2015
I haven't played any other FromSoft game very deeply (I've got 20 hours in Sekiro but never made it past the Butterfly/Seven Spears/Snake Eyes/Genichiro roadblock) so it's not an authoritative take if I say it's the best of their modern catalog - instead, I'll just say it's one of my favorite pieces of lore point blank regardless of medium.
I've watched Jan Ochoa and Brad Shoemaker play through various amounts of this game for Giant Bomb, watched Natalie Watson's entire play through on Waypoint. I've watched the entirety of Aegon of Astoria's Let's Talk Lore series, which covers every inch of the level design, item descriptions and dialogue minutiae over the course of nearly 40 hours of gameplay and conversation. I've read most of Redgrave's The Paleblood Hunt, a sort of fan novelization and compendium of Bloodborne's lore.
In other words, I DEVOUR this shit. Hell, it's not even just the lore - there's something fundamental in Bloodborne that I can't get enough of thinking about. When I first played it, I went down a seven hour death spiral in which I kept trying to clear all of Central Yharnam in a single go (in other words, I am awful at video games) only to barely make it to the town square on most attempts. Again, seven hours beating my head against a challenge the game didn't even ask of me; when I finally stumbled into a boss arena and realized that only THEN could I accrue XP and level up, I smiled.
I doubt any other game could have elicited a smile from me in that moment.
To this day I've started the game over three separate times, with my most recent save being the first time I surpassed Micolash. I brute force this game and I'm not afraid to admit it - I'm often too stressed out by this game to play it, hence why this is as far as I've made it on my own and why it's been a while since I've tried to fight further (the Nightmare suuuuuuuucks). I'll likely never beat this game. I can't put so much as a dent into any of the Old Hunters, either.
Shame, 'cause it's like perfect or whatever.
I've watched Jan Ochoa and Brad Shoemaker play through various amounts of this game for Giant Bomb, watched Natalie Watson's entire play through on Waypoint. I've watched the entirety of Aegon of Astoria's Let's Talk Lore series, which covers every inch of the level design, item descriptions and dialogue minutiae over the course of nearly 40 hours of gameplay and conversation. I've read most of Redgrave's The Paleblood Hunt, a sort of fan novelization and compendium of Bloodborne's lore.
In other words, I DEVOUR this shit. Hell, it's not even just the lore - there's something fundamental in Bloodborne that I can't get enough of thinking about. When I first played it, I went down a seven hour death spiral in which I kept trying to clear all of Central Yharnam in a single go (in other words, I am awful at video games) only to barely make it to the town square on most attempts. Again, seven hours beating my head against a challenge the game didn't even ask of me; when I finally stumbled into a boss arena and realized that only THEN could I accrue XP and level up, I smiled.
I doubt any other game could have elicited a smile from me in that moment.
To this day I've started the game over three separate times, with my most recent save being the first time I surpassed Micolash. I brute force this game and I'm not afraid to admit it - I'm often too stressed out by this game to play it, hence why this is as far as I've made it on my own and why it's been a while since I've tried to fight further (the Nightmare suuuuuuuucks). I'll likely never beat this game. I can't put so much as a dent into any of the Old Hunters, either.
Shame, 'cause it's like perfect or whatever.
[Editor's note: I wrote this blog for Giant Bomb in February of 2019, attempting to get to the bottom of exactly what was so disappointing about Andromeda removed from the launch drama of performance issues and glitches. Some formatting likely won't make it over, apologies. The opening paragraph refers to a blog I wrote upon finishing Red Dead Redemption 2 that I won't be copying over to this website until I figure out if I can post it separate from the bullet point review I did post, as I've grown to feel a bit differently than I did while writing that blog. Enjoy!]
OVERDOSING IN THE VOID: MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA AND THE DISEASE OF MORE
First of all, apologies for using the phrase "disease of more" in the title of two blogs in a row. Unfortunately I find the phrase applies to so many variations of an idea you otherwise can't articulate - or don't hear argued for - that often: the idea that something can be so good it's bad. As a brief refresher for those unfamiliar with the phrase, it's meant to explain how successful/championship level sports teams manage to become worse without any significant changes to their character other than having previously reached the height of achievement in their sport.
Now, it's reasonable to argue Bioware, unlike Rockstar San Diego, had already experienced this phenomenon prior to Andromeda's release. Mass Effect 3 sacrificed clever, character-driven storytelling in favor of satisfying the series' intimidating premise that a trilogy of games would conclude with tailored responses to all of the questions you'd answered. I've never played the Dragon Age series, but my impression of those games is: the second had a lukewarm reception overall, and Inquisition featured much of the content creep that defines Andromeda's worst impulses while also featuring on many's game of the year lists.
If Inquisition had a lot, at least it seemed to have had All That on Bioware's usual terms. Andromeda, meanwhile, is a singularly exhausting experience. Even after several patches allowing for things like semi-normal facial animation, skipping the transition scene between each and every planet (but not system) in the galaxy and whatever else they fixed, two years later Andromeda suffers from a fantastic amount of bloat. One can't help but wonder if this team had just focused on one aspect of their game - mainly, the colonization of a new system - if they wouldn't have been onto something truly special.
Why did I complete Andromeda? Well, like Jeff said to Brad during a podcast a couple weeks after the game's release in response to Brad's lamenting he had played - and would continue to play - far more Andromeda than he'd ever expected to, I was looking for one more hit of Good Mass Effect. Personally, I found the opening hour highly compelling, actually. I loved how high the stakes were while also being contained within a small bubble of a story. I was upset when the father died because it was interesting to consider a Mass Effect in which your character's opinion isn't the one everyone in the galaxy abides by.
I think people forget how unique that first hour feels for a Bioware game because the following hours quickly diffuse that notion as alien creatures immediately understand the five separate languages of human, turian, krogan, salarian, asari and angaara (and this isn't hand-waved away until some small side dialogue sprinkled across side quests) and the player character quickly becomes a known quantity. I wish the idea of a "Pathfinder" had been a confusing notion for the native races throughout the storyline.
I also found the final two hours to be a neat return to that dark, small sort of space. I won't spoiler tag here, because I've said The Final Two Hours - The Final Two Hours. The writing doesn't muscle any of these ideas across the goal line necessarily, nor do the cutscenes sell any of what's going on, but Bioware had some ideas there. Archon severing Ryder's connection to SAM, Ryder nearly killing herself to awaken the Remnant fleet (after already dying three separate times only to be revived by SAM), all the colonies making a push on Meridian, and the hints of DLC to come...it's almost enough to forget that I ignored the main storyline for nearly 25 hours to hunt a bunch of outcast settlements down, track dozens of quests that had me jumping from planet to Nexus to planet to Tempest as if space travel and load times were inconsequential.
Andromeda opened enough interesting spaces that it's actually a bit sad the whole thing got shut down. If I could argue Red Dead Redemption was the Worst Good Game due to its long development cycle allowing its teams to overthink certain aspects of their game, Andromeda is famously a game that's Just Good Enough set in a universe that deserves far better, hamstrung by a publisher that unlike Take Two would rather half-bake a thing and get its money back than make sure the quality is there.
Is the writing bad? Kinda. Yes, mostly. Is the acting bad? It's certainly boring! Are the cutscenes hard to understand by modern standards? For sure. Is the combat a saving grace? Actually, it's kind of awkward, though Singularity + Charge + Nova + Krogan Hammer is still an endlessly satisfying loop. Still, there is something there in the general setting/theme of the game, the opening and the closing hours, and just taking some time to be in a world where they say a bunch of Mass Effect Words that it's disarmingly easy to overlook just how big a waste of time this game is. Queuing up a podcast, turning on subtitles, turning down the volume and just going with it is a little too much like comfort food, bad for your health and just mildly satisfying enough to take another bite.
