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spoadicdeviance · 5 years

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Simple and Clean: The Kingdom Hearts Conundrum

Well it looks like the hype of the release of Kingdom Hearts 3 has calmed down significantly, mostly due to the fact that the game is considered by many to be lackluster. As for myself, I have finished my first playthrough of the game, on proud mode, and done most of the side quests, and while I did like my experience overall, I can’t really refute the criticisms the game has gotten and have to agree that Kingdom Hearts 3 is a disappointment.

I suppose I can’t be too surprised with how the third game in the franchise turned out considering the direction the series has been on since the second game which is actually the third game released but due the number placed at the title the game is still the second game, and I’ll just stop right now before I go on a tangent over the names of each game.

Kingdom Hearts, to me, is a series that captivated me right at the very beginning. I love Kingdom Hearts 1. It’s probably in my Top 20 favorite games of all time. The game managed to encapsulate the whimsy and charm of Disney, while delivering an epic, yet simplistic tale of adventure, light vs darkness, and friendship. The game was fun to play, and the story kept me engaged to the post credits scene. To this day, the game is still one that I would gladly replay and enjoy in its entirety.

Can’t say the same for the other games.

I know, I’m in the minority here on this, but in my opinion, the Kingdom Hearts series peaked with the original game from 2002 while all subsequent games have struggled under lackluster levels, a combat system that favors style over substance, and a convoluted plot with dull, heavy-handed dialog. Heck, a lot of what made Kingdom Hearts 3 such a disappointment to many players can be found in Kingdom Hearts 2 and (to a lesser extent) Birth by Sleep, the two games fans say are the pinnacle of the series.

Now I’m not simply here to say that I like this game over that game end it there. I’m going to explain why I think the Kingdom Hearts 1 (or KH1) is my favorite game in the series while putting into words my disappointment with the later games in the franchise, particularly KH2 and Birth by Sleep. This is going to be a long one so just get yourself comfortable and wait until you finish reading my post before you comment. Let’s go over why Kingdom Hearts 1 is the best in the franchise.

First things first, let’s discuss the levels in these games. The worlds of KH1 are a lot of fun to explore. While not exactly Thief II: The Metal Age complex, they were expansive and navigating them was more than just going from point A to point B. Some of the worlds were almost maze like in their design. There were light puzzle elements to most of the worlds. There was even platforming that, while clunky, added some variety to each level. These different elements made the moment to moment gameplay more than just brawling and therefore playing KH1 never got stale.

It’s quite a different story for the other games. The worlds in the latter games are straight forward in their design. The worlds were usually a singular pathway with the occasional branching off into a mini path, (Enchanted Domain, KH2’s Halloween Town), or central hub area that branches into three-four linear pathways (Beast’s Castle). Just look at the maps of Agrabah from KH1 and KH2 to see the downgrade firsthand.

Not only did the levels lack complex designs, they also had little to no puzzles in them and instead of tweaking the platforming to make it less clunky, the worlds minimize or flat out remove platforming all together. This resulted in worlds where you mostly just walk and fight.

Now these games are not simply all combat. There is something added that is intended to break the monotony, and it’s one of the most out of place aspects of the game; the forced minigames.

To be fair, having minigames isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, even if its put into the main campaign/quest. Games like Jak and Daxter and Donkey Kong 64 have plenty of minigames, however most of them are optional to beat the game. Finishing DK64 requires 50% of golden bananas and minigames give roughly 25% of golden bananas. Final Fantasy IX and Skyward Sword have the player do a minigame, but it lasts for 2-5 minutes out of a 35+ hour campaign and serve more to entice players to do a side quest. Even KH1, the only moments that feel like the game forces you to do a minigame like activity were the race against Rikku at Destiny Islands, the 1 minute of vine surfing at the start of Deep Jungle, and the 2-minute magic carpet escape at the end of Agrabah.

The other Kingdom Hearts games are not as stingy with minigames. As each world progresses, minigame after minigame is dumped on the player. KH2 is one of the worst offenders of this. It doesn’t help that these minigames, unlike the ones from DK64 and Final Fantasy IX, don’t provide a real break from the endless stream of battles. The majority of minigames are just regular fights with an arbitrary stipulation added to it; fight the enemies before the timer runs out, fight the enemies until the timer runs out, fight the enemies while collecting some orbs, fight the enemies while filling the bar onscreen, fight the enemies while depleting the bar onscreen, fight the enemies while escorting a slow ass character. It’s all just more fighting, and it even spills over to some of the bosses as well.

Even the minigames that aren’t centered around fighting, like the rhythm games in Atlantica, are too shallow to provide any sense of fulfillment while playing them. Subsequent Kingdom Hearts games aren’t exempt from this. From Birth by Sleep’s Disney Town world being dedicated to minigames, to the shallow imitation of Nintendogs in Dream Drop Distance, these games also have the same minigame issue that KH2 has.

I have talked about how the games became more combat oriented, however I haven’t really discussed combat itself. This is probably the part where I’ll get the most flack.

Combat in KH1 is a lot of fun and the highlight of the game alongside its story. While basic at first, the fighting gets more complex with the addition of special moves, extra combos, spells, and summons adding variety to the system. Plus, different enemies and bosses a certain attacks and weaknesses. Mashing the x button repeatedly will not get you far, you will have to think and be strategic during battle.

