About once a year I return to Frostpunk to get a handful of playthroughs in, mostly in the main scenario, but this wonderfully weird combination of survival game and city builder always tends to pull me back when I'm lacking in something else to play. It took me a little while to wrap my mind around the intricacies of its systems but it's thankfully a game that's still fun to learn even in failure.

The biggest compliment I can give to Frostpunk is that I originally played this game in the middle of summer, and by the end of my first session, the unyielding oppression of its frozen scenario left me positively freezing in real life. There's a genuine psychological effect to it that makes you absolutely feel like you're cold, even when it's 90 degrees outside. Never experienced anything like that before.

Balatro cracks the code of what a good, simple, and addictive video game should be. I've already lost more hours to this in the span of a few days than I care to admit, and I'm sure to spend many more collecting all 150 Jokers to complete my Jokerdex. That isn't even a joke.

If I could file one minor complaint, it's that Balatro isn't the greatest at explaining the finer nuances of its design; you're bound to lose a few runs in frustrating fashion while learning the ropes. One particular confusing element is that there are three separate facets of the game that all use the term "hand" - the number of hands you can play per round, your current hand of cards, and the hands of poker you score with. So when I came across a blind that said "You can only play one hand" I mistakenly assumed it meant "one type of hand" (ie full house, two pairs, etc.) and not "You get one hand to play, beat the score or lose the whole run." It's a minor frustration to be sure but one that could be mitigated with a little more clarity.

Now someone please make this game but with mahjong instead of poker and I can die a happy man.

dragon's dogma 1.3

it's like they forgot to add enemy variety, new good vocations, engaging boss battles, good music, varied combat styles, an intriguing plot, and a plethora of good enemies to fight.

amazing how a game from 12 years ago is better than the modern day sequel we've been waiting over a decade for.

great job itsuno you fucking hack

Having never played the first Dragon's Dogma, I was relatively surprised to see the buzz Dragon's Dogma 2 was receiving on social media up to and after its release. In addition to the normal marketing materials, users that had bought and played the game were almost uniformly glowing in their assessment of the title. Twitter was abound with clips of their exciting battles and exploits, and the phrase "Game of the Year" had been bandied about. Now, recency bias is a potent thing, but I was certainly intrigued by this reception. So, after making the conscious effort to temper my expectations, I bought the game and dove in.

There's a lot of elements to Dragon's Dogma 2 that impress. Chief among them is that the game has a complete and total commitment to immersion. Going through the quests, both side and main, demands an approach in which the player views them as events coherent with the world as if it was a real environment and not a complete work of artifice. The game leaves things up to the player's common sense to suss out, which is much more satisfying than endless prompts and quest markers that have become standard in open world games over the past couple of decades.

This is an attitude that permeates much of the game's design. Fast travel, while possible, is minimized in an effort to make players immerse themselves in the world. At times inconvenient mechanics such as encumbrance and the effort needed to make a safe campfire for resting are real concerns of would-be adventurers that other titles regularly choose to gloss over. Monsters aren't drones lurking in designated places doing nothing until activated by the player. Instead they are convincingly wild in the ways they show up unexpectedly in would-be "safe" areas such as towns, or they are much stronger and larger than the player could ever hope to be at the time of their chance encounter.

There's many more examples one could list, but when playing Dragon's Dogma 2 you feel like an adventurer in a fantasy world with all of the responsibilities that would entail. It's not always easy or glamorous, but that's why it's an adventure and not a theme park.

This approach to design is so respectable that it breaks my heart that the moment-to-moment gameplay of Dragon's Dogma 2 has been so utterly fumbled.

Combat is an integral part of the experience that no player could possibly hope to avoid, and yet it is so bland. Physical attacks carry no weight in their hits, magic barely registers as connecting, and monster health pools can be so large that encounters regularly feel like slogs. The pawns one can hire have the potential to carry the player even while below their level, thereby removing any feeling of contributing to a fight at all.

While problematic on its own, this flaw is doubly severe in how it compounds the issues Dragon's Dogma 2 already has. With players not having so many fast travel options, at least in the early game, they will be traveling on foot quite often. This, in turn, means they will be getting into many combat encounters. Exploration is thereby discouraged, as excursions out into the wild bring with them the drudgery of combat. In turn, viewing monsters as boring instead of threatening shatters the immersion the fast travel decision was supposed to promote in the first place.

