#the campaign is interesting the gameplay is simple

[didsomeonesayventus]

Okay, I trust you as a source for all things Fire Emblem - can you please tell me if Fire Emblem Engage is worth getting? It's a lot of money, and I've seen a real mixed reception for it. I've read reviews that call it uninspired and shallow, storywise, and that some characters are difficult to enjoy. Is it actually worth it, or am I better off just replaying Fates? I am TORN over here.

SO! Good news in brief: if you liked Fates I'm fairly certain that you've got a good chance of liking Engage. I honestly see Engage as Fates 2 with a much better focus on what it wants to be and do! In fact if I HAD to pick a previous entry for fair comparison/vibe similarities, I'd pick Fates, maybe Sacred Stones (though I've yet to finish that one).

Engage is right now my favorite entry of the series.

MORE DETAILED ANSWER UNDER THE CUT (I have only played thru once on normal + casual as of writing)

I still maintain it's a good game and worth it, but you HAVE to be open-hearted about it. It's going to be silly. It's going to be hammy and subtle as a sledgehammer. It will even say the most cringe ass shit with it's whole heart. It's just about the farthest from 3H you can get on the fire emblem scale to the point you could have it sitting next to Kingdom Hearts and I, personally, love that for it, but feel like comparing it to 3H's darker tones is the thing most negative reviewers fall prey to.

Is it simple? Yeah. Absolutely. Terribly predictable, even. Is it heartfelt? YES! ABSOLUTELY! Engage has no time for "wow that was cheesy" because it LOVES cheese and it wants you to know that LOVE IS THE MOST POWERFUL THING EVER. It knows it's running a trite and cliched story and it doesn't care about that so much as trying to hit its notes with just the right vibe- and I argue it does a majority of the time, but can concede some things are rather silly. It's full steam ahead with the power of love and friendship and it does that with about as much reverence as a Sat. A.M. cartoon. A good Sat. A.M. cartoon that you're still thinking of years down the line that was a formative childhood joy.

And it's not about romantic love, actually! Hardly at all! There's a lot more focus on familial and platonic love than romance!! There are explicit "I love you"s regarding family bonds and multiple sibling relationships that make it clear they would do everything for their family. The only romantic aspect is whoever you choose to have Alear S-Rank (the game calls it a ring rank for Reasons but its essentially an S-Rank), and everyone else's supports end at A. Even then there's room in a fair number of Alear's S-Ranks to get interpreted as Really Good Friends, as the focus is not on "I Love You" but moreso the fact Alear and the blorbo in question have a deep, deep bond (though there are S-Ranks that are romantic-tinted and some who will explicitly say they love Alear, and regardless of gender picked! wow! diversity win!). If you were looking for pairing up your sexy chess pieces and getting paired endings, though, there'll be a bit left to be desired.

Again if you like Fates, or Kingdom Hearts, or stories that are cheesy, simple, cliched, but heartfelt, you're going to like this one. The cast is wonderful, and the story has some surprisingly good emotional beats. Oh, and also some of the FUNNIEST supports I have seen. Ever.

Alear in particular has become my favorite lord of the series, just barely scooting ahead of Corrin by virtue of having a more solid characterization and arc that Fates didn't quite let Corrin have. Which, yes, you can rename Alear and give them their own birthday, but there is NO question that Alear is their own character; hats off to Laura Stahl and Brandon McInnis for bringing stellar performances that are essential to the character. Frankly hats off in general to the voice cast as a whole they really bring a charm to the game that cannot be ignored.

I will say that supports are pretty hard to grind out, though, requiring units to be adjacent, and the leveling curve leaves a lot of... wonkiness? It's VERY easy with the rate of receiving new units + leveling funk to have units fall behind, or your army to feel underleveled, if you're like me and mostly skip the side skirmishes (bad gamer, I know). I hear the skirmishes are also kind of wonky and scaled to Alear's level which. Can Be A Problem if you're trying to level or support grind weaker units. Though I will say that playing Normal + Casual playing straight through the main story, while it occasionally made me sweat, it did not make me have to completely redo a map (or, if it did, it was probably only once or twice and I've simply forgotten about the inconvenience). Just made unlocking supports irksome as units fell off and/or made it hard to keep some characters off the bench.

There's also an OBSCENE amount of freedom in what you can do with your units. Go crazy go stupid try not to die. Resource management can get tricky, there's not quite enough gold or bond points to do everything, but you can do a lot of stuff, especially if you find a favorite to focus in on. As for the Engage mechanic: very powerful, but not to the point of sapping all the challenge out of things, and fairly balanced. The Break mechanic introduced I think is a great addition to the weapon triangle mechanics and adds a nicer layer of consideration to unit placement + weapon diversity in your army than before.

Also, if you're worried Engage overly relies on it's intent as an anniversary celebration, don't! Engage still is doing its own thing, and moreso uses references to past entries as spice or flourishes of color. They add some fun easter eggs and flavoring to the story, but it doesn't rely on the emblems or any throwbacks to tell the story it's trying to tell. Are Firene and Brodia a 1:1 for Zofia and Rigel? Yeah! Probably on purpose! They literally got the guy who voices Duma in FEH to do King Morion! Do you need to know anything about Shadows of Valentia to appreciate that? Nope! Just nice to know. Corrin's ring is found in a Northern Fortress, to further help illuminate the cute nods involved.

If you're on the fence, totally get that, especially since dropping 60$ on a game in this economy- ~90$ if you wanna add DLC -is a lot of money to ask for. But I've thoroughly enjoyed what Engage has to offer, and currently am hopping along through playthrough #2 and trying to tell myself to S-Rank someone who isn't Alcryst (I will probably S-Rank Alcryst again). I'd suggest looking into the first few eps of a playthrough if you're still not quite sure, and, frankly, imo there's no shame in just purely enjoying it from a "watched a playthrough" perspective, if you have to.

and, if none of this has persuaded you, please direct your attention to Zelkov and this Honest-To-Alear real support exchange: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1_lsOLB68g

[nellasbookplanet]

In the wake of FCG' fate I've been thinking about death in ttrpgs, and how it kind of exists on three levels:

There’s the gameplay level, where it only makes sense for a combat-heavy, pc-based game to have a tool for resurrection because the characters are going to die a lot and players get attached to them and their plotlines.

Then there’s the narrative level, where you sort of need permanent death on occasion so as not to lose all tension and realism. On this level, sometimes the player will let their character remain dead because they find it more interesting despite there being options of resurrection, or maybe the dice simply won’t allow the resurrection to succeed.

Then, of course, there’s the in-universe level, which is the one that really twists my mind. This is a world where actual resurrection of the actual dead is entirely obtainable, often without any ill effects (I mean, they'll be traumatized, but unless you ask a necromancer to do the resurrection they won’t come back as a zombie or vampire or otherwise wrong). It’s so normal that many adventurers will have gone through it multiple times. Like, imagine actually living in a world where all that keeps you from getting a missing loved one back is the funds to buy a diamond and hire a cleric. As viewers we felt that of course Pike should bring Laudna, a complete stranger, back when asked, but how often does she get this question? How many parents have come and begged her to return their child to them? How many lovers lost but still within reach? When and how does she decide who she saves and who she doesn’t?

From this perspective, I feel like every other adventurer should have the motive/backstory of 'I lost a loved one and am working to obtain the level of power/wealth to get them back'. But of course this is a game, and resurrection is just a game mechanic meant to be practically useful.

Anyway. A story-based actual play kind of has to find a way to balance these three levels. From a narrative perspective letting FCG remain dead makes sense, respects their sacrifice, and ends their arc on a highlight. From a gameplay level it is possible to bring them back but a lot more complicated than a simple revivify. But on an in-universe level, when do you decide if you should let someone remain dead or not? Is the party selfish if they don’t choose to pursue his resurrection the way they did for Laudna? Do they even know, as characters, that it’s technically possible to save someone who's been blown to smithereens? Back in campaign 2, the moment the m9 gained access to higher level resurrection they went to get Molly back (and only failed because his body had been taken back by Lucien). At the end of c1, half the party were in denial about Vax and still looking for ways to save him, because they had always been able to before (and had the game continued longer it wouldn’t have surprised me had they found a way). Deanna was brought back decades after her death (and was kind of fucked up because of it). Bringing someone back could be saving them, showing them just how loved and appreciated they are. Or it could be saving you, forcing someone back from rest and peace into a world that's kept moving without them because you can’t handle the guilt of knowing you let them stay gone when you didn’t have to. How do you know? How would you ever know?

[thehomelybrewster]

How Much Do Systems Matter?

