mamylon
2018
Would have sunk a month into this if it had been on AddictingGames.com while I was in middle school. Now I'm wise and I played for fifteen minutes, realized I hated the way it was making me feel, and stopped!
1998
Can’t quite carry its effervescent energy forward into Disc 2
2015
Really mechanically creative, obviously pretty twee but not too bad
2015
Just deleted this after realizing I didn’t want to play it anymore. A couple cool mechanics but isn’t fun to play
2019
Fell into a lacuna of frustration / boredom for a while when I had explored ALMOST everything but was still missing one of the endgame steps, and exploring the remaining “there’s more to explore here”s just kept giving me more redundant information I already knew. But the midgame is incredible and the ending was good. “Recommended.”
It’s a magnificent achievement and was almost continuously fun for God knows how many hours, but I didn’t like two of the guys (Tulin and Sidon) and I had a cold when I beat it so I came into the end credits with a headache that’s sort of somatically similar to the headache I get when I’ve been playing a sort of boring video game for too long. Docking it a star for now, will probably round it back up to 4 when I revisit this in a couple months and just remember how much I loved fixing signs
This review contains spoilers
I’m going to try not to repeat anything I said in my review of the first one, because there’s plenty more to talk about here, but I do have to issue a retraction: one of my points in favor of Trails in the Sky FC was that, quote, “PCs swap in and out as the story demands so it’s not stuck to the ‘adventuring party’ format.” This struck me as a key aspect of the game’s structure, which seemed to pride itself on building complex and organic social networks around its characters, and designing scenes around the characters at hand. Trails SC mostly overturns this. A quarter of the way through the game, about every party member from the last game has decided on thin pretext to follow you around the country as deputy junior Benevolent Fantasy Pinkertons, and now every time you go into a guildhall you can decide who to send into battle with you. This stretches the logic of the game to begin with, but it’s made worse by the fact that three of the optional party members are actual Benevolent Fantasy Pinkertons—people who are being paid to do this stuff—and, of the others, two of them are royalty traveling in disguise, and one of them is a ten year old girl with a gun.
Now, reckless child endangerment and warrior princesses are mainstays of the genre here, but I can’t express how little this all jives, especially since the last game was so careful to precede every fight with the ten-year-old girl by having everyone say “no, Tita, you can’t come on the fantasy quest, it’ll be dangerous” whereupon some other character says “she’s the only one who knows how to work The Device… we have no choice.” This game reintroduces her in the party by way of a Device, and then afterward she’s just like “hey is it cool if I keep hanging out with you?” and Estelle is like like “you betcha, kiddo! You’ve proven you can handle it!” even though, in-gameplay, she’s sort of a glass cannon and gets knocked out a lot. I feel less bad about the princess, who is my best healer and who has the plausibly-sketched in-game excuse that she’s traveling the country to put off her royal responsibilities—but still, almost everyone you meet knows she’s the princess now, and no one ever tries to stop her from running around fighting monsters with you.
And it’s not like these characters are just getting swept up in the ceaseless flow of events. All of this, and everything else that happens until right toward the end of the game, is underscored by a constant, overbearing lack of urgency. Trails seems to be very worried about the “problem” of RPG sidequests: how can you justify your characters hanging out and fishing and assisting stray townsfolk and monster-hunting when there’s also a big civilizational-stakes plot going on at the same time? Now, there are several possible answers to this question, one of which is “who gives a shit?” Let Cloud breed several generations of chocobo while the meteor hurtles toward the planet; no one cares! Other answers, perhaps more satisfying to the developers’ weird sense of propriety, might be to construct your sidequests so that the characters have diegetic reasons why they may or may not want to do them—emotional stakes or non-game-abstract rewards—so that the player can make decisions as to what to prioritize from either a mechanical or a roleplaying perspective. This is fundamental game design, right?
None of this is good enough, or bad enough, for Trails. One of the main structural conceits of this game is that you’re a Benevolent Fantasy Pinkerton and you get to walk around picking jobs off the bulletin board in every city—which run the gamut of stock RPG quests from hunting monsters to finding lost cats to gathering ingredients etc—and then cashing in your rewards. So pretty much everything you’re doing, including the main storyline, has this aspect of job-well-done professional abstraction; the intended effect is basically to merge the reward loop of a traditional JRPG and a pleasant lazy farming-simulator-type game. In order to facilitate this, your B.F.P. handlers are constantly (very nicely) reminding you of the jobs on the board, and will actively insist that the main quest isn’t going anywhere if you want to stick around town and do some odd jobs or just hang out. “Things are quiet now, and we have some time to kill,” goes the refrain at the end of every chapter.
But Matt! you ask. Weren’t you promised, and didn’t you mention in your previous review, that that first game was all just nasty ol’ setup, and that this second game was going to hit the ground running with the central story of the franchise? Haven’t our enemies Loewe and Weissman revealed themselves, and sworn to strike imminently against the poor defenseless Liberl Kingdom? Hasn’t the F I R S T B A R R I E R T O T H E A U R E O L E been deactivated already by their nefarious machinations? Worse, hasn’t your brother-slash-lover, Joshua Astray, vanished on a quest for vengeance-slash-redemption, and haven’t you sworn to find him and bring him home? As to the last question, Trails SC is quick to answer: don’t sweat it. As with the missing dad in the first game, everyone is constantly assuring Estelle that Joshua is probably fine, and this time we even check in on him between chapters—hanging around in the woods or in an airship mournfully playing his harmonica—to assure the player that he’s fine. Actually, we pick up the game by shipping Estelle off to a secret B.F.P. training camp for three months, where she trains to make sure that she’s really really ready to go looking for Joshua whenever she decides to get around to it. Shortly afterward, she actively gives up on this plot hook, and starts telling everyone in turn that Joshua is probably fine and will probably come back home on his own time, like a cat that wandered off. She is right about this.
And if Estelle was ever worried about Professor Weissman and the evil Enforcers of his Society Of Ouroborous, the first half of the game is pretty much one long lesson in how little anyone actually has to worry about these guys. This section—which is, I’m pretty sure, about as long as the entire first game—is entirely based around a structural conceit (we love our structural conceits!) that’s doing some work I would describe as “pre-setup.” Every chapter you go to one of the same cities from the first game, where some weird phenomenon is happening, and then you learn that the weird thing—minor earthquakes! a sleeping sickness! ghost sightings!—is the result of a new Enforcer Of The Society Of Ouroborous running an “experiment” using a G O S P E L O F T H E A U R E O L E. Once you track down the culprit, they will sort of wave at you, introduce themself and their deal (like the Legion of Doom, each one of them is an opposite number to one of the supporting cast members, with some past or present connection to them that doesn’t wind up mattering), and then stop their experiment and make you fight a robot or something as a distraction and then leave. Invariably, the threat posed by these evil schemes is like the threat of kids riding dirt bikes past your house: someone could be hurt! “Well, I’m glad no one was hurt,” says the local B.F.P. operative at the end of each of these chapters, “but it’s over now. I hear they’re a little short-staffed in City N+1, so you might want to head over there, but there’s no rush! Why don’t you check out the big board, or just do some shopping?”
