ProudLittleSeal
2022
It’s important that you treat Pentiment with the same scrutiny and scepticism that you (hopefully) do with any other historical source. Most media, not just videogames, are, politely put, atrocious at dealing in good faith with the settings and themes that Pentiment tackles, to the point where it’s probably reasonable to call it one of the most authentic games ever made in this regard. The flip side of this is that it makes the things Pentiment gets wrong feel more conspicuous than they would be otherwise.
If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.
There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.
Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.
I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.
However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.
There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.
If that last part has your guard up, you can safely lower it, because Pentiment’s small handful of inaccuracies are pretty minor in that they don't affect the plot overmuch. I won’t say what they are specifically, because this is the type of game where any and all details ought to be discovered yourself, but among other things, they include at least two cultural events which are unambiguously Christian being misattributed to Alpine paganism of some description, as well as one figure who was (to my knowledge) neither pre-Christian nor worshipped as a goddess being described as a pre-Christian goddess.
There are a couple of reasons why these don’t overly strain Pentiment’s believability and for which it deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt. For starters, relative to the vast majority of media set during the early modern period and (in this case, just after the) Middle Ages, Pentiment’s immensely tactful to the point where I'm (almost but not quite) inclined to think these kinds of mistakes were intentionally included, on the part of its characters rather than its writers; that it avoids the common error of misattributing the origins of Christian saints to pagan figures further suggests this. More broadly, it’s unreasonable to expect anything to be perfect in terms of accuracy and – on exceedingly rare occasions, in exceptionally talented hands – inaccuracies can be advantageous. Excalibur’s a more visually distinctive and symbolic film for featuring armour which is about 1000 years too advanced for the 5th/6th century AD. Shadow of Rome’s a more memorable game for making you fight a ~15ft tall Germanic barbarian whose weapon of choice is a marble pillar. Likewise, in a meta sort of way, Pentiment’s central idea of historiographical truth being difficult to pinpoint is arguably strengthened by its own shortcomings in this respect. Ideally, this’ll encourage players to be more wary of any historically-themed media they engage with, including Pentiment itself.
Any such grievances are further obscured by the mostly impressive weight Pentiment lends to your decisions. I had the fortune of playing through Pentiment concurrently with my brother, and when we’d walk in on each other playing it, we’d do mutual double takes as one of us was in the middle of story events that the other didn’t even consider would be possible. Speech checks being affected by past dialogue choices encourages you to constantly, properly pay attention to and think about what you’re saying in a way I personally haven’t seen done since the isometric Fallouts or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Although its time limits (while appreciated) aren’t implemented as organically as Fallout 1’s, an advantage Pentiment has over even those titans is that it also autosaves after every single action you take, lending everything a degree of permanence that few other RPGs can offer. If you were feeling particularly cheeky, you could go as far as to say that Pentiment can be counted alongside the campaign of Black Ops 2 in the pantheon of games which actually are what everyone pretends New Vegas is.
I call it only mostly impressive because Pentiment’s key weakness is the linearity of its third and final act, which even if you’re being charitable can only really be called overbearing. Not to bang on the choices-don’t-matter drum too hard, because nobody can ever seem to agree what choices mattering in a game really looks like, but you’re much more likely to wish you were able to say or do something other than the options you’re given in the last act than in the preceding two. Potential twists and turns you might hope to direct this chapter’s plot towards are often snuffed out by blurted out variations of “actually, I was only pretending to want to do that” that you rarely have any control over. This isn’t to suggest that Pentiment ends on a sour note – the ending itself’s quite lovely – but from a decision making standpoint, the whole last stretch’s noticeably more limiting.
However close it comes, this is never enough to distract from Pentiment’s visual splendour. Jan van Eyck paintings and The Tragedy of Man are the only other media I can think of which incorporate so many different historical art styles into one cohesive package and so skilfully. Sebhat being drawn in the style of Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox art’s a particularly inspired touch, but in general it’s no wonder that the art director and animators are the first names to pop up on the opening credits, because it’s like a playable manuscript. Rarely do you come across a game where you can legitimately say that the visuals are a selling point in and of themselves.
There should be more games like Pentiment. It represents two things we need more of – big developers putting out more niche, experimental titles, and historical media which isn’t riddled with self-congratulatory 21st century arrogance that spits on the memory of everyone who happened to be born before an arbitrary point in time, in which characters actually believe what they say and aren’t one-dimensional caricatures of the past. Be thankful it exists, whatever its issues.
2019
How to surpass 11 years’ worth of expectations in one fell swoop. Newcomers to this series are doubtlessly fortunate to not have to go through several of Erikson’s life stages before they can try DMC5 now, but I think it’ll always be harder to appreciate what an achievement this game is if you weren’t subject to the gargantuan wait for it. For this to exist at all is one thing, but to have ended up being the peak of not just its franchise but arguably its genre in so many ways after all that time is something else entirely.
All four of the main characters are drowning in so many unique mechanics that no amount of text really does them justice, but don’t mistake that for bloat or a lack of focus, because it’s anything but. Nero’s new caveman-like attacks and exploding Devil Breakers hones in on his reckless punky attitude and fleshes out his combat options in a way that finally makes him feel like a worthy heir to his uncle, while also helping him step out of his shadow – talk about ludowudo-whatever harmony. Vergil’s revamped Concentration meter, plethora of just frames and seamless weaving in and out of Sin Devil Trigger at no cost if you time it right feels like the fullest realisation yet of the devilishly precise fighting style that originally made him so popular. V’s characterisation as a squishy wizard differentiates him from other action games that have you fiddling about with multiple characters at once. Dante is Dante, no explanation required, but I will say that I hope Quadruple S does for modern action games what instant weapon switching did for them 20 odd years ago – you can’t help but wonder why every game with a ranking system doesn’t actively integrate it into the gameplay itself like this.
All these options wouldn’t mean much if the game around them wasn’t engaging, so it helps that the level design of DMC5 is staggeringly less obnoxious than all of its predecessors. One level might have you in a giant lift that collapses if you don’t kill the enemies on it quickly enough, revealing an alternate path through the level if it falls as opposed to making you start the challenge from scratch. Another presents you with some brief platforming challenges and doors that are about to shut on either end of them, encouraging you to make a quick decision about which way to go but not punishing you too harshly if you decide to take the path of least resistance. One even has a series of optional, demonic skating parks you can make your way through in multiple ways thanks to Nero’s obscene aerial mobility. The interconnected structure of the previous games’ levels has been shed, and yet, the levels have more ways to progress through them than ever; even the obligatory pick-up-this-item-and-put-it-here “puzzles” feel less egregious now that you can usually tackle them in different orders. A superb trade off for the dice boards and rotating towers of this world, to be sure; it's unfortunate that what's so clearly a series best in this regard is commonly written off for no reason other than that some of the levels look vaguely similar if you squint a bit.
This is true of the enemy design, too. Front to back, DMC5 has the most consistently non-annoying enemy roster in the franchise. No clipping through walls, no long periods of invulnerability that can’t be exploited, just every property of the combat system being stretched to the fullest in ways that feel 100% natural. My favourites are the two that get superarmour or teleport away if you launch them, and picking what moves to use against them becomes even more of a brain teaser when they’re accompanied by other types, who are varyingly more susceptible to being stunned or the hidden fear status effect or clashing with their sword or guard breaks or staying in the air or any number of other under-the-hood tools you have to experiment with. Between the campaign, Bloody Palace and remixed enemy placements on higher difficulties, I don’t think there’s any two enemies that aren’t fought together at some point. Not a single ounce of potential is wasted. The most capital G of gamers might feel that enemies could stand to be more aggressive or have more anti-air options to bring your fancy jump cancels to an end, but I don’t care who you are, because you have absolutely been killed by a stray Riot or Judecca at least once.
Similar credit goes to the bosses, among whom there are miraculously no misfires. Gilgamesh might seem to be on the weaker end until you remember that this is the same series in which Arkham, the Saviour, Nightmare 3 and all of DMC2 exist, after which you suddenly realise he’s either inoffensive at worst or actually quite cool. My favourite is Cavaliere, in part because the first and last of these sword clashes sent my dopamine centre soaring to new heights and it’s all downhill for me from here.
He or any other boss in DMC5 would be a standout if you drag and dropped them into most other action games, and the only reason they’re arguably not in DMC5 itself is because they in turn exist alongside Vergil. I used to prefer his DMC3 iteration – he didn’t define an entire archetype of boss fights for no reason – but as I’ve played this more and more, I realise there’s really no comparison between the two unless you put a lot of stock in presentation. There are more ways to attack, defend yourself from, clash or just generally interact with DMC5’s Vergil than in every previous appearance of his combined, down to him responding to your taunts or commenting on your performance. This isn’t to suggest that more is always better, but the key strength of Vergil has always been that he felt almost like fighting another player, and all these layers upon layers of extra mechanics go huge lengths towards simulating that.
The best games tend to be more than the sum of their parts, so it helps that every other aspect of DMC5 is about as strong as how it plays. The art direction is HUGELY undersold, juggling the weird bio-Gothic architecture of the Qliphoth with the most overtly horror enemies since DMC1 and westernised photorealism, marrying it all into a single oddly cohesive package. Bingo Morihashi ᴵ'ᵐ ˢᵒʳʳʸ ᴵ ᵈᶦˢᵖᵃʳᵃᵍᵉᵈ ʸᵒᵘʳ ʷᵒʳᵏ ᶦⁿ ᵃ ʸᵒᵘᵗᵘᵇᵉ ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉⁿᵗ ˡᶦᵏᵉ ᵗʰʳᵉᵉ ʸᵉᵃʳˢ ᵃᵍᵒ reconciles the series’ trademark themes of family with a metanarrative about leaving red man vs. blue man behind us in ways that cement Nero as just as legendary as either of them. You already know what the soundtrack’s like, but you probably never noticed how underrated Unwavering Bravery is, so listen to that.
As per Dragon’s Dogma 2’s recent announcement, we’re at most a few years away from video games becoming a solved medium, but DMC5 should by no means be seen as just a pit stop on the way there. You can tell Itsuno threatened to quit if Capcom’s higher ups didn’t let him carry out this game exactly the way he wanted, because every last iota of it oozes passion both for the series itself and everyone who's ever worked on it. Dante has a taunt sourced from a Kamiya tweet, and if that isn’t love, what is?
“DMC is back,” and it’s such a satisfying outing that I don’t mind if it never is again.
All four of the main characters are drowning in so many unique mechanics that no amount of text really does them justice, but don’t mistake that for bloat or a lack of focus, because it’s anything but. Nero’s new caveman-like attacks and exploding Devil Breakers hones in on his reckless punky attitude and fleshes out his combat options in a way that finally makes him feel like a worthy heir to his uncle, while also helping him step out of his shadow – talk about ludowudo-whatever harmony. Vergil’s revamped Concentration meter, plethora of just frames and seamless weaving in and out of Sin Devil Trigger at no cost if you time it right feels like the fullest realisation yet of the devilishly precise fighting style that originally made him so popular. V’s characterisation as a squishy wizard differentiates him from other action games that have you fiddling about with multiple characters at once. Dante is Dante, no explanation required, but I will say that I hope Quadruple S does for modern action games what instant weapon switching did for them 20 odd years ago – you can’t help but wonder why every game with a ranking system doesn’t actively integrate it into the gameplay itself like this.
All these options wouldn’t mean much if the game around them wasn’t engaging, so it helps that the level design of DMC5 is staggeringly less obnoxious than all of its predecessors. One level might have you in a giant lift that collapses if you don’t kill the enemies on it quickly enough, revealing an alternate path through the level if it falls as opposed to making you start the challenge from scratch. Another presents you with some brief platforming challenges and doors that are about to shut on either end of them, encouraging you to make a quick decision about which way to go but not punishing you too harshly if you decide to take the path of least resistance. One even has a series of optional, demonic skating parks you can make your way through in multiple ways thanks to Nero’s obscene aerial mobility. The interconnected structure of the previous games’ levels has been shed, and yet, the levels have more ways to progress through them than ever; even the obligatory pick-up-this-item-and-put-it-here “puzzles” feel less egregious now that you can usually tackle them in different orders. A superb trade off for the dice boards and rotating towers of this world, to be sure; it's unfortunate that what's so clearly a series best in this regard is commonly written off for no reason other than that some of the levels look vaguely similar if you squint a bit.
This is true of the enemy design, too. Front to back, DMC5 has the most consistently non-annoying enemy roster in the franchise. No clipping through walls, no long periods of invulnerability that can’t be exploited, just every property of the combat system being stretched to the fullest in ways that feel 100% natural. My favourites are the two that get superarmour or teleport away if you launch them, and picking what moves to use against them becomes even more of a brain teaser when they’re accompanied by other types, who are varyingly more susceptible to being stunned or the hidden fear status effect or clashing with their sword or guard breaks or staying in the air or any number of other under-the-hood tools you have to experiment with. Between the campaign, Bloody Palace and remixed enemy placements on higher difficulties, I don’t think there’s any two enemies that aren’t fought together at some point. Not a single ounce of potential is wasted. The most capital G of gamers might feel that enemies could stand to be more aggressive or have more anti-air options to bring your fancy jump cancels to an end, but I don’t care who you are, because you have absolutely been killed by a stray Riot or Judecca at least once.
Similar credit goes to the bosses, among whom there are miraculously no misfires. Gilgamesh might seem to be on the weaker end until you remember that this is the same series in which Arkham, the Saviour, Nightmare 3 and all of DMC2 exist, after which you suddenly realise he’s either inoffensive at worst or actually quite cool. My favourite is Cavaliere, in part because the first and last of these sword clashes sent my dopamine centre soaring to new heights and it’s all downhill for me from here.
He or any other boss in DMC5 would be a standout if you drag and dropped them into most other action games, and the only reason they’re arguably not in DMC5 itself is because they in turn exist alongside Vergil. I used to prefer his DMC3 iteration – he didn’t define an entire archetype of boss fights for no reason – but as I’ve played this more and more, I realise there’s really no comparison between the two unless you put a lot of stock in presentation. There are more ways to attack, defend yourself from, clash or just generally interact with DMC5’s Vergil than in every previous appearance of his combined, down to him responding to your taunts or commenting on your performance. This isn’t to suggest that more is always better, but the key strength of Vergil has always been that he felt almost like fighting another player, and all these layers upon layers of extra mechanics go huge lengths towards simulating that.
The best games tend to be more than the sum of their parts, so it helps that every other aspect of DMC5 is about as strong as how it plays. The art direction is HUGELY undersold, juggling the weird bio-Gothic architecture of the Qliphoth with the most overtly horror enemies since DMC1 and westernised photorealism, marrying it all into a single oddly cohesive package. Bingo Morihashi ᴵ'ᵐ ˢᵒʳʳʸ ᴵ ᵈᶦˢᵖᵃʳᵃᵍᵉᵈ ʸᵒᵘʳ ʷᵒʳᵏ ᶦⁿ ᵃ ʸᵒᵘᵗᵘᵇᵉ ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉⁿᵗ ˡᶦᵏᵉ ᵗʰʳᵉᵉ ʸᵉᵃʳˢ ᵃᵍᵒ reconciles the series’ trademark themes of family with a metanarrative about leaving red man vs. blue man behind us in ways that cement Nero as just as legendary as either of them. You already know what the soundtrack’s like, but you probably never noticed how underrated Unwavering Bravery is, so listen to that.
As per Dragon’s Dogma 2’s recent announcement, we’re at most a few years away from video games becoming a solved medium, but DMC5 should by no means be seen as just a pit stop on the way there. You can tell Itsuno threatened to quit if Capcom’s higher ups didn’t let him carry out this game exactly the way he wanted, because every last iota of it oozes passion both for the series itself and everyone who's ever worked on it. Dante has a taunt sourced from a Kamiya tweet, and if that isn’t love, what is?
“DMC is back,” and it’s such a satisfying outing that I don’t mind if it never is again.
