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nomadicism · 6 years

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Any tips or things to keep in mind while writing a original mecha story? What about for original mecha stories aimed at a female audience? (Like ones that are more character focused, but have some Real Robot elements like TLGG, Gunbuster, Eva or Macross)

Hi Anon! Thank you for the Ask!

I’m more of an analytical and academic writer, but hopefully I can be of help anyway.

General Tips

1. If you haven’t already, ask yourself these questions:

What kind of mecha story? For myself (and I think this is true of a lot of mecha fans), “mecha is a genre”—but—it’s not a genre that happens in a vacuum. Both Real Robot and Super Robot can take place in hard science fiction settings as well as fantasy settings with magic.

What kind of writing? Short story, long form novel, novel series (light and long form), poetry, experimental formats, sequential illustration formats (e.g. comics, manga), plays, television/film/animation, etc.

Have you read a mecha story that was not in sequential illustration format?

And now I really want to read/listen to a mecha story in Middle English with iambic pentameter. It could have a name like: “Overwalken Searshaft: Caunterbury Legendes.”

(yes English nerds, that title is some sloppy Anglish smooshed with Middle English but you get the idea)

2. Most people are introduced to mecha via anime, manga, or film; and so are likely to not have read mecha stories in a non-visual format. When a show is scripted, there is a lot of writing that goes into describing scenes that we don’t think about because we’re seeing/hearing the visual and audial representation of that writing.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a single frame worth? Without any context, what do you think is happening in the gif above? How would you describe this less than 3 seconds of action if you were writing it?

I recommend that you read a few novels or short stories that involve mecha or giant robots of one kind or another. They might not be the type of story you’re planning on writing, but they should help with deciding on how much detail you want to go into when writing scenes with mecha (action or otherwise).

Here’s a few to try:

The Pacific Rim film novelization by Alexander Irvine.

The Del-Ray Robotech novels by Jack McKinney. Skip the ones that are about events in the Robotech cartoon—they are all good—but I recommend reading the ones that are fully original, (books #13-17).

“The Relic” by Jonathan Green is a short story within the “Legends of the Space Marines” series from Warhammer 40K. In Warhammer 40k, a “Space Marine Dreadnought” is a powerful Real Robot mecha. One doesn’t need to know the entire mythos of Warhammer 40k to understand the story.

“Mobile Suit Gundam: Awakening, Escalation, Confrontation” by Yoshiyuki Tomino. This book is the English translation and compilation of the three light novels that Tomino wrote. It covers the MS Gundam 0079 story, but with added detail (more about New Types, politics of the Zabi family, etc), and is much darker than the anime.

All of the above are Real Robot mecha under different levels of “science-fiction hardness" and settings. I cannot think of any novels or short stories that are about Super Robots, but they probably exist.

Two Specific Things

1. World-building will need lore and rules for the mecha. Even hand-wavey science-fiction or fantasy-with-magic settings have rules about who can pilot a mecha, how it’s done, what materials the mecha is constructed from, its power source, how it moves, how the pilot(s) perceive the world around them while piloting the mecha, its weapon and defense capabilities, etc. The harder the science-fiction, the more constraints are imposed, and will likely require real world research to help describe it.

For example: Gravity is a Thing. Some Super Robots can fly in such a way that they can easily leave Earth’s atmosphere at or above escape velocity and do battle in multiple types of different gravity environments (e.g. Godmars vs Getter Robo). It’s hand-waved and not really thought about. This happens in Real Robot too, but there are many Real Robot stories that use gravity limitations, while hand-waving other things (not all giant robots can fly).

As shown above—in Gundam 00—the Gundams can do battle in space and LOE (zero gravity and Low Earth Orbit), and also in mid-air (atmosphere) and on the ground. That’s the hand-wavy part, because if we think through the physics of this, a machine optimized for aerial combat at Earth gravity (1G) is probably not going to be optimized for combat in LOE, in space, or in gravity conditions that are less than Earth’s (e.g. the Moon, Mars, etc). The Gundams can fight in all these conditions, but one of their constraints is that they cannot accelerate to escape velocity or shield themselves from high temperature friction during re-entry (atmospheric re-entry is a constraint used throughout the franchise). In Gundam 00, the Gundams have to be transported between surface to space via the space elevators.

Above: One of the things that is a “game changer” for these Gundams within that setting, is that Dynames can use the Super Substratospheric Altitude Gun, capable of hitting an orbital target from a stationery position on Earth’s surface. Use of this weapon comes with additional constraints (power, connection to a network for calculations, etc).

Super Robots can also have constraints. Both the Evas in Evangelion, and the combined form of Dairugger/Vehicle Voltron have a timed operational power limit. Evangelion has a lot of Real Robot elements, so as far as Super Robots go, they’re not very powerful. The more powerful the Super Robot, the harder it is to define a constraint. This is typically where a story hits the “His power level is over 9000!” problem, or “unleashing the full power will destroy the robot, or kill the pilot.”

Which brings us to Specific Thing #2: Why mecha? What problems do the mecha solve for the protagonist? Especially if a story with a lot of character focus is what you’re going for. How much focus do you want to put on the mecha? The answers to those questions are going to help with the lore and rules for the mecha.

Aiming for a Female Audience

I’m probably the worst female-ish person to advise on this because I rarely identify with female characters, especially as a tomboy in the 80s (of course, most of them weren’t written very well to begin with back then). I identify as gender fluid, but the gender binary that I grew up with still shapes my life. My tastes in fiction are all over the place and are probably not representative of a “female audience.”

But I do know that there were a lot of women who liked Gundam from the start. (ʘ‿ʘ✿)

Above: Amuro and Char fight with fencing foils in mid-air.

Any audience can be widely diverse, and not everyone within a demographic (broad or narrow) is going to agree on what they want to see, but it’s safe to assume that a sizable part of a female audience that would be interested in a mecha story is probably going to be Done™ with something that is commonly found in either mecha stories or mainstream science-fiction and fantasy. As to what that specifically is, that can differ quite a bit.

For me, I’m Done™ with “Tits And Camel Toe Out For Mecha” in stories with teen characters that are really just ecchi content with a veneer of a serious story slapped on top with a Gainax Ending.

I’m saying that as someone who loves Go Nagai and Satoshi “Plastic Nipple” Urushihara, and thinks that the Heavy Metal movie (gif above) is a work of art, which probably makes me a hypocrite, but hey, I have standards for my T&A.

I recommend looking at stories that are known to be popular with women, and then look at stories that are known to be popular to specific demographics of women (intersectional identities). They may not be mecha stories, but if they are in the current zeitgeist, then there is something about the narrative, characters, format, etc that might be common between these stories and quantifiable in a way that can help you aim for a female audience. It might be hard to find out what these are beyond a broad female audience, so research will be necessary.

There are much better sources for advice on this than me, so if audience appeal is something that you want to dive into, then you’ve got your work cut out for you.

Character Focused (a grain of salt)

In my biased and totally not expert opinion: the smaller the main cast, the easier it is to have a character focused story (unless you meant “character driven plot”?), and the mecha itself usually gets a lot of attention as that’s more or less the point of the genre.

However, a larger main cast provides more varied opportunities for focusing on character interactions, and more material for plot hooks to support multiple plots that can be structured/threaded in a variety of ways. TV Tropes (not my favorite source, but it’s good enough for this) has a rabbit hole of entries about different types of concurrent plots: Soap Wheel; A-B-C-Plot; Two Lines, No Waiting; Four Lines, All Waiting; etc. These entries are useful for getting outside of one’s head and considering options for how-and-when to introduce and wrap up plots. If character focus is what you want to prioritize, then start with “Soap Wheel,” as soap opera plots are all about character focus and they are a good example of staggering plots in a way that keeps the story going for 20 years or more.

Above: Wolfgang Mittermeyer and Oskar von Reuenthal from Legend of the Galactic Heroes enjoy a drink while scheming. LotGH makes the most of its hundreds of characters with scenes like this. It’s character focus of a different kind. Like Gundam, LotGH has a lot of female fans, but it’s not a show that one would immediately think of that would appeal to a female audience.

Returning to this thing about “character-driven plots”, that’s a concept that I’ve found to be generalized and abstracted to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. A plot-driven story can have a lot of character focus, and most mecha stories are inherently plot-driven (b/c genre), as the mecha is the vehicle for the protagonist to get from Event A to Event B. Mystery and romance genres are an example of plot-driven stories, and in both (but especially romance), there can be a lot of character focus to the point where B and C plots could be “character-driven” if they are about the specific character’s internal change, conflict, growth, some essential part of themselves that demands action, etc.

A mecha story can be structured with a plot-driven long-running A Plot which requires the mecha (so not monster of the week as those are episodic and not long-running), and certain main characters are focused on in such a way that their own internal struggles, conflict, and growth drive B and C plots. It’s up to you if those plots are concurrent, cyclical, or rotate in-and-out of focus.

For example: Aoki Ryūsei SPT Layzner (shown in the gif above) is a Real Robot anime has two sequential long-running A Plots that are plot-driven and focused on the mecha and its pilot (the protagonist). The first A Plot drives the first half of the series, and the second A Plot drives the second half of the series (which was sadly cut short so technically it wasn’t the full second half). There is a time-skip between the A Plots. The protagonist, Eiji, has an internal struggle that is threaded throughout, the focus on him creates the “character-driven” B Plot (who he is, the mystery behind the strange things that happen to him as he pilots the prototype, his conflicting loyalties between both halves of his heritage, how he reconciles his extreme pacifism with being forced to fight and possibly kill, etc). The small main/supporting cast is used effectively as each supporting character interacts with Eiji in such a way that they are integrated into the B Plot for his growth and resolving his internal conflict. The other main/supporting characters have their own struggles and character growth as well, but not quite enough to constitute a “character-driven” plot. The story’s minor C Plot is external and puts pressure upon the A Plot.

For what it’s worth: A truly “character-driven” plot—or story that is fully character focused—is going to yield a story like Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which would be interesting to explore within the mecha genre, but I have a feeling that you’re probably not interested in that much internalized character struggle.

Finally Anon, thanks to your Ask, I’ll have to add “Write a Canterbury Tales parody mecha story in Middle English” to my bucket list. I don’t know why my brain went there but it did. Please enjoy one of the best videos I ever found on YouTube:

youtube

(yes English nerds, the guy in the opening says “Old English” when it’s not OE, it’s ME)

#writing #mecha #probably awful writing advice #ask me anything #anonymous

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klimp42 · 6 years

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Metroid (NES) Retrospective: A Look Back on a Classic

So with Tumblr deciding that naughty bits are no longer allowed on their site, let's look back at one of the first sexy ladies for huge nerds and degenerates, Samus Aran! Bet you thought I was going to talk about Lara Croft, no we are going back to the oldest of schools, with a lady that most people probably didn’t know was a lady when they first played it in ‘86.

Alright, now I know it might be weird to talk about a review and retrospective in a game that is not only 30+ years old, but has been made non-canon in the Metroid story with the remake Metroid Zero Mission being a thing, but trust me I have reasons for wanting to review this. The first reason is that a friend of mine gave me a NES Classic as a Christmas gift, second I am a huge fan of Metroid and have always wanted to play the original, and third I thought up that opening line and thought it would be funny, I know its okay at best, but shut up. So for this little retro review, I am going to break this down into three categories, story, gameplay and legacy.

When it comes to the story of Metroid, it has the same level of complexity to the story as any other NES game from the time, if you just play the game and don’t bother to look into the booklet, its a game about a person going around shooting things and doing flips and then they fight a thing in a jar and escape from a timed bomb. Yet, like a lot of games from the time, the way to get the story was to read, as there simply wasn’t enough space on the cartridges to have a bunch of text and images next to a game of this magnitude at this stage of the consoles life (I say that because games like Castlevania III eventually did just this only 3 years later). So lets break down this galactic tale of a bounty hunter fighting life-sucking aliens and a supercomputer that controls them.

In the far-flung year of 2000, all of the planets came together to make the Galactic Federation, and things were good till a bunch of dick aliens decided to be Pirates of The Carribean in Space and just cause all kinds of space problems. The space 5-0 were super bad at there job so the Galactic Federation created Space Hunters, who were way better at stopping Space Johnny Depp. So while all of these things are happening the space cops find a small egg of an unknown life form on the planet SR388 (which is actually super important and is the location of the 2nd game), and it is believed for no reason other than plot that this small egg probably is the reason the civilization on SR388 was destroyed. So the spacops and the galactic boys decide that this should be brought in for studies, but Captain Hook in space decide it would be pretty dope to have something that might have destroyed a whole civilization, so they can have a biological weapon to rip apart the galaxy, yeah jokey names aside the space pirates are actually really evil for the sake of being evil. So the spirates run off to their main hideout on the planet Zebes and the Galactic Federations men can’t get in so they call on their better fighters, the space hunters, well specifically Samus Aran, a cyborg who strikes fear in the space pirates and is a “man” with a mystery, that mystery being that he has no wangus and is a woman.

Well the only thing left for the story is what I already said, Samus enters the planet Zebes and has to go kick the brainy ass of Mother Brain and destroy any Metroids she finds, what was inside the small egg thing found on planet SR388, that have been awakened and multiplied by the pirates in space. So let's move onto the gameplay of Metroid, which is simple when you look at just the base controls. You can run, jump, and shoot a short distance at enemies with the ability to eventually be able to swap with the select button between rockets and normal energy shots. Yet this game led to the creation of an all-new gameplay style of side-scrolling and backtracking over huge areas, which sounds like a whatever concept, but it is honestly really fun...for some reason, that genre being Metroidvania, the vania coming from the Castlevania franchise. I am simplifying it, honestly, you have tight controls and upgrades to your arsenal as you play, things like the Varia suit to lower the amount of damage that you take, long shot and Ice beam to shoot your shots farther and freeze enemies in place. You also have upgrades that change gameplay like the morph ball (or the Maur Mari as its called in this for some reason) which morphs you into a ball that can get into small places and the ability to drop bombs in that ball form, the high jump that makes you do just that, and the screw attack that is used to say I would like to not shoot things that aren't bosses or Metroids anymore. Seriously the screw attack, like it is in most Metroid games, is just so good, just jump and kill everything.

Alright, so controls is one bit but what about the actual game, so it is interesting, especially being in a unique location like planet Zebes, the music is a bop, just a straight heater of a soundtrack, and the fun of hidden blocks and rooms that let you get the feeling that you are exploring through a labyrinthian planet. However, problems do show up really quickly, first thing being when you start a game you only have 30 health, alright that's tough but okay the first area's enemies in the corridor before Brinstar don’t hit to hard so it isn’t too bad. But then you find you first Energy tank which fully heals you and adds a pip to your health, so now instead of a cap of 99 health, you have 198 health, sick!. So you keep playing, maybe you go to far and hit were Ridley is, one of the bosses and poster boys for the franchise, shit you died, so you’re sent back to the start of Ridley’s area and what’s this? Your health is back at 30, which sucks but also you need to now hit a cap of 198 instead of 99! Though this becomes less of an issue as you get more E tanks, but man does it suck in the beginning to just be like oh cool this sucks. Like I get it, this is NES hard, enemies are bullshit on purpose to hide the fact that you can beat this game in less than an hour if you know what you are doing. Speaking of enemies, damn do they look super cool or super dumb, with the top of the spectrum being the Metroids themselves or Mother Brain, and the bottom being the weird ball things in Ridley’s place, Ridley himself, or those damn Cheerios ( just google Metroid cheerios if you don’t know what I’m talking about). The enemies in this game range from slowly moving annoyance to this homing at me bullshit is getting on my last nerve, so expect to take alot of hits from both of them.

Traversing around the game is alot of fun and it feels greet, but there is a little bit of a problem if you want to play this game now, see in the 80’s you had this like outline of where you where going, an idea of what to expect in the next area, cool right? Well that was in the booklet you got when you bought the game, no such thing in the NES classic or on the Switch’s NES collection. So unless you have a damn good memory you are probably going to want to pull up a map that you can use for your first time, or you might get lost, or maybe you are way better at the whole keeping track of yourself then I am and you don’t need a map.

Now, what is a game without boss fights right? So let's talk about some of, and by some I mean the three total boss fights in the game. For this let's go in order of easiest to hardest to get to, in my opinion, so Kraid, Ridley and then Mother Brain. So Kraid in this game is way smaller than he is from every other time he has, or I guess, will show up in Metroid titles, he is about the size of Samus and also from some reason there is a second one of him in his lair. His attack is what it is for all of his games, he shoots spikes from his chest and throws energy talon things, you just have to hit him to damage him, but it's difficult because he has the whole chest spike things blocking your shoots so you have to let him shoot and then land some hits. Ridley is only like his future self because he can shoot fire out of his mouth, but that's it and sometimes he will only shoot in a huge arc so you just close the distance and this boy is easy as hell to put down. The final boss of the game is Mother Brain and good god is she hard to just take down, one getting to her is the world’s biggest chore, and there is so many cheerios hitting you that trying to shoot missiles into that small window to attack her just sucks, and to get to her you have yo take down this glass tubes that regain health as you dont damage them, so you either get through really quickly, or it takes a thousand years. Also make sure you don’t in the last fight because it is back to the start of Tourian with 30 health, yay. Listen, the game has some hard fights when it comes to the bosses, except for Ridley, but it is still enjoyable to beat them and if you take the time to learn the fights it is actually really easy to exploit them, like Ridley.

Okay, so you beat Mother Brain and the only thing left to do is run to the surface of Zebes to escape it before it explodes, you do it and if you beat the game in less than 5 hours, you get to see the biggest twist in gaming, Samus is a girl! And if you beat the game in less than 3 hours you get to see her in her famous Zero Suit, and if you do it in less than an hour you get to see her in Bikini, a reward for only the most experienced gamer boys and girls! This game is rough, it's clear to see where the love of the game came from, it was unique for the time and it shows, the Metroid franchise has grown and improved with each entry, except for Other M, and was one of the reasons that the Metroidvania genre even exists.

So would I recommend playing this game? If you like classic NES games then yeah I would recommend it and if you have a Switch and just want to play the ending of the game there is a special version that starts you with all upgrades at the fight with Ridley. Also if you are a fan who has never played this game before, I would say that you should give the grandfather of the franchise a try. Now if you don’t really like old NES games or you just want to see the story of the first game, I would recommend just playing Metroid Zero Mission, it’s a complete remake of the first game with better controls and it's much easier, and if you enjoy it you could go from there to the original Metroid, or just play the franchise from there!

#metroid #nes #review #retrospective #gaming #samus aran #ridley metroid #classic #retro #switch

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avoutput · 6 years

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Scruffy-looking Nerf Herders || Solo: A Star Wars Story

With the release of yet another Star Wars film, the franchise has reached and created its own spectrum. A spectrum that until now has not been visible on the larger scale, especially theatrically. On the far end, we have the serious, sobering narratives of Rogue One, in the middle the epic heroics of the Skywalker Saga, and finally at the opposite end, Solo: A Star Wars Story. A true adventure film the likes that have not been seen since Harrison Ford geared up as Indiana Jones and traded a bag of sand for an ancient bobble. By the time Solo had ended, I was certain, downright positive, that this summer will not see a more coherent and effortless tale of daring, drama, arrogance, and charming egotism. Where the Last Jedi stumbled for fans, it is doubtful that anyone will have a bad word for the latest entry in the Star Wars spectrum.

The first thing on everyone’s mind was surely of the type of man that could fill the shoes of Han Solo and Lando Calrissian (and if Chewie had more speaking roles and less facial hair, he might have also been of concern). Fret not, both roles have been deftly passed on to a new generation of young actors in Alden Ehrenreich and Donald Glover. Where the confident charm of Harrison Ford left off (or...ends up as it were), the beginnings of the outlaw hero Han Solo are taking shape, letting Ehrenreich find his place naturally in the shoes of the charismatic smuggler he is to become. His approach to Han is both all his own and yet very much bound to the legacy of the character, and he finds a sweet spot in your heart you can’t deny. Glover on the other hand has a different challenge in creating the original smooth criminal Lando. In doing so, he starts by adopting a playful affectation of the real Billy Dee Williams, and slowly slides into his own character, bringing to life a whole new side of Lando. The Lando we knew never let his cool fade, but a young Lando has much to learn in the ways of effortless tranquility. Glover ends up creating a much more complete picture of Lando’s past as the smuggler, the cheater, the womanizer, and the future politician. We finally are given a complete picture of the enduring competitive friendship that presents itself in Empire Strikes Back.