This post is directly inspired by the video "You shouldn't use DnD for narrative campaigns." by Questing Beast (aka Ben Milton) about the Polygon article "Worlds Beyond Number is teaching me things that no D&D book can" by Charlie Hall.

The video and article basically posit the following:

TTRPGs can use concretely designed procedures for certain types of challenges and scenarios while having much looser procedures for other types of challenges or scenarios

Just because a TTPRG has less thorough rules on a type of challenge or scenario than a different RPG tackling the same subject matter doesn't automatically make the former worse at being used for these scenarios than the latter

Depending on the preferences of the table, having a robust mechanical framework for one element of gameplay while lacking that for other types of gameplay may be preferrable than having robust mechanical frameworks for both

Having distinct game mechanics for narrative progression and character interactions is uncommon in D&D and derived games, but is very common in story games, e.g. most Powered by the Apocalypse games.

The Polygon article includes this quote by Worlds Beyond Number's Brennan Lee Mulligan: "[People say that] because D&D has so many combat mechanics, you are destined to tell combat stories. I fundamentally disagree. Combat is the part I’m the least interested in simulating through improvisational storytelling. So I need a game to do that for me, while I take care of emotions, relationships, character progression, because that shit is intuitive and I understand it well. I don’t intuitively understand how an arrow moves through a fictional airspace."

This intuitive knowledge on handling emotional beats, narrative, and characters of course stems from years of experience Brennan has as a writer, actor, improv teacher, comedian, camp counsellor, and professional TTRPG GM and player.

Using Ron Edwards design language (s. his 1999 essay "System Does Matter"), Brennan wants to run primarily narrativist games, while 5e would fit Edwards' idea of a Gamist system, i.e. one which involves the pursuit of "winning" against NPCs.

Now let's look at 5e: it's generally agreed upon that 5e is opinionated on combat, while also being vocal that exploration and social encounters, while less fleshed-out, are still part of its pillars alongside combat, meaning the game is still encouraging you to pursue these types of play.

Combat is a very fleshed-out series of systems. The action system is centered on combat, both in terms of time and types. Spellcasting is very distinct and allows for casting mostly offensive or defensive spells. Class progression usually focuses on improving one's combat capabilities.

Exploration and social interactions are much more bare-bones.

On the social side, a few more recent supplements have reintroduced the classic Attitude table present in earlier editions and which are a mainstay of the OSR community. Additionally the DMG spends merely three pages on how to run NPCs, mostly using fairly general advice instead of concrete game mechanics. Interaction between player characters is also barely discussed in 5e rules.

Exploration is similarly simple, mostly related to the omnipresent but simple skill system, as well as some relatively simple rules on weather, hazards, overland travel speed, and tracking rations.

5e's shift towards simplified rules for these two pillars, including simplifying the skill system into a mostly binary failure-success affair is a shift away from earlier D&D editions and some of its direct competitors, e.g. Pathfinder, Rolemaster, GURPS, and The Dark Eye, which often would involve subsystems for various aspects of social or exploratory encounters, s. Edwards' "System does Matter" essay and his point on simulationist games.

So if Brennan wants to run a narrative game where we can realiably use his knowledge of narratives and character writing to create a compelling story while having a set system as his backup to run situations where violence becomes a factor... Using a game like 5e is a decent choice.

Of course other systems might be even better for that. Shadowdark for example may just be the perfect fit for someone wanting to run a narrative game with occasional combat. The combat rules are thorough enough to cover the fundamentals. Sure, you may just need to get rid of real-time torches, the key mechanic which sets Shadowdark apart from other OSR games, but subtracting a mechanic, instead of modifying it, is a relatively uninvasive procedure.

Personally I too like it when my TTRPG, especially stuff intended for medium- or long-term play, doesn't touch social and narrative elements much mechanically.

Meanwhile games like Ironsworn and Heart - The City Below, which are much more narrative-focused, do have issues where their resolution mechanics clash with the fiction in ways that would pull be out of the story we're trying to tell. Heart has the issue with the Supplies resistance not being shared within the group, and Ironsworn's fulfillment of vows can be glacially slow (s. A. A. Voigt's "Ironsworn: A Narrative Dilemma" video essay).

Ultimately, it all comes down to preference. Personally, if I wanted to run a fantasy game with magic and a strong narrative (like Worlds Beyond Number), with the clear goal of not getting bogged down in combat or minis, I'd legit use Shadowdark as described above. If I knew I wanted to tell a specific type of story and knew of a game that was designed for these types of stories, I'd definitely give it a read and talk about it with my players before we adopt it.

However, I do implore folks to not Ship of Theseus a game with tons of homebrew and houserules so that it's no longer recognizable as its original game. If you ever feel compelled to do that, ask other players what systems might be a better fit for your needs.

[thydungeongal]

What are your thoughts on situations where either a game doesnt have enough rules to cover particular situations and so rely on, or where the rules explicitly and deliberately rely on, irl skills (usually for social situations).

Like, for pathfinder/dnd, its obviously a lack of sufficient rules for how to mechanically carry out complex social situations. But there are plenty of games where this is deliberate, with the understanding being that you are supposed to resolve certain types of social conflict entirely via roleplaying the conversation.

Or another dnd favorite, riddles and puzzles, where it almost inherently requires the players to be good at that sort of thinking, regardless of the character.

I dont actually know quite where Im going with this, since the obvious answer is "play with players who like relying on out of character skills" or "play games where this isnt an issue, and all situations have mechanical means for satisfyingly carrying out stuff like this", but it still feels sort of.... those things are fun! A lot of people Do want to do those things, but just dont have the irl skill to.

It seems sad that a physically disabled player that wants to play as a super competent warrior can do that easily, but if someone with a stutter whos bad at social interactions wants to play a quick-witted bard, they either cant, or they have to do so with what feels like an extra step of removal (while both of them are only playing a character doing the thing, the one playing a warrior can decide exactly what they want their warrior to do in detail, whereas the one playing a bard only gets a summary of what they do/say, unless the GM Is very good at that sort of thing and on top of everything going on enough that they can effectively put the words in the characters mouth, which then opens up a whole new can of worms).

So yea, not even really sure what Im asking, this isnt even a major problem for any of the campaigns I run, was just kind of curious on your thoughts.

This is actually a really cool question, because it's a topic that I've gone back and forth on a lot over the years! I don't think I've yet reached, like, any kind of conclusion yet, but here's where I am at as of now.

So, I think there are basically conflicting ideas in tabletop RPG circles as to whether or not the purpose of RPGs is to challenge the players or challenge the characters. There's even a bit of controversy as to whether the purpose of these games to begin with is to be challenges or to be essentially shared narratives. I don't think these goals are necessarily contradictory, but I think they produce different types of gameplay: a traditional game like Dungeons & Dragons presents itself very much as a "series of challenges" type of game, where the production of a narrative out of the events is almost incidental, where a game like Apocalypse World isn't about presenting challenges, but presenting explosive situations for players to act in, and those situations pretty much by necessity produce interesting and dynamic narratives.

Now, here's one simple truth: games of the former type will always inevitably challenge players in addition to their characters. Character creation is part of play and part of developing as a player is to develop system mastery to be able to figure out which types of characters are most likely to succeed in the types of challenges the game often presents players with. So, even before the narrative starts, players will already be inevitably challenged. Even in game players will be challenged, because they will be asked how to best apply the character they have created. They'll have to think about which tactics are the best in combat, which abilities are the best for which situation, so on and so forth.

So yeah, I do think it's impossible for tabletop RPGs to entirely challenge just the characters, because play already begins at character creation and players will be expected to express system mastery. And I even think there's a bit of a disconnect when talking about your D&Ds and Pathfinders in that these questions of "is it okay to challenge the players" always seem to circle around talking and puzzles instead of what these games are mostly built around: tactical, granular combat. Because especially in combat these games do challenge their players with stuff like "this is your character; this is the opposition; this is the environment. Now how will you solve this goblin puzzle?" I have heard of people who will say stuff like "your Intelligence 8 Barbarian wouldn't know how to flank an enemy" to which I say bah humbug, and have my Intelligence 8 Barbarian flank an enemy, because I think my Intelligence 8 Barbarian can see the connection between having a friend attacking an enemy from one side and that enemy being unable to focus as well on defence. But to be honest, that's besides the point. Most people aren't like that.

Anyway, so yeah I do think that it's impossible NOT to challenge players. But also I don't generally vibe with the idea of expecting players to solve puzzles or convince me, the GM, that an NPC likes them.

