kumasbear
2022
This is a hard 2 to give, but Tunic was an experience that was much more than I expected only to be brought down by being exactly what I expected.
I don't tend to watch trailers or follow pre-release footage outside of an initial reveal, so I had no clue about the instruction manual aspect of this game or the fact that it was all in a fantasy language. I loved this part of Tunic. The manual artwork was superb and really nailed the feeling of the old Zelda chibi art. The way information is dealt out was very nostalgic, and just as a concept, I love it so much. 5 star stuff. I grew up with a bunch of floppy drives with a ton of NES and SNES roms and combing through the JP releases was one of my favorite things to do. I don't speak this language, and I don't know what is going on, but I play a lot of games so I should be fine, right? And after some trial and error, yeah, I could pick up on that stuff with context clues and intuition. Tunic does such an amazing job of recreating this feeling.
Visually, the game is amazing. Soft shadows and lighting combined with a super strong art design goes a long way. I was in awe of some of the locations in this game (Blue Key area especially.) Likewise, the music also shines. Lifeforced is such a strong composer with Dustforce being one of my favorite game OSTs ever. The track that plays in the East Forest is so reminiscent of an alternate reality "Secret of the Forest" it gave me goosebumps. Every track did such a good job of setting a mood without being too ambient.
The puzzles are so clever. I was filling out a notebook in a way I haven't done since I played Fez and this completely caught me off guard. I had no idea the game was going to go this way and I was so for it. I don't want to spoil too much, but there is one mechanic that gave me the same feeling cracking the Rosetta Stone did all those years ago. I solved the obvious ones then found one of the secret ones, and then I was hooked. I had to 100% this, I had to solve every riddle, I had to complete this.
But I didn't. And that's because I have not talked about, well, playing the game. This game takes heavily from Souls games, more-so than Zelda, honestly. Block, parry, rolling i-frames, stamina, Estus, corpse runs, punishing combat encounters, the works. And okay, cool, I like those games a lot too. The issue is that Tunic..... just doesn't fit that style of gameplay. The controls are very loose... It's hard to describe, moving around feels tank-ish? Like you have a pretty substantial turning radius, so moving about in precise combat just never felt good. I'd constantly find myself dying due to get stuck on geometry or just trying to run past an encounter just to overshoot the path and then be stuck in a corner. Enemy AI at points is relentless and sometimes outright broken, and I mean in the sense that it wasn't functioning correctly, not that it was too hard or something. There's one encounter in West Garden where a bunch of flying enemies come swarming in from halfway across the map, even though I had never even been near them. Like I knew where they became active, it wasn't even remotely close to where I was, and yet the AI would become active and just flyover at hyperspeed like they're trying to catch up. Also, for those particular flying enemies, you aren't really equipped to handle them at that point. The game does a pretty good job about giving you items and consumables, but you don't get a projectile weapon until the end of that area. They weren't hard or anything, so why even have them? They were just annoying, having to wait for 20 seconds for this thing to get it's pathing right and not get stuck somewhere for you to just kill it in 2 hits.
The camera was another big issue for me. The game is pretty cheeky and hides paths that you can't see due to a static isometric angle. And then it does it 50 more times, like it's being clever. It got tiring very quickly and the annoyance was only exacerbated by how often I found myself clipping into the geometry. I constantly found myself asking, "Is this a hidden path or am I just stuck in a cliff again?" I don't even need like a free camera, but just a simple 90 degree rotation would have made things so much less frustrating.
I have a bunch of other minor grievances like the stamina system sucks, the rules the game sets seem inconsistent and it breaks them at seemingly random times, the lack of (good) fast travel in a game about exploration is frustrating, and they all just came culminating to a point where I didn't want to play anymore. I'm missing 2 pieces to the Mountain Door puzzle and maybe half a dozen secret puzzles left and I am super curious about what I left unfinished. But I'll probably just look up a longplay and see if I can solve them without having to actually play the game. This is a game I should be gushing about non-stop to people and honestly I probably still will, just with a big fat asterisk at the end.
