Iro
2023
Game's old news by now, but @yotsuben got it for me for Christmas (thanks to a price fuckup on Humble Bundle's part where it briefly cost something like a third of its intended sale price), and I did enjoy the betas, and there's a 2xEXP weekend running currently, so I've killed a lot of dinosaurs over the past week and wrapped up the story content.
It really sucks that Exoprimal was forced to be some kind of battle-pass live service game when all it really wants to be is a Left 4 Dead style cooperative horde-murderin' game with a loose story through-line. It's especially frustrating because the story is actually pretty good. The game is under no bones about being what it is: in this world people put on power armor and dive through time to shoot dinosaurs in the head. The raid boss is called a Neo T-Rex. They're in on the joke, and it means they can lean into it and not take themselves too seriously, and get some actual pathos out of it. The "Best Screwdriver" series of logs is some primo MGS-style codec call bullshit (complimentary).
As you might expect from a game with time travel, there's some goofy stuff involving time loops and such. It's pretty clear early on that Goddess Bikitoa was an exofighter sent further back than normal, but finding the log they left behind and the story details within was a solid "oh shit!" moment. I think the clear standout story stuff is with Alders, both his relationship with Sandy and his character arc after the confrontation with Durban. The scene where Maj can't come up with anything else to comfort him other than "you know what, fuck that asshole" feels more genuine to me than any number of inspirational speeches.
It's just that to get any to any of this good stuff, you have to hop into the multiplayer queue, and after each battle you get one or two lore logs with some audio of the characters talking about the situation. Collect enough about a specific subject and there's a longer codec call where all of those logs are compiled into some more concrete info. Certain battle thresholds have more produced story cutscenes and milestones accompanied by a special bespoke mission, often some kind of raid boss where all 10 players have to work together.
Any time I got the "special" missions (by far the most enjoyable experiences in the game), there was maybe one or two other humans playing and the rest were bots. I don't know how you're supposed to replay these unless the matchmaking decides to plop you in with a new player progressing through the story for the first time. You're definitely supposed to be able to because there are profile medals for, say, beating the final boss 5 and 10 times. Are they just... random in the queue? Who thought that was a good idea?
To see the entire plot, you have to play about 60-ish Dino Survival rounds, which are about 15-20 minutes apiece. Steam says I've played 26 hours, but a lot of that is waiting for matchmaking or fiddling with builds or leaving the game running while I made dinner or whatnot, I'd wager the actual gameplay time is closer to 20. Which, honestly, pretty reasonable... if, again, this wasn't a stupid live game.
Almost all your gameplay options are gated behind your level and your "Bikcoin" currency, which you get by... leveling up (to Capcom's credit, you cannot buy more Bikcoin). This includes the equippable chips that actually can alter your playstyle pretty drastically and the Alpha variants of every playable exo-suit, which each have different primary weapons and playstyles from their normal counterparts. You can't unlock an Alpha variant until you hit level 20 with a specific suit, and then it costs 15,000 Bikcoin just to unlock the Alpha. You might have spent 5000 just to unlock the regular Murasame suit. Then if you want the good chips, you're spending thousands more to unlock and upgrade those, only if you're a high enough player level.
It's not a problem for me now, because I'm 10 hours deep into the 2xEXP weekend and have like 70,000 Bikicoin laying around waiting to be spent on upgrades, but it's just tedious and frustrating in principle. I feel like I shouldn't play Roadblock Alpha, my favorite class, because that way I'm not earning up points to unlock the other stuff. Sucks! Please don't make progression this way especially in a competitive multiplayer environment where I am actively hindering my team by playing classes I'm bad at!!
And that's kind of the rub in general, right? I'm discouraged from getting invested in the story, from experimenting and enjoying the actually pretty cool and varied slate of classes because Exoprimal is a fucking competitive 5v5 live game and I feel like I'm under constant scrutiny to play well and not screw over my team. Yes Leviathan, I know that I'm completing objectives slower than the enemy team, how about you fuck right off? I hate what this does to me, because yes I do want to win, and more importantly I want to facilitate the other people on my team winning, and it means I become an asshole about playing properly and that the people on my team become assholes about playing properly, and this is why I no longer play Overwatch or Apex Legends or any "third place" game anymore.
At least when I get bodied in Street Fighter 6 I'm the only one who looks like an idiot.
It really sucks that Exoprimal was forced to be some kind of battle-pass live service game when all it really wants to be is a Left 4 Dead style cooperative horde-murderin' game with a loose story through-line. It's especially frustrating because the story is actually pretty good. The game is under no bones about being what it is: in this world people put on power armor and dive through time to shoot dinosaurs in the head. The raid boss is called a Neo T-Rex. They're in on the joke, and it means they can lean into it and not take themselves too seriously, and get some actual pathos out of it. The "Best Screwdriver" series of logs is some primo MGS-style codec call bullshit (complimentary).
As you might expect from a game with time travel, there's some goofy stuff involving time loops and such. It's pretty clear early on that Goddess Bikitoa was an exofighter sent further back than normal, but finding the log they left behind and the story details within was a solid "oh shit!" moment. I think the clear standout story stuff is with Alders, both his relationship with Sandy and his character arc after the confrontation with Durban. The scene where Maj can't come up with anything else to comfort him other than "you know what, fuck that asshole" feels more genuine to me than any number of inspirational speeches.
It's just that to get any to any of this good stuff, you have to hop into the multiplayer queue, and after each battle you get one or two lore logs with some audio of the characters talking about the situation. Collect enough about a specific subject and there's a longer codec call where all of those logs are compiled into some more concrete info. Certain battle thresholds have more produced story cutscenes and milestones accompanied by a special bespoke mission, often some kind of raid boss where all 10 players have to work together.
Any time I got the "special" missions (by far the most enjoyable experiences in the game), there was maybe one or two other humans playing and the rest were bots. I don't know how you're supposed to replay these unless the matchmaking decides to plop you in with a new player progressing through the story for the first time. You're definitely supposed to be able to because there are profile medals for, say, beating the final boss 5 and 10 times. Are they just... random in the queue? Who thought that was a good idea?
To see the entire plot, you have to play about 60-ish Dino Survival rounds, which are about 15-20 minutes apiece. Steam says I've played 26 hours, but a lot of that is waiting for matchmaking or fiddling with builds or leaving the game running while I made dinner or whatnot, I'd wager the actual gameplay time is closer to 20. Which, honestly, pretty reasonable... if, again, this wasn't a stupid live game.
Almost all your gameplay options are gated behind your level and your "Bikcoin" currency, which you get by... leveling up (to Capcom's credit, you cannot buy more Bikcoin). This includes the equippable chips that actually can alter your playstyle pretty drastically and the Alpha variants of every playable exo-suit, which each have different primary weapons and playstyles from their normal counterparts. You can't unlock an Alpha variant until you hit level 20 with a specific suit, and then it costs 15,000 Bikcoin just to unlock the Alpha. You might have spent 5000 just to unlock the regular Murasame suit. Then if you want the good chips, you're spending thousands more to unlock and upgrade those, only if you're a high enough player level.
It's not a problem for me now, because I'm 10 hours deep into the 2xEXP weekend and have like 70,000 Bikicoin laying around waiting to be spent on upgrades, but it's just tedious and frustrating in principle. I feel like I shouldn't play Roadblock Alpha, my favorite class, because that way I'm not earning up points to unlock the other stuff. Sucks! Please don't make progression this way especially in a competitive multiplayer environment where I am actively hindering my team by playing classes I'm bad at!!
And that's kind of the rub in general, right? I'm discouraged from getting invested in the story, from experimenting and enjoying the actually pretty cool and varied slate of classes because Exoprimal is a fucking competitive 5v5 live game and I feel like I'm under constant scrutiny to play well and not screw over my team. Yes Leviathan, I know that I'm completing objectives slower than the enemy team, how about you fuck right off? I hate what this does to me, because yes I do want to win, and more importantly I want to facilitate the other people on my team winning, and it means I become an asshole about playing properly and that the people on my team become assholes about playing properly, and this is why I no longer play Overwatch or Apex Legends or any "third place" game anymore.
At least when I get bodied in Street Fighter 6 I'm the only one who looks like an idiot.
Final Profit is a game made in RPG Maker in the broad lineage of Recettear and the like. You play as Queen Mab of the fey, who - when confronted by the encroaching economic power of the intensely corrupt Bureau of Business - decides that the only way to stop them is to go incognito, climb the corporate ladder, and beat them at their own game. (Because, you know, that always works when it comes to capitalism.)
As the newly christened Madama Biz, you start with a tiny shop in a backwater village; work your way up to an emporium in the big city; and eventually get yourself a holdings office on Fake Wall Street where you trade commodities, buy real estate, and speculate on stocks. All for the sake ofmaking profit stopping those vile business types.
Despite its engine, there's no direct combat in Final Profit (though there's certainly violence); your experience points are directly tied to your overall revenue. Thus, rather than by tough monsters or bosses, game progression is gated directly by your level in the early game and eventually by simply how much money you have to throw around regardless of your level. In fact, a late-game NPC will even let you trade out your EXP stores for a certain benefit that I won't spoil.
You do still want to level up, because it increases your HP and MP, of which you're going to need plenty. Various quests around the game world require you to cough up one or the other, and you often need to spend obscene amounts of mana just to stock up your warehouse or activate an upgrade. Queen Mab regenerates mana slowly over time, but you can also charge it up instantly by drinking alcohol (adding to your Alcoholism stat), easily purchasable in bulk from your nearby tavern.
So, like all clicker/idle games (and make no mistake, despite the overworld and sidequests, this is absolutely a clicker game), the game settles into a rhythm of switching between a few game flavors:
1) Managing your shop and accumulating money
2) Discovering new products that give you more efficient profit
3) Spending your money on incremental upgrades to your income stream
4) Repeat: Eventually you hit the next "tier" of total assets, where you must then effectively start from zero but with a new selection of much more profitable ventures.
Other than the inherent dopamine hit of "number go up", these kinds of games rely heavily on the curiosity value of seeing what kind of silly upgrade will appear next. Final Profit delivers on this by having a decent cast and story to keep you invested. It's nothing amazing, but the tone is whimsical and irreverent without edging into being twee about it (usually). It's willing to tell a bunch of dumb jokes, but when something relatively serious is happening, the storytelling treats those moments respectfully and doesn't undercut itself.
My favorite part of the game by far is the middle chapter where you're trying to build up your emporium. The game keeps new products, quests to improve your current products, quests to recruit new customers, and wacky side adventures coming at a solid pace, along with a looming debt goal to keep you on track. I had a good chuckle the first time I brought the Artist through the shortcut dimension or encountered a certain avian character.
(Aside: I do have to shout out the mini-chapter with an investigation that takes place entirely on a train moving from one city to the other, which is one of my weird pet favorite tropes ever since I played Paper Mario 2)
As for the main narrative, it's mostly about whether or not Madama Biz can actually participate in capitalism without succumbing to its worst impulses. Nearly every choice in the game boils down to either doing something that's morally good but negatively impacts your profit margin, or something that's morally negligent-to-actively-evil for the sake of bigger gains. This is mostly in favor of letting the game proffer its core fantasy of letting you be a good capitalist, and I'm a bit torn on how it all shakes out.
Like, okay, we all know that moral choice systems are often bullshit. Possibly the most infamous example that highlights my point is Bioshock, where you could either kill children for more magic currency or spare them for warm-and-fuzzies but a smaller reward... except you would get special care packages after certain spare thresholds demonstrably better than if you just killed all of them. Thus, it's a non-choice.
I tried to be Nice at every possible opportunity in Final Profit, and you know what? It did affect my profit margins. The game was very clear that, for example, I could either stock a product for 128g apiece or accept a favorable discount for 100g apiece that might negatively affect the supplier down the line. By the time you hit the next "tier", this difference might as well be negligible, but it's nothing to sneeze at in the moment. The problem is it eventually starts to feel like you're just making things take longer for the sake of not seeing a sad face in the dialogue window, and boy do things start to take a long time.
I'm a little too aware of my ADHD brain now to get as taken in by clicker/idle games as I once was. If you give me two dozen upgrades that will each take a good 15-20 minutes to save up for and will each improve my income by like 1-10%, then fuck it. I will open Cheat Engine or a save editor and crank up my money or product stock to avoid having to wait around spinning plates indefinitely. So sue me.
Getting back on track, there's some of that ol' ludonarrative dissonance or what have you going on. You're fundamentally participating in capital in order to defeat capital. While nationalization and sustainability and fair trade are always presented as the "good" options, the question of The Economy At Large starts to loom in the back. Money might as well appear from and disappear into a black hole; does the Bureau mint the coins and distribute the currency? Like, if you have the cash to pay for it, most product stock is infinite. You can purchase property, but from whom? Previous owners are listed, but they appear to lack the ability to refuse your offer (because they don't have the Property Vision spell, I guess), simply grumbling and paying their rent every tick.All salable products grow in sale price as you sell more of them, when it should be the opposite if you're flooding the market.