The later games, however, do not have strategy in their combat. Sure, you have different options with drive forms, shot locks, trinity limits, and other sorts of abilities, but at the end of the day, combat from KH2 onward is mostly whaling on the attack button over and over again. The amount of enemies that require certain strategies to defeat them diminish, dodging becomes practically unnecessary, and combat becomes simplified as a whole

Drive forms and trinity limits require little to no strategy when using them. Just activate them and mash buttons while your character zips their way through the battlefield while all sorts of flashy effects fill the screen and enemies go down without a fight. How fortunate that certain abilities could only be unlocked when the player fights with each drive form for a certain amount of time. Forced grinding, what a treat.

The worst offender of this is the context sensitive “reaction commends” that can clear waves of enemies and knock out a huge portion of the bosses’ health. Sometimes it’s the only way to defeat certain bosses. All the player must do during these reaction commands is simple press the triangle button over and over. It’s like a quicktime event only virtually impossible to fail at. There’s a reason why the phrase “press triangle to win” exists.

Magic also got a downgrade as the series progressed. In KH1, magic was not always at your disposal. When your MP got depleted, the player (or companions) would have to use an elixir/ether or land enough melee strikes on enemies to replenish your magic. Despite that, spells and summons were incredibly useful in battle, as well as for environmental puzzles, and the proper use of magic could mean the difference between success and failure.

In the later Kingdom Hearts games, the inverse seemed to be true for magic. Not only were puzzles that require spells became almost nonexistent, removing more variety in level design, but spells and summons became less effective in battle. In KH1, the player could focus on spellcasting, while doing the occasional melee attacks, and get through the game with relative ease. In later games, due to how magic became nerfed, using magic primarily was more of a self-imposed hinderance rather than an alternative style of play. This results in the player using magic almost exclusively for healing. Lucky for those players, MP automatically regenerates after depletion at a relatively quick rate, making ethers useless, which gives the player an unlimited amount of heals.

After KH2’s release, with the emphasis on style over substance, combat in Kingdom Hearts games became more about how to make the player look cool while fighting rather than making the player feel good after the fight.

The reason why it felt good to complete a battle in KH1; the game was actually difficult. Enemies and bosses didn’t just let you pummel them with combos and stylized forms. You had to react to the enemies and the arena you fought in. Even to this day, fights against Clayton, Ursula, Maleficent (human and dragon), possessed Rikku, many more bosses still put me on edge as I fight them.

There was no challenge to the fights in games like KH2 and Birth by Sleep. Since the player has multiples ways to dispose of an enemy, virtually endless amount of heals, and less adversaries that require any strategy outside of “hit me a bunch of times until I no longer exist”, they face little to no challenge while playing latter day Kingdom Hearts games. Bosses that make creative use of the environment you fight are less frequent too. The only way a boss can begin to test the player is when a minigame-like stipulation is added to the fight. Stipulations such as kill all the water clones in this time limit, put the coins in the chest before you can do damage, whatever the heck the Luxord fight was supposed to be, and so on and so forth.

Even then, I still didn’t get that much of a challenge. After three playthroughs of KH2, two of which were on Proud/Critical mode, the combined total of times I died does not even come close to a quarter of the amount of times I died in my first playthrough of KH1. I never even died during KH2’s Sephiroth fight, and I still struggle to defeat him in KH1’s proud mode. The other games provide even less challenge outside of a few endgame/postgame bosses.

And before you reply, the re-releases did not remedy this issue. In fact, the re-release of KH2 gave the player new abilities that allowed the player to cheese his/her way through some boss fights.

Now I have talked about the level design, the moment to moment gameplay, and the difficulty. I supposed that leaves us with the plot of these games.

Do I even have to explain why KH1 has the superior story?

KH1 had a simple yet effective hero’s journey story about a child who wanted to explore the various worlds with his friends but got more than he bargained for when his home is engulfed in darkness and he’s separated from his friends. He goes to various worlds, forms friendships with numerous people, and learns about his newfound abilities as well as the forces that try to stop him on his quest to find his friends. It’s not the most complex of narratives and that’s all for the better. The amount of exposition is kept to a relative minimum, characters can breathe and are not just there to explain the situation, dialogue was never forced or awkward, each world had their own mini-story that’s both entertaining and connects to the overarching plot, and the story is self-contained, no outside material required to understand what’s going on.

You know the pattern by now, but I still need to elaborate. For some reason, Square-Enix thought that they could pull off this grand epic saga spread over multiple games, well they couldn’t. KH2’s plot is a total mess. It’s a constant bombardment of new ideas, exposition dumps, vague allusions to events from games that weren’t even released yet. It was bad enough that the player had to have played a GBA spinoff in order to understand a lot of the plot, but the narrative was so muddled with inconsistencies and unexplained concepts that two more spinoffs had to be made in order for KH2’s plot to make some sort of sense, even then the plot is still convoluted and heavy-handed.

I’ve seen spiderwebs that have less interwoven parts than the plot of Kingdom Hearts, and far fewer holes as well.

And no, this does not make the story “complex and deep”. While I expect a game called Kingdom Hearts 2 would require me to play the first game in order to get a clear understanding of the plot, that doesn’t excuse having to play multiple spinoffs just to get a iota of a clue of what the heck is going on. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, one of the most celebrated series of books ever, contained an epic tale of war across multiple kingdoms and fleshed out worlds with history and culture. Even then, the reader didn’t have to refer to The Hobbit or The Silmarillion in order to follow the plot of the novels. That’s mainly due to the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien, unlike Tetsuya Nomura, can actually write an overarching story.

