#the general aesthetic of this world makes most areas feel very samey

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance - The Grid

[wfagamerants]

Super Mario Wonder has been out for over a week now and I have beaten it 100% not long after release, so may as well discuss it, shall we?

Spoiler warnings in full effect, since I like to be able to discuss basically everything I’d like, just to clear that up right off the bat.

SMW is the first, for the lack of a better term, normal 2D Mario in over a decade at this point, so naturally, everyone was looking forward to seeing what they’d do next, especially with the step away from the NSMB series, which was really needed by that point.

The NSMB games are also by necessity, the main games to compare Wonder to, given for how long they have been the most recent incarnation of 2D Mario. On that note, this is not meant to be a hit piece on those games. All of them are fine and I am particularly fond of DS and Wii, however they did have problems and it’s hard to think of an area where Wonder isn’t just an unambiguous improvement.

Those improvements already begin in a rather surprising spot: the story.

2D Mario is actually a fair bit more varied in it’s set-ups than it can appear at first, Prior to NSMB it was really just SMB1 and Lost Levels that went with the Bowser kidnaps Peach plot, without much else surrounding it. SMB3 starts as a journey to turn the 7 kings back to normal, with Bowser only kidnapping Peach near the end as a last resort and World, while sticking largely to the base, takes place in a completely new setting. That’s not even going into SMB2 or the Land games, which are all breaks from what we see as the Mario norm in some way. New kingdoms, new characters, new villains and bosses, new a lot of things really.

Wonder in that regard really feels like a return to that. A whole new kingdom once more, with a new companion and NPC species and while Bowser is the big bad, he doesn’t engage in any royalty kidnapping and instead goes after a new power source, which transforms him and he stays that way all the way until defeated. It’s simple, as is typical for Mario, but it is a lot more refreshing than the very samey NSMB plots, which took until U to really add a twist to it and even then failed to do all that much with it, particularly with a level theme as neat as Peach’s Castle taken over by Bowser.

What surprised me even more was how every world had a bit of its own story going on, with the Poplins giving you an idea of what kind of trouble Jr and Bowser’s actions in general, were causing them. A particular stand-out for me was World 3, which doesn’t even have a boss and is instead treated as a series of trials, to obtain a Royal Seed that Bowser hasn’t gotten his hands on.

As with the main story, it never goes especially deep, but it goes a long way to make the Flower Kingdom feel like an actual world, in stark contrast to the Mushroom Kingdom of NSMB games, which was very much just a videogame world for function as a videogame world, doing it’s job and not much more.

The visuals have also seen a refreshing shake-up. Granted, even NSMBU got better about it by U, but even compared to that, I find the visual design of the Flower Kingdom locales to be substantially more appealing, not to mention imaginative. Fungi Mines in particular is full of designs I am a fan of and even a new level theme with its ruins, which isn’t the only time the game diverts and goes for something totally new.

In general, while the game holds true to most of the typical level themes, the aesthetics are so varied that they don’t even really feel that way. This is something you feel as early as World 1, while it functionally serves as the Grassland of the day, it rarely feels that way because the visuals change up enough to not make it feel like a static world theme. It also helps that the order has been changed a bit. You wouldn’t imagine how refreshing it is to not have the Desert be the second world.

The biggest visual highlight of the stages for me were the airship levels, genuinely cool and climactic, in a way that made me pause and just go ‘’woah’’ and I can’t say I feel that way a lot in 2D Mario, but this game brought that out several times.

Of course, the big show stealers are the characters themselves and yeah, everything people say is true. They look great, every animation is filled with personality and detail and there is even some nice stylization, like the sideways mouths for Mario, Luigi and the Toads, which help bring the models in line with the current style of 2D Mario.

Everyone and their grandparents has already made comparisons to the NSMB games and that’s because it is ultimately true. If anything this is one of the best things to point to where these games have different mindsets.

NSMB treated the models more like sprites than anything, going for something functional, with very little flavor, while Wonder is determined to fill its animations with as much charm as possible. Even little things like the characters striking poses when collecting a power-up or reacting to mooks about to get out of their shells, goes a long way in bringing those characters alive, instead of treating them like game pieces that carry out their function and that’s it.

In terms of music it has some stand-outs and the rest is at worst, easy on the ears, about what I expect and everything fits the mood of the stage well, no complaints.

More pressingly in terms of audio is that this is the first time we are hearing the new voices for several characters, most notably Mario. Luigi and Daisy and overall I think they all do a wonderful job, I’m already used to all of them.

It’s also just refreshing to have a set of fresh new voice clips this thoroughly across the board. Mario has never been a stranger to reused voice clips even early on, but by the Wii U era it became even more noticeable than usual and in past years, genuinely a bit distracting, so I am happy Wonder does not fall victim to that.

And then we got the gameplay, of course the most important factor of all and where I have plenty more to gush about.

A notable thing about Wonder is that it has some 3D Mario veterans on the team and to be honest, it shows.

There are some more overt inspirations, such as Petal Isles essentially serving as the hub world of the game, a Shadow Mario type wonder effect or being able to find (Captain) Toad on the overworld in exchange for rewards, as has been his role in the 3D games since 3D Land.

Even taking that aside though, while the game is fundamentally still 2D Mario as we all know it, many of its ideas and gimmicks can sometimes feel more like missions in a 3D Mario game, which I very much mean as a compliment. This is further underlined by stuff like the Wiggler Races, timed enemy gauntlets, Badge Challenges or Search Party sections. In general, there is a surprising variety to the kind of things you get tasked with, which is refreshing.

The characters control quite similarly to the NSMB games, even including nuances like Ground Pound canceling and because of it, control like a dream. The only major difference being that you can crouch walk and that the triple jump is gone. The latter was something I expected to miss, but the levels are designed in a way that never made me feel that way.

While almost everyone plays the same, badges do help bring in variety to make up for it. I stuck with Parachute for just being that fun and useful for me, but I did mess around with a couple and am eager to experiment with it and also play more with the expert badges. I can easily see a ton of replayability options completely new to the series, through them.

It does bring me to my first little gripe, which is the Yoshis being stuck to being designated Easy Mode options. I totally get wanting a full set of 4 for multiplayer, but a simple toggle would have been appreciated. Yoshi does play differently and is still fun, but I’d like a way to play him as a more normal character. Same moveset, but without Easy Mode-like benefits.

What I said about levels being more visually diverse also applies to the level elements. Sometimes it’s small things like the fountain springs in the very first level, but even beyond that the game is so full of new enemies and ideas that it feels a lot like SMB3, in terms of bringing in distinct level concepts one after another. It is miles above NSMB which granted, had plenty stand-out stages too across the series, but also a lot that felt samey, especially as the series went on and some gimmicks were repeated.

The power-ups also hold their own well. Elephant even once you get the initial whut factor out of the way is fun and really the star of certain sections, Drill has some really cool applications and the Bubble Flower is easily my favorite of them all. I love a power-up that has both offensive and platforming uses and this one, especially combined with badges, allows for some really fun stuff.

The Wonder effects are of course the star of the show and a contributor to every level feeling so distinct. The amount of different ideas they came up with and how well they all work, is truly astounding and it’s remarkable how few of them repeat. The balloon or rolling ball Wonder Effects would have been recurring gimmicks in other games, but here, you do them once and twice respectively and move on. 

All this combined makes for a remarkably fresh feeling 2D Mario, which was desperately needed and did a lot to elevate the game to something exciting and genuinely addicting.

The bosses are…a bit more of a mixed bag. I like that not every world has one and that does help with the risk of repetition, because aside from the final boss it’s all Bowser Jr. They could be worse, the Wonder effects do help a little, but it’s still full of the same kind of repetitive boss design the Koopalings get flack for, especially the spinning shell bits. They are serviceable, but that’s it and the airship bosses I don’t even count, they are fancy flagpoles.

