664 Reviews liked by GirlNamedYou
when someone talks about "messy queer art" they're actually talking about this
This review contains spoilers
Rest in peace Akira Toriyama š
Dragon Quest 8 is about as pure of an adventure as you can get and I loved just about every moment of its main story and side content. After beating 11 and now this i'm developing a stronger appreciation for what dragon quest is all about and I feel like i've come around on it massively. At a point I was treating dragon quest 11 like other jrpgs i've come to know and love, this is the series that established so many of its trends after all, but in doing so I feel like I was critiquing it unfairly and overlooking the things that made it really special (which is why I deleted my DQ11 review and reevaluated its score)
The gameplay has evolved from those trends at a, shall we say, 'leisurely' pace; but I think that's what a lot of people love about it and part of why its so popular, you always know what you're getting and fans have actually fought against it to change - see dragon quest 9ās departure from its original action rpg direction and subsequent return to traditional turn-based combat in response to fan backlash. Thereās been experimentation, new additions and quality of life changes but the fundamentals have never really changed all that much and if it isnāt broke, why fix it right? It will always sell like wildfire, but for good reason, thereās something about this familiar and homely approach to game design, sure you can pick it apart but if it didnāt work at its core and wasnāt fun, it simply would not have stuck around for as long as it has. Granted the original on the ps2 had random encounters and iām glad to see those go in favour of visible overworld monsters, a totally meaningful change which is becoming the new norm - infact it always felt like the intention even way back when I was playing pokemon yellow (random encounters felt like a means to an end, a technical shortcut used to āsimulateā bumping into monsters on the road during your adventure by low memory, primitive console hardware). Basically what iām saying is iām glad some things like that have adapted over the years for something that I feel is better, but the template has not changed and thereās something comforting in that.
Comforting is what playing Dragon Quest 8 is on all levels really, even in its melancholic, dramatic and more tense moments, it exists in a fairytale-like universe where you know the heroes are going to win in the end and everyone will live happily ever after. Its not the destination that matters, it is the journey, the friends you make, the places you see and the memorable enemies and rivals you face along the way - simultaneously getting ever stronger and more confident as you go. These games are bedtime stories that you are literally thrust inside of and can take control of and its wonderful; at their best its like the game equivalent of being at home, on a soft chair, wrapped in a blanket with a hot drink in hand (I can also confirm that this is probably the best way to play them if youāre able). I came out of DQ11 enjoying my time but happy to see it finally come to an end, but then in DQ8 I truly fell in love.
Tonally I think DQ8 nails it, from the very beginning it is established that you are a guard to King Trode along with your pal Yangus and need to remove a curse from him and his daughter, princess Medea, which turned them into a monster and a horse respectively. This simple motivation extends to the entire rest of the game and thereās beauty in that simplicity, it never steers too far from its focus and I felt actively involved in the charactersā dilemma, rather than just some guy along for the ride. I love being bossed around by Trode and find him and Yangus consistently hilarious and lovable. Yangus in particular is just the best isnāt he, just the most loyal briāish bloke I ever met, heād have your back in a pub fight any day of the week and he carried me hard for the entire game, nothing on this planet could stop a max psyched and oomphed yangus.
Throughout the entire game I never got bored of its antics, narrative arcs and wacky characters with ludicrously over the top voice acting. I love love love its goofy voices and exaggerated accents, how can you not find it incessantly charming, the english VAs go above and beyond (though sometimes thereās something dire like Dominico or Rhapthorneās first form, what the fuck were they thinking honestly, hilarious though).
Two things that stand out above all the rest and truly made this experience for me are its art and its soundtrack. Sadly both Akira Toriyama, the lead artist and Kuichi Sogiyama, the composer, have passed away now and I dedicate this to them, the future of this series and jrpgs in general owe so much to them both and thank you for delivering such outstanding work! The character (and monster) designs of dragon quest are outstanding but few of its characters are so colourful and full of personality as we see in DQ8, along with my favourite hero design in the entire franchise. The expressive models and brilliantly composed cutscenes do the designs so much justice and create some great scenes ranging from hysterical slapstick antics to this gripping, palpable melancholy. All this heightened by what is now one of my favourite soundtracks ever. DQ8ās soundtrack is beautiful and captures the āvibeā of every sequence perfectly. Every mood it seems to try and convey is done masterfully and drives this consistent feeling of adventure, mystery, and longing. It can be dramatic or it can be soft and ambient, but its never boring, it never fades into the background, it is always there heightening every emotion the game wants to deliver and thatās something only the best soundtracks do. The smooth and soft violins make up a lot of this ost and they are intoxicating, sweeping over and wrapping around everything else.
Its hard to even pick a favourite moment in DQ8 and in this sense it kind of reminded me of ocarina of time, which similarly has these consistent highs where each storyline is as interesting and enjoyable as the last but the overarching tone always stays the same and this sense of familiarity never truly goes away. Not to mention the world itself is really pretty and fun to explore, the 3ds version is among the best looking games on the system I think. The towns and settlements feel like real places and their individuality shines, I particularly loved exploring castle trodain whilst it is under the curse, the melancholic atmosphere is top notch here and the best track in the game plays here aswell, only making it better. The final dungeon is also a total maze and I really enjoyed it, especially the part where you solve a puzzle by circling what looks like a small town which becomes progressively more cursed and ramshackled with each lap. Something that particularly stood out to me were the personal moments like hearing Medea speak to you in your sleep which I adored, the flashback sequence with Medea meeting the hero and looking after him and helping a king to overcome the trauma of losing his wife.
My only real complaints / criticisms are the incessant metal slime grinding needed to defeat that insane final boss and the sheer amount of randomness that involves as well as the creepy treatment / objectification of some female characters like Jessica, it feels out of place and uncomfortable and should go away. I donāt care for metal slimes in general and donāt see why they exist as a āmechanicā or whatever, the fact they can be worth anywhere between 2x and like, 200x as much XP as what most regular monsters give is so unnecessary. I mean having some monsters be worth a fair bit more xp is fine but the difference is astronomical and this is the only real way to grind without wasting dozens of hours of your precious time and yet it involves so much randomness. A level of randomness is acceptable but thereās randomness to even find metal slimes in the first place because theyāre pretty rare (at least you donāt have to find them in random encounters here thank god). After that thereās randomness in whether or not the slime will just flee immediately and thereās even more randomness in trying to get a critical hit to kill them, thatās multiple levels of random and if you get unlucky in any one of them it is frustrating as fuck! Again this wouldnāt matter so much if metal slime hunting wasnāt the fastest and most optimal way to grind XP since they are worth such a ludicrous amount more than regular enemies.
Without those things I think this would be 5 stars honestly, I enjoyed it so much. This game is just delightful, endlessly charming, warm, comforting and so endearing and silly. Its nice to delve into something that isnāt complex or witty or groundbreaking, it is just plain, simple, joyful fun. By the end credits I was smiling with goosebumps as the overture played on the main menu screen, *Keanu voice: yeah iām thinking iām dragon quest fan.
Dragon Quest 8 is about as pure of an adventure as you can get and I loved just about every moment of its main story and side content. After beating 11 and now this i'm developing a stronger appreciation for what dragon quest is all about and I feel like i've come around on it massively. At a point I was treating dragon quest 11 like other jrpgs i've come to know and love, this is the series that established so many of its trends after all, but in doing so I feel like I was critiquing it unfairly and overlooking the things that made it really special (which is why I deleted my DQ11 review and reevaluated its score)
The gameplay has evolved from those trends at a, shall we say, 'leisurely' pace; but I think that's what a lot of people love about it and part of why its so popular, you always know what you're getting and fans have actually fought against it to change - see dragon quest 9ās departure from its original action rpg direction and subsequent return to traditional turn-based combat in response to fan backlash. Thereās been experimentation, new additions and quality of life changes but the fundamentals have never really changed all that much and if it isnāt broke, why fix it right? It will always sell like wildfire, but for good reason, thereās something about this familiar and homely approach to game design, sure you can pick it apart but if it didnāt work at its core and wasnāt fun, it simply would not have stuck around for as long as it has. Granted the original on the ps2 had random encounters and iām glad to see those go in favour of visible overworld monsters, a totally meaningful change which is becoming the new norm - infact it always felt like the intention even way back when I was playing pokemon yellow (random encounters felt like a means to an end, a technical shortcut used to āsimulateā bumping into monsters on the road during your adventure by low memory, primitive console hardware). Basically what iām saying is iām glad some things like that have adapted over the years for something that I feel is better, but the template has not changed and thereās something comforting in that.
Comforting is what playing Dragon Quest 8 is on all levels really, even in its melancholic, dramatic and more tense moments, it exists in a fairytale-like universe where you know the heroes are going to win in the end and everyone will live happily ever after. Its not the destination that matters, it is the journey, the friends you make, the places you see and the memorable enemies and rivals you face along the way - simultaneously getting ever stronger and more confident as you go. These games are bedtime stories that you are literally thrust inside of and can take control of and its wonderful; at their best its like the game equivalent of being at home, on a soft chair, wrapped in a blanket with a hot drink in hand (I can also confirm that this is probably the best way to play them if youāre able). I came out of DQ11 enjoying my time but happy to see it finally come to an end, but then in DQ8 I truly fell in love.
