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thesteadydietofeverything · 5 years

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Top 10 Games of 2019

This was an extremely good year for games. I don’t know if I played as many that will stick with me as I did last year, but the ones on the bottom half of this list in particular constitute some of my favorite games of the decade, and probably all-time. If I’ve got a gaming-related resolution for next year, it’s to put my playtime into supporting even smaller indie devs. My absolute favorite experiences in games this year came from seemingly out of nowhere games from teams I’ve previously never heard of before. That said, there are some big games coming up in spring I doubt I’ll be able to keep myself away from. Some quick notes/shoutouts before I get started:

-The game I put maybe the most time into this year was Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I finally made the plunge into neverending FF MMO content, and I’m as happy as I am overwhelmed. This was a big year for the game, between the release of the Shadowbringers expansion and the Nier: Automata raid, and it very well may have made it onto my list if I had managed to actually get to any of it. At the time of this writing, though, I’ve only just finished 2015’s Heavensward, so I’ve got...a long way to go.

-One quick shoutout to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy that came out on Switch this year, a remaster of some DS classics I never played. An absolutely delightful visual novel series that I fell in love with throughout this year.

-I originally included a couple games currently in early access that I’ve enjoyed immensely. I removed them not because of arbitrary rules about what technically “came out” this year, but just to make room for some other games I liked, out of the assumption that I’ll still love these games in their 1.0 formats when they’re released next year to include them on my 2020 list. So shoutout to Hades, probably the best rogue-like/lite/whatever I’ve ever played, and Spin Rhythm XD, which reignited my love for rhythm games.

-Disco Elysium isn’t on this list, because I’ve played about an hour of it and haven’t yet been hooked by it. But I’ve heard enough about it to be convinced that it is 1000% a game for me and something I need to get to immediately. They shouted out Marx and Engels at the Game Awards! They look so cool! I want to be their friend! And hopefully, a few weeks from now, I’ll desperately want to redact this list to squeeze this game somewhere in here.

Alright, he’s the actual list:

10. Amid Evil

The 90’s FPS renaissance continues! As opposed to last year’s Dusk, a game I adored, this one takes its cues less from Quake and more from Heretic/Hexen, placing a greater emphasis on melee combat and magic-fuelled projectiles than more traditional weapons. Also, rather than that game’s intentionally ugly aesthetic, this one opts for graphics that at times feel lush, detailed, and pretty, while still probably mostly fitting the description of lo-fi. In fact, they just added RTX to the game, something I’m extremely curious to check out. This game continued to fuel my excitement about the possibilities of embracing out-of-style gameplay mechanics to discover new and fresh possibilities from a genre I’ve never been able to stop yearning for more of.

9. Ape Out

If this were a “coolest games” list, Ape Out would win it, easily. It’s a simple game whose mechanics don’t particularly evolve throughout the course of its handful of hours, but it leaves a hell of an impression with its minimalist cut-out graphics, stylish title cards, and percussive soundtrack. Smashing guards into each other and walls and causing them to shoot each other in a mad-dash for the exit is a fun as hell take on Hotline Miami-esque top down hyper violence, even if it’s a thin enough concept that it starts to feel a bit old before the end of the game.

8. Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I had a lot of problems with this game, probably most stemming from just how damn long it is - I still haven’t finished my first, and likely only, playthrough. This length seems to have motivated the developers to make battles more simple and easy, and to be fair, I would get frustrated if I were getting stuck on individual battles if I couldn’t stop thinking about how much longer I have to go, but as it is, I’ve just found them to be mostly boring. This is particularly problematic for a game that seems to require you to play through it at least...three times to really get the full picture? I couldn’t help but admire everything this game got right, though, and that mostly comes down to building a massive cast of extremely well realized and likable characters whose complex relationships with each other and with the structures they pledge loyalty to fuels harrowing drama once the plot really sets into motion. There’s a reason no other game inspired such a deluge of memes and fan fiction and art into my Twitter feed this year. It’s an impressive feat to convince every player they’ve unquestionably picked the right house and defend their problem children till the bitter end. After the success of this game, I’d love to see what this team can do next with a narrower focus and a bigger budget.

7. Resident Evil 2

It’s been a long time since I played the original Resident Evil 2, but I still consider it to be one of my favorite games of all time. I was highly skeptical of this remake at first, holding my stubborn ground that changing the fixed camera to a RE4-style behind the back perspective would turn this game more into an action game and less of a survival horror game where feeling a lack of control is part of the experience. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much they were able to modernize this game while maintaining its original feel and atmosphere. The fumbly, drifting aim-down sights effectively sell the feeling of being a rookie scared out of your wits. Being chased by Mr. X is wildly anxiety-inducing. But even more surprisingly, perhaps the greatest upgrade this game received was its map, which does you the generous service of actually marking down automatically where puzzles and items are, which rooms you’ve yet to enter, which ones you’ve searched entirely, and which ones still have more to discover. Arguably, this disrupts the feeling of being lost in a labyrinthine space that the original inspired, but in practice, it’s a remarkably satisfying and addicting video game system to engage with.

6. Judgment

No big surprise here - Ryu ga Gotoku put out another Yakuza-style game set in Kamurocho, and once again, it’s sitting somewhere on my top 10. This time, they finally put Kazuma Kiryu’s story to bed and focused on a new protagonist, down on his luck lawyer-turned-detective Takayuki Yagami. The new direction doesn’t always pay off - the added mechanics of following and chasing suspects gets a bit tedious. The game makes up for it, though, by absolutely nailing a fun, engrossing J-Drama of a plot entirely divorced from the Yakuza lore. The narrative takes several head-spinning turns through its several dozen hours, and they all feel earned, with a fresh sense of focus. The side stories in this one do even more to make you feel connected to the community of Kamurocho by befriending people from across the neighborhood. I’d love to see this team take even bigger swings in the future - and from what I’ve seen from Yakuza 7, that seems exactly like what they’re doing - but even if this game shares maybe a bit too much DNA with its predecessors, it’s hard to complain when the writing and acting are this enjoyable.

5. Control

Control feels like the kind of game that almost never gets made anymore. It’s a AAA game that isn’t connected to any larger franchises and doesn’t demand your attention for longer than a dozen hours. It doesn’t shoehorn needless RPG or MMO mechanics into its third-person action game formula to hold your attention. It introduces a wildly clever idea, tells a concise story with it, and then its over. And there’s something so refreshing about all of that. The setting of The Oldest House has a lot to do with it. I think it stands toe-to-toe with Rapture or Black Mesa as an instantly iconic game world. Its aesthetic blend of paranormal horror and banal government bureaucracy gripped my inner X-Files fan instantly, and kept him satisfied not only with its central characters and mystery but with a generous bounty of redacted documents full of worldbuilding both spine-tingling and hilarious. More will undoubtedly come from this game, in the form of DLC and possibly even more, with the way it ties itself into other Remedy universes, and as much as I expect I will love it, the refreshing experience this base game offered me likely can’t be beat.

4. Anodyne 2

I awaited Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka’s new game more anxiously than almost any game that came out this year, despite never having played the first one, exclusively on my love for last year’s singular All Our Asias and the promise that this game would greatly expand on that one’s Saturn/PS1-esque early 3D graphics and personal, heartfelt storytelling. Not only was I not disappointed, I was regularly pleasantly surprised by the depth of narrative and themes the game navigates. This game takes the ‘legendary hero’ tropes of a Zelda game and flips them to tell a story about the importance of community and taking care of loved ones over duty to governments or organizations. The dungeons that similarly reflect a Link to the Past-era Zelda game reduce the maps to bite-sized, funny, clever designs that ask you to internalize unique mechanics that result in affecting conclusions. Plus, it’s gorgeously idiosyncratic in its blend of 3D and 2D environments and its pretty but off-kilter score. It’s hard to believe something this full and well realized came from two people.

3. Eliza

Eliza is a work of dystopian fiction so closely resembling the state of the world in 2019 it’s hard to even want to call it sci-fi. As a proxy for the Eliza app, you speak the words of an AI therapist that offers meager, generic suggestions as a catch-all for desperate people facing any number of the nightmares of our time. The first session you get is a man reckoning with the state the world is in - we’ve only got a few more years left to save ourselves from impending climate crisis, destructive development is rendering cities unlivable for anyone but the super-rich, and the people who hold all the power are just making it all worse. The only thing you offer to him is to use a meditation app and take some medication. It doesn’t take long for you to realize that this whole structure is much less about helping struggling people and more about mining personal data.

There’s much more to this story than the grim state of mental health under late capitalism, though. It’s revealed that Evelyn, the character you play as, has a much closer history with Eliza than initially evident. Throughout the game, she’ll reacquaint herself with old coworkers, including her two former bosses who have recently split and run different companies over their differing frightening visions for the future. The game offers a biting critique of the kind of tech company optimism that brings rich, eccentric men to believe they can solve the world’s problems within the hyper-capitalist structure they’ve thrived under, and how quickly this mindset gives way to techno-fascism. There’s also Evelyn’s former team member, Nora, who has quit the tech world in favor of being a DJ “activist,” and her current lead Rae, a compassionate person who genuinely believes in the power of Eliza to better people’s lives. The writing does an excellent job of justifying everyone’s points of view and highlighting the limits of their ideology without simplifying their sense of morality.

Why this game works so well isn’t just its willingness to stare in the face of uncomfortably relevant subject matter, but its ultimately empathetic message. It offers no simple solutions to the world’s problems, but also avoids falling into utter despair. Instead, it places measured but inspiring faith in the power of making small, meaningful impacts on the people around you, and simply trying to put some good into your world. It’s a game both terrifying and comforting in its frank conclusions.

2. Death Stranding

For a game as willfully dumb as this one often is - that, for example, insists on giving all of its characters with self-explanatory names long monologues about how they got that name - Death Stranding was one of the most thought provoking games I’ve played in a while. Outside of its indulgent, awkwardly paced narrative, the game offers plenty of reflection on the impact the internet has had on our lives. As Sam Porter Bridges, you’re hiking across a post-apocalyptic America, reconnecting isolated cities by delivering supplies, building infrastructure, and, probably most importantly, connecting them to the Chiral Network, an internet of sorts constructed of supernatural material of nebulous origin. Through this structure, the game offers surprisingly insightful commentary about the necessity for communication, cooperation, and genuine love and care within a community.

The lonely world you’re tasked to explore, and the way you’re given blips of encouragement within the solitude through the structures and “likes” you give and receive through the game’s asynchronous multiplayer system, offers some striking parallels for those of us particularly “online” people who feel simultaneous desperation for human contact and aversion to social pressures. I’ve heard the themes of this game described as “incoherent” due to the way it seems to view the internet both as a powerful tool to connect people and a means by which people become isolated and alienated, but are both of these statements not completely true to reality? The game simplifies some of its conclusions - Kojima seems particularly ignorant of America’s deep structural inequities and abuses that lead to a culture of isolation and alienation. And yet, the questions it asks are provocative enough that they compelled me to keep thinking about them far longer than the answers it offers.

Beyond the surprisingly rich thematic content, this game is mostly just a joy to play. Death Stranding builds kinetic drama out of the typically rote parts of games. Moving from point A to point B has become an increasingly tedious chore in the majority of AAA open world games, but this is a game built almost entirely out of moving from point A to point B, and it makes it thrilling. The simple act of walking down a hill while trying to balance a heavy load on your back and avoiding rocks and other obstacles fulfills the promise of the term ‘walking simulator’ in a far more interesting way than most games given that descriptor. The game consistently doles out new ways to navigate terrain, which peaked for me about two thirds of the way through the game when, after spending hours setting up a network of zip lines, a delivery offered me the opportunity to utilize the entire thing in a wildly satisfying journey from one end of the map to another. It was the gaming moment of the year.

1. Outer Wilds

The first time the sun exploded in my Outer Wilds playthrough, I was probably about to die anyway. I had fallen through a black hole, and had yet to figure out how to recover from that, so I was drifting listlessly through space with diminishing oxygen as the synths started to pick up and I watched the sun fall in on itself and then expand throughout the solar system as my vision went went. The moment gave me chills, not because I wasn’t already doomed anyway, but because I couldn’t help but think about my neighbors that I had left behind to explore space. I hadn’t known that mere minutes after I left the atmosphere the solar system would be obliterated, but I was at least able to watch as it happened. They probably had no idea what happened. Suddenly their lives and their planet and everything they had known were just...gone. And then I woke up, with the campfire burning in front of me, and everyone looking just as I had left it. And I became obsessed with figuring out how to stop that from happening again.

What surprised me is that every time the sun exploded, it never failed to produce those chills I felt the first time. This game is masterful in its art, sound, and music design that manages to produce feelings so intense from an aesthetic so quaint. Tracking down fellow explorers by following the sound of their harmonica or acoustic guitar. Exploring space in a rickety vessel held together by wood and tape. Translating logs of conversations of an ancient alien race and finding the subject matter of discussion to be about small interpersonal drama as often as it is revelatory secrets of the universe. All of the potentially twee aspects of the game are balanced out by an innate sense of danger and terror that comes from exploring space and strange worlds alone. At times, the game dips into pure horror, making other aspects of the presentation all the more charming by comparison. And then there’s the clockwork machinations of the 22-minute loop you explore within, rewarding exploration and experimentation with reveals that make you feel like a genius for figuring out the puzzle at the same time that you’re stunned by the divulgence of a new piece of information.

The last few hours of the game contained a couple puzzles so obfuscated that I had to consult a guide, which admittedly lessened the impact of those reveals, but it all led to one of the most equally devastating and satisfying endings I’ve experienced in a video game recently. I really can’t say enough good things about this game. It’s not only my favorite game this year, but easily one of my favorite games of the decade, and really, of all-time, when it comes down to it.

#outer wilds #death stranding #eliza #anodyne 2 #control #judgment #resident evil 2 #fire emblem: three houses #Ape Out #Amid Evil #games #video games #GOTY

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xexilia · 4 years

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I notice when you do your comics, it applies a certain level of toner. I ended up deciding on the route of using paint brush india ink, and charcoal for toner instead. Does this aesthetic difference change the marketability of graphic novel, compared to just using toner? In the context of the prologue in this web comic, it is used to denote a fog atmosphere. In the upcoming chapter, I might use it for graveyard fog.

I think first I need to establish that what you mean by “toner” is “shading”?

I do use tones, but tonER is the stuff used in and by physical printers. Print tones refer to the dots, lines, etc. that are present in the majority of my work and that Roy Lichtenstein emulated in his paintings. Tones are dots because that’s how printers print; Thousands of dots. The closer together, the more solid the shade or color is. I’m not trying to correct you on terms, but knowing this difference will help you later because I promise, if you buy toner online and expect to get tones, you’ll be disappointed by what arrives in the mail!

So, I think you’re falling into a common trap webcomic artists make in the beginning, which is focusing on the wrong parts of the project. You asked me if this changes marketability; But you didn’t tell me:

What medium do you want to publish in? Do you want to ONLY have your comics online, or do you want to print them?

Who is your target audience and age group?

Do you want to sell or profit off your webcomic?

The first question is important because far too often, webcomic artists design for the web/screens first, foremost, and only; Later, they decide to print a book, and this is when all hell breaks loose. Lots of media (Charcole, watercolors, etc.—media is the art term for materials) can look both better OR WORSE on a screen—this is where technology comes into play, like the scanner you have, the DPI (dots per inch) its able to scan things in at, and the size of scannable area. A lot of my favorite media and mediums (I like pencil on paper), are really delicate drawings—and like a lot of artists who favor these materials, scanners just never seem to do them justice. Lots of fine artists I talk to admit that they feel their work looks best in person, and no matter how high the quality scanner, small, delicate details get lost. Part of it can be a cheap scanner, the wrong DPI setting, but the other part can be the wrong medium (That’s the term for things like canvas or paper), or the wrong SIZE medium.

Size matters; Both in terms of the scanner surface area AND the size of your medium. A lot of people (And I did this myself for a lot of the first book), work on standard size paper—8.5 by 11 inches; But professional artists, print or not, are always better off to work at a LARGER size than the end result will be. When I printed my book, I didn’t come out too terribly for the size I worked in, because manga book page sizes are smaller than their American counter parts. I also knew I planned to print from the first page onward, so everything was designed for print first and web second—this is much easier and less time consuming to do than the reverse, because a lot of print errors can occur that don’t appear on screens—and literally can’t—and can take hours, days, weeks or more to fix, depending on how bad and common the issue is and how many of your pages have this problem. A big one is called moire, which DOES NOT show up on screens; This happens when an artist applies on tone directly over another. Because most of us work digitally these days, it’s even easier for artists to start doing this and not realize the consequence until you print a book. . .and discover all places where tones overlap create this weird square pattern within them—which is called moire. This is why it’s critical to use separate tones for different shades and such, because unlike solid color printing, you cannot overlay tones like you would layers in Photoshop or other such programs. Ignore this at your peril!

My first suggestion before you go to far is; Of you want to ever, EVER print this, print out a copy of a page at home. Even if you’re happy with it, consider how you may be printing or mass producing these things; If you’re going to make them via a copier at Kinko’s, take a page down to a copier at Kinko’s and see what quality you get. If you don’t like it at full size to the ratio you worked in (In other words, printing on the same size paper you created it on), you can get some improvement by using smaller pages—but going UP in page size will cause quality to drop. I now work on paper—digital or not—that’s always 11 by 17 inches AT LEAST. For anything I make, I try to work in a size 3 to 4 times larger than the end result will be.

When I first began, I made my comics with a copier at Kinko’s, and discovered while my ink wash method looked good, it looked better with color printing; Color printing is ALWAYS more expensive, hence why when digital comic creation tools (Like Clip Studio) got invented, I was an instant convert! It saved a lot of time and money (Tones and such are all expensive), the environment (No trees died for my drawings), effort (Tones are REALLY tricky to work with by hand), and it’s no wonder that manga artists now are nearly ALL working digitally.

Also, for the disabled (Like me), digital allows us to work from beds, at home, etc. instead of in front of a desk, all hunched over. I don’t accidentally smudge ink, my cat doesn’t drink my ink (Yes, it’s a thing cats do!), and if I mess up, the power of Undo/Redo/Copy/Paste/Transform CANNOT be understated. I’ve mentioned it before, but I believe in working smarter, NOT harder. This is why I draw out a lot of backgrounds (Which you can’t see on the free copies online, but you can if you buy a physical copy or the Amazon eBook), separately, and I can just drag and drop them around as I need. That way, I can focus on drawing the characters and not on drawing a giant cathedral for every damn appearance it makes or scene change I do.

As for marketability; A lot of this depends on your target audience and age group. Even so, people tend to grow to like something even if it may be atypical of the general stuff they like. I’m generally not a fan of shoujo-ai—but many of my favorite anime and manga ARE in this genre! Turns out, if the story is good, I don’t care about the sexuality of the characters!

A lot of people expect or want color comics these days though, which is odd to me, since the manga produced in Japan is in black and white (Color printing is expensive—even for a major publishing company!) People still read it, and those who expect an artist to make a free webcomic with color pages and update several times a week or month aren’t aware of the time, effort, or consequences. Generally; No, they will NOT buy a book they’ve read for free online (As much as people love to say to support us creators, they rarely actually do), and they damn sure won’t pay for the extra cost of color printing. If you want to see the difference, check out Ka-Blam comic printers and do a price comparison between printing pages in color versus black and white.

Yes, there are people who do a Kickstarter and such and get these funds up front; They are exceptions, not the rules. Consider them—and most artists who make comics or art they make of their own choosing (Not commissions, but only originals), the same as you might someone who plays a sport and decides that they are GOING to play professionally for some orginazation or team—which is, they are counting on being in this LESS THAN 1% of their field. Yes, some people pull it off; The vast majority don’t—and skill isn’t the biggest factor in the end. Just like an athlete with all the promise in the world can have their career ended before it’s begun by an injury that never heals right, art itself is a career path with MANY hidden pitfalls and problems—and health is a major one. Too many of us don’t eat right, don’t exercise our bodies and minds, and so on; It adds up. I personally really recommend a diet with a caloric/carb intake ratio that works within your activity levels; In other words, if you’re determined not to work out (Which—don’t make this mistake), you can’t eat as much as you’d like—not only will you gain weight, but it impacts your health health, your blood sugar—it can be a recipe for an early, but preventable, grave or a LOT of suffering that could be avoided. I try to jog at least two miles a day, meditate daily, and really put my health as the main focus in my life—even before my art. I can’t draw anything or write more stories if I’m dead, after all, and I can’t produce my best work if I’m not in the best condition I can manage. With an autoimmune disease, there’s only so much I can do or control and I’m often still very sick and in a lot of pain; But I still do all I can to run or walk two miles—at least, and even if it takes me an hour or more—and to keep my heart rate at 120 beats per min. when I do. There’s a lot of days where this is about the ONLY thing I can manage and where my pain is so bad I cry and cry—because right now I don’t have a lot of means of relief; This doesn’t happen to everyone, but it means that health—no matter what you do in life—can make or break you at times. Audiences aren’t always understanding of these circumstances and yes, ones career can dry up as a result. Just because someone manages to play for the sports team of their dreams doesn’t mean their health can’t or won’t turn on them, or a serious injury will end their career; We do not live in a world where people will continue to support you because of a series of or singular unfortunate event.