The most impressive aspect of this film is laid down by the capable, yet predictable, hands of Ron Howard who ended up creating a striking visual ascetic, bouncing back and forth from dark hues of blue to dazzling orange cascades, which feels reminiscent of the classic Episode V. The only thing no one bet on was what a run-away spectacular Howard inherited and commanded in Solo. Although we should have known having had a few blockbusters of his own under his belt. Either way, what started as an unexpected hand-off in directing turned into a runaway play for the endzone, the Millenium Falcon has landed. Touchdown. Sports/Flight metaphors aside, next to the stellar cast and direction, the biggest key to this films success is the way the story was handled. With so many things riding on it, from the meeting of the best duo in space (Han and Chewie), to the best rivalry in space (Han and Lando), to the Kessel Run, and finally the introduction to the origins of a film character legend, so many things could have gone wrong. And not a single one falters, slips, or drops for even a moment. Every moment is so matter of fact and dealt with breathless ease, it almost feels like the story wrote itself. Like we have known Han before Han was Han. To that end, we can celebrate our departed directors, the creative team, the writers (Jonathan Kasdan, Lawrence Kasdan) all of whom deserve a big hand. And another big thanks to Star Wars: The Force Awakens for ushering in the reintroduction of physical props and locations. You can also thank those incessant fans for that.

I have said so much, yet told you so little, and honestly, you are better off. I would however like to continue gushing on behalf of the rest of the cast who brought to life every part of Han that we end up falling in love with. Starting with Beckett (Woody Harrelson) who becomes tantamount to Han’s survival and involvement with people like Greedo and Jabba the Hutt. As I have said before, there isn’t much to say about Harrelson anymore because he has never played the wrong role, each is his own. Could someone else have done it, maybe, but certainly not with that cock-eyed yet commanding nature. And to Qi’Ra (Emilia Clarke), who should forever be cemented as one of the largest female presences in Star Wars from this point forward. Clarke brings to the screen the beginnings of power and presence to the women the Star Wars universe has been lacking, or at least was lacking prior to The Last Jedi. Qi’ra is a full fledged character motivated all on her own and I hope they write more characters like her. Our other female leads were equally strong despite getting a little less light, but Beckett’s love interest Val (Thandie Newton) and Lando’s co-pilot (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) are strong co-stars who shine. In fact, you shouldn’t be surprised, but Han Solo’s life involves a lot of strong women. It was also nice to see a satisfying villain in the SW universe who wasn’t a Sith, kudos to Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany). Finally, right hand and Jiminy Cricket to Han, Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo) is as he ever was, larger than life and a complete breath of fresh air, as fresh as a Wookie’s can be.

Not that you should take my word for it, but this might honestly become everyone's favorite origin story for any co-character in a fantasy film franchise ever. It didn’t have much competition in that very specific category, but even among the broader Star Wars catalog, this film is sure to be considered one of the best. Only time will tell, but I could see this shooting up the charts to fall right under the undisputed champion, Empire Strikes Back, and that’s saying a lot. The enduring image of the underdog, the reluctant hero, the not-too-good good-guy will forever be a classic, and I can only hope this adventure holds strong against the ravages of time and hindsight just as the original Star Wars did before it. We can only hope the rest of the Star Wars franchise holds up this newly placed bar.

~* 9/10 *~

#Film #Review #Film Review #Solo #Star Wars #Solo A Star Wars Story #Alden Ehrenreich #Donald Glover #Emilia Clarke #Woody Harrelson #Joonas Suotamo #Ron Howard #Thandie Newton #Pheobe Waller-Bridge #Paul Bettany #Warwick Davis #Millennium Falcon

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fnlrndcllctv · 4 years

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REVIEW: Blade Strangers (2018)

Crossovers are a huge part of fighting game history, and have been wildly popular since the early heydays of the genre.

Capcom had faced off with Marvel, Tatsunoko and SNK to name a few, and even Mortal Kombat had beef with the DC superhero universe at one point.

So what happens when you get a crossover title that's made up of lesser known games?

The mass appeal that comes from a company or franchise's fanbase spurs these games on, but there's been a handful of games in recent times that collects together some more "niche" titles and forces them against each other in combat.

One of these games is 2018's Blade Strangers.

Gameplay

Upon first glance, Blade Strangers looks and feels like your standard anime fighting game, such as the Blazblue series and even the Under Night In-Birth games.

However, once you start playing matches, it's very clear that the difficulty of executing moves is much easier than most games of this type, and actively encourages newer players to get involved with the game.

Instead of relying on complex command inputs to pull off special moves, players can instead just hold the directional analogue stick in a specific direction and press a single button to execute certain attacks. It’s a simplified method that isn’t too different from the one we see in games such as Super Smash Bros Ultimate.

The four button layout is simple to make use of, and feels pretty responsive most of the time, outside of some slip ups here and there.

The game also feels noticeably slower and weightier to play than many of the other fighting games of this kind, which makes things feel a lot less daunting for newbies to get the hang of.

Story

Blade Strangers revolves around the concept that every universe is one of many simulations being generated by an interdimensional network of servers known as "motes".

A cybernetic being known as Lina appears and begins consuming the servers' data, wiping out entire worlds and defeating all of the Blade Strangers, the warriors who are sworn to protect them.

To protect the universe, the motes summon heroes from worlds Lina has not yet reached, altering their memories to make them believe they are participating in a fighting tournament.

The one left standing will be named the new Blade Stranger in the hopes of awakening their power and allowing them to defeat Lina.

The game's story mode is a pretty dull affair, opting for the visual novel approach of dialogue between fighters. I understand that this makes it easier for the writing team to successfully make sure that all the characters in the game can effectively and uniquely communicate with each other, but when the script is so weak that it resorts to talking about the characters breasts (on more than one occasion, I hasten to add), it just not very engaging.

I will admit though, Isaac's only line of dialogue being repeated everywhere in the game (i.e constant wailing AND NOTHING ELSE) did get a chuckle out of me more than once.

Roster

Blade Strangers’ roster is made up of characters from a number of different franchises in both Nicalis and Studio Siazansen’s back catalogues;

From the action RPG Code of Princess, we get Ali, Liongate, Solange and Master T.

From the Umihara Kawase platform games, we get Kawase, Emiko, Noko and a “Summer” version of Kawase as a separate character.

From the Metroidvania game Cave Story, we get Quote and Curly Brace.

From the platform game 1001 Spikes, we get Aban.

From the platformer Shovel Knight, we get (you guessed it) Shovel Knight.

From the roguelike dungeon-crawler The Binding Of Isaac, we get Isaac.

From the action platformer Azure Striker Gunvolt, we get Gunvolt.

From the RPG Doki Doki Poyacchio, we get Piaa.

We also get Helen and Lina as the game's original fighters.

It's a pretty wacky cast, and a memorable one at that, ranging from an Indiana Jones type character, a permanently crying child and a happy go lucky sushi chef to a buxom princess, a little girl with her giant fluffy pet cat and a series of robots.

There’s a reason why I have specifically highlighted the genres of each of the roster’s respective game series, and that’s down to the fact that none of these games are actually related to the fighting game genre whatsoever.

This is one of the game’s main draws, and makes it clear that the game isn’t particularly aimed at a wider, more casual audience.

It’s fun to see these indie darlings and obscure characters reimagined in a traditional 2D versus fighting game, and much like many other crossover fighting games, made me want to learn more about each of the characters and the games that they originally came from.

This aspect of Blade Strangers kept me feeling invested in the game, and almost makes up for how bad the story mode is.

Graphics

Each of the characters in Blade Strangers were originally created in 3D then subsequently rendered back into the game for 2D gameplay, much like games such as the Guilty Gear Xrd series, and as a result, look fantastic.

Seeing traditionally 2D characters such as Isaac and Shovel Knight being redone in this style is a delight to witness, and the action during fights is suitably flashy, with colourful explosions and anime-style cut ins from each of the characters sprinkled into it. It feels very Arcana Heart in the way it presents itself, which is never necessarily a bad thing.

Stages

As the game is a crossover between several games, each of the game’s stages is a reimagining of each game franchise’s locations.

From the creaking, dark basements of The Binding Of Isaac to the surreal, quirky sea creature-populated Umihara Kawase, there’s plenty of variety presented here.

The stages do feel a little bit lifeless though, apart from some instances of crumbling architecture once a fight is over. It’s a shame when you consider the amount of source material on offer from the roster, and disappointingly feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Replayability

Outside of the game’s story mode and regular versus modes, there isn’t much to do here outside of unlocking some extra icons and titles for displaying in the game’s online mode.

I mean sure, there's a tournament mode, some challenges and a survival gauntlet, but these all feel very similar, and don't offer much reason to grind away at them other than for the sake of completing everything.

The game’s lack of incentives really lets it down, and doesn’t offer many reasons for players to stick around when they’re done fighting.

As the game’s roster is based on so many obscure games, it would definitely have benefitted from the inclusion of a gallery and maybe even some basic information about each of the characters’ respective game series.

Final thoughts & overall score

Blade Strangers is full of character and an interesting way to bring together a slew of non-fighting game franchises into the genre.

What the game lacks in replay value and poor story dialogue is more than made up for by its easy to learn gameplay and just how nice the graphics are.

The game works perfectly as an entry-level title for beginners to learn the ropes, but for experienced fighting game fans, things may run dry somewhat quickly.

Do you agree with our review of Blade Strangers?

Let us know in the comments section below!

#Review #Blade Strangers #2018

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girlonfilmmovies · 5 years

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New Classics: Universal Soldier - Day of Reckoning (2012)

“Would you like to be free from pain?”

The Universal Soldier series was never the blockbuster franchise its producers so desperately wanted to be. Even the original 1992 entry felt like a decade too late when it appeared, a warmed over mish-mash of post-Vietnam fears and cornball sci-fi that’s only remembered for Dolph Lundgren’s delirious villain and Jean Claude Van Damme’s naked buns. By the second, Van Damme was already phoning it in and Lundgren’s charming psychopath was nowhere to be found. Eventually the rights were swept up in the late 2000s, presumably to be relegated to the same dollar-bin garbage that keeps pumping out unnecessary z-tier sequels to forgotten fare like Behind Enemy Lines or The Marine. Yet John Hyams, son of director Peter Hyams of 2010, Outland, and Timecop fame/infamy, had other plans.

While on paper 2009′s Universal Soldier: Regeneration sounds like any other cheap action film shot on whatever Eastern European backlot that will stretch every dollar in their budget, Hyams showcased a natural talent for shooting action that many of his rivals lacked. Especially in the post-Bourne era, an action film that isn’t cut within an inch of comprehension seems like a wonderful breath of fresh air. Bringing back a freshly rehabbed Van Damme and an always hard-working Lundgren certainly helped too. So what to do after achieving a mild success with a mostly forgotten C-tier action franchise? John Hyams certainly had a bold idea: throw everything related to the series in the trash and turn it into a two hour arthouse horror film, complete with hallucinogenic freakouts, nightmarish atmosphere, and some of the most brutal action put to film.

To be fair, he didn’t jettison all aspects of the franchise, although you won’t miss much by going in fresh. He keeps the core concept of the “universal soldier”, a government program that revives deceased soldiers and uses them (under mind control) for their own dirty work which usually goes horrifically wrong every time. He also brings back Van Damme and Lundgren’s respective characters, though now with entirely different personalities and motivations (also Lundgren’s is alive again after having half his head blown off in the last one). He retains the menacing former MMA fighter Andrei Arlovski from the previous film, although he actually plays a different character this time around. Barring all that, Hyams essentially starts from a clean slate, and to do that he finds a new lead in Scott Adkins. A hero in a very specific film niche, Adkins was always the right man in the wrong time. A highly skilled martial artist, he initially started in turn of the century Hong Kong fare, making a few appearances in mediocre Jackie Chan crap and direct to video garbage as evil henchmen. Once he moved on to Hollywood, the Bourne style had taken over and directors had no need for an actor who could actually fight when they could just cut around an actor’s lack of athleticism. Relegated to the henchman role for almost the entirety of his mainstream work (most widely recognized today for Marvel’s Doctor Strange where he plays... a henchman), he only received larger roles in cheap video fare, where he was also mostly wasted. One particular director named Isaac Florentine took a liking to him though, and often gave him major roles that allowed him to showcase his skills. His breakout role was as hardened Russian fighter Yuri Boyka in the Undisputed franchise, a similarly hijacked brand that took a bad prison movie and turned it into a quasi-Bloodsport tribute, complete with flashy fight scenes and a lot of actual talented martial artists. But even then, there was a watchability to Adkins’ raw acting talent, and being handsome and able to roundhouse people flawlessly also couldn’t hurt.

We open with average everyday dad John (Adkins) woken up by his daughter in the middle of the night. She worries that she hears monsters in the house and needs her dad to give her the all-clear to go to sleep. Much to his horror, his kitchen is inhabited by a group of ominous masked men, led by a bald man named Luc Deveraux (Van Damme). The Deveraux of past films was a noble if tired soldier, who was more than willing to save the world last film. This one rocks a shaved head and a thousand yard stare, a man broken by the world around him into whatever shape stands in front of John. He rambles in vague existentialist terms, only to interrupt when he begins to summarily execute John’s family right in front of him. One shot later, John awakens in a hospital bed with that as the only memory left in his shattered brain. A government agent gives him word of an investigation into Deveraux, but even the injured John knows there’s no backbone to his words. Whatever that agent knows he’s keeping to himself, so John has to do some digging on his own. We set on a path reminiscent of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, a dreamlike collage of characters who all seem a little bit off in an environment that looks not to far behind from joining them. A possible lead winds up dead with only the classic noir matchbox to lead John to his next destination. A seedy strip club with a girl who seems to recognize him but under an entirely different name and personality. And for a man who was gravely injured, he seems to be healing at an almost unnatural rate.

Intercut with this first half is the descent into hell of sleeper agent Magnus (Arlovski). An imposing hulk in a massive plumber jumpsuit, he becomes activated in the middle of a job by the same mysterious agent John was questioned by and goes off wordlessly hunting. He shows up at a seedy neon-soaked brothel filled with a group of soldiers led by Deveraux’s right hand man Andrew Scott (Lundgren), all receiving copious amounts of strange, almost brutally violent sexual pleasure. Magnus’ shotgun does most of his talking here, in quite graphic form, until Scott hits him with a drugged syringe. A piercing fluttering sound enters as Magnus slows down and stares into the camera with a thousand yard stare. Scott (and soon a hallucinated Deveraux) preaches about being freed from his government oppressors and joining their separatist group, aimed at infiltrating the very top powers of America through these techniques. He arrives at their compound and it’s a nightmarish hellscape of masculinity: dingy lighting, distant dog barking, more camo than an army surplus store, and a near never-ending barrage of hyper masculine muscle men with guns at their side beating the hell out of each other for pure entertainment. We drift through the compound in slow motion, driven by a constant unnerving low rumble and lights feverishly pulsating. Scott delivers his speeches on freedom to his recruits, but one can only wonder if Deveraux has merely become their new slave master, as he roams the halls silently killing any who seem to perturb him. He is their cult leader, as all bow down before him and worship his words like that of a priest. They send Magnus after John, and soon enough the chase is on.

Hyams’ slow-burn style reads like Lynch by way of Gaspar Noe, a mix of the puzzling bad dream confusion of the former and the drugged up nightmare rave aesthetic of the latter. The brothel Scott’s troops spend their time in plays very much in the fashion of Noe’s underground trips of perversity. Taking full advantage of the film’s rare NC-17 rating, men’s muscular naked bodies are on full display, playing much more like contorted funhouse portraits of the “desired” male physique. Everything is sweaty and dingy, the people more rugged than Hollywood usually goes for, with the glimpses of depravity we see far beyond the usual we expect from sexy fanservice in low rent action movies. We see extremely aggressive acts from violent abuse to fetishized self-harm; the only way these men can get off is through the same violence that surrounds them. We meet mysterious characters later on who seem to know what’s ahead of John even before it happens and once Magnus attempts to hit John with the same drugged concoction that turned him, things get even stranger. Particularly nasty wounds seem to miraculously regenerate, he begins seeing visions of Deveraux in the mirror, and finds footage of a mystery man who looks just like him committing heinous acts of brutality towards people from his past.

Speaking of brutality, Hyams knows that at the end of the day this is an action film, and he really lets it rip with the full freedom of the NC-17. Magnus often comes in like a feral animal, screaming like a bat out of hell and often with a very dangerous weapon to boot. His first confrontation with John is a mess, an average man having to face an enraged behemoth, throwing him around like a ragdoll and tearing the set apart. John’s carelessness gets his fingers get caught in Magnus’ axe, immediately grounding Hyams’ action in clear physical stakes. We’ll eventually see a enraged John storm through Deveraux’s compound, mostly staged like one long shot, tearing through men like they were paper, as he too becomes like a rabid animal, letting out feral yells as he mercilessly slaughters everything in his path. But the real showstopper is a one-on-one showdown with Magnus in a sports department store, as both men grab whatever they can, from baseball bats to dumbbells to bowling balls, to pulverize the other one into pulp. Hyams’ and his team always shoot very clearly and cleanly, letting these talented men showcase their athletic skill and only sprinkling a little extra spice on top when needed.

John will eventually discover that he is quite literally a monster himself, not so different from them, and will be led towards the swamps of the Bayou. There, he will literally descend into the earth into the compound, into the masculine hell, looking for Deveraux’s promises of pure freedom. He’ll find a curious doctor, a man fallen right out of a Cronenberg movie, who will promise him freedom by telling him the truth and offering a rather gruesome surgery. But can John handle learning the truth, a truth that will shatter his entire reality? Much like in Noe’s Irreversible, the original crime is a lot more important than the vengeance we are supposed to demand. And to put it simply, John will not handle the truth very well.

The film ends on a rather disquieting note, as we meet the mysterious government agent again in the middle of nowhere. He admits his greater involvement, but has a bizarre adoration for John, noting how impressed he was that he was not powered by simple blind patriotism like the turned murderous agents, but rather his blind love for family. He speaks to him like a father would to a graduating son. One gun shot later and the agent is being replaced with an identical copy, who takes his spot in his vehicle to presumably go back to work and infiltrate higher parts of society with the separatist group’s ideas. But before he leaves, he gives a blank, subservient bow to the changed John, a man who has become all powerful only by rejecting the reality right in front of him. For if patriarchy has taught one thing, it’s that power and force are the only means of control, and John’s violent rampage has only won him followers. And when a broken man has an army that will listen to his every word, it’s hard to not throw your morals out the window and become a literal god among men.