I feel like the question of whether Mass Effect: Andromeda is worth it on any of its many deep discount sales comes up every time its on sale; I say buy it! I bought this game for $7.99 nearly a year ago on PSN and only just gathered the strength to play it during the lapse between Mass Alex season 1 and 2 because I don't have a working controller for my PS3 to play the original series. I wrung 70-80 hours out of this mess and only really ever hated myself because the mob had made me feel like I should. Will this game make you lament the fact that no truly great Mass Effect game is scheduled for any time soon? Yes, but it might also make you a bit disappointed in how fierce the reaction was to this game initially.
The team at Bioware Montreal famously received mock reviews in the 80+% range and breathed a sigh of relief, content that the game they'd made wouldn't be what fans were expecting, but like the leap from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 they would be able to polish their rough edges and deliver a work worthy of the promise the IP offered. Having finally played Andromeda, I unexpectedly find myself wishing that were still the future of the franchise.
It may have been a cheap trick, the final revelations of SAM and the Ryder Family Secrets paired with the hints at DLC during the epilogue, but I can't help myself pondering over who the benefactor is and why the last ark became so difficult to track down. I also am totally interested in where my choices would have led - SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS - as I let the salarian ark's traitor go free in exchange for his information about the kett, accepted the Primus' kill code and used it, made the Moshae ambassador and let Sloane maintain rule over Reyes. Who knows whatever choices I forget - weirdly, though the game treated almost all of these flatly and unceremoniously (often without any musical cues at all!) I still care about them.
Damn this brand and its inherent goodness. I hope it comes back, even if it sucks again.
OVERDOSING IN THE VOID: MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDA AND THE DISEASE OF MORE
First of all, apologies for using the phrase "disease of more" in the title of two blogs in a row. Unfortunately I find the phrase applies to so many variations of an idea you otherwise can't articulate - or don't hear argued for - that often: the idea that something can be so good it's bad. As a brief refresher for those unfamiliar with the phrase, it's meant to explain how successful/championship level sports teams manage to become worse without any significant changes to their character other than having previously reached the height of achievement in their sport.
Now, it's reasonable to argue Bioware, unlike Rockstar San Diego, had already experienced this phenomenon prior to Andromeda's release. Mass Effect 3 sacrificed clever, character-driven storytelling in favor of satisfying the series' intimidating premise that a trilogy of games would conclude with tailored responses to all of the questions you'd answered. I've never played the Dragon Age series, but my impression of those games is: the second had a lukewarm reception overall, and Inquisition featured much of the content creep that defines Andromeda's worst impulses while also featuring on many's game of the year lists.
If Inquisition had a lot, at least it seemed to have had All That on Bioware's usual terms. Andromeda, meanwhile, is a singularly exhausting experience. Even after several patches allowing for things like semi-normal facial animation, skipping the transition scene between each and every planet (but not system) in the galaxy and whatever else they fixed, two years later Andromeda suffers from a fantastic amount of bloat. One can't help but wonder if this team had just focused on one aspect of their game - mainly, the colonization of a new system - if they wouldn't have been onto something truly special.
Why did I complete Andromeda? Well, like Jeff said to Brad during a podcast a couple weeks after the game's release in response to Brad's lamenting he had played - and would continue to play - far more Andromeda than he'd ever expected to, I was looking for one more hit of Good Mass Effect. Personally, I found the opening hour highly compelling, actually. I loved how high the stakes were while also being contained within a small bubble of a story. I was upset when the father died because it was interesting to consider a Mass Effect in which your character's opinion isn't the one everyone in the galaxy abides by.
I think people forget how unique that first hour feels for a Bioware game because the following hours quickly diffuse that notion as alien creatures immediately understand the five separate languages of human, turian, krogan, salarian, asari and angaara (and this isn't hand-waved away until some small side dialogue sprinkled across side quests) and the player character quickly becomes a known quantity. I wish the idea of a "Pathfinder" had been a confusing notion for the native races throughout the storyline.
I also found the final two hours to be a neat return to that dark, small sort of space. I won't spoiler tag here, because I've said The Final Two Hours - The Final Two Hours. The writing doesn't muscle any of these ideas across the goal line necessarily, nor do the cutscenes sell any of what's going on, but Bioware had some ideas there. Archon severing Ryder's connection to SAM, Ryder nearly killing herself to awaken the Remnant fleet (after already dying three separate times only to be revived by SAM), all the colonies making a push on Meridian, and the hints of DLC to come...it's almost enough to forget that I ignored the main storyline for nearly 25 hours to hunt a bunch of outcast settlements down, track dozens of quests that had me jumping from planet to Nexus to planet to Tempest as if space travel and load times were inconsequential.
Andromeda opened enough interesting spaces that it's actually a bit sad the whole thing got shut down. If I could argue Red Dead Redemption was the Worst Good Game due to its long development cycle allowing its teams to overthink certain aspects of their game, Andromeda is famously a game that's Just Good Enough set in a universe that deserves far better, hamstrung by a publisher that unlike Take Two would rather half-bake a thing and get its money back than make sure the quality is there.
Is the writing bad? Kinda. Yes, mostly. Is the acting bad? It's certainly boring! Are the cutscenes hard to understand by modern standards? For sure. Is the combat a saving grace? Actually, it's kind of awkward, though Singularity + Charge + Nova + Krogan Hammer is still an endlessly satisfying loop. Still, there is something there in the general setting/theme of the game, the opening and the closing hours, and just taking some time to be in a world where they say a bunch of Mass Effect Words that it's disarmingly easy to overlook just how big a waste of time this game is. Queuing up a podcast, turning on subtitles, turning down the volume and just going with it is a little too much like comfort food, bad for your health and just mildly satisfying enough to take another bite.
I feel like the question of whether Mass Effect: Andromeda is worth it on any of its many deep discount sales comes up every time its on sale; I say buy it! I bought this game for $7.99 nearly a year ago on PSN and only just gathered the strength to play it during the lapse between Mass Alex season 1 and 2 because I don't have a working controller for my PS3 to play the original series. I wrung 70-80 hours out of this mess and only really ever hated myself because the mob had made me feel like I should. Will this game make you lament the fact that no truly great Mass Effect game is scheduled for any time soon? Yes, but it might also make you a bit disappointed in how fierce the reaction was to this game initially.
The team at Bioware Montreal famously received mock reviews in the 80+% range and breathed a sigh of relief, content that the game they'd made wouldn't be what fans were expecting, but like the leap from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 they would be able to polish their rough edges and deliver a work worthy of the promise the IP offered. Having finally played Andromeda, I unexpectedly find myself wishing that were still the future of the franchise.
It may have been a cheap trick, the final revelations of SAM and the Ryder Family Secrets paired with the hints at DLC during the epilogue, but I can't help myself pondering over who the benefactor is and why the last ark became so difficult to track down. I also am totally interested in where my choices would have led - SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS - as I let the salarian ark's traitor go free in exchange for his information about the kett, accepted the Primus' kill code and used it, made the Moshae ambassador and let Sloane maintain rule over Reyes. Who knows whatever choices I forget - weirdly, though the game treated almost all of these flatly and unceremoniously (often without any musical cues at all!) I still care about them.
Damn this brand and its inherent goodness. I hope it comes back, even if it sucks again.
