#so people will play them and think wow. representation. no other game from the continent of asia does this.

[piromantic]

i know i say 'i wanna make a video essay about xyz' like once every three months and i've never followed through but hoooly shit i want to make a video essay on queerbaiting in gacha games

[supergenial]

Cindered Shadows was pretty decent

I recently finished the Cindered Shadows DLC and decided to once again write about my impressions, don't worry though, this one isn't as long as the previous ones. Spoilers: I think this is as good as fire emblem is gonna get for a while.

1) No Agarthans, thank GOD

A story as old as fire emblem: There's an interesting human villain with down to earth motivations or obsessions, but in the large scale of the story they're overshadowed by a supernatural being who wants to destroy the world for no reason other than "they're just evil". This is Edelgard and the Agarthans, Arvis and Manfroy/Loptous, Rudolph and Duma, Ashnard and Ashera, Walhart and Grima... you get it. This shit sucks to put it bluntly. Having these stereotypically evil bad guys who are clearly evil is one of the main things that brings down the plot of any fire emblem game. I'm of the belief that they should kick out these supernatural villains and just leave us against the human villains, the one's with actual ideals and beliefs other than "hurr durr, destroy the world".

And then there’s our villain for this DLC. Now yes, it feels like they recycled a certain professor from the Harry Potter series, but I like that he is "The" bad guy for the DLC, he's not being controlled by anyone. He's obsessed with Byleth's mom and in-game this makes a lot of sense. If Byleth, who is incapable of communication, can drive people crazy for them just by existing then just imagine a Byleth who can actually talk. Her "waifu" charms must be off the charts, so I can't blame this guy for being obsessed. More importantly he's not being controlled by the Agarthans, he's not being played by anyone. He's a man who's lived a righteous life, he took care of a lot of people who all love him but ultimately decided to use them for his own gain and his own obsessions. As far as FE villains go... He's good, honestly, great job Intelligent Systems, I expected a lot less.

2) Reduced avatar wanking

Shots fucking fired

Sure, Byleth's mom is a main focus of the plot, and Byleth is the one who sets the plot in motion, but rarely does it feel like the game is going "gee Player, you're so great, you're our god, we all love you and want to marry you". Byleth still plays a large role sure (unfortunately) but it still feels like this is the story of Yuri and his gang with Byleth being their strategist which is, idk, way better than the idea behind the main game? The one where Byleth turns into a literal god, gets every achievement of the army attributed to them only, has every other conversation remind us how glorious Byleth is, etc.

In fact the dlc goes as far as having Hapi constantly belittle Byleth and even make fun of their communication skills by calling him Chatterbox (good job to the localizers, she doesn’t say this in the japanese audio). Get that teacher’s ass girl, destroy them. (Obviously I would hate this behavior if it was directed to someone else, but in this case I'm willing to make a concession).

3) Yuri's backstory

Ashe: I admire and love this man who is my only parental figure but Rhea said he's kind of bad so I killed him Yuri: Church ordered me to kill a bunch of thieves and delinquents and I refused

You have no idea who much I love the fact that Yuri is someone who protested his orders and got kicked out of the church for refusing to kill civillians. This instantly sends him very high in my rankings. Playing through the first half of the game all I wanted was to stop and say "No, Lady Rhea, fuck you. I don't think it's very cash money for the most powerful military force in the continent to eradicate a lightly armed militia of farmers (with popular support in their locality!)" this is what true imperialism is all about! But there is sadly no option for that.

Just by telling us that Yuri is someone who was punished for saying "No, these orders are inhumane, I refuse to carry them out" that is enough for me, the game is saying "yes, we know, have your compensation price". In the end Yuri is extremely loyal to Rhea which is unfortunate but hey, at least they lampshaded one of the most glaring issues I have with the main game, so that's at least something.

4) "You've obtained all information. Proceed with the story, NOW"

Rather than wasting time forever thinking up which activity I should carry out, abyss is simply a place where you talk to the abyssal denizens to get some plot information or speculation, and boom, you're done. No running around forever, no quests, no doors that take ages to load. You can perfectly skip the abyss parts and at most you'll miss out on Edelgard's conversation with Dimiri (which is fucking hilarious) and a few rusted weapons that can be forged but that's it. Upon talking to every resident of the abyss the game will actually say you’ve acquired all information and will prompt you to go into combat rather than assume you want to dilly dally for a while.

