Hand of Fate Shines because of Aesthetic

Hand of Fate is the first, and currently sole, game developed by Defiant Development. A mishmash of action, roguelike, and choose-your-own-adventure, I've been playing the game a bit recently and have really been loving it. But the more I played of the game, the more I began to wonder, why did I enjoy it so much?

The combat is nothing to write home about. If you've played any of the Batman: Arkham titles, you've seen it before. Enemies crowd around. You wait for an attack. Counter with proper timing. Go in for the combo. Rinse and repeat. Some twists, like uncounterable attacks and ranged attacks, force slight change but ultimately don't amount to a huge difference. It's fine, but also lacks the polish the combat had in the Arkham titles. There isn't the nice flow between animations you saw in those game. In the Batman games, a lot of care was done to make sure the different actions transitioned without being jarring. It looks like how a fight would go, with punches going to counters going to rolls smoothly. Hand of Fate, however, snaps from one animation to the next. You punch, and then you're rolling in a jarring change.

The other main portion of the gameplay, the non-action events, tend to get repetitive after a while. Your first encounter with the disguised goblin Mr. Lionel, or finding a weapon at the bottom of a ravine, or receiving aid from an elven maiden, are all intriguing given the ways they can go right, or wrong, and how you can handle them. Your second encounter? Third? Fifth? Eighth? Sixteenth? Less so.

What I think really works about Hand of Fate is the presentation. A man sits before you, with wide arm gestures and passionate exposition, extolling the difficulties and impossibility of the task you've chosen. It's bombastic, it's creative, it's expressive. It's a lot of the qualities fans of tabletop role-playing games would say is essential to be a good game master! And beyond the qualities of the man himself, there are the cards floating in front of him, dramatically swirling, there's an ornate case he has besides, there's subtle music providing ambiance for your next game...everything comes together to feel like if a game of Dungeons and Dragons could be taken that one step further.

Would Hand of Fate be anywhere near as good were it's presentation more drab? If the man merely laid the cards in front of you, and directed the action, would the game be nearly as good? Absolutely not, but this much is obvious. No game can survive without that bit of panache. Just this year, these sorts of flairs can be seen in Persona 5, Gravity Rush 2, Yakuza 0, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, all leverage their aesthetic to go from good to great. But Hand of Fate makes it abundantly clear that your ability to pull off the look and feel of what you're trying to evoke can make or break your game, determining whether it's an enjoyable game or a forgettable mess. Aesthetic can make all the difference, and in the case of Hand of Fate, it absolutely did.

Final Fantasy Theatrhythm: Curtain Call is Great Music, Good Gameplay, and a Poor Mix

Final Fantasy Theatrhythm is proof that great music doesn't necessarily make great rhythm gaming.

It's an unfortunate realization I came to recently, while playing the second Theatrhythm game, Curtain Call. I got the game around it's release, way back in 2014, and haven't played it in about 2 years. But while playing Final Fantasy XIV, I was reminded that the music in Final Fantasy games is always so dang good, and decided to dust off the cartridge. And you know what? I was correct. The music in Final Fantasy is, indeed, so dang good. Sweeping orchestral scores, or as close as 8- and 16-bit hardware could manage way back when, serve as a fantastic backdrop to grandiose stories of capital-h Heroes saving the capital-w World. All of the songs are fantastic in their own right, and a few still give me chills to think about.

And Theatrhythm is a very good rhythm game. Hundreds of songs from the series history are represented, from the very first game for the NES all the way to Final Fantasy XIV, the most recent in the series at the time. Even spinoffs like Crystal Chronicles and the obscure Mystic Quest have a couple songs and characters in the game. Beyond the variety of music, the scoring and progression is unique and interesting as well: you create a party of 4 characters chosen from a wide roster, again culled from across the series' history, which all have their own stats. These stats determine how good they are at what kinds of songs: Some characters will make Battle songs easier, while others make Field songs easier, and more still are suited to cutscene or Event songs. These characters will gain experience as you use them in your party, gaining abilities and stats to further help you pass through difficult songs.

Did I mention all of the different kinds of songs have differing mechanics, as well? Battle Music Stages force you to keep tabs on 4 different tracks for notes, while Field Stages have only one that you'll need to manipulate to keep centered on the upcoming notes. Event Stages will actually move the cursors onto notes rather than the opposite. You also have a variety of ways of hitting notes, so whether you're most comfortable using buttons and the circle pad, your stylus, or a mixture of the two, the game allows it and even keeps track. It can occasionally be a little fiddly when the game asks you to flick the stylus or circle pad in a particular direction, but for the most part it's a fun system. And the incredibly slow progression system, of slowly unlocking art and new characters (earned via crystals) as you gather 'Rhythmia' from finishing songs, ensures dedicated players have a reason to play for months. It's great fun.
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Which all goes to show that sometimes, great tastes do not taste great together.

Rhythm games work best with songs that are more designed to be...well, rhythmic, I suppose. Catchy, recognizable beats that are easy to hum along to. I love Final Fantasy and its music with all my heart, but "hummable" describes very few songs in the series. Some songs certainly work better than others: Battle songs tend to work anywhere from decently enough to pretty well. But once the game wants you to play DDR in time to a slow town theme, the whole things feels off.

Not to mention, the note maps are occasionally...silly. There are a lot of ways high-level rhythm game maps mix up the difficulty: They require more buttons, they force you to more closely follow the notes in the song instead of simplifying, things like that. But there's always a sense that goes into those increases in difficulties. Take, for example, this video from Hatsune Miku Project Diva: Future Tone. It's of the song Sadistic Music Factory, on the hardest difficulty level:

Pretty difficult, right? But there's a flow to how the notes are arranged in the song. There are moments with rapid alternation between two notes, which may shift to hitting the notes simultaneously, or holding one note while hitting out a rhythm of other notes. Ultimately, the speed makes it difficult, but any individual section can be looked at on it's own and have a sense to it that congeals well in the end.

For comparisons sake, let's look at the Final Fantasy XIV Titan Theme at the highest difficulty in Theatrhythm:

The notes are much more all over the place in this one. In the same section of the song, the notes you're expected to play shift rapidly without reason, almost like the game is trying to trick you. Note maps can be difficult, but there's usually a sense to them. Some of the maps in Theatrhythm look like those joke note maps for free computer DDR or Elite Beat Agents games. In a song you'd typically hear in a rhythm game, this kind of stuff isn't necessary because following the song itself can lead to enough challenge on its own. But when the music doesn't get as crazy, you have to resort to stuff like this, even when it feels cheap.

I cannot stress enough that I really enjoy Final Fantasy Theatrhythm. I'm at over 40,000 Rhythmia, a metric which has no meaning even to me but basically means I've played this game a bunch. The music is great, and the gameplay is pretty good. It's just a crying shame that they mix like oil and water.

Amnesia Fortnight 2017: A Primer & Early Impressions

Way back in 2014, I was enraptured with Double Fine's Amnesia Fortnight. The premise is simple: For two weeks, everyone at the studio forgets whatever project they were working on and divides into small groups to create prototypes, based on pitches from members of the Double Fine team. While Amnesia Fortnight was originally a private game jam, started during the production of Brutal Legend and with pitches selected by studio head Tim Schafer, starting in 2012 the studio decided to give the public the opportunity to choose which prototypes got made, watch the teams make the games, and play the final products. I didn't really pay much attention to the 2012 Amnesia Fortnight, but in 2014 I watched every single video, tuned into the livestreams, the whole works. As the highs and lows of development hit the four teams, I was fascinated with this vertical slice of game development.

