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2020
Ghostrunner took a concept I'd wanted for a while and made it real. Like Hotline Miami, it's a series of touch-of-death, speedrunning, kill puzzles but now in full 3D as a parkouring cyber-ninja. It didn't perfect its own twist on the formula, but it was more than good enough to start and I'm glad we're seeing more, soon.
When you play well, it's smooth and satisfying in a way few other first person games are. When you play bad, at least the respawn is instantaneous and the checkpoints are fair.
When it janks up… it can be a bit aggravating, I won't lie, but thanks to that instant retry it was hard to stay mad. And sometimes the things you do to try and recover are their own entertainment.
I was honestly shocked when I first played the game in a Demo shortly before release that the game controls as smoothly as it does. It's designed from an almost exclusively flow-centric philosophy. Almost nothing is animation based. Input is almost never ceded from the player even when the player control is pushed by something. It's easy to catch a high, responsive framerate.
(Well, maybe that last part was less true in mid 2020 for most people)
It can sometimes backfire a bit: feel a bit slippery and cause some funny physics mishaps for the player. But to me, that's the ideal trade off if you can't yet reach perfection with this concept.
The game's bigger missteps are probably with its attempts to "shake up" the gameplay with the puzzlier sections and the boss fights, and both because they suddenly force the player to go at their speed, not the other way around (with some exceptions).
In my mind, the whole game is a puzzle of efficiency, so having explicit puzzle sections is no issue. It's in fact a great idea to give the player a few low reflex requirement activities to do between the high points. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to involve elements that require waiting for an animation or forcing a fixed move speed while navigating a simple space giving the stuck-at-40mph-on-a-70mph-highway, "Traffic" effect.
Not all of them are like this, and I actually enjoyed a few, but it's a shame the last boss in particular gets the Traffic effect the hardest of them all with its simon-says-esque routine.
It's interesting to compare this now to Hi-Fi Rush (in hindsight) where one of the highlight bosses was even more so a simon-says, but because of the expectations set with the game putting EVERYTHING on a fixed beat from the start, it works amazingly there. So really, Ghostrunner's fault is just in that it occasionally fumbled its player-directed pacing after establishing it so prominently in the core game loop.
The overwhelming majority of the game does not have this problem, however and if you catch with the core game loop, the primary memories you'll get out of this game will be the fun you had there.
…
Mmm. I do feel like I need to state that I love first person platforming games, though. I saw at least one friend on my Steam list with 120 deaths on the last platforming segment compared to my 12. I know the appeal of that kind of gameplay is… niche.
But maybe this is the game that gets you into it? 😅
When you play well, it's smooth and satisfying in a way few other first person games are. When you play bad, at least the respawn is instantaneous and the checkpoints are fair.
When it janks up… it can be a bit aggravating, I won't lie, but thanks to that instant retry it was hard to stay mad. And sometimes the things you do to try and recover are their own entertainment.
I was honestly shocked when I first played the game in a Demo shortly before release that the game controls as smoothly as it does. It's designed from an almost exclusively flow-centric philosophy. Almost nothing is animation based. Input is almost never ceded from the player even when the player control is pushed by something. It's easy to catch a high, responsive framerate.
(Well, maybe that last part was less true in mid 2020 for most people)
It can sometimes backfire a bit: feel a bit slippery and cause some funny physics mishaps for the player. But to me, that's the ideal trade off if you can't yet reach perfection with this concept.
The game's bigger missteps are probably with its attempts to "shake up" the gameplay with the puzzlier sections and the boss fights, and both because they suddenly force the player to go at their speed, not the other way around (with some exceptions).
In my mind, the whole game is a puzzle of efficiency, so having explicit puzzle sections is no issue. It's in fact a great idea to give the player a few low reflex requirement activities to do between the high points. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to involve elements that require waiting for an animation or forcing a fixed move speed while navigating a simple space giving the stuck-at-40mph-on-a-70mph-highway, "Traffic" effect.
Not all of them are like this, and I actually enjoyed a few, but it's a shame the last boss in particular gets the Traffic effect the hardest of them all with its simon-says-esque routine.
It's interesting to compare this now to Hi-Fi Rush (in hindsight) where one of the highlight bosses was even more so a simon-says, but because of the expectations set with the game putting EVERYTHING on a fixed beat from the start, it works amazingly there. So really, Ghostrunner's fault is just in that it occasionally fumbled its player-directed pacing after establishing it so prominently in the core game loop.
The overwhelming majority of the game does not have this problem, however and if you catch with the core game loop, the primary memories you'll get out of this game will be the fun you had there.
…
Mmm. I do feel like I need to state that I love first person platforming games, though. I saw at least one friend on my Steam list with 120 deaths on the last platforming segment compared to my 12. I know the appeal of that kind of gameplay is… niche.
But maybe this is the game that gets you into it? 😅
2020
I can't come up with any way to describe what I like about this game without just plagarizing @EVX's review of it so I'm not gonna try and will instead endorse his opinions for what works and elaborate on what makes me a bit more mixed on Evan's Remains.
I think the best way to describe my experience is to compare it to the song Crystal Ball by Styx and my cousin's reaction to it when I had him listen. The switchup from the quiet, melancholy acoustic opening to the driving, synth-accompanied ballad halfway is not necessarily a surprise if you're paying attention (and especially not if you know the band). However, if you really latch onto the first half, the second half becomes jarring and unwelcome, as it did for him.
Is this the song's fault? Not really. It wants to try something more bold and it certainly worked for me with that song, but switchups are inherently risky endeavors.
Which is to say, I do respect this game for what it attempted with its narrative, but I don't think they quite nailed it. That, or I'm simply too attached to the initial vibe of the game's narrative and don't want to follow it to that next stage. However, all of the other elements of the game—visuals, gameplay, pacing, presentation—are so easy to sail along with that I've just ended up accepting it as is.
I do also think there's something interesting here thematically that I've been pondering. It just feels a little more hidden behind the specifics of the writing than it ought to have been.
Either way, it's a fun, short puzzle platformer with gorgeous art. That's justification enough in my eyes for people to give it a shot and see what they take out of it.
I think the best way to describe my experience is to compare it to the song Crystal Ball by Styx and my cousin's reaction to it when I had him listen. The switchup from the quiet, melancholy acoustic opening to the driving, synth-accompanied ballad halfway is not necessarily a surprise if you're paying attention (and especially not if you know the band). However, if you really latch onto the first half, the second half becomes jarring and unwelcome, as it did for him.
Is this the song's fault? Not really. It wants to try something more bold and it certainly worked for me with that song, but switchups are inherently risky endeavors.
Which is to say, I do respect this game for what it attempted with its narrative, but I don't think they quite nailed it. That, or I'm simply too attached to the initial vibe of the game's narrative and don't want to follow it to that next stage. However, all of the other elements of the game—visuals, gameplay, pacing, presentation—are so easy to sail along with that I've just ended up accepting it as is.
I do also think there's something interesting here thematically that I've been pondering. It just feels a little more hidden behind the specifics of the writing than it ought to have been.
Either way, it's a fun, short puzzle platformer with gorgeous art. That's justification enough in my eyes for people to give it a shot and see what they take out of it.
1998
As one of the first games I ever owned and obsessed over as a 3-4 year old, I'll never not love this game. Emerald Coast especially will just be one of those immaculate vibes permanently engraved in my soul. But yeah, it's a rough experience for like 60% of it.
Now, one thing I thing—having first tried the PC version of DX before quitting in 5 minutes for technical issues and "acquiring" a Dreamcast copy again—I was quite happy to learn that my old memories of how this game felt were actually quite accurate. In the areas where the devs clearly spent more time polishing the game can pretty darn fluid if not outright smooth. Having played a couple different ports of both Adventure titles, I thought my memories had just clouded my mind to what was always actually a complete clunky mess.
But no. Sega has just been comitting crimes of art with how its handled the porting of these titles.
Granted, as the first of Sonic's forays into 3D, this is far from a perfect title. There are a lot hiccups with the camera and world geometry that bugger your flow and make it a fairly jarring experience one you get past the first few levels of the Sonic campaign.
That doesn't necessarily end the fun, though. That lack of polish comes along with quite a bit of variety and nothing in the game could really be called a slog. The longest any one level takes is like maybe 8 minutes in a few of the outliers. Most levels are a quick 1-3 minutes.
Or at least they are for me at this point, but that's maybe unfair. It's been like 12-15 years since I last really played this game through but, once you add in the 2 years of early childhood I spent playing it, you could argue that I might have some knowledge and muscle memory advantages.
In any case: I won't argue that this game stands up as a timeless classic of the genre, between the inconsistent quality, jarring scene transistions, and incredibly simplistic writing on the story…
But I do think it's in any platforming fan's interest to give it a playthrough: It's not particularly long; fun enough for what's there; and it's a fascinating little time capsule of both culture at the time and of the genre's transition into new technological realms.
The whole idea of structuring the game as distinct Action and Adventure stages is something I wish a few more games tried as even its sequel dropped the exploration zones. You could argue games like Banjo Kazooie basically did the same thing and maybe better, but there's something about the clear division between no-stakes exploration and high-pressure obstacle courses.
So yeah. Fun little nostalgia trip for me. If you need a quick hit of speed-centric platforming, this could be a fun little adventure for you as well.
Now, one thing I thing—having first tried the PC version of DX before quitting in 5 minutes for technical issues and "acquiring" a Dreamcast copy again—I was quite happy to learn that my old memories of how this game felt were actually quite accurate. In the areas where the devs clearly spent more time polishing the game can pretty darn fluid if not outright smooth. Having played a couple different ports of both Adventure titles, I thought my memories had just clouded my mind to what was always actually a complete clunky mess.
But no. Sega has just been comitting crimes of art with how its handled the porting of these titles.
Granted, as the first of Sonic's forays into 3D, this is far from a perfect title. There are a lot hiccups with the camera and world geometry that bugger your flow and make it a fairly jarring experience one you get past the first few levels of the Sonic campaign.
That doesn't necessarily end the fun, though. That lack of polish comes along with quite a bit of variety and nothing in the game could really be called a slog. The longest any one level takes is like maybe 8 minutes in a few of the outliers. Most levels are a quick 1-3 minutes.
Or at least they are for me at this point, but that's maybe unfair. It's been like 12-15 years since I last really played this game through but, once you add in the 2 years of early childhood I spent playing it, you could argue that I might have some knowledge and muscle memory advantages.
In any case: I won't argue that this game stands up as a timeless classic of the genre, between the inconsistent quality, jarring scene transistions, and incredibly simplistic writing on the story…
But I do think it's in any platforming fan's interest to give it a playthrough: It's not particularly long; fun enough for what's there; and it's a fascinating little time capsule of both culture at the time and of the genre's transition into new technological realms.
The whole idea of structuring the game as distinct Action and Adventure stages is something I wish a few more games tried as even its sequel dropped the exploration zones. You could argue games like Banjo Kazooie basically did the same thing and maybe better, but there's something about the clear division between no-stakes exploration and high-pressure obstacle courses.
So yeah. Fun little nostalgia trip for me. If you need a quick hit of speed-centric platforming, this could be a fun little adventure for you as well.
2023
Well, I think I took the advice to "focus on the main questline" a bit too literally and now at a mere 20 hours in I have seen the credits roll. I do think this has given me a good taste of everything in the game, but I certainly feel that I missed the point and yet I'm not entirely sure I'm bothered too much by that.
| I'm one of those people, just to set expectations here |
If you've been in gaming circles long, you've probably met one of us. A jacka— a firmly-opinionated-person who insists Morrowind was in fact the best game Bethesda put out and every release since has been on a decline design-wise. Now… I actually enjoyed Fallout 4 for the 100+ hours I put into it and will readily admit it. So, I'm not the worst of these types. But, after 15ish years of playing every BGS release, modding them to hell and back, then resetting for a few vanilla sessions before getting frustrated and modding them to hell again—
I got some opinions.
| This could be their best game since Morrowind |
See, to me the biggest marker of the difference between Morrowind and everything before and after it in BGS's library was that: in Morrowind, you could play for first 5+ hours of the game without leaving any of the towns or cities and for the next 20 you could get away with only a handful of quick stops at the local caves/tombs. You could just fast travel hop around the population centers and explore for random quests and faction storylines. It made the world interesting because you actually engage with its people in a way that wasn't necessarily measured in quarts of blood.
Starfield brings that back. I spent a good 3-4 hours near the start letting myself get pulled adrift by the random questlines you discover just by walking through the byzantine settlements and future-cities. And everytime I was just gleefully enjoying the game it was usually from such an encounter or a moment where the major questlines took some time to breath and dwell on a nicely crafted environment for you to explore and which actually took some thought to do so.
At its best the game spectacularly captures that sense of wonder and adventurous optimism that many of us feel towards Space and humanity's long history speculating on it—and our short history of exploring it.