Initially felt inclined to rate The Lost Crown slightly lower due to some minor annoyances brought about by glitches, but by the end, I realised it represents too much of what I want out of this industry to lowball it. This game’s not just a welcome franchise revival or a showcase of a big publisher’s willingness to get experimental, it’s equally a reminder that not enough people are aware of what consistently great developers Ubisoft Montpellier are, an exercise in hardcore Indo-Persian frisbeeing, a vindication of Warrior Within enjoyers and – if you ask me – the single best search-‘em-up outside of actual Metroid games.
There’s a few indicators that Warrior Within was a point of study here – Sargon dual wields swords, it’s bloodier and more combat-oriented than most other entries, creatures from Persian folklore play a bigger role compared to original monsters and the Prince’s outfit from it was a preorder bonus – but the main one is that Warrior Within was Prince of Persia’s precedent for experimenting with a Metroid-y overworld. That more exploratory angle was always why I liked it best, so it’s just as well that The Last Crown expands on this like a duck to water. Mount Qaf’s dishing out surprises so regularly that the game never once feels stale despite how much longer it is than most of this genre, which is thanks not just to the conceptual creativity and sheer number of its biomes but also how those concepts inform their mechanics. To mention just one, my favourite’s the labyrinthine library whose master’s hunger for knowledge ended up turning him into Mr. X, in which you have to juggle that looming threat with puzzles where realising the solution is only part of the equation; showing you how I did this particular one isn’t even really a spoiler, because the onus is still as much on your dexterity and forward-planning as on figuring out what to do. Comparatively straightforward, linear areas aren’t without some kind of distinctive pull or spectacle either, one major highlight being pressing the resume button on a naval battle which had been frozen in time centuries ago.
That sort of moment-to-moment variety goes a big way towards helping avoid the staleness or tedium that could’ve been invited by its length, but the biggest asset in that regard is what a joy it is to gradually unravel Mount Qaf. I love the powers in this to the point that I’m hoping future metroidbraniacs rip them off wholesale. Nearly every individual one of them opens up several means of approach in both platforming and combat by itself; teleporting to an afterimage with Shadow of the Simurgh to slip through obstacles or set up multiple charged attacks quicker than you normally could, phasing between realities like in Soul Reaver to control when certain enemies or platforms become tangible, stuffing an explosive in your pocket to unveil a hidden respite in a precision platforming segment or even an entire enemy to even the odds in a particularly tough encounter… Every time I unlocked a new one, my mind was racing at the possibilities. Combine just a few with a little out-of-the-box thinking and it feels like you can reach just about anywhere – I’ve no idea how you’re “supposed” to get past the bit in that clip normally, and that’s beautiful.
Its combat designers similarly outdo themselves. Experimentation’s the name of the game, in part thanks to the impressive amount of hit reactions on its enemies’ part. They and bosses can be varyingly be tripped, launched, juggled, wallsplatted and more, but these differ heavily according to their weight class, which contributes to them being as varied functionally as visually in addition to making target prioritisation pretty frantic whenever big bois are mixed in with little ones. Coupled with the aforementioned powers, your means of approach are spruced up by the extent to which you can alter Sargon’s attributes through an equivalent to Hollow Knight’s charm system. I personally set him up with a ranged shockwave on melee attacks and another letting you turn the chakram into a lingering hazard, with an additional one that heals you on successful parries in case I ran out of potions during the increasingly tough later levels and their gleefully Shonen boss fights, but the customisation on offer’s such that your combat comfort zone’ll likely be pretty different. The feedback on attacks also deserves credit, seemingly taking pointers from Dreadtroid in that respect (love the slight screenshake on each hit in particular). As I said to a friend of mine, himself a French weeb, I’d loosely compare The Lost Crown to Streets of Rage 4 in that it represents what happens when a bunch of French weebs get together and stuff as much of whatever they think is coolest into a game as possible: an exhibition of action gameplay so well-studied and thoroughly understood you’d swear it was made by the Japanese genre figureheads they so clearly admire.
Same goes for its visual artists and the carvers of ancient rock reliefs they palpably draw inspiration from. It’s a delight to see this series dig deeper into the historical iconography of its namesake, ornate Faravahars and esoteric cuneiform and all, tempered by the hand of Rayman Legends’ art director to drape it all in this lovely cartoony, stylised edge. I imagine part of why it runs so well both handheld and docked’s due in part to some clever tricks the artists use with the backgrounds and certain characters too, rendering them with painted 2D images as opposed to fully textured 3D models; really lends figures like the Simurgh and places like the Crossroads of Time an otherworldly feel.
I’ve always been iffy on how “Ubisoft” is used as a descriptor, partially because it often crops up regardless of how similar the game it’s used in reference to actually is to any of their games, but also because there are so many Ubisofts that you can’t really talk about them like they’re a singular entity. I mentioned in my Chaos Theory review that I find it hard not to retain some goodwill towards them so long as at least some of their oldheads remain, and while that holds true, The Lost Crown’s also a compelling case for their newcomers. It’s clear evidence that there’s a swathe of latent talent amongst the group’s bloated headcount primed and ready for the chance to be let off the mobile game hamster wheel and deliver some genre-best efforts, with such avalanches of great ideas that I haven’t even mentioned Memory Shards or that this has a Persian Vergil who uses the 3D games’ time powers against you. Severely hoping Ahriman decides to lay off for a bit so that this game and the people behind it can see the success they deserve, and so we can get more of those in turn.
There’s a few indicators that Warrior Within was a point of study here – Sargon dual wields swords, it’s bloodier and more combat-oriented than most other entries, creatures from Persian folklore play a bigger role compared to original monsters and the Prince’s outfit from it was a preorder bonus – but the main one is that Warrior Within was Prince of Persia’s precedent for experimenting with a Metroid-y overworld. That more exploratory angle was always why I liked it best, so it’s just as well that The Last Crown expands on this like a duck to water. Mount Qaf’s dishing out surprises so regularly that the game never once feels stale despite how much longer it is than most of this genre, which is thanks not just to the conceptual creativity and sheer number of its biomes but also how those concepts inform their mechanics. To mention just one, my favourite’s the labyrinthine library whose master’s hunger for knowledge ended up turning him into Mr. X, in which you have to juggle that looming threat with puzzles where realising the solution is only part of the equation; showing you how I did this particular one isn’t even really a spoiler, because the onus is still as much on your dexterity and forward-planning as on figuring out what to do. Comparatively straightforward, linear areas aren’t without some kind of distinctive pull or spectacle either, one major highlight being pressing the resume button on a naval battle which had been frozen in time centuries ago.
That sort of moment-to-moment variety goes a big way towards helping avoid the staleness or tedium that could’ve been invited by its length, but the biggest asset in that regard is what a joy it is to gradually unravel Mount Qaf. I love the powers in this to the point that I’m hoping future metroidbraniacs rip them off wholesale. Nearly every individual one of them opens up several means of approach in both platforming and combat by itself; teleporting to an afterimage with Shadow of the Simurgh to slip through obstacles or set up multiple charged attacks quicker than you normally could, phasing between realities like in Soul Reaver to control when certain enemies or platforms become tangible, stuffing an explosive in your pocket to unveil a hidden respite in a precision platforming segment or even an entire enemy to even the odds in a particularly tough encounter… Every time I unlocked a new one, my mind was racing at the possibilities. Combine just a few with a little out-of-the-box thinking and it feels like you can reach just about anywhere – I’ve no idea how you’re “supposed” to get past the bit in that clip normally, and that’s beautiful.
Its combat designers similarly outdo themselves. Experimentation’s the name of the game, in part thanks to the impressive amount of hit reactions on its enemies’ part. They and bosses can be varyingly be tripped, launched, juggled, wallsplatted and more, but these differ heavily according to their weight class, which contributes to them being as varied functionally as visually in addition to making target prioritisation pretty frantic whenever big bois are mixed in with little ones. Coupled with the aforementioned powers, your means of approach are spruced up by the extent to which you can alter Sargon’s attributes through an equivalent to Hollow Knight’s charm system. I personally set him up with a ranged shockwave on melee attacks and another letting you turn the chakram into a lingering hazard, with an additional one that heals you on successful parries in case I ran out of potions during the increasingly tough later levels and their gleefully Shonen boss fights, but the customisation on offer’s such that your combat comfort zone’ll likely be pretty different. The feedback on attacks also deserves credit, seemingly taking pointers from Dreadtroid in that respect (love the slight screenshake on each hit in particular). As I said to a friend of mine, himself a French weeb, I’d loosely compare The Lost Crown to Streets of Rage 4 in that it represents what happens when a bunch of French weebs get together and stuff as much of whatever they think is coolest into a game as possible: an exhibition of action gameplay so well-studied and thoroughly understood you’d swear it was made by the Japanese genre figureheads they so clearly admire.
Same goes for its visual artists and the carvers of ancient rock reliefs they palpably draw inspiration from. It’s a delight to see this series dig deeper into the historical iconography of its namesake, ornate Faravahars and esoteric cuneiform and all, tempered by the hand of Rayman Legends’ art director to drape it all in this lovely cartoony, stylised edge. I imagine part of why it runs so well both handheld and docked’s due in part to some clever tricks the artists use with the backgrounds and certain characters too, rendering them with painted 2D images as opposed to fully textured 3D models; really lends figures like the Simurgh and places like the Crossroads of Time an otherworldly feel.
I’ve always been iffy on how “Ubisoft” is used as a descriptor, partially because it often crops up regardless of how similar the game it’s used in reference to actually is to any of their games, but also because there are so many Ubisofts that you can’t really talk about them like they’re a singular entity. I mentioned in my Chaos Theory review that I find it hard not to retain some goodwill towards them so long as at least some of their oldheads remain, and while that holds true, The Lost Crown’s also a compelling case for their newcomers. It’s clear evidence that there’s a swathe of latent talent amongst the group’s bloated headcount primed and ready for the chance to be let off the mobile game hamster wheel and deliver some genre-best efforts, with such avalanches of great ideas that I haven’t even mentioned Memory Shards or that this has a Persian Vergil who uses the 3D games’ time powers against you. Severely hoping Ahriman decides to lay off for a bit so that this game and the people behind it can see the success they deserve, and so we can get more of those in turn.
2024
In one of its previews, Hideaki Itsuno was deliberately evasive when asked about why Dragon’s Dogma II’s title screen initially lacks the II, saying only “nothing in this game is unintentional.” You can draw whatever conclusion you like from that, but I think I’ve a different interpretation from most – it’s less a signal that this is a reimagining or a remake or whatever else in disguise than a display of confidence in how well he and his team understand what makes it tick.
As much as I’ll never wrap my head around how they got the first Dragon’s Dogma running on 7th gen hardware (albeit just about), I would’ve said it was impossible not to feel how much more II has going on under the hood in even the briefest, most hasty of encounters if it weren’t being so undersold in this respect. While my favourite addition is that enemies’ individual body parts can now be dragged or shoved to throw them off balance, tying into both this new world’s more angular design and how they can be stunned by banging their head off of its geometry, yours might be something else entirely with how many other new toys there are to play with. One particularly big one’s that you and your pawns can retain access to your standard movesets while clinging to larger enemies if you manage to mantle onto them from the appropriate angle, but you’ve gotta watch out for the newly implemented ragdoll physics while doing so, since the damage received from getting bucked off now varies wildly depending on your position at the time and the nearby environment as a result of them. Successive strikes create new avenues of offence akin to Nioh’s grapples, pressuring you to get as much damage in as you can before letting one loose and taking your target out of its disadvantage state, while also enabling you to keep them in a loop if you’re able to manipulate their stun values well enough. Layers of interaction just keep unravelling further as you play – controlling the arc you throw enemies or objects in, tackling smaller enemies by grabbing them mid-air, corpses or unconscious bodies of bosses now being tangible things you can stand on top of instead of ethereal loot pinatas… I would’ve taken any one of these in isolation. To have them all, plus more, every one being wholly complementary and faithful to the scrambly, dynamic, improvisational core of Dragon’s Dogma’s combat? It’s i n s a n e to me that someone can undergo even a confused few minutes of exposure to any of this and reduce it to “more of the first” or what have you.
Your means of approaching enemies or general scenarios which return from the first game’re further changed by II’s more specialised vocations. Having spent most of my time with Warrior in both titles, I love what’s been done with it in particular. They’ve taken the concept of timing certain skills and applied it to almost every move, anything from your standard swings to its final unlockable skill becoming faster and faster as you time successive inputs correctly – this is only the slow, basic version of the latter and I still feel bad for whatever I batter with it – with chargeable skills now also doubling as a parry for attacks they collide with, similar to DMC5’s clashing mechanic. It’s emblematic of the devs’ approach to vocations in general; Archer’s relatively lacking melee options and litany of flippy, full-on Legolas nonsense encourages keepaway where its four predecessors were all slightly differing flavours of “does everything”, Thief trades access to assault rifle-like bows and invites stubbiness for being able to navigate this world’s much rockier terrain like it’s a platformer, Fighter no longer has to waste skill slots to hit anything slightly above your head and has more versatile means of defence in exchange for melee combat being more punishing in general, etc. It’s to the extent that choosing between any two vocations feels like I’m switching genres, man. In a landscape where people are demonstrably content with having no means of interacting with big monsters other than smacking their ankles, how is even a pretty simple interaction like this not supposed to feel like a game from the future?
On simple interactions, much of this would be lessened if it weren’t for the loss gauge in tandem with the camping system and how these accentuate the sense of adventure which the first game built. The persistent thoughts of “how do I get there?” are retained, but only being able to fully recuperate your health via downtime with the lads and/or ladesses fills every step of the way toward the answer with that much more trepidation, bolstered further by the aforementioned verticality and on the more presentational side of things by how your pawns actually talk to each other now. It leads to some very memorable, emergent experiences which are personal purely to you – one I’m especially fond of involved resting after killing a drake, having my camp ambushed in the middle of the night by knackers who were too high up for me to exercise my k-word pass and having to trek all the way back to Bakbattahl with barely a third of my maximum health as my party continually chattered about how freaky the dark is. I take back the suggestion I made regarding potential changes to the healing system in my review of the first game, because even superfans (or, maybe, especially superfans) can, and do, think too small.
I realise in retrospect that even I, on some level, was wanting certain aspects of Dragon’s Dogma to be like other games instead of taking it on its own merits, something II’s seemingly suffered from all the more with how much gaming has grown since the original’s release, the average player’s tolerance for anything deviating from the norm and, presumably, frame of reference growing ever smaller. Look no further than broad reactions to dragonsplague and its effects (which I won’t spoil) being only the second or third most embarrassing instance of misinformed kneejerk hostility disguised as principled scepticism which enveloped this game’s release to the point you’d swear Todd Howard was attached to it – we want consequences that matter, but not like that! Even if you aren’t onboard with this being the coolest, ballsiest thing an RPG has bothered and will bother to do since before I was born, how can you not at least get a kick out of starting up your own homegrown Dragonsplague Removal Service? You thought you could escape the great spring cleaning, Thomyris, you silly billy? I’m oblivious like you wouldn’t believe, had her wearing an ornate sallet by the time she’d first contracted it and still noticed her glowing red eyes every time, so I’m at a loss as to how it could blindside anybody. It vaguely reminds me of modern reactions to various aspects of the original Fallout; a game which you can reasonably beat in the span of an afternoon, designed to be played with a single hand, somehow commonly seen as unintuitive because it just is, okay? Abandon all delusions of levelheadedness: if a Fallout game with a timer were to release now, the world’s collective sharting would result in something similar to that universe’s Great War or, indeed, Dragon’s Dogma II’s own post-game.
For as many hours as I’ve poured into the Everfall and Bitterblack across two copies of the original, they’re not what I think of when I think of Dragon’s Dogma (or particularly interesting, in the former’s case), which is adventuring in its open world. In that regard, I can’t be convinced that II’s post-game isn’t far more substantial, comparatively rife with monsters either unique or which you’re very unlikely to encounter prior to it, changes to the world’s layout beyond a hole in the ground of one city, its own mechanics (one actually a bit reminiscent of Fallout’s timer), questlines and even setpieces. It’s got a kaiju fight between a Ray Harryhausen love letter and a demonic worm thing which, as of the time of writing, roughly 2% of players have discovered, and instead of being praised for the sheer restraint it must’ve taken to keep something like that so out of the way, it’s chastised for it?