The final boss though, I actually liked a lot, Bowser’s general state in this game was always going to make it stand out, but more than anything, it isn’t a rehash, it isn’t over in barely any time and it’s not another Bowser over the bridge. It’s new, it lasts long enough to feel satisfying, it feels right in difficulty, it’s just shockingly good.

Speaking of difficulty, that is a thing I heard a lot about when the game got into the hands of people early and to be honest….I don’t really see the supposed difficulty. It does want you to pay attention and that is good, but on the whole I find the game to be pretty breezy. Even the Special World and designated final reward level, were really not that tough. Not that that’s a bad thing though, it is a joyride kind of easy and not the braindead kind.

Haven’t really dabbled into the online or multiplayer, but do plan on that with a friend, so that’s gonna be fun to discover for my second run.

On the whole yeah, I love Wonder, major shocker. It really is a promising next step for 2D Mario, not being afraid to be wacky, full of character, legit fresh and exciting, a true evolution of the formular.

It’s not flawless, but it is an absolute joy and really, any platformer that lets me play as Toadette gets major brownie points out of the gate.

It’s Mario, Mario in his strongest form and I couldn’t be happier.

[pixel-cat-1]

I just finished The Outer Worlds

I don’t really ever use this blog for more than reblogging stuff, so this is probably coming out of left field for anyone who follows me, but as you see in the title, I beat The Outer Worlds not a couple of minutes ago. I have some thoughts I’d like to talk about while their fresh, and this is as good a place as any to do that lol

So, what did I think of it? Overall, I think The Outer Worlds is okay game that ultimately fails to meet up in many regards to not only Obsidian’s golden child, Fallout New Vegas, but in some departments even regular ass Bethesda games from years ago. And that’s honestly such a shame, because TOW had so much goddamn potential and yet I finished it and felt practically nothing for the entire last level and final ending sequence.

The main issue I think is that ultimately speaking, TOW doesn’t necessarily do anything different from any other RPG I can think of, and it doesn’t do anything like that super well. 

For example, the combat’s good on a technical level. The controls and mechanics are fun to use (especially the dodge system), but the enemies tend to either range from “complete curb stomp bitch babies” to “bullet sponge that’ll kill me so fast I won’t even know what happened.” Most fights weren’t particularly engaging, and I was basically handicapping myself but not using the companion abilities for about 75% of the game (I don’t know why I never tried pressing the d-pad buttons, but yet again, when I can just shoot shit and huff an inhaler, I didn’t need to think too hard). The disparity of how difficult the game can be is often confusing, and I was more often limited because of my ammo count more so than my ability to play the game.

The RP aspects can be good at times. There are plenty of skill checks that reward you for being a smart little egg, and a part of RPG’s I like is being able to avoid combat and make people happy, and generally make myself useful, so that was fairly fun. Overall the dialogue options and the performances by most VA’s left me not feeling like I was being hindered in acting and responding to situations how I’d like, so at the very least, that didn’t let me down.

The music was overall enjoyable, although very forgettable, and sometimes a bit all over the place: there’s Western-y guitar ambient tracks, also some more techno-y ones? Elevator music that sounds like they got it from a royalty free website. This kinda wish-washyness ties into multiple issues I had with the game I’ll get into further on.

The graphics are good, which isn’t necessarily shocking anymore because every game looks good. There are some aesthetic choices I liked, that being things like the Art Deco style architecture and advertisements from the loading screens. Terra 2 is gorgeous as all hell, with the skybox being particularly amazing (I’ve often fantasized about Earth having rings, so this partially fulfills that fantasy). Monarch is overall also very well done, with making it look and feel like a hostile shithole with ravenous wildlife. The looming gas giant overheard also does a good job of making me feel dread, which is about as much of that feeling I ever got. However, the game never really maintains a distinct “style”, rather it collages a bunch of them at once. Because for all the aesthetic of the Art Deco style that they do for cities like Byzantium. there’s like 10 levels/areas that are just generic as all hell “sci-fi space shit” that you’ve seen before. And then there’s Scylla, which is so fucking boring in design I don’t know why it’s even in the game.

This creates an issue where it’s like they wanted to make the game look Bioshock, but some people wanted something out of Mass Effect. But some people played Borderlands, and wanted to go for the wacky space bandit and hostile environment feel. But they also wanted to stick it to Bethesda, so they made is vaguely look like a Fallout game as well. It’s hard to describe in text, so I’m just gonna post these and show it best I can

^ It looks like space Bioshock here

^ And here it reminds me more of Borderlands than anything else (it’s a lot easier to see if you look at it from the ground, rip)

Scylla is literally just a rock. As far as I can tell, you could probably fucking avoid the damn thing if you avoid side quests. There’s fucking nothing there. Just enemies, a few side quest things, an empty town and a giant terraformer thingy that’s interesting to look at for like 4 seconds. And despite what you’d think, no, there is no low gravity. That would’ve at least made this place have some interesting gimmick or mechanic, but no. It’s just a fucking dumping ground for side quests. God. Fucking. Damnit.

All science-y buildings just look like this for the most part across all levels. It’s not bad, just very generic and same-y.

The Groundbreaker’s fairly interesting, until you realize that all it is is essentially a giant corridor front to back. Actually, scratch that, it’s two corridors! One of which is this Back Bays area overrun with criminals. How do you get to this clearly dangerous and isolated part of the ship? Well a fucking elevator smack dab in the middle of the pavilion of course! So anyone can just go up or down into this apparent no man’s land part of the ship by literally going into it via an elevator. Dear god.

^Monarch definitely has one of the best looking environments in the game, tied with Terra 2 down below

But what absolutely fucks the game overall is despite how much effort they put into making everything look nice (regardless if you actually like it or not), the overall level design in terms of function and whatnot? Mind numbingly boring.

All levels are really small maps with (at most) a handful of major buildings or towns depending on the scale, and the rest is just a bunch of abandoned buildings with some enemies, or a crashed ship or something. There's just...nothing going on with half of these dungeons.

Also the vast majority of buildings have a “Quarantine” sign out front or is locked in some capacity, which means you could have 4-5 buildings in a random batch of them along a road, but only 2 you can explore. And since all the fucking interiors across multiple planets look the exact same, it leads to an incredible feeling of sameiness in a game that has you running around an entire solar system. How the fuck even??? I’d argue fucking Fallout 3 handled this better. At least there was more to do! More overall dungeons and levels! Did I miss something? Am I just fucking stupid and I missed the all the good shit?

Combine this with the wish-washy aesthetics and music, it leads to an incredible feeling of not really knowing what to make of things. You’ll just be sprinting around, shooting all the red things on the compass just to get it over with by Monarch. And when you realize that LMG’s are just...the best weapons in the game as far as I could tell, and there’s no real downsize to them, you’ll just fucking run around gunning everything down while some forgettable track plays in the background until some enemy with a weirdly large health bar forces you to think for a bit before you get back to running around and shooting shit again. 

Despite this though? I still overall enjoyed the combat. I liked running around and becoming the 4th Horseman. Plus with the mechanics overall being fun to use, it wasn’t really that bad. But I can’t say on an objective level I think it’s good for a game to feel like that. Because despite how heavy handed I’m being right now (and will be throughout the rest of this impromptu review), I don’t hate this game. 

Sound design is overall very good. Guns make satisfying shooty shooty bang bang noises, and as I said before, the VA’s are overall very good all around. Parvati stands out as the most interesting character to listen to in general. She has a lot of informal speech patterns that makes her distinct, and is generally a treat to listen talk. At worst, you get a character like Nyoka, who doesn’t sound bad by any real means, but for a lot of her dialogue, I felt they should’ve slowed it down and focused on getting her emotions down. But it certainly wasn’t bad.

Storywise? This game wasn’t particularly interesting. I’m gonna put the keep reading thing here because I want to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn’t played yet and cares about them. Long story short, I think the game was good, but very disappointing given what it could have been. I enjoyed myself for the most part, but often found the lack of anything super special to really hold it back from achieving something I think the gaming industry needed in an era of, ironically enough, hyper greedy corporations with no morals to speak of.