This brings me to the last point, which is if you plan to sell or profit off your work; We all want to, but often making sales can come at the cost of producing something that we, as the creators, really love or are passionate about. I decided from the jump that, while profiting was nice, I’d much rather make the title I wanted to make rather than the one that sells the most copies; If I were concerned with it, trust me, Eternity Concepts would be a wildly different story, with different art, etc. I’d have written a formulaic story that was entirely predictable and changed so many aspects, you’d never recognize it; Manga fans tend to be teens, so I’d have made the cast all teenagers! It’d be set in school! Someone might magically transform to fight evil or some such thing.

I didn’t want that; If you do, there’s no shame in that, but audiences will keep buying and reading what we keep producing, and if we’re too afraid to take a risk on a chance that our story won’t make a dime—because making a dime is the most important part for you—then we can’t be surprised when it’s what people keep buying—because we aren’t even attempting to sell anything else.

Publishing houses (With novels and such) can be really guilty of pushing for changes based on market research; The thing is, the research is often based off past sales of what’s already in the market. Plenty of novels that became classics and best sellers got rejected for years and years until a publishing company was willing to take a chance and discovered that people can, will, and do enjoy new and different things. They might also do market focus group testing—but these are small sample sizes of average people—and your audience may NOT be average people.

All creative pursuits involve risks, at the end of the day; You just have to decide what rewards you want or are willing to sacrifice if you take them.

As for aesthetics, there’s no accounting for taste and I’ve seen plenty of paintings I hated sell for insane amounts of money, plenty of art styles I hated become popular titles, etc.

I will say this; When I, PERSONALLY, see a comic with tones or color, usually that’s digitally produced (It cuts out the need for a scanner!), it looks to me like it’s professionally made—by someone who is on their way or already at such a level.

While a lot of newer artists try to make do with other materials, again, the world is not a kind place and making do is just that—making do. Yes, there are a million and one reasons why one can’t get their hands on better or more professional materials—but sadly, people don’t want to hear excuses, and many successful artists got their tools by working jobs they hated, saving up, living in their cars—making major sacrifices to get to where they are now. There’s no easy road or shortcuts to the end; Yes, I do, sadly, think the mixed media approach you’re trying won’t be favorable towards your marketability—but I could always be wrong (Look at how many MS Paint comics made it big!) There’s a first time for everything.

Comics, though, is also about production speed, and traditional materials can come at the cost of working quicker. I’m a big fan of suggesting people save and wait and invest (And it IS an investment) in serious materials and tools if they wish to be seen and taken as seriously; This means making sacrifices and at the end of the day, plenty of people still won’t like what you make, no matter what tools you have or plot you employ. The person who NEEDS to like it most? . . .Is only you.

You cannot please all of the people all of the time, and the faster you accept that, the happier you’ll be with what you make.

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they-did-what-to-allura · 6 years

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My letter for the @justice-for-allura project. Posting mostly to remind anybody who might be lurking that this is a thing, and it’s a cool thing. If you feel bad bout how Allura’s story went down and wanna make your points known, this is a great opportunity for it.

Edit: Changed some things, fixed a couple typos and reworded some points for clarification.

To the Voltron Team, DreamWorks, to Any and All Involved with the Decision to Kill Off Allura,

Let me begin by thanking the team for giving us this iteration of Allura to begin with. She is a beloved character to many fans. If she wasn’t such a great character, there wouldn’t be so many of us upset about the way her story ended. So, thank you for Allura. She was an amazing character with interesting layers of personality and a delightful design.

In this letter I will explain not only why I was personally disheartened by her death, but also why I believe it was a poor choice to make in terms of writing and the larger narrative.

On the personal end, I related very much to Allura. I empathize with the trauma of losing loved ones and it was cathartic for me to see a character lose so much, but not be defined by that loss. A character who retained a multifaceted personality that included a playful streak, a love of sparkly things, a sense of justice, and abundant courage. She is not reduced to her loss even though it impacts her journey as a character.

Allura’s struggle with Alfor’s corrupted AI also deeply resonated with me. While this is coming from a rather abstract point, it reminds me of my own struggle with a father who is an addict. Allura had to let Alfor’s AI go in spite of how painful it was, in spite of the better memories haunting her every step of the way. The possibility I will have to let my own father go is a very real one because he has made it clear he will never change. His addiction has effectively corrupted our relationship and fed into my own stints with substance abuse. This will be an unspeakably painful decision for me and we have many happier memories that reel through my mind every moment I even contemplate making it.

To relate to a character, to be inspired by a character and her persistence, and then watch her die…really blows. My stomach sank. I felt like crap. I felt even crappier upon hearing that my friend’s nine year old niece sobbed when she watched the ending. I doubt we related to Allura for the same reasons, but I do know that Allura was her favorite character. So with that, I’ll get into the less personal and more objective reasons as to why I feel Allura’s death was a horrible decision.

Firstly, VLD is geared toward younger audiences. I know VLD has a notable periphery demographic, with many older teens and adults such as myself watching and being in the fandom. I know sometimes this periphery demographic can be louder than the intended audience, which I can only assume is children due to the toys and easy-read supplemental materials. VLD has a Y-7 rating, so even if the volume of the periphery demographic drowns out that of the intended, the rating alone demonstrates that this is a show that’s at the least meant to be accessible to children.

Children are impressionable. Representation is important for people of all ages, of course, but it is especially important to children. Kids connect more easily to media where they can see themselves and for the good or the ill, fictional characters can be role models for children.

Allura was a non-white female leader, described in-universe as the “Heart of Voltron.” That’s amazing! That’s truly rare. It’s sad that it’s rare. It’s 2019 and there should be a plethora of non-white female protagonists for young girls of color to look up to. But there aren’t.

Allura was fantastic representation for young girls of color. Representation they hardly ever get. I cannot see a single good reason to take that representation away from them. In fact, it seems downright mean to take that away from them. I do not want the excuse that the staff weren’t aware of the importance of representation, either. You can’t promote the show with official art like this:

…and claim you’re unaware of how important representation is. Particularly for children, for whom this show was rated as being appropriate for.

I do not feel the excuse that this show was about war is reasonable either. Yes, in real life, war is painful. Lives are lost indiscriminately. This was one of the justifications cited for Adam’s death when VLD was criticized for portraying the “Bury Your Gays” trope. However, VLD had already made it clear that war had costs. The Arusian village was destroyed purposely to bait the team. Several Blades of Marmora lost their lives aiding the team. The costs of war were very clear early on in the show. Allura certainly didn’t have to die to reinforce a theme that had already been reinforced several times prior.

On that note, it is very telling that an apology letter was sent for the death of a character who had all of two minutes of screen time, but not for Allura, a major protagonist.

Many people are offended by Allura’s death, feeling that it is racist and sexist. I do not want to believe that Allura’s death was intended to be either of these things. However, there are serious unfortunate implications in killing off your only WoC in the main cast that cannot be ignored. VLD is fictional but it exists in a real world, where real people are impacted by these issues.

While Allura’s death ultimately feels disrespectful given what she represented and its sheer pointlessness in the story, I see attempts at respect in its overall framing. Allura is revered as a hero. There is a statue built in her honor. She has a legacy. These are things that generally shape the celebration of a fallen hero. But even within the framing, there are mixed signals. Most notably, her loved ones take cheery selfies in font of her monument. In my personal opinion, that is the antithesis to an attempted respectful tone.

And I specifically use the word ‘attempted’ because despite the framing, Allura’s death does not actually come across as respectful in the least. It is crammed into the last nine minutes of the final episode. It is immediately followed by a flash forward to the future. Neither the characters nor the audience have time to mourn her. I do not want to hear the excuse that Allura’s death isn’t offensive because “she died as a hero.” Simply because something may be framed to be respectful doesn’t mean it actually is. The poor execution of that attempted framing itself is one of the lesser of many harmful messages sent by the decision to kill Allura off.

In a world where representation is important, an importance that is acknowledged by the staff, somehow someone still came to the conclusion that Allura’s narrative should end in death. Intent aside, her death falls into the “Disposable Woman” cliche, and is especially gutting because she is a WoC. I cannot reiterate how rare it is to see characters like Allura, non-white women that serve as major protagonists.

Allura suffered unduly throughout the series. She lost an entire planet, her family, her home, her title, and eventually her life. She was always a giving character. She was willing to sacrifice herself to save the Balmera as early as season one. It is noble of her to have that kind of dedication, I’m not saying it isn’t. But girls are socialized to sacrifice their happiness for others, it is a message they internalize at multiple levels.

Girls are socialized to put others before themselves and to sacrifice, and this expectation is especially pressing for girls of color. The SBW (Strong Black Woman) stereotype is a notably prevalent one because of the expectation placed on black women specifically to always be strong and constantly put their own needs last. While Allura is an alien, she is in-universe a minority post Altea’s destruction and IRL, redesigned to be non-white. And many fans, including myself, do see her as specifically black-coded because of her skin tone, hair texture, and having Kimberly Brooks as her voice actress.

A hopeful ending for any character who sacrificed as much as Allura would be one where that character is rewarded for their sacrifice. Where they’re able to find happiness on the other end. Where the audience feels payoff because a character we’ve seen give for so long finally gets. Where the audience feels fulfilled because a character we’ve seen grieve and grieve finally gets to breathe. For kids to see a non-white female character get this kind of ending isn’t only hopeful, but important. Girls— especially girls of color —should be shown that they don’t have to give up everything. Boys should also be shown these narratives, because they shouldn’t internalize the expectation of the girls and women in their lives to constantly sacrifice.

Allura’s sacrifice stands out as particularly glaring when we take into account that teamwork was supposedly one of VLD’s major themes. In a show entitled Voltron: Legendary Defender, wherein the titular robot must be formed by a team, it seems very out of place that it was up to one person to save the day. What was the point of the team bonding with each other, and with the lions, if all of that was going to be rendered useless in the battle that mattered the most?

None of the main characters we’d been led to believe loved each other made any real attempt to find another solution through teamwork. They more or less accepted Allura’s sacrifice at face value even though she was supposedly important to them. The paladins offered some minimal protest, then each gave Allura a hug and just watched her walk to her death. In addition to undercutting the theme of teamwork in the show, it just felt very strange to watch. I didn’t feel like I was watching a team who fought side-by-side at all. These characters felt less connected to each other than they did during the first season and at this point, supposedly they’ve fought side-by-side for years.

Not only did Allura’s lone sacrifice seem to undercut the theme of teamwork, but it just seemed incongruent to the atmosphere of the series. While loss was depicted and prevalent in VLD, nothing ever indicated that it would be a tragedy. Watching Allura’s death play out feels like watching a show that forgot what genre it was supposed to be. The emotional beats aren’t the right ones.

We feel no payoff from her death because it didn’t accomplish anything of value in the narrative. Allura had something to live for after the war, her newfound family and love interest. She didn’t have anything to atone for, unlike Honerva. At best (and I really mean at best here) one could argue that her death contributed to Lance’s development because he spends his life spreading her message after the fact. However, many viewers understandably perceived this as a demotion for Lance with its own set of unfortunate implications. Even if that was the case— which itself feels like grasping at straws for some kind of explanation —I shouldn’t have to point out why it’s extremely problematic for a female character to be killed for her love interest’s development.

Allura’s death felt as pointless as it did out of place. It felt unsatisfying and frankly, just like someone in the writer’s room wanted to be Edgy™ for the sake of it. It also felt particularly mean coming from a team who acknowledged how important representation was to its viewers and who used representation as a promotion point.

VLD is over. That is clear. I do not write this with the intent to get the “real ending” or anything of the like. I write this to express why Allura’s death effected me personally, why I feel it has harmful messages, and why it comes across both as harsh and as poor writing.

I hope all those who were involved with this decision reflect on the feedback from the way her death was perceived, most important the feedback of the WoC in the audience. Major character death should always be handled with care, especially in children’s programs. Representation should always be handled with care, especially in children’s programs. The way Allura’s story ultimately ended feels careless at best and malicious at worst.

Signed,

An Incredibly Disappointed Viewer

#justiceforallura #voltron critical #representation #allura #justice for allura

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shiningliive · 5 years

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💝, 👘, 💭

💝Tell us your OTP?

I don’t really talk about ships here too much since they can alienate people, but I will literally ship anything. I don’t get up in arms about any ship wars or dynamics, literally every pairing has some good quality that can’t be found in any others. rarepairs? hell yeah. dorm pairs? hell yeah. any character with nanami? sign me up. nanami/tomo? amazing. cross uni pairs? Perfect. This goes for any series. I am open to any and every ship, I don’t think I have EvER come across soemthing I won’t ship given a bit of thought.

I would of course have to go with the classic tokioto. I used to roleplay them (but thats another story) and honestly that serious character that melts around puppy character dynamic? hell yeah. I love that theyre both so clearly inspired by eachother. Their designs also work really well together. Of course this could just be my favourite because there is probably the most canon and fanon content for them (although m/m pairs for Utapri seem a bit rarer especially in western fanbase wehere people seem to really focus on /readers in fic.) I could talk about these two for ages, but I’ll do my best to hold back.

You bet I bought heaps of Utapri doujin when I went to comiket.

👘 Favourite outfit set?

Very hard one! I’ll think about this not considering the art of the cards or anything, just the outfits. Not including event sets or single event themes, my favourite set outfit would have to be the Christmas v1 Set, Snowy Night’s Sparkling Stars Christmas Live. Not only does the sethave beautiful art and URs, but I absolutely adore everyones outfits. Usually, When Quartet Night and Starish have different outfits I’ll much prefer one over the other, but here, theyre a lot more uniform, yet still with individual touches. There seem to be three types of jacket, and I’d say my favourite has to be the simple one worn by Cecil, Otoya and Ranmaru. They just look so soft. When Setsugetsuka comes out though, they will probably be my favourite outfits in cards.

Marine and sweets are my two main aesthetics, so of course those two sets are definitely some of my favourites, but thats probably due to the theme rather than the actual outfits. I also really love the simplicity of Caught in the Rain.

Honorable mention to Secret Halloween Nightmare, love the set, lovely outfits, but I generally prefer lighter themes than darker ones.

💭Interaction you’d like to see between characters?

I’ve mentioned before how much I love the canon fact then Ren and Ai are gamer buddies so off the top of ym head, thats the main thing I’d like to see mroe canon content for. Even if Ai wasn’t my best boy, I think this would still be my answer. You’s expect it from Ai, but its that gap with Ren that makes it so appealing. I love to think of them organising weekly or fortnightly 24 hour gaming sessions on the weekends or whenever they’re both free from work. The rest of Starish and Quartet Night know this, and make sure to keep that time free from any group work.

I feel like it would be a really great time for them to unwind from a hard work week, and they probably have that bond where they can just sit there for hours and only talking about the game.

Also joked with friends once that Ai can just play the mmo in his head during work breaks or when hes charging and at the end of the week Ren has to try and catch up. They probably buy eachother in-game currency for their birthdays. nerds I love them.

#ask #ask game #uuh oops this is very long #im trying to write shorter i swear #Anonymous

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ladala99 · 5 years

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Spyro Reignited Countdown - The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night (Console)

If you expected me to review the handheld versions from the title, sorry. I didn’t get those back when the games first came out. I’m considering getting them in the future and I’ll review them if that happens.

But onto The Eternal Night! The first Spyro game that caused me to consider quitting the series after playing! (Spoiler alert: I didn’t)

Gameplay

Basic controls are exactly the same as its direct predecessor, but with some new twists. Melee now lets you chain five air hits rather than three, and now we have the new ability: Dragon Time.

Dragon Time lets you slow down the environment around you. It’s used in some platforming, and it’s extremely useful in combat. It’s also just plain cool. Too bad I didn’t know how to use it properly when I first played!

If A New Beginning is too easy, The Eternal Night takes the opposite approach. Enemy AI has been improved, new types of enemies are sometimes very cheap, enemies respawn after you die and regain all of their health, cheap shots, and to top it all off, cheat codes for infinite health and mana don’t exist in this game when they were advertised to exist. So not only is it harder, but you’re forced to play it at that difficulty.

Okay, with one exception: the Dark Spyro cheat. It makes the game trivially easy, since Dark Spyro’s breath ability is really overpowered and hardly uses any mana. I honestly haven’t beaten the game without using this ability at least to defeat enemies I already beat. The game as designed just isn’t fun for me.

Additional Game Modes/Characters

There’s the Dragon Challenges that unlock after you beat the game. They’re some combat challenges with special rules. So it’s not really a new game mode, just more combat. I actually found them fun when I actually got around to them, though. (Which I think was the third time I played through the game - did them in a completed file alongside my playthrough on a different file)

Collectables

They actually return in this game! It’s not nearly as extensive as the Classic games, but it’s something.

The most common item is the Scriber’s Quill. These unlock concept art. Generally, these are relatively easy to find and get to, but some of them are hidden.

Then there’s Dragon Relics, which give bonuses to your maximum health and mana. These are hidden very well, to the point that I only found one my first playthrough. Some are extremely difficult to navigate to, as well, such as the Ancient Grove one, where you have to platform across small roots that are difficult to stay on.

They’re pretty fun to get, but they have a major problem: there’s no way to access levels you’ve already beaten without looping through a playthrough (beating the game and starting again on the same file). I always use a guide, simply because I haven’t played the game enough to memorize it. And you really shouldn’t have to do that.

But they exist, which is a step up from A New Beginning.

Breath Abilities

We get the same ones as last time, with some changes. Because plot, Spyro has to relearn his abilities again through the game, and they act a little differently this time. It’s mostly just that instead of a ranged attack, now we have a melee elemental attack.

Fire is fire. But no longer do we have fireballs, but instead the Comet Dash! It’s great for dealing a ton of damage or moving quickly. Honestly I don’t use it much, but it became pretty iconic later. So the fact that it originates here is noteworthy!

Ice is next this time around. The main attack is now a burst attack rather than a stream, and can be used to create platforms in water. Whoa, actual puzzles and platforming! There’s also the tail-based melee attack that slows down your enemies’ movement and, depending on the size of the enemy and your own upgrades, sends them flying. That attack alone made Ice my most-used element.

Earth is third. You get this big flail as your primary attack that you can whip around you quickly, attacking all enemies that surround you. The melee is a pulse attack as Spyro jumps and sends energy out in a sphere underneath him. I really didn’t use it much.

Finally, you get access to Lightning Breath. It was overpowered in the first game, so how does it hold up here? It’s usable, I guess. Primary attack is a large electric orb that you can knock away into distant enemies before blowing up. Pretty neat. Melee is a lightning whirlwind, that’s basically Comet Dash but much more controllable. Very powerful, but uses up mana pretty quickly.

Notice we don’t get any overpowered attacks this time around. Still, second attack wins. They’re all useful, though, as some enemies have hidden weaknesses, and they’re all different enough to be used in different situations.

Bosses

There’s a lot of them, but many are very similar to one another. Not even sure whether to call a lot of these boss fights or alternate game modes since they’re played a lot differently than the rest of the game.

The Assassin and all the Skurvywings fights are all pretty much the same. You’re on a 2D plane where you can move back and forth, and jump, while sending fire (and only fire) out to your opponent, who is flying around. The main difference between these fights is the distance between you and your opponent, and thus when you can hit them. The hardest part is dodging, but using Dragon Time makes it manageable. I find these fights pretty fun, since they have a different playstyle than usual.

Arborick uses the same controls as above, but with a twist: you need to attack all of the different parts of the body to proceed. I think in a specific order, too, but I don’t quite recall. There’s also a second round where you just attack as quickly as you can and dodge his attacks. Pretty creative and fun boss.

Fellmuth Arena is pretty much “lets take some bosses and minibosses from A New Beginning and have you fight them here in a small arena!”

We’ve got the Blunder Tails, which are some optional enemies in A New Beginning. This time, they’re both aggressive at the same time, and their AI’s a bit better. You have to use melee carefully to beat them. It’s a little tough with both of them after you, but they’re only mini-bosses, so it’s doable.

Hey, remember Steam? I bet you do! The Ravage Rider is identical to him! Except he only has two health bars instead of three, so he’s a little easier!