Tonally I think DQ8 nails it, from the very beginning it is established that you are a guard to King Trode along with your pal Yangus and need to remove a curse from him and his daughter, princess Medea, which turned them into a monster and a horse respectively. This simple motivation extends to the entire rest of the game and thereās beauty in that simplicity, it never steers too far from its focus and I felt actively involved in the charactersā dilemma, rather than just some guy along for the ride. I love being bossed around by Trode and find him and Yangus consistently hilarious and lovable. Yangus in particular is just the best isnāt he, just the most loyal briāish bloke I ever met, heād have your back in a pub fight any day of the week and he carried me hard for the entire game, nothing on this planet could stop a max psyched and oomphed yangus.
Throughout the entire game I never got bored of its antics, narrative arcs and wacky characters with ludicrously over the top voice acting. I love love love its goofy voices and exaggerated accents, how can you not find it incessantly charming, the english VAs go above and beyond (though sometimes thereās something dire like Dominico or Rhapthorneās first form, what the fuck were they thinking honestly, hilarious though).
Two things that stand out above all the rest and truly made this experience for me are its art and its soundtrack. Sadly both Akira Toriyama, the lead artist and Kuichi Sogiyama, the composer, have passed away now and I dedicate this to them, the future of this series and jrpgs in general owe so much to them both and thank you for delivering such outstanding work! The character (and monster) designs of dragon quest are outstanding but few of its characters are so colourful and full of personality as we see in DQ8, along with my favourite hero design in the entire franchise. The expressive models and brilliantly composed cutscenes do the designs so much justice and create some great scenes ranging from hysterical slapstick antics to this gripping, palpable melancholy. All this heightened by what is now one of my favourite soundtracks ever. DQ8ās soundtrack is beautiful and captures the āvibeā of every sequence perfectly. Every mood it seems to try and convey is done masterfully and drives this consistent feeling of adventure, mystery, and longing. It can be dramatic or it can be soft and ambient, but its never boring, it never fades into the background, it is always there heightening every emotion the game wants to deliver and thatās something only the best soundtracks do. The smooth and soft violins make up a lot of this ost and they are intoxicating, sweeping over and wrapping around everything else.
Its hard to even pick a favourite moment in DQ8 and in this sense it kind of reminded me of ocarina of time, which similarly has these consistent highs where each storyline is as interesting and enjoyable as the last but the overarching tone always stays the same and this sense of familiarity never truly goes away. Not to mention the world itself is really pretty and fun to explore, the 3ds version is among the best looking games on the system I think. The towns and settlements feel like real places and their individuality shines, I particularly loved exploring castle trodain whilst it is under the curse, the melancholic atmosphere is top notch here and the best track in the game plays here aswell, only making it better. The final dungeon is also a total maze and I really enjoyed it, especially the part where you solve a puzzle by circling what looks like a small town which becomes progressively more cursed and ramshackled with each lap. Something that particularly stood out to me were the personal moments like hearing Medea speak to you in your sleep which I adored, the flashback sequence with Medea meeting the hero and looking after him and helping a king to overcome the trauma of losing his wife.
My only real complaints / criticisms are the incessant metal slime grinding needed to defeat that insane final boss and the sheer amount of randomness that involves as well as the creepy treatment / objectification of some female characters like Jessica, it feels out of place and uncomfortable and should go away. I donāt care for metal slimes in general and donāt see why they exist as a āmechanicā or whatever, the fact they can be worth anywhere between 2x and like, 200x as much XP as what most regular monsters give is so unnecessary. I mean having some monsters be worth a fair bit more xp is fine but the difference is astronomical and this is the only real way to grind without wasting dozens of hours of your precious time and yet it involves so much randomness. A level of randomness is acceptable but thereās randomness to even find metal slimes in the first place because theyāre pretty rare (at least you donāt have to find them in random encounters here thank god). After that thereās randomness in whether or not the slime will just flee immediately and thereās even more randomness in trying to get a critical hit to kill them, thatās multiple levels of random and if you get unlucky in any one of them it is frustrating as fuck! Again this wouldnāt matter so much if metal slime hunting wasnāt the fastest and most optimal way to grind XP since they are worth such a ludicrous amount more than regular enemies.
Without those things I think this would be 5 stars honestly, I enjoyed it so much. This game is just delightful, endlessly charming, warm, comforting and so endearing and silly. Its nice to delve into something that isnāt complex or witty or groundbreaking, it is just plain, simple, joyful fun. By the end credits I was smiling with goosebumps as the overture played on the main menu screen, *Keanu voice: yeah iām thinking iām dragon quest fan.
until 2 finally comes out in a few weeks there just isn't really quite anything else like Dragon's Dogma, combining fluid Capcom action with fantasy open world role playing with a massive amount of freedom given in how you approach your character and some fantastic late game twists. The scope is relatively limited due to console and time constraints, but what is accomplished here is incredible.
Hong Kong 97
1995
genuinely one of the funniest pieces of interactive software one can witness. Hong Kong 97 was made in two days by two video game pirates in 1995 and you can tell because as a game it's barely functional, and everything about it is complete and utter madness. to the 6 seconds loop of I Love Beijing Tiananmen to the explosion sprites being photos of a mushroom cloud, to the game over screen being a real life dead body, to the objective of killing the 1.2 billion of "ugly fucking reds" and their super weapon being the floating severed head of a deceased Deng Xiaoping, who was alive when the game was made but died in 1997, this is a game that only could've been made by shitposters wanting to take the piss out of the Chinese government and I absolutely love it.
The people who were around for the original punk movement and its derivatives are in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s now - isn't that crazy? My own dad, in his 60s himself, loves to remind me that he was actually there for Buzzcocks, The Clash, and Sex Pistols. His crown jewel "I was there" story is that he saw Diego Maradona score his first ever international goal at Hampden Park and then walked down the road to see Joy Division play their one and only gig in Glasgow later that day. Imagine living through that! When I go to a hometown gig and see a grey-haired dude or two hanging around the bar area, leaning on a walking stick or trying to sneak a breather, it's a surreal reminder that the ranks of "the older generation" are quickly being filled with people who raged against the machine before it was even a band. It's fun to imagine what these folks were like when they were young - what passions and dreams they held. How do I relate myself to them, and what do they have left to relate to me?
I'm not going so far as to say that Goichi Suda and his collaborators are synonymous with the occassional old men I see propping up the bar at their local PVSSYC#NT DIY show or Buzzcocks revival tour-stop, but the long-time staff at Grasshopper are, despite their pseudo-punk status, among the elder statesmen of game developers. Suda 51 has credits on 40 games that are spanned across three decades (will he retire at 51 games and release "The Suda 51 Games Collection"?!) and outside of secretive Nintendo legends like Miyamoto and Tezuka, I can't think of many individual game designers who are sitting on such broad production prestige and history. Travis Strikes Again, is, to my mind, the equivalent of one of those old greybeards finally sitting you down at a table in the beer-soaked venue and telling you all about their good old days stories - and how they're going to try and start a new band, too, of course.
It can feel somewhat ridiculous to attribute any video game to a single creator - as people often do with Suda - but Travis Strikes Again seems well aware of this, with frequent acknowledgements of the collaborative sacrifices that game developers make to create something that's either theirs or another's. It may feel unfair to the programmers and artists and guys who man the Twitter accounts, but I feel that it's imperative for games with "independent" spirit to continue transmitting truly single-personal perspectives in response to amorphous commitee-led industry dominators like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, and one of the only ways to tell a personal story is to focus it on one person - often the writer, or the director. Or the guy who is both. And the guy who is both in this case has an interesting life story (that's still in development, sorry) that I'd like to hear.
Despite speaking so highly of Suda (and Grasshopper) here, I'd say it's fair to say that it's rare that I outright love any of the many games they've made. There's always some glaring, punishing flaw or Duchampian aggression against the status quo that just reminds me too much that I'm wasting precious time. Time-wasting feels like a trait that's almost exclusively reserved for video games, and perhaps it's a unique aspect of the medium that Suda just loves to take advantage of time and time again to differentiate his work from that of a movie or painting or book. But I don't often appreciate it! And while it's nowhere near as brain-mummifiying as The 25th Ward or FSR, Travis Strikes Again still likes to hold up your clock. It feels to me like the game is hamstrung by a perceived need to offer value for money - despite its attempts to stand apart as a genuine art-piece of personal history, it's still constrained on some level by a desire to be a consumable product that people can "get their $40 from" and put 6/10 or 4/5 star ratings or whatever against in a games magazine or website or review blog. It fills its levels with stuff that simply doesn't need to be there, feeling like a guitar solo that goes on too long. But that's punk, right?