#new classics #action #horror #scott adkins

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ponydiscordmod · 7 years

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Fixing Power Rangers Megaforce

Alright, was asked this, so I'll do it... But here's the thing: Linkara already beat me too it in his "History of Power Rangers" episode on the season, so go watch that video and I'll cover things that he did not unless I feel it was more important. 1) Trade out directors and producers. People like to beat on the acting of this season, but here's the thing: the actors WANTED to act well, they WANTED character development for their characters...but were vetoed OFTEN both by Jonathan Tzachor and the producers who simply didn't CARE. "It's for five year olds, who cares?!" was the most common answer...which I HATE. When ALLOWED to actually ACT, the actors CAN act...but as the Nostalgia Critic has said: few actor's performance can survive a bad director because actors RELY SO MUCH on them. This season needed someone who actually GAVE A DARN about it. The actors and writers WANTED to do things, but it never actually WENT ANYWHERE because they were the ONLY ONES THAT GAVE A DARN! They NEEDED a good director and producer that really cared about the anniversary series. 2) This is a big one: let's remember that Saban didn't HAVE A CHOICE when it comes to adapting both Goseiger and Gokaiger. The contract forbid it. So that would've happened no matter what. So let's keep that in mind. So how do we work around this in such a way as to make a good season out of it? Well here's an idea: have the team using Gokaiger footage be an ALIEN Ranger teams, mentioned early on as being busy fighting the bulk of the Armada off in space, justifying why they're the ones with access to the Legendary Powers and stronger abilities. We established back in In Space there are teams of Rangers no bound to one specific planet, but rather travelling space fighting evil. This would help remove some of the 'stock footage overdosage by allowing some overlap, IE showing Gokaiger footage in the first season with the Ranger team in space fighting the Armada to build them up and establish some of their powers they already possess. At the ending of the first season, have the seal on the Rangers powers STICK, at least for the time being, perhaps only being temporarily restored to finish off the Messenger in a final fight before remaining sealed at which point the Armada arrives. Gosei then summons the other Ranger Team to Earth while they try to get the main Ranger's powers back, which also means we don't need to establish some of their powers: they've been fighting all this time and come to Earth WITH some of their new powers unlocked, so Gosei wasn't just throwing them random power ups every episode: they simply already HAD some of them when they arrived. Now, yes, this would mean we have 12 main characters at once, but one, we're going to be getting that in Kyuranger's adaptation and Dino Charge had a pretty massive cast. And if suggestion number one was followed, then we would have better directors and producers to actually bring the best out of the actors. AND this would save money by allowing more Sentai footage to be used unedited, which could then be used for the new actor's paychecks. We would've had a season to cover the first team and make them characters. And this would also provide a built in explanation for the Sentai only Ranger Teams: They're ALIEN Ranger Teams that the alien Ranger team knows well, but the Earth Rangers do not, while the EARTH Rangers know the previous Earth teams while the alien Rangers do not. This provides both good world building with good REASON to discuss with the Earth Rangers while it would provide a Watson for the Earth Rangers to explain the previous Ranger teams to. It would work well BOTH ways. And it would give us a big finale: the Earth Rangers with their powers restored vs the returning Vrak, who is now the Crown Prince of the Armada following his brother's death, and the alien Ranger team vs the Emperor and his forces. And this leading into footage from the team up with the two teams fighting together (which also would work with Vrak being there as his Japanese counterpart was IN that movie as a primary villain), ending with the Legendary War, this time with the ALIEN Ranger teams mentioned before arriving to help out, meaning no real cutting is required...and going into Mavro going One Winged Angel using footage from that series (Mavro bares enough of a resemblance to the gigantic final boss of that movie that it is believable)...ending with the previous Rangers, via the Morphing Grid and their combined power, managing to summon all their Megazords at once for one gigantic battle. THAT would've been a finale worthy of a big anniversary season. Look up 'Legendary Megazord War' on youtube to see what I mean. 3) Make Malkor, the first villain who is leading the first invasion force, a survivor of Scorpius's clan who survived somehow. Keep in mind, Malkor and his faction are Insects, and Malkor goes into a cocoon to power himself up at the end of his time as a villain, both of which are things we know Scorpius's species does. This gives him some connection to the Power Rangers franchise and thus more motivation. Do remember that while Scorpius died to the Galaxy Rangers, Trakeena died on EARTH to the Lightspeed and Galaxy Rangers' combined forces, and early production of Lost Galaxy had Zordon's involvement with the Galaxy Powers. Plus even without that, the Rangers who killed them were primarily FROM Earth to begin with. Malkor could have a more interesting motivation of wanting to avenge Scorpius and Trakeena’s deaths by destroying Earth, making him a more interesting baddy over all. 4) Have Bigs and Bluefur be a surviving General Org and Duke Org respectively. We know from Time Force that the Orgs from Wild Force were NOT the only ones of their kind, and others remained imprisoned. Have the increase of pollution awakening this Org remnant, or like Ransik did, have Vrak reawaken them. This would, again, tie them into a previous series, give them more motivation, streamline their story arc, and tie into the fact this is an anniversary season. Now, yes, some people would say 'well, all the Orgs were based off inorganic stuff, and my response is: yes, but not ALL of them. The General Orgs and Duke Orgs weren't, and neither were the Mutorgs, and there were several normal Orgs that were not inorganically based. In fact there's some implication ONLY the modern Orgs are inorganic, as most of the ancient ones we see were not. So have them be a group of Orgs that were sealed away and only now being released, and also being furious that their kind rose and fell once again. 5) Have the Messenger and Argus be Machine Empire remnants and the Robot faction having been built from left over Machine Empire technology. The Messenger and Argus got little characterization, so this would, again, be a good way to give them more development. We know from Forever Red some remains of the Machine Empire survived the Z-Wave, so two specific members living isn't too far fetched. As with the previous two entries, this would give them more motivation: they want to finish what their faction couldn't. In fact in general, doing this would make the Armada feel less a 'generic alien empire' and more like a Legion of Doom, which ironically was also the case with their Japanese counterparts. As for the 'built from the remains of the Machine Empire', we do know there was a large Machine Empire base on the Moon, have Vrak having gone there (since again, his family in this idea would have connections to the Empire) and salvage what he can to build his new faction. 6) Replace Tensou with a new Alpha Model. Not much to say here...just replace Tensou with a new Alpha model. Gosei was Zordon's apprentice, so it would just MAKE SENSE for him to have a robot from the same production line as Alpha would just make sense. 7) Do SOMETHING with Gosei. Gosei is by far the most WASTED character in this show. Zordon's apprentice, how the heck do you screw THAT up? Have him show signs of insecurity given the MASSIVE void he's trying to fill, have him miss his teacher, have him struggle with the legacy that he's now been left with. There is SO much potential for this character but nothing was done with it. So do SOMETHING with him. 8) Have Gosei and his robot side kick constantly BUILDING new Zords. In the show, the Zords were just explained as 'you have earned this by blah blah blah'. Just have them constantly be building new zords if you have to justify as many as we get in this show. There's still a PROBLEM with it, but it's at least not as big of one as what we got. There is of course a lot more wrong with this season, but to me that's a good place to end it. Hope you liked this and please tell me what you think.

#power rangers #power rangers megaforce #power rangers super megaforce #power rangers zeo #power rangers lost galaxy #power rangers wild force #orgs #machine empire #zordon #gosei #goseiger #gokaiger #analysis #analytical #rethink #changes #improvement #redo

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cawfulopinions · 7 years

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Fire Emblem Fates: Just Shove Your Children into the Puberty Void

I really wanted to like Fire Emblem Fates. I really, really did.

But there’s only just so much anime I can take, you guys.

Fire Emblem Fates is the fourteenth entry in the long running Fire Emblem series of fantasy, turn-based strategy games. The series has always made itself distinct from other games in the same genre with its strong sense of fantasy aesthetic, its character writing, and smooth, smooth animation, but has always failed to get traction in the West due to its difficulty and occasional iffy mechanics choices. Fates’ predecessor, Awakening, sold very well, however, and proved that there was a place for Fire Emblem in the states, but sacrificed a lot of franchise difficulty, so Fates promised to give an experience that both fans of Awakening and fans of previous Fire Emblems could enjoy.

It… certainly tried. I don’t think it quite got there, but it tried. But there was a lot going on along the way that makes me question what the hell they were thinking.

Fates, ultimately, feels like it’s torn between being a Fire Emblem entry and being a cool light novel that all of the kids will like. There’s a lot that feels like it was cribbed from the latest cheap anime on the airwaves, just for the sake of appealing to people who’re into that. It’s a very weird atmosphere and it doesn’t really fit for what Fire Emblem has previously been. There’s some serious war drama, but there’s also some creepy incest stuff involving your non-blood related siblings and a lot of fanservice. There’s this soap opera stuff involving whether you should be loyal to your birth family or your adoptive family, but also a dimension crossing dragon man’s evil army that wants to destroy the world. There’s DLC gating. There’s a lot of DLC gating.

It’s not a bad game, persay, but… well, there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s dive in.

Disclaimer: All images in this long pile of salt are either pulled from official Nintendo press releases or official art, from Miiverse posts, or from other sources. Every image is a legitimate image from the localization, at least as far as I can tell. There’s exactly one image I ‘capped myself, and it’s because I wanted a good shot of a booty. Otherwise, I didn’t screencap them. Please excuse my laziness.

So before we get into my gripes with the writing, let’s talk mechanics. Fates is split into two versions, Birthright and Conquest, with a third route titled Revelations available as DLC. Each of the versions sports a different plotline, with different units and different maps. However, rather than each game being their own separate thing, the three routes actually branch from a single choice point a couple chapters into the game, after which point you’re locked into one version’s storyline.

The three versions offer different gameplay experiences – Birthright has you supporting Hoshido and is most similar to Fates’ predecessor, with access to skirmishes to level your units and a generally easier experience; Conquest has you supporting Nohr and is a fairly traditional Fire Emblem experience, so resource management is the name of the game; and Revelations has you rejecting both countries and running off with the intended blue-haired waifu, and features several unique map mechanics and access to almost all units from both games, opening up strategies and marriage options that aren’t available in the other two versions.

This is basically foreplay for these two.

These are all pretty ambitious ideas, so it’s a shame that they all just… don’t really work. For starters, unit types are largely divided by kingdom, which creates some weird balance issues. The majority of the units you get while playing with Hoshido are samurai, ninjas, and mages – speedy foot units with low defense –while the majority of your mounted units are Pegasus knights – low defense, low HP flying units who are vulnerable to archers, which Nohr has in spades. Which is a problem, because the majority of the Nohr units… are slower, hard-hitting mounted units who can tank hits way better than you can. When playing on Birthright, you have to work for your mounted and tanky units, as for a long time the only non-flier mounted unit is Silas, a defector from Nohr who brings along the precious Cavalier class, which can reclass into the tankier Great Knight class. It’s a helpful move, but it’s just not enough a lot of the time.

In a move that’s clearly meant to balance them, Nohr’s units tend to have low resistance, making them more vulnerable to magic. This makes Conquest an exercise in frustration all on its own because the enemy AI on Conquest can afford to throw endless mages and ninjas at you to carve through your resistance and lower your stats with their throwing knives. And, of course, there’s the occasional Spear Fighter with a Beast Killer spear there specifically to fuck up all of your mounted units’ days,

Only on Revelations do you have access to units to both types, since you get every recruitable unit between both games, save for a few specific plot units who you could only support off with the Avatar anyways. Besides the absolute pile of warm bodies you’re suddenly given, it opens up a larger experience with the game and better strategies you can now put into place… so it’s a damn shame that the route’s only available as paid DLC, and not as the base game.

Unfortunately, all three routes (but especially Birthright and Conquest) have a particularly damning, unfun issue: their map design sucks. It’s awful. The maps are almost entirely designed around the quality of “how can we make it easy for everyone ever to get swarmed by everything” and it makes everything an exercise in frustration. There’s one particular map in Birthright where you’re storming a fort, and the lead up to the fort is a large, open field, and the moment you move into one enemy’s range, you’ve basically moved into every enemy’s range, and whoever you send up there is about to get swarmed by everything. Which is an issue, because your tankier units are in short supply, and there’s only so much that Pair Up can do to fix everyone’s defensive issues.

This map’s probably the most extreme case, but it’s far from the only one; several of the maps can more or less be described in qualities of either “big open rectangles” or “awful mazes of corridors”. There’s also a surprising dearth of interesting terrain – I think I can count the number of maps with actual forest tiles on one hand, and since the final chapters on both Birthright and Conquest are all indoors, the terrain’s even more limited.

Making things a bit more interesting is the Dragon Vein mechanic – every map has special tiles that can be activated by any members of royalty you have in your team due to their draconic heritage, causing different effects depending on the map you’re on. These can be used against you or to your benefit, since there are more than a few maps involving you fighting the opposite kingdom’s royalty too. Honestly, it’s probably the shining feature of the game, aside from the rebalanced Pair Up mechanics, and I’d like to see something like it return in later games.

It’s fairly obvious from how the routes were designed and the various balance issues that appear that the decision to split the game into three full games worth of content meant nothing was really properly balanced. Admittedly, difficulty is subjective, but for me, Birthright, when played on Normal, was disgustingly easy. When played on Hard, it was a ball-raking experience in frustration and bullshit deaths. Conquest remains frustrating for the entire experience, especially if you’re playing on Classic, but it never feels frustrating in a fun way – it always feels like you’re clawing against the game, desperately trying to find a foothold while you’re being relentlessly carved apart by a million ninjas. And for all of their difficulty, Fire Emblem games do generally feel fair about it. It never feels unwinnable unless you’re on, like, Lunatic or some shit. But god, there were legitimately moments in Fates where I felt like snapping my 3DS in half because it felt flat out unfair.

You can change the difficulty mid-game, but you can only turn it down – Hard to Normal to Easy, Classic to Casual to Phoenix, where units, upon dying, come back the next turn. There’s basically no middle ground when it comes to difficulty – either you’re coasting through with absolutely no challenge whatsoever, or the game actually has your testicles in a vicegrip. Doesn’t help that the game gives you a few really good units in the form of your royal siblings, some of which come pre-promoted, and others with their own unique weapons. In fact, Ryoma’s weapons and stats are so good that people have actually soloed Birthright with him.

Beware the lobster man, for his lust for destruction is endless.

On the subject of weapons, Fates does away with something that’s been a series standard for decades – weapon durability. Instead, the game gives you several weapons with several differing effects – for example, the Sunrise Katana gives the wielder an insane dodge rate, but has a lower strength. Extra weapons can be forged into one another, letting you steadily improve their stats and, over time, make a weapon far superior to the one you started with. This is a pretty contentious subject in the fandom, but honestly? I don’t have any problems with it. Healing staves still have durability, and it means I don’t feel afraid to use my cool weapons like I always do in other Fire Emblems.

It also carries over the Pair Up mechanic Awakening introduced, with some new balancing to it – now, units can only aid in attacks if they’re standing to the side of the units in question, and only defend if they’re paired up with (on the same space as) another unit. Enemy units can also pair up, which leads to a lot of frustrating moments when you’ve got two heavily defensive units bottlenecking an area and you’ve got to get past them to make progress. Still, it’s an improvement, and I’d like to see it come back in a game with more unit variety, so I could fully take advantage of it.

Another thing Fates introduces is unique skills for every character – some get bonuses depending on the type of terrain they’re on, or the characters they’re around. Others have conditional bonuses or abilities, like Orochi and Niles being able to “capture” units that can be convinced to join your army, or Sophie being able to strip enemy units every now and then. This is actually a pretty cool thing overall and it really makes me think more about who to use beyond just stats and if I like them or not.

There’s also been several changes to how supports work, specifically through the addition of the A+ rank and the new class change seals that have been added. While S-rank is still exclusive to units of different sexes (symbolizing them getting married), A+ notes a “best friend” unit of the same sex, and like S-rank, every unit can only A+ rank once. The new Marriage and Friend seals allow a unit access to classes of their maxed out ranks, giving greater variety in the skills and classes they can earn. It’s a nice change. Master Seals are still in, as are a new variant that allows a child unit to upgrade to a promoted class immediately after recruitment if they’re recruited after a certain point in the game.

…but we’ll get to that later.

There’s also the My Castle, which is an expansion of Awakening’s barracks, and is honestly such a weird part of the game that it barely garners mentioning. It’s where your shops are, and over time you can add more facilities, gather materials to use to upgrade your items and make stat boosting food with, and participate in some faux-multiplayer matches to get points for other upgrades. It’s interesting, but its existence is… odd, especially since the plot explanation for it has to deal with Fates’ weird flirtation with alternate universe bullshit.

…but we’ll get to that later.

Overall, the mechanical changes are for the better, it’s just they’re marred by a lot of other dumb shit. Like the map design, the terrible balancing, and Jesus Christ, can I just have a knight, please, so I can stop getting punched in the face???

This is all without getting into the story, writing, and aesthetic, which is some of the most contentious in the franchise for a good reason. It’s, to be frank, kind of bad. It’s weird and anime in ways that Fire Emblem hasn’t really been in the past, and it feels more like I’m playing a not-so-great light novel adaptation than a fantasy war simulator. And it’s not like Fire Emblem isn’t tropey – for how much people love it, Sacred Stones’ plot sure wasn’t winning too many writing awards, and a good chunk of Awakening’s characters are better described by what anime tropes they adhere to – but Fates really goes all in, complete with some of my least favorite tropes: people being prideful about dumb shit, and sibling fetishism, because no light novel style plot is complete without siblings who want to bang the protagonist.

Some, more blatantly than others.

So here’s the basic outline of the start of the plot: the player Avatar (default name Corrin) is one of Nohr’s princes/princesses, and have been raised in seclusion in a castle distant from Nohr’s capital. Your siblings, who are also children of the king, Garon, have visited you over the years to keep you company and have grown very close to you. After a series of events, Corrin is captured by Hoshido, the neighboring kingdom, it’s revealed that the protagonist was actually born a prince/princess of Hoshido and was kidnapped by Garon in a previous war. In retaliation, Hoshido kidnapped a Nohrian princess, Azura, and raised her among their royalty. A rapid series of events take place following these reveals, with the Hoshidan queen being assassinated through a curse on your sword and the sudden attack of half-invisible soldiers, Corrin suddenly turning into a dragon, and Nohr invading Hoshido, all leading up to the moral choice that marks the version split: do you stay with Hoshido, the family you were born with; do you return to Nohr, the family you were raised by; or do you seek a third path?

So let’s talk about something that becomes very, very obvious when you start off: Nohr is evil. Nohr is hilariously evil. One of the literal first things that happen after you meet Garon is him ordering you to execute a pair of prisoners who were captured in a recent skirmish. When you don’t execute them, and your brother Leo pretends to execute them for you so you can let them go later, you find out that your siblings have to do this shit all the time and spend a lot of time only really following the letter of the order under ol’ Dad. One of the next things that happens is you walking in on Garon literally praying to an evil dragon skull. Basically every Nohrian army executive you meet who isn’t one of your siblings or their retainers is also some degree of evil and/or stupidly bloodthirsty. When you get to Hoshido, you find out that Nohrian mages have been sending literal animated corpses over to Hoshido to fuck shit up and just letting them do whatever they want, because Hoshido has a magic barrier keeping Nohr from directly invading it around it (in fact, this is why the queen had to be assassinated in such a roundabout way).

So when the route choice is presented, it’s supposed to be less “I want to be with this family” and more “I want to stop Nohr” and “I want to change Nohr from within”. Or at least that’s the intent. And while much ado has been made about Treehouse’s various translation changes (which I will not be getting into here, because that’s a can of worms I ain’t touchin’), the changes made at the route split were absolutely for the better. In Japan, when you choose to go with your Hoshidan family, it’s explicitly because they’re your birth family. In the NA version, it’s because you can’t reconcile your own morals with what Nohr’s done.

The weird part is, it really would not have been that hard to present Nohr in a sympathetic light – it’s stated that due to their perpetual night and poor weather, they have always had poor crop yields and had to invade other countries to support themselves, and ultimately it’s Garon’s dickishness that’s perpetuating the war. Previous Fire Emblems have also had antagonistic, but sympathetic enemy armies, including the Plegians from Awakening, who go to war in the first place because their mad tyrant wants revenge for the previous slights of Ylisse. So Nohr’s levels of cartoonish evil aren’t because it’s not a thing the franchise does… it’s because they just didn’t want to put the effort in to make it actually nuanced.

From the choice point onward, the plots follow three different paths. Birthright’s path is a fairly standard trudge through a Fire Emblem plot. I’ve heard it called the best “plot” out of the two starting routes, but I think that’s more because its plot is actually paced out well and doesn’t spend the first 15 chapters fucking around making you do Garon’s dirty work and complaining about it ad nauseum. What makes Birthright annoying is in the individual plot beats. There’s two distinct instances of characters killing themselves for no goddamn reason that occur during the story, and while the writers clearly want you to feel something during them, the actual reasons and circumstances are so contrived it’s hard to feel anything about it.

*muffled Rihanna plays in the background*

Furthermore, the further you get into Birthright, the more contrived the reasons for your Nohrian siblings to not ally with you get – Elise is blatantly on your side (and gets a storyline death for it), Camilla is clearly considering defecting before some contrived plot bullshit happens to make her want your friends dead again, and Xander and Leo just keep fighting you for reasons. Reasons that are never adequately explained beyond “Me Nohr, you Hoshido, you traitor, blaaaaaaugh”.

“Contrivance” is the name of the game with Conquest, too, which sounds like it’s going to have a sneaky storyline about you trying to pull a coup on Garon and change Nohr that way, but is actually about you putting down rebellions for him and fucking up Hoshido because you found out that he’s secretly a monster, and the only way to convince your siblings that he’s a monster is to sit him on Hoshido’s magic throne, because the plot device that Azura pulled out of her ass to reveal this to you with was a one-time use. And your character complains about this a lot. A lot. Half of the dialogue between them and any members of the Nohrian army boils down to “BUT WHY—“ and then your siblings rushing in and saying that yes, you’ll do the evil thing, don’t worry about a thing, and then your character resuming complaints. By the end of the game, you succeed on putting Garon on the throne, revealing that he’s a gross monster, kill said gross monster, and then have a surprise boss fight with a possessed Takumi, who had previously appeared to kill himself for inadequately explained reasons.

