Gone Home, or, “I take my eyes off you guys for a few months and everything goes straight to heck: The Game”

Posted on June 14, 2016 by baudattitude

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Gone Home isn’t my usual sort of game.  There are no bikini ninjas and absolutely nothing explodes.

It’s one of those games, like Dear Esther, that gets rather uncharitably lumped into the category of “Walking Simulator”, and similarly it has a mute protagonist wandering around while you piece together a deeply personal story.  While Dear Esther has you roaming a rather starkly beautiful island, Gone Home takes place in a massive empty house full of lots of little things to pick up and read or fiddle with and then carefully put back where you got them.  It’s much more the game for the casual voyeur than the scenery tourist. 🙂

There’s not a lot of “game” to Gone Home, in the traditional sense, though it does have a few puzzles to solve. Mostly, you wander an empty house turning lights on and discovering that your parents’ marriage has been decaying and your sister has been seeing someone they don’t approve of. You read a bunch of notes, get a sense for your father’s frustrations and your mother’s regrets, find combinations to open locks and maps to expose secrets, and listen to a very sweet romantic story unfold.

The whole thing is steeped in that mid 90s just-before-the-Internet-age nostalgia vibe that should have anyone of a certain age waxing poetically about mix tapes, photocopied zines and Super Nintendos.  I suspect it’s got much more impact for the Gen X kid than practically any other generation, and anyone born after that might find the whole thing a little dull.

For me, I was square in the middle of the target audience and found it well worth the 70 minutes it took to go through the house’s nooks and crannies.

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Did I Actually Just Finish Bloodborne?

Posted on June 12, 2016 by baudattitude

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Yes. Yes, I did.

Going from “OK, I’m going to man up and try this Demon’s Souls thing” to, two months later, finishing the last of From Software’s series of rather brutal RPGs has been an interesting experience.  It’s made me take a second look at how I think of difficult games – which I’ve never been a fan of, traditionally – and why the Soulsborne series turned into such an exception.

I think it comes down to the way they make it easy to fail, but also don’t punish you for failing.  The series is defined by its bosses; but almost every boss fight has a, let’s call it a pre-fight stage, where you grind through the level to GET to the boss and, just before you actually fight them, you unlock a shortcut back to the last checkpoint.  When you die, you respawn at the last checkpoint, run back to the boss in a fraction of the time it took to clear to him the first time, and take another crack at him.

There are obviously some exceptions to this, but MOST bosses share this design.

It also doesn’t rub your nose in the fact that you died.  As an example of what I mean by this: a few months ago, I tried playing Aliens: Colonial Marines, a roundly-panned first person shooter known mostly for terrible enemy AI and graphics that came nowhere near the quality of the trailers.

I’ve played plenty of games with bad enemy AI and games with dodgy graphics, so I figured it would be good for a laugh, if nothing else.

I hated it, largely because every death was accompanied with an annoying unskippable cutscene wherein your character got murdered by an Alien, and then some loading screens, and then you had to fight through the level from the last checkpoint, and there were so many bits in the levels where you were tapping your fingers impatiently waiting for an NPC to do something… cinematic.  It was a game that was so full up in How Awesome It Was that it made me hate playing it.

The Souls “YOU DIED” screen is, by comparison, brilliant.  You died, the game acknowledges it, you can try again in a minute.  If you don’t feel like fighting everything in the level, there’s probably a way around them or through them if you have one finger on the dodge button.  If you die a second time, well, there go those souls you were trying to get back to, but now you don’t have the stress of trying to get back to them.  You can let them go, because now you have license to goof around and try new things.

It also doesn’t hurt that they are absolutely dripping with atmosphere and – even when you’re slogging through Yet Another Poison Swamp Zone – the games make you want to see what’s around the next corner.  Usually it will be something that tries to kill you, of course.

I’m trying to avoid turning into a Souls evangelist around friends and family, because I recognize that they’re not for everyone and I really think that Demon’s Souls is essential to play AND my favorite entry in the series and not many of the gamers I know even still have a PS3 hooked up.  Should From/Sony put out a PS4 or PC remaster, they will be “encouraged” to play it.