Ever since AF2014, I've been looking forward to its return. To be honest, it had been so long that I was worried they weren't going to be public anymore; Despite the years being "2012" and "2014", the releases were actually less than a year and a half apart, with the 2012 jam occurring in November and the 2014 jam happening in February. From this, it was easy to assume Amnesia Fortnight was an annual tradition of the studio, so when 3 years passed with nary a word, I had more or less figured that it wasn't happening anymore. But lo and behold, earlier this month Amnesia Fortnight was announced once again. I actually didn't partake in voting this year; I was short on cash and also Persona 5 had just come out. But now that the event is well and truly underway, and episodes of the documentary are being released (much more slowly than previous years, unfortunately; more on that later) I'm back in it and I gotta say, it's looking to be a good two weeks.

One of the purposes of Amnesia Fortnight is to give members of the studio a chance to see how well they do in a leadership position, and it's always fascinating to see how each project leader handles their position. And this year, there's a good variety of experience among the winners: For starters, there's Zak McClendon, a recent hire of Double Fine Productions brought on to be the project lead on Psychonauts 2. McClendon has worked on a variety of projects, and is a Bioshock 2 alumnus, working as the lead designer on the title. McClendon is clearly used to a leadership position, and his experience shines through in the documentary. He's very clearly aware of what he wants his game, I Have No Idea What I'm Doing, to be: A virtual reality minigame collection with a focus on collaboration between the person wearing the VR headset and outside observers. That may sound like an odd thing to note as a positive, but even in the last Amnesia Fortnight, one of the projects spent several days nailing down what the primary gameplay was going to be. McClendon has also already considered the difficulties the team may face: He specifically notes that a multiplayer game will be difficult to playtest on account of needing more people, and developing for virtual reality presents all sorts of new challenges to developers. The aesthetic of the game is chosen to allow a quick asset creation process, and McClendon is clearly optimistic and confident, but realistic about how far the game can get by the time the 2 weeks are over.

Derek Brand is the sole returning Amnesia Fortnight project lead with his game, Kiln. In AF2014, Brand pitched Mnemonic, an adventure game where you pieced together memories using various odd sights and sounds to draw attention to and remind you of details in other scenes. It was Brand's first time leading a team, and it took him quite a bit of time to get used to the role. Mnemonic had, or at least was portrayed as having, a rough start, but ended up being my favorite game of the bunch. So I was excited to see Brand get another opportunity to lead a game with Kiln, a competitive multiplayer game where you form your body on a clay throwing wheel and charge into battle. Compared to 2014, Brand comes off as much more confident in his role. In 2014, Brand had to be encouraged and guided to take control of the project and steer it towards his vision when the designers got the wrong idea of what was intended in the game. This year, he's taking charge wonderfully, leading team meetings with confidence. He knows what the game is, and has done a much better job communicating that to the rest of the team. The difficulties from the previous Amnesia Fortnight seem to have all but vanished, and I'm very excited to play Kiln even just from three days worth of documentary and assorted preview images on Twitter. Maybe it's too early to be asking this, but honestly I'm just curious: when Derek Brand gets to lead a full game, will it be a full version of Mnemonic, or a full version of Kiln? Either way, I'm looking forward to it!

Devin Kelly-Sneed is something of an enigma to me. His game, Darwin's Dinner, is a fairly simple concept that is likely difficult in practice to create: You play as a hunter going after various wildlife, but at the end of each stage of the game, evolution occurs, and traits that you leave in the populace will become more prevalent in later generations. So, if you only kill slow animals, the following generations might be too quick to be able to catch and you'll starve, etc. The team leader himself, however, doesn't feel quite so easy to get a grasp of. He certainly comes off as calm, and isn't cracking under the pressure of being in charge of a project, at least not in the starting few days. The documentary hasn't been showing much of his team meetings, so it's hard to get a handle on his leadership style. It's even been difficult finding out much of his game development history; I assume he's another relatively new hire, given the fact that he's not credited on any released Double Fine project and his most recent credit is as Lead Gameplay Engineer on the game CounterSpy. As far as the doc series has gotten so far, we've yet to see much of Darwin's Dinner, and not much seems to have been posted online either, so we'll just have to wait and see how it ends up.

Finally, we have the surprise leader and something of a wild card: Asif Siddiky, Director of Photography and co-founder of 2 Player Productions, the documentary team which has done all of the doc work for Double Fine since the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter way back in 2012. You will note one important thing from that: Asif Siddiky is not a game developer. He has never worked in video games in his entire life, besides filming the people who make them. He has no experience with anything he is expected to do as part of Amnesia Fortnight. And in every interview, he is very nervous. In his very first interview, he says,

Why is anyone letting me do this? Uh...I don't know. I don't know what to do! Uh...

He's in high spirits, make no mistake, but Siddiky's nervousness never really seems to subside. He's working in a medium almost completely unknown to him, trying to lead a team of game developers who know far more than him. He notes the difficulties in working in a new medium, in working with a team that has so many skills spread between them. But like all the other leaders, Siddiky knows what game he wants to make, and between all the leaders in all the Amnesia Fortnights I've seen, a clear vision of what the game should be is the most important thing, and Siddiky has it. He may always seem like he's fretting one thing or another, but his game, The Gods Must Be Hungry, seems like it's going to end up great in spite of this. It's unfortunate that his involvement in one of the prototypes is delaying the release of the documentary, as 2PP has confirmed on the Double Fine forums, but from what I've seen, The God's Must Be Hungry may be well worth the wait.

The project leads end up as the focus in Amnesia Fortnight, but seeing the difficulties each team faces is an important part of the process as well. In 2014 alone, Mnemonic had difficulty finding its core gameplay, Dear Leader had a large portion of the planned prototype cut, and Little Pink Best Buds faced numerous difficulties stemming from its ambition of being able to talk to 16 distinct personalities via keyboard-entered speech. Again, it's still early in the development of this years games, but we already see some difficulties: The Kiln team has trouble deciding how the pot sculpting should work, Darwin's Dinner has some trouble making its evolution work as intended, IHNIWID takes time to become playable along with getting a view for both the player wearing the headset and those who aren't, and figuring out the scope and an appropriate level of ambition is a bit difficult for the GMBH team and their non-developer leader. Double Fine, between Amnesia Fortnight and the Double Fine Adventure documentary, is no stranger to showing the ups and downs of development. I appreciate that they're willing to show projects on all levels, as they form, warts and all.

Amnesia Fortnight is an amazing time, and I look forward to the rest of the documentary and playing the games that come out of it. The leadership is varied, the projects sound fun, and the look into development the documentaries give is fantastic. Every time it happens, Amnesia Fortnight is a ton of fun to tune into. I just hope it comes back quicker this time.

Time Wasted in Persona 5

Persona 5 has a time problem. Not the amount of time it takes to complete; I personally enjoy my time spent playing Persona games and have no issue with their incredibly long run times. It's Persona 5's tendency to disallow you to use that time effectively, to manage your life, that is rubbing me the wrong way.

I should back up and explain: Persona 5 is a Japanese Role Playing Game, or JRPG, in the vein of a traditional Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game. In it, you control a party of teenagers who are all sick and tired of how they're labeled, beat down, and taken advantage of by manipulative and shitty adults in their life. Gaining the ability to summon Personas, magical representations of their own true emotions and personalities, they're able to go through dungeons caused by "distorted desires" and steal those desires. This causes those shitty adults to become good and, since they still did all the shitty stuff, turn themselves into the police.