There’s also the fact that a lot of the plot in these games feels like filler. In KH2, the first visits to most of the worlds don’t connect to the main plot about the nobodies and Organization XIII. It’s not until the second visit to Radient Gardens where the plot starts to get rolling. In Birth by Sleep, almost all of Aqua’s campaign feel inconsequential until the very end. You could cut her story and have her just be a side character in Ventus and Terra’s campaigns and not much would be lost, plot wise.

The reason why I find a lot of the plot to be filler is due to the stories of most of these worlds are retellings of the Disney movies they’re based on while having little connection to the game’s main plot. In KH1, the stories of the worlds were mostly original tales that were intertwined with the game’s main plot. Whether it was dealing with Maleficent’s group of villains, the search for King Mickey, Rikku, and Kairi along with the rivalry between Sora and Rikku, learning more about the keyblade and its various abilities, visiting each world moved the main plot forward while having fun mini-narratives of their own. Even worlds like Wonderland, Deep Jungle, and Neverland focused more on one scene/act from the movie and expanding on it rather than rushing through the cliff notes of the source material.

It seems like for the other games, Nomura just copied and pasted the scripts of the movies the worlds a based on, added interjections from Sora, and called it an original story. It sticks out like a sore thumb and makes visits to these worlds feel more like distractions than anything else.

This longwinded plot also extends to the dialogue. The dialogue in KH1 was natural, aside from a few moments of emphasizing the difference between light and darkness. Characters acted normally, they had actual personalities and chemistry with each other. That was because KH1’s plot was not domineering to the point where the characters were relegated to just be vessels meant to explain the narrative. In games like KH2, conversations don’t feel like a group of people talking amongst themselves but rather like a lecture that the player needs to pay attention to. It makes a large chunk of scenes drag on for what feels like an eternity.

The fact that characters feel more like lore dispensers than actual people leads me to my next point, I don’t care about these new characters. Almost every character introduced from Chain of Memories onward has left little to no impact on me.

Organization XIII are a bunch of cliché Shonen Jump villains, either cackling at how evil they are or brooding over something quasi-poetic until the main character comes in and inevitably defeats them.

Roxas got a 2-hour prologue in KH2 in order for the player to get to know him and I was more relieved than upset whenever he “sacrificed” himself in order for Sora to wake up. Even 358/2 Days couldn‘t get me to care for this guy.

Xion exists solely to die at the end of 358/2 days and then be resurrected in Dream Drop Distance, that’s it.

Hayner, Pence, and Olette are like the annoying group of kids you’re forced to hang out with during college orientation, then they think you want to spend more time with them afterwards.

Ventus, Terra, and Aqua might’ve been interesting characters if we had more than 10 minutes dedicated to their friendship and personalities. Birth by Sleep is so focused on explaining the origins of Xehanort, the ways of the keyblade master, and linking its plot to the overarching plot of the series, that I never find myself connecting to any of the characters. The three separate campaigns don’t do the plot any favors. In fact, it makes the story seem disjointed. To be honest, when the characters were either killed, possessed, or banished to the Realm of Darkness, I did not care in the slightest.

It doesn’t help that Tetsuya Nomura can only seem to write 4 or 5 kinds of original characters, resulting in everyone being a Xehanort/Ansem clone or a copycat of the Sora, Kairi, Rikku dynamic. Seriously, the amount of Sora clones in this franchise is absurd.

The worse thing about these new characters is that Square seems convinced that the general audience needs more of them and forces them into the plot at the expense of characters we already have investment in.

The most egregious example of this happens at the end KH2 when during the final fight against Xemnas, rather than allowing the player to use Donald and Goofy, the game forces you to use only Rikku in the fight.

I don’t care that it’s meant to serve as Rikku’s redemption. He seemed to have redeemed himself with his self-sacrifice at the end of the first game. I don’t care about that stupid reaction command in the middle of the battle looks cool. It’s just another example of the game preferring style over substance. I don’t care that I get to fight with Rikku. I want Donald and Goofy.

I know we play as Sora and therefore focus on building his stats/abilities, but we put almost as much time into Donald and Goofy while we played the game. The player had to find the best equipment, do the side quests in order to obtain their ultimate weapon, mastered their trinity limits, managed their A.I. to suit the player’s needs in battle. Then the game rewards your dedication to these characters by saying “Screw you! Here’s a premade character with a default weapon you can’t change, and you only have the final level to learn how he is like in combat. You’re gonna love it.”

I’m sorry, but for an RPG to do that is inexcusable. Imagine in an Elder Scrolls game, before the final part of the main quest, your character is killed, and you must play as a premade Dark Elf Mage for the rest of the game. How about in Persona 5 before the last boss, instead of the Phantom Thieves, Joker gets a party consisting of some random side characters you barely interacted with in the game. Would anyone defend that design choice then?

The fact that I’m forced to only use Rikku in the fight, alongside how easy it is, makes the final battle against Xemnas in KH2 one of the worst final bosses in gaming, in my opinion.

I’ve been ranting about KH2, Birth by Sleep, 358/2 Days, Chain of Memories, but I haven’t talked specifically about Kingdom Hearts 3. KH3 is a weird case because it fixed some issues that I had with the later Kingdom Hearts games while doubling down on the issues it didn’t fix and adding new issues altogether.

