Should I Buy? – Papers, Please

One of the more interesting indie titles of late, in both premise and execution. You play as a nameless, faceless border control officer of Arstotzka who is tasked with following the labyrinthine bureaucratic procedure that is verifying migrants for entry into the country.

The idea of a game based around checking passport dates and work permits for a dystopian government is a hard sell, but I’m about to try my darndest anyway. The main bulk of the game is in its story mode. Over a period spanning about a fortnight in game, you begin your job and are forced to contend with the ever-changing rules, smugglers, terrorists, recurring characters, a shadowy organisation and the volatile political condition of the world away from your desk.

Much like Super House of Dead Ninjas, there’s a perfect blend  of game-making at play here. Mechanically, the strict time limit to each day, the necessity to pay for food, rent, heating and occasionally medicine for your family of five and wage based on applicants processed juxtaposes with the necessity of taking your time to check, double check and cross reference every last detail of what can be up to half a dozen forms. This ensures you’re always on edge and never quite have enough money to make all ends meet.

Then comes in the moral choice aspect. Some scripted characters have sob stories that may or may not be true, and as the adjudicator of who enters the country it’s up to you whether to deny the possible murderer, or admit the woman who claims to be the husband of the man you just admitted. Nice as it might be to play hero, doing so works against your own interest, as an incorrect entry or denial will cost you money out of your own wages. And the family is so very hungry, your wife is sick and Tiny Timyevski’s birthday is just around the corner…

The world you inhabit is a grim place. As bad as Arstotkzka is, there’s a reason people are fleeing the region enmasse to gain entrance. This is where the game’s narrative strength comes into play. At the end of each day, you get your wages and pay your expenses. Hopefully you can pay for food and heating after rent, but maybe you can’t. Uncle Festeronyev may have to forgo his medicine, if it means the rest of the family get to eat tonight. There are one off events that happen here too that will tax your moral centre, like your niece needing a new home.

There are other events during your work day that serve to create a plot you can participate in, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. It does, however, serve as proof that even the cardinal rules of storytelling can be broken. You have only limited agency in the mess that is this region. You’re not the hero of any of the game’s stories. You’re a minor character at best, just trundling along, trying to keep your family alive while others are involved in murder, terrorism, rebellion and desperate romances.

To give the game’s story mode even more recommendations, it also has a branching personal story for you. By making certain critical errors or proving your loyalty to different groups, you can achieve twenty different endings. Many of them are variations on the same event, but others can radically change not just the ending but some of the in-game days. My first play through, I took a large bribe and got tattled on by my neighbours and sent to a debtor’s prison. The second time, I tried being helpful to the scary Ministry of Information officer and got myself arrested and interrogated for my trouble. The third time, however, I got through to the end of the very last day with a squeaky clean record of loyalty to Our Great Arstotzka. Even if Tiny Timyevski and Uncle Festeronyev did die of disease along the way.

If you get Ending 20, you’ll unlock the Endless Mode. In this, you choose one of three challenge types and one of four levels of complexity. In Timed, you try to process as many applicants as possible in ten minutes. Perfection will fail you for making a single mistake. Finally, Endurance sees you earn a single point for every correct judgement, with every mistake losing you a set number based on its severity and ending the game when you enter negative points.

I’ll admit that after finishing the story I just wanted to process some more paperwork, and once you find the challenge and difficulty to suit you, it can have that “just one more game quality” but without the narrative framework and moral complexity, the game loses a lot of its charm.

That said, once you’ve unlocked a day in Story mode, it’s available for reply any time you want form the main menu. And the story is so unobtrusive that any reply of the Story mode doesn’t have that “ugh now I have to do THIS mission and watch THAT super long cutscene” problem a lot of larger games have.

Papers, Please is  a bit pricey for a 5-6 hour Story mode’d indie title at $10, but it’s an intelligent game that deserves to be played and discussed far more than just about every AAA release of this generation. It’s available on both Windows & Mac OS X from Steam & gog.com

Stuff You Should Really Be Into 4 – Too Many Darn Sequels

Time to level. I haven’t been updating much because I kind of got out of the groove with reviewing what with being a third year university student and all. That said, I have played a lot of games this year like Sleeping Dogs, Dishonored, Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Transformers: War For Cybertron, Inazuma Eleven & Far Cry 3, not to mention the news 3DS I bought myself. So maybe you’ll be getting more reviews soon. But until then, I’ve recently discovered a treasure trove of my new nerdvana: retro videogame webshows. So here’s some of the stuff I like in no particular order.

Pat the NES Punk

Where The Angry Video Game Nerd uses excessive swearing (and if you don’t mind/like/can get past that, his show is pretty damn great), Pat uses excessive self-deprecation.

His purview is NES games, believe it or not. He reviews games good, bad and somewhere inbetween. If you’re interested, you can find his stuff on YouTube, Blip, retroware.tv & thepunkeffect.com

PushingUpRoses’s A Second Look At

A reviewer of old PC adventure games, PushingUpRoses also has a pretty large amount of Let’s Plays with various webshow folk you might be familiar with like Paw. Her stuff can be found on YouTube, Blip and retroware.tv

Note: Her Let’s Plays are not on retroware.tv

RinryGameGame’s…er…stuff

General 8 and 16-bit game stuff. Sometimes it’s reviews, other times it’s discussing things like censorshipin Nintendo games or stress-testing NES carts. It’s an enjoyable mix.

Only a small about of Rinry’s stuff is up on retroware.tv, the rest can be found on her YouTube channel.

Roo of the Clan of the Grey Wolf’s 16 Bit Gems

Another retroware.tv contributor, Roo creates the 16 Bit Gems show. Which, believe it or not, is dedicated to reviewing SNES games you might not have heard of but are, well, hidden gems. That last sentence has too many commas, doesn’t it? Oh, well, you’ll, live, probably,.

His Blip channel contains a lot of vlogs and such, so you might want to stick to watching his stuff on YouTube or retroware.tv

JewWario’s You Can Play This

A show dedicated to 8 & 16-bit Japanese games that you can import and play. Ever wanted to know which Japanese Famicom platformers to import? I haven’t, but I do love seeing periods of gaming history I’m all but ignorant of!

His stuff is on Blip, retroware.tv and YouTube.

The Video Game Years

A collaboration documentary project of many retroware.tv contributors which goes through video game history year by year and talks about the various milestones and oddities along the way. Available on retroware.tv & Blip, as well as the retroware YouTube channel.

One last thing

While I like what little of 8-Bit Alli there is so far, it’s still a very small amount. Put her under the “ones to watch” category, I guess. She’s also on retroware.tv & YouTube.

Another last thing

These content producers do so off their own backs and are only paid via ad revenue. If you’re going to watch their content, please disable any ad-blockers you normally use for these sites, or at least for as long as you’re watching there stuff. Watching on Blip will give them a better cut of the proceeds than YouTube, and if you do use an ad-blocker on Blip you’ll be forced to stare at a message about ad-blockers for 90 seconds instead of watching a 30 second advert, so it’s really not worth it.

Should I Buy? – Super House of Dead Ninjas

Before Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure I was never a platforming fan, but I had to try that one out because, well, take a look for yourself:

So I gave Super House of Dead Ninjas a try on Steam when it was their Daily Deal and I am so very glad I did.

SHoDN is a retro throwback to 2d platformers full of fast paced ninj-ing where you die a lot A. Lot. It’s a quasi-sequel to the flash game House of Dead Ninjas, so if you liked that this is strictly an improvement.

The premise is simple. There’s a giant tower full of monsters which many people enter in hopes of finding great treasure, but never return from. You play as Ninjette, a female ninja not looking for fame or fortune but instead investigating the disappearance of the legendary One-Armed Ninja who previously entered the tower.

You progress down the 350 floors of the tower, fighting enemies and bosses, collecting powerups and trying not to die. Ninjette is certainly fleet of foot, and she needs to be as you’re on a timer that summons Death should you let it run out. This is where the principle difficulty of the game rears its head. Taken by themselves, the individual enemies and traps are really kinda easy and predictable. But you need to keep moving at high speed, meaning it’s your own damn fault if you forgot that enemy needs two hits, or you didn’t press the down attack in time, or you weren’t patient enough to wait that extra fraction of a second.

Luckily this isn’t a one-hit death sort of game. You get a large life bar and three continues, with no insta-deaths in the game. Though death is frequent, the fact that it stems from your own mistakes instead of some ridiculous challenge makes it that much less frustrating, and when you’re ‘in the zone’ and kicking ass, you’ll feel like an unstoppable badass.

But this alone isn’t enough to give SHoDN enough replay value to justify the purchase. That honour goes to the horde of unlockable weapons. Ninjette has a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, a bomb and a magic spell at her disposal. Each of these has a range of different weapons to unlock and experiment with.  Do you want to use the Katana of Miffed Barbarians for that extra attack power, or will the longer reach and speed of the Taming Whip of Many Nuns win you over?

Trying to unlock all the new toys to play with will give you a good few hours more play time. Some are easy, some very difficult. Combined with the other unlockables like greater ammo capacity and new powerups, SHoDN has a lot to find.

As for the graphics, they’re a kind of pseudo 8-bit that look pretty darn good. They are kinda completely cheating by doing things not possible with 8-bit hardware, but the game looks great and the soundtrack is atmospheric and enjoyable. A free copy of the soundtrack for download is also one of the unlockables, by the way.

The game isn’t really that long. The main tower can be completed in well under half an hour if you’re good at the game, and while there are two difficulty settings and a few bonus areas this game is all about the replay.

The hardware requirements for SHoDN are low enough that you won’t need a powerful machine to run it. Though if your machine is really low end, you may still get some lag. SHoDN is real cheap on Steam, and easily worth the low price for plans of platformers and of hard, retro games.

Stuff You Should Really Be Into 3: Star Wars Reference

I, having completely infallible taste in everything ever, have come across a bunch of stuff that I think is cool and want to share with you all. I’m fantastic like that.

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E.

A twelve issue Marvel Elseworlds miniseries, Nextwave is the story of a bunch of D list Marvel heroes and original characters forming the team Nextwave to take on H.A.T.E. It is the epitome of psychotic fun. I’ll take this over some “dark”, “mature” and “edgy” issue of whatever superhero or team DC has decided needs to be just as depressed and angsty as Batman any day.

It’s very difficult to find any words to adequately describe Nextwave, so below is an excerpt from the book. It has not been altered in any way.

Batman: The Brave And The Bold

A TV show dedicated to all that is wonderful and silly about DC Comics’ 75+ year history. It takes its name from DC’s old team-up book, and features the Caped Crusader teaming up with heroes ranging from mainstays like Green Arrow & Aquaman to more obscure characters like Detective Chimp & Bwana Beast. It also features some of DC’s wackier villains like Crazy Quilt & Ma Murder. Not to mention the fact that it has a musical episode with Neil Patrick Harris playing the villain. Yes. Batman had to stop Neil Patrick Harris from taking over the world through song. That is a thing that happened.

Teen Titans

I’m not talking about any of the comic book incarnations of the team, but rather their animated show from a few years back. Yes, it’s a kid’s show. Yes, the animation has a discernible anime influence. You know what else it is? Fun. And funny. With good characters, solid action and the most awesome theme song in kid’s TV history. Also, its quality is a lot more consistent than Brave and the Bold’s, which had three seasons with a lot of ups and downs.

Young Justice

I like superhero cartoons, OK? The first season of Young Justice impressed me for being a good team show with likeable, three dimensional characters and a tight story focus. The overarching plot of a villainous cabal called “The Light” can get grating, but overall the first season was fantastic.

The second season is a little less so, far too many new characters who don’t get enough time and far too many plot threads running. It’s still a good show, though it’s looking like it won’t get renewed for a third season.

Brows Held High

One of my favourite review shows over on TGWTG, it’s a series on art house films, delivered with humour and intelligence by Oancitizen. Check it out. It’s cool. And I said you should. So ner.

Do beware, there’s often sex and/or violence in the films he reviews. Censored, but still.

Stuff You Like

Another review show. Here’s the show’s description: “Ursa presents Stuff You Like, where fangirls + analysis + awesome examples of media = good times for all.”

The videos are a little short for my liking, but Ursa combines intelligence and insight with the enthusiasm of a fangirl. Highly recommended.

Needs More Gay

These things come in threes, OK? Another review show, looking at male homosexuality and its representation in the media. Again, a little short for my liking but if you’re interested in issues of media representation and such like I am, this is a good show.

don’t take it personally babe, it just ain’t your story

The second game from Canadian indie developer Christine Love, who also created Digital: A Love Story & Analogue: A Hate Story. It has a title that annoys me for being very long to type and not having any capital letters, which upsets the pedant in me.

The game itself is a short visual novel where you play a new teacher who is given unrestricted access to the social networking accounts of your students, and face the dilemma of how to act on this information when it comes to helping them with their personal problems. I don’t like the thesis of its ending, or the way it forces you to read all your students’ communications, but its certainly an interesting experience and I hope we see more from Christine Love and her fascination with communication in the digital age.

Katawa Shoujo

I’ve already talked about Katawa Shoujo here, so I won’t get into it much here. It’s a visual novel in which you date one of five disabled high school girls. Please don’t be squicked out by the premise, this is a game that deserves attention and discussion.

Depression Quest

A short text game about suffering from depression. Obviously, trigger warning for depression. As somebody who’s had problems with depression, it does a pretty good job of showing just how hopeless and crushing it can be. If you do play this, please don’t treat it like a ‘game’ to ‘beat’. Make the decisions you would make. Play it through a few times, going through all the ways you could conceivably see yourself acting in those situations. Whether or not you have or do suffer from depression, it’s a good tool for helping to understand the issue.

*Sigh* Remember when I started this post and I was talking about superheroes fighting evil monkeys? Those were good times.

Should I Buy? – LEGO Harry Potter Years 5-7

A brief look back over my posts will show that I’m quite the fan of Traveller’s Tales  series of LEGO games based around famous franchises. I was quite taken with LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4 in particular for its emphasis on puzzles and exploration instead of the more linear, simple formula the earlier games had relied on. It wasn’t their best game, sure, but it was a fun experiment. So surely Years 5-7  must be a refinement on the original and a true classic of the series, right? Eh, not really.

It’s not a bad game by any means. It will occupy your time. It’s not that there’s a whole raft of problems holding it back, it’s more that Years 5-7 is just…going through the motions.

It recreates the films pretty faithfully, with the slapstick humour the LEGO games are so well known for. This does lead to some odd choices in order to fill out the necessary twenty four levels, but seeing a they’re pretty much all based around solving puzzles it’s not as noticeable or annoying as with other games.

A weakness of Years 1-4 was that the minimal fighting and lacklustre bosses meant levels often felt free of tension or danger and that’s certainly still present to an extent. There are more enemies added in when it makes sense, but the bosses aren’t really improved much. Most of them are just the same ‘puzzle’ recycled.

There is a true improvement on the combat, though, as Duelling has been added. You and your opponent stand in a circle and have to cast the appropriate spells to hurt each other. Again, it’s recycled without variation and is basically just another puzzle, but it does help to add variety and keep things fresh.