Persona 5, as Persona 3 and 4 before it, is not just about going through those dungeons and defeating monsters, though. There's also a sort of time-management element to the game. The story of the game takes place over the course of several in-game months, and typically you can choose what to do on any particular day. You can go into dungeons to become more powerful in battle, obviously, but maybe you don't wanna do that today. Maybe you want to hang out with a party member, giving them additional skills and uses in battle as your bonds become stronger. Maybe you wanna take part in a sketchy medical trial to increase your courage. Maybe you wanna study for your exams that are coming up. There's a huge variety of activities to take part in, and friends to hang out with, and learning to use this time effectively is important to getting the most out of the game both narratively and mechanically.

The problem is, Persona 5 wastes a lot of this time, forcing you to go to sleep without performing any actions. If you've seen this complained about elsewhere, that's probably the context: The mascot character of the game, Morgana, tells you that you simply must go to bed, as you've had a busy day today, or you're going to have a busy day tomorrow, or just for no reason whatsoever, just go to bed already. Any time there's a main plot development in a day, the game can be counted on to say your day has been spent and send you off. The amount of days the game effectively passes over with no real explanation besides "because you need sleep" is astounding.

I've also got a bone to pick with how the game progresses time during dungeons, as well. In Persona 4, it was possible to clear an entire dungeon in a single in-game day. It was difficult, especially since it would mean taking on the final boss of the area low on items, health, and magic points, but certainly possible, especially on New Game +, where you play through the game with certain attributes carried over from a previous playthrough. If you could manage, it was the most effective way to play the game in my opinion: You're one-and-done on the dungeon, and you can coast out the rest of the time until the next story beat stress-free. Even in Persona 3, which did not let you face bosses until you hit the final day of that story arc, let you clear out a dungeon and know you were safe to face the final challenge at the end.

In Persona 5, the structure changes: See, the "distorted desires" are inside of "Palaces", mental fortresses where the person's cognition of the real world affects the rules of the land. And since people know you can't "steal" desires in real life, those desires aren't in a form that can be taken when you first encounter them at the end of a Palace. The target needs to perceive their desires as something that can be taken before they're able to be taken. So, the process of clearing a dungeon as quickly as possible goes like this: You spend one day, or as few days as you possibly can, going through the dungeon, fighting enemies to power up and solving puzzles to progress. Eventually, you come across their Desires, which are a vague blob of something-or-other when you first see them. You then end the day, since going into the dungeon uses up all of the time slots for that day. The following day, you decide to send a calling card warning the target that their desires are going to be stolen. This calling card changes their cognition of their desires to something which can be stolen, which in turn makes their desires take the form of something that can be stolen. The day then progresses again, with you unable to perform any other tasks that day, since you "need to rest up for the heist tomorrow!" I should be clear: You do not send out the calling card on the second day. You merely decide you're going to do that the following day, and then end the day without doing anything else. On the third day, you send the calling card out and make the desires take form. You go back into the Palace, where the desire has materialized but obviously this is a JRPG so there is inevitably a boss fight, and once you've beaten the boss, you've cleared the dungeon, congrats. You're still not able to do anything after the dungeon, but typically at this point you're celebrating with your friends so at least it makes sense in this case.

This all means the game actually requires you to take at least 3 days to clear dungeons, assuming you beeline to the end of dungeons like I typically try to do. But even this is misleading: increasingly common is the game's tendency to eat additional days out of your schedule by forcing you out of a dungeon prematurely so you can see some story play out. In the second dungeon, the game halted my progress midway through the dungeon, and forced me to exit so I could advance the plot outside the dungeon. This ended up adding 2 additional days to the process of clearing the dungeon, one for initial dungeoneering and another for plot, a significant dig in to your time in the game.

All of this does not even take into account issues returning from previous Persona games that take up your time. For example, exams will still effectively automatically progress you through an entire week. Any holiday time is also most likely going to go towards advancing the story of the game, over increasing your Kindness by eating meatloaf, or taking to a schoolmate about their insecurities. This stuff never bothered me in older Persona games, but in Persona 5 they just end up becoming the straws that break the camel's back.

This isn't a huge downer on the game that's dragging me down. As I sit here writing this piece, it's 7:36 AM on the day this will be posted. I wrote the entirety of this piece, or at least its first draft, in the last hour after mulling it over for the last week. I meant to start writing it sooner, I really did. But then I'd start playing Persona 5, and then suddenly the sun's coming up and I have to go to bed. The same thing happened today, in fact, except I don't have work tonight so I don't have to go to sleep at a reasonable time. I finally found the time to write this piece; it's a shame that the game makes it so hard to find the time to spend how I want.

Persona 5 and the Continued Excuses for No Gender Option

Persona 5 has finally been released in the West, after a long wait, and I'm glad to say that I've been enjoying the opening moments. Unfortunately, this release has proven to be somewhat controversial, as decisions and comments by the game's developers have riled up a sizable audience. One of these controversies, the decision to not allow any Playstation 4 sharing features to be used and threatening to take down any videos or streams of the game taking place after an in-game date, I'll not touch on in detail here. I'll just say I believe that once someone has purchased a game, they should be entitled to share it in whatever fashion they wish and leave it at that.

What I will be talking about regards comments made by the game's director, Katsura Hashino, during a recent interview posted onto Waypoint. In the interview, Hashino was questioned on a wide variety of topics related to the game, but his comments on the lack of a gender option in the game were most discouraging. In Persona 3 Portable, appropriately enough the port of the third title on the Playstation Portable, the player was given an option to play the original male main character or a new female main character. The changes were widespread. Certain plot details changed; a huge variety of Social Links, an in-game system of measuring your interpersonal relationships, were switched to account for the gender difference; and of course there were new animations and voice acting to accompany the change. It made many hopeful that similar changes would occur in later games. Unfortunately, Hashino made it clear, both in action and in words, that this would not be the case.

"Every time the development on a new Persona game starts, this subject always comes up at the very beginning," Hashino tells me. "When thinking about how much work goes into accomplishing such a feat, it's a huge amount. Honestly, to put that option into the game, we'd have to cut out other things to compensate for the workload, and every time that's the situation we'll basically say, 'it's not worth it'."

While the question was being asked, Hashino also elucidated the reasoning behind the option never being added to Persona 4. His reasoning was...perplexing, at best:

" . . . With Persona 4, though, we needed the character to come from a big city to a small country town to be the driving force of the story, and it seemed more natural for a male character to fulfill that role. There are story aspects to this decision, as well." 

First of all, speaking as a huge fan of Persona 4, I can't think of any "story aspect" to the game that made a male main character important or necessary. As for the move from a big city to a small country town...surely Hashino doesn't think there aren't any girls who have gone through this?

Back to Persona 5, however, the idea of a female main character being "impossible" strikes me as silly. It's almost amazing that this argument is being made; Remember when Assassin's Creed: Unity got flak for claiming it would have doubled the amount of work the animators had to do? Remember people from other companies, such as Naughty Dog and former BioWare animator Jonathan Cooper estimating it would actually take perhaps two days? He details his reasoning here, and even specifically notes it's an issue of planning over any sort of technical or resource limitation. That was nearly three years ago. And here we have another company talking about the work for a female option like an entire team of animators would be hunched over their computers for years.