KH3’s level design is improved somewhat. There’s still generally not much to do in the worlds aside from walk, fight, and do a minigame, however the actual levels are more open and intricate compared to KH2 and Birth by Sleep. The presentation is the best in the series, not just the graphical upgrade but also cinematography of the cutscenes and animations are more expressive than in past games. Plus, I got to give the game credit for making me like Axel/Lea, who before was just another forgettable side character.

However, combat is even more style over substance with additions like the Attractions Summons. The minigames are still as intrusive as they are lacking in quality. The retelling of the Disney plots is so bad here that there are literally shot for shot recreations of scenes from the movies with Sora, Donald, and Goofy added in the background. The Frozen and Tangled worlds suffer the most from this. Plus, the Pirates of the Caribbean world is based on the third movie despite the fact that no Kingdom Hearts game covered the second Pirates movie. Good luck understanding that plot without seeing the films. Dialogue is just as mind-numbingly dull. Also, you know how the plots of the latter Kingdom Hearts game can be described as having 30-50% filler, well KH3’s plot is almost 80% filler.

All this is combined with new problems such as combat feeling floatier compared to KH2 and Birth by Sleep, the emphasis on Disney over everything else, and the fact that this supposed “conclusion” to the trilogy didn’t fulfill on all the promises of past games, forgot to fill some of the plot holes, and felt like advertisement for games yet to come, makes it hard for me to say KH3 is a total improvement over the other Kingdom Hearts sequels and spinoffs. In many ways, it’s a downgrade.

You know, it feels like Kingdom Hearts is the Guns and Roses of the video game industry. Their first effort is groundbreaking and makes a huge impact on the scene. Subsequent follow-ups do their best to expand upon the initial outing only to end up with well regarded yet still confused end products. Then a new project is in the works and gets constantly delayed during which a revolving door of crew members tries to salvage the development, all the while a talented yet egomaniacal leader is micromanaging every aspect. Then when the long-awaited product is released, reviewers give mild praise while the general public is disappointed and finds the end result to be a mish mash of disparaging ideas while feeling almost unfinished.

Yes, Kingdom Hearts 3 is Square’s Chinese Democracy.

If I were asked to do a tier list ranking of each game in the series, at this moment, it would look like this.

This maybe a bit of a surprise to you since I spent the entire time ranting about KH2’s flaws, so let me explain. After playing KH3, I’ve come to notice more of the positive aspects of the second Kingdom Hearts. While I do think that they serve more to make the game easy and hate the excessive grinding that comes with them, the drive forms do give the player a sense of experimentation with some of these fights. In fact, compared to KH3, 2 has more builds for the player, as well as more balanced. KH2 is still easy as heck, and in my opinion inferior to KH1 in almost every way. However, I now appreciate more of the second game’s strong points.

Also, the music is excellent. I think that goes without saying. Yoko Shimomura is a goddess of music.

So as if this entire post hasn’t made it clear already, I love Kingdom Hearts 1. Unlike the other games in the franchise, it knew where to be straightforward and where to have complexity. It had a robust, dynamic combat system, the plot was self-contained and had more personality than exposition, and the gameplay was varied without being diluted. To this day, I find it hard to understand why most Kingdom Hearts fans prefer games like KH2 and Birth by Sleep over the original Kingdom Hearts.

Who knows? Maybe they like the combat to have some flash and felt the fighting in KH1 is too rigid. Maybe they found the puzzles, exploration, and platforming of KH1 to be more akin to fat that had to be trimmed in service to the aspect of the games that they actually like. Maybe they enjoy the plot because it has such a detailed lore and expands the narrative beyond three guys saving the universe from darkness. Maybe they find the new characters charming and enjoy the parallels between them and other characters like Sora and Rikku.

If that’s how they feel, then that’s more than fine. We’re all allowed to have out take on things and no one should tell someone else that they shouldn’t have their opinion.

That being said, in my opinion, while I do enjoy most of the games in the Kingdom Hearts franchise, the only game that I find exceptional is Kingdom Hearts 1.

#kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 2 #kingdom hearts 3 #birth by sleep #358/2 days #chain of memories #dream drop distance #sora #rikku #kairi #disney #donald duck #goofy #roxas #axel

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kupogames · 6 years

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PlayStation 4 Binge

Hey guys, I borrowed my brother’s PS4 over the holidays, and played through some great games. Figured I’d write a few quick reviews about them as I’ve got some thoughts, so here it goes.

Inside Inside has some of the most fluid animation I’ve seen in a game. Every movement feels incredibly natural: The way your character stumbles after a jump, objects flexing as you walk on them, the way background characters react when they see you, and so on. It’s a spooky puzzle-platformer game that tells a story without words, and does it well. It’s a good game to study if you want to see how much feeling can be conveyed with relatively simple graphics.

Unfortunately, it’s very similar to Limbo, which is a good thing, but also makes it feel much less groundbreaking. I’ve already played something like this before.

The Last of Us: Remastered The Last of Us is a masterpiece. It’s the first game I’ve ever played where I would consider the storytelling to be as good as a top-notch TV show or a movie. The cutscenes are exciting, and the scenery is detailed enough so that areas in the game actually look like real places. Even the gameplay enhances the story: The characters visibly work together, get power ups as a result of story progress, and actions have consequences. It’s all tied together.

