SmAshMk01
198 reviews liked by SmAshMk01
This review contains spoilers
13 sentinels is a daring exercise that asks us the question "what if the season 1 finale to twin peaks was the prologue to a visual novel?". and while the result is, ironically enough, novel at first, it stops being funny around the time you get to the talking cat. i find this to be a microcosm of 13 sentinels' most pronounced flaw: it is trying to do too much, too quickly, not paced nearly well enough for its own good, with characters i am not invested enough in.
let's start smaller. 13 sentinels is about an RTS meets Visual Novel mashup (if you've never played the game, work with me). you have, funnily enough, 13 main characters who each have distinct stories that bleed over rashomon style while all having their own independent throughlines for what we should care about. and every now and again, you'll hit various locks that force you to either advance a certain character's story to a certain point or do some of the RTS gameplay to a certain point. all of this sounds fine on paper, and it's certainly one of the more creative pitches i've heard for a game.
unfortunately, execution, much like for the french monarchy, is its doom. as mentioned, the prologue slams you through several characters at once and immediately thrusts you into their dilemmas before you've even gotten a grasp to understand who they are. for characters like ei and hijiyama, this works well in a "the audience is learning with the character" way that introduces the setting and conflict, but it's far more miss than hit. i can only dance around it for so long: this game is called 13 sentinels when it would really benefit largely from downsizing to maybe 7 or 8 sentinels. why? well let's go through each character individually to illustrate my point.
juro kurabe: what an absolute nothingburger of a character. his plotline is one of three amnesiac plotlines in the game, and while it's arguably the most important to understanding the plot, he's easily the most dull character. he has tame and meager reactions to the events that unfold in the story, his identity conflict fails to resonate when he's such a dullard, and overall he fails to evoke any pathos.
iori fuyusaka: another nothingburger character. she primarily exists to do anime tropey things like be late for class and run with toast in her mouth, crash into a cute boy and think it's love at first sight, and then trip and give the viewer a gratuitous panty shot (high school girl btw). there are interesting things about her, but much like juro, i would struggle to describe her with adjectives, which is usually a very bad thing for characterization. it's actually very impressive to me that her romance with ei does not take the cake for being the worst one in the game, considering how little the two interact and how one-sided said interactions are.
ei sekigahara: honestly i'm at a weird point with this guy because he was almost unquestionably one of my favorite characters, but he's also not that compelling once you get past his external conflict. i think he benefits largely from having one of the most interesting and compelling visual novel sections in the game, so i give him a lot more wiggle room despite most of his character being "stoic badass guy who is always frowning".
keitaro miura: at the risk of being harsh, he's completely unremarkable. sure, he has a fish out of water story, but hijiyama does as well, and he's 10x the character that keitaro is both in definition and compelling story. despite having played most of this game within the week, i can barely recall what even happens in keitaro's story. he ends up feeling like a side character to most other stories. he is the most "oh, right, that guy's in this game" character.
megumi yakushiji: i want to thank 13 sentinels for giving me a new character to greatly dislike in my life with this one. i think the hardest i laughed in my entire playthrough was when yuki was going through the list of sentinel pilots, got to megumi, and just briefly said "she's pretty dull" and quickly moved on. megumi is the most nothing of nothingburgers, and when we do get scraps of characterization, they make her seem not only unnecessarily cruel, but also foolish. her storyline is that she's trying to save her beloved (old juro) by listening to an evil (or at least british) cat by shooting witches. you do not have to be an anime scholar to see the PMMM reference, and while i don't watch anime, any bitch worth their salt knows you don't make a homura character have the most insultingly dull hetero romance of all time. megumi is a lifeless character because she is utterly incurious to the curious circumstance she finds herself is, is dutifully gullible, and is willing to sacrifice everything for an equally dull character. i think the greatest failing about this story is that we're never given a chance to see megumi/old juro as a romance until it's already dead. i think coming in on the tail end of a relationship and then seeing a character mourn it can definitely work (see: the ambiguous nature of shadow of the colossus), but this game works in the explicit and the intense details. having both of them be as fascinating as wallpaper tanks any interest i could have in their individual stories as well as when their stories intersect. at least make one of them interesting. throw me a fucken bone.
natsuno minami: fun character in that she is dumb as all shit and the game wants you to laugh at her constantly. still, she's curious and inquisitive, and even if her conclusions have a 30% batting average, it's at least fun to see a character attempt to do some level of problem-solving. i do hate how the game basically slaps her in panties for the entire game and acts like it's normal, not to mention how her story starts off with her almost immediately showing off her boobs (high schooler btw). but whatever. she passes the adjective test and i like how she plays off of a couple of characters, so at least she has that going for her. her romance with keitaro is completely token and comes out of a writer's asshole, but whatever. at least it's not juro/megumi.
nenji ogata: man, i am too easy. sure this guy is archetypal as hell but i'm a sucker for rough and tough guy with a sensitive side. it helps that nenji gets one of the better executed stories in his groundhog day loop. overall he was one of the characters who i always wanted to hear talk. he also benefits from having undoubtedly the best romance in the game with tomi because they both interact in great capacities, challenge each other, and also offer solace to each other during their respective difficulties. THIS is what the game needed more of!!
renya gouto: sure, he's a "cold-hearted and emotionless guy secretly is a good guy who has those he cares about" archetype that i've seen a thousand times before, and sure, he's not especially unique or well-executed compared to said thousand portrayals i've seen. but, he's kind of fun as a pseudo-antagonist in some of the stories and is a nice counter-balance for the cast. i'm not especially passionate about him, but as far as "characters as functions/devices" go, he's fine.
ryoko shinonome: sorry, even kira buckland couldn't save her from the nothingburger diagnosis. ryoko suffers from being far more interesting retroactively as the woman who causes everything to go to shit + a pseudo-antagonist in a lot of character stories. when you actually play as her? good god is it dull. amnesiac characters can still have personalities and express emotion. i get that ryoko's a sullen girl who has emotional trauma/baggage that she's repressed, but she has next to no emotional range beyond "im angry at character for wrong reason" and "im disaffected and disoriented uwaa x_x". compelling external conflict can elevate a character, sure (see: ei). but there has to be some base character to elevate in the first place.
shu amiguchi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifaoKZfQpdA the only positive i can say is that he's a character and therefore automatically superior to a third of the cast, but good christ is he unbearable. i get some people like the whole "playboy that's always skirt-chasing" type character, but it always falls flat for me because it usually just results in said character hounding women who are clearly not interested. shu has a somewhat interesting backstory being the clone of ida but the game doesn't do much with it and instead his story mostly serves as a vehicle to introduce the miyuki inaba subplot. i guess gun to the head i would rather take a character i dislike over a nothingburger character because at least they're making an impact.
takatoshi hijiyama: another standout character in the cast. memorable and has a down-to-earth story in a game that is trying too hard to be too much. his whole deal is coming to terms with his homosexuality on top of being a fish out of water, and while there are some cringey forced jokes (his obsession with yakisoba pan comes to mind), he has a strongly defined character with a compelling arc. my only complaint is that his romance with okino is very. . . i don't dislike it, and obviously i think there's value in showing a fleshed out gay romance. my problem lies in that there's a power dynamic in hijiyama/okino that doesn't really sit well with me. a lot of the time, okino doesn't display basic respect to hijiyama and often talks down to him or belittles him. and the scene where he completely violates hijiyama's boundaries/consent all under the guise of "well the machine says you like it when i tie you up lololol" is really. . . Bad. but whatever, most of my nitpicking comes out of resentment that i heard so much about this game having canon lgbt characters and then it has so much pedophilia pandering + general misogyny issues. but we'll get there.
tomi kisaragi: another good character, i like how she feels immediately defined from the word go. she's snarky, she's impetuous, she's rash, she's easily excitable, she's quick to judge, she's compassionate, etc. etc. probably one of my favorite characters in the game because she felt flawed in a very realistic teenager-y kind of way, and, as mentioned, her romance with nenji feels the most organic out of all of them by far.
yuki takamiya: i liked yuki! she's got a point of view that you can immediately identify and observe. she's had to learn to fend for herself growing up, and you can tell with how jagged and messy her social interactions can be. she's not well-spoken, but she's sincere. she was a compelling character to watch and i think it's a crying shame that she ended up having more romantic chemistry with natsuno than either had with their respective male love interests. i will say that the "yuki is originally natsuno's mom" plot point felt very unnecessary and strangely barely touched upon? like you could delete the few lines where it's even mentioned and virtually nothing in the game would change.
so, with that over and done with, perhaps you see my point. there's a divide in this cast between characters i actually like a lot and characters who do nothing for me. the thing that makes this worse is that a lot of these character stories hit the same beats and feel redundant. oh no, all the amnesiac characters reckon with the fact that they did something bad before they lost their memories. golly gee, there's a fish out of water coming to the 80s from a different period of time. there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed here to make the story leaner and more focused, which is what this game desperately needs. playing some of these stories sections felt like i was developing ADHD for how bored i'd get. this game really was a "sit down for five minutes and then realize how interesting it would be to suddenly do [household chore] instead" experience for me. would 8 sentinels be as snappy of a name? probably not, no. but it would make for a much tighter and more focused story.
beyond that, a greater issue with the game is the amount of pedophile pandering and general misogyny that's soaked into this thing. you have to be naked to pilot the sentinel, and, of course, every time a girl pilots the sentinel, her portrait suddenly shows her in a sexy and titillating pose meant to appeal to dudes who jack off to danganronpa porn or whatever. it's so disgusting and shameless, like cool, i'm glad i'm playing a game where a 15 year old girl is naked and showing off a fucking arched back while supposedly piloting a giant robot. thanks for that vanillaware. don't even get me started on how there's a Big Booba character who inexplicably wears a skintight catsuit that is laughably out of place in every cutscene it's shown because god knows we need gamers to be aroused during these boring dialogue sections. i almost feel like vanillaware is lowballing it's own audience with this type of pandering. "you bought the big robot game because you want tits and ass, right?" no, i wanted big robots.
and even if you cut out the rampant unnecessary sexual objectification, the writing for a lot of the girls in this game leaves a lot to be desired. they often lack agency in their own stories (yuki is controlled by the SIU, iori has no equity in her relationship with ei, ryoko is constantly being monitored by chihiro and renya, megumi is commanded around by the cat, etc.) in a way that their male counterparts don't. but whatever. i spent 138 paragraphs explaining why the game didn't work for me beyond the misogyny in it, god knows i can hope some of you can operate on good faith and understand that i did try to give this game a chance in spite of all this shit.
surprisingly, the most unabashedly positive things i have to say about the game are. . . its gameplay! i sit in the minority of people who seemed to actually like the RTS gameplay of this thing. maybe it's because it was extremely brainless and it gave me the skinnerbox-y number go up syndrome, but i did have a good time. it definitely could use refinement, better UI, and overall more diversity in its presentation and challenges. but as a base, it's good. it doesn't save the game from its shortcomings, but it was genuinely something i looked forward to any time i started to get bored out of my mind by the VN sections. part of me wonders if some of the VN dev time could have been used to add more meat to the RTS sections. hell, maybe restructure the game such that the VN sections are minimal and only serve as flashbacks for important plot info, and instead focus all your attention on establishing these characters in the RTS sections through their dialogue in the before and after mission portions. who knows, it could be even worse than what we got. but i would love something different than this.
overall, i just sit on a pile of disappointment with this game. i can almost see what people really adore about this, but i feel left out. this game suffers from complexity addiction in that it tries to have too many plot twists and too many reveals, to the point where i get burnt out on them. by the end of the game, i was rolling my eyes every time some twist happened. i'd just shrug and go "okay. why should i care." and often not get a decent answer. the story was where all the attention and polish went, and it unfortunately falls flat because it tries harder to be flashy than to tell a story rooted in well-defined and compelling characters. not every narrative implicitly has to be that, but what's the point of creating 13 protagonists if that's not your ultimate goal? it's the simple story of trying too hard to do something flashy that you fuck up the basics, like trying to flambé your steak while it's still raw.