I'll talk about the latter first: the mechanics exist for a reason. They're there to take the narrative out of the hands of the players, including the GM. Having to convince the GM to convince an NPC leaves the situation in the hands of the GM, and as you said, doesn't often allow for players to express the character they want to express if they, for an example, are shy or socially awkward. But there's a condition: I the GM still need to know what you're doing. This often gets misread as "You still need to tell me, the GM, what you are saying, exactly as your character would, using your character's voice, before I give you the permission to roll a Charisma check." I don't expect that much. But I need something specific and grounded in the fiction to work with so I know a) which specific skill might apply to this check b) what the potential consequences of success and failure might be. Specificity is what grounds these things in the fiction, and it's actually something that is useful for almost every kind of dice roll in the game (unless it's something where the input and output in the fiction is extremely specific): if you tell me your character wants to Strength check the portcullis I don't really know what you mean. If you say you want your character to lift the portcullis so the rest of the party can slip on under it, now we're cooking, at that changes the situation in a different way than bending the bars on the portcullis to create a gap your party can slip through.

Now the fact is that D&D and Pathfinder don't really have the deepest social mechanics, but that's okay in my opinion. The relatively sparse social mechanics should not, in my opinion, be paved over with a "we expect players do more talking because the mechanics can't." I feel that's fundamentally misunderstanding why these games don't have a lot of mechanics for talky talking: it's because that's not an activity these games have a lot to say about. A Charisma (Persuasion) check or Request action (handled as a Diplomacy check) is just about the level of social interaction these games can be asked to handle, and that's perfectly fine. The amount of social mechanics in a D&D you need is "mechanics for determining whether a creature wants to eat the characters right away and mechanics for convicing a creature not to eat the characters." And okay I guess having the characters ask around for rumors when in town.

So, yeah, players should be able to build Charismatic characters and be able to get meaningful and consistent results out of it in game provided they know where to point their Charisma at. And that's really the thing: we're challenging characters, but it's still the player's responsibility to figure out where they want to point That Thang at and where they want their character to shoot their Charisma beams. Just like a player in combat is asked to make a bunch of specific choices that inform their tactics, checks outside of combat also need to be grounded in the fiction. Your character won't just Charisma check their way through all obstacles, those checks need to be grounded in the fiction.

And finally, we get to puzzles. I emphatically think that puzzles in the sense I've seen them in RPGs are generally a bad fit for your D&Ds, because what they often are actually is singleton mechanics that player character's can't actually interact with meaningfully within the fiction and which are divorced from the rest of the game. Like, sure, they can be fun puzzles, but they're still often completely divorced from the rest of the game. I'm talking your chess board puzzles, your twisting gems puzzles, whatever.

But like, that doesn't mean there isn't a place for puzzles of a type in RPGs, but I think we need to move away from the idea of puzzles as, like, a separate board for players to solve while the game screeches to a halt. And I've already hinted at this: these games already have their own places where they intellectually stimulate and challenge players! More of that, please! So, like, instead of throwing the characters into a situation where they suddenly have to play tic-tac-toe to progress, instead introduce a situation where the players can gauge the situation through what they know about the mechanics of the game and assess the best way for their characters to act! Think about how the last two Legend of Zelda games did away almost entirely with your traditional video game dungeon puzzles and went almost entirely for physics puzzles which test the player's ability to engage with their physics engines! Do that, except with RPG rules! (This is why I actually feel systemic games like D&D 3e and, to a lesser extent, D&D 4e, as well as both editions of Pathfinder, the Hero engine, Rolemaster, and so on, are fantastic for challenge type gaming: because while there are lots of rules they produce consistent results and there's a degree of system mastery to be gained in learning to apply those rules as a player!)

Anyway, so to wrap things up: challenge type RPGs will inevitably challenge players as well as characters and that's okay; social mechanics are good because they allow for player expression and placing the situation outside of the control of all the players; traditional puzzles are not really a good fit for RPGs because they are usually divorced from the rest of the gameplay, and instead we should focus more on presenting game situations that provide a bit of a neat puzzle!

Thank you for this question! And I do think there's a lot of nuance to this whole situation and even though this is a very long answer I also feel that this is barely just scratching the surface.

[worldruins]

Meet the Remnant, my "slugcat" oc. Because I have no sense of moderation, it has an entire campaign loosely mocked up in my head- I don't have the modding ability or time to make anything of it but I enjoy thinking about it! The two iterators on the sheet are the central npcs of the campaign.

Remnant is larger, more aquatic, and faster on all fours than a slugcat. It struggles to use the same tools, carries items in its mouth, and can eat batnip and bubble weed. And, though it doesn’t know it, it is one of the last four of its kind left.

More about the campaign below VVV

BONUS: Remnant obviously resembles a slugcat, and they are sort of a slugcat ancestor! The genomes of the pipe slugs slugcats evolved from had remnant DNA as well as the simple tool-worm base that ancients used for many creatures. The blueprints were present in the modified organisms, and over several generations and mutations began to express themselves once more. Anyway…

To start, the Remnant is living with their family in an idyllic natural landscape much like survivor and monk at the beginning of their campaigns. The incident kickstarting their journey would be them wandering off from their kin and- gameplay starts here- getting lured off by something interesting, before the wall closes quickly behind them and the player realizes they have been trapped. They find themselves in a crate lined with wet plant matter, which gets shaken and turned around for a bit before settling down. It continues with a gentler rattling and remnant is clearly being taken somewhere, but the game acts like you're in a den and, once you've eaten the food set out for you in there, you sleep.

You are woken when the train carrying you crashes. You are able to escape and wind up in a light drizzle. Numerous overseers, some purple and others seafoam green, follow you around. The artificial, dilapidated surroundings are alien to the remnant.

During the first cycle an overseer will direct you to the nearest den, but you don’t have a rain timer until the first time you hibernate. You’ve never experienced rain like this before, after all.

The fact is that the remnant and their family are primal fauna, from the old world before bioengineering and iterators. They have spent their whole lives in a carefully controlled environment, maintained at first by ancients and then the systems the ancients left behind. The mass ascension happened, and nobody really knew what to do with these creatures- depending on the species, animals in captivity were generally released to fend for themselves or set for years of being maintained by machines scheduled in advanced, automated to care for them.

Remnant is taken when the iterator Ink Stained Palms orders a specimen of one relatively hardy species to study and potentially have the rest delivered to their regions. Something goes wrong- their delivery is sabotaged by their semi-active former senior, Calls To Stony Skies. And out Remnant goes into an alien land, with each of the two rival iterators trying to lure or force it to go to them.

This generally takes the form of projections like Iggy uses to get the slugcats to Moon, though it’s two different kinds of overseer guiding you in opposite directions at the same time. There may also be introduced environmental hazards- some of the chases in Little Nightmares come to mind- to corral you toward wherever the iterator causing it wants you to go.

ISP was the one who was getting the remnant delivered to her facility. They’re a bioengineer interested in long-term ecosystem restoration. It’s come to believe there’s a natural ‘balance’ to the world that could, in time, let living things leave the cycle of their own accord if it was realigned properly.

CTSS is in a condition not unlike spearmaster moon, though his decline has been steadier and over a longer period of time. They’ve been replaced by another iterator as group senior, and derailed your journey in the hopes of using a rare animal as collateral to get ISP’s help. Watching the remnant’s struggle to survive, however, he ends up very attached to it and can’t bring himself to kill it as he originally planned to.

Though they might want to, CTSS can’t save the remnant from a more insidious fate. The air, the soil, the water itself is toxic to you, whose kind has lived countless generations shielded from the heavy metal byproducts of industry and the artificial metabolisms of those great boxes in the sky. Ascension is an option, but so is going to ISP, whose body itself possesses a complex with artificial environments much like the one you began in. It can’t protect the remnant fully, but it can offer them a longer life. There are multiple endings to the campaign, based on the order you visit the iterators in.

If you read all this thank you so much and feel free to send questions!! About my little guys.

[prokopetz]

Is there anything about Break!! that has stood out to you as "oh this helps explain their success" or is this just a simple case of "its an appealing, well made product, and people are buying it"

(With reference to this post here.)

Certainly, the slick presentation is a big part of it – that's what you get when 50% of your game's two-person development team is a really good graphic artist. It's also pressing a lot of specific buttons, though.

On the mechanical side, it's within spitting distance of being tabletop Legend of Zelda, which is something that hasn't had a really good tabletop adaptation that actually cares about the particulars of the Zeldalike gameplay loop. (Not that it hasn't been tried – Fellowship makes a good effort, off the top of my head, but its approach to the source material is a little too esoteric for the average group.) The timing of the campaign doesn't hurt there, either, being in its final week just as the release of Tears of the Kingdom is stoking renewed interest in doing Zelda-style campaigns at the tabletop.