And finally, the Executioner. The guide I use says he’s identical to the Ice and Electric Kings from A New Beginning, but there is a fairly major difference here: you can’t spam ranged attacks if you don’t have any! Just that fact alone makes the fight a lot harder - you need to fight him like you were supposed to in the first place! *gasp*

Next up is Skabb, who is a boss that acts like a boss should. Dodge his attacks, wait until he rests, and beat on him when he does. You’ve seen this kind of boss as far back as A Hero’s Tail. (before that, you generally were using the environment or powerups to fight rather than your normal attacks)

The Elemental Spirits are more copies of the Ice and Electric King, but this time you’re limited to just one element when you fight them. Hope you upgraded more than just Ice! (I think you can also use Dark Spyro here if you’re cheap, though)

Remember Cynder’s fight from the first game? What if she was crazy aggressive and you could only use one element at a time on her? What if you simply can’t cheese her because Dark Spyro doesn’t work? Honestly, it’s a very fun fight. Although I think I mostly love it because the first time I completed the game, I spammed Dark Spyro everywhere I could, and here I was forced not to. And I had fun.

Finally, Gaul. you lose your breath abilities against him, meaning you’re forced to fight him with melee. It makes a very fun and intense fight. Second round you get access to Dark Spyro, but you aren’t completely out of the water as he still has some fight left in him. Dark Spyro’s still really overpowered, though. Still, you’ll need it. I had a blast the first time I actually got to him. Again, being forced not to use Dark Spyro (and then being in a fight where you have to use Dark Spyro) made it a lot of fun.

So in general, very varied, and there’s a ton of bosses here. Some are copy-pasted from A New Beginning, but with the increased difficulty, they feel new enough to work, and some limit what you can use against them.

Levels

Much more varied compared to the first game. Maybe not necessarily in style, but definitely in gameplay. There’s so much more platforming and cleverer puzzles scattered around. You need to make full use of Dragon Time and Spyro’s Elemental abilities not only to fight, but simply to get through each level.

The levels themselves are also well-themed and not nearly as cliche as in the first game. Okay, crystal-based caves are pretty cliche, as well as evil volcanoes. But Skabb’s Fleet, come on! Flying pirate ships manned by dogs!

I can say I definitely had a lot more fun maneuvering in this game than in tits predecessor.

Story

Honestly, a whole lotta nothing happens in this game. It’s basically the filler episode of the series. The storytelling is still incredibly well-done, but really, it all boils down to rescuing the princess dragoness.

So Cynder feels all guilty about the first game and tries to leave the Dragon Temple. Spyro tries to go after her, but unfortunately the Dragon Temple ends up under attack and Spyro has to go help.

After defending the Temple, Spyro gets a vision from this Chronicler guy and is instructed to find a special tree in a forest. Ignitus encourages him to follow his advice, and Spyro goes on to look for that tree.

Tree turns out to be Arborick. Who some pirates were in the middle of capturing for their arena tournament. They capture Spyro, too, for good measure, because he happened to pass out to learn a new breath ability at a bad time.

Spyro is forced to participate in the arena challenges. Turns out they captured Cynder, too, though. But Cynder is captured again by Gaul the Ape King’s forces. And Spyro has to break himself out of this situation to go after them. Oh, and Hunter of Avalar has a note delivered. He never really appears in this game.

He does, and promptly passes out in the middle of the ocean for another lesson. Luckily this turtle-guy you’ll never see again was there to rescue him. And take him to the Celestial Caves, where Spyro has to make it through the Chronicler’s security system before finally meeting the king of bad timing himself.

Spyro learns that Cynder has been captured by Gaul to be used to summon the Dark Master or something. Spyro wants to go after her. The Chronicler tells him to “ride out the storm. Live to fight another day,” basically telling him to stay there and stay safe.

Spyro say no way and escapes, traveling to the Mountain of Malefor and the Well of Souls to rescue Cynder. He faces Gaul, but not before the Celestial Moons do their thing and Spyro gets caught up in the corruption. He turns into Dark Spyro and brutally kills Gaul. It takes Cynder knocking him out of the beam to snap him out of it.

The cave crumbles around them, and there’s no escape. Spyro remembers the Chronicler’s words, and uses his time powers to freeze them in crystal. There they would be stuck, until Hunter finds them. Cue credits.

So yeah. But again, the storytelling is amazing despite what it is and I had a blast watching and experiencing it. The atmosphere’s great, and I really loved the sketchbook style some of the cutscenes had.

Once I saw the ending (because I think I looked it up on YouTube; I didn’t beat the game until many years later), I couldn’t wait for the next game. Mostly to watch it, because I had decided that if it was going to be this hard, I wouldn’t get it again. Sadly, this series never got a real conclusion in the same style.

Unique in the Series?

In many ways, yes. Dragon Time never shows up again, and thus a lot of the gameplay is completely unique because a lot of the game relies on it.

In other ways, it’s very similar to A New Beginning.

Conclusion

I gave up on this game because I didn’t like Action games at that age. Once I got older, and actually appreciated Action games a bit more, I learned to love this game.

Sure, it’s not perfect. Sure, I do need to cheat to fully enjoy it (because it’s not fun fighting cheap enemies you’ve already beaten. I just blast them until I get back to where I was before). But it’s a really solid game and a ton of fun.

On it’s own right, I think it’s just as good as the classic trilogy. It’s just a completely different genre. It’s a shame in hindsight that it didn’t do well enough for Krome to finish the series.

#spyro #the legend of spyro #the eternal night #video game review #spyro reignited

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bunnyadvocate · 6 years

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Analysing Anime Fan Priorities

How much does the aesthetic of an anime influence how much you enjoy it? Does it matter more or less than the music? Subjective questions like these can seem unanswerable when applied to the fandom as a whole, but due to the way MyAnimeList splits its review scores into music/animation/story/character/enjoyment categories, we might be able to determine which of these is most influential. We can also see how different genres compare on these categories, and possible differences in how each gender rates anime.

Data collection

I collected 48,526 reviews from the 5752 most popular anime on MAL. To prevent a few super-popular anime from dominating the results, a maximum of 20 reviews were collected from each anime. I then collected any public demographic information listed on each reviewer’s profile page to determine their age and gender.

Category importance

When reviewing an anime, MyAnimeList allows you split your rating into 6 categories: story, animation, sound, character, enjoyment, and an overall rating. If you really care about one of these categories more than the others, then we could expect to see a link between the rating you give your favourite category and your overall anime rating.

So for example, if you really care about the stories in anime, those anime you give a high story rating to are also those you’re more likely to give a high overall rating to. Alternatively if you don’t care about a category, we’d expect that there wouldn’t be much of a link between them. So if you don’t care about animation, we could expect a mix of higher and lower animation ratings among your most highest rated overall anime.

The technical term for this link between categories is the Pearson correlation coefficient, which sounds intimidating but all you need to understand is that a result of -1 means there’s a negative correlation (i.e. you rate X in the opposite way to Y, so if you rate X high then you rate Y low). A result of 0 means there’s no connection between how you rate X and Y, and a result of 1 means that you always rate X in proportion to Y. So if you rate X high then you always rate Y high and vice versa.

If we apply this calculation to the MAL categories we get this...

Overall Male reviewers Female reviewers Story 0.847 0.843 0.863 Animation 0.657 0.667 0.649 Sound 0.697 0.707 0.690 Character 0.853 0.854 0.856 Enjoyment 0.894 0.896 0.898

As would be expected, all the correlations are positive, so if you rate a category higher you’re more likely to rate the overall anime higher, but what’s important is the ranking of the categories. We can see that for a reviewer’s overall score, their enjoyment is the most important factor, then character, followed closely by story, then sound, and lastly animation. This seems to make sense, as we typically associate what we enjoy with what we think is good, and anime is watched primarily for entertainment, so of course we care about that the most.

Both story and character ratings are almost equally as important as enjoyment, so plot really does mean more than “PLOT” for most reviewers. I was a little surprised that sound mattered more than animation for reviewers, as I view anime more as a visual medium than an auditory one, but seemingly I’m in the minority.

The third and fourth columns are the correlation results when we filter the reviewers by their gender. For sound, character, and enjoyment, there’s practically no difference. But men tend to have a higher animation correlation and women a higher story correlation. This might reflect the large amount of male-targeted fanservice in anime, so female fans focus more on the story while the male fans ogle the underage girls.

Complimenting categories

We’ve looked at how important each category is to the overall score, but we haven’t looked at how those categories overlap and are could be linked to one another. If we calculate the correlation coefficient between categories, we can see which categories tend to go hand-in-hand. The results are presented both in radar chart form (which is prettier but harder to read) and as a table.

Each coloured “flower petal” represents a category, with it reaching closer to categories it overlaps with. Each category always correlates most with itself.

Story Animation Sound Character Enjoyment Story x 0.578 0.634 0.821 0.804 Animation 0.578 x 0.699 0.605 0.611 Sound 0.634 0.699 x 0.661 0.658 Character 0.821 0.605 0.661 x 0.830 Enjoyment 0.804 0.611 0.658 0.830 x

The categories can be roughly sorted into 2 groups: the character, story, and enjoyment ratings are all closely linked, and then animation and sound are outliers who link slightly more to each other than anything else, but still less so than the other core 3 character/story/enjoyment categories do.

It makes intuitive sense that the story and character ratings would be linked, you can’t have a good story without good characters, and good characters can’t shine without a good story. Sound and animation also compliment each other well, as they both work on our senses directly and a studio that’s competent in one is probably more likely to be competent in the other too.

Genre rankings

We can see how each genre ranks for each category by looking at the average rating anime in that genre got, so if you care about a specific aspect of anime, you’ll know which genre to find it in.

Story Animation Sound Character Enjoyment Josei Samurai Music Josei Sports Historical Thriller Thriller Sports Josei Thriller Josei Josei Historical Cars Sports Historical Space Slice of Life Historical Drama Space Historical Parody Slice of Life Space Slice of Life Mystery Samurai Kids Mystery Kids Cars Shounen Parody Kids Mystery Samurai Shoujo Thriller Military Hentai Sports Thriller Samurai Samurai Military Military Drama Shounen Slice of Life Drama Kids Comedy Space Shoujo Sports Drama Seinen Music Demons Music Psychological Kids Seinen Shounen Fantasy Slice of Life Mystery Comedy Police Mecha Shounen Adventure Drama Psychological Sci-Fi Mecha Demons Military Cars Police Adventure Music Shoujo Adventure Supernatural Game Space Mystery Seinen Psychological Sci-Fi Military Adventure Music Adventure Supernatural Romance Hentai Supernatural Cars Seinen Cars Police Romance Shounen Shoujo Game Demons Comedy Super Power Fantasy Shoujo Ai Shoujo Ai Game Shoujo Ai Parody Police Game Fantasy Action Magic Magic School Mecha Seinen Romance School Romance Sci-Fi Romance Police Supernatural Fantasy Magic Magic Super Power Fantasy Supernatural Parody Shoujo Action Hentai Mecha Action Demons Demons Super Power Magic Shoujo Ai Comedy Comedy Psychological Sci-Fi School Game Shoujo Ai Sci-Fi Psychological Super Power Parody School Action Super Power Shounen Ai School Hentai Mecha Action Horror Yuri Vampire Martial Arts Shounen Ai Vampire Vampire Harem Shounen Ai Yuri Hentai Harem Martial Arts Yuri Martial Arts Martial Arts Martial Arts Dementia Vampire Harem Dementia Ecchi Horror Harem Vampire Harem Dementia Shounen Ai Ecchi Horror Ecchi Horror Ecchi Horror Ecchi Yaoi Shounen Ai Yuri Dementia Dementia Yuri Yaoi Yaoi Yaoi Yaoi

This table is ranked with the genres having the highest average rating in that category at the top, and the lowest average genres at the bottom.

We’ve already proven that the ratings in each category is linked, so of course genres that tend to do well in one genre also do well in the others, but there are some interesting outliers, a few of which I’ll comment on.

Thrillers and mysteries tend to focus more on atmosphere, with good ratings for story, animation, and sound, but fall short on their characters and overall enjoyment. This is a shame as character motivations are vitally important to my enjoyment of these anime.

Porn genres tend to do well in terms of animation and enjoyment, but their “oops did I accidentally release a tentacle monster” plots leave something to be desired.

Superhero content seems to be quite superficial, doing better with their visuals and sound but poorly with story or enjoyment.

Sci-fi tends to do better in its aesthetics than it does in story. As a literary sci-fi fan, I’m disappointed at this. There are so many fantastic sci-fi plots out there.

Slice of content does well with its characters and enjoyment, but of course the plot isn’t anything special.

Helpful review biases

MyAnimeList allows users to rate which reviews they found helpful, and by default will show an anime’s reviews in order of those reviews that got the most helpful ratings. What kind of factors might influence what you consider helpful?

If we compare the overall rating reviewers gave an anime, we find the most helpful review tends to 0.35 higher than average. So being enthusiastic gets you to the top of the list. But if we look at the top 10 reviews they tend to be 0.18 lower than average. So that one enthusiastic review tends to be followed by more critical reviews, giving a fairly well-rounded set of reviews overall.

Another more contentious factor is the gender of the reviewer. On average, women are ranked 0.31 places lower than male reviewers. There are a lot of possible explanations, perhaps with male profiles outnumbering female ones 2-1 on MAL the male reviewers might be resonating more with the general audience than female ones do, or there might be a degree of sexism involved.

Criticisms

While I’ve had fun analysing the MAL reviews, it’s important not to take any statistic too seriously as there are always complicating factors. The typical person who reviews anime might not be reflective of the average anime fan, or fans may be less inclined to review anime they disliked so we might have a bias in the data.

There’s also the question of whether we’re measuring reviewer’s anime tastes, or reflect inherent correlations in anime production. Studios that are good at animation might also tend to be good at sound design, so the correlation is more about the studio than how reviewers perceived the quality of the anime.

I hope you enjoyed the analysis. I plan to do a follow-up post in a few weeks with some wordclouds for the words that tend to come up more often in positive/negative reviews or specific genres. As a little teaser, here is an early result of which words female reviewers are more likely to use than male ones.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future analyses, please let me know either in the comments here or on twitter.

#anime #myanimelist

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bffhreprise · 5 years

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Entry 268

After leaving the boarding bridge from the plane, I pulled out my phone to double-check the instructions. This all felt so weird to me. If I didn’t trust Jarod, I’d have never accepted the invitation for his bachelor party. The free, first class flight for a vacation covered by James seemed too good to be true, given that he was such a public figure to gamers, but I was part of his guild and didn’t believe Jarod would endanger me.

Still, who provides a phone app with such detail directions, including course-plotted maps, for a weekend vacation? Just how organized were these people? Well, Jarod was a bit ridiculous in his schemes. In any other game, our guild’s coordination would be impossible, but I really doubted many people had mastered Ancient Tribes of Earth’s system as Jarod had.

The map’s directions matched the signs for baggage claim, so I followed them. Supposedly, there would be a car waiting for me right outside. Whoever prepared the maps had even placed a car symbol there, changing colors for the car route. Finally spotting my bag, I grabbed it and headed out. I frowned, only seeing a limo near the door. What was I supposed to be looking for?

“Lake, come on! Don’t make us wait all day.” called Jarod.

I recognized his smiling face from convention pictures. “We’ve got a limo?’ I questioned, realizing as I said the words that it made sense. These people were rich. Okay, so renting a limo for a bachelor party wasn’t exactly uncommon either, but I still hadn’t expected it.

“I’ll take care of your bags.” stated a girl from behind me.

I blinked, staring at the tiny, beautiful girl dressed as a maid.

“Mila’s with us. Hand over the bags and get inside already. We’ve got a schedule!” insisted Jarod, still grinning.

I heard other people laughing from inside. Was everyone else here? I passed off the bags, feeling a little guilty, but the maid girl acted like they were weightless, easily lifting my large, check-in bag and walking around me.

The door for the limo opened as I approached, and I saw James sitting on the other side of Jarod with Aaliyah on his lap. I reminded myself to breathe as I was trying not to freak out. That adorable half-pint with her messy, blonde hair and large, blue eyes had created the most incredible game on the planet, and she was here with us.

The vehicle was in motion before I snapped out of my daze. “Would you mind if I get an autograph later?” I asked, ignoring the laughter.

“Check the app, Lake. She scheduled an autograph time between paintballing and dancing.” asserted Jesse.

Finally seeing faces to match all of the voices was different. I never knew how beautiful Jesse was when she smiled. James, Jarod, and Brandon didn’t even need to speak to be recognizable, despite Brandon having a stand-in at the convention. His red hair was obvious. I knew Shaurya instantly, as the only Indian male in the car. That left Alec and Damien, but I was confident that the older-looking, blond-haired guy was Damien.

As we chatted on our way, I became even more confident in my assessment and started to relax more. This was just like we chatted in game, save that Brandon, James, and Aaliyah were talking directly with me at times. Brandon was the most over-bearing of the guild Generals, but he obviously deferred to James, even in real life. I could understand why.

James was a large man with the face of a model. He came across as even more charming in real life than he had in interviews and on the game, which was really saying something. The other girls were obviously into him, but I had known they were straight.

We ate a light lunch at a local diner, not wanting to be too stuffed during paintballing. I wondered if any of these people had tried it before? My bet was on James, Jarod, and Damien. They’d quickly find out that I knew a bit about it as well.

On the way to the paintball center, Aaliyah gave a short lecture over what was about to happen. Special uniforms were already waiting for us there, so we’d be able to change clothes. We were entered into several team-vs-team fights. To my surprise, Aaliyah was planning on competing too. Did they even allow people her size to play? Wasn’t she really young? Her website claimed she was twelve, but she didn’t look it. Even twelve seemed young for this.

When the first match started, I quickly felt like a novice. The teams we were competing against were amazing compared with the ones I had fought before. Who were these people? I was stunned to find out we had won. Jarod, James, and even Aaliyah were still alive. Between matches, we talked about what had gone wrong, and Jarod gave us a new battle strategy.

Seeing the Generals move in real life was a bit awe-inspiring. They were like video game characters who stepped out into the world to mercilessly destroy our enemies. I had seen people shoot while flipping through the air in movies, but seeing Jarod do that in real life was distracting enough that I forgot to get down. By the fourth match, I was really determined not to get out, even knowing that I couldn’t keep up with these people. Little Aaliyah was surprisingly hard for enemies to hit, and she never seemed to miss. Her skills were probably the freakiest.

Only on the way to the clubs did I find out that we had been up against actual military teams… and won. James had expected us to win, and explained this his company did martial arts training daily. I still didn’t understand how they were so good with paintball guns!

The only big surprise to hit me while we were out clubbing was that Aaliyah was the one with a VIP pass into all the ones we hit. I found some cute girls while we were out, and certainly had a good time being treated like some sort of celebrity. Finding out that we were sleeping on an enormous yacht didn’t even faze me by that point. Of course, I was too tired to really care where I slept.

I had some pretty crazy dreams and felt a bit disoriented when I woke up, but I had no complaints when I smelled breakfast. During the night, the yacht made its way clear to the Bahamas!

A bit of video gaming started right after breakfast, using some super high-spec laptops. I was amazed at how fast our connection was, but again… rich people.

“When you told me the girls had nabbed Marco, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed.” claimed Jarod just before biting into another macaroni and cheese hors d’oeuvres at lunch. “Poor guy doesn’t know what he’s missing. Aaliyah and Mila really have things covered.”

Mila certainly knew how to move. I danced with her a little last night, but she was another one whose focus was mostly on James. He had quickly stolen the show at the clubs.

“Surprisingly, I actually did have some input as well.” replied James defensively.

Jarod laughed and said, “I’m sure, but this is still crazy!”

“Who’s Marco?” questioned Shaurya.

“Marco’s one of our friends and James’ chef. The guy’s cooking is off the hook!” exclaimed Brandon, grinning widely.

“He’s my friend too.” insisted James.

“Oh, Master, no one would question that you consider Marco a friend.” stated Mila, smiling at him. She always referred to him as “Master”, which was a bit unnerving.

“Does she always call you, ‘Master’?” questioned Jesse, looking as confused by it as I felt.

“Of course! He is my master.” replied Mila, still smiling. “I was made to serve him after all.”

“Huh?” asked Jesse.

“My mind was created by mother.” explained Mila, nodding toward Aaliyah. “And my body was then constructed as a joint effort between mother, Jarod, and me.”

“Wow. Thumbs up to you, sir.” teased Damien, winking at Jarod.

“I’m still confused. Are you saying that you’re a machine?” I questioned, feeling like I missed some joke.

“She’s my baby girl!” exclaimed Aaliyah as she grinned at me and patted Mila’s arm.

“She’s really not joking.” insisted Jarod. “Mila, mind giving them a little demonstration? Maybe comment to them on the laptops?”

