ogremode
2006
Wife caught me doing the spanking QTE
MGS3 crashes on Steam Deck 😩
2006
I'm not sick of God Hand yet so for my third play through I decided to do a Kick Me Sign run—a challenge run in which you can never activate your tension meter, and you can never use your special roulette abilities. It's called a "kick me sign" run because in one of the early stages you get a kick me sign slapped on your back, and it drops off when you use those special abilities—I was surprised to learn that the sign is persistent throughout levels if you don't use your abilities. In fact you are rewarded with unlockable music tracks after completing it, though the game never explicitly mentions this run as far as I know, which is an interesting bit of design in itself. You're never technically locked away from using the special attacks either, so there's a level of self control to it. You can even activate the roulette ability to slow down time and make your character face an enemy, and then back out of the menu without selecting a special ability. I learned the hard way to be extra careful about this—if you accidentally hit the special attack and then let yourself get killed so you can start the level over, you'll actually have to go back to whatever your latest save was to get the sign back on your back.
My experience for the KMS run was surprisingly close to my prior play throughs. It's simple enough to live without "Unleashed Mode," which turns Gene invincible and lets you wail away at an enemy while your Tension Meter ticks down; in lieu of that, you're just forced to put more time and damage into enemies, and to be more careful and consistent about dodging. In other words, you're forced to play better. I felt the most pain without that ability fighting the enemies that were really good at dodging you—Tiger Joe, Devil Hand—since the Unleashed Mode gives you a bit of a breather and a level of essentially guaranteed damage. I also missed this mode when fighting the demons, since they tend to run away from you and it can be very annoying to chase them down.
The inability to use roulette moves are a different story, and really highlighted the gaps in Gene's toolbox. For one thing, there's no gap closing technique, no projectile, no easy crowd control move—without these in your back pocket, it can make certain encounters pretty annoying and hard to deal with at the higher difficulty levels. I eventually learned to rely on juggling enemies and separating them to keep things under control. I still don't have a great solution to when the game sends a whip wielder plus a couple of "leader" characters at you (the tall enemies that have some kind of gimmick—axe wielders, knife throwers, etc.). The whip wielder tends to hide behind these leader types, so your best bet is to do some hit and run attacks, but since they're cloistered together it's just as likely Gene will tackle the wrong enemy, and that's a tedious, fraught way to play already. I wish there was a larger variety of crowd control techniques too—there's the round house kick and the quicker, weaker round kick move, but your best move is to juggle enemies and launch them, which takes a lot of patience and skill to pull off when you're being attacked by multiple enemies.
I had a lot of fun with this challenge run but would be lying if I didn't say I found myself frustrated with certain limitations, but this is the first time, after two complete playthroughs, that I have felt that way about God Hand. I wouldn't recommend this challenge run necessarily unless you're like me and are trying to squeeze as much juice out of the game as possible. The in-game reward doesn't feel worth it, and the game feels designed to be played with the special abilities. But I might not completely feel that way once I finish the game on hard mode...
I'm still not sick of God Hand after finishing the run. After my third playthrough, I just wish I was better at God Hand. This time I managed to stay between second and third difficulty for most of the game, with dips into the fourth difficulty mode, but I felt really challenged in third difficulty already...
My experience for the KMS run was surprisingly close to my prior play throughs. It's simple enough to live without "Unleashed Mode," which turns Gene invincible and lets you wail away at an enemy while your Tension Meter ticks down; in lieu of that, you're just forced to put more time and damage into enemies, and to be more careful and consistent about dodging. In other words, you're forced to play better. I felt the most pain without that ability fighting the enemies that were really good at dodging you—Tiger Joe, Devil Hand—since the Unleashed Mode gives you a bit of a breather and a level of essentially guaranteed damage. I also missed this mode when fighting the demons, since they tend to run away from you and it can be very annoying to chase them down.
The inability to use roulette moves are a different story, and really highlighted the gaps in Gene's toolbox. For one thing, there's no gap closing technique, no projectile, no easy crowd control move—without these in your back pocket, it can make certain encounters pretty annoying and hard to deal with at the higher difficulty levels. I eventually learned to rely on juggling enemies and separating them to keep things under control. I still don't have a great solution to when the game sends a whip wielder plus a couple of "leader" characters at you (the tall enemies that have some kind of gimmick—axe wielders, knife throwers, etc.). The whip wielder tends to hide behind these leader types, so your best bet is to do some hit and run attacks, but since they're cloistered together it's just as likely Gene will tackle the wrong enemy, and that's a tedious, fraught way to play already. I wish there was a larger variety of crowd control techniques too—there's the round house kick and the quicker, weaker round kick move, but your best move is to juggle enemies and launch them, which takes a lot of patience and skill to pull off when you're being attacked by multiple enemies.
I had a lot of fun with this challenge run but would be lying if I didn't say I found myself frustrated with certain limitations, but this is the first time, after two complete playthroughs, that I have felt that way about God Hand. I wouldn't recommend this challenge run necessarily unless you're like me and are trying to squeeze as much juice out of the game as possible. The in-game reward doesn't feel worth it, and the game feels designed to be played with the special abilities. But I might not completely feel that way once I finish the game on hard mode...
I'm still not sick of God Hand after finishing the run. After my third playthrough, I just wish I was better at God Hand. This time I managed to stay between second and third difficulty for most of the game, with dips into the fourth difficulty mode, but I felt really challenged in third difficulty already...
2001
Few things feel better than weaving your way through enemy bullets, tapping the shoot button to clear the screen of enemies so they turn into jewels, then holding down and releasing the shoot button just a second later to pull them all in. Still super bad at these games, but they’re such a blast. $2 on modern platforms in the Capcom Arcade collection, you will not beat this bargain.
2022
Signalis is the debut production by rose-engine, a two-person team made up of Barbara Wittmann and Yuri Stern. This is a strong survival horror action game. There's a mechanical emphasis on scarcity, on being thoughtful with your actions. Every attack costs ammunition of some kind, and the game doesn't dole out enough ammunition for you to ever feel too comfortable for too long. As well, your character can only carry six items. There's even an in-fiction reason for it—there's a somewhat spiritual tenet of the culture called The Rule of Six. As you continue to play the game, you learn that having certain items can be dangerous for the androids, in that they may develop problematic, rebellious personalities if they interact with certain ideas or objects; the Rule of Six, which forces you to carefully balance the weapons you're carrying (each taking one slot), the ammunition types (another slot), special items, or keys, while leaving room for pick-ups you might encounter in the world, is a means of oppression, and you feel it. In fact, my only major problem with this game was the number of times I had to backtrack to pick up items or bring the rest of the keys to a door, since some doors can require six keys. This limitation, like the scarce ammo and health drops, successfully evoke the mood its trying to establish.