This is not the only example of poor game design clashing with the mission statement of the game. Pawns, as a system, are a baffling choice to me. The developers want players to feel engrossed in their world, but the pawn system is one of the most grossly artificial I could conceive of. While there are in-universe explanations for their existence, the amount of player-made mommies I encountered with immersion breaking names scuttled that meager effort almost instantly.

It's not only the intrusion of other players' inclinations into my fantasy world that makes the pawn system a poor design choice. The adventuring party, as a concept, has been central to the RPG genre all the way back to early titles like the first Final Fantasy. The appeal of the party as a mechanic is two fold: In terms of gameplay, one can balance their approach with characters of different specializations. In terms of story, many players enjoy growing alongside and getting to know their certain characters over a game's runtime. The pawn system of Dragon's Dogma 2 executes the first premise decently enough, though it's not so necessary when the player can change their own class so easily, but it actively bungles the second.

With half of my party so blatantly being temporary, man-made golems instead of anything resembling a character it is so hard to accept the party as a legitimate, in-world construction. If I am constantly going to be reminded that most of the people on screen come from the world of XxDickSucker420xX, how in the world is a restricted amount of fast travel going to draw me into the world of the game?

And boy, one will be reminded of that often. The pawns in this game chatter incessantly. They chat about elements of mild import to the player, such as locations of items, and they also chat about absolutely nothing often to comedic effect. The former has its uses, though I still would prefer it toned down in frequency, but the latter is incredibly misguided. For party chatter to be interesting, the party needs to have personality. Pawns, by design, have no personality.

The artificiality of it all cannot be ignored. Even the name, pawn, drives home the point that these are beings with no humanity. So then, why is the game so insistent on contradicting that with attempts at endearment to the player?

The pawn dialogue highlights a separate issue: the writing. The outmoded form of English chosen for the game's dialogue is incredibly jarring. Other series of games and certainly other works from other mediums have certainly gone down this road before; "old English" is nothing new to people who have been around the block. But Dragon's Dogma 2 sticks out as uniquely weird in its phrasing. Rather than sounding natural the dialogue reads as a deliberate attempt at old English.

I'm not particularly interested in discussions of the accuracy of the words themselves. Art exists as a deliberate work by, and as such it is graded on the impressions of legitimacy, taste, and sense it leaves rather than its actual accuracy. Maybe people really did run around saying "yon chest", but in this game it comes across as ham-fisted.

Doubly jarring is the disconnect between this localization and the game's native Japanese. I played with English subtitles to a Japanese dub. I speak both languages. The dub had no attempt at using an archaic, period form of Japanese. To state the obvious, such a thing does exist and has been used for period pieces in the past. Localization discussions are simultaneously outside of my interest and above my pay grade, so all I'll say is that when a script constantly makes me incredulously cock an eyebrow, I am once again being drawn out of the game's world rather than the reverse.

There are other, smaller issues with Dragon's Dogma 2. The design of the monochromatic minimap is not at all a wise choice for dense areas such as towns; spell targeting is finicky at best; and the camera draws in too close during combat to properly see enemies. These, however, are not glaring flaws. No game is perfect, and most foibles are easily forgotten.

The reason I find Dragon's Dogma 2 to be so disappointing is that there is a clear indication of what the developers wanted to do with their game and how they wanted the player to experience it. The clashing of that intent with various mechanical decisions is a death knell, and a good example for others on how games must be coherent packages if they are to rise to the top of their field.

Deeply flawed yet eminently enjoyable.

Dark Cloud 2 is a game I've had an affinity for for quite a long time, and just recently I played it for the first time in 15 years. The amount of flaws in the game was staggering so I wanted to take moment to briefly recount them.

To start, the inventory system of the game is possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. The player collects so, so many items throughout the adventure in a variety of types. There's quest items, weapons, battle items, healing items, status items, crafting materials, upgrade materials, fishing materials, fish, etc. etc. All of these things co-mingle in the same inventory with no auto-arrangement options. Over the course of the game the inventory balloons to an unusable girth, and manually organizing things becomes a chore.

Crafting is such a fundamental mechanic of the game that a cumbersome inventory system is not only unforgivable (Spoiler alert: I end up forgiving this flaw) but mind-boggling in how the inventory made it out the door looking the way it does.