The greatest artwork-transgressor is likely the combat itself. While surprisingly strategic and satisfying at times (especially in the later levels), it eventually boils down to the same patterns/plays as always, and ultimately serves as an overbearing obstacle that stands in the way of getting more personal insights and pseudohistorical musings from the remembering minds at Grasshopper. Golden Dragon GP and Killer Marathon are probably the most enjoyable Death Balls in the collection due to the generous ways they interrupt the monotony of streets of raging/geometry warsing across Pac-Man mazes, and I kinda wish the game had been a minigame collection that homaged the different Grasshopper genres. It might have been even better if Travis had just peacefully walked round an Unreal Engine recreation of Suda's headspace and history in a manner not unlike Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective; the game is at its best when it's just sharing its secrets and fun with you.
It's cute that the Serious Moonlight section bills itself as a Shadows of the Damned mini-sequel, but how fun would it have been if they're actually tried to emulate that game's feel, even superficially? C'mon! It's Unreal! The engine that everyone and everything uses for TPS action! (Given how much this game honours Unreal Engine/Tournament, it's a shame that Travis hasn't flossed his way into Fortnite yet) Perhaps too much to ask of our developers, but I honestly feel like there's a human limit to how much mindless swinging of a beam katana one can do while waiting for their clinch super move to charge back up. I went to the UK National Video Games Museum recently, and it proved to me that there's genuine value in getting people to experience gaming history by actually playing those games in quick, sequential succession. I think an Any% playthrough of Grasshopper's entire history is maybe what Vicarious/Grasshopper wanted for Travis Strikes Again, but probably didn't have time to do. Again, video games continue to take away our time in ways other artworks don't quite manage...
It's interesting to parallel this game with something like this year's Iwata Asks book - Iwata's auto/biography has some insightful stories and letters, but doesn't truly bear any of the guy's emotion or soul much beyond vague pleasantries like "I respect the developers at Nintendo" and "Shigeru Miyamoto was my friend". Suda, by contrast, seems more than willing to (sparsely) share his silver threads of thought, often in ways that can be uncomfortable for players - the infamous "the CEO of EA is a woman-beating piece of shit because he didn't let me make my high-concept AAA RPG game wacky enough" is an ugly piece of thinly-veiled thought from Suda, but it's preferable to the Nintendo CEO's polite corporate mannerisming. If video games really want to take that next artistic step, they do need the space to let out some of the ugly problematic thoughts inside our heads (the need to "burn sadness like life-giving fuel" as Travis surprisingly says), and I feel like Travis Strikes Again is moving things in the right direction. This is arguably an art-therapy session for these old boys.
At its core, I guess that's what Travis Strikes Again is. Something that's kinda ugly and protracted and painful, but undeniably worthwhile by virtue of its willingness to be earnestly personal and transgressive. A game that isn't so much about the act of playing the game itself, but more focused on the process of putting your brain against a gamepad to see inside someone else's brain on the other side of the cartridge. It's been a long road to this point, and there's still a long way to go, but they'll keep going. 10 hours of video games a day.
In the human world,
the time for games has ended.
Nothing binds us now.
I'm not going so far as to say that Goichi Suda and his collaborators are synonymous with the occassional old men I see propping up the bar at their local PVSSYC#NT DIY show or Buzzcocks revival tour-stop, but the long-time staff at Grasshopper are, despite their pseudo-punk status, among the elder statesmen of game developers. Suda 51 has credits on 40 games that are spanned across three decades (will he retire at 51 games and release "The Suda 51 Games Collection"?!) and outside of secretive Nintendo legends like Miyamoto and Tezuka, I can't think of many individual game designers who are sitting on such broad production prestige and history. Travis Strikes Again, is, to my mind, the equivalent of one of those old greybeards finally sitting you down at a table in the beer-soaked venue and telling you all about their good old days stories - and how they're going to try and start a new band, too, of course.
It can feel somewhat ridiculous to attribute any video game to a single creator - as people often do with Suda - but Travis Strikes Again seems well aware of this, with frequent acknowledgements of the collaborative sacrifices that game developers make to create something that's either theirs or another's. It may feel unfair to the programmers and artists and guys who man the Twitter accounts, but I feel that it's imperative for games with "independent" spirit to continue transmitting truly single-personal perspectives in response to amorphous commitee-led industry dominators like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, and one of the only ways to tell a personal story is to focus it on one person - often the writer, or the director. Or the guy who is both. And the guy who is both in this case has an interesting life story (that's still in development, sorry) that I'd like to hear.
Despite speaking so highly of Suda (and Grasshopper) here, I'd say it's fair to say that it's rare that I outright love any of the many games they've made. There's always some glaring, punishing flaw or Duchampian aggression against the status quo that just reminds me too much that I'm wasting precious time. Time-wasting feels like a trait that's almost exclusively reserved for video games, and perhaps it's a unique aspect of the medium that Suda just loves to take advantage of time and time again to differentiate his work from that of a movie or painting or book. But I don't often appreciate it! And while it's nowhere near as brain-mummifiying as The 25th Ward or FSR, Travis Strikes Again still likes to hold up your clock. It feels to me like the game is hamstrung by a perceived need to offer value for money - despite its attempts to stand apart as a genuine art-piece of personal history, it's still constrained on some level by a desire to be a consumable product that people can "get their $40 from" and put 6/10 or 4/5 star ratings or whatever against in a games magazine or website or review blog. It fills its levels with stuff that simply doesn't need to be there, feeling like a guitar solo that goes on too long. But that's punk, right?
The greatest artwork-transgressor is likely the combat itself. While surprisingly strategic and satisfying at times (especially in the later levels), it eventually boils down to the same patterns/plays as always, and ultimately serves as an overbearing obstacle that stands in the way of getting more personal insights and pseudohistorical musings from the remembering minds at Grasshopper. Golden Dragon GP and Killer Marathon are probably the most enjoyable Death Balls in the collection due to the generous ways they interrupt the monotony of streets of raging/geometry warsing across Pac-Man mazes, and I kinda wish the game had been a minigame collection that homaged the different Grasshopper genres. It might have been even better if Travis had just peacefully walked round an Unreal Engine recreation of Suda's headspace and history in a manner not unlike Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective; the game is at its best when it's just sharing its secrets and fun with you.
It's cute that the Serious Moonlight section bills itself as a Shadows of the Damned mini-sequel, but how fun would it have been if they're actually tried to emulate that game's feel, even superficially? C'mon! It's Unreal! The engine that everyone and everything uses for TPS action! (Given how much this game honours Unreal Engine/Tournament, it's a shame that Travis hasn't flossed his way into Fortnite yet) Perhaps too much to ask of our developers, but I honestly feel like there's a human limit to how much mindless swinging of a beam katana one can do while waiting for their clinch super move to charge back up. I went to the UK National Video Games Museum recently, and it proved to me that there's genuine value in getting people to experience gaming history by actually playing those games in quick, sequential succession. I think an Any% playthrough of Grasshopper's entire history is maybe what Vicarious/Grasshopper wanted for Travis Strikes Again, but probably didn't have time to do. Again, video games continue to take away our time in ways other artworks don't quite manage...
It's interesting to parallel this game with something like this year's Iwata Asks book - Iwata's auto/biography has some insightful stories and letters, but doesn't truly bear any of the guy's emotion or soul much beyond vague pleasantries like "I respect the developers at Nintendo" and "Shigeru Miyamoto was my friend". Suda, by contrast, seems more than willing to (sparsely) share his silver threads of thought, often in ways that can be uncomfortable for players - the infamous "the CEO of EA is a woman-beating piece of shit because he didn't let me make my high-concept AAA RPG game wacky enough" is an ugly piece of thinly-veiled thought from Suda, but it's preferable to the Nintendo CEO's polite corporate mannerisming. If video games really want to take that next artistic step, they do need the space to let out some of the ugly problematic thoughts inside our heads (the need to "burn sadness like life-giving fuel" as Travis surprisingly says), and I feel like Travis Strikes Again is moving things in the right direction. This is arguably an art-therapy session for these old boys.
At its core, I guess that's what Travis Strikes Again is. Something that's kinda ugly and protracted and painful, but undeniably worthwhile by virtue of its willingness to be earnestly personal and transgressive. A game that isn't so much about the act of playing the game itself, but more focused on the process of putting your brain against a gamepad to see inside someone else's brain on the other side of the cartridge. It's been a long road to this point, and there's still a long way to go, but they'll keep going. 10 hours of video games a day.
In the human world,
the time for games has ended.
Nothing binds us now.
Kind of an interesting case study in how games can very clearly and irrefutably be 'about something' while also fucking up the thesis so badly as to seem self-condemnatory.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a pro-union story that comes across as a propaganda piece meant to make unions look terrible, in much the same ways Starship Troopers is to fascism but accidentally as opposed to deliberately.
Shipbreaker begins on that precarious 'okay' platform that so many games end on and sadly doesn't get better. You, a faceless cog in a machine who follows orders, sign a contract with an inhumane megacorp that gives them the right to kill you and clone you indefinitely. You're then shunted into a gameplay loop which bottoms out at fine and doesn't really get better.