The art and narrative design of Signalis recalls a lot of other games—the game is honestly homage heavy, which I don't mind, but it might bug others. I might not mind it because I've also been inspired by so much of the same stuff.
The idea of the diametrical replikant/gestalt is straight out of the replicant/gestalts in Nier: Replicant, and the way there is an attempt to manage and control the replikants from developing personalities, and the way similar personalities develop for similar robots regardless of their station, is very Nier: Automata. The first wall safe combination includes the numbers 0451, an homage to the Looking Glass/Ion Storm games. (When I got to this safe I actually tried 0451 to open it, which I always do, but it didn't work; I felt really smart when I completed the puzzle to get the code and it had 0451 in there.) Plugging the various keys into the doors is reminiscent of the colored plates puzzle from Silent Hill, and in general the puzzles recall the first three Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. (And you're constantly jumping down or crawling through holes, like in Silent Hill.) I was also reminded of Control a few times—there's the censorship of certain key-words, and the design of the mine level reminded me a lot of Control's Black Rock Quarry. There's a lot of anime influence. The character designs are reminiscent of the anime Ergo Proxy and Tsutomu Nihei's manga BLAME!, or GANTZ. There's an unmistakable Neon Genesis Evangelion influence in the way the story develops towards its emotionally driven cosmic climax; there's also a weird fiction (my favorite kind) influence in the story: you find a copy of The King In Yellow in the game, and certain places reminded me a lot of what I imagined when reading The Fisherman by John Langan. The HUD and menus also seem inspired by Evangelion. There's an industrial looking funicular elevator that evokes the ones in Evangelion, Akira, and Metal Gear Solid. And of course there's a lot of Alien in the industrial spaceship and planet base designs. The PS1 style models, where the faces are fragmented into polygons evoking the ideas of a face, are used for cut scenes, and are reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill. The game also references The Isle of the Dead), a series of paintings done by Arnold Böcklin who created many different versions of it, and which is homaged often in art, from artists like Salvador Dali to movies like Alien: Covenant.
But the game isn't just its influences. It's effortlessly stylish. The use of German in HUDs and cut-scenes are just cool; the cut-scenes themselves have a rapid editing and strange style to them, cutting between anime style drawn close-ups of characters or objects, text, tech HUDs. The game enters first person in certain spaces, and there are full first-person interludes that gives the game a nice pace. I dug this game, and I'm excited to see where rose-engine goes next.
The art and narrative design of Signalis recalls a lot of other games—the game is honestly homage heavy, which I don't mind, but it might bug others. I might not mind it because I've also been inspired by so much of the same stuff.
The idea of the diametrical replikant/gestalt is straight out of the replicant/gestalts in Nier: Replicant, and the way there is an attempt to manage and control the replikants from developing personalities, and the way similar personalities develop for similar robots regardless of their station, is very Nier: Automata. The first wall safe combination includes the numbers 0451, an homage to the Looking Glass/Ion Storm games. (When I got to this safe I actually tried 0451 to open it, which I always do, but it didn't work; I felt really smart when I completed the puzzle to get the code and it had 0451 in there.) Plugging the various keys into the doors is reminiscent of the colored plates puzzle from Silent Hill, and in general the puzzles recall the first three Resident Evil and Silent Hill games. (And you're constantly jumping down or crawling through holes, like in Silent Hill.) I was also reminded of Control a few times—there's the censorship of certain key-words, and the design of the mine level reminded me a lot of Control's Black Rock Quarry. There's a lot of anime influence. The character designs are reminiscent of the anime Ergo Proxy and Tsutomu Nihei's manga BLAME!, or GANTZ. There's an unmistakable Neon Genesis Evangelion influence in the way the story develops towards its emotionally driven cosmic climax; there's also a weird fiction (my favorite kind) influence in the story: you find a copy of The King In Yellow in the game, and certain places reminded me a lot of what I imagined when reading The Fisherman by John Langan. The HUD and menus also seem inspired by Evangelion. There's an industrial looking funicular elevator that evokes the ones in Evangelion, Akira, and Metal Gear Solid. And of course there's a lot of Alien in the industrial spaceship and planet base designs. The PS1 style models, where the faces are fragmented into polygons evoking the ideas of a face, are used for cut scenes, and are reminiscent of Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill. The game also references The Isle of the Dead), a series of paintings done by Arnold Böcklin who created many different versions of it, and which is homaged often in art, from artists like Salvador Dali to movies like Alien: Covenant.
But the game isn't just its influences. It's effortlessly stylish. The use of German in HUDs and cut-scenes are just cool; the cut-scenes themselves have a rapid editing and strange style to them, cutting between anime style drawn close-ups of characters or objects, text, tech HUDs. The game enters first person in certain spaces, and there are full first-person interludes that gives the game a nice pace. I dug this game, and I'm excited to see where rose-engine goes next.
1997
This is the first mainline Final Fantasy game I've ever completed, having only played the Remake, and it's easy to see why this game is so beloved. The characters are cool, the music is great, and its a fun world to explore. Most of the story is presented in the same mode you traverse the world— super deformed versions of the characters on top of painted background images, often from a dramatic angled perspective. The doll like characters give most of this game an almost puppet show feeling, since you're mainly viewing these characters in a diorama mode. There are also more realistic/anime proportioned character models used in battles, and even more realistic versions of the characters used in special cut scenes, which can be genuinely cinematic. The combination of all these styles is fascinating—the variety would be unusual in live action and even animated films, but its taken for granted in video games. It gives the story and presentation a unique air.
I had some problems with playing the game—while the materia system is unique, I found designing and shifting loadouts to be tedious, and it wasn't until late game that the combination system really became interesting. The combat itself I found boring and tedious—there are so many long animations to watch, and the status effects are just annoying and mostly amount to waiting for more animations to be over. I kept waiting for the combat to get good, and while it never really did, my characters were so powerful by end game that battles at least didn't take very long. Still, it was never bad enough to make me throw in the towel, and I'm glad I saw the story through.
I had some problems with playing the game—while the materia system is unique, I found designing and shifting loadouts to be tedious, and it wasn't until late game that the combination system really became interesting. The combat itself I found boring and tedious—there are so many long animations to watch, and the status effects are just annoying and mostly amount to waiting for more animations to be over. I kept waiting for the combat to get good, and while it never really did, my characters were so powerful by end game that battles at least didn't take very long. Still, it was never bad enough to make me throw in the towel, and I'm glad I saw the story through.