Oh, and on that note: My final ranking.  Entirely personal opinion here, with all that entails and acknowledging that every one of these has been an A+ game.  Some have just been that tiny bit MORE A+ than others:

  1. Demon’s Souls
  2. Bloodborne
  3. Dark Souls II
  4. Dark Souls I
  5. Dark Souls III

Now I guess I get to join the ranks of the fans hoping that Miyazaki was kidding about that whole wanting to do something different thing.  🙂

 

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Cleric Beast Beatdown

Posted on June 6, 2016 by baudattitude

bloodborneboxAfter finishing Estival Versus, I had three PS4 games sitting on my shelf taunting me from their shrinkwrap.  Two of them – Nights of Azure and Deception IV: The Nightmare Princess – are JRPGs that heavily emphasize the general bustiness of their heroines, and normally those would be difficult selling points to overlook.

I thought about it a bit and realized that I’d actually reached a sort of fanservice saturation point and needed something a little less bouncy.

That left me with Bloodborne, a Souls game in everything but name, but with a reputation for being closer to an action game and for discouraging the sort of turtling-up that had gotten me through all of the other games in the series.

I will confess that I spun up the disc with a certain trepidation, and a few very early deaths had me thinking that I might well have gotten in over my head, but then I looked up “how to level in Bloodborne” and found that all I needed to do was make it through the level to find the Cleric Beast and let him kill me, at which point leveling would be unlocked and I could grind up some Don’t-Call-Them-Souls and boost my stats a bit.

So, I bought some molotov cocktails from the vendor in the Hunter’s Dream, and I used those to make it past the pair of werewolves that had been giving me trouble, and then I found myself face to face with aforementioned Cleric Beast, and I figured that I would take a couple of swings at him and try to get a feel for his patterns and then come back once I’d leveled up a bit.

…then I noticed that I’d taken a good chunk out of him with those couple of swings, and started trying to win.

Nobody could have been more surprised than me when he dropped.  I did need to use 8 Don’t-Call-Them-Estus flasks during the fight – I’m still having some trouble getting used to the way you can heal yourself after you’ve been hit by hitting back – but my philosophy in the Souls games has always been that Any Win Is A Good Win, especially when I went in expecting to die.

So, a pretty good start 🙂  I understand that the mandatory boss for getting out of Central Yharnam is actually a big step up in terms of difficulty, so I don’t think I’ll be repeating the performance on him, but it feels good to get that early W and I’m a lot more confident in my choice of games now.

 

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My OCD Is Showing: Senran Kagura Estival Versus, Take Two:

Posted on June 5, 2016 by baudattitude

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This makes eight total platinum trophies, three of them for entries in the Senran Kagura series.  Say what you will about the series, it doesn’t make you jump through a ton of crazy hoops to get cheevos.  If you just play through all of story modes, you are almost certainly going to be 95% of the way to getting the plat for this one.

It does take some time, mind you.  There are 220-some missions in the game, and most of them are at least five minutes each with a little bit of conversation between characters before and after.

The main story is, well, I didn’t care for it very much because it pushed my favorite characters into the background in favor of new characters.  There’s a bonus mission where Asuka (the original main character) goes and beats up all of the other team leaders for hogging the spotlight, and I chose to take it as something of an apology from the developers.

Fortunately, you can unlock side stories for all of the characters while playing the main story, and the side stories turned out to be a lot more fun.  They’re full of the kind of fan service that doesn’t involve bouncing, with the sorts of callbacks to earlier games that are more rewarding if you’ve played all of them.  Some of them got a little… weirder than others, mind you – Ryona’s longing to be made into tempura is one of those things that barely makes sense if you HAVE played all of the previous games, and Ikaruga’s ending is bizarrely out of character for Hanzo Academy’s most prim and proper student.

Of course, if you’re a completionist, this presents a certain disadvantage:  You need to play all of the stories for trophies, so you’ll spend roughly a half-hour each stuck with characters that drive you batty.

Also, as a second warning: If you are particularly fond of any characters that play a little slower – Yozakura comes to mind, also Yomi and Hanabi – I found their story modes to be particularly frustrating.  Estival Versus is a fast game, and heavily rewards building up huge combo numbers with experience bonuses, and some of the slower characters have more trouble building combos and will therefore level slower.  It’s a bit of a design oversight that I will forgive them for only because balancing 27 characters (and more via DLC) must have been a special nightmare.

One final note before I wrap this up – because each character’s story mode has a trophy attached, and because PSN lets you see what percentage of people get each trophy, it’s plausible that there’s a fair correlation between the side story completion rate and character popularity.  With THAT in mind, it is very odd to consider that Murakumo is apparently the most popular character in the series.  The other end of the scale makes much more sense, with Hanabi and Haruka virtually tied for Worst Girl.