I get it. It's a video game. You gotta have progression somehow. I wouldn't think about it too hard if the game itself didn't gesture towards these things, though.
(aside: I thought about it a little more and regarding that last point, every product is actually consumable or addictive in some way that justifies it not oversaturating the market, so that's to the game's credit [but dang it sure makes your entire mission even more inherently unethical])
I hear there's actually quite a bit of story and ending mutability depending on your specific choices as well as NG+ content, but for now I think I'm satisfied with Final Profit. It's got fairly novel gameplay, some clever and funny writing, and plenty of optional completionist tasks if those are your kind of thing. It's a great example of the kinds of things possible with a tool like RPG Maker (you know, besides indie horror games).
As the newly christened Madama Biz, you start with a tiny shop in a backwater village; work your way up to an emporium in the big city; and eventually get yourself a holdings office on Fake Wall Street where you trade commodities, buy real estate, and speculate on stocks. All for the sake of
Despite its engine, there's no direct combat in Final Profit (though there's certainly violence); your experience points are directly tied to your overall revenue. Thus, rather than by tough monsters or bosses, game progression is gated directly by your level in the early game and eventually by simply how much money you have to throw around regardless of your level. In fact, a late-game NPC will even let you trade out your EXP stores for a certain benefit that I won't spoil.
You do still want to level up, because it increases your HP and MP, of which you're going to need plenty. Various quests around the game world require you to cough up one or the other, and you often need to spend obscene amounts of mana just to stock up your warehouse or activate an upgrade. Queen Mab regenerates mana slowly over time, but you can also charge it up instantly by drinking alcohol (adding to your Alcoholism stat), easily purchasable in bulk from your nearby tavern.
So, like all clicker/idle games (and make no mistake, despite the overworld and sidequests, this is absolutely a clicker game), the game settles into a rhythm of switching between a few game flavors:
1) Managing your shop and accumulating money
2) Discovering new products that give you more efficient profit
3) Spending your money on incremental upgrades to your income stream
4) Repeat: Eventually you hit the next "tier" of total assets, where you must then effectively start from zero but with a new selection of much more profitable ventures.
Other than the inherent dopamine hit of "number go up", these kinds of games rely heavily on the curiosity value of seeing what kind of silly upgrade will appear next. Final Profit delivers on this by having a decent cast and story to keep you invested. It's nothing amazing, but the tone is whimsical and irreverent without edging into being twee about it (usually). It's willing to tell a bunch of dumb jokes, but when something relatively serious is happening, the storytelling treats those moments respectfully and doesn't undercut itself.
My favorite part of the game by far is the middle chapter where you're trying to build up your emporium. The game keeps new products, quests to improve your current products, quests to recruit new customers, and wacky side adventures coming at a solid pace, along with a looming debt goal to keep you on track. I had a good chuckle the first time I brought the Artist through the shortcut dimension or encountered a certain avian character.
(Aside: I do have to shout out the mini-chapter with an investigation that takes place entirely on a train moving from one city to the other, which is one of my weird pet favorite tropes ever since I played Paper Mario 2)
As for the main narrative, it's mostly about whether or not Madama Biz can actually participate in capitalism without succumbing to its worst impulses. Nearly every choice in the game boils down to either doing something that's morally good but negatively impacts your profit margin, or something that's morally negligent-to-actively-evil for the sake of bigger gains. This is mostly in favor of letting the game proffer its core fantasy of letting you be a good capitalist, and I'm a bit torn on how it all shakes out.
Like, okay, we all know that moral choice systems are often bullshit. Possibly the most infamous example that highlights my point is Bioshock, where you could either kill children for more magic currency or spare them for warm-and-fuzzies but a smaller reward... except you would get special care packages after certain spare thresholds demonstrably better than if you just killed all of them. Thus, it's a non-choice.
I tried to be Nice at every possible opportunity in Final Profit, and you know what? It did affect my profit margins. The game was very clear that, for example, I could either stock a product for 128g apiece or accept a favorable discount for 100g apiece that might negatively affect the supplier down the line. By the time you hit the next "tier", this difference might as well be negligible, but it's nothing to sneeze at in the moment. The problem is it eventually starts to feel like you're just making things take longer for the sake of not seeing a sad face in the dialogue window, and boy do things start to take a long time.
I'm a little too aware of my ADHD brain now to get as taken in by clicker/idle games as I once was. If you give me two dozen upgrades that will each take a good 15-20 minutes to save up for and will each improve my income by like 1-10%, then fuck it. I will open Cheat Engine or a save editor and crank up my money or product stock to avoid having to wait around spinning plates indefinitely. So sue me.
Getting back on track, there's some of that ol' ludonarrative dissonance or what have you going on. You're fundamentally participating in capital in order to defeat capital. While nationalization and sustainability and fair trade are always presented as the "good" options, the question of The Economy At Large starts to loom in the back. Money might as well appear from and disappear into a black hole; does the Bureau mint the coins and distribute the currency? Like, if you have the cash to pay for it, most product stock is infinite. You can purchase property, but from whom? Previous owners are listed, but they appear to lack the ability to refuse your offer (because they don't have the Property Vision spell, I guess), simply grumbling and paying their rent every tick.
I get it. It's a video game. You gotta have progression somehow. I wouldn't think about it too hard if the game itself didn't gesture towards these things, though.
(aside: I thought about it a little more and regarding that last point, every product is actually consumable or addictive in some way that justifies it not oversaturating the market, so that's to the game's credit [but dang it sure makes your entire mission even more inherently unethical])
I hear there's actually quite a bit of story and ending mutability depending on your specific choices as well as NG+ content, but for now I think I'm satisfied with Final Profit. It's got fairly novel gameplay, some clever and funny writing, and plenty of optional completionist tasks if those are your kind of thing. It's a great example of the kinds of things possible with a tool like RPG Maker (you know, besides indie horror games).
2023
A western-made visual novel that actually does things with the medium! And does them well. A rarity, to be cherished.
(At this point I spent a very long time staring at the draft of this post, pondering how I could write this in a way that wasn't as mechanical and wooden as my usual output, in a way that does justice to the impressive writing within Amarantus. I did not succeed. Workmanlike it is.)
Amarantus takes place in a sort of low-fantasy world where you play as a young man named Arik Tereison. The game opens with the lord's soldiers raiding his house in the dead of night, capturing his parents while he only just escapes. Arik assembles a small team of friends and acquaintances with the intent to march to the capital and Do Something About This.
The core story doesn't really change based on your choices; it's Arik's relationships with his team that do. I'd kill to see this game's internal flowchart. There's a huge amount of mutability based on what you say, and it's complex enough that I genuinely have no clue how to reach certain branches. The choices do matter and do have consequences, and they can be so small that you don't notice until they compound into a situation that smashes the back of your skull with a hammer.
The game shoves you into the deep end, expecting you to figure out the pre-existing relationship dynamics and state of the world almost purely via context clues. Thankfully, the writing is strong enough to support this approach, and the game is short as to facilitate multiple playthroughs. It trickles just enough information that I experienced multiple "oh my god, I knew it!" and "holy shit, they were actually talking about this!" moments in equal measure through subsequent runs.
This approach allows the game to squeeze tons of value out of its limited cast, who each have an impressive sense of specificity and agency. I'm used to companions in games simply following my lead and doing what I say, but would Marius stop trying to score with Raeann just because I told him to? Of course he wouldn't, he's a fucking disaster of a human being. You can't hook up with characters just by being nice like in most games with romance options (lookin at you, Baldur's Gate 3). You have to actually act in a way they're interested in.
The writing in Amarantus - the dialogue, really - is genuinely impressive. There's a heavy emphasis on naturalistic timing, taking full advantage of the Power of Computers to display things at various speeds. You know that awkward, beat-too-long pause where the game has to load the next line, even if the next line is supposed to be immediate? None of that shit here. Characters will pause to sigh, visibly hesitate to answer, interrupt themselves and others; all without waiting for player input. Words will change depending on how characters are pronouncing them.
I cannot overstate how huge this is. The classic fetter of visual novels is limited expressions and how one deals with that restriction. For example, Ace Attorney uses bombastic, hammy animations to convey character, which works well because every character is some kind of larger-than-life caricature. Amarantus has subtler writing and these accordingly subtler animations elevate it from great to amazing.
And just, man, I gotta get back in there, test every possible combination of choices. Some of my favorite dialogue in that game so far is in a scene that - according to the achievement statistics at time of writing - 2.5% of players have seen. And I can't imagine that many people are playing something as niche as this in the first place.
Honestly between Amarantus, Exocolonist, Citizen Sleeper, Roadwarden, and South Scrimshaw: Part One, I'm eatin' well from the "high-quality narrative game of relatively modest scope" table. Keep 'em coming.
(At this point I spent a very long time staring at the draft of this post, pondering how I could write this in a way that wasn't as mechanical and wooden as my usual output, in a way that does justice to the impressive writing within Amarantus. I did not succeed. Workmanlike it is.)
Amarantus takes place in a sort of low-fantasy world where you play as a young man named Arik Tereison. The game opens with the lord's soldiers raiding his house in the dead of night, capturing his parents while he only just escapes. Arik assembles a small team of friends and acquaintances with the intent to march to the capital and Do Something About This.
The core story doesn't really change based on your choices; it's Arik's relationships with his team that do. I'd kill to see this game's internal flowchart. There's a huge amount of mutability based on what you say, and it's complex enough that I genuinely have no clue how to reach certain branches. The choices do matter and do have consequences, and they can be so small that you don't notice until they compound into a situation that smashes the back of your skull with a hammer.
The game shoves you into the deep end, expecting you to figure out the pre-existing relationship dynamics and state of the world almost purely via context clues. Thankfully, the writing is strong enough to support this approach, and the game is short as to facilitate multiple playthroughs. It trickles just enough information that I experienced multiple "oh my god, I knew it!" and "holy shit, they were actually talking about this!" moments in equal measure through subsequent runs.
This approach allows the game to squeeze tons of value out of its limited cast, who each have an impressive sense of specificity and agency. I'm used to companions in games simply following my lead and doing what I say, but would Marius stop trying to score with Raeann just because I told him to? Of course he wouldn't, he's a fucking disaster of a human being. You can't hook up with characters just by being nice like in most games with romance options (lookin at you, Baldur's Gate 3). You have to actually act in a way they're interested in.
The writing in Amarantus - the dialogue, really - is genuinely impressive. There's a heavy emphasis on naturalistic timing, taking full advantage of the Power of Computers to display things at various speeds. You know that awkward, beat-too-long pause where the game has to load the next line, even if the next line is supposed to be immediate? None of that shit here. Characters will pause to sigh, visibly hesitate to answer, interrupt themselves and others; all without waiting for player input. Words will change depending on how characters are pronouncing them.
I cannot overstate how huge this is. The classic fetter of visual novels is limited expressions and how one deals with that restriction. For example, Ace Attorney uses bombastic, hammy animations to convey character, which works well because every character is some kind of larger-than-life caricature. Amarantus has subtler writing and these accordingly subtler animations elevate it from great to amazing.
And just, man, I gotta get back in there, test every possible combination of choices. Some of my favorite dialogue in that game so far is in a scene that - according to the achievement statistics at time of writing - 2.5% of players have seen. And I can't imagine that many people are playing something as niche as this in the first place.
Honestly between Amarantus, Exocolonist, Citizen Sleeper, Roadwarden, and South Scrimshaw: Part One, I'm eatin' well from the "high-quality narrative game of relatively modest scope" table. Keep 'em coming.
2023
This review contains spoilers
I am not immune to propaganda. Show me a trailer for an indie JRPG featuring scripted encounters on the field maps, dual techs, and guest tracks by Yasunori Mitsuda, and I'll go "oh, a Chrono Trigger inspired indie JRPG, I sure hope they actually learned the right lessons from the classics" and drop $30 to see if they did.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)
I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.
I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.
You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.
Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.
Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.
The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.
Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.
I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.
Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".
Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!
It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.
Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.
Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.
No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.
Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.
Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!
Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!
You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.
Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?
The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.
Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.
Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.
Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.
This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.
Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.
The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.
If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.
An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.
In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.
It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.
In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.
But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!
How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.
I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.
But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.
Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.
They didn't.
(Full spoilers for both Sea of Stars and Chrono Trigger.)
I criticized Chained Echoes for being overly derivative of various golden age JRPGs, but to its credit: it feels purposeful in its imitation. It re-uses elements from older games wholecloth, smothering its individual identity under a quilt of influences, but I can appreciate the craftsmanship and intent behind it. It's clearly made from a place of love.