Also the general variety of pacing and combat is very refreshing. You may be fighting thugs, soldiers, or zombies. You may be chased, ambushed, navigating complex terrain, stealthing your way through an obstacle course, or just having an all out shoot-out. Each enemy encounter in the game felt different, and the game rewarded taking your time and experimenting with approaches.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture If you’ve heard anything about this game, it’s probably that it’s an incredibly slow-paced walking sim, where your character can’t run. This is very accurate, but I feel like it adds to the weird dream-like atmosphere. It’s much easier to enjoy if you play it first thing in the morning or just before bed, when you’re very sleepy. I thought the voice acting was great, and I liked the way characters were portrayed as glowing lights – it meant that you could imagine real people instead of falling into the uncanny valley of modern games. Anyway, it’s different from any game I’ve played before, and if you’re in the right state of mind and don’t rush it, it’s easy to look past its flaws.

Until Dawn Until Dawn is a fun interactive-horror-movie to play with friends. It’s got some very pretty graphics – though the framerate is noticeably less than 60fps. There’s a lot of story branches, and although I’m unlikely to play through the game again, it’s still fun to talk to other people about how many characters died in each other’s playthroughs.

Call of Duty: Black Ops III I played through the campaign mode just to say I’ve completed a Call of Duty game, but apparently I didn’t pick the best one to start with. I found the gameplay and story excruciatingly boring. There’s no sense of pacing: Every mission is just over-the-top action and chases and explosions – there’s no stealth missions, or moments to enjoy the scenery, or time to question the choices I’ve made in the game. It just flies down a linear path at a constant full speed. The characters are as bland and shallow as they can be – I don’t think any of them ever told a joke or talked about their history at all. The dialogue is mostly made of military cliches. The enemies types become repetitive very quickly.

Also I just outright suck at CoD. I’m okay at other FPSs: I can play Doom or Halo. But something about CoD just never clicks with me, and I die a lot even on easy mode. I can’t tell which guns to use in which circumstances, nor how aggressively I should be moving forward. *shrugs*

Doom I’ve already played new Doom several times on my PC, but only on the lowest settings (being 5 or 6 years old, I suppose it’s good that my PC can run it at all). I played it again on PS4 to compare graphics and controls – and woah does it look good on a huge 4K TV. Until I get a new PC, I should probably enjoy AAA games on console for a while.

Anyway, I definitely prefer playing FPSs on PC – mouse controls are more accurate and it’s much easier to switch weapons with all the keys you got. But Playing with a controller wasn’t too bad. It’s still nice to have the comfort of sitting on your couch.

Oh, and Doom is a great game. Probably my favourite of 2017.

#game review #gaming #video games #blog #thoughts

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kreuzdrache · 6 years

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After playing an (admittedly) unhealthy amount of Doom 2016′s single player campaign, I would say this game is VERY solid and a good step in the right direction.

I did have some issues, such as the points-of-no-return in the levels, the weapon wheel was a little hard to read from the glance since some of the gun silhouettes look kinda samey, unskippable expositions, and the fact that map’s secrets were often times incorrect. But these are honestly VERY minor issues that do not detract a lot from the game.

I feel the glory kills can make combat a little too easy at times, but considering the large amount of damage that even an imp could do plus the fact it could easily put you in position that surrounds you with demons, I feel it’s a mostly fair mechanic that doesn’t break the game.

The guns are fairly varied, most have two modes that have to be unlocked that changes the gun’s mechanics, such as giving the plasma rifle an aoe burst or a stun grenade. And you get so many points to upgrade the weapons, so it rarely feels like you have to grind for the upgrades. And when you do have to grind, its very reasonable.

The enemy variety is also very good, each set of demons feel mostly different and have a nice mix for when you’re lock in the arena with them.

Levels are kinda linear for the most part with some large open spaces and verticallity, but that’s honestly okay. Each level does have a decent amount of secrets, weather it be alternate routes that lead to collectibles or upgrades, that encourage exploration, so they are fairly big. Another thing I do like, is how some the structures and platforms have green lights that lead the to player to their destination without being too obvious, which was a nice touch. They’re admittedly not the most interesting of level design, but I would argue and say they’re well design.

Another thing I do like, is that a lot of the lore and info bits of the ingame universe are in the menu rather than just telling the player during gameplay. Gives people a chance to focus on the game or focus on the lore, rather than mashing them both up at once.

So yeah, Doom 2016 is very good. I feel this is probably the closest we’ll get to an older style fps, without it being too shallow and having levels that were a bit trickier to navigate through.

#random #reviews #doom 2016 #doom #dumb #long #long post

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poppiseed · 7 years

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Okay so I beat Sonic Forces.

First things first, not the worst game in the series. You would rather play this than Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic 06, the Storybook games, or Sonic Boom.

But considering that they were continuing on a playstyle that was previously, in my opinion, fine tuned, it's quite disappointing.

In recent years, I found Generations to be a high point in the series. It's a game that took what was created in Unleashed, refined somewhat in Colors, and simply nailed it. While Unleashed was too "boost-2-win" and linear (still LOVE the game though omg) and Colors too platform heavy with constant breaks in momentum, Generations had a perfect balance with fluid platforming that did not have you feel as if you were constantly in a state of stop-and-go, the sense of speed needed in a Sonic game, and various pathways to discover. Many people consider Sonic's Adventure formula to be the pinnacle of Modern Sonic and I think what we got in Generations was just as good.