As I said before, I really didn’t find the first game that “setup-y;” it was boring, and had that same sense of non-urgency I complain of here, but there was at least a continuous escalation of stakes and scope that led to a functional, if dramatically inert, climax. But, in retrospect, I have to ding First Chapter a little, since it turns out that its “setup” fell short of introducing the antagonists, and in fact still left us with a debit of 25 hours of “setup” before the bad guys could come within arm’s reach of actually hurting a human being on purpose.
What’s that, reader? You detect a note of playful cleverness in the structural conceit? An earthquake machine, an illusion machine, a rock that mind-controls dragons: this is sort of a heist-movie thing, isn’t it? You see all the components of the criminals’ plan before you get to see it all come together in the back half? That’s pretty fun! Reader, it breaks my heart to tell you that literally none of this stuff is mentioned after chapter 5.
Once you’ve done all your shopping and exchanged professional references with all five of the new villains, the narrative does in fact get a bit more juice, as the Enforcers of the Society of Ouroborous swoop in and start doing real damage: slightly injuring minor side characters, knocking them unconscious, locking them in little jail cells. Shortly before I reached this point, starting to suspect that I’d been played for a rube by an overenthusiastic anime-adjunct fandom—a mistake I swore I’d never make again after watching almost a hundred episodes of Bleach in eighth grade—I overcame my spoiler aversion and Googled “trails characters die ever.” I found a Reddit thread where some poor soul who had already played like five of these games said, quote, “as much as everyone praises the world building & in-depth development of characters and their interactions (points I agree with), I'm gonna have trouble keeping my suspension of disbelief if no one of importance ends up dying. I'm old enough to realize being edgy, violent or killing characters off for shock value does NOT equal mature storytelling...but I also strongly believe that you need stakes in your story; you need that to create dramatic tension.” Most of the replies informed him, basically, to surrender hope for the future games.
Is this an Avatar: the Last Airbender thing, where the Wikia lists the timeline as “Before Genocide” and “After Genocide” but the show itself can only say characters are “…gone”? Have I been getting mad at a game for eight-year-olds? Characters say “shit” a lot and there’s an evil little girl who keeps talking about ripping our intestines out, but maybe that’s just a localization thing. But no: a couple of the bad guys wind up dying at the end, and there are big goofy-looking gouts of blood in some of the combat animations; they could definitely kill off the fucking dad if they want to. These people are making a choice. The choice is rooted in the understanding that the much-praised “story” and “writing” of this game doesn’t matter at all; what matters is the volume of content. If you create one thousand characters and you rotate them in and out of the players’ eyeline for fifty hours every year or two, the players will start to make up their own little stories about the characters in their heads. Once you’ve pulled that trick, you’ve got a “fandom.” If the primary goal of your series is to hook and maintain a fandom, then killing off a character is just sinking a good investment: it’ll give the fandom one fewer little guy to be periodically reminded of. There’s probably a good seventy or eighty nerds somewhere who will abruptly look away from the screen and go outside for once if you kill off the stupid fucking dad, because the stupid fucking dad is their comfort character or they’ve otherwise constructed out of the images on the screen some tenuous fandom-reality in which the stupid fucking dad is load-bearing. Maybe they’re giving free advertising to the series by pumping out little comics where Cassius and Agate are both married to Mayor Maybelle and Walter is their son who’s in a rock band. They don’t need this version of the story validated in any way except to have all of these characters pass in front of the screen now and then. So not only do you need to keep all of them in play, you should probably avoid having them really suffer or struggle or change or do anything interesting or noteworthy or specific enough to supplant the version that might be in any particular fan’s head. Having everyone be blandly nice to one another and occasionally make a speech about how it’s our bonds that make us human is probably okay.
As an aside, since playing the first game I read Fullmetal Alchemist, which successfully pulls off the exact blend of mid-fantasy political thriller and cozy “my friends are my power” quest narrative that this is going for. This was a helpful point of reference to me, since it’s obviously unfair of me to keep comparing these to the good Final Fantasys, which A) are masterworks of the form and B) I played in high school when I was a complete emotional sponge for anything with melodrama and dragons in it. But when I come to the point of it, contrasting Trails with FMA also feels somehow unfair… I can see the faces of a thousand Trails fans staring up at me in judgment, as though by holding their franchise to the lightest standards of humor, pathos, suspense, or aesthetic beauty I am somehow missing the point… I‘m reminded of a passage from The Idiot:
“As to faith,” he said, smiling, and evidently unwilling to leave Rogojin in this state—“as to faith, I had four curious conversations in two days, a week or so ago. One morning I met a man in the train, and made acquaintance with him at once. I had often heard of him as a very learned man, but an atheist; and I was very glad of the opportunity of conversing with so eminent and clever a person. He doesn’t believe in God, and he talked a good deal about it, but all the while it appeared to me that he was speaking outside the subject. And it has always struck me, both in speaking to such men and in reading their books, that they do not seem really to be touching on that at all, though on the surface they may appear to do so. I told him this, but I dare say I did not clearly express what I meant, for he could not understand me.”
Lest you think I played this game just to torture myself, I’ll restate that the gameplay is immaculate, and I largely enjoyed playing the whole thing in twenty-minute increments over several months (windowed on the PC, using the Turbo button because I never found the separate Run button until this morning, as God intended) so long as I opened up to a fighty part and not a talky part. It’s a bit harder than the first game, which is good, and some of the boss fights are puzzley in a way that really rewards tinkering with your high-level strategy. On the con side, it’s a bit padded—there are too many variants of the same fights against giant robots, and a whole late-game boss-rush sequence you basically need to do twice—and it throws three unwanted new party members at you late in the game, which is just sort of unpleasant. One of the new party members starts off at a lower level than the protagonists and is sort of diegetically shitty and you have to use her for one quick mission, which is fine, but the other two are hyped-up power players who start off a couple levels higher than your main party, but still, frustratingly, aren’t very good. For most of the final chapter I just settled into my core party of Estelle, Joshua, Kloe, and Zin, and the latter two in particular became a huge pleasure to play—respectively complete monsters at magic and punching. So, I’m a little sick of myself for making it through two of these things, and I will absolutely never play the third one, but in the end I found my joy. Two stars.
Won a game on Prince and deleted the app. Dangerous game for me to have access to. I like how strong the faction bonuses are and how it gives more interesting choices than V—you can’t just make three megacities that do everything and win on Culture like in V.
2019
Obviously this is a more-or-less perfect puzzle game, but playing it mostly just made me sleepy and I abandonedi t before too long, which raises the question: do I even like puzzle games?