I don't get that vibe from Sea of Stars at all. I complained about some tediously self-aware dialogue in the early hours, and while it only dips down quite that low once or twice more, it colored the entire game with a feeling of self-aggrandizement. In fairness to what I wrote then (and based on a lengthy speech in the hidden Dev Room) it sounds like the devs truly did want to make a JRPG and pay homage to their childhoods. But to me, harsh as it may be, Sea of Stars feels like the devs thought making a JRPG was easy: just copy the greats (specifically, Chrono Trigger), and it'll work out. Based on sales and reviews, it is working out for them, but I'm the freak out here with highly specific ideas about why Chrono Trigger was good and Sea of Stars doesn't seem to agree with my assessment. This inherent friction lasted across the game's entire 30-35 hours.
You play as Zale and Valere, paired Chosen Ones whose innate Sun/Moon powers allow them to do battle against Dwellers, ancient beasts left behind when the villainous Fleshmancer set his sights on this plane of reality. He has since moved on to another world, but Dwellers left unchecked evolve into World Eaters, planar monstrosities that do exactly what it sounds like they do. The Solstice Warriors must hold a never-ending vigil in case previous generations missed a Dweller, battling them when their powers peak during an eclipse.
Joining them is Garl the Warrior Cook, the pair's childhood friend and the only character with anything resembling charisma; Seraï, a masked assassin of mysterious origin; Resh'an, a former companion of The Fleshmancer; and B'st, an amorphous pink cloud with almost no relevance to the plot a-la Chu-Chu from Xenogears.
Battles happen on the field map, like Chrono Trigger, and their main feature is essentially the Break system from Octopath Traveler. When a monster is charging up a special move, they gain "locks" that can only be broken by hitting them with specific types of damage; break them all, and they lose their turn. It's frequently impossible to break all the locks - you simply do not have the action economy to put out that many hits - and so you're usually playing triage regarding which special move you're willing to take to the face.
The battle system also takes a page from Super Mario RPG and includes timed hits and blocks for every attack. Tutorial messages insist to not worry about these and just think of them as bonus damage, but most of your attacks (especially multi-target spells) won't function properly unless you're nailing the timing. You'll often still do some damage, but the number of hits is the most important thing when you're dealing with Locks. There is an accessibility option (purchasable with in-game currency) to make timed hits always land in exchange for lower damage, but that only works for basic attacks.
Only a handful of skills have a message explaining when to push the button, and for the rest? Tough luck, figure it out. It's inconsistent at best and opaque at worst. And I mean literally opaque: because of how the field maps and graphics are constructed, character sprites (especially Seraï) often end up entirely offscreen or covered by other sprites when you're meant to time a press. This wasn't a problem in SMRPG or Mario & Luigi because those had bespoke battle screens with fairly consistent framing for timed hits; the concept isn't very compatible with CT style battles without a way to maintain that consistency.
I legitimately enjoyed the battle system for about the first 30% or so of the game, at which point the startling lack of variety in the battle options began to chafe. Every character has a basic attack, a mere three skills, and a Final Fantasy summon-like Ultimate attack that requires a bar to charge up. There's around a dozen "Combo" moves (read: Dual Techs) across the entire party, but the meter to use them charges so slowly they might as well only exist during boss battles. Your maximum MP caps at around 30 (at the max level, which requires a lot of grinding), skills cost anywhere between 4 and 11, and your potion inventory is limited to 10 items, meaning you're going to almost always rely on basic attacks - which recover 3 MP on a hit - for most battles. Landing a basic attack lets you imbue another basic attack with a character's inherent elemental attribute, which is the only way to break most locks once you're in the mid-game.
Play SMRPG sometime (perhaps the upcoming remake, even) and you'll figure out quick that Timed Hits are cool because if you do them properly it makes battles faster. You aren't trying to get 100 Super Jumps in every single battle because that would be exhausting and slow. Sure, in Chrono Trigger I'm solving 80% of encounters with the same multi-target spells, but that also means they're over in less than a minute. In Sea of Stars, if I mess up an early button press with Moonerang or Venom Flurry, it might not even hit every enemy, which probably means I won't break the locks I need to, which means they'll do their long spell animation. A trash mob battle will probably take two full minutes of me carefully trying to land my timed hits and manage my MP. That shit adds up.
I wouldn't quite go so far as to say Sea of Stars disrespects your time, but a lot of shit adds up. The backgrounds and sprite work are universally great - really beautiful stuff, great animations - but there are tightropes/beams scattered everywhere around the game world, seemingly placed only so you're forced to slow down and look at the backgrounds. From a purely quality of life standpoint, I don't know why you have to hold the button for so long when cooking something, especially if it's a higher-tier restorative. The overworld walk speed is agonizing. The narrative flails in several bizarre directions, only cohering in the broadest possible sense of "we need to beat the bad guy".
Comparatively, Chrono Trigger never stops moving. Your objectives in CT are clearly signposted and make logical sense, even when they string together into longer sequences. To save the world from the Bad Future, we need to defeat the big monster, and we learn the monster was summoned by an evil wizard. To defeat the evil wizard, we need the magic sword, but the sword is broken. To re-forge the sword, we need an ancient material, so off to prehistory we go!
It may sound tedious when written out this way, but the crucial element is that this only takes something like 4 or 5 hours. You're never stuck in any individual location longer than 45-60 minutes, and that's if you stop to grind (which you don't need to). Working at a leisurely pace, you can 100% Chrono Trigger in somewhere between 15 and 20 hours. My most recent playthrough - in which I deliberately walked slowly, grinded out levels, and talked to every NPC for the sake of recording footage - clocked in at about 17.
Sea of Stars doesn't stop introducing new plot elements until the middle of the end credits and makes little effort to tie them together in a cohesive way, instead relying on the inherent fantasy of the setting to smooth over any bumps. For example, take The Sleeper, a massive dragon that once ravaged the world before being sent into an eternal slumber. It explicitly isn't a Dweller, being little more than a curiosity on the overworld map. It bears no relevance to the plot other than as a mid-game side objective to earn the privilege to progress the actual story.
Zale and Valere, despite having speaking roles, do not possess an iota of personality between them; they are generically heroic and valiant and stop at every stage along their quest to help the weak and downtrodden as JRPG Protagonists are wont to do. The idea that Garl should not join them on their dangerous journey - as he is a mere normie - is raised once or twice, but ultimately disregarded due to Garl's endless luck and pluck. He barrels through any possible pathos or character development by simply being the Fun Fat Guy at all times, whether or not the next step follows logically.
No less than three times do the characters visit some kind of Oracle or Seer who reads the future and literally tells them what is going to happen later in the story, sometimes cryptically and sometimes giving explicit instructions. At one point a character awakens from a near-death experience having suddenly gained the knowledge of how to restart the stalled plot, launching into a multi-stage quest that has no logical ties to the party's objective. It's just progression, things happening because something has to happen between points A and B.
Another example: a late game dungeon introduces a race of bird wizards complete with ominous side-flashes to their nefarious scheming atop their evil thrones. They are relevant for only that dungeon, which is broadly just an obstacle in the way of the party's actual objective. I don't understand the intent. Is it supposed to be funny that this guy looks like Necromancer Daffy Duck? If so, why is the story genuinely trying to convince me of the sorrow of their plight and how it relates to the lore (in a way that also isn't relevant to the current events of the plot since it's shit that happened like 10,000 years ago)? How am I meant to react to this? Why is it here, in the final stretch of the story? I was asking these kinds of questions the entire game.
Presumably, the plot is like this because it's trying to imitate JRPGs of the time, which had a reputation for sending you on strings of seemingly random errands to defeat monsters or fetch items. You know what game doesn't do that? Chrono Trigger! The game Sea of Stars is obviously trying to position itself as a successor to!
Is it fair that I criticize the Solstice Warriors for being flat characters when Crono literally does not speak and his party consists of a bunch of genre caricatures? Yes, because CT doesn't try to be more than that. There's no need for wink-wink "did you know you're playing a JRPG? eh, ehhh?? aren't they so wacky with plots that barely make sense bro???" writing in Chrono Trigger because it knows that you know that it knows that you know you're playing a damn JRPG. It's got Akira Toriyama art like Dragon Quest! It says Squaresoft on the cover, those dudes made Final Fantasy!
You're on a roller coaster through time and space! You're here because you want to see knights and robots and cavemen do exactly what knights and robots and cavemen do. Of course Ayla the weirdly sexy cavewoman will say "what is raw-boot? me no understand" after Robo the robot shoots dino-men with his laser beams. It's comedic melodrama, it's operatic in a way that leverages genre familiarity.
Sea of Stars isn't willing to fully commit to this approach, undercutting its own pathos with half-measures and naked imitation. I'd be so much more willing to accept the sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end of the first act if the game didn't then whip around and say "haha, we sure did the thing, huh?" Yeah, I saw. We both clearly know that you're not being clever about it, so why is it in the game?
The answer is usually "because it was in Chrono Trigger", without any examination of what made it work. Like, okay, everybody knows Chrono Trigger is "a good game", but do you know why it's a good game? I could see someone playing it and just thinking, "I don't get it, this is an incredibly generic JRPG," but what you have to understand is that CT is an immaculately constructed generic JRPG. Simply using the same ingredients isn't going to create the same result.
Take the most famous twist of CT: at a critical moment, silent player avatar Crono sacrifices his life to get the rest of the cast to safety, removing him from the party lineup. In the context of 1995, this is a shocking, borderline 4th-wall-breaking twist. Permanent party member death wasn't unheard of - take FFIV or FFV - but the main character? Crono was the mandatory first slot of the party, a jack-of-all-trades mechanical role akin to a DQ Hero. Even though he doesn't have a personality, Crono's consistent presence and the story's inherent melodrama lend a tangible feeling of loss.
Using the power of time travel, the player can undertake a sizeable sidequest to bring Crono back to life, replacing him at the instant of his death with a lifeless doll. He rejoins the party, no longer a mandatory member of the lineup. At this point in the game, you arguably don't even want to bring him along on quests, because he still doesn't have dialogue. Crucially, the entire quest is optional; the first time I played CT, I accidentally did the entire final dungeon (also optional!) first, assuming it was a necessary step.
Sea of Stars tries to do this with Garl. He takes a fatal blow for Zale and Valere then dictates the plot for the next two hours of the game while living on literal Borrowed Time. You journey to an ancient island floating in the sky (sick Chrono Trigger reference bro!) and split the party to pursue multiple objectives in multiple dungeons, culminating in a whole sequence complete with bespoke comic panels of the party mourning their best friend for months offscreen.
This didn't work because I, the player, had no attachment to the character. Garl is the least mechanically useful party member, dealing the same damage type as Valere but without any elemental type to break locks; his heal skill is more expensive than Zale's and his repositioning skill is unnecessary once you have all-target attacks. I dropped him for Seraï at first opportunity and literally never put him back in the main lineup.
Nor do I buy into Zale and Valere's feelings. Protecting Garl is supposed to be one of their main motivations - it's a major scene in the prologue, and leads to an entire dungeon detour in the first act - but they haven't put forth any genuine effort to prevent him from hurling himself into danger's way throughout the game. As noted, he just repeatedly barrels his way through the plot by demanding it continue, even after he's fucking dead.
The true ending of Sea of Stars requires beating the game once, then completing numerous optional objectives which lead to... can you guess? Going back in time, replacing Garl at the instant of his fatal wound with a body double (which means B'st was pretending to be Garl - someone he's never met - during that entire segment, a completely absurd notion), and pulling him back into the present. You do another lengthy sidequest to get an invitation to a fancy restaurant, and then you can fight the true final boss, again, because Garl simply demands it when you get there.
If this CT retread had to be in the game, it would have obviously been better served by Garl being the main player character; go all the way with the imitation. Any vague gesturing the narrative makes towards not having to be The Chosen One to still fight for justice would carry more weight if you weren't playing as the Solstice Warriors, instead scrambling to keep up with them as the worst party member. As things stand, it's just a big ol' reference to a better game, a transparent play for Real Stakes that rings hollow.
An even more egregious example is The Big Thing at the start of Act 3, once the cast finally sets sail upon the eponymous Sea of Stars. Leaving their world of fantasy and magic, they enter a post-apocalyptic sci-fi world, complete with a brief graphics shift into 3D and a full UI overhaul. It's intended to be a shocking twist, a mind-blowing reveal... but it doesn't work, because A) it's a blatant crib of CT, and B) it's all in service to a punchline.
In Chrono Trigger, once the game has fully established the time travel concept by sending you to 600 AD and back (about three hours of gameplay), the party is forced to flee into an unknown time gate. It spits them out to 2300 AD, a wrecked hell world in the depths of a nuclear winter. Here, the party discovers an archive computer recording that sets up their goal for the entire rest of the game: prevent the apocalypse by stopping Lavos, a titanic creature buried deep within the earth.
It's important that this happens at the beginning of the game. You're expecting some form of going to the future to see goofy robots - it's a natural extension of time travel as a plot device - but 2300 AD is a genuine shock in the moment. It serves as a constant reminder of the stakes: this is the bad future, and you're trying to stop it from ever happening. After gallivanting through medieval times, the contrast really works.