"Now now," I hear you cry, "There's story considerations as well! There would need to be differences in some dialog for male and female main characters!" Yes, absolutely. Some of the dialog would need to be rewritten. Specifically, given that Persona 5 has disappointingly continued to not allow any queer relationships in the game, any references to a romantic attraction towards or from another female character would need to be altered. Similarly, romantic options would need to be added for the male characters in the game. Again, I'm not going to say that I know, for certain, that this would be a simple task. Writing romantic dialog is, I imagine, a different thing from writing typical dialog which requires looking at a character in a particular way. But, much like the animating, I can't imagine it's some hellish nightmare of writing. I can't see a writer on Persona 5 slaving away at it night after night because it's such an impossible task.

Hashino's claim seems to be that the team didn't have the resources to make a female main character option. One thing I'd like to point out before continuing on: This game was originally scheduled to release in 2014. They had the resources to develop it for 2 and a half years past their original release window...but not for a female main character?

What this all boils down to, and what it has always boiled down to, is that Hashino doesn't care. He doesn't care about any portion of the audience that would want a female option. He doesn't care about how much it would mean for a title in a series as popular as Persona is (in Japan, at least) to let you play as a woman. He believes that it's unnecessary, so it's more important to have a special animation for one of your party members to be visibly uncomfortable with a revealing outfit they're obliged to wear. To be fair, I imagine that's an opinion that a fair amount of the team share. But he still has the final say, and he just didn't care.

I appreciate the work Hashino has done; Again, I'm really enjoying Persona 5 so far and I'm a huge fan of Persona 4, another game he directed. But to hear "it would have been too much work" as an excuse again after so much criticism was levied against other games for it is disheartening. Hashino says that, after Persona 5, he's hoping to move on to other series at Atlus, specifically the fantasy RPG announced late last year. I sincerely hope that, whoever takes over the franchise from here is more willing to listen to those asking for a gender option. Or, at least, they give a better reason for it. 

The slow and steady start of Mass Effect

Mass Effect: Andromeda launched less than two weeks ago now, and opinions on this one seem low. It's incredibly disappointing, especially considering how much I love the other titles in the series.While talking about the title, Waypoint's Austin Walker compared it to the original, in doing so said the following on the original Mass Effect:

You get all of this dump, like "Oh, there's so much to this world! There's so many things that I'm learning about, and I'm learning about the different conflicts, and the different relationships, the genophage, the First Contact War between the Turians and the Humans, there's so much to dig into there."

Certainly, I've always enjoyed how Mass Effect opens. I've certainly replayed the beginning enough times, thanks to new runs started and never finished. But after hearing this quote, and recently starting yet another new playthrough of the game in honor of the new game coming out, I started to realize just how perfect the opening of Mass Effect is. It sets the exact right tone, and the exact right expectations, for the game to follow.

The game opens with characters discussing your Shepard, specifically mentioning some backstory details you pick during character creation. The very first thing the game does is take a moment to reiterate what your character has done, and how some view them already. I feel it should be noted your characters ability in combat is never mentioned, only where they're from, and what they've accomplished.

After this, you get a brief cutscene of your spaceship, the Normandy, cruising through space, before the game cuts to...dialog! The very first interactive aspect of the game is a dialog option, and immediately you can start fleshing out what kind of character your Shepard is. When someone questions an authority's action, do they agree if it seems suspicious or not acknowledge it? Do they stay professional at all times, or do they relax when the situation allows for it? One of the first things the game does is allow you to decide what kind of person your character is. You keep getting to determine what kind of character your Shepard is, as well; You're asked to meet with the captain of the ship, and on your way, there are several conversations you can have with a variety of characters on the ship. When you finally get to the captain, there's a lengthy segment of dialog, focused on setting up the story of the game and the lore of the universe. Once the game has set up a situation which will finally start some combat, and the game...gives you a little more talking!

Eventually, the first combat segment begins. Your crew jumps off the ship into an attacked colony filled with violent robots, but even here the focus is on speaking. Between almost every battle, there's a dialog tree: How do you handle a squad mate dying? How do you treat a soldier who's managed to survive a pretty rough situation? What about the civilians who did the same? It's your first introduction to what many would call the "real gameplay" of Mass Effect, but even here the game is clearly more interested in its writing and story than in its fighting.

After this segment, you're taken to the main hub, so to speak, of the game: The Citadel, a massive space station, and here the game really starts to show off its true colors. Very quickly, the game starts showing off more of the world the writers crafted, specifically the varied alien species. There are monotone and looming Elcor, small and wheezing Volus, tall and lanky Salarians, and a host of other aliens you can interact with and learn about. Among all of this, the game starts giving you a variety of side quests you can perform throughout the Citadel. They're all heavy on story, but have no combat. You can help a consort stop a war veteran from spreading lies, or try to convince a civilian working undercover with the police that their work is dangerous, or trace an odd money wire to an errant AI, but you never get into gunfights with any of them. It's all about experiencing these many varied stories.

If you decide to focus on getting through the main story at this point, to get to the "real game," there is some fighting...eventually. Once or twice. But it's not combat because "oh, we need some fighting here," it exists to show how dangerous the situation you're in at that moment. You take down a crime kingpin, who points you towards a witness who is both integral to your goals and in danger, so you go and save them. Two fights, within 5 minutes of each other, which only exist because it made sense in the story. And again, these segments exist to allow for character development: How do you react when a party member, who said they'd kill the crime kingpin once he was cornered, makes good on their word? When you rescue the witness, is your first concern their safety or the information they have?

In the end, this whole segment frames what Mass Effect's focus is wonderfully. It's not about combat, it's not about your abilities in a firefight, it's not about how powerful your guns are. It's about your character, your Shepard, and how they choose to interact with the world. Some may complain that the opening is "too slow" or "plodding," but what do they expect? It's the start of the story. Better to give it time to breath than force it to be something it isn't.

Splatoon 2 Global Testfire Impressions

Stage 1 - Denial

It's the morning of March 24th, approaching noon, and I've gotten my nice new Nintendo Switch out to play some Splatoon. Starting soon, the Global Testfire will start, and as a huge fan of the original Splatoon on the Wii U I'm looking forward to seeing how things have changed. The supers are all brand new, there's a new kind of weapon in the Splat Dualies (which allow for rolling, how fun!), and the maps are all new.

The hour rolls around, and I boot up the game. A tutorial lets me get the hang of the controls, which seem largely unchanged from the original game, and I'm quickly shown the weapon select. I select my old standby, the Splat Roller, and the test starts connecting me to the game. Or, it tries to, at least. After a little bit, a connection error message pops up, and I'm booted back to weapon select. I try again, and the same thing happens. Try again, same thing. I look up information online, certain this must be a widespread issue, but...no, most everyone else has gotten in, enjoying themselves.

I find a few scattered reports of issues, and I try their suggestions. I restart my Switch, no dice. I double- and triple-check my internet connection, and it's green across the board. There is, as far as I can tell, no reason that I should be unable to play the game. Yet, I still get booted out. I post a joke on Twitter, complaining that there's no Squid Jump to distract me like in the original game, all while continuing to try, fruitlessly.

The hour ends, and with it the test, but my hopes remain high. The server tests for the original Splatoon were rough at first as well, but by the next time I was able to connect no problem and start splatting. I look forward to the next test I'll be able to join in on.