2018
I've never been, quote unquote, a comic book guy. I owned some Johnny Quest, Spider-Man, G.I. Joe and X-Men comics same as any other budding nerd in the mid90s (shoutout Jonah Hill) but I wasn't ever rushing to the comic book store for one issue or another despite living just up the block from the best comic book store in town. I was, in this way, the perfect mark for what has become the Marvel industrial complex - the kid who loved their IP mostly through other media and was just waiting for the right confluence of circumstances to fall in love.
I have a lot of strong thoughts about Peter Parker, for someone who could count the number of comics he'd read on less than two hands if he could even remember their titles. He's at his best as a character between the ages of 17 and 24, he belongs with Mary Jane but Gwen ought to be teasing him for it and his stories will always, always be at their best when they capitalize on the core of Spider-Man's appeal.
Unlike other superheroes, Spider-Man is a broke kid from Queens who just so happened to get bit by a radioactive spider and become maybe the most effective, well-rounded superhero of all-time. That's a lot to put on a high schooler who's also just going through puberty and struggling to make friends, or a college kid who's too smart for his own good yet too goofy to realize he has massive sex appeal ('cause, y'know, he's ripped and mysterious at a smart kid school and all that). You take this central dilemma and pair it off against mentors, confidantes and office rivals and you've got the perfect template for taking wholly relatable troubles with coming of age and entering the world of adulthood and wrapping them up in a fantastic, larger than life shell (covered in gooey, icky webbing - subtext!).
Marvel's Spider-Man, more than any property aside from perhaps Sam Raimi's first two films, fucking GET IT. Peter is both certainly goofy looking (pre-patch, anyway) and undeniably hot, he's got a mess of a personal life but he can handle a supervillain like they're house chores. The villains aren't manifest evil or tyrants out to take over the world - they're his idols, the people who made him realize exactly what Uncle Ben meant when he said with great power comes great responsibility. In that case, it's also a story of systems crashing down on men who just can't deal with them anymore, of Peter having to watch those men fail to live up to his image of them...and then you do a lot of punchy punchy. Perhaps a silly resolution to weighty subject matter, but boys will be boys.
In other words, Insomniac's take on Peter Parker, let alone Spider-Man, ought to be considered absolutely perfect; I think back on 2018 and seem to remember I ranked the game third or fourth on my Giant Bomb Game of the Year ballot (user edition), baffled at my hubris. Yeah, God of War was stellar and Red Dead Redemption 2 was a monolith, but Marvel's Spider-Man is a top to bottom MASTERWORK. I can't possibly imagine Insomniac can match this portrayal of the character, but I'm so excited to see them try.
Oh, and the game plays pretty damn good, too. 100% New Game Plus on Ultimate difficulty, holler at me.
I have a lot of strong thoughts about Peter Parker, for someone who could count the number of comics he'd read on less than two hands if he could even remember their titles. He's at his best as a character between the ages of 17 and 24, he belongs with Mary Jane but Gwen ought to be teasing him for it and his stories will always, always be at their best when they capitalize on the core of Spider-Man's appeal.
Unlike other superheroes, Spider-Man is a broke kid from Queens who just so happened to get bit by a radioactive spider and become maybe the most effective, well-rounded superhero of all-time. That's a lot to put on a high schooler who's also just going through puberty and struggling to make friends, or a college kid who's too smart for his own good yet too goofy to realize he has massive sex appeal ('cause, y'know, he's ripped and mysterious at a smart kid school and all that). You take this central dilemma and pair it off against mentors, confidantes and office rivals and you've got the perfect template for taking wholly relatable troubles with coming of age and entering the world of adulthood and wrapping them up in a fantastic, larger than life shell (covered in gooey, icky webbing - subtext!).
Marvel's Spider-Man, more than any property aside from perhaps Sam Raimi's first two films, fucking GET IT. Peter is both certainly goofy looking (pre-patch, anyway) and undeniably hot, he's got a mess of a personal life but he can handle a supervillain like they're house chores. The villains aren't manifest evil or tyrants out to take over the world - they're his idols, the people who made him realize exactly what Uncle Ben meant when he said with great power comes great responsibility. In that case, it's also a story of systems crashing down on men who just can't deal with them anymore, of Peter having to watch those men fail to live up to his image of them...and then you do a lot of punchy punchy. Perhaps a silly resolution to weighty subject matter, but boys will be boys.
In other words, Insomniac's take on Peter Parker, let alone Spider-Man, ought to be considered absolutely perfect; I think back on 2018 and seem to remember I ranked the game third or fourth on my Giant Bomb Game of the Year ballot (user edition), baffled at my hubris. Yeah, God of War was stellar and Red Dead Redemption 2 was a monolith, but Marvel's Spider-Man is a top to bottom MASTERWORK. I can't possibly imagine Insomniac can match this portrayal of the character, but I'm so excited to see them try.
Oh, and the game plays pretty damn good, too. 100% New Game Plus on Ultimate difficulty, holler at me.
Always great to see Miles get some shine, and his Venom/stealth powers are a cool twist on the formula of the first game, though it raises questions about how you up the ante for Peter in the next full game, especially if we're to assume Miles will be playable as well. Nadji Jeter gives a wonderful performance that well and proper separates this Miles from Shameik Moore's big screen alternative, while Troy Baker has more fun than he's had in a while as world class shitbag Simon Krieger.
And, y'know, don't really need to say anything about the gameplay otherwise, it's the swingin' and punchin' that worked so well just a couple years prior. What ain't broke and all that.
Still, I have to vent something. A lot of people liked to puff up their chest and claim this game was better than the first game because it was more concise and carried less fat. I just don't see it. The pacing of this story is a little hurried due to its smaller scale - many seemed to like that very little was left to simmer or linger in this story, but for me it gave me a little more of a Rockstar campaign kind of vibe, where certain cutscenes would completely catch me off guard with their extremely high stakes.
Likewise, no fat, really? The found sound sampling mini-game is utter garbage, while the FNSM app merely backgrounds the constant neighborhood petty crime that makes Spider-Man feel like Spider-Man. It obscures the problem of Spider-Man IGNORING active crimes, but I'm not convinced it solves that problem, either. There's also still all those postcards to collect, a pretty similar number of hideouts, secret chests, labs to sabotage and training sequences to complete...all I'm saying is, Miles Morales is both a choppier narrative while still offering up plenty of flabby, completionist affairs in the gameplay.
But that's just me being petty and wanting better for my guy Miles. The bar was set so high with Peter's 2018 outing that I can't be satisfied until Miles gets the same attention to detail and emotional arc - they try with The Tinkerer, but that relationship isn't given enough time to grow and ultimately makes them look needlessly impulsive more often than not for the sake of forward momentum.
Some of the boss fights are pretty gimmicky as well, but I suppose it's remarkable Spider-Man 2018's bosses mostly felt as natural as they did given the history of superhero boss fights.
This all reads like I'm more down on Miles Morales' first major video game than I am, but as I said I just want the best for your boy, as most Spidey fans do, and it seemed to me we were all a bit desperate to laud his game as a classic given the overwhelming context of the real world relative to this game's release date, just two weeks after a (...probably...?) monumental election.
Miles in many ways felt bigger than Spider-Man in that moment, but in the afterglow of hindsight I think we can take his Spider-game much higher than it is here.
And, y'know, don't really need to say anything about the gameplay otherwise, it's the swingin' and punchin' that worked so well just a couple years prior. What ain't broke and all that.