In Sea of Stars, you probably aren't expecting to suddenly fight a robot when you're chasing The Fleshmancer across worlds. It's a potentially cool swerve, but what's actually gained by having the final act be in sci-fi land other than some kind of "dang, didn't see that coming" factor? He isn't even actually in control of the robots or anything, he just hides his castle here because... well, it's unclear why, because even once you restore the sun and moon and fight him in the True Ending, he only seems momentarily inconvenienced.
But it sure is a CT reference! And it's also a joke, because your mysterious sometimes-assassin-sometimes-swashbuckler companion Seraï reveals that this is her home world, pulling off her mask to reveal her metallic endoskeleton. You see, she used to be human, but had her soul chewed up and put into this mechanical body. She is a literal Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
You know! Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot! Like TVTropes, lol? Wacky JRPG party members!
How do you expect to maintain any investment after that? There's like four more dungeons in sci-fi world - including aforementioned Necromancer Daffy - and I just couldn't give a shit about any of it. The post-apoc stuff doesn't add any stakes, because we already know the Fleshmancer has ruined countless worlds and we're just chasing him to this one in particular because Seraï asked us to (and I guess they want revenge for Garl). I wasn't having fun, I was just annoyed.
I'm baffled. Sea of Stars clearly knows how to outwardly present itself as a quality JRPG. At a glance, the game looks like everything I could want: beautiful artwork, smooth gameplay, fun characters. Something that gets why I fell in love with the genre in the first place, and why I hold up Chrono Trigger as its crown jewel.
But it just isn't that, at least not to me, and that's... I dunno, existentially troubling? Based on the reviews I've seen, I'm clearly in the minority for feeling this way. I do believe the dev team and all of these players also love JRPGs. But if they do, it must be in a way fundamentally different from the way I do, because otherwise I simply don't understand the creative choices in Sea of Stars. I want more than this.
Maybe one day, hopefully sooner than later, we'll get the Disco Elysium of JRPGs, but today sure isn't that day.
2020
Baldur's Gate 3 is the Star Wars The Force Awakens of CRPGs
Previous BG3 posts here
This probably isn't going to be particularly structured or edited or even necessarily coherent.
Spoilers for the entire Baldur's Gate series and also Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer to follow
---
As said in previous posts, I think BG3 is a three out of five game, definitely not (to me, personally, this is subjective) the sort of revelatory RPG experience that some people have had. This user can say it because he's played most of the big tentpole CRPG releases from the past 20 years. Also I'm a born hater. Feel free to disregard me.
Biggest problem with Baldur's Gate 3 IMO: it has to be Baldur's Gate 3, the AAA CRPG here to revive an old franchise and finally bring Dungeons & Dragons back into the video game space with a vengeance, developed by Larian Studios, et cetera et cetera. The rest of my problems kind of stem from this and the development realities of making it this.
Aside: sure, Solasta (which I admit, I didn't play, sorry) is out there, but that's an indie using the 5e SRD, not an officially licensed DND product; Hasbro and WoTC weren't out there helping to market it. I am not immune to propaganda.
Here's what every tabletop DnD player knows: the low levels aren't that fun in a mechanical sense because you don't have many options. Shit doesn't get rolling until level 5 or so. You are some kind of barely competent goon who can fight rats in a cellar or maybe some wolves and goblins. The fun, other than the social aspect of playing with your IRL friends, is in the character growth; going from being Dude Ratsbane into Dude the Saviour of Baldur's Gate.
BG3 solves the feeling of your character progress stagnating mostly by trickling a never-ending stream of loot that would be completely busted in a tabletop setting. This is fine, this is what RPG video games do, it's what the other games did.
But like, narratively, BG3 is kind of a mess. The game never stops telling you how cool and awesome and special you are until all the narrative stakes and impact are completely sanded away and there's no reason to fucking care about any of it. You are simply on a carnival ride through the Sword Coast.
You start by traveling the planes in a spaceship. The companions have epic-level backstories (Mystra's ex! Decade's service in the Blood War! The Blade of Frontiers!) despite being level 1 dirt farmers. A forgotten deity hangs out at your camp so you can respec. Chances are you freed an immortal angel from her soul prison in the Plane of Shadow, then fought the literal avatar of death. As a mid-game boss fight.
...The final boss starts in a sewer.
It probably seems completely ridiculous that I'm arguing BG3 is too big and empowering. That's just what these games are like! Hell, when I first started playing I was saying the Mindflayers were the most interesting part of the game and fighting goblins and gnolls was boring. But a horde of goblins is appropriate for a level 3 party, and to BG3's credit it makes things more interesting by giving them all various class levels (warlock gob, ranger gob, fighter gob). I want to build up to the mindflayers, not fight them when I'm supposed to be worrying about goblins.
What I was actually saying in the previous post is that I wanted to see some of the weirder shit DND can do, and mindflayer stuff is a good place to start; they have big tentacle spaceships that hop dimensions! I sure hope we'll be doing things with that later!! But, because this is a AAA video game titled Baldur's Gate 3, it can't do anything with that other than make it some kind of generically world-ending threat that may shatter the entire Sword Coast - nay, all of Faerun (none of which we see!) - if not stopped by Prot'agon Ist'You the half-elf paladin and their Goth GF Shadowheart.
It didn't have to be this way... but it did, because the game is called Baldur's Gate 3. It has to be by the city of Baldur's Gate, never mind that 2 and Throne of Bhaal are hundreds of miles away. It has to be about the Dead Three still up to their bullshit, never mind that it completely invalidates what Gorion's Ward - what I, and you - did in the previous games, or how I (canonically dammit!) obliterated the final dregs of Myrkul's soul in the back half of Mask of the Betrayer.
(Aside: I fucking get it, it's comic book shit. Jaheira and Minsc can no longer be level 40 demigods who could solve this problem singlehandedly. The villains must always come back and the status quo cannot meaningfully change unless it was something that happened offscreen to set up the new edition's status quo. I get it, but I don't have to like it.)
The insistence on having the city involved (by all accounts it was a huge development hurdle) - plus Larian's Early Access pipeline (disclosure: the game was bought for me as a gift midway through early access, and I did not play or install it until the 1.0 release) - makes the game's pacing incredibly bizarre. I ain't a game dev, but it's gotta be partly because of early access right? The Druid Grove stuff is a meticulously crafted vertical slice, and then they had to bake the whole cake separately and try to make it match perfectly. The whole story just feels like it was made backwards like that.
To their credit, Act 1 - the tiefling refugees and the druid grove, leading into the search for the Adamantine Forge as a final climactic encounter - is great, obviously the most polished portion of the game (seeing as it was the Early Access stuff). This could be a solid level 1-10 module by itself with a bit of expanding and stripping out the Cult of the Absolute shit. I mean, you'd still be going into the fuckin carnival ride children's playground version of the Underdark, but if it's some long-forgotten corner that nobody gives a shit about, it could work. It'd be a great semi-freeform middle section. But in the context of how the rest of the game is... why the fuck does it start this way?
If we look at the whole game, Act 1 is a relatively freeform adventure where multiple factions are butting heads and you're trying to figure out what's actually going on, with the answer eventually revealing itself as the Cult of the Absolute. Act 2 is a climactic charge on the enemy stronghold, defended by their greatest warrior, before they can unleash their armies upon the Sword Coast. Upon learning that this has only caused things to worsen, hastening the Absolute's rise... Act 3 is about exploring a bustling city, doing a bunch of random quests, and then when you're feeling up to it you can take a left in the sewers and kill a giant Netherbrain with the powers of a god. But like, whenever, no rush. No worries if not.
The story is desperately shouting at you that time is running out and you must stop this nefarious scheme before the world ends etc etc, but yo check out this gigantic city hub map full of goofy little side quests. Don't you want to see what's happening at the ghost house or the broadsheet printer? Oh the impending Absolute threat with the whole-ass army outside? No big deal dude we swear. Steel Watch had it handled. Take your time.
(And like, yeah, yeah, Meteor will definitely crash in 7 days, whatever. It's a video game. I know.)
They could (should?) have shuffled it around, I think. Picture this: you start in the city of Baldur's Gate, doing basic tutorial adventuring, killing rats in cellars. Then, the nautiloid; you're kidnapped and infected and tossed back out on the streets and you don't know why you haven't turned. All the healers and higher level adventurers in town are gone now, recruited towards defending against some kind of approaching threat that you only hear whispers about.
Your only choice to find a healer is to venture outside of the city and brave the dangers of the realms. The city acts as a home hub zone with its own plotlines (like an evil inventor manipulating the council, hm) as you explore the wilderness nearby. You visit several locales: a nearby druid grove, housing tiefling refugees fleeing this new cult; a githyanki creche built into an old temple, in an uproar over the mindflayer threat and a mysterious McGuffin; a brief and deadly sojourn into the Underdark, where the cult has carved out a base of operations for their offensive.
All signs point towards the shadow-cursed lands to the east, where the Cult of the Absolute is headquartered. Their armies are at the city's doorstep, now. Teaming up with legendary Harpers and all of those you have helped along the way, you find a way to overcome the shadow curse, take the battle to the villains, and discover their true plot, saving the day at the last possible moment.
I feel like this makes more sense. I mean, if all those parts still have to be in there.
A more charitable take is that BG3 is trying to be imitative of Baldur's Gate 1. Once you're booted out of Candlekeep but you're still a level 1 dirt farmer, you're just in the world map. You do a bunch of freeform adventuring just to figure out what's going on, then you mount a charge on the Nashkel Mines once you discover it's core to the villain's scheme, and then you finally enter the city - a densely packed environment with all sorts of silly things happening - and foil Sarevok's scheme in the Temple of Bhaal.
But like I said above, the narrative stakes were different. It feels different. Or, perhaps what I'm saying, is that it feels the same, but BG3 either doesn't understand why it worked last time or does and is simply cursed to be a AAA game with AAA expectations for its scale.
Baldur's Gate 1, despite ultimately being about the Bhaalspawn Crisis, understood it was fundamentally a low level adventure. You fight wolves and gnolls and kobolds in the woods for twenty hours. The plot is about Sarevok's dark conspiracy to... make a shitload of money by manipulating the iron trade, causing a war, becoming an arms dealer, and fixing an election. It's reasonable that a squad of level 8 goons could deal with this. Jaheira isn't even at the level to fistfight her way up the druid ranks yet!
In Baldur's Gate 3, you go to the fucking Underdark at level 4 or 5. You spend a fair amount of time in the Underdark in Baldur's Gate 2, and (power differentials between DnD editions aside) you're probably somewhere around level 11 to 12 there - the end of the level curve of BG3 - and it's still a dangerous, intimidating location. They have fucking mindflayers down there dude. It's scary. Everyone knows not to fuck with mindflayers. Except you because you're cool and strong and have the special tadpole that gives you psychic powers instead of killing you.
I've played a lot of RPGs, I don't need to be told that my player character is cool and special anymore. Yes, it's nice that sometimes a dialogue option pops up that has [MONK] in front of it, but like, I don't care about clicking that option, I do it because it's there and it shows that the designers noticed my build, and I definitely appreciate it, but it really does nothing for me on a storytelling level.
I guess I'm just saying that I want the GM's fantasy, not the player's fantasy. If your narrative is going to be standard stuff, at least give me cool and interesting sidequests and companions.
Like, I dunno, what is Baldur's Gate 3 about? Its themes, other than being a rip-roaring Sword Coast adventure? I have to genuinely think about this for a moment because the narrative left so little impression on me. Hang on.
I guess family? All your companions have problems with their parental figures as their whole thing, except Gale who has big Divorced Guy Energy but you just know that dude calls Mystra "mommy". You do too if-and-only-if you play as The Dark Urge (aka the "I played the old games and want to make this even more like BG1 daddy" option {no judgement, this is what I picked}). BG1 was (broadly) about your status as a Bhaalspawn and as Gorion's Ward and how you would handle that legacy, which is to say, "murder bad or murder good?", so it tracks as something you'd do for a revival.
Perhaps "inevitable, irreversible physical change" (aka puberty aka growing old). Karlach's infernal engine, Gale's ticking orb, Wyll's forced TF into a store-brand tiefling. The imminent ceremorphosis from the tadpoles.
Though, no matter how much the writing attempts to position the illithid tadpoles in BG3 as a potentially dangerous, corrupting influence, the fact of the matter is that they're nothing but beneficial to you. They are your main character privilege powers and as far as I could tell there were zero negative consequences from going all-in. Kinda undercuts the whole thing.
What else? I'm drawing a blank. Proverbial deals with the devil? Not judging people based on their race?? I got nothing. Hell, why are the villains doing what they are doing other than because they are villains working for evil gods?