I expected Sonic Forces to improve or simply just continue established, solid mechanics and it didn't.

Level design is the dullest of dull. Go straight, just straight, reach the goal. Especially in Sonic and classic Sonic stages. Any minor detour is made simply for a red ring and nothing more. Modern Sonic has no 3D platforming as well. If you're in 3D, you will be boosting and that's it. I know this is a complaint often made in Unleashed, but it's even more shallow here. Unleashed had platforms, drifting, fun level gimmicks and even some nifty qte tricks to pull off. This game has very jarring qte segments and little else.

Avatar stages have more variation, but if you don't have the right wispon, you're stuck doing more of the same. Colors did it better, you unlock the wisp, you can now use the wisp if it's there. In Avatar levels the wisp options shuffle and vary, but again if you don't have a wispon compatible, it's a waste.

Classic Sonic? Why? Why were you just shoehorned into this game? With Generations and Mania behind my belt, it's disheartening to see these stages. There's just a few classic levels (again, shoehorned), and they're lacking in pathways and fun gimmicks. The level with the casino elements was a nice touch, but the physics didn't act the way I expected to. How am I flipping off a flipper and not going sky high? Now I know that Generations doesn't have classic physics down to a tee, but Classic Sonic felt awkward. Really awkward.

In fact, controlling all three was awkward. Sonic's homing attack reticle wouldn't always appear when I expected after years of previous gameplay. The Avatar was meant to have gameplay a little less speedy than Sonic's (hence a delayed homing attack) with a minor, really minor, focus on combat but the character moves as fast as Sonic so I would unintentially zoom off the edge. At one point I started to use the d-pad to alleviate this in 2D sections, and while that helped (until I got to wall jumping...), that shouldn't be a thing I need to do. Control, depending on the character, can be too stiff and awkward or to loose and awkward. Even with a double jump. Sonic has controlled super smooth in previous titles and it was not the case here.

Levels aren't just barren in terms of design, but also looks. It's not Shadow the Hedgehog bad, but does every level have to feel like a factory? A Sonic game can have a darker tone and not overly bleak level design. SA2 doesn't have much of a light story and it doesn't have overly bright levels like Heroes, but they aren't saturated in dark grays and dark greens. There were times when I had a hard time seeing my character because of the way they blended in the level. That's pretty damn bad. I get it, Eggman took over everything but it was a bit much.

Also... kinda tired of both Chemical Plant and Green Hill at this point lol.

Music was fine minus whatever the fuck that shit was for Classic Sonic. All of those themes were grating. I can honestly dig a Sonic game rocking a soundtrack with loads of dnb, though I can't remember most of it. I'm going give it another listen through some headphones though. I STILL LOVE INFINITE'S THEME SO MUCH OMG.

Character interactions were great (minus Shadow being hard to hear), Knuckles wasn't a moron, and Tails was PRECIOUS. I was apathetic about my character's involvement in the plot, but I'm not really in this series for that anyway.

I'll probably end up deleting this off my Switch when I wanna do some housekeeping on it, but I'll most likely keep playing to see if I warm up to it.

I bet this sounds harsh, but this is coming from a fan. I've loved the series for a long time and truly felt they nailed it with Generations, I didn't expect them to go so backwards with the winning formula. If you're a fan, try the game. Try it first, don't buy. But I, personally, don't feel the same kind of thrill and joy in this game and expected more after so long of a wait.

As a friend said: Unleashed >= Generations >> Colors >>> Forces

#sonic forces #and that is that #unleashed is greater than/or generations for those who dont get it lol #ebby rambles

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aurimeanswind · 7 years

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Games Are BETTER With Stories. Full Stop.

So this is a bit of a different tact for a post. This kind of acts as an OpEd to Ian Bogost’s opinion piece over at The Atlantic claiming that video games would be better if they abandoned stories.

For reference, here is the article in question:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/

Now I understand this article was probably intended to get a rise out of not just passionate video game writers such as myself, but also folks who actually write video games, develop games, and aspire to make the medium better as a whole. I have nothing against Bogost, this is even the first I’ve heard of him, but his piece seems so lacking in any credit for fantastic gaming examples at all that I thought a detailed response to the article, some counterpoints, could prove an interesting read.

I have nothing against him, and he is absolutely entitled to his own opinion. That being said... I really, really disagree with him. This is not meant as an attack at all.

So the big aspect this article hinges on is that environmental storytelling is kind of a joke, by comparison, to “real” storytelling, like that of TV, film, and novels. The two big examples he uses are BioShock and Gone Home. The comparison of Gone Home to a young adult novel is both kind of apt, but also really dismissive of what that game evokes out of people.

Something really massive about games, and I talked about it on my Alex Talks about experiences, is that each person experiences a game differently. Now, this is absolutely true of all art and art forms, but the difference in games is that can have some form of physical manifestation. When you experience a video game differently, when it causes different senses in your brain, you will likely play the game differently. This can be a subtle thing, from dying more in a shooter to dying less, or exploring one room where another person spent hours in it, examining the environment.