Still, I have to vent something. A lot of people liked to puff up their chest and claim this game was better than the first game because it was more concise and carried less fat. I just don't see it. The pacing of this story is a little hurried due to its smaller scale - many seemed to like that very little was left to simmer or linger in this story, but for me it gave me a little more of a Rockstar campaign kind of vibe, where certain cutscenes would completely catch me off guard with their extremely high stakes.
Likewise, no fat, really? The found sound sampling mini-game is utter garbage, while the FNSM app merely backgrounds the constant neighborhood petty crime that makes Spider-Man feel like Spider-Man. It obscures the problem of Spider-Man IGNORING active crimes, but I'm not convinced it solves that problem, either. There's also still all those postcards to collect, a pretty similar number of hideouts, secret chests, labs to sabotage and training sequences to complete...all I'm saying is, Miles Morales is both a choppier narrative while still offering up plenty of flabby, completionist affairs in the gameplay.
But that's just me being petty and wanting better for my guy Miles. The bar was set so high with Peter's 2018 outing that I can't be satisfied until Miles gets the same attention to detail and emotional arc - they try with The Tinkerer, but that relationship isn't given enough time to grow and ultimately makes them look needlessly impulsive more often than not for the sake of forward momentum.
Some of the boss fights are pretty gimmicky as well, but I suppose it's remarkable Spider-Man 2018's bosses mostly felt as natural as they did given the history of superhero boss fights.
This all reads like I'm more down on Miles Morales' first major video game than I am, but as I said I just want the best for your boy, as most Spidey fans do, and it seemed to me we were all a bit desperate to laud his game as a classic given the overwhelming context of the real world relative to this game's release date, just two weeks after a (...probably...?) monumental election.
Miles in many ways felt bigger than Spider-Man in that moment, but in the afterglow of hindsight I think we can take his Spider-game much higher than it is here.
2020
Plenty to like here, and I get why some people were smitten enough to place this atop their Game of the Year lists if not close to it. In its first five hours or so, there's one version of me that's right there with them, enjoying the core loop of minor farming and house building, shipmate recruitment and map exploration.
It's just...over time, some of the materials you need are more obscure than they should be, and the game (or personal laziness) reveals that you really don't need to be satisfying these souls' every last desire nearly as much as you think you do (read: at all). As you start getting lost trying to find materials, and some of the new shipmates get more and more demanding (I'm looking at you, Bruce and Mickey) the empathetic nature of the game recedes in favor of, well, a game. And that game is actually about managing the incredibly petty desires of some very stereotypical anthropomorphic representations of ethnic and cultural stereotypes that undermines the very empathy it's attempting to, actually, weaponize against the player rather than extract from them.
I know, not a common take, but by the back third of the game I was so fed up with this thing, I couldn't help but see Spiritfarer as an exercise in artifice, and thus the ultimate conclusion of this story as one of self-service rather than selflessness. That's the beauty of art, yeah? Glad y'all ain't as cynical as your boy, Nodima.
It's just...over time, some of the materials you need are more obscure than they should be, and the game (or personal laziness) reveals that you really don't need to be satisfying these souls' every last desire nearly as much as you think you do (read: at all). As you start getting lost trying to find materials, and some of the new shipmates get more and more demanding (I'm looking at you, Bruce and Mickey) the empathetic nature of the game recedes in favor of, well, a game. And that game is actually about managing the incredibly petty desires of some very stereotypical anthropomorphic representations of ethnic and cultural stereotypes that undermines the very empathy it's attempting to, actually, weaponize against the player rather than extract from them.
I know, not a common take, but by the back third of the game I was so fed up with this thing, I couldn't help but see Spiritfarer as an exercise in artifice, and thus the ultimate conclusion of this story as one of self-service rather than selflessness. That's the beauty of art, yeah? Glad y'all ain't as cynical as your boy, Nodima.
2020
I'm the asshole that thinks this plays better than Breath of the Wild. Good thing I absolutely hated everything about the characters and art style (though in its native Chinese the voice acting is a LITTLE more understated, and as someone who hasn't heard much spoken Chinese in his life also sounds kind of cute) because I otherwise may have been convinced to put real money into this thing and never put it down. I loved exploring this world and got REAL lucky with character rolls early on. I never cared much about the artifact systems or min/maxing my characters, so the gacha wouldn't have ever hooked me, but I think it says something dark that I played this game for just a little over a month (I'm using trophy data which only spans October 2020 but I played longer, I swear...) and logged 94 hours, more than Breath of the Wild which I played for months, and that's...terrifying?
Kind of an unrate-able game considering how much pleasure I wrung out of playing it and yet how much I despised everything about its world and writing style while outright rejecting its core progression loop of cash for ass.
Genshin Impact scares me, because I can see a game that is exactly this wrapped up in a façade I actually like even a little bit. And in that game I see my doom.
Kind of an unrate-able game considering how much pleasure I wrung out of playing it and yet how much I despised everything about its world and writing style while outright rejecting its core progression loop of cash for ass.
Genshin Impact scares me, because I can see a game that is exactly this wrapped up in a façade I actually like even a little bit. And in that game I see my doom.
[Editor's note: I wrote this blog for Giant Bomb back in January of 2011. Some formatting likely won't carry over, I apologize.]
DETERMINED TO GET MY CYBERPUNK FIX, I FINALLY PLAYED DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN (thx PS+)
Blade Runner. Detroit. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. L.A. Noire. Toy Story 3. Heavy Rain. Blade Runner 2049. The Matrix. Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The Matrix Revolutions. Toy Story. Telltale's Batman: The Enemy Within.
I thought about all these films and games while playing Detroit: Become Human this weekend, a game I've been sure I'd absolutely despise since it was announced, on through the early reviews and brief discourse on podcasts like Giant Bomb's and Waypoint's...and yet now that I've played it, I have very mixed feelings about the game. When it leans into the Blade Runner, L.A. Noire, Telltale-ness of it all it seems like Quantic Dream has finally hit the jackpot here. The direction (or the technology used to direct) has finally caught up to Cage's ambitions and many of the shots in this game are absolutely gorgeous. Connor is absolutely intimidating and stoic in certain frames, while Markus can come off as a crazed religious fanatic and Kara...well, the less said about her storyline the better.
I say that because Kara's storyline is emblematic of every flaw coursing through Detroit's blue-blood pumping veins. Her sequences consist almost entirely of oddly sketched stealth sequences, puzzles in which you reach all the yellow cards in your scanner before a timer hits zero followed by action sequences that inevitably spill out of failed stealth sequences, and worst of all most of her character building moments smear the most mud over exactly how these androids work. Much is said of their programming and intentions, but oftentimes Kara's campaign seems to exist solely to throw all that world building into doubt. The nicest NPCs in the game are introduced like it's The Night of the Living Dead for some reason, pretty much every android she meets is either a Sids playroom monstrosity or a...sorry, a RINO (Robot in Name Only) exhibiting every characteristic of a human being other than that little LED on their temple (which it seems only main characters prefer to remove, oddly).
Even forgiving that - and it's a video game, so ultimately I expect the logic undergirding its world building to buckle under the needs of the plot from time to time - Kara also deals with by far the most Cageian characters, whether that's the nearly identical alcoholic dad and sadistic mad scientist or all the cops who conveniently can't see you until the "skill" check pops you out in the open. The sequence where Kara has her memory erased, regains it in the span of five minutes (while freeing the aforementioned imprisoned misfit toys as well as a half-robot polar bear for some reason) then proceeds to fight Luther's Mr. X-like will throughout the house until they reach the backyard and he just...has enough? That was an ugly bit of Quantic Dream foolishness and had me set down the controller for the night, unsure I'd come back to the game.