2016
Hard DNF. I made it I think eight hours in, which is more than this game could ask for. Everything I could reasonably say I liked about this one comes down to “production value” plus the basic hook of “Final Fantasy with four dudes in a car.”
In that sense, the thing I can most fairly compare this to is X-2, the “girls rule” Final Fantasy to this one’s “dudes rock” Final Fantasy, and a game that also wound up pissing me off. X-2 had some of the same flaws at this—it only has one real character and the other people have nothing going for them other than “they’re her friends,” and it’s full of minigame chaff. But X-2 at least tries to make an argument for itself early on (“it’s showtime, girls”) whereas XV’s equivalent gambit is the smarmy “Stand By Me” scene, which just doesn’t cut it.
Mostly this game wants you to marvel at how big and expensive it is. Like many open world games, it’s very aesthetically focused on things that look good from a distance, which mostly means interesting rock formations. The main characters are also designed like rock formations, and have about as much personality. I don’t really begrudge them doing the broad archetypes of “nerd, jock, funny guy, main guy,” but generally in the “adventuring party” genre it’s considered polite to have all the party members experience conflict or interact with the story in some way. FFXV doggedly refuses to do this. Several hours in, all I had was that one of the characters had a sister, but then once I met the sister the sister only wanted to interact with the main guy. (It’s funny that the most solipsistic Final Fantasy game I’ve played is also the only one where the POV character is royalty.) As for the main guy, he has a bland-on-purpose personality for the player to project himself onto, and the main bit of character intrigue is that it’s unclear how he feels about his maybe-cancelled arranged marriage to “Lady Lunafreya,” a sort of soft Yuna figure who pops up for a little twenty-second aside every couple hours of gameplay, hanging around in some sort of foreign land and doing Yuna stuff. When I stopped playing, the game was teasing a love triangle, which I’ll grant was more interesting than anything else going on. The third vertex on the triangle was the aforementioned sister: she told me she loved shopping, and I was given the options “Act Interested” and “Act Uninterested,” and when I picked “Act Interested” I got 250 EXP. Presumably it was the right choice. If you hooked me up to electrodes, that scene was probably the most my brain chemistry spiked during the whole time I played that game. It used to be that you could play a whole array of games along those lines on Flash right on your browser!
I’ve only really played a handful of big-studio games released since I got out of college and read Infinite Jest and realized I should try and do stuff I enjoy instead of stuff that sucks. But based on this one, it strikes me that the purpose of games now is to generate content that you can share on social media to create free advertising for the game. The ideal way to do this is to create a very beautiful game with lots of interesting emergent-narrative events that won’t necessarily happen the same way for all players, and then stacking on some cool sharing tools. But if you don’t have faith in either your game or your player base, you have another option, which is to create a lot of content that’s meant to /look/ like emergent narrative but is actually totally uninteractive and scripted, and then simply hand the player the content to be shared. So, for instance, you see a clip on Twitter of four Final Fantasy boys in the middle of a field in search of an ore deposit—a Garnet stone, which one can imagine has some interesting crafting applications. They approach the indicated spot on the minimap, and—whoa! A giant bird! The size of a house! Luckily, the bird is asleep. The player, wisely, goes into a crouch and walks slowly around the bird. He grabs the ore and heads back to the road. As soon as he does, the bird rouses itself and takes to the skies, passing overhead on the way to another part of a map, and luckily not bothering the player. What a close shave! And the player was able to get all these cool screencaps of the whole event. Neat! Anything can happen in the wild world of Final Fantasy XV, right?
Wrong. In fact, the episode I just described is an early main-story mission. A guy who is both a journalist and a jeweler blackmails you, the Prince, into collecting a garnet for him. He marks on your map the only space in the world where you can find a garnet deposit. You go there, encountering no combat on the way, and the game has placed the giant bird there. You don’t have to do anything to start sneaking around the bird—the game decides that for you. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to actually wake the bird. Getting the rock and heading out is trivial. Then, when you’ve reached the road, the game triggers for the bird to wake up and automatically pans the camera so you can see it pass overhead. You go back to the car and drop off the rock. In exchange, the journalist / jeweler promises to give you a ferry ticket, but makes you go to sleep first. In the morning you decide not to take the ferry due to unrelated plot events. This is what passes for a “game” now.
Now, of course I didn’t take any screen caps to share this wonderful event, because I was bored to tears the entire time. Luckily, the game has me covered! The funny guy, Prompto, has the “special skill” of photography, and he makes sure to document my journey for me. Every time I turn in for the night, he shows me all the cool pictures he took of my wonderful adventures in the world of Final Fantasy! And every time, about two thirds of these are pictures of cutscenes, which are presumably exactly the same for every single player doing the same quests. (Pictures taken during combat are usually visually incoherent, just as combat is visually incoherent… but we’ll get there). Nonetheless, I am given an option to share these photos on the social pages I have linked to my PS4, so everyone knows what a fun time I’m having playing Final Fantasy XV.
These games are designed around stuff that looks good from a distance. The idea of a Final Fantasy game where you drive a car around looks good from a distance, because driving a car around is famously one of the most fun things you can do in a video game. Of course, the game doesn’t want to ruin Prompto’s photographs by letting you drive over the line, so it pretty much railroads you during the driving sequences (and, for an early stretch of the game, forces you to put the car on autopilot while Ignis drives). Nevertheless, the game insists that some sort of gameplay is happening, even when it clearly isn’t. The last story quest I made it through was called “A Dubious Drive.” My mission was to follow a guy who was setting up a meet between me and some sort of imprisoned God (presumably this would have been explained better later). He intoned, just as if he were explaining a GTA mission, that I wasn’t to get too close to him, because it might cause an accident. But /also/, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight, because then I’d get lost on the road. I was not allowed to let Ignis drive; this was a challenge I would have to endure alone. Throughout the drive there was a big flashing warning on the screen: “IF YOU LET [I already forgot this dude’s name] OUT OF YOUR SIGHT, THE GAME WILL END.” I pressed the accelerate button continuously and made two turns and then was directed to press “X” to pull in to a rest stop. The quest was completed and I was awarded experience. The story then commanded me to go to sleep, and then Prompto showed me three photographs of cutscenes.
Well, all Final Fantasy games have minigame chaff, you will say. It is the way of things. What about the combat? What about the combat, indeed? At some point in the mid-2000s ten million guys, their MKULTRA programming triggered by a scent deployed in the upper atmosphere by crop-duster planes, had the same observation all at once: “RPGs are boring. You just press circle to decide who to attack? Where’s the game?” From that day on, traditional RPG combat was considered retro. The age of the action-RPG had begun. In an action RPG, instead of pressing circle and selecting who to attack, you press circle and the game selects who to attack for you. But then there’s a fluid, “cool” looking animation of the attack, so it looks sort of like an action game in trailers or in screencaps.