A second issue with the game is the implementation of the literal world-building mechanic relative to the first game. The Georamas were never too intricate in Dark Cloud 1 (DCX for the PlayStation fans) but they did go a bit further in the various requests of the citizens that the player had to keep in mind when arranging the cities of land. There was also that delightful totem pole puzzle in the desert area.

The city building in Dark Cloud 2, however, is pretty mindless. There's a reason for this: the amount of structures the player can build is largely uncapped. Let's look at an example:

In the volcanic area of the game there are a few buildings that need to be built a certain way. One needs to be elevated a few blocks in height, which entails committing materials to building those elevator blocks and then placing the house on top of it. So I did this, and when it came time to move a particular NPC into the village, I found that he needed a special house with a fence built around it.

In Dark Cloud 1, I'd have a conundrum here. I would need to construct more blocks around the house to allow room for the fence to also be built up a few stories high. However, in Dark Cloud 2, I can just build an entirely separate house on ground level, easily build a fence around it, and move the NPC into it with nobody occupying the higher-up structure.

By removing the cap on structures players can dedicate one house to each "building requirement", where before the very slight difficulty of the building sections came from balancing all of the requirements within the limited number of structures.

There are precisely two attempts to do something interesting with the building: One is a city that has to be built on four plateaus that rise and sink depending on the number of houses on them (???) and thus the player has to equally build on all to create a perfectly flat ground. The other is the final building section of the game that tasks the player with rebuilding a garden to the exact specifications laid out in a few portraits they can find in the nearby dungeon.

While these approach the more thoughtful usage of the building mechanics in the first game, neither is that mentally demanding nor engaging.

One is left thinking why they brought this mechanic back at all. Did Dark Cloud have that much star power that they needed to brand this as a sequel with ham-fisted legacy mechanics instead of just making a new game unburdened by what kids in Blockbuster perceived as "discount Zelda"?

Almost everything to do with the story of Dark Cloud 2 is another misfire. The voice acting ranges from mid to awful, and the awkward load times of the PlayStation 2 ensure that cutscenes never run smoothly. There are frequently awkward pauses as the next line of dialogue loads that produce unintended comedy as characters just stand around in otherwise dire situations.

A significant element of the story is time travel, and Dark Cloud 2 has some of the least thought-out time travel mechanics seen yet in games. There is no attempt to logically think through what time travel would mean in-world insofar as causality and logic. I'm fine engaging a game on its own level when it comes to these things rather than missing the point by nitpicking, but the way time travel is handled in this game is just so illogical that it can be difficult to accept at times for anyone who has engaged with the idea before in any other form.

The rest of the writing, too, is off. It's incredibly juvenile, which is of course fine were the game to be good for kids, but I the mechanics of Dark Cloud 2 are just one step above what most children would find approachable or even possible to engage with. The mismatch of the mechanical depth and the maturity of the writing produces some amount of cognitive dissonance.

And man are there just so many mechanics! At the base level there's world-building and weapon crafting, both fundamental to the completion of the game. But there is also photography, invention, monster recruitment, fishing, fish breeding, fish racing, golf (???), and robot customization. All of these exist in varying degrees of completion of depth, and none of them are particularly engaging. The dominant strategy of completing this game seems to lie in choosing just one of these, whichever you find the most fun, and forgetting all of the others exist.

And yet the core gameplay loop of this game is just so satisfying to me. Running through samey floors of dungeons, wiping out enemies, building up your weapons until they evolve (???) into another weapon, saving the nearby city until all of its inhabitants are happy, it's something I could do for hours. Despite all of the flaws listed above, I was incredibly disappointed when the game concluded after only 35 hours.

The Dark Cloud series will never win any awards nor be put on any best-of lists, but it is one whose gameplay resonates so completely with me as an individual. I love these games; I love playing them despite all of their warts. It may take a special kind of autism, but if you enjoy rote dungeon crawling, I recommend this game with my entire being.

Look at me...
I will never pass for a perfect bride
or a perfect daughter...

Can it beeee
I'm not meant to playyy this paaaart

Now I see
that if I were truly to be myself
I would break my family's heart

WHOOO IS THAT GIRL III SEEEE
STARING STRAIGHT
BACK AT MEEE
WHY IS MY IS RELECTION SOMEONE IIIII DON'T KNOWWWW

SOMEHOWWW I CANNOT HIDE
WHO I AM
THOUGH I'VE TRIED

WHEN WILL MY REFLECTION SHOWWWW WHO I AM INSIIIIIIIIDE

when will my reflection show who i am
insiiiide