(I really like this game, and only shelved it because God Hand has taken over my life.)
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is most well-regarded for its unique loop that preceded similar designs in Dead Rising and FromSoftware's Souls games. At any moment during Dragon Quarter, you can reset to your last save point (using the Give Up option in the menu, then selecting SOL-Restore), which are typically placed at the beginning of dungeon sections and before bosses, or to the very beginning of the game (using the SOL-Restart), while maintaining your equipped weapons and armor, all of your skills, your money, and any items you place in a storage locker.
Most importantly, your characters "D-Counter" gets reset to whatever it was before your last save. The "D-Counter" is a percentage on your HUD that is constantly on-screen, which raises slowly as you move, but balloons in huge chunks when you activate the "D-Dive," which transforms your main character Ryu into an extremely strong and invincible dragon form. What this means is you can save at the start of the dungeon, use the D-Dive form to very easily stomp your way through the dungeon, collecting all the new skills and equipment, then use the SOL-Restore option to go back to the start of the dungeon with all those new skills and weapons but with your D-Counter reset to what it was when you saved earlier. Besides the new abilities you gained from completely clearing the dungeon, you also learn how to get around—the route to go directly to the end of the dungeon, and what enemies are absolutely required to get there. Dragon Quarter's encounters can be very difficult and item draining—enemies hit hard—so this knowledge is as important as the power ups you've found. I've played through all From's Souls games, and found this loop really familiar.
After you do the SOL-Restore, you can use the new power-ups you collected to fight your way directly to the end of the dungeon. For the initial D-Dive dungeon or boss runs, I would also set each of my characters shield skill to use the "steal" skill, which collects items, equipment, money, and, most importantly, skills, from the enemies that attack them; then on the regular run, I'd switch the shield skill to the "counter" skill or higher defense, and use the new skills to strengthen my characters. Since you can usually save right before bosses, you have as many chances as you want to steal unique items or skills they might be carrying. You can use one of your characters to profile enemies and see what items they might have; this list is updated as items are taken from them. As well, you will also find single use items that raise characters stats—physical attack strength, magic strength, and health points—and these changes carry over after SOL-Restoring.
Items and unequipped equipment that are in your inventory disappear during SOL-Restore, but in some levels you can find an Item or Weapon Locker vendor and place them there to save them. Your inventory gets reset to 5 Heal Kits, 1 Tonic, and a Save Token, and in fact you could conceivably farm these by SOL-Restoring or SOL-Restarting, placing your refreshed inventory in an item locker, then SOL-Restoring or SOL-Restarting again. If you find any "backpacks", which add more inventory slots, since the last save, these are also removed when resetting.
Dragon Quarter doesn't ever force you to SOL-Restore or SOL-Reset. You can scrape by going from encounter to encounter without ever resetting, but playing this way is miserable. I know, because I played this way for about five hours. A few hours in, I never had enough money to buy enough health items to offset the level of damage my characters were taking; as well, the damage I was doing to enemies was in the low 10s, making fights a totally unfun slog. I eventually hit a wall during an encounter with a bunch of humanoid enemies that overwhelmed me. I wasn't doing much damage, I didn't have enough health restoration items, and I didn't have any money to get more. I bit the bullet and used the SOL-Restore option to go back to the start of the game. I didn't exactly fly through the game to get back to where I was, but it was significantly easier to get there.
The game is really balanced towards using the SOL-Restore method, and when going through a section again after using it, you are also shown a new cutscenes, denoted by the SOL icon beside the Skip Scene icon in the corner. These tend to show different characters perspective, filling you in on what the supporting cast knows.
I had a good time with Dragon Quarter, and I might pick it up again sometime. I like the characters and the dreary, depressing tone; the game wears its Evangelion influence on its sleeve. However, the downside to its fascinating loop is that you have double the JRPG to playthrough, and I just don't have time in my life right now to feel comfortable spending that time on a single game that I don't completely love. However, it is absolutely worth checking out, and it's easy to see why this game clicks with people so much harder than it did for me.
Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is most well-regarded for its unique loop that preceded similar designs in Dead Rising and FromSoftware's Souls games. At any moment during Dragon Quarter, you can reset to your last save point (using the Give Up option in the menu, then selecting SOL-Restore), which are typically placed at the beginning of dungeon sections and before bosses, or to the very beginning of the game (using the SOL-Restart), while maintaining your equipped weapons and armor, all of your skills, your money, and any items you place in a storage locker.
Most importantly, your characters "D-Counter" gets reset to whatever it was before your last save. The "D-Counter" is a percentage on your HUD that is constantly on-screen, which raises slowly as you move, but balloons in huge chunks when you activate the "D-Dive," which transforms your main character Ryu into an extremely strong and invincible dragon form. What this means is you can save at the start of the dungeon, use the D-Dive form to very easily stomp your way through the dungeon, collecting all the new skills and equipment, then use the SOL-Restore option to go back to the start of the dungeon with all those new skills and weapons but with your D-Counter reset to what it was when you saved earlier. Besides the new abilities you gained from completely clearing the dungeon, you also learn how to get around—the route to go directly to the end of the dungeon, and what enemies are absolutely required to get there. Dragon Quarter's encounters can be very difficult and item draining—enemies hit hard—so this knowledge is as important as the power ups you've found. I've played through all From's Souls games, and found this loop really familiar.
After you do the SOL-Restore, you can use the new power-ups you collected to fight your way directly to the end of the dungeon. For the initial D-Dive dungeon or boss runs, I would also set each of my characters shield skill to use the "steal" skill, which collects items, equipment, money, and, most importantly, skills, from the enemies that attack them; then on the regular run, I'd switch the shield skill to the "counter" skill or higher defense, and use the new skills to strengthen my characters. Since you can usually save right before bosses, you have as many chances as you want to steal unique items or skills they might be carrying. You can use one of your characters to profile enemies and see what items they might have; this list is updated as items are taken from them. As well, you will also find single use items that raise characters stats—physical attack strength, magic strength, and health points—and these changes carry over after SOL-Restoring.
Items and unequipped equipment that are in your inventory disappear during SOL-Restore, but in some levels you can find an Item or Weapon Locker vendor and place them there to save them. Your inventory gets reset to 5 Heal Kits, 1 Tonic, and a Save Token, and in fact you could conceivably farm these by SOL-Restoring or SOL-Restarting, placing your refreshed inventory in an item locker, then SOL-Restoring or SOL-Restarting again. If you find any "backpacks", which add more inventory slots, since the last save, these are also removed when resetting.