So, what did I think of the story? And I guess by extension, the side quests. Overall, I think the main story was...not very good. There was a lot of good stuff inbetween though, and a lot of side quests and little things definitely were enjoyable. But the plot is just not nearly as engaging as it should be. Given how short it was though, that might’ve been a mercy.

The story, as roughly as I can summarize is, is that you’re a colonist frozen on the colony ship “Hope.” It’s been adrift for 70 years, but you’re woken up by a guy named Phineas Welles (he’s basically Doc Brown, but nicer). The Board (which consists of the 10 companies who own and run the colony/solar system) try to stop him, but they fail, and you’re escape podded onto Terra 2, near a dying town called Edgewater. The pod accidentally kills the contact you were to meet, so now you’re gonna steal his ship and use it to do shit basically.

Along the way, you pick up a ragtag band of miscreants and general shitheads and kill a lot of people and wildlife in a quest to stop the corrupt Board from running the colony harder into the dirt than they already have. It’s very by the numbers, more or less. I guess.

The immediate issue is that, despite being able to join the Board and betray Phineas if you want, there’s absolutely no fucking reason to do that. Not a single goddamn reason, other than for the evulz. This creates an issue where I feel no reason to deviate from the Phineas side of the story. And I know what someone might be thinking “But Pixel! The Board is supposed to be evil!” And I am absolutely aware of that. But the thing is, so was Caesar’s Legion in Fallout New Vegas. And yet, that faction is often considered just as interesting and compelling a faction for the game as the NCR or Mr. House. People will, to this day, still argue over who had the best idea for solving the Wasteland’s issues. Because despite how evil the Legion is, they still had very valid points about the NCR and how horribly corrupt and bloated it was. And there was absolutely an argument to be made about how safe they made their lands for those under their ownership. Stuff like that that makes you actually consider and think about whether or not you're actually making the right choices for the whole of the New Vegas wasteland, and by extension the rest of the Western part of America.

Here? There’s no contest. There is no necessary evils. There is no good reason the Board does anything. No logic, no reason. All they can do is fuck shit up even more, and that makes them such a boring, vague antagonist that there was never a moment in my mind I actually considered working for them. Any potential moments they had to sway me or dashed aside by them constantly proving how they could never actually fix the problems they made. And if that was the intention? Then Obsidian fucked up.

People remember the villains that raise a point a hell of a lot more than they do villains that are just evil for the sake of it (there are obviously exceptions, for an RPG? you need a compelling villain). And that’s why no one will remember this game in a decade. It pales so hard in comparison to New Vegas, it’s not even funny. It’s on par with Fallout 3, at best. Which wouldn’t be a bad thing if the whole point of this game was to make a statement against an increasingly morally bankrupt Bethesda.

Let’s look at, per se, Skyrim. Paarthurnax was a supporting character with an interesting backstory: he’s Alduin’s brother, who is the main antagonist. He is a dragon that secludes himself on the top of the tallest mountain in Skyrim, who meditates and focuses on suppressing his inherit evil dragon nature. Despite this nature, he chooses to be good. And he asks a very compelling question.

"What is better? To be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?”

In a single sentence, Skyrim asked a more though provoking question than the entirely of The Outer Worlds. And if you played F:NV, then it’s probably weird to hear that, because F:NV was full of moral and philosophical quandaries. So where did it all go?

The thing is, people forget that the Obsidian that made F:NV is dead and gone. The actual people who made that game have all moved on from that company. This is the child trying to replicate the success of it’s parents, without entirely understanding exactly what the parent did to achieve what it achieved.

The biggest difference between F:NV and TOW is that F:NV really forces you to think. TOW just doesn’t require that, at all. 

Phineas good, Board bad. No thinking required.

I think the real warning sign is at the beginning of the game as well. Edgewater, the first town in the game, is dying. People are leaving and the town's also dealing with a disease epidemic. The town’s leader’s answer? Cut off power to the deserters, and force them to work harder despite the fact the town’s basically dying because of the overworking and disease. Despite the fact there’s not even enough medicine to heal everyone, and they have to play favorites with who lives and who dies.

What the fuck logic is this? Why would I ever choose that?

The only other choice, unless I missed a compromise solution (which I would’ve wanted) is to route power to the deserters and finish off the town more or less. The deserters wouldn’t take in everyone though, so a lot of people would die anyways. But even then, she’s still clearly the more competent leader. There’s not a goddamn contest. 

It just continues like that the whole game. I rarely had to think about who I’d side with. because the solution is obvious. The literal only reason I’d side with the corporations is if I was being evil, nothing else.

The best the story gets is when you need to make a compromise on Monarch between MSI (a corporation who got the boot from the Board) and the Iconoclasts (Religious people who are anti corporation). If you work with the second in command of the Iconoclasts, you can depose their extremist, dipshit leader and work out a truce. Which is good! It rewards the player for this too, when these factions come to help in the final level of the game (and when you see specific characters you could save helping out, that also make it feel like your decisions had an impact). You see the two factions...standing next to eachother, which isn’t much, but it’s about as much change you see in the game.

Which is also another thing that TOW fails to accomplish: a sense of longevity with my decisions leads to me feeling that, despite making the right choices, nothing really changes. 

Going back to Edgewater, you’d think after a while, I’d come back and the town would be entirely gone or something, right? 

Nope.

Some NPC’s stood outside the factory forever, as did some guards. There weren’t any lights on. That’s about it.

Well, certainly the Deserters must give me more quests to help out, which can lead to me establishing them and helping them help the Edgewaterers, right?

No. Very quickly you realize there’s very little do or talk about with NPC’s after you do monumental decisions. The only functional difference is an opinion slider, which is another imitation from F:NV that means fuck all. The only in game things it affects is: a) The prices of venders of that factions

b) Whether or not that faction will shoot you on site.

That’s it as far as I noticed. The best idea they had, that being that factions can love you, but also fear you just doesn’t do anything. As far as I could tell, at least.

I’d love to be wrong, because I was so excited to see what would happen to entire settlements and after I helped them. After I made important decisions that’d change the face of the colony. And I felt so disappointing when it became apparent little actually mattered. 

The companion sidequests aren’t too much better. The pacing is so weird, sometimes, depending on how available certain planets are. Parvati’s was especially jarring, despite it being the best written by far.

It basically is you helping her get with an engineer chick from the Groundbreaker. It’s pretty adorable overall, and without a doubt has some of the better writing character wise, but the pacing was so fucking weird. It initially starts with you getting Parvati to talk to her about engineering stuff. They say they’ll email and stuff about engineering stuff. which is neat. So I run around, finish up all the side quests on the ship as I can, then head back to my own ship. I did not go back to my ship at all during this. 

When I come back, Parvati immediately tells me that she and the engineer, Junlei, have been messaging and getting flirty and now she has a crush and it’s just like “Dude, were you texting her while we murdered all those bugs in the engine?”

It’s doubly funny as well, because Obsidian wanted to avoid the player having romanceable characters. Which makes about as much sense as you think. Once source said the reason was that they wanted you to focus on roleplay, and not trying to bang anyone you found hot (okay?). Another just said they weren’t ready for it. And I believe it. As much as I think romance would’ve been another good thing to add depth to this game, I bet you they’d have fucked it up. It’s just funny. Even Fallout 4 had pretty acceptable romances.

Granted the system was fucking basically “Kill shit together until you wanna bang” but fuck, it was something! It also doesn’t help there’s a bunch of cuties all over this game: Huxley stands out as an adorable muffin who becomes a generic NPC at the end of the MSI/Iconoclast questline, despite the fact you can even repair her journal terminal with zero indication at you can do it, which is good! Let me just do things to be nice! But she literally just sits there after you rescue her with a few dialogue options which goes away after the peace deal, and it's so fucking frustrating that I want to enjoy the characters more, but none of them seem to have more than a paragraph's worth of depth to them and it's so sad.