I’m not sure any other game’s ever made me realise how divorced what I want out of games seems to be from the wider populace. So much of this is 1:1 aligned with my tastes that the only thing that feels potentially missing’s the relative lack of electric guitars, but even then I’d be a liar if I told you that Misshapen Eye, the dullahan’s theme, the griffin’s new track, the post-game’s somber piano keys or the true ending’s credits song among others haven’t gotten stuck in my head at some stage anyway or didn’t perfectly complement the action through dynamically changing. It manages this despite clearly not caring about what you or I or anyone else thinks or wants from it. It’s developed a will and conviction all of its own. It’s Dragon’s Dogma, too.
As much as I’ll never wrap my head around how they got the first Dragon’s Dogma running on 7th gen hardware (albeit just about), I would’ve said it was impossible not to feel how much more II has going on under the hood in even the briefest, most hasty of encounters if it weren’t being so undersold in this respect. While my favourite addition is that enemies’ individual body parts can now be dragged or shoved to throw them off balance, tying into both this new world’s more angular design and how they can be stunned by banging their head off of its geometry, yours might be something else entirely with how many other new toys there are to play with. One particularly big one’s that you and your pawns can retain access to your standard movesets while clinging to larger enemies if you manage to mantle onto them from the appropriate angle, but you’ve gotta watch out for the newly implemented ragdoll physics while doing so, since the damage received from getting bucked off now varies wildly depending on your position at the time and the nearby environment as a result of them. Successive strikes create new avenues of offence akin to Nioh’s grapples, pressuring you to get as much damage in as you can before letting one loose and taking your target out of its disadvantage state, while also enabling you to keep them in a loop if you’re able to manipulate their stun values well enough. Layers of interaction just keep unravelling further as you play – controlling the arc you throw enemies or objects in, tackling smaller enemies by grabbing them mid-air, corpses or unconscious bodies of bosses now being tangible things you can stand on top of instead of ethereal loot pinatas… I would’ve taken any one of these in isolation. To have them all, plus more, every one being wholly complementary and faithful to the scrambly, dynamic, improvisational core of Dragon’s Dogma’s combat? It’s i n s a n e to me that someone can undergo even a confused few minutes of exposure to any of this and reduce it to “more of the first” or what have you.
Your means of approaching enemies or general scenarios which return from the first game’re further changed by II’s more specialised vocations. Having spent most of my time with Warrior in both titles, I love what’s been done with it in particular. They’ve taken the concept of timing certain skills and applied it to almost every move, anything from your standard swings to its final unlockable skill becoming faster and faster as you time successive inputs correctly – this is only the slow, basic version of the latter and I still feel bad for whatever I batter with it – with chargeable skills now also doubling as a parry for attacks they collide with, similar to DMC5’s clashing mechanic. It’s emblematic of the devs’ approach to vocations in general; Archer’s relatively lacking melee options and litany of flippy, full-on Legolas nonsense encourages keepaway where its four predecessors were all slightly differing flavours of “does everything”, Thief trades access to assault rifle-like bows and invites stubbiness for being able to navigate this world’s much rockier terrain like it’s a platformer, Fighter no longer has to waste skill slots to hit anything slightly above your head and has more versatile means of defence in exchange for melee combat being more punishing in general, etc. It’s to the extent that choosing between any two vocations feels like I’m switching genres, man. In a landscape where people are demonstrably content with having no means of interacting with big monsters other than smacking their ankles, how is even a pretty simple interaction like this not supposed to feel like a game from the future?
On simple interactions, much of this would be lessened if it weren’t for the loss gauge in tandem with the camping system and how these accentuate the sense of adventure which the first game built. The persistent thoughts of “how do I get there?” are retained, but only being able to fully recuperate your health via downtime with the lads and/or ladesses fills every step of the way toward the answer with that much more trepidation, bolstered further by the aforementioned verticality and on the more presentational side of things by how your pawns actually talk to each other now. It leads to some very memorable, emergent experiences which are personal purely to you – one I’m especially fond of involved resting after killing a drake, having my camp ambushed in the middle of the night by knackers who were too high up for me to exercise my k-word pass and having to trek all the way back to Bakbattahl with barely a third of my maximum health as my party continually chattered about how freaky the dark is. I take back the suggestion I made regarding potential changes to the healing system in my review of the first game, because even superfans (or, maybe, especially superfans) can, and do, think too small.
I realise in retrospect that even I, on some level, was wanting certain aspects of Dragon’s Dogma to be like other games instead of taking it on its own merits, something II’s seemingly suffered from all the more with how much gaming has grown since the original’s release, the average player’s tolerance for anything deviating from the norm and, presumably, frame of reference growing ever smaller. Look no further than broad reactions to dragonsplague and its effects (which I won’t spoil) being only the second or third most embarrassing instance of misinformed kneejerk hostility disguised as principled scepticism which enveloped this game’s release to the point you’d swear Todd Howard was attached to it – we want consequences that matter, but not like that! Even if you aren’t onboard with this being the coolest, ballsiest thing an RPG has bothered and will bother to do since before I was born, how can you not at least get a kick out of starting up your own homegrown Dragonsplague Removal Service? You thought you could escape the great spring cleaning, Thomyris, you silly billy? I’m oblivious like you wouldn’t believe, had her wearing an ornate sallet by the time she’d first contracted it and still noticed her glowing red eyes every time, so I’m at a loss as to how it could blindside anybody. It vaguely reminds me of modern reactions to various aspects of the original Fallout; a game which you can reasonably beat in the span of an afternoon, designed to be played with a single hand, somehow commonly seen as unintuitive because it just is, okay? Abandon all delusions of levelheadedness: if a Fallout game with a timer were to release now, the world’s collective sharting would result in something similar to that universe’s Great War or, indeed, Dragon’s Dogma II’s own post-game.
For as many hours as I’ve poured into the Everfall and Bitterblack across two copies of the original, they’re not what I think of when I think of Dragon’s Dogma (or particularly interesting, in the former’s case), which is adventuring in its open world. In that regard, I can’t be convinced that II’s post-game isn’t far more substantial, comparatively rife with monsters either unique or which you’re very unlikely to encounter prior to it, changes to the world’s layout beyond a hole in the ground of one city, its own mechanics (one actually a bit reminiscent of Fallout’s timer), questlines and even setpieces. It’s got a kaiju fight between a Ray Harryhausen love letter and a demonic worm thing which, as of the time of writing, roughly 2% of players have discovered, and instead of being praised for the sheer restraint it must’ve taken to keep something like that so out of the way, it’s chastised for it?
I’m not sure any other game’s ever made me realise how divorced what I want out of games seems to be from the wider populace. So much of this is 1:1 aligned with my tastes that the only thing that feels potentially missing’s the relative lack of electric guitars, but even then I’d be a liar if I told you that Misshapen Eye, the dullahan’s theme, the griffin’s new track, the post-game’s somber piano keys or the true ending’s credits song among others haven’t gotten stuck in my head at some stage anyway or didn’t perfectly complement the action through dynamically changing. It manages this despite clearly not caring about what you or I or anyone else thinks or wants from it. It’s developed a will and conviction all of its own. It’s Dragon’s Dogma, too.
2003
The Devil May Cry games, and arguably action games as a whole, wouldn't be what they are today without DMC2. Everyone knows it's bad, but I think there's an unfortunate tendency to gloss over what an important piece of action game history it is. Few games are as absolutely brimming with legitimately really good and innovative ideas as DMC2 is, it's just that it didn't have anywhere near the development time it needed to realise them. Because of this, I think it's much more interesting to look at DMC2 in terms of what it did well & why it's ultimately much more influential than one would initially assume.
So, what did DMC2 bring to the table? Among other things, we've got:
- Instant weapon switching (albeit only for guns, but a paradigm-shifting precedent regardless).
- Prototypes of what would later become Styles; dodging & wallrunning were refined into Trickster, the air combo into Swordmaster, Rainstorm and Twosome Time into Gunslinger, etc.
- Bloody Palace, which pretty much every 3D action game worth its salt has a loose equivalent of.
- Majin Devil Trigger, which eventually led to Sin Devil Trigger (i.e. the coolest thing ever) in DMC5.
- A level select menu, which is probably taken for granted now.
- Multiple playable characters, which became enough of a series staple that it's effectively the main selling point of DMC3, 4 and 5's Special Editions.
- Customisation of your equipment in the form of amulets, which carried over into DMC3 and was eventually taken to an unparalleled extreme in DMC5.
Make no mistake: DMC2 is atrocious. But if not for its existence, both the DMC series itself & action games in general would be unrecognisable. For that reason, I think DMC2 is worth experiencing for yourself, even if you understandably don't finish it. You probably won't enjoy it, but you will inevitably gain a greater appreciation for why the games that came after this are as good as they are. Hideaki Itsuno and the rest of the developers under him probably deserve more credit for salvaging and expanding upon virtually every ounce of potential that this game had.
So, what did DMC2 bring to the table? Among other things, we've got:
- Instant weapon switching (albeit only for guns, but a paradigm-shifting precedent regardless).
- Prototypes of what would later become Styles; dodging & wallrunning were refined into Trickster, the air combo into Swordmaster, Rainstorm and Twosome Time into Gunslinger, etc.
- Bloody Palace, which pretty much every 3D action game worth its salt has a loose equivalent of.
- Majin Devil Trigger, which eventually led to Sin Devil Trigger (i.e. the coolest thing ever) in DMC5.
- A level select menu, which is probably taken for granted now.
- Multiple playable characters, which became enough of a series staple that it's effectively the main selling point of DMC3, 4 and 5's Special Editions.
- Customisation of your equipment in the form of amulets, which carried over into DMC3 and was eventually taken to an unparalleled extreme in DMC5.
Make no mistake: DMC2 is atrocious. But if not for its existence, both the DMC series itself & action games in general would be unrecognisable. For that reason, I think DMC2 is worth experiencing for yourself, even if you understandably don't finish it. You probably won't enjoy it, but you will inevitably gain a greater appreciation for why the games that came after this are as good as they are. Hideaki Itsuno and the rest of the developers under him probably deserve more credit for salvaging and expanding upon virtually every ounce of potential that this game had.
Something this singularly focused and confident in what it’s setting out to achieve goes beyond a breath of fresh air and into the realm of interactive mouthwash. Nearly everything about Penny’s game encourages you to stay on the move at all times – it’s present in how the secret areas’ entryways outright throw you in or out, its main enemy type’s mode of attack being chasing you, her bouncy bunny-like outfit and the combo system rewarding you for every trick you pull, and it knows what a joy it is to do so to the point that its main collectibles reward with you with progressively zanier layouts to test your mastery of it in.
It all hinges on building and maintaining momentum, so it’s just as well that her toolkit feeds into both so intuitively. Comparisons to different platformers in this respect are easy – I got enough mileage out of her drop dash equivalent that I occasionally forgot she also has a spin dash one – but viewing this game through the lens of others is selling it short when her yo-yo swing’s the type of thing which makes returning to them initially feel weird for the lack of it. It’s so malleable it’s unreal: an on-demand boost whose strength’s proportional to her speed going into it, contextualised into her design, which can mantle up ledges or grab special items or correct jumps, all dependent on the angle at which you let go and the nearby geometry. Rarely will any two attempts at the same section of a level pan out the same way because of it alone, and that’s without delving into how fluidly almost all of her other manoeuvres interweave with it and what a complementary fit they are for stages so littered with half-pipes and slopes. By no means am I a capital P Penny gamer as of yet, but hopefully this shows what I mean to some degree.
I say “almost” for the same reason as the “nearly” at the start, because although it’s a resounding success at funnelling you into a flow state the vast majority of the time, one or two common interactions stand out as uncharacteristically finicky. The window for maintaining a combo when transitioning from a yo-yo swing into spinning on top of screws feels excessively strict, slightly marring how much I’m predisposed to love any control scheme which even vaguely reminds me of Ape Escape, while obstacles which require Penny to come to a stop (like tree catapults or giant drawers) seem incongruent with how you otherwise pretty much always want to be moving. I’m hesitant to criticise these aspects too much because all manner of unconventional games, not just skill-intensive ones like Penny’s, suffer too often from players’ tendencies to blame them for their own lack of willingness to meet them on their own terms, and knowing that levels can be beat in a single combo makes me think the relative discomfort of these moments is my own fault. Occasional collision issues and/or clipping through terrain are more unambiguously annoying, but in any case, stuff like this is only so conspicuous because everything else about how it plays is so bang on.
That’s similarly true of its levels themselves. While it’s a bit of a pity that the amount of levels per area vary so steeply – Industria and Tideswell, my two favourites in part for the Dynamite-Headdy-if-he-real visuals and being yet further evidence for why Tee Lopes should be made to compose every game ever, only have two levels each – any pacing issues this could’ve potentially resulted in are offset by what a smooth difficulty curve they result in when taken wholistically. The progression from early hazards like water, which can be manipulated to the player’s advantage via the point bonuses it offers by riding on top of it with enough speed, to the absolutely no-touchy electrical discharges powered by breakable lightbulbs in later areas creates this lovely feeling of the game taking its gloves off just as you’ve become acclimatised enough with its systems to no longer need the help. I initially found it frustrating that hazards like the latter hurt Penny if her yo-yo collides with them, but after sitting on it, I can now see that it’s just another example of what a unique platformer this is – substantially extending her hurtbox whenever you perform a trick causes you to really consider when and where to do so in a way that many others don’t really demand of you.
It's evocative of a larger point, which is that Penny’s Big Breakaway is the type of game we could all do with more of. It’s one that’s not afraid to be so out-there in both mechanics and visual design to the point of potentially being offputting for some. It’s one which tangibly takes enough inspiration from the like of Sonic or Mario Odyssey to feel immediately familiar on some level, yet also puts equally as much of its own spin on areas in which it shares common ground with bigger names to the extent that you can’t treat it like them. It’s one that’s in general so unabashedly itself that you can’t not respect it regardless of whether or not it’s to your personal taste, but if you’re at all into the kind of game which gives out as much as you put in and only becomes better as you yourself do, there’s too much on offer here executed to too high of a standard for it not to be.
To extend to it the highest praise in a more succinct way: in art direction, ethos and gameplay philosophy, this is essentially a fully 3D Mega Drive game. Breakaway indeed.
It all hinges on building and maintaining momentum, so it’s just as well that her toolkit feeds into both so intuitively. Comparisons to different platformers in this respect are easy – I got enough mileage out of her drop dash equivalent that I occasionally forgot she also has a spin dash one – but viewing this game through the lens of others is selling it short when her yo-yo swing’s the type of thing which makes returning to them initially feel weird for the lack of it. It’s so malleable it’s unreal: an on-demand boost whose strength’s proportional to her speed going into it, contextualised into her design, which can mantle up ledges or grab special items or correct jumps, all dependent on the angle at which you let go and the nearby geometry. Rarely will any two attempts at the same section of a level pan out the same way because of it alone, and that’s without delving into how fluidly almost all of her other manoeuvres interweave with it and what a complementary fit they are for stages so littered with half-pipes and slopes. By no means am I a capital P Penny gamer as of yet, but hopefully this shows what I mean to some degree.