Ketheric Thorm is pure Dead Wife Guy. Gortash is just trying to recreate the plot from BG1 again while otherwise being a smug prick about it. Orin is Diet Sarevok to the point where the game literally digs up Sarevok and has him say as much. Absolutely zero pathos to any of them.
But I suppose in fairness, this is mass market AAA media. These are big, broad themes that are common to the human experience. Everyone's got family troubles, everyone has anxiety over the inevitable passage of time. It's Good vs Evil (but also if you want to be Cool Evil and beat up the Loser Evil people you can do that too). I get why it's like this. I just want more to chew on, something that makes me go "oh, yeah, that's some writing baby".
I can't help but think about Mask of the Betrayer, the sequel expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 and the best of the Forgotten Realms CRPGs. The main campaign of NWN2 is as generic Sword Coast as they come: you start as a literal villager and slowly graduate to doing battle against the King of Shadows using your special Main Character Power, et cetera. It's all about something hoary like the making of a True Hero. The expansion is more interesting, actually doing things with the Forgotten Realms setting.
You wake up in a strange land: Rashemen, where Minsc is from, which is like 4000 miles from the Sword Coast. Your cool main character privileges have been violently removed, and instead you're stricken with the Spirit-Eater curse which will eventually eat your soul so that it may move to another host. Familiar enough.
The illithid perks in BG3 are cool and strong and you get a whole skill tree where you get to spec into what psychic powers you want. The Spirit-Eater has some strong powers along with a meter that constantly ticks down, inflicting worse and worse debuffs until it outright kills you... unless you consume spirits and souls to keep it topped off. Convenient that Rashemen is the land of telthor, ancient guardian god animals in an animist sense.
Your companions in MoTB also have parental issues - I can't deny that - but in more specific, thematic ways. Take my least favorite party member: Gannayev-of-Dreams, aka Gann, whose whole deal is that he's a hagspawn. A pretty hagspawn, which is supposed to be an impossibility. Gann was abandoned in the woods as an infant and raised by telthor, so he refuses to acknowledge the pantheon of Faerun. He's got a real chip on his shoulder regarding his heritage, since the hags don't want him for being a mostly-normal guy and the regular folk don't want him because he's a hagspawn (and seducing all their daughters besides). He puts up a Casanova-like front as he makes his dream visits to all the village girls, looking for love in all the wrong places while feeling like a pariah wherever he goes.
And like, sure, you could boil this down to "mommy abandoned me so now I fuck away my problems", but it's how he's written in the context of the story that makes it work. Every main quest and sidequest in MoTB ties into ideas about the masks people wear to hide their true selves, intentionally or not; faith in higher powers and what they stand for, and what might drive one to defy them; love, in so many different ways than simply romantic, and the challenge of seeing it through.
I don't get that feeling of specificity from Baldur's Gate 3. Why is it thematically important that Karlach fought in the Blood War and got an infernal engine? Her father figure betrayed her and she has a ticking time bomb that's different from the one the rest of the party has, I guess. Is this relevant to the Absolute plot? Not really other than Gortash is one of the villains; it could be the backstory of a cool barbarian lady in basically any other DND story. It is kiiinda related to Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, the 2019 5e tabletop module marketed as a prequel to BG3... which I feel like just proves my point.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a fun game! I've played it for like 150 hours at this point. It's a great 5e toybox that makes some interesting choices about how to adapt the system to a video game. Larian is good at what they do! It's probably...? the biggest profile, biggest budget CRPG ever made, a meticulously produced game. It's got that money. For the hypothetical player who knows what Dungeons & Dragons is but doesn't know anything about Dungeons & Dragons or the Forgotten Realms, it's exactly what it needs to be.
It's also not what *I* want out of a CRPG. They rarely are.
Previous BG3 posts here
This probably isn't going to be particularly structured or edited or even necessarily coherent.
Spoilers for the entire Baldur's Gate series and also Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer to follow
---
As said in previous posts, I think BG3 is a three out of five game, definitely not (to me, personally, this is subjective) the sort of revelatory RPG experience that some people have had. This user can say it because he's played most of the big tentpole CRPG releases from the past 20 years. Also I'm a born hater. Feel free to disregard me.
Biggest problem with Baldur's Gate 3 IMO: it has to be Baldur's Gate 3, the AAA CRPG here to revive an old franchise and finally bring Dungeons & Dragons back into the video game space with a vengeance, developed by Larian Studios, et cetera et cetera. The rest of my problems kind of stem from this and the development realities of making it this.
Aside: sure, Solasta (which I admit, I didn't play, sorry) is out there, but that's an indie using the 5e SRD, not an officially licensed DND product; Hasbro and WoTC weren't out there helping to market it. I am not immune to propaganda.
Here's what every tabletop DnD player knows: the low levels aren't that fun in a mechanical sense because you don't have many options. Shit doesn't get rolling until level 5 or so. You are some kind of barely competent goon who can fight rats in a cellar or maybe some wolves and goblins. The fun, other than the social aspect of playing with your IRL friends, is in the character growth; going from being Dude Ratsbane into Dude the Saviour of Baldur's Gate.
BG3 solves the feeling of your character progress stagnating mostly by trickling a never-ending stream of loot that would be completely busted in a tabletop setting. This is fine, this is what RPG video games do, it's what the other games did.
But like, narratively, BG3 is kind of a mess. The game never stops telling you how cool and awesome and special you are until all the narrative stakes and impact are completely sanded away and there's no reason to fucking care about any of it. You are simply on a carnival ride through the Sword Coast.
You start by traveling the planes in a spaceship. The companions have epic-level backstories (Mystra's ex! Decade's service in the Blood War! The Blade of Frontiers!) despite being level 1 dirt farmers. A forgotten deity hangs out at your camp so you can respec. Chances are you freed an immortal angel from her soul prison in the Plane of Shadow, then fought the literal avatar of death. As a mid-game boss fight.
...The final boss starts in a sewer.
It probably seems completely ridiculous that I'm arguing BG3 is too big and empowering. That's just what these games are like! Hell, when I first started playing I was saying the Mindflayers were the most interesting part of the game and fighting goblins and gnolls was boring. But a horde of goblins is appropriate for a level 3 party, and to BG3's credit it makes things more interesting by giving them all various class levels (warlock gob, ranger gob, fighter gob). I want to build up to the mindflayers, not fight them when I'm supposed to be worrying about goblins.
What I was actually saying in the previous post is that I wanted to see some of the weirder shit DND can do, and mindflayer stuff is a good place to start; they have big tentacle spaceships that hop dimensions! I sure hope we'll be doing things with that later!! But, because this is a AAA video game titled Baldur's Gate 3, it can't do anything with that other than make it some kind of generically world-ending threat that may shatter the entire Sword Coast - nay, all of Faerun (none of which we see!) - if not stopped by Prot'agon Ist'You the half-elf paladin and their Goth GF Shadowheart.
It didn't have to be this way... but it did, because the game is called Baldur's Gate 3. It has to be by the city of Baldur's Gate, never mind that 2 and Throne of Bhaal are hundreds of miles away. It has to be about the Dead Three still up to their bullshit, never mind that it completely invalidates what Gorion's Ward - what I, and you - did in the previous games, or how I (canonically dammit!) obliterated the final dregs of Myrkul's soul in the back half of Mask of the Betrayer.
(Aside: I fucking get it, it's comic book shit. Jaheira and Minsc can no longer be level 40 demigods who could solve this problem singlehandedly. The villains must always come back and the status quo cannot meaningfully change unless it was something that happened offscreen to set up the new edition's status quo. I get it, but I don't have to like it.)
The insistence on having the city involved (by all accounts it was a huge development hurdle) - plus Larian's Early Access pipeline (disclosure: the game was bought for me as a gift midway through early access, and I did not play or install it until the 1.0 release) - makes the game's pacing incredibly bizarre. I ain't a game dev, but it's gotta be partly because of early access right? The Druid Grove stuff is a meticulously crafted vertical slice, and then they had to bake the whole cake separately and try to make it match perfectly. The whole story just feels like it was made backwards like that.
To their credit, Act 1 - the tiefling refugees and the druid grove, leading into the search for the Adamantine Forge as a final climactic encounter - is great, obviously the most polished portion of the game (seeing as it was the Early Access stuff). This could be a solid level 1-10 module by itself with a bit of expanding and stripping out the Cult of the Absolute shit. I mean, you'd still be going into the fuckin carnival ride children's playground version of the Underdark, but if it's some long-forgotten corner that nobody gives a shit about, it could work. It'd be a great semi-freeform middle section. But in the context of how the rest of the game is... why the fuck does it start this way?
If we look at the whole game, Act 1 is a relatively freeform adventure where multiple factions are butting heads and you're trying to figure out what's actually going on, with the answer eventually revealing itself as the Cult of the Absolute. Act 2 is a climactic charge on the enemy stronghold, defended by their greatest warrior, before they can unleash their armies upon the Sword Coast. Upon learning that this has only caused things to worsen, hastening the Absolute's rise... Act 3 is about exploring a bustling city, doing a bunch of random quests, and then when you're feeling up to it you can take a left in the sewers and kill a giant Netherbrain with the powers of a god. But like, whenever, no rush. No worries if not.
The story is desperately shouting at you that time is running out and you must stop this nefarious scheme before the world ends etc etc, but yo check out this gigantic city hub map full of goofy little side quests. Don't you want to see what's happening at the ghost house or the broadsheet printer? Oh the impending Absolute threat with the whole-ass army outside? No big deal dude we swear. Steel Watch had it handled. Take your time.
(And like, yeah, yeah, Meteor will definitely crash in 7 days, whatever. It's a video game. I know.)
They could (should?) have shuffled it around, I think. Picture this: you start in the city of Baldur's Gate, doing basic tutorial adventuring, killing rats in cellars. Then, the nautiloid; you're kidnapped and infected and tossed back out on the streets and you don't know why you haven't turned. All the healers and higher level adventurers in town are gone now, recruited towards defending against some kind of approaching threat that you only hear whispers about.
Your only choice to find a healer is to venture outside of the city and brave the dangers of the realms. The city acts as a home hub zone with its own plotlines (like an evil inventor manipulating the council, hm) as you explore the wilderness nearby. You visit several locales: a nearby druid grove, housing tiefling refugees fleeing this new cult; a githyanki creche built into an old temple, in an uproar over the mindflayer threat and a mysterious McGuffin; a brief and deadly sojourn into the Underdark, where the cult has carved out a base of operations for their offensive.
All signs point towards the shadow-cursed lands to the east, where the Cult of the Absolute is headquartered. Their armies are at the city's doorstep, now. Teaming up with legendary Harpers and all of those you have helped along the way, you find a way to overcome the shadow curse, take the battle to the villains, and discover their true plot, saving the day at the last possible moment.
I feel like this makes more sense. I mean, if all those parts still have to be in there.
A more charitable take is that BG3 is trying to be imitative of Baldur's Gate 1. Once you're booted out of Candlekeep but you're still a level 1 dirt farmer, you're just in the world map. You do a bunch of freeform adventuring just to figure out what's going on, then you mount a charge on the Nashkel Mines once you discover it's core to the villain's scheme, and then you finally enter the city - a densely packed environment with all sorts of silly things happening - and foil Sarevok's scheme in the Temple of Bhaal.
But like I said above, the narrative stakes were different. It feels different. Or, perhaps what I'm saying, is that it feels the same, but BG3 either doesn't understand why it worked last time or does and is simply cursed to be a AAA game with AAA expectations for its scale.
Baldur's Gate 1, despite ultimately being about the Bhaalspawn Crisis, understood it was fundamentally a low level adventure. You fight wolves and gnolls and kobolds in the woods for twenty hours. The plot is about Sarevok's dark conspiracy to... make a shitload of money by manipulating the iron trade, causing a war, becoming an arms dealer, and fixing an election. It's reasonable that a squad of level 8 goons could deal with this. Jaheira isn't even at the level to fistfight her way up the druid ranks yet!
In Baldur's Gate 3, you go to the fucking Underdark at level 4 or 5. You spend a fair amount of time in the Underdark in Baldur's Gate 2, and (power differentials between DnD editions aside) you're probably somewhere around level 11 to 12 there - the end of the level curve of BG3 - and it's still a dangerous, intimidating location. They have fucking mindflayers down there dude. It's scary. Everyone knows not to fuck with mindflayers. Except you because you're cool and strong and have the special tadpole that gives you psychic powers instead of killing you.
I've played a lot of RPGs, I don't need to be told that my player character is cool and special anymore. Yes, it's nice that sometimes a dialogue option pops up that has [MONK] in front of it, but like, I don't care about clicking that option, I do it because it's there and it shows that the designers noticed my build, and I definitely appreciate it, but it really does nothing for me on a storytelling level.
I guess I'm just saying that I want the GM's fantasy, not the player's fantasy. If your narrative is going to be standard stuff, at least give me cool and interesting sidequests and companions.