Dragon Quarter doesn't ever force you to SOL-Restore or SOL-Reset. You can scrape by going from encounter to encounter without ever resetting, but playing this way is miserable. I know, because I played this way for about five hours. A few hours in, I never had enough money to buy enough health items to offset the level of damage my characters were taking; as well, the damage I was doing to enemies was in the low 10s, making fights a totally unfun slog. I eventually hit a wall during an encounter with a bunch of humanoid enemies that overwhelmed me. I wasn't doing much damage, I didn't have enough health restoration items, and I didn't have any money to get more. I bit the bullet and used the SOL-Restore option to go back to the start of the game. I didn't exactly fly through the game to get back to where I was, but it was significantly easier to get there.
The game is really balanced towards using the SOL-Restore method, and when going through a section again after using it, you are also shown a new cutscenes, denoted by the SOL icon beside the Skip Scene icon in the corner. These tend to show different characters perspective, filling you in on what the supporting cast knows.
I had a good time with Dragon Quarter, and I might pick it up again sometime. I like the characters and the dreary, depressing tone; the game wears its Evangelion influence on its sleeve. However, the downside to its fascinating loop is that you have double the JRPG to playthrough, and I just don't have time in my life right now to feel comfortable spending that time on a single game that I don't completely love. However, it is absolutely worth checking out, and it's easy to see why this game clicks with people so much harder than it did for me.
2019
Dipped back into Control to do the Wake DLC, after putting it down in February 2021. Without realizing it, I only had two missions/levels left in the game to go, so I finished them as well. Like in replaying Alan Wake, I kind of got tired of the sheer number of fights, but there's so much more here to play around with. The fights are a lot of fun but it feels like they can turn in the enemies favor frustratingly quickly, and I found myself repeating fights an annoying number of times. Granted, I returned to endgame content after two years of not playing it at all, so maybe I'm playing it wrong, or I've invested my ability points wrong, but Jesse is such a squishy character, as powerful as she is. Still I had a good enough time that after finishing it I wanted to start the game on a current gen version. I finished the PS4 version, which looked good and played well enough on my PS5; I did encounter one annoying bug which is that button prompts, or half of them, would randomly stayed glued to the screen until they disappeared just as randomly. If there's a way to move the last gen saves to the upgraded version, I could not find it. The action is very strong and a lot of fun, and the game essentially has infinite content if you want to keep plugging away at it. What's most attractive to me about this game is its vibe and characters, and it was really fun to see Jesse interact in the usual dreamlike way with Alan Wake. Really looking forward to AW2 later this month.
1984
Tower of Druaga is probably the first great social game; and like the first week of Pokémon Go, like long offline MMOs, it's impossible to play Druaga the way it was meant to be played: at an arcade with other players, swapping tips, theories, or ideas as to how to get to the next floor in the tower of Druaga. It's no wonder this didn't catch on in the States, where you play arcade games with your friends, if you play them with anyone at all.
As it is today, Tower of Druaga is, genuinely, a fun combat puzzle game. I'm a fan of NES The Legend of Zelda's combat, and that same simple swordplay is here almost verbatim, though there's a little more friction here; the item-based puzzle/combat loop of Zelda clearly starts here (Miyamoto is an outspoken fan of this game). The puzzle solutions are fun to do, even if the solutions themselves are complete insane. To find treasure chests, you will rotate your joystick three times; you will swing your sword from your starting spot, but first you will turn your character so they're not facing the outside wall so when you do you don't also destroy your crucial pickaxe; you will pass through one enemy and then and only then kill three of a different enemy type.
I had a good time playing up the tower, sincerely marveling at its tricks and what it asked of you. Really worth playing for a while to see whats so special about it. Don't even feel bad using a guide. For a game like this, the guide isn't cheating so much as it is an analog to that social experience that's impossible to get today.
As it is today, Tower of Druaga is, genuinely, a fun combat puzzle game. I'm a fan of NES The Legend of Zelda's combat, and that same simple swordplay is here almost verbatim, though there's a little more friction here; the item-based puzzle/combat loop of Zelda clearly starts here (Miyamoto is an outspoken fan of this game). The puzzle solutions are fun to do, even if the solutions themselves are complete insane. To find treasure chests, you will rotate your joystick three times; you will swing your sword from your starting spot, but first you will turn your character so they're not facing the outside wall so when you do you don't also destroy your crucial pickaxe; you will pass through one enemy and then and only then kill three of a different enemy type.
I had a good time playing up the tower, sincerely marveling at its tricks and what it asked of you. Really worth playing for a while to see whats so special about it. Don't even feel bad using a guide. For a game like this, the guide isn't cheating so much as it is an analog to that social experience that's impossible to get today.
2006
Replay. Having played a handful of "beat them up" games between finishing God Hand for the first time and the second time, it's fun seeing so many of the ideas that God Hand homages. This review is just a note on some of those.
From Final Fight, there's a handful of enemy types—skinny knife throwers, agile women, plump guys, and the idea of tall and short enemies indicating their strength. There's also the "destroy a car" minigame, and in God Hand there's even throwbacks to that 90s style homophobia. From Streets of Rage, God Hand takes the whip enemies, and also the thing where enemies will sit on the ground and get pouty.
After finishing God Hand again, I started playing God Hand for a third time. It just feels amazing to play. The new game experience reminds me a lot of FromSoft in the level of skill (and level/enemy knowledge) you carry over, even though you don't carry over techniques you bought or health or "tension point" upgrades; probably the game I'd compare it to most is Sekiro. When I finished that game, I ended up speeding through the NG+ and didn't die until I got to the burning bull enemy, which was immensely satisfying. On the other hand, God Hand also feels like there's a lot of skill I have left to build. I started playing the hard mode and got my ass beat in the first level. I want to get there, but it is truly difficult.
From Final Fight, there's a handful of enemy types—skinny knife throwers, agile women, plump guys, and the idea of tall and short enemies indicating their strength. There's also the "destroy a car" minigame, and in God Hand there's even throwbacks to that 90s style homophobia. From Streets of Rage, God Hand takes the whip enemies, and also the thing where enemies will sit on the ground and get pouty.
After finishing God Hand again, I started playing God Hand for a third time. It just feels amazing to play. The new game experience reminds me a lot of FromSoft in the level of skill (and level/enemy knowledge) you carry over, even though you don't carry over techniques you bought or health or "tension point" upgrades; probably the game I'd compare it to most is Sekiro. When I finished that game, I ended up speeding through the NG+ and didn't die until I got to the burning bull enemy, which was immensely satisfying. On the other hand, God Hand also feels like there's a lot of skill I have left to build. I started playing the hard mode and got my ass beat in the first level. I want to get there, but it is truly difficult.