Also Mirai is horribly slighted despite having one of the funniest side stories.  At least she’s ranked higher than any of the new characters.

No idea what’s next up.  I’m out of Souls games and a little hesitant to start Bloodborne.  I have a couple of JRPGs, maybe I should check whether any of them are doable or whether they’re all 80+ hour monsters.

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What the heck is an “Estival”?

Posted on June 2, 2016 by baudattitude

So, after a steady diet of From Software’s finest, I needed something a little more fluffy.  This took the form of two visual novels (Aozora Meikyuu and Sakura Beach 2), THREE hidden-object games (Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood, Empress of the Deep and Dark Parables: The Curse of Briar Rose), and Senran Kagura: Estival Versus, the latest bouncy brawler from Marvelous.

I will not make excuses for having played, now, five separate entries in the Senran Kagura series.  I am a boy type human and these are made for boy type humans.

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This is the first non-portable version of the series, and the jump to PS4 did some very good things for the game technically. Apart from the obvious jump from 960×544 to 1920×1080, the arenas are larger and have interesting hidden areas that you need to seek out in order to unlock the side story missions.  Your battles are still hemmed in by Mysterious Glowing Ninja Barriers, but there are plenty of places where the barrier doesn’t, for example, extend all the way to the rooftops and a little platforming will let you break out and explore.

estival_vs_frontStill, It didn’t turn out to be my favorite entry.  To be brutally honest, while it manages to rank higher than Senran Kagura 2: Crimson Burst, it came with a lot of issues that frustrated me, starting with the roster and the mission structure.

Estival Versus has 27 playable characters.  2 of them were added after launch, so they’re not part of the main story, leaving you with 25 characters to choose from.  Only, you can’t, not really.  All of the story missions have required characters for the first go-found, so you will wind up playing as each and every one of the characters, but never for long enough to get comfortable with any given one.  You can always go back and replay missions with the characters you actually LIKE, but that’s only on replays.

Also, while I realize that taste is highly subjective, I really disliked most of the characters they added for Estival Versus and was never particularly fond of the Gessen or Hebijo Academy squads from the Vita game to begin with.  This game is all about the Gessen girls,  three of the Hebijo members, and the new characters, leaving the main characters from the Hanzo and Homura squads to mostly sit around and warm benches waiting for their turns in the spotlight.

Side note: If I never have to slog through a mission with the candy-addled bucket girl Minori again, it will be too soon.

To end this particular rant, the story is a serious affair, all about coming to terms with the loss of loved ones and moving on, and it mixes very poorly with a game where the central mechanic is “hit your opponent hard enough to knock their clothes off”, so you have these long tearful speeches coming from characters whose modesty is currently being preserved only by a couple of lens flares.

Now, I haven’t started on the “Girl’s Heart” side missions, so those may be a little more tonally-consistent, but the main story just doesn’t really work, especially with the fan service turned up to, well, 11 seems low actually, so let’s just say that it’s well after the point where the knob should have stopped turning.  The goofy SD faces from earlier versions have been replaced with the aforementioned lens flares, the “defeat” poses are frequently crossing the line between “funny” and “humiliating”, and the new characters – who you play as or fight against far too often – come off as a little too much of lolicon bait.

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…though they do get some good lines.

So now that I have griped about pretty much every aspect of the game, I guess I should point out some of the things I liked about it.

First, Asuka and Homura are probably my favorite frenemies in video games, so the few bits of story where they get to snipe at each other are great fun. The entire original cast gets some great moments, especially when they’re acknowledging just how weird their situations have become.

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Most of the actual combat is very fluid and I loved seeing huge combo numbers rack up.  This did make it a LITTLE more obvious when I was playing one of the slower characters – Yozakura in particular needs you to cancel out of her four-hit combo before the final hit every time if you want to get any decent numbers, but playing with the speedy characters had the pinball-of-doom feeling that I very much enjoy.

And, as previously mentioned, escaping from the small screen made things look REALLY good.

I’m still going to play through the side missions and try to mop up the last of the trophies, but future entries in the series have slipped out of the “preorder” category and into “wait and see”.

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Did I Actually Just Finish Dark Souls III?

Posted on May 27, 2016 by baudattitude

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Yes.  Yes, I did.