Like, I dunno, what is Baldur's Gate 3 about? Its themes, other than being a rip-roaring Sword Coast adventure? I have to genuinely think about this for a moment because the narrative left so little impression on me. Hang on.
I guess family? All your companions have problems with their parental figures as their whole thing, except Gale who has big Divorced Guy Energy but you just know that dude calls Mystra "mommy". You do too if-and-only-if you play as The Dark Urge (aka the "I played the old games and want to make this even more like BG1 daddy" option {no judgement, this is what I picked}). BG1 was (broadly) about your status as a Bhaalspawn and as Gorion's Ward and how you would handle that legacy, which is to say, "murder bad or murder good?", so it tracks as something you'd do for a revival.
Perhaps "inevitable, irreversible physical change" (aka puberty aka growing old). Karlach's infernal engine, Gale's ticking orb, Wyll's forced TF into a store-brand tiefling. The imminent ceremorphosis from the tadpoles.
Though, no matter how much the writing attempts to position the illithid tadpoles in BG3 as a potentially dangerous, corrupting influence, the fact of the matter is that they're nothing but beneficial to you. They are your main character privilege powers and as far as I could tell there were zero negative consequences from going all-in. Kinda undercuts the whole thing.
What else? I'm drawing a blank. Proverbial deals with the devil? Not judging people based on their race?? I got nothing. Hell, why are the villains doing what they are doing other than because they are villains working for evil gods?
Ketheric Thorm is pure Dead Wife Guy. Gortash is just trying to recreate the plot from BG1 again while otherwise being a smug prick about it. Orin is Diet Sarevok to the point where the game literally digs up Sarevok and has him say as much. Absolutely zero pathos to any of them.
But I suppose in fairness, this is mass market AAA media. These are big, broad themes that are common to the human experience. Everyone's got family troubles, everyone has anxiety over the inevitable passage of time. It's Good vs Evil (but also if you want to be Cool Evil and beat up the Loser Evil people you can do that too). I get why it's like this. I just want more to chew on, something that makes me go "oh, yeah, that's some writing baby".
I can't help but think about Mask of the Betrayer, the sequel expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 and the best of the Forgotten Realms CRPGs. The main campaign of NWN2 is as generic Sword Coast as they come: you start as a literal villager and slowly graduate to doing battle against the King of Shadows using your special Main Character Power, et cetera. It's all about something hoary like the making of a True Hero. The expansion is more interesting, actually doing things with the Forgotten Realms setting.
You wake up in a strange land: Rashemen, where Minsc is from, which is like 4000 miles from the Sword Coast. Your cool main character privileges have been violently removed, and instead you're stricken with the Spirit-Eater curse which will eventually eat your soul so that it may move to another host. Familiar enough.
The illithid perks in BG3 are cool and strong and you get a whole skill tree where you get to spec into what psychic powers you want. The Spirit-Eater has some strong powers along with a meter that constantly ticks down, inflicting worse and worse debuffs until it outright kills you... unless you consume spirits and souls to keep it topped off. Convenient that Rashemen is the land of telthor, ancient guardian god animals in an animist sense.
Your companions in MoTB also have parental issues - I can't deny that - but in more specific, thematic ways. Take my least favorite party member: Gannayev-of-Dreams, aka Gann, whose whole deal is that he's a hagspawn. A pretty hagspawn, which is supposed to be an impossibility. Gann was abandoned in the woods as an infant and raised by telthor, so he refuses to acknowledge the pantheon of Faerun. He's got a real chip on his shoulder regarding his heritage, since the hags don't want him for being a mostly-normal guy and the regular folk don't want him because he's a hagspawn (and seducing all their daughters besides). He puts up a Casanova-like front as he makes his dream visits to all the village girls, looking for love in all the wrong places while feeling like a pariah wherever he goes.
And like, sure, you could boil this down to "mommy abandoned me so now I fuck away my problems", but it's how he's written in the context of the story that makes it work. Every main quest and sidequest in MoTB ties into ideas about the masks people wear to hide their true selves, intentionally or not; faith in higher powers and what they stand for, and what might drive one to defy them; love, in so many different ways than simply romantic, and the challenge of seeing it through.
I don't get that feeling of specificity from Baldur's Gate 3. Why is it thematically important that Karlach fought in the Blood War and got an infernal engine? Her father figure betrayed her and she has a ticking time bomb that's different from the one the rest of the party has, I guess. Is this relevant to the Absolute plot? Not really other than Gortash is one of the villains; it could be the backstory of a cool barbarian lady in basically any other DND story. It is kiiinda related to Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, the 2019 5e tabletop module marketed as a prequel to BG3... which I feel like just proves my point.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a fun game! I've played it for like 150 hours at this point. It's a great 5e toybox that makes some interesting choices about how to adapt the system to a video game. Larian is good at what they do! It's probably...? the biggest profile, biggest budget CRPG ever made, a meticulously produced game. It's got that money. For the hypothetical player who knows what Dungeons & Dragons is but doesn't know anything about Dungeons & Dragons or the Forgotten Realms, it's exactly what it needs to be.
It's also not what *I* want out of a CRPG. They rarely are.
Turns out the way to get me to play a roguelite deckbuilder is to make it a life sim where the runs are 5-8 hours long and the cards are tied to the narrative.
In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, you play as the eponymous teenage exocolonist (who knew?), born on a colony ship bound for the planet "Vertumna". The ship lands when you are age 10 and the game continues until age 20. Each year has various bespoke narrative events and about a dozen "turns" where you can grow your stats and manage your relationships.
Notable narrative events award you a new card, the deck contextualized as your memories. Cards have suits (yellow for social, blue for mental, red for physical), a number value, and possibly an extra effect like "+1 during mental challenges". For skill checks, you draw a hand from your deck and try to beat the goal number with the card slots available. You get extra bonuses from pairs, straights, flushes, et cetera. If you puzzle out the highest possible value with your cards, you get a minor cash reward. If you can't hit the goal, you can take a stress penalty to push through anyway.
It's a solid gameplay loop that carried me through a couple runs before I eventually turned on Debug Mode to skip every card battle and tweak stats to my liking (humans are just human, yeah?). There's also an option to ignore the cards entirely and turn the challenges into straight stat checks, if you're into that.
Of course, I wouldn't have cared about the cards and deckbuilding if not for the narrative context in which they exist. But the writing is... uh. Well. It doesn't really jive with my personal tastes, but I think it would for a lot of people. Another review (positively) describes the game as "queer socialist propaganda", and I can't really disagree with that assessment. I appreciate the game's politics, but not its aesthetic.
The colony is some kind of anti-capitalist, communal child-care, anti-cultural, vegetarian collective. You can change your name, appearance, and pronouns at any time along a spectrum of female-presenting to male-presenting. There are multiple romanceable characters across the LGBTQ+ spectrum and the game lets you date any of them, though that doesn't mean the relationship will always work out. It's better than I expected from a game that puts "you can date a dog-boy" on its Steam page, at least.
This is also a time loop story, which helps contextualize multiple playthroughs and allows you to pick options on later runs that help optimize your new life (a unique narrative strength of video games as a medium that has been insidiously co-opted by the isekai genre). For example, instead of spending several months figuring out a solution to an impending famine, you can guide characters directly to a solution you figured out last time, saving lives and giving you more time to spend patrolling the walls or repairing robots. Figure out someone's likes and dislikes, and those will stay in their character window in the next run.
But with one foot firmly embedded in the Twee Zone, Exocolonist could headline a Wholesome Direct (derogatory). Your menu doesn't have an Achievements section, it has a "Cheevos" section. Vertumna is cast entirely in pastel blues, pinks, and yellows; populated by aliens like "floatcows" and "unisaurs". Every character has a cutesy hippy name that's shortened from a longer word, so you're hanging out with Marz (Marzipan), Kom (Kombucha), Tonin (Melatonin), Seeq (Obsequious), et cetera. The fictional space sport is literally called "sportsball". Un-fucking-bearable.
The game advertises a large number of endings, but it's more of an Obsidian-style modular ending slides thing. Depending on what jobs you picked most often and the status of your relationships, you get some paragraphs about how they all turned out. I played enough to get three different job-related endings and most of the bespoke endings that require more specific sequences of events, and my Steam runtime is listed at about 35 hours. Though, as noted, this was with me using Debug Mode to speed up later runs considerably.
Despite my issues, I'd say enjoyed my time with Exocolonist. While I'd love to see its broad structure applied to an aesthetic I find more personally appealing, its (relative) simplicity compared to the big RPGs I usually play starts the creative gears turning in my head. Whether it's actually realistic or not, games like this and Citizen Sleeper make me wonder if this is something I could do one day, as late a start as it might be.
A thought for another day, perhaps.
In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, you play as the eponymous teenage exocolonist (who knew?), born on a colony ship bound for the planet "Vertumna". The ship lands when you are age 10 and the game continues until age 20. Each year has various bespoke narrative events and about a dozen "turns" where you can grow your stats and manage your relationships.
Notable narrative events award you a new card, the deck contextualized as your memories. Cards have suits (yellow for social, blue for mental, red for physical), a number value, and possibly an extra effect like "+1 during mental challenges". For skill checks, you draw a hand from your deck and try to beat the goal number with the card slots available. You get extra bonuses from pairs, straights, flushes, et cetera. If you puzzle out the highest possible value with your cards, you get a minor cash reward. If you can't hit the goal, you can take a stress penalty to push through anyway.
It's a solid gameplay loop that carried me through a couple runs before I eventually turned on Debug Mode to skip every card battle and tweak stats to my liking (humans are just human, yeah?). There's also an option to ignore the cards entirely and turn the challenges into straight stat checks, if you're into that.
Of course, I wouldn't have cared about the cards and deckbuilding if not for the narrative context in which they exist. But the writing is... uh. Well. It doesn't really jive with my personal tastes, but I think it would for a lot of people. Another review (positively) describes the game as "queer socialist propaganda", and I can't really disagree with that assessment. I appreciate the game's politics, but not its aesthetic.
The colony is some kind of anti-capitalist, communal child-care, anti-cultural, vegetarian collective. You can change your name, appearance, and pronouns at any time along a spectrum of female-presenting to male-presenting. There are multiple romanceable characters across the LGBTQ+ spectrum and the game lets you date any of them, though that doesn't mean the relationship will always work out. It's better than I expected from a game that puts "you can date a dog-boy" on its Steam page, at least.
This is also a time loop story, which helps contextualize multiple playthroughs and allows you to pick options on later runs that help optimize your new life (a unique narrative strength of video games as a medium that has been insidiously co-opted by the isekai genre). For example, instead of spending several months figuring out a solution to an impending famine, you can guide characters directly to a solution you figured out last time, saving lives and giving you more time to spend patrolling the walls or repairing robots. Figure out someone's likes and dislikes, and those will stay in their character window in the next run.
But with one foot firmly embedded in the Twee Zone, Exocolonist could headline a Wholesome Direct (derogatory). Your menu doesn't have an Achievements section, it has a "Cheevos" section. Vertumna is cast entirely in pastel blues, pinks, and yellows; populated by aliens like "floatcows" and "unisaurs". Every character has a cutesy hippy name that's shortened from a longer word, so you're hanging out with Marz (Marzipan), Kom (Kombucha), Tonin (Melatonin), Seeq (Obsequious), et cetera. The fictional space sport is literally called "sportsball". Un-fucking-bearable.
The game advertises a large number of endings, but it's more of an Obsidian-style modular ending slides thing. Depending on what jobs you picked most often and the status of your relationships, you get some paragraphs about how they all turned out. I played enough to get three different job-related endings and most of the bespoke endings that require more specific sequences of events, and my Steam runtime is listed at about 35 hours. Though, as noted, this was with me using Debug Mode to speed up later runs considerably.
Despite my issues, I'd say enjoyed my time with Exocolonist. While I'd love to see its broad structure applied to an aesthetic I find more personally appealing, its (relative) simplicity compared to the big RPGs I usually play starts the creative gears turning in my head. Whether it's actually realistic or not, games like this and Citizen Sleeper make me wonder if this is something I could do one day, as late a start as it might be.
A thought for another day, perhaps.
What tipped me over from a "huh, neat I guess" reaction to actually downloading and playing this was learning that the game opens with a goofy little personality test (ala the various Dragon Quest 3 remakes) that assigns you one of eighteen (18!) original Stands. On my first playthrough I was assigned "Adam Ant", a long-range swarm-type Stand made of insects. It has low attack power, but it can hit all enemies at once and has a host of status effect, debuff, and damage-over-time skills.
Each Stand also causes various changes in the dialogue and opens up special events and interactions both in and out of battle. For example, Ocean Blue is a Stand that uses long-range water-based attacks, which creates a special event in the battle against the Wheel of Fortune Stand when it attacks by shooting droplets of gasoline. Also, because water conducts the Ripple from Parts 1 and 2, it's possible to learn a unique Ripple-based attack from Joseph.
