team of Shepherds grow into this formidable powerhouse of an army, with absolutely 0 casualties. I didn’t let anybody die. No sir.

Maybe that's why I'm frustrated enough to write about this. Awakening has this glowing potential in every aspect of it, but spreads that potential around on a huge slice of toast. Reaching the end mission made me ask the same question that I did about the characters: Is that really it?

[rexiortem]

Koholint Island: Link's Biggest Small Adventure

Before starting the third dungeon in Zelda: Link's Awakening, Link must unlock the gates with a key. Part of the quest to get the key is taking Marin on a date. Marin is, perhaps, the only level headed person in all of Koholint Island - the island that Link shipwrecks onto and strives to escape from. Before taking her out, Marin confides in Link that she wants to be like the seagulls that she sees every day. To fly out of the tiny island and see the world beyond. Whether she achieves this or not is determined by if the player gets a single game over, one of the many weird goals in what could be the weirdest game in The Legend of Zelda series.

Marin's frustrations are fitting for the series' first Gameboy installment. Even if Link's Awakening came out in 1993 - several years before the world got to explore Hyrule in its vast, 3D glory - the series was no stranger to big, open landscapes. The first Legend of Zelda, in fact, helped build the concept of open world games as we know them today. Like Jon Irwin states, the player is given several options from the start, and the barren 8 bit world is your oyster. Zelda 2: Link's Adventure expands on the big world by mixing RPG elements and side scrolling action, having the player travel through several regions and villages, each with their own personalities and (very basic) livelihoods.

Jumping into the SNES, A Link to the Past shrinks Hyrule down several notches. The number of villages has shrunk to less than a handful. Most of the territory is occupied by hermits, violent Zoras, and abandoned temples. Link explores many of the landscapes we come to expect from a fantasy adventure: the forest, the desert, the mountains. The temples all play the same theme, their most distinctive features being the color of the stones that line their walls. A Link to the Past is oddly generic, the evil knights and wizards evoking more Tolkien than most games in the series. This is not to say that A Link to the Past is a bad game, it successfully shrinks down the empty, void filled worlds of its two predecessors and offers a mirror world with its own brand of quests and enemies. However, the graphical leap from the NES leaves less room for the imagination, presenting a universe that wouldn't stand out if it were not for the trademark green tunic and evil pig monsters.

Enter Link's Awakening, a Zelda entry of many firsts. The first portable Zelda game, the first Zelda game that doesn't take place in Hyrule, the first Zelda without a Zelda. Link's silent confusion upon waking up from his boating accident reflects the confusion of many new players: few things are familiar, and the familiar things are strangely warped. Chain chomps talk, moblins do their thing without ganon, and the master sword is awarded after collecting a bunch of seashells. It's weird and it's wonderful.

Due to the Gameboy's limitations, Nintendo made sure every screen in Link's Awakening promised something. If they weren't going to emulate the size of past games, they were going to make up for it with content. You don't have to wander far to open a secret staircase under a rock, or to find one of the island inhabitants needing your help. Awakening's NPCs are possibly the most mobile and fleshed out the Zelda series had seen upon its release. Tarin, Marin's caretaker and dedicated Mario cosplayer, is found getting into a variety of trouble thanks to his lack of foresight. A ghost haunts Link halfway through his adventure, only for the player to discover that they simply want some guidance for their nostalgia. An alligator who sells bananas on the beach has a craving for dog food.

Players discover many of the personalities through a trading sidequest, revealing relationships that span across the island. Everyone knows each other and - despite Koholint’s dangerous beasties - are willing to travel and mingle. Future games in the Zelda series will see a natural evolution of these concepts, especially in Majora's Mask, infamous for having character focused sidequests take priority over the main story. While Link's Awakening doesn't present dead kingdoms, or races on the verge of extinction, it places the building blocks for those stories to be told.

Koholint Island's small space affects the flow of gameplay as well. Time spent between dungeons is minimal. If the player knows what they're doing, they're looking at a max of ten to fifteen minutes between each "level" (The phrase the game uses to categorize the dungeons.) The exceptions being the previously mentioned key quest for level three, and the process to enter level seven, in which Link must revive a legendary rooster to cross a large pit. While Koholint Island has much of its own personality outside, the dungeons also benefit from the gameboy's restrictions. Every dungeon has its own style: a visual theme, a distinct soundtrack, and chatty bosses. In level five, you chase a cocky, overgrown skeleton warrior that steals your powerup straight from the chest. In level two, an invincible genie taunts you from his bottle, until you smash it against the wall. Dungeons in Link's Awakening are not just these old, run down temples that happen to have wandering monsters. They are homes to these monsters.

That's what Koholint Island feels like, a home. A small house complete with its grassy backyard, its cozy bedroom, and creepy wet basement. A house where every bit of space was carefully considered: is it better to put the couch against the far wall? Is the lamp light too strong in this corner? Should the floor be tiled or wood paneled? It's the home that Marin, the intelligent and curious child of this bizarre multi-species family, wants to escape from and see what the world has to offer.