The dialogue here is also a significant step up from their previous titles and you can really tell they were "trying" to reach a new level of narrative presentation here.
| Unfortunately its broke and it ain't in a fun way |
There's a limit to how much I can care about what an NPC is saying to me when they're chronically turning away or in the process of phasing into the next plane of existence. Dramatic moments like a character's death don't hit as hard when the one holding their corpse in lament is teleporting back and forth to seemingly act out two roles in the play simultaneously. And I don't really feel the gravitas of a great discovery if every NPC in the room interupts every other line to say "WHEN YOU HAVE A MOMENT LET'S TALK."
GREAT. LET'S TALK NOW. OH. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. COOL.
It only hurts more because of how much potential the game shows at times. There are some quests in this game that had me more engaged than the whole of Skyrim's main storyline. I would get a nice little cozy tingle of SPACE ADVENTURE!™ and a smile would spread across my fat mug.
But then the next hour of gameplay would shove an icecube down my shirt.
| The primary point of pain |
I could go on about combat at length, but it's better to just summarize with an explanation of how Stealth currently works in the game. It seems to operate on a system where upon each time you load the game each NPC rolls a dice to determine if they are a bloodhound or a rock:
"Bloodhounds" will notice the scent of the paint of your armor as you stand on the other side of a wall and can spot your invisible companion with ease. And once a bloodhound becomes even the slightest bit suspcicious you exist, the entire dungeon will be alerted to you and stare at you through those walls until you move somewhere they can finally trace a bullet path to you.
"Rocks," meanwhile will let you land sneak attack criticals on them as they shoot in your direction because you're kinda far away and they need to update their prescription. They honestly think they're simply in the middle of target practice and they're very confused by how their bullets keep bouncing right back at them.
And, as mentioned, if you happen to reload a save all roles will be shuffled. Good luck.
Stealth is usually my preferred build in a game and it has existed in every BGS game since at least Daggerfall.
So yeah.🙂
| There are other points I could make but I'm not sure I care |
For instance, I could probably double the length of this review just commenting about how this game tries to balance scripted and player directed content and how well that does and doesn't work. But quite frankly I think the game just made me too darn upset with its UI jank, physics issues, animation misfires, and obscene balance flaws to care.
I will reiterate again: there is cool stuff here. But you have to have a higher tolerance and better luck than me to walk away feeling good about it.
Although, there is one other point I want to touch on.
| Final aside on the main plot |
I'll avoid the specifics for spoilers but—contrary to what I see as a common opinion—the main story doesn't really have the weight people say it does unless you've invested some time into the world and characters. So learn from my mistake and don't mainline the whole thing.
There's a point with a pretty obviously significant gameplay unlock. From that point I would suggest setting the main quest on the back burner and doing side quests until you're just about sick of the game (which, hopefully for you, will be many hours later than it was for me).
Personally, I didn't really find the main plot all that interesting. However, there were two surprisingly fantastic segments in the last third that I quite enjoyed for their own merits.
| The average player will probably enjoy this game just fine |
I'm too familiar with this studio. The lingering pain points are too glaring to me. I was hoping it would be a new start for the studio but they snuck an overstuffed suitcase onto the flight. They are at least in a new city, but we still have some work to do.
If you move your frame of reference a few years forward, however, things are looking amazing and I hope many people have fun exploring the Cosmos.
| I'm one of those people, just to set expectations here |
If you've been in gaming circles long, you've probably met one of us. A jacka— a firmly-opinionated-person who insists Morrowind was in fact the best game Bethesda put out and every release since has been on a decline design-wise. Now… I actually enjoyed Fallout 4 for the 100+ hours I put into it and will readily admit it. So, I'm not the worst of these types. But, after 15ish years of playing every BGS release, modding them to hell and back, then resetting for a few vanilla sessions before getting frustrated and modding them to hell again—
I got some opinions.
| This could be their best game since Morrowind |
See, to me the biggest marker of the difference between Morrowind and everything before and after it in BGS's library was that: in Morrowind, you could play for first 5+ hours of the game without leaving any of the towns or cities and for the next 20 you could get away with only a handful of quick stops at the local caves/tombs. You could just fast travel hop around the population centers and explore for random quests and faction storylines. It made the world interesting because you actually engage with its people in a way that wasn't necessarily measured in quarts of blood.
Starfield brings that back. I spent a good 3-4 hours near the start letting myself get pulled adrift by the random questlines you discover just by walking through the byzantine settlements and future-cities. And everytime I was just gleefully enjoying the game it was usually from such an encounter or a moment where the major questlines took some time to breath and dwell on a nicely crafted environment for you to explore and which actually took some thought to do so.
At its best the game spectacularly captures that sense of wonder and adventurous optimism that many of us feel towards Space and humanity's long history speculating on it—and our short history of exploring it.
The dialogue here is also a significant step up from their previous titles and you can really tell they were "trying" to reach a new level of narrative presentation here.
| Unfortunately its broke and it ain't in a fun way |
There's a limit to how much I can care about what an NPC is saying to me when they're chronically turning away or in the process of phasing into the next plane of existence. Dramatic moments like a character's death don't hit as hard when the one holding their corpse in lament is teleporting back and forth to seemingly act out two roles in the play simultaneously. And I don't really feel the gravitas of a great discovery if every NPC in the room interupts every other line to say "WHEN YOU HAVE A MOMENT LET'S TALK."
GREAT. LET'S TALK NOW. OH. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. COOL.
It only hurts more because of how much potential the game shows at times. There are some quests in this game that had me more engaged than the whole of Skyrim's main storyline. I would get a nice little cozy tingle of SPACE ADVENTURE!™ and a smile would spread across my fat mug.
But then the next hour of gameplay would shove an icecube down my shirt.
| The primary point of pain |
I could go on about combat at length, but it's better to just summarize with an explanation of how Stealth currently works in the game. It seems to operate on a system where upon each time you load the game each NPC rolls a dice to determine if they are a bloodhound or a rock:
"Bloodhounds" will notice the scent of the paint of your armor as you stand on the other side of a wall and can spot your invisible companion with ease. And once a bloodhound becomes even the slightest bit suspcicious you exist, the entire dungeon will be alerted to you and stare at you through those walls until you move somewhere they can finally trace a bullet path to you.
"Rocks," meanwhile will let you land sneak attack criticals on them as they shoot in your direction because you're kinda far away and they need to update their prescription. They honestly think they're simply in the middle of target practice and they're very confused by how their bullets keep bouncing right back at them.
And, as mentioned, if you happen to reload a save all roles will be shuffled. Good luck.
Stealth is usually my preferred build in a game and it has existed in every BGS game since at least Daggerfall.
So yeah.🙂
| There are other points I could make but I'm not sure I care |
For instance, I could probably double the length of this review just commenting about how this game tries to balance scripted and player directed content and how well that does and doesn't work. But quite frankly I think the game just made me too darn upset with its UI jank, physics issues, animation misfires, and obscene balance flaws to care.
I will reiterate again: there is cool stuff here. But you have to have a higher tolerance and better luck than me to walk away feeling good about it.
Although, there is one other point I want to touch on.
| Final aside on the main plot |
I'll avoid the specifics for spoilers but—contrary to what I see as a common opinion—the main story doesn't really have the weight people say it does unless you've invested some time into the world and characters. So learn from my mistake and don't mainline the whole thing.
There's a point with a pretty obviously significant gameplay unlock. From that point I would suggest setting the main quest on the back burner and doing side quests until you're just about sick of the game (which, hopefully for you, will be many hours later than it was for me).
Personally, I didn't really find the main plot all that interesting. However, there were two surprisingly fantastic segments in the last third that I quite enjoyed for their own merits.
| The average player will probably enjoy this game just fine |
I'm too familiar with this studio. The lingering pain points are too glaring to me. I was hoping it would be a new start for the studio but they snuck an overstuffed suitcase onto the flight. They are at least in a new city, but we still have some work to do.
If you move your frame of reference a few years forward, however, things are looking amazing and I hope many people have fun exploring the Cosmos.
2001
I wasn't old enough to go on a bender with my mates in the late 90's, but I feel like this game captures that experience.
It starts as dumb fun; communication is done mostly in movie references; bodily fluids get everywhere; and if you're the first to sober up you're in for a rough end to the night.
| An aside on self-sabotage |
I played this game on the Project N64 emulator, which was the second N64 emu on Windows that I've tried. Given the behavior of the simulation here, I'm now convinced all three of my attempts to play through Rare's N64 titles this year have been marred by subtle emulator problems.
From aiming, to climbing ropes, to the "pissing mechanic" everything was just a bit wrong for me—sometimes just crossing over into breaking the game logic entirely—even after applying hex-code config injections for "lag" and "FPS" fixes. So I'm going to withold most of my judgement on the game controls and mechanics.
If I play a game on a 2009 LCD with every picture processing feature on, then it's on me when a game feels "mushy." Maybe one day I'll try some of these games again on the Rare Replay or something and see what the actual game feel is like.
| I can still critique everything else |
And perhaps unsurprisingly there isn't much to say.
Conker is a 10 hour gauntlet of every joke the developers thought to cram into it. It's high on effort, surprisingly, but very uneven on quality. It's the kind of experience where one minute an entire boss fight is orchestrated to an opera song with some fairly impressive vocal range on the performance, and the next you're running into slow moving blades underwater because you can't judge distance with the flat rendering and tight FOV.
Sometimes you'll giggle to a cheeky Terminator reference in a boss fight. Sometimes they're just doing a drawn out remake of the bank lobby scene from the Matrix with no actual punchline. Sometimes its such dumb fun its charming. Sometimes you feel like you need to sit in confessional just for playing the game.
It's very... NewGrounds-esque. Whichever came first.
| You can never accuse it of a lack of variety |
For those who value novelty in experience above all else, this game can definitely deliver on that. It's 30 different tech demos jammed together, each made special for a joke and thrown away after the telling whether it landed or not. It's very uneven, but I actually enjoyed that part about it (when my emulator wasn't sabotaging me).
It has that sense of dream logic lunacy that made text and point-n-click adventures so charming.
I frankly don't think I'd recommend this game to anyone—as I don't want to be associated with it—but it was a fascinating little bit of gaming history to witness.
It starts as dumb fun; communication is done mostly in movie references; bodily fluids get everywhere; and if you're the first to sober up you're in for a rough end to the night.
| An aside on self-sabotage |
I played this game on the Project N64 emulator, which was the second N64 emu on Windows that I've tried. Given the behavior of the simulation here, I'm now convinced all three of my attempts to play through Rare's N64 titles this year have been marred by subtle emulator problems.
From aiming, to climbing ropes, to the "pissing mechanic" everything was just a bit wrong for me—sometimes just crossing over into breaking the game logic entirely—even after applying hex-code config injections for "lag" and "FPS" fixes. So I'm going to withold most of my judgement on the game controls and mechanics.
If I play a game on a 2009 LCD with every picture processing feature on, then it's on me when a game feels "mushy." Maybe one day I'll try some of these games again on the Rare Replay or something and see what the actual game feel is like.
| I can still critique everything else |
And perhaps unsurprisingly there isn't much to say.
Conker is a 10 hour gauntlet of every joke the developers thought to cram into it. It's high on effort, surprisingly, but very uneven on quality. It's the kind of experience where one minute an entire boss fight is orchestrated to an opera song with some fairly impressive vocal range on the performance, and the next you're running into slow moving blades underwater because you can't judge distance with the flat rendering and tight FOV.
Sometimes you'll giggle to a cheeky Terminator reference in a boss fight. Sometimes they're just doing a drawn out remake of the bank lobby scene from the Matrix with no actual punchline. Sometimes its such dumb fun its charming. Sometimes you feel like you need to sit in confessional just for playing the game.
It's very... NewGrounds-esque. Whichever came first.
| You can never accuse it of a lack of variety |
For those who value novelty in experience above all else, this game can definitely deliver on that. It's 30 different tech demos jammed together, each made special for a joke and thrown away after the telling whether it landed or not. It's very uneven, but I actually enjoyed that part about it (when my emulator wasn't sabotaging me).
It has that sense of dream logic lunacy that made text and point-n-click adventures so charming.
I frankly don't think I'd recommend this game to anyone—as I don't want to be associated with it—but it was a fascinating little bit of gaming history to witness.
2020
Baldur's Gate III is the most ambitious, high-production Computer Roleplaying Game since Dragon Age Origins. The degree to which they realize that ambition is astounding, but its scale also amplifies the effect of the many footguns in its design.
Footguns I can talk about with confidence because I put well over 100 hours into the game. That said, the fact I put that much time into it in a month should be seen as a glowing endorsement for the game.
In terms of core gameplay, technical depth, the presentation of the story, and visual aesthetic I can't call BG3 anything less than a superb evolution on what Larian has been building since Divinty Original Sin. It's pretty, it's flashy, it's deep, and it's densely packed with handcrafted encounters for you to discover in ways that will be unique to each player and playthrough.