2011
I've been really excited about the Resident Evil 4 Remake, and couldn't wait to dig into the demo tonight. It looks great, but I wish I liked it more. The encounters feel sparse, broken up with cinematic, tension building exploration sequences that nonetheless feel like filler. There's a few more cutscenes, some of which trigger based on your behavior, like the chainsaw enemy cutting up part of the level as he chases you, which is a cool addition and again looks sick, but snatching away control as you're trying to fight off the village feels terrible and weirdly antiquated. The changes to the combat don't seem to be in its favor either--RE4R is faster than the original game, but also weightier, more animation driven, and as a consequence it doesn't feel half as good as the original game, which is slow, but snappy. Maybe I'll feel differently playing the full remake, as I adjust to these changes, though I feel like I'd just have more fun replaying the old game. There's also a surprising emphasis on stealth, which is the opposite of what I want from this game. I also encountered a bug where Leon got stuck on a corner and got killed, which made the whole experience feel even worse.
I booted up Resident Evil 4 HD immediately after playing the demo, and played through the village for my second time tonight. It's plainly so much more fun, so much more gamey. Enemies fell to their knees and Leon sent them flying, knocking down a group of enemies like bowling pins. I don't know how you modernize such an arcade feeling, perfect action game to modern standards without losing what makes it excellent. And unfortunately, it looks like Capcom doesn't either.
I booted up Resident Evil 4 HD immediately after playing the demo, and played through the village for my second time tonight. It's plainly so much more fun, so much more gamey. Enemies fell to their knees and Leon sent them flying, knocking down a group of enemies like bowling pins. I don't know how you modernize such an arcade feeling, perfect action game to modern standards without losing what makes it excellent. And unfortunately, it looks like Capcom doesn't either.
1991
While Mega Man 3 felt like more Mega Man, Mega Man 4 feels like even more Mega Man. The addition of the charge blast is nice. I like the iterative nature of Mega Man's development, and here with the slide and charging blast, Mega Man finally feels complete as an action game character.
I realized this time around that I definitely prefer the latter half of the game—the two castles—to the first part where you take out the robots in their own levels, because the game requires you to use your special abilities to make it through the level. I feel like I tend to under use Mega Man's abilities in general, saving them for a challenge or an enemy type that never comes. You only really need to use robot abilities against other robots, which trivialize the fights with them, and that's always disappointing to me—I want to feel like I beat a boss, not like I found the right key to them. The non-robot bosses at the end of the game were pretty fun, and felt like they were designed to be fought rather than puzzled out.
All that said, I really got annoyed at the final boss, where you have to use a certain weapon to damage them—at that point, I was all out of ammunition for that weapon, and had to die and farm drops from enemies to fill that back up. It made me just not want to finish the game.
I'm going to put down the mainline series for now and swap over to X. I'm really interested to see how this series develops into the 16bit era.
I realized this time around that I definitely prefer the latter half of the game—the two castles—to the first part where you take out the robots in their own levels, because the game requires you to use your special abilities to make it through the level. I feel like I tend to under use Mega Man's abilities in general, saving them for a challenge or an enemy type that never comes. You only really need to use robot abilities against other robots, which trivialize the fights with them, and that's always disappointing to me—I want to feel like I beat a boss, not like I found the right key to them. The non-robot bosses at the end of the game were pretty fun, and felt like they were designed to be fought rather than puzzled out.
All that said, I really got annoyed at the final boss, where you have to use a certain weapon to damage them—at that point, I was all out of ammunition for that weapon, and had to die and farm drops from enemies to fill that back up. It made me just not want to finish the game.
I'm going to put down the mainline series for now and swap over to X. I'm really interested to see how this series develops into the 16bit era.
Install instructions at the end of this review...
The sequel to Outrun vastly improves upon the original game by adding a handful of empowering mechanics, and adding layers to the original vision. This can be annoying in bad games, but Yu Suzuki and team made something sparkling and beautiful here.
Outrun 2 gives you five gears to work up through. You'll rarely want to use anything but the last two. The speedometer is drawn in the right-hand corner, and every car has a different optimal place to upshift. When the space behind the needle is white, you're in a good place with your gear and speed. The starter cars have yellow spots on the speedometer that signal you should upshift, which are missing from the faster cars; you just have to time it so you upshift before your needle spills over to the red. I'm not sure if there's any mechanical bonus for upshifting while in the optimal spot, but even without that this feature brings the satisfying timing rhythm of the reloading mini-game from Gears of War.
The trick of the original Outrun is downshifting into corners so you can maintain control of the car, otherwise you will slide too far on either side off the road and into obstacles. When you downshift on the corners here, your car slides into a the most satisfying drift ever made. To me it feels somewhere between the Mario Kart 8 drift and the manual mini-game in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. You have to lean your analog stick left or right into the drift, and time it just right when you come out of a drift to straighten your car—you also need to remember to upshift back into a higher gear to maintain your speed. Downshifting while turning isn't the only way to enter a drift—you can use your brake too—but it's the way that felt the most natural and optimal to me.
Drafting is as important as drifting. I smiled like a baby when I drove behind another car and not only got a slipstream effect, but a big SLIPSTREAM title in the middle of my screen like a trick from Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and when my Dino 246 GTS zoomed quickly behind the other car, sling-shotting around a DeVille with ease, it felt amazing. Unlike other arcade racers, there aren't dedicated boost spots on the road or nitrous you can kick off: the other cars on the road are your speed boosts. I've never played another game where the slipstream effect, a real-life racing technique, is this useful (or fun to use). There is also some risk-reward to this mechanic. Since you're going so fast, it's easy to smack into the back of the car that's pulling you forward. This isn't an unrecoverable moment in a race, so long as it happens early enough, and it doesn't mean you won't reach the goal in time in Outrun mode—you're afforded a few mistakes, but you will cut it close if you're not fast. Besides killing the momentum, what it does do is push the car you hit in front of you. There is no pit maneuver or side-swipe mechanic to take out the competition—if you hit the car in front of you, you are giving it a boost of their own. It's a beautiful solution to enforcing race etiquette afforded purely by its arcade style.