I say “almost” for the same reason as the “nearly” at the start, because although it’s a resounding success at funnelling you into a flow state the vast majority of the time, one or two common interactions stand out as uncharacteristically finicky. The window for maintaining a combo when transitioning from a yo-yo swing into spinning on top of screws feels excessively strict, slightly marring how much I’m predisposed to love any control scheme which even vaguely reminds me of Ape Escape, while obstacles which require Penny to come to a stop (like tree catapults or giant drawers) seem incongruent with how you otherwise pretty much always want to be moving. I’m hesitant to criticise these aspects too much because all manner of unconventional games, not just skill-intensive ones like Penny’s, suffer too often from players’ tendencies to blame them for their own lack of willingness to meet them on their own terms, and knowing that levels can be beat in a single combo makes me think the relative discomfort of these moments is my own fault. Occasional collision issues and/or clipping through terrain are more unambiguously annoying, but in any case, stuff like this is only so conspicuous because everything else about how it plays is so bang on.
That’s similarly true of its levels themselves. While it’s a bit of a pity that the amount of levels per area vary so steeply – Industria and Tideswell, my two favourites in part for the Dynamite-Headdy-if-he-real visuals and being yet further evidence for why Tee Lopes should be made to compose every game ever, only have two levels each – any pacing issues this could’ve potentially resulted in are offset by what a smooth difficulty curve they result in when taken wholistically. The progression from early hazards like water, which can be manipulated to the player’s advantage via the point bonuses it offers by riding on top of it with enough speed, to the absolutely no-touchy electrical discharges powered by breakable lightbulbs in later areas creates this lovely feeling of the game taking its gloves off just as you’ve become acclimatised enough with its systems to no longer need the help. I initially found it frustrating that hazards like the latter hurt Penny if her yo-yo collides with them, but after sitting on it, I can now see that it’s just another example of what a unique platformer this is – substantially extending her hurtbox whenever you perform a trick causes you to really consider when and where to do so in a way that many others don’t really demand of you.
It's evocative of a larger point, which is that Penny’s Big Breakaway is the type of game we could all do with more of. It’s one that’s not afraid to be so out-there in both mechanics and visual design to the point of potentially being offputting for some. It’s one which tangibly takes enough inspiration from the like of Sonic or Mario Odyssey to feel immediately familiar on some level, yet also puts equally as much of its own spin on areas in which it shares common ground with bigger names to the extent that you can’t treat it like them. It’s one that’s in general so unabashedly itself that you can’t not respect it regardless of whether or not it’s to your personal taste, but if you’re at all into the kind of game which gives out as much as you put in and only becomes better as you yourself do, there’s too much on offer here executed to too high of a standard for it not to be.
To extend to it the highest praise in a more succinct way: in art direction, ethos and gameplay philosophy, this is essentially a fully 3D Mega Drive game. Breakaway indeed.
As I initially set off to finish the last of the remaining dungeons, I round a corner and a stray thought occurs: “Can I dogfight dragons in this game?” After an evening spent on that instead, it turns out that I can both do that and send it tumbling down a cliff in the process. Another thought follows: “This is probably the coolest game I’ve ever played.”
This reflects a strength that’s been carried forward from Breath of the Wild and part of what separated that game from standard open world fare: the “triangle rule.” It includes shaping environmental geometry in such a way that landmarks and other notable sights were deliberately obscured from angles players were most likely to view them from, creating a visual chain of interest as they orient themselves around it. It’s impressive that Tears of the Kingdom retains this considering just how much Hyrule has been reshuffled and expanded upon, but where it particularly excels in this regard is in terms of new additions, namely its tripling down on verticality.
Diving into a well or tree stump, winding up in a complex cave system, finding treasure behind a waterfall or at the top of a hidden shaft and using Ascend to pop out the other end in parts unknown is the exact kind of storybook-like experience that this new formula needed, like meat added to the bones of the sense of adventure BOTW was otherwise so successful at selling. Caves seem a deceptively simple inclusion on a conceptual level – goodness knows open world fantasy games’re no stranger to them – but one reason you couldn’t just plop TOTK’s into some other game is because of how their design’s informed by Link’s traversal options. Just finding them often resembles a scene out of Katsuya Terada’s art for the first few Zelda games, steep climbs into hidden entryways and all, often in a way that foreshadows the challenges inside. Slippery walls, boulders you have to smash your way through, confined spaces and other hazards combine to form the other reason, which is the contrast these environmentally constrained puzzle boxes create with the rest of the game’s freedom.
Shrines and temples alike exemplify this, as much as or more than the spectacle of diving from a sky island straight into the Depths in what’s a sensation I haven’t felt since Gravity Rush 2. Getting goofy with a combination of Ultrahand and Recall or whatever other powers you prefer to circumvent obstacles brings to mind an anecdote I have about a level in Thief 2 called Casing the Joint – years now after first playing that level, I still couldn’t tell you the “proper” way to beat it, because I’d always drag boxes from the opposite end of the level and use them to scramble onto titular joint’s roof before smashing a window that would leave every guard permanently alerted. Scuffed a method as it may sound, the important thing is that the game says “yes” to the player regardless, and the same’s largely true of TOTK; although, as with BOTW, some of its quest design shows that it isn’t fully designed in accordance with these sorts of open-ended solutions (Calip’s omniscient fence in Kakariko comes to mind), this isn’t necessarily so much a flaw as just an indicator that it’s not quite the same type of game. Where limitations like these do exist, they rarely feel so arbitrary as to outweigh the feeling of thinking like an adventurer that comes with nonlinear problem solving through Link’s new, more multifaceted powers.
Fuse is a favourite of mine not just for how it turns any item you come across into a potential tool, but also because this by extension encourages thinking about your equipment more than BOTW required. A bokoblin reaper may share the same animations as a horriblin hammer, but only one of them’s getting used for smashing enemies’ armour, clearing boulders out of caverns or searching for ore among other things. It’s understandable why some players may initially be upset at the apparent lack of any new weapon types compared to BOTW, but considering how many different functionalities are covered thanks to this one power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs considered and rejected the idea based on potential new ones being redundant. It feels weird to say so about a game that isn’t by any means hurting for recognition, but this is just one example of how it (and its predecessor) probably deserves more credit for achieving more with less.
This extends to its enemy design. We have a tendency to think of “enemy variety” in terms of the quantity of different enemy types, but what gets lost in that sort of discourse is the mechanical variety between those types. Even in BOTW, bokoblins have more dynamic behaviours than the combined enemy rosters of some other games, and that was without boss bokoblins, aerocudas and Zonai constructs for them to interact with. While TOTK having a higher amount of different and region-specific enemy types is appreciated nonetheless, I’m glad that fleshing out these behaviours amongst a relatively condensed roster still seems to have been a priority.
Flux Constructs are a standout in both that respect and why we ought to also apply this sort of lateral thinking to TOTK’s combat as well – in a game in which you can remove a golem’s hands to prevent him from being able to punch you, shoot dragons out of the sky with a DIY plane or suspend yourself in air with a foot-mounted flamethrower, it seems myopic to judge it based on how many ways Link can swing a weapon. Between using Recall on a certain attack of theirs to fling myself to places I couldn’t otherwise reach, darkness that’s actually dark and which requires resources to dispel, plus summonable AI companions, it becomes apparent that the sceptics were wrong – this isn’t BOTW DLC, but rather a Dragon’s Dogma 2 closed beta.
I’m only being slightly facetious, because much of what makes Dragon’s Dogma and its mutual point of influence, i.e. Skyrim, special as adventure games is present here too. If those two games could each be distilled into one key characteristic, I’d say they’re respectively dynamism and player-directed experiences. TOTK takes both and melds them with a largely honoured commitment to unrestricted problem solving that – in my view – has always felt like the most natural direction for Zelda to go in, forming a superlative package which I think sits at the top of its franchise, its console and potentially open world games in general.
All this and somehow I still feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of all there is to appreciate here. As many words could be written about the atmosphere invoked during a sunset with the Dragon Head Island theme playing, the extent to which Ganondorf’s phase 2 transition has been living in my head rent free or the fact that, if you think about it, Link himself has become the legend of Zelda. I might play another 100 hours and still be finding new things to wrap my head around. Such a game.
This reflects a strength that’s been carried forward from Breath of the Wild and part of what separated that game from standard open world fare: the “triangle rule.” It includes shaping environmental geometry in such a way that landmarks and other notable sights were deliberately obscured from angles players were most likely to view them from, creating a visual chain of interest as they orient themselves around it. It’s impressive that Tears of the Kingdom retains this considering just how much Hyrule has been reshuffled and expanded upon, but where it particularly excels in this regard is in terms of new additions, namely its tripling down on verticality.
Diving into a well or tree stump, winding up in a complex cave system, finding treasure behind a waterfall or at the top of a hidden shaft and using Ascend to pop out the other end in parts unknown is the exact kind of storybook-like experience that this new formula needed, like meat added to the bones of the sense of adventure BOTW was otherwise so successful at selling. Caves seem a deceptively simple inclusion on a conceptual level – goodness knows open world fantasy games’re no stranger to them – but one reason you couldn’t just plop TOTK’s into some other game is because of how their design’s informed by Link’s traversal options. Just finding them often resembles a scene out of Katsuya Terada’s art for the first few Zelda games, steep climbs into hidden entryways and all, often in a way that foreshadows the challenges inside. Slippery walls, boulders you have to smash your way through, confined spaces and other hazards combine to form the other reason, which is the contrast these environmentally constrained puzzle boxes create with the rest of the game’s freedom.
Shrines and temples alike exemplify this, as much as or more than the spectacle of diving from a sky island straight into the Depths in what’s a sensation I haven’t felt since Gravity Rush 2. Getting goofy with a combination of Ultrahand and Recall or whatever other powers you prefer to circumvent obstacles brings to mind an anecdote I have about a level in Thief 2 called Casing the Joint – years now after first playing that level, I still couldn’t tell you the “proper” way to beat it, because I’d always drag boxes from the opposite end of the level and use them to scramble onto titular joint’s roof before smashing a window that would leave every guard permanently alerted. Scuffed a method as it may sound, the important thing is that the game says “yes” to the player regardless, and the same’s largely true of TOTK; although, as with BOTW, some of its quest design shows that it isn’t fully designed in accordance with these sorts of open-ended solutions (Calip’s omniscient fence in Kakariko comes to mind), this isn’t necessarily so much a flaw as just an indicator that it’s not quite the same type of game. Where limitations like these do exist, they rarely feel so arbitrary as to outweigh the feeling of thinking like an adventurer that comes with nonlinear problem solving through Link’s new, more multifaceted powers.
Fuse is a favourite of mine not just for how it turns any item you come across into a potential tool, but also because this by extension encourages thinking about your equipment more than BOTW required. A bokoblin reaper may share the same animations as a horriblin hammer, but only one of them’s getting used for smashing enemies’ armour, clearing boulders out of caverns or searching for ore among other things. It’s understandable why some players may initially be upset at the apparent lack of any new weapon types compared to BOTW, but considering how many different functionalities are covered thanks to this one power, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs considered and rejected the idea based on potential new ones being redundant. It feels weird to say so about a game that isn’t by any means hurting for recognition, but this is just one example of how it (and its predecessor) probably deserves more credit for achieving more with less.
This extends to its enemy design. We have a tendency to think of “enemy variety” in terms of the quantity of different enemy types, but what gets lost in that sort of discourse is the mechanical variety between those types. Even in BOTW, bokoblins have more dynamic behaviours than the combined enemy rosters of some other games, and that was without boss bokoblins, aerocudas and Zonai constructs for them to interact with. While TOTK having a higher amount of different and region-specific enemy types is appreciated nonetheless, I’m glad that fleshing out these behaviours amongst a relatively condensed roster still seems to have been a priority.
Flux Constructs are a standout in both that respect and why we ought to also apply this sort of lateral thinking to TOTK’s combat as well – in a game in which you can remove a golem’s hands to prevent him from being able to punch you, shoot dragons out of the sky with a DIY plane or suspend yourself in air with a foot-mounted flamethrower, it seems myopic to judge it based on how many ways Link can swing a weapon. Between using Recall on a certain attack of theirs to fling myself to places I couldn’t otherwise reach, darkness that’s actually dark and which requires resources to dispel, plus summonable AI companions, it becomes apparent that the sceptics were wrong – this isn’t BOTW DLC, but rather a Dragon’s Dogma 2 closed beta.
I’m only being slightly facetious, because much of what makes Dragon’s Dogma and its mutual point of influence, i.e. Skyrim, special as adventure games is present here too. If those two games could each be distilled into one key characteristic, I’d say they’re respectively dynamism and player-directed experiences. TOTK takes both and melds them with a largely honoured commitment to unrestricted problem solving that – in my view – has always felt like the most natural direction for Zelda to go in, forming a superlative package which I think sits at the top of its franchise, its console and potentially open world games in general.
All this and somehow I still feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of all there is to appreciate here. As many words could be written about the atmosphere invoked during a sunset with the Dragon Head Island theme playing, the extent to which Ganondorf’s phase 2 transition has been living in my head rent free or the fact that, if you think about it, Link himself has become the legend of Zelda. I might play another 100 hours and still be finding new things to wrap my head around. Such a game.
2015
Why is it that the itty bitty sprite-based Fallouts let me blow up a locked door or pry it open with a crowbar, but this shiny, hundred million dollar PS4 game doesn’t?
I’m implying that Fallout 4’s more primitive than a game almost two decades its senior, but that isn’t being completely fair. In some ways, it’s the most complex one yet. Armour & weapon customisation is the most fleshed out it’s ever been, letting you not only personalise each of your character’s individual limbs or every component of a gun, but also the stat bonuses they offer. Power armour now requires some resource management just to wear it, while also being so heavy that you have to slowly walk underwater rather than swim, causing you to think more carefully about traversal than in prior entries. Settlement building lets you create custom-built homes nearly anywhere you want and set up trade routes between them via procedurally generated NPCs, not only helping the world feel more alive but also allowing you to contribute to its liveliness. So on and so forth.
This is all great; one might even say that it just works. But nearly all of the fresh ideas Fallout 4 introduces either come at the expense of something else or don’t fully capitalise on their potential. The deeper armour customisation would be more impactful if the RPG elements weren’t almost totally gutted, while weapon customisation is enormously lopsided in favour of guns. Power armour excludes you from using fist weapons, which is somewhat accommodated for by having arm pieces that boost your unarmed damage, but still feels oddly limiting and detracts from the power fantasy that it’s trying to sell. Creating settlements adds some much needed dynamism to the game world, but it’s at odds with the story’s urgency and environments are barely interactive otherwise, with invisible walls still regularly cordoning off the slightest of inclines – this one feels especially egregious considering Bethesda themselves already came up with the solution to this in 1996, i.e. Daggerfall’s climbing system.
Thanks to all of this, it’s tempting to think of Fallout 4 as a game which takes a step back for every step forward. A more unambiguous step back, though, is its use of a voiced protagonist. I’d carefully modelled my character after Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat in the hopes of getting it on (read: being a murderous nonce), but my motivation to carry this out was killed pretty much off the bat. The Sole Survivor isn’t some malleable blank slate no-name from a nondescript Vault, or tribe, or post office – he or she’s very much their own set-in-stone character, a pre-war ex-military family man or woman with a tone of voice so affable it puts your local Tesco staff to shame and a love for their son so integral to their identity that it’s the catalyst of the story. There’s not much room for imagination. You have to set up a bunch of mental barriers before you can really treat Fallout 4 as an RPG, whether it be handwaving the fact that much of what you plan to do throughout the game is going to be grossly out of character or trying to ignore the inherent disconnect between you and the Sole Survivor if you happen to not particularly care about Shaun.
To this end, Fallout 4’s dialogue system’s gotten a lot of flack, but I don’t really mind it; if nothing else, it offers more variety on average than Skyrim’s did. Part of where it really falters, I think, is the contextualisation of skipping through dialogue. Interrupting people with bored “uh huh”s as they suggest where you might find your kidnapped son is kind of hilarious, but as far as immersion goes, it’s something the game would’ve been better without. The dynamic camera angles during conversations also could’ve used some work – my introduction to the mayor of Diamond City was an extreme close-up of a blurry turquoise girder, and the camera haphazardly cuts between first & third person often enough that it sometimes feels like watching Don’t Look Up with fewer random shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s boots. What doesn’t help things is that conversations themselves just generally aren’t up to scratch with the pedigree of this series; it’d be easy to look past all of this if Fallout 4 had any Lieutenants, or Masters, or Frank Horrigans, or Joshua Grahams, but it doesn’t really. At its peak, the dialogue and voice acting only ever feel vaguely acceptable, which is a bit of a shame considering it claims descent from the game that popularised the concept of talking the final boss to death.