Even the companions are like this. At the beginning I’d try and talk with Parvati about anything, but the only dialogue options would be about getting her out of the party, and that’s it. I can’t ask her what she thinks of things, or of the current quest/situation. There’s such a weird lack of depth in a weird amount of areas, that it felt almost worse than playing a Bethesda game.

I think the penultimate disappointment of the game is, fittingly, the final level, Tartarus. Which is fitting, because it feels very hellish. Not the planet mind you, or the prison which it takes place in, but just the complete lack of anything super special. It’s just the same kind of environments you’ve already run through, but bigger and with more bullet sponge bad guys. Which is funny, because jumping around and killing an army on a purple hell planet that has perpetual lightning storms would’ve been sick as fuck, but nah, gotta run around on Scylla instead of anywhere else compelling.

In my playthrough, MSI, the Groundbreaker, and the Iconoclasts came to help me deal with all the fucking goons, which was mostly cool because I didn’t have to deal with the tediousness of killing every last one of corporate goon myself.

This is about as big of an impact your decisions come to as far as I’ve noticed. Which isn’t saying much.

You meet the Chairman of the Board here, by the way. I just shot him and kept moving. shrugs

There’s also a last minute villain in this Sophia person, who is also apparently on the Board? It’d help if there was a list of the Board people, which could’ve been on a terminal somewhere. Maybe I’m dumb and never found it, which is plausible. 

The final boss fight, (I hesitate to call it that) is just somewhat large robot. It’s a bullet sponge with respawning combat drones flying everywhere and they’re very annoying. I died once after around 10 minutes of fighting, then using Parvati and Felix’s (he’s another companion, he’s also okay I guess) combat abilities I knocked it down and layed into the robot’s weak spot. He died very quickly.

So depending on how you do it, the final fucking boss is either stupidly hard or mind numbingly easy. I don’t know which is worse.

So you go past the dead robot, gun down Sophia in one shot, and save Phineas. You basically become the leader of Halcyon, there’s a F:NV-esque slideshow and commentary about your actions that somehow is worse that New Vegas’s, credits roll, and you sit there thinking “That’s it? That’s really it?”

Yeah, that’s it. 

It’s such a let down, especially because this was supposed to be Fallout New Vegas’s spiritual successor. But all it does it make me want to play that game instead of this one.Which is probably what you should do regardless if you pick this game up or not.

There’s a bunch of other mechanics and stuff I never brought up. There’s technically a character customization screen, but you literally only see your character in the select menu, and there’s no third person. There’s a barber in Edgewater who’s also a doctor, and yet you can’t even get a haircut from him (again, failing to match up to even Fallout 3). 

There’s these Mods you can put on armor and guns, and you find them by the bucket full so you’ll always have those. Just get an aim stabilizing one for an LMG and you’ll be fine. You can also tinker your armor and weapons, making them stronger if you spend credits on it (why not the armor and weapon parts, I’ll never fucking know). You can repair your stuff at a workbench, which is advisable. Just take all the weapons and armor you pick up, take it apart for parts, and never worry about it again. You’ll get money from quests, so buying those parts is meaningless and a waste of money

There’s also hacking and stealth and stuff. Stealth is such a non...thing in the game. There’s no silencers, but since all enemies decided to put cotton into their ears, there’ll be plenty of times I shoot someone, and a guy ten feet away heard fucking nothing. Plus there’s this disguise mechanic where you pick up ID guards and get a hologram disguise that wears out as you walk (passing speech check from suspicious guards restores it), so it’s not like sneaking around was ever a priority. Just put your points into the speech. Stealth is a dump stat more or less. 

Oh yeah, Parvati’s an ace lesbian. Which is nice that they handled that way in a non-dipshit way (you can also identify as ace in certain dialogue with her in her companion questline, which is funny considering they never let you fuck anyways, so it’s weird that you even have the choice). My only complaint is that they should’ve put this representation in a better game. 

What’s funny is that, despite everything, I don’t even hate this game. I feel a remarkable numbness, followed by a desire for something better. I spent about a week burning through it? If I had more free time, I could’ve finished it sooner probably. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It was pretty fun for what it was, but knowing that this is somehow supposed to match up to what F:NV was is sad, and a sign of how bad the gaming industry had fallen. 

The only difference here is that unlike the Outer Worlds, I can’t purge the rot of the gaming industry with a haelstrom of plasma bullets.

Would I recommend this game? I guess. There’s still some fun to be had, but don’t expect anything too major or interesting. Get it on sale, it;s not worth $60 right now. There’s apparently DLC coming out for it eventually? I might play it, and I might post an update to this review, or make a seperate post for that eventually. Depends on how well this one does? Or if the DLC makes me feel enough emotion to type something out like this in 2 straight hours.

[baconpal]

pokemon isn’t for us anymore

ya that’s right it’s time for a daytime juvenile rant cus i’m angry and finally think i can put my thoughts to words, 

if you like the new pokemon then this isn’t really for you, cus pokemon is still for you. enjoy it while you can. otherwise click that read more

i’ll start by making my opinion and background immediately clear, so you have something to compare to and such. I loved Pokemon as a child, and for a long while afterward. I think the series’ highest moment was black and white in terms of art and story, and the gameplay was at its best in black and white 2. Gen 5 is also the gen where I have the most competitive experience. 

And my opinion is that every single thing that’s been shown of pokemon sword and shield is really, really bad. Not even as a hyperbolic statement of “wow i hate new thing!” but as a fan who wants nothing but for the series to realize its potential, not one thing they’ve done has made feel anything besides disgust and disappointment. But this is not a normal thing, this isn’t what everyone thinks, i’m not preaching to the choir by saying i hate sword and shield. I’m the contrarian, i’m the one whose saying shit nobody agrees with, and I’m the voice who will be ignored. And that’s because pokemon is no longer being made with someone like me in mind. 

The question then becomes, what is pokemon now? What did it used to be? What should it be?

POKEMON AS A BRAND

Pokemon today is not a game series. It’s a brand, a franchise, something that has weight simply by existing. Of course pokemon has been more than just games for forever, the shows, the toys, the side games, everything about it is marketable and marketed. But the main line games were separate from that to an extent. They were the new bits of source material thrown out into the world without concern for how it would all fit together. A video game was made first, and was then marketed to whoever would buy in whatever form hey wanted.

Today pokemon games themselves are a tailored product. People of today don’t care about the actual video game, many wont play it, and many won’t even realize when it comes out, but gamefreak doesn’t need the game itself to sell (though it will), they just want everyone on earth to know about pokemon and to be excited about it, it’s advertising for their brand. As long as people know pokemon exists and is out there, it will make money. 

So instead of holding their cards and releasing a video game to let people mess around in, the entire game is drip fed to us on social media before it’s even out. The days of korokoro leaks and blurry photos of pokemon are over, the discussion of what they might be or do is over, and a joy in the exploration of the unknown is gone. Instead, a trailer will be split up in to a chain of individual tweets, all tailored to be as easily digestible as possible. Videos or photos that require seconds of attention, and descriptions of characters and pokemon that make it easy to form a shallow attachment, enough to repost it and say “oh that’s so me” or “love this kind of character”, and that’s free advertisement. the kinds of people who live on social medias will translate genuine advertisements into a form of speak their friends will appreciate and thus engage with the advertisements further. The job is done and pokemon is making more money than ever. 

POKEMONS ART DIRECTION

Again, something many disagree with, the art is fucking awful in the new games. But that’s because its not art meant to impress me, an artist with his own design sense and standard of quality, the art only needs to be serviceable, enough for someone who can’t draw to appreciate. The standard of what will be accepted is never actually very high, but pokemon no longer makes any effort to exceed passable. Fanartists will be essentially forced to draw better versions of all their characters since pokemon is once again the hot new thing, so the actual quality of the original art will not be reflected in peoples perception. The model quality as also awful, every design manages to look even worse in motion and in game. But since the goal is not to make an enjoyable game, this is again not a problem. 