For Link, it's the home of a friend. An unfamiliar landscape with its own culture and its own schedule. It's natural that Link - and Nintendo as a whole - would want to escape Koholint and go back to adventuring in Hyrule. Future portable installments in the Zelda series would see Link dipping his toes in other lands, but none have been so disconnected or restricted in the series as Link's Awakening. Oracle of Ages and Seasons bypass the Gameboy's restrictions with its link cable features, with screens that scroll and carry more of that large space seen in Zelda 2 or A Link to the Past. Later portable installments take place in Hyrule outright, no longer serving as opportunities to explore the world outside of the Kingdom's borders. Koholint Island remains a distant memory, a small chapter of bizarre events that Link had to roll with - much like that one weird dream you had.

[rexiortem]

A 2015 Game of the Year List

2015 has been a weird year for me. I went from being a confused college student with no handle on the future, to a confused employed kid who is suddenly in Chicago. The second half of this year has been one of - if not the most - exhausting times my life. Juggling work that takes actual brainpower, figuring out improv stuff, trying to find completely new friend groups, and trying to squeeze in some Me Time with video games among all of that. In this way, video games have been more of an escape for me than ever before, and those that managed to take me away from the real world are gonna be the ones higher on this list.

Dishonorable Mention: Axiom Verge

Best Track: Apocalypse

I have very mixed feelings about Axiom Verge. It has such a strong start. The Metroid look is apparent right away, the music is awesome, the first three boss fights are awesome, and the first couple of weapons you get are both practical in unlocking new environments as well as shooting bad guys. Then... everything sort of drops off. Halfway through I was waiting for the game to get better, rolling my eyes at the story that was trying so hard to be mysterious, and ignoring the fact that most of the new weapons I was getting were nowhere near as useful as the early ones.

Then the game ended. I decided to at least 100% percent the game, and realized the game world wasn't that much fun to move around in. Axiom Verge tries to differentiate itself from Metroid by having other types of powerups. They're neat, and the drone you can launch in particular can lead to some cool movement tricks... but it wasn't enough. Not only that, but to 100% the game only does a slight change to the ending, one that doesn't seem to satisfy anyone that played this game, and just feels like a hamfisted message by the developer.

I don't know. I just wanted to play a Metroid game that felt like Metroid again. At the end of the day, that's where it boils down to. The sound mixing sucks too.

10. Environmental Station Alpha

Best Track: Spinning Dandelion (15:26)

This is the one-man Metroid game that should have gotten at least half the press Axiom Verge did. In ESA you control a robot tasked with exploring a space station that suddenly went dark. As you delve deeper into the station, you learn about the scared scientists that ran the station, the wildlife in the station that took control, and a rampant AI. It is a very simple story, and that's okay, because ESA keeps the story as a secondary objective and the fun of exploring the station as the first.

The artstyle is low-res and simplistic. Your character is maybe 4-6 pixels high and only has three colors, and it may be one of the most detailed sprites in the game. This doesn't stop the game from being nice to look at, my favorite area being a leafy green vegitated zone home to dozens of blocky plants and wildlife. The soundtrack is often ambient, moody, and pushes a sense of loneliness than Axiom Verge never delivered. The power-ups are closer to standard Metroid affair: a speed boost, a double jump, a grappling hook, but they make navigating the large station fun and snappy.

The best thing I can say about Environmental Station Alpha is that it feels like Metroid Fusion, but without the stuff that bogged Metroid Fusion down. My only regret is that I got to the last boss, and never beat it.

9. You Must Build A Boat

Best Track: Sewers (theres not even youtube vids of the music for this game oops)

I never played 10 Million, so #YMBAB was my introduction to EightyEight Games' take on Match 3 Phone Games. I downloaded it after watching a short gameplay video at 11 PM, and was up playing it until 2 in the morning. It took up my attention when my Mom and I flew a plane to Chicago to look for apartments, and during the quiet half hour mornings I had to myself before leaving for work. You can play the game on a phone, tablet, or computer, but phone feels like the most natural to me.

While it's not entirely obvious, the game rewards you for replaying it from the beginning. Add that to the fact that daily challenges were added in a recent update, and I still find myself launching the game when I have a couple minutes to kill.

8. Downwell

Best Track: Mochi Yasan (20:03)

Another short time killer game. I first played Downwell at the Chicago Independent Game festival back in August of this year. It was on an arcade cabinet, and if it wasn't for the fact that a line was starting to grow behind me, I would have stood there and played it the entire night. It was the most fun I had playing it, but having it on Computer is good too.

Downwell is a drug. That's a really lame thing to say, but not many moments are more exhilarating than keeping a chain up from jumping off of monsters and shooting off of them, the screen rapidly scrolling down, ghosts chasing after you in groups of five to ten. Then you die, and a bar fills up and rewards you with new color palettes and playstyles. Sometimes I don't even think about whether I want to restart or not, my fingers just act on their own and I'm suddenly in the thick of it again.