let's start smaller. 13 sentinels is about an RTS meets Visual Novel mashup (if you've never played the game, work with me). you have, funnily enough, 13 main characters who each have distinct stories that bleed over rashomon style while all having their own independent throughlines for what we should care about. and every now and again, you'll hit various locks that force you to either advance a certain character's story to a certain point or do some of the RTS gameplay to a certain point. all of this sounds fine on paper, and it's certainly one of the more creative pitches i've heard for a game.
unfortunately, execution, much like for the french monarchy, is its doom. as mentioned, the prologue slams you through several characters at once and immediately thrusts you into their dilemmas before you've even gotten a grasp to understand who they are. for characters like ei and hijiyama, this works well in a "the audience is learning with the character" way that introduces the setting and conflict, but it's far more miss than hit. i can only dance around it for so long: this game is called 13 sentinels when it would really benefit largely from downsizing to maybe 7 or 8 sentinels. why? well let's go through each character individually to illustrate my point.
juro kurabe: what an absolute nothingburger of a character. his plotline is one of three amnesiac plotlines in the game, and while it's arguably the most important to understanding the plot, he's easily the most dull character. he has tame and meager reactions to the events that unfold in the story, his identity conflict fails to resonate when he's such a dullard, and overall he fails to evoke any pathos.
iori fuyusaka: another nothingburger character. she primarily exists to do anime tropey things like be late for class and run with toast in her mouth, crash into a cute boy and think it's love at first sight, and then trip and give the viewer a gratuitous panty shot (high school girl btw). there are interesting things about her, but much like juro, i would struggle to describe her with adjectives, which is usually a very bad thing for characterization. it's actually very impressive to me that her romance with ei does not take the cake for being the worst one in the game, considering how little the two interact and how one-sided said interactions are.
ei sekigahara: honestly i'm at a weird point with this guy because he was almost unquestionably one of my favorite characters, but he's also not that compelling once you get past his external conflict. i think he benefits largely from having one of the most interesting and compelling visual novel sections in the game, so i give him a lot more wiggle room despite most of his character being "stoic badass guy who is always frowning".
keitaro miura: at the risk of being harsh, he's completely unremarkable. sure, he has a fish out of water story, but hijiyama does as well, and he's 10x the character that keitaro is both in definition and compelling story. despite having played most of this game within the week, i can barely recall what even happens in keitaro's story. he ends up feeling like a side character to most other stories. he is the most "oh, right, that guy's in this game" character.
megumi yakushiji: i want to thank 13 sentinels for giving me a new character to greatly dislike in my life with this one. i think the hardest i laughed in my entire playthrough was when yuki was going through the list of sentinel pilots, got to megumi, and just briefly said "she's pretty dull" and quickly moved on. megumi is the most nothing of nothingburgers, and when we do get scraps of characterization, they make her seem not only unnecessarily cruel, but also foolish. her storyline is that she's trying to save her beloved (old juro) by listening to an evil (or at least british) cat by shooting witches. you do not have to be an anime scholar to see the PMMM reference, and while i don't watch anime, any bitch worth their salt knows you don't make a homura character have the most insultingly dull hetero romance of all time. megumi is a lifeless character because she is utterly incurious to the curious circumstance she finds herself is, is dutifully gullible, and is willing to sacrifice everything for an equally dull character. i think the greatest failing about this story is that we're never given a chance to see megumi/old juro as a romance until it's already dead. i think coming in on the tail end of a relationship and then seeing a character mourn it can definitely work (see: the ambiguous nature of shadow of the colossus), but this game works in the explicit and the intense details. having both of them be as fascinating as wallpaper tanks any interest i could have in their individual stories as well as when their stories intersect. at least make one of them interesting. throw me a fucken bone.
natsuno minami: fun character in that she is dumb as all shit and the game wants you to laugh at her constantly. still, she's curious and inquisitive, and even if her conclusions have a 30% batting average, it's at least fun to see a character attempt to do some level of problem-solving. i do hate how the game basically slaps her in panties for the entire game and acts like it's normal, not to mention how her story starts off with her almost immediately showing off her boobs (high schooler btw). but whatever. she passes the adjective test and i like how she plays off of a couple of characters, so at least she has that going for her. her romance with keitaro is completely token and comes out of a writer's asshole, but whatever. at least it's not juro/megumi.
nenji ogata: man, i am too easy. sure this guy is archetypal as hell but i'm a sucker for rough and tough guy with a sensitive side. it helps that nenji gets one of the better executed stories in his groundhog day loop. overall he was one of the characters who i always wanted to hear talk. he also benefits from having undoubtedly the best romance in the game with tomi because they both interact in great capacities, challenge each other, and also offer solace to each other during their respective difficulties. THIS is what the game needed more of!!
renya gouto: sure, he's a "cold-hearted and emotionless guy secretly is a good guy who has those he cares about" archetype that i've seen a thousand times before, and sure, he's not especially unique or well-executed compared to said thousand portrayals i've seen. but, he's kind of fun as a pseudo-antagonist in some of the stories and is a nice counter-balance for the cast. i'm not especially passionate about him, but as far as "characters as functions/devices" go, he's fine.
ryoko shinonome: sorry, even kira buckland couldn't save her from the nothingburger diagnosis. ryoko suffers from being far more interesting retroactively as the woman who causes everything to go to shit + a pseudo-antagonist in a lot of character stories. when you actually play as her? good god is it dull. amnesiac characters can still have personalities and express emotion. i get that ryoko's a sullen girl who has emotional trauma/baggage that she's repressed, but she has next to no emotional range beyond "im angry at character for wrong reason" and "im disaffected and disoriented uwaa x_x". compelling external conflict can elevate a character, sure (see: ei). but there has to be some base character to elevate in the first place.
shu amiguchi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifaoKZfQpdA the only positive i can say is that he's a character and therefore automatically superior to a third of the cast, but good christ is he unbearable. i get some people like the whole "playboy that's always skirt-chasing" type character, but it always falls flat for me because it usually just results in said character hounding women who are clearly not interested. shu has a somewhat interesting backstory being the clone of ida but the game doesn't do much with it and instead his story mostly serves as a vehicle to introduce the miyuki inaba subplot. i guess gun to the head i would rather take a character i dislike over a nothingburger character because at least they're making an impact.
takatoshi hijiyama: another standout character in the cast. memorable and has a down-to-earth story in a game that is trying too hard to be too much. his whole deal is coming to terms with his homosexuality on top of being a fish out of water, and while there are some cringey forced jokes (his obsession with yakisoba pan comes to mind), he has a strongly defined character with a compelling arc. my only complaint is that his romance with okino is very. . . i don't dislike it, and obviously i think there's value in showing a fleshed out gay romance. my problem lies in that there's a power dynamic in hijiyama/okino that doesn't really sit well with me. a lot of the time, okino doesn't display basic respect to hijiyama and often talks down to him or belittles him. and the scene where he completely violates hijiyama's boundaries/consent all under the guise of "well the machine says you like it when i tie you up lololol" is really. . . Bad. but whatever, most of my nitpicking comes out of resentment that i heard so much about this game having canon lgbt characters and then it has so much pedophilia pandering + general misogyny issues. but we'll get there.
tomi kisaragi: another good character, i like how she feels immediately defined from the word go. she's snarky, she's impetuous, she's rash, she's easily excitable, she's quick to judge, she's compassionate, etc. etc. probably one of my favorite characters in the game because she felt flawed in a very realistic teenager-y kind of way, and, as mentioned, her romance with nenji feels the most organic out of all of them by far.
yuki takamiya: i liked yuki! she's got a point of view that you can immediately identify and observe. she's had to learn to fend for herself growing up, and you can tell with how jagged and messy her social interactions can be. she's not well-spoken, but she's sincere. she was a compelling character to watch and i think it's a crying shame that she ended up having more romantic chemistry with natsuno than either had with their respective male love interests. i will say that the "yuki is originally natsuno's mom" plot point felt very unnecessary and strangely barely touched upon? like you could delete the few lines where it's even mentioned and virtually nothing in the game would change.
so, with that over and done with, perhaps you see my point. there's a divide in this cast between characters i actually like a lot and characters who do nothing for me. the thing that makes this worse is that a lot of these character stories hit the same beats and feel redundant. oh no, all the amnesiac characters reckon with the fact that they did something bad before they lost their memories. golly gee, there's a fish out of water coming to the 80s from a different period of time. there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed here to make the story leaner and more focused, which is what this game desperately needs. playing some of these stories sections felt like i was developing ADHD for how bored i'd get. this game really was a "sit down for five minutes and then realize how interesting it would be to suddenly do [household chore] instead" experience for me. would 8 sentinels be as snappy of a name? probably not, no. but it would make for a much tighter and more focused story.
beyond that, a greater issue with the game is the amount of pedophile pandering and general misogyny that's soaked into this thing. you have to be naked to pilot the sentinel, and, of course, every time a girl pilots the sentinel, her portrait suddenly shows her in a sexy and titillating pose meant to appeal to dudes who jack off to danganronpa porn or whatever. it's so disgusting and shameless, like cool, i'm glad i'm playing a game where a 15 year old girl is naked and showing off a fucking arched back while supposedly piloting a giant robot. thanks for that vanillaware. don't even get me started on how there's a Big Booba character who inexplicably wears a skintight catsuit that is laughably out of place in every cutscene it's shown because god knows we need gamers to be aroused during these boring dialogue sections. i almost feel like vanillaware is lowballing it's own audience with this type of pandering. "you bought the big robot game because you want tits and ass, right?" no, i wanted big robots.
and even if you cut out the rampant unnecessary sexual objectification, the writing for a lot of the girls in this game leaves a lot to be desired. they often lack agency in their own stories (yuki is controlled by the SIU, iori has no equity in her relationship with ei, ryoko is constantly being monitored by chihiro and renya, megumi is commanded around by the cat, etc.) in a way that their male counterparts don't. but whatever. i spent 138 paragraphs explaining why the game didn't work for me beyond the misogyny in it, god knows i can hope some of you can operate on good faith and understand that i did try to give this game a chance in spite of all this shit.
surprisingly, the most unabashedly positive things i have to say about the game are. . . its gameplay! i sit in the minority of people who seemed to actually like the RTS gameplay of this thing. maybe it's because it was extremely brainless and it gave me the skinnerbox-y number go up syndrome, but i did have a good time. it definitely could use refinement, better UI, and overall more diversity in its presentation and challenges. but as a base, it's good. it doesn't save the game from its shortcomings, but it was genuinely something i looked forward to any time i started to get bored out of my mind by the VN sections. part of me wonders if some of the VN dev time could have been used to add more meat to the RTS sections. hell, maybe restructure the game such that the VN sections are minimal and only serve as flashbacks for important plot info, and instead focus all your attention on establishing these characters in the RTS sections through their dialogue in the before and after mission portions. who knows, it could be even worse than what we got. but i would love something different than this.
overall, i just sit on a pile of disappointment with this game. i can almost see what people really adore about this, but i feel left out. this game suffers from complexity addiction in that it tries to have too many plot twists and too many reveals, to the point where i get burnt out on them. by the end of the game, i was rolling my eyes every time some twist happened. i'd just shrug and go "okay. why should i care." and often not get a decent answer. the story was where all the attention and polish went, and it unfortunately falls flat because it tries harder to be flashy than to tell a story rooted in well-defined and compelling characters. not every narrative implicitly has to be that, but what's the point of creating 13 protagonists if that's not your ultimate goal? it's the simple story of trying too hard to do something flashy that you fuck up the basics, like trying to flambé your steak while it's still raw.
videogame 2
Starfield
2023
Warning:
Poorly written near four thousand word novel incoming. Big Bethesda fan so I’m probably biased too. Just read the conclusion if you want a TL;DR I guess. Or don’t.