What’s weird is that right around the time the one million gamers had their great revelation about RPGs being boring, Square created two incredibly fun action RPGs twice in quick succession: first with the original Kingdom Hearts, and then a few years later with The World Ends With You. If you squint, every mechanic in this game has an analogue in Kingdom Hearts: you have a little D-pad controlled menu in the bottom of the screen that lets you cycle through different spells and attack options, you are encouraged to “lock on” to enemies before attacking, and you have NPCs who you can direct around and occasionally exploit for a combo attack. Kingdom Hearts maintains most of the qualities of a good RPG—you can customize your play around different styles; different enemies require different strategies; and it’s immediately, brightly apparent on the screen what the consequences of a given action might be—while also providing fun reflex challenges and making you exploit space on the fly in a way typical of good action games. it also has well calibrated difficulty, with multiple modes for players of different skill. You would think that having mastered this genre over a decade ago, Square could come up with an analogous system for their flagship franchise that didn’t play like the Mama Bear’s cold porridge.
You’d be wrong! It’s difficult to express how little I felt like I was playing a game the entire time I was playing FFXV’s combat system. Apart from the way-too-strong giant monsters dropped cheekily on the map so you can run away from them (they never seem to chase you, so this is not really a source of tension), all strife in this world can be solved by holding circle and closing your eyes. If you see your health getting low (one of your friends may helpfully say “Noctis, you’re not looking too hot!” in case you get too bored to look at your health bar) you can pop a potion, which you can always do with no time delay, so you don’t have to worry about mistiming it and getting finished off before you can heal. Occasionally there are little QTEs, or, well, the same one over and over: the game will tell you to press square, and then tell you to press circle, and sometimes this causes you to block and parry an attack, but usually you or the monster has incidentally wandered out of attack range before the prompt resolved and it turns out to be a false alarm. There are other things you can do—spells, companion abilities, “Warp Strikes,” various weapon switch-outs, a plot-relevant thing where you can summon holy weapons and spend HP to use them—but none of it feels very different or has measurable consequences on what’s going on. I found myself judging these things by not letting my various bars overfill: if I’m fill up on the little green bar, I let one of my friends take an attack at random; if I’m full up on elemental energy, I make a very powerful spell and use it at the beginning of the next fight; if one of my friends yells “Noctis, DON’T use that weapon! The enemy is STRONG against it!” I switch to another one at random.
It’s almost never clear how many enemies are on the field, partly because of the camera and because they tend to spawn in waves but mostly because most of the monsters are a tangle of dark grey limbs and all of the dungeons are dark grey caves and you are playing as four dark grey lads and the camera doesn’t reliably stay around Noctis instead of the other ones, so I sometimes lose track of which gray blob I am, although it doesn’t matter, because as long as I keep holding circle, the fight will be over in a couple minutes. After almost every fight I am awarded a score of “A+.” I tried making the game harder by avoiding sidequests and going into a plot dungeon underleveled, but it just made the fights longer and more Potion-intensive, and I still wasn’t spending healing items faster than I was getting them.
I happen to love traditional JRPG combat, although I’m not a stickler. I like gameplay in Fallout 3 well enough. I liked Skyrim’s a bit less, but it had odd moments of glory every now and then. I didn’t much like FFXII with its “you don’t have to press any button at all” system, but the mechanics there felt intuitive and meaningful so when I non-interactively walked my PCs through a dungeon I at least knew what was going on and why it mattered and could feel some sort of satisfaction. The World Ends With You was a game where it was almost impossible to understand what was going on, but that one was both overwhelming and hard, and made it rewarding to try and figure out some combination of street fashions and stylus taps that made the bad guys go away. I even got really into the awful brain-intensive deckbuilder system in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. FFXV is just shitty mush. I got excited for a bit when it dropped some Flans on me, thinking I would have to do something on-purpose in order to exploit the Flans’ elemental weaknesses, but then I found it was easier to just hold circle and kill them with my sword. I thought I noticed the little damage numbers turning a different color, indicating that my attack was either strong or weak against them, but they didn’t seem to take any more or less time to kill than any other enemy. Ah well. Final Fantasy used to be my favorite game series. But “They have passed like rain on the mountain / Like wind in the meadow / The days have gone down over the hills into the west / Into shadow” I guess.
In that sense, the thing I can most fairly compare this to is X-2, the “girls rule” Final Fantasy to this one’s “dudes rock” Final Fantasy, and a game that also wound up pissing me off. X-2 had some of the same flaws at this—it only has one real character and the other people have nothing going for them other than “they’re her friends,” and it’s full of minigame chaff. But X-2 at least tries to make an argument for itself early on (“it’s showtime, girls”) whereas XV’s equivalent gambit is the smarmy “Stand By Me” scene, which just doesn’t cut it.
Mostly this game wants you to marvel at how big and expensive it is. Like many open world games, it’s very aesthetically focused on things that look good from a distance, which mostly means interesting rock formations. The main characters are also designed like rock formations, and have about as much personality. I don’t really begrudge them doing the broad archetypes of “nerd, jock, funny guy, main guy,” but generally in the “adventuring party” genre it’s considered polite to have all the party members experience conflict or interact with the story in some way. FFXV doggedly refuses to do this. Several hours in, all I had was that one of the characters had a sister, but then once I met the sister the sister only wanted to interact with the main guy. (It’s funny that the most solipsistic Final Fantasy game I’ve played is also the only one where the POV character is royalty.) As for the main guy, he has a bland-on-purpose personality for the player to project himself onto, and the main bit of character intrigue is that it’s unclear how he feels about his maybe-cancelled arranged marriage to “Lady Lunafreya,” a sort of soft Yuna figure who pops up for a little twenty-second aside every couple hours of gameplay, hanging around in some sort of foreign land and doing Yuna stuff. When I stopped playing, the game was teasing a love triangle, which I’ll grant was more interesting than anything else going on. The third vertex on the triangle was the aforementioned sister: she told me she loved shopping, and I was given the options “Act Interested” and “Act Uninterested,” and when I picked “Act Interested” I got 250 EXP. Presumably it was the right choice. If you hooked me up to electrodes, that scene was probably the most my brain chemistry spiked during the whole time I played that game. It used to be that you could play a whole array of games along those lines on Flash right on your browser!
I’ve only really played a handful of big-studio games released since I got out of college and read Infinite Jest and realized I should try and do stuff I enjoy instead of stuff that sucks. But based on this one, it strikes me that the purpose of games now is to generate content that you can share on social media to create free advertising for the game. The ideal way to do this is to create a very beautiful game with lots of interesting emergent-narrative events that won’t necessarily happen the same way for all players, and then stacking on some cool sharing tools. But if you don’t have faith in either your game or your player base, you have another option, which is to create a lot of content that’s meant to /look/ like emergent narrative but is actually totally uninteractive and scripted, and then simply hand the player the content to be shared. So, for instance, you see a clip on Twitter of four Final Fantasy boys in the middle of a field in search of an ore deposit—a Garnet stone, which one can imagine has some interesting crafting applications. They approach the indicated spot on the minimap, and—whoa! A giant bird! The size of a house! Luckily, the bird is asleep. The player, wisely, goes into a crouch and walks slowly around the bird. He grabs the ore and heads back to the road. As soon as he does, the bird rouses itself and takes to the skies, passing overhead on the way to another part of a map, and luckily not bothering the player. What a close shave! And the player was able to get all these cool screencaps of the whole event. Neat! Anything can happen in the wild world of Final Fantasy XV, right?