Almost everything has narrative context. Every character is voice acted and most are motion captured. The writing has many great moments: rich layers of character, surprising plot developments, capturing moments of drama, excitement, intrigue, levity, and—more often than I expected—some rather dark turns.
| The meat of it |
Exploration is immensely rewarding and varied. Talking to every NPC can lead to unexpected quests and opportunities and sometimes even open new paths on the central narrative. The nooks and cranies of the map hide unique treasures that often have the potential to completely change or enhance your playstyle. And the various fights you'll end up in are almost never repetitive and allow for a great deal of tactical approaches while still being quite challenging.
Compared to its Computer RPG peers—Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, and of course its own predecessor the original Baldurs Gate—the game is borderline an "immersive sim" with its mechanics, level design, and quest progression. My greastest point of evidence being how much I relied on my characters being built to abuse stealth and really high jumps.
Locked gate? Jump over it. Blocked Bridge? Jump past it. Running enemy? Jump on it.
Too many enemies? Hide, jump up to a high place, and pick them apart with arrows.
But I've played with alternate builds enough to know that you could have a party of physically inept nerds and still have a rip roaring good time with combat and adventuring.
Its hard for me to say how approachable it is, given my many hours of experience in the Original Sin games carrying over almost completely, but given how many CRPG newcomers I've seen enjoying the game, I wager it does well enough.
Overall, it really is a beautiful digitalization of the tabletop experience it intends to emulate, just as its predecessors were in their time, but perhaps even more dramatically so now. From the on-screen dice rolls to the sense of humor and adventure, its an almost 1:1 emulation of D&D 5e.
What then are these issues I speak of?
| Inherited flaws |
Firstly—and most cheekily—that tabletop game it's emulating is D&D 5th Edition. 5e has some longstanding design problems as a tabletop ruleset and a few new problems in the context of a video game where there is no human Dungeon Master to fill the holes on the fly. (I'll still take it over 4th Edition every time, though)
For one, class design and scaling is erratic. Some classes, like the Ranger and Barbarian, get left in the dust after a certain point while others (Paladin) rocket up to the moon with all of their damage and utility. A lot of this Larian thankfully smoothed over with some reworking of class progressions and changes to specific class ability rules, but some of its is in the core designs which didn't get changed very dramatically.
| Illusory viability |
I would even say that 5e is generally not very flexible or experessive in terms of play styles. Or at least not flexible and expressive in the ways it thinks it is. Take for instance Shadowheart's starting class as a "Trickster" subclass Cleric that focuses on Stealth.
If you try to play into that concept, you either lock yourself out of a Cleric's secondary role as a tank by picking armor that doesn't negate your bonuses to stealth, or you're locked to very particular sets of armor that you may or may not find, and to add insult to injury there's not a single useful action a Cleric can do that either maintains or benefits from stealth. Half of their spells are giant glowing AoEs for crying out loud.
Ah, but they could buff your actual stealth character to make them more effective... which is fine until your Rogue gets a few pieces of gear that give the same bonuses with less hassle, and by then their skill is more than high enough for every scenario where stealth is even a viable option in this game.
Oh, and their unique decoy ability takes a full action for a mere 1 HP on it and uses your "concentration," blocking you out of any of your other actually useful spells. By the start of Act 2, enemies will delete it from existence by sneezing in its general direction then proceed to pummel you anyway.
Then on the other end of the spectrum is the "Light" Cleric who gets free explosions on every short rest and the ability to "nope" an arbitrary enemy's attack every round.
If you're playing on Exploration or Balanced modes, none of these class design issues will likely ever matter to you, as they are balanced well enough for casual play. But it's one of the more frustrating parts of the system in how it promises certain combat archetypes and playstyles but doesn't actually support them either through poor decisions on the classes or just by flaws in the fundamental rules.
| "You notice that you can't see the treasure. Sucks to suck." |
Speaking of: pass/fail dice rolls still don't translate well to computer games. They work on tabletop because tabletop is casual and abstract. A fully realized virtual environment is not so much the latter. Especially one where I can just rewind time with a reload if I can't make it (You call it save scumming; I call it "respawning after a failed attempt."). And this is ultimately just a clumsy attempt to replace the narrative smoothing a good Dungeon Master would be able to do in tabletop.
Sure, all is well in good when your Charisma 8 fighter fails a DC18 Persuasion check to convince the guard to let you off scott free. That's just getting what you paid for and hoping for a rare exception. But try and tell me you won't reload when your master thief character fails a narrative sleight of hand check that you need to save an NPC you like.
If this was a 10 or even 20 hour game, I'd say sure: maybe you will let the dice roll as they do.
This is a 100 hour game and there are hundreds of significant dice rolls with many ways for things to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, like ruin-your-story wrong. Lose-your-spec'd-out-Cleric wrong. You aren't going to wait until a replay you never actually do just to get the sequence of events you actually wanted.
You are going to reload to redo dice rolls.
So why does the game waste so much time on them?
This is why almost every other series in the genre threw out dice rolling for pass/fail conditions. Larian found ways to do it better than its been done before: inspiration, active bonus selections, a cool interface, and plentiful alternate methods if one fails (in most cases). But that doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it more tolerable. The fact that Larian dropped the "Honour Mode" option that both Original Sin games had—limiting you to one save and erasing it on death—is very telling to this fact.
I will say, though, it was refreshing in some ways for a game to try this method again so wholeheartedly. The little dice noises are very satisfying.
| Fickle People |
Another long standing issue for Western RPGs in general is diplomacy in its many forms. The wider genre is pretty infamous for "No u" style dialogue options to talk your way through "tricky situations." Ideals dismantled, higher reason found, passions cooled (or maybe ignited?) all because a pretty guy said "have you tried X instead?"
That isn't actually that unrealistic on its own (human history is full of a lot of hard to explain decision making) and Baldur's Gate III does a much better job avoiding this tendency than a lot of games. A certain pivotal moment in Shadowheart's storyline stands out to me, as the skill marked options actually made things worse when I tried them. But, despite Larian's immense effort on the writing and motion capture, there's still a few too many important moments where characters change their minds way too quickly and for far too little.
Act 3 in particular suffered this in my experience, with Gale's storyline there being one of the prime examples of that kind of emotional whiplash. One minute he's venting pent up frustrations and resolving to go one way on a decision, then the time comes to choose and he talks like he had always intended to go the other after you say one line of your opinion on the matter.
| Almost too chaotic for tactics (almost) |
A good amount of my core issues with combat are downstream of the dice rolling problem as well. It's hard to feel tactical and clever in the moment to moment when the deciding factor between your plan handing you a quick victory or a miserable defeat is a mostly arbitrary 30% chance for a spell to either work completely or not at all.
This kind of chaos is fine for a casual tabletop session with the boys where the DM is probably fudging the roles for the most exciting outcome anyway. Or even a faster paced game where the individual chances aggregate more. It's less fine for a game that offers you a "tactical" difficulty, tunes things relatively decisively, and hits you with some pretty insidious encounter designs.
Is it an unmanageable tactical experience then? No. The tools at your disposal are just well enough designed and plentiful enough that there's almost always some way to recover and wrest out a victory. But those recovery options burn a limited pool of resources.
| Resource management and risk mitigation (the HR way) |
There is almost no item farming in this game: once an area has been looted, it's empty. So, if you rely on chugging potions and burning scrolls on every fight, you will only make future fights more difficult by exhausting most of what's available. Not to mention the rest and recovery mechanics require a steady supply of food and can advance certain time sensitive quests so you have to be mindful there as well.
There are shops that replinish some consumables every day, but that requires gold which you also can't farm. (Those willing to pickpocket, however, bypass this issue entirely)
Where this led me was the practice of intense pre-fight risk mitigation and stingy consumable usage. Most fights ended in 2-3 rounds for me because I had already scoped out the field and used stealth to position myself for the greatest advantage I could, leveraging my power-gamed character builds.
That might sound very enticing to many of you, and it is, in fact, a lot of fun for a while.
But I'm a bit too familiar with Larian's mechanical design at this point and know a lot of really nasty, tension deflating exploits that have ironically been reintroduced from Original Sin 1. Yes, I could just not use them, and I try not to. But when the first two fights of a potentially expansive dungeon drain most of your resources playing the normal way and you don't know what's next, you tend to stop pulling punches.
And the main set piece fights really hammer in the long term immersion issue with this risk averse playstyle as I often ended up reloading after a failed first attempt only for "divine inspiration" to tell my characters exactly where to stand and what pre-fight buffs to use before triggering the cutscene. All because the alternative is risking another 15 minute failed attempt because some bad dice rolls foiled my most important plays of the fight.
Which brings us to another inherited issue.
| D&D 5e does not scale gracefully |
Both up and out.
As mentioned Larian did tamp down on the worst of the power scaling. They limited player levels to 12 as opposed to the tabletop game's max of 20 and smoothed out some of the class designs. But what I'm actually focusing on here is the "action economy" of the game (how many actions per round each side of a fight has available) and the time scaling of combat.
The further the game goes the more health everything has, the more actions they have, the more effects get layered into fights, and the more enemies there are. In Act 3 especially the combat tracker is frequently overflowed because of how many combatants are actively fighting, and that's before everyone starts summoning more. None of this scaling comes free from a real-time standpoint. The bigger the fight, the slower it goes as a rule. The variables at play, the more you and the AI have to figure out to make good decisions.
Larian did introduce a nice mechanic allowing allied characters with adjacent turns to act together, but that's another thing that gets mangled by dice rolls and class balance. Eventually characters' "initiative" values vary too much even on the same side, causing allies and enemies to get evenly distributed in the order and forcing everything back to one-at-a-time.
By the late game it wasn't uncommon for a single round of combat to last 10-15 minutes. The finale getting the absolute worst of this and unfortunately deflating the rest of any emotional momentum I had at that point.
| There's no "oil field" moment for me |
Ultimately, I walk away from the combat of Baldur's Gate III a bit disappointed as a fan of Larian's last two games. 5e has some fun stuff, but its ultimately not as interesting of a tactical sandbox compared to Original Sin. Abilties and effects have relatively unintuitive, restrained interactions in general and have to rely too much on special cases and rule exceptions. And the ruleset's general lack of determinism only multiplies that effect.
Most people won't engage in the game to a level where what I've been talking about matters, and there's still plenty of fun to be had even if you do.
I was just hoping the game would eventually give me another moment like I had in Original Sin 2, where a seemingly non-descript fight next to an oil drill organically evolved into a desperate fight for survival on a smoke filled tower amidst a sea of flames—and that was after multiple attempts. But everything in BG3 felt rather tame in comparison. Often creative, surely... but tame.
| That's enough about 5e |
It feels unfair to critique problems with a ruleset Larian didn't actually design and which the majority of the gaming sphere has determined they are fine with. So I'll focus now on what they are actually responsible for.
| Scope |
If this was 10 years ago, I would have nothing but praise for their ambitions and be perfectly willing to overlook every rough edge, disappearing player model, out of sequence dialogue, and Vulkan rendering crash. But now we're in a world where Final Fantasy games are considered "shorter" compared to the average AAA release.
The first two acts of Baldur's Gate III were fantastic. Act 2 definitely a bit rougher, but constrained enough that most of the polish of Act 1 still carried through.
Then Act 3 arrives and is both larger and much messier than both. The hard part for me analyzing it, is that it doesn't have any less heart. There's a lot of cool things going on in the Act and clearly the team at Larian was excited to do it all. And a lot of it is good. Like 80%.
But that other 20% is cripplingly problematic: screwed up quest progression; rushed dialogue; pacing sinkholes; immersion killing glitches. The works. I was fortunate enough that none of it broke my solo playthrough entirely, but my co-op partner was not as lucky with his solo games and had two of his playthroughs borked by glitches.
| Plot juggling |
And by Act 3 there are just too many active plot threads going on in general for me as a player to follow meaningfully. As an example, there was a major companion questline that I let end with the companion's (permanent) death in an unrelated event because I just couldn't spare any more brainpower to figure out how to reconcile it with all of the other threads I was trying to resolve.
In this game, quests do not just automatically resolve because you follow a marker and they often spill into each other in both symbiotic and conflicting ways. That is special and I love that.
But that also limits how many you can actually handle dealing with in a single playthrough.
If this was a 20 hour game like Obsidian's Tyranny, that would be fine. But this is very much not that short and the overwhelming majority of players will not be seeing Act 3 a second time. So it's pretty frustrating when a plotline you were interested in gets borked because of a decision you made 10 hours ago without quite realizing it (sorry, Lae'zel).
Again, that would be exciting in a short game. This is not a short game. So instead I experienced snowballing apathy for the last 20-30 hours of the narrative.
| Faerun's babysitter |
This apathy I think also really colored my experience with the companion characters and a lot of the supporting cast. I'm not sure if the apathy was the start or the result, but by the end of Act 2 I began to feel less like my character was a "budding hero with his band of troubled but ultimately dependable allies," and more like I was "the designated driver after a particularly bad bender and we have a group assignment due tomorrow."