By far my favourite part of Years 1-4 was how Hogwarts was full of secrets to uncover, and as you learned new spells and abilities you could explore more and more. It helped pace the game and  give a real sense of growth to your main trio, seeing as you were almost always stuck with playing as them.  And yes, your characters do have to relearn a lot of their spells and there are special abilities you’ll need to get from buying other characters, but there isn’t the same sense of exploratory wonder any more.

Partly this is because your characters, despite the depowering, still have a large selection of powers off the bat. By the time you’ve played a good chunk of the story levels, you’ll have almost all of them. And finally, either finding all the collectibles is that much easier in this game or I’ve become some sort of LEGO game Zen master. Regardless, I got 50% in under two days without even trying.

My biggest problem with Years 1-4 was that if you needed another character’s skills while roaming Hogwarts, you had to backtrack all the way to a Polyjuice Potion in order to do it. Thankfully, Years 5-7  lets you use any cauldron in the Hub areas as any of the four available potions, and using a Polyjuice Potion gives you a wheel of characters who cover all the skills (provided you’ve bought a character with the necessary skills) to flick between with the press of a button. Problem though, why do I need to use a Polyjuice Potion before I can use this feature? It’s unnecessary busywork.

Should you buy Years 5-7? If it’s going cheap and you want a light distraction or are/have a rabid Potterhead in your life, sure. But it’s not one of the classics of the series. It’s an also-ran. It fixes a few problems of the original but fails to offer anything substantive or new enough to make it stand out.

In Which I Don’t Review Katawa Shoujo

A freeware visual novel/eroge based on the drawings of a doujinshi artist, developed primarily by 4chan users in which the player romances and, yes, sleeps with one of five disabled girls. Oh, and the title’s best translation into English is “Cripple Girls”.

Here’s a link to it.

Depending on what corners of the internet you inhabit, that was either a stream of useless gobbledegook or a series of alarm bells. But I’m here to tell you today that such fears are actually pretty unfounded. I’m not sure I can really say I’m a fan of Katawa Shoujo, but it is a brave, bold game that deserves credit for even trying to tackle its subject matter in the way that it does.

Yes, 4chan looked at porn and said “let us come together to make a respectful game about love, relationships and disability.” Also, dear 4chan users out there, I know I am riffing on the bad reputation the site gets but I know that you and the site are not the greatest hive of scum and villainy on this side of the galaxy. You guys do have some freaky porn, though.

And yes, while I’m addressing things I feel the need to point out two things Katawa Shoujo has. Romance, and sex. If you’re not into romance, then only a real interest in the representation of disability and disabled characters could possibly get you interested in this game. If you’re just here to get your rocks off with the sex scenes, they are both brief and rare. This game is not porn. And finally, if the inclusion of sex is a dealbreaker for you, then…well there’s an option to turn the sex scenes off but I wouldn’t recommend it as the sex scenes help give us insight into the characters and they can be just as important, if not more so than a lot of the surrounding scenes.

Down to business. You play as Hisao Nikai, a third year Japanese high school student who has a heart attack when a girl asks him out. Insert joke here. As it turns out, Hisao actually suffers from a form of arrhythmia and this is just the first time it’s ever amounted to anything. After four months of depressing hospital care, his parents transfer him to Yamaku High School for the rest of his final year, as Yamaku specialises in providing care and assistance for physically disabled students.

While there, events contrive to ensure he meets five girls. Hyperactive sporty Emi (a double amputee with prosthetic legs), artist and all around oddball Rin (who was born with no arms), Student Council President Shizune (who was born a deaf mute), severe social anxiety sufferer Hanako (whose right side of her body is covered in severe burns) and the half-Scottish Lilly (who was born blind). Your actions will set you on the path to a relationship with one of these girls.

I’m no expert on the subject of disability in general or any of the specific disabilities the cast have, so I can’t really say how good the representation of disability is here. From what I can gather, there aren’t any major criticisms people have with this game’s handling of its subject matter from a representational standpoint.

Still, this is the internet and I’m sure somebody does have a problem with it. Nothing jumped out at me, and to be honest the way that the game incorporated both the practical issues of life with these disabilities as well as using them to inform rather than define the characters was what kept me playing well after the point when the saccharine romance was losing its charm.

For example, in Shizune’s path, Hisao starts learning Japanese Sign Language so he communicate with her when her friend Misha (her usual interpreter) isn’t around. He realises how the loss of vocal tone means that a lot of conversational nuance is difficult or impossible and comes to understand why Shizune can be so blunt. He also realises the difficulty in using a rather rigid language to articulate complex thoughts and emotions, and how something like holding a box or eating lunch renders you unable to communicate. Through this, we’re given hints as to why Shizune is the way she is without it ever having to be stated through character conversations or ever outright confirmed as the truth as it relates to Shizune.

Getting back to that ‘saccharine’ comment…Don’t get me wrong, there are external and internal problems for both characters in every romance path that complicate and impede things, but the prose here is rather purple.  Thus, when things are happy or contemplative, saccharine. When they’re downbeat or introspective, angsty purple. While the dialogue won’t win any prizes, it’s not a purple as Hisao’s internal monologue and each character has a distinct voice. A professional editor would gleefully take pruning shears to the script, but it’s by no means unreadable.

Though for a freeware indie title from a team of non-professionals, the production values are rather high. Each character has a range of expressions and poses, the background music is pleasant enough and each path gets its own little animated sequence. The backgrounds do kinda suck, but I can forgive that.

This not a review is starting to sound an awful lot like a review, but I’m not really here to critique or pass judgement on Katawa Shoujo. Instead, what I really want to say is how glad I am that this title exists. Also, SPOILER ALERT.

Yes, each girl does have an ‘issue’ that their relationship with Hisao helps them face. This issue is always ‘letting somebody get close to me’, and may or may not be related to their disability. Instead, it’s Hisao who has to grow and change to ensure the happy ever after. He comes to Yamaku as literally and figuratively a broken-hearted boy, and each of his relationships help him find a way of coping with what he’s going through. And in doing so, he develops the kind of unhealthy trait you get from putting all your eggs in one relationship basket. Then it’s the girl he’s romancing that helps him snap out of it.

Take Hanako. She suffers heavily from social anxiety in addition to her burn scars. When the game starts, the only people she can bring herself to talk to are Lilly and Lilly’s sister and she regularly skips class to hide away in her room or the library. When you romance her, Hisao is too afraid of acting on his feelings for her because he sees her as too fragile for such things and is happy with just taking care of her. When you finally get to the big climactic moment of her arc, she tells you that it’s exactly that kind of condescending ‘care’ that’s stopped her from wanting to enter a relationship with you. She calls you out on seeing her as some scared child, and not a person and equal who, yes, sometimes needs time to herself or that little extra bit of TLC. The only way to achieve the happy ending is to have recognised throughout her path that your smothering approach might not be right, leading to your ability to truly realise your mistake and want to change.

Contrast this to when you’re romancing her friend Lilly. Because Hisao isn’t worrying over how to treat her or whether to make a move on her he treats her much like any other person, but becomes mindful of the fact that she likes her space and that not every silence has to be filled, or every absence checked up on. Because she has this new friend that shows she can interact with the world around her and her past experiences won’t necessarily be indicative of her future, she becomes much more open and outgoing than she started out as. She even joins a club and makes a friend outside of her little trio with Lilly and Hisao, something that is done firmly on her own terms.

Also, with regards to the sex scenes. They’re not porn, or even really erotica. Yeah, there is plenty of amazing first times and simultaneous climaxes to go around but there’s also scenes that are uncomfortable for the characters, whether it’s because they’re not emotionally ready or they’re trying something physical that doesn’t pan out.

And like I said earlier, the attitudes of each of the girls to sex and their actions in the scenes aren’t the sort of stuff harem animes are made of. The sex scenes are, by and large, used to inform the characters. Any titillation is really more a side bonus than an intended effect.

Also also, the  most you’re going to see is some boobs. Everything else just so happens to be out of shot.

Katawa Shoujo deserves to exist. It has earned its place in this world more than any of the dozens of mediocre AAA titles that get shovelled out every year. It deserves to be played and examined and debated. There are plenty of reasons not to like this game, be it the premise, its handling of disability, relationships, sex or female characters, the writing, the setting, the genre or the characters themselves.  But that shouldn’t stop you from giving it a go.

If you’ve got time to spare that is. Seriously, there’s a damn lot of reading to do to get through this one. It can be a good few hours before you even start a romance path. Thankfully there are dialogue skip buttons available in the menus for repeated playthroughs.

Should I Buy? – Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3

I don’t make any secret of the fact that I really like the Dynasty Warriors games and the associated spinoffs, something which is not common among a lot of professional reviewers due to how “formulaic” and “repetitive” the games are.

Usually I take umbridge with those words attached to a Dynasty Warriors game as I roll my eyes and go through the mental Rolodex of redesigned maps, new mechanics, tweaked movesets, overhauled weapon systems, brand new characters or gradual improvements in storytelling each iteration brings. But with Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3  those words really do feel applicable, at least to the game itself.

By the way, if you’re a Gundam fan looking to see if your favourite characters, Mobile Suits, musical tracks or whatever are recreated for you to play with I’m afraid I hadn’t seen a single episode before playing this game so I can’t help you there. Also, I haven’t played the two preceeding DWG games so I don’t know how much has changed for this third installment.  I’m sure it’s a big deal to some of you out there that Ribbons Alamark and Char Aznable can go Mobile Suit-to-Mobile Suit or have Setsuna and Amuro fighting hoardes of Zukos back to back.

Despite the same huge cast of loosely connected characters and frantic button-mashing combat being in place from the DW franchise, this game feels a lot different from the main series.

All the battles take place on a handful of small maps, made up of connected “Fields” that you battle for control for. Whenever one side loses a Field, their special gauge at the top of the screen drops by a certain amount. Once below 50%, an army’s Ace Pilots can no longer respawn and the powerful laser cannons at their Headquarters are powered down, making it that easier to move in for the kill.

In and of itself, this promotes moving fast from Field to Field, taking them from your enemies and claiming neutral ones in a furious, explosion filled tug of war. Thankfully, this isn’t all there is to it, as certain Fields are special bases that confer bonuses to the army that control them and provide incentive to pick a certain route through the battlefield and prioritise your target instead of just hitting everything you come across with laser swords.

Given that the special objectives in missions are both rare and seem to revolve entirely around which random Ace Pilots seem to be on the field (i.e. only Seabook ever gets ambushed by ‘Bugs’ that you have to save him from) this rinse and repeat formula of field claiming isn’t enough to sustain long missions. Which probably makes it a good thing that this game *has* no long missions. It’s always the same few small maps to scrap your way through.

I can’t really call that a problem though, the game doesn’t go all out on a story mode that would make such missions necessary and the fast pace of the game will probably ensure you don’t notice. Given that you’re into effortlessly slicing through hords of giant robots with laser swords on Easy, or mastering combo strings and block timing and emergency dash on Hard, that is.

Often Dynasty Warriors games bore me because their pace can be too slow depending on my mood, so pumping the action to a break-neck  pace is pretty much the perfect method of enrapturing me. Of course, everybody’s tolerance for repetitive missions and button-mashing is different so while it worked for me better than just about any previous DW titles, you know your own limits on the subject way better than I could.

I mentioned the story mode not being up to much above, and it’s really not. Each character (seemingly at random) is part of one of several groups who band together after finding themselves in some mysterious alternate dimension, and start battling over control of several self-replicating facilities. Each group goes through exactly the same motions, so only the characters spouting the lines are really any different. I’m sure all the people forced together by the whims of fate means something to a Gundam fan, but as I said before I don’t have that connection to the source material.

Aside from the story missions (which will probably take you a few days to get all the way through, just going by the sheer number of them), there’s an array of extra ones for specific purposes. History missions let you replay battles from the different shows, Collection missions let you fight themed collections of Mobile Suits to get the Plans for certain types, Relationship Missions let you get a huge boost to your Friendship with certain characters, etc.

Oh yes, Friendships.  You can forge one with each character in the game and levelling it up to certain levels confers bonuses, like being able to call on them for special attacks or unlocking them as either your mission control or a playable pilot. The system for levelling them up isn’t entirely explained and as such seems a bit random, but I can’t really think of a better way it could have been done that wouldn’t have made the production team cry for a week and go on crunch for an extra six months.

The music? The same high octane metal guitars DW games are famed for. The visual design? A cel-shaded approach which often comes off more as a really great 3d anime than it does a cel-shaded videogame. Seriously, it took me a long time to realise it even was cel-shaded.

Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 is no work of art, but it’s a fast, fun experience full of giant robots, laser swords and plentiful explosions. Except for the final boss. Seriously, even on Easy, that guy is some of if not *the* biggest bullshit, fake challenge I’ve ever come across in a videogame. Seriously, fuck that guy.

Should I Buy? – LEGO Lord Of The Rings

Who’d have thought that not only would the  gimmicky idea of mashing up LEGO and Star Wars into a videogame for kids not only work, but endure for nearly a decade without stagnating and branch out into some of the most beloved nerd culture franchises of all time? So far it’s taken on Star Wars, Indiana Jones, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Pirates Of The Carribean and now Lord Of The Rings. There was even that Rock Band spin-off that was actually better than Rock Band (not that that’s hard) .

Oh, and next for the franchise? Marvel Comics. No really, they’re making a LEGO Marvel game that will have over 100 characters including Spider-Man, Iron Man, Wolverine, Captain America, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, Deadpool, Loki and Galactus. I know!

After that? Almost definitely a Hobbit game. Another DC Comics game to capitalise on the planned Justice League film also really likely. Somebody gets these guys the rights to do Doctor Who and Star Trek. Not just the new revivals either, both new and classic versions of both shows should be made into LEGO games.

Anyway, the question you clicked on this link to have answered is “is LEGO LOTR any good?” Rest assured, it is. Maybe not the best, but certainly up there with titles like LEGO Batman 2 & LEGO Star Wars 2.

Squeezing Peter Jackson’s three Lord Of The Rings films into one videogame took a fair amount of compression that really shows at times. Sure, all the key scenes and plot points are recreated but this is one of if not the first time a LEGO game has cut out parts of its source material that could have made great levels, rather than expand small action beats into full levels.

This is most readily apparent with the Return of the King section, where Denethor is completely absent, and there’s no night raid on Osgiliath, no attempt to reclaim it, no trying to take over the Black Fleet, no lighting of the Beacons and no battle in the streets of Minas Tirith.

While it is a shame that both these and sections that weren’t in the film like the Barrow Wight aren’t in the game, the levels that are there are fun, varied and of a good length. Unfortunately, not all the characters are as great. Oh sure, their designs are all spot on but some like Merry and Pippin don’t get that much to do while others like Legolas, Gimli and Sam are so incredibly useful you’ll spend most of your time as them.

While it is fantastic that they’ve recycled the audio from the films, with both Howard Shore’s music and the original actor’s voices, none of the voices were re-recorded to make them better match the heavily shortened cut-scenes. It’s not a huge problem, but the flow from one line to the next isn’t quite as natural as it was in the films in terms of emotion or emphasis.

They’ve made a fairly big deal out of how Middle-Earth is a completely free roaming experience, and you can literally walk from Bag End to the Crack of Doom on the world map, passing through all the key locations. It’s scaled down just enough so that it feels big enough to encompass all those locations and secret collectibles yet not so big that it’s a chore to navigate and even if you do feel that way, there’s also a fast travel system in place.