I don't tend to watch trailers or follow pre-release footage outside of an initial reveal, so I had no clue about the instruction manual aspect of this game or the fact that it was all in a fantasy language. I loved this part of Tunic. The manual artwork was superb and really nailed the feeling of the old Zelda chibi art. The way information is dealt out was very nostalgic, and just as a concept, I love it so much. 5 star stuff. I grew up with a bunch of floppy drives with a ton of NES and SNES roms and combing through the JP releases was one of my favorite things to do. I don't speak this language, and I don't know what is going on, but I play a lot of games so I should be fine, right? And after some trial and error, yeah, I could pick up on that stuff with context clues and intuition. Tunic does such an amazing job of recreating this feeling.
Visually, the game is amazing. Soft shadows and lighting combined with a super strong art design goes a long way. I was in awe of some of the locations in this game (Blue Key area especially.) Likewise, the music also shines. Lifeforced is such a strong composer with Dustforce being one of my favorite game OSTs ever. The track that plays in the East Forest is so reminiscent of an alternate reality "Secret of the Forest" it gave me goosebumps. Every track did such a good job of setting a mood without being too ambient.
The puzzles are so clever. I was filling out a notebook in a way I haven't done since I played Fez and this completely caught me off guard. I had no idea the game was going to go this way and I was so for it. I don't want to spoil too much, but there is one mechanic that gave me the same feeling cracking the Rosetta Stone did all those years ago. I solved the obvious ones then found one of the secret ones, and then I was hooked. I had to 100% this, I had to solve every riddle, I had to complete this.
But I didn't. And that's because I have not talked about, well, playing the game. This game takes heavily from Souls games, more-so than Zelda, honestly. Block, parry, rolling i-frames, stamina, Estus, corpse runs, punishing combat encounters, the works. And okay, cool, I like those games a lot too. The issue is that Tunic..... just doesn't fit that style of gameplay. The controls are very loose... It's hard to describe, moving around feels tank-ish? Like you have a pretty substantial turning radius, so moving about in precise combat just never felt good. I'd constantly find myself dying due to get stuck on geometry or just trying to run past an encounter just to overshoot the path and then be stuck in a corner. Enemy AI at points is relentless and sometimes outright broken, and I mean in the sense that it wasn't functioning correctly, not that it was too hard or something. There's one encounter in West Garden where a bunch of flying enemies come swarming in from halfway across the map, even though I had never even been near them. Like I knew where they became active, it wasn't even remotely close to where I was, and yet the AI would become active and just flyover at hyperspeed like they're trying to catch up. Also, for those particular flying enemies, you aren't really equipped to handle them at that point. The game does a pretty good job about giving you items and consumables, but you don't get a projectile weapon until the end of that area. They weren't hard or anything, so why even have them? They were just annoying, having to wait for 20 seconds for this thing to get it's pathing right and not get stuck somewhere for you to just kill it in 2 hits.
The camera was another big issue for me. The game is pretty cheeky and hides paths that you can't see due to a static isometric angle. And then it does it 50 more times, like it's being clever. It got tiring very quickly and the annoyance was only exacerbated by how often I found myself clipping into the geometry. I constantly found myself asking, "Is this a hidden path or am I just stuck in a cliff again?" I don't even need like a free camera, but just a simple 90 degree rotation would have made things so much less frustrating.
I have a bunch of other minor grievances like the stamina system sucks, the rules the game sets seem inconsistent and it breaks them at seemingly random times, the lack of (good) fast travel in a game about exploration is frustrating, and they all just came culminating to a point where I didn't want to play anymore. I'm missing 2 pieces to the Mountain Door puzzle and maybe half a dozen secret puzzles left and I am super curious about what I left unfinished. But I'll probably just look up a longplay and see if I can solve them without having to actually play the game. This is a game I should be gushing about non-stop to people and honestly I probably still will, just with a big fat asterisk at the end.