Stage 2 - Anger

It's 4 AM, the following morning, March 25th. I got home a few hours ago from a pretty rough shift at work, my feet still hurt, and I'm still a bit annoyed at some stuff I won't go into. But that's all in the past, and now I'm about to jump into the Splatoon 2 Global Testfire, which is about to start another hour of testing. I hop in, pick my weapon, and...the same thing happens. Can't connect.

I go through all the same motions as last time, restart the console, check the internet, everything's good, everything's working, why the fuck can't I play this game? I start trying different weapons to see if somehow my choice of the roller is preventing it from working, no luck. I'm already tired and annoyed, and now I can't even play this goddamn video game. Great. I post into a group chat that I want someone to complain to about this, but it's four in the goddamn morning, nobody's around. I go to sit next to our router, get as good a connection as I can, but nothing works. Around this time, I notice that it's always around 2 measures of music, the same two measures of music, before I get booted around, but it's never the exact same amount of time, always ever so slightly off.

I go back to my computer and am quite surprised that someone has in fact joined voice chat. I take a moment to remember that it's not 4 AM everywhere, then hop in and start my complaints. They lend a compassionate ear at my understandable frustrations. They tell me what they thought of the game, which doesn't annoy me as much as I was afraid it would (though I still make a sarcastic comment). Apparently Rollers have some momentum now where they take a second to roll at full speed? That's weird, and feels super unnecessary, but so did making the Kraken super in the original Splatoon completely useless by the time they stopped updating it, so who knows.

We shoot the shit about the original Splatoon, and our likes and dislikes about it. We both agree that skills shouldn't be tied to equipment anymore, so we can just be stylish, and that Nintendo will likely keep that stuff linked to equipment anyway. The entire time I keep trying to connect to a match, but no luck the entire way through. Eventually, the hour ends, and I've still put absolutely no time into Splatoon 2. I thank my friend for lending me their ear, and go to bed, setting my alarm for before the next test starts. I end up sleeping through it anyway.

Stage 3 - Still Anger

It's 8 PM that night, and guess what, the same shit happens. Can't connect. Earlier today a friend of mine who lives on a rock with bad internet and doesn't own a Switch tweeted about how they were playing Splatoon 2, which definitely wasn't rubbing it in my face but also definitely felt like it a little bit.

I spoke to the same friend earlier and apparently Bill Trinen, Senior Product Marketing Manager and notable public face of Nintendo of America, noted issues related to Comcast, the same ISP which I am unfortunately bound to. I check, and he is able to connect just fine to the current one. He is now tweeting about college basketball, and I guess I hope the team he was rooting for did well.

My thoughts wander to the worst case scenario. What if this is just how the game is gonna be? I feel like I'm one of like 7 people on the planet who can't get in, what if I'm considered an acceptable loss and Nintendo just doesn't do anything because hey, most people aren't having an issue? Splatoon 2 was one of the reasons I spent 300 dollars on this, what if that's just not feasible? I tweet to the official Nintendo of America account asking what work is being done between sessions, but I might as well scream into the void. The void does not scream back.

Stage 4 - Acceptance, And Definitely Not Anger Or A Different Kind Of Denial

It's 4 AM on Sunday, March 26th, and there's another hour of testing, the last hour of this group, but who cares honestly. Splatoon wasn't that great anyway, I guess on a floundering system like the Wii U it was alright, but it was overrated in retrospect. Who cares about the sequel to it? Even if you did, it all looks the same, they haven't changed anything, so you might as well just play the one that actually fucking works instead of this new piece of garbage.

You know what game is better than Splatoon 2, probably? Nier: Automata. This game is rad, and I'm starting my second playthrough, and it's already pretty crazy. I'm still trying to connect to the Splatoon 2 servers, but not because I wanna play it, I just feel like I have to, if I want to be able to speak with any sort of authority on video games I should play all the games I can, even if I don't care about them even a little bit. 

You know what else is definitely better than Splatoon 2, which I know because Splatoon 2 is dumb? Persona 5. That's coming out in like, a week or something crazy like that, and I still need to beat Nier: Automata like 4 more times or something before it comes out so I can see all the endings, which are apparently all pretty amazing. Who has time to play some dumb multiplayer paint game, that I just checked again and nope still no connection shit, when I have to beat a game that many more times in a week? Not me.

Definitely not me.

The Static Story of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The following post contains spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a game about what came before. It is about the fight against Calamity Ganon 10,000 years ago, where people built machines to fight off evil and triumphed handily. It is about 100 years ago, when Calamity Ganon returned, pitted those machines against their creators, and defeated the heroes who would oppose him without a second thought. It is also, to a lesser extent, the story of the entire line of Zelda titles, and their (occasionally shoehorned in) story of a hero through the ages, destined to defeat Ganon and save the world. But as the characters chafed against their destiny, and thinking on their failures 100 years ago, I found myself disappointed that a distinct possibility was never even considered: What if Princess Zelda and Link aren't the 'chosen ones' at all?

Throughout the story, or rather the story from 100 years ago, Zelda visibly hated her role in this prophecy. She wanted to contribute by working with the giant mechanical Guardians which patrol the kingdom, and garner a greater understanding of the society that built them 10,000 years ago. When ordered to go on a pilgrimage to gain the power necessary to defeat Ganon by the king, she barely withheld her anger, clenching her fist as she quietly acquiesced to the request. Even then, the power didn't come to her; all the prayer in the world didn't unlock the ability to defeat Ganon which was supposed to come so naturally to her.

There isn't much solidly connecting Link to his destiny either. In the flashbacks, he carries the Master Sword, which has apparently chosen him as its wielder, proving that Link is the warrior of legend. But there's no such choice when you recover the Master Sword in the present. It does not speak and claim you are the reincarnated hero, it does not look at your deeds and make a decision. The sword will cause damage to you as you try to pull it out, and if you cannot withstand the damage, you do not get the sword. It seems to imply you don't get the Master Sword because of some destiny; you get it because you have the physical fortitude required, the strength required to fight Calamity Ganon.

At first, I was rather happy with my little headcanon, as all the pieces were fitting firmly into place. Link had the sword, but it didn't seem as though it was any real destiny that got it into his hands. Zelda was not only unhappy with her lot in life, but actively unable to fulfill it. The final piece of the puzzle is obvious not an hour into the game: These heroes, these destined individuals, fought Ganon as foretold.

And they lost. Hard. In fact, it's implied they never really stood a chance. That doesn't happen with heroes of legend, the ones destined to win.

Yet, the game decided that this would not do. Late in the game, in the final optional memory you can unlock, you see Zelda did in fact use the power of the goddess to fight against Ganon and speak to the Master Sword. It's a silly thing to be disappointed about, but I was still a little bummed. Here was this great Zelda game, the first in the series I can say I love out of anything other than nostalgia (even that only applies to Link to the Past), and in so many ways the game broke the series mold: The guided story structure was replaced with the most freeform progression in recent memory. The combat was expanded with multiple weapon movesets and elemental types. Even Links traditional outfit, the one true standard of the series from the beginning, is nowhere to be seen in the game unless you complete every single one of the 120 shrines in the game.

Is it so weird to hope the "destiny" and "prophecy" story would be played with? The game is a story of what came before,- but that's just as much why we change what worked before as why we follow it. Breath of the Wild makes huge changes to some of the fundamental aspects of the Legend of Zelda series as a whole. Why make a story that is, besides framing and some minor details, the same "destined heroes" story we've seen a ton of times in this series before? Why not make the story about heroes who aren't chosen but made by the hardships they experience, the bonds they form, and the battles they fight? Breath of the Wild is so different, and so amazing, I can't see Nintendo do anything but use this as the template moving forward. With everything else on the table, I just hope the story can be given that same critical treatment.