A message appeared on my laptop as an overlay above Ancient Tribes of Earth, saying, “Hello, Lake. I hope you’ll believe the truth after a few small demonstrations.” My eyes shot to Mila and back to my screen.

Several of the others were laughing and grinning, but this was…

“I also can control this vessel.” claimed Mila. The yacht’s motor suddenly turned on with no one at the controls. Mila simply smiled.

“This is completely insane, but cool!” exclaimed Marlin, her long, black hair flowing in the wind as she grinned.

“Mila’s an incredible friend and exceptionally talented, so don’t underestimate her.” warned Jarod.

“I won’t, but where did you get the idea for the design? She’s hot!” insisted Damien.

Smiling and nodding at him, Mila said, “My master answered a series of questions to determine preferences, which led to the form you see here. I will admit to slightly resembling his girlfriend, whom you know as Eseld.”

“Sorry, Mila, but I’d say more than slightly.” argued Brandon with a laugh.

Frowning, Mila told him “As mother would say…” Then she stuck her tongue out at him.

He laughed even harder, but she was smiling again.

“These laptops are pretty amazing.” commented Alec, who seemed to take Mila being an android in stride. “Have you guys logged in yet?”

I had to admit that Aaliyah had created numerous highly sophisticated AIs for her game, so creating one to function in real life wasn’t that much of a stretch, but I never guessed that she wasn’t human.

“Make sure the name at the bottom is right before you get too far into it.” stated Jarod. “They’re yours to keep.”

I wasn’t the only one completely floored by that statement, quickly checking the bottom of my machine. In the center, there was a plate with a hologram of my character, Agnimitra, saying,

“To Lake

May this serve you for a couple good years of gaming. Thanks for attending my party.

-Jarod”

“I designed the operating system, though mother personally created the port for Ancient Tribes of Earth. The hardware was a joint project between Jarod and me.” claimed Mila.

“James, did you hear that?” asked Marlin.

“Sure did.” he replied, seeming amused.

“Oh, he doesn’t get to keep his. Don’t want Mila jealous.” teased Jarod.

Mila’s smile widened as she said, “I wouldn’t mind. Think of Master’s gentle caress as he touches the keys. Imagine his deft strokes across the touchpad. Even if he activated the motion controls, I would follow his every hand movement as if I were the air through which he moved.”

“Yes, Mila can be a flirt. Please don’t read into things.” stated James as he watched her.

“Sure, James. Not sayin’ a thing.” teased Jesse.

“Whatever floats your boat!” added Damien, also smiling.

Brandon was obviously amused as he said, “He’s actually being serious. His girlfriend’s got a bit of a temper.”

“Let’s get started, shall we?” suggested James to change the subject.

We had met up in the game to explore a dungeon after breakfast. Hopefully, we’d finish before dinner. This was one unique vacation.

#Best Friend For Hire Reprise #Best #Friend #For #Hire #Reprise #Jovial Times #Jovial #Times #Fantasy #Fiction #Story

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theneircarebear · 6 years

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My Infinity War Rant (And MCU Rant, by Extension)

Spoiler-free TL;DR: I’d give Infinity War a 4/10. Pretty action movie with some fun humour, but plot was executed poorly and the current state of the MCU is so annoyingly amatonormative, that I was honestly annoyed and bored throughout Infinity War and unfortunately likely will be for future films.

Some spoilers and expansion on my ideas under the cut. Please note that I am not an MCU expert (I have not seen every single title, nor have I read Marvel comics).

Avengers: Infinity War Critique

Too many characters and, by extension, too many storylines plagued this film. I suspected that this would happen, but hoped for some coherence anyway. Viewers were granted little. I think that a big fault of this film was that the writers/director tried to cram too much into one film. I found a few of the individual plots really interesting (e.g., Gamora and Thanos’ storyline, the execution of the Asgardians and Thor’s mourning over his people and his brother AND ALSO the fancy axe weapon that was not given nearly enough explanation, why exactly Scarlet Witch is powerful enough to destroy the Infinity Stones but no one else), and I would have loved separate movies that addressed these. Because they were crammed into one film, though, they seemed rushed. Loki’s death was sad, but I found that I didn’t really care all that much because Thor was given a five-second sad scene about it and then proceeded to be reserved for the rest of the film. Gamora and Thanos’ relationship was well-explored, and I remember that part of the film best; but I found that the cuts to the other superheroes and their storylines took away from that main story and just made me wait longer to watch the storyline I actually liked. Also, the end of it where Gamora was sacrificed (out of love) was really cheesy and stereotypical. I think that this film could have been decent even with all of the characters still in it, but the problem I had was that too many of the characters got Center Stage. I think that the film would have flowed better and been more coherent if many of these characters took supporting roles instead of being explored just as much as the main ones. Alternatively, since I know that many superheroes owned the Infinity Stones that were crucial to the plot and therefore had to be Center Stage at some point, concentration on those characters and cutting unnecessary other characters would have worked well. Did we really need so much focus on Ironman (and, by extension, Pepper)? No, not really, in my opinion. Did we need to bring Black Panther into the fray when the whole plan of Shuri taking out Vision’s Infinity Stone ended up being a waste of time anyway? No, I don’t really think so. Little scenes that detracted from the overall plot plagued this movie and just made it more incoherent.

The message of this film was not readily apparent to viewers. This is a consequence of cramming so much into one film, I think. I noticed that the ending of the film confused everyone in my theatre. Spoiler alert: half of the superheroes disappear into dust (i.e., Thanos wins). The obvious message here is that not everyone wins all the time (and that includes superheroes). I don’t take issue with this message necessarily, because I think it can be good to remind people to be realistic, but I do think that it was an odd direction to take for a movie of the superhero genre, and in the Avengers titles in particular. Superhero movies are meant to be escapist, and people go to watch them to see the hero win through some fantastic fireworks. “Well then obviously this film was meant to counter expectations and subvert the genre, so it’s Art,” you might say. If this was the goal, though, then I think it was executed poorly and with the wrong franchise. The Avengers titles are big frontrunners in the superhero boom of the present. When the average movie-watcher wants to see a typical superhero movie they will probably go to a popular one like the Avengers. You don’t have the art-appreciating people go to these films. Those people go see indie films or films that they already know exist to subvert the superhero genre (the Deadpool films come to mind here - so if the MCU already has a “genre-subverting” franchise, then why would they do that again with something very popular that was never designed to stray so much from genre norms?). I think that Infinity War could have still gotten the “not everybody wins all the time” message across in the film pretty well while still sticking to the superhero formula by having a conclusion beyond the one that we saw. Audience members might believe that Thanos smugly watching the sunset is the end of the movie but SURPRISE, one last battle fixes things or something. That’s something that many other superhero movies make use of and I think is effective. You can still convey the idea that battles are sometimes lost, but the point of superhero movies is to show that, no matter what, the war will be won. OK, so if that was the message the director wanted to go with, I think it was poorly executed mainly because of the ending. But I also think it was poorly executed in its writing and flow of other parts of the plot. I could tell that there was an attempt to focus on relationships between the supers: romantic plots, getting over rivalry (between Captain America and Ironman after Civil War’s happenings, for example), learning to team up with new and foreign supers, etc. Those attempts were all right, but could have been way better if, again, there weren’t so many of these subplots happening at the same time. They also distracted from the main message. Captain America and Ironman got over their differences pretty quickly and with no confrontation, which I thought was strange, even in the “ignore our grievances for the greater good” scenario. Wakanda was very quick to open itself up to participate in a war, considering its history and general distrust of others, honestly. The first thing Wakanda did after opening itself up publicly was fight, which is the absolute last thing anyone wanted to do. Because the film flip-flopped between so many ideas and morals, I found myself getting annoyed or confused or bored with the film because not much progress was being made with the main plot and I didn’t really get what the main message of the film was supposed to be. Every scene in a film should have a purpose, and there were many scenes I watched that honestly didn’t seem to have one except to appeal to niche viewers (that, again, probably weren’t the majority of the population watching this movie).

This brings me to my issue with the MCU in general, and with much of other media (it wouldn’t be fair to say only superhero movies have this problem): unnecessary romantic subplots and pretend feminism. Man, was I completely bored with Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship. Man, was I so annoyed that nearly every single main female superhero was paired off at some point in the MCU. Black Widow had a completely unnecessary stint with the Hulk. Scarlet Witch pretty quickly shifted from mourning her own brother to pursuing a romance with an AI. The idea that every female needs to have a romantic relationship is annoying and, frankly, unrealistic. As someone who identifies as aromantic, as well, I am so tired of seeing many of the superheroines I admire be forced into random relationships. This idea is harmful even for romantic people: romance is not the be-all-end-all of life. I didn’t take issue with Wonder Woman’s pursuance of romance. It was realistic and made sense for her character, and it was also not her character’s defining role in the story. It was also afforded a lot of development relative to the random romances we have seen in Marvel’s titles, namely the Avengers ones. I’m tired of films bowing to amatonormativity, and giving characters love interests when there aren’t any coherent logical bases for them. Individual superhero movies (like the Ironman titles, for example) can [more] successfully develop relationships, but in action-centered titles with a tonne of characters (like Avengers), there isn’t the time or place to be dealing with such things. Scarlet Witch and Vision’s relationship (as much as I hated it existing in the first place) felt incredibly rushed in the film. Ironman’s random kissing scene with Pepper was not important to the film at all - Pepper made little to no further appearance in the film later on. Her concern over the phone was enough to let us know that Ironman’s superheroing bothered her and put strain on their relationship. We didn’t need an additional scene to reaffirm their relationship, or establish it because, let’s be honest, Infinity War was not made to cater to audiences that hadn’t seen any of the previous films. Now the pretend feminism. Giving every female up to romance is one way the MCU perpetuates stereotypes that every girl wants to be in a relationship. But another big thing I have seen in many recent Marvel films (and other superhero films or just films where women are fighting anything) is that women are almost always and exclusively paired up to fight other women. The main villains are predominantly male, and the male superheroes get to fight them. One particular scene in Infinity War comes to mind that really gets at this well. Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, and Okoye are all fighting a female baddie. Just before this fight sequence, Scarlet Witch got to show off her incredible power by wiping out a large portion of the enemy horde sprinting into Wakanda. Okoye’s comment about Scarlet Witch’s power made me think that now that she’s on the field, the lads can have her help to take everyone down. But she doesn’t do that. Instead, she’s made to fight the female antagonist. If Scarlet Witch had such power, why wasn’t she on the team to go fight Thanos? Especially if she has enough power to destroy the Infinity Stones. I suspect it has something to do with the relationship she has with Vision and wanting to stay near him, which I think is a mightily convenient excuse and kind of boils her character down to one that will put romance above everything else in her life. This fight scene isn’t the only time Marvel (and many other films) does this female vs. female thing. I find that while these films claim to be feminist because they have literally super strong female characters, they very quickly send the women away to fight other baddies while the men get to deal with the main threat. I still see women being saved by men way more often than I see the other way around in these films. It’s like, women’s strength is being acknowledged but still laid inferior to men’s.

Something more subtle that I noticed (that is unconfirmed, btw) was in the post-credits scene Marvel always does. Audiences saw the Captain Marvel symbol flash on the screen, likely signalling that Captain Marvel will fix the whole situation. I had a few issues with this. 1. I thought that including some sort of hope like that would have better fit in the movie proper, but 2. I recognize that only non-casual Marvel fans (i.e., people who know the comics) would even recognize that symbol anyway. And also, 3. When I looked up Captain Marvel to see how the character could possibly fix the wacked up situation Thanos caused, the most popular result was the female Captain Marvel (Ms. Marvel) and she does not seem to have any sort of powers that I can imagine would fix everything. But, upon further reading, I found out that there is another version of Captain Marvel (male) who fixes the Thanos problem in the comics by essentially turning back time to before Thanos caused everything to go to shit. That’s great! And apparently there’s a Captain Marvel movie in the works (keeping Captain Marvel female, instead of making her male like the alternate comic version... right?). However, with this, the MCU is adding another character to the already confusing mix. We’ll have to watch her movie to understand her. This is a money grab. I know that it’s always been a money grab, but this is a little silly.

There were many points in Infinity War where the protagonists almost defeated Thanos, but were deterred because of too-convenient reasons (Starlord, I’m looking at you). There were many points in Infinity War where I or my friend sitting next to me thought of a much easier way to solve the problem and defeat the baddie than the characters did. As a result, I felt more and more disconnected from the characters, because so much of what they were doing wasn’t logical and I wasn’t entertained. Doing illogical things for the flashiness is fine, but in moderation. There was unnecessary drama in the fight sequences, and also not enough drama from other parts of the movie, to the point where I was so incredibly bored unless I was watching an action scene, which never really delivered completely because most of them were failures. I felt like I was watching amateurs, not seasoned superheroes.

The film started off decently, and it did have some good scenes, but I was overwhelmed by unnecessary plotlines and scenes, too many characters, and constant failure to really enjoy the movie past the first 45 minutes. I love action and superhero movies, but this one was one of the worst I’ve seen in recent years. You could have done better, Marvel.

#avengers #infinity war #rambling #annoyances #i don't know what else to tag this

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spiralatlas · 7 years

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GCAP (Game Connect Asia Pacific) 2017 Day 1

I’m in Melbourne for GCAP and PAX Australia, and GCAP started today.

Sadly things were cut short by me BREAKING MY WHEELCHAIR in a DOOMED QUEST FOR A SMOOTHIE. I got a replacement, but it was a hassle and I needed to go rest afterwards. But what I saw of GCAP was good!

Below: descriptions of talks by Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonya (creators of Gone Home and Tacoma) and by David Gaider (narrative designer on Dragon Age), plus misc other conference things.

There were three introductions, all about How Great The Melbourne Games Scene Is and how Everyone Is Friends And Awesome.

Keynote: Steve Gaynor and Karla Zimonya from Fullbright Games: The names didn't mean much to me but then I realised THEY'RE THE PEOPLE WHO MADE GONE HOME AND TACOMA :D

The theme of GCAP this year is The Ripple Effect, and the theme of this talk was how people connect and affect each other.

Steve and Karla met as part of the team for Bioshock 2. Karla was a researcher, and Steve a level designer, and when they were in those roles they didn't interact. But they both finished their assigned tasks and asked around for other things that needed doing, which led them both to the massive task of writing all the little bits of extra dialogue around things like what enemies say when they attack, flavour text on objects, optional little stories told through random audio diaries etc. They made a great team (Steve as writer and Karla as editor) and got really into it. I think you can totally see how this grew into their later approach to games.

The company 2KMoran being willing to let them develop like this was part of them being a good company, with many ex-employees who have gone on to make interesting games.

Steve then got to design his own DLC, and went I MUST BRING IN KARLA. And after they did that, and Bioshock 2 was done, they created Fullbright and started working on Gone Home.

At some point Steve encountered some cool Bioshock fanart and became mutuals with the artist on twitter. Since she was a lesbian, he asked her if she'd be up for discussing things to help with the game. She brought along her wife for an extra point of view. The wife turned out to be a 3D artist, and both of them ended up hired to work on the game.

David Gaider: Creating a World and Making it Stick

So this was like 50% general advice and 50% morality tale about the Hubris Of The Writer Who Thinks His Worldbuilding Stands Alone.

Basically he created all the basic Thedas worldbuilding by himself, then told the rest of the team, and worked with his writers, and never checked in to make sure the game worked as a whole until it was Far Too Late.

He was trying to create a relatively grounded, dark, realistic story...and the art team was making orcs and bikini armour. He had lore about the mages being too oppressed to learn offensive spells or do anything flashy in public, while the gameplay team was implementing fireballs, and specialisations like Reaver which were not connected to the worldbuilding at all. And by the time these incompatibilities became apparent everyone was committed and refused to budge. So the final game is a hodge podge of inconsistent parts that all make sense individually but don't fit together.

Now my general notes:

He scrawled out the original Thedas map on paper the same way he would for a D&D game (his original draft looked very Middle Earth-ish in style), expecting someone who knew geography would go through and fix the rivers at some point. They did not.

One lesson he learned is that you can't just throw pages of worldbuilding at people and expect them to both read and be engaged with it. You have to have a "razor", a short description of the core of the game, and make sure everyone understands what it is. Anything that doesn't fit the razor gets cut. For example, DA2 had themes of The Price of Freedom, Family, and All Things Change. And you have to sell them on why your worldbuilding elements are interesting, and what makes them cool. Once the art team understood what darkspawn were they got invested and redesigned them to not just be orcs.

Remember to feel: Don't just come up with the history of your city: what is it like to visit, is it loud and friendly and sunny or oppressively silent?

Pick your battles: choose the parts of your worldbuilding you really value and emphasise those, be willing to let the others go, especially if it’s to follow changes that make the game more fun. The game being fun is the final aim, your worldbuilding is just a tool to get there.

He got confused by his cursor a lot :)

One good thing about the DAO worldbuilding is that he didn't know where it would be set at first, so worked out all the history for everywhere, and that added lots of depth.

Names are the devil, totally subjective so everyone argues about them and hates any new suggestion. Many names for DAO were bandied about, like "Chronicle". He has a rule to never put Shadow, Dark or Blood in a list of possible names or the publishers will go THAT ONE.

His two rules: 1) People aren't allowed to complain about a name unless they have a better suggestion. 2) Wait six months. Chances are people will be used to it and not mind any more.

When the Grey Wardens were first suggested they were supposed to be pretty minor, based off the rangers in Tolkein. So they got named the White Rangers, but that was too similar, so White Wardens, but that wasn't morally grey enough, so: Grey Wardens! Which was fine until they turned out to be important, people suggested "cooler" names like Blood Knight Brotherhood/Lords of War/Disciples of Pain (not sure if he was joking) but he waited six months and took a vote and lo, the old name stuck.

Track your changes.

Have an elevator pitch (not the same as the razor) If you can't come up with one your concept needs work.

Question your biases. He was originally inspired by Middle Earth and D&D, and his own ideas of Medieval Europe...all of which are way too white. Some of this could be fixed in later games, but the world he created closed off a lot of possibilities (he didn't say any examples but I guess he meant, like, Africa and Asia equivalents)

When he took inspiration from Jews and Romani for the elves he thought he was being very clever, and only later realised that this created all sorts of unfortunate implications, since now anything that happens to elves seems like a statement about those cultures.

He was happily surprised to be able to include bi characters in DAO.

The writers were all pretty happy with how they'd handled gender in DAI, then the Voice Over person was like "why are the vast majority of our lines for men?" and they realised they'd all made most of their background characters men for no reason.

At the start it's hard to walk the line between a long, boring, exposition heavy intro, and players getting confused by lack of explanation. (It felt like he wished players would just be smarter lol) He said "If DAO had started at Ostagar then the PC's backstory would have felt irrelevant" which made me think "So like DAI?".

Players have to know why to care about an event before it happens, or the emotional reaction will fall flat.

When you introduce the first member of a group, they should be fairly typical so the player gets a feel for the default. For example, Sten is a pretty typical Qunari. Only after that can you introduce outliers like The Iron Bull.

Every main character the player interacts with (for a RPG, the party members) should represent a different interesting facet of the worldbuilding.

They didn't think DAO would get sequels, and thus had those wildly differing epilogues. He isn't sure he'd change letting the player died, since it was a cool moment. But it was certainly inconvenient to deal with later.

They had a rough idea of how the history of Thedas would continue after DAO "but no plan survives contact with the enemy, in this case I guess that's EA" loll

Having player decisions affect so much has been a bit of a nightmare.

Card tricks in the dark: if you do something clever and the player doesn't notice, it doesn't matter.

If the enemies drink potions and it's not obvious they're doing it, it just looks like the AI is cheating. If a choice affects the plot but this fact isn't made clear, players will just think that's how the plot always goes. Need to heavily lampshade that this is the consequence of that choice. And keeping track of all the possibilities gets ridiculous with characters like Alistair, who can be any one of dead/king/a drunk etc.

The players who DO pay attention to these changes tend to want way more reactivity than is practical. So nobody is impressed. And most new players found the save game editors confusing and off putting. He thinks perhaps it would be better to have a smaller number of major choices.

He's not going to judge other writers but the HUGE changes at the end of the Mass Effect trilogy mean they can now no longer set anything in that galaxy again.

Question time!

Something about the process leading to Krem being written. He talked about the bad stuff previously, and them realising they'd screwed up. A trans fan on the forums said "Could we have a trans character who isn't a sex worker or the butt of a joke?". They got jumped on, but the team read it and went "Oh."

Gaider wrote Maevaris in the comics, talked to a trans woman friend about it. One of the other writers was working on Kress...*audience shouts KREM* and he seemed a bit boring so he got made trans, since it added some interest and fitted in well with the worldbuilding about the Qun etc.It would have been better with a trans voice actor but they couldn’t find one.