I generally prefer to avoid being a negative Nancy unless I can use it as an opportunity to draw attention to things I love, which is why I keep bringing up Fallout 4's predecessors. I can't help but feel that Fallout used to be more than this. Fallout 1 was so laser focused on delivering an open ended role-playing experience that it’s (deservedly) credited with revitalising the genre; there are a lot of things Fallout 4 does well enough, but I don’t know if you can really say where its focus lies. It’s competent as a looter shooter to turn your brain off to, but it’d be a better one if it wasn’t also trying to be an RPG, and it’d be a better RPG if it had gone with just about any premise or protag other than the ones it has. Despite having so much more money behind it, it feels so cobbled together in comparison.
Looting plastic forks from decrepit buildings while fending off mutants and ghouls is fun, but if that’s the kind of experience you’re after, I’d recommend just walking around Belfast at night instead.
I’m implying that Fallout 4’s more primitive than a game almost two decades its senior, but that isn’t being completely fair. In some ways, it’s the most complex one yet. Armour & weapon customisation is the most fleshed out it’s ever been, letting you not only personalise each of your character’s individual limbs or every component of a gun, but also the stat bonuses they offer. Power armour now requires some resource management just to wear it, while also being so heavy that you have to slowly walk underwater rather than swim, causing you to think more carefully about traversal than in prior entries. Settlement building lets you create custom-built homes nearly anywhere you want and set up trade routes between them via procedurally generated NPCs, not only helping the world feel more alive but also allowing you to contribute to its liveliness. So on and so forth.
This is all great; one might even say that it just works. But nearly all of the fresh ideas Fallout 4 introduces either come at the expense of something else or don’t fully capitalise on their potential. The deeper armour customisation would be more impactful if the RPG elements weren’t almost totally gutted, while weapon customisation is enormously lopsided in favour of guns. Power armour excludes you from using fist weapons, which is somewhat accommodated for by having arm pieces that boost your unarmed damage, but still feels oddly limiting and detracts from the power fantasy that it’s trying to sell. Creating settlements adds some much needed dynamism to the game world, but it’s at odds with the story’s urgency and environments are barely interactive otherwise, with invisible walls still regularly cordoning off the slightest of inclines – this one feels especially egregious considering Bethesda themselves already came up with the solution to this in 1996, i.e. Daggerfall’s climbing system.
Thanks to all of this, it’s tempting to think of Fallout 4 as a game which takes a step back for every step forward. A more unambiguous step back, though, is its use of a voiced protagonist. I’d carefully modelled my character after Waingro from Michael Mann’s Heat in the hopes of getting it on (read: being a murderous nonce), but my motivation to carry this out was killed pretty much off the bat. The Sole Survivor isn’t some malleable blank slate no-name from a nondescript Vault, or tribe, or post office – he or she’s very much their own set-in-stone character, a pre-war ex-military family man or woman with a tone of voice so affable it puts your local Tesco staff to shame and a love for their son so integral to their identity that it’s the catalyst of the story. There’s not much room for imagination. You have to set up a bunch of mental barriers before you can really treat Fallout 4 as an RPG, whether it be handwaving the fact that much of what you plan to do throughout the game is going to be grossly out of character or trying to ignore the inherent disconnect between you and the Sole Survivor if you happen to not particularly care about Shaun.
To this end, Fallout 4’s dialogue system’s gotten a lot of flack, but I don’t really mind it; if nothing else, it offers more variety on average than Skyrim’s did. Part of where it really falters, I think, is the contextualisation of skipping through dialogue. Interrupting people with bored “uh huh”s as they suggest where you might find your kidnapped son is kind of hilarious, but as far as immersion goes, it’s something the game would’ve been better without. The dynamic camera angles during conversations also could’ve used some work – my introduction to the mayor of Diamond City was an extreme close-up of a blurry turquoise girder, and the camera haphazardly cuts between first & third person often enough that it sometimes feels like watching Don’t Look Up with fewer random shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s boots. What doesn’t help things is that conversations themselves just generally aren’t up to scratch with the pedigree of this series; it’d be easy to look past all of this if Fallout 4 had any Lieutenants, or Masters, or Frank Horrigans, or Joshua Grahams, but it doesn’t really. At its peak, the dialogue and voice acting only ever feel vaguely acceptable, which is a bit of a shame considering it claims descent from the game that popularised the concept of talking the final boss to death.
I generally prefer to avoid being a negative Nancy unless I can use it as an opportunity to draw attention to things I love, which is why I keep bringing up Fallout 4's predecessors. I can't help but feel that Fallout used to be more than this. Fallout 1 was so laser focused on delivering an open ended role-playing experience that it’s (deservedly) credited with revitalising the genre; there are a lot of things Fallout 4 does well enough, but I don’t know if you can really say where its focus lies. It’s competent as a looter shooter to turn your brain off to, but it’d be a better one if it wasn’t also trying to be an RPG, and it’d be a better RPG if it had gone with just about any premise or protag other than the ones it has. Despite having so much more money behind it, it feels so cobbled together in comparison.
Looting plastic forks from decrepit buildings while fending off mutants and ghouls is fun, but if that’s the kind of experience you’re after, I’d recommend just walking around Belfast at night instead.
2006
Before there was Oblivion with guns, there was Resident Evil 4 without guns. More so than with respect to even its emphasis on crowd control, dynamic difficulty scaling or abundance of contextual carpal tunnel generators, God Hand’s arguably most reminiscent of its spiritual cousin in terms of how forward-thinking it is.
An action game likes convenience. To be able to jump in and fight what you want, when you want with as little fluff as possible’s part of why DMC’s Bloody Palace (or equivalents) became a genre mainstay, why Bayonetta 3’s revamped chapter select system is probably the single most underappreciated feature of 2022 and why the not-infrequent complaint about Nioh having a level select menu is so mystifying. Play enough games from when this family tree was still in its relative infancy and you’ll likely realise how easy it is to take such features for granted, which is why it's so cool that God Hand had something like the Fighting Ring so early on in the genre’s history.
A practice area coupled with all sorts of bespoke combat encounters you can tackle and/or fail any number of times, totally free of consequence, would be a natural fit for any action game, but it’s especially great for God Hand because of how its equipment system works. There’s not just a litany of attacks at your disposal, each with their own distinct properties and niches, but you can also equip any of them in any order and assign them to any button. It’s an unprecedented degree of customisation that might’ve otherwise been overwhelming without an area like this, and which I’m not sure’s been matched before or since. The likes of The Wonderful 101, God of War 3 and DMC5 might let me switch from one weapon to any other in any order, but not even they let me build a moveset out of pimp slaps if I feel like it, purely because I can.
The draw of experimentation that comes with this is hampered a bit by certain rough patches – for example, multi-hit attacks occasionally feel disincentivised in a way that doesn’t seem intentional because of how frequently enemies block and counterattack as the difficulty level increases (especially on Hard where you’re permanently at the highest), while low profile moves which dodge enemies’ high attacks for some reason don’t avoid jumping grabs – but what helps keep the combat malleable despite these is the counterhit system. Interrupt an enemy or boss’ attack with one of your own and they’ll varyingly flinch, be stunned, get juggled or launched, even if none of those properties work on them normally. It creates an engaging sense of back-and-forth and ensures you’re never completely strapped for options no matter how suffocating the situation you find yourself in or which moves you've equipped, especially when taken in tandem with being able to cancel any of Gene’s attacks at any point with one of three different dodges (which, provided your thumbs can remain intact, is also particularly helpful for circumventing the aforementioned issues with multihit attacks).
On that point, God Hand’s handling of defence is something more games could probably stand to learn from. The Great Sensei is a sink or swim moment in this respect and, in my view, the embodiment of what makes it shine, stringing together high attacks, vertical attacks and crowd control in blistering succession that demands you have an iron grip on each of Gene’s dodges and what they’re for like no boss before or after him. He would still be infamously difficult because of all this in a vacuum, but I think part of why he’s such a challenge also stems from how many other games with real-time combat systems treat their (often singular) dodge as a one-size-fits-all invincibility bubble and how tough it can be to break the conditioning that that sort of standardisation instils. Lost Judgment is another 3D beat-‘em-up which plays excellently, but despite being 15 years God Hand’s junior on platforms multitudes more powerful, it can’t help but feel comparatively primitive whenever Yagami “evades” a sweep kick by ducking his head. In contrast, God Hand’s more nuanced combination of side/backward dodges and bobbing & weaving reminded me loosely of Soulcalibur, which on top of its counterhit system makes one wonder how much other action games might benefit from leaning into their common ground with fighting games.
Not all of God Hand’s boss fights or enemies utilise its mechanics equally well, the final boss in particular running the risk of jettisoning the player’s goodwill into the bin, but some scattershot ups and downs are to be expected when your game is so bonkers at every turn. It speaks to how entertaining its stages manage to be, both conceptually and in design, that you end the game with no further mechanics than what you start with and it never once feels stale. There’s an inherent excitement that comes with cramming so many clowns, demons, cowboys, Venetian canals, floating pyramids and other seemingly disparate ideas that you don’t know what to expect next; while some might be surprised at the fact that he considers Resident Evil 4 to be the opposite, it’ll likely shock nobody that Shinji Mikami feels that God Hand is the game with the most amount of himself in it. What results is no doubt chaotic, but more than worth looking past the imperfections of for experiencing what’s essentially his and a bunch of other loveable goofballs’ collective personality transcribed onto a disc, which also happens to be perhaps the only game that feels like an interactive version of an action film’s fight choreography.
If you happen to still have a PS2 lying around, I can attest that the ~80 gamerbux that used copies of this bad boy go for are worth it. You may not be you know who, but you’ll feel like it by the end.
An action game likes convenience. To be able to jump in and fight what you want, when you want with as little fluff as possible’s part of why DMC’s Bloody Palace (or equivalents) became a genre mainstay, why Bayonetta 3’s revamped chapter select system is probably the single most underappreciated feature of 2022 and why the not-infrequent complaint about Nioh having a level select menu is so mystifying. Play enough games from when this family tree was still in its relative infancy and you’ll likely realise how easy it is to take such features for granted, which is why it's so cool that God Hand had something like the Fighting Ring so early on in the genre’s history.
A practice area coupled with all sorts of bespoke combat encounters you can tackle and/or fail any number of times, totally free of consequence, would be a natural fit for any action game, but it’s especially great for God Hand because of how its equipment system works. There’s not just a litany of attacks at your disposal, each with their own distinct properties and niches, but you can also equip any of them in any order and assign them to any button. It’s an unprecedented degree of customisation that might’ve otherwise been overwhelming without an area like this, and which I’m not sure’s been matched before or since. The likes of The Wonderful 101, God of War 3 and DMC5 might let me switch from one weapon to any other in any order, but not even they let me build a moveset out of pimp slaps if I feel like it, purely because I can.
The draw of experimentation that comes with this is hampered a bit by certain rough patches – for example, multi-hit attacks occasionally feel disincentivised in a way that doesn’t seem intentional because of how frequently enemies block and counterattack as the difficulty level increases (especially on Hard where you’re permanently at the highest), while low profile moves which dodge enemies’ high attacks for some reason don’t avoid jumping grabs – but what helps keep the combat malleable despite these is the counterhit system. Interrupt an enemy or boss’ attack with one of your own and they’ll varyingly flinch, be stunned, get juggled or launched, even if none of those properties work on them normally. It creates an engaging sense of back-and-forth and ensures you’re never completely strapped for options no matter how suffocating the situation you find yourself in or which moves you've equipped, especially when taken in tandem with being able to cancel any of Gene’s attacks at any point with one of three different dodges (which, provided your thumbs can remain intact, is also particularly helpful for circumventing the aforementioned issues with multihit attacks).
On that point, God Hand’s handling of defence is something more games could probably stand to learn from. The Great Sensei is a sink or swim moment in this respect and, in my view, the embodiment of what makes it shine, stringing together high attacks, vertical attacks and crowd control in blistering succession that demands you have an iron grip on each of Gene’s dodges and what they’re for like no boss before or after him. He would still be infamously difficult because of all this in a vacuum, but I think part of why he’s such a challenge also stems from how many other games with real-time combat systems treat their (often singular) dodge as a one-size-fits-all invincibility bubble and how tough it can be to break the conditioning that that sort of standardisation instils. Lost Judgment is another 3D beat-‘em-up which plays excellently, but despite being 15 years God Hand’s junior on platforms multitudes more powerful, it can’t help but feel comparatively primitive whenever Yagami “evades” a sweep kick by ducking his head. In contrast, God Hand’s more nuanced combination of side/backward dodges and bobbing & weaving reminded me loosely of Soulcalibur, which on top of its counterhit system makes one wonder how much other action games might benefit from leaning into their common ground with fighting games.
Not all of God Hand’s boss fights or enemies utilise its mechanics equally well, the final boss in particular running the risk of jettisoning the player’s goodwill into the bin, but some scattershot ups and downs are to be expected when your game is so bonkers at every turn. It speaks to how entertaining its stages manage to be, both conceptually and in design, that you end the game with no further mechanics than what you start with and it never once feels stale. There’s an inherent excitement that comes with cramming so many clowns, demons, cowboys, Venetian canals, floating pyramids and other seemingly disparate ideas that you don’t know what to expect next; while some might be surprised at the fact that he considers Resident Evil 4 to be the opposite, it’ll likely shock nobody that Shinji Mikami feels that God Hand is the game with the most amount of himself in it. What results is no doubt chaotic, but more than worth looking past the imperfections of for experiencing what’s essentially his and a bunch of other loveable goofballs’ collective personality transcribed onto a disc, which also happens to be perhaps the only game that feels like an interactive version of an action film’s fight choreography.
If you happen to still have a PS2 lying around, I can attest that the ~80 gamerbux that used copies of this bad boy go for are worth it. You may not be you know who, but you’ll feel like it by the end.
1997
The trouble with calling something “ahead of its time” is that it implies whatever made that something so special has become standard since its release. It’s easy to describe Fallout like that, or to say it’s “impressive for 1997” as if standards only ever improve over time, until you look around and realise how few RPGs since Fallout have even attempted to replicate what makes it such an excellent game, including its own sequels. Had they, it’s doubtful that Fallout would be subject to as many hyperbolic horror stories as it is today.
Among the most infamous and exaggerated of these is the time limit of Fallout’s main quest, which isn’t just arguably more generous than it should be even if you don’t choose to extend it, but also disappears halfway through anyhow. That makes it sound like a non-factor, but it’s an essential part of what makes Fallout a step above. No matter how generous it might be, the fact that it’s there at all creates a kind of congruence between player and protagonist that isn’t there in any other Fallout game, or many RPGs in general. Everything you do in Fallout is coloured by the underlying sense of urgency that it’s game over, literally and figuratively, if you spend too much time gallivanting about the wastes instead of on your core responsibility. The plights of Arroyo, Liam Neeson and Hoover Dam can wait until the Chosen One, Lone Wanderer and Courier feel like doing something about it, but unlike them, the world doesn’t revolve around the Vault Dweller. It probably doesn’t need to be said how much more synergistic this is with Fallout’s harsh setting than any its follow-ups, or how relieving it is when you finally get your hands on that water chip.
What this is indicative of is Fallout’s larger design philosophy – it isn’t afraid to let you make mistakes. Yes, you’re going to have a particularly hard time if you don’t dump points into your Agility, but why shouldn’t you? It makes sense that someone who isn’t quick on their feet shouldn’t be able to easily get by in such a hellish place. You feel the consequences of neglecting a particular S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat more palpably here than in any other Fallout bar 2, most famously with how low Intelligence makes every single conversation in the game more strained (to say the least).