On the aesthetic side, it's really hitting that 1990s/early 2000s anime nostalgia that's been badly under-served in tabletop gaming ever since Guardians of Order self-destructed, while sprinkling in just enough influence from modern YA animation to capture the interest of folks who aren't drawn to nostalgia bait. A lot of contemporary games that draw inspiration from contemporary YA animation seem to feel the need to prove that they're Not Just For Kids™ by, like, saying "fuck" a lot and such, to the extent that just playing that kind of source material 100% straight like Break!! does feels mildly unconventional.

Of course, apart from all that, there's the fact that it's been in public development for a solid decade, which has given it a great deal of lead time in terms of building word of mouth – that's a big part of it, too!

[banshee-king]

AoS Realms of Ruin Gameplay Review:

I’ve played through the campaign, some of Conquest mode, not multiplayer so I’m not going to talk about that, and also did some creation stuff. I’ve also read other people’s thoughts online but here I just want to talk about the battles/gameplay. No story spoilers, I’ve leave that for another post.

I like this game but I also see valid criticism of it. I’ve all seen a lot of dumb as all hell “criticism” which annoys me. Firstly, this game is an RTS, not a MOBA. RTS games do not need base building, unless you think Homeworld is also not an RTS. Realms of Ruin (RoR) is real time and requires strategy, it’s an RTS.

Furthermore, you can not only upgrade your HQ 3 times (unlocking units + tech), but every outpost once captured can be upgraded into a choice of different buildings (and upgraded again). 2 resource production ones, a turret, and potentially a healing outpost depending on the faction you play. That’s more building options than DoW 2 which had set requisition/power nodes to capture. Yes DoW 2 had some other buildings, but they used army size limit. RoR buildings are separate to army size, and so functions like true buildings, not stationary units.

Upgrading outposts/the HQ also deactivates them whilst you’re doing so. As your HQ is your primary way of healing units, a mistimed upgrade can really cost you dearly as you’ll have to wait until it’s finished to heal again. Building/upgrades also costs a lot of resources, so it’s an investment, doubly so when upgrading a resource outpost stops it producing for a while.

That fact that unit abilities also require resources further complicates this. Splurging all your resources to improve your long term survivability can backfire if you suddenly can’t use abilities in a fight. Timing is important. There is strategy in this game!

Look I love base-building RTS games, but some people are way to elitist about it. It’s perfectly valid to have a preference and not buy RoR because it’s not to your tastes. But RoR is not a MOBA (derogative) because of this. You build/control units, it doesn’t have towers unless you build a turret (rare), and not every map can be simplified to 3 lanes. One map had the HQs in the centre of the map, with the outposts in a circle around the edges. That’s not a MOBA, the heroes aren’t even strong enough to solo more than a few units.

The tech upgrades (for unit types, not individual units) are also interesting. Some are normal stand-alone options, many others are an exclusive choice between two options. You could upgrade an ability, making it more worth the cost each use, but then you’d also have to use it more. Or you could improve the passive attack/defence of a unit, discouraging you from using its non-upgraded ability. How many units you upgrade their passive stats or activatable abilities depends on your micro skill.

As for the rock-paper-scissors dynamic, yes it’s simple and I understand that’s a deal breaker for some. That’s fine. I will say though that I’ve seen higher tier units defeat lower ones even when type disadvantaged. Some upgrades also improve damage vs heroes, or monsters, so it’s not so basic. Units positioning is everything though. Ranged units won’t slaughter assault units if they get caught in melee.

Some people have criticised how units get stuck in melee (you either stay and die/win, or retreat fully back to HQ). Whilst I can get this, it’s accurate to the tabletop where most units can’t fall back and shoot. The tabletop also doesn’t have base-building like RoR, but whatever. Furthermore, I’ve successfully juked wounded/ranged units away from enemy units, so it’s not all unfair. And that’s the big thing. The game punishes you for bad positioning/micro. Many other games punish bad players too. If souls-likes and Cuphead can get praise for daring to be hard, RoR gets a pass for absent minded players not paying attention. Because you’re doing less economy management, you have more time for micro anyway.

Units also don’t move unless you tell them to. If a melee unit is being hit by missiles, they’ll just stand there and take it, and if a nearby melee unit is fighting, they’ll still just stand there. This has been another sort of valid criticism. All units are on hold ground stance, and I’m glad my units don’t go charging off whilst I’m not looking. But other games have had before a change stance feature (no chase, chase a little, follow forever). I think a change stance button would help, but the game’s design is intentionally about micro. Again it punishes you for bad micro, or just not looking at the mini-map. Like I get the complaint, but it’d be weird to demand a stealth game be more action oriented just because you personally prefer action games over stealth ones. It’s a design choice, not for everyone.

Lastly I want to mention price. It’s been a frequent complaint. Price is something subjective I feel, it comes down to each individual person’s feelings about whether a game is worth it. I bought RoR, no regrets, fine with my purchase. I also happen to have enough disposable income to do that. Someone who doesn’t have the luxury to get or time to play many games, I get them thinking it’s not worth it. If this were a few years ago, maybe I too would wait until it came on sale. As it stands, the campaign is normal RTS length (not much replay value though), the Conquest mode adds a bit more fun (but isn’t too different to a series of skirmishes against AI), the army painter is useful for hobbying (even let’s you change individual unit colours separate to the army), and the map/scene editor is also fun. I’m glad I bought it.

[townofcrosshollow]

Not to be too SCREE on main but I just got a frankly magical opportunity! Guy on Reddit invited me to a Vampire the Masquerade game that he was forming with a pre-existing group, I guess somebody probably couldn't play in their new campaign, so they invited me. I was nervous because Vampire is a more complicated system than I'm used to, but the GM actually took the time to hop on a call with me ahead of time to discuss the game and the rules, and gave me some one-on-one time in session 0 to help me fill out my character sheet, and even planned the group's backstory around my character (so the other players' first goals are going to be to teach my character some of the mechanics in-game).

Since it's a pre-existing group of people he's already played with, I already knew going in that the players would be cool, and ofc they were! They were all really nice and made sure I felt welcome, even though I couldn't contribute much since I don't know all the rules and lore. Everybody made a point to ask me what I thought about the ideas they had.

In one of my previous games I tried joining I was happy to see people talking in the discord a lot but then a lot of the players turned out to be very... terminally online? Y'know? Like in a bad way? So I was a little worried about joining a group that might be the same! It's so uncomfortable to get out of it once you realize you don't vibe with them. But I think I'm going to vibe with all these folks! They're all very funny, a lot of them are also queer, they seem to have similar interests re: roleplaying and what kind of game we like to play. I didn't get much chance to speak with them since it was a lot of rules talk, but once we get into gameplay, I'm really excited to start roleplaying with them and getting to know them better.

And the rules of Vampire are really cool now that I've gotten the chance to learn them! I'm always scared about more complicated games like that, but I love the mechanics, they're all really interesting and well crafted. It feels like... a bunch of super simple games mashed up together. All the mechanics are recognizable from rules-light games I've played, so it's way less confusing when they're all put together.

And I'm excited for my character, he's a combination of a bunch of ideas and aesthetics I love and he's going to be so much fun to play.

Basically we're feeling JOY in this Wendy's tonight!!!!

[sevrai]

Armored Core

I went on a journey this year. Or maybe I should say I continued an old journey.

On July 10th, 26 years ago, the first Armored Core released in Japan. On an unknown day about 20-ish years ago a young me stumbled upon a copy of Armored Core 3 for the PS2 in a used game store.

It's been some time since I decided to indulge in a lengthy, meandering post about my loves and hobbies outside of awkward Twitter threads, so I wanna air my thoughts on the Armored Core series! (This is gonna be a long post, primarily for my own enjoyment. You have been warned.)

Most who know me online or read my comics will know of my penchant for fantasy, but not all may know of my love for the "Real Robot" subgenre of mecha. As someone obsessed with DBZ and magic, you'd think I'd fall more into the epic "Super Robot" camp of mecha anime, but growing up I felt captivated with Gundam Wing and the Universal Century OVAs that aired on Toonami and Adult Swim. They hard-wired my DNA early on. (With the Escaflowne film later impacting me so hard with it's grounded mecha and magical fantasy setting that it played a huge role in inspiring WOE, though my comic is noticeably lacking in Guymelefs.)

Naturally that awe and love for such works made me feel incredibly drawn to Armored Core 3 when I first saw it. It was my introduction to a series that I wouldn't comprehend the true breadth of for well over a decade.