What program is best for explaining stuff to the art team etc early on: Biowre had a sort of Grey Box level for playing through choices, but something like twine is good, just to test pacing. (not sure this actually answers the question asked)

Are there any genres you would like to work on but haven't: Yes :D :D But he can't tell us about it yet :D :D

He got sick of high fantasy after ten years. Would look longingly at Mass Effect sometimes just for a change but then they would implode and he'd think"Actually I'm fine".

Off the top of his head: Victorian London, finding husbands for your girlfriends while fighting zombies and also it's a Western?

Misc other things: I didn't make it to any more talks because Wheelchair, but met some cool people, and played some of the student games on display. My favourite was a time travel murder mystery called Lacuna where you have to connect clues. Apparently I was way better at it than most people :D I also actually enjoyed one of the puzzle platformers (I forget the name but it's about a little grumpy blue hexagon), which is a pretty big achievement.

GCAP has a "food intolerances station" with special food options and knowledgeable staff which was pretty great. Morning tea was just various gluten free biscuits, but for lunch there was poached chicken and salmon and various plain chopped vegetables, as well as dressed salads and gluten free bread and dessert. I could eat about 1/3 of it which is pretty good odds, I ended up happier than my partner who doesn’t have as many intolerances but just didn't like any of the food options.

#gcap 2017 #gcap #migw 2017 #game dev #david gaider #indie game dev #conferences #dragon age #fullbright #gone home

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lonesomealley · 5 years

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Risk of Rain 2 Early Access Review and Discussion

Writer’s Note: This review was written after the December update was released. Any opinions and problems with the game are subject to change over time as the game reaches its full release. This review also contains some spoilers? Risk of Rain isn’t really a game that you can spoil, you’re not ultimately losing anything from reading ahead for this type of game.

-=REVIEW=-

Risk of Rain 2 is a game that I’ve played over 200 hours of since I initially bought it on June 5th of 2019. This is important to say outright because it needs to be expressed that Risk of Rain 2 is super into the arcade-y, repetitive, RNG roguelike style that many games before it have fallen into. These games are not for everyone, and if you’re someone who’s expecting runs to be bursting at the seams with new content, you’re going to be left in pure disappointment. At best this game will throw new content at you for the first couple of hours you play, but after that there is a sharp decrease in this content.

However, I have to preface that this review is a positive review, and that Risk of Rain 2 has created a gameplay loop that is very addictive to get into for many (including me). This game can be easily summarized down to the following: You pick a character, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, go to the next level, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, etc. There is technically an “end game” to Risk of Rain however it basically involves becoming so powerful that you’re capable of constantly obliterating all enemies instantaneously. And while this system is fun, this review is going to explain why the end game is currently broken and that the game suffers from a bunch of small yet consistent issues that actively bring down the experience of the game.

First let’s talk about all the things that the game does right. All of the characters, while some flawed, are exceptionally different from each other and are fun to play in their own ways. All of the characters are also well balanced in that there is no character that is obviously the best character in the game, and no character is so bad that it is beyond difficult if not impossible to reach the end game with. The vast majority of items are well balanced in the scheme of the game, with only a couple items being overwhelmingly awful to acquire (primarily the lunar items) and one item being a direct detriment to pickup. We’ll come back to these later in the discussion part. The game’s art style is great, and the stages are beautiful albeit some poorly designed. The enemy types are somewhat varied yet become boring to look at with time, and the AI of the game is pretty mediocre but otherwise serviceable for a hoard shooter. And finally the multiplayer is an alright system of peer to peer, however many players have complained about the lack of host migration, meaning that if the host leaves the lobby, the entire lobby will close.

You wouldn’t know that I basically covered all of what you can really talk about from a basic review standpoint of Risk of Rain 2, if I wasn’t so generous as to tell you. So instead of providing a long form critique/review like the one I just did for Borderlands 3, I’m instead going to give you a brief review with the review score ahead of time, before I go into just deconstructing the game. So, here it goes:

Risk of Rain 2 feels exactly what a sequel should strive to do in the face of a game franchise. It takes the original concept of the first game and puts all of it into three dimensions. The way that this is pulled off is almost so flawlessly done that it is legitimately difficult to attempt to go back to the original game’s mechanics. This new focus on 3D gameplay has come with the freedom of movement that was noticeably absent in the first game (shooting while moving, sprinting, faster movement, and versatile movement skills). In some ways certain elements of the game have become dramatically less important or dumbed down, such as drones being next to useless, homing rockets being seen as passive damage rather than a massive game changer, and the introduction of death pits that correspond well enough with certain items or abilities to completely change the tide of a fight.

In many more ways, however, the game has become a much more flexible and skill based game that allows the player to play in a much more expressive manner. Gameplay is a smooth, fast paced, hoard based experience that will push you to cleverly use the resources that you’ve been given to turn the tides of a fight. Initially this game is going to seem very difficult for people who begin playing on the, “Rainstorm,” A.K.A normal difficulty, because what this game doesn’t tell you is that there are a ton of nuances that will completely change how you play the game as you learn them. During your first playthroughs you’re going to find that Stone Titans are a very annoying enemy, and that the laser is a powerful attack that will melt your health very quickly. Then later on you’ll find that Stone Titans are pretty much push overs in small numbers or individually, because you can stand at the feet of the Titan which stops it from ever trying to laser you. There are many little quirks like this in the game that will ultimately change how you handle the hoard based combat, and eventually you’ll come to the resolution that Lesser Wisps, supposedly the weakest enemy in the game, are actually the strongest.

By the time you reach that point though, you may become frustrated with the RNG systems of the game. RNG dictates a couple things in Risk of Rain 2, but most importantly it dictates what items you get and in what order you get them (randomly). On some of your runs you may find a legendary, or two, or three on the first level that essentially renders the difficulty of that run nullified. On other runs you’re going to get a bunch of trash items 3-4 levels in and eventually find yourself fighting a game of attrition until your inevitable demise. Of course, you can theoretically skill your way through the game, and the further into the game you get, the more possibilities you have to find items that will turn the tides of your run around.

The character you choose is also a massive influence on how you learn to play the game. If you’re anything like me or my friends, you’re going to immediately gravitate towards the Huntress, as she’s easy to unlock and has considerably more survivability than the other survivors that you unlock early on. The biggest problem that the Huntress posses to the player’s attitude towards the game is that she provides players with the tools to never properly learn how to position or prioritize enemies. What happens when you begin playing the Huntress is that you find it very difficult to play other characters such as the Commando, Mult, or Artificer. This may result from what pieces of information that Risk of Rain provides about the other characters simply not being clear enough as to how versatile they really are. This was somewhat addressed with the introduction of, “Mastery,” challenges that unlock cool skins for each of the characters (minus engineer :c). However, I don’t believe that players will be driven to try out these new characters or even play the, “Monsoon,” difficulty of the game before they’ve put anywhere from 20-40 hours into Rainstorm/Drizzle.

Given this, Risk of Rain isn’t ultimately a game about becoming the best at its systems. It feels much like a “for fun” kind of game where you just sit down for a couple of hours and have a blast killing enemies. This isn’t how I approached the game, however if you ultimately decide that the game is too difficult, the Drizzle difficulty is going to be just the thing for you. You will be, more or less, consistently overpowered on this difficulty if you have even the most basic understanding of how to play the game. You can totally just play a Drizzle run for 2 hours straight and ultimately understand the purpose of Risk of Rain: Get overpowered and screen wipe enemies consistently. And even though I personally don’t play the game like this, I wouldn’t blame you if this is how you prefer to play it.

This game isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like arcady, roguelike, third person action this game will probably be right up your alley. I give this game a review score of 7/10. It is well worth the $20 asking price, and is definitely made much more fun with friends (who can manage to get good at the game). When this game receives more content and is completed I imagine that this review score will go up, but for now this game may be lacking in content for many people.

-=DISCUSSION=-

That’s where the review portion of this post ends. If you really only wanted an overview of what the game is and what it does well, then that’s what I have to offer you. The rest of this post is going to be going into a long discussion about why certain systems of Risk of Rain 2 are bland and overall degrade elements of the game. So let’s dive into those core issues, why don’t we?

Items

Firstly let’s hit on the core mechanic of this game: randomized item drops. The method in which Risk of Rain 2 hands out items isn’t heavily biased into giving a player a certain set of items or outright trying to discriminate against items (except of course that item tiers become more rare as they go up). However the problem with this system is the aforementioned frustration that comes along with a game that's far too dependent on RNG. In some runs you will be given just the right combo that will turn your run into a god run, whereas others are doomed from the start. I don’t consider the option of “skilling” your way through the first 7 stages to really be an option, since without damage and effect procing (chance on hit) items, the later levels become an absolute chore to play through. Of course, this is detrimental to the game in the way that it may just be outright impossible to obliterate or reach god run every run.

Now this is going to be a hard change to swallow, but I think this game could benefit from having biases in its RNG distribution of items which, according to Ghor (developer of Risk of Rain 2), has been confirmed to be entirely random.

This system doesn’t have to be a drastic overhaul that makes every item has its own custom probability for drop, but it should focus on making each playthrough feel a little more balanced. My proposal for this is to make a system that attempts to balance out how many damage, healing, and utility items the player gathers throughout their playthrough. Basically, if you have too many damage and utility items, the game should start pushing towards giving you some healing items and etc. But there’s some new problems introduced with the change.

Firstly, how do 3D printers affect this? Well, I think there’s two options for this. One, have 3D printed items have a special tag on them that stops them from affecting the RNG calculations of items drops. Or two, just doing nothing about it. That latter fix doesn’t seem all too appetising, but I think it could lead to some interesting developments and meta games around 3D printing items.

The other major gripe I have with the item system is that items are hitting this level of power creep that has made certain elements of the game almost meaningless. And when I say meaningless, I do literally mean meaningless. For the most part, Risk of Rain’s item balancing is fantastic with most items feeling like they belong in that tier, while others are either way too overpowered or provide next to no benefit. And this is the type of subject that I think is difficult for ROR2 to get right because the ultimate goal of this game is to become overpowered, so it would make sense for overpowered stuff to just exist, right? Well no. While it is important for the game to have kinda meh items and kinda alright items, the extent to which the game has pushed its power creep is really stupid.

Most predictably I will bring up Shaped Glass. This item has been in hot heat from most of the game’s community for making the gameplay really dull and having little to no actual risk in using it, despite being a lunar item which is supposed to be a risk and reward item. For those uninformed, Shaped Glass cuts your health capacity in half while doubling your damage multiplicatively. All is well so far, until you factor in how healing and one shot protection works in the game. When your health is over 90%, you cannot die to a single hit of damage excluding over time effects like burning or sticky bombs. The basic gist is that by cutting the maximum health you have with Shaped Glass, healing items will retain their default stats and hence actually be improved each time a Shaped Glass is acquired. Given that this item works multiplicatively, (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x damage and health debuff) a run will quickly spiral into a god run with no penalty to the player long term.

But at least that takes some effort to achieve, where as Old Guillotine has outright destroyed the balance of elite monsters. Stack a couple of these bad boys, and elite enemies are now a complete joke. Originally introduced in the Scorched Acres update as a direct counter to malachite enemies (as far as I can tell that’s the only reason this item was added), this item allows the player to kill elites at a percentage of their health instead of just getting their health to zero. So if you collect 1 guillotine, the elite monster will die at 20% of its health instead of 0%. This item is generally an okay item, balance wise, if it wasn’t already piss easy to instantly screenwipe enemies during a god run. But oh god, the flat percentage rates compared with how high these percentage rates are per stack are ungodly. According to the Risk of Rain Wiki, collecting just 10 of these bad boys will allow you to kill elites at a whopping 90% health. Meaning, if you manage to find an Old Guillotine printer in your mid game, elite enemies are no longer a problem. But let’s be real, no one needs that many guillotines when only 3 of these nets you roughly 50% (This piece of information has become outdated, now it's about 40% for 3 stacks and 70% for 10 stacks). This is the stack count that I usually strive for because it's the best blend of economy and effectiveness. As you can imagine, even with 3 of these, elite enemies essentially become pushovers. Seriously, having 50% of elite enemies’ health gone is just that good, I don’t know how else to explain this pretty simple concept, but yes it’s true.

And I haven’t seen many people in the ROR community saying this item is a bad game item (please email me) so I will now explain why this hurts the game. Nothing in this game, especially in the later stages or god run, will be difficult if you are on the right track. Elite enemies could’ve and should’ve been the one turning point that kept any resemblance of the game's difficulty outside of the bosses (unless you’re already insta killing them). I can really only qualify this claim by making the point that “elite enemies” are called elite for a reason, right? The following screenshot is Google’s definition for the word “elite.”

However, when I think of the elite enemies in ROR2, I think, “Oh hey more money.” Not, “Uh oh this is bad,” or, “I really need to focus this thing.” To be fair, malachites do manage to pull this off even in the late game due to their (rather bullshit) debuff applied on getting hit by their normal attacks or dispersed spikes (we’ll touch on this later). But this mentality is, most likely, not what the developers intended players to think about their marketed “difficult” enemies. This isn’t to say that elite enemies aren’t dangerous, but even that only comes from the fact that flaming and overloading elites can outright kill you from landing one attack on you in late game. But this isn’t a danger that I’m actively worried about when the elites die in mere seconds at this point anyways.

There are also several items that just outright break bosses. Willow the Wisp turns the Grovetender boss into a free teleporter item. The Halcyon Seed is an item so strong, accompanied by a boss so easy to defeat, that it’s worth getting every time. Previously this item was a pretty meh item because the Aurelionite simply didn’t do much damage or assist you in any meaningful fashion. At some point, though, his laser beam attack was added to his friendly AI via an update, and it just melts bosses. Unstable Tesla Coil makes horde boss fights beyond easy (this item generally makes the game a cake walk). And of course, Chronobauble will transform you into an invincible chad ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

I’m sure there are some items that I’ve missed in this list, I could go into some depth about how 57 Leaf Clover is the best item available, or that some items are useless in comparison and were outright terrible for some time because of the developers’ oversights (H3AD-ST-v2 breaking Artificer’s float and Aegis being worse than the Topaz Brooch.) But you should get the point. Overall the item balancing isn’t awful, the game is still overall playable without an overwhelming amount of this power creep, and to be fair instantly melting the bosses in this game is enjoyable even if I don’t, at all, deserve it.

Stage Imbalance

What is awful then, is the stage imbalance present in the game. Stage imbalance is probably one of the biggest things turning me off from the game right now. Nothing frustrates me more than getting Scorched Acres or Siren’s Call on a shitty run, and basically having to accept my death because I’m unable to grab the Preon Accumulator or kill the AWU with my pitiful damage and healing.

For some unknown, dumb shit reason, Hopoo has stated that this is the way they want to continue developing the game. So this is an issue that isn’t getting fixed, and might get worse over the next three updates. I really hope it doesn’t, because the idea of having the game be more luck based than it currently is might just make me pull my hair out. These tiny, rather inconsequential things in the moment, will eventually build up into a sort of “power creep” among the levels. I’m unsure if this is the right term for this imbalance between the levels, but right now it certainly feels like exactly that. Now, to be fair, there are only 2 levels per stage, however I will now argue that this only furthers the point that this design style is harmful to the gameplay.

Right now, it feels like the most optimal stage path is Distant Roost, Abandoned Aqueduct, Rallypoint Delta, and then Abysmal Depths. While some of these maps have their own issues, the others have issues that pull the maps to be less favorable than the ones described.

Titanic Plains, firstly, is way too big and spacious in comparison to Distant Roost. When you spawn into Distant Roost, you can very quickly identify where the teleporter has spawned due to the compact nature of the map and where the teleporter can spawn. This compactivity also gives you the benefits of an RNG chance at a large supply of items spawning in the center of the map. Titanic Plains is giant, and lacks anything interesting to look at or venture into. It’s an okay map, but has a huge issue with pacing and seems to come from a completely different design philosophy than Distant Roost. Far too many times on Titanic Plains I will get confused on where the teleporter is because it’s out in the open plains area on a bright blue backdrop. And of course, the particles that the teleporter gives off are not prominent enough to stand out from this backdrop.

Other times it’s tucked way too far into a back corner, or obscured by a structure.

The items on this map are also very hit or miss, sometimes I favor Titanic Plains over Distant Roost for how many items this map can really provide, other times I leave the map with the bare minimum for my tastes. This is, however, a problem with the general generation of chests and not strictly an issue with Titanic Plains, but I feel the issue is exacerbated on Titanic due to its size.

I also largely favor Abandoned Aqueduct over Wetland Aspect because of its readability and predictable chest placements. Wetland Aspect has way too many branching pathways with tons of stuff in the way. This is the one map I’ll often ask myself, “Did I miss checking somewhere?” or, “Did I miss it when I was looking through an area?” The teleporter, more often than not, seems to always be tucked away into some obscure corner that I have to go way out of my way to go for. Although I will say this map’s chest distribution is far better than TItanic Plains.

A map that is terrible in almost every aspect however is Scorched Acres. I truly despise this map, and seeing it come up on 50% of my playthroughs makes me want to turn the game off and leave it for good. This map is god awful, where Rallypoint Delta has a circular pathing structure so you can walk all the way around the map and get almost all of the chests (for players who are into that), Scorched Acres is a slow slog up some water geysers and into a park and down some giant structures, ugh. The best place to spawn on this map is at the highest point it generates, because having to look up to find the teleporter’s red specs on an orange background is comparable to making color blind people take color blind tests just so you can laugh at them. And having to get to a specific point on the map in order to jump up a water geyser, for a game about time management, is outright awful design. This map also lacks basic functionality that others ones have like the special TC-280 Prototype (who cares honestly) and the timed chest which contains a free Preon Accumulator (I care). And when I say lacks, I mean it doesn’t have anything else to compensate. Generally how you’d play this map, is you’d locate the teleporter or establish a general area for where the teleporter is, and linearly work your way towards it. If you see an area with a bunch of chests, you sit there and grind up enough money to collect those chests before heading on your way.

Now that final bit might have you scratching your head, “Don’t all of the maps play that way?” Well yes and no, you can play it that way if you want, but most maps are going to have the connectivity to allow you to skip on those chests until after you’ve found some other chests or defeated the teleporter event. You basically cannot do that on this map unless you want to waste minutes of your time or you have so many jumps and so much speed that you can jump from the center of the map to the upper areas with ease. Some characters also have an easier time on this map than others like the Huntress, but that’s generally just amplified because of the shitty map design and not a specific issue for Scorched Acres.

Finally, we come to Abysmal Depths versus Siren’s Call, and. . . Abysmal Depths wins, no big surprise. Siren’s call isn’t really a bad map per se, it’s compact, somewhat easy to navigate, and isn’t a hassle to get the things you need. However there’s one massive imbalance with this map, and that’s the Alloy Worship Unit. The AWU is Siren’s Call’s way of getting a guaranteed red item, and this boss fight is pretty damn tough even after its nerf. This boss scales faster than other enemies, so if you don’t get to him quickly in your early game you’ll be suffering in this boss fight, hell you’ll be suffering anyways. But beyond the boss being a pain to defeat, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with placing a red item behind a boss. Except when you take into account the fact that it is menially easy to get the golden chest on Abysmal Depths. The golden chest on Abysmal Depths always spawns in the same location, and costs a whopping 16 times the cost of a normal chest for the stage. There’s no hooks, no catches, it just requires a decent time investment to get the item because you’ll be grinding out normal enemies. That time investment is the only real contending downside for going for the golden chest on Abysmal Depths, but that also applies to fighting the AWU. If you have a terrible build and you’re gambling for a good red item from the AWU, you could find yourself spending just as long (longer even) fighting this boss. Plus you have the possibility of dying, meaning your run is over. At least now you'd have another chance to get Abysmal Depths.

And sure, as of the December update the AWU has been nerfed pretty drastically. A huge 75% decrease in damage scaling and 20% less scaling in the health department means that this boss is now overall easier to kill. But these changes haven’t ultimately made the boss any more enjoyable to kill when the run just isn’t getting started. Sure, now you can kill it faster, and you now have a more adaptable playstyle where either stage can be more viable than the other depending on your loadout but I still feel myself gravitating towards Abysmal Depths more often than not. This update also added “map variants,” but for the sake of just calling them what they are, they’re basically just additional maps. I’m honestly okay with having more than 2 maps per stage, I think that can lead to a pretty satisfying experience. My only real gripe with these maps is that you can tell these were made by another company and not Hopoo. These maps, especially the Distant Roost variant, incorporate a lot of vertical space into their game play and map flow that at times can be confusing to work around for new players. However I would not be opposed to having essentially 4 different maps for the game to choose from, granted that they’re all balanced well enough.