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It took me over 50 hours to grind my way through, which is apparently WAY over the curve, but I’m fine with that.  I was very uncertain about what I was getting myself into back on April 10th when I decided to give Demon’s Souls a try, and I am still somewhat in awe at the notion that I managed to get through the entire series.

It was my first attempt at playing a glass cannon, and I definitely felt brittle the entire way.  It was somewhat made up for by getting to watch enemy health bars drop in massive chunks rather than slivers, particularly once I got into the last couple of zones and unlocked the BIG nukes.

I also did a ton more multiplayer this go ’round, so that added quite a bit of time to the total.  Most of it was on my own terms, but I did get invaded (and generally stomped into the dirt) a few times after killing a boss put me into Ember form and made me a target.  In the entire time, I only won one 1v1 invasion, and that was thanks to an invader who didn’t expect the shield-piercing lunge from the Moonlight Greatsword.  Most of the time, I just saw the “you are being invaded!” message and went to go find a bonfire to die near.

But I’ll set that aside now so I can talk a little more about the game, which was brilliant.  I suspect that I’ll always have a soft spot for Demon’s Souls (and you can count me in with the masses slavering after a PS4 or PC version), but Dark Souls III felt like From had taken all of the good ideas from the first two games, chucked out some of the annoying ones (particularly a couple of questionable design decisions from DS2), and given it all a very shiny coat of paint.

I particularly appreciated the level design and the way rough bits were almost always followed by shortcuts, From’s way of saying “You’ve proven you can get here on your own, you don’t have to keep proving it” and frequent bonfires kept the post-failure loop to a minimum, which is important.  I’ve discovered that I’m not turned off by difficult games, but I AM turned off by difficult games that put extra hurdles between the point where you’ve died and the point where you get to try the fight again.

They also put the story a little more front-and-center in this one.  Your hub slowly fills up with NPCs, and most of them have a fair bit of information to impart about exactly how terrible the world has gotten and how it got to that point in the first place.  There’s still a lot of reading item descriptions to fill in the blanks, but I felt much more part of the story this time, rather than just a random undead bouncing off the plot on occasion.  Not that knowing the story was particularly complimentary at times – it’s made very clear that you’ve been charged with the job of saving (as much as that means anything) the world not because you’re any good, but really because you’ve already tried and failed once.

I wouldn’t recommend anyone play DS3 as their first Souls game, but I’m having to resist the urge to get super annoying with friends and try to convince them that they need to drop everything and play the entire series from beginning to end.

I guess I should probably try Bloodborne at some point now. I’m giving myself advance permission to decide that it’s not my kind of game, though – it sounds a little too fast-paced for my reflexes.  🙂

 

 

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On The Perils Of Over-Specialization

Posted on May 25, 2016 by baudattitude

So, several more Dark Souls 3 bosses down and I am chugging along towards the fourth Extra Bad Big Bad Guy because the Dark Souls series seems fixated on the Rule of Four. Presumably there will be something else after I kill the first four. 

That’s not that noteworthy. What is, however, is a lesson that I thought I’d learned years ago (from a PSP game!) but which I apparently hadn’t fully internalized. 

Basically, while playing through “Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core”, there was a point where I got trapped in a room full of fire elementals, with me carrying a fire sword and with fire spells equipped. It did not go well for me, because they were completely immune to every form of damage I had on offer, and I thought that it had taught me to always have a backup. 

So when I got to Aldritch in Dark Souls 3 and realized that he was, well, not 100% magic resistant but certainly pretty dang resistant, I was quite embarrassed to realize that I had done exactly the same thing again. He’s very weak to fire, but most fire spells are “Pyromancies” rather than “Sorceries” and require at least some investment in the Faith stat. 

My Faith was 7. 

I did give it a try. Several tries! I got pretty good at dodging the guy’s attacks, even, but I just could not hurt him enough before I made enough mistakes to wind up looking at the You Died screen again. 

So I grumbled, and backed away from the boss, and found a quiet corner full of respawning enemies, and ground up five levels of Faith so I could equip a low-level fire spell, and then I absolutely steamrollered the guy on the next attempt. 

So victory? But not really one for the record books. 

Anyway I have several optional zones open to me before I actually go for Bad Guy #4, so those are my next goals. With any luck, the next DS3 post you see will start with “Did I Actually…”

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Bro, Do You Even BlueBro?