I was terrible at it, both due to my lack of experience with TPS games and the oldschool control scheme, but the customization, detail, and overall atmosphere of the game were incredible to experience all the same.

It wasn't until the holiday season of 2008 that I was finally able to fight through an AC campaign, when I was gifted a PS3 and several games, among which was Armored Core: For Answer. It blew me away. I already had fond memories of bumbling around AC3, but For Answer's over-the-top presentation, haunting soundtrack, challenging gameplay, and dystopic atmosphere really sucked me in.

Along with Demon's Souls it kick-started a general admiration of FromSoftware and the distinct games they developed. After getting swept up in the excitement of Dark Souls, me and a friend dabbled in Armored Core V and Verdict Day, even playing a decent amount of the territorial multiplayer, but it never drew me in like AC3 and AC4A did.

The years went on and although I always adored Armored Core, I took my sweet time getting around to going backwards in the series. I've always been a fan of emulation and rarely used to feel a particular drive to collect physical games, (can't say the same for myself nowadays. Sorry, wallet!) but I always remembered how much AC resonated with me, and when walking around used game stores I would muse to my friends that I wanted to someday collect all of the Armored Core games in physical form.

I made relaxed progress grabbing the games when I saw them over the years, but at the end of 2022, the Game Awards hit everyone with a bombshell reveal. The show faded to black, the screen eventually being lit by the Bandai Namco logo, followed by a little red light. Something in my soul knew what was coming as soon as I saw that simple red light start to glow, I jumped out of my seat and exclaimed out loud "Armored Core!?"

It was a trailer for Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, the first new AC game in ten years. It was a surreal moment that still makes me smile now.

The series was always niche, but since it went dormant From has achieved superstar status as a developer thanks to the Souls series and Elden Ring. There's now more attention and interest in Armored Core than it has ever gotten in the past. It didn't dawn on me until a buddy messaged me shortly after the reveal that the prices of the old games were gonna go crazy from the huge amount of people who were From fans but had never heard of AC, and were now interested in trying the old games.

Some were content to wait patiently to see if the market and prices would calm down, but I took a gamble and started shoring up my collection ASAP. Sure it felt embarrassing paying so much more for several of them than they were going for a mere few weeks earlier, but I supplemented my hunt by selling a few rare old SHF and Figmas.

After a few tense months of scanning listings for good prices with some very focused personal criteria, the result was expensive but satisfying;

On top of this investment I even went all-in on the Premium Edition of ACVI. Perhaps people should rightfully poke fun at me for throwing so much money around for video games about giant robots, but it's not often I can say I accomplished a goal of this caliber in my life.

Now with all the games in hand a new journey had begun; from collecting to playing. I've played Armored Core games off and on since the early 2000's, but I was only just now finally making the pilgrimage through the series proper from the very first release, alongside the huge wave of newcomers dipping their toes into the old games before the new one comes out. Like an Armored Core version of Billy Madison.

I started playing the PSOne Classics release of AC1 on my PS3, before transitioning to my PS2 Slim once all of the PSX games were in my hands. Learning that both systems used funky software emulation for PSX games I went on a subquest of ordering and cleaning up a SCPH-39001 model PS2, (which was super nostalgic in it's own right since I started with a fat PS2 in 2003,) hooked up to a massive KV-36FV310 via component cables. I even went down a DualShock 2 model rabbit hole. Every game now looks and runs like a dream on this hedonistic setup.

As of the day I'm posting this silly blog post, I am seven games deep. I have 100%'d, (all parts unlocked, all missions complete, all enemy AC beaten both optional fights in missions and in the Arena,) without any Human PLUS enhancements or OP-INTENSIFY used, and even sticking with the default control scheme:

Armored Core

AC: Project Phantasma

AC: Master of Arena

Armored Core 2

AC2: Another Age

Armored Core 3

… And right now I'm just a few percent shy of 100%ing AC3: Silent Line. Sorry if this sounds like juvenile bragging, but it's always been hard for me to focus on and finish games. My ADHD has me jumping from game to game for years on end, never seeing many of them through to the end, so I want to indulge in a bit of pride being able to spend several months blasting through these games without slowing down, and without taking any shortcuts.

Admittedly I haven't played on Hard Mode in any of the games that have offered it, and Silent Line is really pushing me to my limit demanding S Ranks on every mission, but I'm still enjoying it and hoping to finish it up in time to sample a bit more of the games I missed out on, as well as make a nostalgic return to For Answer, by the time ACVI comes out.

Returning to Armored Core 3 felt especially sentimental. Like a return home. I'm sure many people can relate to the feeling of returning to a childhood game with newfound abilities and knowledge, finally able to do what your younger self could not. Having beaten the game that started this whole obsession for me about two decades ago is a really great feeling.

I adore these games. I always loved the few I did play as a youngster, and knew that From was a consistent enough developer that I would enjoy the rest as well, but not to the extent I truly have. Despite the time and money spent collecting them, I still underestimated just how much I'd fall in love with each and every one. Even the aspects others struggle to return to. I love the FCS quirks, the turn speed, the bunny hopping, the heat and energy management, the opponents riddled with cybernetic enhancements pushing you to your limits, I even love the old controls of using L2/R2 for vertical camera movement. For all it's quirks and older design philosophies it's such an engrossing and immersive series.

ACVI will be a very different, (and streamlined,) beast. I'm okay with this. My adoration for old Armored Core will only make it easier to return to and appreciate this storied series I've gone to such lengths to collect, even after the new one releases. I trust From to do the series justice, no matter how easy it is for newcomers to jump in.

I love Armored Core, I love this genre of mecha, and I hope lots of people will learn to love it as well. I want the new game to do well so we can see more in the future. I sincerely doubt anyone will actually have read all of this, but if you did, thanks for your time. I know my rambling can be unfocused and pretentious. I don't need to put this much effort into waxing nostalgic about video games, but I miss the part of me that used to do this on a regular basis.

(I also apologize for how much my comic updating will probably slow down when ACVI drops, regardless of what momentum I can build through July and August.)

[ash-rigby]

I know this is based on D&D, but what is your opinion of Warlock x Patron type relationships?

I honestly don't know a ton about D&D. I'd love to fully get into it and play someday because I know I'd really like it (recently got into Critical Role and I'm nearing the end of the Chroma Conclave arc of the Vox Machina campaign and it looks like a blast, but I'm taking the gameplay elements there with a grain of salt because I know the way they play is very homebrewed).

But I am really intrigued by any of the classes where one forges a very close, personal connection with a deity of some kind. A lot of potential for interesting character dynamics; something simple and cute or questionable co-dependency on a godly level.

[ghenry]

2023 YouTube channel recap!

It is now the end of the year, so now I'm looking back at the videos I managed to release in 2023! There weren't too many, but they were all challenging in unique ways. So let's take a look!

Hi-Fi Rush | As Basic As Things Can Get

So, this video is pretty polarizing. And I knew it would be! Hi-Fi Rush received endless praise when it was released in January 2023. Being fairly dabbled in both action platformers and hack-n-slash games, I had to see how it was for myself. And the water of mediocrity splashing at my face was cold enough to convince me I needed to vent about it in video form. I took this video as a lesson on exercising absolute honesty. I feel like I have been holding myself back with a lot of video projects because I was afraid of coming off too strong. But this time I didn't care. I let out my most raw, uncouth feelings about this game because I want to be more comfortable with my voice and assertiveness. In that sense, I think I succeeded. The split ratio would say otherwise, though.

The point of the video: Hi-Fi Rush took advantage of having this specific art style that not a lot of high-end companies really tackle, and that carried it throughout waves of praise, despite having middling game design and lack of confidence in what it actually succeeds in. It underplays its own strength--the hack-n-slash combat-- and pads the game out to a high degree suing boxy platforming with only character dialogue attempting to make it drag less. Games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta have similar structures where it showcases awkward platforming that isn't very fun to perform, but they both go elbow-deep with their pure combat (which takes up the majority of their campaigns) because the developers were confident in the hack-n-slash gameplay. Tango did not have that confidence, which is why the majority of the gameplay is boxy platforming that lacked any sense of urgency or challenge.

Also, the writing sucks complete ass and Chai is a terrible example of writing an unlikable protagonist. Nothing will ever convince me otherwise. I'm so sick of everyone trying to make their own Spider-Man.

I don't regret this video, even a little bit. I don't care how many people unsubscribed, if they're not here to take in my thoughts and feelings, what are they here for? Because that's all I'm doing and will continue to do with my channel.