The slate of original Stands (playable and otherwise) is surprisingly diverse and probably the most impressive thing about the game. A few are clearly store-brand versions of canon Stands, but on the whole they avoid being Mary-Sue-like overpowered stuff that one might expect from a fan project. I could totally see "Quicksilver" or "The Joykiller" popping up as villains of the week in Parts 4-6.
The story, however, is what you might expect from a self-insert fix fic: it goes through the plot of Part 3, but with the player character standing off to the side and commenting on things. Your involvement is fundamentally limited and mostly consists of helping out in fights that characters generally handled solo in the manga. There are a handful of deviation points, though. Instead of Avdol, you can get "killed" by Hol Horse and head on a separate track of chapters through Saudi Arabia to buy a submarine. If you have enough relationship points with Kakyoin, you can believe him when he reveals he has carved the words "BABY STAND" into his arm with a knife. Depending on the specifics of your Stand, you can bypass certain obstacles altogether. Stuff like that.
Not to say there isn't a fair amount of original content in the game, of course. There's a persistent sub-plotline about how/why there's now a 7th Stand user that makes use of various concepts from elsewhere in the JoJo timeline, in a way where I reacted with "sure, alright" rather than "that's dumb". I can at least respect the gumption, you know?
Gameplay wise, between the big Stand fights there are hub zones where you can level grind, hang out with other party members, and do some minor sidequests that often involve original characters as sub-bosses. This is the main way you can fiddle with relationship values, which determine which ending you get. There's something like a dozen different endings, probably more.
Another point of interest for me was the option to play as Josuke from Part 4, which is my favorite arc of JoJo. There's a bit more specificity to Josuke's dialogue and unique events compared to the original protagonist, but not quite to the level that I wish there was. They end up saying "oh no, it happened too fast for us to do anything!" a lot since, well, the plot still has to happen the same way and Josuke's Stand would solve a lot a problems. It's also only available on a NG+ run, which brings up another issue...
Much of the bonus content and other interesting bits and bobs require you to beat the game multiple times. The "best" ending isn't even an option until you've gone through three full runs. The option to play as Josuke and the ability to skip cutscenes aren't available until the postgame developer's room (which you can only enter if you get specific endings), and unlocking them requires spending highly limited tokens that you also need to cash in to enter NG+ in the first place. It's dumb. I used Cheat Engine.
On the whole though, The 7th Stand User is an obvious labor of love, and I had a good time playing it despite my quibbles. I've been on a bit of a JoJo kick in the aftermath of the Part 6 anime ending (finally reading Steel Ball Run and such) and this helped scratch that itch and the JRPG itch at the same time. Might be worth a shot, even if just to see what Stand you get.
Each Stand also causes various changes in the dialogue and opens up special events and interactions both in and out of battle. For example, Ocean Blue is a Stand that uses long-range water-based attacks, which creates a special event in the battle against the Wheel of Fortune Stand when it attacks by shooting droplets of gasoline. Also, because water conducts the Ripple from Parts 1 and 2, it's possible to learn a unique Ripple-based attack from Joseph.
The slate of original Stands (playable and otherwise) is surprisingly diverse and probably the most impressive thing about the game. A few are clearly store-brand versions of canon Stands, but on the whole they avoid being Mary-Sue-like overpowered stuff that one might expect from a fan project. I could totally see "Quicksilver" or "The Joykiller" popping up as villains of the week in Parts 4-6.
The story, however, is what you might expect from a self-insert fix fic: it goes through the plot of Part 3, but with the player character standing off to the side and commenting on things. Your involvement is fundamentally limited and mostly consists of helping out in fights that characters generally handled solo in the manga. There are a handful of deviation points, though. Instead of Avdol, you can get "killed" by Hol Horse and head on a separate track of chapters through Saudi Arabia to buy a submarine. If you have enough relationship points with Kakyoin, you can believe him when he reveals he has carved the words "BABY STAND" into his arm with a knife. Depending on the specifics of your Stand, you can bypass certain obstacles altogether. Stuff like that.
Not to say there isn't a fair amount of original content in the game, of course. There's a persistent sub-plotline about how/why there's now a 7th Stand user that makes use of various concepts from elsewhere in the JoJo timeline, in a way where I reacted with "sure, alright" rather than "that's dumb". I can at least respect the gumption, you know?
Gameplay wise, between the big Stand fights there are hub zones where you can level grind, hang out with other party members, and do some minor sidequests that often involve original characters as sub-bosses. This is the main way you can fiddle with relationship values, which determine which ending you get. There's something like a dozen different endings, probably more.
Another point of interest for me was the option to play as Josuke from Part 4, which is my favorite arc of JoJo. There's a bit more specificity to Josuke's dialogue and unique events compared to the original protagonist, but not quite to the level that I wish there was. They end up saying "oh no, it happened too fast for us to do anything!" a lot since, well, the plot still has to happen the same way and Josuke's Stand would solve a lot a problems. It's also only available on a NG+ run, which brings up another issue...
Much of the bonus content and other interesting bits and bobs require you to beat the game multiple times. The "best" ending isn't even an option until you've gone through three full runs. The option to play as Josuke and the ability to skip cutscenes aren't available until the postgame developer's room (which you can only enter if you get specific endings), and unlocking them requires spending highly limited tokens that you also need to cash in to enter NG+ in the first place. It's dumb. I used Cheat Engine.
On the whole though, The 7th Stand User is an obvious labor of love, and I had a good time playing it despite my quibbles. I've been on a bit of a JoJo kick in the aftermath of the Part 6 anime ending (finally reading Steel Ball Run and such) and this helped scratch that itch and the JRPG itch at the same time. Might be worth a shot, even if just to see what Stand you get.
2022
Chained Echoes is a pizza with too many toppings
First: I enjoyed Chained Echoes. It's an incredibly well-made, polished product considering the small team. The battle system feels good, the systems are balanced to prevent a need for level-grinding, and it didn't start to drag until I started pursuing the optional superboss stuff in the endgame. If this came out five years ago, I'd probably be singing its praises.
The dev has echoed a common sentiment with many of these retro-inspired indie games, which is that they want to recreate how those games are in your memories - how they made you feel - rather than how they actually were. If Chained Echoes succeeds in this, it's only partially, because it reminded me of other games constantly.
It's got a pretty standard JRPG narrative, but I have nothing inherently against that (unlike G4). The cast is full of the broad archetypes you might expect - hesitant hero, rebellious princess, self-interested thief - doing the sorts of things you might expect. Monsters roam the countryside, the empire controls dangerous magic, and the Pope's inquisitors make cryptic statements to each other about Gods' true intention. I think there's plenty of room for another retro-inspired indie JRPG out there, but there might be such a thing as too inspired.
Literally from the moment I hit New Game up until the middle of the end credits, I found myself thinking, "Oh, this is just that thing from that other thing." It reads almost like an extended X-meets-Y marketing copy: WHAT IF... the plot from Xenogears, the party dynamics from FFVI, the geopolitics of the Ivalice Alliance, the event scripting from Chrono Trigger, the Giant of Babil from FFIV, the Mana Fortress from Secret of Mana, the final act from FFVII, the introductory missions from Wild ARMs, the Yevon church from FFX, the home base from Skies of Arcadia, plus a special mixture of secret herbs and spices... were all in the same game?? Any individual identity Chained Echoes has is subsumed by slavish adherence to its inspirations.
To clarify, I definitely wouldn't say any of this is plagiarism or anything, and they usually aren't tiresome "hey, remember X?" direct references. It's that the whole thing feels like like every Squaresoft RPG from the 1990s was pureed in a blender and poured into a SNES-shaped mold, kitbashed into some kind of Franken-game.
Sometimes, I take my mother to a chain restaurant called "Pieology", which is basically an assembly-line style (Subway, Chipotle, etc) fast food place for pizza. She puts every single topping she likes on the same pizza without considering why you might use a specific ingredient. If you separately enjoy parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella, pineapple, corn, cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic, cilantro, artichokes, olives, peppers... putting all of them together should be even better, right?
But you get something underbaked. It tastes like everything and thus tastes like nothing in particular. It's still recognizably pizza, and you like the pizza genre as a whole... but "it's pizza!" feels like the only intention behind it.
For example, Chained Echoes has mecha, which stand out next to the usual JRPG airship fare in its otherwise Ivalicean setting. Xenogears has mecha. But Xenogears (for all its faults) also has a sci-fi plot about the intersection of man, god, and machine; mecha are a deliberate narrative device to buoy those themes. Why does Chained Echoes have mecha? Because mecha were in Xenogears.
It's that feeling, every 20 minutes, for 35 hours.
I genuinely believe there isn't anything inherently wrong with being an imitative work. Something like Signalis wears its aesthetic inspirations on its sleeve, but makes use of them for its own thematic goals. Crystal Project is transparently a FFV-style job system battle simulator that doesn't pretend to have any lofty narrative ambitions. And Chained Echoes is a perfectly good indie JRPG... but I wish it were a bit more than that.
First: I enjoyed Chained Echoes. It's an incredibly well-made, polished product considering the small team. The battle system feels good, the systems are balanced to prevent a need for level-grinding, and it didn't start to drag until I started pursuing the optional superboss stuff in the endgame. If this came out five years ago, I'd probably be singing its praises.
The dev has echoed a common sentiment with many of these retro-inspired indie games, which is that they want to recreate how those games are in your memories - how they made you feel - rather than how they actually were. If Chained Echoes succeeds in this, it's only partially, because it reminded me of other games constantly.
It's got a pretty standard JRPG narrative, but I have nothing inherently against that (unlike G4). The cast is full of the broad archetypes you might expect - hesitant hero, rebellious princess, self-interested thief - doing the sorts of things you might expect. Monsters roam the countryside, the empire controls dangerous magic, and the Pope's inquisitors make cryptic statements to each other about Gods' true intention. I think there's plenty of room for another retro-inspired indie JRPG out there, but there might be such a thing as too inspired.
Literally from the moment I hit New Game up until the middle of the end credits, I found myself thinking, "Oh, this is just that thing from that other thing." It reads almost like an extended X-meets-Y marketing copy: WHAT IF... the plot from Xenogears, the party dynamics from FFVI, the geopolitics of the Ivalice Alliance, the event scripting from Chrono Trigger, the Giant of Babil from FFIV, the Mana Fortress from Secret of Mana, the final act from FFVII, the introductory missions from Wild ARMs, the Yevon church from FFX, the home base from Skies of Arcadia, plus a special mixture of secret herbs and spices... were all in the same game?? Any individual identity Chained Echoes has is subsumed by slavish adherence to its inspirations.
To clarify, I definitely wouldn't say any of this is plagiarism or anything, and they usually aren't tiresome "hey, remember X?" direct references. It's that the whole thing feels like like every Squaresoft RPG from the 1990s was pureed in a blender and poured into a SNES-shaped mold, kitbashed into some kind of Franken-game.
Sometimes, I take my mother to a chain restaurant called "Pieology", which is basically an assembly-line style (Subway, Chipotle, etc) fast food place for pizza. She puts every single topping she likes on the same pizza without considering why you might use a specific ingredient. If you separately enjoy parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella, pineapple, corn, cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic, cilantro, artichokes, olives, peppers... putting all of them together should be even better, right?
But you get something underbaked. It tastes like everything and thus tastes like nothing in particular. It's still recognizably pizza, and you like the pizza genre as a whole... but "it's pizza!" feels like the only intention behind it.
For example, Chained Echoes has mecha, which stand out next to the usual JRPG airship fare in its otherwise Ivalicean setting. Xenogears has mecha. But Xenogears (for all its faults) also has a sci-fi plot about the intersection of man, god, and machine; mecha are a deliberate narrative device to buoy those themes. Why does Chained Echoes have mecha? Because mecha were in Xenogears.
It's that feeling, every 20 minutes, for 35 hours.
I genuinely believe there isn't anything inherently wrong with being an imitative work. Something like Signalis wears its aesthetic inspirations on its sleeve, but makes use of them for its own thematic goals. Crystal Project is transparently a FFV-style job system battle simulator that doesn't pretend to have any lofty narrative ambitions. And Chained Echoes is a perfectly good indie JRPG... but I wish it were a bit more than that.
2022
There was a somewhat viral tweet calling it "the Hollow Knight of PS1 survival horror", I think. Which, lol, but... it is really dang good.
What I Liked
-The Vibes
No notes.
Okay, one note. As an alleged creative, I have a lot of anxiety around being too derivative of existing media. This game wears its influences on its sleeve and doesn't give a fuck and makes it all work.
-The story
Extremely vague in a way that I don't often enjoy, but did here. In a world where people unironically make lore videos about literally anything (and I'm sure there are plenty for Signalis already), this game is intentionally abstracted to the point where it's practically a fool's exercise to determine what parts are literal and what parts are figurative.
-It's short
Like 8 hours. Good length.