You play a game of Operation on some abandoned ships, ranging from simply dismantling it as one would dismantle a twink to carefully pruning out hazards so that you don't immediately die when you splitsaw is 1% off the mark and hits a ship-wide fuel line. It's... alright I guess. It never really goes anywhere interesting once you get the core upgrades and it unfortunately straddles the miniscule line between "indepth" and "braindead" that makes it fairly forgettable.
Unlike similar games it does tack on new challenges, but at their core they're just rehashes of things you've seen before: Something you need to exercise caution towards when removing from its location, something that you shouldn't touch with the saw or it'll explode, something
But I'm not here to talk about gameplay, I'm here to talk about writing, and Shipbreaker has a lot of issues.
Shipbreaker's stance towards manual labourers is strange and not because it's bad or unrealistic, but because it's one of the rare positive takes on them in the medium. Manual labourers are, speaking from experience, a proud and sardonic bunch who are fully aware that they're doing dangerous and [LITERALLY] back-breaking labour but also view it as a craft that they have become proficient in.
Shipbreaker agrees with this assessment, being one of the first games to acknowledge that people who do dangerous manual labour might genuinely love what they do and see it as a point of pride. Thereās no irony or humour to it, it just is.
The problems stem from how this interacts with Shipbreaker's stance on unions, which is a messy and incoherent jumble of garbage written by what I can only assume is someone who's mostly worked office jobs and knows instinctively that unions are good but hasnāt bothered to understand WHY.
For starters, Shipbreaker's setting is every single stereotype about bad cyberpunk/sci-fi settings thrown into one. It throws the word 'overpopulation' around a lot which is a pretty bad indicator of the writer's politics. A company named LYNX helps people get off shithole-Earth but ropes them into ludicrous contracts that saddle someone with obscene debt and also kill them, because the contract includes a line about consenting to DNA harvesting for cloning purposes.
It's very hamfisted, and the rare moments the parody lands at all are the ones where they just pull something from the headlines, like CEOs getting off scot-free no matter what.
LYNX are absurdly evil, irrevocably evil, an entire capitalistic meat grinder unto themselves.
And your allies, the union, are okay with them.
Shipbreaker is a grand example of what ābad writingā actually is, because in the writerās negligence the game comes off as being both anti-union and pro-capitalist meatgrinder. I donāt think the writer intended this, itās the only read I can take away from the game.
LYNX, to repeat myself, are super evil. Amazonās real life evil multiplied exponentially forever and ever.
The in-game union donāt have any real issues with it. The union and its members know full well that the suffering they endure is deeply systemic, so fundamental to the machine that the entire thing is entirely unfixable. It views human lives as resources to the extent where they just kill new staff and clone them endlessly, claiming them as property
Shipbreakerās story unfortunately betrays its characters, and theyāre only really concerned with how it affects them. The climax of the story is less about the gang being upset about the world they live in and more about how annoyed they are at their middle management. They go on strike once and it worksā¦ kind of? Overtime is ended, middle management is gutted, the corporation nukes slavery clauses/statements from the contracts andā¦
Okay, the cloning thing is something I really need to focus on, because it explains a lot of what I dislike about this game.
This game opens with you signing the LYNX contract and immediately dying, with your clone being thrown out into space to start working. The end of the game has the Space UN intervene in the situation to outlaw cloning. Why wouldnāt they? Itās deeply immoral and exploitative tech thatās worse than the Artificial Intelligence technology the setting has already banned - tech which is (I assume, I may be giving the writer too much credit) deliberately used to highlight how awful cloning is. Itās a no brainer that itād get nuked, right?
ā¦Yeah okay so the Union actually loves cloning tech, so they go out of their way to ensure itās kept around for them specifically. They essentially get a monopoly on the torment nexus.
Also everyone who caused this shit gets off scot-free.
ā¦Sigh, god.
The real issue with this game is that a lot of the plot points can be defended with ābut itās realisticā, and that particular defense is mostly irrefutable.
I love unions. I am a devout proponent of worker solidarity, but Iām not naive enough to think everyone who gets involved with unions cares about every worker thatās like them. A lot of people only join up for self-preservationās sake, giving nary a thought to others because theyāve secured their bag. This is sad, but itās unfortunately human nature. So I guess on some level, the Shipbreakerās Union being obsessed with self-preservation to the point of amorality isnāt unbelievable. Shit dude, farmers do it in real life all the time.
Likewise, yeah. In real life, companies get away scot-free all the time. They are the modern feudal monarchs, able to take losses but never truly lose. Really, a lot of what LYNX do in this game has already been done by either Activision, Amazon, Nestle or any Lithium mining company. Of course itās believable that the Shipbreaker Union strike doesnāt actually hurt them in any meaningful way, and that they arguably benefit because none of the people involved were ever alive to mount a defense on account of clones.
It doesnāt help that both the gameplay and the narrative point out that nothing really changed. You āwonā some minor concessions, but youāre still stuck doing work where dying a horrific, undignified death aboard a silent lifeless spaceship results in little more than a new body being cooked up and sent out.
My ultimate problem, I suppose, is that the experience of Shipbreakerās story simply compounds why ārealistic writingā is such a pitfall. It is neither cathartic nor engaging to experience this story. Neither are the frustrations, inconsistent writing, and accidentally-awful protagonists intended. It may mirror reality, sure, but the end result is that the game comes across as waffling.
You ever see someone go to make a political statement at an award show but they freeze for a moment as their lost paychecks flash across their eyes? This game has the same cadence and hesitance. A game that wants to say āWOO! UNIONS!ā but stumbles so much that it comes across as a hit piece. Let unions win and theyāll monopolize evil technology and happily shack up with the industrial hellmachine.
ā¦The gameplay itself also runs counter to the story. Characters will repeatedly assert that they are not faceless cogs in the hellmachine and they are humans capable of autonomy and feeling.
You arenāt, though. You, the player, are a faceless personality-less cog in the hellmachine who does what theyāre told. You are such an inconsequential cog in the machine that you can refuse to strike and the game still proceeds as if you did. Itās quite the dissonant experience to have the NPCs talk as if youāre actively sabotaging LYNX while youāre standing on the bridge of a ship, knocking out the frame of a window so you can do your job as youāve been doing the entire game.
I wouldnāt recommend you buy Hardspace: Shipbreaker. If you read my reviews you probably have enough dignity to not want to subject yourself to whatās ostensibly a white midwesterner paraphrasing a union newsletter to you.
If you do have it, just mute the game. Put on a playlist or a good album - I recommend Wasted Mind, a legendary pop punk album - and enjoy the gameplay. It might be mid, but āSurgeon Simulator on shipsā is pretty cool, though Space Engineers might tickle your fance more.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a pro-union story that comes across as a propaganda piece meant to make unions look terrible, in much the same ways Starship Troopers is to fascism but accidentally as opposed to deliberately.
Shipbreaker begins on that precarious 'okay' platform that so many games end on and sadly doesn't get better. You, a faceless cog in a machine who follows orders, sign a contract with an inhumane megacorp that gives them the right to kill you and clone you indefinitely. You're then shunted into a gameplay loop which bottoms out at fine and doesn't really get better.
You play a game of Operation on some abandoned ships, ranging from simply dismantling it as one would dismantle a twink to carefully pruning out hazards so that you don't immediately die when you splitsaw is 1% off the mark and hits a ship-wide fuel line. It's... alright I guess. It never really goes anywhere interesting once you get the core upgrades and it unfortunately straddles the miniscule line between "indepth" and "braindead" that makes it fairly forgettable.
Unlike similar games it does tack on new challenges, but at their core they're just rehashes of things you've seen before: Something you need to exercise caution towards when removing from its location, something that you shouldn't touch with the saw or it'll explode, something
But I'm not here to talk about gameplay, I'm here to talk about writing, and Shipbreaker has a lot of issues.
Shipbreaker's stance towards manual labourers is strange and not because it's bad or unrealistic, but because it's one of the rare positive takes on them in the medium. Manual labourers are, speaking from experience, a proud and sardonic bunch who are fully aware that they're doing dangerous and [LITERALLY] back-breaking labour but also view it as a craft that they have become proficient in.
Shipbreaker agrees with this assessment, being one of the first games to acknowledge that people who do dangerous manual labour might genuinely love what they do and see it as a point of pride. Thereās no irony or humour to it, it just is.
The problems stem from how this interacts with Shipbreaker's stance on unions, which is a messy and incoherent jumble of garbage written by what I can only assume is someone who's mostly worked office jobs and knows instinctively that unions are good but hasnāt bothered to understand WHY.
For starters, Shipbreaker's setting is every single stereotype about bad cyberpunk/sci-fi settings thrown into one. It throws the word 'overpopulation' around a lot which is a pretty bad indicator of the writer's politics. A company named LYNX helps people get off shithole-Earth but ropes them into ludicrous contracts that saddle someone with obscene debt and also kill them, because the contract includes a line about consenting to DNA harvesting for cloning purposes.
It's very hamfisted, and the rare moments the parody lands at all are the ones where they just pull something from the headlines, like CEOs getting off scot-free no matter what.
LYNX are absurdly evil, irrevocably evil, an entire capitalistic meat grinder unto themselves.