No matter which route you finish first (because let’s be real, you have to pay extra for Revelations, so you’re definitely not playing it first), you’re going to be left with a lot of unanswered questions, first and foremost being “Who were those semi-invisible enemies I fought all the time? What was up with that alternate dimension I fell into with Azura that one time in Conquest? Why were Takumi and Garon possessed by weird gross monsters? Why did Azura just suddenly die at the end for no real reason?” Good news: these are all explained if you buy Revelations. Bad news: You have to buy Revelations to even get so much of a semblance of an explanation, because otherwise these plot things are all left completely unexplained. The plot for Revelations barely has anything to do with the plot for the other two versions, too – while Birthright and Conquest are about the war between the two countries, Revelations is about a dragon that went mad, an alternate dimension kingdom, and how basically every problem in the game was because of these two things.

All routes manage to hit on one of my bigger pet peeves about Fates, though, and that’s that for all the plot tries to be about this moral quandary of the war, it ends up being more of a soap opera about how much it’s tearing you apart to have to fight your siblings, with a lot of very anime bullshit along the way, and by the time you get to Revelations, it’s gone so full anime that it’s not even pretending to be about a war anymore. The weirdest bits of the writing are in the alternate universe stuff, which you’re first introduced to early in the game when they introduce the My Castle, a pocket dimension only the Avatar can access where time doesn’t pass and the army can just hang around and chill. This alternate universe stuff then proceeds to go wholly unreferenced until a brief visit to Valm that takes place in Conquest, and Revelations, where it’s suddenly the crux the plot spins around.

Or unless you have a kid.

…but we’ll get to that later.

There’s a myriad number of other things that make the plot feel weirdly anime and amateurish for such a huge production. Azura is pretty much just “Plot Device: The Character”, with the song she sings through the game basically just being “Plot Device: The Song” with how many different things it gets used for (its actual effects, naturally, are unexplained unless you play Revelations). Azura being a songstress in the first place is a very tropey move – singers and divas are frequently very important characters in Japanese media, and having their songs have magical effects is one of those very common tropes that always feels contrived when it shows up. She’s extremely obtuse with her intentions, which turns out to be because of a literal curse that keeps people from talking about Valm (the alternate universe kingdom) without being in Valm (so again, you want explanations for stuff, better buy Revelations).

Similarly, Corrin tends to basically stumble onto new powers and weapons as the plot demands, giving the feeling that they’re meant to be a self-insert wish fulfilment character of some sort. In order, Corrin is a member of all three courts of royalty (yes, including Valm’s), is part-dragon, can turn into a dragon, suddenly has a magic weapon reveal itself to them that’s actually the key to saving the world, and spends a large portion of the plot seeking out a massive power boost so they can go fight Garon on his terms. And while there’s definitely something to be said about a character you can customize being meant to be something of a self-insert, since Corrin’s appearance is fully customizable, and since they can support with everyone, have the most versatility class-wise out of anyone, there’s an amount of wish fulfilment fantasy I can take, and we crossed it a while ago here.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Revelations and things that come out there, one of the big plot points is that your birth parents actually aren’t the same as your Hoshidan siblings’ birth parents, and your dad’s actually a dragon. This is something that’s also told to you when you S-rank one of your Hoshidan siblings, in the form of a secret letter your mom left for them, but up until that point on Birthright? You just think you’re partaking in some incest of the highest degree. So if you want to get that explanation without thinking you’re banging your biological siblings? Better buy Revelations.

Not that any of this makes any of the sibling fetishism in Fates any less creepy. Since the Avatar, like in Fates’ predecessor, Awakening, can marry any character in the game, all of your Hoshidan and Nohrian siblings are fully marriageable. However, a few things are made immediately obvious when you’re interacting with these characters. The first is that both families consider you to be their family, which raises a ton of awful, creepy questions about power dynamics and the morality of fucking the people who raised you. The second is that the developers absolutely wanted you to fuck your siblings anyways, because Elise and Camilla exist.

From left to right: Three potential routes in the mythical bisexual anime dating sim that only exists in my dreams.

All of the Nohrian and Hoshidan royalty characters are written around specific anime tropes and honestly feel like they could have been plucked from an otome game, or at the very least, a passably written light novel, but Camilla and Elise specifically play into a particular incesty trope-set that’s very common in Japanese media: the sister who wants a more-than-sisterly relationship with the protagonist. Half of Camilla’s dialogue is basically just throwing innuendo at you while simultaneously implying she wants to mother you, leading to a frankly disconcerting combo of MILF-femme fatale-big sister tropes. And just in case you hadn’t gotten the memo yet, Camilla gets an entire CG scene dedicated to showing off her tits and ass on Birthright, while on Conquest, a large part of the ending CG scene is dedicated to the protagonist running headlong into her titties. Subtle.

Elise, on the other hand, is a cute little gothic Lolita little sister who’s always cheering you on and calling you “Big brother!” or “Big sister!” – grating, but standard enough little sister tropes in Japanese media. The problem is that she’s marriageable, and unlike Awakening, where it was implied that the debatably legal characters all had their kids at least a few years into the future from when the game takes place, the children in Fates are all born not too long after characters get married. So either Elise is supposed to be a legal loli (which is creepy), or you’re banging your underage adoptive sister (EVEN CREEPIER).

All of the siblings in Fates have these problems, but Elise and Camilla really get it the worst, because they’re so overt about it. They’re characters whose entire identities are wrapped up in being your sibling, and you can fuck them. Even with them not being your blood sibling, there was a conscious decision to write them in this faux-incesty manner that adds a real creepy sheen to the whole thing. All of the other members of the royalty? They’re dating sim tropes. Ryoma and Xander are dependable, kind of dorky older guys, Leo and Takumi are supposed to be the standoffish, full of themselves ones, Sakura’s the cute, shy one; and Hinoka’s the hot blooded genki girl. And then there’s Elise and Camilla, who fall into two varieties of incest trope, with a double dose of lolicon on Elise’s end.

But hey, while we’re talking marriage options, let’s talk about the other characters in Fates. So a big thing about Fates is that since it’s technically two separate campaigns, both Birthright and Conquest have complete casts and full armies to take with you, with the characters you get determined by which route you’re on. This isn’t inherently a problem (at least until you get to Revelations and you get both casts, minus a few pre-promotes, giving you a massive pile of units you’ll probably never use), but something about the cast feels very incomplete. There’s a lot of character tropes that are reused from Awakening – for example, Subaki is a Pegasus riding retainer for the crown who’s well known for being absolutely perfect at everything, much like Awakening’s Cordelia; while Hayato is a child-like mage who wants to be taken seriously and has been trying to prove himself, much like Awakening’s Ricken.

It doesn’t stop with just tropes though – a few of the characters are wholesale lifted from Awakening, too. Did you like Cordelia, Tharja, and Gaius? Well, I hope you did, because they’re child units on Birthright. This is actually one point where Conquest has a definite leg up on Birthright, because Conquest’s Awakening cameos, Odin, Laslow, and Selena (Owain, Inigo, and Severa, respectively) actually came to Fates’ world using an actual plot mechanic from Awakening, and get a set of DLC dedicated to explaining their presence in the world in more detail. So that’s another paywall on massive plot material, because that’s the name of the game with Fates, but at least the effort’s been put in.

And something that doesn’t really help is a lot of characters seem to be written very differently depending on route and whether you’re in the main story or the supports. For example, Takumi, if you’ve only played Conquest, is a raging asshole. There is nothing good about him, definitely nothing that seems to suggest the popularity he apparently has in the fandom. If you play Birthright, he’s cold and standoffish and jealous, but there’s depth there. But then there’re his supports, and he’s awkward and prideful and somewhat endearing about it. It literally feels like three different characters.

Top: Takumi in Conquest. Bottom: Takumi in Birthright and his supports.

Overwhelmingly, the various Support chains feel better written than the majority of the game. Even with how tropey a lot of the characters are and how sick I grew of them in the main story, I still enjoyed the support chains a lot. Anything involving Mozu pretty much immediately became a feel good, good time, even with the less personable characters. Raging asshole Takumi became likeable through his supports. It legitimately felt like I was reading a completely different story when I got to the supports, and I genuinely wonder if they were written by a completely different writing team.

Fates also does something no other Fire Emblem has allowed before: there’s gay marriage options. There was much ado made about how stupid it is that they’re version locked, as well as the tropes that go into them, but I’ll give Intelligent Designs credit for trying. However, I won’t give them credit for the fact that the options suck ass. The gay marriage options are Niles, an innuendo spouting Nohrian thief with a thing for bondage and enough angsty backstory and hidden darkness to make him a stereotypical yaoi “top” character; and Rhajat, who is literally just Awakening’s Tharja, a creepy Dark Mage with a penchant for curses and is the Avatar’s stalker. These characters weren’t written to actually make them appealing to gay people – they’re written to fit yaoi and yuri archetypes to make them appealing to straight people.

Go away.

And it’s not like I didn’t give them a chance on my own playthroughs – both my Birthright and Conquest avatars were actually genders that matched the gay options for those routes – but as I got through their support chains, I found out pretty quickly that I didn’t want anything to do with either of them. I’m not interested in marrying someone whose only interesting character traits are his love for innuendo and his angsty backstory, or a creeper who wants my vagina because she’s convinced that I’m her fated lover, and is willing to curse everyone to make it happen.

Legitimately, there’s other characters that would have made more interesting gay options, like Silas, the Avatar’s childhood friend who’s dedicated enough to them to defect to Hoshido; and Soleil, Laslow’s daughter who loves girls so much that her personal skill is all about powering her up when she’s around other girls. Why she’s not the gay option, and Discount Tharja is, is beyond me.

There’s something that’s really jarringly apparent about the Fates cast the further you get into it, though. The game really wanted no business with any party members who weren’t conventionally pretty and young. And nowhere is this more exemplified than with certain pre-promotes you can get, the character of Nyx, and the non-recruitable boss character, Zola.

So in Fates and Awakening, pre-promoted units (units who come to you already as an upgraded class) generally can’t be supported with any party members besides the Avatar. Both games have exceptions (specifically, Frederick and Anna in Awakening and the royal family members in Fates can all be supported with other units besides the Avatar), but that’s generally the rule. It was odd in Awakening, because in previous Fire Emblems pre-promotes usually could still support with other party members.

But something Fates does that Awakening didn’t is that all of the pre-promoted units who can only support with the Avatar are also old. From Reina, a Kishin Knight with visible wrinkles and a lust for murder; to Shura, a vagrant from a Hoshidan border nation who defected to Nohr; to Gunter, an old man who is one of the Avatar’s retainers. It seems like anyone over the age of 20-something is shoved into the “Avatar-only” category of supportable characters, regardless of their apparent depth of character. Some of these characters are also among the few who don’t come back for Revelations – Scarlet, a Wyvern Lord Resistance leader who joins you in Birthright, gets a particularly undignified death when you first go to Valm to justify her lack of involvement.

It’s the kind of thing that really feeds into Fates’ weird, creepy light novel feeling, because that’s not something other Fire Emblems really have done. Awakening had a good amount of visibly older characters who were still fully supportable (Frederick and Gregor come to mind), and previous Fire Emblems had multiple older characters per game and never really called attention to them the way Fates does. But here, every character (save, say, Benny on Conquest) has to be in the age of conventional attractability and look appropriately, and god forbid they don’t, especially if they’re a woman.

The most egregious instance of this is quite possibly Nyx, a child-like Nohrian mage who’s actually old enough to be an old woman. She falls into a long-standing Fire Emblem tradition of “characters who look like little girls but are actually super old”, which are usually among the various Manakete characters of Fire Emblem. These generally range from “wise despite their appearance” (Myrrh from Sacred Stones) to “uncomfortably childlike” (Nowi from Awakening).

Nyx is a rare exception in that she’s fully human, and looks the way she does because of a curse… and she’s also a Dark Mage, so she wears a bikini everywhere. It really does feel like they wanted an excuse to put a kid in a bikini, and used the “she’s really like a hundred years old!” excuse to justify it (which they also did in Awakening, and it was just as uncomfortable there). And yes, you can marry her as a male Avatar, and yes, she will give you a kid. Have fun with that mental image.

And then there’s Zola.

Who wouldn’t want to give this little creeper a hug?

Zola is a character with… very contentious writing, and another character where, in order to get any perspective on him, you have to play Birthright first. In all three routes, Zola is a minor boss who impersonates the Duke of Izumo, a neutral kingdom in the war, and uses this as a chance to try and execute the Hoshidan royal family before getting killed by Leo for his dishonorable behavior. It’s pretty standard Fire Emblem boss fare, and he’s pretty forgettable there.

But on Birthright, Zola lives past that chapter as a prisoner of the Hoshidan army, and this allows him to gain more depth as a character, revealing that despite his cowardly nature, he does have loyalty toward the Avatar and there’s something sympathetic about him. In any other Fire Emblem game, it’s entirely possible he would be recruitable. In fact, he factors into the Hoshidan army’s plans to fight Garon during the theater episode in Chapter 12.

However, by this point, keen-eyed Fire Emblem players have probably already noticed that Zola did not join the army after his “recruitment”, and the plot summarily executes him after taking three chapters to humanize him, and he’s completely forgotten from that point on. The thing is, more morally ambiguous characters are recruited to the Avatar’s team in Fates alone (cough cough Niles cough Rhajat cough), and they’re allowed to stick around. But Zola is executed despite the game clearly showing he’s loyal to the Avatar (he even pleads to Garon to spare the Avatar after he betrays the party) and him having a fully fleshed out character.

As far as I can tell, the only reason Zola is not recruitable is because he is not pretty. He’s a coward whose looks match his personality, and so he was always intended to be cannon fodder. It creates some legitimate questions about the equating of beauty and goodness in Fates, because there’s legitimately no reason why that plot development needed to occur in Birthright considering how that event is handled in Conquest and Revelations. It would have been easier to leave it all out.

So that’s three distinct cases of characters who are over the hump as far as “acceptable age” and appearance goes, and how they’re treated. It’s another thing that feeds back into Fates’ “big budget light novel” feel – you’re not going to see a ton of those with main characters who aren’t conventionally attractive young people, and the characters are generally designed in a way that they’re appealing to younger players and their aesthetics.

And boy oh boy, does this show in Fates’ character design.

While Fates borrows a lot from Awakening, one thing it does not borrow are Awakening’s class designs. Awakening’s designs were generally fairly simplistic, and aside from a few specific things (flying classes’ baffling lack of armor, those… shoulder things on knights, cavaliers wearing toilet seats for neckpieces), they were fairly reasonable fantasy armor. In fact, most female characters, including the prissy aristocrat troubadour Maribelle, wore pants. The downside there was that a lot of classes were gender-locked; Pegasus knights and troubadours were female only, but even so, they didn’t have particularly egregious designs.

Fates removes gender locking for all classes, but the female only designs are often… egregious. By which I mean, everyone wears panties. Everyone wears panties into battle.

Can you please put on some goddamn pants before you chafe your thighs into oblivion?

Hoshido classes, thankfully, generally wear loincloths over their panties, but the egregious lack of pants tends to be really blatant. But Nohr classes tend to be more than willing to let it all hang out there, even if (or especially if) they’re a horse-riding class. Nothing was worse than upgrading my daughter to a Great Knight, only to find out that she was now riding her horse into battle pantsless. I may have explicitly decided to go with a male Avatar for my Conquest run because I found out that the upgraded Nohr noble class just bares her panties everywhere for female Avatars.

Fates has a lot of really weird fanservice in it. The explicit focus on Camilla’s everything, the panty-baring female class designs, the access to a hot spring that doesn’t seem to have any real purpose beyond being there, and being able to strip enemy units with certain weapons all just gives it a really weird atmosphere for a game that’s supposed to be a serious war drama. It’s the same incongruity I get from a lot of recent anime, such as Re:ZERO, which is apparently a serious story, but also gives its generic main character a harem of pretty anime girls who all want to get with him.

A lot of Fates feels like it’s trying to appeal to the most common denominator by emulating what other games and anime are doing, like the dynamics between characters and the related character design, as well as things they felt were the most popular elements of its predecessor, which was the best-selling Fire Emblem game in a long, long time and possibly saved the franchise. So it gives you a massive cast of characters and a dynamic world-saving plot makes pairing them all up a major mechanic, and even includes previous games’ characters as a throwback to people who liked Awakening. And, most bafflingly, it includes Awakening’s child mechanic.

IT’S TIME.

When two characters of opposite sex reach an S-rank support with each other, they get married, and their child can then join your army after completing a side mission. Awakening reconciled the fact that the parents and children could fight alongside one another through the use of a time travel plot – no one actually has any children over the course of Awakening’s story (besides Chrom, which is part of the set-up for this element); rather, their future children travel through time to help prevent the horrible future that happened in their own world. It’s a major part of Awakening’s plot, and while none of the child characters have major plot relevance outside of Lucina, the fact that they go out of the way to weave the explanation for why they exist into the plot helps ground them, and several of the children’s Supports involve them trying to connect with their younger, past parents now that they’re in a world where their parents are alive again.

Fates, however, doesn’t use this explanation. Instead, after your first marriage scene, you’re treated to a cutscene explaining that the parents didn’t waste any time getting knocked up, and after the child was born, it was determined it was too dangerous for any kids to be kept around with the war going on, and so the children were sent off to their own alternate pocket universes (or “Deeprealms”) to grow up safely. Because time passes differently there, the children almost instantly grow to adulthood from the people in the army’s perspective, and by the time they’re recruited they’re fully trained, fully capable soldiers ready to go stab the shit out of some enemy soldiers.

Just shove ‘em riiiiight in. Don’t worry about any consequences, it’s fiiiiiiine.

There’re a lot of stupid holes and questions that pop up as a result of this, first and foremost being the very obvious question of “When did anyone have time to have children?” All of the female characters in Fates are also combatants, so unless they’re all badasses on the same tier as Metal Gear Solid’s the Boss, they probably weren’t fighting at the same time they were pregnant. Also, Fates isn’t very clear about the time frame the game takes place during, but since no one ages significantly, it can’t be more than a couple of years. Since time doesn’t pass while the characters are in their My Castle, theoretically they could have stayed there for the duration of their pregnancy, but unless the gestational period in Fates’ world is significantly shorter than real life human gestational time, that would mean individual characters having to stay in My Castle for periods approaching upon months, at which point they would have their children, and then shove them in the puberty void to keep them safe while the parents go right back to fighting in a war.

Which brings it around to the next unsettling implication -- the neglect in the children’s upbringing. Fates’ children only aged quickly from the perspective of their parents outside the pocket dimension – inside their Deeprealm, time moved for them at a normal rate, and the occasional visits the parents gave (as indicated in their Supports with their children) were separated by periods of years. Fates does not shy away from showing how this kind of upbringing affected their children – many of them have major gripes with their parents for essentially abandoning them for their own good, and a few of them have developed some odd quirks and delinquent behavior as a result. Several of their recruitment events are about guilting their parents into bringing them along for the war, and it’s a constant subject in their Supports, as well. No one is particularly happy with how the situation worked out in-story.

The constant statements that it was done for the children’s own good in their Supports and recruitment events really pushes to the forefront how baffling the explanation is, because the game makes it more than clear that it was this distant upbringing that messed the children up so badly. It goes into absurdity if you’re playing Conquest, which features three returning child characters from Awakening as potential parents, who should know what it’s like to grow up with no parents (all of Awakening’s parent units are dead by the time their children travel back to the past) and would probably not want to subject their children to the same upbringing.

It’s the inclusion of the child mechanic that pushes Fates from a passable, if flawed, game, right into “basically unplayable”. It’s blatantly obvious that Fates was not written with a child mechanic in mind, and that it was added because Awakening’s shipping mechanics went over very well, and they wanted to capitalize upon that. And it’s not like any of the child characters are bad characters--

Well, most of them aren’t, anyways.

You are not my children. You are a disgrace.

But ultimately, all they do is serve to give you more units in a game that’s already swimming with units, and end up being a massive distracting bit of bad writing in a game whose writing is already only passable at best. They literally could have been left out of the game entirely, and nothing of real importance would have been lost.

(Also, it would have forced them to make a lesbian option that wasn’t just “Discount Tharja”. Or at least tried to make it less obvious that they were recycling everyone’s favorite stalker waifu.)