The slipstream effect is helpful in the rote races to speed around your rivals, but it is delightful in the Outrun mode, which is where you should be spending most of your time. You aren't racing other drivers through the five (or fifteen) locations; you're just trying to get to the end before the timer ticks down. And since you're in a hurry, of course there's traffic. But the traffic is an opportunity to get ahead of it and impress your girlfriend. While you're weaving through it like the most annoying 24 year old on the highway, your girlfriend asks, in a voice that's sweet yet coy, "How far are you going to take me?" The driving in Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast feels so visceral and satisfying, so good, that it's impossible to deny its sensual effect. I can't remember the last time I fell harder in love with a game than this recent tryst with Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. I've played it every day since I started playing it; I only want to play more of it.
There are certain games I like to have on every PC I use, and this has quickly become one of those. I've written install instructions below, in case I forget.
---
Download Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast for PC from MyAbandonware dot com; use the MagiPack repack, which comes with the FXT mod pre-installed. After installing the MagiPack repack, navigate to the folder you installed it on your hard drive and run the FXTConfig.exe executable as admin. If you are installing this on a PC that hasn't had many games installed on it, you will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 x86 version. In the FXT mod settings, turn off XInput, or rumble might not work. After opening the game and saving your license, open up the license settings, set your name to ENTIRETY, then back out without saving to unlock all cars and tracks.
The sequel to Outrun vastly improves upon the original game by adding a handful of empowering mechanics, and adding layers to the original vision. This can be annoying in bad games, but Yu Suzuki and team made something sparkling and beautiful here.
Outrun 2 gives you five gears to work up through. You'll rarely want to use anything but the last two. The speedometer is drawn in the right-hand corner, and every car has a different optimal place to upshift. When the space behind the needle is white, you're in a good place with your gear and speed. The starter cars have yellow spots on the speedometer that signal you should upshift, which are missing from the faster cars; you just have to time it so you upshift before your needle spills over to the red. I'm not sure if there's any mechanical bonus for upshifting while in the optimal spot, but even without that this feature brings the satisfying timing rhythm of the reloading mini-game from Gears of War.
The trick of the original Outrun is downshifting into corners so you can maintain control of the car, otherwise you will slide too far on either side off the road and into obstacles. When you downshift on the corners here, your car slides into a the most satisfying drift ever made. To me it feels somewhere between the Mario Kart 8 drift and the manual mini-game in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. You have to lean your analog stick left or right into the drift, and time it just right when you come out of a drift to straighten your car—you also need to remember to upshift back into a higher gear to maintain your speed. Downshifting while turning isn't the only way to enter a drift—you can use your brake too—but it's the way that felt the most natural and optimal to me.
Drafting is as important as drifting. I smiled like a baby when I drove behind another car and not only got a slipstream effect, but a big SLIPSTREAM title in the middle of my screen like a trick from Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and when my Dino 246 GTS zoomed quickly behind the other car, sling-shotting around a DeVille with ease, it felt amazing. Unlike other arcade racers, there aren't dedicated boost spots on the road or nitrous you can kick off: the other cars on the road are your speed boosts. I've never played another game where the slipstream effect, a real-life racing technique, is this useful (or fun to use). There is also some risk-reward to this mechanic. Since you're going so fast, it's easy to smack into the back of the car that's pulling you forward. This isn't an unrecoverable moment in a race, so long as it happens early enough, and it doesn't mean you won't reach the goal in time in Outrun mode—you're afforded a few mistakes, but you will cut it close if you're not fast. Besides killing the momentum, what it does do is push the car you hit in front of you. There is no pit maneuver or side-swipe mechanic to take out the competition—if you hit the car in front of you, you are giving it a boost of their own. It's a beautiful solution to enforcing race etiquette afforded purely by its arcade style.
The slipstream effect is helpful in the rote races to speed around your rivals, but it is delightful in the Outrun mode, which is where you should be spending most of your time. You aren't racing other drivers through the five (or fifteen) locations; you're just trying to get to the end before the timer ticks down. And since you're in a hurry, of course there's traffic. But the traffic is an opportunity to get ahead of it and impress your girlfriend. While you're weaving through it like the most annoying 24 year old on the highway, your girlfriend asks, in a voice that's sweet yet coy, "How far are you going to take me?" The driving in Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast feels so visceral and satisfying, so good, that it's impossible to deny its sensual effect. I can't remember the last time I fell harder in love with a game than this recent tryst with Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. I've played it every day since I started playing it; I only want to play more of it.
There are certain games I like to have on every PC I use, and this has quickly become one of those. I've written install instructions below, in case I forget.
---
Download Outrun 2006: Coast 2 Coast for PC from MyAbandonware dot com; use the MagiPack repack, which comes with the FXT mod pre-installed. After installing the MagiPack repack, navigate to the folder you installed it on your hard drive and run the FXTConfig.exe executable as admin. If you are installing this on a PC that hasn't had many games installed on it, you will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 x86 version. In the FXT mod settings, turn off XInput, or rumble might not work. After opening the game and saving your license, open up the license settings, set your name to ENTIRETY, then back out without saving to unlock all cars and tracks.
1990
M.U.S.H.A. (Metallic Uniframe Super Hybrid Armor), known in Japan as Musha Aleste: Full Metal Fighter Ellinor, is a stylish, if somewhat standard, shooting them up video game for the Sega Genesis (I played on the Nintendo Switch Online Genesis application). Like Compile's earlier games Blazing Lazers and Gun Nac, the enemy sprite and level designs are pretty impressive; I was really taken aback by Stage IV, where you battle over storm clouds, and as lightning strikes the screen goes white except for the silhouette of your ship and enemies. It's really cool. I'm a sucker for the mecha theme, and really like the robot designs. One of the enemies looks like an off-brand Zaku when they take their stance to point their gun at you; always loved killing those guys.
The final level is kind of a pain, expecting pixel perfect dodges in a constrained space, which had not yet been asked of the player. The way there is pretty breezy though. There's an options system where you can control how your drones behave, and the usual upgrade system that gets more powerful as you pick up more of the same color, but I played through most of the game without realizing which button fired your upgrade weapon, and the drones setting is never necessary to fiddle with. There are upgrades that float around which drop cards, and when you pick up three cards you get another drone added to your bank. I liked that addition; deciding when to shoot the icon to drop the cards reminded me of the Bells from Twinbee.
Altogether a pretty decent time; need to check out the other Aleste games.
The final level is kind of a pain, expecting pixel perfect dodges in a constrained space, which had not yet been asked of the player. The way there is pretty breezy though. There's an options system where you can control how your drones behave, and the usual upgrade system that gets more powerful as you pick up more of the same color, but I played through most of the game without realizing which button fired your upgrade weapon, and the drones setting is never necessary to fiddle with. There are upgrades that float around which drop cards, and when you pick up three cards you get another drone added to your bank. I liked that addition; deciding when to shoot the icon to drop the cards reminded me of the Bells from Twinbee.