That example is maybe a bit too hyperbolic. The character storylines are quite interesting in their own rights. The issue is that once you mix in the rest of the supporting cast failing miserably to resolve their own issues without killing someone, themselves, or selling their souls to the devil (literally) you start to have flashbacks to your college days. Or at least my college days.
I did not get any sense of reward or accomplishment when the other characters showered mine with praise as a hero. All I heard were the desperate pleas of my fellow back row sitters looking for someone to tell them what to do.
In one sense, that made one particular villain character's offer very compelling near the end, but I can't abide ends-above-the-means logic so I had to refuse it and trudge on as the reluctant babysitter.
I would perhaps recommend to other to pick one of the origin characters instead of a custom. The story might work better when your character is also damaged. My great weapon fighter and his pristine moustache were simply too untainted, reliable, and self-sufficient for what the story was trying to do, I think.
Off the top of my head, the only characters I can think of that got by fine without your handholding were an 8-year-old orphan, a strange ox, the literal devil, and the final boss. The last two of which I killed, so...
I understand that it being an RPG means the story is geared to give the player as many important things to help with as possible, but there's a point where you compromise the believability of the world. The investigators are incompetent. The guards are useless. The freedom fighters are outmatched. The gods are impotent. Their champions are failures. The "good guys" are all wearing red shirts under their armor. The defenseless civilians emulate deer on the road. The villains are self destructive. And even the thieves guild is outdone.
Your character is not just a "factor" to tip the scales of the conflicts in the story, they are the single, final brick holding up an entire collapsing building.
| The exploration really is quite excellent, though |
Despite all of the critiquing (or perhaps complaining) prior to this paragraph, I still hold this game in rather high regard. That's because as an immersive sim experience it's so intricate, varied, and reactive that my disappointments about the narrative couldn't spoil my whole experience. Even if I no longer really had much emotional investment in the proceedings, I was still really curious to see what routes and outcomes were possible.
| What about co-op? |
I had fun with it, but this is going to be so heavily dependent on who you're playing with that I can't comment much, other than to say that it's the most properly accomodating co-op CRPG I've played, just as Original Sin was before it.
Actually, it shouldn't be understated how well it works. You can even properly quick save and load safely while one player is mid conversation and the other is in combat on the other side of the map.
Any other game I've played, that scenario would be unthinkable. But it's effortless here. So major props to Larian on that.
That might sound small, but multiplayer in CRPGs is usually tacked on at best so everytime its good I'll celebrate.
| Not the crowning achievement I thought it'd be, but an achievement nonetheless |
Between great art direction, a rich world to traipse through, plentiful moments of genuinely entertaining dialogue and action, and a wide array of possible playstyles, Baldur's Gate III is a very impressive game and Larian should be proud of their work so far and enjoy its great opening sales and acclaim. But it's a shame that so many of the fibers of the game are left loose at the end and easily frayed.
I recommend anyone interested in RPGs and especially D&D to give it a go, but I also think most people could probably wait a bit longer for the first few big post-launch patches before they get deep enough to hit Act 3. My reaction actually seems to be a minority view on the story as well, so maybe you'll fare much better than me.
In any case. Cool game but glad to be done. I will probably not finish my co-op games anytime soon.
Footguns I can talk about with confidence because I put well over 100 hours into the game. That said, the fact I put that much time into it in a month should be seen as a glowing endorsement for the game.
In terms of core gameplay, technical depth, the presentation of the story, and visual aesthetic I can't call BG3 anything less than a superb evolution on what Larian has been building since Divinty Original Sin. It's pretty, it's flashy, it's deep, and it's densely packed with handcrafted encounters for you to discover in ways that will be unique to each player and playthrough.
Almost everything has narrative context. Every character is voice acted and most are motion captured. The writing has many great moments: rich layers of character, surprising plot developments, capturing moments of drama, excitement, intrigue, levity, and—more often than I expected—some rather dark turns.
| The meat of it |
Exploration is immensely rewarding and varied. Talking to every NPC can lead to unexpected quests and opportunities and sometimes even open new paths on the central narrative. The nooks and cranies of the map hide unique treasures that often have the potential to completely change or enhance your playstyle. And the various fights you'll end up in are almost never repetitive and allow for a great deal of tactical approaches while still being quite challenging.
Compared to its Computer RPG peers—Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age, and of course its own predecessor the original Baldurs Gate—the game is borderline an "immersive sim" with its mechanics, level design, and quest progression. My greastest point of evidence being how much I relied on my characters being built to abuse stealth and really high jumps.
Locked gate? Jump over it. Blocked Bridge? Jump past it. Running enemy? Jump on it.
Too many enemies? Hide, jump up to a high place, and pick them apart with arrows.
But I've played with alternate builds enough to know that you could have a party of physically inept nerds and still have a rip roaring good time with combat and adventuring.
Its hard for me to say how approachable it is, given my many hours of experience in the Original Sin games carrying over almost completely, but given how many CRPG newcomers I've seen enjoying the game, I wager it does well enough.
Overall, it really is a beautiful digitalization of the tabletop experience it intends to emulate, just as its predecessors were in their time, but perhaps even more dramatically so now. From the on-screen dice rolls to the sense of humor and adventure, its an almost 1:1 emulation of D&D 5e.
What then are these issues I speak of?
| Inherited flaws |
Firstly—and most cheekily—that tabletop game it's emulating is D&D 5th Edition. 5e has some longstanding design problems as a tabletop ruleset and a few new problems in the context of a video game where there is no human Dungeon Master to fill the holes on the fly. (I'll still take it over 4th Edition every time, though)
For one, class design and scaling is erratic. Some classes, like the Ranger and Barbarian, get left in the dust after a certain point while others (Paladin) rocket up to the moon with all of their damage and utility. A lot of this Larian thankfully smoothed over with some reworking of class progressions and changes to specific class ability rules, but some of its is in the core designs which didn't get changed very dramatically.
| Illusory viability |
I would even say that 5e is generally not very flexible or experessive in terms of play styles. Or at least not flexible and expressive in the ways it thinks it is. Take for instance Shadowheart's starting class as a "Trickster" subclass Cleric that focuses on Stealth.
If you try to play into that concept, you either lock yourself out of a Cleric's secondary role as a tank by picking armor that doesn't negate your bonuses to stealth, or you're locked to very particular sets of armor that you may or may not find, and to add insult to injury there's not a single useful action a Cleric can do that either maintains or benefits from stealth. Half of their spells are giant glowing AoEs for crying out loud.
Ah, but they could buff your actual stealth character to make them more effective... which is fine until your Rogue gets a few pieces of gear that give the same bonuses with less hassle, and by then their skill is more than high enough for every scenario where stealth is even a viable option in this game.
Oh, and their unique decoy ability takes a full action for a mere 1 HP on it and uses your "concentration," blocking you out of any of your other actually useful spells. By the start of Act 2, enemies will delete it from existence by sneezing in its general direction then proceed to pummel you anyway.
Then on the other end of the spectrum is the "Light" Cleric who gets free explosions on every short rest and the ability to "nope" an arbitrary enemy's attack every round.
If you're playing on Exploration or Balanced modes, none of these class design issues will likely ever matter to you, as they are balanced well enough for casual play. But it's one of the more frustrating parts of the system in how it promises certain combat archetypes and playstyles but doesn't actually support them either through poor decisions on the classes or just by flaws in the fundamental rules.
| "You notice that you can't see the treasure. Sucks to suck." |
Speaking of: pass/fail dice rolls still don't translate well to computer games. They work on tabletop because tabletop is casual and abstract. A fully realized virtual environment is not so much the latter. Especially one where I can just rewind time with a reload if I can't make it (You call it save scumming; I call it "respawning after a failed attempt."). And this is ultimately just a clumsy attempt to replace the narrative smoothing a good Dungeon Master would be able to do in tabletop.
Sure, all is well in good when your Charisma 8 fighter fails a DC18 Persuasion check to convince the guard to let you off scott free. That's just getting what you paid for and hoping for a rare exception. But try and tell me you won't reload when your master thief character fails a narrative sleight of hand check that you need to save an NPC you like.
If this was a 10 or even 20 hour game, I'd say sure: maybe you will let the dice roll as they do.
This is a 100 hour game and there are hundreds of significant dice rolls with many ways for things to go wrong. Not just a little wrong, like ruin-your-story wrong. Lose-your-spec'd-out-Cleric wrong. You aren't going to wait until a replay you never actually do just to get the sequence of events you actually wanted.
You are going to reload to redo dice rolls.
So why does the game waste so much time on them?
This is why almost every other series in the genre threw out dice rolling for pass/fail conditions. Larian found ways to do it better than its been done before: inspiration, active bonus selections, a cool interface, and plentiful alternate methods if one fails (in most cases). But that doesn't fix the problem, it just makes it more tolerable. The fact that Larian dropped the "Honour Mode" option that both Original Sin games had—limiting you to one save and erasing it on death—is very telling to this fact.
I will say, though, it was refreshing in some ways for a game to try this method again so wholeheartedly. The little dice noises are very satisfying.
| Fickle People |
Another long standing issue for Western RPGs in general is diplomacy in its many forms. The wider genre is pretty infamous for "No u" style dialogue options to talk your way through "tricky situations." Ideals dismantled, higher reason found, passions cooled (or maybe ignited?) all because a pretty guy said "have you tried X instead?"
That isn't actually that unrealistic on its own (human history is full of a lot of hard to explain decision making) and Baldur's Gate III does a much better job avoiding this tendency than a lot of games. A certain pivotal moment in Shadowheart's storyline stands out to me, as the skill marked options actually made things worse when I tried them. But, despite Larian's immense effort on the writing and motion capture, there's still a few too many important moments where characters change their minds way too quickly and for far too little.
Act 3 in particular suffered this in my experience, with Gale's storyline there being one of the prime examples of that kind of emotional whiplash. One minute he's venting pent up frustrations and resolving to go one way on a decision, then the time comes to choose and he talks like he had always intended to go the other after you say one line of your opinion on the matter.
| Almost too chaotic for tactics (almost) |
A good amount of my core issues with combat are downstream of the dice rolling problem as well. It's hard to feel tactical and clever in the moment to moment when the deciding factor between your plan handing you a quick victory or a miserable defeat is a mostly arbitrary 30% chance for a spell to either work completely or not at all.
This kind of chaos is fine for a casual tabletop session with the boys where the DM is probably fudging the roles for the most exciting outcome anyway. Or even a faster paced game where the individual chances aggregate more. It's less fine for a game that offers you a "tactical" difficulty, tunes things relatively decisively, and hits you with some pretty insidious encounter designs.
Is it an unmanageable tactical experience then? No. The tools at your disposal are just well enough designed and plentiful enough that there's almost always some way to recover and wrest out a victory. But those recovery options burn a limited pool of resources.
| Resource management and risk mitigation (the HR way) |
There is almost no item farming in this game: once an area has been looted, it's empty. So, if you rely on chugging potions and burning scrolls on every fight, you will only make future fights more difficult by exhausting most of what's available. Not to mention the rest and recovery mechanics require a steady supply of food and can advance certain time sensitive quests so you have to be mindful there as well.
There are shops that replinish some consumables every day, but that requires gold which you also can't farm. (Those willing to pickpocket, however, bypass this issue entirely)
Where this led me was the practice of intense pre-fight risk mitigation and stingy consumable usage. Most fights ended in 2-3 rounds for me because I had already scoped out the field and used stealth to position myself for the greatest advantage I could, leveraging my power-gamed character builds.
That might sound very enticing to many of you, and it is, in fact, a lot of fun for a while.
But I'm a bit too familiar with Larian's mechanical design at this point and know a lot of really nasty, tension deflating exploits that have ironically been reintroduced from Original Sin 1. Yes, I could just not use them, and I try not to. But when the first two fights of a potentially expansive dungeon drain most of your resources playing the normal way and you don't know what's next, you tend to stop pulling punches.
And the main set piece fights really hammer in the long term immersion issue with this risk averse playstyle as I often ended up reloading after a failed first attempt only for "divine inspiration" to tell my characters exactly where to stand and what pre-fight buffs to use before triggering the cutscene. All because the alternative is risking another 15 minute failed attempt because some bad dice rolls foiled my most important plays of the fight.
Which brings us to another inherited issue.
| D&D 5e does not scale gracefully |
Both up and out.
As mentioned Larian did tamp down on the worst of the power scaling. They limited player levels to 12 as opposed to the tabletop game's max of 20 and smoothed out some of the class designs. But what I'm actually focusing on here is the "action economy" of the game (how many actions per round each side of a fight has available) and the time scaling of combat.