And your allies, the union, are okay with them.
Shipbreaker is a grand example of what ābad writingā actually is, because in the writerās negligence the game comes off as being both anti-union and pro-capitalist meatgrinder. I donāt think the writer intended this, itās the only read I can take away from the game.
LYNX, to repeat myself, are super evil. Amazonās real life evil multiplied exponentially forever and ever.
The in-game union donāt have any real issues with it. The union and its members know full well that the suffering they endure is deeply systemic, so fundamental to the machine that the entire thing is entirely unfixable. It views human lives as resources to the extent where they just kill new staff and clone them endlessly, claiming them as property
Shipbreakerās story unfortunately betrays its characters, and theyāre only really concerned with how it affects them. The climax of the story is less about the gang being upset about the world they live in and more about how annoyed they are at their middle management. They go on strike once and it worksā¦ kind of? Overtime is ended, middle management is gutted, the corporation nukes slavery clauses/statements from the contracts andā¦
Okay, the cloning thing is something I really need to focus on, because it explains a lot of what I dislike about this game.
This game opens with you signing the LYNX contract and immediately dying, with your clone being thrown out into space to start working. The end of the game has the Space UN intervene in the situation to outlaw cloning. Why wouldnāt they? Itās deeply immoral and exploitative tech thatās worse than the Artificial Intelligence technology the setting has already banned - tech which is (I assume, I may be giving the writer too much credit) deliberately used to highlight how awful cloning is. Itās a no brainer that itād get nuked, right?
ā¦Yeah okay so the Union actually loves cloning tech, so they go out of their way to ensure itās kept around for them specifically. They essentially get a monopoly on the torment nexus.
Also everyone who caused this shit gets off scot-free.
ā¦Sigh, god.
The real issue with this game is that a lot of the plot points can be defended with ābut itās realisticā, and that particular defense is mostly irrefutable.
I love unions. I am a devout proponent of worker solidarity, but Iām not naive enough to think everyone who gets involved with unions cares about every worker thatās like them. A lot of people only join up for self-preservationās sake, giving nary a thought to others because theyāve secured their bag. This is sad, but itās unfortunately human nature. So I guess on some level, the Shipbreakerās Union being obsessed with self-preservation to the point of amorality isnāt unbelievable. Shit dude, farmers do it in real life all the time.
Likewise, yeah. In real life, companies get away scot-free all the time. They are the modern feudal monarchs, able to take losses but never truly lose. Really, a lot of what LYNX do in this game has already been done by either Activision, Amazon, Nestle or any Lithium mining company. Of course itās believable that the Shipbreaker Union strike doesnāt actually hurt them in any meaningful way, and that they arguably benefit because none of the people involved were ever alive to mount a defense on account of clones.
It doesnāt help that both the gameplay and the narrative point out that nothing really changed. You āwonā some minor concessions, but youāre still stuck doing work where dying a horrific, undignified death aboard a silent lifeless spaceship results in little more than a new body being cooked up and sent out.
My ultimate problem, I suppose, is that the experience of Shipbreakerās story simply compounds why ārealistic writingā is such a pitfall. It is neither cathartic nor engaging to experience this story. Neither are the frustrations, inconsistent writing, and accidentally-awful protagonists intended. It may mirror reality, sure, but the end result is that the game comes across as waffling.
You ever see someone go to make a political statement at an award show but they freeze for a moment as their lost paychecks flash across their eyes? This game has the same cadence and hesitance. A game that wants to say āWOO! UNIONS!ā but stumbles so much that it comes across as a hit piece. Let unions win and theyāll monopolize evil technology and happily shack up with the industrial hellmachine.
ā¦The gameplay itself also runs counter to the story. Characters will repeatedly assert that they are not faceless cogs in the hellmachine and they are humans capable of autonomy and feeling.
You arenāt, though. You, the player, are a faceless personality-less cog in the hellmachine who does what theyāre told. You are such an inconsequential cog in the machine that you can refuse to strike and the game still proceeds as if you did. Itās quite the dissonant experience to have the NPCs talk as if youāre actively sabotaging LYNX while youāre standing on the bridge of a ship, knocking out the frame of a window so you can do your job as youāve been doing the entire game.
I wouldnāt recommend you buy Hardspace: Shipbreaker. If you read my reviews you probably have enough dignity to not want to subject yourself to whatās ostensibly a white midwesterner paraphrasing a union newsletter to you.
If you do have it, just mute the game. Put on a playlist or a good album - I recommend Wasted Mind, a legendary pop punk album - and enjoy the gameplay. It might be mid, but āSurgeon Simulator on shipsā is pretty cool, though Space Engineers might tickle your fance more.
Itās very weird to see a series that has until now had such a small, tight team with a very clear authorial voice jump in prestige so that weāre now several rereleases out and firmly in the realm of originally unintended sequels and spinoffs. I didnāt realize that Apollo Justice actually preceded this game in release or I WOULD have played that one first and even now that Iāve committed to cleaving the series in half by trilogy with this little stop off in Investigation town in between. my brain is beginning to itch a bit. But itās a neat exercise to get such a hard break in style from the original games and this one, which sees Takeshi Yamazaki (who came onto the series during the DS rerelease period and seemed like mostly an odd job guy before getting a planning gig on Apollo Justice) as the scenario writer, working closely with relative series newcomer Motohide Eshiro in the producer role to innovate the gameplay quirks that define this subseries. The fresh writing alone gives the game a very distinct vibe from its predecessors for better and worse.
The shift towards investigating with the intent to prosecute crimes places a greater focus on the methodology of the acts youāre looking into, and cases are generally speaking really complex in this game, and less structured, which I think is good. Investigations are more dynamic to begin with just by virtue of moving a little guy around a usually pretty limited screen, which drastically reduces pixel hunting ā but they also only go as long as they need to because youāre not inhibited by the two-or-three day long trial system. It leads to a more natural progression. Edgeworthās special logic minigame where he pieces together little bits of information in his mind as he collects them is unfortunately simple the whole time but it doesnāt ever stop being satisfying in the way that getting an answer right in these games almost always is. Thatās the saving grace of the game ā the act of playing Ace Attorney simply feels good.
The grace needs to be saved because the PACING is completely dreadful the entire time. Thereās no punch, no drama to any of the cases here. Not even one time do you nail a villain at the end of a chapter with a big drop of a huge reveal or a satisfying click of a puzzle piece coming together. More than once I was caught off guard when I finished a case because I didnāt realize that the small, mundane piece of information Iād just revealed was going to be the clincher. This is at its worst in the final case, which might be the longest finale in the series, or maybe it only FEELS like it is, because it is so deeply tied to the previous case and it completely solved all of the emotional arcs of every major character roughly two hours before the game ends. Yeah you wrap up your spunky teenaged sidekickās traumatic backstory, you earn the respect and friendship of the interpol detective who hates prosecutors, you solve the decade-old mystery of the phantom thief thatās haunted the game.
But whatās this? You have to catch the guy who runs the smuggling ring! Who killedā¦.some guy! And itās SO easy. Not once in this sequence did I find myself unable to immediately guess the correct answer to a riddle fifteen minutes before I was allowed to present it, and we are CONSTANTLY being interrupted by new characters storming into the room not to save the day but to do comedy bits. It doesnāt really spoil the mood though because thereās NOT really a mood to spoil because like Iāve mentioned nobody really cares at this point beyond the basic principle of not liking asshole murderers getting away with it!
On the subject of Too Many Characters, this is a place where the game strikes me as particularly insecure. This game is a nonstop parade of guys I Did Not Need To See Again. Why is Maggie Byrde making her third appearance? Why is Officer Meeks here for one scene? How do we, as a polite society, keep letting Wendy Oldbag have bigger and bigger roles in these games even though she continues to have One Joke and it Sucks Ass??? Itās tough because it sucks in both directions. On one hand, everybody involved in this series (including Shu Takumi, he is not innocent here) should be tried in a criminal court for the character assassination of Larry Butz, who in the first game was a kind of mean and stupid guy who is unlucky in love but ultimately has a heart of gold and is a key person in the lives of both of his friends and over time has become a moronic creep who will try to fuck any child he meets and doesnāt understand most of the things that come out of his own mouth. On the other hand I would love to spend more time with Ema Skye, I would love to check in with her, see what sheās up to, hear all about what sheās got going on. Thereās a lot of potential for that character, especially free from the shadow of her big story in the re-release of Ace Attorney 1. Why is she only in one screen of the entire game?? If sheās gonna be here she should be here. It feels weird and desperate, like theyāre scared I wonāt like the game if they donāt constantly jangle keys in the shape of guys I remember in front of my face.
Itās a shame too because I do think the original characters are the actual best part of the game. I like Ema but I think in her original appearance sheās way too much of a Maya clone, distinguished mostly by having a Different Gimmick rather than a different personality. Kay Faraday is a completely different genre of spunky teen sidekick than either of the previous girls, and I find her endlessly funny and charming. Aggressively weird and goofy and cool and with a very fun gimmick that she clings to based on a series of genuinely affecting tragedies. Everyone in her orbit rocks too, Callisto Yew and Detective Badd both hall of fame Ace Attorney guys. Langās drama is not convincing to me but his connection to Shih-na is and his reactions to how their relationship evolves salvage him for me, and his affection for his subordinates is by far the funniest joke in the entire series. The original stuff here is consistently the best shit in the game. I wish it felt like they knew that.