Crime is Crime | The Silver Case Analysis

This was something I've wanted to do for years, but prioritized Travis Strikes Again as well as No More Heroes 3. Even so, The Silver Case was a daunting project. I'm not a professional writer, I never took any elective courses for it throughout my school career. I don't consider myself even remotely smart, never-mind 'an intellectual.' I'm not even that familiar with philosophy and such, so part of me was thinking "Do I even have the capacity to analyze this game?" literally every single second I was writing, capturing, and editing the video.

Regardless, in the end, I think I got a good grasp of the story and was able to dissect a lot of it in a satisfying manner.

The point of the video: Crime will always exist, but what's more interesting is the source of it. The motivation of an individual, a society, or even a corporation. The game also showcases a lot of elements and even narrative quirks that would be prevalent in Suda51's future directing gigs. I think he and his crew have some fine critiques on things like capitalism, police justice, and what it means to be a part of a controlled society. It doesn't give any answers in how you can change the worst parts of a society, but it isn't really meant to in any real way, it just isn't that simple.

Analyzing Henry Cooldown | The Devil In the Details

What started out as a little defense piece for Henry in No More Heroes 3 ended up much longer and more in-depth than I initially planned. While looking over his dialogue, appearance, and overall design, I realized there is so much more to this living plot-twist.

The point of the video: I think Henry represents the devil for Travis Touchdown. And this further accentuates what I've pontificated in my full analysis of NMH3, that Travis is stuck in this eternal form of hell. While Suda has never explained --and probably never will-- what he was trying to say with games like NMH, I like to think having Travis be cursed with eternal battle, eternal recognition, and eternal brand potency (like many video game icons) was something he was considering, at least by the time he was making NMH3.

And, sure, I've analyzed and described Henry to mean different things, but so what? He can be more than one thing. Nothing is certain, a lot of this will remain open for interpretation. That's art.

Grasshopper's Translator | James Mountain Interview

Earlier this year I got to have a nice, long chat with James Mountain, the main translator/interpreter of Grasshopper Manufacture! I wanted his input since he was the sole individual given the task to translate the entirety of The Silver Case from beginning to end. I ended up learning a lot about him as well as the process of such a dense job that is interpreting a visual novel completely by yourself. I also thought it'd make a good exercise if I ever want to release videos like this again. I had fun learning how to make audio visualizers as well as including visual context during our conversations.

The point of the video: There was a lot of debate (and bickering) in regards to the English interpretation of the game, and I figured who better to clarify their process of the whole thing than the interpreter himself? I had a lot of fun conducting this interview, and there were a lot of bits I didn't use for my analysis video, so I figured it would make a nice bonus for everyone!

That's everything from this year! I'm really proud of how all of these videos came out, and I'm itching to keep going, expressing myself to my best ability! But I think a little break is in order. Thank you so much if you have read up to here! Have a great rest of your holiday, and I'll catch you in 2024!

[sneakyscarab]

touhou 19 time! this game was literally not even released when i started this, so this is really fresh! this post is probably the closest i will ever be to a real games journalist lol.

nina's thoughts on Touhou 19 - Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost

the most recent touhou, coming out just a few weeks ago, so this review is hot off the presses! UDoALG (wild abbreviation by the way, this name is so long) is a pretty neat game, being a direct sequel to Wily Beast and Weakest Creature story-wise, and a sequel to Phantasmagoria of Flower View gameplay-wise.

UDoALG is another in the competitive-danmaku type gameplay, similar to PoFV but with a number of evolutions to make the gameplay more balanced and easier to control. i won't go over every little change, since theres quite a lot, but ill point out some interesting changes, mostly in relation to story mode. for starters, Ability Cards are back again from UM, although with a much smaller role. each character has 2 cards themed to them, and whenever you beat an opponent in story mode you're randomly given one of their two cards. the three animal spirits are added, but they work completely differently to WBaWC, now being stronger variants of the generic spirit enemies from PoFV. a change that i think is only in story mode is that a new win condition is added, where if you defeat your opponent's boss summon an amount of times then your opponent loses. this is also pretty much the only wincon in story mode, since the AI has insane dodging skills. i literally only saw them lose a life one (1) time across 19 characters' stories (if you're curious, it was in Chiyari's stage 1).

one really interesting aspect of this game is the storytelling. i usually don't bring up the story in these posts outside of how certain characters relate to it, the story usually is a fairly simple affair that just gives the characters a reason to fight, but UDoALG has a much more complex story, which im kinda mixed on. i'll start with the cool part: the story actually progresses as you play through and unlock various characters in story mode, every set of character unlocks represents a later time period of the story, so you don't get the full story and resolution until you play through it all. this is a super cool idea, and gives good incentive to keep playing different routes and see how it all plays out. its a cool idea that uniquely plays off of the large character roster and unlocking method of these competitive vs games.

unfortunately, in order to make this happen and make every character be relevant, the plot is needlessly convuluted, especially in the first couple campaigns. there are so many factions at play, all with their own motives and double-agents and subterfuge. by the end of the 19 story scenarios you will be absolutely sick of the phrase "this is exactly as i had planned", and yet i still dont fully understand What the "main villain"s plan was. i commend ZUN for trying something new with the narrative, both in doing a direct sequel with most of the same characters as a former game, as well as this way of unfolding the story over time through different character routes, but i can't say it was Good. maybe im just biased since it mostly revolves around the WBaWC cast, and that game already had pretty rough plot and characterization, but i dunno. i will say i liked the story more at the end than i did after doing the first couple routes, but some of that early confusion never really goes away, and characters like Ran and Tsukasa dont really get their stories resolved.

time to talk about the characters! UDoALG is furry city, pretty much every character besides the human incident resolvers is some kind of animal-person, plus a few Onis. for returning characters we have Reimu, Marisa, Sanae, Ran (from PCB), Aunn (HSiFS), Nazrin (UFO), Seiran (LoLK), Rin (SA), Tsukasa (UM), Mamizou (TD), Yachie (WBaWC), Saki (WBaWC), Yuuma (the 3rd Animal Realm leader, coming from a fighting game i think?), and Suika (also a fighting game, and SA). for the new characters, we have 3 new youkai who have each joined one of the animal realm families respectively, plus the 'main villain' Zanmu and her assistant Hisami. since theres only 5 new guys, ill just give them each a quick review.

Son Biten is a monkey youkai, based on Son Wukong, recruited to Yachie's Kiketsu family. she's pretty goofy, and has a really neat musical theme. i dont have much to say about her, besides that she has a cool inspiration, and some of her interactions are pretty funny.

Enoko is a dog-type youkai, loosely based on the idea of Cerberus, who was recruited to Saki's Keiga family. instead of literally having 3 heads, she has bear traps on her wrists that act as analogues to the jaws of two additional heads, which is a really neat interpretation of a cerberus concept, as well as having tons of comedic potential. i love all the jokes people make about her offering up a Totally Normal Handshake, dont worry about it. she apparently lived in the Forest of Magic as a dog before awakening as a youkai, so she joins the crew of Marisa's funny forest friends.

the third new Youkai is Chiyari, who is NOT a chupacabra, despite what everyone says. she's based on a Tenkajin, which is apparently an obscure youkai that sucks blood, obscure enough that i could only find a single source for it online, being a Japanese blog post written by who i assume is a youkai enthusiast. Anyways, nobody in Gensokyo knows what a tenkajin is either, so everyone calls her a chupacabra instead since its another bloodsucking creature who is 'pretty popular right now'. most of her interactions are her being annoyed by being called a chupacabra, and eventually coming to terms with it. poor tenkajin gets no respect. shes very funny, and also apparently completely broken in pvp. great character.