The further the game goes the more health everything has, the more actions they have, the more effects get layered into fights, and the more enemies there are. In Act 3 especially the combat tracker is frequently overflowed because of how many combatants are actively fighting, and that's before everyone starts summoning more. None of this scaling comes free from a real-time standpoint. The bigger the fight, the slower it goes as a rule. The variables at play, the more you and the AI have to figure out to make good decisions.
Larian did introduce a nice mechanic allowing allied characters with adjacent turns to act together, but that's another thing that gets mangled by dice rolls and class balance. Eventually characters' "initiative" values vary too much even on the same side, causing allies and enemies to get evenly distributed in the order and forcing everything back to one-at-a-time.
By the late game it wasn't uncommon for a single round of combat to last 10-15 minutes. The finale getting the absolute worst of this and unfortunately deflating the rest of any emotional momentum I had at that point.
| There's no "oil field" moment for me |
Ultimately, I walk away from the combat of Baldur's Gate III a bit disappointed as a fan of Larian's last two games. 5e has some fun stuff, but its ultimately not as interesting of a tactical sandbox compared to Original Sin. Abilties and effects have relatively unintuitive, restrained interactions in general and have to rely too much on special cases and rule exceptions. And the ruleset's general lack of determinism only multiplies that effect.
Most people won't engage in the game to a level where what I've been talking about matters, and there's still plenty of fun to be had even if you do.
I was just hoping the game would eventually give me another moment like I had in Original Sin 2, where a seemingly non-descript fight next to an oil drill organically evolved into a desperate fight for survival on a smoke filled tower amidst a sea of flames—and that was after multiple attempts. But everything in BG3 felt rather tame in comparison. Often creative, surely... but tame.
| That's enough about 5e |
It feels unfair to critique problems with a ruleset Larian didn't actually design and which the majority of the gaming sphere has determined they are fine with. So I'll focus now on what they are actually responsible for.
| Scope |
If this was 10 years ago, I would have nothing but praise for their ambitions and be perfectly willing to overlook every rough edge, disappearing player model, out of sequence dialogue, and Vulkan rendering crash. But now we're in a world where Final Fantasy games are considered "shorter" compared to the average AAA release.
The first two acts of Baldur's Gate III were fantastic. Act 2 definitely a bit rougher, but constrained enough that most of the polish of Act 1 still carried through.
Then Act 3 arrives and is both larger and much messier than both. The hard part for me analyzing it, is that it doesn't have any less heart. There's a lot of cool things going on in the Act and clearly the team at Larian was excited to do it all. And a lot of it is good. Like 80%.
But that other 20% is cripplingly problematic: screwed up quest progression; rushed dialogue; pacing sinkholes; immersion killing glitches. The works. I was fortunate enough that none of it broke my solo playthrough entirely, but my co-op partner was not as lucky with his solo games and had two of his playthroughs borked by glitches.
| Plot juggling |
And by Act 3 there are just too many active plot threads going on in general for me as a player to follow meaningfully. As an example, there was a major companion questline that I let end with the companion's (permanent) death in an unrelated event because I just couldn't spare any more brainpower to figure out how to reconcile it with all of the other threads I was trying to resolve.
In this game, quests do not just automatically resolve because you follow a marker and they often spill into each other in both symbiotic and conflicting ways. That is special and I love that.
But that also limits how many you can actually handle dealing with in a single playthrough.
If this was a 20 hour game like Obsidian's Tyranny, that would be fine. But this is very much not that short and the overwhelming majority of players will not be seeing Act 3 a second time. So it's pretty frustrating when a plotline you were interested in gets borked because of a decision you made 10 hours ago without quite realizing it (sorry, Lae'zel).
Again, that would be exciting in a short game. This is not a short game. So instead I experienced snowballing apathy for the last 20-30 hours of the narrative.
| Faerun's babysitter |
This apathy I think also really colored my experience with the companion characters and a lot of the supporting cast. I'm not sure if the apathy was the start or the result, but by the end of Act 2 I began to feel less like my character was a "budding hero with his band of troubled but ultimately dependable allies," and more like I was "the designated driver after a particularly bad bender and we have a group assignment due tomorrow."
That example is maybe a bit too hyperbolic. The character storylines are quite interesting in their own rights. The issue is that once you mix in the rest of the supporting cast failing miserably to resolve their own issues without killing someone, themselves, or selling their souls to the devil (literally) you start to have flashbacks to your college days. Or at least my college days.
I did not get any sense of reward or accomplishment when the other characters showered mine with praise as a hero. All I heard were the desperate pleas of my fellow back row sitters looking for someone to tell them what to do.
In one sense, that made one particular villain character's offer very compelling near the end, but I can't abide ends-above-the-means logic so I had to refuse it and trudge on as the reluctant babysitter.
I would perhaps recommend to other to pick one of the origin characters instead of a custom. The story might work better when your character is also damaged. My great weapon fighter and his pristine moustache were simply too untainted, reliable, and self-sufficient for what the story was trying to do, I think.
Off the top of my head, the only characters I can think of that got by fine without your handholding were an 8-year-old orphan, a strange ox, the literal devil, and the final boss. The last two of which I killed, so...
I understand that it being an RPG means the story is geared to give the player as many important things to help with as possible, but there's a point where you compromise the believability of the world. The investigators are incompetent. The guards are useless. The freedom fighters are outmatched. The gods are impotent. Their champions are failures. The "good guys" are all wearing red shirts under their armor. The defenseless civilians emulate deer on the road. The villains are self destructive. And even the thieves guild is outdone.
Your character is not just a "factor" to tip the scales of the conflicts in the story, they are the single, final brick holding up an entire collapsing building.
| The exploration really is quite excellent, though |
Despite all of the critiquing (or perhaps complaining) prior to this paragraph, I still hold this game in rather high regard. That's because as an immersive sim experience it's so intricate, varied, and reactive that my disappointments about the narrative couldn't spoil my whole experience. Even if I no longer really had much emotional investment in the proceedings, I was still really curious to see what routes and outcomes were possible.
| What about co-op? |
I had fun with it, but this is going to be so heavily dependent on who you're playing with that I can't comment much, other than to say that it's the most properly accomodating co-op CRPG I've played, just as Original Sin was before it.
Actually, it shouldn't be understated how well it works. You can even properly quick save and load safely while one player is mid conversation and the other is in combat on the other side of the map.
Any other game I've played, that scenario would be unthinkable. But it's effortless here. So major props to Larian on that.
That might sound small, but multiplayer in CRPGs is usually tacked on at best so everytime its good I'll celebrate.
| Not the crowning achievement I thought it'd be, but an achievement nonetheless |
Between great art direction, a rich world to traipse through, plentiful moments of genuinely entertaining dialogue and action, and a wide array of possible playstyles, Baldur's Gate III is a very impressive game and Larian should be proud of their work so far and enjoy its great opening sales and acclaim. But it's a shame that so many of the fibers of the game are left loose at the end and easily frayed.
I recommend anyone interested in RPGs and especially D&D to give it a go, but I also think most people could probably wait a bit longer for the first few big post-launch patches before they get deep enough to hit Act 3. My reaction actually seems to be a minority view on the story as well, so maybe you'll fare much better than me.
In any case. Cool game but glad to be done. I will probably not finish my co-op games anytime soon.
2016
[Just a few thoughts after coming back to this again a few years after my initial playthrough. This is less about the content of the game, and more on the co-op experience, which is what I played for.]
My original opinion of the game is that it was a solid, classic-style ARPG with some interesting experimental expansions on the formula the dev team originally established with Titan Quest. Unfortunately my experience at the time was marred by a fatal flaw in the multiplayer: loot level was set to the average of all players in the lobby, thereby making co-op between players at mismatched levels a practice in frustration as one half of the party gets stuff they can't use and the other half gets stuff they won't use.
This was a problem I felt acutely having recently graduated college at the time and having all of my friends on different schedules. One missed session for a player (me) meant all proceeding sessions would be fruitless, painful endeavors stuck behind the power curve. Sure, if I played solo maybe I could catch up, but there was a reason I was the one missing sessions.
So despite all of the elements of the game I liked, my memory of the game was only pain for years.
Recently I got the urge to give it another go. The game has been updating for years, got a few major expansions, and I made sure my co-op partner this time was disciplined to only play their character with me so we could keep exact pace through the whole base campaign.
And hey, would you look at that, when you're at the right point in the power curve, the game is a lot of fun. A little stiff feeling, but satisfying overall.
For kicks and giggles, we had a few friends join for the finale with overlevelled characters. While our builds were min-maxed well enough that it caused no issue with combat balance, I noticed something rather disappointing given that the game is still being maintained.
"Oh look, I can't use any of the gear drops now. Yaaaaayyyy...."
This is not a unique problem, historically, in the ARPG space. From Diablo II to Borderlands 2, party levelling had always been one of the most common pain points with trying to play co-op in those games. But while those titles we made it work beause that was the best we had, I can't excuse Grim Dawn as it came out in 2016 when the solutions to this problem had already been found and implemented. Destiny being the shining example for this particular area of design.
Yet even 7 years of active development later, Grim Dawn shows no sign of budging. They have instanced loot and other modernized elements, but co-op quest progression is still janked up and loot levelling is still an active detriment to the experience.
So if you plan to play singleplayer or have a very disciplined co-op group, this is a good hit of classic ARPG fun. But, I cannot recommend this game for casual sessions. The game will shoot itself in the foot then shoot you for asking.
My original opinion of the game is that it was a solid, classic-style ARPG with some interesting experimental expansions on the formula the dev team originally established with Titan Quest. Unfortunately my experience at the time was marred by a fatal flaw in the multiplayer: loot level was set to the average of all players in the lobby, thereby making co-op between players at mismatched levels a practice in frustration as one half of the party gets stuff they can't use and the other half gets stuff they won't use.
This was a problem I felt acutely having recently graduated college at the time and having all of my friends on different schedules. One missed session for a player (me) meant all proceeding sessions would be fruitless, painful endeavors stuck behind the power curve. Sure, if I played solo maybe I could catch up, but there was a reason I was the one missing sessions.
So despite all of the elements of the game I liked, my memory of the game was only pain for years.
Recently I got the urge to give it another go. The game has been updating for years, got a few major expansions, and I made sure my co-op partner this time was disciplined to only play their character with me so we could keep exact pace through the whole base campaign.
And hey, would you look at that, when you're at the right point in the power curve, the game is a lot of fun. A little stiff feeling, but satisfying overall.
For kicks and giggles, we had a few friends join for the finale with overlevelled characters. While our builds were min-maxed well enough that it caused no issue with combat balance, I noticed something rather disappointing given that the game is still being maintained.
"Oh look, I can't use any of the gear drops now. Yaaaaayyyy...."
This is not a unique problem, historically, in the ARPG space. From Diablo II to Borderlands 2, party levelling had always been one of the most common pain points with trying to play co-op in those games. But while those titles we made it work beause that was the best we had, I can't excuse Grim Dawn as it came out in 2016 when the solutions to this problem had already been found and implemented. Destiny being the shining example for this particular area of design.
Yet even 7 years of active development later, Grim Dawn shows no sign of budging. They have instanced loot and other modernized elements, but co-op quest progression is still janked up and loot levelling is still an active detriment to the experience.
So if you plan to play singleplayer or have a very disciplined co-op group, this is a good hit of classic ARPG fun. But, I cannot recommend this game for casual sessions. The game will shoot itself in the foot then shoot you for asking.
2023
This is a game that understandably causes mixed feelings in the wider gaming audience and especially the franchise's own playerbase. That's pretty much an expectation for the series at this point, so it's hard for me to say what even my own expectations for this game were.
Whatever they were, they were blown away. I enjoyed its direct predecessor, but that game had very visible seams and glue. That's all gone here. Every decision made with the direction of Final Fantasy XVI felt to me intentional and clear. Even when it was obvious those decisions were made for budget and time constraints, I was left to believe they were the right decisions to not compromise the beautiful gem at the core of this work of art.
[Yes, it being a "Role Playing Game" is debatable ...]
I don't like formulating my opinions reactively, but I've heard so much disappointment expressed about this game's status as an RPG that I can't help but address that point directly.
I don't care about this game as an RPG. I come from the pen-n-paper RPG traditions, even to the point that I've gone back to first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when running games for my friends (actually Old School Essentials, now, which is a much cleaner representation of that ruleset). Final Fantasy to me has always been "baby's first RPG" at its deepest.
While I couldn't resist that snarky phrasing, I don't say that disparagingly or as any kind of criticism. I've been enjoying Final Fantasy alongside the likes of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights ever since I was a 4-year-old. Its simplification of the Western tradition has been a feature since day one and in my eyes a nice, lighter alternative.
Even FFX, what I consider the best game in the series for "tactical" combat, is still a bare as bones "RPG."
Final Fantasy XVI then isn't that huge of a change to me as it finally goes all in on being a character action game. It still has Final Fantasy grade presentation, which was the important part, and now it's also captured a bit of that classic BioWare magic with its character driven moments. One might even call it Squeenix's Mass Effect 2.