2022
2/24 EDIT: I wanted to add an update to my feelings of this game as I'm revisiting it, something I never thought I would do, but the press about the DLC has me hopeful that I'll actually REALLY enjoy that, but because of how bad the PC port was I played on PS5 and need to get a character up to speed on PC. Anyway, my feelings remain the same. Such dissonance between the field design and legacy dungeons. If anything, I actually feel worse playing this game again because I forgot how much cool stuff IS in here but I only remember the vast swathes of boring, bland, repetitive catacombs and ruins. The one positive is all the stuff I said about the PC port is fixed, game no longer stutters and is buttery smooth, so that's good I guess. I still stand by DS2 being a better version of this game, and Lies of P is superior to this AND DS3. Trying to be optimistic for Shadow of the Erdtree.
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Alright, I know since I didn't give the game 5 stars that no one is actually going to pay attention to this review because this is the god game to save all video games, but that's fine. There's a lot of critique going around right now that is completely superficial or outright racist ("Japanese video games are bad wow when will they learn I hate anime and their culture and history and they should conform to our Western standards that we made and abandon anything they have accomplished!!") and I wanted to give critique that isn't any of that. This is a game I should love, but was ultimately disappointed by.
I guess I'll talk about the bad first. The PC performance is awful. It isn't a hardware issue, it is a software issue, DX12 takes a lot of the responsibility of performance off of the hardware driver and places it on the software using it. This is a double edged sword because while it can be very powerful, it has to be utilized correctly. Elden Ring does not accomplish this and is riddled with stuttering and loading lag as new assets get loaded in and compiled in real time. This is happening whether you notice it or not, so don't try and say "Well it's fine for me!" because it isn't, you just aren't sensitive to the frame hitching. I've seen footage of people who said it was fine and it was hitching. I've seen footage of speedrunners using autosplit and their time lagged as the game hitched. It's an issue, it exists, and if you are sensitive to framerates, as I am, it was unplayable.
So I already had a sour taste in my mouth for the game, but hey, I have a PS5, I picked it up there, and running the PS4 version ran at an incredibly smooth 60 FPS with no issues whatsoever (I guess this is a positive but it make more sense to include it here.)
Gameplay-wise, it's Dark Souls 3 again. This is kind of a bummer since I found DS3's combat to be a little too simple and every fight inevitably winds up being spamming R1 and rolling. Never really had to question my tactics, and anytime I tried using R2 or even power stancing and throwing in L1 and weapon arts, I would leave the encounter going "That would've been half as long if I just spammed R1." Balance-wise, it's kind of rough right now as well. Arcane, my initial build, is completely bugged and doesn't scale correctly so I was banging my head against the wall for the first 40 hours wondering why everything was so spongy. I unlocked respeccing and switched to a Dexterity build, which then wound up becoming nothing but R1 spam and later Hoarfrost Stomp spam because it was so overtuned.
Maybe my biggest gripe with the gameplay was the complete trivialization of multiplayer. I love the multiplayer aspect of these games. I love the tension of getting invaded while exploring a big, scary new area just as much as I love the thrill of invading someone else once I'm confident with my knowledge of the zone. I never got invaded once. It was only when I started invading for an NPC questline that I realized you only ever get invaded if you have other players co-op with you. Every invasion was 1v3 and invaders never get backup either. After about a dozen or so failures I promptly ignored the NPC and went on with the game. A complete waste of time to even have that feature in the game, and a true disappointment. PVP is the one time that R1 spam fails, and with so many fun and unique spells and weapons, I was crafting all these builds in my head only to realize that there was no point.
The open world is probably my biggest point of contention. It keeps getting so much praise as being wholly unique and vast, but it really isn't. Every catacombs is the same, every cave is the same, the same ruins are scattered throughout the entire map, the same enemies get used everywhere, etc. This in turn hurts the game's lore, as I really can't find myself getting invested when over half of the things I'm finding are just reused fights. The Crucible Knight Evergaol was the first fight where I really went "Wow okay this is gonna be good!" but after running into the 20th knight I just got so tired of it. It wasn't fun anymore and just felt like a chore. The constant reuse of fights and factions really made it hard for me to get invested in the game's lore, which is one of my favorite parts of Fromsoft's games. It's especially frustrating voicing this complaint when everyone just yells "The lore doesn't even matter you're just gonna watch it all in a YouTube video anyway!" because no, I'm not. I've never watched a Souls lore video, I just play the games and pay attention. They do such a good job writing these worlds and building up situations and stages that tell the story if you just explore and look around. This game simply feels like it was written by 2 people who didn't collaborate at all so they could just market a well-known name (🤔)
I don't have much else to say in terms of audio, but the music is really lackluster. For having the most tracks of any of Fromsoft's games, there were like, 3 that I can even remember. Most tracks are completely incidental or generic. Most of the voicework is also pretty weak (Rykard's VA was super sick though.)