Preamble:
After putting around 20 hours into Starfield I wrote a near 1000 word review. It was a review going into detail about how Starfield isn't the next No Man's Sky or the replacement to Star Citizen. About how comparing it to other critically acclaimed RPG series like The Witcher or the recently released Baldur's Gate 3 was like comparing apples and oranges. About how it wasn't a matter of one being better than the other but rather a matter of taste and direction. About Bethesda RPGs not truly belonging to the same categories as the aforementioned games, and the need to establish different expectations because of this. About how Starfield offered an entirely different experience from other RPGs. About how this experience wasn’t necessarily worse or better, just different -for other people with different tastes. To put it simply, I was defending Starfield.
Then I played for another 30 hours and I realised something: why should I need to justify my enjoyment? Why am I spending more time talking about games not called Starfield in my Starfield review? I realised that it didn't matter. So no more of that. Fair warning: lots of praise incoming and plenty of complaints too. So let's go.
Intro:
Starfield is the accumulation of everything Bethesda has learnt over the years. Through their Masterpieces, their flawed gems, and their failures. Starfield is a love letter to Bethesda fans who have been entrenched in the worlds of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. A love letter to those who get sucked into those worlds, who spend years playing these games that seemingly never end. Starfield, though by no means perfect, is Bethesda's Magnum Opus.
Praises:
So let's get into what I love about Starfield. As it's a Bethesda game it would be wrong to start with anything else but the game world. Starfield takes place in the aptly named ‘Settled Systems’, a catch-all term for a collective area of chartered systems within the Milky Way Galaxy. Naturally Starfield is in no short supply of places to go and see. It’s not just the wide vistas and deep blacks of outer space that grab your attention, but also the handful of cities neatly hand-crafted and packed full of detail. The hand-crafted portions of Starfield are what I’d call masterfully done, and it definitely shows in game. Delicately placed bits and pieces of detailed clutter breathe life into the game's areas. This clutter adds to the immersion of the settled worlds, alongside the delicately placed bars, restaurants, shops, and other key locations littered throughout. Each of the large cities have their own unique aesthetics not just in architecture: but also in lighting, atmosphere, and of course the characters and quests that populate these places.
Quests are something I always enjoy in Bethesda games, and Starfield is no different. Starfield features a genuinely insane amount of quests and content -perhaps to the point of becoming overwhelming. I haven’t gotten very far myself, but so far the main quest has been pretty interesting, and is definitely a level above Bethesda’s prior efforts. There are also plenty of side quests, faction quests, and a bunch of random encounters out in the far reaches of space that I’ve enjoyed sinking my teeth into. We also can’t forget about the procedural/radiant content that while lacking the depth and quality of the handcrafted content; help fill out the world to create a truly immersive universe to play in. I can’t speak on the quality of all of it as after 50 hours I feel I’ve barely even scratched the surface. Of the quests that I have played I can say they have been great.
When thinking about standout quests there are many quests that come to mind, but one that I always find myself thinking about is actually a very minor delivery quest. Without going into the details, I had to deliver a letter across systems. It was a simple quest that would get filed under ‘misc’; the kind you forget about after 10 minutes. I was given some credits and EXP after finishing it, and I figured that would be that. Flash forward an hour or so and I'm back where I got given the quest and would you look at that: the person I delivered the letter to had actually travelled across systems specifically because of the letter I had delivered. They were having a conversation because of that letter, and I was able to talk to them about it and get some deeper info. What's more the next day they were hanging out somewhere else; chatting about something entirely different! Something that I thought was just some stupid little side quest to fill out the game actually ended up having more depth than I had expected which was very cool.
Bugs, or lack thereof, are surprisingly a major positive for Starfield. It goes without saying that this is entirely anecdotal. After all, everyone's systems react differently; so my experience isn’t necessarily the same as everyone else's. Now I’ve had a few small bugs here or there, but I’ve never had anything more than an odd ragdoll or physics clutter. For a game of this size with everything it’s trying to do, it’s truly remarkable how polished it has been so far. I can thankfully say I’ve never once had to reload a save because of a bug. Time will tell whether or not this experience persists, but for now Starfield has been a very polished game in the bug department -which is a far cry from Bethesda’s prior titles.
Combat is the best it’s ever been in a Bethesda game. Gunplay is smooth, responsive, and most importantly fun. Animations are fluid and add to the general feel of combat. The jetpack provides a level of verticality to the already fast paced combat, and weapon variety helps it from feeling samey. There is however a big flaw in the combat, and a couple of smaller ones, but I will get to them later. Overall combat is very fun. It’s a massive improvement over Fallout which I already thought did a great job for a single player RPG shooter.
Another thing I love are the traits. Now, I haven't seen much action from my background (I chose Bounty Hunter) so I won't comment on that, but the traits I chose were: 'Neon Street Rat', 'Hero Worshipped', and 'Kid Stuff', and I have to say... wow. Obviously I can't comment on the other traits as I haven't used them (maybe I just chose the best traits), but man I was not expecting these traits to have so much content to them. I don't want to go into it too much, but I will simply say that these traits are more than little additions to your dialogue. They define who you are and ground you to the world. 'Neon Street Rat' has unsurprisingly seen a lot of action on Neon and comes up regularly in quests there. Hero Worshipped is probably a must have for Oblivion fans simply for the nostalgia factor. Kid Stuff... man that trait is genuinely just amazing. I won't say any more but yeah these traits are very cool.
The main companions/crew in this game are definitely some of the best Bethesda have ever made (sans Serana) and I’m certainly enjoying my time with them. They each have interesting backstories that have me looking forward to the next time they’ll ‘ask me for a chat’, so I can hear more about their lives. It’s fun seeing them mention what I said in our previous chats too, which makes me feel like I’m truly impacting them rather than just clicking whatever option progresses the dialogue. It truly feels like my talks with them actually affect who they are and how their problems will unfold. Time will tell how much of an impact my choices actually have on them as I’m so early into the game, but so far it’s very promising. Their voice acting is also superb as are their visual designs. Special shoutout to my best friend Adam Jense- err I mean Sam Coe. He’s my favourite by far.
Music. My god Inon Zur absolutely cooked with this soundtrack. I honestly have nothing to say, I’m not a music critic. Unfortunately I don’t know anything technical about music. All I know is those soundtracks play, and I’m taken away into another world. Truly magical stuff... well done.
Choice and consequence is actually surprisingly good for a Bethesda game. There are a variety of different choices you can make throughout all sorts of quests through Starfield that support proper role playing and gives the player agency in how they want their own story to play out. I haven’t played any of the faction quest lines yet, same with most of the main questline, so I’m unaware of how well they handle this. However given the choices I’ve been given in the many side quests I’ve done, I imagine it’s likely just as good.
Random encounters out in space have also been a highlight in my playthrough and gives incentive to interact with the areas outside of the planets rather than just fast travelling straight into a location. From geologists asking me to contribute to their fancy rock collection, to having a Q&A session with a group of overly excited customers on a tour ship, to helping random faction ships fight off some spacers; I’ve had plenty of fun encounters on my journeys in space.
Apparel is also a fun aspect of Starfield. Each of the locations in Starfield present a different motif and because of that there are a wide variety of different styled outfits available. I love getting new clothes not just for myself, but also to kit out my companions and crew. I don’t like that we can’t mix and match clothes anymore, but the outfits available are great. I also appreciate that hair changes dynamically depending on the hats you put on rather than just making you bald like in prior games. Spacesuits and Helmets also look very nice and have a great amount of attention to detail.
Now this is a much smaller thing than the others but I wanted to mention it. I love the detail in planet simulation. Different gravity between planets gets my heart absolutely racing and I always end up having a blast (literally) on low-grav planets. It’s also super cool to watch light scatter differently based on how the planet is orbiting its star, whether another planet is in the way, and even what type of star it's orbiting. I also love that sleeping on different planets has a different effect on universal time versus local time due to space-time dilation.
Ship Combat is pretty fun. It’s a lot more stat-check based than normal combat but the solution there is to just not go into high levelled systems or to grav-jump away. I originally thought it was just a hold your triggers and keep aim kind of thing but there’s a surprising depth to it. There’s definitely some skill required in piloting to make sure you are keeping target, keeping within range, and also moving enough to not be a sitting target dummy. There’s also a bit of tactic in shooting. Shields are up? Probably best to lay off the ballistics and send all your power into lasers. Shields are down? Divert everything to ballistics and missiles and let those spacer scum feel it! It’s actually pretty fun. I just wish there were a power profile button switcher or something since that time wasted manually diverting power can actually end up in taking a lot of damage. On a side note it would be really cool if there was a mod that could use our voices to change the power allocation... “Adoring Fan, divert all power to the grav drives! We’re making a run for it!”
Lastly I want to speak on Ship Building because it's seriously awesome and might just be one of my favourite parts of the game. There’s just something so special about creating your very own ship, hand picking all its systems and its look, and then flying into space and getting into a dogfight with it. I’ve seen people create the Millenium Falcon, and I’ve even seen someone make the Starship Enterprise. The builder system is actually much deeper than I expected from watching the direct and I have to say, I can’t wait to build up enough credits to make myself a whole new Ebon Hawk or even a Normandy SR-1. It would also be really cool if we could have our extra crew follow us as a fleet in our other ships or something too since ally NPC ships do actually assist in fights.
Criticisms:
Now that I've fellated Starfield long enough to be called the biggest fanboy alive, let's get to some of my gripes. Some will be minor nitpicks while others will be genuine issues, so let’s begin.
First and foremost has to be PC performance. Now granted the performance is not by any means outrageous, but it's still an issue. I've thankfully never had to deal with any stutters or issues unlike in [Insert UE4/5 Game Here] however those games also look much better as a tradeoff for the performance. For a game that doesn't even have Ray Tracing to need upscaling tech to keep a steady 60fps on a [3090 5800X3D] PC is very stupid, even if I'm at 3440x1440. Again, I haven't run into any issues with stuttering or any frame drops so it's not the end of the world; but given the fidelity of this game it really should not be so graphically demanding. Lack of official DLSS support is also very disappointing but I’m not sure who is at fault for this.
Next absolutely has to be the AI. While lots of aspects have improved over their prior games, AI is certainly not one of them. Both the enemy and companion AI are absolutely atrocious and I see no improvements over their past games. Now I can mostly ignore the enemy AI since on very hard I tend to just get completely ripped apart by their guns anyway, but companion AI is seriously terrible. Here are a few things I absolutely hate about companion AI:
Sitting in cover doing absolutely nothing but peeking through the corner for the entire fight.
Suddenly deciding that running out into the open is a great idea and getting completely shredded within seconds.
Not adjusting their tactics based on the gun they’re using -- why are you shooting a shotgun from a long range Barrett?
Not even arriving to the fight in time because they follow from 30 miles back for some reason.
Having the absolute worst aim I've ever seen with my own two eyes.
Saying the AI needs work would be a major understatement. Note I am specifically talking about on-foot AI since the space AI is actually pretty good. Anyway, I would rank this as my number one issue with the game but unfortunately I don't see a fix coming any time soon.
On the combat side, melee combat is seriously disappointing. There are a couple of cool melee weapons, but they are never any better than just using a gun. The lack of any level of modding for them really sucks too. This is unfortunately a regression from Fallout’s melee system (even if the animations are much better) and there is next to no reason to play melee in this game.
Continuing on from combat, enemy sponginess is something I'm of two ways about. On one hand, I think it's a necessary evil that comes from meshing a shooter into an RPG. On the other hand, having to empty 2 full mags into someone's unprotected skull to kill them is immersion breaking to say the least. I'm not too torn up about this since mods can just change it anyway, and it's realistically a drawback of shooter RPGs rather than a problem particular to Starfield; but I figured I should mention it anyway.