Everyone complained about ME2's lack of heavy RPG systems. It's also considered one of the studio's greatest works. Yes, this a fairly odd take. Don't think too much about it.
[... but it's a smooth and approachable "Action" Game]
Sure, you can argue that even ME2 probably has more "build choices" with the suite of weapons and power upgrades. But in my experience with FFXVI, I was regularly playing around with my combat power selections until the last 3 hours of my 60 hour playthrough. That seems like a good amount of playstyle options to me.
You know what I don't spend any time thinking about? The Green/Blue/Purple/Orange gear shoehorned into a lot of games today. Not that they're automatically ruined for it, but as an example, God of War (2018) is a game I recently played that epitomizes what I consider "tacked-on" RPG systems. None of it felt like it did anything for my playstyle.
I played Diablo 2 and especially 3 for hundreds of hours. I do not get a high just from item-make-number-go-up anymore (more power to you if you do). I do get a high from inventing and executing a series of actions that make a damage number double in size without having to even change my equipment. I got that a fair amount in Final Fantasy XVI.
And a funny thing happened as I got used to the timing of the abilities and enemies... I discovered there's an oddly deliberate amount of downtime woven between many of the actions. Abilities, especially big ones, have a tendency to have fairly long executions with either minimal additional input needed, or they outright stop time for the animation. That gave me a fairly tactical experience at points as I took a couple seconds to double check my available abilities and plot out my follow up action when was either in a bind or trying to figure out how to best capitalize on an opportunity.
Maybe the future of JRPGs has been fighting games all along.
The combat here is rarely that "punishing" but that's quite certainly because it's tuned for a narrative driven experience and an audience looking for that. I consider it quite rewarding, though, as it's fluid, flashy, impactful, and as mentioned, if you dig into its systems you get the satisfaction of completely demolishing your foes. There are a few fights that require that, as well, so it's not all rose lined paths.
[A minimal distractions experience]
This is a case where my opinion is that the only-what-matters approach to gameplay systems was the correct one. I do think the equipment systems might have been stripped a bit too bare midway through development, as they still show signs that more was once intended, but otherwise I like the very reigned in approach this game has to the content.
Maps aren't overly expansive but they have a few key explorable parts. The only real drivers are the marked story sidequests, the unmarked "hunt" fights, and some hidden accessories. Otherwise you're in it just to see the beautifully crafted world and soak in the sights. Even when the side quest log hits its longest, you can still mop it up and return to the main story in an afternoon. And for most of the runtime you'll never have much more than 2 or 3 additional objectives in a story chapter for about 3-10 minutes a piece.
Overall, my impression is that it kept its sights close to the central narrative at all times without resorting to the infamous "hallway" design. This is not a game where you can eff off for 30 hours then come back when you're bored to "mainline" it. It's a meaty, focused narrative with a few optional breaks to soak in the world and characters.
[A deluge of spectacle delivered with excellent performances]
One thing I've always appreciated about Final Fantasy is the series penchant for larger than life fantasy and imagery that I will never forget in my life. Like the opening of FFX as Sin swallows Zanarkand, looking into the Jenova tank in FFVII, or the whole city of Burmecia in FFIX.
XVI stands on equal ground for me. There's some fight sequences in particular here that I can only imagine are what the developers of the original games always dreamed of putting to the screen. The sense of scale, the color, the detail the motion the lighting —
(Breathes deep, finds calm)
It's so good.
And the voice acting and motion capture performances during the directed cutscenes, along with the most natural and nuanced writing the I've seen from the series yet, were a pleasure to see. Just as I was floored by the big moments of the game, the little moments and "blink and you'd miss it details" kept getting me too.
This is the best character work the series has seen. I won't try to argue on a subjective matter like the "most interesting cast" but I'd certainly die on the hill that this is the most "fully realized" cast in a mainline title. It's hard to sum up exactly what I mean in a way that won't bloat this review into a full thesis, but the sum of it — I think — is that they all feel "present" and in the balances they should be for their roles. And frankly they feel more "real" than any other FF character I can remember.
And the camera work and facial detail and THE MUSIC ahhhhhh—
This is a bittersweet story about the struggle to keep living and to find a reason to do so in the face of world breathing its last whispers. And every bit of it sold that for me and got me entirely invested in Clive's journey.
I love it so much.
[This probably isn't a game for most people]
I'm not going to make a pretentious claim like "modern gamers are too hooked on the digital casino of modern AAA to appreciate this game." For one because, while I've seen a lot of takes on this game's story and pacing I just cannot understand, lots of people are enjoying this game just fine. So it's not my mission in this review to make everyone "see the light."
And secondly, because I know that this game is decidedly made for people who look forward to sitting through an hour of dialogue and cutscenes between 15-30 minute bursts of gameplay (not that the game is always that balance). And the game does start light on the gameplay.
While I personally find a heavily cinematic gaming experience very natural and compelling, I can understand those who don't want that.
So I won't call this a perfect game.
But it sure was near perfect for me.
Whatever they were, they were blown away. I enjoyed its direct predecessor, but that game had very visible seams and glue. That's all gone here. Every decision made with the direction of Final Fantasy XVI felt to me intentional and clear. Even when it was obvious those decisions were made for budget and time constraints, I was left to believe they were the right decisions to not compromise the beautiful gem at the core of this work of art.
[Yes, it being a "Role Playing Game" is debatable ...]
I don't like formulating my opinions reactively, but I've heard so much disappointment expressed about this game's status as an RPG that I can't help but address that point directly.
I don't care about this game as an RPG. I come from the pen-n-paper RPG traditions, even to the point that I've gone back to first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when running games for my friends (actually Old School Essentials, now, which is a much cleaner representation of that ruleset). Final Fantasy to me has always been "baby's first RPG" at its deepest.
While I couldn't resist that snarky phrasing, I don't say that disparagingly or as any kind of criticism. I've been enjoying Final Fantasy alongside the likes of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights ever since I was a 4-year-old. Its simplification of the Western tradition has been a feature since day one and in my eyes a nice, lighter alternative.
Even FFX, what I consider the best game in the series for "tactical" combat, is still a bare as bones "RPG."
Final Fantasy XVI then isn't that huge of a change to me as it finally goes all in on being a character action game. It still has Final Fantasy grade presentation, which was the important part, and now it's also captured a bit of that classic BioWare magic with its character driven moments. One might even call it Squeenix's Mass Effect 2.
Everyone complained about ME2's lack of heavy RPG systems. It's also considered one of the studio's greatest works. Yes, this a fairly odd take. Don't think too much about it.
[... but it's a smooth and approachable "Action" Game]
Sure, you can argue that even ME2 probably has more "build choices" with the suite of weapons and power upgrades. But in my experience with FFXVI, I was regularly playing around with my combat power selections until the last 3 hours of my 60 hour playthrough. That seems like a good amount of playstyle options to me.
You know what I don't spend any time thinking about? The Green/Blue/Purple/Orange gear shoehorned into a lot of games today. Not that they're automatically ruined for it, but as an example, God of War (2018) is a game I recently played that epitomizes what I consider "tacked-on" RPG systems. None of it felt like it did anything for my playstyle.
I played Diablo 2 and especially 3 for hundreds of hours. I do not get a high just from item-make-number-go-up anymore (more power to you if you do). I do get a high from inventing and executing a series of actions that make a damage number double in size without having to even change my equipment. I got that a fair amount in Final Fantasy XVI.
And a funny thing happened as I got used to the timing of the abilities and enemies... I discovered there's an oddly deliberate amount of downtime woven between many of the actions. Abilities, especially big ones, have a tendency to have fairly long executions with either minimal additional input needed, or they outright stop time for the animation. That gave me a fairly tactical experience at points as I took a couple seconds to double check my available abilities and plot out my follow up action when was either in a bind or trying to figure out how to best capitalize on an opportunity.
Maybe the future of JRPGs has been fighting games all along.
The combat here is rarely that "punishing" but that's quite certainly because it's tuned for a narrative driven experience and an audience looking for that. I consider it quite rewarding, though, as it's fluid, flashy, impactful, and as mentioned, if you dig into its systems you get the satisfaction of completely demolishing your foes. There are a few fights that require that, as well, so it's not all rose lined paths.
[A minimal distractions experience]
This is a case where my opinion is that the only-what-matters approach to gameplay systems was the correct one. I do think the equipment systems might have been stripped a bit too bare midway through development, as they still show signs that more was once intended, but otherwise I like the very reigned in approach this game has to the content.
Maps aren't overly expansive but they have a few key explorable parts. The only real drivers are the marked story sidequests, the unmarked "hunt" fights, and some hidden accessories. Otherwise you're in it just to see the beautifully crafted world and soak in the sights. Even when the side quest log hits its longest, you can still mop it up and return to the main story in an afternoon. And for most of the runtime you'll never have much more than 2 or 3 additional objectives in a story chapter for about 3-10 minutes a piece.
Overall, my impression is that it kept its sights close to the central narrative at all times without resorting to the infamous "hallway" design. This is not a game where you can eff off for 30 hours then come back when you're bored to "mainline" it. It's a meaty, focused narrative with a few optional breaks to soak in the world and characters.
[A deluge of spectacle delivered with excellent performances]
One thing I've always appreciated about Final Fantasy is the series penchant for larger than life fantasy and imagery that I will never forget in my life. Like the opening of FFX as Sin swallows Zanarkand, looking into the Jenova tank in FFVII, or the whole city of Burmecia in FFIX.
XVI stands on equal ground for me. There's some fight sequences in particular here that I can only imagine are what the developers of the original games always dreamed of putting to the screen. The sense of scale, the color, the detail the motion the lighting —
(Breathes deep, finds calm)
It's so good.
And the voice acting and motion capture performances during the directed cutscenes, along with the most natural and nuanced writing the I've seen from the series yet, were a pleasure to see. Just as I was floored by the big moments of the game, the little moments and "blink and you'd miss it details" kept getting me too.
This is the best character work the series has seen. I won't try to argue on a subjective matter like the "most interesting cast" but I'd certainly die on the hill that this is the most "fully realized" cast in a mainline title. It's hard to sum up exactly what I mean in a way that won't bloat this review into a full thesis, but the sum of it — I think — is that they all feel "present" and in the balances they should be for their roles. And frankly they feel more "real" than any other FF character I can remember.
And the camera work and facial detail and THE MUSIC ahhhhhh—
This is a bittersweet story about the struggle to keep living and to find a reason to do so in the face of world breathing its last whispers. And every bit of it sold that for me and got me entirely invested in Clive's journey.
I love it so much.
[This probably isn't a game for most people]
I'm not going to make a pretentious claim like "modern gamers are too hooked on the digital casino of modern AAA to appreciate this game." For one because, while I've seen a lot of takes on this game's story and pacing I just cannot understand, lots of people are enjoying this game just fine. So it's not my mission in this review to make everyone "see the light."
And secondly, because I know that this game is decidedly made for people who look forward to sitting through an hour of dialogue and cutscenes between 15-30 minute bursts of gameplay (not that the game is always that balance). And the game does start light on the gameplay.
While I personally find a heavily cinematic gaming experience very natural and compelling, I can understand those who don't want that.
So I won't call this a perfect game.
But it sure was near perfect for me.
A pleasant little epilogue for the first game. Mostly more of the same with a few QoL improvements to how exploration content is handled, but almost exactly the same combat for better or worse. The story is a pretty simple setup, but it's nice seeing Melia grow into a position of leadership and I think anyone who's familiar with the burden of such responsibilities could appreciate it.
2020
There are some gaming experiences where I realize that the best thing I can do to enjoy them is to shut-off the analytical side of my brain for a while and just go on whatever journey the developers have crafted. If for no other reason, I will always remember Omori for the way it just does "whatever it feels like doing."
But there are certainly more reasons to remember this experience and no matter how eccentric it got, it never felt like it forgot the player. This was an experience made to be shared.
[A Sketchbook World]
The most regonizable elements of Omori is also one of its strongest. The crayon and color-pencil art was executed so wonderfully. Every sprite and scene glows with character. The color palettes are often extravagent and playful but never to me felt "childish" or gaudy, and when the tone shifted drastically the purpose behind it could be felt and was never jarring. Animations were often fairly simple in terms of frame count, but they accomplished what they needed to and sometimes more.
I'm also quite in love with the way they used blurring and shading effects to give that feeling that you were sometimes looking at actual paper puppets.
[It is a JRPG]
It actually was a bit of a surprise to me how much traditional JRPG gameplay was here. There is a lot of exploration, sidequests, secrets, and combat. From the exploration side, I had a delightful time scouring Headspace and Faraway Town. They both presented all sorts of unexpected events and neither got too expansive, making sure you can hit all of the key points without derailing the pace of the game.