Hisami is a 'guide of Hell', who is also inexplicably based on grapes for some reason (or eggplants, depending on who you ask, but im in grapes camp.) she pretty much just finds people in hell and helps them find their destination, although 'their destination' is up to Hisami's interpretation, and multiple times in the story she leads characters somewhere else. apparently she does her job wrong because she wants Zanmu to notice her, and it doesn't work cause apparently that was part of Zanmu's plan all along, so she doesn't care. Zanmu is too busy playing 4d chess to give her suboordinate some attention, so sad.

speaking of, Zanmu is an Oni, and the 'main villain' of the game. i say that with quotes because, despite being the final boss in most routes, and being the chessmaster supposedly laying out the big plans and manipulating everyone, she also is simultaneously resolving the incident, kinda?? its a bit hard to understand her motivations. well i guess her motivations make sense, but its hard to understand how exactly she plans to get what she wants from this plan. like her plan involves getting beat up by Reimu multiple times? hello?? not a fan, and she doesn't even have a cool design inspiration to make up for it, shes just another oni.

alright, lets wrap this one up. i was surprised to see another VS type game come out, and it seems to deliver a lot more balanced and interesting combat than the first one (granted, story mode plays pretty differently from what i can tell). the story is weird though, and the roster doesn't really have many characters i'm excited to play as compared to PoFV, and the characters i do like are pretty bad. (Sanae in particular is really weak in this format, her homing snakes are a huge disadvantage against bosses since they turn as soon as they see an enemy, meaning they wont hit the boss unless every random spirit or fairy is dead first). complaints aside though, at the base level its still pretty fun, and im glad that this type of gameplay is being given another chance.

i said it in my PoFV review, and ill say it again here: if any of you reading this have UDoALG, and are interested in playing the PvP with me, hit me up! itd be fun to try playing this with another person (although i heard the online is rough so i dunno…)

thank you so much for reading, especially those of you that have stuck with me through each post! this is the end of the mainline series, but there's still a lot out there i havent done. im not sure where this will go from here, especially since my college semester just started so i'll have a lot less free time, but ive had a lot of fun working on this project, and i hope that youve had fun reading it! if i do keep going, i might do the PC-98 quintilogy next, or maybe talk about cool fangames like Luna Nights or Mystia's Izakaya, i dunno. whatever comes next though, i hope to see you again! consider this the end of 'volume 1' of my grimoire. farewell!

[thydungeongal]

Something I started thinking about after your The Big Damn Post 4e was how Adventure Paths or pre-written campaigns fit within the context of D&D being really good at challenge mode but not quite so at story mode.

Having run only a handful of pre-written content, and with the longest game I ever played/GMed in being an underground, secret assassin society thing that was very much modeled after the then popular Assassin's Creed series that ALSO started in 3.5 D&D, transitioned to 4e, then Pathfinder, AND where narrative and character stories emergently popped up for us, I'm trying to retroactively find all the times we encountered issues with challenge vs story modes and house tueld or waved away something to get it to work.

With regards to some pre-written content, I feel like it's billed as a "harmonious" blend of satisfying challenge gameplay meant to advance an equally satisfying overarching story. Having also recently played through Pathfinder: Kingmaker the game, and wanting to run the adventure path for some friends, I'm curious if video games are naturally a strange mix of good challenge gameplay that CAN result in good story telling, albeit not at the same time? Sort of how the story happens in cutscenes or in dialogue but is separate from gameplay because a fail state is meant to reload and try again until you succeed.

I have limited experience with prewritten material because for a variety of reasons I really like making my own adventures, but I'll try to answer this based on what I have read:

Adventure paths are an interesting proposition to me, but I think in the hands of good designers they can be a pretty harmonious blend of challenge and narrative: basically having the challenge parts as small, self-contained adventuring zones that you travel to in order to advance the wider overarching plot. They are, ultimately, still vulnerable to the loss of narrative continuity that I feel a mix of Challenge Mode and Story Mode will always have, but one would hope that they would at least try to address it in the text. (like, at least a little "What if I accidentally TPK?" sidebar)

Thus far my favorite modern D&D adventure I have experienced has been the Dragon of Icespire Peak. I've heard some grumbling about it, and I don't think it's without its issues, but it's almost purely Challenge Mode, albeit with a (very simple) overarching plot. There's a dragon on that mountain and things are Fucked Up because of the dragon. It's a mini sandbox with lots of stuff to do and explore, all ultimately in the pursuit of going up to kill that dragon, and while there is a bit of soft hand-holding built into the adventure to introduce locations in a set order since it doesn't try to tell a story beyond "Dragon bad" it also feels like it wouldn't actively resist D&D's structure.

Anyway, video game RPGs are a whole different beast and I think you've basically cracked the code: video game RPGs basically have you, the player, beating all the story encounters as a necessity, but a TPK isn't a total failure state because you can just reload!

And yeah I do agree with you that a lot of videogame RPGs almost feel like they are placing story and gameplay into completely different silos. In many CRPGs I've played at key story moments control is wrested away from the player just so that the game can tell its authored narrative. In BG2 someone always gets taken to wizard jail, you always get sent to the Underdark, which always leads you back to the Elfwoods, and so on. In Divinity: Original Sin 2 your first fight with what seems to be the main villain turns out to be nonlethal and he's still alive actually.

And that also kind of feels like a lot of my problems with using D&D for larger narratives: by the structure of the game players have to win to maintain narrative continuity, which feels unsatisfying. To introduce players losing meaningfully you either have to introduce failure as a story element that does not flow from player actions or ignore rules text to get the game to produce the type of narrative you want.

[in-darkness]

OOC - Session Zero?

I'm in the middle of designing a system which can be enjoyably played via the medium of "eight choices in a poll, with available durations of either one day or one week." It... actually isn't as hard as it seems, interestingly enough. But I am, regardless, running into one key quandary I will need an outside answer for - how much of a say would you all like to have in the world? This is the complete start from scratch, and normally in a tabletop setting that means I meet with the players and ask them what they're interested in playing. Hack & slash? Political intrigue? High magic or low? Does gunpowder exist?

At the same time, however, I could easily see how that might drag things out beyond what people are interested in. This is a simple, low-intensity style of gameplay - and normally those sorts of systems have a very bare-bones attention to starting a campaign. Some of them are literally "you are X, in Y, seeking to do Z - now go."

So the way I see it, there are three options... and since there are three options, I figure I should make a poll and ask all of you.

The first option is to run a True Session Zero, TTRPG style. This will be more involved, with several OOC polls posted, to zero in on the sort of world and plot the collective people interested in this would be most happy playing within. It will, as a result, take more time to get into the actual matter of playing the game. But it means getting a world built to meet the overall interests of the majority of you.

The second option is the one most people are the most experienced in - what I'd call a Character Sheet model. I design the world myself, without your input, but post a series of OOC polls to allow those interested to design the Player Character. You'd be voting on things like gender identity, basic appearance (skin color, hair color, eye color, and build basically), stats, skills, and a starting set of equipment. This is the middle-of-the-road option as far as customization goes - you don't get a say in the world around the PC, but you get to define who the PC is.

The last option is what I'd dub the Press Start to Play option - because it basically borrows from video games. I make the world AND a premade Player Character, then drop everybody straight into the game. It gets you playing the fastest, but gives you the least freedom to define who you were before the start of the game. I will still do what I can to give you some flexibility to define your backstory through poll options, Mass Effect style, as this is a role-playing game. But you'll be far more limited. It's the trade-off for jumping directly into play.

[doorplays]

Door Reviews: Betrayal at Club Low (2022)

I discovered Cosmo D’s work through a Jacob Geller video (this one called “Bad Graphics”). It looked so weird yet so cool. Maybe it even looked cool because it’s weird? The design is intentionally odd, and yet all set up in a coherent way. It interested me. A few weeks later, I saw this game, and saw the dev, and remembered the vid, so I wishlisted it. And when it went on sale, I immediately bought and played it. I had a lot of fun! Let’s now review Betrayal at Club Low!

What’s it about? Betrayal at Club Low has you infiltrating a club to save your associate who’s on an intelligence mission. You have to use your various qualities to overcome obstacles, as you roll the dice to succeed. Also, it’s weird as fuck?? Yet very fun.

STYLE (Gameplay, Graphics, Music)

Betrayal at Club Low has you assuming the role of an agent of The Circus, which, quite honestly, I’m not sure if they’re an actual circus or what, considering one of their members is an intelligence agent but ALSO someone who manages to ride a unicycle on a moving platform, but NONETHELESS, you are this person and you are part of this group. You are a simple working-class citizen trying to survive in this gig economy of a world, and now you have to get through your mission through utilizing your six skills: Cooking, Deception, Music, Observation, Physique, Wisdom, and Wit. How do you utilize them? Well, by rolling dice!

In this game, you encounter a lot of unexpected obstacles and opportunities. You can try and drink puddle water, you can try to convince a chef to Let You Cook for the club, you can try to beat up a bouncer, etc etc. To succeed in doing all these things, you have to roll your skill dice. Each skill has a dice associated with them, with each starting at their base values (the six faces having the numbers 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, and 1). This is how “combat” works in this game: roll the dice against other entities and obstacles who will also roll their own die. If you match or beat their roll, you win and get progress!

With each win you get, you get progress and some cash. You then use cash to level up your skill dice, giving you the opportunity to increase the value of each dice face thereby increasing your odds of beating enemy rolls. So not only is this a rowdy wild west of dice combat, it’s also a careful resource management game: get more cash to upgrade your stats so that you can get MORE cash. But be wary, if you fail challenges too much, you are liable to lose some Health or some Nerve. Lose all of your Health or all of your Nerve, and, well, you lose…

Whew! That was a LOT of explaining. All in all, I found the gameplay to be VERY fun. There was actual strategy involved in managing what dice faces to upgrade, and what challenges to take on. And despite me feeling like I explained a lot of it, in reality the game feels simple and organic. It really feels like a fun one-shot TTRPG campaign! I loved it.