If Hopoo doesn’t wish to balance the stages with each other, the much simpler system I’d recommend is to have the game force the player to eventually play that stage they missed out on later. So instead of being able to get Scorched Acres 2 times in one run, if the game makes me play on that map for my 3rd stage, then I should know for a fact that I’ll get Rallypoint Delta for my 7th. And of course for Rallypoint Delta I would also recommend putting a second timer on the Preon Accumulator chest just so that it’s an option for players who don’t get it on their first loop. This would scath a good amount of my frustration towards the system because at least then I’d know my run would balance out towards the end.

The stage progression system in this game is currently very awkward. As of writing, you have to run through 7 stages before you can enter a “celestial” portal and obliterate yourself at an obelisk. It seems the way that Hopoo wants to take the game is to have 4 entirely unique stages, and then from there you’d either go to the boss or you may be forced through another loop of the game until stage 7 where the celestial portal will be replaced with the portal to the final boss area. I wish this system was more transparent with where it’s going, and if it is going to do a double looping system I’d honestly appreciate just having 7 unique stages rather than this current system. Again, this problem would be fixed if the game forced you to play the alternative stages on concurrent loops.

Feedback

Feedback was something that was somewhat addressed in this recent December update. The screen now gets dark around the edges when you’re hit and at low health your screen will start graying out. These are absolutely great steps towards integrating more feedback into the game, but it’s still missing the mark with a lot of elements.

Namely, elites have been one of the leading factors in me dedicating a part of this discussion to the feedback of the game, and this is due to the shift towards developing more powerful, end game elites. A lot of the time in Risk of Rain 2, especially end game, you’ll find yourself in situations where you just die seemingly instantly. This isn’t a problem specific to the end game but more a general problem with the lack of feedback that the game gives you when you’re being hurt or have, say, a sticky grenade stuck to you. This recent update has since added some incredible feedback additions to the game, but this system is still lacking. In an ideal universe, I should be able to tell how I’ve been hit and what’s happening to me without having to specifically focus on that. To an extent this game does that well, red lasers appear from Lesser Wisps and shoot very quickly, Golem laser blasts are pretty distinguishable, and so on. But other elements, namely elemental elements, are an area of the game that lack any specific feedback currently.

It would be cool if there were different effects that showed on screen when I was hit by different elements. Such as flames around the edges of the screen when I’m on fire, vines or whatever for the malachite, and some ice for freezing. In the case of the sticky grenades (whatever you wanna call them) it would be cool if they had a Halo-esque sound effect where it would beep for a bit before exploding to give you a very clear indication that, “You’re about to die.” Currently the game lacks this. At best the fire ticking away at your health always means that the screen is darkened, but this is an annoying effect to have on your screen for more than a mere moment. I’d say feedback is the primary reason why malachites are such a massive problem in this game, because more often than not I’ll get the malachite debuff without realizing it and then die shortly after because I wasn’t regenerating health.

More auditory feedback would also be greatly appreciated. Something as simple as a crashing sound (like the Loader’s gauntlet punch) to indicate something like, “You’ve just been melee attacked!” would go a long way to improving the crowd fighting aspect of the game. I would also like to see some more ambient sounds for enemies to emit simply from existing on the map like the high pitched hum of the Lesser Wisps or the burrowing of the Magma Worm. Again, for the most part, the audio is done well, but some enemies are just lacking in any auditory presence. Bosses like the Grovetender and Titan don’t have just a passive sound effect, you’re really only alerted to their presence when you’re close enough to see them or to initiate their attacks. Being able to hear the distant chattering of rocks or the clanking of chains in the distance to signify bosses being around the corner would add a lot to the ambience of this game. It already seems that Hopoo wants to do something great with the game’s audio because of the already existing ambience, enemy sounds, and even the music that all feed into Risk of Rain’s atmosphere. Right now it’s just lacking.

Lunar Bazaar / Lunar Coins

This system, you can tell, is disliked by most people who play this game. Streamers are always talking about how they’re out of lunar coins and a fair amount of the playerbase have just cheated themselves to a couple million so they’ll never run out. In a lot of different ways, I don’t like this system. It encourages players to grind the game instead of playing it for fun. It requires stocking up on coins in down time runs so that players can experience god runs. The system is easily made meaningless by just a simple value change and people who do this are having more fun with the game than those who don’t. And there’s a couple more issues but let’s just begin listing out these problems and going in depth from there.

First, let’s talk about how many lunar coins you can expect to earn from a single round of playing just going from stage 1 to stage 7 and obliterating. On average, I was earning about 6-7 lunar coins on each run, 1 or 2 from random drops and 5 from obliterating which always rewards the same amount. This isn’t factoring in the new secret boss that has the capacity to drop 10 lunar coins, plus the 5 you’d earn from obliterating. So in the best ideal scenario you could earn a profit of 16 lunar coins (Beads of Fealty cost 1, 10 from the secret boss, 5 from obliterating, and assuming you get 2 from world drops). But you probably won’t be able to fight the secret boss consistently from run to run without losing lunar coins in the process, so for the sake of argument I’ll be leaving this new boss out of the equation. All of this math speak demonstrates the upcoming point: You aren’t paid enough lunar coins on a per run basis. Let’s assume that you start off a run with 5 lunar coins from a previous obliteration, and that you’re going to earn 2 more as random drops throughout your progression. The cheapest that you can acquire a lunar item, far less likely one that you actually want, is 1 lunar coin spent towards a lunar pod. The next possibility is that a free blue portal appears and then you find an item you want and can spend 2 lunar coins on it. The scenario after that is that you purchase a blue portal for 1 lunar coin, go in and find the item you want and buy it for 2 to make a total of 3 spent. From here the total amount of lunar coins spent can increase exponentially because, given the rng nature of the game, it’s totally possible to never find the lunar that you want. And that’s a big problem, because ROR2’s rng systems are essentially locking away the player’s potential for success at almost every turn.

And the reason for that is the absolutely abysmal balancing of the lunar items. See, the regular items can get away with a decent amount of imbalance because one, these items don’t negatively affect the player in most instances (Personal Shield Generator cough cough) and two, you’re given the opportunity to 3D print these items away for potentially better items. At best, you can spend more lunar coins at a cleansing pool to have the potential to remove a lunar item that you dislike, but again that’s just more rng on top of the rng and costs lunar coins to use. It’s incredibly easy to lose all 7 of your lunar coins because the game just refuses to give you the item you want, which is most likely going to be Shaped Glass or Gesture of the Drowned. So I suppose I’ll begin with why you’ll most likely want these items over other ones.

Shaped Glass, as mentioned before, doesn’t really have a downside to using it as it’s pretty easy to abuse the game’s mechanics with it. Firstly, if you’re killing more things faster, those things most likely won't even have an opportunity to damage you. This is an okay example of a risk versus reward mechanic, but I’m going to have to lean on this item being more rewarding than risky. That’s because, as also stated before, healing doesn’t scale with this item, hence the lower amount of health you have the faster you can recover back to full. And recovering back to full is important because you restore one shot protection which allows risky players to continually survive even in the most drastic situations by abuse of the mechanic. This item is the foundation for building a god run.

Gesture of the Drowned, on the other hand, has a downside that’s very easy to bypass by simply picking up the right items and equipment. If you pick up something like Preon Accumulator, sure it shoots off 50% more often but now you have to be constantly thinking of what you’re going to be shooting it at and at what time it’s going to happen. Where as if you pick up a Deployable Missile launcher, you don’t have to worry about aiming at all because those rockets are homing and rarely go after the target you’re trying to aim at anyways. Gesture + Deployable Missiles also synergizes incredibly well with Soulbound Catalyst which decreases your equipment cooldown by 4 seconds every time you kill and enemy. So in this scenario, as long as you’re able to continually chain kills with your abilities and the missiles, you will be spewing out missiles constantly with no stopping. So there’s not really a downside to picking this item unless you really want to use something like the Preon Accumulator which, most of the time, isn’t a necessary item for the late game. There are a plentiful amount of other equipment that synergize decently well with Gesture as well such as the Gnarled Woodsprite, Royal Capacitor (due to its short cooldown time), the Back Up, Blast Shower, etc. So odds are that you’ll already be carrying an equipment that synergizes well with Gesture.

Examples of lunar items that are bad would be Brittle Crown, Corpse Bloom, and Effigy of Grief. These items are ones that no rational player would ever consider picking up in their runs (maybe Effigy if you got it from a lunar pod). Corpse Bloom is an item that you’d really only take if you were desperate enough to just get through the rest of the run, but even then it may be detrimental to your healing capabilities. The only situation I can see Corpse Bloom being useful would be in situations where the player has no active healing items and has had to rely on passive healing for the entire duration of the run. Otherwise, in the long run, the item will only restrict the player’s ability to be successful because they’re going to be hard limited to that 10% healing per second. This means that for the player to reach the one shot protection threshold from less than 10% health, they’ll be waiting a whopping 9 seconds and cannot take damage during that time otherwise the player is dead in late game. These kinds of items are embarrassing to see in the lunar item pool and are essentially scams.

Another item that’s entirely a scam is the Brittle Crown. On paper this item seems like a blast. You’ll have about a third of a chance to acquire additional gold simply from dealing damage to an enemy that scales over time, and the only downside is that the player will lose gold equal to the amount of percentile damage taken. What percentile damage means is that if you lose 90% of your health, you lose 90% of your gold. It’s another example of a risk versus reward item, but during the entirety of the run you’re bound to take a lot of damage simply because of the hoard combat. There are a lot of factors to take in when fighting a hoard and not taking damage on just one stage is incredibly difficult. So that means that you’ll be losing gold quite often, and losing this gold (especially while farming) can be devastating to the flow of your run. Especially in the late game where you can lose millions of gold all because you simply got hit once. There is no chance of losing gold either, it’s 100%. So if that isn’t enough to dissuade you from this item, then the fact that this item costs lunar coins to acquire absolutely should.

I’ll skip talking about the Effigy of Grief so I can get back to the point that lunar coins are a limited resource. So how do you stock up on these? Well, since lunar coins are kept between runs, that means the best way to experience the game is to grind out a couple obliterate runs until the player has stocked up over 10 to 20 lunar coins. This will give the player a decent amount of wiggle room for spending and dealing with the RNG of the lunar bazaar. Here’s the issue with this: The player will most likely grind them out over a long period on Monsoon or speedrun Drizzle to maximize how many coins can be acquired in a short amount of time. Grinding, as a game mechanic, is very polarizing for many different players. It has its place in games because why else do we have the massive game titan World of Warcraft, or Borderlands, or Destiny, or just about any mmorpg to hit the market? But introducing grinding to your small, indie roguelike is questionable.

The grinding system of lunar coins in Risk of Rain just feels like Hopoo wanted to have a more premium currency for adding depth to the game, but had no clever ideas as to what they wanted to achieve with it. Right now, the system is bland, uninspired, and cumbersome to play with for many legit players. The first thing to get out of the way is that I have the actual data collected in Hopoo’s discord server to back up what I’m saying here. This poll was posted by a moderator from the aforementioned discord server to collect feedback for the developers to work with.

Most players here are saying that they’d like to be paid out more lunar coins because they’re shredding through them too quickly. Personally, I tried to avoid spending lunar coins except in situations where I really wanted to win a run or was trying to shoot for a god run. Before my save file corrupted I had about 180 lunar coins which is absolutely more than enough to keep up consistent runs for a while, but that’s assuming I’d want to be working at a deficit. This is because, for the lunar bazaar, the chance of the item you’re specifically looking for spawning is around 30% according to this video and it's even less for the lunar pods (This piece of information has become outdated with time as more lunar items have been added to the game, dropping the percentage even lower). Using this logic and the knowledge that I’ll be spending at least 2 lunar coins on a bazaar item it’s pretty easy to deduce that i can easily play my runs at a lunar coin loss if I am actively trying to get that one item. All of this, again, creates a down time period where players either won’t be spending any lunar coins or are actively trying to build them up. I do not believe, however, that simply increasing the amount of lunar coins paid out will entirely fix this problem.

I would recommend entirely revamping the lunar system to be way different or just outright deleting the lunar system altogether and allowing lunar items to spawn as world drops. There are a couple ideas that come to mind: Randomized challenges on each run that reward lunar items, making lunar items world drops, or creating more world events like the Void Fields, mountain shrines, or maybe even being able to fight the lunar bazaar shop keeper so that he’ll drop a lunar item. These randomized challenges don’t need to be anything specific, but I do believe they should incorporate a good amount of the environment and gameplay to make each run unique in its own ventures. Something like tasking players to kill Runald and Kjaro (ideally only as the engineer or in multiplayer games), activating a newt alter on a specific stage, reaching a stage within a specific time, etc. These challenges would reward specific lunar items and be cycled out for new challenges upon completion so that the player isn’t limited to their capabilities in late game. A system like this probably doesn’t solve the rng factor of obtaining the lunar items and is contrary to the goal of lunar items (to be risk and reward items) while probably creating a list of its own issues, but at least now players won’t feel limited by simply how many lunar coins are on them.

Hoppo could completely remove the RNG aspect of obtaining lunar items while still keeping lunar coins a viable option in the game by allowing the player to purchase a specific amount of certain lunar items at the very beginning of the game or even in the character select menu. A system like this would completely kill off the rng aspect of the game, while encouraging players to levy their odds of just how far they want to go with their run. A player can purchase 4 Shaped Glasses right at the beginning of the game, but the player is going to have to be able to carry those throughout the entirety of the game if they want to achieve a god run and should they die, they lose whatever they invested into the run. Although I’d have to wager that there would be a limit to how many lunar items a player can buy each run so that the player doesn’t just stock up on lunar coins and Shaped Glasses for easy runs. Of course the issue of down time still isn’t resolved, but given an increase in the amount of lunar coins paid out would ensure the player could somewhat consistently engage with this system on a run by run basis.

Having lunar items drop as extremely rare world drops would also be an interesting spin on the mechanic but is probably far less desirable than the other options. While it would make gathering lunar items more consistent, I imagine the rng chance of obtaining lunar coins would be comparable if not less than red items. Although I imagine having the occasional lunar drop would allow players to quickly restructure their runs assuming they got a worthwhile item. Aside from this minor bonus, this suggestion wouldn’t be capable of replacing the current lunar system that’s in place.

While the lunar system is simple and intuitive, it’s overall harmful to the game and draws many players towards just cheating in millions of lunar coins so that they never have to micromanage this currency. Please understand that the above suggestions are merely suggestions and not tried and true methods for replacing this system. However given that Hopoo doesn’t even seem interested in nerfing Shaped Glass, I suspect that the lunar system won’t be changing any time before release.

World Events

The new optional events included in this December update are absolutely fantastic. The Void Fields are a fun way to break up the monotony of the game, and having a new optional boss to kill is always a joy. Even though I may trash on bosses like the Aurelionite, having these bonus areas to play through does make the game feel more substantial, and I think Hopoo should incorporate more of these deliberate world events and even some procedurally generated ones.

I personally enjoy the small secrets and additions like Kjaro and Runald’s cave, shrine of N'kuhana, etc. But I find these additions too small in scope to really be worth the effort to achieve every run. The Void Fields on the other hand is a substantial enough challenge and provides a large enough scope that I want to see more of in upcoming content updates. It would be cool to have the world be an almost mmorpg-esque world, with multiple side objectives to do along the way to a main objective. The unfortunate thing here is that not all of these side things are worth doing. N’kuhana’s shrine in fact offers nothing to the player outside of the initial unlock of the item, N’kuhana’s opinion. And the cave of Runald and Kjaro isn’t worth visiting for the measly two green items, on top of the caves only being accessible in multiplayer, or as the Engineer, or managing to glitch your way through the door with character abilities like the Huntress’ blink. I believe the Void Fields did it right in this regard by having a decent reward for players to contend for in the form of 8 white/green items and a red item. Perhaps having items that were more easily accessible or simply rewarding more items and incentives to partake in these optional areas (3D printers, boss items, particular shops, etc.) would drive more players to use them in their common routing. Blend these generated areas with the suggested stage progression of playing each stage once throughout a run, and a player would be able to make a reasonable path of execution that they could somewhat reliably depend on as long as rng was on their side.

To keep the more randomized spin on a player’s run, the use of randomly generated events could be used to allow the player to participate in potentially unique events to acquire a little bit more power for a little bit of their time. A system that immediately comes to mind is a hit list: You load into a new map and the game will tell you to kill a specific enemy on the map for a reward. In of itself, having something like this wouldn’t do much to bolster the game for people who can already kill bosses consistently, so instead there would need to be some type of modifier system. Simple modifiers could be used like 2x damage, health, enemy leeches health on hit, etc. But simple modifiers cause a game to lack depth, so I propose different challenges and modifiers: Time limits, hydra bosses (duplicate on death), health gated bosses (to somewhat halt OP players), and maybe even specialized boss elements that are separate from the usual elite elements. That isn’t to say that these randomly generated events even have to be bosses, it could be something to defend, a flag to capture, a delivery drop to conquer, etc. I believe this would be the best way to keep a game like this fresh while maintaining a lot of what the game wants to do.

Randomized events could also be a risk versus reward endeavor through the use of limiting what abilities and items the player has access to. Let’s say in the latter parts of the game, the player can stumble upon an event that will restrict them down to 20 randomized items (while they possibly have over 100 to be chosen from). Although I’d wager that players in this position would just opt to not even do the event as it could possibly end their run, what better way to reward these players for being risky than giving them more of the lunar items they want or even lunar coins? If players are able to be more productive in their runs by taking these additional challenges, I believe it’ll drive those players to accept these events in their late games. Plus these events give the game that feeling of a larger scope without altering all that much about the levels or the gameplay. And really, you only need to put like 2-3 on each stage to make the events system feel substantial enough.

Overall, I think if Hopoo were capable of designing a system like this, and designing it well, it could draw players back into playing the game for hours upon hours on top of what they’ve already invested. For me personally, the game has gotten pretty bland to play with time because each run just feels like it runs through the same loop: Hope for good beginning items, hope for good stages, farm for a red item on stage 4, and then if I’m doing alright I’ll try to get my way to the celestial portal, if I’m doing really good I’ll try to go for a god run. As much as the game tries to hide this gameplay format by having a wide range of RNG systems at play, the overall experience after a couple hundred hours can become apparent and stale as time progresses forwards. That isn’t to say that I think the current game is bad, but I think it could be so much more than what it is currently.

Challenges?

Another thing that would go a long way to making the game feel more expansive and player-progression focused would be the implementation of some good ol’ challenges. Hopoo seemingly doesn’t know how to develop a challenge that doesn’t have something locked behind it, or outright refuses to make challenges without a reward. Like seriously, some of the hardest challenges in the game reward alternative abilities for characters. Some of those being direct upgrades from the character’s normal ability. You really mean to tell me that I have to beat stage 20 without picking up any lunar items just to get a frag grenade for Commando? Alright, I guess. Hopoo has even realized that not all players want stuff to be locked behind challenges, and has added a decent amount of immediately accessible content to the game to appeal to those who aren’t into the challenges system. However they have also stated that they’re proud that players aren't immediately able to unlock the new abilities from the Skills 2.0 update and I just have to wonder, why?

Limiting the players to the degree that Risk of Rain 2 does seems overall harmful to a player’s experience with the game. You don’t unlock the best red item in the game, 57 leaf clover, until you’ve managed to clear 20 stages in a single run, which will probably be a player’s first time getting a god run. When you start up a new save file, you’re severely limited on the items that you can get your hands on because stuff like tougher times, armor piercing rounds, berserker's pauldron, preon accumulator, etc. are just locked away from access completely. That is disappointing because many of these items are staples in developing a good build, and it’s now more difficult for players to understand what items do what and which items are worth the time and effort when they have to unlock the item first and then have a random chance of acquiring it in a future run with a random amount of stacks to be accumulated. It’s even more disappointing that players have to fight a hill of challenges that get progressively more and more steep with its requirements and begin requiring players to either master elements of the game or the characters present.

I understand having hard challenges in your roguelike, but having items and content locked behind those challenges can turn a lot of players away from your game. The only saving grace here is that these challenges don’t have difficulty requirements outside of a couple select challenges, but most of these only offer cosmetic rewards that come from the monsoon obliteration challenges. It seems inexcusable to me that there wouldn’t just be challenges that players could attempt for fun. Instead we have challenges that players are being forcefully drawn to if they want new toys and gadgets to play around with in their future runs. Some of the challenges are understandable to skip, like if you don’t like the Engineer, you probably don’t have to worry about doing his challenges. However I wouldn’t skip any of the item and equipment challenges because items and equipment are the core of the game experience. Being limited in the items available means you’re only experiencing a limited amount of the game, and that’s a big no no.