Impressions from a 1 week Switch owner

Note: Apparently I forgot to post this last week. This post was intended to be up on March 11. I apologize for the error, and will post two articles some week in the future to keep up my once per week schedule.

Hey so remember back in January when I said I wasn't going to get a Switch "anytime soon" because of how thin the launch line-up was? Yeah, oops, I own a Switch now. Last Saturday, one day after the Switches release while everyone was scrambling to find one, while spending time with a friend, he mentioned that a local Amazon Books had a lot of Switch's in stock. I called them, and apparently they still had "about two or three hours worth" of Switch's left, which struck me as an odd way to quantify it. We headed over, and when we got there we saw...this:

That picture depicts, by my estimate, several dozen Nintendo Switch consoles, and probably well over 100 copies of the main attraction, so to speak: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

So I got one. Strike while the iron is hot, as they say. After about a week of it, I can at least say that I don't regret the decision.

Pillars of Eternity, and the Possibility of Crowdsourced Lore

I've been spending a little bit of time lately playing 2015's Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian Entertainment's old-style RPG in the mold of Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights. I kind of suck at the genre, but I've been enjoying it a great deal. The gameplay does "classic" without feeling outdated, and the story of trying to discover the reason behind a slew of soulless childbirths and your own newly-activated ability to converse with souls both living and dead keeps me going even as the opening stays fairly vague and mysterious.

Your ability to converse with souls most commonly comes to the fore via "soul stories," stories you can read from certain non-player characters depicting events from their lives or past lives. I was a bit surprised to learn, after doing some research, that all of the soul stories and the NPC's they're connected to were by backers of the games Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which raised nearly 4 million dollars in 2012. Anyone who donated a whopping $1000 or more was able to design an NPC who would appear in the game, with a soul story written by the backer. These small pieces of backstory on their characters (and, despite the game making it clear the souls held stories from past lives as well, every backer seems to have written stories from their NPC's point of view) led me to thinking: Could a game have NPC's written by their fans? Could you take those small, personal pieces of lore, and put their creation in the hands of the crowd?

Very Itch-eresting, Vol. 1

Valve, the gaming corporation behind the PC gaming platform Steam, recently announced that Steam Greenlight, the current method for non-traditionally published games to make their way onto Steam, will soon be phased out in favor of a new system, called Steam Direct. Rather than the complicated and obtuse method of combining votes, money gathered via crowdfunding, apparent quality, and a host of other reasons which Valve somehow used to determine what did or did not make it onto Steam, they will instead simply charge a fee. If you pay, you get on. The actual amount of the fee has yet to be determined, but Valve says they are asking developers for their thoughts and have received recommendations ranging from 200 dollars, twice as much as it took to put your game onto Steam Greenlight, to 5000 dollars.

5000 dollars, it should go without saying, is a lot of money, and would most likely prevent many smaller developing studios, and especially solo developers, from being able to get onto Steam. Some don't see this as a problem, however: if the game is worthy of being on Steam, the largest and most visible PC gaming platform, then 5000 dollars should be easy to recoup. If they don't happen to have a spare 5000 dollars just lying around, well there are other places to sell their games, such as perennial weird-game favorite, Itch.io.

A Lament for Persona 5, Which I Should Be Playing Right Now

Ah, Persona. How I've missed you these many years. Like most, I first cut my teeth on Persona 3, a fantastic JRPG that was just as much social simulator as dungeon crawler. The story, about students fighting the Shadow monsters which appear during a secret 25th hour, The Dark Hour, hooked me easily when I first played it my freshmen year of high school. It's sequel, Persona 4, remains a favorite of mine, containing my favorite cast of characters in any game and having many quality-of-life improvements over it's predecessor. It's been over 8 years since we were last graced with a game in the franchise, but at long last we've arrived at the release of Persona 5!

Waiting For The Fun

I've been spending a fair bit of my free time (or at least, small slivers of free time between other activities) playing Nintendo's latest mobile offering, Fire Emblem: Heroes. It's a perfectly serviceable title, offering bite-sized tactics gameplay in a simplified package. I've been thinking two things in my time with the game: One, I should probably try to finally beat Fire Emblem: Awakening. Two, free-to-play games sure rely on waiting a lot, huh?

The game has your typical F2P mechanic of a stamina meter. Instead of allowing you to play for as long as you'd like, every fight you undertake will cost a variable amount of stamina from your stamina meter. Capping out at 50 points, your stamina meter will refill at a rate of 1 point every 5 minutes, or a little over 4 hours to go from empty to full. Needless to say, this puts a hamper on prolonged play sessions, but the game isn't too hampered by this. The battles in the game are incredibly quick, swapping out the occasionally over half-hour long battles with huge maps and armies in typical titles and replacing them with 4 on (typically) 4 short-form skirmishes. It's been incredibly easy to simply hop in during a short bit of down time, play a quick fight, then put the game away for a bit while you do something else. In all my time playing over the last couple of days I've only been unable to continue due to lack of stamina once. Where I can see it becoming a problem is with trying to train up new units, preventing you from playing multiple fights to get experience. It's annoying, but hardly gamebreaking.

The whole thing has made me think of how waiting gets used in other titles. For example, I've also been playing a lot of the MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. If you encounter interactive spots during quests, activating them will cause a short bar to appear, which needs to fill before you can continue. I'm not entirely certain why these appear (I assume they are either to allow time for the game to communicate with the servers or to ensure you're not being attacked by monsters), but the short little waits can add up to a bit of annoyance if you're in a rush. On the longer side, you need to wait for a party to be formed every time you join the Duty Finder, the "Looking For Group" feature in FFXIV which matches you with other players for dungeons, boss fights, and raids. The game leans heavily on the typical MMO class trinity of DPS (damage-dealer), Tank (damage-taker), and Healer, and parties found through the Duty Finder must have a particular makeup of classes. If you’re playing a Tank, a type of class which tend to be less common, the wait for a party to be formed is often instantaneous. If you play the more common DPS class...well, I typically sit around for 5-10 minutes before getting into a dungeon if I play when a lot of people are online, and I’ve sat around for as long as 30 minutes.

I try not to hold this against the developer. The shorter waits are typically only around a second long, even if I'm not entirely certain of their purpose. The longer waits are a necessary evil, given how FFXIV is structured and the nature of the classes: Everyone's playing DPS, so it's harder to find a group that needs one. But if you're catching up on old content, or just happen to be playing the game a lot, those short 1-second long add up to a pretty big annoyance. Meanwhile, those longer waits are a drag in any case, but they're especially bad if you're trying to run through dungeons multiple times in a row for special currencies or items.

These waits, difficult to avoid as they may be, end up dragging down what is otherwise a fun and relatively fast-paced MMO. But I've seen long waits like this work in other games. In fact, I'd argue it's one of the few things that worked in last year's No Man's Sky.

No Man's Sky is a space exploration and survival game, tasking players with making their way to the center of a massive galaxy. The game takes great pride in it's realistically sized planets and galaxies, even taking into account how long travel between planets would be. Depending on how far you need to go, it was often a couple of minutes from one planet to the next. A couple of minutes of nothing but a cockpit view of space, hurtling towards a planet that will probably have very little of note on it.