What a I really loved was that it didn't use checklists or neuron-firing loot rewards to bait you into it. I explored because I wanted to see where the long chain of destructable traffic cones would take me, or if the next NPC I talked to would show me another hilarious doodling of theirs.
The combat was fairly well done as well. It's never a demanding system, but it's engaging enough and is executed with the same sense of charm as the rest of the world. "Spectacle" isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but what carries it is something like that. There's a lot of little Quality-of-Life details as well which was nice.
If I want to get technical (which I can't help it, I do) I think the 'emotion' system was underdone and too easy to bypass entirely, especially late game. There could be an argument there was some intention to this, but it's very implicit if that's the case so I won't write it off as such.
[I can't process how much work this OST was]
179 tracks, most of which are very distinct and cover a fairly wide range of styles and instrumentations. From the synth/bit-tunes of Headspace to the nostalgic piano pieces and even some EDM combat music with a harpsicord mixed in, yet it all feels right in context. The music here is incredible and yet it never felt "forceful." It was an accompaniment to the visuals and narrative not the dictator.
[A painful narrative but not a bleak one]
My biggest concern going in was that the story would be either hamfistedly clumsy or esoterically pretentious. A concern that probably didn't come from the game at all but rather my own perspective on modern discourse around psychological matters.
I don't wanna write that essay now (or maybe ever), so I'll put it this way: for all the more abstract elements of Omori, it knew when to touch the ground and speak clearly without becoming long-winded. I really appreciated that.
A lot of elements of the story felt very familiar to me, so that hurt a bit. But a good hurt, I think.
[Yes]
I'm firmly of the belief that video games are a form of art. Omori is a good "game" but that's not the reason I would recommend anyone play it, that's just a nice sugar coating on a journey that wants you to experience a lot of different things, and one that was crafted with a lot of care and effort. Like all art, it will mean something different to every observer, and it might not mean anything to you. But, if the mood seems right, I can absolutely recommend looking for yourself to find out.
But there are certainly more reasons to remember this experience and no matter how eccentric it got, it never felt like it forgot the player. This was an experience made to be shared.
[A Sketchbook World]
The most regonizable elements of Omori is also one of its strongest. The crayon and color-pencil art was executed so wonderfully. Every sprite and scene glows with character. The color palettes are often extravagent and playful but never to me felt "childish" or gaudy, and when the tone shifted drastically the purpose behind it could be felt and was never jarring. Animations were often fairly simple in terms of frame count, but they accomplished what they needed to and sometimes more.
I'm also quite in love with the way they used blurring and shading effects to give that feeling that you were sometimes looking at actual paper puppets.
[It is a JRPG]
It actually was a bit of a surprise to me how much traditional JRPG gameplay was here. There is a lot of exploration, sidequests, secrets, and combat. From the exploration side, I had a delightful time scouring Headspace and Faraway Town. They both presented all sorts of unexpected events and neither got too expansive, making sure you can hit all of the key points without derailing the pace of the game.
What a I really loved was that it didn't use checklists or neuron-firing loot rewards to bait you into it. I explored because I wanted to see where the long chain of destructable traffic cones would take me, or if the next NPC I talked to would show me another hilarious doodling of theirs.
The combat was fairly well done as well. It's never a demanding system, but it's engaging enough and is executed with the same sense of charm as the rest of the world. "Spectacle" isn't quite the word I'm looking for, but what carries it is something like that. There's a lot of little Quality-of-Life details as well which was nice.
If I want to get technical (which I can't help it, I do) I think the 'emotion' system was underdone and too easy to bypass entirely, especially late game. There could be an argument there was some intention to this, but it's very implicit if that's the case so I won't write it off as such.
[I can't process how much work this OST was]
179 tracks, most of which are very distinct and cover a fairly wide range of styles and instrumentations. From the synth/bit-tunes of Headspace to the nostalgic piano pieces and even some EDM combat music with a harpsicord mixed in, yet it all feels right in context. The music here is incredible and yet it never felt "forceful." It was an accompaniment to the visuals and narrative not the dictator.
[A painful narrative but not a bleak one]
My biggest concern going in was that the story would be either hamfistedly clumsy or esoterically pretentious. A concern that probably didn't come from the game at all but rather my own perspective on modern discourse around psychological matters.
I don't wanna write that essay now (or maybe ever), so I'll put it this way: for all the more abstract elements of Omori, it knew when to touch the ground and speak clearly without becoming long-winded. I really appreciated that.
A lot of elements of the story felt very familiar to me, so that hurt a bit. But a good hurt, I think.
[Yes]
I'm firmly of the belief that video games are a form of art. Omori is a good "game" but that's not the reason I would recommend anyone play it, that's just a nice sugar coating on a journey that wants you to experience a lot of different things, and one that was crafted with a lot of care and effort. Like all art, it will mean something different to every observer, and it might not mean anything to you. But, if the mood seems right, I can absolutely recommend looking for yourself to find out.
2021
A farming RPG for those that felt Stardew was a bit too cozy and need a little more neuron activation on the side of your honest working of the land. In many ways it's a nicely streamlined farming experience with a little extra emphasis on some more classical ARPG elements. Unfortunately, it also introduces new tediums and seems to lack for much in content beyond filling out checklists before the end of the first year.
The checklists are fairly robust, so I can see die hard Animal Crossing/Stardew players having their fill here, but as I was once again reminded, the farming life has a short lived appeal for my ape brain.
I did enjoy it for a good stretch, though, before the final set of main quests plowed the pacing for me and my co-op partner. Everything levels some skill tree and the spell casting isn't just for combat options so there's a fun progression of unlocking abilities and perks to farm/mine/fish/hunt efficiently.
The combat is also a decent step up from what's in Stardew. While the set of options is fairly modest compared to a full ARPG, there's still a good set of skills and weapons available, and the movement mechanics allow for a bit more kineticism to encounters.
What's also fun is that there's an actual exploration aspect to the game. Places to discover, NPCs to meet and befriend, and secrets and treasure to gnab. It's pretty neat...
Unfortunately the longer it goes, the more that side of the game starts to backfire on it. While they do offer a decent number of diegetic quick travel options between the different zones, by the late game far too many of the tasks and quests have you trudging back and forth across the far ends of the maps for frankly rather petty chores that could have been turned into a quick cutscene sequence.
I mean, the first couple times make sense for world setting, but it's not like your spunky new farmer has many other pressing matters to attend to. And if you're already started questing on a given day, you probably watered all of your plants on the way out in the morning, so... would have been nice to have a few more jump cuts to the next scene.
That said, I have a hard time saying whether or not your typical farming sim player would have the hangups I do. It expects that when it shows you a long list of all the plants you should grow, fish to catch, and items to craft that you came there to do exactly that.
I did for a while, then I just wanted to headbutt the "mean" dragon and call it a day.
It didn't seem to appreciate my hastiness at that point. But hey, if they give you an "invinvicibility" toggle in the first page of the options, then I guess they understand that people are going to be coming in with a much wider variety of expectations.
So yes, I cheesed the last boss with it and I do feel proud of myself. That healthbar was absurd. There was an alternate path to the ending, but I'm a terrible farmer so it would have taken me another year to get all of the seasonal items requested.
[Probably a great game for people who've actually seen a filled out checklist once in their lives]
Sun Haven a has a vibrant art style, a lighthearted sense of humor, and a clear love for the genre. It's fairly polished where it matters, but I don't think it's quite found the winning formula for this hybrid concept. Can definitely recommend to anyone looking to get that farming sim itch scratched, but one year in game was enough for me.
The checklists are fairly robust, so I can see die hard Animal Crossing/Stardew players having their fill here, but as I was once again reminded, the farming life has a short lived appeal for my ape brain.
I did enjoy it for a good stretch, though, before the final set of main quests plowed the pacing for me and my co-op partner. Everything levels some skill tree and the spell casting isn't just for combat options so there's a fun progression of unlocking abilities and perks to farm/mine/fish/hunt efficiently.
The combat is also a decent step up from what's in Stardew. While the set of options is fairly modest compared to a full ARPG, there's still a good set of skills and weapons available, and the movement mechanics allow for a bit more kineticism to encounters.
What's also fun is that there's an actual exploration aspect to the game. Places to discover, NPCs to meet and befriend, and secrets and treasure to gnab. It's pretty neat...
Unfortunately the longer it goes, the more that side of the game starts to backfire on it. While they do offer a decent number of diegetic quick travel options between the different zones, by the late game far too many of the tasks and quests have you trudging back and forth across the far ends of the maps for frankly rather petty chores that could have been turned into a quick cutscene sequence.
I mean, the first couple times make sense for world setting, but it's not like your spunky new farmer has many other pressing matters to attend to. And if you're already started questing on a given day, you probably watered all of your plants on the way out in the morning, so... would have been nice to have a few more jump cuts to the next scene.
That said, I have a hard time saying whether or not your typical farming sim player would have the hangups I do. It expects that when it shows you a long list of all the plants you should grow, fish to catch, and items to craft that you came there to do exactly that.
I did for a while, then I just wanted to headbutt the "mean" dragon and call it a day.
It didn't seem to appreciate my hastiness at that point. But hey, if they give you an "invinvicibility" toggle in the first page of the options, then I guess they understand that people are going to be coming in with a much wider variety of expectations.
So yes, I cheesed the last boss with it and I do feel proud of myself. That healthbar was absurd. There was an alternate path to the ending, but I'm a terrible farmer so it would have taken me another year to get all of the seasonal items requested.
[Probably a great game for people who've actually seen a filled out checklist once in their lives]
Sun Haven a has a vibrant art style, a lighthearted sense of humor, and a clear love for the genre. It's fairly polished where it matters, but I don't think it's quite found the winning formula for this hybrid concept. Can definitely recommend to anyone looking to get that farming sim itch scratched, but one year in game was enough for me.
2020
Lord help you if you play this game high.
From a gameplay perspective, Bugsnax is the logical evolution in creature catching gameplay in a post-Pokémon Snap world. I feel like I missed a few transitionary steps in that sequence, but as the bugs chirped names at me over the Dualsense speaker, I could think of nothing else.
The toolset of traps and interactions available for hunting down the snack monsters is a fairly well rounded and satisfyingly physics enabled set. 80% percent of the time, the core gameplay is snappy, reactive, and sensible even as it engages in light puzzling. 15% of the time it can get a bit jank or tedious (somewhat an inevitability of trap gameplay for me)... 5% of the time I don't know what exactly happened but I got the bug so all's well in the end.
As is inevitable, I'm unable to compel myself to completion amount beyond "a bit more than necessary," so it was nice to see the game didn't really demand any more than that from me. I did what looked interesting and moved only fairly smoothly.
There were likely a few "big catches" at the end of some of the sidequest lines that I might have wanted to get to, after having incidentally gotten at least two of them and having fun there. However, my chimp brain couldn't stomach teleporting back and forth across the island another dozen times to catch a bunch of stuff I'd already gotten to before, in order to get to said final quests.
Which brings me to the part of the gameplay that ground my gears: small inventory space but frequent demands for random critters.
Usually with a bunch of collection quests, I try to nab 1 or 2 of everything as I see them so I can quickly turn in and move on, or at least get a head start. But Bugsnax foiled my every attempt to take the initiative.
First it introduces a funny but insidious mechanic where you can feed anyone snax at anytime to transform body parts. Entertaining, but effectively all it does is make you waste bugs that you should be shoving into the ranch for backpack upgrades. This likely should be considered an element of interactive storytelling.
Second, and to my actual point, is that the number of times I had to discard a bug that I thought I was done with to make room for 3 or 4 of one type I needed, only to then find out I needed one of those discarded ones 10 minutes later, was too damn high. Probably have been an issue if I didn't catch anything until requested so I didn't waste the effort...
... But why would I not catch every new bug I see in a bug catching game??
There's no storage at base (that I was aware of), so anything you couldn't hold in your hands was wasted or consumed. As a bit of mechanical storytelling, kind of genius. As someone who only barely enjoys collectathon gameplay, screw you, game.
And as for the storytelling.
Well, it somehow managed to bypass my expectations. Certainly hasn't done anything to mend my suspicion of muppet-based stories.
What I will talk about, is that for the most part it was Muppet Gilligan's Island, which was a bit charming. I found the main points of the character drama early in a bit too petty, though, and not done with the right kind of humor to make it work for me. It was funny often, but its the difference between getting hit by a stick wrapped in foam versus a stick and a piece of foam.
To summarize: as a game, Bugsnax is delightfully weird and a very solid experience with just a few manageable flaws. As a complete experience, it gave me tonal whiplash and not in the way I like.
Not-quite-kid-friendly puppet stuff just isn't the same without Bowie 😔
From a gameplay perspective, Bugsnax is the logical evolution in creature catching gameplay in a post-Pokémon Snap world. I feel like I missed a few transitionary steps in that sequence, but as the bugs chirped names at me over the Dualsense speaker, I could think of nothing else.