While there’s just about every character you can think of from the films and a few more like Radagast and Tom Bombadil thrown in, most of them don’t have any innate special skills that make them useful in Free Play, and there’s basically no enemy exclusive skills you’ll need to collect so it can often seem like you’re doing it for its own sake.

There is a way to remedy this, however, with the also much vaunted item forging system. By collecting Mythril bricks, which replace the traditional Gold Bricks, and the appropriate schematics you can craft a large variety of items that give your character access to abilities they don’t normally have. By the time you’ve forged a good chunk of these items, you can pretty much demolish the entire game as characters like Arwen, Eomer, Rosey Cotton, Faramir or Lurtz.

But even this throws up a new problem. That’s not an option until you’ve already completed a good chunk of the game and fun as it is to replay levels and the like, a major part of the fun in LEGO games is going back to find all the crazy secrets as characters you love and/or didn’t get to use the first time round. Sure, the inventory system means that almost every character is precisely as useful as every other, but it takes a damn long time for that to happen. Time you’ll spend playing primarily as Sam and Legolas.

To talk about the controls, there are some problems there too. In order to access the inventory, you have to hold down a button to bring it up, from which you scroll through the items which seem to have no real order to them and pick one out. This is often way slower than just quickly switching to an on-hand character.

Also, most Mithril items can only be wielded one at a time and can’t be placed in a character’s own inventory, so every time you want a new one it’s back into the confusing menu. The only items that do get placed in your inventory (other than ones you pick up from the world map in the levels) are the various cosmetic items like the Goggles, Shimmering Armour and Statue Hat.

Switching characters is something which should be perfected by now, but LEGO Lord Of The Rings contains the most infuriating problems yet. For starters, the ‘press button to open character wheel, hold to bring up big menu’ thing quite often doesn’t register that you’re actually holding the button and just plain switches you over to the other character (at least on the XBOX 360 version). This isn’t too bad in and of itself, but when you’re in the middle of a particularly long or difficult platforming section and when you accidentally switch to Samwise waiting at the bottom and the character you were playing as has jumped halfway back to you by the time it switches back, it is really annoying.

There’s also an odd problem where the game seems to want to keep you as having one Hobbit sized and one human sized character at all times, perhaps to further enforce that Samwise and Legolas are the Gods of LEGO Middle-Earth. See, if you’re playing as Legolas but want to switch over to say, Frodo for his Vial of Earendil, the game will switch you to playing as the Hobbit in the player 2 slot and then change *them* into Frodo whenver you’re in Free Play or wandering the world map after finishing the story. Again, this doesn’t really become a problem until you’re in the middle of a platforming section, but they make up a a fair portion of the levels and a huge chunk of the post-story collect everything stage of the game.

None of this is insurmountable or game-breaking, merely frustrating. Oh, and like all the other LEGO games, there’s a fair few mostly harmless bugs to be found in this game.

Again, I feel like I’ve been way too hard on a game I actually really like. LEGO Lord Of The Rings has all the charm and polished design the rest of the series has, and a greater reliance on sight gags has meant they can keep their trademark humour without compromising the serious tone of the story.

There’s a lot of content, most of the collectibles can either be plainly marked on your world map, or are hidden in easy-to-find places and behind puzzles with an obvious start point in the levels themselves, so you can work through it all at a sold and productive pace without getting it done in a few dedicated sessions.

The puzzles and boss fights have by and large been simplified, but giving that this is a series aimed at kids being more readily accessible to both children and people who don’t frequently play videogames is really a plus rather than a negative. Actually, it’s probably one of the most easily accessible LEGO games out there.

In a sense, it is to Peter Jackson’s film trilogy what the Jackson trilogy is to the books. After a long time, finally a truly great conversion to another medium that cuts, changes and compresses where it needs to in order to fit itself into a new medium.

If it being a fun, long-lasting and well designed game isn’t enough by itself, let it be known that what you see below is real in game footage of an item that actually exists.

Should I Buy? – Saints Row The Third

Saints Row II surprised everybody by actually by not only good, but pretty damn funny too. Ultimately the process of grinding the same four or five side missions to be able to play the actual story annoyed me so much I gave up about three quarters of the way through so my expectations weren’t particularly high for the third game.

But rest assured, Saints Row The Third is still fun and humorous. It seems to have taken the sequel trope of “go big or go home” a little too much to heart. You begin the game by robbing a bank and firing an assault rifle with infinite ammo at dozens of SWAT troopers and attack helicopters, and ten minutes later you’re dumped in a new city and expected to take on the kinky mafia, a gang of luchadors and one whose design philosophy seems to have been “what if TRON had an anime series.”

There’s pretty much two games going on here, one is an over the top third person shooter that mixes the afformentioned gimps, luchadors, anime cosplayers and army dudes that seem to have been ripped out of Starship Troopers that, while goofy is still fun and the set pieces manage to impress most of the time.

The other is most of Saints Row The Third, the actual sandbox element. Remember how in GTA: Sand Andreas you could get in shootouts with other gangs to take over areas of the city and expand your gang’s influence? Well instead of doing it all in shootouts, The Third lets you buy up properties and take on special Activities as well.

I say “lets”, but “really, really wants you to” is closer to the mark.  Some of the missions consists of support characters introducing you to the activity as contrived ways of taking on the different gangs of Steelwater, and earning money is an important task. See, missions and Activities don’t pay that much and money is now used to buy upgrades to your character and gang, as well as guns and ammo. Each chunk of territory you take control of both gives you a higher income and cuts down on the number of enemy gang members on the map.

The economy system actually works quite well. You can’t buy an upgrade until your Respect has reached the appropriate level, and even then the increasing cost means you have to pick and choose the upgrades you want. Even by the end of the game, I’d conquered the entire city and bought some top tier stuff but needed rivers more cash to buy up everything.

That said, the upgrade system is not perfect. Some options are just kinda useless, like decreasing falling damage. Any time you actually fall from high enough to take damage, you can just use your infinite use parachute yo glide to safety. Or the ability to get cash from bumping into people. It never seems to top triple digits, and would take far longer bumping into random people to pay for itself than the game actually is.

As for the combat, the range of weapons is quite small. There’s the usual array of weapon types and some of the Special weapons are hella powerful, but not all that necessary or practical. Melee combat is quite fun, if only for the “groin attack” button and Heavy Melee button which sends you into a quick time event of graphic wrestling moves and physical violence. Combat is most of the game, and while not the Arkham Asylum kind of so fun you can play just that for hours on end it’s perfectly functional.

Driving works a lot better than Grand Theft Auto with cars having something almost approaching steering and being able to stand a few knocks. Strangely, the game provides two types of vehicle entry. One, where your character walks up to the door at an agonising pace and risks getting stuck on stray textures and another where you can you dive kick in through the window for half a street away. I see absolutely no reason why you’d ever use the first one.

The Activities themselves are a mix of wanton destruction, psuedo-racing and a few eclectic odds and ends.  Each one gets six different iterations  and in some cases, like the Insurance Fraud this is a shame as they’re inventive and fun. In other cases, like Trafficking (which doesn’t actually involve any drugs) are more just chores you’ll slog through. At least you’re often given indestructible vehicles or infinite ammo weapons for them.

While nothing in the gameplay ever really rises above pretty good, The Third is one of those games that’s very playable. I got through it after two and a half days of dedicated playing and still spent most of the next day playing it with a new character. It’s that same comfortable level of being diverse and competent enough to engage but comfortable enough to be able to half zone out and just unwind.

The story and characters are another matter. I was sad that the lack of different walking animations and reduced makeup options meant I couldn’t recreate my British Joker from Saints Row II, so instead I cranked the age up to maximum, gave him floppy hair, a tacky suit and all the facial scars I could and decided I was playing Evil Mick Jagger.

I grew attached to Evil Mick. The Boss has mellowed from II‘s wanton sociopathy into a more level headed character as part of a plot thread about the Saints selling out and becoming celebrities and losing touch with their criminal roots. The male British voice option is very snarky and enjoyable. The other characters don’t endear themselves as much, however.

Your beginning lieutenants are Shaundi, who is angry, and Pierce, who likes selling merchandise and playing chess. Alter on you’re joined by Oleg, who’s pretty much Team Fortress 2‘s Heavy without the gun, Zimos, some kind of ultra-pimp who talks with an obnoxious golden autotuning cane, Kenzie, an ex-FBI computer genius shut in and Angel, a grimly serious ex-Luchador.

The only ones who made an impression on me were Oleg and Kenzie. Knexie especially, seeing as she was a lazy, anti-social shut in who prefers the company of her laptop. Yeah OK, obvious points aside, there were hints of agoraphobia and such that gave her at least a veneer of depth.

Though you don’t strictly have to, you’ll often want to take breaks from the missions to earn cash, conquer territory and upgrade your skills. All sandbox games run this risk, of being unable to tell a cohesive story because of how stop and start players can be about actually doing the missions. The Third falls into it not necessarily by not keeping things episodic enough, but by being too non-linear.

Strange as that may sound for a sandbox game, as soon as you finish Act 1 you gain access to three new lieutenants, each of whom offers missions against one of the three different gangs and while you’re faffing about with them, the actual plot gets put on hold for a few hours. Not only that, but you can have two actual plot threads going on at once depending on which order you play the missions in. Though I’m glad they don’t lock off the islands until you’re done with each one like GTA, it wouldn’t have hurt to lock off the mission threads into a preset order.

The story works best when embracing its silly aspects and just goes for broke, which is a shame because it too often attempts to be serious. It’s a pleasantly coherent silly that plays it so nobody bats an eye when the city’s crime boss is a luchador with ‘roid rage who never removes his mask, or bats an eyebrow when the military start using laser rifles.

Some final points, but the game is bugged up the wazoo. I don’t know if this is just a problem with the XBOX 360 version or because I hadn’t downloaded any patches, but it was certainly a problem. Characters would get stuck inside textures, Follower AI pathfinding was terrible and sometimes Gang Operations would fail to trigger amongst other niggles. But really, niggles is all they were.

Also, the difficulty levels of an Activity is not always truly indicative. Take Mayhem, where the Hard versions are far easier because you get an infinite ammo rocket launcher, or one Medium version of Escort which is by far the hardest because you start at the airport, where all the one lane roads make it much easier for the news vans to hem you in.

Finally, when will a GTA or GTA  style game include radio stations that actually cater to a wide range of tastes? Even the stuff in the genres I actually like was boring and forgettable. I know licensing pop culture classics is expensive, but licensing nothing is better than licensing 98% crap, as you can tell by playing any Guitar Hero style game after III.

So that’s Saints Row The Third. A flawed and sometimes infuriating gem. If you can overlook the slightly wonky design choices and disjointed story there’s a lot going for it. I certainly recommend it if you want a timesink.

Showing, Not Telling: How To Give Exposition Quickly And Effectively

Mild Spoilers ahead for the TV show “Young Justice”.

I’ve been on a binge of the TV show Young Justice recently, a well above average animated show from DC about a group of teenaged superheroes. Season 2 shakes things up by having a lot of important events having happened off-screen between seasons, and as such has a lot of information to be imparted.

Some of it is so clunky it’s near painful, such as when Lagoon Boy tells Nightwing that he used to be Robin so that we, the viewer know that he’s Robin from Season 1. Other times it’s so well integrated and multi-faceted that it looks like it belongs in a textbook.

I’m going to talk about one such time. The video below is not timestamped to play at the important part of the clip sadly (I did try). The section I’m talking about runs from 2:56-3:28.

That was one of the best 32 seconds of television I have ever watched, from a writing standpoint. Seriously, it shows and suggests a number of character traits and a relationship dynamic without ever outright stating any of them. OK, so the name “Wonder Girl” does get spoken, but I’m giving it a pass. Now, I shall list what those 32 seconds tell us.

1. Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl are partners (2:56-2:57): Both are flying in unison, with a serious expression. Their movements and temperaments match in this shot. It says “hello, these people are here now and they work together”.
2. Wonder Woman’s physical prowess is established (2:57-3:04): OK, chances are you know that Wonder Woman is hella badass. But this is primarily a kid’s show, and kids (or adults) watching may not know who she is. You can’t count on “she fought in Season One” as a reason for people to know either, as not everyone will have watched from the beginning. Instead, a few brief seconds of Wonder Woman being badass introduces her and some of the gravitas she carries.
3. Wonder Girl is relatively new to superheroics, and greatly admires Wonder Woman (3:05-3:10): Wonder Girl’s admiration for Wonder Woman is obvious, what with her fangirling right in the middle of battle and all, but what’s interesting is the implication. This does rely on further context, but all the necessary context can be found in the same episode. When Wonder Girl witnesses Wonder Woman’s prowess, she drops her defences and squees over her mentor. Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, Lagoon Boy and Superboy are all present with their mentors, yet none of them act this. Instead, they work in synch with each other and communicate (mostly) vital tactical messages. Wonder Girl is set apart by her lack of professionalism.
4. Wonder Woman is a strict mentor, and far more professional than Wonder Girl (3:10-3:15): Wonder Woman sees that Wonder Girl is in danger, and immediately moves in to protect her from injury or death at the hands of her own unprofessional nature, while simultaneously admonishing Wonder Girl for her error. Wonder Woman’s tone is serious, and her expression is unchanged from her entrance. With this we can see that Wonder Woman is calm under fire, able to keep up with the flow of combat, attentive of her surroundings and that she does not let mistakes pass unnoticed.
5. Wonder Girl, while raw, is a powerful and effective warrior keen to learn from Wonder Woman (3:16-3:26):  Once her mistake has been made clear to her, Wonder Girl composes herself for battle and defeats the two giant alien spider tanks that nearly hit her in short order. Her tactic is a revised version of Wonder Woman’s, using her lasso to destroy the machines from a distance. With this, it’s clear she’s trying to emulate her idol and mentor, but also that she recognises her own physical limits and adapts the tactic to suit her abilities. The next two points are also on this section of footage.
6. She doesn’t have Wonder Woman’s level of strength: Instead of pulling the whole tank into the air, Wonder Girl is only able to rip off a vital part of the machine (with some difficulty). Also, note how when Wonder Woman uses her lasso, our attention is drawn to the fact that she was standing with both feet on the ground, lifting the machine into the air with brute strength before using its momentum to slam it down. Wonder Girl instead flies up so that she can pull the tank part towards her, which would require less strength.
7. She’s a fast thinker: Whether she planned it from the beginning or it only occurred to her as that giant hunk of tank was flying towards her, at some point she realised she needed to deal with said tank hunk. Either way, she thought very fast, using a potential weakness and making it into her advantage.
8. Wonder Woman cares about Wonder Girl (3:27-3:28): This is my favourite moment of the whole sequence, and it was what made this clip stick in my mind. These 32 seconds are a story unto themselves, and this brief smile from Wonder Woman is an amazing cap to it. Despite how strict and serious she is, and how much of a contrast this is compared to Wonder Girl’s demeanour, this smile shows Wonder Woman cares. Not just about her physical safety, but of her growth as a hero. She sees Wonder Girl pull out an impressive move on the fly and is proud of her. These 32 seconds say more about their characters and their relationship than some shows manage in an episode.

There, textbook. Eight important pieces of information delivered with very few words spoken. No need to have whole episode devoted to explaining this, 32 seconds will do. Although, dear Young Justice producers, I still want a Wonder Girl episode. And a Batgirl one. And a Robin one. And I want Zatanna back, dammit!