The change that I’d propose here is just to nerf a lot of the more difficult challenges that have gameplay impacting items locked behind them, and then put those challenges in their own categories that players can try out on their own time for their own enjoyment. With these changes the unlock system would appear less like a grind and more like something for completionists and avid players to use in order to test their skills at the game. Something else that I’d recommend is a little stamp or indicator that tells people what difficulty the challenges were completed on, just as a little extra something for players to work towards. This part of the discussion is relatively simple because, come on, it’s challenges. But hopefully Hopoo changes the way that they handle the inclusion of challenges in the future.

Collectibles

Oh boy the collectibles. The collectibles aren’t terrible and before my save corrupted I was very close to have 100%’d the unlocks and collectibles, but 200 hours in and I still hadn’t unlocked everything. And the reason for that is because the unlocks take way too long to unlock and are way too frustrating to actively chase after. The environment logs became a chore to try and collect, when after spending about 100 hours after the Scorched Acres update I was still completely unable to obtain its environment log. It took me 90+ Grovetender kills to finally get his monster log, and to this date I’ve only had the little disciple item drop for me twice (one was in a multiplayer match). I ultimately gave up on trying to even go for the Aurelionite’s monster log when it once took me 4 hours to get a single gold portal to show up in a god run.

This section of the discussion is going to be short because I have a very simple message here: Increase the god damn drop rates of some of this stuff, seriously. It’s not satisfying to spend 200 hours and still see that there’s some little lore tidbits that I’m missing from my log book. It’s not satisfying to have to stop my flow of gameplay every time I get Scorched Acres just to have a tiny tiny tiny chance that the environment log radio might have somewhere on the map and then having to go hunt for it. And then when I don’t find it after being way more thorough than one should be on any given stage, I then have to question if I simply missed it or it actually didn’t spawn. It’s not satisfying to finally get that environment log or that one item from that one boss that has a random chance to spawn in the 50% chance stage that also has his own fucking chances on whether or not he’s going to drop the monster log and/or the boss item. Stuff like this is absolutely ridiculous and tedious and is making me work way too hard and having me dedicate too many resources just to get some god damn lore text. Little disciple isn’t even that good of an item, so why is it so rare? Just increase the spawns of stuff like the gold portals, monster logs (for bosses), and environment logs. Come on Hopoo, I just want to read your game’s lore.

-=CLOSING=-

So that’s my super long and in depth explanation and critique of many of the systems that Risk of Rain 2 has. I still love this game, and can’t wait for more content updates on it (primarily a fix to the corrupting save files). Please understand that these are just my opinions and whether or not you disagree with me doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right, it just means I want a different game than you do.

To summarize my review from the beginning of this post: Risk of Rain 2 does it’s predecessor justice and so much more. The jump from 2D to 3D just feels so right that one has to question if this was Hopoo’s original intent before realizing they didn’t have the resources for it. The gameplay loop and gameflow are excellent and you really do feel like you’re overcoming insurmountable odds at certain points to become invincible by the end. It has issues and probably always will be given Hopoo’s unmoved demeanor in even the most balance breaking items in their game. I just hope that they will reconsider some of their design philosophy for the sake of making a much more entertaining video game. As stated before, I overall give this game a 7/10 and depending on the person you may play a few or a few hundred hours in Risk of Rain 2. It’s a fun game to just sit down and play, and you’re given a decent amount of freedom in how you go about playing. And at the end of the day, just having a fun game to play is all that should matter, right?

-Count_

#review #discussion #risk of rain 2 #risk of rain #lonesome alley

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aaronheatonwords · 7 years

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Tacoma

It's difficult to separate a work from its creators, despite the intention of the work itself. While Tacoma isn't a direct sequel to Gone Home, Fullbright's previous release and the breakthrough into the mainstream that these character-oriented experiences have become, it certainly follows in the footsteps of the groundwork that Gone Home has laid in its wake. Where many games would opt for a setting that feels believable enough to be a real place but “gamey” enough to occupy and traverse, Tacoma and other games in this genre trade in a deliberately slow, measured pacing that takes pride in the realism of their settings. Where many games reference and idealize settings for the effect of creating and enjoyable level, Walking Simulators (as much as I hate that term, it isn't entirely inaccurate at this point) trade in environments that are realistic to truly inhabit.

In that regard, Tacoma is a resounding success. By daring to break away from the willfully indulgent nostalgia that many of these games have occupied, whether it's through a time period or a well-established setting like a national forest or a haunted house, Tacoma steps outside of those boundaries in a way that forces the creative boundaries outward. Where the player could before assume the general state of the world, Tacoma raises the challenge of creating an entirely new reality to inhabit, but one that has the same believability as an abandoned mid-90's mansion. There is a tactile, realistic feel to picking up and examining recorded VHS tapes of the X-Files that would be challenging to recreate in a setting that almost literally does not exist, but Tacoma grapples with that problem admirably.

The space station Tacoma, which operates as a glorified shipping and receiving factory, is an incredibly essential character in the game. As it isn't a simple real-world location gone creepy, it requires as much setup as the actual human characters. The player, a third-party contractor named Amy hired to board and investigate the Tacoma, is free to walk and poke around Tacoma as they gain access to new areas. Though only being a setting, it serves as a microcosm of the outside world; before you can begin your adventure proper, you're required to grab a special pair of AR augmentations and sign off on a user agreement which sounds actually pretty scary when you read it closely, though not unlike many of the EULAs we blindly agree to nowadays anyway (use of image in perpetuity across the universe? Really?). From there, the reality of the fiction that Tacoma places itself in becomes horribly real. There is a pervading sense of corporate ownership that runs through the game, hinting at the obsoletion of currency in favour of a system called “Loyalty,” which can be traded between various companies for less than desirable rates that aren't entirely clear to the person making the decision to convert. There are fictional holidays about the advancements (or stagnation, depending on how you view it) of the workforce, which the contractors of space stations take part in. Whether they actually enjoy the holiday or even understand it is played with, and many simply use it as a free day off. Fictional (and real) corporations are named and given histories, and even the technology that powers the station is given realistic uses and limits (try turning a stove or a treadmill on, go for it).

For all of that work, it would have been unfortunate for Tacoma to drop the ball on the human characters which act as the core of the experience. The most realistic space station in the world would be boring to explore if the humanity in the station didn't hold up its end of the bargain. (Mostly) Fortunately, Tacoma delivers the good on its human crew members. Despite being only a couple of hours long, Tacoma boasts six crew members to experience during the journey, and each with their own ambitions, problems, goals, and worries. The amount of characters who seem actually real seems like an odd thing to praise, but in the context of a short video game, it's not something that's seen very often. Fullbright explored plenty of options to bring these characters to life and they're all handled well.

One of the chief ways to explore and learn the characters are the AR recordings, which play out as coloured silhouettes that roam about the environment, almost like a stage play. As you watch these play back, you're presented with a timeline that informs you of how far along in a recording you are, which events of interest are happening, and the ability to scrub through the recording as you see fit. What first seems like a very basic twist on the audio log formula (the ability to manually track your position in a recording) quickly becomes much more complicated, as characters congregate and branch out during the recording. Being a real-time recording of the events of the station in a given area, the recording is not simply of a single character but of whoever was present in the zone during that recording. This leads to many instances of pausing and forwarding tracks to keep up with moving characters, navigating the environment to figure out who was standing where and when, and how to access the AR terminals the game presents.

Right, so another way the game presents characters is through a very indirect method, which is the AR terminals that everyone on board (including Amy herself) has access to. They open in front of characters like a digital book, and have area for email, web browsing, video calls and other computer-like interactions. Any time that a character is using his or her AR terminal during a recording, the player is free to poke around in it as well, though some interactions are locked off as corrupted or otherwise inaccessible. On top of the mostly passive AR recordings and the usual ability to poke and prod and twist and turn every item in the environment, the AR terminals act as a welcome addition to the usual formula of these games and give much needed context to certain characters. Like any media, sometimes there were characters who seemed to be acting entirely irrationally only for me to find well-earned justification in their email log or through a conversation with their partner or child. Adding a layer of context that isn't outright shown is a realistic way to add layers to characters. After all, how many times have you thought someone to be acting irrationally in real life, only to find out later that they were going through trauma or issues in their lives? The AR terminals are a layer of reality, despite being a digital item.

The conventions that Tacoma chooses to engage with and subvert do define a significant portion of my opinion of the game. Being the next entry in the genre from the creators who worked to popularize it, there's a certain notion of conventions being challenged and problems being addressed. With the popularity and advent of this genre, from Firewatch to SOMA to Layers of Fear, comes an expectation of improvement and expansion. Tacoma puts forth ideas that don't always pan out, though a lot of that does come down to individual opinion.

The prevalence of audio logs in the game seems like a very conscious design decision, rather than a creative freedom like Gone Home. Telling a story which has already happened is fascinating in its own right, not entirely disassociated from the strange voyeuristic tendencies that people might have, but because it allows a freedom to explore and inhabit an environment that was very lovingly crafted. While a game like Bioshock (which members of Fullbright have worked on) leans on tension to keep the player moving, games like Gone Home are fully propped up by their narratives and environments. In this case, Tacoma is full of very compelling people who participate in an event which seems equal parts terrifying and thrilling, guided by an AI whose intentions are not entirely clear (as is the case with so many AIs in fiction). Despite the joy of picking through drawers and bookstacks on the space station, I found myself something wishing that I could have inhabited a character who lived through the events of the space station. It speaks to the strength of the dual narrative style that Gone Home and Tacoma utilise that I want to experience both stories, though whether or not your story is the more interesting one is entirely a matter of personal opinion.

Similarly, the world around the Tacoma is so well-realised, even through snippets of emails and advertisements and AR terminals, that there's a part of me which wants to dive deeply into the universe outside of the airlock and find out who the tertiary characters and big players in the ecosystem are. Subtle hints like the faded American flag in a certain character's office or the constant reference to a competing company within the Tacoma stoke the fires of my interests so much that being a passive observer feels like a step back from what could have been. The art design is immaculate and the trail of breadcrumbs left for the player to follow through the station paint such a vivid world that I wish I could have either taken a step down, into the events of the Tacoma itself, or a step up, into a more wide-reaching political thriller.

Despite this, Tacoma succeeds whole-heartedly at what it does. It exposes an extremely believable world in microcosm, one that seems to respect all current avenues of political and social reality while presenting a very real picture of where it might go, and fills that opening with characters who feel motivated and clearly grounded without degenerating into two-dimensional caricatures of what a person in space might look or act like. As a follow-up to Gone Home, it smartly engages and subverts what it needs to by twisting the environmental storytelling model into an interactive and immersive space while ditching what isn't required, which is a faithful recreation of a time that's already passed us by. That's not to say that it diminishes what Gone Home accomplished, but it stands to prove what can be done when you look at a genre as a feeling and an idea, instead of a list of bullet points that need to be hit. I come away from Tacoma disappointed that its world isn't more immediately accessible, but very happy with the story it tells within the confines of its universe.

#review #reviews #video games #fullbright #tacoma #walking simulator #2017 #sci-fi #pc #steam #xbox one #words #4 stars

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ges-sa · 5 years

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Mortal Kombat 11 reviewed

Grind, Grind and Grind. The MK series has long been apart of the gaming sub-culture and has seen a lot highs and some lows *cough* banned in some places *cough*. I had really high expectations for the new MK11 and I must say, I am beyond disappointed with the route they decided to take here, the corporate one.

Story

The story picks up from the predecessor, MKX, where boy Raiden decided to throw the balance between good and evil off by cutting off evil Elder God Shinnok head. Neverrealm writer’s deserve praise here, the story is incredible and the timeline reset is genius. The introduction of Kronika helps push the timelines into whack, sending the past and presenting into a single timeline. The creation of double characters makes for some fun and exciting combos (i.e. imagine 2 Johnny Cages) This gives the base of the story without giving too much away because it is probably my favourite part of MK11, don’t want any spoilers. The story had me glued and I managed 2 sittings of 7 hours total to finish this magnificent timeline that sets up a great follow on for the developers.

Krypt…to currency?

The customisation of characters has changed beyond belief, each character has over 150 customisable options, with Skins, gear and special moves that you can use to create your perfect character to play with both online and in the Krypt. Now let’s talk about those corporate issues with the customisation. I completely understand the looter aspect they were going for but come on, the Krypt has been a part of the MK series before and shouldn’t be anything new, however, some things have changed. My adventure in the Krypt was a run around of opening loot boxes and getting jumped on. The loot boxes are now randomised and you aren’t guaranteed anything for your character as the last game did. Another way to get loot is through the towers of time, this is where you can unlock everything that you couldn’t within the Krypt, however, you still can not get character specific loot….UNLESS, you spend 25 000 MK Coins to summon a character specific tower that you can grind out something random for your chosen character, and even when this is done the reward is extremely random and this is hyper frustrating.

“Why frustrating” you may ask? Well let me tell you about the most horrific and unfair gameplay I have ever encounter in a fighting video game (Yes, even more so than Injustice 2). The living towers are basically the equivalent of fighting a real-life sub zero with your puny mutant hands, the combat is taken to the most one-sided nonsense I have ever seen. The fight is not only about the 2 characters but about what gear and consumable they have equipped, and let me tell you I saw some horrors, everything from missiles to slowing down your character with ice shards and much, much more. The balance of the fights are astronomically one-sided and I just could not figure out why, then it hit me like a tonne of bricks: CURRENCY. The following my opinion. It seems like MK11 have made the grind so astronomically impossible because of the launch of time crystals, an in-game currency that can be used to buy cosmetics and “Match Skip Tokens” that will allow you to skip these incredibly one-sided fights! Think about it, why would they want cosmetics to be obtained when players can fork out real cash to buy these items or better yet, fork out money to buy a skip token that will get you a randomly generated item and when its not what you want, you spend to get what you want. It is a win-win for the CORPORATE behind the game. The truth is that games make more money of in-game currency nowadays and everyone will try get onto this wagon when they can. There has ben a talk of a hot-fix patch to help with these towers, but let’s wait and see.

Oh, but what, there’s more, you can now equip an AI character of your choosing to fight the ladders for you and sit back and watch the best chance you have get flattened by the ladder as well. Now, why would I spend money on a game that I sit back and watch AI do my bidding for me? I don’t know but I mean, each to their own right. The AI spread into other modes to, with the coolest choice being a 3v3 AI chosen battle with someone online, with the winner walking away with the rewards. Fun, once in a while.

Characters and Design

With the introduction of 3 new characters Kollector, Cetrion, Geras and non-playable character Kronika, we see a lot of work being done into character development and redesign. Some characters have been redesigned and redone, with Cassie Cage, Jacqui Briggs and Sonya Blade being two of the more major updates to characters, with Sonya now being voiced by MMA legend Rhonda Rousey. NetherRealm Studios’ has definitely put in work and has seen the roster grow to a strong and diverse one with these character additions, my favourite being Geras, who can literally shave time from the match clock. The art style and finishing of the design is on par with what we would expect and still remains on of the best in Fighting Game design.

Conclusion

MK11 has taken the series to a new level and allows for a major branch out into different genres of fighting games, however, the corporate influence in the title has put me off the game for now. With the talk of hot fixes and patches coming, I would personally wait to see if this is true before spending my well-earned money on a good story. The overall feel of the game is well adjusted and taken for the market, but for the price that we pay for games in this day and age, value for money needs to be key and without the patches and updates I just don’t see it.

#FATALITY #MK11 #NetherRealm Studios #PC #Switch #Warner Bros #Xbox One #Gaming #Reviews

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pod7 · 7 years

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Winter Anime* 2017 Lightning Review

*just the shows I watched of course

Shows included - ACCA: 13-ku Kansatsu-ka, Ai Mai Mi: Surgical Friends, Akiba’s Trip The Animation, All Out!!, BanG Dream!, Chain Chronicle, Chaos;Child, Demi-chan wa Kataritai, ElDLive, Fuuka, Gabriel Dropout, Gintama., Hand Shakers, Kemono Friends, Kobayashi-san chi no Maid Dragon, KonoSuba S2, Kuzu no Honkai, Little Witch Academia, Masamune-kun no Revenge, Minami Kamakura Koukou Joshi Jitensha-bu, Mori no Yousei: Kinoko no Musume, Nobunaga no Shinobi, Nyanko Days, One Room, Onihei, Piace: Watashi no Italian, Pokemon Sun & Moon, Sangatsu no Lion, Seiren, Spiritpact, Urara Meirochou, Youjo Senki

Settle in for some long reviews, and probably the worst reviewed season since I started doing this! Wow!

ACCA: 13-ku Kansatsu-ka It’s a MADhouse production, so I went in pretty sure I would like it. I was a bit wrong on my first impression; I thought it would be a man on the run type show, but it was actually a more nuanced, spy-that-doesn’t-know-he’s-a-spy type story. I liked the character design. It reminded me of some of the manga series in the “non-moe art” tag on Dynasty Scans. I was in love at first sight with Director General Mauve, voiced by Atsuko Tanaka (Motoko, Ghost in the Shell), and hoped she would play a bigger role than she actually did. I was completely taken off guard by Jean’s confession of his feelings for Grossular at the end, which Mauve had in common. If it had to be someone, I would have guessed it to be Niino, in the old ‘observer falls for subject’ cliche. Still, a welcome, and very low-key revelation that is certainly welcome. The music is really great in this series, especially the intro and outro themes. I would have like for some of the female cast members to have more to do; there were seemingly more women in the show, but they hardly ever had any relevancy. Also, a bit more action or urgency would have been nice. It felt towards the end like this would be called “the hipster’s anime”. Definitely recommended. 9/10

Ai Mai Mi: Surgical Friends Just as ridiculous as ever, though it had some oddly serious parts in some episodes as well. I am appreciating more and more the bit during the credits of each episode where an alpaca recounts an awkward tale of the life of the mangaka who writes AMM. I think the randomness is wearing thin now though. 7/10

Akiba’s Trip The Animation I had never played the game before so I didn’t really have any idea what this was about besides being located in Akihabara. It had a lot of parallels with Punch Line, which I noted in my first impression, just chock full of references and insider humor that I think ended up being lost on a lot of the Western viewers (including me, obviously.) I enjoy the first eight or so episodes, but right when most probably thought it got interesting, for me it was like I just couldn’t stand to watch it anymore. I ended up skimming through the last episodes, but honestly, unless you are REALLY into Akihabara as a culture or just otaku interests in general, I would pass on this show, sadly. Having to watch the idol performance more than once was torture. 6/10

All Out!! The not-so-subtle pattern that is emerging in my anime viewing habits, is that I will start a sport or game series, as soon as it becomes entirely focused on the sport or game itself, I lose interest almost immediately. The same unfortunately happened here; as soon as they hit training camp, it was like I was watching a completely different show, and just couldn’t stand to even skim through it at the end. They can’t all be winners, and even MADhouse can’t be perfect all the time. Dropped

BanG Dream! My first impression was pretty much right on the nose; this is literally what would happen if the people behind Love Live adapted K-On. The melodrama of Love Live with similar archetypes to K-On. Unfortunately, no super gorgeous teacher steps in to help, and instead of a school they have to save the local girls-only concert venue by playing a pop rock version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I wish I were kidding. Not horrible or offensive, but just felt like a phoned in effort from the waifu buffet factory. 6/10

Chain Chronicle Sadly I just kind of forgot this show was even on, even though it showed signs of promise, I just couldn’t bring myself to care enough to catch up on it. Dropped

Chaos;Child The edgiest of edge. It made me appreciate the GOOD parts of Occultic;Nine that much more. I might have watched more if the adaptation of the prequel (episode zero) wasn’t just about the most boring thing I’ve watched in years. Dropped

Demi-chan wa Kataritai Top 3 of the season. It definitely felt less wacky than the manga, but I was okay with that. Satou-sensei stole the show, but Machi held her own in my opinion. It was funny to see how fast people tried to turn on the show when Hikari made Machi’s body hug Sensei and he was embarrassed because her boobs pressed into him when he wasn’t expecting it. However with a certain maid being INCREDULOUS, that movement died out before the next episode even came out. It was a good adaptation, and I think may just be my “comfy” show of the season, though again, a certain maid gave it a run for it’s money there too. 9/10

ElDLive I stand by my previous Space Patrol Luluco comparison. It was silly for the sake of being silly, but tried to add various chuuni and action tropes in to spice it up. To be quite honest this was a bit of a stinker, and only watched it for Misuzu to see if she grew any over the season (she did, but just the tiniest bit.) 4/10

FUUKA This was basically KimiKiss Pure Rouge but flipped love interests and included music to make more money off of the property with. It doesn’t do anything new or interesting, and it wasn’t satisfying at all. Like even knowing that Fuuka would end up being the girl the protag had feelings for, I still thought that maybe, just maybe she would do SOMETHING endearing in the least, but no, she just kind of was a brat at all points. Everything was really pretty, but zero substance. 3/10