My one thing about Downwell is that I take very long breaks between playing it. I think I only have 2-3 hours of actual playtime since every time I do play it, it's so intense to me that I have to take that breather. I only got to the last zone once.

7. Until Dawn

Best Track: this game had music??

I never actually played Until Dawn. I have watched a lot of people play Until Dawn. When a character makes it out of a situation alive, I cheered with the player. When a character dies, I felt bad like the player did. When a character does something horror movie stupid, we would both do the horror movie thing of "Wowowow you'r eso dumb why would you do tha t idiot." Until Dawn is not only the best adventure game I've experienced so far, it might be my favorite slasher flick.

6. The test game I made in RPG Maker

Best Track: um

Okay, bear with me for a moment. There's a lot of crappy, low effort RPG Maker games on Steam right now. These have given RPG Maker a bad rap. There's also a handful of really good ones, Lisa: The Painful RPG being the one that comes to mind. Sometime in the last couple months, I loaded up RPG Maker - something I bought on an impulse during a steam winter sale - out of boredom. I read the help guide, I got a very basic handle on how some types of Events works, how Actors worked, how Control switches worked. Then, I decided to put together a very short game out of it.

The game is simple, two pirates land on a barely inhabited island to find their runaway friend. Their friend is hiding out in an ancient ruin, because some nameless society is after him. The pirates fight and defeat a member of that society, find the friend, and the game ends. It takes 5 minutes to beat, and within it, I had NPCs walking around that the player could talk to, treasure chests, buildings that could be explored from the inside, and even an event where a ghoul flashed into the screen and surprises the player!

It is an RPG Maker-Ass game. It is not something I would ever show to the public because of that, but playing through it, in my head, I made a fucking video game, man. The most amateur and basic game, but it was something. If we can celebrate Mario Maker for encouraging all types to build stages, then I can celebrate RPG Maker for letting me indulge a little in making a world, dude.

5. MOLA MOLA

Best Track: Main Theme

Mola Mola is the greatest phone game of our time. Despite what #YMBAB and Downwell have done to improve mobile gaming, none of them will surpass the perfection of style and substance that Mola Mola offers. In it, you take care of a Mola Mola, also known as the Sunfish. Your Mola Mola has one goal: to be the biggest! To do that, your precious child fish must eat as much as it can.

There's only one problem: Mola Mola are very fragile! Yours could choke on the squid it just ate, if it gets to close to shore it can wash up and dehydrate, if you tap the phone screen too much your Mola Mola might get scared and have a heart attack! It is a dangerous world out there for your pet, but who cares, your Mola Mola faces adversity with all matter of positivity, sporting bright colors and a cheery chiptune track that never gets old. My largest Mola Mola got to be the king of the Atlantic Ocean, and died from getting snapped in half by a giant clam shell. Such is life, we must face all obstacles with deterministic optimism, one Mola at a time.

4. Bloodborne

Best Track: Final Boss (tihs is a spoiler!)!

All 4 years of college, I had one high school friend that I could always hang out with. We played a lot of games together, and the Souls games were definitely some of the best. We had one shared character in every games, Dongs69 (I know), who ran through Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, and now Bloodborne. We ran through the whole game, switching the controller on every death, sometimes letting the other keep the controller when we knew a certain boss would be better handled by them. I sucked at the huge bosses like Ebrietas, Vicar Amelia, and the One Reborn. He wasn't good at the faster bosses like Blood Starved Beast, Martyr Logarius, or the Shadows of Yharnam. He also never learned how to parry, which did not help.

Bloodborne by itself is awesome: I love the Victorian Lovecraft setting, I love the way Yharnam warps into a hell world halfway through, I love the cane. It has the best difficulty curve of the Souls games so far, and I'm glad that the armor is less used as armor and more as a means of being Fashionable. More than that though, it's the last game my friend and I were able to play through fully before having to graduate and part ways. It's got a good place because of that. I'm excited for Dark Souls 3, but it will be the first Souls game I will be playing solo, and that makes me a little sad.

3. Metal Gear Solid V

Best Track: The Man Who Sold The World

With work being as stressful as it is right now, I realize that I can't take a lot of pressure from action games. My PS4 came with the Last of Us, and when I actually had to do any, you know, fighting in that game, it was the worst. I was much more content with walking around the pretty post apocalypse and seeing the remains of peoples' old lives. I was worried, then, that MGS5 would be too much for me to handle.

It wasn't. There's a lot of words on the internet about MGS5, but for me, I'll just let you know when it clicked. Early on, there is a mission where you have to stop a bunch of tanks. There's no right way to do it. I got on a horse, packed on as many rocket launchers as I got, and fired RPG after RPG while circling tanks in the middle of the night. I felt like that was something Big Boss would do, and it felt badass. What a cool game.

2. Undertale

Best Track: Death By Glamour

The closest this game got to making me tear up was when Mettaton was getting calls from how much his fans loved him. I don't know, something about that scene really took me.