Posted on May 21, 2016 by baudattitude

So, there are a couple of different Covenants in Dark Souls III that revolve around helping other people.  The Warriors of Sunlight (“SunBros”), as previously mentioned, hang out near boss fights to lend a hand if needed.  I started off as a SunBro and have gotten enough of the covenant rewards so that I’ll be able to get max rank in the covenant as soon as I find the dang altar to hand them all in at.

Then I met an NPC who inducted me into the Blue Sentinels.  This is a Covenant where, once you’ve joined it, you will be occasionally plucked out of whatever you’re doing and plopped down in another player’s game for the purpose of defending them from a PvP invasion.  You are a bright blue phantom while in the other player’s game, hence “BlueBro”.

I’m not actually very good at PvP, and I can’t say that I was ever a GREAT help to any of the people whose games I got summoned into, but I like to hope that I was at least a helpful distraction at times.

If I’m honest… it did wear after a while.  Once the novelty wore off it actually got to be a little jarring constantly being yanked out of my own game and dropped into whichever area I was needed in.  Still, I stuck with it for long enough – and was present for enough successful defenses – to get the top rank in that covenant as well.

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Ironically, neither covenant gives me any real game benefits.  Their top-rank rewards are Miracles, which are Dark Souls’ faith-based spells, and I’m playing an all-Int sorcerer.  Still, sense of satisfaction and accomplishment and all that.

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Bro, Do You Even SunBro?

Posted on May 16, 2016 by baudattitude

I promise I won’t go too wacky with the Dark Souls III posts.  What’s far more likely, to be honest, is that I forget entirely about updating this thing.

But for now, here’s one more.

There aren’t a ton of sympathetic and likable characters anywhere in the Souls universe, but I think that Solaire, the Knight of Sunlight you first meet in the Undead Burg early in the first Dark Souls, is most everyone’s favorite.  In a world where being undead but not insane YET is pretty much the best you can say for anyone, he is terrifically optimistic and helps you out during some of the game’s worst boss fights.

I felt just awful when I failed to save him in the end.

I joined the Heirs of the Sun covenant in Dark Souls II, but did it pretty late in the game and never managed to get enough co-op fights in to actually rank up in the covenant.  I rather felt like I’d let the jolly madman down a second time.

So, in Dark Souls III, when I realized that I could join the Warriors of Sunlight covenant super early – just after beating the game’s first boss, in fact – I got my very own gilt-edged membership card and went right back to the first boss to lay my summon sign down.

What followed was, mmm, about four hours of helping with the boss, and occasionally helping fend off PvP invasions, and far far FAR too many instances where I’d get summoned to help and watch the host rush up the stairs to tackle the Dancer boss (and die, every single time), and EVENTUALLY…

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The crazy thing, of course, is that I’m not even close to the actual altar where I turn these dang things in.  But, once I get there, I am going to hand these things in with pride.  For Solaire’s sake.

Oh, and I also wound up with about 50000 souls and 40 embers, 25 of which I turned into more souls.  Net result, 10 levels, all spent on INT and now my Soul Arrow is extra punchy.  Next, I need to find an int-scaling weapon, and fast.

 

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Dark Souls III: Okay, NOW it gets hard. 

Posted on May 15, 2016 by baudattitude

So, after triumphantly smashing my way through three Souls games in a row, I wasn’t going to be able to put off buying DS3 until the next Steam sale.

What I’m saying is, I bought a PC game at full price.

I have brought shame on myself and my family.

Every game thus far, I’ve tried different play styles, and my plan for DS3 was to try something completely different and go shieldless, relying on parrying and dodging to get me through.

For the record, I stuck with the plan for a good six hours and managed to claw my way to Soul Level 28 before saying “to heck with this” and strapping on a nice 100% physical damage reduction shield.

I am at least trying to stick with the parry plan. I’m not very good at it though.

It took me most of those six hours to make it to the first boss. This entry in the series makes it very hard to get your feet under you to start; stuff is very aggressive and not worth much experience, the cost of upgrades ramps up very quickly, and it’s back to unlimited respawns so there is no way to completely pacify an area.

Once I made it to that first boss, and did some jolly co-operation to help a couple of other people with him, and then did it again for myself, I started feeling like I was actually in control of the situation for the first time.

But, wow, getting to that point was seriously making me wonder whether I’d finally gotten in over my head.

That’s in the past, though. Onwards!

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