Fire Emblem Fates is, ultimately, not a bad game. For all of my griping about the map design and unit distribution, there was clearly a lot of thought put into the new mechanics. Forging weapons to make them stronger feels more rewarding than the old durability system, which always ended up boiling down to “Iron swords for everyone!” so you didn’t waste your cool super weapon. And if you can look past the writing, you’ll definitely have a good time with it, or at least end up frustrated in the kind of fun way only Fire Emblem players do. But the obvious DLC gating, the poor writing, and the nonsensical puberty void bullshit make it a very hard game for me to like, and I don’t think I’ll ever get around to playing the third route as a result.

#fire emblem fates #fe14 #fire emblem #review #opinion #a massive pile of salt

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gascon-en-exil · 7 years

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The Not Really Definitive Ranking of the Zelda Series: #1

#11-19 (link to #11, with further links to each of the others)

#10 - Tri Force Heroes

#9 - The Wind Waker

#8 - The Minish Cap

#7 - A Link to the Past

#6 - Link’s Awakening

#5 - Ocarina of Time

#4 - Twilight Princess

#3 - A Link Between Worlds

#2 - Breath of the Wild

#1 The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (including the 3DS remake)

I may say with a small degree of hipster-y pride that I liked Majora’s Mask before it was cool, that in fact this game has topped my personal Zelda ranking practically since it was first released. I’ve already written in exhaustive length about how much thought I’ve devoted to the most efficient means of fully tackling the game while working around its infamous time constraints, so none of that bears repeating. Even when MM was new I loved the fresh challenge the time limit represented for 100% completion, and I loved all the more that the game feels tailored specifically to reward that kind of playstyle. In addition to the usual item upgrades and extra hearts, there’s also the mask collection system, which culminates in a sequence of fairly challenging mini-dungeons that award the intentionally overpowered Fierce Deity’s Mask. What’s more, most of the masks unlock scenes in the credits montage that relate to their acquisition. My twelve-year-old self couldn’t get enough of this ode to complicated logistical projects.

In the years since I’ve also come to appreciate everything else that this game has to offer, including its profound and unique impact on the fandom. No other Zelda game has inspired such a curious combination of fanwork, ranging from creepypastas to fanmade remixes and reinterpretations of the soundtrack to extended philosophical essays on the game’s existential narrative and themes. It’s not difficult to understand how MM made the leap from cult classic to beloved mainline entry in the franchise when those of us who love it clearly love it so very much.

For a certain, rather complex definition of “love.”

At the same time however I can understand why all the attention MM has received in the past few years has come with a subsequent wave of backlash. Perhaps because of its separation from many of the key elements of the Zelda franchise this is a game that demands to be approached as a distinct entity. Players who come into MM expecting something resembling the typical Zelda experience (even on its initial release, when there were only five previous games to compare it to) will probably only come away with criticisms: it recycles the Ocarina of Time game engine and only occasionally does anything interestingly new with it, the main story is short and fairly easy, there are only four dungeons, and the time limit and restricted save system can feel too punishing unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s all it ever will be unless you bring something else to the experience, and for that reason I completely understand why opinions are divided over this game, and for reasons less easy to quickly identify than graphical style or gimmicky controls or linearity (or lack thereof) like all of the other controversial titles.

That demand for more from the player is one of the aspects of MM that makes it stand out so strongly from the rest of the series. From the moment Link passes through the door leading into Clock Town and the ominous “Dawn of The First Day: 72 Hours Remain” appears on the screen the game forces the player to engage with its world and its defining mechanic directly, in such a way that not even Breath of the Wild with its varied environmental demands has been able to match. With very few exceptions you are always on the clock from that point forward, which in addition to its obvious ramifications for gameplay plays perfectly into the tone and atmosphere of MM. The bright and outwardly cheerful world of Termina contrasts sharply with the mounting dread of its inhabitants as the moon looms ever larger in the sky above, and everything from lighting to music to NPC activity (in Clock Town and Romani Ranch, at least) builds on that feeling such that the player can’t help but feel it too. Link may have a Get Out of Apocalypse Free card in the Song of Time, but the terrible fate of Termina resonates powerfully nonetheless.

I could go on in that vein for quite a while, and in fact many people already have - reading deeply into anything and everything in this game, from the physical world of Termina to the overwhelming number of personal tragedies that play out over the course of the story and side quests to the ambiguous villains that are the Skull Kid and Majora’s Mask. This has been recently expanded upon even further with the revelation in the 30th anniversary Hyrule Encyclopedia that Termina is a creation of the Skull Kid, which adds further (disturbing) dimensions to his personality and helps to explain why this parallel world of Hyrule exists as it does. This is a game that encourages overthinking, or what some would refer to accusingly as “reading too deeply,” and as I’ve demonstrated myself that even extends to something as comparatively superficial as game progression. It is, in other words, a work of art, something that encourages thought beyond the surface level of entertainment. I’m not suggesting that none of the other Zelda games qualify as art, and indeed the question of the definition of art and how it applies to video games is far too large a subject to get into here. However, in my opinion no other Zelda game (with the possible exception of Link’s Awakening) delivers such a multilayered experience, and for that reason alone Majora’s Mask still takes the top prize.

And I’ll be honest - I have a literary academic background and years of experience reading into queer subtext for personal pleasure. Of course I’m going to love a game that gets me thinking on that level. I don’t even really feel the need to expound upon how I find MM enjoyable purely from a gaming perspective either; after all, a game with a great story and thought-provoking themes can still be ruined if it’s not fun to play. But for those curious:

There are no really frustrating side quests or minigames, which as I’ve mentioned several times before can really irk me in a Zelda game. Even the famed complexity of the Anju and Kafei side quest is somewhat overblown; it only consists of about half a dozen required events, and many of them are brief.

The dungeons all feel distinctive and cleverly designed. There may only be four, but there’s not a bad one in the bunch. (And while Great Bay Temple may not be my favorite water dungeon in the series, I will absolutely step up to defend it if necessary.)

The transformation masks are an amazing idea that demands gushing over. It’s like controlling four characters in one, to say nothing of the deeper implications inherent in the masks both collectively and individually. They all get a significant amount of use and excel in different areas, and they incorporate the abilities of several pieces of equipment held over from OoT, ex. the boomerang and iron boots for the Zora Mask, which helps streamline gameplay.

The experience of MM improves drastically once you learn to work with the clock rather than against it, which I suppose counts as this game’s biggest learning curve. The nice thing is that you don’t even have to master time management to complete the game; you can still make it to the end if you take fifty cycles or five (100% N64 version), four (100% 3DS version), or two (any% either version - I think).

There’s really little more I can say. MM was a phenomenal accomplishment of gaming that almost feels like a fluke. It was produced in under two years as the immediate follow-up to the most lauded game in history at that time, and yet it emerged as a wholly unique entity that still demands attention and analysis from fans even today. Like several others I’m now left to wonder if Nintendo will follow BotW with a similarly unusual and groundbreaking work. Given how thoroughly that game has shaken the foundations of this venerable franchise, the material is certainly there. I don’t know if any Zelda game will ever surpass this one for me, but I’m open to the possibility. I enjoy being pleasantly surprised (almost) as much as I enjoy obsessive scheduling.

#The Legend of Zelda #Majora's Mask

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sazorak · 8 years

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What I Thought Of Every Single Game I Played In 2016

I played a bunch of games in 2016. Here's what I thought about them, in a ranked order! This is my list, and if you have problems with me putting games released in previous years on it: fight me.

[2015]

Honorable Mention: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - DS - ★★★★★ - 2011

Apropos of nothing, I replayed Ghost Trick this year. Man: Ghost Trick is still reaaaaally goddamn good. It's got style, it's got charm. Its bypasses the miserable scavenger-hunt aspects of traditional adventure games by focusing on self-contained environments with limited, obvious points of interaction that put the focus more on sequencing and logic than "well, I guess I'll use the banana on the duck." You spend a lot time thinking about umbrellas, how to knock umbrellas around, and the different shapes umbrellas can take. It made me understand why people like dogs that bark all the time.

This replay has definitely cemented it as my all time favorite adventure game. It's a shame we'll never see another of its ilk. It's some small consolation that the lack of interest in making a sequel prevents Capcom from ruining it with an ill-advised, poorly constructed follow-up. Let them keep milking Phoenix Wright half to death while their masterpiece rests on its mighty laurels. Oh Nick, your poor, poor teats. You don't deserve that kind of treatment.

Coast Guard the Video Game - Steam - ★ - 2015

I have never been so disappointed in a video game.

I admit: this may seem a bit extreme. No one in their right mind would have any kind of expectations for Coast Guard: The Video Game. It's a bottom-of-the-barrel budget release created to capitalize on the fact that there's been literally no other game about the Coast Guard – the point where they literally were able to call the game "Coast Guard." A bunch of Germans made it on a shoestring German-game budget, and sitting on the title screen for longer than 30 seconds causes the whole thing to go haywire. I knew all this going in, and it filled me not with antipathy, but hope.

All I wanted was a game that was not only shitty, but also stupid; I wanted something that would be worthy of showing my pal Chorocojo, a member of the US Coast Guard, so that I could get some real good goofs. It didn't need to be good; it just had to be entertainingly bad and on topic. I just wanted to recapture the kind of inane shittiness that we I loved about Man vs Wild the Game.

The Man vs Wild game was bad. It was cheap. It was stuuuupid. But Man vs Wild was structured in a way that fit the experience. It's a budget title created by a team that knew that even budget titles need some bare minimum of production and gameplay. It doesn't waste your time. Coast Guard, for its stupid story and writing, has absolutely no respect for your time. It suffers the ultimate sin of media: being not only bad, but also plain boring.

Fuck this game.

Sayonara Umihara Kawase - Steam - ★★ - 2015

I picked up the latest title in this reel old series of fish-avoidance fishing-pole-platformers because, frankly, seeing the older games on Game Center CX piqued my interest to see where they've taken the franchise in the intervening decades. Turns out? Not very far. The game is almost identical in every way to the older titles, just rendered in a more modern 3D engine. But boy is this package rough.

The controls are a nightmare. It crashed on me several times. I literally could not figure out how to beat the first boss. You'd think a platformer whose only point of interaction with enemies is "use fishing pole" would have a relatively simple to deduce first boss, but man, you got me. I tried hooking the thing, I tried going over the thing, I tried jumping the thing, I tried pulling the thing. After a half an hour of trying, I realized I really did not care for the game anyway so why bother? There are better uses of my time.

#19: Death Road to Canada - Steam - ★★★ - 2016

Death Road to Canada is... OK? It has some neat procedural design. It has the varied, challenging gameplay you'd expect from a zombie-shooting rogue-like. It's real goofy and doesn't take itself seriously, which is really the only way to handle zombie-apocalypse themed games in 2016. But man: I do not like how this controls. The two-dimensional sprite character look neat, but with how combat operates on a three-dimensional axis, it's frustrating. The forced perspective made it hard to just hit enemies directly above my character, and I fell prey too frequently to damage that arose less from misplay on my part as from an inability to predict how hit boxes work on what feels like an inappropriate aspect angle.

I think part of the issue is that I came to this game less from the perspective of "Hey, I like zombie games!" or even "Hey, I like roguelikes!" (though I've been known to enjoy both of those) but more "Oregon Trail II is a fucking dope game." I think what I wanted out of this was less "2D zombie loot brawler with Oregon Trail II" themes, and more "Another Oregon Trail: I guess there's zombies an anime in this one?" Wait, shit, someone should make an Anime Oregon Trail. Or an Oregon Trail Anime.

Never Alone - Steam - ★★★ - 2014

I appreciate what Never Alone is trying to do. Conveying the folklore of a culture an artistic video game is a brilliant idea, and the atmosphere that they create is fantastic. There's also a lot of interesting documentary material built in.

Problem is: the actual platforming isn't all that fun. Kind of frustrating, really. It's like a low-rent version of Brothers. What they've done is admirable and fine as an experience, but as a game it ironically left be rather cold. Worth experiencing if you're interested in the folklore side of it, but not really otherwise.

#18: Fire Emblem Fates - 3DS - ★★★ - 2016

I'm beginning to suspect I don't actually like Fire Emblem that much.

Here's the thing: My first entry in the series was Awakening. I enjoyed the tactical combat well enough, and the notion of managing the interactions of a really diverse, anime-ass cast was like a weird, omnidirectional relationship magician was neat! Combat scenarios were challenging but not too bad by and large, and the characters and writing were fun— if somewhat shallow. I managed to get through the combat with judicious reloading to keep everyone alive (which I blamed on my inexperience), though I was rather frustrated with just how little they actually managed to do with the cast. The way they had so many characters but none of them really interacted with each other unless you were setting them up to bone down— and none of them really had anything to really do with the ongoing plot beyond being another interchangeable unit in your altogether too oversized army.

After playing through the entirety of Birthright and most of Conquest, and with them really doubling down on the elements I didn't really like in Awakening, I'm really beginning to doubt what I thought I liked about this series. The difficult of combat scenarios are so dependent on minute variations of motion-capability and enemy movement which seem utterly unpredictable without either tons of iterations (ie, retrying a scenario over and over) or by plotting out actions with painstaking detail. The sheer amount of damage that can be done in a single turn is absurd, a reality made trickier by the game's love of introducing enemies in such an unpredictable way that you can be royally screwed if you don't know it's coming. Oh, you left a healer over near this tree? Surprise idiot, apparently a dozen wyvern riders were living in that tree! Birthright swung wildly between trivially easy / too simple missions and frustratingly badly constructed ones. Conquest had more interesting mission design, but they rewarded less tactical expertise and understanding of the systems than the constant-reload mindset required to keep everyone alive – and to ensure your party got enough experience to keep everyone alive down the line.

The writing for Fates is real fucking bad. The story is the most generic, milquetoast-ass warring kingdoms plot, and the way they attempt to throw a twist at is so surface level obvious that the existence of it was baked into their damn marketing campaign. An evil dragon is up to no good and causes a king to go do evil shit and there's literally nothing else it. Not a single twist along the way. I don't need deep literature here, but they need to do SOMETHING with the story beyond what they've been doing. The two games having diverging takes of the same story could have been interesting if it weren't for the fact that it's constructed on so flimsy a framework that in order for it to work it requires the cast to be biggest most stubborn morons imaginable— which really doesn't make me like them at all.

And boy do they really, REALLY struggle from their character's own mortality. Because any character— bar a few crucial exceptions— can die, characters cannot have any writing devoted to them outside the missions where they're recruited, certain character-specific missions, and their ten paragraphs of support dialog in the castle. Because everyone can die at any given point, writing conditional dialog that may not be used would be a waste of the developer's resources / potentially alter the plot- meaning no one actually has any time to build any real character. This is made all stupider by the fact that the game for whatever reason also maintains Awakening's children-generating mechanic, which is spuriously supported in this game by using fast-time bubbles your children are raised in so that they can fight in your army within a day of you getting married / them being born. It's fucking stupid, and they refuse to even tip the tiniest hat to acknowledge it.

The sad part is, I don't think there's much hope in much of this being changed going forward. Permadeath is considered a "core feature" of the Fire Emblem series that grognards love to argue about, and the fundamental combat system has become increasingly more frustrating the more and more I learn it, rather than the other way around. This whole series and paradigm feels like it could learn a lot of what BioWare has done with its own relationship-heavy RPGs, and maybe dial the cast back a bit and put a bit more time into increasing the quality of the writing. Not going to happen though.

Azure Striker Gunvolt - Steam - ★★★ - 2015

Here's a secret about me that you may not know: I like anime. Quite a bit, actually. I've watched a lot of anime. I devoted perhaps too much mental energy during crucial years of my life towards anime. My brain is irreparably wired for it. I cannot escape it. I am anime.

And as much as the anime ideal in my head differs wildly from the style of Azure Striker Gunvolt, I don't dislike having a really stereotypical-ass neon-colored anime romp now and then. That being said: Azure Striker Gunvolt is not an especially good one of those. The story is Mega Man meets X-Men meets Idol music numbers, with very little of what would make all of that any good. The bad guys you face somehow have less character than even ostensibly mindless Mega Man bosses, and the story is way too sparse (and no good) for as much weight as it wants to give it. The music numbers are pretty OK though.

The tag-and-zap system of Gunvolt and its interplay with platforms and dodging enemy fire is interesting and certainly more complex than Mega Man's old run-and-gun, but it's ultimately Gunvolt's downfall as well: it actually requires a bit too much deliberate thought and action to work well. Mega Man, across so many of its platforming-focused instantiations, has been less about precision and more about flow. While the platforming may occasionally be very precise, and they are definitely not mindless games, you still ultimately spend most of your time just holding right and dealing with challenges as they come. It's platforming by gut and feel. Gunvolt rewards precision and punishes slack. It rates you at the end of every mission and basically yells at you if you can't maintain a combo and dodge fire the entire mission. The game expects you to replay the missions and aim for perfection, but I don't feel the mechanics of Gunvolt are good enough to even consider putting that kind of time of mine in. Good for those that do, but nope.

Also, for some reason the US version had a bunch of story shit cut which makes the game even more incoherent. Bizarre.

#17: Worms W.M.D. - Steam - ★★★ - 2016

It's still really fun to import art into Worms and then blow it up. WMD isn't substantially different from Reloaded (which I also liked well enough), but it has enough quality of life improvements and new features that I still enjoyed my time with it playing against my friends. This is about all I want from it. Congrats Worms, you managed to make it this far just from "I enjoy fucking around with my friends".

Transformers: Devastation - Steam - ★★★ - 2015

One of the weird twists of a kind of strange, sort of shitty year was me being exposed more to and getting really into Transformers. I really like the Transformers. I used to not give a Cybertronain shit about these guys but man I get it now (thanks entirely to IDW's great line of Generation 1 comics). Transformers: Devastation is just a big ol' fanservice send up to Transformers from Platinum Studio's B team. Luckily for me, I really like Bayonetta and similar titles from Platinum's menagerie, so a Transformers game with those mechanics sounded pretty great!

And for what it is, Transformers: Devestation IS pretty great. But that "what it is" really just amounts to a budget tie-in game that slaps a mediocre weapon looting system and a simpler version of the Bayonetta combat onto the old generation 1 Transformers license. If you're willing to accept that for what it is and march through four hours or so of somewhat-repetitive encounters so that you can have Optimus Prime punch Megatron in the face in low-earth orbit, it's a good time. It's not exactly something I'd recommend to anyone not into either Transformers OR character action games, but if you like either (both?) of those things, this is a decent enough.

Theatrythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call - 3DS - ★★★ - 2014

I liked the previous Theatrythm Final Fantasy game for the 3DS well enough. The Final Fantasy series has catchy tunes, playing through them in a vaguely Ouendan manner is fun. This game adds a whole heap of new songs from across the series that wasn't in the previous game, and adds another heap of new characters for exploring the expanded RPG elements (particularly, their quests). The music and rhythm parts are fine, no real objections with those. My big problem with this game is that the RPG elements still have no purpose. Yes, they allow you to get "further" through enemy sequences, get more points or prizes, or stumble through badly performed sections longer - but to what end, really? The major driver for the game when you get down to it is the desire to unlock the characters from across the different series by collecting colored crystals, but there's not a lot of point to this past a desire for completion or to see your favorites. I got my favorites rather quick, and after that the act of actually using and improving those characters felt... empty? It's rather shallow and short lived because they don't really do anything. Each character's unique traits and skills don't serve any other end beyond the numbers getting bigger and bigger, or allowing you to hobble your way through higher difficulties that you may not be able to keep up with.

The RPG aspect is a tacked on element to make their rhythm game more "Final Fantasy", when the game would have been much better served as an RPG that integrated rhythm-based execution of songs into its combat / navigation structure. Their quests play at this kind of idea, but don't actually implement the mechanics in such a way that makes it anything beyond just another way of presenting a randomized sequence of the three different rhythm mini-games— and those mini-games just aren't nearly as well executed as the kind you encountered in Ouendan or Elite Beat Agents in the first place.

Steamworld Dig - 3DS - ★★★ - 2013

Steamworld Dig has a very simple but effective draw: digging deeper to get materials to upgrade your tools to dig deeper to get materials to upgrade your tools to dig deeper to get materials to upgrade your tools is a fun gameplay loop. It's a huge part of what makes Minecraft and its ilk appealing. It targets the weird portion of our lizard brains focused on letting us know that even menial labor can be appealing if you feel like you're slowly accomplishing something.

Steamworld Dig is a great example of how that loop can play out, but that's about it. Its plot is essentially a placeholder, and while it has a mild amount of platforming mechanics for handling its occasional puzzle side levels, none of it really helps it get past being just a digger game. But for a short, cheap game, it's good enough.