I couldn't stop thinking about Undertale for a month straight after I played it. It was a really nice surprise (not the best surprise of the year), especially after dismissing it from the release trailer. I'd like to thank all my twitter friends who wouldn't stop talking about it the weekend it came out. I got to play the game before it was cool to hate it!

1. The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky First/Second Chapter

Best Track: Zeiss

This was the best surprise of the year. The Trails games originally came out in Japan back in 2006 (I think). The First Chapter was translated and released in America four years ago, the Second Chapter released in America in October of this year. They're basically the same game, so I count it as a 2015 release.

What started as an impulse steam sale buy (that my good friend @Uznare yelled "DO IT. DO IT." on steam to follow through on) ended up being a combined 110 hour obsession. A game that scratched the JRPG itch I've been having since forever, and then doing countless more. A fully realized and interesting world, a streamlined battle system that didn't demand too much out of me, one of the best main characters written for a JRPG I've ever seen. As soon as I beat the Second Chapter (which was 3 days ago from writing this) I immediately went to Amazon to buy one of the many branched out sequels and a PSTV to play it on.

There's so much I want to gush about this game, but for the interest of time, it'll be saved for a different article (video?) Falcom (the developers) deserve as much money as they can get from these games, and the translators deserve national awards for going through 4 million characters worth of text. Olivier is great, the music is the best, I feel empty from finishing these games and I want more.

[rexiortem]

Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee - It’s On Android Now

Oddworld Munch's Oddysee is the third game of the Oddworld series. The first two Oddworld games, Oddysee and Exoddus, were decent successes. The central protagonist, Abe, was on the cover of several video game magazines, and even considered a Playstation mascot. That is, until Oddworld Inhabitants (the developers back then, now known as Just Add Water) dropped the bomb that the next Oddworld game would be on the Xbox. This decision happened roughly halfway into the development of Munch's Oddysee, and was only the tip of how messy the development process must have been. Playstation purists were - to put it nicely - upset at being betrayed, and despite the mixed reactions to the game by Xbox owners, twiddled their thumbs until the game was finally available without having to buy a whole console. In 2010, the game came out on PC, then on PS3 on 2012.

The game is now is out for Android devices. My immediate reaction to finding out about this was, "Why would anyone do that." So, I bought it. I installed it on my phone and tablet, reading the positive reviews on the Google play store. Most of the positivity stemmed from nostalgia. Munch's Oddysee is 15 years old at this point, some of the kids who played it are now older. I was one of those kids, I played the first stage of Munch's Oddysee on a Christmas morning, with the brisk Florida winter air streaming through a cracked window.

Now I'm playing it on a tablet, in Chicago, as the first snow of 2015 falls. My immediate reaction to launching the game is "I can't believe this is working" followed by "I can't believe how bad this controls." The game uses a virtual joystick on the left side of the screen, and four buttons on the right. Three of the buttons are actions specific to whoever you control: Abe or Munch. Abe can jump, chant, and smack bad guys. Munch can hop, use his sonar, and zap bad guys. Both characters have the speak icon, a messy button that pops up six other commands in tiny bubbles. You use these commands to either have allies follow you, work for you, or defend you. Sometimes the icon needs to be tapped several times to keep the bubbles up, which has gotten one of my allies killed.

The movement in Munch's Oddysee has always been mess. With a big, bulky xbox controller, Abe took wide turns and never had enough momentum to make a precise jump. Munch was too clunky on land with his one leg, and too spastic in the water (causing him to run into a bunch of mines.) Both characters' problems are doubled with the virtual joystick, although I did find that playing on a phone ended up being easier.

Even if the buttons are smaller, the lack of screen real estate meant you didn't have to swipe up as much to make a character move. It was a relief to find out about this when, at the end of the first stage of the game, Abe couldn't outrun a group of slogs (Oddworld dogs.) In a later stage, the first Slog Hut, you have to run through a gauntlet of trigger happy guards, slogs, and mines. This was already a pain for 8 year old me, now 22 year old me is breaking the phone in half, putting too much pressure on the screen as if it would make Abe take a cleaner turn.

I should mention I'm playing this game on a fairly new Samsung Galaxy Tab A, and a 3 year old HTC One phone. Munch's Oddysee on Android offers cloud saves through your Google+ account, allowing for easy transition of save files. On the tablet, while it controls worse, the graphics are cleaner and the framerate is a smooth 60. On the phone, the framerate dips often, though not so much that it is unplayable. Going by reviews on the play store, it seems like the game is designed for the Nexus in mind, as well as the Android tv. Android development is, as I understand it, a messy process. As annoying as the FPS drop is, I’m not someone who gets super peeved by it.

Fractions of scrapped storylines, locations, characters, and mechanics can be found all over Munch's Oddysee. Many of these were never hinted or alluded to in the previous games. The Almighty Raisin is a leader to the mudokons (Abe's race of humanoid aliens) who pops up without any explanation, there are mudokon eggs that Abe has to save now, and every stage is littered with Spooceshrubs - green blobby growths that act as game currency. There could probably be a whole other article focusing on how having progress being achieved by collecting currency goes so much against Oddworld’s philosophies. It's the first game in the series to be so cleanly cut by stages, each with their own names and no real sense of place or connectivity. What was once a series that sported an organic soundtrack of clicking crickets and soft drums, now is covered by looping techno beats (I won't lie, though, I like the Munch's Oddysee soundtrack).