I remember when the game first came out, I played it on livestream so my friends could watch. One of them was absolutely astonished that so much nothing could be in the game. They were adamant that a game with this much time 'wasted' was no good. They were right about the game being no good, but in my opinion this time spent waiting was actually pretty cool. The developers, Hello Games, were going for a realistic view of space travel, and "a lot of nothing for a long time" is probably pretty accurate to what it would be like to actually travel throughout the galaxy and over entire planets. It made me feel more like I was really sitting there in my spaceship, hopping from planet to planet hoping to find what I needed to keep heading towards the center.

My most vivid memory of the game was when I spent a long while, something like 2 or 3 hours, on a single shitty planet with nothing on it. The whole thing was hotter than hell, around 80 or 90 degrees Celsius, hot enough to make prolonged time out of my ship dangerous. Worse, it had frequent dust storms that would cause massive heat spikes, upwards of 300 degrees Celsius. At times like this, my only respite was to hop into my ship, which I guess had the universe’s greatest air conditioning, and wait it out.

It was boring, and time consuming, but I felt immersed in those moments. Me sitting on my couch, turning on a podcast to pass the time, was not all that dissimilar to my character in the game, feet up on the dashboard, listening to something to pass the time while a storm rages outside. It was waiting, sure; I was doing nothing in this game I paid 60 dollars for, yeah; and considering the inexplicably long amount of time I was on this shithole of a planet I didn't end up with much to show but a couple of inventory slots and a new ship, both of which I could have gotten on any other planet. I honestly, truly don't have a good explanation for why I stuck around. But it felt really cool, y'know? Like I was a real explorer, dealing with the bullshit of a terrible place that I had to put up with for a bit. That little shitty planet made me feel more like a proper space adventurer than anything else I've played before. It was the only time playing No Man's Sky where I felt like the game had achieved anything close to its lofty goals.

When it’s done like this, I can defend waiting for the “real game” to continue. When a game isn’t forcing me to wait to try and encourage more purchases, or because there aren’t enough people running a dungeon, it’s possible for waiting to be hugely beneficial. I won’t deny it takes a certain frame of mind: if I wasn’t still on the game-just-came-out high with No Man’s Sky, I might not have had the patience. But those moments of peace, of taking in the view while I waited out a storm or flew across the galaxy, were my favorite part of the game. Not every game will benefit from forced waiting. But for putting you in a space, and taking in the sights, there’s easily potential for it to be well worth the wait.

Final Fantasy XIV and Anti-Anxiety Repetition

Check the supply and provisioning log. What do I need to craft today? What do I need to gather? Get a list of the things I need.

I don't respond to stress particularly well. I get angry, I get frustrated, I need to walk away even when it feels like the last thing I should be doing. The best solution, I've found, is to find something quick and repetitive to do to take my mind off for a bit. And as I've found recently, MMOs are the perfect fit.

Crafting is easy, but annoyingly luck based. Start the crafting: Activate Great Strides now, so you can take advantage of any possible condition changes; Use Basic Synthesis to increase the progress; pay attention to the durability so I don't waste this stuff; raise high quality chance as much as I can, and hope for the best once it's done.

Once everything is crafted, time to move on to gathering. Look up the location of the requested botany and fishing items. Go to where the botany item is, and gather 10, always 10. Figure out the right bait and location for the fish I need to gather, then cast my line. Then fail, and cast it again. Then fail again, and cast it again. The fishing always takes a while.

My poison of choice, for a while now, has been Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. I'm well into endgame, at the moment, and eagerly await the upcoming expansion pack Stormblood. But right now, world being as it is, I'm thankful for a place to go with plenty to do when I need it.

All the crafting and gathering is done. Turn it in to the Storm Sergeant,  he'll give me experience and currency. Time to do work for the Beast Tribes; the Vundu, bird people; the Vath, bug people; and Moogles. I'm getting close to having the quest lines for all three finished, and once I do I can get a new quest line and get a cool new dance. It's nice to have a goal to work towards.

The variety of things available in the game, as far as repetitive stuff goes, is impressive. Maybe it's nothing special for people who have sunk time into MMOs before, but as a relative noobie it can be overwhelming sometimes. Every 18 hours, I have to check in with my retainers (NPCs who can hold items, sell items on the market, and do odd jobs for you) and ensure they're still working on ventures, along with searching for treasure maps that can contain valuable crafting materials and currency. Every day, I have new Supply and Provisioning missions, where I need to craft and gather items for one of the three PVP factions; I don't participate in PVP at all, but joining a faction is required for the story and being a part has other benefits. I can also do Beast Tribe quests every day, which can provide experience or endgame currency, or do Duty Roulette, which will have me running a dungeon for bonus money and experience. And every week, the game’s Challenge Log resets, which has tons of different objectives within which can provide experience, money, and some of the special currencies such as faction seals and Gold Saucer Points.

With the Beast Tribe quests finished, I run a few dungeons; one of the roulettes picks from the two most recently added dungeons, but for some reason more people seem to be running the one that isn't required for the story. And in the roulette of the rest of the dungeons, the Aetherochemical Research Facility is almost always where you end up: it gives the most Allagan Tomestones of Lore, a currency which is probably going to be phased out once the new expansion hits, but is still valuable right now. Running the dungeons is a little rote, but sometimes the other people you get grouped with are fun to talk to.

In all honesty, it can take me hours to complete everything on my plate any given day, if I even bother to try finishing everything. But sometimes I need a few hours. Sometimes I only need like 30 minutes. Sometimes just hearing a familiar tune, a calming melody, is enough to put me in the right state of mind. To be able to face a tough day, as days tend to be lately. Just something to stop anxiety and panic attacks.

The dungeons are finished, and with it my entire daily routine is exhausted. But there's still a ton of classes and jobs I could level up, and I still need to finish the Scholasticate questline, and I still need to get my Relic weapon up to date, and finish all of the Alexander raids, and the new Dun Scaith raid, and I just saw an advertisement for a player-run club that I could check out as a goof, and...

I used to hate this stuff: it was repetitive, it was boring, it was what weird people did when they ran out of real stuff to do in the game. But now, when I need something simple and easy to do, something I can lean back on, I appreciate this stuff as more than fluff. It's the same, over and over, and it's the exact relaxation I need.

Sonic Adventure 2 is Bad

I won't lie: I couldn't think of something to write this week. I wanted to play Yakuza 0 and maybe try to write something about that, but I wasn't able to get my hands on a copy until two days ago, and while I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn nearly constantly, I'm at a loss as to what I could write about it. Instead of missing a week, I'm writing something quick that isn't original or good but is mostly something that I want out so I can stop thinking about it. Therefore, to fill the void: A List of Reasons Why Sonic Adventure 2 Isn't A Very Good Game.

1. Knuckles stages suck now

For those of you unfamiliar, Knuckles (and Rouge) stages in the Sonic Adventure series are based around finding three items scattered around the level, with a radar at the bottom using a cold-hot scheme to indicate when you're getting close to an object. Many maligned the Knuckles stages in the original Sonic Adventure, being a somewhat frustrating and plodding treasure hunt around open levels. Personally, I thought they were really fun. I loved getting to know the places these levels take place in, and despite length complaints I never found the levels took too long, at least not frustratingly so. In Sonic Adventure 2, however, one simple change makes Knuckles levels, and by extension Rouge the Bat levels, unbearable.