For the first game that as far as I know had zero involvement from the series creator, itās really interesting to see how it feels the same and how it feels different, and where itās successful and where itās not. I think the flaws are desperately glaring, and they are unfortunately mostly play-related, but the moment-to-moment act of Doing Ace Attorney is maybe the best itās ever been. I just wish it was remotely as impactful as it ever had been in the past.
The shift towards investigating with the intent to prosecute crimes places a greater focus on the methodology of the acts youāre looking into, and cases are generally speaking really complex in this game, and less structured, which I think is good. Investigations are more dynamic to begin with just by virtue of moving a little guy around a usually pretty limited screen, which drastically reduces pixel hunting ā but they also only go as long as they need to because youāre not inhibited by the two-or-three day long trial system. It leads to a more natural progression. Edgeworthās special logic minigame where he pieces together little bits of information in his mind as he collects them is unfortunately simple the whole time but it doesnāt ever stop being satisfying in the way that getting an answer right in these games almost always is. Thatās the saving grace of the game ā the act of playing Ace Attorney simply feels good.
The grace needs to be saved because the PACING is completely dreadful the entire time. Thereās no punch, no drama to any of the cases here. Not even one time do you nail a villain at the end of a chapter with a big drop of a huge reveal or a satisfying click of a puzzle piece coming together. More than once I was caught off guard when I finished a case because I didnāt realize that the small, mundane piece of information Iād just revealed was going to be the clincher. This is at its worst in the final case, which might be the longest finale in the series, or maybe it only FEELS like it is, because it is so deeply tied to the previous case and it completely solved all of the emotional arcs of every major character roughly two hours before the game ends. Yeah you wrap up your spunky teenaged sidekickās traumatic backstory, you earn the respect and friendship of the interpol detective who hates prosecutors, you solve the decade-old mystery of the phantom thief thatās haunted the game.
But whatās this? You have to catch the guy who runs the smuggling ring! Who killedā¦.some guy! And itās SO easy. Not once in this sequence did I find myself unable to immediately guess the correct answer to a riddle fifteen minutes before I was allowed to present it, and we are CONSTANTLY being interrupted by new characters storming into the room not to save the day but to do comedy bits. It doesnāt really spoil the mood though because thereās NOT really a mood to spoil because like Iāve mentioned nobody really cares at this point beyond the basic principle of not liking asshole murderers getting away with it!
On the subject of Too Many Characters, this is a place where the game strikes me as particularly insecure. This game is a nonstop parade of guys I Did Not Need To See Again. Why is Maggie Byrde making her third appearance? Why is Officer Meeks here for one scene? How do we, as a polite society, keep letting Wendy Oldbag have bigger and bigger roles in these games even though she continues to have One Joke and it Sucks Ass??? Itās tough because it sucks in both directions. On one hand, everybody involved in this series (including Shu Takumi, he is not innocent here) should be tried in a criminal court for the character assassination of Larry Butz, who in the first game was a kind of mean and stupid guy who is unlucky in love but ultimately has a heart of gold and is a key person in the lives of both of his friends and over time has become a moronic creep who will try to fuck any child he meets and doesnāt understand most of the things that come out of his own mouth. On the other hand I would love to spend more time with Ema Skye, I would love to check in with her, see what sheās up to, hear all about what sheās got going on. Thereās a lot of potential for that character, especially free from the shadow of her big story in the re-release of Ace Attorney 1. Why is she only in one screen of the entire game?? If sheās gonna be here she should be here. It feels weird and desperate, like theyāre scared I wonāt like the game if they donāt constantly jangle keys in the shape of guys I remember in front of my face.
Itās a shame too because I do think the original characters are the actual best part of the game. I like Ema but I think in her original appearance sheās way too much of a Maya clone, distinguished mostly by having a Different Gimmick rather than a different personality. Kay Faraday is a completely different genre of spunky teen sidekick than either of the previous girls, and I find her endlessly funny and charming. Aggressively weird and goofy and cool and with a very fun gimmick that she clings to based on a series of genuinely affecting tragedies. Everyone in her orbit rocks too, Callisto Yew and Detective Badd both hall of fame Ace Attorney guys. Langās drama is not convincing to me but his connection to Shih-na is and his reactions to how their relationship evolves salvage him for me, and his affection for his subordinates is by far the funniest joke in the entire series. The original stuff here is consistently the best shit in the game. I wish it felt like they knew that.
For the first game that as far as I know had zero involvement from the series creator, itās really interesting to see how it feels the same and how it feels different, and where itās successful and where itās not. I think the flaws are desperately glaring, and they are unfortunately mostly play-related, but the moment-to-moment act of Doing Ace Attorney is maybe the best itās ever been. I just wish it was remotely as impactful as it ever had been in the past.
Drmwrldgrl
2023
silly girl sunday.
the overworld sprites are sooo funny looking.
the overworld sprites are sooo funny looking.
Helldivers 2
2024
A victim of its own success.
I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did ā least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.
What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.
The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers ā EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have ā but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.
I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.
I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun ā even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen ā allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.
There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon ā How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER ā and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.
Anyway, it's pretty good.
I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did ā least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.
What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.
The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers ā EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have ā but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.
I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.
"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.
I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun ā even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen ā allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.
There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon ā How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER ā and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.
Anyway, it's pretty good.
Helldivers 2
2024
3D shooters are a genre long and particularly afflicted with 'just so' game design; Half-Life popularized a reload mechanic where you tap a button and wait to have your gun refilled from a pool, and this became a defacto standard for no particular reason over not having reloading, or reloading that actually has gun magazine management, or dozens of other one off systems meant to represent a games ethos. Halo introduced a two-weapon system that, along side a nuanced weapon selection forced you to always accept a trade off, games without nuanced weapon selections copied it wholesale, usually resulting in defacto one weapon system because you really need to carry the M16 at all times to get anything done. Halo Infinite in turn has a sprint button with so little effect that you need a stopwatch to tell if it makes you faster- because Halo doesn't benefit from a sprint mechanic but Shooters Have Sprint. Helldivers is perhaps the only studio published 3D shooter in half a decade if not more where there is no 'just so' game design, from meat and potato mechanics like your gun's recoil being semi-deterministic to help you avoid the regular concern of friendly fire, and your gun being loaded from a small pool of disposable magazines, to fun details like running out of spawns but completing the mission objective still constituting a victory.
Fallout 2
1998
the tribal stuff is awful and the sense of humour stinks of greasy 90s posturing. bombards you with unbearably unfunny pop culture references, plays sexual assault for laughs, and couches all its insipid beerbong edgelord shit in THATS THE WASTELAND BRO because it has no conviction or insight whatsoever that wasn't set up in advance by cain and boyarsky
avellone + friends' worst work by miles and miles. the only thing I like here is My Chrysalis Highwayman which mark morgan probably plagiarized like (allegedly) half the music. everything bad bethesda did to the series' integrity (and worse) started here. this is ground zero and the common (delusional) notion that FO3 was a bolt from the blue tells me the classic fanbase doesn't know shit. Bro??? it's all right here. it's been here since 1998, inside this gross, smelly software that you (allegedly) played. imagine clutching your pearls about a fridge ghoul when FO2 canonized talking deathclaws and tom cruise ā even pete hines unwittingly had you boneheads pegged. who the fuck cares about the world building in the knowyourmeme ass family guy rpg?
"this is worse than the time I got beaten at chess by a freaking radscorpion"
lower gen x into the ground already
avellone + friends' worst work by miles and miles. the only thing I like here is My Chrysalis Highwayman which mark morgan probably plagiarized like (allegedly) half the music. everything bad bethesda did to the series' integrity (and worse) started here. this is ground zero and the common (delusional) notion that FO3 was a bolt from the blue tells me the classic fanbase doesn't know shit. Bro??? it's all right here. it's been here since 1998, inside this gross, smelly software that you (allegedly) played. imagine clutching your pearls about a fridge ghoul when FO2 canonized talking deathclaws and tom cruise ā even pete hines unwittingly had you boneheads pegged. who the fuck cares about the world building in the knowyourmeme ass family guy rpg?