What I Didn't Like
-My own inability to understand German and Chinese
Nobody to blame but myself here, I guess.
What I'm ambivalent about
-The inventory
Six slots is incredibly restrictive, and while having to manage that is core to the gameplay texture, it crosses over into "blatantly tedious" a little too often. Maybe if the flashlight didn't take up a slot?
- The secret ending
My understanding is that it requires resources from outside the game to figure out, which seems kind of baffling in a game that literally has a screenshot item that takes up an inventory slot as if it's still on the PS1 where you couldn't simply take your own screenshots at any time.
What I Liked
-The Vibes
No notes.
Okay, one note. As an alleged creative, I have a lot of anxiety around being too derivative of existing media. This game wears its influences on its sleeve and doesn't give a fuck and makes it all work.
-The story
Extremely vague in a way that I don't often enjoy, but did here. In a world where people unironically make lore videos about literally anything (and I'm sure there are plenty for Signalis already), this game is intentionally abstracted to the point where it's practically a fool's exercise to determine what parts are literal and what parts are figurative.
-It's short
Like 8 hours. Good length.
What I Didn't Like
-My own inability to understand German and Chinese
Nobody to blame but myself here, I guess.
What I'm ambivalent about
-The inventory
Six slots is incredibly restrictive, and while having to manage that is core to the gameplay texture, it crosses over into "blatantly tedious" a little too often. Maybe if the flashlight didn't take up a slot?
- The secret ending
My understanding is that it requires resources from outside the game to figure out, which seems kind of baffling in a game that literally has a screenshot item that takes up an inventory slot as if it's still on the PS1 where you couldn't simply take your own screenshots at any time.
2022
Wow, yeah, this is pretty good!
What I Liked
-The exploration
Big honkin' ol' voxel world, and you can platform two (2) boxes high and three (3) boxes wide, which means that each time you get a new method of traversal it feels like a huge increase to your explorative capabilities. If you like exploring off in random corners and seeing what weird shit's there, this has a lot of that. The warp point limit (and I used the additional home points assist option) feels incredibly restrictive at first in a way that makes you appreciative of the world design later when it's no longer an issue.
Like, remember how in Dark Souls, you couldn't warp for the first half of the game, and that added a huge amount of texture to simply traversing to your next destination, and more importantly, back home after a major trip? Like, finding the bonfire in the bottom of Blighttown is a blessing because it's finally a bonfire and then a curse because now you're stuck in Blighttown? It's a little like that.
-The class system, most of the time
FF-style job system, right? If it ain't broke don't fix it. You get a main class with an active ability and passive bonuses and a sub-class's active ability. Support abilities are lumped into one big pool and each has a point cost, so there's some decent configuring to be had. I stuck with a tanky physical boy, a dex/agility DPS, an offensive spellcaster, and a healing/support caster, and it worked out most of the time.
-The battle system
Yum yum, give me that transparent turn order and damage numbers. I didn't get up to the kind of shenanigans I did in Bravely Default (Hasten World + Jump) but I had a few boss fights that came right down to the wire in a really satisfying way. I am always a fiend for Damage Over Time abilities and there are like three different kinds in this game fuck yeah.
-Assist options
No missable items is a nice one; there's a Lost 'n' Found vendor in the main city who sells all of the boss steal items and anything that was in a chest that wouldn't fit in your inventory. You can talk to an NPC and respec your level growths at any time, which is great for the kinds of people who would step on that one trap space in Final Fantasy Tactics that lowered your level, but you would do it with a crappy job with bad stat growths, so that you could level up again later with a higher tier job with better stat growths, thus achieving a net gain in stats. But I'm sure nobody would do this.
I turned on the multiple home points thing immediately, but in retrospect I might not have needed to. There are ways to configure the battle difficulty and to win minigames instantly and such (I will never race another Quintar again as long as I live). I also fiddled with the ones that let me configure EXP/Gold/Job Points rewards, which sort of leads me into...
What I Didn't Like
-The game is somewhat judgemental about you using the assist options
Once you turn them on, you can't turn them off, and each puts a permanent mark of shame on your save file. This is ridiculous. Just let me have the sliders set to 100% normally and let me move them up or down as I see fit, alright? Have a little trust.
-Long term progression is unreasonably tedious on Normal mode without using assist options (IMO)
Okay, so like, with this kind of JRPG, non-boss encounters are all about resource attrition, right? You don't want to use up all your healing items before you get to a boss, because you want to be as close to full power as you can. But you also need to fight them to get strong enough to fight the boss, so you can't just skip them all. It's the push and pull.
Encounters in this game will fuck you up. I assume I was pretty much on level curve, and I would often end bog-standard encounters with one or more party members downed or at low health. This is not bad in itself, but the game also has restrictive limits on how many restorative items you can carry, gold is fairly scarce, and equipment is expensive. By the time I was halfway-ish through the game, I was starting to dread reaching big new areas because I knew it would be a huge uphill climb.
Then I turned gold earned up to like, 150%? of normal. Enough to actually afford potions and at least one piece of the next equipment tier for the whole party. Suddenly everything got way more manageable, while staying tough.
-The map system
Specifically, the way it won't even show you where you are in the void if you don't have the map for that location. Look, fine, don't give me the minimap, but I deserve to know my relative location on the world map.
What I'm Ambivalent About
-The lack of story
It's not that there isn't a story, or that what's there doesn't do a decent job, but I could go for a little more meat here. For what it is, it's perfectly adequate, I guess. Just like, in Breath of the Wild or Souls/Elden Ring, the big-name "explore off in weird corners and see what shit's there" games, you often find things that tie back into the main plot and backstory and such or add flavor. In Crystal Project you might also find a sick sword, but it won't have a cool, evocative description that deepens your understanding of the world and its inhabitants. And that's fine, but I sorta wish wish it did, you know?
The only real exceptions to this I think are the final boss area and the secret boss questline. Except, because of how most of the game is, I feel like there's little point in thinking about it because nothing else seems to really have much going on narrative wise. I dunno.
-Long term class balance
There was never a moment where I felt like I learned a real game-changer of an ability. There's not really a Rapid Fire or Doublecast equivalent where you feel in your bones you need to beeline directly towards it (even though Doublecast is totally in the game, it has a bunch of caveats that make its usefulness limited to specific situations). The closest was probably theRed Mage Warlock passive that lets you regenerate 6 MP a turn for six turns every time you enter battle; never took that off my casters once I got it. Instead I got these moments more from finding or buying fancy equipment, which is neat but not something I felt like I had control over.
This isn't a bad thing per se, I think it's definitely by design to keep the classes balanced, but it does flatten the curve a bit. I didn't feel like my party had crystallized into true shitwreckers until, when I reached the level cap towards the end of the game, I decided I was done trying to fill out jobs, stripped my entire party naked, and respecced them all into what I felt were the best versions of themselves. Did pretty well after that.
In conclusion, Crystal Project is pretty good (IMO).
What I Liked
-The exploration
Big honkin' ol' voxel world, and you can platform two (2) boxes high and three (3) boxes wide, which means that each time you get a new method of traversal it feels like a huge increase to your explorative capabilities. If you like exploring off in random corners and seeing what weird shit's there, this has a lot of that. The warp point limit (and I used the additional home points assist option) feels incredibly restrictive at first in a way that makes you appreciative of the world design later when it's no longer an issue.
Like, remember how in Dark Souls, you couldn't warp for the first half of the game, and that added a huge amount of texture to simply traversing to your next destination, and more importantly, back home after a major trip? Like, finding the bonfire in the bottom of Blighttown is a blessing because it's finally a bonfire and then a curse because now you're stuck in Blighttown? It's a little like that.
-The class system, most of the time
FF-style job system, right? If it ain't broke don't fix it. You get a main class with an active ability and passive bonuses and a sub-class's active ability. Support abilities are lumped into one big pool and each has a point cost, so there's some decent configuring to be had. I stuck with a tanky physical boy, a dex/agility DPS, an offensive spellcaster, and a healing/support caster, and it worked out most of the time.
-The battle system
Yum yum, give me that transparent turn order and damage numbers. I didn't get up to the kind of shenanigans I did in Bravely Default (Hasten World + Jump) but I had a few boss fights that came right down to the wire in a really satisfying way. I am always a fiend for Damage Over Time abilities and there are like three different kinds in this game fuck yeah.
-Assist options
No missable items is a nice one; there's a Lost 'n' Found vendor in the main city who sells all of the boss steal items and anything that was in a chest that wouldn't fit in your inventory. You can talk to an NPC and respec your level growths at any time, which is great for the kinds of people who would step on that one trap space in Final Fantasy Tactics that lowered your level, but you would do it with a crappy job with bad stat growths, so that you could level up again later with a higher tier job with better stat growths, thus achieving a net gain in stats. But I'm sure nobody would do this.
I turned on the multiple home points thing immediately, but in retrospect I might not have needed to. There are ways to configure the battle difficulty and to win minigames instantly and such (I will never race another Quintar again as long as I live). I also fiddled with the ones that let me configure EXP/Gold/Job Points rewards, which sort of leads me into...
What I Didn't Like
-The game is somewhat judgemental about you using the assist options
Once you turn them on, you can't turn them off, and each puts a permanent mark of shame on your save file. This is ridiculous. Just let me have the sliders set to 100% normally and let me move them up or down as I see fit, alright? Have a little trust.
-Long term progression is unreasonably tedious on Normal mode without using assist options (IMO)
Okay, so like, with this kind of JRPG, non-boss encounters are all about resource attrition, right? You don't want to use up all your healing items before you get to a boss, because you want to be as close to full power as you can. But you also need to fight them to get strong enough to fight the boss, so you can't just skip them all. It's the push and pull.
Encounters in this game will fuck you up. I assume I was pretty much on level curve, and I would often end bog-standard encounters with one or more party members downed or at low health. This is not bad in itself, but the game also has restrictive limits on how many restorative items you can carry, gold is fairly scarce, and equipment is expensive. By the time I was halfway-ish through the game, I was starting to dread reaching big new areas because I knew it would be a huge uphill climb.
Then I turned gold earned up to like, 150%? of normal. Enough to actually afford potions and at least one piece of the next equipment tier for the whole party. Suddenly everything got way more manageable, while staying tough.
-The map system
Specifically, the way it won't even show you where you are in the void if you don't have the map for that location. Look, fine, don't give me the minimap, but I deserve to know my relative location on the world map.
What I'm Ambivalent About
-The lack of story
It's not that there isn't a story, or that what's there doesn't do a decent job, but I could go for a little more meat here. For what it is, it's perfectly adequate, I guess. Just like, in Breath of the Wild or Souls/Elden Ring, the big-name "explore off in weird corners and see what shit's there" games, you often find things that tie back into the main plot and backstory and such or add flavor. In Crystal Project you might also find a sick sword, but it won't have a cool, evocative description that deepens your understanding of the world and its inhabitants. And that's fine, but I sorta wish wish it did, you know?
The only real exceptions to this I think are the final boss area and the secret boss questline. Except, because of how most of the game is, I feel like there's little point in thinking about it because nothing else seems to really have much going on narrative wise. I dunno.
-Long term class balance
There was never a moment where I felt like I learned a real game-changer of an ability. There's not really a Rapid Fire or Doublecast equivalent where you feel in your bones you need to beeline directly towards it (even though Doublecast is totally in the game, it has a bunch of caveats that make its usefulness limited to specific situations). The closest was probably the
This isn't a bad thing per se, I think it's definitely by design to keep the classes balanced, but it does flatten the curve a bit. I didn't feel like my party had crystallized into true shitwreckers until, when I reached the level cap towards the end of the game, I decided I was done trying to fill out jobs, stripped my entire party naked, and respecced them all into what I felt were the best versions of themselves. Did pretty well after that.
In conclusion, Crystal Project is pretty good (IMO).
Well structured on the meta level; it's easy to see how Bioware decided they'd hit a winning formula and basically remade this game over and over. On the other hand, I mean, it's Star Wars, so everything's as generic as it comes.
2017
The best Supergiant game so far, IMO. Has some of the highest hang-out-itude levels I've seen in a Western game, which works particularly well with how Supergiant does narrative breadcrumbs, and the modular storytelling is an incredible feat.
2021
It's nice to have a slightly more mature protagonist in a game like this, and it's pretty rare that a game romance doesn't feel too forced. The nickel-and-dime DLC is miserable though, and the second half of the game is blatantly half-baked. I absolutely hooted and hollered when the OP started playing during a cutscene, though.
The true ending. It edges a little hard into wink-wink-nudge-nudge in-joke territory, but it's a party and we're all just here to have a good time. Delivers on the modular character stuff that 3 couldn't include in the main game and is a delight from start to finish.
Exactly what you want out of a 4-6 hour story DLC, and represents what makes Mass Effect 2 great. You heard about the Shadow Broker early on in 1, and looping back around to that and getting access to his files on all the major characters is a real treat.