It all feels so constructed, so sterile, so video gamey. Where Abe's Oddysee and Exoddus has thick and full environments that could span for miles, Munch's Oddysee stages are devoured by emptiness. The in-door factory levels are gray cages of long hallways and the occasional spinning gear, the outdoor areas are islands of green and brown - surrounded by blue foggy nothingness. Every mudokon has the same nasally voice, every death is the same animation, and there are maybe 3 or 4 music tracks in the game.

As a kid, spots that I found difficult and made me give up on the game for a couple days weren't exactly difficult, just monotonous. In the previously mentioned Slog Hut stage, you have to save Mudokon slaves by running through the same area over a handful of times. There is a stage where you have to herd Meep (One eyed Sheep) into a pen, which is less exciting than real life sheep herding. Near the end, you start rescuing Mudokon eggs by throwing crates into a hole. Not only does every Mudokon egg stage have at least 8 crates, they're all extremely sensitive and break easily. If you break even one egg, you're locked out of the perfect ending, causing an endless amount of quicksaving.

Yet, despite all of this, Munch's Oddysee is a game that most Oddworld fans yearn to play. Even I still think back on that Christmas break, fond memories of clicking the right thumbstick a bunch to smack a slig to death. I haven't played it in the better part of 5 years, mainly because the PC version of it is too buggy on my laptop, and the PS3 version can't be played on PS4. The android version is my best option, and I'm still enjoying it. Maybe it's because the fractions of scrapped ideas are still there.

In small moments of the game, in the nooks and crannies of muddy canyon textures and foggy factories, you see moments of sincerity within the stage design. A mudokon enjoying a fire outside of his tent, a small village of chirping birds, a toothpick factory glowing gold as the sunset streams through its arched windows. Remnants of an Oddworld that could have been, that was once so hyped in the preview pages of PSN magazines and fan forums. That's the game fans want to play, and even if it will never meet our expectations, the game that was once the hardest to play, is now one of the easiest. At the very least, I can say this: When I first started booted this game on a touch screen, I didn't think I would be able to get past the third level. I am now halfway through, and I'm probably gonna beat the whole thing, for the twentieth time.

[rexiortem]

Thoughts on Lisa: The Painful RPG

Note - Lisa: The Painful covers things like drug abuse, domestic violence, and sexual abuse/violence. I can’t claim to be an expert on these things, but do cover them in this article, since they’re important themes within the game.

Also: this post contains endgame spoilers

           Finishing Lisa: The Painful a couple of days ago, I think I’ve settled on what I liked about it, and what I didn’t. A lot of this is story related stuff. The gameplay of Lisa is straightforward, but creative and challenging enough to be not too easy, not too hard. I did my best not to reload a save when I made a poor decision, or if a random event made me lose some items (or in the worst case, a party member). I will say that once I realized Birdy’s useful oil move, it was hard for me not to do anything else. Especially since by the end of the game, I had both of Brad’s arms torn off, _and _lost all my items. That’s more on me than the game, though. The soundtrack is amazing. I bought it with the game, and don’t regret it. Nothing more I can say.

           Lisa: The Painful first shows Brad’s history of parental abuse, followed by his dependence on the drug Joy. With that in mind, some might be able to predict the ending before it happens. Brad’s brief episodes of blind rage prove that the cycle of abuse can easily repeat itself. I’ve read complaints that because Brad was taking Joy, whatever violent acts he did in the game (killing his childhood friends, hurting Buddy, massacring an entire squad of soldiers) can all be handwaved away as a side effect of Joy. I don’t think this is entirely fair. Cases of domestic abuse and drug use are usually co-morbid. We already know that Brad’s father, Marty, was an alcoholic. The first Lisa – the one where you play as the sister – also implies that alcohol wasn’t Marty’s only vice. In this way, while Joy is some sort of violent super drug that turns people into monsters, in the case of Lisa, it simply acts as a stand-in for real world alternatives.

           This brings me to the role drugs play in general through Lisa. Before the Flash - the apocalyptic event that took away all the women from the game world - Brad took painkillers. He buys them without a prescription, from his friend and dealer. The creator seems to imply that taking any sort of drug is a bad choice, but as someone who is prescribed anti-depressants – and is better off doing so, making me one of the luckier ones – I found the message misguided.

           If there’s one moment with Brad’s rage that felt poorly handled, it was in the fight with Marty. Before Brad destroys his father, Buddy runs in to defend Marty. Brad, in his blind rage, smacks Buddy out of the way. For many players it’s a turning point, the moment where they question if Brad is really doing the right thing. The player does not hurt Buddy in this scene, Brad does it himself. In fact, the player is presented a choice on whether Brad should kill Marty or not. Even if the player doesn’t want to kill Marty, Brad does it anyway. This part, I think, is fine. It’s when the player is controlling Brad directly in the battle window, and Buddy tries to defend Marty again, that things go wrong.