POKEMONS SETTING

This extends to the clothing the characters wear as well, but pokemon no longer is its own universe. It is doing all it can to act as if it takes place in the real world, and making the clothing its characters wear bastardized versions of modern aesthetics, instead of the unique and simple sudo-sporty aesthetic the other games had, where clothing was cohesive and sleek, looked fit for various kinds of weather, and seemed generally comfortable. The new gym leaders for example, wear horribly messing and unneeded sportswear based mostly on real life soccer clothing, but without any of the benefits, as they are also loaded with unneeded accessories that go in direct contrast to what they’re supposedly doing. Nessa is the worst offender to me (and what do you know she’s the most popular), compared to misty’s attempt at being part time swimmer part time trainer, nessa looks absolutely ridiculous, and not prepared to do either swimming or pokemon battles. She wears a swimsuit, but not an actual swimmer’s suit, and she’s covered in jewelry, accessories, makeup; things that would ruin any attempt to go swimming even casually. And yet she doesn’t look like she could comfortably go on an adventure or catch and raise pokemon. She is a bland aesthetic mess of what people want a cute swimmer girl to be.

Custom trainers are a whole different problem in that no game with custom characters actually has good ones. The best result you can have is funny looking characters, which is actually a pretty good goal, but gamefreak still wants everything to be samey and appeal to broad aesthetics so people can post their own characters and share some feeling of attachment. 

POKEMON THE VIDEO GAME

the quality of sword and shield from a technical standpoint is clearly very low, and this is one of the few things people have been willing to call out. The model quality hasn’t improved, the animations are sparse and bad. The wild areas are a mess and run terribly, the game crashed trying to handle multiplayer bosses live on stream. The national dex has been removed for literally no reason. The gyms have been completely gutted and reduced to just the fights (which are still nothing but bland checks for type advantage) and the new gimmick is just “make your guy strong” and is obviously best used in response to the opponent using it. the pokemon wonder around the open area and yet wild grass is still there, there’s no option to approach pokemon peacefully and capture like in let’s go, so even the few out there things they’ve tried aren’t going to be used in any meaningful way. But repeat after me, the game doesn’t matter! As far as gamefreak is concerned, the game could crash 40 minutes in and they would have done all they needed to do.

THE GOAL IN POKEMON

so i’ll end this stupid rant with something the new pokemon games don’t have, even the ones I really like don’t have em. Multiple goals to achieve, multiple ways to approach the game. Even the originals didn’t truly have multiple ways to play, but they started you off by presenting you multiple goals, which were tangled together to start but by the end of the game would become 2 very seperate things, becoming champion and completing the pokedex. Johto did it best, to complete one goal, you had to make a pretty good chunk of progress on the other, it was impossible to not “beat the game” if you actually wanted to accomplish either goal, but after that you were free to tie up whatever goals you had left. It was primitive and mostly meaningless, but it was there. The shows and the manga also put a lot of emphasis on the fact that every trainer can do something different, and their own ultimate goal is completely different from everyone else. 

The closest the games come now to this idea is having your rivals go off and do something else other than fight the elite 4. Some of them aren’t even actual rivals and just like pokemon, like lyra from HG/SS. But there is no pokemon game in which you, the player, are presented a goal other than to beat the game, winning the elite 4 and defeating some evil plot along the way.

For me, an ideal pokemon game would be about giving complete freedom, start off with some explanations of what all the possible goals are, completing the dex, becoming champion, winning all the contests, defeating the evil organization, exploring the world, anything. And once the player gets an idea of what they want to do, they’re set free into a world where they can find pokemon and do whatever they want, working towards whatever goal they want. Other aspects will naturally come into play, battling pokemon and making them stronger would help you catch more pokemon, learn moves for contests, explore more dangerous areas, beat stronger trainers. So no matter what goal you have, you’d still interact with many of the systems and areas in the game, and make progress on all goals at the same time, but ultimately feel satisfied when you accomplish your own, personal goals, instead of following the straight line gamefreak set for you.

Obviously that sort of thing will never happen. That’s just what I think pokemon has the potential to become, but pokemon isn’t made for me, anymore.

Thank you for reading.

[gusogames-blog]

Red Dead Redmeption 2: Big, But Why?

Red Dead Redemption 2 marks one of the most detailed and massive open world games to date. It’s also incredibly divisive. Its deliberate pace, dated controls, and dense menus hold many players back from truly enjoying the game. I would posit that the game suffers from a disparity between its form versus its function. Generally speaking in storytelling, the saying goes, “Form form follows function.” That’s to say whatever the purpose of your story is should be supported by the form your story takes. I first learned this from a film instructor in college. The concept boils down to figuring out what best fits your story and what will best magnify it. I learned it about film, but it works for any storytelling media.

When playing Red Dead Redemption 2 or RDR2 for brevity, I often found myself feeling like what I was doing wasn’t fun. Nothing about the situations spelled out that they wouldn’t or couldn’t be fun. Yet, here I was halfway bored a lot of time. The Function of RDR2 is to tell the story of Arthur Morgan, illuminate the pitfalls of being a career criminal, and the cycle of bandit-tude and critiquing the idea of an honorable thief, among other things. I think largely it was successful in terms of its story. However the form that the story took held it back from affecting its audience as much as it could. Being an open world, the game had to allow for huge breaks in the story, traveling through the world and finding a way to continue the story outside of the main missions. RDR 2 isn’t particularly good at any of those things. The story of the game doesn’t really benefit from being an open world game.

I will qualify that with the fact that Arthur’s character is explored in the open world pretty well. You see how he interacts with strangers, animals, etc. The world itself feels alive and massive. Yet somehow stilted by your lack of choices. Arthur always says what he does, save for a few choices. Your options in combat are limited. You follow the objectives of the missions to a tee. The game feels very funneled most of the time. It forces you into things which is a detriment to its story. For a game about the west’s dying freedom it actually makes quite a bit of sense.

Yet the issue with the story is that The Dutch Vanderlinde gang isn’t always in the shit. They start out in a rough spot, but you never get a feeling that they’re being closed in on. There’s a constant sense of the gang always seconds away from being caught almost all the time. Every big crime the game commits to starts out okay then goes wrong. That can describe almost every mission. The game has a big problem with letting the player have agency. Stealth missions always turn into shootouts. Arthur is always forced to fight. And that’s part of the strange part of this game. Inside Arthur’s journal you see a man who is deeply conflicted about his actions. An element of his character that doesn’t come to a head nearly as fast as you may expect.

He puts up with so much of Dutch basically shit talking him because the story demands it. And another issue with the game is the fact that the gang always needs money for this and that yet if you explore the game a bit and find some treasure, you’re carrying around thousands of dollars at any given time. It’s completely ignored. And that’s essentially what all the problems in this game boil down to. The game ignores the world and sometimes even the player.

The issue with this in terms of form vs function is that there are hidden functions of the story which are unclear to the player. A lot of people will say that a big aspect of the game and the story is that the world doesn’t care about you. The world doesn’t care about your morals or motives or desire to have snappy controls. It’s about what the world is. It’s a slow cruel world. The player is constantly belabored by the desired of the creators to have the world be “authentic” and deliberate. The story of the game suffers so much because of this. All of the characters of the game are fascinating and well-written. The world is exceptionally detailed. The story is impactful and intriguing, not to mention a great companion piece to the original Red Dead Redemption. Yet something along the way was lost in translation.

Compared to other open world games of recent times, RDR2 feels like a game made as an open world out of obligation, not to serve the story. Whereas games like the Witcher 3 take the world and make it packed to the gills with impactful and thoughtful content that informs Geralt’s character and story, Red Dead Redemption 2 fills its vast world with fairly samey tasks to complete for minor aesthetic changes or stat buffs and a few missions where Arthur helps someone. (Which are pretty interesting honestly.) Whereas a game like Metal Gear Solid V dialed in its controls and options in combat to really make you feel like Snake and pushed the series to a new territory (minus the missing third act train wreck), RDR2 decides instead to give the player few options and force them into gunfights and chases over and over because that’s a commentary on the cyclic nature of violence and crime. Maybe?