I actually rather like this and would not be opposed to it being the philosophy behind future in-between segments between chapters. I can understand IntSys wanting to load in a ton of features like a sauna and fishing to rack up excitement for the game, I know I was excited for fishing, but when these activities have rewards tied to them, replaying becomes kind of a chore, "aw geez, I have to fish 69 fish to reach professor rank A+ AGAIN" (I actually had to when trying to get the piss screen from clearing maddening). Getting only some conversations and a bit of context for the story, that's... pretty good honestly, I liked this better than the monastery and better than My Castle. Throw in some skits with multiple characters at once and I’m gold

(seriously how come there’s no scenes with the three of the bros, Dimitri, Sylvain and Felix all hanging out together, the fact that a third character never shows up in support conversations is fucking bad)

5) Sometimes less is more

I've extensively complained about three houses already but bear with me. Yet another thing that infuriates me about the game is the extensive amount of work it required. I truly do think that if they had released only the blue lions route and left everything else in the plot as mysterious and unexplained loose ends left entirely up to speculation, that'd be a great game on it's own. Instead I have to see all the hard work that went into making the other routes only so that, in the end, they just had me going "well it was ok I guess". Every scene in the game requires work, many hours of coding, writing, voice acting, sound editing, making sure the models don't look too messed up, bug testing, etc. The amount of work that went into three houses was brutal regardless of what you think of the final product, yet a lot of people didn't even bother playing through all of that. So yes, I honestly wanted less, give me a more concise game rather than spreading too wide and ending up thin.

Cindered Shadows on the other hand is concise to a fault to make up for that. The story is pretty straightforward and leaves no loose ends to itself, there's no anime cutscenes, no supports (within abyss, you can support them all in the main game). There's even that very awkward sacrifice scene where some characters are having their life and blood drained from them yet the visual representation we see is just them standing around like normal, with Yuri even doing that hand pose he does all the time instead of squirming in pain or something. It's very awkward looking, objectively not good, but it gets the point across and doesn't make me go "wow you put in all this effort for nothing" because the whole thing is also fairly short (5 to 10 hours in hard mode).

I know, it sounds like I'm shitting on the dlc, but the point is I'd much rather get something short that leaves me satisfied than something like the main game that makes me go "this could've been so hecking gooood if they changed X" for the rest of my life.

6) The gameplay

Chapter 4 is my favorite mission in the whole game

They made Hard Mode good. I previously said maddening was the one difficulty where this game made sense, but this one achieves perfection with just hard mode. This is because the team actually knows what you have. In the main game there's all sorts of variables to account for due to the large amount of player expression that is possible, you can reclass anyone into anything and throughout many lucky or unlucky level ups, maps can be entirely different based on that rng and choices. Here though, your characters already have solid bases starting at lvl 20, and you can't reclass too much so the devs know exactly what you're working with and can plan accordingly. Beating the maps feels incredibly satisfying not just because the objectives have more variety now, but also because you feel like you found the right way to use the tools you were given. This is why the first few chapters of any fire emblem game often feel so good, because the devs know exactly what you have.

Not that I think player expression is bad! It's very satisfying to warp skip chapters and to use broken units like battalion vantage+wrath Dimitri as these things make you feel like you've truly subjugated the game, but it takes some time for those things to really take off. There's a time to reap and a time to sow, and the sowing time can get pretty dull sometimes but that's what makes the payoff feel worth it. Still, for a short experience like cindered shadows is, this style just fits perfectly, plus chapter 4 has quickly become one of my favorite chapters in the whole game, along with chapter 6.

7) In The End

Idk folks, I just like it. If you just want more adventures with the three lords, this is it.

If you’re looking for any excuses to avoid this I'd say the better ones are: maps are reused from the main game (they work much better here though), it's 10 hours at most so it's price-to-cash ratio isn't very good with the expansion pass being $30, and also the Abysskeeper feels a bit TOO winkwink nudgenudge to me, especially since Gatekeeper was popular enough to make it into Super Smash Brothers. Like yeah bro, we get it, we all love Gatekeeper, you didn't have to do this.

I also like that they finally gave Dimitri a semi-problematic quote where he says he kinda likes the idea of poor people living underground out of sight, I think it’s a very rich-white-boy flaw to have and not entirely awful given his life experience up to that point. And yes I do think he has no flaws and is entirely unproblematic in the main game, “feral” as he may look it doesn’t seem like he goes around killing civilians or doing anything other than busting up imperial troops which is kind of justified since they started the invasion, on top that he’s the strongest unit in the game and the most chill and honest ruler once he calms down, so little dent in his record that’s irrelevant in the large picture is indeed welcome.