"this is worse than the time I got beaten at chess by a freaking radscorpion"
lower gen x into the ground already
YĢµaĢµkĢµuĢµzĢµaĢµ Like A Dragon Mission: ā KĢµiĢµrĢµyĢµuĢµ Joryu, we need you to save the cancer-riddled children of Sunflower Orphange from the Big Baby Breakdancing Gang! Iāll give you 5,000 Bronze Dragon Points if you can finish them off with this flaming dildo shaped like a copyrighted anime character and livestream it all on Snitch.tv!ā
YĢµaĢµkĢµuĢµzĢµaĢµ Like A Dragon Cutscene: āIāve survived past the point of death so many times, often in the place of others who meant so much more to me than I could have known in the moment. Only now, as I face my own end, do I understand the true pain of feelings left unsaid. I tried to live without regrets, but the consequences of a life left living are inevitable.ā
------------------------
Long - though comparatively short by franchise standards - periods of drama wholly contingent on the viewer's pre-existing knowledge of plot and history from Yakuza 0, Yakuza, Yakuza 2, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6, Judgment and Yakuza: Like A Dragon exist in tandem with tutorials for complex game systems like "using the map" and "doing a kick", highlighting the epic contradictions this saga repeatedly unfolds and upholds upon itself. If you're an insane member of this subcultural phenomenon and have played through all ten games in the series, there is no spiritual need for anything beyond Kiryu's story, but ultimately all the Level-Up Daily Login Bonuses are in service of this game's overarching theme of going through the duties while you watch the exterior world move further away from you and begin to accept life in the interior world built for you by the actions of your past. Either you're new to this and woefully out of your depth (don't worry, Joryu will help you), or you've always known the man who erased his name and are now compelled by brotherly honour to remain with him until the end.
YĢµaĢµkĢµuĢµzĢµaĢµ Like A Dragon Cutscene: āIāve survived past the point of death so many times, often in the place of others who meant so much more to me than I could have known in the moment. Only now, as I face my own end, do I understand the true pain of feelings left unsaid. I tried to live without regrets, but the consequences of a life left living are inevitable.ā
------------------------
Long - though comparatively short by franchise standards - periods of drama wholly contingent on the viewer's pre-existing knowledge of plot and history from Yakuza 0, Yakuza, Yakuza 2, Yakuza 3, Yakuza 4, Yakuza 5, Yakuza 6, Judgment and Yakuza: Like A Dragon exist in tandem with tutorials for complex game systems like "using the map" and "doing a kick", highlighting the epic contradictions this saga repeatedly unfolds and upholds upon itself. If you're an insane member of this subcultural phenomenon and have played through all ten games in the series, there is no spiritual need for anything beyond Kiryu's story, but ultimately all the Level-Up Daily Login Bonuses are in service of this game's overarching theme of going through the duties while you watch the exterior world move further away from you and begin to accept life in the interior world built for you by the actions of your past. Either you're new to this and woefully out of your depth (don't worry, Joryu will help you), or you've always known the man who erased his name and are now compelled by brotherly honour to remain with him until the end.
Void Stranger
2023
Pretty lukewarm on this, which is unfortunate since Zeroranger is one of my favourite games and I was looking forward to this quite a bit. It definitely has retained some of the strong points of that game, not least the music, which is just as amazing (at least in the levels) and is honestly worth playing the game for by itself, but itās also brought along some of the weaknesses and exacerbated them. It was clear in Zeroranger that Project Erasure like to indulge in āanimeā tropes, which I thought was acceptable there because of the connection between Super Sentai and STGs, and the generally lighthearted tone of Zeroranger also allowed them to indulge in a bit of cheesy anime stuff without really detracting from the overall effect of the game. I donāt think that applies here, the immediate tone of the game is thick and tense, the mechanics engender deliberate, thoughtful movements, and this immediately clashes when you are presented with the corny theatrics of the first dream sequence, full of anime-esque character tropes and pop-culture references and (iām sorry to be this mean) genuinely terrible writing, littered with colloquialisms and slang expressions and a super schlocky plot with unbelievably saccharine piano pieces playing in the background. It shows its hand far too early and a lot of the intrigue and general interest in where things were going completely evaporated for me from that point. In hindsight I appreciate how minimalist Zeroranger was with its story.
How is Void Stranger as a sokoban then? Itās ok, pretty good, I wasnāt amazed with the solutions and I rarely felt like I had to get truly creative to solve things until a lot later and even then it was rarely satisfying. Itās probably unfair to compare this to Stephenās Sausage Roll since thatās probably the best sokoban Iāve ever played but almost every puzzle in that game required me to expand my perception of what was possible within the mechanics, which this isnāt nearly as good at. Iām also apprehensive about the lives system of the game. Having extra lives be earned by solving difficult optional puzzles is an excellent idea for a puzzle-roguelike! But when you run out of lives you can either restart from the beginning of the game or accept receiving a narrative āpunishmentā in exchange for infinite lives and neither of these are interesting. Itās uninteresting to repeat puzzles you already know the solution of, and the āvoidā mode feels poorly considered: Pretty much all of the tension diffuses when youāre given infinite lives and you never get a rewind ability or a quick-reset ability, so itās kind of a worst of both worlds situation where you lose the tension of limited lives but donāt get the quality of life options that other infinite-attempt sokoban games give you, which gets annoying in the more complex levels. Sokobans are notoriously persnickety; solutions can often be ruined by one single move being out of order, which is especially relevant in this game as there are a lot of enemy movement cycles to take into account, so losing one of your limited lives and/or having to re-do an entire solution because of something very small can really get frustrating and adds up to that feeling of trial-and-error. Theoretically, everything here is deterministic, so it should be possible to calculate the solution without even moving or risking anything, but in practice I feel it's not common to play this way (I certainly donāt).
The big appeal for a lot of people will be the secrets, which Iām sure will be gradually discovered by the playerbase in weeks to come, and Iām sure some of them will be interesting. Personally, I really donāt care about that stuff, I feel like discovering cryptic secrets without online help is just an exercise in a lot of trial-and-error which is only enjoyed by a certain subset of players that I am not in and I would rather have interesting things presented to me in a structured way (which Zeroranger is excellent at, ironically).
To be honest I should really play more of this but I'm 6 hours in and not really enjoying it. I took a peek at some people further than me and it seems to just be more of what I don't like: More bad anime-esque story, more loops and repetition, so I think I'm just gonna give it up.
How is Void Stranger as a sokoban then? Itās ok, pretty good, I wasnāt amazed with the solutions and I rarely felt like I had to get truly creative to solve things until a lot later and even then it was rarely satisfying. Itās probably unfair to compare this to Stephenās Sausage Roll since thatās probably the best sokoban Iāve ever played but almost every puzzle in that game required me to expand my perception of what was possible within the mechanics, which this isnāt nearly as good at. Iām also apprehensive about the lives system of the game. Having extra lives be earned by solving difficult optional puzzles is an excellent idea for a puzzle-roguelike! But when you run out of lives you can either restart from the beginning of the game or accept receiving a narrative āpunishmentā in exchange for infinite lives and neither of these are interesting. Itās uninteresting to repeat puzzles you already know the solution of, and the āvoidā mode feels poorly considered: Pretty much all of the tension diffuses when youāre given infinite lives and you never get a rewind ability or a quick-reset ability, so itās kind of a worst of both worlds situation where you lose the tension of limited lives but donāt get the quality of life options that other infinite-attempt sokoban games give you, which gets annoying in the more complex levels. Sokobans are notoriously persnickety; solutions can often be ruined by one single move being out of order, which is especially relevant in this game as there are a lot of enemy movement cycles to take into account, so losing one of your limited lives and/or having to re-do an entire solution because of something very small can really get frustrating and adds up to that feeling of trial-and-error. Theoretically, everything here is deterministic, so it should be possible to calculate the solution without even moving or risking anything, but in practice I feel it's not common to play this way (I certainly donāt).
The big appeal for a lot of people will be the secrets, which Iām sure will be gradually discovered by the playerbase in weeks to come, and Iām sure some of them will be interesting. Personally, I really donāt care about that stuff, I feel like discovering cryptic secrets without online help is just an exercise in a lot of trial-and-error which is only enjoyed by a certain subset of players that I am not in and I would rather have interesting things presented to me in a structured way (which Zeroranger is excellent at, ironically).
To be honest I should really play more of this but I'm 6 hours in and not really enjoying it. I took a peek at some people further than me and it seems to just be more of what I don't like: More bad anime-esque story, more loops and repetition, so I think I'm just gonna give it up.
The worst sin a musou can commit is making the mere act of bludgeoning peons to death uninteresting, and in this regard DW Gundam Reborn is the antichrist.
DWGR's tutorial introduces you to charged shot attacks (executed by holding down the charge button and releasing) that instantly kill peons and start chain reactions, on top of doing respectable damage to officers. They are, unfortunately, the best tool in every single Mobile Suit's kit, which leaves the entire game feeling super samey and the suits themselves feeling like extraneous little skins.
Not helping this is that, perhaps due to most suits using beam weaponry, the actual combos available all feel decidedly weak even by the standards of early-mid 2010s musous. Especially on a sound design front, where everything is diet Star Wars wooshes. Not sure what happened; I used to rate this higher than DWG3 but combat in THAT game feels like Monster Hunter in comparison.
There's also that trademark Bandai Namco cheapness on display that leaves this feeling like a port of an arcade title.
There's a lot of archive dialogue in use, meaning characters whose sole narrative contribution is 'dying' will often scream their heartfelt tragic final words in the midst of you clearing through like 300 dudes a second on your way to murder a teenager and end the level.