Why Tidus Saves Final Fantasy X

SPOILER WARNING

Whether you like it or not, there’s no denying that Final Fantasy X is a sombre, dark game. The peoples of Spira have spent 1000 years living to a strict religious code under the very real threat of wide scale death and destruction by Sin; a creature that can only be destroyed by a Summoner who has completed their Pilgrimage and will always come back when it is killed. There have been four such Summoners in the past 1000 years. Most die on their journey. And when you add into that an evil religion and a genocidal maniac, things don’t get any happier.

A lot of criticism has fallen on the game’s lead character, Tidus. His detractors call him whiny, stupid, vapid and all round inferior to Yuna or Auron, the game’s other main characters. I say no. Tidus may not be a great character like FFIX‘s Vivi, but he is absolutely necessary to allowing a player to experience the world and story of FFX and without him, the plot as is would suffer heavily.

If you don’t have Tidus in there, you need to completely rewrite the script.

First of all, the world of Spira contains a lot of key concepts like Summoners, Aeons, Yevon etc. that need explaining to us, the player. Yuna, Lulu, Wakka, Kinahri, Auron and Rikku already know this stuff ad verbatim and likely have done so since they were tiny children. Tidus serves as our viewpoint. The naive newcomer it’s justified to exposit to.

Imagine if, when setting out on her pilgrimage, Wakka said “So where we goin’, ya?” and Yuna followed up with “Well, you know how I’m a Summoner who is training to defeat that giant monster thingymabob Sin…”

Yeah. Wouldn’t work, would it? But Tidus does more than do the Luke Skywalker/Harry Potter uninformed newcomer role. He’s an important source of levity.

He has his moments of doubt and despair, relating to his personal story of being a stranger in an exotic land, his issues with Jecht and as reactions to Yuna’s Pilgrimage. But these are tempered by him being the only party member until Rikku to show enthusiasm and optimism as a rule rather than as an exceedingly rare exception.

Whether it’s cheering Yuna up with the oft-misunderstood and maligned laughing sequence (they’re meant to be laughing extremely forcedly, and at the end of the scene they break down into genuine laughter) or giving Aruon something to snark at, Tidus does a lot to offer a different emotional tone to a scene or plot point than weary resignation.

Also, without Tidus, how would we get anything out of Yuna? She does open up without Tidus instigating it a few times (notably in her “goodbye sphere” in which she leaves messages for her Guardians to find after her death) but for the most part the Guardians who aren’t Tidus or Rikku are just as resigned to Yuna’s upcoming sacrifice as she is.

Without Tidus they could have focused more on the emotional strain between old friends that this foreknowledge puts on her, but this would negate the emotional sucker punch of finding out about the fact that Yuna has to sacrifice herself earlier and would be a lot darker without as many of the light hearted moments the other, Tidus-oriented approach provides.

As Jim Sterling recently talked about on his web show The Jimquisition,  comedy is a very necessary element to tragedy. You need moments of levity and positivity in order to not become some dull depressing affair. He’s nowhere near as good a leading man as Zidane of FFIX, but he allows the tragedy to be stronger through his positive attitude.

Also consider this; Sin is a boring enemy. We don’t actually cares about the giant magic killer whale thingy blowing up towns, because it’s just a big whale monster. The investment comes from the characters, from Tidus’ relationship with Jecht and the corrupt church/crazy Seymour subplot. These are what keep our interest through the slog of going from temple to temple.

Seymour and the Yevon church are stories that operate entirely independent of Tidus, but they also both only engage for so long. The Seymour thread starts in Luca and is basically over by the time you leave Bevelle. Sure, he still turns up to be fought and kill off a shitload of Ronso, but he ceases to factor into the plot in any meaningful way.

This is a shame, as his “kill everybody” motivation could have been replaced by something deeper and he could have been a much more engaging villain with a greater longevity but alas, his potential does get rather squandered.

The other emotional journeys in the game are Tidus’ romantic attachment to Yuna and his relationship with his estranged father Jecht. The romance with Yuna is surprisingly out of focus, more a by-product of  his efforts to keep her spirits up than just him wanting to get his rocks off.

But the relationship he has with Jecht, who has since become Sin (or at least the power source for Sin) runs from roughly Besaid up until the penultimate boss battle. Jecht is a constant shadow over Tidus who has helped inform his entire character. While it may mean that Yuna doesn’t get much of a look in in the end-game emotional stakes, it does ensure that somebody does.

I will admit, you could have replaced Jecht as Sin’s heart with Yuna’s father Braska in order to create a a stronger emotional connection for Yuna at the endgame, though seeing as she only has love and not animosity for her father, I  feel the Jecht choice is superior as it’s not so emotionally one-note. Tidus’ final conflict with Jecht shows how Jecht has matured, accepted his wrongdoings and that he does love the son he mistreated, as well as allowing Tidues to vent his issues and come to accept his father. And tell me his “I hate you dad” line isn’t also saying “I love you” in the subtext.

You may have noticed I haven’t mentioned the corrupt church of Yevon in the emotional stakes for this game. It does have some emotional relevance for Yuna, Auron and Wakka but Yuna puts it behind her before they reach the Calm Lands and never speaks of it again and Auron’s is more of a “now they finally know” vibe he gives off. Wakka is the only character to be really affected by this and it does serve as a nice little sub-plot for him, but ultimately doesn’t affect the emotional stakes of the game as a whole.

And that’s my thesis. You cannot have the story they told without Tidus, and without his kind of influence, you wouldn’t have a story as good and emotionally complex. I may still have problems with some his characterisation, but I find Tidus to be overall a good character.

Should I Buy? – Warriors Orochi 3

The works of Koei, now Tecmo-Koei, are a rather love it or hate it affair. Koei is best known for its two Warriors series, Dynasty Warriors set in the Three Kingdoms Era of ancient China and Samurai Warriors set in the Sengoku Jidai of feudal Japan.

They both follow the same basic hack’n’slash structure, you choose a character and beat up on folk through a recreation of a historical battle. In Japan they’re well received, but in the West they’ve never really caught on thanks in part to critics deriding the entire series as repetitive regardless of what changes were actually made between iterations.

Warriors Orochi is a subseries which unites the casts of Dynasty and Samurai Warriors into one game. Why? Because it’s freakin’ awesome, that’s why. With WO3 some of the greatest warriors, strategists and leaders of Asian history are united to wage war against demons. See what I meant when I said it was an awesome premise?

Those of you who have played a Warriors game before will find the basic combat mechanics incredibly familiar, as this is essentially more of that. For those of you who haven’t, each character has a one note personality, a ridiculous weapon and can string together a variety of combos from their “Normal”, “Charge” and “Musou” attacks to slaughter waves of footsoliders and the occasional enemy officer.

So, the excuse to have Oda Nobunaga facing off against Guan Yu this time is that several years after the events of WO2, the demon army returns with a giant 8-headed Hydra at the…head of it. Unfortunately, the war against the Hydra goes south and we start the game with only three of the game’s impressive 132 playable characters still alive. And so just when it seems that Sima Zhao,  Ma Chao and Takenaka Hanbie are about to fall, the Mystic Kaguya rescues them and takes them back in time to find a way to destroy the Hydra.

From here the game’s story consists of the various characters using their knowledge of the past and future to revisit important battles in order to turn the war around. This makes for a surprisingly interesting tale, where one character can lament the loss of a close friend, only to travel back in time and save them.

I appreciate and admire Koei’s attempt to craft more engaging and mature stories for their Warriors games over the years, but WO3 won’t knock your socks off in the story department. While it’s perfectly competent in what it tries to achieve, with such a huge cast it can’t ever focus on the development of the major characters that would be necessary for a truly engrossing story.

Attempts have been made to invigorate the combat with a few extra tweaks that keep things flowing faster. For example, you can now combo straight off of a rush attack and switching a character mid combo will make them come out swinging, allowing you to extend your combo with all the tricks your two allies can bring to the table. All these changes work and give you a lot of new options to experiment with.

Unfortunately, most of the characters who lost their unique fighting styles in Dynasty Warriors 7 don’t regain them here, though there has been some effort to shake things up. As a tradeoff for this though, each character is stuck with one weapon style instead of being able to chop and change between two on the fly.

The shared movesets aren’t as annoying here as they were in DW7 because A) you have dozens more characters to play with and B) the focus on the more obscure characters means that you won’t have to put up with the damned Spear and Sword movesets all the time.

Tecmo-Koei have come up with a rather elegant solution to the problem of managing the huge cast. Each mission has a set of “Recommended” characters, who often tie in to the particular story thread at hand. Thanks to the “Growth Points” system, you won’t have to keep on carting a load of level one characters into battle. Growth Points are basically EXP that gets put into a bank from which you can assign them to any character you like.

Though you can get a good few days out of the Story Mode, once it’s done you can’t restart it without making a fresh save. You still get the pre and post mission briefing, but not the connecting cutscenes and such. If you’re not the sort of person who can keep replaying old battles without a sense context, this might give you problems.

Another potential problem is that each battle is very much intended to fill a role within the story, and as such are highly based around completing certain objectives and not big pitched battles. Sure, you can ignore these objectives, but this will often lead to the odds becoming highly stacked against you.

Unfortunately there’s no “Legendary Battles” for each character like some of the other games, or versions of famous battles like Sekigahara or Chi Bi to play. That a few of the maps get recycled isn’t as much of a problem, however, as they’re not that common and each time it does happen, the allied and enemy armies tend to be laid out in completely different patterns.

There are a few other things I should mention. the most important is the lack of English voice acting in this game. Though everything has subtitles, some people may be put off by this (especially as it has that problem where the text is tiny if you’re not using an HD TV).

There’s nothing wrong with the Japanese VAs, though I found myself thrown by how wildly differently some of the characters sounded between versions.  The biggest of these was the contrast between Guo Huai’s deep raspy death rattle in the English version and his high-pitched Japanese version.

The other thing to mention is that this game includes a number of guest character from various Tecmo franchises. Included are Ayane from Dead Or Alive, Ryu Hyabusa from Ninja Gaiden, Joan of Arc from Bladestorm: Hundred Year War, Achilles from Warriors: Legends of Troy and Nemea from Trinity: Souls Of Zill O’Ill. Which is pretty cool.

It’s pretty fair to say that you’ll get out of Warriors Orochi 3 what you get out of any Warriors game. If you’ve never played one, this game is an acquired taste but if it grooves with you there’s a lot to be got out of it.

The various team mechanics and overall polish can make for a lot of crazy combo options, combined with the numerous difficulty settings means there’s a lot here for players who like to master a game to find. If you’re after something casual then playing a few battles on Easy Mode every now and again is a fun way to pass the time, especially with a friend.

But if you’re after a great story then this isn’t the game for you. As nicely as it’s presented, this game is about the mechanics first and foremost.

Warriors Orochi 3 is available on XBOX 360 and PS3, although it is exclusively a digital download for the PS3.

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Physicist's revenge

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18701200

This was the moment Peter Higgs has been waiting 45 years for. This was the moment scientists from the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment, at CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) confirmed that they had found a Higgs Boson like particle and have confirmed the finding to 5σ significance (I’ll come back to this in a bit).

Okay, this all well and good, but what does it mean and why should you care?

Well, I can’t answer that. I can tell you why Physicists care and you can fucking well decide for yourself whether you care or not!

Okay?
Okay.

Now, the first question you’re asking is “Why am I reading this blog?”, the second question is probably “what is a Higgs Boson exactly?”. Excellent question hypothetical reader!

In a nutshell it’s the holy grail of particle physics. It’s something that has been sought after for the past 45…

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Should I Buy? – Penny Arcade On The Rainslick Precipice Of Darkness Episode 3

Which, to save me from typing out that mammoth title every time, shall henceforth be referred to as Rainslick 3. The history of this series is a little troubled, the first two being fully 3D hughly linear riffs on JRPGs, Cthulhu mythos style apocalyptia and Penny Arcade’s trademark humour. Though the first one did reasonable business, the second game (despite being superior) only sold half as well and the series was shelved for several years until a deal was struck with Cthulhu Saves The World dev Zeboyd Games. Zeboyd signed on to complete the quadrilogy, their own irreverent humour and use of antiquated JRPG mechanics nicely  matching Rainslick’s.

So how’d it do? Well, for the most part. Obviously there’s been a severe graphical downgrade which unfortunately a lot of Penny Arcade’s signature art that made the first two episodes look so great is missing. Luckily though, Rainslick 3 trawls through the Penny Arcade backlog to deliver a host of familiar creatures like the Broodax and the Deep Crows.

The music, while also a departure from the previous episodes, is enjoyable though not exactly memorable stuff that’d sound right at home in any given 8 or 16 bit JRPG.

Character customisation is obviously gone, in its place is an entirely new combat system with four party members. See, each character has an innate Class, like Brute or Scholar, and characters can equip Class Pins to gain additional classes like Hobo or Tube Samurai which level up and learn new skills just like the innate ones, with the bonus of being switched between the team for different strategies.

I gotta say, some of the class pins are downright worthless. Whether its a lack of skills or just downright terrible skills some will simply not be useful whereas others like the Hobo and the Elemenstor are more useful than some innate Classes.

Items are also pretty useless, though only at lower difficulty levels. At high level play the additional stat boosts and other such effects become much more useful as battles become more protracted.

It also uses the full restore after every battle shtick to both streamline play and to promote the use of as much power as you can muster in each fight, fitting the surprisingly fast pace of the battle system. See, MP starts at zero and you get one point each turn, so you have to play strategic and think ahead. Luckily most techs fall between one or two MP, but anything beyond that won’t see frequent use.

It also has a unique time mechanic that, while a little tricky to get used to, adds another layer of strategic depth to the title. See, when nobody’s doing anything all the icons representing characters and enemies move along the bar at the top of the screen and when they reach the ‘CMD’ section, you get to input the command which won’t come into play until it reaches the end of the bar. But if you use an attack with the Interrupt property on an enemy who’s between CMD and END, they’re sent waaaaaaay back along the bar. Newcomer Moira gets cheap techs that do just this and if effectively used, make boss battles laughably easy as they struggle to get a single turn in.

The secondary Classes are an eclectic mix. The Hobo is a hard hitting bruiser with a powerful poison type effect in the “Hoboism” disease that works so well when given to Gabe, but at the other end of the scale you have classes like the Masochist and the Diva which have weird, weak effects and undesirable side effects. You’re likely to find one good combination and stick with it the whole way.

All in all, combat works really well. It’s more forgiving and a little more laid back than Zeboyd’s previous games, and the difficulty that you can adjust on the fly will allow you to find the challenge sweetspot.

Which is great news, because this game basically is dungeon crawling. Sure, there’s a world map with some shops and such but dungeons are everywhere, to the point where one dungeon has two more inside it.

This is a shame in some ways, as we miss out on a lot of the dialogue the previous games revelled in. It’s still sharp and witty, but most of it is loaded onto the front of the game and the plot seems stretched pretty thin over the game’s many dungeons. Penny Arcade’s great writing is there, there’s just not enough of it.

Despite being plentiful, the dungeons are pretty small and bare. What Zeboyd can do with combat, they do not match in area design. It’s way more a series of rapid fire gags than a string of impressive set-pieces. Well, so long as you’re not in one of the dungeons with a plethora of damn durable monsters, in which case it’s a slow gag that you will just want to end.