Overall though, after being so massively disappointed by the Fates DLC, so much I didn't even bother with the ones for Echoes, I certainly like what I'm seeing here and that's a good sign, bravo Intsys.

[oliverarditi]

Flawed immersion

Having bought a Playstation 4, the first games console I have ever owned, so that I can play CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 when it comes out, I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up with the same studio’s The Witcher III: Wild Hunt.  I enjoyed the second instalment of this series a great deal on my Mac, but Wild Hunt does not show any sign of being ported to that platform, four years after release, so I’ve had to wait until now. If you play video games this is all old news, then, and I have to admit I probably don’t have anything that insightful to say. When I play current (i.e. four years old) AAA games I’m mainly just going ‘wow, they can do that now?’

Of course, as my introduction to the latest generation of open-world games was Red Dead Redemption 2, my expectations are rather inflated, especially in terms of how naturally the landscape, townscapes and inhabitants seem to behave. My background reading suggests that Wild Hunt set a new standard on that front when it was released, and I was certainly very impressed with the day-night cycle and weather patterns, although the behaviour of both wildlife and passers-by is noticeably less convincing than in the later game - I think I’d been playing for tens of hours before I heard a piece of incidental NPC dialogue repeated in RDR2, whereas it happens almost straight away in Wild Hunt. However, there is a huge, beautifully modelled landscape to roam through, taking in a wide range of terrains, with (including the two DLC packs) three major urban areas, a number of major indoor locations, and countless villages, camps, forts, caves, towers etc. There are also a lot of people milling around in ways which, if you don’t examine them too closely, look quite a lot like people getting on with lives to which the player is almost completely irrelevant. Various fantasy ‘races’, such as elves, dwarves and gnomes, exist in the unnamed ‘Continent’ where the game is set, and are used to explore issues of discrimination - although I think those ideas would have been better served without resorting to the idea that some of the characters in the story are somehow ‘non-human’. That’s a fantasy trope though, and The Witcher series is a tissue of fantasy tropes.

Through this beautifully rendered milieu moves Geralt of Rivia, the player character, one of the last of the witchers - a group of people mutated by the application of various unpleasant toxins at a young age, in order to produce long-lived, superhuman monster hunters. Geralt has many of the characteristics one would expect of a character in a book (I haven’t read Andrzej Sapkowski’s books that these games are based on, so I can’t offer any specific observations on their faithfulness), and is engaged in various matters that continue seamlessly from the earlier games. A lot of care has been taken over dialogue, interactions with other characters, and those characters themselves. Most of these, if they play any major role in events at all, have been given enough interesting quirks, habits and traits to elicit the appearance of some independent existence, and most have their own aims and goals, distinct from Geralt’s and incidental to his quest. There is an unfortunate tendency to unnecessarily sexualise prominent female characters, and several of them wear implausibly high heels. Geralt is a sexually active character, and there are several scenes in which every one of the many female characters present is someone he’s had sex with in at least one game of the series. There are also a number of prostitutes available for his convenience, and it’s pretty clear that women’s bodies are present in the game, not only to populate its setting, but primarily to gratify the desires of its male players. This is really the major creative shortcoming of both Witcher games I’ve played.

Gameplay, quest design, storytelling and so forth are both beautifully realised, and absolutely epic in scope. This game is enormous, and would take an eon for a completist to explore in every detail. It features a card game called Gwent, with collectible cards, which has been spun off as a standalone product; this really isn’t my thing at all, so I more or less ignored it, but it would add many hours to the already extremely lengthy playing time. Combat is exciting, action packed, and strategically deep (if you’re playing at a high enough difficulty level). I’ll leave the details out of this discussion, as my principal interest in this kind of game is in its world-building, and in the habitable imaginative space it offers to the player. On that count, this is one of the most immersive I’ve played. Player choices have real consequences, on the conditions in settlements that are revisited, and on the story outcomes. My response would be overwhelmingly positive, but the sexually exploitative representation of women in the game (despite the presence of several strong, independent female characters), is more than a minor objection; it’s a fatal flaw. I’m quite certain this game will be remembered as an open-world landmark, given how breathtakingly it realises its setting, and I can’t deny I enjoyed playing it a lot, but overall, as an example of what now has to be recognised as the latest artform to emerge from developing media technologies, (even as an example of mainstream AAA development) it falls well short of a bar that has been set progressively higher in recent years.