Altogether a pretty decent time; need to check out the other Aleste games.
(I spoil the ending of the game in the last paragraph.)
This is the first Armored Core game I've played, though I'm a massive fan of FromSoft's Souls games, and I was looking forward to checking out their other major game series. I came away loving it, and it left me really wanting to explore the earlier games.
The action of the game is excellent, fun and impressive, though rarely very difficult. Like the Souls games, attacks are grounded in their animations, though most of the projectile weapons are near instant. The real limiting factor is that each of your four weapons, once it expends its ammunition, is sent into cooldown. The loop of the action is juggling these four cooldowns while looking for opportunities to get a hit in on the enemies, as well as managing your boosting and stagger bars. Each enemy has a stagger bar, though the vast majority of enemy types are one or two-hit fodder enemies, called MTs, which do more damage as the game goes on but never become harder to kill. There are two or three tiers of regular enemies, each requiring more damage as you go up the tier, then there are enemy AC/LC enemies, which are similar to your own ship. Fights against other style of human NPCs are always fun in the Souls games, and they're great here, and there's a lot of them, as well as arena fights which are one on one. There are only a few boss enemies, but they're all unique and fun to fight. There's the usual genre of FROM bosses—action/skill tests like Balteus; puzzle-y bosses like the helicopter, which can be trivialized by staying underneath it; and then finally the Stormruler style cinematic fight (Ice Worm) where you must use a specific weapon to take it down.
Your weapon choices are limited primarily by two stats--first, the encumbrance stat, which is determined by your legs. The heavier the leg part, the more you can carry, though you might be slower. The other limiting stat is your generator. Generally, generators with more energy are heavier, limiting your choices for your other parts. Certain weapons work better with certain AC designs—each part—head, arms, cores, legs, computer, and generator—has specific stats that make them better for fast weapons, slow weapons, energy weapons, melee weapons, long distance, medium distance, and so on. You're rewarded for building highly specialized ACs, and certain load-outs will work better in different situations.
The game is all about customizing; the tension between expression and optimization, as well as the extreme amount of possibilities, reminded me of playing God Hand. I felt different parts of my action game player tendencies butt up against each other. On the one hand I wanted to find the right solution for every fight or kind of fight, and on the other hand I wanted to choose one weapon set and stick to it, like I tend to do in Dark Souls games. So I did both. For most of the three play throughs I've done so far, I used a medium weight AC, plasma whip and Zimmerman shotgun, the SOUP missiles and the Songbirds, and I painted it like the Gundam Ez8. For certain bosses I swapped over to a heavy, fast Guntank style build, where it was beneficial to have the hard hitting, heavy weapons be able be fired while still maintaining your momentum.
This tension between builds towards ends and builds as an identity, towards a particular mastery, seems to be reflected in the reviews and comments you see about builds in this game. On the one hand, there's the group that embrace modifying your equipment towards whatever end (who mostly appear to be seasoned AC players), and on the other side, there are players who are searching for the best build for them. In most mecha stories, as a rule, changes to the fundamental composition of the robot is rare; practically speaking, designing a completely new kind of Gundam for one-off episodes is not practical, and in general, a characters identity is often wrapped up in whatever kind of mecha they pilot. Amuro Ray is, narratively and iconagraphically, the RX-78-2 Gundam (nu Gundam etc. notwithstanding). In Dia Lucina's Armored Core 6 review, she says "Armored Core VI isn’t about perfecting a build, it’s about understanding that the Core is the persistence of identity, everything else can and should be swapped to suit the needs of the job"--but this is generally only true for the player character. On Rubicon, with few exceptions, every NPC pilot we encounter is tied to a specific Armored Core. Those that do change Cores, into bigger and badder machines, are typically only pilots that are, narratively at least, like the player character in their pilot mastery. Maybe that ability to move between different Cores is the mark of the great Core pilot; and the game forcing you into different builds for different fight's is its way of shaping you into a great pilot.
The mission loop is highly addicting--every mission takes between five to fifteen minutes, but it's impossible not to want to jump right back into the next mission. If you want to see the full game you will replay these missions a lot—it takes two NG+ cycles to see every mission and all the story content, NieR style. After you beat a mission for the first time, you can replay it as often as you want in the replay mission section, and when you replay a mission from that menu you get a letter grading. I really would have liked if you automatically got grades for replaying missions in the NG+ cycles. On the other hand, after seeing all the story content the letter grading is a reason for me to keep playing, and trying a mission over and over with different builds until getting the S is sincerely satisfying. I don't tend to think of myself as a score chaser in video games, though I do love playing score based arcade games or character action games. I guess a prerequisite for score chasing for me is that the game feels good to play, and AC6 feels great to play.
The games narrative structure is somewhat of a departure from the Souls games, though I understand its par for the course for AC games. As you get into chapter 3, where you learn that Raven is a name used by AC pilots that make choices, you are given a handful of choices for what mission to take, and one or two in-mission choices about how to complete certain missions. These choices unlock future possible choices, ultimately unlocking a choice in which ending to pursue. In NG+ you see more missions and more dialogue, and in NG++ you see even more changes and a new ending possibility. This felt a lot like NieR Replicant to me, since the narrative is designed with these new game cycles in mind (though, to be clear, playing through the NGs is 100x more fun here). Each NG puts not only the information you have from the prior NGs in new light, but recasts a lot of the main characters dialogue. When a new game cycle starts, the introductory dialogue hits different emotionally.
The narrative is classic Gundam/mecha anime stuff—not only is the mecha a weapon, crucially, piloting the mecha reduces a human being into a weapon. In AC6 this is taken to a dystopian extreme. Your character exists inside the mecha only—the vehicle is your body. As a player playing the character, you only exist during combat or when outfitting your Core for combat. The narrative is satisfying and well written, though a lot of it is delivered in that classic FROM way—sparse cut scenes, menu descriptions. The narrative feels implied. At a certain point in the game, you get connected with the Coral, one part of it named Ayre, who functions somewhat as a ghost haunting you, influencing you; Walter, your handler, constantly talks about his own "friend," though you learn he is not connected by the same way. Instead, he's haunted by the death of an old friend, haunted by a ghost in his own way. The character writing is sparse, but effective. In NG++, you have the option to work for Allmind—ultimately dispersing Coral into AC shells, and the very last line of the game implies that they are waging some kind of war. The Coral then get embodied as ACs, and immediately turn into weapons for some kind of vague war. The final line of the game is Ayre repeating the "engaging combat mode" dialogue spoken at the start of every mission. The Coral's dispersement into bodies is doomed, for themselves and for everyone, because of the particular bodies that they land in.