As much as I like the companions, I feel like they don’t really interact with each other enough outside of main story quests. Maybe this is an expectation I have due to playing so many party-based RPGs and I shouldn’t have them since Starfield only lets you bring one crew member, but I think it’s a shame nonetheless. Crew banter is one of the best things about companions/parties in RPGs and it’s a shame the banter is so lacking in Starfield. This is especially true given that while they may not be out together on foot, they are together literally any time I’m on my ship.
Following on from the companions I don’t like that they’re pretty much all goodie two shoes. Now I play a good guy typically with a bit of grey morality here or there so it’s not the biggest issue in the world, but it’s weird that we have no evil or at least grey companions in Constellation -I would’ve liked a little more variety there. Oh well, at least my Adoring Fan doesn’t question me when I accidentally throw a live grenade into a crowd of innocents.
Now this is a small one and honestly it's less to do with Starfield and more to do with RPGs in general, and that's the Persuasion system. Gamifying and tying dialogue to game skills will forever be something I absolutely hate in RPGs. Reward me for understanding the characters and paying attention to the quests and the conversation. Don't just let me use a 'skill' I spent a point on to magically get my way with one liners that wouldn't convince a child. Yes I know there are certain 'blue checks' in the persuasion system and they are great but they are also few and far between. Trait/Power based persuasion is okay with me because that is at least immersive, but the chance based xyz persuasion will always be bad. It is boring and it tends to make quest design lazy. Admittedly it is a better persuasion system than Fallout and Skyrim, but I still don't like it. I will stand by the fact that Deus Ex has, to this day, the best persuasion system in gaming; and will continue to hopelessly wish that other games will pick up on it.
I also don't like that enemies aren't fully lootable like in TES or Fallout. I don't think this is an economic choice since credits aren't exactly hard to come by and you'd be limited by encumbrance anyway. It was a key staple in Bethesda games that I feel added a depth to the immersion that other games simply didn't have. I genuinely think Starfield suffers with its loss. I also miss seeing the NPCs get stripped when we took their gear and I think it blows that it doesn't happen anymore. I’m sure it’ll get modded in eventually, but this isn’t something that we should need to be modded in the first place.
I'm not a huge fan of the perk system either. I like the idea behind challenges but I stand by Oblivion having the best levelling system in a Bethesda game. The perks that unlock systems or new functions are fine, but perks that just add an extra 10 percent damage or 20 percent chance are boring and lazy. It’s a shame that the vast majority of perks are like this and it takes away all of the fun of class building and levelling up when a level essentially constitutes to: “here’s an extra 10 percent damage”. Nothing else to really say except this is a very boring and uninspired part of the game. Thankfully there’s a system that I won’t mention for spoilers that does add some cool stuff, but that doesn’t negate how boring the perks are.
Now I’m not too sure how accurate this criticism will be since I haven’t maxed out the weapon modding skill, but I feel like modding guns is actually a step down from Fallout. In Fallout 4 you could change a gun's characteristics so much that you could turn say a Pipe Pistol into a Pipe Sniper Rifle or a Pipe Machine Gun. In Starfield you can still modify the guns to a good amount, but it just doesn’t feel as deep as the system in Fallout 4. I may just not have enough levels in the skill or I’m just misremembering Fallout 4, but right now it definitely feels like a regression.
The regional map is the worst map I've ever seen in any game too by the way. I have no idea who thought this completely unreadable dot amalgamation was a good idea, but it’s terrible. I honestly thought my game was bugged when I first saw it, only to find out it was intended. It would be one thing for the procedural planets to use that type of map (I still think it’s lazy) but the handcrafted cities too? The local maps needed a major revamp last week. Get on it.
Miscellaneous loot is also something I have a problem with. In Fallout 4 all miscellaneous items had a use -in that their components could be used as resources for crafting. Unfortunately Starfield does not follow this trend and goes back to having all that miscellaneous junk be useless. Not a fan of this at all. I understand that the majority of resources will be gathered from actual minerals and animals, but at least allow us to burn all the miscellaneous loot for a percentage of the resources. My loot goblin heart burns seeing all that clutter be completely useless and this feels like needless regression.
The lack of a transmog feature is something I find a little baffling. For a game with so many different armors with a diverse set of effects and resistances (a lot of which is also random) to not have a transmog system is so weird. It's 2023. We should not have to choose between the strongest armour in our inventory and the look that we like. Get with the program Bethesda, this is an outdated issue.
Another flaw is one that I imagine I share with many people here and that's the lack of seamlessness. This game is littered with loading screens and while I can ignore it for the most part on my M.2 (never takes more than a few seconds to load) it's still a shame. I don’t mind the existence of all different fast travels (it’s very convenient when you need to jump between 4 different outposts all in different systems) but I still think keeping in some sort of way to manually travel between planets and systems outside of these menus would’ve been nice. It’s not by any means a big deal to me, but it certainly hurts the flow of the game and general immersion.
The final flaw I think is worth mentioning has to be the tile system. I never had any intention of walking across an entire planet anyway, but I still think it would’ve been cool to have as an option. Even if it couldn’t be seamless, why not just prompt the player to generate a new tile as they’re walking? Why do they need to return to their ship? Just have a loading screen right there when they’re walking and make them go through a loading screen at each boundary, no ship necessary. In the end the tiles aren’t a huge problem to me since the only times I interact with the procedural planets is when it’s related to a quest or I’m making an outpost. Even then it’s still something that I consider a negative, if only in terms of immersion. Oh by the way I hate that there are no ground vehicles. It’s almost certainly because of the tile system (reaching boundaries would be way quicker) but it still sucks.
Conclusion:
Starfield is Bethesda’s first new IP in over 25 years and their first single player experience since the release of Fallout 4 back in 2015. How does it match up against their previous games? Does it beat out gaming behemoths like Skyrim and Fallout 4? How does it fare against their crowd favourites in Oblivion and Fallout 3? What about their original masterpiece that quite literally saved the company in Morrowind?
In my humble opinion: Starfield absolutely blows those games out of the water. Starfield is the accumulation of everything Bethesda has learnt and achieved since the beginning of their company. It is the embodiment of the Bethesda DNA that we’ve come to expect from their releases. It is the ultimate refinement of a Bethesda game; a Bethesda RPG. Starfield is their Magnum Opus.
For some this game will be a letdown, for others it will be just okay. It will really come down to whether you like Bethesda RPGs or you don’t, because that’s exactly what Starfield is. For me this game is what I’ve been waiting for the past 8 years when I had first heard of the trademark ‘Starfield’. It is the fulfilment of the dream I’ve had since I was a child. To explore the vastness of space and be set free in a near endlessly wide and fun open world, or better yet, open universe. That is what Starfield has given to me.
Starfield is not perfect, not even close; but I don’t care. In my eyes, this is a masterpiece. To me, this is what gaming is meant to be. An escape into a dream world where I can do anything I want, and be whoever I want. That is what Starfield truly is.
So to close out this far too long ramble that no one has even read, I’ll say this. Bethesda has created something truly special with Starfield; and I’ve barely even started my journey with it. As Marthe Troly-Curtin once wrote: ‘time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time’. Well, I suppose I’ll be spending a lot of time, ‘not wasted’, with Starfield.
5/5
Poorly written near four thousand word novel incoming. Big Bethesda fan so I’m probably biased too. Just read the conclusion if you want a TL;DR I guess. Or don’t.
Preamble:
After putting around 20 hours into Starfield I wrote a near 1000 word review. It was a review going into detail about how Starfield isn't the next No Man's Sky or the replacement to Star Citizen. About how comparing it to other critically acclaimed RPG series like The Witcher or the recently released Baldur's Gate 3 was like comparing apples and oranges. About how it wasn't a matter of one being better than the other but rather a matter of taste and direction. About Bethesda RPGs not truly belonging to the same categories as the aforementioned games, and the need to establish different expectations because of this. About how Starfield offered an entirely different experience from other RPGs. About how this experience wasn’t necessarily worse or better, just different -for other people with different tastes. To put it simply, I was defending Starfield.
Then I played for another 30 hours and I realised something: why should I need to justify my enjoyment? Why am I spending more time talking about games not called Starfield in my Starfield review? I realised that it didn't matter. So no more of that. Fair warning: lots of praise incoming and plenty of complaints too. So let's go.
Intro:
Starfield is the accumulation of everything Bethesda has learnt over the years. Through their Masterpieces, their flawed gems, and their failures. Starfield is a love letter to Bethesda fans who have been entrenched in the worlds of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout. A love letter to those who get sucked into those worlds, who spend years playing these games that seemingly never end. Starfield, though by no means perfect, is Bethesda's Magnum Opus.
Praises:
So let's get into what I love about Starfield. As it's a Bethesda game it would be wrong to start with anything else but the game world. Starfield takes place in the aptly named ‘Settled Systems’, a catch-all term for a collective area of chartered systems within the Milky Way Galaxy. Naturally Starfield is in no short supply of places to go and see. It’s not just the wide vistas and deep blacks of outer space that grab your attention, but also the handful of cities neatly hand-crafted and packed full of detail. The hand-crafted portions of Starfield are what I’d call masterfully done, and it definitely shows in game. Delicately placed bits and pieces of detailed clutter breathe life into the game's areas. This clutter adds to the immersion of the settled worlds, alongside the delicately placed bars, restaurants, shops, and other key locations littered throughout. Each of the large cities have their own unique aesthetics not just in architecture: but also in lighting, atmosphere, and of course the characters and quests that populate these places.
Quests are something I always enjoy in Bethesda games, and Starfield is no different. Starfield features a genuinely insane amount of quests and content -perhaps to the point of becoming overwhelming. I haven’t gotten very far myself, but so far the main quest has been pretty interesting, and is definitely a level above Bethesda’s prior efforts. There are also plenty of side quests, faction quests, and a bunch of random encounters out in the far reaches of space that I’ve enjoyed sinking my teeth into. We also can’t forget about the procedural/radiant content that while lacking the depth and quality of the handcrafted content; help fill out the world to create a truly immersive universe to play in. I can’t speak on the quality of all of it as after 50 hours I feel I’ve barely even scratched the surface. Of the quests that I have played I can say they have been great.
When thinking about standout quests there are many quests that come to mind, but one that I always find myself thinking about is actually a very minor delivery quest. Without going into the details, I had to deliver a letter across systems. It was a simple quest that would get filed under ‘misc’; the kind you forget about after 10 minutes. I was given some credits and EXP after finishing it, and I figured that would be that. Flash forward an hour or so and I'm back where I got given the quest and would you look at that: the person I delivered the letter to had actually travelled across systems specifically because of the letter I had delivered. They were having a conversation because of that letter, and I was able to talk to them about it and get some deeper info. What's more the next day they were hanging out somewhere else; chatting about something entirely different! Something that I thought was just some stupid little side quest to fill out the game actually ended up having more depth than I had expected which was very cool.
Bugs, or lack thereof, are surprisingly a major positive for Starfield. It goes without saying that this is entirely anecdotal. After all, everyone's systems react differently; so my experience isn’t necessarily the same as everyone else's. Now I’ve had a few small bugs here or there, but I’ve never had anything more than an odd ragdoll or physics clutter. For a game of this size with everything it’s trying to do, it’s truly remarkable how polished it has been so far. I can thankfully say I’ve never once had to reload a save because of a bug. Time will tell whether or not this experience persists, but for now Starfield has been a very polished game in the bug department -which is a far cry from Bethesda’s prior titles.