#16: Forza Horizon 3 - PC - ★★★ - 2016

It's good to drive a car now and again. I'm not really into these sorts of games much for the racing; it is fine, I don't dislike doing it. Driving faster than other cars in a loop and getting ahead because I drive like a fucker is good. But really I just want to drive around a world far-too-fast and just look at it. Forza Horizon 3 is pretty good for that. The driving feels real good, the cars are fun, and the environment is diverse and interesting.

... but unfortunately, given what I wanted out of the game has less to do with racing and more to do with the environment itself, it is a bit lacking in terms of the longer-term appeal. It actually didn't take long to see all of what they had going on in their tiny Australia; while the environments are diverse, they're actually pretty small. I guess I just wanted something bigger. Forza-style driving in a The Crew-sized world would have been amazing, for example. The big attraction of Forza Horizon 3 is its online features, but frankly I don't have any real interest in that kind of thing; I'm here to treat it as basically a podcast game.

As a side note: the special unique racing events you unlock over the course of the game are actually not that great? As it turns out, racing a train, or some boats, or a helicopter really isn't all that different; they're just time trials with some neat set dressing. The fact that they're basically your reward and motivation for winning a bunch of races is kind of daft. They could do better.

#15: American Truck Simulator - Steam - ★★★ - 2016

Speaking of liking-to-drive while zoning out: man is it fun to drive a truck around the southwestern United States. As I talked about last year with Euro Truck Simulator 2, it's good to have a low-impact simulation that you can just load a podcast or some music on and drive. Problem is: there's way too little of it! If you want me to enjoy driving around you gotta give me more of the country to work with.

Guacamelee: Super Turbo Championship Edition - Wii U - ★★★ - 2013

I really wanted to like Guacamelee more than I do. It's a Metroidvania, which is possibly my favorite gaming genre. It has a great aesthetic. I fucking adore Mexican culture as an aesthetic for fantasy, and Guacamelee has that in spades with its luchador hero-myth, its underworld cast, and its overall world design. It's just got a great, unique feel that jives great with their combat system.

But I REALLY dislike the writing in the game, especially their attempts at comedy. Apparently this is the version where they toned down the amount of meme-y billboards and game references, but holy shit are there still WAY too goddamn much. It feels like nearly every single screen has a reference to old video games taped to the wall, and every single time it takes me completely out of the experience. Games NEED cohesiveness to sell you on their world, and each element should ultimately serve that cohesive whole— or at the very least, not detract from it while doing their own thing. The sheer amount of constant reference-based humor combined with overall just generally mediocre writing, made me cold on the experience.

While the combat was certainly unique and it worked overall pretty well with their arena combat, it just didn't feel all the way there. After a while it just got dull, and instead of varying my moves I started to just rely on tried-and-true combinations to get it done. This was in part due to a number of mechanics being introduced which, while certainly making the combat more dynamic, weren't actually all that fun in the actual flow of things (looking at you, dimension hopping bad guys). Towards the end it began to remind me of the Wolf Link segments of Twilight Princess, which isn't the most ringing of endorsements.

The game as a whole is decent with glimmers of brilliance—, it's just a real shame that there are so many weird inclusions that prevent it from achieving a truly timeless greatness. As a side note: the requirement for getting the "best ending" was stupid and, ultimately, really not that fun to do. Then again, the bad ending is arguably a better one than the "best ending", so that may be beside the point.

#14: SteamWorld Heist - 3DS - ★★★★ - 2016

It's absurd that this game works. The very notion of a 2D XCOM-like just seems like a bad idea? Or just be too simple? SteamWorld Heist is not a super complex game, but what's there is actually incredibly fun. The different class-based abilities paired with the weird guns and hat-removing laser-sight-aiming combat us super interesting. The story and world were pretty forgettable, but the actual combat and missions were varied enough and interesting that I had a good time with it. The hat collection mechanic is such a stupid good idea; the risk reward of "wow that's a different hat, do I take a turn off to shoot that hat off to try to collect it while I'm being shot at?" is both goofy and an interesting complication to the tactical combat.

#13: Inside - Steam - ★★★★ - 2016

Inside has a very effective and affective atmosphere. It's dark, it's mysterious, and while playing it I had absolutely no fucking idea what was going on. Hell, after finishing it I still have no fucking idea what was going on, and I'm usually pretty good at sussing out this kind of thing. While it is nominally a puzzle-platformer, the puzzles and platforms really only exist to sell the mood and setting and get you asking what's going on, until you reach the final twist where they really throw the whole thing for a loop. It's a good, self-contained experience, though I did not find it nearly as affecting as others did.

The final twist seems like it'd be more impactful if you are particularly susceptible to that style of horror; to me it was mostly just a cool thing that ended a bit too soon, with too many answers unanswered. A microcosm of the game as a whole, really.

#12: XCOM 2 - Steam - ★★★★ - 2016

XCOM 2 is... weird. In so many ways it's XCOM But More, which sounds great. The increased customization in terms of character designs, loadouts, and team composition, and the increased variability in mission-style, enemy types, and the overall flow of combat should have made it just an immediate total improvement on XCOM 1. But the story as executed really wasn't different enough (or interesting enough) compared to its predecessor, and the overworld strategic element ended up being more frustrating than I think they intended for.

The real crux of this seems to come down to their focus on ticking clock elements to solve the gameplay problems of the first game. There are just too many time-based fail states, both in and outside of missions. I get why they're there: to force you to keep moving forward and take risks rather than playing it totally safe and defensively, as the game's mechanics would otherwise encourage you to do. The natural inclination when you can be surprised at any given moment and lose valuable soldiers is to play it careful and wait for the enemy to come to you, so making that not an option by forcing to keep moving towards the exit is a great idea in principle. But the actual result is so punitive if you fail to adequately perform due to any number of XCOM-esque unpredictable events ("SURPRISE YOU WALKED INTO AN AMBUSH OF 20 DUDES", "Surprise you got bogged down and lost your whole team before you could evacuate", "Surprise you misjudged the arbitrary overworld clock and just lost the whole game!") that it narrowly misses the point of XCOM. XCOM is supposed to be punishing, but XCOM is more about coming back from the brink than it is supposed to be about avoiding punishment. You're supposed to keep soldiering on. The timer-elements put too much focus on punishment avoidance than on just pulling through the constant struggle. It addresses people playing too safe by forcing them to play risky in order to play it safe. The end result is that gameplay is often times stressful, and not necessarily in a good way. Which is a shame; the actual improvements to base XCOM are by and large GREAT. I had a fantastic time playing XCOM 2, but I am not exactly itching to go back for another run like I was with XCOM. If they had just made some different design decisions, and had more time to polish the game and bug-fix, I could have seen this game much higher on my list.

#11: Firewatch - Steam - ★★★★ - 2016

Firewatch has some very interesting character writing and storytelling, but it mostly made me really want to go camping. It's a great representation of what it's like to be in the wilderness around Yellowstone National Park, and just what it's like to hike around and just look at beautiful nature general. I really want to go back to the area now. Damn it.

People give a lot of guff towards these "walking simulator" style narrative-driven games, but I like them an awful lot. They're an interesting approach towards interactive storytelling, and the effect it has on immersing you in the role of its characters is interesting. That being said, Firewatch struggles between making Henry an established, known character, and you "playing" at being Henry. Henry makes a lot of decisions and conclusions that I, personally, would never do. He comes across as a real fuck up at times. Which is fine, I like flawed characters. But when I'm expected to deal with the repercussions of his decisions from a first-person perspective where I even have some amount of dialog choices, it's a bit weird. That's the nature of the medium, to be sure; you can't just let me decide to not go into the wilderness in the first place because then there's no game. But there's still this struggle between the narrative and our place in it that I don't feel like Firewatch necessarily gets wholly right. The contextual handling of decisions is crucial for Firewatch to work (turtle adoption included), but it seems in conflict with the story that they're trying to tell.

I enjoyed the narrative ride by and large, but the ending is abrupt on multiple levels. It feels deliberate and intentional, but I just didn't care for it. Some of that stems from a desire for more closure, but I also think their technical limitations may have caught up with them as well.

#10: Titanfall 2 - Origin - ★★★★ - 2016

Titanfall 2 is a lot of fun, but the experience is in many ways emotionally shallow.

The campaign has an abundance of really interesting design. Bouncing from the shooter equivalent of Powerhouse to committing egregious technochronomancy to what is in essence a HL2 gravity gun sequence to LOADING AUTOAIM DOT EXE, you can tell that the chapters were probably conceived independently of each other. While this might seem like a risk to a coherent overall flow, it results in a varied experience that doesn't dwell too long on any one idea. Mechanics as specific as "time travel" and "AUTO GUN" are introduced, explored, and then discarded before they can grow tired. It's a neat outcome of what must have been several teams prototyping a variety of gameplay designs, then building a framework to tie them all together. And it works!

The unfortunate side effect of this is that it was hard for them to layer a good, well-written, and evocative story over it. Because the game is haphazardly structured between these different extended sequences, there's not a lot of room for its cast and the narrative to breathe. The quality of writing leaves a lot to be desired. You'd think, "Weird gimmick mercs in giant robots challenging you one by one", Snake Eater meets Gundam, would write itself, but the game's refusal to take the time necessary to develop the cast makes each encounter emotionally empty. The lead is a shmuck best defined by being good at shooting men with robots, and his robot body is underutilized and then killed off.

The gameplay, both in singleplayer and in multiplayer, is challenging and fast without being too hectic, but it doesn't achieve the kind of flow I want in a shooter. I suppose that's what you get from a game that's essentially a Super CoD when all things are said and done. Still, I can crush people with a robot from orbit, which is pretty great.

#9: Rhythm Heaven MEGAMIX - 3DS - ★★★★ - 2016

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#8: Overwatch - Battle Net - ★★★★ - 2016

Say what you will about Blizzard. Maybe they always play it safe. Maybe their writing is always terrible. But man can they polish the hell out of a game. Overwatch is an immaculately well-polished team-based shooter. Each hero plays and feels really good and different. Where writing fails them, art and setting design triumphs. Blizzard has some of the most killer creative and art designers in the business.

While they certainly deserve the praise they get for the way they mesh TF2 and MOBA-style hero mechanics, I don't think they get nearly enough attention for how smart they are avoiding the feel-bad elements of those games. The way Overwatch lauds praise on players without surfacing negatives, even in defeat, is a fascinatingly effective bit of smoke and mirrors. Relentless surfacing individual successes without even showing the FPS standby of the kill/death ratio works to the game's benefit, and I can only imagine it has a lot to do with their success in shepherding in a more diverse audience that may not have a background in shooters.

Personally, I got a little bored with it after putting a few dozen hours in, but that's a pretty reasonable amount of time from a multiplayer shooter in my book. It's good. D.VA #1.

#7: Stellaris - Steam - ★★★★ - 2016

Stellaris is so close to being a truly great 4X game. The UI is phenomenal, the writing is good, and the varieties of weird things that can happen and that you can do are great. It's easily the most accessible game Paradox has ever made; as someone who has bounced off Crusader Kings 2 and its ilk every time, I easily picked up Stellaris and have put well over a hundred hours into it. As they continue to increment on it, I can see myself putting over a hundred more. The baseline gameplay loop is just VERY, VERY GOOD, and it's caused me to 4X time travel an embarrassing amount of times.

It's so close to being truly great, but there are a number of major issues Paradox still needs to address. Ship combat needs refinement; there's no real tactics, and barely any strategy. War is a slog; the current war goals mechanic makes it painstakingly slow to eke out a victory, even with an overwhelming power disparity. The game needs to support more variety in its playstyles; after a certain point it's kind of rote. Politics, both inside and outside of one's empire, are paper-thin; factions just don't matter at the moment. My xenophilic empires of weirdo alien delights are not nearly weird enough yet; let my race of dirty nasty boys give the xenophobes something to really hate.

I guess I'll have to live with it being a mostly great 4X game for the time being. This is one I'm in for the long haul.

#6: Abzu - Steam - ★★★★★ - 2016

Like Endless Ocean before it, Abzu is one of the few games that really captures the experience of diving; not so much the technical, grounded experience (which Endless Ocean, while quite fantastical itself, embodies more) but more the emotional experience of experiencing the majesty of the oceans. Abzu is an experience. While there's not much to it beyond just moving forward and looking at fish, the moving forward feels good, the fish look great, and there's some real good visuals and music throughout the ride.

I'm not entirely sure what all happened in it, but it was a relaxing time that made me want to dive more. Good work. Now I've spent hundreds of dollars on new diving gear.

#5: Drawful 2 / Jackbox Party Pack 3 - Steam - ★★★★★ - 2016

I get the feeling that some permutation of Jackbox Games' party games will exist on my favorite game lists for the remainder of time, just because I really enjoy joking and drawing with my idiot friends. These games are fantastic if you hang with a crowd with like-minded senses of humor. The actual content of Party Pack 3 is a bit hit-and-miss, though TKO is such a standout that I don't care. The drawing ones typically are.

#4: Dark Souls 3 - Steam - ★★★★★ - 2016

It's kind of funny: one of my biggest complaints about Dark Souls 2 was how it didn't give a due amount of respect to its predecessor in its setting and story. Dark Souls 2 made the events of the first game into just the first in what is apparently an indefinite cycle of people-turning-into-assholes as death loses meaning and the world going haywire. I think part of my distaste stemmed from how it completely cast aside the religious undertones of the first game. I enjoy stories of gods and men, men stabbing gods as the world ends, and then men beginning a new dark age with really tall serpents with too many teeth. As far as I was concerned, that was the canon ending for the first Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 2 didn't really explain how we got from there to, well, Two.

Dark Souls 3 does a much better job playing tribute to its origins, through a lot more explicit explorations of the nature of the world, the mechanics of how the setting works, and the place of larger-than-life figures in it. Where Dark Souls 2 felt like Dark Souls More, Dark Souls 3 feels like Dark Souls Chapter 2: This Time It Ends. And end it does.

Thematic stuff aside, it's also just a good Souls game. There are some really fun location designs and boss fights. It doesn't have quite the absurd amount of interconnectedness that Dark Souls 1 had with its locations, but it was still kind of mind-blowing to come out of a swamp after a few hours and realize I'd looped back to the first area of the game again. I found myself also enjoying the very explicit Dark Souls 1 cameos, though it got a bit stupid in a few places. If you've played the game, you'll know the ones. Knights of Catarina continue to be great, though. Shine on you dullard onion sons.

If there's one real problem I have with the game, it's what they did with the poise mechanic. Whereas in the past it was a viable strategy to wear heavy armor, wield heavy weapons, and go to town because there was an invisible "poise" meter for resisting stagger (offsetting your own slowness to a degree), now EVERYTHING staggers. Fast weapons and low armor are the law of the land and the correct way to play. Their new invincibility-frame interpretation of poise outright sucks, and being Estoc'd to death again and again is a miserable way to go.

Tabletop Simulator - Steam - ★★★★★ - 2015

I don't actually have a lot of first-hand experience with tabletop games of any kind. I've certainly played the occasional board game, but I never really ran with that crowd for most of my life, and my parents have never been much in the way of the game-playing type beyond Scrabble. My exposure to tabletop gaming has a lot to do with my current circle of friends, and I've enjoyed them an awful lot.

Tabletop Simulator's strength is that it is any tabletop game that anyone takes the time to import into its engine. Which includes a lot of really, really good tabletop games as it turns out. It's a bit cheating, but that's the strength of it: it's hundreds of brilliant games in one, so long as you have the friends to play it with.

A lot of goofy improv, card games, and trivia have gone down in Tabletop Simulator for me over the last year. It's probably the game on this list I want to revisit the most, too, as it's a sure-fire way to have a real good time. I really want to play more Snake Oil. Snake Oil is a very good game.

#3: Final Fantasy IX - Steam - ★★★★★ - 2016

Final Fantasy IX is REALLLLLLY GOOD. Like yes, I had heard this for ages, but it was never on a platform I owned. Finally it has come to Steam, and finally did I play it. And man: real good!

The gameplay is pretty standard JRPG fare for its original era. It's serviceable, but rather unchallenging and doesn't have much in the way of mechanical depth. But the quality of the characters and writing in the game make up for it in spades. I really enjoyed the main cast an awful lot, and liked how much more playful it was than its 3D predecessors (and successors). It's got a sweet love story, meaningful explorations of mortality, loss, and sacrifice, and you at one point save a tiny rat prince from a rather pissed off antlion.

The only thing I really dislike about the game are the oodles of strategy guide hooks that still remain and don't have much meaning in 2016. There are so many weird hidden things that are essentially impossible to divine without a guide (or, in my case, a helpful friend). None of them are mandatory or even crucial, but many of them are actually pretty interesting to the point where missing them would kind of stink. It's bizarre that beating the extra super boss (which admittedly I didn't do) rewards you with an in-game version of the strategy guide that just sits in your inventory as a final fuck-you note of "THERE'S ON WAY YOU'D HAVE MANAGED ANY OF THIS IF YOU HADN'T LOOKED IT UP HUH, THANKS FOR P(L)AYING".

I also could go the rest of my life never having to play Chocobo Hot-and-Cold again because man. MAN.

#2: Pokemon Moon - 3DS - ★★★★★ - 2016

Pokemon Moon is one of the best games in a franchise I adore. It, like its predecessors, is not a particularly challenging RPG. But building a team of weirdo goofball monster friends, raising them up, then doing battle with them against my friends, is really fun!. I am also the kind of weirdo with sincere opinions on the quality of Pokemon storytelling; namely, I want it to be really good AND really stupid.

Pokemon Moon diverges from past Pokemon games by dropping the badge-and-gym system and replacing it with a series of combat-adjacent trials. The switch allowed them to explore alternate ways of presenting Pokemon-based challenges while better using the gym-leader-stand-in trial captains and kahunas, who are all great. The fire island-challenge made me cry laughing. The cast is phenomenal, easily my favorite in the series.

The plot is not nearly as goofy or weird as some of the previous games (to be fair, it's hard to top X & Y's insanity), but the cast is sooooo much better and more likeable that it's hard to really care. The new faces are a diverse, eclectic bunch, and the cameos from old faces are also fantastic. I did not expect to find Grimsley, amateur Dracula, waiting on a beach wearing a kimono so he could give me a shark.

Mechanically, there's also a ton of quality of life improvements that eliminate much of the lingering frustrations that the series has been carrying with it for years now0. The elimination of HMs, the streamlining of breeding and IV stats-checking, and other minor improvements to the interface and menus make the game so much better than its predecessors.

Really, my only complaints about the game are tied to some issues with post-game grind, a much worse online interface system than the deeply integrated one in X&Y, and the fact that the Battle Tower and Battle Royale continue to be imbalanced, poorly structured, and huuuuge cheating pieces of shit. That's Pokemon for you.

#1: Doom - Steam - ★★★★★ - 2016

DOOM is power.

DOOM is flow.

DOOM is violence.

DOOM is finding yourself surrounded by thirty dozen demons, each more capable of killing you than the last, and then just tearing them apart. DOOM is the lizard brain, the id, knowing how to murder everything around you while the ego is just barely hanging on for the ride.

DOOM gives you the tools and the means to take on everything that they put before you, and then says "Go." The cycle of killing enemies with your arsenal, using the melee takedowns to regain health, and then using the chainsaw to get ammo when you're running dry is beyond satisfying, it is... complete. It is mechanical perfection. Everything is as it is; everything is as it should be. It is combat as a dance, it is violence in motion. The music blares, it screams. The bass is your heartbeat.

Who would have thought DOOM could have a great story? That they would take one of the oldest, most generic franchises in history and turn it into something wonderful? It's the tale of a soulless corporation making the very logical decision to frack Hell so as to provide Earth with clean energy, turning their corporate infrastructure into a cult before awakening the DOOM Marine when it's far too late. The DOOM Marine is re-imagined not as some shmuck with a gun but instead a divine avenger, violence incarnate. The demons write scripture about your coming. Imps tell their kids scary stories about you. Hell announces your arrival on its infernal doorsteps with a rumbling, simple message on the dimension-wide intercom: "He's here." DOOM revolves around Hell doing ANYTHING to try to stop you, not because you can stop their plans, but because you will stop their plans. And that feels awesome.

I don't give a shit about their multiplayer, I don't care about snapmap. DOOM is the ultimate power fantasy. Play it on Ultra-Violence. Demonic presence is at unsafe levels, and we've got the double barreled shotgun needed to make things right.