           I’ve watched plenty of Let’s Plays of this scene. I wanted to see if other people did the same thing I did, and they did. The game expects you to directly attack Buddy the second time, but this time, the player issues the command. What I did, as well as many other people, was guard for several turns until something happened. But nothing happened. You have to attack Buddy. It was upsetting, not only because the core idea of hitting a kid will make anyone feel bad, but I saw no reason for it. I wasn’t on the same wavelength as Brad, I was too disconnected from his character.

           A big part of this disconnect, I feel, is from not knowing what happened in the prequel, Lisa: The First. In fact, I didn’t even know there was a prequel until after I beat the game. It’s not like I couldn’t piece together what was going on: Brad had a sister, she was also abused by Marty, and she killed herself because of the abuse. But I was nowhere near as familiar with the events as the creator seemed to expect me to be. Watching a playthrough of Lisa: The First, there was a lot more intimate detail over what was going on: the lengths of Lisa’s abuse, how she couldn’t escape from it, how Brad _did _escape. It puts the battle between Brad and Marty into better context, but even then, I don’t think a lot of people (including me) would have willingly hurt Buddy.

           The best change would have been to take control away from the player at this point of the battle. Only for a couple of seconds, and it would even work within the theme of Brad losing control of his sense of self. Instead, we’re left wondering why we have to hit a kid.

           Throughout Lisa: The Painful we’re constantly being told of the all-powerful Rando. Rando’s army is a consistent threat within the game. From the word go it’s presented as this evil empire, an army that wants Buddy solely for the sexual fact that she is a girl in a world full of men. When we finally meet Rando himself, though, it’s sudden, and you expect Brad to get destroyed. Instead, Rando apologizes for wrecking Brad’s bike, and gives him some rations.

           Rando doesn’t show up until the end of the game. Again, instead of being a comic book villain, he’s gentle with Buddy, and tries to positively encourage her. Rando doesn’t even want to fight Brad, no one in the endgame does, they give him plenty of opportunity to turn back and walk away. In fact, throughout Lisa I was surprised at how often failing a fight didn’t necessarily mean failing the game. Instead of killing Brad and his party outright, the enemy simply tells you to leave and never come back.

           Subverting the player’s expectation of how Rando would act is a good surprise, and certainly makes Rando one of the more interesting characters in the game. I don’t think this means that Rando is actually a _good _person though. When we first see him, his army is driving away with a cart full of corpses. While we don’t know why Rando just killed all these people, it definitely shows how brutal he can be. It should also be considered that Rando idolizes Brad. An optional scene in the game shows Brad teaching martial arts to a group of kids. A lonely boy watches from afar, and Brad encourages him to join – for free. This boy turns out to be Rando. They have history together. If the player _wasn’t _Brad, would Rando had been as apologetic, or as reluctant to fight him? I’m hoping these sorts of questions are explored in the sequel, Lisa: The Joyful, since he has a clear role in that game as well. (Also, it’s not clear if Brad actually kills Rando in the endgame. Instead of saying Rando is “dead”, Brad says he’s “finished.”)

           Finally, the humor of the game is what probably keeps the downer parts so bearable. I don’t remember a last time I laughed at a game that advertised itself as funny. Nern’s introduction is one of my favorite parts of the game, some of the enemy encounters like Man Laying on Grass are wonderful, and the fish court is art. That said, if any joke falls flat on its face, it’s Fardy. With a game revolving so closely around the horrors of rape, having a rape victim be “the joke” is a serious misstep. It feels like a scene that the developer put in early on, still deciding what kind of tone the game would have, only to forget taking it out later. Juxtapose this with the scene where Brad finally finds Buddy, and what Buddy implies Sticky did to her, it’s like they’re from two different scripts.

           After I beat Lisa: The Painful, I ended up thinking about it for the rest of the day. That’s a compliment. I missed a lot of content on my first runthrough, and ended up Youtubing it, if only because I was so emotionally drained by the end of the game. I highly recommend it to anyone that likes RPGs, or even just a good story, since it doesn’t have a lot of stereotypical RPG trappings (No grinding, random encounters are few and far between, the writing isn’t embarrassing.) I do, however, recommend planning a palette cleanser as soon as you beat it. Something colorful and cheery.

[rexiortem]

Trust Fall

The Fall doesn't dodge the cliches of robotic science fiction. Its main story is nothing new, but familiarity can be a good thing. Instead of trying to radically innovate the genre, Over the Moon finely tweaks the story of A.R.I.D. - the suit AI that has to bend rules in order to save its pilot – to perfect beats that don't overstay their welcome.

It's a fine line The Fall straddles that makes its length more of a positive than a negative. The moody atmosphere, barely lit caverns, glowing red mushrooms, and screeching larva make the player feel alone and lost. It's a feeling not unlike in the Metroid games, where isolation is a key factor to the exploration formula. What bodies there are have been so disfigured that Arid can't determine when they died, and the central mainframe – Arid's only friend in the game – clearly has its own mysterious agenda.