Transitioning into the (few) things I legitimately enjoyed, the set pieces dungeons (Stormveil Castle, Raya Lucaria, Leyndell, a couple more that I won't spoil) were where the game truly shined. This was the world building I was talking about. They are some of my favorite stages in all of the Soulsborne titles. The game also has such a well realized aesthetic. The vistas are awe-inspiring and some of the creature design is top-notch.
I wasn't super hyped for this game so it's not like it just didn't meet any lofty ambitions that I set for it in my mind. I went in having only seen the reveal trailer from last year and the knowledge that I like Fromsoft's dark fantasy games. It's ironic that the game being touted as "too Japanese" is maybe the most Western game they've made and I think that it suffers greatly because of that. I clocked in at around 107 hours, with over half of that time spend running along cliff edges, going through cookie-cutter Skyrim dungeons, getting to the end and saying "Well, I'm sure the next one will be cool."
At the end of a Soulsborne game, I immediately fire up a new game to play it a totally different way with my knowledge of what is where and how to get it as fast as possible. But as the credits ran on Elden Ring, the only thing I was thinking of was installing a different game.
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Alright, I know since I didn't give the game 5 stars that no one is actually going to pay attention to this review because this is the god game to save all video games, but that's fine. There's a lot of critique going around right now that is completely superficial or outright racist ("Japanese video games are bad wow when will they learn I hate anime and their culture and history and they should conform to our Western standards that we made and abandon anything they have accomplished!!") and I wanted to give critique that isn't any of that. This is a game I should love, but was ultimately disappointed by.
I guess I'll talk about the bad first. The PC performance is awful. It isn't a hardware issue, it is a software issue, DX12 takes a lot of the responsibility of performance off of the hardware driver and places it on the software using it. This is a double edged sword because while it can be very powerful, it has to be utilized correctly. Elden Ring does not accomplish this and is riddled with stuttering and loading lag as new assets get loaded in and compiled in real time. This is happening whether you notice it or not, so don't try and say "Well it's fine for me!" because it isn't, you just aren't sensitive to the frame hitching. I've seen footage of people who said it was fine and it was hitching. I've seen footage of speedrunners using autosplit and their time lagged as the game hitched. It's an issue, it exists, and if you are sensitive to framerates, as I am, it was unplayable.
So I already had a sour taste in my mouth for the game, but hey, I have a PS5, I picked it up there, and running the PS4 version ran at an incredibly smooth 60 FPS with no issues whatsoever (I guess this is a positive but it make more sense to include it here.)
Gameplay-wise, it's Dark Souls 3 again. This is kind of a bummer since I found DS3's combat to be a little too simple and every fight inevitably winds up being spamming R1 and rolling. Never really had to question my tactics, and anytime I tried using R2 or even power stancing and throwing in L1 and weapon arts, I would leave the encounter going "That would've been half as long if I just spammed R1." Balance-wise, it's kind of rough right now as well. Arcane, my initial build, is completely bugged and doesn't scale correctly so I was banging my head against the wall for the first 40 hours wondering why everything was so spongy. I unlocked respeccing and switched to a Dexterity build, which then wound up becoming nothing but R1 spam and later Hoarfrost Stomp spam because it was so overtuned.