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nazih-fares · 8 years

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It’s been eight long years since the Halo series ventured into the ruthless world of “PC-only” RTS with Halo Wars back on the Xbox 360. Halo Wars is probably a title that is on this list of surprising games, and ended up becoming one of my most memorable gaming experiences as well as others, but sadly the developers – Ensemble Studios – close house roughly a year after launching the game. Probably most known for their work on Age Empires, Ensemble Studios was acquired in 2001 by Microsoft, and all of its assets remained with the Redmond publisher and developer, and now comes its sequel, simply named Halo Wars 2 under the care of 343 Industries as caretaker of the Halo franchise and The Creative Assembly, a studio renown for its Total War RTS series. Will this be the same experience as it was on Xbox 360, or just a simple upgrade of a former gaming sensation?

The story starts with the cryogenic awakening of James Cutter, Captain of the brave UNSC Spirit of Fire, 28 years of a long sleep. For those of you which played Halo Wars, this is the same crew that you played as in the first game, waking up and embarked in a new conflict against the insurgents of the alien coalition: The Banished led by the Brute warlord Atriox. In any case, the storyline has deep root with the Halo lore – as you would expect – and will be perfect for fans of the franchise, even if it’s a rather short campaign with only 12 missions, which will take 5 to 8 hours to finished depending on difficulty or if you’re a Halo Wars veteran. In the end, even if you peak beyond the cutscenes which are on par with the quality of a certain iconic competing RTS developer (Blizzard Entertainment) – Halo Wars 2’s narrative is all in all particularly faithful to the franchise’s universe, which is great considering it was given to new hands.

Newcomers to Bungie’s original Sci-Fi might find this game a good entry point for the franchise, especially since a “definitive edition” of the first title is paired with Halo Wars 2 as a preorder incentive. Yet there’s nothing groundbreaking, and the campaign basically sees you play as the UNSC, leading Cutter and the Red Team in missions that are not really inspired where you’ll have to destroy Atriox bases, kills X many enemies, defend checkpoints under the pressure of a stopwatch. Nothing that reinvents the wheel for fans of the genre, especially since these are usually winning conditions and goals that will be re-purposed in multiplayer which is the major upgrade in this episode, but we’ll get to that later on.

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On the point of view of gameplay, the original Halo Wars smooth playability with the controller is yet again as a success, especially in a game genre that is usually on PC and played with mouse/keyboard combination. For those that never played the first game, the first missions will obviously teach you all the subtleties of the controls, which have been a bit reworked on the interface front as well as adding some new possibilities. Would you like quickly navigate from one base to another? Quickly jump on alert points? Assign tactical groups to the D-pad arrows? It’s all in here. I will though spare you from falling into a very complex description of each unit, its use or hero special skills, as they are mainly based on successful mechanics of the original Halo Wars and are worth discovering on your own. The only inconvenience I wished they fixed from the first game is the unit and building production system, which is as always tedious.

Why tedious? Well you mainly start with a base of command, a limited number of spots on which you can build add-ons to either harvest resources (mainly supplies and power) or assign to other kind of productions like building military units. The whole is ruled by a set of timers based on what build you are going for, and there comes the eternal RTS dilemma between either farming resources to better plan or just playing aggressive and destroy the opponent before he gets a chance to prepare for an attack. While the latter is the wrong approach in this game, the game system induces to build more resource modules (at the beginning of the game) than production, and thus giving you an unbalanced harvest/production ratio. The result is that it makes the matches extremely slow in the beginning, filled with farming and light map scouting, and while there’s always strategic points with fresh resource around the map that will initiate probably early confrontations, they are not enough to build a stable economy and favor a truly aggressive expansion strategy.

These rules of direction are obviously applied both in multiplayer and singleplayer, which gives a slow playing pace that really struggles to take off. Thankfully, when it comes to singleplayer, the most interesting – and challenging – missions of the campaign are those that require almost no economy management, centered around the combat. But with an AI that is not that smart, and the lack of mission diversity, you’ll quickly forget the campaign and jump in the core of the game: the multiplayer mode.

When it comes to multiplayer, don’t expect major clashes and the depth of a StarCraft II, as Halo Wars 2 is an easier RTS game to tame… as well as simpler to master. Multiplayer games start the same as the previous Halo Wars, where you are asked to choose a Leader, with their specific attributes and powers, before each match. You soon get used to the very balanced Stone/Paper/Scissor strategy of the game, even if sadly fades quickly when you are faster at building your economy, and can literally dump insane amount of units, overwhelming any weakness or strength of the opposing force… After all, like all RTS, strength in numbers can mean an easier victory. Bigger matches with allies can be more more interesting and fun, but there are more complete alternatives of this game genre on PC, but it remains one of the rare options on Xbox One for now.

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While the original Halo Wars only had one PVP competitive mode which was Skirmish, Halo Wars 2 adds Blitz mode, offering a new take on RTS with a blend of Hearthstone-ish deck building strategies. The concept is simple: open card packs that you obtain by finishing the campaign, performing daily and weekly goals or buy them with real-life money and build decks to use in battle. Blitz mechanics remove the whole need of building specific base modules to build units, instead the cards themselves once played will call upon that same card unit, having only one resource to take in consideration which is energy. It’s a more fun and simpler take on the Stone/Paper/Scissor strategy of each faction, and matches can be finished quickly, in comparison to a more traditional skirmish mode.

On the point of view of graphic engine and the more technical front, Halo Wars 2 is a clean and smooth experience, even if the framerate drops on some rare occasions when there’s too many units on the battlefield, but remains an overall visual success. The special effects such as explosions add some fun flair to the visual output, with overdoing it and removing the attention of the player on the field of action.

Halo Wars 2 was reviewed using an Xbox One and Windows 10 downloadable copy of the game provided by Microsoft. The game was tested on an Xbox One and a PC running Windows 10 Pro, with a 4GB NVIDIA Geforce GTX 960 fitted on a 5th Generation Intel i7 4720HQ 3.2Ghz CPU and topped with 16GB of RAM. We don’t discuss review scores with publishers or developers prior to the review being published

The first Halo Wars was intended for Halo fans, and Halo Wars 2 is no different even with a new multiplayer modes and story. It's been eight long years since the Halo series ventured into the ruthless world of "PC-only" RTS with Halo Wars back on the Xbox 360.

#343 Industries #Creative Assembly #Halo #Microsoft Studios #pc #RTS #Strategy (real-time)#Xbox Exclusive

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entergamingxp · 5 years

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DualShockers’ Favorite Games of 2019 — Cam’s Top 10

December 30, 2019 10:00 AM EST

2019 has been a pretty disappointing year overall for me when it comes to video games, but there was still plenty to love too.

As 2019 comes to a close, DualShockers and our staff are reflecting on this year’s batch of games and what were their personal highlights within the last year. Unlike the official Game of the Year 2019 awards for DualShockers, there are little-to-no-rules on our individual Top 10 posts. For instance, any game — not just 2019 releases — can be considered.

2019 has been an insane year for me. After getting my Bachelor’s in Journalism, I’ve been working to get my foot into the gaming industry to write and talk about what I love, and I’m forever thankful for the opportunities that have unexpectedly fallen onto my lap. I’ve traveled the country and have met and made connections with numerous members of the industry that I look up to, and eventually want to stand along side. So much has happened in such a short amount of time that I’ve spent most of the time that I can outside of playing games to prepare myself in big ways moving into 2020. If you are reading this, whether you are someone I know or someone I don’t, you are helping my dreams become a reality so, thank you. Now let’s get into what you came here for.

Depending on who you ask, some will say that 2019 was a great year for video games, while others will say that it was okay at best; I happen to sit on the latter. We have been spoiled with absolutely mesmerizing gaming experiences in both 2017 and 2018. If I’m being honest, I don’t think any game in 2019 would be in a serious discussion for Game of the Year if they came out in either of those time frames. Last year, I was incredibly conflicted about which title would be my Game of the Year between Red Dead Redemption 2 and Dead Cells to the point where I just said both (at this point though, it’s Red Dead).

For 2019, my GOTY immediately sat at my number one spot, and no other game made me question that choice as the year has progressed. 2019 has just been a mixed bag of games that a lot of people genuinely love, but nothing that most people could hold hands on and say is an absolute frontrunner. I don’t want to seem too down on the hard work that these creators put into their games, because I had some great gaming experiences in 2019, and still am going into 2020. I love talking about games, and I’ve been anticipating writing my top 10 games of 2019 so let’s get to it, shall we?

(Notable Games That I Did Not Get to Play in 2019: Ape Out, Astral Chain, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Judgment, Katana Zero, Luigi’s Mansion 3, Link’s Awakening, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order and Telling Lies)

Honorable Mention: Death Stranding

Alright, let’s talk Hideo Kojima for a second. I’m sure it will sound crazy to some, but Death Stranding is my first real crack at one of his games. I’ve always wanted to get into the Metal Gear Solid series, but the stars have never aligned for me to do so. Ever since the fallout of Kojima and Konami to the announcement of the game at E3 2016, all I ever thought was “what’s the big deal here?” while everyone else was dancing their pants off. All I got from him is that he likes to go big and over-the-top while naming his characters way too literally. Regardless, I wasn’t entirely sold on Death Stranding until a few weeks before its release. By the time I pressed start, I still had no idea whether or not I was going to like “a Hideo Kojima Game.”

After trying out Death Stranding for myself, the verdict is I like it. The scary part is that I think I INCREDIBLY love it, and the reason that is scary to me is that I want to do everything this game has to offer. I want to do every premium delivery, earn every absolutely pointless star and I don’t care because I love…delivering packages. I love sorting everything as best I can and keep them clean for the drop off. I’ve played almost 30 hours of this game and I am still on Chapter 3. I just refuse to mainline this game because it is such a disservice to the world that has been made.

Even with all the things I love about this game, there are an equal amount of things that I hate about Death Stranding. I still can’t even say much as to what I think of the story. The stealth mechanics are terrible, even coming from a developer that practically invented the genre. Specific areas of this gorgeous world are just designed for you to want to bang your head against the wall.

While I equally hate what I love about this game, what I love about the game wins at the end of the day. So I will keep playing it slowly but surely, probably until the end of next year along with everything else that 2020 has to offer. I will finish this game; I will complete everything possible because I want to feel that satisfaction and I will likely write a very long article about that entire experience.

Until then, it doesn’t feel right to rank it on my 2019 list. I have no idea where I’m going to be at with everything once the time credits roll. All I know is, Death Stranding is one of my favorite games that I will never play again, once everything is said and done.

10. Creature in the Well

Creature in the Well is the first game from developer Flight School Studio, which focuses on an engineering droid known as Bot-C who awakens from a deep slumber in an endless storming desert. Coming across a small village with a lifeless power plant, Bot-C ventures inside to restore the plant while evading an unknown creature that lurks in the dark. Known as a “pin brawler,” Bot-C travels through different dungeons that involve pinball puzzles.

By charging energy cores and batting them at bumpers I solved engagingly fun puzzles that helped me restore the plant to its former glory. It is a straightforward but challenging experience that makes me want more of that addicting gameplay. Knowing this game was created by a two-man team makes me applaud it even more. Creature in the Well left a lasting impression, and I will be keeping my eyes on what that team is working on next. The game has one of my favorite art styles of this year along with atmospheric music and environments, making it a favorite of mine in the indie sphere of 2019.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Creature in the Well.

9. Control

Within the first couple of hours of playing Control, I was enthralled with everything about it: the world, the lore, and the aura, which is one of my favorites in any video game. It is beautifully made and feels haunting no matter what part of the bureau that you are exploring through. Being able to throw debris at enemies and levitate across platforms is incredible fun, even if the combat as a whole is pretty one-note.

At first, Control shot up to my Top 3 games of 2019, but as the game progressed and more of the story was explained, I felt like it fell to shambles. By the time I hit the end of Control, it didn’t feel like there was a proper “ending” to the story. It felt like a “to be continued” moment for the game’s upcoming DLC, with the number of things from the main story that didn’t get resolved. Even though the game didn’t entirely land on its feet, I still love the premise of what Remedy brought to the table with Control, along with its fun combat.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Control.

8. Borderlands 3

After waiting far too long since Borderlands 2, Borderlands 3 hit all the right notes for me except for what I was looking forward to the most, being the story. In Borderlands 2, I was so blown away by how strong a narrative that Gearbox was able to create in a universe that was so explicit and self-aware. Ending on a cliffhanger teasing the departure of Pandora to travel the galaxy for vaults on other planets encapsulated me, but I was worried about what was to come, especially after the end of Handsome Jack.

The story that was served in Borderlands 3 is such a disappointment on every level, but that doesn’t mean the full package wasn’t still great. With the amount of the quality-of-life changes made in Borderlands 3, the franchise is at the best place that it’s ever been. It is the first entry where I want to play as every Vault Hunter, just because all of them stick out so interestingly.

Even though I don’t get to play in co-op often, when I do it is some of the most fun that I have ever had in gaming. Gearbox may not have gone in the direction that I wanted with its story, but I love shootin’ and I love lootin’, which is exactly what Borderlands 3 is truly about.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Borderlands 3.

7. Indivisible

Indivisible is one of the few games from that come back to my mind of the most memorable gaming experiences that I had in 2019. When I reviewed it, I said that it was hard to put into words how I feel about the game, and up to now that is still true.

It has my favorite art direction of any game in 2019, all handcrafted and beautifully detailed. There’s a vast and unique set of party members that you can recruit into battle (including a lightning dog!), which gave me nearly endless ways to execute combos. The platforming is incredibly satisfying on so many levels, and it’s easily my favorite in the genre this generation. The story presented makes you truly consider the consequences that you might bring onto others based on the choices that you make.

There is very little about this game that I don’t think works in its favor. Give it a shot.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Indivisible.

6. Pokemon Sword and Shield

Pokemon was the first gaming franchise that I fell in love with. To this day, whether or not I am anticipating the newest mainline entry of the series, I will always pick it up and play the latest installment.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the franchise has been a far off memory from what it once was back in the first three generations. For the longest time, there was nothing in the recent Pokemon entries that brought back the love I once had, until I played Pokemon Sword and Shield. When I found out that Nintendo was moving away from a handheld-only platform with the Switch, I finally thought we would be getting a new title similar to Pokemon Coliseum or XD Gale of Darkness back on the GameCube.

While Sword and Shield isn’t particularly that, it feels like what a modern-day Pokemon game should be. I’m always going to like the grindy old school versions more, because that is what Pokemon is to me. But with the incorporation of the Wild Area, being able to run into Pokemon from any generation and the variety with which they show up feels fresh. I can run into a Snorlax and then walk a few steps into a Drapion.

I know that a lot of people within recent years have criticized the series for having random encounters, which I still think is a weak criticism being a turn-based RPG, but I like how Game Freak was able to appease all players in that sense. This of course just speaks to the number of quality-of-life changes that Pokemon Sword and Shield made to make the series more accessible, combined with its great new setting. The Galar region–while on the nose a little bit too much–has a fascinating backstory, and how the legendary Pokemon Zacian and Zamazenta fit into that story is much more interesting than previous generations.

Pokemon Sword and Shield may honestly make the best changes that have ever been done in the entire franchise. The best part is, I’m not even finished with the game yet. I’m only five badges in as of writing this, and when I’m not playing Pokemon, all I’m thinking about is wishing that I was, which makes me so enormously happy. The only reason it isn’t higher on my list is that it is still just more of the same (which is not a bad thing at all).

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Pokemon Sword and Shield.

5. Baba is You

I’ve never been a huge fan of puzzle games. There are specific titles in the genre that I live and die for, but as a whole, I don’t go out of my way to play them unless they’re recommended to me. I heard great things about Baba is You and after hearing about its concept, I wanted to try it out. By playing as this rabbit-sheep thing known as Baba, you move words around changing the effects of items and environments around you. I can change a wall into water, or I can change my playable character to a rock instead. All of the game’s systems are new and cool.

Baba is You happens to make me feel like a complete imbecile the majority of the time that I play it, and I love every second of it. I will spend an hour trying to figure out a puzzle and not feel fatigued of my efforts, just stupid. Why is that ok? Well, it’s because after all the trial and error that I ensue by the time I figure it out and win, I can’t help to think that all that time and investment was worth it. It’s one of those puzzle games where you want to YouTube how to beat a specific level just to progress, but you refuse to do so because you’re doing the game dirty and you want to figure it out yourself. It makes me want to feel validated by beating every level so I can say “I beat Baba is You.”

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Baba is You.

4. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

It is crazy how in-depth and detailed that Fire Emblem: Three Houses is. It includes a massive suite of fleshed-out characters that you get to learn about and build them the way you want to utilize them on the battlefield, or you can let them do whatever they want. While teaching my students, I found out pretty early on that I could recruit kids from the other two houses over to my house (Golden Deer REPRESENT), taking them away from the other house leaders. However, knowing that there are technically four different routes that you can choose from in this 60+ hour game, I decided to stick with my original house members to focus on them because they were in the house I chose for a reason, and I didn’t want to sacrifice their characterization for other unassociated students.

Developer Intelligent Systems decided this time around to get rid of the weapon triangle, which isn’t a bad thing per se. But in previous Fire Emblem titles, I felt more inclined to use every character as equally as possible, and with the absence of that long-running franchise mechanic, it also made the combat feel slightly less engaging. I haven’t gotten to finish Three Houses yet, but with the amount that I have played so far it is probably, in my opinion, the best first-party title on the platform in 2019.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

3. Disco Elysium

If I had to make an unbiased, objective choice for Game of the Year in 2019, it would have to go to Disco Elysium. It is simply one of the most well-written games I have ever played (and there is A LOT of writing). Throughout every conversation I have with an NPC, I learn something about them or the world that exists around me while I’m trying to solve a crime about a man hanging from a tree. Each character I interact with has great charisma, and I feel like that fits into the city of Revachol as a whole.

At the start of the game, your character doesn’t know who he is, so you’re figuring it out along with him. As an RPG, your skills speak similarly to how your brain sends messages to you before you decide what to say out loud. Depending on how you build the detective, you can attempt skill checks to get the information you want, whether it is with charm or force. It is all so intricate and fascinating that I wish I had more time to play games, because it is another that I have yet to hit the credits for.

That being said, everything that I have experienced up to the point that I am currently at has been innovative and gripping. I can’t wait to go back to explore more of Revachol and find out its mysteries along with the murderer.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Disco Elysium.

2. Kingdom Hearts III

Oh god, here we go. Listen, Kingdom Hearts III…no matter what people thought of the game whether you loved it, liked it or hated it, it never would have met anyone’s expectations. After waiting almost 15 YEARS it could have been everything fans wanted and there would have still been backlash.

When it comes to me, I loved it. Were there issues? Of course. But where the game succeeded is where it truly matters to me. Kingdom Hearts is about friendship, caring for one another, making connections and how those connections lift us. Even though I think that Nomura could have structured the game better instead of shoving everything that we’ve been waiting all these years for in the final act, I think it delivered in the end. Kingdom Hearts III, especially with being such an acquired taste to many gamers, could have been A LOT worse than people were making it out to be. Even then, it is still a great game, even if it isn’t the great game that everyone wanted.

The combat is exactly as you’d expect from a mainline Kingdom Hearts title (although I wish they kept Limit Commands). There are numerous quality-of-life improvements made, like being able to upgrade your Keyblades and transferring them over to new game saves. Square has already added the much-beloved critical mode and is releasing a patch where players can modify exactly how they want to play through the game.

Kingdom Hearts III is great, and the upcoming Re:MIND DLC seems to be adding a lot of things that fans wanted originally in the main package. There is much still to look forward to as a Kingdom Hearts fan, and I’m incredibly excited to see where Nomura takes me.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for Kingdom Hearts III.

1. The Walking Dead: The Final Season

The final season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead can be — and to a degree is — a reprise of the first season, but it is so much more than that. It is a game that teaches you valuable lessons in parenting and how to build up children as they take your place as the future of humanity.

Playing as Clementine one last time felt like a chapter of my life was coming to an end. I’m not a parent yet, but seeing this young woman grow from the girl she once was into a motherly figure must feel similar to watching your own kid in the same way. This was also the first time where I felt like I could build Clementine into who I think she is as a person. I loved that there was an option to romance someone for those who see her having a partner, but I loved it even more that I could decide Clementine doesn’t need that, because she has AJ. She has always walked her path up to this point that way.