Combat is the best it’s ever been in a Bethesda game. Gunplay is smooth, responsive, and most importantly fun. Animations are fluid and add to the general feel of combat. The jetpack provides a level of verticality to the already fast paced combat, and weapon variety helps it from feeling samey. There is however a big flaw in the combat, and a couple of smaller ones, but I will get to them later. Overall combat is very fun. It’s a massive improvement over Fallout which I already thought did a great job for a single player RPG shooter.
Another thing I love are the traits. Now, I haven't seen much action from my background (I chose Bounty Hunter) so I won't comment on that, but the traits I chose were: 'Neon Street Rat', 'Hero Worshipped', and 'Kid Stuff', and I have to say... wow. Obviously I can't comment on the other traits as I haven't used them (maybe I just chose the best traits), but man I was not expecting these traits to have so much content to them. I don't want to go into it too much, but I will simply say that these traits are more than little additions to your dialogue. They define who you are and ground you to the world. 'Neon Street Rat' has unsurprisingly seen a lot of action on Neon and comes up regularly in quests there. Hero Worshipped is probably a must have for Oblivion fans simply for the nostalgia factor. Kid Stuff... man that trait is genuinely just amazing. I won't say any more but yeah these traits are very cool.
The main companions/crew in this game are definitely some of the best Bethesda have ever made (sans Serana) and I’m certainly enjoying my time with them. They each have interesting backstories that have me looking forward to the next time they’ll ‘ask me for a chat’, so I can hear more about their lives. It’s fun seeing them mention what I said in our previous chats too, which makes me feel like I’m truly impacting them rather than just clicking whatever option progresses the dialogue. It truly feels like my talks with them actually affect who they are and how their problems will unfold. Time will tell how much of an impact my choices actually have on them as I’m so early into the game, but so far it’s very promising. Their voice acting is also superb as are their visual designs. Special shoutout to my best friend Adam Jense- err I mean Sam Coe. He’s my favourite by far.
Music. My god Inon Zur absolutely cooked with this soundtrack. I honestly have nothing to say, I’m not a music critic. Unfortunately I don’t know anything technical about music. All I know is those soundtracks play, and I’m taken away into another world. Truly magical stuff... well done.
Choice and consequence is actually surprisingly good for a Bethesda game. There are a variety of different choices you can make throughout all sorts of quests through Starfield that support proper role playing and gives the player agency in how they want their own story to play out. I haven’t played any of the faction quest lines yet, same with most of the main questline, so I’m unaware of how well they handle this. However given the choices I’ve been given in the many side quests I’ve done, I imagine it’s likely just as good.
Random encounters out in space have also been a highlight in my playthrough and gives incentive to interact with the areas outside of the planets rather than just fast travelling straight into a location. From geologists asking me to contribute to their fancy rock collection, to having a Q&A session with a group of overly excited customers on a tour ship, to helping random faction ships fight off some spacers; I’ve had plenty of fun encounters on my journeys in space.
Apparel is also a fun aspect of Starfield. Each of the locations in Starfield present a different motif and because of that there are a wide variety of different styled outfits available. I love getting new clothes not just for myself, but also to kit out my companions and crew. I don’t like that we can’t mix and match clothes anymore, but the outfits available are great. I also appreciate that hair changes dynamically depending on the hats you put on rather than just making you bald like in prior games. Spacesuits and Helmets also look very nice and have a great amount of attention to detail.
Now this is a much smaller thing than the others but I wanted to mention it. I love the detail in planet simulation. Different gravity between planets gets my heart absolutely racing and I always end up having a blast (literally) on low-grav planets. It’s also super cool to watch light scatter differently based on how the planet is orbiting its star, whether another planet is in the way, and even what type of star it's orbiting. I also love that sleeping on different planets has a different effect on universal time versus local time due to space-time dilation.
Ship Combat is pretty fun. It’s a lot more stat-check based than normal combat but the solution there is to just not go into high levelled systems or to grav-jump away. I originally thought it was just a hold your triggers and keep aim kind of thing but there’s a surprising depth to it. There’s definitely some skill required in piloting to make sure you are keeping target, keeping within range, and also moving enough to not be a sitting target dummy. There’s also a bit of tactic in shooting. Shields are up? Probably best to lay off the ballistics and send all your power into lasers. Shields are down? Divert everything to ballistics and missiles and let those spacer scum feel it! It’s actually pretty fun. I just wish there were a power profile button switcher or something since that time wasted manually diverting power can actually end up in taking a lot of damage. On a side note it would be really cool if there was a mod that could use our voices to change the power allocation... “Adoring Fan, divert all power to the grav drives! We’re making a run for it!”
Lastly I want to speak on Ship Building because it's seriously awesome and might just be one of my favourite parts of the game. There’s just something so special about creating your very own ship, hand picking all its systems and its look, and then flying into space and getting into a dogfight with it. I’ve seen people create the Millenium Falcon, and I’ve even seen someone make the Starship Enterprise. The builder system is actually much deeper than I expected from watching the direct and I have to say, I can’t wait to build up enough credits to make myself a whole new Ebon Hawk or even a Normandy SR-1. It would also be really cool if we could have our extra crew follow us as a fleet in our other ships or something too since ally NPC ships do actually assist in fights.
Criticisms:
Now that I've fellated Starfield long enough to be called the biggest fanboy alive, let's get to some of my gripes. Some will be minor nitpicks while others will be genuine issues, so let’s begin.
First and foremost has to be PC performance. Now granted the performance is not by any means outrageous, but it's still an issue. I've thankfully never had to deal with any stutters or issues unlike in [Insert UE4/5 Game Here] however those games also look much better as a tradeoff for the performance. For a game that doesn't even have Ray Tracing to need upscaling tech to keep a steady 60fps on a [3090 5800X3D] PC is very stupid, even if I'm at 3440x1440. Again, I haven't run into any issues with stuttering or any frame drops so it's not the end of the world; but given the fidelity of this game it really should not be so graphically demanding. Lack of official DLSS support is also very disappointing but I’m not sure who is at fault for this.
Next absolutely has to be the AI. While lots of aspects have improved over their prior games, AI is certainly not one of them. Both the enemy and companion AI are absolutely atrocious and I see no improvements over their past games. Now I can mostly ignore the enemy AI since on very hard I tend to just get completely ripped apart by their guns anyway, but companion AI is seriously terrible. Here are a few things I absolutely hate about companion AI:
Sitting in cover doing absolutely nothing but peeking through the corner for the entire fight.
Suddenly deciding that running out into the open is a great idea and getting completely shredded within seconds.
Not adjusting their tactics based on the gun they’re using -- why are you shooting a shotgun from a long range Barrett?
Not even arriving to the fight in time because they follow from 30 miles back for some reason.
Having the absolute worst aim I've ever seen with my own two eyes.
Saying the AI needs work would be a major understatement. Note I am specifically talking about on-foot AI since the space AI is actually pretty good. Anyway, I would rank this as my number one issue with the game but unfortunately I don't see a fix coming any time soon.
On the combat side, melee combat is seriously disappointing. There are a couple of cool melee weapons, but they are never any better than just using a gun. The lack of any level of modding for them really sucks too. This is unfortunately a regression from Fallout’s melee system (even if the animations are much better) and there is next to no reason to play melee in this game.
Continuing on from combat, enemy sponginess is something I'm of two ways about. On one hand, I think it's a necessary evil that comes from meshing a shooter into an RPG. On the other hand, having to empty 2 full mags into someone's unprotected skull to kill them is immersion breaking to say the least. I'm not too torn up about this since mods can just change it anyway, and it's realistically a drawback of shooter RPGs rather than a problem particular to Starfield; but I figured I should mention it anyway.
As much as I like the companions, I feel like they don’t really interact with each other enough outside of main story quests. Maybe this is an expectation I have due to playing so many party-based RPGs and I shouldn’t have them since Starfield only lets you bring one crew member, but I think it’s a shame nonetheless. Crew banter is one of the best things about companions/parties in RPGs and it’s a shame the banter is so lacking in Starfield. This is especially true given that while they may not be out together on foot, they are together literally any time I’m on my ship.
Following on from the companions I don’t like that they’re pretty much all goodie two shoes. Now I play a good guy typically with a bit of grey morality here or there so it’s not the biggest issue in the world, but it’s weird that we have no evil or at least grey companions in Constellation -I would’ve liked a little more variety there. Oh well, at least my Adoring Fan doesn’t question me when I accidentally throw a live grenade into a crowd of innocents.
Now this is a small one and honestly it's less to do with Starfield and more to do with RPGs in general, and that's the Persuasion system. Gamifying and tying dialogue to game skills will forever be something I absolutely hate in RPGs. Reward me for understanding the characters and paying attention to the quests and the conversation. Don't just let me use a 'skill' I spent a point on to magically get my way with one liners that wouldn't convince a child. Yes I know there are certain 'blue checks' in the persuasion system and they are great but they are also few and far between. Trait/Power based persuasion is okay with me because that is at least immersive, but the chance based xyz persuasion will always be bad. It is boring and it tends to make quest design lazy. Admittedly it is a better persuasion system than Fallout and Skyrim, but I still don't like it. I will stand by the fact that Deus Ex has, to this day, the best persuasion system in gaming; and will continue to hopelessly wish that other games will pick up on it.
I also don't like that enemies aren't fully lootable like in TES or Fallout. I don't think this is an economic choice since credits aren't exactly hard to come by and you'd be limited by encumbrance anyway. It was a key staple in Bethesda games that I feel added a depth to the immersion that other games simply didn't have. I genuinely think Starfield suffers with its loss. I also miss seeing the NPCs get stripped when we took their gear and I think it blows that it doesn't happen anymore. I’m sure it’ll get modded in eventually, but this isn’t something that we should need to be modded in the first place.
I'm not a huge fan of the perk system either. I like the idea behind challenges but I stand by Oblivion having the best levelling system in a Bethesda game. The perks that unlock systems or new functions are fine, but perks that just add an extra 10 percent damage or 20 percent chance are boring and lazy. It’s a shame that the vast majority of perks are like this and it takes away all of the fun of class building and levelling up when a level essentially constitutes to: “here’s an extra 10 percent damage”. Nothing else to really say except this is a very boring and uninspired part of the game. Thankfully there’s a system that I won’t mention for spoilers that does add some cool stuff, but that doesn’t negate how boring the perks are.
Now I’m not too sure how accurate this criticism will be since I haven’t maxed out the weapon modding skill, but I feel like modding guns is actually a step down from Fallout. In Fallout 4 you could change a gun's characteristics so much that you could turn say a Pipe Pistol into a Pipe Sniper Rifle or a Pipe Machine Gun. In Starfield you can still modify the guns to a good amount, but it just doesn’t feel as deep as the system in Fallout 4. I may just not have enough levels in the skill or I’m just misremembering Fallout 4, but right now it definitely feels like a regression.
The regional map is the worst map I've ever seen in any game too by the way. I have no idea who thought this completely unreadable dot amalgamation was a good idea, but it’s terrible. I honestly thought my game was bugged when I first saw it, only to find out it was intended. It would be one thing for the procedural planets to use that type of map (I still think it’s lazy) but the handcrafted cities too? The local maps needed a major revamp last week. Get on it.
Miscellaneous loot is also something I have a problem with. In Fallout 4 all miscellaneous items had a use -in that their components could be used as resources for crafting. Unfortunately Starfield does not follow this trend and goes back to having all that miscellaneous junk be useless. Not a fan of this at all. I understand that the majority of resources will be gathered from actual minerals and animals, but at least allow us to burn all the miscellaneous loot for a percentage of the resources. My loot goblin heart burns seeing all that clutter be completely useless and this feels like needless regression.
The lack of a transmog feature is something I find a little baffling. For a game with so many different armors with a diverse set of effects and resistances (a lot of which is also random) to not have a transmog system is so weird. It's 2023. We should not have to choose between the strongest armour in our inventory and the look that we like. Get with the program Bethesda, this is an outdated issue.