I think that the story of this game would have been more effective as a short-form, tight game with small open areas. The whole story felt like it was dragging because it constantly made us see how big the world was. You ride from on end of the map to the other and back a lot. And those horse rides, house only a small amount of interesting dialogue or gameplay. In general the game loves to make you do things the long way. It’s strange that this game is so clearly inspired by films and filmmaking, yet it lacks a clear understanding of editing and in particular cutting. So much of this game takes away from the story because it's too long or unimportant, yet still present. The job of an editor is to find the story and try to form everything around it, and RDR2 often loses the story because it just has too much fat left untrimmed.

There’s a certain magic in this game that comes through the cracks every once in a while. The epilogue of the game feels better than the main game because it isn’t afraid to condense time for example. However, these moments are surrounded by a sense of duty to a function of story that weighs down the whole game as a result. Yet despite all this, in technical achievement, and in story overall, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good game. I just wish it was better.

[thetravellingvagrant]

Day 8- Lviv: In Which I Am The Man In The High Castle

I spent the vast majority of my morning catching up on blog business, various pieces of travel admin and sleeping for longer than I should have done; consequentially (and shamefully), it was veering close to one in the afternoon by the time I removed myself from bed.

I walked, bleary eyed to the bathroom. The toilet was still running from the last time I had pressed the flusher. It was, I had learned through experimentation, possible to fix this problem, though each time I did, it would relapse at the next push of the plunger and require ever so slightly more drastic action for its next repair. Not willing to eventually have to dismantle the entire cistern, I had begun to just let it run in between uses; a barely acceptable, though mildly infuriating solution at best.

Barely acceptable, though mildly infuriating is actually not a bad way to describe this apartment in general. It hadn't taken long for the shiny white veneer of the place to crack apart, revealing the poo-brown mankiness that lay underneath (Not literally, though give me time...). The constantly howling toilet and genuinely stomach-turning décor of the place were among the steadily more and more irksome irritations which had begun to surface at this point and in no area was this more apparent than in the kitchen.

The kitchen had been stocked in a genuinely mind-boggling manner, boasting far, far too many of certain items- something like 20 plates, 15 shot glasses, a single pastry brush, because even one of those is too many in an AirBNB kitchen- and far, far too little of others. Zero bowls being the most egregious offender, though an utter lack of any kind of bread or butter knife also ranked fairly high on that list. Two types of spoon were available; teaspoons and giant-ass serving ones. Nothing in-between that you might, say, want to eat cereal with. Also whenever you turned the hob on, touching any of its corners would immediately result in a mild electric shock, which. You know,. Not great.

And so I found myself on my first morning in this apartment, in a bad mood, pouring cereal into a mug. I cracked open the milk I had bought the previous night, gave it a customary whiff to check its freshness and immediately wretched.

“Thaaaat is not milk” I spluttered to myself.

I took the time that I should have taken in the supermarket to translate the Cyrillic on the carton.

“Yuh...ooooh...guh...urt...” For fucks sake.

I tipped the contents of my mug back into the packet from whence it came and decided to have a sandwich instead.

Five minutes later, I was rewarded for my effort with a piece of mangled bread, torn up initially in the cutting and later in the butter spreading process- given that, as I mentioned, I was sans bread and butter knives respectively- topped hastily with clumps of butter, a couple of slices of plasticy Emmental cheese and a few bits of some thinly sliced, cured sausage. It wasn't the prettiest sandwich ever made, but begrudgingly I will admit that I still enjoyed it. Somehow. Nyerr.

And so I left my apartment, full of starch and rage, close to two in the afternoon, with only a few hours before darkness and the freezing cold of eastern winter set in. Unlike Brest, Lviv boasted a great number of worthwhile attractions and museums and whatnot, so I had had rich pickings for the day's plans. A great number of the things I really wanted to do were positioned in the area immediately adjacent to the city's Russian consulate, though, and so I decided to perhaps postpone them for a day or so, pending a check up on that whole pesky martial law thing. Instead I had opted to have a little walking tour of the city, taking me past some of the cooler statues (and this city has some very cool statues...), around High Castle park- which, as the name suggests, is a park, on the top of a hill with...a castle. I think, at least, I didn't see a castle, but I bet there is one- and finally to the arsenal museum, positioned right next to my flat, to gawp at all old weaponry and that for a bit.

I decided to head to the park, first and foremost, as time was getting on and I didn't fancy climbing a big hill in the dark. It was located around half an hour's walk outside the core of the city, so I had hoped the walk would give me an opportunity to take the city in, properly, this time after straight up forgetting nearly everything I had seen and done, the previous day.

I wasn't disappointed; Lviv is a nice city, seemingly walking a line in its aesthetics between its eastern neighbours and something altogether more...Scandinavian. The best of both worlds, really. Particularly, if like me, you enjoy wide open, freezing cold, borderline dystopian spaces. Mmmm.

Anyway, I progressed through its relatively lovely streets, freezing away- it is still routinely around -5/6 every day- and soon found myself at at the base of the High Castle.

The park was as pleasant as the city, itself and, save for a weird greenish, mustardy colour that the well trodden snow had somehow taken on, was an altogether lovely experience. I clambered my way to the highest peak, which was, I dunno, pretty high, I guess?

...I guess?

snapped a few pictures, as I am wont to do, before, after around twenty minutes, finding myself becoming just a little too cold to justify hanging around any further and unclambering my way back down. Despite the feeling in my fingers fading alarmingly quickly, I decided to continue around the rest of the park, having seen a sign pointing to a thing called a “grot” and having very little idea what that could have been but knowing that I absolutely needed to find out.

TELL ME YOUR SECRETS.

The rest of the park was equally lovely, save for the grot- which was actually a bit rubbish in the end-

Genuinely thought a troll would live here. Beyond disappointed.

though did, by the time I found myself leaving, strike me as being all a bit samey thanks in no small part, I imagine, to the snow covering everything, like the big white bastard blanket that it is.

After another half hour walk back to the city, time was marching on and I knew I needed to move quickly, if I was to make it to the arsenal museum with enough time to ooh and ahh at its pointy wares. My stomach, however, was growling with hunger and my core temperature dropping to genuinely uncomfortable levels and so I took a calculated risk to drop into a cafe quickly to refuel and warm up.

By the time I had made it to the museum, there remained only around half an hour before it was due to close. Perhaps just enough time for a whirlwind tour of the place (which, realistically was all I had really anticipated in the first place). Even this blitzkrieg visit was not to be, however, as I watched in (admittedly minor) dismay as the couple entering the museum ahead of me, were immediately turned away, presumably as they wouldn't have enough time to make it around the entire exhibit before the staff effed off home. I breathed a sigh of relief, grateful that the minorly awkward bit of social interaction had fallen on these other people rather than me and vowed to come back tomorrow, instead. All that was left to do, then, was pick up some food for the night and go home. My next stop was to be the supermarket.

I went to a different supermarket than I had the previous night; a necessity, given that I couldn't find the last one I had gone to and had since entirely forgotten its name. This new supermaket was the fucking worst. Tiny enclosed aisles, bustling with genuinely quite rude people who had seemingly very little in the way of awareness of the space their body occupied or how the way in which they used that space may come off as slightly antisocial; this coupled with the shop's bizarre, almost one way circular circuit of a layout and mind-boggling insistence to not stack like products together, saw me spending the better part of half an hour, walking round and round, being knocked into, tutted at and side-eyed in the pursuit of three paltry items, by, to put it as kindly as I can, wankers; a phenomenon not entirely localised to Lviv's supermarkets, by the way- there appears to be a general culture of being just honestly a bit rude and refusing to get out of other people's ways, here.

Audibly grumbling to myself, like a nutter might, I returned home to warm up and continue my desperate efforts to chip away at the mountain of vagrant admin.