At the risk of sounding reductive, The Fall is separated in two halves, solving puzzles and conversation trees. As you progress through the game, Arid slowly loses its strict protocol voice, learning how to weave around the rules. The caretaker – the primary antagonist – sounds like it's ready to rip you in half if you say the wrong word. The central mainframe's uncharacteristically goofy voice and human inflections helps develop the slapstick relationship it starts with Arid. Since The Fall, technically, doesn't have a lot to offer, it works on what it does have. In an industry where voice acting is considered a throwaway bonus, it's important to recognize when its done right.

Speaking of what it doesn't have, the actual process of playing The Fall gets old fast. You'll spend your time flashing a light everywhere, using your low number of items on everything that blinks, under the belief that, eventually, something will happen. I've gone through entire areas triple checking objects, not sure what it was I'd been missing. Once, I solved a puzzle by complete accident, and I did it long before I was supposed to. This isn't to say that puzzles in The Fall are brainless or arbitrary, but the presentation has unfortunate holdovers from an outdated era of point and click adventure games.

Reviews claim that the combat is the lowest point of the game, and, sure, it's pretty simple. Cover shooters are dull enough when they're 3rd person over the shoulder, and having it be condensed to 2 dimensions doesn't help. Still, I found it a nice break from running around trying to solve puzzles. The combat isn't difficult, and most scenarios go by quickly. The only issue was when I got a power up for my pistol, and a new enemy type was introduced at the same time. This enemy is fast, kills you in one hit, and takes several shots in the head to take down.

The Fall isn't trying to spit some truth on you. It doesn't have a crazy plot twist that will make you lay in bed and re-evaluate your life. The ending is a bummer, even if you expect it, but it's an unfinished story. It's a personal story about growing up, one that isn't finished yet. My biggest regret about buying The Fall is getting it on sale. I regret even more not being a kickstarter backer. At ten dollars, the plot and atmosphere of the game more than makes up for the inoffensive gameplay. Being the first of a trilogy, Over the Moon is working on the sequel right now, and I'll definitely nab it for full price.

[rexiortem]

Crypt of the Necrodancer is my GOTY 2014

I hate the word ��flow.” In writing workshops, when someone says a piece flows, it means they can't think of anything positive to say. Flow, as an action, is also something that's hard for me to reach. It's easy to pull me away from this legendary flow, where creatives can focus on their work for hours, where athletes feel like they can run forever, where reading a book feels like jumping into a new world. If I don't have something to do with my hands when I'm not typing (like drinking coffee) and if I'm not listening to music, then my stray thoughts take over immediately. As I type this opening paragraph, it has already seen countless revisions from single words to entire sentences.

I think, in this context, I have video games to thank for letting me enjoy any flow at all. As everyone thinks up their game of the year lists, I force myself to think about what games came out this year that I actually played, let alone enjoyed. It's not a long list of candidates, I'm becoming increasingly prudish about where to spend my scholarship money. Out of everything in 2014, Crypt of the Necrodancer consumed the majority of my time.

Necrodancer thrives on flow. If you can't get into the game's wavelength, you won't go far. First attempts at Necrodancer involve pressing the directional keys in panic, trying to figure out what beat the stage wants you to move at, as progressively larger enemies hop to your underarmored heroine. Chances are, you'll die in seconds. This is not your fault, it is what's expected of roguelikes. Spelunky is not a rhythm game, but you will also flail around and die in seconds when you enter hell the first time. Ditto the final boss of FTL. Ditto the cathedral in Binding of Isaac. I don't know if this is a good design choice, maybe it's not. Maybe people don't freak out at every new area. That could all be Just Me.

At the release of any decent roguelike, the same compliment is thrown around: when you die, it's your fault. I don't know if this is completely true for Necrodancer. Sometimes, an unseen red dragon will burn you from the other side of the map. Sometimes, in zone 3, you are immediately rushed with so many large enemies that if you're not properly equipped, you'll be overwhelmed in a way most brains can't handle. One time, I could not finish the stage because floor traps surrounded the stairs. I had to wait for the song to end, killing my chain combo.

I can forgive these issues. Not because this is an alpha game, but Necrodancer is the most involved I've been with a videogame in ages. The insane focus I have when playing Necrodancer, my fingers moving as I calculate how to maneuver around the next group of enemies – like some round of chess where pieces move every second – is one I haven't experienced in ages. The last game to make me dance that Do or Die number was Hotline Miami.

Here's how involved I am: When I get hurt, or if I die, I jump. Like, I shake in my chair, as if something just shocked me. If I lose my composure in a good run, dying horribly at the end, chances are I'm done for the day. If I keep going, I'll be drained, and won't make it out of the first area. Some might see this as a bad thing, I think it's a natural side effect. It's like gambling, you need to know when to stop high. Whether you win or lose in your best run, the real benefit is being so invested that the outside world doesn't exist. Isn't that what all video games are trying to achieve? Designers are so convinced that immersion relies on huge, detailed worlds with involved stories, that they forget any involving gameplay. What's the point of a big world if I can't do anything with it?