But come back I did, in large part thanks to the flowchart feature that caps every segment. Until that moment I'd been making decisions that landed me in the upper-80 to mid-90s percentile, and while the game looked stellar and had some very good performances (forgiving that every android actor aside from Connor and to an extent Markus didn't find the inhumanity in their performances) I was also beginning to worry the game was just too on the nose for me to get anything out of it. Except, in the chapter prior, I'd flubbed a quick-time event and Connor had been run over my a crop harvester. I thought he was gone for good, and I wanted to see how the game would play out...especially since only 4% of players failed that sequence.
Well, if you've played the game you probably remember that Detroit would have had a hell of a time writing Connor out of the remaining 60% of the game (tellingly, Kara can die in the that very first sequence with Todd) and thus began my super-engaging experience with the Connor-Hank narrative. To that point Hank had been taking a decent-enough liking to me despite playing Connor mostly cold and distant, and this returning Connor openly joked with Hank while sobering him up and on the way to the Eden Club. However, once the investigation was under way I made some poor assumptions about the path of the sex robot and became one of just 10% of players to fail that sequence - not only had Connor ultimately failed twice in a row, he was racking up a pretty huge bill on Hank's expense report.
Later that night, Connor remained self-righteous about his purpose and his livelihood, and Hank murdered him in cold blood on the boardwalk - only 16% of players experienced this scene this way, likely because by this point they'd accepted the game's core argument that androids are humans too, but I wanted Connor to accept this new reality of his. Connor is a utility in the world of Detroit: BH, and what is dead may never die, but I was genuinely shocked, particularly because I (and Connor) had understood the subtext of that scene involved Hank's dead son but we chose to withhold that knowledge from Hank because it wasn't our goal.
And now that I had this mindset entrenched, that an android would pursue goals above all else, especially empathy, the game started really opening up for me. Markus killed Simon on the roof after giving a mostly peace-driven speech on the broadcast, which left me in the minority again with 22% of players. This also began my rollercoaster ride with North in which she did ultimately fall in love with me but seemed to be more reactionary and emotionally driven by every word I said than a pre-teen (or sitting American President). Later, investigating the crime scene (for those who haven't played, I think we can all universally agree this pair of sequences is the high point of the game) I stumbled my way into the kitchen, triggering events that would bring about the end of the vignette with, because Connor was aware he could return and Hank could not, Connor sacrificing himself to save Hank.
Three days of investigation, three dead Connors. Hank was wrecked. His partner just kept dying, reminding him of the artificial nature of androids and the corporeal nature of his son. There was nothing I could do at this point to earn his trust, and unlike their first meeting rooted in standard buddy cop tropes this hatred felt truly earned. Better yet, I'd come by it honestly. I wasn't manipulating the game to experience this side of it - I'd long before assumed it incapable of such honest storytelling. Following that, as Markus I hacked the police radio (5%) to get them off my tail and reveal the scarier side of an android/tech-led revolution. I peacefully tagged benches (59%) but demonstratively toppled the statue celebrating the "birth" of androids. I sent a strong, pacifist message (71%) but killed the police (14%) who killed my brothers and sisters in the street. As Connor was displaying a clear sense of fealty to his mission and the laws of Detroit's world, Markus was convulsing wildly within them.
Unfortunately, from there Connor meets a bad analog of the tech bro from Ex Machina while he and Markus both struggle with the existential question of whether or not they're Neo from The Matrix (complete with their own respective takes on The Oracle) while Kara...stumbles around in a really crummy recreation of the Underground Railroad that is neither truly embarrassing nor all that interesting. And then the game just keeps going and going, seeming to end multiple times and just going all out on more, more, more. Eventually, I just put the controller down and let the police beat the shit out of Markus before murdering him in the middle of the street.
Zero percent of players reached the same level of exhaustion I ultimately did if this game is to be trusted, so maybe that says more about me than it does the game. But for one beautiful three hour stretch in the middle there, and speckled all throughout the first third as well, Detroit has a game that I really could've loved in it. Unfortunately, David Cage made it and so it had to mean something, despite his long since proving he has nothing interesting to say about the world and its ills at all.
My Connor let Hank have his suicide, in the end. After all, the mission was over, and we wouldn't be coming back for more.
DETERMINED TO GET MY CYBERPUNK FIX, I FINALLY PLAYED DETROIT: BECOME HUMAN (thx PS+)
Blade Runner. Detroit. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol. L.A. Noire. Toy Story 3. Heavy Rain. Blade Runner 2049. The Matrix. Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The Matrix Revolutions. Toy Story. Telltale's Batman: The Enemy Within.
I thought about all these films and games while playing Detroit: Become Human this weekend, a game I've been sure I'd absolutely despise since it was announced, on through the early reviews and brief discourse on podcasts like Giant Bomb's and Waypoint's...and yet now that I've played it, I have very mixed feelings about the game. When it leans into the Blade Runner, L.A. Noire, Telltale-ness of it all it seems like Quantic Dream has finally hit the jackpot here. The direction (or the technology used to direct) has finally caught up to Cage's ambitions and many of the shots in this game are absolutely gorgeous. Connor is absolutely intimidating and stoic in certain frames, while Markus can come off as a crazed religious fanatic and Kara...well, the less said about her storyline the better.
I say that because Kara's storyline is emblematic of every flaw coursing through Detroit's blue-blood pumping veins. Her sequences consist almost entirely of oddly sketched stealth sequences, puzzles in which you reach all the yellow cards in your scanner before a timer hits zero followed by action sequences that inevitably spill out of failed stealth sequences, and worst of all most of her character building moments smear the most mud over exactly how these androids work. Much is said of their programming and intentions, but oftentimes Kara's campaign seems to exist solely to throw all that world building into doubt. The nicest NPCs in the game are introduced like it's The Night of the Living Dead for some reason, pretty much every android she meets is either a Sids playroom monstrosity or a...sorry, a RINO (Robot in Name Only) exhibiting every characteristic of a human being other than that little LED on their temple (which it seems only main characters prefer to remove, oddly).
Even forgiving that - and it's a video game, so ultimately I expect the logic undergirding its world building to buckle under the needs of the plot from time to time - Kara also deals with by far the most Cageian characters, whether that's the nearly identical alcoholic dad and sadistic mad scientist or all the cops who conveniently can't see you until the "skill" check pops you out in the open. The sequence where Kara has her memory erased, regains it in the span of five minutes (while freeing the aforementioned imprisoned misfit toys as well as a half-robot polar bear for some reason) then proceeds to fight Luther's Mr. X-like will throughout the house until they reach the backyard and he just...has enough? That was an ugly bit of Quantic Dream foolishness and had me set down the controller for the night, unsure I'd come back to the game.
But come back I did, in large part thanks to the flowchart feature that caps every segment. Until that moment I'd been making decisions that landed me in the upper-80 to mid-90s percentile, and while the game looked stellar and had some very good performances (forgiving that every android actor aside from Connor and to an extent Markus didn't find the inhumanity in their performances) I was also beginning to worry the game was just too on the nose for me to get anything out of it. Except, in the chapter prior, I'd flubbed a quick-time event and Connor had been run over my a crop harvester. I thought he was gone for good, and I wanted to see how the game would play out...especially since only 4% of players failed that sequence.
