Homeopathic Dragonfall.
That above line is a bit extreme, and I don't think that I really mean it. But I was writing out my thoughts on Hong Kong, and those words found themselves on the page. I don't hate Hong Kong by any means — if anything, it's more of what I already like — but the magic was lost on me, here. I missed the connections I had with the old crew, the NPCs strewn throughout the Kreuzbasar. Hong Kong is cold, and brutal, and awful. I didn't want to be in the world of Hong Kong the way I did in Dragonfall. I wanted to escape it.
And that was the point.
Berlin was the city of dreams. Kowloon is the city of nightmares.
This is a crew brought and stuck together through little more than necessity. You're drawing alliances between manic pixie girls, psychopathic drone operators (but I repeat myself), flesh-eating samurai, and gamers. Kindly Cheng is an immensely strong character, acting almost as the polar opposite of Dragonfall's Paul Amsel; stony, ruthless, sadistic, operating in all of her ferocity because she has to. Your party feels a bit less organic — more unique, less real — like something that you and your friends would all collectively come up with if you ran a tabletop campaign together. This is most likely going to be the tipping point that determines whether this is your favorite entry in the series, or if it's second place; if you thought your party in Dragonfall felt too soft, Hong Kong agrees.
Hong Kong is still built off the back of the previous two entries, which means it's mechanically almost identical to what those games did. There are expansions and tweaks to factors like leveling and magic that provide a few more options and quality of life improvements. These are harder to notice if you're not actively looking for them, but that's probably the ideal way of balancing a game. This is probably the best-feeling world to actually interact with in the series.
The most notable and obvious change is in the way that decking gameplay has changed; it's less of a secondary combat operating below the current combat layer, and more of a slow stealth-puzzle segment. I'm not really a fan of this change, because it makes it a little tougher to carelessly brute-force your way through your hacks; deckers have it bad in all three of these games, and this was Harebrained's attempt at making it less awful. I don't think it worked, but keeping Dragonfall's mechanics here wouldn't have been much better.
I couldn't manage to feel the same attachment to any of these characters that I did when I went through Dragonfall. I did still like them, of course — Rachter and Kindly Cheng being completely, unapologetically awful is kind of refreshing — but there was something about them as a collective that felt artificial. Is0bel's entire DeckCon sequence is silly in a way that didn't make me laugh, and Gobbet is a little too monkey cheese random for my tastes. I can't manage to remember much of anything about Duncan. It didn't really feel as though all of the discord among the cast gets resolved in a satisfying way, though I imagine that's a hefty appeal for those who didn't like how quickly you gained buddies in the prior entry.
It is, however, immensely gratifying to be rewarded so strongly in the final act for your attentiveness up until that point. Getting what I believe to be the best ending requires you put a significant amount of care into studying every little facet of this world, and it demands that you show the game some respect if you want a happy outcome. You can rules-lawyer the final boss as though you're the most annoying guy at the table, and it works. It's great.
Much less great is the Shadows of Hong Kong expansion that follows the ending, and was riddled with bugs, spelling mistakes, and a second ending that offers a complete non-choice which allows you to throw out all of the development of every character in the interest of going back to a blank slate. Fucking flimsy. It reeks of being the mandatory Kickstarter stretch goal that it was, and it's best skipped over lest you want to sour your memories of the game in the eleventh hour.
Hong Kong is a game that needed to be different, and it was. Shadowrun Returns is like the family member that we don't talk about during the holidays, so Dragonfall got to skirt by as a literal expansion to that game. Hong Kong is a proper sequel, which meant things needed to be fresh, lest Harebrained be accused of self-plagiarism. I can respect the way in which they shook things up, but I still think that Dragonfall sticks the stronger formula of the two. I haven't stopped comparing Hong Kong to Dragonfall since I started writing this, and I feel a little bad about that. But it's an inevitable comparison when you look at them side-by-side, and one that I can't really bring myself to gloss over.
This was the last good thing that Harebrained ever made.