In Necrodancer, everything matters. From the placement of enemies, to the arrangement of walls, each action has to be considered within a span of milliseconds. You may not realize it when playing, but when you finish, and all that mental word in the background catches up, it's exhausting. A good kind of exhausting, like finishing a research paper or running a record mile. If it starts getting boring, you can use other characters. Some of them are neat (Dove just got added, encouraging pacifist runs) while others seem impossible (How could someone do anything as bolt?) All that said, I'm still getting my fill of enjoyment by playing as Cadence alone.

Necrodancer still has a fourth world in development (if it's like any other roguelike, a secret fifth world as well), with tons of features and tweaks to be implemented. If you played it several months ago, I suggest giving it another shot. The developers have already put new items (with helpful in-game descriptions) and elements that freshened the formula. It's official release date won't be until 2015, probably. As far as I'm concerned, it's my 2014 Game of the Year.

[rexiortem]

I liked Earthbound, I hated playing it

I beat Earthbound tonight. I wasn't planning on it, it was one of those times where you knew the end of the game was real close so you think another hour will do it, then four hours of your night are gone. While this was my first time playing through the entire game, it wasn't my first time seeing the final boss. The Giygas fight is sort of a cultural milestone on the internet, and it was shown to me back when all I knew about Earthbound was Ness from smash brothers. The nastiest surprise that battle gave me was using my highest level of psi rockin on the egg, only to get countered.

So my thoughts are less on the craziness of Giygas, and more on how I experienced Earthbound as a whole. From a storytelling and stylistic perspective, it was a great experience. From Onett to Summers, the portrayal of contemporary America made me giggle all the way through. The Happy Happy Village is probably a highlight, being such an uncanny roadblock with a religious critique that doesn't immediately feel like snobby holier-than-thou atheist commentary. Summers is a great portrayal of beachside cities, being someone that grew up in one. The way policemen are portrayed is something not a lot of games today would do, having their stubbon rules stifle your own progress. Once you leave Summers to Scarabana, the game loses its way with the American narrative, losing my interest, but the awesome power of Dungeon Man brought me back.

All that being said, I don't think I'll ever play Earthbound again.

I'm someone who can usually tolerate weird, or even objectively bad gameplay if the game is stylish enough. Sonic CD is my favorite sonic game, I like Metroid Prime 2 over the original Metroid Prime, I find most Zelda games boring but Link's Awakening never fails to entertain me. I definitely wasn't playing Earthbound for the actual game, in fact, most of the time I wished the game would play for me. I hated how slow your characters moved. I hated how the camera man appeared what felt like every 10 minutes, making me drop everything to take a picture. I hated how the text crawled during battle scenes. I hated how long battles took in general. By the halfway point of the game, I made liberal use of my emulator's speed up button.

You may be thinking, well, this is someone who doesn't play JRPGs in general. That's not true, I've played my fair share of the stuff, the most recent being the Shin Megami Tensei games. Which is probably where the problem lies. One of the best things about the SMT games is how fast the battles go. They zip by! Random encounters don't take longer than 15 seconds if you know what you're doing. Earthbound, by comparison, has you spending at least a minute during each encounter. Don't tell me it's because Earthbound was an old game. SMT2 came out before Earthbound and moved faster.

I appreciate that you can anticipate enemies before fighting them, and if they were weak enough you could insta-kill them. Near the end of the game, though, it didn't matter. Enemies zipped up at me with little rest in between, and they weren't pushovers either. I swore and prayed (heh) that this room would be the last room before the boss. Thanks to cultural osmosis, I was highly aware of how overpowered Jeff's bottle rockets were. This, at least, made nearly all the bosses a pushover (shout outs to Diamond Dog for countering 2000 damage).

If it wasn't for Earthbound's charm, I would have given up long before the halfway point. In fact, I had before! This was my third attempt at beating the game, the last one being foiled when I ran into the monkey maze. Yes, you only needed three items outside of the maze to beat it. It still discouraged me, I used a FAQ for the maze this time around.

I get why people like Earthbound. I like it too. I cooked dinner after beating it and found myself humming the eight melodies. I took my time to talk to many NPCs after beating Giygas, and thought it was cute that Ness' only line of said dialogue (?) was saying “see ya” to Paula. I renamed Poo as “Skull” cause I thought it would be funny, and as a result I saw the phrase “Prince Skull” more than once. I've been listening to the Sanctuary Guardian fight music in the background while doing work. Early in the game, an NPC says, “The wild boys are in town.”

Earthbound is in a weird realm of good video games where I'll fondly remember the broad strokes of playing it, but hate the exact details. Other games in this category include Half-Life 2, Deadrising, and Pikmin 2. I don't regret playing it at all, and as a result am catching up on backstory by reading a Mother let's play, while planning to tackle Mother 3 sometime. Maybe then I'll find out why Pokey was such an asshole.

[rexiortem]

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