Another flaw is one that I imagine I share with many people here and that's the lack of seamlessness. This game is littered with loading screens and while I can ignore it for the most part on my M.2 (never takes more than a few seconds to load) it's still a shame. I don’t mind the existence of all different fast travels (it’s very convenient when you need to jump between 4 different outposts all in different systems) but I still think keeping in some sort of way to manually travel between planets and systems outside of these menus would’ve been nice. It’s not by any means a big deal to me, but it certainly hurts the flow of the game and general immersion.
The final flaw I think is worth mentioning has to be the tile system. I never had any intention of walking across an entire planet anyway, but I still think it would’ve been cool to have as an option. Even if it couldn’t be seamless, why not just prompt the player to generate a new tile as they’re walking? Why do they need to return to their ship? Just have a loading screen right there when they’re walking and make them go through a loading screen at each boundary, no ship necessary. In the end the tiles aren’t a huge problem to me since the only times I interact with the procedural planets is when it’s related to a quest or I’m making an outpost. Even then it’s still something that I consider a negative, if only in terms of immersion. Oh by the way I hate that there are no ground vehicles. It’s almost certainly because of the tile system (reaching boundaries would be way quicker) but it still sucks.
Conclusion:
Starfield is Bethesda’s first new IP in over 25 years and their first single player experience since the release of Fallout 4 back in 2015. How does it match up against their previous games? Does it beat out gaming behemoths like Skyrim and Fallout 4? How does it fare against their crowd favourites in Oblivion and Fallout 3? What about their original masterpiece that quite literally saved the company in Morrowind?
In my humble opinion: Starfield absolutely blows those games out of the water. Starfield is the accumulation of everything Bethesda has learnt and achieved since the beginning of their company. It is the embodiment of the Bethesda DNA that we’ve come to expect from their releases. It is the ultimate refinement of a Bethesda game; a Bethesda RPG. Starfield is their Magnum Opus.
For some this game will be a letdown, for others it will be just okay. It will really come down to whether you like Bethesda RPGs or you don’t, because that’s exactly what Starfield is. For me this game is what I’ve been waiting for the past 8 years when I had first heard of the trademark ‘Starfield’. It is the fulfilment of the dream I’ve had since I was a child. To explore the vastness of space and be set free in a near endlessly wide and fun open world, or better yet, open universe. That is what Starfield has given to me.
Starfield is not perfect, not even close; but I don’t care. In my eyes, this is a masterpiece. To me, this is what gaming is meant to be. An escape into a dream world where I can do anything I want, and be whoever I want. That is what Starfield truly is.
So to close out this far too long ramble that no one has even read, I’ll say this. Bethesda has created something truly special with Starfield; and I’ve barely even started my journey with it. As Marthe Troly-Curtin once wrote: ‘time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time’. Well, I suppose I’ll be spending a lot of time, ‘not wasted’, with Starfield.
5/5
Exoprimal
2023
But I don't WANT to cure cancer! I want to make people shoot dinosaurs!
Exoprimal
2023
Exoprimal is more fun than it has any right to be, frankly. The core loop is fun, the game runs shockingly well, the presentation is great, and the monetization doesn't seem too intrusive.
Some caveats:
- The production level is very high, but a multiplayer-only game like this shouldn't be full price, so definitely enjoy this one through Game Pass if you can.
- The game mode and map variety currently leaves a bit to be desired.
Overall, Exoprimal is fun, and I recommend trying it for yourself because it seems to be cool thing to be mad at online right now.
Some caveats:
- The production level is very high, but a multiplayer-only game like this shouldn't be full price, so definitely enjoy this one through Game Pass if you can.
- The game mode and map variety currently leaves a bit to be desired.
Overall, Exoprimal is fun, and I recommend trying it for yourself because it seems to be cool thing to be mad at online right now.
Sonic Heroes
2003
There is a specific way you can look at art. You can appraise it on a technical scale, assess its merits, and incorporate a rubric to try and determine how you ultimately feel about it. That's what my reviews in large part do. However, you can go more free-form and say "This piece of art impacted me in this way that I cannot quantify.", sort of like you're explaining the emotions it evoked out of you and leaving them out for a third-party audience to mull over.
So, in the spirit of trying something new, I will simply say that Sonic Heroes is a video game that has brought the most misery and unhappiness out of me that I can ever recall of any piece of art. Trying to 100% this game was nothing short of a waking nightmare, and it brought out such severe anger in me that I wasn't actually aware I was capable of. This game significantly reduced my capacity to experience joy or contentment during the entire time I was playing it. Every time I sat down to play it, I walked away unquestionably feeling worse.
That is my review of this game.
So, in the spirit of trying something new, I will simply say that Sonic Heroes is a video game that has brought the most misery and unhappiness out of me that I can ever recall of any piece of art. Trying to 100% this game was nothing short of a waking nightmare, and it brought out such severe anger in me that I wasn't actually aware I was capable of. This game significantly reduced my capacity to experience joy or contentment during the entire time I was playing it. Every time I sat down to play it, I walked away unquestionably feeling worse.
That is my review of this game.
It's difficult to review Tears of the Kingdom without acknowledging my bias. After playing Breath of the Wild for several years and completing multiple playthroughs, I started feeling a sense of exhaustion with the game. Having explored everything and completed all the shrines, the magic of Breath of the Wild had faded. Sadly, I experienced a similar feeling around the 93-hour mark in Tears of the Kingdom, which left me somewhat disheartened.
Tears of the Kingdom offers an abundance of content, but this is where the game falls short for me. While the sandbox mechanics allow for inventive and absurd creations, they are not enough to carry the overall gameplay. Unlike many others on Twitter, I didn't find myself engrossed in making outlandish inventions to bother Koroks or obliterate enemy civilizations. Instead, I spent most of my time re-exploring a map that felt around 80% the same, excluding the Depths. The exploration in Tears of the Kingdom lacked the magical feeling of discovery I had cherished in Breath of the Wild. Very few locations brought about that exhilarating moment of stumbling upon something extraordinary. Hateno Village was overrun with mushrooms, Kakariko Village had ring ruins, and Hyrule Castle was elevated. Most locations remained largely unchanged, leading to accusations of the game being a DLC asset flip, and unfortunately, it did little to refute those claims.
Additionally, I found the Depths to be quite underwhelming. Initially, the concept of a creepy, pitch-dark world that was mostly optional and provided rewards seemed intriguing. However, the layout quickly became frustrating. Even with the aid of Brightbloom Seeds, I frequently encountered massive walls and blockages that appeared impassable unless I took a detour through a completely different chasm. I recall a specific scenario recently where I was attempting to head west from a northern lightroot I activated, only to be confronted by the seemingly endless expanse of the Forest Coliseum. It felt like a dead end, so I gave up and redirected my path to a lightroot south of my intended destination. While the Depths had an impressive aesthetic, exploring them often felt like a chore.
It's important to note that these criticisms might stem from my recent fatigue with Breath of the Wild. I should have anticipated that this game might not resonate as strongly with me. Nevertheless, there were positive aspects worth acknowledging. The soundtrack in Tears of the Kingdom, already a strong suit in Breath of the Wild, is phenomenal. It significantly enhanced the otherwise dull moments of the game. The finale boasts some of the best music I've heard in 2023 thus far. I particularly enjoyed the tracks featuring reversed vocals, which were not only eerie but also progressively intensified. Furthermore, considering that this game runs on a Nintendo Switch, with areas like the Depths essentially constituting two maps, it pushes the console's limits. It leaves me wondering how it would perform on a more powerful system.
Despite the lackluster exploration, I appreciated some aspects even by the end of the game. This included the memories found in the Tears, as well as the new abilities that replaced those in Breath of the Wild, especially the weapon fusing mechanic. This fuse feature genuinely astonished me, such as the ability to turn any weapon into a makeshift katana using Lizalfo horns or transform a weapon into a fire-blade with a fire horn. It significantly alleviated the tedium of combat compared to Breath of the Wild.
The game's writing initially showed promise. However, after completing the first main objective of resolving the phenomena, the writing lost its potential and became overly simplistic, similar to Breath of the Wild. The cutscenes when encountering new sages were redundant, with each one repeating the same information. By the time I reached the third and fourth sages, I found myself rolling my eyes. These cutscenes explaining the Demon King's story felt superfluous if one had already watched all the Tears cutscenes. This sense of pointlessness permeated various aspects of the game. While the dungeons did show improvement, they were not exceptional, except for the Wind Temple. The Spirit Temple, in particular, proved tedious and unengaging, making me contemplate abandoning the game. Fortunately, the game concluded shortly after. The final boss fight was captivating, particularly during the dragon encounter, but the battle against Ganondorf beforehand was frustrating and tedious due to the agonizing flurry rush face off.
It saddens me that Tears of the Kingdom initially felt like a masterpiece during the first half of my 93-hour playthrough, only to lose its charm around the 50-60 hour mark. Everything seemed to overstay its welcome, and even the side quests failed to maintain the game's magic. Despite completing around 30 side quests, none of them left a significant impact as I pushed through the main story. However, the ending was undeniably incredible, with the final cutscenes evoking intense emotions and leaving a lasting impression. While I ultimately consider this game to be decent, it falls short of being a masterpiece and is plagued by issues inherited from Breath of the Wild, which are even more apparent in this 70-hour experience. I sincerely hope the next Zelda game deviates from this formula and remains a duology, as I can't envision myself purchasing a third game built upon Breath of the Wild's foundation. With that said, I acknowledge that many people will view this game as perfect, but for me, it stands as one of the biggest letdowns in recent years.
Tears of the Kingdom offers an abundance of content, but this is where the game falls short for me. While the sandbox mechanics allow for inventive and absurd creations, they are not enough to carry the overall gameplay. Unlike many others on Twitter, I didn't find myself engrossed in making outlandish inventions to bother Koroks or obliterate enemy civilizations. Instead, I spent most of my time re-exploring a map that felt around 80% the same, excluding the Depths. The exploration in Tears of the Kingdom lacked the magical feeling of discovery I had cherished in Breath of the Wild. Very few locations brought about that exhilarating moment of stumbling upon something extraordinary. Hateno Village was overrun with mushrooms, Kakariko Village had ring ruins, and Hyrule Castle was elevated. Most locations remained largely unchanged, leading to accusations of the game being a DLC asset flip, and unfortunately, it did little to refute those claims.
Additionally, I found the Depths to be quite underwhelming. Initially, the concept of a creepy, pitch-dark world that was mostly optional and provided rewards seemed intriguing. However, the layout quickly became frustrating. Even with the aid of Brightbloom Seeds, I frequently encountered massive walls and blockages that appeared impassable unless I took a detour through a completely different chasm. I recall a specific scenario recently where I was attempting to head west from a northern lightroot I activated, only to be confronted by the seemingly endless expanse of the Forest Coliseum. It felt like a dead end, so I gave up and redirected my path to a lightroot south of my intended destination. While the Depths had an impressive aesthetic, exploring them often felt like a chore.
It's important to note that these criticisms might stem from my recent fatigue with Breath of the Wild. I should have anticipated that this game might not resonate as strongly with me. Nevertheless, there were positive aspects worth acknowledging. The soundtrack in Tears of the Kingdom, already a strong suit in Breath of the Wild, is phenomenal. It significantly enhanced the otherwise dull moments of the game. The finale boasts some of the best music I've heard in 2023 thus far. I particularly enjoyed the tracks featuring reversed vocals, which were not only eerie but also progressively intensified. Furthermore, considering that this game runs on a Nintendo Switch, with areas like the Depths essentially constituting two maps, it pushes the console's limits. It leaves me wondering how it would perform on a more powerful system.