I’m not entirely sure where it is that the narrative elements fail to come together. Perhaps its that the villain doesn’t get enough screen time? Or that the game doesn’t explain its plot as well as the previous entries? That the previous two were much more focused in design and location and subsequently much more narratively focused? Probably some combination of the above.

The expansion on the hinted at Brahe family history is interesting, if a little mishandled. Also Gabe, whose childlike enthusiasm and simple-mindedness are somehow even funnier than Tycho’s caustic wit and misanthropy in these games, gets a dramatically reduced line count as the game progressed. Tycho’s ex-wife Moira holds promise but her relatoinship with Tycho is never followed through and she fails to really leave an impression.

But the game is a blast to play for fans of old school JRPGs, easily eight hours long (the length of most single player campaigns in AAA titles these days) and great value for the ridiculously low price they’re asking for it. Seriously, you could buy this game with pocket change…If the pocket change were actually in your bank account cause you have to buy it digitally…

Anyway, I totally recommend this as a fun distraction to while away a couple of afternoons or one dedicated day.

Should I Buy? – LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes

Over the last nine years, the LEGO crossover games have slowly been refining their mechanics and it’s pretty obvious with LEGO Batman 2 that they’re still working on it. As fun as LEGO Batman 2 is, it’s pretty rough around the edges. In some places, it’s just a few niggling bugs that shouldn’t have made it through, in others its design choices that are confusing or questionable.

The LEGO Harry Potter and LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean  games experimented with a fairly limited sandbox as opposed to the traditional mission hubs that you can adventure through and explore to find secrets, and LEGO Batman 2 ups the ante by giving you all of Gotham when you’re not playing the story mode. There’s a wealth of content including villains to defeat, heroes to discover, citizens to save and more beside. It’s almost a shame that the weeks you could spend finding all this stuff can be muted to a couple of afternoons once you find the cheats that point out the locations of all these things.

Travelling around the map itself can be a bit of a headache. Of course running about is way too slow unless you’re The Flash, so you’ll want to rely on vehicles and the power of flight to get around. The actual unlockable vehicles like the Batmobile and Two-Face’s truck are really fast, to the point where trying to drive them in anything other than a straight line is a hassle. Flight itself works great for gross motor control, but when you try to make small movements to, say, land on a small roof, things get infuriatingly fiddly.

That said, flying is fun and fast and pretty widely available. Just in the course of playing through the story, you’ll unlock Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern as flying heroes so actual aircraft become rather pointless. Not quite as pointless as aquatic vehicles though, which have no use other than the Gold Brick containing driving courses. When you play one of the rare vehicle levels, you don’t even get the choice of your unlocked vehicles. It’s kind of a mystery why they bothered, and this is one of the areas where the game where things get questionable.

What about the story mode? Well, it’s the first fully voiced LEGO crossover game and the second to use an original story, so it’s a pretty big change from the standard format. The humour is much less slapstick this time around, but still has that same goofy, irreverent charm which is really helped by the healthy application of DCAU VAs reprising their roles and other experienced VAs  stepping into the empy slots. Christopher Corey Smith’s Joker is fine, but does lack the range and sheer insanity of Mark Hammil’s, Troy Baker makes for a good Batman, though I do miss Kevin Conroy. The real star of the show is Clancy Brown’s Lex Luthor, whose deep voice is equally adept at making Lex sinister and comedic.

The story itself is just as silly as you’d expect, with some pretty questionable logic on the villain’s part. Fifteen levels being pretty short as far as a LEGO crossover game goes and the story feels truncated and aguely unsatisfying for it. Any villain that isn’t the Joker or Luthor get the short end of the stick, basically being reduced to cameos. Still, the levels are fun and make good use of the character’s abilities.

Remember how in the original LEGO Batman the hero levels were the most boring because the limited number of abilities meant there were only so many ways you could be asked to solve a puzzle?  2 handles the situation a lot better, with the new Suits Batman and Robin wear each having two different abilities instead of just one and the design requiring a lot more cooperation than before. And when Superman comes on the scene, he’s just as powerful as you’d expect. He’s super strong, can fly, has heat vision, ice breath and is completely invulnerable to damage. However, he can’t demolish levels by himself and relies on Batman and Robin to fill in the gaps for him, meaning that the other two don’t turn into useless loads.

If nothing else, LEGO Batman 2 is a great representation of why Batman and Superman make such a good team. Unfortunately, there’s no villain levels this time around to counterbalance the hero ones which might leave you feeling short changed, given how the original game had twice the levels.

The much vaunted inclusion of characters from across the DCU doesn’t really make itself apparent until the end of the game. Apart from Cyborg, they’re not high on the versatility scale so you probably won’t be using them much unless you’re a real fan. Green Lantern and Flash do have unique abilities, but it’s pretty rare that you’ll need them. Actually, Aquaman is more useful than they are in the grand scheme of things. Aquaman! Among the Batman villains, there’s also a few from other heroes like General Zodd, Brainiac and Sinestro. Though this leads me to one of the design choices that annoys me most. Sinestro can’t build Green bricks like Green Lantern, but there are no Yellow bricks for him to use, and neither of them get a ranged attack, so Sinestro only gets to fly and Green Lantern’s one special trick is very situational.

But that’s a minor complaint. And those are all I can really muster. It looks great, it’s funny, the soundtrack mixes Superman and Batman music together well, there’s plenty of content for the explorers to find and hey, where else can you play as Huntress, Hawkgirl, Ra’s Al Ghul or Captain Boomerang? Also, whenever you take to the skies of Gotham as Superman, that music plays.

In Which I Don’t Review Persona 3

WARNING – MILD SPOILERS FOR PERSONA 3 & 4 IMMINENT

I frikkin’ love Persona 4. It stands as one of my favourite games of all time and every few months I get pangs to go back and spend time with those characters again. So I was really excited to crack open Persona 3 FES and experience another such game.

I didn’t get it.

Let me just say that if you’re a fan of the game that’s great. It just wasn’t for me.

Setting aside the slightly differing mechanics and the darker tone, the real difference between 3 and 4 is in its narrative railroading. One could quite reasonably argue that 4‘s gigantanormously long introduction and fairly frequent and lengthy cutscenes are too much and there’s not enough time spend playing the game as opposed watching it, but in my opinion it used that time to make me care for the characters and set up clear goals and conflicts.

Persona 3 was, for the twelve hours I logged on it, a hell of a lot more vague about what was happening or why I should care. I hadn’t met any characters that I *really* liked or was interested in and I had no idea what the overarching plot was. But in about four hours of cutscenes and exposition at the start of Persona 4, I knew very clearly the personalities of each of the characters I’d been introduced to. I had favourites and quotable lines and despite being more than a little fatigued at all the cutscenes, I knew where I stood, what I was doing and why I was doing it.

The third playable character in 4 is introduced a little over half an hour in and becomes playable at about the four and a half hour mark, by this point I know her hobbies, mannerisms, relationships with other characters and why she’s with the team. The third playable character in 3 is just brought to the dorm one day with Akihiko informing us he’s a Persona User and part of the team now. Sure, he was in one cutscene or so before where I learnt he knows Yukari and she doesn’t like him very much (very, very understandable). That’s it. We don’t even get to see his “awakening” to his powers.

I get the 3 is meant to be more of a slow-burner, plot wise, but in not yanking me by the leash and giving me a reason to care like 4 did, I didn’t form any attachments to it. It’s kind of like how I feel about sandbox games and games with customisable protagonists. If I’m not given a narrative or mechanical ‘hook’ early on and have to find my own somewhere down the line, I’m likely to just not find one at all and if that happens, I won’t care and I won’t play.

Sometimes a game needs that freedom. It took me quite a while to ‘get’ Fallout 3, but I love that game. But then again I spent about three or four hours wandering around the countryside in Oblivion with no idea what I was doing, how anything worked or why I sould care and, well, I didn’t care. I turned it off and never a backwards glance did I throw it.

And that’s why Persona 3 disappointed me so. It didn’t give me enough of a reason to care. Seeing as I was renting it and therefore paying to be unimpressed with it, twelve hours is all it got from me. Sorry Persona 3. Maybe you got really good at the thirteen hour mark, but I’m not willing to search any further to find the brilliance in you.

Should I Buy? – El Shaddai

OK, I have no idea what is happening most of the time in this game. All I know is that my eyes did not want it to stop. Just, just look at this trailer.

That doesn’t even do it proper justice. If nothing else, it’s worth checking out El Shaddai on a big telly just to marvel at the visuals. Though any one of the myriad styles this game adopts over the course of its story could hold a game, it never sticks with any one of them for too long.

I could relate a plot summary but 1) the trailer already does that and 2) going in completely ignorant and getting confused by this game is a  marvellous way to experience it. That and…beyond the basics, I spent most of the time not knowing what was going on. Of course, this isn’t indicative of an intricate and gripping story but it does mean that I get to endlessly reply “How the El Shaddai know?” when people ask me what’s happening.

Truth be told the very archetypal and somewhat neglected narrative isn’t a real weakness. In its own way it’s actually a strange strength. It gives the game a feeling of bigness that nicely matches the visuals and general ethereal feel of the design and execution.

But OK, enough dilly-dallying with the artsy visuals and narrative, what’s El Shaddai like to play? Pretty fun. It’s not too long, 6-10 hours depending on how good you are and pretty bare bones. For the most part it switches between 2D & 3D platforming and third person combat that has more than a smidge of Devil May Cry about it.

The biggest barrier to success in platforming is that the visuals and camera angles can make distances and timing hard to judge, though the 2D sections mix it up with elements that appear to be part of the background actually being foreground elements that you need to interact with. It’s not Mario Bros., but it gets the job done.

The combat takes a while to really get the hang of. You, as Enoch, are able to wield three different weapons by taking them from the enemies you fight, and each one has its own properties, special moves, strengths, weaknesses and all that stuff. Even if you’re playing on Easy, you’ll still be challenged pretty much constantly and punished for your mistakes. The jeopardy isn’t too great however, as you get a free extra life in every fight. This’ll be pretty much necessary for when you reach El Shaddai‘s bosses.

They all hit like a demonic truck full of TNT, but it’s like a more complex form of the old platformer bosses where each attack had a specific tell and there was a counter to each of their techniques. Learning and mastering all this is pretty damn tricky, however. This is a game in which there is no shame in bumping down the difficulty.

All in all El Shaddai is an experience in the good sense of the phrase. It won’t change your life, but it will challenge you and enchant you with its beauty. If you’re the type of gamer that likes a challenge, you’ll probably get some life out of replaying on higher difficulties when you’re done. And if you’re a lover of great visuals, you might want to keep the game and occasionally replay it. But if none of these an hold a game for you, it’s probably just a rental rather than a full on purchase.

Either way, this is one of, if not the premier current gen Japanese action-platformer based on Biblical apocrypha you should play.

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shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows

About a week ago, I wrote a post on Penny Arcade vs. Rape Culture, which sent my blog traffic skyrocketing after it was linked on Reddit. However, both in comments on the post itself and elsewhere on Reddit, quite a few people seemed to be missing the point: or, more specifically, misunderstanding what rape culture actually is and how it applies to gaming. One commenter, in fact, responded thusly:

My mind is boggled that you feel righteous in condemning something people enjoy, especially when it’s not even real. Do you realize that’s what you’re doing? You’re standing up and telling all these people, people you don’t know, that what they’re enjoying is *wrong*. You don’t have numbers or statistics or any sort of fact behind you quantifying how what they do is wrong. None. Telling people that what they enjoy in the privacy of their own homes…

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In Which I Don’t Review Suikoden V

So I rented Suikoden V recently cause it’s Goddamn Suikoden and has a pretty impressive pedigree behind it. I didn’t really like it. The beginning was way too slow (after twelve hours of gameplay I’d barely gotten to the actual meat of the game) and left so many parts of its mechanics unexplained that even though I had a fleeting knowledge because of my time with Suikoden IV I just couldn’t get into it.

But I’m not here to review it. Instead, I want to talk about something that puzzled me.

See, the nation of Falena from which the hero hails is a Queendom. I’m all for gender diversity and alternative socio-political-economic-cultural structures in videogames but nothing’s ever done with it.

Well, OK, spoiler warning for the first 12 or so hours of the game. So you’re the Prince of Falena but in the Queendom, obviously only women can inherit the throne so it falls to your younger sister, Lymsleia, to inherit the throne.  This seems like it’d be setting up a female dominated society, which could let us see men undergoing gender based assumptions and persecutions, but instead it’s just a place with a queen. Sure, the people and her knights are loyal to her, and nobody questions her executive power, but in the hierarchy of Falena she’s the only woman (bar two others) of high office we ever get to meet.

The others are Raja, the Falenan Admiral who worked her way up from commoner status during the last civil war. But she runs the nomadic boat-based town of Raftfleet and seems to hold no sway in the kingdom except as the leader of Raftfleet. During the second civil war – the focus of this game – the Godwins have their own loyal contingent of the navy led by a man. Then there’s Lady Haswar, the Queen’s cousin and the Oracle of Falena. Despite it being an important religious role, she lives in a tiny mountain village and only ever seems to play a ceremonial role in proceedings.

All the members of the Senate we meet are men. The commander of the Queen’s Knights and, by extension, the entire Falenan army, has always been the Queen’s husband, the King. And he’s not selected by the Queen choosing a suitor, instead there’s a giant gladitorial tournament called the Sacred Games which determines the winner.

Even among the Queen’s Knights there’s only one woman and one young woman as an apprentice, and we never see any female guards or more than a handful of women in all of Falena who have jobs that weren’t traditionally associated with men. Those who do have what would be considered atypical jobs based on old fashioned gender assumptions, like doctors, are almost always one of the 108 recruitable Stars of Destiny or turn out to be a plot important NPC.

It’s also made clear that the Queen’s rule is not absolute. The Senate members have their own lands and loyal soldiers and citizens and so the Queen must play politics herself  to skirt around them in order to get things done.

What I’m really bemoaning here is the missed opportunity. I have a few theories about why the writers settled on having a Queendom but I’m not actually sure. It’s never explained. I’m not saying that I buy into Rune Magic and Dragon steeds but I can’t buy a woman being in charge. I’m saying that it strikes me as lazy to give no explanation as to how this socio-political structure (unique to Suikoden as far as I know) works and functions. The writers could at least follow through on the whole “women in charge” angle to gender-flip the traditional power structures. Like, it was the foundation for a great story with facets the series hasn’t really delved into before but instead we got the bog standard Suikoden plot.

Am I asking too much? Back in the PS2 era we hadn’t really started asking “Big Questions” as a community, so perhaps taking a series so grounded in tradition and making a radical shift in its gender policies would be too mu-no, wait, that’s stupid. Persona 4 gave us the stories of Kanji Tatsumi and his struggles against society’s perceptions and his possible homosexuality as just *one* of its character studies and that was a PS2 game.

Persona may well be “about” people, but Suikoden isn’t a game with a completely traditional take on gender politics. Since Suikoden I there’s been a healthy array of female fighters and not just in a “rebellious tomboy fighting even though she’s not meant to” kind of way. We’ve seen mercenaries, knights, magicians, strategists, explorers, heroes, villains; it’s had them all.