This design extends beyond character building, too. Fallout trusts players to figure out for themselves which dialogue options are affected by a high speech skill, instead of highlighting them for you as all of the 3D games do. Choose your words poorly upon meeting someone for the first time and their opinion of you can be permanently dampened for the rest of the game, signalled to you organically with a change in their facial expression, potentially locking you out of quests or causing others in the locale to distrust you. If things go really south, no punches are pulled in terms of everybody being expendable – you can go as far as to kill children, and making a good first impression with even evil characters becomes an uphill battle if you do.
In general, I don’t think killing things in Fallout is anywhere near as much of a drag as it’s often made out to be either. Weighing up how much AP to spend on either moving to get to a more advantageous position and reduce the amount of actions enemies can potentially take, or on attacking them definitely gets the gears in your head turning to some extent. Damage sound effects in this series never sounded anywhere near as satisfying after ditching the thumps and thwacks of this and Fallout 2, which make for some nice feedback on attacks when taken in tandem with the wonderfully gory sprite work. Being able to destroy or pry open doors enables ways for you to creatively manoeuvre through combat encounters and lets you progress quests in ways that you can’t in later titles, plus the amount of different hit reactions for each part of each enemy’s body is also pretty novel. You won’t be making any Combo MADs out of this, but if you don’t get even a hint of enjoyment out of seeing somebody gently slide across half of Los Angeles after they’ve been smacked with a sledgehammer, I probably don’t trust you.
What I do trust is Fallout’s ability to engross me in its world every single time I play it. Listen to how haunting this is, and then be aware that every other track in the game is at least on par with it. The ambient clicking and clacking of now ancient wartime equipment, the cosy boxed-in presentation of the HUD and its descriptive flavour text in its bottom left, the freaky architecture with all its giant heads... they all combine to sell the feeling of really being there, rivalling the best of any other game that predicates itself on immersion. When you encounter a voiced character and the music cuts you know you’re in for a proper event, bolstered by across the board stellar performances from tons of classic 90s voice actors that utterly command your attention. Meeting the Master and hearing him jolt his way through his iconic monologue about the Unity is like one long lesson in why he ended up defining the guy-with-good-intentions-does-the-wrong-thing-for-the-right-reasons-and-also-you-can-talk-him-to-death archetype. No Fallout antagonist has come close ever since (as cool as Frank Horrigan might be), be it in terms of motivations, the lengths you have to go to convince him that he’s in the wrong, anything.
Fallout is a remarkably pure translation of vision to game, and as another comment on here points out, it’s simply not given its dues as often as it ought to be. Even with this proverbial Vault of text, I still haven’t touched on everything it does well – for one thing, I can’t believe the Tell Me About feature didn’t become standard in every RPG made after this game’s release – but I hope this does it some justice all the same. Do give it a chance at some point if you haven’t already, and don’t be put off by any claims of “jank” or “clunk” or whatever other nebulous jargon you could just as easily apply to any of its much more recent successors. I first played Fallout well over a decade after it came out after being introduced to the series with 3, and even as a kid, I never found myself wishing it was more like the modern RPGs I was accustomed to. Quite the opposite.
I wanted to cap this off with a twist on “you’re a hero and you have to leave,” Fallout being the hero, but my Int is too low to make it sound clever. In the interest of avoiding a critical miss, I present a rare but thematically appropriate Todd. Will trade for either 20 caps or an iguana on a stick.
Among the most infamous and exaggerated of these is the time limit of Fallout’s main quest, which isn’t just arguably more generous than it should be even if you don’t choose to extend it, but also disappears halfway through anyhow. That makes it sound like a non-factor, but it’s an essential part of what makes Fallout a step above. No matter how generous it might be, the fact that it’s there at all creates a kind of congruence between player and protagonist that isn’t there in any other Fallout game, or many RPGs in general. Everything you do in Fallout is coloured by the underlying sense of urgency that it’s game over, literally and figuratively, if you spend too much time gallivanting about the wastes instead of on your core responsibility. The plights of Arroyo, Liam Neeson and Hoover Dam can wait until the Chosen One, Lone Wanderer and Courier feel like doing something about it, but unlike them, the world doesn’t revolve around the Vault Dweller. It probably doesn’t need to be said how much more synergistic this is with Fallout’s harsh setting than any its follow-ups, or how relieving it is when you finally get your hands on that water chip.
What this is indicative of is Fallout’s larger design philosophy – it isn’t afraid to let you make mistakes. Yes, you’re going to have a particularly hard time if you don’t dump points into your Agility, but why shouldn’t you? It makes sense that someone who isn’t quick on their feet shouldn’t be able to easily get by in such a hellish place. You feel the consequences of neglecting a particular S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat more palpably here than in any other Fallout bar 2, most famously with how low Intelligence makes every single conversation in the game more strained (to say the least).
This design extends beyond character building, too. Fallout trusts players to figure out for themselves which dialogue options are affected by a high speech skill, instead of highlighting them for you as all of the 3D games do. Choose your words poorly upon meeting someone for the first time and their opinion of you can be permanently dampened for the rest of the game, signalled to you organically with a change in their facial expression, potentially locking you out of quests or causing others in the locale to distrust you. If things go really south, no punches are pulled in terms of everybody being expendable – you can go as far as to kill children, and making a good first impression with even evil characters becomes an uphill battle if you do.
In general, I don’t think killing things in Fallout is anywhere near as much of a drag as it’s often made out to be either. Weighing up how much AP to spend on either moving to get to a more advantageous position and reduce the amount of actions enemies can potentially take, or on attacking them definitely gets the gears in your head turning to some extent. Damage sound effects in this series never sounded anywhere near as satisfying after ditching the thumps and thwacks of this and Fallout 2, which make for some nice feedback on attacks when taken in tandem with the wonderfully gory sprite work. Being able to destroy or pry open doors enables ways for you to creatively manoeuvre through combat encounters and lets you progress quests in ways that you can’t in later titles, plus the amount of different hit reactions for each part of each enemy’s body is also pretty novel. You won’t be making any Combo MADs out of this, but if you don’t get even a hint of enjoyment out of seeing somebody gently slide across half of Los Angeles after they’ve been smacked with a sledgehammer, I probably don’t trust you.
What I do trust is Fallout’s ability to engross me in its world every single time I play it. Listen to how haunting this is, and then be aware that every other track in the game is at least on par with it. The ambient clicking and clacking of now ancient wartime equipment, the cosy boxed-in presentation of the HUD and its descriptive flavour text in its bottom left, the freaky architecture with all its giant heads... they all combine to sell the feeling of really being there, rivalling the best of any other game that predicates itself on immersion. When you encounter a voiced character and the music cuts you know you’re in for a proper event, bolstered by across the board stellar performances from tons of classic 90s voice actors that utterly command your attention. Meeting the Master and hearing him jolt his way through his iconic monologue about the Unity is like one long lesson in why he ended up defining the guy-with-good-intentions-does-the-wrong-thing-for-the-right-reasons-and-also-you-can-talk-him-to-death archetype. No Fallout antagonist has come close ever since (as cool as Frank Horrigan might be), be it in terms of motivations, the lengths you have to go to convince him that he’s in the wrong, anything.
Fallout is a remarkably pure translation of vision to game, and as another comment on here points out, it’s simply not given its dues as often as it ought to be. Even with this proverbial Vault of text, I still haven’t touched on everything it does well – for one thing, I can’t believe the Tell Me About feature didn’t become standard in every RPG made after this game’s release – but I hope this does it some justice all the same. Do give it a chance at some point if you haven’t already, and don’t be put off by any claims of “jank” or “clunk” or whatever other nebulous jargon you could just as easily apply to any of its much more recent successors. I first played Fallout well over a decade after it came out after being introduced to the series with 3, and even as a kid, I never found myself wishing it was more like the modern RPGs I was accustomed to. Quite the opposite.
I wanted to cap this off with a twist on “you’re a hero and you have to leave,” Fallout being the hero, but my Int is too low to make it sound clever. In the interest of avoiding a critical miss, I present a rare but thematically appropriate Todd. Will trade for either 20 caps or an iguana on a stick.
Hylics like you and I will hang a basket over a shopkeeper’s head, ransack his life’s work from under his nose without consequence, laugh at how ridiculous this is and heap it upon the list of Skyrim’s alleged shortcomings. Game developers will look at the same situation, hang it up on their wall and adhere to it as a design philosophy.
Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.
He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.
What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.
Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.
It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.
You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.
Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.
~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.
Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.
He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.
What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.
Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.
It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.
You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.
Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.
~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.
Translator’s note: “wealth” means “padding.”
It can’t be stressed enough how much Infinite Wealth’s core gameplay tweaks salvage it. This marks an all-time high for the Dragon Engine games’ responsiveness in terms of just fundamentally moving around, both Ichiban and Kiryu turning and 180ing with an unprecedented level of fluidity, but the real star’s the combat’s new emphasis on positioning. The movement circle’s so impactful for such a seemingly minor addition; lining up back attacks, proximity bonuses and the directions enemies get knocked in is an endlessly engaging triptych with suitably punchy feedback, as well as the best justification of the engine’s ragdoll physics outside of Lost Judgment’s big enemies, and only improves as you fiddle with party members’ equipment, jobs or builds. Kiryu’s fighting styles are arguably better differentiated here than in the game they’re from, which is emblematic of the extent to which all these pre-existing assets and gameplay concepts get freshened up by the genre switch. Despite retaining some of 7’s issues which’re less understandable in a game that already has a foundation to work off of, like a poor battle camera regularly obscuring enemies’ attacks and allies sometimes just not performing chain attacks when they trigger, it’s overall legitimately at the point where I can picture this being someone’s favourite turn-based RPG based on its mechanics rather than solely for how conceptually unique it is.
Playing so well’s an absolute lifeline given its relentlessly sluggish pacing. There’s an early segment in which Ichiban needs $30 to pay an information broker, and if you already have at least $30 he actually comments on how it’s already sorted, but instead of letting you just pay the broker at that point (as you weirdly can when this exact scenario resurfaces much later), you instead have to get roped into a substory which isn’t even really a substory since it’s bloating the main story to play a minigame to make the money you already have first, then travel back and only then pay him. The fatigue a situation like this brings on’s initially lessened by said minigame being great, but its introduction would’ve been a more unambiguous highlight if you’d been permitted to find it on your own and is quickly exacerbated by how often this happens; sizeable portions of the next three or four chapters are comprised of mandatory, agonisingly slow tutorials for shallow knock-offs of games Yokoyama was pretending this series is too cool for fewer than a couple of years prior. He talked big pre-release about how much longer Infinite Wealth is than the others, and although he wasn’t lying, it would’ve been good to mention that this is only because the typewriter monkeys under his dominion are masters of stretching out what could be single button presses into entire hours.
Some kind of stride’s finally hit with Kiryu’s segments – the core theme of recognising his mortality and appreciating the time he has left’s particularly resonant, as someone whose family’s seen one stage 4 cancer diagnosis and other health scares in recent years – but it’s also got the side effect of making the rest of the narrative that much thinner comparatively. In the same game partially revolving around the terminal illness of a character whom a decent amount of players will have essentially grown up alongside, I just can’t get invested in nuclear waste disposal, the unintentional humour brought about by a Vtuber interviewing yakuza figureheads or Ichiban’s efforts to assure child-gassing Dick Dastardly that they’re still nakamas to the extent that the amount of time dedicated to these seemingly expects you to, especially not with the lifeless substory-esque presentation the cutscenes for these plot threads often have or villains so tepid and hard to believe. Never mind that the Geomijul can hack government satellites but can’t doxx a famous streamer, whose decision was it to make the most American-as-interpreted-by-the-Japanese looking centenarian you’ve ever seen speak English like he’s fresh off the boat from the Tokugawa shogunate? I don’t know if it’s more or less dire than how Ichiban’s either unable to speak English or fluent in it depending on what the given scene demands. The camerawork’s presenting Bryce like he’s on the brink of attaining godhood or something and I’m giggling every time he speaks. The mismatch between voice and character’s sillier than all the plot twists people meme about combined.
His home turf’s enjoyable to explore at first thanks to an impressive amount of detail relative to its size, but the scale ultimately detracts more than it adds. Bigger in-game worlds wouldn’t feel so misguided for these games if Lost Judgment hadn’t already solved the issue of boring traversal; compared to its skateboard, the segway’s much slower to whip out, put away or move around on, more expensive, vulnerable to enemy encounters, prevents you from picking up valuable materials, doesn’t even require player input and has no tricks to perform or any means of interacting with the environment at all. Taken together with still being able to immediately fast travel to any taxi from the map, plus the fact that doing so’s cheap as chips, it becomes redundant not long after it’s introduced and with it goes most reasons to actually engage with this huge, meticulously crafted city. The likes of Kamurocho and Sotenbori stand out from the worlds of most vaguely comparable games for being small enough that you’ll naturally come to know them street by street and getting from A to B’s never arduous. Conversely, Hawaii and (this and 7’s version of) Yokohama are pretty much the definition of what Hideaki Itsuno was talking about here.
Regressions like these are only so frustrating because the occasional flashes of greatness shine so bright, though even those are weighed down by a disproportionate amount of them being relegated to a protagonist who’s supposed to have passed the torch roughly four times as of Infinite Wealth, which seems especially egregious when you consider how often its core cast reflect on the importance of moving on. The route 7 decided to go down was a much needed one that I’m still on board with in theory, and Ichiban remains a pot of potential narrative gold (which I don't think either 7 or IW fully capitalise on outside of Aoki's final scenes in the former), but it’s increasingly difficult to be confident in his ability to carry a franchise on his back when his own creators don’t seem to be themselves. His last scene ending on a punchline at his expense is so uncharacteristically insincere for these games, like an exclamation mark punctuating my confusion at this being their biggest break commercially and critically. If I wasn’t a big proponent of trusting people to know what they like instead of rationalising silly reasons why they might feel differently from you, I’d assume that the Daidoji are both real and responsible for the inherent RGG bonus that factors into Backloggd’s average score calculations.
The net gameplay improvements here are too substantial to suggest that Infinite Wealth isn’t worth playing, but at the same time, I reckon it’d be made largely redundant by its own predecessor if you could somehow surgically remove them and retrofit them into it. Eagerly anticipating this series’ sense of direction appearing as a bartender in the next one.
It can’t be stressed enough how much Infinite Wealth’s core gameplay tweaks salvage it. This marks an all-time high for the Dragon Engine games’ responsiveness in terms of just fundamentally moving around, both Ichiban and Kiryu turning and 180ing with an unprecedented level of fluidity, but the real star’s the combat’s new emphasis on positioning. The movement circle’s so impactful for such a seemingly minor addition; lining up back attacks, proximity bonuses and the directions enemies get knocked in is an endlessly engaging triptych with suitably punchy feedback, as well as the best justification of the engine’s ragdoll physics outside of Lost Judgment’s big enemies, and only improves as you fiddle with party members’ equipment, jobs or builds. Kiryu’s fighting styles are arguably better differentiated here than in the game they’re from, which is emblematic of the extent to which all these pre-existing assets and gameplay concepts get freshened up by the genre switch. Despite retaining some of 7’s issues which’re less understandable in a game that already has a foundation to work off of, like a poor battle camera regularly obscuring enemies’ attacks and allies sometimes just not performing chain attacks when they trigger, it’s overall legitimately at the point where I can picture this being someone’s favourite turn-based RPG based on its mechanics rather than solely for how conceptually unique it is.