Oh, and there’s pizza dice! They give you cash and other goodies apparently!

I want to talk about the aesthetics of this game. Seeing the world and the tones of color, it is very much a seedy nightclub vibe. The graffiti, the airs assaulting your senses, the random road puddle you can actually drink from, it’s all strangely dark yet whimsical. The world may be shit, but people are still gonna play in it.

Your character, the undercover pizzaiolo, looks like a mannequin, a statue come to life. They remind me of this one surreal artist I follow: Person918x. Cosmo D and this person probably use the same software, but they somehow evoke the same oddness, a sort of liminal space. Here are a few works of Person918x that I like. See how strange they are? Looking into these images and artpieces, I can’t help but feel a vague sense of dread. But here, in Club Low, the fact that I can move through the place makes it feel less surreal, more vibrant, more alive.

And the music! It’s absolutely BOPPING. I wanna dive in that dancefloor and just jive with the beats!

This game just OOZES with style. It’s a unique aesthetic that I really like. The game is also apparently also set in the same universe as Cosmo D’s older games, so I can’t wait to play more of his games!

SUBSTANCE (Story, Characters, Impact)

Here’s the down low at Club Low: Your coworker, Gemini Jay, is trapped in there. You are now charged with saving him, infiltrating the club under the guise of a pizza delivery guy. With your various skills, you have to get in and out with him in tow, bringing him back to The Circus.

The premise is simple enough. It’s the wacky hi-jinks you get up to that make this game. Convincing the coat rack receptionist that the shiny blue coat in the back is actually yours, aggressively punching out the laser security measures put in place to keep out those who aren’t hipster enough, concentrating on the CCTV monitors until you merge your consciousness with the security system… these are all things you can do in this game.

Earlier, I was talking about how surreal Person918x’s works were. Still images evoking liminal spaces. But here, the images are no longer still: you move through them, inspecting, interacting, even finding out about their history. You see skulls from a century ago, left behind by peoples’ ancestors. You see an ominous mirror that wants… something, emitting a strange green aura. Even the club itself is strange: it was once a coffin factory, passed down through generations, now turned into a club. You even see the DJ set mounted on a coffin.

The sights and sounds might muffle it all, but the world will always be there, waiting for you to listen to it.

I like the world of Club Low. The story shown here is simple enough to have fun with the gameplay, but I definitely want to experience more of its worldbuilding.

VERDICT

Betrayal at Club Low is a short but fun ride into Cosmo D’s brand of games. If you are up for a unique one-shot experience, definitely get this game! It’s energetic, it’s funny, and it’s delightfully strange. Get this game!!

Door Rates Betrayal at Club Low: 4/5!

[leam1983]

Playing "Mafia: Definitive Edition" and...

It's interesting, in its own way. As to how that is, consider the fact that it's an open-world that isn't open. Not really, at least.

You technically can roam the map to your heart's content while you're driving, and the game simulates everything more fleshed-out and purpose-built open worlds do. There's pedestrians and they react to you, you're free to interact with the game's systems as much as you'd care to - but you're not really expected to do any of it.

For the most part, Mafia is an open-world game that has a laser-eyed focus on its story. It's not at all concerned with letting you soak in the sights of its distaff counterpart of the Roaring Thirties' San Francisco, and actually really cares about what you'll make of Tommy Angelo's story of power, greed, perdition and regret.

Compare and contrast with any of Grand Theft Auto's peers: outside of mission trigger points, you're free to do absolutely whatever it is you'd care to do, in most cases. In Mafia, there isn't anything except the main quest, and the world instead serves as a tone-setter, rather than a tool or a separate character.

Take Cyberpunk 2077's Night City. There's a ton of jank in the systems involved, but you get the sense that the city formerly known as Coronado Bay has a ton of stuff going on that doesn't directly involve you. Most of it's ancillary, sure, but you'll come across cordoned-off crime scenes, protests in front of the local prison and the occasional attempted arrest, among other things. Lost Haven has none of this, but the setting and attention to detail more than compensates adequately. You do indeed get a sense that the Salieris and Morellos are holding on by a thread of corruption, greed and hubris, and that the city is as much an environment as a byproduct of said environment. It manages this without side missions or collect-a-thons, and with a map screen that remains focused on one, simple goal: in-world navigation.

Mafia feels like what happens when your dev team is dead-set on prioritizing diegesis, and doesn't have any lick of a trace of concern as to some expected "gameplay value" ballpark. It's twenty missions long at about an hour each if you're generous or criminally shit at working a Tommy gun like I am, and it bows out quickly and cleanly. It's proof positive that short campaigns aren't an ill to be eradicated from the medium, not when properly-executed ones are as easy to revisit as a good book.

That's where the game stumbles a bit. Andrew Bongiorno brings a lot of gruffness and a tiny bit of expected Americano-Sicilian swagger, with a clipped delivery that could've come straight out of a Bogart vehicle. Every moment Tommy Angelo is onscreen feels rooted and authentic. Unfortunately, the same can't be said of his partners-in-crime Paulie Lombardo and Sam Trapani.

Picture the idea of the characterization of an Italian-American Prohibition-Era goon as a spectrum of sorts. If we're generous and place Tommy Angelo on one end, the opposite end would have to house Who Framed Roger Rabbit's Smartass Weasel. I'd love to say that Paulie and Sam are on the same level of characterization as Tommy, but there's several instances where I was left thinking that even a streetwise and otherwise-uneducated caporegime would've sounded more natural than these two. It's like you spend half the game lugging caricatures of yourself around and have to sort of buy into their exaggerated reactions for the sake of fitting in. If you mentally pictured them as nasally, high-pitched and a little too much in love with their scabrous job, you've got it in one.

It's a surprise, too, seeing as you've also got characters like Sarah Marino and Frank Colletti, who look and sound exactly like you'd expect them to in-context, with Frank earning special marks for sounding exactly like a first-generation Sicilian immigrant with a tardy, if flawless command of English and decades of professionalism to account for.

As to how I know? I was raised in Saint-Léonard, in Montreal proper, and grew up hearing several male voices that sounded exactly like Colletti's. The kind of guy who speaks Italian on the daily since his birth, but who seriously hit the books after emigrating to Canada, to the point where they could give enunciation pointers to lifelong English speakers.

The story being told, however, won't reinvent the wheel. If you've played Mafia Prime, if you will, then you're familiar with it. It's your typical "rags-to-riches, then almost back to rags and in a body bag" affair that echoes everything from The Godfather to The Untouchables to every single True Crime special on the Castellamarese War that's ever hit the History Channel. If your knowledge of the Roaring Twenties' criminal intelligentsia goes beyond just Al Capone, you know exactly what to expect. It's told in really interesting cinematic vignettes, as well as in gameplay segments that really don't reward your trying to think your way out of things. You're a triggerman for a Capo, and that's all there is to it; so get to ducking into cover and blasting heads and legs off. If that's what you came here for, you're bound to be pleased.

Of particular note is the fact that the remake of a game dating back to 2004 comes with location-based damage that doesn't try to reach the gory depths of The Last of Us: Part II, but that still isn't shy about letting you kneecap rival fedora-wearing and pinstripe-sporting gentlemen using a twelve-gauge. There's no dismemberment action on offer, but several mixtures of physics-based and canned animations that give your unfortunate victims a fair amount of personality in their final moments.

As you'd expect, physics systems like this have a few fun bugs on offer. If you're playing the Hotel Corleone mission, try and get enemy soldiers to tip over the couches they're huddling behind for cover. They'll let out hilariously inappropriate death screams, as if tipping over the chair's back and flopping into its offered pillowy crevice required a scream you'd associate with falling down the Grand Canyon...

All things considered, Mafia: Definitive Edition is a great upgrade to a package that was starting to show its age, and an unorthodox entry into the Open-World genre. I hear its sequels take more definitive steps towards the usual chestnuts in the genre, but I haven't tried Mafia II and Mafia III yet. It feels like a faithful simulation of a period in time that's typically not confidently touched by most developers, tied together with a plot that isn't anything special, but that remains consistently entertaining.

Now I'm crossing my fingers for a hypothetical Cosmic Horror-themed DLC pack that'll never be released. The Salieri Crime Syndicate Versus the Priests of Dagon is something I'd definitely pay to play...