Dialogue from the main cast was done by the VAs and it shows because not a single sole providing voices to this game gives a shit. Shuichi Ikeda either wasn't being paid enough or simply stopped caring, because all of his voicework here sounds like he's been AI-synthed.
Lastly... God the music is so bad. I know licensing music from animanga properties is hellish unless you're called Cygames, but what they gave us is impactless generic music that tries to vaguely recreate the mood of Gundam music and fails miserably.
Genuinely, when I say 'it's bad' I don't just mean that I dislike it, I mean that on a technical level it's a mess that's barely fit for TV commercials let alone Gundam. It's cheap, repetitive music without any sort of motif or cohesivenes that sounds like each track was made by separate composers.
DWGR features a whole bunch of story modes recreating official Gundam stories and they're all terrible. Only the melodrama of Gundam is preserved, nothing else, and the stories are so truncated that their inclusion is somewhat baffling. The SD Gundam arena fighter has a better story than this.
DWGR's format does not support Gundam very well, with each stage just being a series of capture objectives interspersed with bored/archive dialogue and the odd officer fight. In attempting to retell Gundam stories - especially MSG - they've inadvertently made it funny. It's telling then that the format only really works for Unicorn.
Looping back to the music, each story reuses the same 5-6 tracks so you'll get TIRED of that one exact 'sad song' by the time Zeta Gundam's arc has concluded, and it's only the second story arc.
I'll admit that this game's quality or lack thereof is fascinating to me, because the last game was quite frankly the kind of opulent vanity project that I wish more anime franchises got. Not quite Koei's Attack on Titan 2 levels of insane (or enjoyable), but up there.
This, though? This is ChatGPT's Universal Century.
DWGR's tutorial introduces you to charged shot attacks (executed by holding down the charge button and releasing) that instantly kill peons and start chain reactions, on top of doing respectable damage to officers. They are, unfortunately, the best tool in every single Mobile Suit's kit, which leaves the entire game feeling super samey and the suits themselves feeling like extraneous little skins.
Not helping this is that, perhaps due to most suits using beam weaponry, the actual combos available all feel decidedly weak even by the standards of early-mid 2010s musous. Especially on a sound design front, where everything is diet Star Wars wooshes. Not sure what happened; I used to rate this higher than DWG3 but combat in THAT game feels like Monster Hunter in comparison.
There's also that trademark Bandai Namco cheapness on display that leaves this feeling like a port of an arcade title.
There's a lot of archive dialogue in use, meaning characters whose sole narrative contribution is 'dying' will often scream their heartfelt tragic final words in the midst of you clearing through like 300 dudes a second on your way to murder a teenager and end the level.
Dialogue from the main cast was done by the VAs and it shows because not a single sole providing voices to this game gives a shit. Shuichi Ikeda either wasn't being paid enough or simply stopped caring, because all of his voicework here sounds like he's been AI-synthed.
Lastly... God the music is so bad. I know licensing music from animanga properties is hellish unless you're called Cygames, but what they gave us is impactless generic music that tries to vaguely recreate the mood of Gundam music and fails miserably.
Genuinely, when I say 'it's bad' I don't just mean that I dislike it, I mean that on a technical level it's a mess that's barely fit for TV commercials let alone Gundam. It's cheap, repetitive music without any sort of motif or cohesivenes that sounds like each track was made by separate composers.
DWGR features a whole bunch of story modes recreating official Gundam stories and they're all terrible. Only the melodrama of Gundam is preserved, nothing else, and the stories are so truncated that their inclusion is somewhat baffling. The SD Gundam arena fighter has a better story than this.
DWGR's format does not support Gundam very well, with each stage just being a series of capture objectives interspersed with bored/archive dialogue and the odd officer fight. In attempting to retell Gundam stories - especially MSG - they've inadvertently made it funny. It's telling then that the format only really works for Unicorn.
Looping back to the music, each story reuses the same 5-6 tracks so you'll get TIRED of that one exact 'sad song' by the time Zeta Gundam's arc has concluded, and it's only the second story arc.
I'll admit that this game's quality or lack thereof is fascinating to me, because the last game was quite frankly the kind of opulent vanity project that I wish more anime franchises got. Not quite Koei's Attack on Titan 2 levels of insane (or enjoyable), but up there.
This, though? This is ChatGPT's Universal Century.
In 1995, the BBC founded a videogame publishing division in "BBC Multimedia", in which they contracted developers to produce games based on their IP (they would later publish PS1 games based on Teletubbies and Tweenies, and would announce videogame adaptations of Spooks and Doctor Who [based on the 9th Doctor] that would go unreleased).
They lasted just under a decade before they decided to start licensing out their IP instead.
One of their first console outings, as far as I'm aware, is this PlayStation port of the Windows title Can We Fix It?, based on the stop motion children's series Bob the Builder.
Now, if you've seen my account, you've probably seen that I've played both versions of the Bear in the Big Blue House videogame, so I know what to expect.
After the videogame opens with probably some of the most terrifying sounds a child could hear (the PlayStation startup noises followed by the BBC Multimedia logo), we're treated to the theme song to the show.
Inside this game are eight minigames, each with a variety of "segments".
"Can we build it?" follows Lofty as you knock down a bridge and build a new one. Knocking it down requires you to hit the X button at the right time, and building it has you matching coloured bridge sections.
"Hedgehog Rescue" (or "Porcupine Rescue") only has one minigame, where you match pipe sections.
"Scary Spud" is the next minigame, which is kinda stressful. In it, you use the D-pad (because the analog sticks don't work) to scare away crows by walking over to them.
It's not that difficult, but the fear of messing up is still there...
"Wendy's Birthday" features two minigames; "Cake-tastic!", where you just decorate a cake, and "Wild west Wendy", where you just push buttons to make them dance.
Kinda boring, honestly.
"Bubble trouble" is next, which is quite like the Spud one, only this time you have to drive over bubbles before time runs out.
It's only after this minigame in the menus where you realise that's where the settings are..
Each level is bookended with some kinda empty, low quality CG FMV cutscenes, and each minigame ends with a game of "Where's Pilchard?", which involves you moving a cat's food bowl around the screen until you hear a noise. It's kinda boring since it's pretty obvious where she is, but sometimes you can only see a few pixels of her.
The only minigames without one of these Pilchard games are "Travis' Race Day", a pretty empty racing minigame which really just involves you avoiding things.
There's also two "Plumbing Puzzles", the first of which requires you to slowly walk through a sideways house and back again while you fit pipes and radiators into different coloured rooms, and then "Fix the leaks" has you slowly walk through that same house again on a time limit as you attempt to fix leaky pipes.
The UI is spookily empty.
Seeing "WELL DONE !" in all caps kinda freaks me out in this game and I don't know why.
And that's basically it.
I can't really talk much about this game since it obviously wasn't made for me.
It's fun.
No replay value, though.
They lasted just under a decade before they decided to start licensing out their IP instead.
One of their first console outings, as far as I'm aware, is this PlayStation port of the Windows title Can We Fix It?, based on the stop motion children's series Bob the Builder.
Now, if you've seen my account, you've probably seen that I've played both versions of the Bear in the Big Blue House videogame, so I know what to expect.
After the videogame opens with probably some of the most terrifying sounds a child could hear (the PlayStation startup noises followed by the BBC Multimedia logo), we're treated to the theme song to the show.
Inside this game are eight minigames, each with a variety of "segments".
"Can we build it?" follows Lofty as you knock down a bridge and build a new one. Knocking it down requires you to hit the X button at the right time, and building it has you matching coloured bridge sections.
"Hedgehog Rescue" (or "Porcupine Rescue") only has one minigame, where you match pipe sections.
"Scary Spud" is the next minigame, which is kinda stressful. In it, you use the D-pad (because the analog sticks don't work) to scare away crows by walking over to them.
It's not that difficult, but the fear of messing up is still there...
"Wendy's Birthday" features two minigames; "Cake-tastic!", where you just decorate a cake, and "Wild west Wendy", where you just push buttons to make them dance.
Kinda boring, honestly.
"Bubble trouble" is next, which is quite like the Spud one, only this time you have to drive over bubbles before time runs out.
It's only after this minigame in the menus where you realise that's where the settings are..
Each level is bookended with some kinda empty, low quality CG FMV cutscenes, and each minigame ends with a game of "Where's Pilchard?", which involves you moving a cat's food bowl around the screen until you hear a noise. It's kinda boring since it's pretty obvious where she is, but sometimes you can only see a few pixels of her.
The only minigames without one of these Pilchard games are "Travis' Race Day", a pretty empty racing minigame which really just involves you avoiding things.
There's also two "Plumbing Puzzles", the first of which requires you to slowly walk through a sideways house and back again while you fit pipes and radiators into different coloured rooms, and then "Fix the leaks" has you slowly walk through that same house again on a time limit as you attempt to fix leaky pipes.
The UI is spookily empty.
Seeing "WELL DONE !" in all caps kinda freaks me out in this game and I don't know why.
And that's basically it.
I can't really talk much about this game since it obviously wasn't made for me.
It's fun.
No replay value, though.