That above line is a bit extreme, and I don't think that I really mean it. But I was writing out my thoughts on Hong Kong, and those words found themselves on the page. I don't hate Hong Kong by any means — if anything, it's more of what I already like — but the magic was lost on me, here. I missed the connections I had with the old crew, the NPCs strewn throughout the Kreuzbasar. Hong Kong is cold, and brutal, and awful. I didn't want to be in the world of Hong Kong the way I did in Dragonfall. I wanted to escape it.
And that was the point.
Berlin was the city of dreams. Kowloon is the city of nightmares.
This is a crew brought and stuck together through little more than necessity. You're drawing alliances between manic pixie girls, psychopathic drone operators (but I repeat myself), flesh-eating samurai, and gamers. Kindly Cheng is an immensely strong character, acting almost as the polar opposite of Dragonfall's Paul Amsel; stony, ruthless, sadistic, operating in all of her ferocity because she has to. Your party feels a bit less organic — more unique, less real — like something that you and your friends would all collectively come up with if you ran a tabletop campaign together. This is most likely going to be the tipping point that determines whether this is your favorite entry in the series, or if it's second place; if you thought your party in Dragonfall felt too soft, Hong Kong agrees.
Hong Kong is still built off the back of the previous two entries, which means it's mechanically almost identical to what those games did. There are expansions and tweaks to factors like leveling and magic that provide a few more options and quality of life improvements. These are harder to notice if you're not actively looking for them, but that's probably the ideal way of balancing a game. This is probably the best-feeling world to actually interact with in the series.
The most notable and obvious change is in the way that decking gameplay has changed; it's less of a secondary combat operating below the current combat layer, and more of a slow stealth-puzzle segment. I'm not really a fan of this change, because it makes it a little tougher to carelessly brute-force your way through your hacks; deckers have it bad in all three of these games, and this was Harebrained's attempt at making it less awful. I don't think it worked, but keeping Dragonfall's mechanics here wouldn't have been much better.
I couldn't manage to feel the same attachment to any of these characters that I did when I went through Dragonfall. I did still like them, of course — Rachter and Kindly Cheng being completely, unapologetically awful is kind of refreshing — but there was something about them as a collective that felt artificial. Is0bel's entire DeckCon sequence is silly in a way that didn't make me laugh, and Gobbet is a little too monkey cheese random for my tastes. I can't manage to remember much of anything about Duncan. It didn't really feel as though all of the discord among the cast gets resolved in a satisfying way, though I imagine that's a hefty appeal for those who didn't like how quickly you gained buddies in the prior entry.
It is, however, immensely gratifying to be rewarded so strongly in the final act for your attentiveness up until that point. Getting what I believe to be the best ending requires you put a significant amount of care into studying every little facet of this world, and it demands that you show the game some respect if you want a happy outcome. You can rules-lawyer the final boss as though you're the most annoying guy at the table, and it works. It's great.
Much less great is the Shadows of Hong Kong expansion that follows the ending, and was riddled with bugs, spelling mistakes, and a second ending that offers a complete non-choice which allows you to throw out all of the development of every character in the interest of going back to a blank slate. Fucking flimsy. It reeks of being the mandatory Kickstarter stretch goal that it was, and it's best skipped over lest you want to sour your memories of the game in the eleventh hour.
Hong Kong is a game that needed to be different, and it was. Shadowrun Returns is like the family member that we don't talk about during the holidays, so Dragonfall got to skirt by as a literal expansion to that game. Hong Kong is a proper sequel, which meant things needed to be fresh, lest Harebrained be accused of self-plagiarism. I can respect the way in which they shook things up, but I still think that Dragonfall sticks the stronger formula of the two. I haven't stopped comparing Hong Kong to Dragonfall since I started writing this, and I feel a little bad about that. But it's an inevitable comparison when you look at them side-by-side, and one that I can't really bring myself to gloss over.
This was the last good thing that Harebrained ever made.
psychbomb
1 year ago