Despite the lackluster exploration, I appreciated some aspects even by the end of the game. This included the memories found in the Tears, as well as the new abilities that replaced those in Breath of the Wild, especially the weapon fusing mechanic. This fuse feature genuinely astonished me, such as the ability to turn any weapon into a makeshift katana using Lizalfo horns or transform a weapon into a fire-blade with a fire horn. It significantly alleviated the tedium of combat compared to Breath of the Wild.
The game's writing initially showed promise. However, after completing the first main objective of resolving the phenomena, the writing lost its potential and became overly simplistic, similar to Breath of the Wild. The cutscenes when encountering new sages were redundant, with each one repeating the same information. By the time I reached the third and fourth sages, I found myself rolling my eyes. These cutscenes explaining the Demon King's story felt superfluous if one had already watched all the Tears cutscenes. This sense of pointlessness permeated various aspects of the game. While the dungeons did show improvement, they were not exceptional, except for the Wind Temple. The Spirit Temple, in particular, proved tedious and unengaging, making me contemplate abandoning the game. Fortunately, the game concluded shortly after. The final boss fight was captivating, particularly during the dragon encounter, but the battle against Ganondorf beforehand was frustrating and tedious due to the agonizing flurry rush face off.
It saddens me that Tears of the Kingdom initially felt like a masterpiece during the first half of my 93-hour playthrough, only to lose its charm around the 50-60 hour mark. Everything seemed to overstay its welcome, and even the side quests failed to maintain the game's magic. Despite completing around 30 side quests, none of them left a significant impact as I pushed through the main story. However, the ending was undeniably incredible, with the final cutscenes evoking intense emotions and leaving a lasting impression. While I ultimately consider this game to be decent, it falls short of being a masterpiece and is plagued by issues inherited from Breath of the Wild, which are even more apparent in this 70-hour experience. I sincerely hope the next Zelda game deviates from this formula and remains a duology, as I can't envision myself purchasing a third game built upon Breath of the Wild's foundation. With that said, I acknowledge that many people will view this game as perfect, but for me, it stands as one of the biggest letdowns in recent years.
Janky mess but its a great janky mess.
Best game of 2018 imo, aside from production values this game puts RDR2 and GoW to shame.
Best game of 2018 imo, aside from production values this game puts RDR2 and GoW to shame.
Lisa
2014
This review contains spoilers
i do not understand what LISA is trying to say. i mean this both in the literal sense in that characters and their motivations come and go with the fickleness of a windy day in chicago, but also in that, when you look at the text of LISA, it is inane. i wanted to like this game, and, at times, i did. in spite of all that i'm about to say, there are moments in this game that genuinely amuse me. and some of the character stuff comes very close to landing with me, but it completely falls apart upon any level of scrutiny. i played this game in 2019 and only finally got around to finishing this game (3 full playthroughs, one on pain). yet, for a very long time, i've known that i dislike this game, and the biggest hurdle for this review was assessing how much i disliked it, how much was irredeemable, and how i'd be able to properly communicate the certainy i feel in that opinion to any reader.
any time my brain tries to analyze LISA, it goes immediately, as if drawn by a lighthouse on a stormy night, to the scene where brad kills marty. i am one of the few people on earth who seemingly played LISA the first before LISA the painful, so having context for not only marty's mistreatment of lisa as well as brad, i find it extremely difficult to side against brad, as the game wants me to here. marty is implied to have sexually abused lisa, was verbally and physically abusive to brad, and this is just what the player is shown. i not only understand, but endorse the violent murder of marty at brad's hands, especially knowing he's trying to groom buddy. sure, wanton murder isn't exactly moral, but this comes at the tail end of a game where it has forced death upon you with no alternative. in the grand scheme of things, killing marty should not be such a big deal. brad has killed at least a hundred guys by this point, probably more. it's telling that marty claims to have changed, yet one of the very actions he can do when brad fights him is to throw a glass bottle at him, just like in his childhood. but no, you kill marty, and in doing so, physically abuse buddy, and you are absolutely railroaded into this conclusion.
the first time i saw this scene, i assumed it was a heavy-handed hallucination/nightmare on brad's part because something this on the nose is not only poorly written, but poorly executed. why is marty here suddenly? how did he know about buddy? why is buddy so attached to him despite very likely barely getting to know him between the last time we saw buddy and now? to be fair, i'm going to take a good faith interpretation of this moment and say that, okay, sure, marty DID reform and WAS actually a changed man who was going to be a good influence on buddy (despite the game giving no evidence to believe this claim), unlike brad. but what does that say about the events that follow? if that is what was intended by the scene, then what does that say about brad and abuse victims? the only way to complete that moment is to knowingly and intentionally harm buddy, your surrogate daughter, someone the narrative has hammered home is the most important person to brad (and likely the player by this point). is this a metaphor about hurting those you love to protect them? if so, it's clumsy at best. instead, it feels as though the game cums over itself and the armchair psychology textbook it's reading from to go "abuse victims perpetuate the cycle of abuse whether they intend to or not". this is a DSM III type scene attempting to be some big emotional climax of brad's relationship with buddy, and it completely fucking sucks.
i'm all for sad and challenging narratives, but this isn't meaningful, this is just deterministic cynicism at best. brad was always doomed to harm buddy and realistically shouldn't have been anywhere near her. why? because he was never going to accept her personhood or agency and instead was set on using her for his own vindication. the text of LISA is pretty plain and direct in stating this, and it does so with the justification that lisa's suicide on top of marty's abuse forever fucked him in a way he could never recover from. this isn't dark, this is. . . boring! this is a boring read of abuse and how it functions. a narrative that says "a victim of abuse is going to be broken forever and incapable of loving themselves and those around them in a healthy way" is a very standard plot point that we've seen since something as early as 1960's Psycho. this is a standard unconscious social belief. there are bigger plot twists in "everybody poops". if you're going to choose such a standard and unremarkable theme to base your game on, at least do it well.
you can very easily take the perspective that looking at the events like this is results-oriented and that, ultimately, the events that happen in LISA are not meant to be extrapolated into universal applicability and events. i find this to be a cowardly way of viewing art, as art is not made or presented in a vacuum. there is, like it or not, baggage associated with the idea of a cycle of abuse being perpetuated by victims. if you want to use that in your narrative, there are going to be implications and inferrences. this is just how storytelling works. you can divorce yourself from the themes, but you can't deny them. LISA's problem is that it wants to be about nothing, it wants to present this shocking and grotesque world without any real-world grounding just to use shock value black humor. oh man, you made a joke about orphans getting set on fire? let me tell you this really funny dead baby joke while you're at it.
ultimately my root problem with LISA is that i detest what little of austin jorgensen i can find in his work. i do not know the man nor have i ever spoken with him, so i am not going to assert that he is this villain that needs to be taken down. i am, however, someone who has invested a significant amount of time into a game that he largely made on his own (as i understand it, outside of the music, it was a solo endeavor). it's hard to not gleam some fairly repugnant viewpoints from him based on how he portrays sexual violence, gender, and masculinity.
here, let's start with the real winner of the show: Male Rape and how epically funny it is. early in the game you're told there's a woman that exists and is real and is at a location. you go to the location where she is guarded by a fairly difficult boss encounter. you beat the boss, enter the door, and then SURPRISE lmfao the """woman""" was an man!! and it gets funnie because he cries about how they still raped him despite him having a mustache and saying he was a man XDDD and then after meeting him you get an achievement on steam titled Violated Guy, because sexual violence is teh epic pwnage. lastly, if you were unclear as to how serious he is treating the concept of rape, he names this character Fardy. because it sounds like fart. he has brothers named Shardy, Lardy, and Tardy. in-game text states that all his peers hate him.
accuse me of being a huge joyless unfun sjw all you want, i really don't care. i just want to know: what is the point of this character? rofl male rape victims are weak and when they get raped it's funny? compare this to the implied rape (via grooming) of buddy by sticky. the game at least passingly treats this as more serious and worthy of sympathy. it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but by brad's reaction and the extremely subtle dialogue with sticky afterwards ("she wanted it", "she needed to be educated", etc. etc.), you're given very little room to interpret any alternative. to be fucking blunt, if you're going to have sexual violence in your work and handle it with the shittiest most clumsy portrayal possible, do everyone a favor and just omit it. it's personally offensive to me to see jorgensen point and laugh at a male rape victim and go out of his way to let you know that not only was a man raped, but it's extremely funny and we should be finding this inherently comedic. it's legitimately evil shit to put in your game and it's astonishing to see something so mask off get so little criticism.
i'll jump back and try to be a little more charitable. LISA is a game about the post-apocalypse and what would happen if all the women on earth suddenly disappeared or died or whatever. ok, well what does this world look like? surely infrastructure still exists, it's not like BOMBS fell or anything, right? NOPE, it's mad max out here and men are completely dysfunctional in all meaningful ways without women. i do believe a societal shift and potentially even collapse would occur with the total removal of women. but there's nothing to go off of what happened to cause this beyond "women no longer exist so naturally everything's fucked". like, you're telling me no one's trying to do some IVF or something? maybe trying to do some dolly-esque cloning to make a female? does some of this fall out of the scope of the game? of course, i'm not going to deny that this could come off as pedantic. but so much of this setting is cutting corners just to get to the meat of the narrative, which is men doing heinous and awful things to each other, often in gangs. i need at least something to work with to believe that civilized society could go so poorly so quickly.
but no, men without women to temper their barbarous spirits will naturally form sadistic gangs that seek out nothing but wanton destruction and suffering, as you do. again, this is such a fucking dull take on gender politics. you have an interesting premise and you completely shit the bed just to go into gender essentialism that's existed for centuries. yeah, of course, without women, men will use pornography magazines as currency. sure, that makes sense. there's such a drought of actual gay and trans men in this work too that it makes jorgensen come off as sheltered and telling on himself. did you really not consider what a gay/trans/etc. man would do in this situation or how they would fit into this new world? jorgensen comes off as someone who just wanted to tell a story that begins and ends at "men are inherently violent, women are inherently caregivers, and without one, the other goes wildly out of control."
by the way, this is a video game. i know you might have been confused considering i've said sweet fuck all about the actual gameplay of this video game that i played. and here is my opinion: it has amateur design. i know that's almost a nothing statement considering that jorgensen IS an amateur, but i want to call a spade a spade. he seems to really value and want this aura of "this game is going to make you have to REALLY choose things and it's going to be really difficult to deal with it", but he completely fumbles the execution. oh no, buzzo showed up and wants to cut off your arm or kill the first party member in your team. instead of giving him your arm, you can just reload your most recent save (which is approximately 5 minutes away from this choice), put a character you either don't ever use or outright dislike in that slot, and just kill them that way. you can spend the night at campfires but OH NO sometimes bad things can happen to you like you get poisoned or one of your party members gets held hostage. but, there's a save point near almost every major one, so you can just reload if that happens. or, even better, you can just stay at an inn that charges a measly 10 mags for guaranteed safety. how about when you're forced to do russian roullette? yep, you can just save reload until you get through flawlessly. this is a viable and applicable strategy even on the supposed "pain" mode that was intended to curb this type of behavior. these choices ultimately just end up being unnecessary inconveniences that add nothing to the game. they're speedbumps that you can detour around masquerading as some dark soulsian punishment.