This is the first Armored Core game I've played, though I'm a massive fan of FromSoft's Souls games, and I was looking forward to checking out their other major game series. I came away loving it, and it left me really wanting to explore the earlier games.
The action of the game is excellent, fun and impressive, though rarely very difficult. Like the Souls games, attacks are grounded in their animations, though most of the projectile weapons are near instant. The real limiting factor is that each of your four weapons, once it expends its ammunition, is sent into cooldown. The loop of the action is juggling these four cooldowns while looking for opportunities to get a hit in on the enemies, as well as managing your boosting and stagger bars. Each enemy has a stagger bar, though the vast majority of enemy types are one or two-hit fodder enemies, called MTs, which do more damage as the game goes on but never become harder to kill. There are two or three tiers of regular enemies, each requiring more damage as you go up the tier, then there are enemy AC/LC enemies, which are similar to your own ship. Fights against other style of human NPCs are always fun in the Souls games, and they're great here, and there's a lot of them, as well as arena fights which are one on one. There are only a few boss enemies, but they're all unique and fun to fight. There's the usual genre of FROM bosses—action/skill tests like Balteus; puzzle-y bosses like the helicopter, which can be trivialized by staying underneath it; and then finally the Stormruler style cinematic fight (Ice Worm) where you must use a specific weapon to take it down.
Your weapon choices are limited primarily by two stats--first, the encumbrance stat, which is determined by your legs. The heavier the leg part, the more you can carry, though you might be slower. The other limiting stat is your generator. Generally, generators with more energy are heavier, limiting your choices for your other parts. Certain weapons work better with certain AC designs—each part—head, arms, cores, legs, computer, and generator—has specific stats that make them better for fast weapons, slow weapons, energy weapons, melee weapons, long distance, medium distance, and so on. You're rewarded for building highly specialized ACs, and certain load-outs will work better in different situations.
The game is all about customizing; the tension between expression and optimization, as well as the extreme amount of possibilities, reminded me of playing God Hand. I felt different parts of my action game player tendencies butt up against each other. On the one hand I wanted to find the right solution for every fight or kind of fight, and on the other hand I wanted to choose one weapon set and stick to it, like I tend to do in Dark Souls games. So I did both. For most of the three play throughs I've done so far, I used a medium weight AC, plasma whip and Zimmerman shotgun, the SOUP missiles and the Songbirds, and I painted it like the Gundam Ez8. For certain bosses I swapped over to a heavy, fast Guntank style build, where it was beneficial to have the hard hitting, heavy weapons be able be fired while still maintaining your momentum.
This tension between builds towards ends and builds as an identity, towards a particular mastery, seems to be reflected in the reviews and comments you see about builds in this game. On the one hand, there's the group that embrace modifying your equipment towards whatever end (who mostly appear to be seasoned AC players), and on the other side, there are players who are searching for the best build for them. In most mecha stories, as a rule, changes to the fundamental composition of the robot is rare; practically speaking, designing a completely new kind of Gundam for one-off episodes is not practical, and in general, a characters identity is often wrapped up in whatever kind of mecha they pilot. Amuro Ray is, narratively and iconagraphically, the RX-78-2 Gundam (nu Gundam etc. notwithstanding). In Dia Lucina's Armored Core 6 review, she says "Armored Core VI isn’t about perfecting a build, it’s about understanding that the Core is the persistence of identity, everything else can and should be swapped to suit the needs of the job"--but this is generally only true for the player character. On Rubicon, with few exceptions, every NPC pilot we encounter is tied to a specific Armored Core. Those that do change Cores, into bigger and badder machines, are typically only pilots that are, narratively at least, like the player character in their pilot mastery. Maybe that ability to move between different Cores is the mark of the great Core pilot; and the game forcing you into different builds for different fight's is its way of shaping you into a great pilot.
The mission loop is highly addicting--every mission takes between five to fifteen minutes, but it's impossible not to want to jump right back into the next mission. If you want to see the full game you will replay these missions a lot—it takes two NG+ cycles to see every mission and all the story content, NieR style. After you beat a mission for the first time, you can replay it as often as you want in the replay mission section, and when you replay a mission from that menu you get a letter grading. I really would have liked if you automatically got grades for replaying missions in the NG+ cycles. On the other hand, after seeing all the story content the letter grading is a reason for me to keep playing, and trying a mission over and over with different builds until getting the S is sincerely satisfying. I don't tend to think of myself as a score chaser in video games, though I do love playing score based arcade games or character action games. I guess a prerequisite for score chasing for me is that the game feels good to play, and AC6 feels great to play.
The games narrative structure is somewhat of a departure from the Souls games, though I understand its par for the course for AC games. As you get into chapter 3, where you learn that Raven is a name used by AC pilots that make choices, you are given a handful of choices for what mission to take, and one or two in-mission choices about how to complete certain missions. These choices unlock future possible choices, ultimately unlocking a choice in which ending to pursue. In NG+ you see more missions and more dialogue, and in NG++ you see even more changes and a new ending possibility. This felt a lot like NieR Replicant to me, since the narrative is designed with these new game cycles in mind (though, to be clear, playing through the NGs is 100x more fun here). Each NG puts not only the information you have from the prior NGs in new light, but recasts a lot of the main characters dialogue. When a new game cycle starts, the introductory dialogue hits different emotionally.
The narrative is classic Gundam/mecha anime stuff—not only is the mecha a weapon, crucially, piloting the mecha reduces a human being into a weapon. In AC6 this is taken to a dystopian extreme. Your character exists inside the mecha only—the vehicle is your body. As a player playing the character, you only exist during combat or when outfitting your Core for combat. The narrative is satisfying and well written, though a lot of it is delivered in that classic FROM way—sparse cut scenes, menu descriptions. The narrative feels implied. At a certain point in the game, you get connected with the Coral, one part of it named Ayre, who functions somewhat as a ghost haunting you, influencing you; Walter, your handler, constantly talks about his own "friend," though you learn he is not connected by the same way. Instead, he's haunted by the death of an old friend, haunted by a ghost in his own way. The character writing is sparse, but effective. In NG++, you have the option to work for Allmind—ultimately dispersing Coral into AC shells, and the very last line of the game implies that they are waging some kind of war. The Coral then get embodied as ACs, and immediately turn into weapons for some kind of vague war. The final line of the game is Ayre repeating the "engaging combat mode" dialogue spoken at the start of every mission. The Coral's dispersement into bodies is doomed, for themselves and for everyone, because of the particular bodies that they land in.