Wrong. In fact, the episode I just described is an early main-story mission. A guy who is both a journalist and a jeweler blackmails you, the Prince, into collecting a garnet for him. He marks on your map the only space in the world where you can find a garnet deposit. You go there, encountering no combat on the way, and the game has placed the giant bird there. You don’t have to do anything to start sneaking around the bird—the game decides that for you. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to actually wake the bird. Getting the rock and heading out is trivial. Then, when you’ve reached the road, the game triggers for the bird to wake up and automatically pans the camera so you can see it pass overhead. You go back to the car and drop off the rock. In exchange, the journalist / jeweler promises to give you a ferry ticket, but makes you go to sleep first. In the morning you decide not to take the ferry due to unrelated plot events. This is what passes for a “game” now.
Now, of course I didn’t take any screen caps to share this wonderful event, because I was bored to tears the entire time. Luckily, the game has me covered! The funny guy, Prompto, has the “special skill” of photography, and he makes sure to document my journey for me. Every time I turn in for the night, he shows me all the cool pictures he took of my wonderful adventures in the world of Final Fantasy! And every time, about two thirds of these are pictures of cutscenes, which are presumably exactly the same for every single player doing the same quests. (Pictures taken during combat are usually visually incoherent, just as combat is visually incoherent… but we’ll get there). Nonetheless, I am given an option to share these photos on the social pages I have linked to my PS4, so everyone knows what a fun time I’m having playing Final Fantasy XV.
These games are designed around stuff that looks good from a distance. The idea of a Final Fantasy game where you drive a car around looks good from a distance, because driving a car around is famously one of the most fun things you can do in a video game. Of course, the game doesn’t want to ruin Prompto’s photographs by letting you drive over the line, so it pretty much railroads you during the driving sequences (and, for an early stretch of the game, forces you to put the car on autopilot while Ignis drives). Nevertheless, the game insists that some sort of gameplay is happening, even when it clearly isn’t. The last story quest I made it through was called “A Dubious Drive.” My mission was to follow a guy who was setting up a meet between me and some sort of imprisoned God (presumably this would have been explained better later). He intoned, just as if he were explaining a GTA mission, that I wasn’t to get too close to him, because it might cause an accident. But /also/, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight, because then I’d get lost on the road. I was not allowed to let Ignis drive; this was a challenge I would have to endure alone. Throughout the drive there was a big flashing warning on the screen: “IF YOU LET [I already forgot this dude’s name] OUT OF YOUR SIGHT, THE GAME WILL END.” I pressed the accelerate button continuously and made two turns and then was directed to press “X” to pull in to a rest stop. The quest was completed and I was awarded experience. The story then commanded me to go to sleep, and then Prompto showed me three photographs of cutscenes.
Well, all Final Fantasy games have minigame chaff, you will say. It is the way of things. What about the combat? What about the combat, indeed? At some point in the mid-2000s ten million guys, their MKULTRA programming triggered by a scent deployed in the upper atmosphere by crop-duster planes, had the same observation all at once: “RPGs are boring. You just press circle to decide who to attack? Where’s the game?” From that day on, traditional RPG combat was considered retro. The age of the action-RPG had begun. In an action RPG, instead of pressing circle and selecting who to attack, you press circle and the game selects who to attack for you. But then there’s a fluid, “cool” looking animation of the attack, so it looks sort of like an action game in trailers or in screencaps.
What’s weird is that right around the time the one million gamers had their great revelation about RPGs being boring, Square created two incredibly fun action RPGs twice in quick succession: first with the original Kingdom Hearts, and then a few years later with The World Ends With You. If you squint, every mechanic in this game has an analogue in Kingdom Hearts: you have a little D-pad controlled menu in the bottom of the screen that lets you cycle through different spells and attack options, you are encouraged to “lock on” to enemies before attacking, and you have NPCs who you can direct around and occasionally exploit for a combo attack. Kingdom Hearts maintains most of the qualities of a good RPG—you can customize your play around different styles; different enemies require different strategies; and it’s immediately, brightly apparent on the screen what the consequences of a given action might be—while also providing fun reflex challenges and making you exploit space on the fly in a way typical of good action games. it also has well calibrated difficulty, with multiple modes for players of different skill. You would think that having mastered this genre over a decade ago, Square could come up with an analogous system for their flagship franchise that didn’t play like the Mama Bear’s cold porridge.
You’d be wrong! It’s difficult to express how little I felt like I was playing a game the entire time I was playing FFXV’s combat system. Apart from the way-too-strong giant monsters dropped cheekily on the map so you can run away from them (they never seem to chase you, so this is not really a source of tension), all strife in this world can be solved by holding circle and closing your eyes. If you see your health getting low (one of your friends may helpfully say “Noctis, you’re not looking too hot!” in case you get too bored to look at your health bar) you can pop a potion, which you can always do with no time delay, so you don’t have to worry about mistiming it and getting finished off before you can heal. Occasionally there are little QTEs, or, well, the same one over and over: the game will tell you to press square, and then tell you to press circle, and sometimes this causes you to block and parry an attack, but usually you or the monster has incidentally wandered out of attack range before the prompt resolved and it turns out to be a false alarm. There are other things you can do—spells, companion abilities, “Warp Strikes,” various weapon switch-outs, a plot-relevant thing where you can summon holy weapons and spend HP to use them—but none of it feels very different or has measurable consequences on what’s going on. I found myself judging these things by not letting my various bars overfill: if I’m fill up on the little green bar, I let one of my friends take an attack at random; if I’m full up on elemental energy, I make a very powerful spell and use it at the beginning of the next fight; if one of my friends yells “Noctis, DON’T use that weapon! The enemy is STRONG against it!” I switch to another one at random.
It’s almost never clear how many enemies are on the field, partly because of the camera and because they tend to spawn in waves but mostly because most of the monsters are a tangle of dark grey limbs and all of the dungeons are dark grey caves and you are playing as four dark grey lads and the camera doesn’t reliably stay around Noctis instead of the other ones, so I sometimes lose track of which gray blob I am, although it doesn’t matter, because as long as I keep holding circle, the fight will be over in a couple minutes. After almost every fight I am awarded a score of “A+.” I tried making the game harder by avoiding sidequests and going into a plot dungeon underleveled, but it just made the fights longer and more Potion-intensive, and I still wasn’t spending healing items faster than I was getting them.