Well, if you've played the game you probably remember that Detroit would have had a hell of a time writing Connor out of the remaining 60% of the game (tellingly, Kara can die in the that very first sequence with Todd) and thus began my super-engaging experience with the Connor-Hank narrative. To that point Hank had been taking a decent-enough liking to me despite playing Connor mostly cold and distant, and this returning Connor openly joked with Hank while sobering him up and on the way to the Eden Club. However, once the investigation was under way I made some poor assumptions about the path of the sex robot and became one of just 10% of players to fail that sequence - not only had Connor ultimately failed twice in a row, he was racking up a pretty huge bill on Hank's expense report.
Later that night, Connor remained self-righteous about his purpose and his livelihood, and Hank murdered him in cold blood on the boardwalk - only 16% of players experienced this scene this way, likely because by this point they'd accepted the game's core argument that androids are humans too, but I wanted Connor to accept this new reality of his. Connor is a utility in the world of Detroit: BH, and what is dead may never die, but I was genuinely shocked, particularly because I (and Connor) had understood the subtext of that scene involved Hank's dead son but we chose to withhold that knowledge from Hank because it wasn't our goal.
And now that I had this mindset entrenched, that an android would pursue goals above all else, especially empathy, the game started really opening up for me. Markus killed Simon on the roof after giving a mostly peace-driven speech on the broadcast, which left me in the minority again with 22% of players. This also began my rollercoaster ride with North in which she did ultimately fall in love with me but seemed to be more reactionary and emotionally driven by every word I said than a pre-teen (or sitting American President). Later, investigating the crime scene (for those who haven't played, I think we can all universally agree this pair of sequences is the high point of the game) I stumbled my way into the kitchen, triggering events that would bring about the end of the vignette with, because Connor was aware he could return and Hank could not, Connor sacrificing himself to save Hank.
Three days of investigation, three dead Connors. Hank was wrecked. His partner just kept dying, reminding him of the artificial nature of androids and the corporeal nature of his son. There was nothing I could do at this point to earn his trust, and unlike their first meeting rooted in standard buddy cop tropes this hatred felt truly earned. Better yet, I'd come by it honestly. I wasn't manipulating the game to experience this side of it - I'd long before assumed it incapable of such honest storytelling. Following that, as Markus I hacked the police radio (5%) to get them off my tail and reveal the scarier side of an android/tech-led revolution. I peacefully tagged benches (59%) but demonstratively toppled the statue celebrating the "birth" of androids. I sent a strong, pacifist message (71%) but killed the police (14%) who killed my brothers and sisters in the street. As Connor was displaying a clear sense of fealty to his mission and the laws of Detroit's world, Markus was convulsing wildly within them.
Unfortunately, from there Connor meets a bad analog of the tech bro from Ex Machina while he and Markus both struggle with the existential question of whether or not they're Neo from The Matrix (complete with their own respective takes on The Oracle) while Kara...stumbles around in a really crummy recreation of the Underground Railroad that is neither truly embarrassing nor all that interesting. And then the game just keeps going and going, seeming to end multiple times and just going all out on more, more, more. Eventually, I just put the controller down and let the police beat the shit out of Markus before murdering him in the middle of the street.
Zero percent of players reached the same level of exhaustion I ultimately did if this game is to be trusted, so maybe that says more about me than it does the game. But for one beautiful three hour stretch in the middle there, and speckled all throughout the first third as well, Detroit has a game that I really could've loved in it. Unfortunately, David Cage made it and so it had to mean something, despite his long since proving he has nothing interesting to say about the world and its ills at all.
My Connor let Hank have his suicide, in the end. After all, the mission was over, and we wouldn't be coming back for more.
Okay, fine, a half-star for the shitty puzzles. We all know which ones they are. Otherwise, fantastically upscaled art (it looks like what I forced my imagination to make the Smoothing option look back in the '90s!) and audio along with typically interesting commentary from Tim Schafer and Co. do justice to one of the greatest adventure games ever made.
Short enough it can be finished in an evening, full of quick wit writing, incredible style and an all-time lineup of voice performances from Roy Conrad, Mark Hamill, Hamilton Camp, Maurice LaMarche and all the the rest - what more could you ask for from a point-and-click, especially so far removed from its heyday when more foundational games like Day of the Tentacle or more ambitious games like Grim Fandango are meeting players without the mental fortitude and muscle memory required to deduce solutions to their absurdly obtuse puzzle designs.
Unfortunately, and I can't guarantee this is true, but something about playing this on a Dual Shock 4 rather than mouse and keyboard made it impossible to pull the trigger on the chainsaw fast enough to steal the bike from the Cavefish and I'm definitely sad about that. But I also played this game about once a month for, oh, my entire childhood so I didn't need the third act to get what I needed out of this.
Short enough it can be finished in an evening, full of quick wit writing, incredible style and an all-time lineup of voice performances from Roy Conrad, Mark Hamill, Hamilton Camp, Maurice LaMarche and all the the rest - what more could you ask for from a point-and-click, especially so far removed from its heyday when more foundational games like Day of the Tentacle or more ambitious games like Grim Fandango are meeting players without the mental fortitude and muscle memory required to deduce solutions to their absurdly obtuse puzzle designs.
Unfortunately, and I can't guarantee this is true, but something about playing this on a Dual Shock 4 rather than mouse and keyboard made it impossible to pull the trigger on the chainsaw fast enough to steal the bike from the Cavefish and I'm definitely sad about that. But I also played this game about once a month for, oh, my entire childhood so I didn't need the third act to get what I needed out of this.
Video games have, on the whole, more examples of "it's about the journey, not the destination" than any other medium I'd wager, even books. Even going beyond the actual content of most video games, just look at how most people play them! Just HALF of players who booted Spider-Man and God of War, two of the most acclaimed Playstation exclusives ever released, saw their campaigns to their respective conclusions. And that's a very impressive clear rate, reserved for only the most narrative-driven, linear, prestigious titles - widen the scope and players are likely to get lost forever, as evidenced by the 30% clear rate for The Witcher 3 or Horizon: Zero Dawn.
And 13 Sentinels just may be the "it's the journey, not the destination"-iest of them all! While it resides in a genre frequented by more fervent players than some other genres and thus can boast a nearly 60% completion rate on PS4, it's not rare to hear from many of those who finished the game that the ending doesn't "live up" to the game that preceded it. To which I say: the entire story was KIND OF bullshit, yeah, so who cares?
On the way to that smoldered conclusion, players get bombarded with just about every major work of science fiction in the last 50 years as interpreted by a choose your own adventure book rooted in the zaniness of Japanese kaiju and waifu culture. Seen another way, it's watching the East mollify the West's future-fearing paranoia in real-time and applying a cheery, aw shucks attitude to some of the scariest stories and concepts ever committed to paper and film.
If this sounds like it shouldn't work, try fracturing it across 13 different characters who all satisfy various archetypes, further fracture the story by separating it across five timelines in five separate decades (some of which are actually CENTURIES apart) and then design the progression of this structure so that certain characters are locked out of progression for seemingly vague reasons, and not always the same ones - sometimes another character or two need to reach a certain point in their story, or sometimes you have to...oh yeah, sometimes you have to go into an Ender's Game like real-ish-time-strategy layer and fight these kaiju in mechs on an AR chess board animated by voxels that pop every which direction like confetti when the action kicks off.
13 Sentinels is an almost unfathomably bad idea on paper, and yet, one of the most satisfying and propulsive video games, despite mostly being a visual novel, there's ever been. It satisfies the "just one more turn" impulsiveness of Civilization, the "what the hell's gonna happen next" of blockbusters like the aforementioned God of War and the "hmmm, this is just a pleasant mess" of the most classic downtime moments in old Squaresoft RPGs all in one violently comprehensive masterstroke.