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And that’s the key thing with games: everything is a story, and that story is always different depending on the player. Like I said in the video above, some games are crafted in a way to make that experience almost identical for everyone, but death count, level of frustration, difficulty level, all go a way to make it very subtly different for everyone who plays that, and thus the experience will evoke different things for different people, and in turn, will be different depending on the player. Now, I just mentioned that a different interpretation or experience is true of any form of interpretive art, but the fact that the way, the vehicle by which that changes is completely unique to games (deaths, retries, difficulty, etc) goes further to make gaming experiences have their own unique flair to them. This may seem like a weird and arbitrary detail or argument, but it’s not. It makes games accessible in ways that some mediums just art. Take my experience with Uncharted 4, compared to my mother’s. She doesn’t play many shooters, but because of the lock on and ease-of-diffuclty settings specific to Uncharted 4, she was able to play the entire game by herself, something untrue of the series up until that point, and she loved it.

Another big focus of Bogost’s argument were examples that all fell into the narrative-driven gaming experience. He also didn’t really end on an argument, a concept to push forward with. He said that games would be more interesting if we could take their worlds apart and put them back together, which I think was mostly in reference to What Remains of Edith Finch, a game that just came out today and I have not played, so I can’t really understand.

But to the argument against the narrative-driven game, let me bring up a gameplay-driven game: The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Every aspect, every occurrence in that game is a story. It’s a unique story to the player that is playing it, but there is no denying that this game that “forewent its story in service of being a video game” actually has more unique storytelling to it than most games of the last ten years. Everything you do and explore and engage with is a story unique to you as a player, and all the pulls and hints and attractions of that world, while still slightly guided, are at the behest of your own agency. When I run off and find some animal that I chase into a fight with a Lynel, that is a narrative of my own making, with characters, a hero, a villain, and a complete arc. It’s unquestionably the narrative he believes games should be abandoning, but never seems to provide a clear explanation of what that abandonment would be in service of? Instead, he’d rather a game be a flat picture that evoked sounds and colors over player-driven exploration, because guess what: that’s story. That’s one of many, many ways games can tell stories, and to disregard that as “just gameplay” or “not a real story” would be to disregard the majority of ambient storytelling devices in games.

Again, I think this may come across as an odd example, and maybe Bogost would even say that that’s merely gameplay, and in service of his argument. But I’d disagree.

There would probably be an argument saying that The Last of Us’s story is just a movie or short TV series made into a game series, and that’s fine. I’d respect that argument, if it was well articulated. The Last of Us isn't even mentioned as one of the story-focused games in Bogost’s articles, either. Probably because he’d too easily write it off as another, “better” medium’s linear narrative merely adapted into a game. But The Last of Us accomplishes so much within the medium of games. It’s a story with gripping tension that genuinely complements the set piece moments of action placed throughout it’s story. There are moments, like when Joel gets injured toward the end of the Fall season, that are experience partly through cutscene, partly through actual, interactive gameplay. Their subtle ways to trick your mind into investing in the characters, only its not really trickery; it’s genuine emotion brought out of the player. Naughty Dog’s linear storytelling approach is one that works, and works very well. People will argue about their gameplay, but the tense, slow pulse of combat in The Last of Us is almost perfectly tailored to the narrative in play. It’s top of the line.

I could go on and on, but let me just touch on one other thing.

A lot of people give JRPGs shit for having batshit stories, or as what Bogost would probably describe as an “objectively bad story”, but that’s just not true. You can tell a story that is over the top, occult, or absurd, and still have it contain gripping characters, true moments of genuine emotion, and incredible payoffs. Persona 5 is absolutely one of those. If you want to sit here and tell me Persona 5 has a bad story, be my guest, but you’d be for sure wrong. All stories have some level of subjective determination with them, and they’ll resonate differently with different people.

What’s very cool and poignant about the Persona stories is their sense of scale. They take place over such a long time that it’s a different kind of investment. The 102 hours it took me to play Persona 5 was an investment, typically far longer than any entire TV series that exists out there. And instead of the time-skipping pacing of a television show, Persona always has a strictly metered pace. Pacing is a massive advantage video games have over just about every single other medium in existence, but I won’t get into that here. What i’m saying is, by pacing things out in a game like Persona 5, so that you actually live an entire year in a person’s life, there is a gradual and steady build of investment, not just in your own character and the world, but the other characters, You have to spend some collective amount of time with another character to become their best friend and confidant, just like real life. Persona is already unique in its approach to this, and just going and watching the Persona 4 Animation ostensibly proves that you lose almost all of the magic converting what is an “anime game” to an “actual anime”, and that is proof enough for this relatively shallow argument in an example that I don’t even think Bogost would have considered.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive here. There is absolutely room for conversations about how video games could, and should, be better. They still have plenty of room to grow. But by saying that they will be stuck in “perpetual adolescence” and should ostensibly “give up” is, as Danielle Riendaeu said on Twitter, just fucking lazy.

Anyway, cheers to Bogost’s opinion, it did awaken something passionate in me. It seems this was definitely more on the bait-y end of the article spectrum, and maybe I fell for it, but I’ve always vehemently fought for the fact that video game stories are great in their own right, interesting, and unique in both their approach and results. But like I said, he is absolutely entitled to his opinion. <3

#ian bogost #the atlantic #persona #persona 5 #persona 4 #the last of us #the legend of zelda breath of the wild

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swipestream · 6 years

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The Mad Max/Id’s Rage Ripoff Conundrum!

This week I discovered something so absolutely amazing, so utterly startling, that I was compelled by my sheer amazement to share it here, with you my loyal readers:

The much ballyhooed 2015 Mad Max video game, a sorta-but-not-really movie tie in for Mad Max: Fury Road, by (not so) famed developer Avalanche Studios, makers of Just Cause 2, is utterly and totally ripped off from Id Software’s disappointing 2011 game Rage.