I happen to love traditional JRPG combat, although I’m not a stickler. I like gameplay in Fallout 3 well enough. I liked Skyrim’s a bit less, but it had odd moments of glory every now and then. I didn’t much like FFXII with its “you don’t have to press any button at all” system, but the mechanics there felt intuitive and meaningful so when I non-interactively walked my PCs through a dungeon I at least knew what was going on and why it mattered and could feel some sort of satisfaction. The World Ends With You was a game where it was almost impossible to understand what was going on, but that one was both overwhelming and hard, and made it rewarding to try and figure out some combination of street fashions and stylus taps that made the bad guys go away. I even got really into the awful brain-intensive deckbuilder system in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. FFXV is just shitty mush. I got excited for a bit when it dropped some Flans on me, thinking I would have to do something on-purpose in order to exploit the Flans’ elemental weaknesses, but then I found it was easier to just hold circle and kill them with my sword. I thought I noticed the little damage numbers turning a different color, indicating that my attack was either strong or weak against them, but they didn’t seem to take any more or less time to kill than any other enemy. Ah well. Final Fantasy used to be my favorite game series. But “They have passed like rain on the mountain / Like wind in the meadow / The days have gone down over the hills into the west / Into shadow” I guess.
2007
Way way on the easy end by the standards of the franchise. Almost every “hidden” star was findable without any hints or even looking too hard, and it never once expects you to do any of the fancy jumps except a couple times in the postgame.
The deal with Mario is supposed to be that any kid or mom can pick it up but there’s a sliding scale of content for different kinds of freaks. I should be a pretty good calibration case here because I’m right around the middle: a semi-casual who hasn’t gotten any better or worse at Mario since age 10. I beat the capstone stuff in Odyssey by the skin of my teeth and left behind a couple moons that I couldn’t figure out or found too frustrating—perfect outcome. With 64, I flamed out on most of the hard stuff, got as much of the hidden stuff that people used to have to learn about from magazines as I’d picked up from cultural osmosis, and topped out at ninety-something stars—also a perfect outcome. I haven’t played the Mario Makers but my understanding is that you can either dick around like a toddler with a Lego set or funnel an endless stream of those levels that only a robot or Star Platinum can ever actually complete. With this one I 100%’d the game and it only really pushed me 2 or 3 times, and then all it had to offer me was the opportunity to do it again as Luigi. I’ve come to detest any attempt by a game to try and trick me into playing it more than once. I’m not one of those people! Leave me alone!
Anyway there are worse things a game can be than too easy, and I love zooming around and doing fun physics stuff and shooting star bits at goombas, so: three stars. Gonna wash this one down with a FromSoft thing for sure.
The deal with Mario is supposed to be that any kid or mom can pick it up but there’s a sliding scale of content for different kinds of freaks. I should be a pretty good calibration case here because I’m right around the middle: a semi-casual who hasn’t gotten any better or worse at Mario since age 10. I beat the capstone stuff in Odyssey by the skin of my teeth and left behind a couple moons that I couldn’t figure out or found too frustrating—perfect outcome. With 64, I flamed out on most of the hard stuff, got as much of the hidden stuff that people used to have to learn about from magazines as I’d picked up from cultural osmosis, and topped out at ninety-something stars—also a perfect outcome. I haven’t played the Mario Makers but my understanding is that you can either dick around like a toddler with a Lego set or funnel an endless stream of those levels that only a robot or Star Platinum can ever actually complete. With this one I 100%’d the game and it only really pushed me 2 or 3 times, and then all it had to offer me was the opportunity to do it again as Luigi. I’ve come to detest any attempt by a game to try and trick me into playing it more than once. I’m not one of those people! Leave me alone!
Anyway there are worse things a game can be than too easy, and I love zooming around and doing fun physics stuff and shooting star bits at goombas, so: three stars. Gonna wash this one down with a FromSoft thing for sure.
Edit: if you’re finding this in 2023 or later, I played the second fucking game.
The gameplay here is immaculate. Pure JRPG goodness, if a little on the easy side. No wasted mechanics, winning is fun, losing is fun, random encounters and boss fights are all fun. The money/equipment economy feels balanced all the way through, which is incredibly rare for this sort of thing. There’s no minigame chaff except for one unbelievably bad stealth section. Normally immaculate gameplay should guarantee a three-star review, but this clearly /wants/ to be a story-focused game above all else, so I have to underweight the fighty stuff.
I can see where people get confused and think this is a good game, story-wise, because it has the structure of a much better game. There’s a lot of sort of baseline stuff that suggests a lot of care went into designing this as a game that could tell a complex story through lots of different kinds of scenes. PCs swap in and out as the story demands so it’s not stuck to the “adventuring party” format; there’s a certain deftness to the blocking with the little sprites that gives a lot of flexibility to the talky bits; and it’s /very/ talky—these games are famous problems for localizers, I guess, because every little JRPG-type man-on-the-street interaction is a novel and changes contextually every time a character so much as sneezes. It’s all suggestive of a game that’s very patient, that does a lot of “worldbuilding” and character work, and is setting up something more complex than the normal get-the-boys-together-and-fight-God JRPG plot.
But it’s not! The story and the character work are, in practice, /incredibly/ bad here—pretty bad even by video game standards. A comment you’ll see about this game is that it’s unfortunately a bit boring because it’s doing all this patient worldbuilding and setup work rather than getting to the story; this is false. In fact, at the end of the game the kingdom has been taken over by sinister conspirators whose palace coup is actually a front for an apocalypse plot involving retrieving an ancient doomsday weapon from a secret prelapsarian robot palace beneath the castle. This is actually where most JRPGs end up after forty hours. What seems to be giving players the impression that this is not in fact happening—that the two main characters are still walking around meeting different Mayors and battling small-time Sky Bandits at the end of the game, as in the beginning—is A) this sort of ambience of “slow-burn” that the game projects and B) the fact that all of this is so completely dramatically inert.
I’ve never felt an RPG journey from “let’s go to the sewers for some training!” to “the A U R E O L E has been unleashed, and the R I N G G U A R D I AN has awakened” to be so free of conflict. These characters never really struggle. The story structure revolves more around them being /delayed/ then thwarted—there’s never really a point where they don’t know what they’re going to do next. They are constantly encountering and re-encountering incredibly helpful, friendly people who have the exact information they need. The next step in the quest is often, “let’s go to the bar to talk to X about this,” or, “Y wants to meet in the morning, so let’s go back to the hotel.” Characters do a lot of checking in on each other and relaying information, sometimes along roads full of monsters, and then eventually they find where the bad guy is and go proactively to bring them to justice.