My dinner for the evening was to be a hearty bowl of tuna-pasta. I boiled my fuisilli, diligently for as long as I could be bothered waiting and set about mixing two new additions to the vagrant larder- tuna and mayo- into some kind of grim, almost edible paste. I cracked the top off of the little pouch of mayonnaise I had just bought and, for some weird reason, thought it prudent to give it a taste before I let it touch my precious tuna. Be it due to some kind of weird psychic vagrant-sense, or because the packet, on closer inspection looked like it might not actually be mayonnaise in the strictest sense, I slurped a glob of it into my mouth. For the second time today, I wretched. I wretched hard. I wretched so hard that I was nearly immediately sick as my very nice and also total bastard of a girlfriend with whom I was skyping at the time, laughed herself feral at my obvious discomfort. My mouth was filled with a weird, putrid sweetness that immediately hit the back of the throat. It was like drinking a death milkshake.

[REDACTED]

“...are you sure its in date?” she queried, except more Geordie than that.

Again, I was fairly sure that it wa-ah, no. There it is. Mystery solved. It was more than one month past its sell-by date. I had just eaten a mouthful of rotten mayonnaise, with an audience. Perfect. What a perfect day this was. I put the mayonnaise in the bin, right next to that fucking yoghurt and the Arsenal museum. Fuck this.

Thinking on my feet, I ended up mixing the remnants of my sandwich fillings into the pasta, creating a sort of cheesy, meaty brick of carbohydrates, which I grimly and dilligently munched my way through, on the verge of tears before, almost immediately afterwards heading to bed, with an ominous churning beginning in my guts...

[retspecgame]

Retropective: Monster Hunter

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Or in heat. May the Lord have mercy upon thy soul

So, you played all those newfangled Souls games but you crave for something a bit more... different? You’ll probably feel confident enough to take on this odd yet incredibly popular Japanese game which sadly, suffered the same fate in terms of how well-known it is in the West. It has all the bells and whistles that makes the combat just as nuanced and perplexed as a Souls game would. But then, when you just try to get that woolly mammoth thing’s delicious meat and all to barbaque on a spit you brought along in a snowy place, you’ll suddenly get greeted by a huge dragon-like creature that would crawl really quick right to you after dropping straight down. A roar that could send an avalanche rolling down, snapping its jaws, sharp teeth and all. You’re just armed with a toothpick. And wear paper for armor. It’s 5 feet right in front of you. 

Welcome to Monster Hunter.

The recent developments of the game, having an open beta of Monster Hunter: World this week (which unfortunately, only PS4, PS+ users are allowed to take part in) for a stress-test of their servers, had me hyped since the game was first unveiled in E3 this year. It is a fantastic, long-awaited take for the game itself. Finally there are changes that makes sense in the game that long-time players would be more relieved than be disgusted by, honestly. At least in my opinion. But I do find it a bit awkward that these kinds of changes that I would had fantasized of when I was just a new player back in ‘08. It’s uncanny!

Monster Hunter is a game that first came out in 2003 when Capcom was not crap trying to make full use of the PS2′s internet connectivity option for online multiplayer. So they came out with 3 games: a racing game, a Resident Evil/Biohazard: Outbreak and... this. Of the lot, Monster Hunter actually managed to came out top, even against friggin’ RE which is not exactly a bad game though with somewhat questionable implementation. The thing is, the team that wanted to make this game put a lot of effort into it. It wasn’t generic or half-assed like the other two, it actually had a more unique gameplay mechanic in comparison. The music produced for the game is gorgeous, the worldbuilding around the game surprisingly meaty even if most of it isn’t really fleshed out in-game, they have adorable cat-men made, and basically the whole pull for the game is that you constantly beat the hell out of the dragons and dinos you find and wear their skin as hats. Awesome. The game later managed to be honored with a remixed version endorsed by Capcom that added the G-rank, more monsters in the roster, more weapons, more maps, some new improvements, just about everything! And you get to pay for it full price after buying the first game. Typical Capcom business as usual.

But the series never truly shined until it comes to the handhelds. Sure, it had a console release soon after with Dos but the real reason why this game is developed because the game emphasizes multiplayer a lot more than you think, having the Gathering Hall readily available for online play. Unfortunately, consoles don’t really solve the age-old problem of Japanese salarymen lacking time and money to own and play consoles at home, their very target audience. So, let’s say getting the game to run on the PSP is not only technically impressive, but it does make a hell lot of sense. You could go for a quick curbstomp with some random strangers or friends travelling along the train ride to and fro, the rush hour is always a frantic but sometimes frustratingly dull daily routine. Or, get to your friends’ house to play MonHun together instead of theirs to play. Either way, a 4-man hunting party taking down a fiery dragon is always a magical experience, not quite like how you’d have seen before outside of a drab MMO. Strategy and skill (and a big stick) is what you need to kill a monster but teamwork makes the job all the more enriching than taking one down alone. Even the later Portable versions of the game pretty much made the game mandatory for multiplayer, even in singleplayer with the introduction of Felyne Comrades (later known as Palicos), adorable little cat-men decoys/light support hunters that you have them tag along in hunts. 

You just can’t say no when it says it wants to go with you!

Of course, all the big fancy fights and nice weapons and armours you’d get along progressing the game later would ultimately boils down to slow, hard, meticulous, gratuitously grindy work. A very Japanese thing sometimes. Besides, you’re not a Monster Hunter just because you happen to have a chest full of weapons and armour that popped out of nowhere right? You have to understand firstly that your character here took this as a career. Your character definitely signed up for this. Most of the time, your character will start off as the village Exterminator- I mean, Monster Hunter, where he/she accepts quests from the local village chief to do jobs and bounties posted by just about anybody in the game. A newlywed? Chef? A friggin’ Princess? The Chief? Yes, anybody! Sometimes you don’t even need to go through the details why, just take it for that sweet, sweet zenny reward. And maybe you’d be able to make that hat you always wanted along the way. Or if you’re down with the fluffy bits of the game, you could get to know who your clients are with the descriptions detailing the job you’ll be taking. Some desperate for reprisals, some makes sense, some petty, some irresponsible, some are dubious. Some even came from kids who just wanted you to gather some plants in the woods. Yes, you don’t always get to kill monsters in this game, filling out that hunter-gatherer criteria of your job. 

In that matter, gathering (and eventually hoarding) stuff in the game would be your bread and butter in the experience. To get plants and mushrooms totally for medical stuff is one of the earliest thing you have to do in the game. Preparations before taking on the big ones are key to surviving your fight, just as crafting, farming and cooking would. In this early phase of the game, the really slow burn, grindy part of the game would center around you familiarizing with the game before eventually getting to finish the main story in the game in less than 10 hours in-game when you come back a veteran. Hoarding enough of your stuff in the wild would eventually lead to you actually make cool stuff with it too! Mainly the fancy hats.

Capcom might have called this a hack-n’-slash but you never get to play this like you did with Dante in Devil May Cry (another Capcom release). When in that game, you’d be more aggressive and pulling your attacks, lightning-fast and never get tired from it, Monster Hunter is much less so about that. Even the fastest weapon you can play in the game stresses in a way that you must position yourself in a good spot before pulling off some fancy moves. Wrestling with how the game’s control scheme shits on the more simplistic, button-mashing style of gameplay in most hack-n’-slash games could be half the pleasure, especially if you happen to master them as well. But the game still relies on you methodically placing your attacks, learning attack patterns of your enemies, knowing when to run, set up traps, manage stamina and health, noticing telltale signs of it about to pull off moves or ready for capture. All the while not knowing when you’ll know when the monster would drop with the lack of a health bar. It does sound complicated on paper but in practice, well, even less so. All those things would happen in the heat of the moment and it’s up to you to manage them. No amount of preparation could save you of you can’t utilize them properly here. The weapon animations are, however, mostly uncancellable and sometimes you got to drop the hammer in the right place in the right time if you want to do some serious damage. That includes finding openings for the monsters and targeting their soft, squishy parts for that extra DAMAGE. The game would really punish you for doing haphazard attacks but sometimes it’s not really your fault as much as the game itself.

What do I do to deserve your hitboxes?