Playing so well’s an absolute lifeline given its relentlessly sluggish pacing. There’s an early segment in which Ichiban needs $30 to pay an information broker, and if you already have at least $30 he actually comments on how it’s already sorted, but instead of letting you just pay the broker at that point (as you weirdly can when this exact scenario resurfaces much later), you instead have to get roped into a substory which isn’t even really a substory since it’s bloating the main story to play a minigame to make the money you already have first, then travel back and only then pay him. The fatigue a situation like this brings on’s initially lessened by said minigame being great, but its introduction would’ve been a more unambiguous highlight if you’d been permitted to find it on your own and is quickly exacerbated by how often this happens; sizeable portions of the next three or four chapters are comprised of mandatory, agonisingly slow tutorials for shallow knock-offs of games Yokoyama was pretending this series is too cool for fewer than a couple of years prior. He talked big pre-release about how much longer Infinite Wealth is than the others, and although he wasn’t lying, it would’ve been good to mention that this is only because the typewriter monkeys under his dominion are masters of stretching out what could be single button presses into entire hours.
Some kind of stride’s finally hit with Kiryu’s segments – the core theme of recognising his mortality and appreciating the time he has left’s particularly resonant, as someone whose family’s seen one stage 4 cancer diagnosis and other health scares in recent years – but it’s also got the side effect of making the rest of the narrative that much thinner comparatively. In the same game partially revolving around the terminal illness of a character whom a decent amount of players will have essentially grown up alongside, I just can’t get invested in nuclear waste disposal, the unintentional humour brought about by a Vtuber interviewing yakuza figureheads or Ichiban’s efforts to assure child-gassing Dick Dastardly that they’re still nakamas to the extent that the amount of time dedicated to these seemingly expects you to, especially not with the lifeless substory-esque presentation the cutscenes for these plot threads often have or villains so tepid and hard to believe. Never mind that the Geomijul can hack government satellites but can’t doxx a famous streamer, whose decision was it to make the most American-as-interpreted-by-the-Japanese looking centenarian you’ve ever seen speak English like he’s fresh off the boat from the Tokugawa shogunate? I don’t know if it’s more or less dire than how Ichiban’s either unable to speak English or fluent in it depending on what the given scene demands. The camerawork’s presenting Bryce like he’s on the brink of attaining godhood or something and I’m giggling every time he speaks. The mismatch between voice and character’s sillier than all the plot twists people meme about combined.
His home turf’s enjoyable to explore at first thanks to an impressive amount of detail relative to its size, but the scale ultimately detracts more than it adds. Bigger in-game worlds wouldn’t feel so misguided for these games if Lost Judgment hadn’t already solved the issue of boring traversal; compared to its skateboard, the segway’s much slower to whip out, put away or move around on, more expensive, vulnerable to enemy encounters, prevents you from picking up valuable materials, doesn’t even require player input and has no tricks to perform or any means of interacting with the environment at all. Taken together with still being able to immediately fast travel to any taxi from the map, plus the fact that doing so’s cheap as chips, it becomes redundant not long after it’s introduced and with it goes most reasons to actually engage with this huge, meticulously crafted city. The likes of Kamurocho and Sotenbori stand out from the worlds of most vaguely comparable games for being small enough that you’ll naturally come to know them street by street and getting from A to B’s never arduous. Conversely, Hawaii and (this and 7’s version of) Yokohama are pretty much the definition of what Hideaki Itsuno was talking about here.
Regressions like these are only so frustrating because the occasional flashes of greatness shine so bright, though even those are weighed down by a disproportionate amount of them being relegated to a protagonist who’s supposed to have passed the torch roughly four times as of Infinite Wealth, which seems especially egregious when you consider how often its core cast reflect on the importance of moving on. The route 7 decided to go down was a much needed one that I’m still on board with in theory, and Ichiban remains a pot of potential narrative gold (which I don't think either 7 or IW fully capitalise on outside of Aoki's final scenes in the former), but it’s increasingly difficult to be confident in his ability to carry a franchise on his back when his own creators don’t seem to be themselves. His last scene ending on a punchline at his expense is so uncharacteristically insincere for these games, like an exclamation mark punctuating my confusion at this being their biggest break commercially and critically. If I wasn’t a big proponent of trusting people to know what they like instead of rationalising silly reasons why they might feel differently from you, I’d assume that the Daidoji are both real and responsible for the inherent RGG bonus that factors into Backloggd’s average score calculations.
The net gameplay improvements here are too substantial to suggest that Infinite Wealth isn’t worth playing, but at the same time, I reckon it’d be made largely redundant by its own predecessor if you could somehow surgically remove them and retrofit them into it. Eagerly anticipating this series’ sense of direction appearing as a bartender in the next one.
This is the only game I've ever played during which I've thought to myself "this is probably what it would be like to fight a dragon in real life."
From that thought, a lot can be gleaned about Dragon's Dogma. The animations and behaviours of its fictional fantasy creatures are remarkably lifelike, which bolsters its already strong immersive qualities, but the combat is arguably where it shines the most - and not just because its bows feel like semi-automatic rifles or because Arc of Deliverance is the single most satisfying move to use in any game ever made. Where a lesser game would typically have you fight a giant monster by whittling away at its ankles ad nauseam or some other comparably restrictive method, Dragon's Dogma lets you (among other things) climb onto it, knock it over, stun it, break off or cripple certain body parts, douse it in oil & light it on fire, lure it into a disadvantageous spot or environmental hazard, bring it crashing down to the ground while it's flying, send it flying through the air, freeze it, parry it, or jump off of it to reach a place you otherwise couldn't. It's like a power metal album cover come to life, with a soundtrack to match. It’s chaotic, it’s dynamic, and it’s absolutely drowning in techniques to try out.
That alone would be enough to set Dragon's Dogma above most other real-time combat systems, but what takes it to the next level is the genius pawn system. Few games offer satisfaction on the level of figuring out a golden tactic against a particularly troublesome enemy, watching your pawns become better and better at its execution over time, and being rewarded by other players for renting out your home-made killing machine to them. My mind was blown the first time I realised my pawn had learned to throw explosive barrels specifically when a tough enemy is near a ledge to kill them instantly, and almost a full decade later they continue to surprise with behaviours like this. There’s plenty else to enjoy about Dragon’s Dogma’s combat system, like the enormous playstyle diversity afforded by its classes or the chunky hitstop that provides great feedback on every attack, but it’s far from the only thing the game offers.
For one thing, Dragon’s Dogma sells the feeling of adventure very well. While not quite to the extent of in something like Breath of the Wild, you really do have to legitimately think about how to get from one place to another. Should I risk trying to clamber up that ledge or is it more practical to take the long way around, even if that means meeting more monsters? What time of day should I start my journey, or will it be short enough that I shouldn’t have to worry about all the beasties coming out when night falls? If night falls, do I have enough fuel for my lantern and is my character tall enough that it won't be extinguished by forging through bodies of water? You find yourself asking all these questions as you make your way to distant landmarks which you weren’t initially even sure if you could physically get to, which I think is enough to make the open world a net positive overall despite its blatant and unfortunate unfinished-ness. It helps that pretty much all of the dungeons in both Gransys and Bitterblack are rewarding to explore, with lots of goodies to find in hidden alternate pathways and enemy layouts which get dramatically overhauled in the post-game.
Beyond that, I’ll always stick up for the story of Dragon’s Dogma. Bingo Morihashi is seemingly cursed to always deliver well thought-out, thematically solid stories that everyone writes off as crap for some reason. Even if contextualising new game plus into it wasn’t rad as hell (and it is), the intentionally antiquated dialogue gives it so much character and it conveys such an immense, ambitious sense of progression in terms of scale. And speaking of scales (literally), Grigori is an all-timer in the realm of video game antagonists. Coupled with David Lodge’s masterful delivery, every line of his gives him such presence. He’s everything a dragon should be according to their traditional cultural depictions; not just huge, imposing and a fierce fighter, but also really intelligent and reserved to the point where it's not easy to classify him as a 'villain.' The fight against him having both style and substance in spades is just the cherry on top.
Daimon is also compelling, and his segment of the game is probably what’ll keep you coming back for more. Bitterblack Isle’s not just a wonderful, almost endlessly replayable DLC that marks a gold-standard for content density, it’s also a tantalising glimpse into Hideaki Itsuno’s full vision for Dragon’s Dogma. It was meant to have dozens of Bitterblack equivalents scattered throughout the world before its development was cut short, not the least of which included being able to travel to the moon and a massive MMO-like tower in which players could trade with one another and glimpse at each other’s worlds, endlessly stacked on top of each other. Had Itsuno and his team been allowed to carry out that vision, I’ve little doubt that Dragon’s Dogma would probably be my favourite game of all time. As it stands, it’s close enough already – all I think a hypothetical sequel would really need is for its open world to be more densely packed with content and a real-time healing system (outside of hotkeys and spells), like that of Nioh or a certain other ARPG series from the past decade or so that I hear is pretty popular.
It’s well known now that Capcom presented Itsuno with the choice to either develop Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 a few years ago. Given the freedom that Capcom granted to him during the making of DMC5 and his recent teasing that his elusive new project is making good progress, I can’t help but have hope for the first time since release that aught is on the horizon. A Dragon’s Dogma sequel wouldn’t just be nice to see, it’d mark a victory for any and all game creators who want to see their vision fully realised.
From that thought, a lot can be gleaned about Dragon's Dogma. The animations and behaviours of its fictional fantasy creatures are remarkably lifelike, which bolsters its already strong immersive qualities, but the combat is arguably where it shines the most - and not just because its bows feel like semi-automatic rifles or because Arc of Deliverance is the single most satisfying move to use in any game ever made. Where a lesser game would typically have you fight a giant monster by whittling away at its ankles ad nauseam or some other comparably restrictive method, Dragon's Dogma lets you (among other things) climb onto it, knock it over, stun it, break off or cripple certain body parts, douse it in oil & light it on fire, lure it into a disadvantageous spot or environmental hazard, bring it crashing down to the ground while it's flying, send it flying through the air, freeze it, parry it, or jump off of it to reach a place you otherwise couldn't. It's like a power metal album cover come to life, with a soundtrack to match. It’s chaotic, it’s dynamic, and it’s absolutely drowning in techniques to try out.
That alone would be enough to set Dragon's Dogma above most other real-time combat systems, but what takes it to the next level is the genius pawn system. Few games offer satisfaction on the level of figuring out a golden tactic against a particularly troublesome enemy, watching your pawns become better and better at its execution over time, and being rewarded by other players for renting out your home-made killing machine to them. My mind was blown the first time I realised my pawn had learned to throw explosive barrels specifically when a tough enemy is near a ledge to kill them instantly, and almost a full decade later they continue to surprise with behaviours like this. There’s plenty else to enjoy about Dragon’s Dogma’s combat system, like the enormous playstyle diversity afforded by its classes or the chunky hitstop that provides great feedback on every attack, but it’s far from the only thing the game offers.
For one thing, Dragon’s Dogma sells the feeling of adventure very well. While not quite to the extent of in something like Breath of the Wild, you really do have to legitimately think about how to get from one place to another. Should I risk trying to clamber up that ledge or is it more practical to take the long way around, even if that means meeting more monsters? What time of day should I start my journey, or will it be short enough that I shouldn’t have to worry about all the beasties coming out when night falls? If night falls, do I have enough fuel for my lantern and is my character tall enough that it won't be extinguished by forging through bodies of water? You find yourself asking all these questions as you make your way to distant landmarks which you weren’t initially even sure if you could physically get to, which I think is enough to make the open world a net positive overall despite its blatant and unfortunate unfinished-ness. It helps that pretty much all of the dungeons in both Gransys and Bitterblack are rewarding to explore, with lots of goodies to find in hidden alternate pathways and enemy layouts which get dramatically overhauled in the post-game.
Beyond that, I’ll always stick up for the story of Dragon’s Dogma. Bingo Morihashi is seemingly cursed to always deliver well thought-out, thematically solid stories that everyone writes off as crap for some reason. Even if contextualising new game plus into it wasn’t rad as hell (and it is), the intentionally antiquated dialogue gives it so much character and it conveys such an immense, ambitious sense of progression in terms of scale. And speaking of scales (literally), Grigori is an all-timer in the realm of video game antagonists. Coupled with David Lodge’s masterful delivery, every line of his gives him such presence. He’s everything a dragon should be according to their traditional cultural depictions; not just huge, imposing and a fierce fighter, but also really intelligent and reserved to the point where it's not easy to classify him as a 'villain.' The fight against him having both style and substance in spades is just the cherry on top.
Daimon is also compelling, and his segment of the game is probably what’ll keep you coming back for more. Bitterblack Isle’s not just a wonderful, almost endlessly replayable DLC that marks a gold-standard for content density, it’s also a tantalising glimpse into Hideaki Itsuno’s full vision for Dragon’s Dogma. It was meant to have dozens of Bitterblack equivalents scattered throughout the world before its development was cut short, not the least of which included being able to travel to the moon and a massive MMO-like tower in which players could trade with one another and glimpse at each other’s worlds, endlessly stacked on top of each other. Had Itsuno and his team been allowed to carry out that vision, I’ve little doubt that Dragon’s Dogma would probably be my favourite game of all time. As it stands, it’s close enough already – all I think a hypothetical sequel would really need is for its open world to be more densely packed with content and a real-time healing system (outside of hotkeys and spells), like that of Nioh or a certain other ARPG series from the past decade or so that I hear is pretty popular.
It’s well known now that Capcom presented Itsuno with the choice to either develop Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon’s Dogma 2 a few years ago. Given the freedom that Capcom granted to him during the making of DMC5 and his recent teasing that his elusive new project is making good progress, I can’t help but have hope for the first time since release that aught is on the horizon. A Dragon’s Dogma sequel wouldn’t just be nice to see, it’d mark a victory for any and all game creators who want to see their vision fully realised.
As rickety and often barely functional yet ultimately powerful as its titular protagonists. Less than an hour into this replay, I got stuck inside a door and had to reload a save to get out, had a guard I’d intimidated into passivity turn hostile again when he rounded a corner and witnessed an unconscious, bedridden patient aggressively A-pose when I fed on his doctor, but as ever, I stick with it regardless because virtually everything else about the game is so enthralling. The ladies call it “oh God!,” but you can call it Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines.
Paradoxically, VTMB’s main strength is probably its immersion. No amount of glitchiness could be enough to prevent anyone from feeling smothered in the atmosphere of dark urban decay it depicts, even after several playthroughs; this was my fourth since I was little and I still find myself wary of areas which I should know by now have no enemies or other dangers, because (appropriately, considering the game’s premise) there’s always a pervasive sense that there could be. Something less obvious that contributes to this is the fact that it’s one of few RPGs with a contemporary setting – it’s easier to feel on edge when familiar locales like a beachside hotel, a hospital or an arcade are supernaturally twisted into something uncomfortable. These aspects join hands with a soundtrack which sounds like what you’d see if you peered into the mind of any of this portrayal of LA’s aimless drifters, grungy ambient sound effects, imposing neo-Gothic architecture and some lovely, imagination-sparking skyboxes to make each of its four small but dense hub worlds that much more of a joy to explore, even when the later portions take their infamous downturn in terms of options for resolving quests and general rushed-ness.
It's a pity that the endgame’s so combat-orientated given that the combat system, despite being somewhat flexible and satisfying in small doses thanks to some of the more out-there vampiric powers, generally isn’t engaging enough to maintain long-term interest. One area in which VTMB never falters, though, is in terms of character interactions. Stellar voice acting and facial animations unique in their sheer expressiveness, true even of NPCs which most players might never even encounter, don’t just bring its cast to (un)life but also make the dialogue system feel more natural, too. As in the first two Fallout games with which Troika shared several staff, NPCs’ demeanour towards you is telegraphed diegetically via their facial expressions and, although speech checks are highlighted by a bunch of fancy fonts, there’s no indication of whether you’ll succeed at them or whether doing so’ll even result in a beneficial outcome. Only on my third playthrough did I learn that you can lock yourself out of getting the Downtown haven if you’re too cheeky to LaCroix, with no warnings next to any of the dialogue options that result in this. It’s all too rare and all too cool that an RPG pulls the rug out from under you like this and lets you get whisked away on a domino effect of your poor decisions, however minor they seem at the time.