I don't think I know anyone in real life that would be interested in this game if I just tried to describe it to them, or show them a Quick Look or something. But I'd surely be angry with them for judging a book by its (admittedly awkward, skeevy) cover.
And 13 Sentinels just may be the "it's the journey, not the destination"-iest of them all! While it resides in a genre frequented by more fervent players than some other genres and thus can boast a nearly 60% completion rate on PS4, it's not rare to hear from many of those who finished the game that the ending doesn't "live up" to the game that preceded it. To which I say: the entire story was KIND OF bullshit, yeah, so who cares?
On the way to that smoldered conclusion, players get bombarded with just about every major work of science fiction in the last 50 years as interpreted by a choose your own adventure book rooted in the zaniness of Japanese kaiju and waifu culture. Seen another way, it's watching the East mollify the West's future-fearing paranoia in real-time and applying a cheery, aw shucks attitude to some of the scariest stories and concepts ever committed to paper and film.
If this sounds like it shouldn't work, try fracturing it across 13 different characters who all satisfy various archetypes, further fracture the story by separating it across five timelines in five separate decades (some of which are actually CENTURIES apart) and then design the progression of this structure so that certain characters are locked out of progression for seemingly vague reasons, and not always the same ones - sometimes another character or two need to reach a certain point in their story, or sometimes you have to...oh yeah, sometimes you have to go into an Ender's Game like real-ish-time-strategy layer and fight these kaiju in mechs on an AR chess board animated by voxels that pop every which direction like confetti when the action kicks off.
13 Sentinels is an almost unfathomably bad idea on paper, and yet, one of the most satisfying and propulsive video games, despite mostly being a visual novel, there's ever been. It satisfies the "just one more turn" impulsiveness of Civilization, the "what the hell's gonna happen next" of blockbusters like the aforementioned God of War and the "hmmm, this is just a pleasant mess" of the most classic downtime moments in old Squaresoft RPGs all in one violently comprehensive masterstroke.
I don't think I know anyone in real life that would be interested in this game if I just tried to describe it to them, or show them a Quick Look or something. But I'd surely be angry with them for judging a book by its (admittedly awkward, skeevy) cover.
2017
This should be a 4/5. It should be a 5/5. Does any game, fundamentally, PLAY better than Destiny 2? No. It fuckin' nailed first-person platforming, what the hell more could you want? Well, other than no more first-person platforming...
Unlike the first Destiny, I had the good sense to get what I could out of vanilla and let it go, swooping back in for new story DLC and quickly getting back out. While I tried to maintain three characters, I quickly focused on the Titan class I preferred. But because I was so strictly sticking to the story and some random strike playlists (which seemed to constantly feed me the same two or three strikes out of, what, a dozen? does this game actually not have many strikes?), each expansion offered an expanding problem: I had less and less idea what was going on with this game every time I booted it up.
When I got a PS5, this was one of the games I was most excited to take for a ride. 4K, 60fps headshot party? Sign me up! And, goddamn, this game is a real hummin', sing-songy motherfucker of a ride on PS5. It looks and feels so, so, sooooo good.
But...I only played about an hour of it before uninstalling. There's a new hub area? Most of the game is kind of inaccessible with the Beyond Light expansion? Half the maps are gone? Destiny 2 is absolutely confusing to return to, even for someone who put over 1,200 hours into Destiny and about 250 into Destiny 2 (like I said, I wised up between games...) and really isn't looking for much as a solo player who just likes to float around and do the shooty shooty.
I wanted to return to Destiny 2, but Destiny 2 seemed like it was more than done with me. We'll always have Savathun's Song, kid.
Unlike the first Destiny, I had the good sense to get what I could out of vanilla and let it go, swooping back in for new story DLC and quickly getting back out. While I tried to maintain three characters, I quickly focused on the Titan class I preferred. But because I was so strictly sticking to the story and some random strike playlists (which seemed to constantly feed me the same two or three strikes out of, what, a dozen? does this game actually not have many strikes?), each expansion offered an expanding problem: I had less and less idea what was going on with this game every time I booted it up.
When I got a PS5, this was one of the games I was most excited to take for a ride. 4K, 60fps headshot party? Sign me up! And, goddamn, this game is a real hummin', sing-songy motherfucker of a ride on PS5. It looks and feels so, so, sooooo good.
But...I only played about an hour of it before uninstalling. There's a new hub area? Most of the game is kind of inaccessible with the Beyond Light expansion? Half the maps are gone? Destiny 2 is absolutely confusing to return to, even for someone who put over 1,200 hours into Destiny and about 250 into Destiny 2 (like I said, I wised up between games...) and really isn't looking for much as a solo player who just likes to float around and do the shooty shooty.
I wanted to return to Destiny 2, but Destiny 2 seemed like it was more than done with me. We'll always have Savathun's Song, kid.
2017
I suppose I'd feel uncomfortable rating this without having finished it, but I'm also not sure I'll ever get back to it. While I appreciate the themes its exploring, particularly the social anxiety and alcoholism that can bubble up from a brief college experience that goes about as poorly as it possibly could have (spoiler: I can relate!) I just didn't find the interactivity that pleasant. I got stuck wandering around for a progression point multiple times in my six or so hours, which is maybe on me for being a bit of a drunk idiot but...I didn't THINK so! There, channeling my inner Mae for a moment.
Less acceptable but no less true is that I was simply tiring of the art style after a while. I'm not anti-cartoon nor anti-anthropomorphic art direction, there was just a certain kind of Nickelodeon vibe I was getting from this that didn't fully magnetize me.
Actually, no, I'll rate this. I'll rate it 3.5/5. Why? Some of the absolute worst in-universe band music I've ever heard and an absolutely terribly rhythm game to match it, getting lost from time to time despite an incredibly small map and an art style I can appreciate but will never love. And yet..."I GOT NIGHTMARE EYES!!!!"
I hope something nice happens to Mae in the end. Maybe I'll see it one day.
Less acceptable but no less true is that I was simply tiring of the art style after a while. I'm not anti-cartoon nor anti-anthropomorphic art direction, there was just a certain kind of Nickelodeon vibe I was getting from this that didn't fully magnetize me.
Actually, no, I'll rate this. I'll rate it 3.5/5. Why? Some of the absolute worst in-universe band music I've ever heard and an absolutely terribly rhythm game to match it, getting lost from time to time despite an incredibly small map and an art style I can appreciate but will never love. And yet..."I GOT NIGHTMARE EYES!!!!"
I hope something nice happens to Mae in the end. Maybe I'll see it one day.
I definitely get why people are in love with this game. It's got a really cool world, feels like you can do just about anything you want, the powers are really cool and mobility is pretty choice.
Unfortunately, as will come to be a theme as I get more of my thoughts on games out there, I'm just not that good at making my own fun for myself. I want to follow the markers, complete the objective and get out of the level. Even worse, half of this game is action and half is stealth, but all of it is in first-person and first-person stealth is about as appealing to me as self-mutilation. Absolutely too stressful in almost all cases without the situation awareness of a third-person camera.
ALL THAT BEING SAID, the blink mechanic makes the use of stealth to rain death upon A.I. from parts unknown is quite a good feeling, and while the objectives often lay down clues for clever bonus objectives you can do they're never explicit or handholdy, so I do get to feel some kind of smart without having to put everything together on my own.