I don’t think the inclusion of a Queendom was meant to be a lip service to feminism (and if it was, it was pretty piss poor). It was probably because this game being set before all the other Suikoden games that Falena was mentioned to be a Queendom and they had to run with it.

Either that or it was an attempt at narrative convenience. They want you to play as a prince because “girl protagonists don’t sell videogames”, isn’t that right Samus Aran and Lara Croft (how sad is it that they were the only two consistently appearing, long running, mass recognised videogame heroines I could name)? And introducing a female lead to a long running franchise never works, does it Terra Brandford and Lightning? Also, the heir to the throne has to be a princess because no *woman* could manipulate a prince into being a figurehead, right?

There are arguments and counter-arguments to be made how necessary a Queendom is to the plot but it quickly gets convoluted. To reiterate, I am not attacking women in positions of power, or gender equality. I just really feel like Suikoden V missed a trick. With so many different ways they could have played it, it’s almost a shame they chose to tell the story they did with the world they’d created.

And here’s the really…heavy? important? controversial? whatever. Here’s That Part. As horrible as it is to admit, humankind has in 99.9% of cases created patriarchal societies with the role and power of women either never present or squashed as the patriarchal power structure became more entrenched. And we still don’t have true gender equality anywhere in the world.

I get the want to make our fictional worlds into utopias, like how the Federation of Star Trek was basically a socialist conclave of races based entirely around the promotion of peace and knowledge, and as Star Trek proved those settings can still give us amazing stories.

But as much as fiction is about escaping the unfairness of life, it’s also about dealing with it. Whether it’s speculative sci-fi or fantasy trying to understand how and why humanity could be changed by our advancement as a species, post-colonial literature bridging the gap between the cultures we destroyed and the ones we imposed on other people, romance novels letting us fulfill our unmet desires, adventure stories giving us the pulse-pounding thrill we crave or maybe we’re just empathising with how alone and under pressure Harry Potter feels as he struggles against the world around him.

And so too our fiction should meet matters of gender equality and other Serious Issues head on and tackle them. Of course, there’s places for fiction that does that and fiction that doesn’t. I don’t ‘hate’ Suikoden V for not tackling these issues, and I don’t feel that whenever we see women with power in fiction it ‘needs’ an explanation.

But I do feel that whenever we get ‘feminism-but-not-really’ in our fiction, like a woman stated to be all kinds of badass but really does nothing like Kate from the BBC Robin Hood series that it kind of demeans the fight for women’s rights that are still being fought for today.

I just feel that Suikoden V had a chance to do something really interesting with its setup of a Queendom, and if it had done any of the things mentioned above I would probably have stuck it out just to see what they did.

Suikoden V isn’t bad. In the end, it just wasn’t for me, even though I can see it’s what a Suikoden game is meant to be and competently pulled off. But it was like seeing an advert for some “All new Big Mac! Like nothing you’ve ever tasted before!” and getting yourself worked up, only to find it’s no different than before.

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Sarah Ditum

I’ve got a lot of time for good people. If I can choose who I spend my days with, I’ll always pick the good people over the evil, murderous, power-hungry ones. Life’s just nicer with good people. But good people are also – and no offence intended towards good people; like I said, some of my best friends are good people – not always very interesting. That’s why fictional worlds quite often feature not-entirely-good people: they’re just better at drama.

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Should I Buy? – Catherine

For some people, just hearing that this game was made by Atlus is reason enough to buy this game. See, the developers have a certain reputation. They’re known for making very difficult JRPGs, specifically two series. Megami Tensei and Persona. Both are different flavours of weird and are known for different things, but this time around instead Atlus have switched genres to bring up Catherine, which in terms of narrative structure more closely follows the standard set by the Persona franchise.

But instead of JRPG this time around we have a puzzle platformer with sheep as its main motif. Yeah.

Also this is the first time I’ve noticed the constant reuse of voice actors between projects. Apparently it was quite deliberate this time around, as the actors were chosen because their previous roles suited these ones. Which is why it’s pretty easy to hear who’s who. There’s a galumphingly large couple of paragraph at the end about which game I found out these people are also from if you care to read that kind of thing.

OK, so Vincent Brooks is a 30 something slacker dating Katherine, his slightly bossy girlfriend of some years. He spends most of his nights drinking with his friends and tends to blow his excess cash on junk he doesn’t need, and hasn’t got round to making a commitment yet when the wild, flirty young Catherine walks into his life and he starts an affair in his drunken stupor.

In his everyday life, Vincent has to deal with multiple problems, like the guilt of his affair, whether or not he wants to commit to Katherine and the various other problems this all throws up, while at night he has this bizarre dream of having to climb a tower with a bunch of sheep or die. All while a mysterious affliction is killing off men who cheat.

The story takes place over a week in which you, as Vincent must decide the course his life will take. This is done not only by surviving the nightmares but also in the responses you give to the various things Vincent gets asked, which are tracked in a little bar on the screen.

Structurally, it’s about as linear as you can get. Each day plays out the same way, you have some cutscenes, you hang out at the bar, talking to the patrons, getting drunk and texting both C and K, then you go home and get to the real meat of the game. The nightmares.

Even on Easy Mode they’re tough. Using the unique physics of blocks comprising the towers and the various special properties you must ascend to the top. Each night has multiple towers to ascend, and each night ends with a Boss encounter, who will try to disrupt your climb with various hazards  and in the grand old Persona tradition represents various anxieties in Vincent’s life that he has to overcome in order to not only survive but grow as a person.

You’ll die a lot. I suggest finding an easy place to grind lives early on.  But as this is Atlus, the difficulty isn’t ever too high to deter you so long as you select the appropriate difficulty (which will probably be easy mode). Instead, it’s actually quite addicting and as you continue to play you’ll realise you continue to learn, devise and use more and more advanced ways of solving problems.

The difficulty isn’t so much a curve as a collection of jagged peaks and harsh drops. This generally depends on whether the level in question is meant to be a puzzle or a quick dash to the top, because the various hazards are pretty easy to learn to circumvent making dashes simple whereas the puzzles will always stump you.

Luckily, the game keeps the formula fresh with new hazards on pretty much every stage, even up to the very end.

There’s even a game within the game, an arcade cabinet called “Rapunzel” in the Stray Sheep (name of the pub) which has its own huge collection of tower climbing puzzles.

Apart from that, the other ‘sidequest’ as it were is trying to save the other men in the shared nightmare. Various sheep in the in-betweeny bits of the nightmare have distinguishing features like wearing a tie or a cop hat that helps you recognise who they are in the real world.

By speaking to them in the nightmares and when they enter the Stray Sheep, you can help talk them through their problems and give them the strength to overcome the nightmares too.  This is just an optional thing, and doesn’t affect the ending you receive.

So, with a game so focused on the story and characters, how well does it work? Pretty well, actually. Despite Vincent’s inability to say any of the things he needs to say to either woman, it’s nice to see him making his emotional journey and how it’s not just “things go from bad to great”. As a character arc it really lets us see him grow as a person and learn to appreciate him as a character.

The two -atherines don’t get as much growth or screen time, but both work as foils to each other and there are valid reasons why a person would want to pursue a relationship with both of them, as well as why a person wouldn’t want to.

Vincent’s friends are a fun bunch, each one have a particular viewpoint that means that whenever Vincent talks his troubles through with them, you get an array of advice. Luckily, they’re not just strawmen there to illustrate different viewpoints, they’re people with problems of their own going who’ve been shaped by their pasts. They’re not as complex or interesting as the main three, but they’re still pretty darned good.

The other characters that inhabit the Stray Sheep also have their own particular reasons for appearing in the nightmares built out of their own neuroses which come out of sympathetic backstories, but they’re a lot more expository about everything. I’d still put them slightly above average, but they’re really not great.

The story as a whole is a nice interplay of themes with some interesting characters and doesn’t artificially stretch itself to accommodate extra gameplay but as a game it’s pretty short. Depending on how fast you can go through the puzzles, there’s two to four days in the main story.

As for extra play value? Well, there’s a multiplayer mode that I didn’t play because multiplayer and a challenge mode called Babel with its own ending that requires high score to be attained in the Story Mode which I didn’t play because bugger going through Clock Tower on Normal mode.

While I would have had trouble justifying this purchase when it was at full price other than it being an Atlus game and we should buy every damn one of them so they keep releasing them outside of Japan, now that you can buy it cheaper I’d say it’s worth the investment if you like tough puzzles or good stories.

Vincent is Kanji Tatsumi of Persona 4 fame and Snow from Final Fantasy XIII, Catherine is Dissidia‘s Cloud of Darkness, Final Fantasy XIII’s Serah, Persona 4‘s Rise Kujikawa and Street Fighter‘s Chun Li. Katherine is Street Fighter‘s Crimson Viper (Chun Li’s rival, natch) and Dynasty Warrior‘s Sun Shang Xiang.

Orlando in Final Fantasy‘s Kain Highwind, Toby is Persona 4‘s Yosuke Hanamura (he’s even doing the exact same voice).   Johnny is Dynasty Warrior‘s Zhou Tai and Street Fighter‘s Guile,  Boss is Dynasty Warrior‘s Xiahou Dun and Erica will be the new VA for Chie Satonaka in Persona 4 The Arena (which is totally getting a Japanese and European release! Also why the hell are they changing Chie’s VA!?)

Should I Buy? – Batman Arkham City DLC – INCLUDING Harley Quinn’s Revenge

This isn’t a review of the Game of the Year edition because I don’t own that, and truth be told I’m also missing the additional Challenge Pack from my purchases so I can’t in all honesty say I’m reviewing the content in the GOTY version.

If you want to see what I thought of the main game, that review’s here. This review is for the Catwoman, Robin, Nightwing, Skins and Harley Quinn’s Revenge packs.

A final note, the prices here are in Microsoft Points. If you want prices for PC or PSN, I’m sorry but you’ll have to track those down yourselves.

Catwoman Bundle Pack

This was launch content included for free with all new copies of the original game and costs 800MS points to buy. It adds the four “Catwoman Episodes” into the main game, as a separate option on the main menu and adds Catwoman as a playable character in the Challenge Mode.

Her episodes are quite short, the first one is just a small fight sandwiched by cutscenes, but flow pretty well as they were obviously designed in tandem with the main game to flow into each other.

Though the rest of her episodes are of a better length, they’re still fairly short and lack any of the big set pieces that Batman has. If you just zip through the story aspects of the episodes, they’ll pass by pretty damn fast and you may start to wonder just where your money’s worth is.

In my opinion, that’s in the post-game content. Just like how you can control Batman after the plot’s over, Catwoman’s fully controllable in the playable epilogue section as well as the aforementioned Challenge Mode and this is where you’ll really get to stretch your feline legs.

Cats plays as a much weaker but faster version of Bats with much fewer tools  to work with. She only has her whip for exploration and there’s only two more gadgets but this works. She’s not a super-rich badass detective, she’s a cat burglar and though she’s competent in a fight, she doesn’t have cash, know-how or need for any of Bats’ trinkets.

Her animations make good use of her lighter frame and sex appeal to give a real sense of character, even when she’s fighting. Learning quite how to handle Cats is a bit of a curve as you can’t tank as many hits as usual, but it’s just as fun as Bats.

Instead of a Grapnel like Bats, Cats whips to things and then climbs them. Though annoying at first, I got into quite a groove with it and ended up preferring it to Bats’ grapple. Though it trips me up every time that you can end up exposing yourself to the enemies you’re trying to ambush while you’re swinging across an area.

In Predator situations Cats does come with the added ability to cling to grated ceilings.  This helps to make up for her lack of tricks, and it, along with her “Thief’s Vision” (which doesn’t list the number of enemies or even flag the ones with guns a different colour) force you to think and act more carefully.

All in all the Catwoman Bundle Pack was worth it for me, but if you’re looking for a solid story expansion this probably isn’t the investment for you.

Robin Bundle Pack

Robin was, until Harley Quinn’s Revenge, a Challenge Mode only character. This Robin is Tim Drake, by the way, famed for his use of a staff in combat and currently Red Robin in comic continuity.

In this game we have a Robin wielding a retractable staff, and he makes full use of its properties in a fighting style that makes him rather unpredictable. He’s stronger than Cats and faster than Bats, and several of his Gadgets have interesting properties.

For example, his staff can throw out a frontal Bullet Shield that’s handy for tight spots, and he can instantly zip to an enemy in battle instead of pulling them towards him like Bats does.

In terms of difficulty for Predator Challenges he’s between Cats and Bats. He’s a bit fiddly to get used to, but his unique properties mean that if you want to mix things up, he’s a good candidate for it.

At just 560 MSPoints for him individually or 1200 Points for him, Nightwing and the bonus skins all together which’ll save you several hundred points.

Nightwing Bundle Pack

Now the only one of the four playable characters with no story mode, Nightwing is a lightning fast bruiser who really struggles in Predator challenges. Also, strangely, he doesn’t speak at all. Just kind of scowls. Which is really weird for Dick Grayson.

He makes Batman feel slow as a turtle and Catwoman as weak as a newborn kitten with his Escrima sticks (which are now also stun batons). I also really admire his fighting animations, which really drive home his acrobatic past. Actually, I’m calling it. The fight animations of Batman Arkham City are the finest in gaming history as far as I’m concerned. Every single attack the heroes have feel like a part of the character and what they’re about.

Nightwing is priced the same a Robin and part of the 1200MSPoint The Arkham Bundle as well.

Arkham City Skins Pack

This pack is really just something fun, it doesn’t affect gameplay at all. Batman gets about six different ones, Cats and Robin get two and Nightwing only gets the one. It costs 400MSPoints, so track down pictures of the costumes and if you want them, go buy it. There’s not really any more to say than it’s 400MSPoints alone or part of the 1200MSPoints  The Arkham Bundle.

Harley Quinn’s Revenge

Look at me! I’m topical! This DLC came out at midnight and I stayed up late playing it especially for m-er, you. It’s an additional short story campaign set after Arkham City‘s ending in which you get to take control of both Batman *and* Robin. that’s right, the Dynamic Duo are tackling this caper together.

Basically, Batman went missing investigating Harley Quinn’s base and Robin goes in when he doesn’t pop back for more Bat-mints. Like the Catwoman story, it’s split into four segments, two for the Dark Knight and two for the Boy Wonder.

The thing I noticed first was that the difficulty has been ramped up. Enemies seem to hit harder and faster and a lot more of them are armed now. This was a bit infuriating at first, but I managed to adapt.

Though I like that they introduce sections to explain how Robin’s gadgets can be used to interact with the environments like Bats’, but his sections are so short they never really get used more than once or twice. Robin’s sections feel more like a proof of concept demo at times.

But I’d still call them the highlights. Bats’ sections feel a little padded and less well thought out. Almost like it was meant to be an all-Robin story until someone upstairs pulled the plug on that idea.

There’s been some pretty obvious corners cut. Most of the places you could explore in Joker’s turf has now been forcibly closed off, to the extent that parts of the scenery have been destroyed. Still, there is a new warehouse area where most of the action takes place, including a Predator battle for Robin against Quinn and her goons that provides a fun challenge.

At 800MSPoints I had to put a tenner on my account to get it and I did finish it in one sitting of maybe an hour or two but I still enjoyed it. As to whether it’s worth it? Well…that depends on how much you like the game and whether or not you want more.