It may sound like a feeble excuse of not being good at the game fighting it but there is a reason why the Plesioth, the big fish monster thingy, is universally reviled as a monster to fight. Simply because hipchecks are incrdibly annoying when mixed with the large hitbox sizes in the earlier iterations. Capcom managed to fix this AND not having it back in later games, thankfully. So all is well.

Outside of combat, you’ll notice how explorable the maps can be when you step foot in the hunting grounds. Most of the time, they felt like natural locations, sometimes asymmetrical but never quite felt like it intended to direct the players to a certain location like some level designs would. More like, how much you could explore the whole place to sate your ever-growing curiousity. Hiddn paths, shortcuts and potentially exploitable  spaces you’d find along the way while looking for your prey. It’s also the little things about the whole environment that you’d notice. It’s incredibly diverse, never feeling samey or generic as most fantasy-themed game would when involving dinos and dragons to kill. Sometimes you’d enjoy the little details surrounding the map, like a giant shell of an elder dragon on top of a mountain or  how nature had reclaimed an age-old ruin in the middle of a jungle, large swathes of desert sands or lava that actually behaved differently depending on the time you are in there, day or night. Or simply something more aesthetically pleasing like a mountain you see right in front of the first area of the map or islands with waterfalls come crashing down from a height as far as the eyes can see. Those maybe just blocky polygons and textures at the time but they never fail to capture my sense of wonder and the fact it reminds me that I couldn’t explore at those parts of the game. If you want to know how immersive the game world can be, look no further.

Perhaps this is what their newest game wants to convey to us. The maps of the previous games are beautiful but barely interactable. You could only hop onto ledges, swim and gather at select sites at that point. But nothing further from that. The new game, Monster Hunter: World would explore more on this, allowing players to actually do something cool about it. Breakable obstacles, environmental destruction for opening new paths or traps, places you could actually hide in, animals you can find there to travel to new areas or inflict status effects, the amount of the detail they put in this is crazy, limited only to your imagination. All in one, massively seamless map. One might fear these could lead to a wasted effort since sometimes it’s not a big focus during fights, especially when you’re timed during your job to take down one big monster before it’s up. The emphasis on exploration could potentially be ignored in the favour of a more direct action-oriented play. Players more accustomed to focusing their efforts onto fighting monsters for more than 4 games may not even try something new for that but it remains to be seen. What appears to be a novelty may evolve into something bigger when you have all the time you need to explore on the map, opening up more possibilities to what you can do in the game-world later in the full-game.

[terryblount]

The Division 2 Private Beta Impressions

When Tom Clancy’s The Division was offered as a free game for PS Plus subscribers in Asia last month, I gave the game a shot. And many of the other live service looter-shooters that are now in vogue. I have mixed feelings about it. My hype for the sequel, The Division 2, fluctuates for weeks as I try to comprehend this series.

After playing the Private Beta for The Division 2, I can safely say that Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment are changing the right things to make the base experience just a bit smoother. And the new addition in content looks like a meaty one for fans and veterans of the previous game. But I still have a few minor, personal, quibbles on it.

Sense Of Place, But The Place Is Muddy

The Division’s setting of a recent virus oubreak in wintery New York was such a great, realised space. It’s a believable location that isn’t just all there to serve gameplay. It is filled with environmental storytelling cues. Yet the many spaces you visit served gameplay due to the many, many cover places you can duck down too.

Also, the ability to close doors on cars and see the tyre popping was a neat novelty.

Some time has passed in The Division 2 and now you are in Washington D.C. in summer. When I first see the setting in the E3 reveal, I was bummed. The series has a bland and at worst generic aesthetic thanks to its focus on being grounded- it’s a Tom Clancy game after all. The winter setting in the first game sets it apart but now, I fear it will all just be muddy and brown.

For the most part, this is unfortunately true. A lot of the environment just looks ugly. And no, I also mean it also looks unintentional ugly due to slow texture loading so everything can look all muddy for the wrong reasons.

However, Massive Entertainment managed to flesh out the open world map to feel just as a believable space as the previous game has. In a side mission location, a hotel was converted into an outpost for one of the enemy factions. They are an organised bunch it seems, as you see a board of patrol shifts with sticky notes plastered. In the safe spaces you visit, you can spot kids playing around the area. Old banners are repurposed and painted over for one vendor I saw.

And to sell you that some time has past, pristine cars with doors opened are a rarity. And the piles of garbage you can spot has grown vegetation. Even wild animals can be spotted roaming the area. There are no random civilians hanging out in the streets no more, ally forces will go out on patrol and will engage in enemies naturally, so the world feels more alive without contradicting too much with the core gameplay.

Quality Of Life And Accessibility

The Division 2 also addresses some minor but important issues that should make the looter shooter RPG feel better. The UI is noticeably snappier than ever, with less need to navigate through tabs. Equipping gear is also faster.

Plus, you can even customise individual elements of the UI- making as big or as small as you like, or disable some of them.

And props for making a very in-depth setup screen. Before you can start a new game, there’s a multitude of options to adjust outside of the regular brightness settings options. Subtitles and inverting Y-axis are available here too, which I find welcoming.

The Shooting, The Looting And The Numbers

If you’ve played The Division, The Division 2 feels right at home, for good and bad. The weapons are all resembling real weapons and they shoot as good as you expect. Except for the shotguns, they still lack the punch and heftiness you expect from a video game shotgun.

Combat are of the cover shooter variety. But it’s fun, thanks to smart AI enemies. They will attempt to outflank you for sitting in one place too long and will retreat should they be in danger.

I loved that they changed how health is displayed. Being an RPG where guns with bigger number do bigger damage, this means at worst the first Division is a bullet sponge fest, popping and shooting your very realistic looking gun just to see the health bar slowly drain.

Instead, you now start the game with armour with a small regenerating health bar. This slight change plus all of the enemy factions actually looked like geared for tough firefights, makes it a bit more believable that you need guns with bigger numbers to do damage. And you can soak more damage too.

Another improvement in the sequel is the change in how skills work. Rather than unlocking boring abilities, you instead unlock a platform- or a skill archetype. Say, you can have a drone used for healing, or use another variant that can shoot enemies.

It’s a fun way that allows for more free-form builds compared to the previous game. Though I feel like some platforms feel odd to use. The seeker mines, which in theory will move to a target you select and blow up, don’t work as much as I wanted it to be.

Also, looting is streamlined as well. You only get to see your character in animation kneeling down to open a box when it’s rare loot inside.

The Endgame

The Private Beta lets players play a couple of side missions, encounters dotted in the open world and two main missions. These plays out similar to the first game, nothing of note aside from the much more pronounced soundtrack. The soundtrack’s good!

After completing the two missions, you get access to the endgame. By the endgame, your character can have three different specialisations, each with a signature weapon exclusive to them and special grenades. The beta allows you to try all three and one endgame mission, which is essentially resuing one of the main mission but now with tougher enemies.

And they sure are tough. There are new enemy unit types to fight and can be overwhelming. Despite the reuse of a main mission location, it works. You follow the same path but the fights unfold differently where the extra kit you are not just handy, but essential to survive. I just hope that these endgame missions don’t become too samey from its original counterparts.

I did not get to try the Dark Zone, the series’ signature PVE/PVP content, though it seems some good changes are heading there too. And a post-launch update will add 8-person raids, which sounds very intriguing, and should excite players that are willing to sink their teeth into this game.

Final Thoughts

Overall, The Division 2 is poised to be a better one of these looter shooter RPGs. It brings the right amount of small changes to keep new players engaged, while adding big new content for the series veterans and those that want to spend more time in the endgame. The summer D.C. setting might not look the most aesthetically popping, but the world remains well-realised as you expect from the previous game.

Ubisoft has announced that there will be a public beta coming just before release. So if you need to try the game for yourselves, you can do that too.

The Division 2 will be out on March 15th for PS4, PC (Epic Games Store, Uplay) and Xbox One.

The Division 2 Private Beta Impressions published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/