All of this would work out fine if the scenes of characters hanging around hotels were psychologically insightful, or compellingly naturalistic, or funny, or sexy, or anything like that. Other reviews of this game on this website will suggest that this is so—a lot of “plot: 6/10; CHARACTERS: 10/10.” Anyone who thinks this desperately needs to watch an R rated movie. All of the writing here (and it’s not just the localization, which seems high-quality) is… I would define it as “sub-anime.” The “jokes” are terrible and often homophobic. Everyone’s primary character trait is how happy they are to see each other, plus maybe some plot-inert “flaw” (Schera drinks too much, but in a cool high-functioning way; Olivier is bisexual, which grosses the other characters out, but they heroically put up with it; Agate has a gruff exterior, which everyone immediately sees through to his heart of gold). There’s not a single joke that lands.
There is one main dramatic thread about which the game musters up a bit more genuine passion, and it fucking sucks: the main characters are a sixteen-year-old brother and sister by adoption, and they’re starting to develop feelings for each other. Watching this warmed-over Pornhub scenario play out completely mechanically, without an affection mechanic to jimmy or even a nominal love triangle to form an opinion on, is like a forty-hour-long sleep paralysis nightmare, in which you know exactly what’s going to happen but are powerless to prevent it. Imagine my horror when a character casually mentions that a nearby town is famous for its hot springs…
There are two other major dramatic threads: the first involves the characters’ father, who disappears in the beginning of the game. This should at least give you something to worry about, except that the game, terrified of stressing you out, keeps having characters insist that your dad is fine, or even that they just talked to him last week. He does in fact reappear at the end, completely unharmed, to tell you how proud of you he is. The other thing is Joshua’s mysterious past, which is way too vague to be of any interest, and then sort of comes out in a sputter at the end of the game. I was told that the game ends on a cliffhanger, by the way, which is such a generous definition of “cliffhanger;” a minor character reveals himself to have been evil all along, announces that everything that happened in the game was according to his plan, and then walks off with a vague promise to continue doing bad-guy stuff in the future. No cliff, no hang.
What the game is counting on is propinquity, the great ally of the game developer. If you spend enough time with these people, watching them hang out, alternately imagining that you “are” them or that they’re your friends, eventually you’ll fall in love. Clearly this has worked on a lot of gamers, and if the game were any better (say, as good as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, another game I would not describe as well-written) it might have worked on me. As it stands, I kind of like Kloe, the schoolgirl (I know, I know) character who turns out to be the secret princess and fights with a rapier and a trained falcon named Sieg. Sieg is cool, and Kloe kind of seems most convincingly like she would be friends with the protagonists. Her bit of the game includes a fascinating interlude where the protagonists are assigned (the gimmick is that you belong to “the Bracer Guild,” which is a sort of multinational benevolent fantasy Pinkertons) to attend a high school (?) to help out with a school play (??) in drag (ah, okay). I’m not sure I was ever more interested in the story than during this bit, which promises all the parapedophilic low-level sexual intrigue one expects from a different sort of game. (This is one of /two/ sequences in the game where Joshua has to crossdress, by the way; the other one involves a maid uniform, for purposes of sneaking into a palace. This all just makes me nostalgic for the edgier, more complex queerphobia of Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing gag.) But it all fizzles out into the same chumminess as the rest of the game; all the schoolgirls agree that the siblings are made for each other and you walk around after the play meeting an array of Mayors, each of whom congratulates you on your stunning efforts.
Apropos of the secret princess, a note on the politics of this game: it’s completely unreflectively pro-royalist. The Queen of the Liberl Kingdom (yes, “the Liberl Kingdom”) is a wonderful old lady, and her granddaughter, Kloe, is a wonderful young lady. But there’s another heir, through the distaff, the queen’s nephew the Duke, who is a shitty, pampered, self-obsessed aristocrat. Kloe and the Duke have a coequal (not “contested,” just “equal,” like no one has gotten around to reading the line of succession yet, the Queen being only sixty) claim to the throne, and nasty bad actors in the military, in service to foreign interests, lock the queen in her room and abduct the princess and announce that the Duke has been made heir. Vile treason! Luckily the Benevolent Fantasy Pinkertons are here to set things to right. Now, I’m not a whiner about this stuff, and I’ll accept a benevolent princess and kindly queen, but this isn’t Zelda: it’s supposed to be a complex palace intrigue story! Maybe it should think about this stuff for even a second!
Anyway, I haven’t ruled out playing the second one eventually, because I’m a mark, and it’s supposed to be better, and the gameplay really is fun. But I’m very glad that I have regular exposure to way, way better art than this. If this is your idea of “plot pretty good, characters excellent,” I consider you a victim. Of what, I’m not sure exactly. This game, much like every villain I sliced my way through in the course of playing it,, is only the innocent pawn of something much larger and more sinister, but that I can’t spend too much time thinking about, because it’s boring and I have better things to do.
The gameplay here is immaculate. Pure JRPG goodness, if a little on the easy side. No wasted mechanics, winning is fun, losing is fun, random encounters and boss fights are all fun. The money/equipment economy feels balanced all the way through, which is incredibly rare for this sort of thing. There’s no minigame chaff except for one unbelievably bad stealth section. Normally immaculate gameplay should guarantee a three-star review, but this clearly /wants/ to be a story-focused game above all else, so I have to underweight the fighty stuff.
I can see where people get confused and think this is a good game, story-wise, because it has the structure of a much better game. There’s a lot of sort of baseline stuff that suggests a lot of care went into designing this as a game that could tell a complex story through lots of different kinds of scenes. PCs swap in and out as the story demands so it’s not stuck to the “adventuring party” format; there’s a certain deftness to the blocking with the little sprites that gives a lot of flexibility to the talky bits; and it’s /very/ talky—these games are famous problems for localizers, I guess, because every little JRPG-type man-on-the-street interaction is a novel and changes contextually every time a character so much as sneezes. It’s all suggestive of a game that’s very patient, that does a lot of “worldbuilding” and character work, and is setting up something more complex than the normal get-the-boys-together-and-fight-God JRPG plot.
But it’s not! The story and the character work are, in practice, /incredibly/ bad here—pretty bad even by video game standards. A comment you’ll see about this game is that it’s unfortunately a bit boring because it’s doing all this patient worldbuilding and setup work rather than getting to the story; this is false. In fact, at the end of the game the kingdom has been taken over by sinister conspirators whose palace coup is actually a front for an apocalypse plot involving retrieving an ancient doomsday weapon from a secret prelapsarian robot palace beneath the castle. This is actually where most JRPGs end up after forty hours. What seems to be giving players the impression that this is not in fact happening—that the two main characters are still walking around meeting different Mayors and battling small-time Sky Bandits at the end of the game, as in the beginning—is A) this sort of ambience of “slow-burn” that the game projects and B) the fact that all of this is so completely dramatically inert.
I’ve never felt an RPG journey from “let’s go to the sewers for some training!” to “the A U R E O L E has been unleashed, and the R I N G G U A R D I AN has awakened” to be so free of conflict. These characters never really struggle. The story structure revolves more around them being /delayed/ then thwarted—there’s never really a point where they don’t know what they’re going to do next. They are constantly encountering and re-encountering incredibly helpful, friendly people who have the exact information they need. The next step in the quest is often, “let’s go to the bar to talk to X about this,” or, “Y wants to meet in the morning, so let’s go back to the hotel.” Characters do a lot of checking in on each other and relaying information, sometimes along roads full of monsters, and then eventually they find where the bad guy is and go proactively to bring them to justice.