And really, that’s my verdict on all the DLC for this game. It’s enjoyable and if you want more out of the game, then this’ll probably see you right. In the end I can’t give it the giant gold stars the main game gets, but it’s by no means bad content.

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An article that politely redressed some of the anti-genre fiction sentiments in a much more eloquent and informed way than I could.

Surprise!

Yo hey, Elijah

I realise I have neglected my duties as ‘editor’ quite severely. I thought I’d give you something I hope will make you smile instead. You don’t mind a surprise hack-but-not-really-a-hack-because-I-have-the-blog-details-surprise-post, right?

Yeah. Trolololol ahahahahah hello!

Love, or something.

Lemons

Should I Buy? – Final Fantasy XIII

Oh dear. Final Fantasy XIII isn’t very good. Not that it’s a *bad* game by any measure, well OK by a fair few measures, but I don’t hate it and I kind of admire how it tries to do things differently. Some of them even work.

To give a quick over-view of the plot with a few spoilers, there’s this giant floating world called Cocoon in which people live. And then there are these weird angel-like things called fal’Cie that provide power, food etc. Outside of Cocoon is the mysterious “Pulse”, which has its own fal’Cie that want to destroy Cocoon. The player characters are made into l’Cie (super-powered slaves) of a Pulse fal’Cie and tasked to destroy Cocoon because…pancakes and along the way must question…oh, many things.

I don’t cherry pick the most prominent ones because the damn game can’t ever seem to decide. This is where most of my complaints come from. The game suffered from a pretty far-reaching array of internal problems. The English script was rewritten so often that the dialogue had to be re-written five times.

The narrative  holds most of the flaws. The dialogue has that slightly clunky feel that most Japanese games do, but it’s in the broad strokes. Characters will shift motivations on a dime, not address fundamental differences of opinion in the group, make senseless decisions, have strange outbursts that they never address again, the villains are poorly characterised and almost entirely absent, plot holes you could drive an airship through…It’s all kind of a mess. Not that I blame the English translators entirely, it’s clear there was only so much they could do with the original story.

To be fair, everything connected to Snow that doesn’t involve the words “hero” or “Serah” really does work, not just in the character himself but also in how others react to him. In fact if it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I’d be able to discern any character from Lightning other than “she seems like a bit of a bitch” and Hope would have literally no arc or reason being tagging along.

Let’s talk about the actual game itself. After all, we went decades where stories were an excuse to play a good game so let’s not pin a game down because it fails there.

The basic idea in combat is that your three characters can have one “paradigms” which basically amount to jobs like warrior, black mage, white mage etc.  active at a time, and you can set up different combinations of roles and switch between them on the fly to adjust to the flow of battle.

And that’s about it. You only control one character at a time, and even then it’s only this weird quasi-control. You have an Auto-Battle option that queues up the most useful actions based on your paradigm and the battle situation, and there’s few times you’ll want to choose a different set or do something different. Items are almost non-existent and the only other option is to Summon your Eidolon or use one of half a dozen or so Techniques, most of which aren’t that useful.

It works well enough. It’s not exciting, but once you gain the ability to set your own paradigms and switch between them on the fly there’s a kind of “yay I used tactics kind of” feel to proceedings.  Which is way too late in the game, but ah well.

Levelling up is done by earning points at the end of a battle and then using them to unlock a new Node in the Crystarium to get the next bonus, whether it’s stats or ability. You might be wondering how this is any different from the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X. Well, each character has their own version of the Crystarium that ensures they’ll perform differently in a paradigm somebody else has because they’ll learn different abilities.

For example, as a Ravager Hope is all about powerful spells because of his sky high magic stat, but Lightning mixes it up with special “-strike” abilities that rely partially on her strength to do damage cause she’s not so hot a spellcaster.

In an effort to prevent power levelling, only so much of the Crystarium is available to you at one time, the rest being locked off until the plot says so. For the first two thirds of the game, this keeps pace pretty well with the plot, so that you can max it out with just a little grinding.

But then the final third hits and all of a sudden there are huge bonuses real close together. Except they now cost thousands of points instead of hundreds for each of them. Dick move. Literally days of grinding are necessary to be able to progress beyond this section of the game.

Finally, weapons. You can, every once in a while buy a new one from a shop or find one in a chest. But there’s not really much point. The point is to upgrade your weapons with items you find to increase their stats but these stat increases are pretty minimal and the added bonuses some weapons have aren’t really worth it.

Not that finding materials is hard, oh no, after a certain point you can just buy them (which you can do easily because after the first few hours Phoenix Downs are the only items you’ll ever need) but this just makes it a hassle to buy new items and then go through the process of upgr-ahhh no pointless mechanic go away.

That’s…pretty much it. For a Final Fantasy game there’s really very little to it. It looks pretty enough, I guess, the character designs are fairly under control and the music’s decent if not anything especially memorable or beautiful.

I don’t hate it. I don’t regret having paid £10 for it. But I really don’t know if I’ll ever replay it. I know it sold well, but  I can’t really find anything from a narrative or mechanical standpoint to justify giving it more than a 6.5 out of 10.

Inoffensive, playable but also repetitive with head-scratchingly bad plot.

Stuff You Should Really Be Into 2 – The Revengening of Blood Death

So over the past couple of months I’ve been enjoying a site called thatguywiththeglasses.com, a collaborative site where many, many video reviewers review stuff and I thought I’d share it with you all so in no particular here’s my top 5 That Guy With The Glasses reviewers.

1. Doug “The Nostalgia Critic” Walker

That guy with the glasses himself, Doug’s Nostalgia Critic character reviews nostalgic film and TV shows. Well, ones that are from roughly the 80’s to the 2000. They’re comedy skits in which his larger than life character makes jokes about the bad characters, writers, acting, effects, plotholes etc.

It’s a bit MST2Kish,  but the videos usually don’ t run any longer than 15 minutes, so it’s really him just picking the highlights to make fun of.  He’s got a huge backlog of stuff and it’s well worth checking out.

2. Lindsay “The Nostalgia Chick” Ellis

Like The Nostalgia Critic, the Chick is a comedic persona that reviews nostalgic films and TV shows. Although she was hired to be the female Critic, reviewing the girly stuff Doug couldn’t, she’s evolved into a more analytical reviewer and because of that is my favourite on the site. Sure you get to see somebody making fun of bad films and it’s still funny, but I often feel like I’ve learnt something from watching her videos. Also, her friends Nella and Elisa who appear in her videos are hilarious.

Also also check out Elisa’s Vampire Reviews too.

3. Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug

The site’s comic book guy, the Linkara persona is an angry man dedicated to reviewing bad comics. He’s pretty forgiving to them though, and a lot of what he points out are from what he’s learnt from decades of reading comics. It gets a little continuity nitpicky at times, but he’s still funny and well worth a look for comic fans.

Oh, and he’s also got a series dedicated to breaking down each series of the Power Rangers and reviewing them. Fuck yeah.

4. Todd “Todd in the Shadows” Nathanson

Why do I like this guy? He reviews pop music, which I’m really not into, has terrible production values and never reveals his face. But he’s hilarious. His persona is that of a pitiable, angry young man and a lot of the humour comes from his over-analysing the lyrics and thematic content of the songs, exposing their bad writing. He does also cover the music and technical side of things, but it’s not the focus.

I haven’t even heard of most of the songs he’s reviewed, but I watch these videos just for his spin on things.

5. Hope “JesuOtaku” Chapman

JesuOtaku is the anime reviewer for the site. I’m not much into anime, but I still enjoy her serious breakdowns of the technical and story/character focused breakdowns of the shows she reviews. She hasn’t really got a comedic persona like the other reviewers, but does have comedy skits related to the show she’s looking at at the beginning of her videos that’re always worth checking out.

She’s also part of the Desu Des Brigade of anime reviewers, creating a Digimon retrospective like Linkara’s Power Rangers one and a lot more besides.

Honourable Mentions

I like both The Spoony One and the Blockbuster Buster as well, but I haven’t looked at as much of their stuff and they don’t quite break into my top five. Check them out too.

And there it is gang! I really urge you to explore the site, there’s a lot of great stuff there.

Mass Effect 3 Fans Just Can’t Be Pleased – SPOILERS – ALSO KINDA RANTY

Look, I was there with you all when we got pissed off about the ending. I called for DLC from Bioware. I even defended the idea of an author compromising their work to please their audience. But I kept some perspective. Bioware have promised  to give us the closure we were all saying we wanted. I respect that they don’t want to change or rewrite the endings they have or add a new one, and I don’t think they should.

This is Shepard’s story, and you may want your to raise little blue babies with Liara, but to me a story this big about someone this important can only end with that person dying. We can respectfully disagree on that.

But according to a poll of nearly 3,000 players on Bioware’s forum had 84% of participants say that the new ending DLC isn’t enough. Apparently, getting what we asked for isn’t good enough. We need the same “epic battles” and cookie-cutter happy endings everybody else needs.

But about that battle…were you not there? Maruaders and Brutes and Banshees spawning from four different locations, completely encircling you in a place with no adequate cover as you fought desperately for the future of all sentient life against impossible odds? Did I just dream that? Is that part of the Indoctrination Theory too now?

I didn’t really mind that the endings were more Arthur C. Clarke than Star Wars. It was their lack of integration and explanation that irked me. That looks to be what they’re fixing. And I can work with that. In fact, I’ve gotten over the ending completely now. By the time they’d announced the new DLC, I’d stopped caring.

Because it’s just a video game.

Like Star Wars is just a bunch of films, Transformers is just an old (and kinda bad) cartoon. These are huge, formative parts of various eras of our lives but that doesn’t mean we have to hold them to these unreachable standards. And we shouldn’t be so damn bitchy when we don’t like what we get.

Video games and films and cartoons and comics and all that stuff are important. I get it. Really, I do. I’m right there arguing that pop culture is  more vital and culturally truthful  than any amount of “High Art”. But at the end of the day, politics, the environment, charitable works, scientific advancement, your job/grades/social life/love life/whatever are more important things to spend your time on.

Mass Effect was a trilogy that tried to give a rich, original universe and compelling, transmutable story on a scope that just seems to be too big for them to really pull off.  Bioware really don’t deserve this level of hate.  They gave us Baldur’s Gate, Jade Empire, Dragon Age, KOTOR, The Old Republic. Remember all that stuff? Yeah. Good stuff.

In fact, Bioware’s one of the most consistently good studios out there. Who else really matches up to them? Valve sure, but who else can you name that’s been delivering such consistently good games for so long?

And considering the wealth of wonders the Mass Effect trilogy has given me, let alone their other works, I can forgive them a shitty ending.

Should I Buy? – Mass Effect 3

Yeah. Review’s over, roll credits.

OK OK, here’s the real review.

So it’s about a year after Mass Effect 2 and Shepard’s effectively been put under house arrest by the Alliance and the old gang have once again parted ways. So when we rejoin Shep, it’s about five minutes before the Reapers attack Earth. Ah. That could be problematic.

Anyway, you escape Earth with Joker, new squadmate James Vega and whichever person survived on Virmire. For me, that was Kaidan Alenko (former runner up to Jacob Taylor for the prestigious most Bland Mass Effect Character Award). You leave Earth in order to try and unite the fleets of the galaxy to rescue Earth destroy the Reapers once and for all.

A strength of the Mass Effect games has always been in their atmosphere. Not so much in scene-to-scene but in the overall feeling of each game. 1 was a Space Opera with a very positive, Star Trek-esque outlook on things, 2 was the dirty underbelly of the galaxy and 3 does a good job of infusing the game with a sense of foreboding and a general sense that everything is going to hell.

It’s all in the little touches like how Batarians, Vorcha, Volus and even Aria are willingly to straight up help with no strings attached, or the little conversations between various NPCs that evolve over several visits and tell their own stories.

Things are, like they promised, faster, tougher and more shooter-y this time round. The addition of combat rolls, a better cover layout, easier ways of moving between them and decent melee attacks make it a lot easier to be more active in combat. And you’ll need to be because not only are the enemies smarter, but they specialise and work together. Vipers will rush you down in melee combat while a Nemesis tries to pick you off with his sniper rifle when you pop out of cover etc. etc. etc.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to move out of cover when you don’t mean to, and even though sprinting is now unlimited you can’t move the camera while you’re doing it which can be a real nightmare at times.  And your team mates aren’t as smart as the AI a lot of the time.

In terms of squadmates, fan favourites Tali and Garrus return, as well as Liara and the Virmire survivor, with Mr Vega and a surprise character. They seem to be trying to do the Mass Effect 1 thing where each of the six squad members represents a different player class, but having both Vega and Ashley Williams will mean you have two Soldiers and no Sentinel, and you have two Engineers but there’s no Vanguard type unless you get the From Ashes DLC and even then he’s a ranged fighter, rather than a destructive close range bruiser.

This is only really a problem if you have a particular tactic that doesn’t gel with the available squadmates, and they’re as well written as ever. Well, most of them. I’ve never seen the big deal about Liara and I can’t get a proper bead on her in this game. She  keeps that weird new voice from 2, but seems to oscillate between her differing personalities from the two games without ever settling down.

Garrus is probably the best written character after the DLC squadmate because he’s the Goddamn Space Batman. Although basically all he does this time around is bromance with people.

Vega is a character I thought I was going to hate, he looks like a meathead and was designed to be a soldier with little knowledge of galactic politics. And yeah, though he can be pretty ignorant of basic stuff at times, he’s not an uber-macho jock. In fact, he’s pretty serious and well adjusted. He’s clearly a highly competent soldier and if you don’t mind a bit of bluster, he’s a pretty cool character.

I’d also like to give special mention to Kelly Chamber’s replacement, Specialist Samantha Traynor. She’s a civilian who was on the Normandy when it fled Earth and she has her own little arc about adjusting to military life on ship and she ends up being one of the two lesbian options a FemShep can explore.

Oh yeah, only Kaidan can be romanced into a homosexual relationship out of the squadmates, lesbian Shepards have to make do with Samantha or the aggressively bland new reported Diana Allers. Kind of a cop out in my opinion, Dragon Age never had a problem with characters engaging in homosexual relationships. But at least it’s there.

And if you don’t romance either Garrus or Tali, they end up in a relationship together. BEST. PAIRING. EVER.

The bulk of the game is trying to secure the support of the major players in the galaxy through a series of missions. This gives the effect of the game having several self-contained arcs that you move between.

And while I can’t speak for all the romances you could carry over from the first two games, I can tell you that great as it was to see Jack again and see how she’s grown, her ‘romance’ wask rather underdeveloped. Although the fact that the culmination is something as simple as dancing in a club with her, rather than a sex scene is a nice thematic continuation of her character.

Ultimately, I’d say that with Mass Effect 3 having much more bromance than romance that the universe has effectively turned gay for MaleShep. At the very least, Kaidan has.  That’s canon.

All of the Mass Effect 2 squadmates that you’ve still got alive return in some fashion and play into the plot. Although this does bring up another problem I have. While I’m glad that you don’t lose access to content through not having characters alive, it does feel like a bit of a copout to have every single dead character be replaced in some way by an NPC. True, not having the original character alive often means things turn out worse but the Rachni show up regardless of what you did, there’ll be another NPC to fill the dead character’s role, the Council now includes a turian, salarian and asari regardless of your choice etc.