i now want to talk about the part of the game that infuriated me more than any other singular part: the road scholars. for anyone unfamiliar or forgetful, the road scholars are a trap boss fight you will encounter early in the game. you go to a side path and find a small town with no way to heal, and nothing much of note in it. just one way in, one way out. no place to grind for item or money. just. that's it. still, there's a save point, so unless you're playing on pain mode, you're almost certainly going to save. and so you try to leave and suddenly you're accosted by a gang who wants either 100 mags (a significant amount of money by this point in the game) or they're going to destroy the town you just left. i want to stress that there is very little of value in this town in the first place, so this choice from a metagame standpoint doesn't even particularly matter, and thus fails to be "hard". yet, you've likely just saved and you're locked into this worst-case scenario. but, here's the thing: i'm an asshole. i hate when games try to gotcha me like this. i say no, eat shit, i'm fighting you. and i fight them. and i lose. several times. because this fight is very clearly heavily stacked against the player. it's a gotcha, but it's also a trap. you made me make a choice i didn't know i was making then tried to point and laugh at me for the choice i didn't know i made having consequences. these types of things can be done well, and oftentimes having a game react to something you did that you didn't expect it to acknowledge can be some of the best type of stimuli-reaction you can get out of the medium. but this is just a gotcha, an attempt to make me feel as though i should've been more careful when there was no way i could have possibly predicted this outcome would occur. it's not clever, it doesn't elevate the gameplay in any way, and it ultimately just burned goodwill i would've had for the game.
in a sad way i want to give points for effort and heart here, because while i think jorgensen largely missed the mark and likely has a personality i would find repellant, i genuinely respect the authorial stamp he put on this game. it is uniquely and creatively his own, probably for the worse. i still can't quite wrap my mind around the positive reception this game has garnered. this is considered an indie classic and it's frankly baffling to me how it earned such accolades. this game is mechanically unengaging, thematically cretinous, and overall an extreme disappointment considering the mountains of praise that i have seen from both strangers and friends. i can only hope that games we love in 2024 age better than the ones we loved in 2014.
any time my brain tries to analyze LISA, it goes immediately, as if drawn by a lighthouse on a stormy night, to the scene where brad kills marty. i am one of the few people on earth who seemingly played LISA the first before LISA the painful, so having context for not only marty's mistreatment of lisa as well as brad, i find it extremely difficult to side against brad, as the game wants me to here. marty is implied to have sexually abused lisa, was verbally and physically abusive to brad, and this is just what the player is shown. i not only understand, but endorse the violent murder of marty at brad's hands, especially knowing he's trying to groom buddy. sure, wanton murder isn't exactly moral, but this comes at the tail end of a game where it has forced death upon you with no alternative. in the grand scheme of things, killing marty should not be such a big deal. brad has killed at least a hundred guys by this point, probably more. it's telling that marty claims to have changed, yet one of the very actions he can do when brad fights him is to throw a glass bottle at him, just like in his childhood. but no, you kill marty, and in doing so, physically abuse buddy, and you are absolutely railroaded into this conclusion.
the first time i saw this scene, i assumed it was a heavy-handed hallucination/nightmare on brad's part because something this on the nose is not only poorly written, but poorly executed. why is marty here suddenly? how did he know about buddy? why is buddy so attached to him despite very likely barely getting to know him between the last time we saw buddy and now? to be fair, i'm going to take a good faith interpretation of this moment and say that, okay, sure, marty DID reform and WAS actually a changed man who was going to be a good influence on buddy (despite the game giving no evidence to believe this claim), unlike brad. but what does that say about the events that follow? if that is what was intended by the scene, then what does that say about brad and abuse victims? the only way to complete that moment is to knowingly and intentionally harm buddy, your surrogate daughter, someone the narrative has hammered home is the most important person to brad (and likely the player by this point). is this a metaphor about hurting those you love to protect them? if so, it's clumsy at best. instead, it feels as though the game cums over itself and the armchair psychology textbook it's reading from to go "abuse victims perpetuate the cycle of abuse whether they intend to or not". this is a DSM III type scene attempting to be some big emotional climax of brad's relationship with buddy, and it completely fucking sucks.
i'm all for sad and challenging narratives, but this isn't meaningful, this is just deterministic cynicism at best. brad was always doomed to harm buddy and realistically shouldn't have been anywhere near her. why? because he was never going to accept her personhood or agency and instead was set on using her for his own vindication. the text of LISA is pretty plain and direct in stating this, and it does so with the justification that lisa's suicide on top of marty's abuse forever fucked him in a way he could never recover from. this isn't dark, this is. . . boring! this is a boring read of abuse and how it functions. a narrative that says "a victim of abuse is going to be broken forever and incapable of loving themselves and those around them in a healthy way" is a very standard plot point that we've seen since something as early as 1960's Psycho. this is a standard unconscious social belief. there are bigger plot twists in "everybody poops". if you're going to choose such a standard and unremarkable theme to base your game on, at least do it well.
you can very easily take the perspective that looking at the events like this is results-oriented and that, ultimately, the events that happen in LISA are not meant to be extrapolated into universal applicability and events. i find this to be a cowardly way of viewing art, as art is not made or presented in a vacuum. there is, like it or not, baggage associated with the idea of a cycle of abuse being perpetuated by victims. if you want to use that in your narrative, there are going to be implications and inferrences. this is just how storytelling works. you can divorce yourself from the themes, but you can't deny them. LISA's problem is that it wants to be about nothing, it wants to present this shocking and grotesque world without any real-world grounding just to use shock value black humor. oh man, you made a joke about orphans getting set on fire? let me tell you this really funny dead baby joke while you're at it.
ultimately my root problem with LISA is that i detest what little of austin jorgensen i can find in his work. i do not know the man nor have i ever spoken with him, so i am not going to assert that he is this villain that needs to be taken down. i am, however, someone who has invested a significant amount of time into a game that he largely made on his own (as i understand it, outside of the music, it was a solo endeavor). it's hard to not gleam some fairly repugnant viewpoints from him based on how he portrays sexual violence, gender, and masculinity.
here, let's start with the real winner of the show: Male Rape and how epically funny it is. early in the game you're told there's a woman that exists and is real and is at a location. you go to the location where she is guarded by a fairly difficult boss encounter. you beat the boss, enter the door, and then SURPRISE lmfao the """woman""" was an man!! and it gets funnie because he cries about how they still raped him despite him having a mustache and saying he was a man XDDD and then after meeting him you get an achievement on steam titled Violated Guy, because sexual violence is teh epic pwnage. lastly, if you were unclear as to how serious he is treating the concept of rape, he names this character Fardy. because it sounds like fart. he has brothers named Shardy, Lardy, and Tardy. in-game text states that all his peers hate him.
accuse me of being a huge joyless unfun sjw all you want, i really don't care. i just want to know: what is the point of this character? rofl male rape victims are weak and when they get raped it's funny? compare this to the implied rape (via grooming) of buddy by sticky. the game at least passingly treats this as more serious and worthy of sympathy. it doesn't explicitly come out and say it, but by brad's reaction and the extremely subtle dialogue with sticky afterwards ("she wanted it", "she needed to be educated", etc. etc.), you're given very little room to interpret any alternative. to be fucking blunt, if you're going to have sexual violence in your work and handle it with the shittiest most clumsy portrayal possible, do everyone a favor and just omit it. it's personally offensive to me to see jorgensen point and laugh at a male rape victim and go out of his way to let you know that not only was a man raped, but it's extremely funny and we should be finding this inherently comedic. it's legitimately evil shit to put in your game and it's astonishing to see something so mask off get so little criticism.
i'll jump back and try to be a little more charitable. LISA is a game about the post-apocalypse and what would happen if all the women on earth suddenly disappeared or died or whatever. ok, well what does this world look like? surely infrastructure still exists, it's not like BOMBS fell or anything, right? NOPE, it's mad max out here and men are completely dysfunctional in all meaningful ways without women. i do believe a societal shift and potentially even collapse would occur with the total removal of women. but there's nothing to go off of what happened to cause this beyond "women no longer exist so naturally everything's fucked". like, you're telling me no one's trying to do some IVF or something? maybe trying to do some dolly-esque cloning to make a female? does some of this fall out of the scope of the game? of course, i'm not going to deny that this could come off as pedantic. but so much of this setting is cutting corners just to get to the meat of the narrative, which is men doing heinous and awful things to each other, often in gangs. i need at least something to work with to believe that civilized society could go so poorly so quickly.
but no, men without women to temper their barbarous spirits will naturally form sadistic gangs that seek out nothing but wanton destruction and suffering, as you do. again, this is such a fucking dull take on gender politics. you have an interesting premise and you completely shit the bed just to go into gender essentialism that's existed for centuries. yeah, of course, without women, men will use pornography magazines as currency. sure, that makes sense. there's such a drought of actual gay and trans men in this work too that it makes jorgensen come off as sheltered and telling on himself. did you really not consider what a gay/trans/etc. man would do in this situation or how they would fit into this new world? jorgensen comes off as someone who just wanted to tell a story that begins and ends at "men are inherently violent, women are inherently caregivers, and without one, the other goes wildly out of control."
by the way, this is a video game. i know you might have been confused considering i've said sweet fuck all about the actual gameplay of this video game that i played. and here is my opinion: it has amateur design. i know that's almost a nothing statement considering that jorgensen IS an amateur, but i want to call a spade a spade. he seems to really value and want this aura of "this game is going to make you have to REALLY choose things and it's going to be really difficult to deal with it", but he completely fumbles the execution. oh no, buzzo showed up and wants to cut off your arm or kill the first party member in your team. instead of giving him your arm, you can just reload your most recent save (which is approximately 5 minutes away from this choice), put a character you either don't ever use or outright dislike in that slot, and just kill them that way. you can spend the night at campfires but OH NO sometimes bad things can happen to you like you get poisoned or one of your party members gets held hostage. but, there's a save point near almost every major one, so you can just reload if that happens. or, even better, you can just stay at an inn that charges a measly 10 mags for guaranteed safety. how about when you're forced to do russian roullette? yep, you can just save reload until you get through flawlessly. this is a viable and applicable strategy even on the supposed "pain" mode that was intended to curb this type of behavior. these choices ultimately just end up being unnecessary inconveniences that add nothing to the game. they're speedbumps that you can detour around masquerading as some dark soulsian punishment.
i now want to talk about the part of the game that infuriated me more than any other singular part: the road scholars. for anyone unfamiliar or forgetful, the road scholars are a trap boss fight you will encounter early in the game. you go to a side path and find a small town with no way to heal, and nothing much of note in it. just one way in, one way out. no place to grind for item or money. just. that's it. still, there's a save point, so unless you're playing on pain mode, you're almost certainly going to save. and so you try to leave and suddenly you're accosted by a gang who wants either 100 mags (a significant amount of money by this point in the game) or they're going to destroy the town you just left. i want to stress that there is very little of value in this town in the first place, so this choice from a metagame standpoint doesn't even particularly matter, and thus fails to be "hard". yet, you've likely just saved and you're locked into this worst-case scenario. but, here's the thing: i'm an asshole. i hate when games try to gotcha me like this. i say no, eat shit, i'm fighting you. and i fight them. and i lose. several times. because this fight is very clearly heavily stacked against the player. it's a gotcha, but it's also a trap. you made me make a choice i didn't know i was making then tried to point and laugh at me for the choice i didn't know i made having consequences. these types of things can be done well, and oftentimes having a game react to something you did that you didn't expect it to acknowledge can be some of the best type of stimuli-reaction you can get out of the medium. but this is just a gotcha, an attempt to make me feel as though i should've been more careful when there was no way i could have possibly predicted this outcome would occur. it's not clever, it doesn't elevate the gameplay in any way, and it ultimately just burned goodwill i would've had for the game.
in a sad way i want to give points for effort and heart here, because while i think jorgensen largely missed the mark and likely has a personality i would find repellant, i genuinely respect the authorial stamp he put on this game. it is uniquely and creatively his own, probably for the worse. i still can't quite wrap my mind around the positive reception this game has garnered. this is considered an indie classic and it's frankly baffling to me how it earned such accolades. this game is mechanically unengaging, thematically cretinous, and overall an extreme disappointment considering the mountains of praise that i have seen from both strangers and friends. i can only hope that games we love in 2024 age better than the ones we loved in 2014.
If a single combat wasn't taking an hour to finish, I would've continued playing but it's too slow in my opinion. Using the environment during combat is neat though.
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