Maybe my biggest gripe with the gameplay was the complete trivialization of multiplayer. I love the multiplayer aspect of these games. I love the tension of getting invaded while exploring a big, scary new area just as much as I love the thrill of invading someone else once I'm confident with my knowledge of the zone. I never got invaded once. It was only when I started invading for an NPC questline that I realized you only ever get invaded if you have other players co-op with you. Every invasion was 1v3 and invaders never get backup either. After about a dozen or so failures I promptly ignored the NPC and went on with the game. A complete waste of time to even have that feature in the game, and a true disappointment. PVP is the one time that R1 spam fails, and with so many fun and unique spells and weapons, I was crafting all these builds in my head only to realize that there was no point.
The open world is probably my biggest point of contention. It keeps getting so much praise as being wholly unique and vast, but it really isn't. Every catacombs is the same, every cave is the same, the same ruins are scattered throughout the entire map, the same enemies get used everywhere, etc. This in turn hurts the game's lore, as I really can't find myself getting invested when over half of the things I'm finding are just reused fights. The Crucible Knight Evergaol was the first fight where I really went "Wow okay this is gonna be good!" but after running into the 20th knight I just got so tired of it. It wasn't fun anymore and just felt like a chore. The constant reuse of fights and factions really made it hard for me to get invested in the game's lore, which is one of my favorite parts of Fromsoft's games. It's especially frustrating voicing this complaint when everyone just yells "The lore doesn't even matter you're just gonna watch it all in a YouTube video anyway!" because no, I'm not. I've never watched a Souls lore video, I just play the games and pay attention. They do such a good job writing these worlds and building up situations and stages that tell the story if you just explore and look around. This game simply feels like it was written by 2 people who didn't collaborate at all so they could just market a well-known name (🤔)
I don't have much else to say in terms of audio, but the music is really lackluster. For having the most tracks of any of Fromsoft's games, there were like, 3 that I can even remember. Most tracks are completely incidental or generic. Most of the voicework is also pretty weak (Rykard's VA was super sick though.)
Transitioning into the (few) things I legitimately enjoyed, the set pieces dungeons (Stormveil Castle, Raya Lucaria, Leyndell, a couple more that I won't spoil) were where the game truly shined. This was the world building I was talking about. They are some of my favorite stages in all of the Soulsborne titles. The game also has such a well realized aesthetic. The vistas are awe-inspiring and some of the creature design is top-notch.
I wasn't super hyped for this game so it's not like it just didn't meet any lofty ambitions that I set for it in my mind. I went in having only seen the reveal trailer from last year and the knowledge that I like Fromsoft's dark fantasy games. It's ironic that the game being touted as "too Japanese" is maybe the most Western game they've made and I think that it suffers greatly because of that. I clocked in at around 107 hours, with over half of that time spend running along cliff edges, going through cookie-cutter Skyrim dungeons, getting to the end and saying "Well, I'm sure the next one will be cool."
At the end of a Soulsborne game, I immediately fire up a new game to play it a totally different way with my knowledge of what is where and how to get it as fast as possible. But as the credits ran on Elden Ring, the only thing I was thinking of was installing a different game.
2018
Incredibly frustrating game. The core combat here is a ton of fun, and going through dungeons is a blast. The combat system really makes mowing down dozens of mobs at a time addicting.
The issue, however, is that these combat opportunities are drip fed to you over the course of the most generic, trite fantasy story possible that gets bogged down even further by the virtue of wanting to be an MMO. I just handled 40+ enemies at once in this dungeon, why is the next quest objective "Kill 4 bandits" or "Pick 3 flowers?"
I hear end game is where this games shines, and I'd believe it. When you can just do all the fun stuff without 90% filler? Yeah, that sounds great. But I won't see it because I can't imagine wasting anymore time delivering apples or some garbage.
The issue, however, is that these combat opportunities are drip fed to you over the course of the most generic, trite fantasy story possible that gets bogged down even further by the virtue of wanting to be an MMO. I just handled 40+ enemies at once in this dungeon, why is the next quest objective "Kill 4 bandits" or "Pick 3 flowers?"
I hear end game is where this games shines, and I'd believe it. When you can just do all the fun stuff without 90% filler? Yeah, that sounds great. But I won't see it because I can't imagine wasting anymore time delivering apples or some garbage.