What accentuates this even further is the diversity between the clans you can pick at the start. Playing a Malkavian or Nosferatu in particular’s so differentiated from those with their heads and/or skin screwed on that it’s almost like playing the game for the first time again; as above, it wasn’t until this replay that I learned you could skip the tutorial and miss out on a free lockpick until I realised the hard way that I don’t have as good a grasp on the voices in my Malk’s head as I’d thought. It occasionally feels like every character needing to be voiced restricted the lengths Troika could go to in integrating unique interactions for these oddball clans, but the fact that there’s one entirely optional clan which alters every single line of player dialogue in the game and at least one other which fundamentally changes how you have to navigate the hubs is really impressive, no less for the restraint this must’ve taken than for its impact on gameplay and replay value – again, reminiscent of low-INT builds in Fallout 1 and 2.
You’ll probably have noticed that this review’s got a consistent thread running through it of getting slapped in the face with things I didn’t know were in the game before, and that’s because a core draw of VTMB is discovery. It’s why I’ve not dug into how juicy much of its dialogue is, the surprising amount of other World of Darkness tabletops it draws from beyond just Vampire or the frequency with which it reminds you what a vivid imagination its character designers/artists have, because it all deserves to learnt firsthand. That said, I did make a tiny collage to drive home the latter point: these four characters all live on roughly the same street. The amount of effort it must’ve taken to conceptualise a cast so varied’s almost as mad to think about as the fact that VTMB is old enough now to arguably function as period piece.
This being as true of the time in which it released as of its contents is what led to this revisit in the first place. Having played and enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield in quick succession, both of which feature only about as many bugs across an entire playthrough as any individual hour of this (if even), I find it hard to imagine a world where the public wouldn’t sentence VTMB to the same death-by-hyperbole if it were to come out now, without the reputational fortune of being long solidified as a cult classic for epic gamers only. It turns out that releasing in the same week as Half Life 2, MGS3 and Halo 2 was a blessing in disguise, if only because this was well before the Camarilla saw fit to punish us with social media monetisation and how it's helped foster vague, directionless outrage about games most of those perpetuating it have no intention of playing anyway as its own micro-industry.
Forever glad that people were able to see the forest for the trees in this particular case, for whatever reason, and recognise that not even bugs on the level of crashing the game when you press the screenshot button or a penultimate boss in three out of four story routes constituting what may genuinely be the worst boss fight in any video game are enough to sink the one-of-a-kind RPG that VTMB is. Take the plunge into its supernatural underworld, look forward to making mistakes along the way and remember: don’t open it.
Paradoxically, VTMB’s main strength is probably its immersion. No amount of glitchiness could be enough to prevent anyone from feeling smothered in the atmosphere of dark urban decay it depicts, even after several playthroughs; this was my fourth since I was little and I still find myself wary of areas which I should know by now have no enemies or other dangers, because (appropriately, considering the game’s premise) there’s always a pervasive sense that there could be. Something less obvious that contributes to this is the fact that it’s one of few RPGs with a contemporary setting – it’s easier to feel on edge when familiar locales like a beachside hotel, a hospital or an arcade are supernaturally twisted into something uncomfortable. These aspects join hands with a soundtrack which sounds like what you’d see if you peered into the mind of any of this portrayal of LA’s aimless drifters, grungy ambient sound effects, imposing neo-Gothic architecture and some lovely, imagination-sparking skyboxes to make each of its four small but dense hub worlds that much more of a joy to explore, even when the later portions take their infamous downturn in terms of options for resolving quests and general rushed-ness.
It's a pity that the endgame’s so combat-orientated given that the combat system, despite being somewhat flexible and satisfying in small doses thanks to some of the more out-there vampiric powers, generally isn’t engaging enough to maintain long-term interest. One area in which VTMB never falters, though, is in terms of character interactions. Stellar voice acting and facial animations unique in their sheer expressiveness, true even of NPCs which most players might never even encounter, don’t just bring its cast to (un)life but also make the dialogue system feel more natural, too. As in the first two Fallout games with which Troika shared several staff, NPCs’ demeanour towards you is telegraphed diegetically via their facial expressions and, although speech checks are highlighted by a bunch of fancy fonts, there’s no indication of whether you’ll succeed at them or whether doing so’ll even result in a beneficial outcome. Only on my third playthrough did I learn that you can lock yourself out of getting the Downtown haven if you’re too cheeky to LaCroix, with no warnings next to any of the dialogue options that result in this. It’s all too rare and all too cool that an RPG pulls the rug out from under you like this and lets you get whisked away on a domino effect of your poor decisions, however minor they seem at the time.
What accentuates this even further is the diversity between the clans you can pick at the start. Playing a Malkavian or Nosferatu in particular’s so differentiated from those with their heads and/or skin screwed on that it’s almost like playing the game for the first time again; as above, it wasn’t until this replay that I learned you could skip the tutorial and miss out on a free lockpick until I realised the hard way that I don’t have as good a grasp on the voices in my Malk’s head as I’d thought. It occasionally feels like every character needing to be voiced restricted the lengths Troika could go to in integrating unique interactions for these oddball clans, but the fact that there’s one entirely optional clan which alters every single line of player dialogue in the game and at least one other which fundamentally changes how you have to navigate the hubs is really impressive, no less for the restraint this must’ve taken than for its impact on gameplay and replay value – again, reminiscent of low-INT builds in Fallout 1 and 2.
You’ll probably have noticed that this review’s got a consistent thread running through it of getting slapped in the face with things I didn’t know were in the game before, and that’s because a core draw of VTMB is discovery. It’s why I’ve not dug into how juicy much of its dialogue is, the surprising amount of other World of Darkness tabletops it draws from beyond just Vampire or the frequency with which it reminds you what a vivid imagination its character designers/artists have, because it all deserves to learnt firsthand. That said, I did make a tiny collage to drive home the latter point: these four characters all live on roughly the same street. The amount of effort it must’ve taken to conceptualise a cast so varied’s almost as mad to think about as the fact that VTMB is old enough now to arguably function as period piece.
This being as true of the time in which it released as of its contents is what led to this revisit in the first place. Having played and enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield in quick succession, both of which feature only about as many bugs across an entire playthrough as any individual hour of this (if even), I find it hard to imagine a world where the public wouldn’t sentence VTMB to the same death-by-hyperbole if it were to come out now, without the reputational fortune of being long solidified as a cult classic for epic gamers only. It turns out that releasing in the same week as Half Life 2, MGS3 and Halo 2 was a blessing in disguise, if only because this was well before the Camarilla saw fit to punish us with social media monetisation and how it's helped foster vague, directionless outrage about games most of those perpetuating it have no intention of playing anyway as its own micro-industry.
Forever glad that people were able to see the forest for the trees in this particular case, for whatever reason, and recognise that not even bugs on the level of crashing the game when you press the screenshot button or a penultimate boss in three out of four story routes constituting what may genuinely be the worst boss fight in any video game are enough to sink the one-of-a-kind RPG that VTMB is. Take the plunge into its supernatural underworld, look forward to making mistakes along the way and remember: don’t open it.
2010
Something’s clearly amiss from the outset of Bioshock 2. The first thing you lay your crusty visor upon is graffiti stating that Babylon has fallen. You’ll then notice that Rapture’s once pristine art deco stairways are now taken over by luminous coral overgrowth, rubbish and, strangely enough, butterflies. Even the game’s HUD is corroded with rust and calcifying under barnacles. It’s like a corruptive force has washed over and warped the city’s very essence, wherein lies Bioshock 2’s own essence – a reinterpretation of one of gaming’s most well realised worlds more thoughtful than it’s ever given credit for.
This is most noticeably distilled in Sofia Lamb, monologue dispenser extraordinaire and embodiment of Rapture’s ideological swing of the pendulum. Collectivism for her doesn’t stop at every I in service of the we, but rather the outright elimination of self-awareness and subsuming of individuals into a singly-minded mass, a bit like a (purely theoretically) more utopian vision of those guys from that other game whose title ends in ‘Shock 2.’ She’s a well chosen opponent for a story whose stakes are so much more personal this time around, revolving around her attempts to erase the individuality of your girl Eleanor and transform her into what she refers to as “the People’s Daughter,” a prototype for the citizenry of the utopia she envisions who’ll be unable to question anything and who can fill any societal role by way of plasmids. Where Ryan and Atlas question the player’s agency, Lamb questions the player’s ethics: you can prove her wrong and even save her from herself by setting a positive example for Eleanor to follow that only Subject Delta as an individual is in the position to produce.
Your treatment of the Little Sisters is a key factor in this respect, as ever, but Bioshock 2 tweaks this mechanic so that the method of obtaining the most ADAM from them is much more proportional than before. To get the best result from rescuing each one, you need to protect her as she harvests ADAM from two corpses scattered about the area, attracting splicers, new kinds of Big Daddies and eventually the bullet sponge to end all bullet sponges that is a Big Sister. Between all parties attacking each other in the crossfire, security bots and a harsher limit on how much first aid/EVE you can carry, these sections can become legitimately tough, if not in terms of deaths accrued then certainly in resources consumed. Harvesting Little Sisters is now granted the niche of middling reward for little risk, an all the more tempting proposition if you use one of the new modular difficulty options to turn Vita Chambers off. It’s an altogether solid solution to the dilemma that led Clint Hocking, lead designer of Splinter Cell 1, Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, to coin the term ludosudowudo-whatever.
2 revises much of Bioshock’s formula in other, similarly beneficial ways. Being able to wield a plasmid and a weapon simultaneously ties each half of the combat system together by granting you bonus damage to enemies afflicted by plasmids, allows for more flexible enemy design (brutes and Big Sisters are particular standouts, turning every environmental object into both a potential tool & hazard) and is otherwise such an obvious addition that a friend of mine misremembered it being in the first game. They say any FPS is as good as its shotgun, and while we do have one here that’s both very useful and emblematic of this series’ A+ art direction, only Bioshock 2 is as good as its gigantic drill hand, which allows for anime moments and the worst possible deaths in equal measure. They and every other weird and wonderful weapon Subject Delta comes across enjoy greater functional variety this time around too, thanks to an expanded weapon upgrade system that grants each one a unique quirk at the final, gated tier – for example, reflecting projectiles with the drill or ricocheting bullets for the machine gun.
Mechanics aren’t the only things that’ve been fleshed out, either. Bioshock 2 concentrates a veritable Metroid Prime’s worth of effort into conveying the sense that you, the player, really are inside the rustbucket of a suit inhabited by Rapture’s #1 dad. Rims of Subject Delta’s visor occupy each corner of the screen, reflect light and jolt about according to his current state. Droplets of blood, water and certain plasmids spatter and drip down its glass, which also gets fogged up by steam. Landing after a jump is accompanied by a hefty screen shake, an upheaval of lingering dust and a metallic thud. You can even see your shadow now, projected by dynamic light sources, which is used against you for at least one jumpscare that I’m aware of. A diegetic HUD of some kind might’ve helped it stand out even more in this respect, but in general and as befits a game with this kind of ancestry, Bioshock 2’s immersion dial has been turned up several notches compared to its predecessor, making the recipe of raiding long-abandoned apartments and backrooms for tidbits of environmental storytelling and other goodies feel all the more tactile.
This is all without even touching upon Minerva’s Den, but despite deserving its credit both as what should be a standard for DLC and for its influence over a subset of indie games birthed in the years that followed, I can’t help but feel that the general perception of it as the highlight of a lesser entry is erroneous. It’s really just more of what’s an already excellent game which demonstrates an intimate understanding of what made its predecessor tick, gameplay-wise and thematically, and is as a whole long overdue a reappraisal.
Revisit Rapture with Bioshock 2 and discover that what you’ve been misled to believe is an ancillary sequel is, in reality, assuredly among the most underappreciated games to have still garnered relative acclaim, as well as further evidence that the real best games usually have an average Backloggd score starting with a 3.
This is most noticeably distilled in Sofia Lamb, monologue dispenser extraordinaire and embodiment of Rapture’s ideological swing of the pendulum. Collectivism for her doesn’t stop at every I in service of the we, but rather the outright elimination of self-awareness and subsuming of individuals into a singly-minded mass, a bit like a (purely theoretically) more utopian vision of those guys from that other game whose title ends in ‘Shock 2.’ She’s a well chosen opponent for a story whose stakes are so much more personal this time around, revolving around her attempts to erase the individuality of your girl Eleanor and transform her into what she refers to as “the People’s Daughter,” a prototype for the citizenry of the utopia she envisions who’ll be unable to question anything and who can fill any societal role by way of plasmids. Where Ryan and Atlas question the player’s agency, Lamb questions the player’s ethics: you can prove her wrong and even save her from herself by setting a positive example for Eleanor to follow that only Subject Delta as an individual is in the position to produce.
Your treatment of the Little Sisters is a key factor in this respect, as ever, but Bioshock 2 tweaks this mechanic so that the method of obtaining the most ADAM from them is much more proportional than before. To get the best result from rescuing each one, you need to protect her as she harvests ADAM from two corpses scattered about the area, attracting splicers, new kinds of Big Daddies and eventually the bullet sponge to end all bullet sponges that is a Big Sister. Between all parties attacking each other in the crossfire, security bots and a harsher limit on how much first aid/EVE you can carry, these sections can become legitimately tough, if not in terms of deaths accrued then certainly in resources consumed. Harvesting Little Sisters is now granted the niche of middling reward for little risk, an all the more tempting proposition if you use one of the new modular difficulty options to turn Vita Chambers off. It’s an altogether solid solution to the dilemma that led Clint Hocking, lead designer of Splinter Cell 1, Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, to coin the term ludosudowudo-whatever.
2 revises much of Bioshock’s formula in other, similarly beneficial ways. Being able to wield a plasmid and a weapon simultaneously ties each half of the combat system together by granting you bonus damage to enemies afflicted by plasmids, allows for more flexible enemy design (brutes and Big Sisters are particular standouts, turning every environmental object into both a potential tool & hazard) and is otherwise such an obvious addition that a friend of mine misremembered it being in the first game. They say any FPS is as good as its shotgun, and while we do have one here that’s both very useful and emblematic of this series’ A+ art direction, only Bioshock 2 is as good as its gigantic drill hand, which allows for anime moments and the worst possible deaths in equal measure. They and every other weird and wonderful weapon Subject Delta comes across enjoy greater functional variety this time around too, thanks to an expanded weapon upgrade system that grants each one a unique quirk at the final, gated tier – for example, reflecting projectiles with the drill or ricocheting bullets for the machine gun.
Mechanics aren’t the only things that’ve been fleshed out, either. Bioshock 2 concentrates a veritable Metroid Prime’s worth of effort into conveying the sense that you, the player, really are inside the rustbucket of a suit inhabited by Rapture’s #1 dad. Rims of Subject Delta’s visor occupy each corner of the screen, reflect light and jolt about according to his current state. Droplets of blood, water and certain plasmids spatter and drip down its glass, which also gets fogged up by steam. Landing after a jump is accompanied by a hefty screen shake, an upheaval of lingering dust and a metallic thud. You can even see your shadow now, projected by dynamic light sources, which is used against you for at least one jumpscare that I’m aware of. A diegetic HUD of some kind might’ve helped it stand out even more in this respect, but in general and as befits a game with this kind of ancestry, Bioshock 2’s immersion dial has been turned up several notches compared to its predecessor, making the recipe of raiding long-abandoned apartments and backrooms for tidbits of environmental storytelling and other goodies feel all the more tactile.
This is all without even touching upon Minerva’s Den, but despite deserving its credit both as what should be a standard for DLC and for its influence over a subset of indie games birthed in the years that followed, I can’t help but feel that the general perception of it as the highlight of a lesser entry is erroneous. It’s really just more of what’s an already excellent game which demonstrates an intimate understanding of what made its predecessor tick, gameplay-wise and thematically, and is as a whole long overdue a reappraisal.
Revisit Rapture with Bioshock 2 and discover that what you’ve been misled to believe is an ancillary sequel is, in reality, assuredly among the most underappreciated games to have still garnered relative acclaim, as well as further evidence that the real best games usually have an average Backloggd score starting with a 3.