WAIT!

Before you get all persnickety about that whole “ripped off” thing, let me explain that I do not consider this to, of necessity, be an insult. To quote one of our foremost modern intellectuals, myself:

“‘Good artists borrow; great artists steal.’ In other words, the only defense against accusations of ripping something off is to make something so good, the point is moot. Quality justifies its own existence.” — Daddy Warpig

Quality justifies its own existence. Absolutely true. So, two questions become pertinent:

1. Did Mad Max really rip off Rage?

2. If it did, is it such a great video game that the entire point is moot?

I pre-ordered Rage, back in the day, and never finished the game. I always wanted to, but never quite got back to it—there was always something better to play. Then, just last week, Bethesda released two trailers for the sequel, imaginatively titled Rage 2, and I thought, “Eh. Might as well finish the first before the second comes out.” So I did, and what I discovered was astounding:

Rage is a hybrid shooting/driving open world game, set entirely in a desert badlands: rocky canyons, blasted and dusty open ground, and nary a green, growing thing anywhere. The wastes are dotted with the remnants of pre-cataclysm industrial complexes: catwalks, giant containers, blasted buildings. Oh, and there’s also a landlocked cargo ship in one area, cut in two by some catastrophe, its cargo containers spilling out.

Bad guys in combat-modded cars drive around the wasteland, shooting the crap out of anything passing through their territory, including (and primarily) you. Fortunately, you can return the favor. Run them off the road, shoot them with guns, shoot them with rockets: it’s a Car Wars world out there, and you’re in the gunner’s seat. (At least after the first driving mission, when you actually get some bullets.) There’s even combat towers you can ram to bring down, cutting the bandits’ fire support.

There’s also mutants, massive mutants, massive and resistant-to-bullets mutants, super-massive mutants, and a bunch of human enemies. You can enjoy scenic mission hubs (cheerfully decorated in stereotypical post-apocalypse chic) at which you can pick up missions from quest givers, said missions usually requiring you to drive to some location, disembark, and journey through a mostly-linear series of corridors, dispatching enemies with extreme prejudice.

Rage has a crafting system, naturally, various combat mods for the several cars you can acquire, multiple games of chance, and meteor storms which drop loot. You can take on several gangs in their home bases, killing ever tougher opponents until you face the gang boss and straight beat him down. There’s non-combat races, combat races, and a gladiatorial TV show which lets you shoot mutants for dollars. There’s even a mission which requires you to blow up a great big door before you can progress to the next area.

If you’ve played Mad Max, most of those elements will sound hauntingly familiar. Almost exactly. Here’s the difference, however: Everything Mad Max did right, Rage did mostly wrong.

Rage is a disjointed experience. The driving isn’t quite good enough, the overworld too cramped (being a series of narrow corridors, instead of Mad Max’s expansive vistas), and the shift from hub world traversal, to wastelands driving, to corridor-centric FPS-ing is jarring and inelegant. The game feels like a bunch of almost-completed parts, hastily thrown into a box with only a token effort to make them fit together, then sold as-is. Mad Max, on the other hand, felt like it had been hand-crafted for maximum enjoyability. (Up until that one race in the final boss area that most people don’t get past. Screw that race, and the people who designed it.)

More, Rage was, for the most part, a fairly generic post-apocalyptic game with stereotypical dun and drab visuals, lacking the visual or setting flair of Borderlands and Fallout 3 (wingsticks, the one iconic weapon in the game, being excepted). Mad Max, OTOH, had style to spare. (To be fair to Bethesda, they look to be correcting this for the sequel, at least if the trailers are any guide.)

Mad Max also benefitted from being designed for a new generation of consoles, with more memory, faster CPU’s and GPU’s, and more storage space. (Rage shipped on three DVD’s, which is shocking considering how short and shallow the game really is.) Just on visuals alone, the designers of Mad Max used the improved hardware to good effect. Plus, the beefier hardware allowed Mad Max to add several other gameplay elements (like dudes on foot in the wastelands, guys who could jump onto your car from the next, fantastic and impressive lightning-filled sand storms, and so forth) and have bigger and more visually impressive areas than Rage.

Mad Max is truly an excellent game, well-polished and well-designed. The missions are mostly great, the characters memorable (which Rage’s are not), and the guy who hangs out to repair your car is a hoot. In a straight-up comparison, Mad Max wins hands down.

So was Mad Max ripped off? To a certain extent, almost certainly. It was John Carmack’s last game at Id, and scored only lukewarm sales. Most gamers considered it a disappointment. Anybody working in games development would know Carmack—he straight-up invented the First Person Shooter genre—and would have been familiar with Rage. Frankly, I’ve heard of worse ideas than “This game could have been great, but wasn’t, so let’s make something very similar but do it right.” And the developers of Mad Max did it right.

Which is why, despite having duplicated so many elements from Rage, Mad Max is remembered as a great game and not a lifeless copy. It is a quality game, and quality justifies its own existence.

Jasyn Jones, better known as Daddy Warpig, is a host on the Geek Gab podcast, a regular on the Superversive SF livestreams, and blogs at Daddy Warpig’s House of Geekery. Check him out on Twitter.

The Mad Max/Id’s Rage Ripoff Conundrum! published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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