I bought this in a huge bundle of every Arkane Definitive Edition release prior to Deathloop because it was like $25, and I do hope to really give Arkane a fair shot at some point. Unfortunately, after nearly six hours I realized that I really wasn't paying attention to any of the systems this game had to offer, I was just blinking around killing dudes until I made it to my target where I'd get clever and figure out the secondary way to complete the mission. Stealth runs? Retrying missions to experiment with the A.I.? Clever possession tactics, catching bullets with enemy bodies, being mindful of the corruption or whatever that mechanic is?
No, I'm just a simple murder boy, and I hated that I couldn't meet Dishonored on its own terms. I knew I put this studio's games off for so long for a reason.
Unfortunately, as will come to be a theme as I get more of my thoughts on games out there, I'm just not that good at making my own fun for myself. I want to follow the markers, complete the objective and get out of the level. Even worse, half of this game is action and half is stealth, but all of it is in first-person and first-person stealth is about as appealing to me as self-mutilation. Absolutely too stressful in almost all cases without the situation awareness of a third-person camera.
ALL THAT BEING SAID, the blink mechanic makes the use of stealth to rain death upon A.I. from parts unknown is quite a good feeling, and while the objectives often lay down clues for clever bonus objectives you can do they're never explicit or handholdy, so I do get to feel some kind of smart without having to put everything together on my own.
I bought this in a huge bundle of every Arkane Definitive Edition release prior to Deathloop because it was like $25, and I do hope to really give Arkane a fair shot at some point. Unfortunately, after nearly six hours I realized that I really wasn't paying attention to any of the systems this game had to offer, I was just blinking around killing dudes until I made it to my target where I'd get clever and figure out the secondary way to complete the mission. Stealth runs? Retrying missions to experiment with the A.I.? Clever possession tactics, catching bullets with enemy bodies, being mindful of the corruption or whatever that mechanic is?
No, I'm just a simple murder boy, and I hated that I couldn't meet Dishonored on its own terms. I knew I put this studio's games off for so long for a reason.
One of the stranger experiences I've had with a game in recent memory. Even made me question some of my own beliefs in the past; count me among those who felt Shadow of Mordor wasn't the best Game of the Year candidate for 2014 merely because it didn't have much competition (though, admittedly - Far Cry 4, South Park, Destiny-at-launch? that year is a yikes from me, dawg) but because it was a genuinely novel approach to A.I. rivalries and procedural storytelling tucked into a pretty exhilarating third person action game that introduced more super powers and strategy to the Batman formula.
Fast forward to Shadow of War and ignore all the microtransaction controversy because I'm playing it via Playstation Plus in the year 2021. It's got all the stuff that made that game feel so great with an even more nuanced system of checks and balances in the Nemesis system, a much, much larger map, fairly complex tower defense AND tower siege mini-games and Talion gets to start basically where he left off in the previous game power-wise...
Yet somehow it all adds up to a significantly less satisfying experience, even for free. At times the stipulations for certain orcs felt a little TOO contrived, while the map was so densely populated with orcs, rival orcs and subordinate orcs that any random subset of five or ten minutes in a play session could feel inordinately overwhelming.
That's not inherently bad, and there is something to be said for the mad scramble to avoid getting swamped by the pawns as you try to juggle the bigger orcs' various weaknesses in your head. That can be quite exciting, it's just a bummer as you get deeper into the game and more and more of their buffs seem to stack on top of each other, creating orcs that are more or less invincible unless you are capable of approaching them in a very singular way. In some ways this is not unlike the DOOM Eternal problem, taking a system that suggested best practices and forcing the player to abide by them this time around. The "git gud" of Mordor.
That would've been something to be a little perturbed by but ultimately surmountable, only after 20 hours of it with very little payoff in the narrative (despite some surprisingly well acted and directed cutscenes when they do appear) those aforementioned siege aspects become the primary focus of the game. It's at this point that the scope zooms out so expansively that I suddenly found myself delirious, frantically reaching out for anything to get a handhold on and feel urgent, or even important.
Suddenly I saw before the entirety of Mordor's landscape, constantly re-populating and endless, expanding towards the edges of knowable time. Was this a 200 hour journey I was embarking on? I realized I didn't want to find out; MLB The Show had arrived, and with it the One Podcast Game to Rule Them All.
I wouldn't cast Shadow of War into the fire, but you REALLY oughta know what you're getting into. I'm so thankful this was a PS+ offering, personally, as it relieved me of the guilt I'd have felt in walking away otherwise.
Fast forward to Shadow of War and ignore all the microtransaction controversy because I'm playing it via Playstation Plus in the year 2021. It's got all the stuff that made that game feel so great with an even more nuanced system of checks and balances in the Nemesis system, a much, much larger map, fairly complex tower defense AND tower siege mini-games and Talion gets to start basically where he left off in the previous game power-wise...
Yet somehow it all adds up to a significantly less satisfying experience, even for free. At times the stipulations for certain orcs felt a little TOO contrived, while the map was so densely populated with orcs, rival orcs and subordinate orcs that any random subset of five or ten minutes in a play session could feel inordinately overwhelming.
That's not inherently bad, and there is something to be said for the mad scramble to avoid getting swamped by the pawns as you try to juggle the bigger orcs' various weaknesses in your head. That can be quite exciting, it's just a bummer as you get deeper into the game and more and more of their buffs seem to stack on top of each other, creating orcs that are more or less invincible unless you are capable of approaching them in a very singular way. In some ways this is not unlike the DOOM Eternal problem, taking a system that suggested best practices and forcing the player to abide by them this time around. The "git gud" of Mordor.
That would've been something to be a little perturbed by but ultimately surmountable, only after 20 hours of it with very little payoff in the narrative (despite some surprisingly well acted and directed cutscenes when they do appear) those aforementioned siege aspects become the primary focus of the game. It's at this point that the scope zooms out so expansively that I suddenly found myself delirious, frantically reaching out for anything to get a handhold on and feel urgent, or even important.
Suddenly I saw before the entirety of Mordor's landscape, constantly re-populating and endless, expanding towards the edges of knowable time. Was this a 200 hour journey I was embarking on? I realized I didn't want to find out; MLB The Show had arrived, and with it the One Podcast Game to Rule Them All.
I wouldn't cast Shadow of War into the fire, but you REALLY oughta know what you're getting into. I'm so thankful this was a PS+ offering, personally, as it relieved me of the guilt I'd have felt in walking away otherwise.
2016
Cute art, should be looked at more as an interactive picture book than a video game probably. The art is wonderful. The writing is fine. I don't have any young children so I was one-and-done - in for a penny, out for a dollar.
2019
Downloaded via PS+. I'm pretty tolerant of games because I appreciate them as art as much as entertainment experiences, but it was less than an hour with this one before I knew it absolutely wouldn't work out between us. This game is ugly as sin while relying on voice acting and dialogue trees that are some of the worst I've seen from any era.
I have no nostalgia for the era of RPGs often referenced when praising this game, and it seems lacking that potential flash of euphoria over lost time there's absolutely no hook here.
I won't rate it because, well, this is something like a 20 hour game and I gave it about as null a shot as someone could give a game of any length. Absolutely disgusted by what I saw of it, though.
I have no nostalgia for the era of RPGs often referenced when praising this game, and it seems lacking that potential flash of euphoria over lost time there's absolutely no hook here.
I won't rate it because, well, this is something like a 20 hour game and I gave it about as null a shot as someone could give a game of any length. Absolutely disgusted by what I saw of it, though.