All of this would work out fine if the scenes of characters hanging around hotels were psychologically insightful, or compellingly naturalistic, or funny, or sexy, or anything like that. Other reviews of this game on this website will suggest that this is so—a lot of “plot: 6/10; CHARACTERS: 10/10.” Anyone who thinks this desperately needs to watch an R rated movie. All of the writing here (and it’s not just the localization, which seems high-quality) is… I would define it as “sub-anime.” The “jokes” are terrible and often homophobic. Everyone’s primary character trait is how happy they are to see each other, plus maybe some plot-inert “flaw” (Schera drinks too much, but in a cool high-functioning way; Olivier is bisexual, which grosses the other characters out, but they heroically put up with it; Agate has a gruff exterior, which everyone immediately sees through to his heart of gold). There’s not a single joke that lands.
There is one main dramatic thread about which the game musters up a bit more genuine passion, and it fucking sucks: the main characters are a sixteen-year-old brother and sister by adoption, and they’re starting to develop feelings for each other. Watching this warmed-over Pornhub scenario play out completely mechanically, without an affection mechanic to jimmy or even a nominal love triangle to form an opinion on, is like a forty-hour-long sleep paralysis nightmare, in which you know exactly what’s going to happen but are powerless to prevent it. Imagine my horror when a character casually mentions that a nearby town is famous for its hot springs…
There are two other major dramatic threads: the first involves the characters’ father, who disappears in the beginning of the game. This should at least give you something to worry about, except that the game, terrified of stressing you out, keeps having characters insist that your dad is fine, or even that they just talked to him last week. He does in fact reappear at the end, completely unharmed, to tell you how proud of you he is. The other thing is Joshua’s mysterious past, which is way too vague to be of any interest, and then sort of comes out in a sputter at the end of the game. I was told that the game ends on a cliffhanger, by the way, which is such a generous definition of “cliffhanger;” a minor character reveals himself to have been evil all along, announces that everything that happened in the game was according to his plan, and then walks off with a vague promise to continue doing bad-guy stuff in the future. No cliff, no hang.
What the game is counting on is propinquity, the great ally of the game developer. If you spend enough time with these people, watching them hang out, alternately imagining that you “are” them or that they’re your friends, eventually you’ll fall in love. Clearly this has worked on a lot of gamers, and if the game were any better (say, as good as Fire Emblem: Three Houses, another game I would not describe as well-written) it might have worked on me. As it stands, I kind of like Kloe, the schoolgirl (I know, I know) character who turns out to be the secret princess and fights with a rapier and a trained falcon named Sieg. Sieg is cool, and Kloe kind of seems most convincingly like she would be friends with the protagonists. Her bit of the game includes a fascinating interlude where the protagonists are assigned (the gimmick is that you belong to “the Bracer Guild,” which is a sort of multinational benevolent fantasy Pinkertons) to attend a high school (?) to help out with a school play (??) in drag (ah, okay). I’m not sure I was ever more interested in the story than during this bit, which promises all the parapedophilic low-level sexual intrigue one expects from a different sort of game. (This is one of /two/ sequences in the game where Joshua has to crossdress, by the way; the other one involves a maid uniform, for purposes of sneaking into a palace. This all just makes me nostalgic for the edgier, more complex queerphobia of Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing gag.) But it all fizzles out into the same chumminess as the rest of the game; all the schoolgirls agree that the siblings are made for each other and you walk around after the play meeting an array of Mayors, each of whom congratulates you on your stunning efforts.
Apropos of the secret princess, a note on the politics of this game: it’s completely unreflectively pro-royalist. The Queen of the Liberl Kingdom (yes, “the Liberl Kingdom”) is a wonderful old lady, and her granddaughter, Kloe, is a wonderful young lady. But there’s another heir, through the distaff, the queen’s nephew the Duke, who is a shitty, pampered, self-obsessed aristocrat. Kloe and the Duke have a coequal (not “contested,” just “equal,” like no one has gotten around to reading the line of succession yet, the Queen being only sixty) claim to the throne, and nasty bad actors in the military, in service to foreign interests, lock the queen in her room and abduct the princess and announce that the Duke has been made heir. Vile treason! Luckily the Benevolent Fantasy Pinkertons are here to set things to right. Now, I’m not a whiner about this stuff, and I’ll accept a benevolent princess and kindly queen, but this isn’t Zelda: it’s supposed to be a complex palace intrigue story! Maybe it should think about this stuff for even a second!
Anyway, I haven’t ruled out playing the second one eventually, because I’m a mark, and it’s supposed to be better, and the gameplay really is fun. But I’m very glad that I have regular exposure to way, way better art than this. If this is your idea of “plot pretty good, characters excellent,” I consider you a victim. Of what, I’m not sure exactly. This game, much like every villain I sliced my way through in the course of playing it,, is only the innocent pawn of something much larger and more sinister, but that I can’t spend too much time thinking about, because it’s boring and I have better things to do.
2015
Dunno if I have 8 of these in me but this was good
2015
Here’s about where I stand with video games in general. Obviously I love this kind of bullshit. But it set my writing back like a week. And did I get anything out of it that lasted beyond the moment? Not really!
In the interest of trying to be empathetic, the closest comparison I can make is, say, Claremont's X-Men. Claremont's X-Men doesn't immediately give any signs of having been "written." There's a brutal excess of gristly, repetitive dialogue; Marvel editorial at the time had a hard rule that you had to reintroduce every character and their powers in every issue, which is why you have to hear "WITH A BURST OF ENERGY, PIOTR RASPUTIN CHANGES HIS BODY TO ORGANIC STEEL, AND BECOMES... COLOSSUS!" every ten minutes of reading. The art style and many of the basic storytelling devices at play are offputting to someone unfamiliar with the genre. I can assure you over and over that eventually there's some incredible stuff, but I can't expect you to take it on faith, and the only reason I personally was able to get there is because I've been mainlining superhero comics since age 10 and swim in this shit like water.
So maybe there's some value here, down the line, and maybe if I invested 60 hours to get to game 3 I would get into this. But I played, what, 4? 5? hours of this just to get through the first trial--hours and hours and hours of handholding and incessant repetition of the same three little bits of information. I think that's a pretty reasonable time expenditure to come to the conclusion that this is the worst video game I've ever played.
So maybe there's some value here, down the line, and maybe if I invested 60 hours to get to game 3 I would get into this. But I played, what, 4? 5? hours of this just to get through the first trial--hours and hours and hours of handholding and incessant repetition of the same three little bits of information. I think that's a pretty reasonable time expenditure to come to the conclusion that this is the worst video game I've ever played.