Although this, in turn, leads to a strength. You often can’t get the “best” outcome to a situation by not having the original character in that slot and a lot of the “failure” scenes turn out more dramatic and tragic than the good variations. This game can get surprisingly dark, and sometimes seemingly innocuous choices that you didn’t expect to have any effect can be the difference between  success and failure.

And in the true spirit of the game’s “death is everywhere” theme, sometimes a loss in inevitable. Even in a “perfect” playthrough, you WILL lose certain beloved characters and you WILL mourn them. This just makes the darker, more death-laden “imperfect” playthroughs that much tougher to play. I was playing a game with a brand new character and had the conversations set to full auto and found myself forced to use Renegade interrupts to kill two of my most personal favourites. Yeah. I had to pull the trigger on my own favourite characters.

Not just any two characters, my actual, honest to Shepard, one and two slots on my favourite character list. But let’s move on from all that now.

So, that horrible planet scanning from Mass Effect 2 is all but gone. Instead, you now press a shoulder button to activate a radial scan while moving through a system and any trinkets to collect are highlighted on your map. But too many scans, and the Reapers will find you and swarm the system, forcing you to flee. They leave once you finish a mission, so it can be pretty hilarious to deliberately provoke them into chasing you, only to hop planetside and leave half a dozen Reapers to scratch their heads and wander off.

This does help add a sense of danger and urgency to a typically boring part of the Mass Effect games, meaning that now it’s only the Normandy and the Citadel that get tedious. Though the odd lull between combat and fighting Reapers is nice, a lot of the cutscenes fill that role, so it’s a lot of walking around to see if your squadmates want to develop their character in front of you or talk to another person to update a sidequest.

Basically the Citadel is now the only place where you can wander around and buy stuff, and it like the Normandy has had a redesign. Half the sidequests are “overhear somebody needing something and scan a planet for it to give to them” and the other half are “talk to/use panels in the correct sequence, with the odd choice hear or there”.

Although it is nice when you come across two people arguing about something and you can side with one or another. Not only because one sentence from Shepard can seemingly defuse any situation, but because even these do have an effect, namely in usually making a change in your War Assets.

War Assets and their collection are basically the point of the sidequests, and serve as a tangible abstraction for the effect of your choices in the game. Getting a civilian militia set up on the Citadel may only contribute 5 points, but recruiting the krogan fleet will net you ridiculous amounts like 700 points. And getting to read all the little updates like “because you gave that schematic to a guy on the Citadel, these soldiers have better Medi-gel” is a nice touch.

Getting full War Assets is necessary to being able to get all the endings, and while it’s certainly possible to get enough without playing the multiplayer, it’s certainly a lot harder. See, each area of space has a “Galactic Readiness” rating that starts at 50% raises by completing missions in that area in multiplayer. This means all the points you collect only count for half if you don’t use the multiplayer, making doing all the sidequests that much more important.

I haven’t played the multiplayer because I never do, but apparently it’s pretty damn good. It uses the premise that you’re a Spec Ops member taking on high-risk missions for the war effort and you get to choose a race and class to play as in 4 player missions against NPC opponents. It’s actually pretty tempting for me to try, and that’s saying a huge deal for me.

Now, if you’ve been on the internet once since the game came out, you’ll know that people really didn’t like the ending. I won’t touch on the specifics hear, you can read my thoughts in this article (warning, MAJOR spoilers), but I will say that they don’t ruin the game.

Mass Effect 3 is the epic final trilogy of a serious that’s always had it’s troubles. But for me, this game was its zenith. Although it’s way out of the price range I usually write for, this is a game that deserves that full price investment. It’s fun, it’s emotional, it’s replayable and apparently the multiplayer is good so there’s plenty to be gotten out of it. But if you’re picking up this series for the first time you may not see what all the fuss is about. My, and  I have a feeling most people’s real connection to this story was because of the time and emotion we’d invested in the first two. And although I too have been moddy and criticised the ending, I really do want to say thank you Bioware. Thank you for Mass Effect.

UPDATED – The Mass Effect 3 Ending Scandal – SPOILERS

Now, to be clear, this is not a case of me straight up ranting over which particular camp is correct. I will voice my opinions on the ending, but I’ll also provide an overview of the various reactions to the ending of Mass Effect 3.

By the way, when I say ending, I’m talking about the very last conversation and choice you get to make, which is about 5-10 minutes.  The rest of it is pretty damn awesome.

So, from here on out I have to throw up a spoiler warning.

SERIOUSLY OH GOD THE MASSIVE, MASSIVE SPOILERS! TURN BACK NOW IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE GAME. PLEASE!

*ahem*

So, at the end of Mass Effect 3 you’re trying to fire the Crucible, a superweapon of ancient design that will hopefully stop the Reapers once and for all. Every damn fleet you’ve assembled is there to try to take back Earth and get this damn weapon fired. But the key to firing the Crucible is, in fact, the Citadel, which the Reapers have parked over London. Shepard and Anderson lead a last ditch ground assault to secure it, and on the way Shepard takes a direct hit from a Reaper cannon & survives, and the Illusive Man turns out to have been indoctrinated by the Reapers.

And so it seems Shepard’s journey is over. He sits with Anderson to watch the end of it all. But it doesn’t fire. Shepard tries to reach the console again and collapses. When he wakes, an ancient VI tells him the purpose of the Reapers. Organic life always create synthetic life that then tries to destroy organic like.  And so, the Reapers exist to “save” sentient life by turning them into Reapers, destroying synthetic life and allowing new life to grow.

Shepard is now told that this system has failed because Shepard made it so far. He can choose to destroy all synthetic life, including the Geth and EDI, take control of the Reapers and force them to leave, or sacrifice himself to cause a fusion of organic and synthetic life. But whichever way, all the Mass Relays will be destroyed. So no interstellar travel.

What’s wrong with this conceptually? Nothing. Conceptually. But this isn’t just one game.  It’s a trilogy we’ve been playing over 5 years. A trilogy where we’ve not only chosen, but worked to make our choices to come to fruition. Ultimately, what does it matter if the krogan would start a galactic war with the Genophage cured? The Mass Relays are destroyed. They can’t travel anywhere outside of the Sol System.

What do all those fleets do now they’re stranded on a ruined Earth? Who knows! We never get any explanation about how everything plays out in the end. I have all these problems and more with the ending.  But, at the same time I can see what they’re doing. They’re trying to remind us that this conflict is bigger than just the cycle we’re experiencing. They’re trying to show we can’t always have that “golden ending”. Also, the ending was meant to be memorable and divisive, something we could discuss for years.

And I recognise as the creators and owners of the Mass Effect franchise, it’s their right to end the story the way they want to. But I also think that after five years of investment in this universe, and the choices we’ve made and resolutions we’ve worked at, we deserve more closure. Not to necessarily change the endings, but at least something that says “and then everyone made FTL drives and went home and all the races lived happily ever after and were all very sad that Shepard was dead.”

Hell, I still *want* that Golden Ending. I want to destroy the Reapers without destroying all synthetic life and blowing up the Mass Relays. I want to see everything go back to the way it was, with the changes I’d brought about taking shape. The Quarians reclaiming Rannoch, the Krogan becoming more peaceful, Earth being rebuilt.

But there we have it. That’s the ending and how I feel about it. As for how other people feel about it, I can discern four major opinions that seem to be cropping up.

1) Authorial Control

It’s Bioware’s story. Accept it. You may not like it, I may not like it, but to demand a new one is to be entitled and immature.

2) Death of the Author

It’s not just Bioware’s story though. It’s our’s. Each of us has our own Commander Shepard through whom we’ve experienced and invested in this story.

(I’d like to add an addendum that I feel there’s validity to this, not just entitlement. As an interactive medium where we’ve been given agency to affect the world, denying us the ultimate conclusion of our choices is a choice I think it’s right for fans to take umbridge with.)

3) Defenders

They liked the ending. Mostly it seems by looking past the surface to the themes and recognising the levels of metaphor and philosophy the choices play off of.

4) Fakeout

Aside from those who just write off the last ten minutes as a dying dream before someone gets the Crucible to actually fire, there’s a group that has, with alarming speed, created a rather solid seeming theory that Shepard didn’t really experience those past ten minutes.

Basically, some people think that his exposure to Reapers, Reaper tech and other indoctrinated creatures has been slowly and insidiously poisoning Shepard’s mind, and they force him to hallucinate either everything beginning with the charge to board the Citadel or from the meeting with the Catalyst VI onwards.

It talks then of the choices all being different ways for the Reapers to “win”, by tricking him into one of these things. I can see how “Control” would be a trap and that he couldn’t actually do it, and how “Synthesis” requiring him to jump to his death would be them saying “jump off a cliff!” but  I don’t really see how this explains the “Destroy” ending.

Supporting this are various pieces of circumstantial evidence, like Shepard’s frequent contact with Reaper tech, some audio/visual strangeness in the game’s ending sections as well as an app and some digging into the game’s code.

The last two haven’t been verified,  and the circumstantial evidence looks solid but has nothing conclusive. The audio/visual strangeness, however, is either a series of art mistakes and thematic choices, or a big pile of hints.

Anyways, the app in an non-Bioware piece that, among other things, sends messages from your squadmates as you reach certain parts of the game. Once you complete it, it apparently sends a message from the Virmire survivor, suggesting that you’re in a hospital. This could be because one of the endings implies Shepard is still alive, but I’ve seen a Bioware member declare the app non-canon in the forums. Then again, it’s also been promoted by Bioware themselves. So, that’s up in the air.

As for the code, apparently the game tags the ending with one of three titles, including “did not finish” as one of them. This would seem to correspond to one for each of the three endings. Bioware has hinted we should keep our ME3 files, and that some “great new single player content is on its way” before, but it’s all speculation right now.

If we take that they knew the ending would be a huge, divisive shock and accept the code & audio/visual evidence, it looks like they were playing us all along and planned the ending to be a fakeout.

And I hope so. Not just because I’m displeased with the ending, but I want to see what they’d do if there are indeed plans to expand upon it.

UPDATE: Bioware have since announced that there will be some kind of “story extending single player content” coming out in response to all the backlash. This has, in itself, caused a backlash.

Some game developers, of Bioware or otherwise, have responded to the controversy with sorrow, saying that these are the works of the creator and that fans should accept them and not insist on having things their way.

Also, a lot of professional commentators have responded negatively, seeing this as an act of immature fan entitlement winning out of artistic integrity. I won’t name names because I respect those people and their opinions, but I do have to disagree.

Many of them are acting like this WILL set a terrible precedent, this WILL change the industry, this WILL set the medium back, this WILL damage its artistic integrity. I really don’t think so. Fallout 3‘s ending was changed due to fan complaints about how contrived and illogical it was with the DLC Broken Steel. And editors, producers, writers, actors, directors, studio executives, publishers, test audiences, these have all caused endings or parts of works in pretty much every medium to be changed before or after its release.

Overall, I’ve found the backlash against the backlash to be more annoying than the original backlash, which I personally think has gone way too far. Metabombing was stupid and wasteful, but understandable. The charity drive was nice, but also kinda dopey. The “Retake Mass Effect” campaign and the fan suing Bioware for false advertising is also ridiculous but the point is the people who were angry do have legitimate reasons, and changes are made all the time based on fan feedback. That’s why there’s no Mako after Mass Effect 1. Really, I don’t see this as inherently different from that.

Also, there is a literary theory commonly known as “Death of the Author” that basically states that the creator of a work isn’t a Godlike entity with supreme control of it any more. The fans, the investors, anybody who’s got any kind of stake in it has a role to play in the creation of the work. Not just the actual process of creation, but also in how it’s remembered and interpreted. And I support it. It’s like an academic theory that lets you say “that really stupid episode in that show never happened” or “I choose to believe Snape was never actually evil”, even if a work suggests or outright states otherwise.

To me, I’d say that game developers also need to grow up a little and accept that fans have a real voice, and that taking criticism on board for a sequel isn’t always enough and that there will be times when they have to bend over for their fans to do things they don’t want to, like compromising on their idea of an ending because it won’t be one that satisfies fans. Like fans need to be a lot less rude and learn to properly show the appropriate level of disappointment, and publishers need to grow up and adapt to the rapidly changing game market instead of trying to swindle fans at every turn.

Should I Buy? – Mass Effect 3 DLC From Ashes

OK, so, I got Mass Effect 3. It’s great, buy it. But, I need some time before I can properly review it. There are also other things I want to write about the game, and possibly the trilogy as a whole, so welcome to “Mass Effect time of as of yet undetermined length”!

So. Day one DLC. Surely it must be horrendously evil right? No. It’s basically a pre-order bonus you can buy. At least in this case. See, it’s included as standard in N7 Collector’s Edition but available for everybody else to download for $10USD/£8.50/800 Microsoft Points. And is it worth that much? Well, yeah.

I get that it was probably planned to be full content, but the were told that they had to make something day one DLC, and having played the whole damn game, I can tell you it’s in no way needed to make the game “complete”. It’s a nice addition that nets you an awesome and interesting squadmate and a stupidly powerful gun.

Anyways, seeing as the main feature of this DLC is a new squadmate, it’s best to buy it either when you get the game or when you’re about to start a new playthrough. And when you have it, try to make the recruitment mission on Eden Prime be the first one you play, when given the chance.

So. The DLC itself. It gives you a mission to recruit a new squadmate whom I must now talk about so SPOILERS. As you’ll see from even just looking at the promotional images, it gives you a Prothean squadmate called Javik.

And he’s awesome. He’s got a great look, a great voice and as a character he has a complete range of conversations with you and other squad members. His presence does go largely un-addressed in the game proper by people who don’t even question what he is.

That said, the character as a whole works. He provides a good look into the Prothean culture that we’ve had almost zero information on. Also, his accent is awesome.

Recruiting him will bump your total squad member count up to seven. In combat, he’s a combat/biotic mix who can equip pistols and assault rifles. So he’s kinda filling the same role Samara filled in ME2, and I used him in pretty much all of my missions as my biotic support. But seeing as how this game has a reduced cast list, the only other Biotic characters are Liara and Kaidan, if you saved him so having a good Biotic alternative is also  a good thing to have from a mechanical standpoint. Now, I was on Easy mode, but he did a bangup job.

Recruiting him gives you the Prothean Particle Rifle, an assault rifle that has infinite ammo in the always-recharge sense. And it’s a constant beam that can strip down health, shield, armour and barriers pretty damn easily. And it has awesome range. And enough concentrated fire from these guns can slow down even the OHMYGODITWILLKILLUSALL enemies while they die. And all your rifle-bearing squadmates can equip it.

Seriously, that’s a fucking awesome gun.

Oh, and all the squad members get a second alternate outfit. Aside from being cool, each different outfit gives the squad member  a different bonus like extra weapon damage or increased power cooldown. Which is nice.

I do feel that this DLC really adds to the experience of the game, and I’m damn glad that I bought it. And I almost never buy DLC. Now that I’ve played a game with it, it’s kinda hard to imagine a playthrough without it. But then that’s just a sign that it works and is integrated well.

Yes, you’re losing out on a great experience by not buying it. But your Mass Effect 3 core experience will not be compromised by not buying this. It’s not necessary. But it’s cool as all hell.

Buy it. Buy it now.