Gabriel Dropout I think I started reading the manga for this before reading Demi-chan or Maid Dragon, so it’s kind of a surprise that of those three, this felt like the weakest effort. Something was lost in translation to animation to take away the magic presented in print. It was still enjoyable, it just didn’t have the punch I was expecting it to have, and I don’t know if it’s the low key music or the voices or what. Calling it a disappointment is going too far for me, but I certainly thought it would be better. 7/10

Gintama. Top 3 of the season. Pretty much just the adaptation of a single story arc, but an important one. Also, a super kick-ass, pulls no punches season. Loved the hell out of this show before, but this took it to a whole new level. I mentioned in my first impression that the period was a bit scary, but I now see that it was more of an affirmative statement, “GINTAMA, period.” 10/10

Hand Shakers This was really bad. Like, it’s a known thing that this show is bad. It was excruciating to give this show three whole episodes, but I managed it somehow. As admirable as it is that they went out on a limb to make their own original series, that doesn’t save it from being an over-designed, poorly thought out mess of a show. Dropped

Kemono Friends I just want the record to show that I was on board with this show from the very beginning, whereas the MAL user score was as low as 4.2 at the start of the season. It’s the innocence of Serval mixed with the goofiness of the friends, rounded out by the mystery of Kaban that give this show it’s oomph. The character design is really great too. Basically what it boils down to is that this show has four or five things that the internet typically hates when it comes to an anime, yet somehow captured the hearts thousands, from 4chan to tumblr and everywhere in between. It’s hard to imagine this not getting a second season of some kind, whether it’s a continuation of this season or an adaptation of the manga. 9/10

Kobayashi-san chi no Maid Dragon Top 3 of the season. A loving relationship between two adult women, albeit each loves the other in a different way (or do they?) A nurturing and caring relationship between an office worker and a young girl she adopts on sight. A family unit of two moms and a daughter that works. A dragon woman with giant boobs teasing a young boy that meant to summon a demon. Well, okay that last one isn’t exactly the squeaky-cleanest thing to happy this season, but the people who demonize this show because of it are missing out on an other wise great and potentially important series. I was surprised to find this was a KyoAni series; they tend to work in a very specific style, so the fact that this turned out looking anything like the manga is a miracle of it’s own, I think. Once I knew it was KyoAni though, I could see their thumbprints everywhere; the suddenly very poignant moment with great lighting and super appropriate music is something they’ve managed to perfect almost to a fault (to where it feels forced), but the couple examples in this show just added to the already cute moment that was happening. I am writing this the week before the finale, which features the dreaded anime killer Big Boobs Loli, but having read what comes after her initial appearance, I think that, should this get a second season, people will understand her character once the story moves forward (though the big boobs thing is kind of ridiculous, admittedly.) A wonderful, lovely, heart-warming supernatural comedy. 10/10 highest recommendation

KonoSuba S2 I may get some flak for this, but I felt there was a noticeable drop in quality between seasons. The writing was still good, and the performances as always were hilarious, but the animation seemed to have worsened quite a lot. I haven’t read any BTS for this series but it seemed like some of the more involved shots were rushed. Darkness continues to steal the show for me, even though I know Megumin is everyone’s waifu. I think it’s because I tend to always gravitate towards the girl in a show like this that has the least chance of ending up with the protagonist (Nisekoi, Toradora, Zero no Tsukaima, etc.) Not bad by any means, but I’m concerned for a season three should it happen. 8.5/10

Kuzu no Honkai Despicable trash. Soap opera level characters with midnight softcore love scenes between teenagers, some of which are borderline rape at best. Not even the legit lesbian love interest could keep me watching this show, that should tell you everything. Five episodes makes about 90ish minutes of my life I’ll never get back. Dropped, avoid

Little Witch Academia This didn’t quite get the hype I thought it would, but it still seems most people that watch it are enjoying it immensely. However, I feel like it may be losing steam a bit, which is worrisome since it still has 12 episodes left to go through. It’s a bit frustrating to watch sometimes as someone who watched the first two movies/OVA, waiting for things like Ursula to be revealed as Chariot, and for Akko to get to a respectable level of magic use, things like that. I do enjoy the extra development that Lotte and Sucy have gotten, and I hope it extends to Diana, Amanda and some of the more prominent girls too. Continues!

Masamune-kun no Revenge The show had a bit of a twist on the usual formula, but by the fifth or sixth episode it was pretty clear it was the same old contrived tsundere harem romance series. When the guy seems to have some redeeming qualities, I can stomach a show like that for the sake of decent characters and performances, but this just ended up being a chore to watch. Even the debut of a late game older woman/love interest’s retainer wasn’t enough to save the show for me. I can’t see myself tuning in to a second season of this without some kind of huge plot twist like a female rival that the love interest is actually interested in (ha ha HAHAHAH) 5/10

Minami Kamakura Koukou Joshi Jitensha-bu In my first impression of this show, I wondered if it would be as dumbed down as the previous season’s cycling anime whose name I’ve already forgotten. It is. It’s basically the same show but with more characters. Has a good, cute sensei, but also has generic foreign student trope character, which was insufferable because she was basically the same character as the foreigner in Akiba’s Trip. Dropped

Mori no Yousei: Kinoko no Musume The amateurish charm I thought I saw in the first episode of this show quickly dissolved into frustration. If it had been a high school clubs project, then I would have supported them whole heartedly, but this seems like a bad mobile game cash-in, and unfortunately it came out in a season that had a GREAT mobile game cash-in. Dropped

Nobunaga no Shinobi The first season ends, but the second season starts in like two weeks, so I’m tempted to not even include this, because it’s silly that it will be considered separate seasons. It’s a charming, and surprisingly bloody show about feudal Japan and for those that have studied the history of that time period, there are some great gags pertaining to certain figures not shown in the best of lights. 8/10

Nyanko Days Once again, this was just a cute fluff series that hopefully paves the way for Nukoduke. If you need a cuteness shot in the arm between heavy shows, this is a good choice. 8/10

One Room My hopes that they would keep the viewer genderless were dashed pretty quickly with a onsen episode early on, and then the sickening imouto arc in the middle. The final four episodes featuring the childhood friend chasing her dreams was the redeeming factor here, I would recommend just watching those episodes to be honest. 6/10

Onihei One of the better shows of the season. It has a different vibe to anything else on at the moment, probably because the source was originally published fifty years ago. There is very little that is lost in translation, and I think it plays well to the modern audience. There is a bit of a problem with character design, which @fucktsunderes pointed out to me, that because there’s more realism to it, some of the characters end up looking pretty similar. Actually, not just some, but a lot. To the point where I wasn’t sure if a character that died was a character that I liked or not until they showed up in a later episode. Other than that though, a great crime thriller action show. 9/10

Piace: Watashi no Italian After an incredible year of short form series in 2016, it’s an odd feeling to only have Piace as a stand out show this season. It was just the right about of silly and cute, while also being about food and food service. A highlight is the outro being sang by two different cast members each week, with the finale having everyone singing. 9/10

Pokemon Sun & Moon The most fun I’ve had watching pokemon since I was a kid, fantastic show. I am somehow even more in love with Japan’s Musashi than America’s Jesse. I am definitely on the Mao/Lillie ship. Also the only theme song this season that I listened to for every single episode, it is so awesome. Continues!

Sangatsu no Lion As I covered in my review for All Out, when a show has a game or sport in it, if it becomes too focused on that game or sport, I lose interest quicker than a hiccup. It’s a good show, but the shogi was just not the good part of the show for me. I enjoyed Rei’s interactions with his sister and the three Kawamoto girls the most of the whole season. It’s when the show felt the most alive and relatable to me. Not to mention Momo is just too darn cute. Shaft does cute very well, and also does cold depression very well, too. A spinoff with the Kawamotos as the star would be the ideal second season for me, but I will continue to watch just about anything Shaft decides to gift to us. 8/10

Seiren I should have dropped this show, but I didn’t for some reason. The middle arc was definitely the best, the epilogue was really cute too. Not really much to say about this series, it just kind of was there every week. One of those “each path of the romance vn is animated” shows, so your mileage may vary. 6/10

Spiritpact Yaoi bait adapted from a Chinese comic iirc. The main characters were both unbearable, and the way they treated the first significant female character in the show was gross, so I dropped this quicker than a hot rock. Dropped

Urara Meirochou Controversial opinion time: This show would have been better without Nono and Koume. They added nothing to the story that couldn’t have been done by either Kon or Chiya, and honestly the four girls thing is so over-done that I end up comparing it mentally to all the shows I’ve already seen before I even watch the first episode. The teacher and the... morals officer? Whatever Saku was stole the show, with some great late game performances from Kon’s mother. It was a cute show, and I’ll watch another season if it gets one, but I’d like it to be a bit more focused on the divining stuff going forward, or at least more focused on Kon and Chiya. 8/10

Youjo Senki Not really sure about this show. I spent the first half of the season mistakenly thinking it was glorying the third reich, but even after being corrected, I still didn’t really understand who I was meant to support or sympathize with. I end up rooting for Tanya a lot of the time because I understand a lot of the anti-theological sentiment she has, but I’m not sure that’s really the intent... Like in the last episode, we see the young daughter of the man who was killed by Tanya after encountering more than once enlisting in what is the equivalent of the American army. Rather than sympathy and compassion for what is obviously a scared young woman going for revenge, I felt pity, because I know far too many people in real life who FROG it up big time (that being ‘full relying on God’, btw) when any sort of hardship comes their way. I don’t really think I could watch a second season of this, it would have to be more than just ‘Tanya pushes back against Being X, BX recruits someone else, etc’, like, if Tanya went the whole season pushing back but never heard a peep out of BX, and started to wonder how much of it was just in her head, and began to doubt the things she remembered from her past life, that would be intriguing, but I don’t really see it heading that way. Also, not nearly enough Visha screen time for my taste. 7/10

#winter anime 2017 #anime review #lightning review #anime

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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How the System Shock Remake Modernizes a PC Gaming Classic

https://ift.tt/3gcgfWv

When LookingGlass Technologies’ System Shock released in 1994, few people knew what to make of it. It was a first-person game with action and guns, but it most certainly wasn’t a first-person shooter like Doom, which had been released less than a year before System Shock. It featured navigation and level design similar to games like Ultima Underworld, but it wasn’t necessarily an RPG in most respects. While System Shock received quite a bit of praise from critics and players who took a chance on it, but it wasn’t exactly revered as a game-changer or considered a major hit at the time. In fact, LookingGlass lost money on the game.

But not long after System Shock’s release, a new breed of games began to emerge, PC titles that were clearly inspired by its innovations. Titles like Thief and Half-Life, both released in 1998, expanded on System Shock‘s emergent gameplay and first-person storytelling. Other games, such as 2000’s Deus Ex, were largely re-imaginings of the System Shock formula. By the time BioShock arrived in 2007, a “Shock” game was a bit easier to define. In fact, imagine playing BioShock in 1994 and you’ll have a pretty good idea why System Shock is typically referred to as a game ahead of its time.

Even in that respect, the case of System Shock has always been a strange one. Because so many of the games that followed in System Shock’s footsteps went on to become more successful (at least in terms of sales), there are times when System Shock is remembered more for the games it inspired than LookingGlass’ original experience. That’s a legacy that Nightdive Studios, the team behind the upcoming System Shock remake, is well aware of.

“The original System Shock was a ground-breaking experience that inspired a generation of amazing games and developers, though, today, it’s been largely forgotten,” says Stephen Kick, CEO and founder of Nightdive Studios, who spoke to Den of Geek via email. “One of the driving motivations of developing this remake was to expand the reach of the original.”

Nightdive Studios’ desire to bring System Shock into the modern age shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. After all, Nightdive was founded as part of an effort to re-release System Shock 2 for modern platforms, and the studio has spent most of the last eight years restoring and re-releasing classic games such as The 7th Guest, Doom 64, and even the original System Shock.

It was actually Nightdive’s work on an enhanced version of the original System Shock that convinced the team that the game deserved something more substantial.

“After we recovered the source code of the original and implemented mouselook and high-resolution support in the Enhanced Edition, we began to feel that underneath the complex and sometimes obtuse control scheme was a one-of-a-kind game,” Kick says. “[It was] something special that truly deserved to be revisited.”

While System Shock was indeed something special in 1994, its innovations may feel familiar to younger generations who take certain gameplay mechanics for granted in 2020. That means Nightdive has to answer a tricky question: how do you make System Shock feel special again for a new audience 26 years later?

“One of the constant struggles has been finding a balance between what the original did and what 20 plus years of game development and innovation have taught us,” Kick says. “System Shock was one of the first games that offered players a non-linear experience in a fully 3D world. It also allowed the player to customize the difficulty level of the various challenges they faced independently from one another, introducing an innovative system that to my knowledge has never been replicated…We knew that if we stayed true to the original and introduced modern conventions and mechanics that today’s audience expects that we could deliver an authentic Shock experience.”

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Defining what constitutes an authentic System Shock experience seems to be the key to successfully remaking the original game. Despite a legion of imitators that have come and gone, there are still elements of the original System Shock which remain relatively unique to it. For instance, System Shock was much more mechanically complex than many of its spiritual successors (and its official sequel) — certain weapons and ammunition dealt specific types of damage to specific enemies while “dermal” patches found in the game offered perks but also buffs to your character. The game also focused less on stats and other traditional character building elements in favor of a system where players collected “hardware” upgrades throughout the game.

Yet, when asked what element of the original System Shock (and the System Shock series) best defines it and separates it from everything else out there, Kick offers a clear and confident answer: “I believe it’s SHODAN.”

“I’ve played just about every game that can credit its lineage to System Shock and I can’t think of one that has an antagonist as diabolical or even remotely as memorable as her,” Kick says. “Even when she’s not directly interacting with you, she’s there. Security cameras are whirring and spying on you, Citadel Station creaks and moans as she alters and modifies the structure to her will, the pipes hiss and hum as she infects every system. She’s always there and the environment feels alive even when you’re surrounded by death.”

For those who don’t know, SHODAN was the primary antagonist of the original System Shock. Actually, she’s much more than that. As an advanced A.I. hellbent on wiping out humanity, SHODAN may sound like a pretty standard villain, but she’s actually a somewhat tragic figure whose plans are largely based on her desire to find a place where she belongs and gain some understanding of her own existence. As noted above, her omnipresent nature often casts her into the role of a constant companion. And it’s not uncommon for System Shock players to become attached to SHODAN despite her hostilities.

Kick attributes some of the effectiveness of SHODAN as a character to the work of the actress who voiced her.

“You can’t talk about SHODAN without mentioning the work of Terri Brosius who lends her voice to the character,” Kick says. “Her voice is absolutely chilling and the intermittent clicks, pops, and distortions that permeate her lines sink deep into your subconscious. It’s been over 20 years since we’ve heard her and she’s still one of the most quoted antagonists in gaming…We’ve heard samples of new SHODAN lines and the individual blips, stutters, and noise have been meticulously considered and handcrafted to preserve her iconic voice.”

It may sound odd for a modern studio to highlight things like “clicks, pops, and distortions,” but that’s another element that has always helped define System Shock. It was, especially in terms of sound, an ugly game. Voices were often distorted in such a way that not only accurately reflected the condition of the game’s audio logs but enhanced the level of dread. Like the recent hit Amazon film The Vast of Night, it used antiquated audio techniques to more effectively convey the uncertainty of a bizarre event.

It’s certainly tempting to call System Shock’s audio quality a by-product of an era when such complex sound design was in its infancy. To be fair, there is some truth to that. While that may cause many to list the sound design as one of those aspects of the original game most in need of a modern makeover, Nightdive recognizes that System Shock was filled with rough edges which were ultimately part of its grand design.

“There has been a very conscious effort to preserve that ‘rawness’ from the beginning,'” Kick says. “We knew that we wanted the art style and overall aesthetics to call back to the original so we developed a technique where if you get close enough to objects that the textures break down all the way to their individual pixels.

“This was by design so that from far to medium distances, the visuals look high fidelity with full PBR material support. But, when you get close up, it resembles the retro aesthetic. It adds a really beautiful texture and grit to everything that has become a unique feature specific to our game. It was important that when you looked at a screenshot of System Shock next to a number of other games you’d be able to identify it immediately.”

While the game’s art style helps preserve key elements of the System Shock experience, there are other ways in which advancements in technology have helped Nightdive bring some of the PC classic’s ugliness to life in ways that just weren’t possible in 1994.

“Visually, one of my goals was to realize the true horror of what occurred once SHODAN assumed control of Citadel,” Kick says. At the start of the original game, you wake up from a coma to find that the self-aware AI has turned a once-prosperous space station into a grotesque nightmare.

“Every creature, mutant, and monster you encountered was once an innocent crew member who was reshaped and modified with child-like curiosity by a near-omniscient being, and I made it a priority to explore that using the tools and technology at our disposal. Some of the things we’ve created are nauseating and downright disturbing.”

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As important as it was for Nightdive to retain and enhance certain System Shock qualities, the team also recognized that there are parts of the original game that simply don’t work as well now.

Consider those aforementioned audio logs, for instance. In 1994, it was shocking to think that a game could tell the bulk of its story through found audio. In 2020, Kick rightfully notes that such a storytelling technique has become “cliched and even parodied due to overuse.” Still, Kick describes those audio logs as being “quintessentially System Shock” due to the way that they “become somber reminders of the consequences of your actions.” As such, the team considers them irreplaceable.

That desire to retain the spirit of an idea while recognizing that the idea itself doesn’t necessarily work as originally intended resulted in Nightdive coming up with an elegant solution.

“The problem we faced was that the audio logs were placed so close together that you were constantly finding them and the length of each VO recording was not only slowing the player down, but they were overlapping,” Kick explains. “While you were listening to one audio log, you’d have already found another and that became very cumbersome. It was an easy fix, but we had to space them farther apart from one another to find a good balance. We’ve also re-written the logs to be a bit shorter and more concise with the information they convey.”

Audio logs are hardly the only way in which System Shock utilized design elements that were both technically outdated yet oddly essential to its core experience. There’s perhaps no better example of that contradiction than the game’s learning curve. System Shock was, in many ways, designed to be intentionally confusing and sometimes even frustrating. You weren’t meant to just blast through the game like a shooter, and mastery of its mechanics, interface, and controls demanded time and patience from the player.

While Nightdive has addressed one of those frustrating elements (its confounding controls, which were rooted in the era of primitive 3D exploration) without diluting that “hardcore” spirit of the original experience, there’s at least one other contradictory aspect of the original game that has raised difficult questions about the line between preservation and modernization.

“The level design is probably the worst offender,” Kick says of System Shock’s flaws. “Its labyrinthian design is archaic, but it’s undeniably System Shock.”

System Shock’s Metroidvania-like level design encouraged players to explore an expansive area in search of the way forward, but it was also often unnecessarily confusing. That typically resulted in the player running around without a clear sense of where they were, where they were going, and what they were supposed to be doing.

As frustrating as those parts of System Shock could often be, Kick suggests that our perception of System Shock’s learning curve may have as much to do with an overall change to how we look at games as well as how the game itself was designed.

“You should feel like a rat running through a maze under the watchful glare of a rogue artificial intelligence constantly testing you and obstructing your progress with her other experiments,” Kick says. “Contemporary games often hold your hand and direct you to the next objective with breadcrumbs or waypoints, removing the sense of dread, isolation, and relief you feel when you discover the exit. We’ve received some negative feedback about the level design, but it’s System Shock, so it stays.”

That philosophy not only captures why Nightdive is the perfect studio to revive System Shock but why there are so many who believe that System Shock is one of those pieces of PC gaming history which deserves a remake despite the fear that it won’t live up to memories of the original.

Even if you’ve never tried it, you may feel like you’ve played System Shock because you’ve played games like it. But you really haven’t. From its ambiguous philosophical nature to its brilliant antagonist and haunting cyberpunk aesthetics, only System Shock is System Shock.

While other games may have come along and evolved the System Shock formula, Nightdive is determined to ensure that future generations will never forget one of the PC titles that changed the medium forever.

“BioShock, Thief, Dishonored, Deus Ex, Prey, they all owe their existence to [System] Shock so, in that regard, we were not only motivated, but we were compelled to expand its reach as a way of honoring its legacy and the groundwork it laid for not only other games but the developers of those games,” Kick says. “So, no, I don’t believe that modern gamers are aware of how many video game concepts were introduced or refined by System Shock, but if we do our job right, hopefully they will be.”

System Shock is coming to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC in 2020. You can download the Alpha Demo of the game on Steam and GOG now.

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