Throughout the game you are teaching AJ important lessons about life. These lessons may be focused on the reality of living in a post-apocalyptic world, but they all translate into normal life as well. Constantly I saw myself being presented with challenging questions of morality on what AJ should learn, and constantly I sat by myself in an empty room questioning my choices over and over, just because I didn’t want my choices to affect his decisions poorly. Even if Clem and AJ were partners throughout the story, at the end of the day, he is just a kid who was born into this world that doesn’t know what it is like to be a “normal” child like the other children that he meets, and it is Clementine’s job to show him what is right and what is wrong.

I experienced a vast variety of emotions playing through Clementine’s final chapter. I laughed, cried, cheered, and applauded due to the wonderful, frightening, and heart-wrenching moments that occurred throughout. But it wasn’t just a sendoff for the series, it was a bow of respect to Telltale; the old Telltale who started it all. With everything that the studio went through, it was an utter joy that Skybound was able to bring back a portion of the original team to finish the game. I was continuously invested in the story and characters, not even including Clementine. By the time credits rolled, I was crying ugly tears while smiling cheek-to-cheek.

All I have left to say is thank you. Thank you to every single person who had a part in making The Walking Dead a reality, whether it be the final season or any season prior. Thank you for creating one of my favorite characters in any medium and thank you for telling her story…Clementine’s story.

Check out DualShockers‘ review for the final episode of The Walking Dead: The Final Season.

Check out the rest of the DualShockers staff Top 10 lists and our official Game of the Year Awards:

December 23: DualShockers Game of the Year Awards 2019 December 25: Lou Contaldi, Editor-in-Chief // Logan Moore, Managing Editor December 26: Tomas Franzese, News Editor // Ryan Meitzler, Features Editor December 27: Mike Long, Community Manager // Scott White, Staff Writer December 28: Chris Compendio, Contributor // Mario Rivera, Video Manager // Kris Cornelisse, Staff Writer December 29: Scott Meaney, Community Director // Allisa James, Senior Staff Writer // Ben Bayliss, Senior Staff Writer December 30: Cameron Hawkins, Staff Writer // David Gill, Senior Staff Writer // Portia Lightfoot, Contributor December 31: Iyane Agossah, Senior Staff Writer // Michael Ruiz, Senior Staff Writer // Rachael Fiddis, Contributor January 1: Ricky Frech, Senior Staff Writer // Tanner Pierce, Staff Writer

December 30, 2019 10:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/dualshockers-favorite-games-of-2019-cams-top-10/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dualshockers-favorite-games-of-2019-cams-top-10

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myentertainmentthoughts · 7 years

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi - General Thoughts & Review

Upon getting out of the theater after watching The Last Jedi, I just can’t NOT write down my thoughts and feelings, as this movie definitely gave me quite a lot of both. So here we go! Ranty rant on my often defunct blog!

So, it’s pretty much impossible for me to give my true thoughts on this movie without going into more detail about its finer points, given that I have so many mixed feelings about both The Last Jedi’s strengths and weaknesses. But for a general review minus spoilers, what are my thoughts? This movie was extremely entertaining - a great watch, and definitely a fresh take on the Star Wars franchise. A solid 7.5/10. The extra points being docked off for the fact that as great of a watch as it was, it is certainly a pretty flawed movie, and one that divides the fandom heavily (and I can definitely see why).

But let’s first talk about the good things.

Based on this movie alone, I can say with certainty that Rian Johnson is indeed a fantastic director and has a great sense of using his shots to convey story meaningfully. I really felt like this movie was freakin’ BEAUTIFUL, and I would highly suggest it as a first rate choice for film studies and whatnot. I can’t praise the cinematography and general visual direction of this movie enough. We’ll get that aspect out of the way - I think it’s pretty much a 10/10 there.

As for the “tribute” points, I also think he does a great job of doing some old Star Wars film throwbacks without being quite so literal. This is by far my heaviest criticism of the first new SW sequel - The Force Awakens was so heavy handed in trying to please the fandom. The first three films are undoubtedly the most beloved, and while some tribute and throwback being done absolutely makes sense when considering this, The Force Awakens went too shot-for-shot, plot point for plot point, and re-featuring old character moments/history. It was overkill. It was a New Hope 2.0 remake, just swap some of the characters. Whereas The Last Jedi does a great job of paying tribute to the older films and characters, but retains its sense of originality. It builds very successfully onto the older established characters in terms of adding to their personality and development. Which I must seriously applaud this movie for - that’s a pretty damn hard thing to do with characters as beloved and iconic as the older Star Wars staples like Luke, and Leia.

And I finally add that the originality and flavor of this movie is really its strongest point as a whole. Yes, the tribute thing was done well, but in general what I appreciate most about this movie is that it felt like a brand new, and fresh take on the Star Wars mythos and world. Yes - it’s far from being a perfect movie, but I must say that it is a great follow up from The Force Awakens. It’s the movie that this franchise needed at this point in time. In terms of how the movie handles the characters, the tone, the shooting, the action sequences, and the general approach to Star Wars - it just feels…well, for lack of a better word, FRESH. And that - if nothing else - is for sure a very valuable thing that The Last Jedi has brought to Star Wars. For a huge universe as deep, diverse, and expansive as Star Wars - to have something that feels so new within the films is to be lauded without a doubt.

So overall - these are the highest points of this film. Well - in addition to the fact that it’s very, very, entertaining. I mean, hot damn! There are some COOOOOOL battle/fight/action sequences. It doesn’t disappoint in that category either. So all that awesome stuff about it being said, stated, and put aside. Where did this movie fall flat? I’d say my biggest criticism of The Last Jedi has everything to do with editing. The run time of this film was 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Granted, I understand that it’s Star Wars, and isn’t more content always a good thing? But being a 2 hour 30 minute movie does say a lot about just how much story is packed into this thing, and a lot of that story (IMHO) really, really didn’t need to be told. You know that saying, less is more? Yeah - this is the case with The Last Jedi, and the whole movie definitely felt bloated. Some of the plot straight up didn’t make sense - and where it didn’t make sense - I look back on it and realize that those nonsensical plot moments weren’t even necessary to the overall arc of the movie. They could have been cut out entirely, and the movie would not only be shorter, more concise, and MADE more sense but would’ve probably been a much stronger story as a whole. (Basically, I’m referring to the entire plot point of going onto Canto Bight. I will ramble about that one in more detail and more specifically in a future write up, but anyone who has seen the movie will know exactly what I’m talking about.)

But the long and short of it (Ha-ha. Loooong and short of it - get it?) issss - the movie would’ve benefitted greatly from some slashing. This is really the worst problem of all of the prequel movies that are so widely hated from everyone. George Lucas went into way too much detail about his universe and completely forgot that the first trilogy was compelling for its classic and iconic hero’s adventure storytelling. (No one cares about your damn trade federation politics George. -_-) And this is where The Last Jedi gets hurt too.

These sorts of detailed tangential storylines - while helping develop some of the characters - did nothing for the overall plot of the movie, and only achieved in making it feel super dragged out. And you should never feel like watching Star Wars is a chore. By the end of the movie - I’m not gonna lie - it actually does feel a bit like that. Thank god the movie was generally entertaining and had some GREAT action sequences to break it up because, otherwise these pacing and plot issues honestly had the potential to kind of ruin the entire movie. (Also I realize that me complaining about this long and dragged out movie is ironic given that I’m writing the world’s longest and most dragged out review of said movie. I have some self awareness but I’m too much of a nerd to not ramble on, HAHA.)

Alright moving on - my other main gripe with this movie is a nitpick one, but one that I think other people had issues with too. The humorous, “cutesy” moments. Granted - I loved that Johnson wasn’t afraid to explore more humor and light-heartedness with Star Wars. And the original trilogy had plenty of funny and cute moments just as purposely injected into them too. I just felt like at some points, it got to be too much. Sort of like a pastry that a chef felt like he/she had to put that last little teaspoon of sugar in, and made it taste overly sweet when it could’ve been perfect with just a tiny bit less. This was probably most pronounced with the porgs - the adorable little creatures living on Luke’s island that were obviously put in for marketing and merchandising purposes (Let’s not kid ourselves Disney. *eyeroll*).

(^Snoke’s true identity. Never fails to crack me up. :P)

But in general, the little humorous bits that were sprinkled into this movie, fun as they were, did kind of take me out of it JUST enough that I felt it was too much. Sometimes it felt (for lack of a better term) hokey. And just not…Star Wars. Star Wars isn’t supposed to be hokey. (Maybe except for Jar Jar. Not exactly a good or well-loved part of the series.) Maybe it’s a bit prudish and not open minded enough to feel like Star Wars can’t be light hearted in that way, but pushing the boundaries like that did feel out of place for this particular universe, and ultimately it took me out of the story enough to be a problem.

All in all, I will be the first to admit that this movie had its fair share of both ups, and definite downs. But does it deserve the harsh criticism from the hardcore Star Wars fans who are apparently requesting for Episode 8 to be deleted from canon? Far from it for anyone who is able to emotionally detach themselves away from their own expectations of what they think a Star Wars film should be, to recognize that this movie was ultimately well-executed and had enough redeeming qualities to be thoroughly enjoyed by the average movie goer. And as far as I am concerned, it’s a very solid entry into the Star Wars fiction.

I have so much more specific detail that I would love to get into because apparently Star Wars is one of those things that I have to really search my feelings for (Hehehe. Get it? Heh.....heh.........ahhh). But there you go! My general review for those of you who don’t like to listen to a crazy person ramble on and on about every little specific plot point in this new movie. (Sidenote: THAT crazy recap is to be posted on this blog next, for any fellow fanatics who are interested.) To be continued...*CUE JOHN WILLIAMS END CREDIT STAR WARS NUMBER*

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echobasegazette · 7 years

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Star Wars: A New Adventure

Two new Star Wars movies have been released since the last time that I wrote an article on my all-time favorite franchise, and I’ve decided that it is finally time to take a long hard look at the newest entries to the franchise and see if they really hold water.

Several people have asked me why I never did a review on the two new films, and for those wondering here is the answer: I did not feel that I could provide an unbiased review of any film in this franchise because I just love it too much! In any review I’d write, I would either fawn all over the film or pick at things that the average viewer wouldn’t have noticed. And if I read a review that was overly picky, I know it would color my judgment of an otherwise watchable movie. So, I have saved my praise and condemnations for this article, where I can profess my love for the new films and pick them apart.

For those of you who haven’t seen these movies, I will warn you that you will find spoilers, but I will properly label each section, so if you’ve only seen one of the two films you can still read half of the article. Additionally, if you haven’t seen one or both of these two films, go see them now.

This is my official Star Wars Ranking: (First to worst)

1. Empire Strikes Back

2. Star Wars (A New Hope)

3. Rogue One

4. Return of the Jedi

5. The Force Awakens

6. Revenge of the Sith

7. Attack of the Clones

8. The Phantom Menace

Star Wars: Episode 7 – The Force Awakens

I of course saw this film as a midnight release (well it was at 10pm on a Thursday but I’m going to call it a midnight release). My four-man group arrived at the movie theater two hours early to ensure that we would get good seats, and we ended up being the first four people inside. I remember having a combination of both high and low expectations; low because the prequels were bad and high because the trailers looked great. I was pretty sure that J.J. Abrams (who is a huge fan of the franchise) wouldn’t mess it up after his successful Star Trek films. Overall, I thought The Force Awakens was a solid, watchable film that had lot of solid aspects.

Things I liked:

· The lightsaber fights – the scenes felt like traditional Star Wars lightsaber scenes. The flipping and fast action of the prequels was pretty cool but it felt too frantic and almost draining to watch.

· The movie had light-hearted humor that was a lot more natural than in the prequels.

· Tension – I was actually worried about the fate of the characters, whether they’d live or die, and what would happen to them in the future. The prequels lacked this same tension because the fate of the characters was already predetermined.

· I really liked the new characters. Rey is a multi-faceted character, and her parentage promises to be the next big Star Wars reveal. Finn also has potential and held my interest throughout the film, even though it looks like he will be starting Episode VIII in a coma. I also enjoyed Poe Dameron, the newer version of Wedge Antilles (Wedge is an X-Wing pilot that is in all three movies and a major character in the expended universe and it would be cool for Disney to bring him and Lando into the new movies) and I hope they really develop this character.

· The sets for The Force Awakens were grittier and darker than prequels. Episodes I, II and III seemed too perfect and neat, almost less “real” when compared with the atmosphere of the new films.

Things I didn’t like:

Derivative

This is the best way to describe the plot of the Episode VII: If I saw Star Wars: A New hope, as an 11-year-old and then imagined what my Star Wars adventure would be like, it would be the plot of The Force Awakens. I’m stranded on a deserted planet, and I steal the Millennium Falcon to escape. Along the way I shoot down some TIE Fighters and bump into Han Solo, who offers to make me his second mate. Together we travel to a seedy bar where we meet some crazy looking aliens and get tangled up with the Empire. I learn about the Force and wield a lightsaber against a poor man’s Darth Vader. Afterwards I travel to a new world to start my force training with the ultimate, Luke Skywalker. So yes, the movie was good but it was basically a remake of Episode IV, without being a remake.

New Planets & Aliens

When Disney purchased Lucas Arts, one of the first things they did was remove the Expanded Universe (EU) from the Star Wars cannon. For those of you who aren’t Star Wars nerds, the EU made up the stories and characters that were created in the Star Wars books, comic books, and video games. Disney essentially eliminated these stories and made all of them irrelevant. I completely understand why they did this, and if you just paid $4.2 billion for a franchise, you probably wouldn’t want to be bound by the countless stories that already existed either. But why do they have to create entirely new planets and aliens too? Can’t they at least use some of the old ones that Star Wars fans are familiar with?

Humor

While some of the scenes in the movie possessed a natural humor that played well with the story line, other scenes seemed to force humor when there wasn’t really a need for it. One of the scenes that I felt was really well done involved Han Solo and Finn. Upon landing on Star Killer Base, Han asks Finn about the “plan”, and Finn responds, “We’ll use the Force.” Han Solo, now angry to find out that Finn made up the plan says, “That’s not how the Force works.” For me this scene was perfect, it had the quick relatable humor that seemed and the dialog seemed to flow naturally. One of the scenes I didn’t like was when the new rebels are discussing the plan to blow up Star Killer base and Han says, “There is got to be a way to blow it up, there always is.” To me this seemed like forced humor and really removed the seriousness of the situation.

Lightspeed

In the Star Wars books, lightspeed had specific rules. You couldn’t go into lightspeed if you were inside of a star or planet’s gravity well, and you couldn’t jump to lightspeed from inside of a star ships hanger bay. But apparently in this film, those rules no longer apply. This kind of has an effect on how space battles might be fought. Wouldn’t the rebels just run away any time they couldn’t win, and wouldn’t the First Order do the same thing? I am probably a huge nerd for even caring about this, and I am sure the Star Wars movies will always still have space battles, but I must admit that I was annoyed about this because it contradicted a cool quote from Han Solo in a New Hope, “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops boy, without precise calculations we could fly right through a super nova or too close to a black hole and that would injure something real quick.”

Star Killer Base

Star Killer Base is really lame and was probably one of things that bothered me most. It’s essentially a planet killing weapon that’s built into a planet and uses the power of a star, draining that star in the process? So, what happens when the star is completely drained? Is Star Killer now useless? Does it even have the ability to move? A lot of details are never really explained, and let’s be serious, it’s a complete rip off of the Death Star.

Star Wars: Rogue One

I am not old enough to have seen the original trilogy in theaters, but I was around when the prequel trilogy was released, and waiting three years for the next installment is not a fun wait. Disney decided to fix this problem when they bought the franchise with a plan to release new Episodes every two years with standalone stories in between. This means that every year for the foreseeable future, we get to experience a new Star Wars adventure! But exactly what stories were they going to tell? The first one that was released was the story of how the rebels got their hands on the Death Star plans, essentially serving as a prequel to A New Hope.

I will admit that I really enjoyed this movie and thought that it was a much better film than The Force Awakens. As I said earlier the thing that I liked most about the original trilogy was the grittiness, and this film had it in spades. Rogue One was also much better with the comic relief than Episode VII, and overall felt like a more natural flowing storyline. Because I liked this film more, I’ll switch it up and quickly list the points I didn’t like and expand on my favorite parts.

Things I didn’t like:

· The use of lightspeed is just as bothersome in this movie as it was in The Force Awakens

· More new aliens, including that crazy Bor Gullet thing that reads your thoughts – creepy!

· I am not sure if I like or don’t like that the new movies put a small label in the corner every time a new planet is introduced…I will get back to you on this one.

· There was no opening scene story crawl? What the hell?! This is one of the things that make Star Wars movies, Star Wars movies. Why did they get rid of it?

· The Guardians of the Whills. For those who aren’t crazy fans, the Whills were part of the original concept of the Force. Lucas got rid of this aspect early in the development of Episode IV, and they haven’t appeared in any of the other films…until now. I wish they would have just kept them out of the story.

· As I stated earlier, I don’t like that Disney is creating new planets, and the worst of all is Jedha. According to Rogue One, Jedha is a major planet for the Jedi but it doesn’t show up until this movie? It just doesn’t make sense and isn’t necessary.

Things I liked:

Old Characters Return

One of the main villains of this film is Grand Moff Tarkin, who is played by Peter Cushing in both this film and A New Hope. Peter Cushing died in 1994, and because this film takes place directly before A New Hope it wouldn’t have really worked to have a different actor play this character. Disney recreated him using digital technology, and for the most part this was generally well done. The voice worked sounded great and most of the time his character looked very realistic.

On top of bringing back Grand Moff Tarkin, they also brought back some of the more obscure characters. During the final space battle, the rebels show up to battle in X-Wings and Y-Wings to take on the Empire, and Disney used the pilots from A New Hope. If you look closely, you will recognize the pilots of the Red and Gold Squadron. However, the same technique was used for a final scene involving Princess Leia, and that felt too cheesy. Leia was only really used to show that the next scene would be the opening of A New Hope and they didn’t really need to show her face to get that message across.

Space Battle

The final space battle was freaking awesome! There were Rebel capitol ships duking it out with Star Destroyers. TIE fighters, X-Wings and Y-Wings were dogfighting for control of the sky. Finally, Vader and the Devastator show up to mop up the pesky rebels. Scenes like this are one of the reasons I love Star Wars films, and there have really only been two major space battles shown on screen before: the final battle in Return of the Jedi, which is epic, and the opening battle of Revenge of the Sith, which was lame because you knew there was no chance that Anakin or Obi-Wan were going to die. Hopefully future movies will have even more epic space battles!

SPOILER: Everyone Died!

Rogue One did a nice job of developing a new cast of characters for this film. Jyn Erso is the daughter of an Imperial Science officer, Cassian Andor is the Rebel Intelligence officer who is forced to do things he doesn’t like for the sake of the Rebel cause, and Saw Gerrera is a disillusioned Rebel Leader who has lost his way in his war with the Empire. Chirrut Imwe and Baze Malbus are guardians of the Whills who join the rebel cause, and they even added some comic relief with the presence of a rebel owned Imperial Droid, K-2SO.

Halfway through the movie I started to wonder, what is going to happen to these characters? Is Disney really going to kill everyone? None of the characters are in IV, V or VI so there really isn’t anything that they could do except kill them. But would they really spend $265 million developing characters just to kill them off? Are they going to keep them alive and develop a whole new series with these characters appearing in movies set around the original trilogy? Well I didn’t have to wonder about this for very long. By the end of the film every one of these characters was dead, and as much as I enjoyed getting to know them, it was the right way to end the movie.

Female Leads

This is really more of a “like” for both movies because they both have strong, lead female characters. The original trilogy only really has one female character, Princess Leia, and most other women are just in the background. The prequels included a few more women, but again, none of them were leads while Padme was a supporting character at best. But having no female leads won’t work in the new post 2010 world, so the new movies fixed this! Both films have females in leading roles which helps make the film more appealing to the masses and makes the films easier to watch with girlfriends and wives.

Overall, I am generally excited about the new direction of the Star Wars world. There are a lot of things to like in these new movies with expanded and parallel storylines and new actors and actresses. Disney has also avoided adding a Jar Jar Binks character who all Star Wars fans love to hate. There are still a handful of things that I don’t like, but I am willing to suffer through them so that I can continue enjoying the franchise that I love. Luckily, Disney hasn’t shit the bed yet.

The Movie Guy

#Star Wars #The Force Awakens #rogue one #movie review #Film Review

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