In the original Sonic Adventure, the radar worked with all three items at once. If you got close to any of the three items, it's radar would start flashing and beeping, allowing you to find the items in whatever order you wished or found them in. Sonic Adventure 2, on the other hand, limits you to one radar at a time. If you're relying on the radar to find the items, and you are unless you've memorized every possible location the items could spawn in, you have to find the first item first, then the radar for the second item will unlock, and only after finding that item will the radar for the third item unlock. It's the most subtly aggravating thing I think I've experienced in a video game. It's possible to wander the stage for 5 or 10 minutes before finding the first object, then wander around again only to discover the second object is back where you were searching for the first object originally. Then, you can wander around again and find the third object is near where you found the first! It's the oddest design choice, since as far as I can tell the only way you can see the change as beneficial is if you want a bunch of frustrated players. If that is the case, it worked: I was definitely frustrated when a level in Sonic Adventure 2 too me over half an hour to complete.

2. So do Tails' stages

In the original Sonic Adventure, Tails stages were races: you raced against an opponent, typically though not always Sonic, to the end of a shortened, speed-oriented version of levels from elsewhere in the game. In Sonic Adventure 2, however, Tails (and Dr. Eggman in the Dark campaign) takes the place of E-102 Gamma, with combat from a robot you're piloting being a major focus. The problem is that the combat sucks, literally just holding down a button to trigger auto-aim and releasing after you've managed to target a few enemies (this is also part of the reason why Gamma's stages weren't combat-focused but time trials, racing against a clock you could extend by defeating enemies).

Tails also has a health bar rather than the typical Sonic health of "If you have rings you lose them, if you don't you die". This sounds fine except it takes a ton of rings to refill your health bar after getting hit, and later levels especially will use the health bar as an excuse to throw more difficult and, at times, entirely unfair enemies at you who will whittle health down over time without providing enough rings to heal you. Combine this with the annoying whine that accompanies the auto-aim weapon, and Tails stages are frustrating beyond belief, especially once the levels become longer towards the end of the game

3. Nothing about this terrible story works

I'm not gonna sit here and claim Sonic the Hedgehog has some deep lore that is disrespected by the quality of story in this game, but even compared to its predecessors Sonic Adventure 2 tells a bad tale poorly. Let me try to recap: Sonic the Hedgehog is being pursued by GUN, a government agency which does...something, because they think he's the only barely at all similar Shadow the Hedgehog, who has been stealing Chaos Emeralds. He's doing this to help Eggman for some reason, who is trying to power a doomsday device his grandpa made so he can force the President of the United States of America to give him land to make Robotnikland I guess? Also Tails is helping Sonic and Knuckles is looking for the pieces of the Master Emerald again because it was broken during a conflict with Rouge the Bat who is a treasure hunter who is also working with Shadow and Eggman because she's secretly an agent of GUN and also Shadow is the "ultimate lifeform" except maybe he isn't.

That was confusing to read, and it's also confusing to remember and understand while playing the game, not helped at all by the baffling direction of the cutscenes in the game: Shots will cut from one place to the next during important scenes (such as the destruction of the Master Emerald, where in one shot it's fine and in the next it's exploded), and voice lines play over each other causing them to be muddled and confusing, assuming the sound mixing in that particular scene isn't so quiet that you can't even hear them. Again, it's not like we were expecting amazing things, but the game fails to cross over a bar that is basically on the ground already.

4. City Escape is a bad song

It is. It just is. I'm sorry you had to find out like this.

5. I Don't Have Nostalgia

I'm not stupid. I know the real reason a bunch of people love this game even though it holds up absolutely terribly: they played it when they were kids, they have good memories associated with the game. I'm in the same boat with the first game, actually: Sonic Adventure was one of the first games I ever played, and that is entirely the reason I'm still fond of it. It definitely isn't the controls, which are wobbly and imprecise at the best of time. It isn't the glitches, which are varied, constant, and new every time I play. Given the benefit of retrospect, Sonic Adventure isn't a good game, it's a game that's alright at best and typically much worse, popular in the moment but almost immediately starting to age. It wasn't the story, which may be told better than Sonic Adventure 2's but is nonetheless a confusing cross-section between "Eggman is trying to make Robotnikland" and "There is an ancient evil which will destroy the world".

My experience playing Sonic Adventure 2 for the first time was uniquely terrible. I tried to beat it just to say I did, and I ended up with an incredibly frustrating week and two separate existential crises. I don't see what people like about it. But some people don't see what I love about the first game. And that's fine. I'm allowed to like my bad thing, and other people are allowed to like their bad thing.

Sonic Adventure 2 is worse, though.

The Familiar Feeling of Thumper

Before finally getting a chance to play it this week, I'd been hearing things about Thumper for a good long while. It's freaky, it's fast, it's "Rhythm Violence". It's barely even a rhythm game, it's all about getting into the flow of things. It'll stress you out. It'll make you sweat. It's not like other rhythm games.

Having played it, I'm inclined to disagree. Not to say the game isn't an odd duck, it definitely has its own idiosyncrasies. For instance, in a genre which typically maintains a shorter playtime on songs, around 2-4 minutes, to avoid overwhelming the player, Thumper gleefully has levels which reach over 30 minutes in length. In relation, the game doesn't really seem to expect you to memorize the levels the way you would memorize note charts in other rhythm games, given how it'll give additional sound cues ahead of time for the notes and also how 30 minutes is a ludicrous amount of time to memorize. Most importantly, in my opinion, the game’s soundtrack isn't catchy, or listenable, or even rhythmic: I often found myself completely incapable of finding a beat, only hitting notes by listening for the sound cues or looking carefully ahead. The soundtrack is more like a horror movie soundtrack, like John Carpenter's The Thing: The point isn't to be melodic or catchy, it's to set an unnerving and eerie mood.

But, ultimately, it's still a rhythm game. Let's compare it to a more recent release: Hatsune Miku Project Diva: Future Tone! There are the obvious similarities: You're still hitting buttons and directions in time with a rhythm. The music is a focus, though for different reasons. And, interestingly, there's a lot of visual noise behind the important, gameplay-focused notes and paths: Thumper has writhing limbs and flashing backgrounds, while Hatsune Miku has its music videos, which vary from unassuming fake concert footage to 3D animated music videos.

For me personally, the biggest similarity is what many people seem to think separates Thumper from the rest of the genre: stress.

Thumper revels in the stress it causes players: The long levels mean you can't feel "finished" with a song in the same short period of time as a typical rhythm game, and of course the Lovecraftian look of the game is incredibly unsettling. But the sweaty palms, the tense shoulders, the cursing at mistakes...that's not a new feeling for me when I play rhythm games. When I play, I want to get a perfect score. Any difficult part of a song, any tricky pathing...my shoulders tense up. My toes involuntarily flex. Every part of my body acts as if a moment of great exertion is happening.

That's what rhythm games are to me: stressful. A fun stress, not unlike what horror fans get out of their chosen genre. I don't dislike the Hatsune Miku games for that reason: Project Diva f 2nd is still a mainstay in my Vita, which I come back to periodically to try and do a bit better on songs that are always frustrating me. Ultimately the thing I'm there to do is overcome that tension and do my best. Thumper revels in it like few others do, sure, but it's not particularly novel in that respect. Thumper extends that stress out over 30 minutes, but the spikes I've felt playing through, say, Close and Open Demons and the Dead on Extreme difficulty easily match that stress, if not exceed it (though to be fair, I'm only about halfway through Thumper.)

My palms may be sweaty, my shoulders may be tense, my tongue may be sticking out to focus, I may be cussing a lot. But that's rhythm games for me. Thumper isn't an outlier; it fits comfortably, if oddly, among the rest.