The toolset of traps and interactions available for hunting down the snack monsters is a fairly well rounded and satisfyingly physics enabled set. 80% percent of the time, the core gameplay is snappy, reactive, and sensible even as it engages in light puzzling. 15% of the time it can get a bit jank or tedious (somewhat an inevitability of trap gameplay for me)... 5% of the time I don't know what exactly happened but I got the bug so all's well in the end.
As is inevitable, I'm unable to compel myself to completion amount beyond "a bit more than necessary," so it was nice to see the game didn't really demand any more than that from me. I did what looked interesting and moved only fairly smoothly.
There were likely a few "big catches" at the end of some of the sidequest lines that I might have wanted to get to, after having incidentally gotten at least two of them and having fun there. However, my chimp brain couldn't stomach teleporting back and forth across the island another dozen times to catch a bunch of stuff I'd already gotten to before, in order to get to said final quests.
Which brings me to the part of the gameplay that ground my gears: small inventory space but frequent demands for random critters.
Usually with a bunch of collection quests, I try to nab 1 or 2 of everything as I see them so I can quickly turn in and move on, or at least get a head start. But Bugsnax foiled my every attempt to take the initiative.
First it introduces a funny but insidious mechanic where you can feed anyone snax at anytime to transform body parts. Entertaining, but effectively all it does is make you waste bugs that you should be shoving into the ranch for backpack upgrades. This likely should be considered an element of interactive storytelling.
Second, and to my actual point, is that the number of times I had to discard a bug that I thought I was done with to make room for 3 or 4 of one type I needed, only to then find out I needed one of those discarded ones 10 minutes later, was too damn high. Probably have been an issue if I didn't catch anything until requested so I didn't waste the effort...
... But why would I not catch every new bug I see in a bug catching game??
There's no storage at base (that I was aware of), so anything you couldn't hold in your hands was wasted or consumed. As a bit of mechanical storytelling, kind of genius. As someone who only barely enjoys collectathon gameplay, screw you, game.
And as for the storytelling.
Well, it somehow managed to bypass my expectations. Certainly hasn't done anything to mend my suspicion of muppet-based stories.
What I will talk about, is that for the most part it was Muppet Gilligan's Island, which was a bit charming. I found the main points of the character drama early in a bit too petty, though, and not done with the right kind of humor to make it work for me. It was funny often, but its the difference between getting hit by a stick wrapped in foam versus a stick and a piece of foam.
To summarize: as a game, Bugsnax is delightfully weird and a very solid experience with just a few manageable flaws. As a complete experience, it gave me tonal whiplash and not in the way I like.
Not-quite-kid-friendly puppet stuff just isn't the same without Bowie 😔
One thing I can say quite definitively about this title is that that the world designers were cookin'. Very few things coming off a Nintendo console can be considered "high fidelity" — even with the fresh coat of a remastering — but fidelity is only ever one part of a game's visual toolset. Creativity and an eye for detail are what truly make a work special, and the world designers at Monolith Soft clearly had it.
I've been into sci-fi tales from the cradle, so I'd like to think that I've seen a lot in the long list of works — both new and old — I've read, watched, and played. I have vague memories that I've seen a general setup like Xenoblade's "universe for two" before, but... there's a magic to the execution here that got even my desensitized, open-world-burned-out self to spend 30 minutes in areas just "looking around." Something I haven't done much of since I was first awed by Mass Effect back in 2008.
Original or not, it sure feels unique. Even when I knew that I had probably found all of the interesting gameplay elements in an area, I still would feel compelled to look.
So for all of the more mixed opinions I'll give after this, I will say right off the bat that I now see why this game has been held in such high regard by its fans since its original 2010 release.
I also understand why people compare it to a single-player MMO, because beyond just the combat, every technical aspect of this game feels like it was derived from that space of the industry. In more good ways than bad — I say as an occasional MMO enjoyer.
[Combat]
Combat on the surface is almost one-for-one with the likes of World of Warcraft or (more relevant to me) Star Wars the Old Republic. You can move freely and it's in "real-time," but it uses the same style of targeting and action queueing any MMO player would immediately recognize. With that said, as an offline game it's far more responsive and willing to push for tighter timings on actions. They took the liberty to add features that its online contemporaries could not, like a system that plays out a possible future action from the enemy as a warning for the player to shift their tactics.
Frankly, I find the combat very satisfying with all the little tools they give you to maximize your damage-per-second and balance that with defense. It's not too complex when you're being introduced, but over time you find added layers that can create some pretty dramatic effects when you figure them out.
My only real problem with it is tuning. The game wants to encourage a diversity of team compositions and character builds, but it has two particularly grevious misfires to that point: the "Medic" character is way too effective as a healer compared to anyone else (and the team size is a mere 3); the main character has only one set of skills and most of his variety comes from special mechanics related to his weapon which don't have as much organic interplay.
This doesn't rear its head much in most fights, but once you get to the actual challenges you're heavily pressured into taking those two and one of two effective tanks. You can finagle the system to make other things work or level over the challenge, but to me it always seemed like I was intentionally hamstringing myself to do so.
[Checklisting]
The rest of gameplay revolves around exploring the world and collecting items. There are some interesting aspects to this, but its mostly fairly rudimentary in implementation. Smooth and neuron-activating, but simple and potentially very time consuming if you're a completionist or nearly one.
On the more interesting side, there is a mechanic that tells you if a random item you pick up will be part of a sidequest that fits the plot. That's a very cool bit of QoL that I loved. Also, there's a whole system around building reputation with the named NPCs of the world, and a big ol' graph showing all of their connections, likes, and tradable items. The further you build out that graph, the more side quests you unlock. Some of which even have alternate outcomes if you talk to specific characters before mindleslly setting out.
It's just a bit unfortunate that most of these quests are piled in with token fetch/kill quests so they can be easy to miss and there's little additional presentation for them. Just the same text boxes only with more involved dialogue. Great if you notice it, but no one will blame you if you don't.
There was one aspect of this system that I feel particularly let down by (though, maybe unfairly) which is that your party members have affinity values for each other as well, which unlock passive combat bonuses and, more importantly, "heart-to-heart" scenes that give their individual relationships more development. The "unfortunate" part to me was in how much time commitment it would take to fully engage with the system and in how obnoxious it was to actually trigger the scenes. To the point where I gave up on doing them in normal gameplay and opted to watch them on YouTube.
In my 41 hour playthrough where I tried to do the significant side content I could find, I got about 3 party members to full affinity with the main character, and none of them higher than 4/5 with each other. In addition, you have to find the locations for each scene on the large maps with no option to at least fast travel back to them later, and you definitely won't have them unlocked on first visit.
So great idea, poor execution.
[Narrative]
The tale that sets the context for your long trek through this alien-yet-inviting world fittingly evoked my nostalgia for both Gurren Lagann and Final Fantasy. The broadstrokes being close to the former and the details of the characters and atmosphere closer to the latter.
I ended up liking the whole cast more than I had expected after seeing their visual designs for years (I have a prejudice against the kind of not-shorts Shulk wears, apparently). I'd even say the writing had some great moments, just not consistently. Still, the only real "negative" moments were a couple fairly repetitive beats in Shulk's character development, and I otherwise liked him. He was much more direct and brash than I expected, but not in a thoughtless way.
I can't say I ever felt "surprised" by the twists in the story, but there were some details to it that caught me off-guard at times. And in the end, like the exploration, I was always happy to just soak up the sci-fi goodness.
I do really think the game needed a proper "point-of-no-return" in the last 2 or 3 chapters and drop off the exploration elements at that point, because there was a bit too much dissonance between what the gameplay and narrative were trying to accomplish pacing-wise at that point. It's not the worst I've seen, but it let out a bit of the steam it had built for me.
[It's not 'Incredible' but it's certainly 'Memorable']
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this game, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with the series now. It's hard to pinpoint anything other than the world design that it does particularly well, but in a "whole greater than the sum of its parts" way, I left with rather warm feelings about the whole experience.
If you're a JRPG veteran and haven't gotten to this one yet, I absolutely recommend. I think sci-fi fans who want something a bit low-key on the gameplay side will generally enjoy this as well.
I've been into sci-fi tales from the cradle, so I'd like to think that I've seen a lot in the long list of works — both new and old — I've read, watched, and played. I have vague memories that I've seen a general setup like Xenoblade's "universe for two" before, but... there's a magic to the execution here that got even my desensitized, open-world-burned-out self to spend 30 minutes in areas just "looking around." Something I haven't done much of since I was first awed by Mass Effect back in 2008.
Original or not, it sure feels unique. Even when I knew that I had probably found all of the interesting gameplay elements in an area, I still would feel compelled to look.
So for all of the more mixed opinions I'll give after this, I will say right off the bat that I now see why this game has been held in such high regard by its fans since its original 2010 release.
I also understand why people compare it to a single-player MMO, because beyond just the combat, every technical aspect of this game feels like it was derived from that space of the industry. In more good ways than bad — I say as an occasional MMO enjoyer.
[Combat]
Combat on the surface is almost one-for-one with the likes of World of Warcraft or (more relevant to me) Star Wars the Old Republic. You can move freely and it's in "real-time," but it uses the same style of targeting and action queueing any MMO player would immediately recognize. With that said, as an offline game it's far more responsive and willing to push for tighter timings on actions. They took the liberty to add features that its online contemporaries could not, like a system that plays out a possible future action from the enemy as a warning for the player to shift their tactics.
Frankly, I find the combat very satisfying with all the little tools they give you to maximize your damage-per-second and balance that with defense. It's not too complex when you're being introduced, but over time you find added layers that can create some pretty dramatic effects when you figure them out.
My only real problem with it is tuning. The game wants to encourage a diversity of team compositions and character builds, but it has two particularly grevious misfires to that point: the "Medic" character is way too effective as a healer compared to anyone else (and the team size is a mere 3); the main character has only one set of skills and most of his variety comes from special mechanics related to his weapon which don't have as much organic interplay.
This doesn't rear its head much in most fights, but once you get to the actual challenges you're heavily pressured into taking those two and one of two effective tanks. You can finagle the system to make other things work or level over the challenge, but to me it always seemed like I was intentionally hamstringing myself to do so.
[Checklisting]
The rest of gameplay revolves around exploring the world and collecting items. There are some interesting aspects to this, but its mostly fairly rudimentary in implementation. Smooth and neuron-activating, but simple and potentially very time consuming if you're a completionist or nearly one.
On the more interesting side, there is a mechanic that tells you if a random item you pick up will be part of a sidequest that fits the plot. That's a very cool bit of QoL that I loved. Also, there's a whole system around building reputation with the named NPCs of the world, and a big ol' graph showing all of their connections, likes, and tradable items. The further you build out that graph, the more side quests you unlock. Some of which even have alternate outcomes if you talk to specific characters before mindleslly setting out.
It's just a bit unfortunate that most of these quests are piled in with token fetch/kill quests so they can be easy to miss and there's little additional presentation for them. Just the same text boxes only with more involved dialogue. Great if you notice it, but no one will blame you if you don't.
There was one aspect of this system that I feel particularly let down by (though, maybe unfairly) which is that your party members have affinity values for each other as well, which unlock passive combat bonuses and, more importantly, "heart-to-heart" scenes that give their individual relationships more development. The "unfortunate" part to me was in how much time commitment it would take to fully engage with the system and in how obnoxious it was to actually trigger the scenes. To the point where I gave up on doing them in normal gameplay and opted to watch them on YouTube.
In my 41 hour playthrough where I tried to do the significant side content I could find, I got about 3 party members to full affinity with the main character, and none of them higher than 4/5 with each other. In addition, you have to find the locations for each scene on the large maps with no option to at least fast travel back to them later, and you definitely won't have them unlocked on first visit.
So great idea, poor execution.
[Narrative]
The tale that sets the context for your long trek through this alien-yet-inviting world fittingly evoked my nostalgia for both Gurren Lagann and Final Fantasy. The broadstrokes being close to the former and the details of the characters and atmosphere closer to the latter.
I ended up liking the whole cast more than I had expected after seeing their visual designs for years (I have a prejudice against the kind of not-shorts Shulk wears, apparently). I'd even say the writing had some great moments, just not consistently. Still, the only real "negative" moments were a couple fairly repetitive beats in Shulk's character development, and I otherwise liked him. He was much more direct and brash than I expected, but not in a thoughtless way.
I can't say I ever felt "surprised" by the twists in the story, but there were some details to it that caught me off-guard at times. And in the end, like the exploration, I was always happy to just soak up the sci-fi goodness.
I do really think the game needed a proper "point-of-no-return" in the last 2 or 3 chapters and drop off the exploration elements at that point, because there was a bit too much dissonance between what the gameplay and narrative were trying to accomplish pacing-wise at that point. It's not the worst I've seen, but it let out a bit of the steam it had built for me.
[It's not 'Incredible' but it's certainly 'Memorable']
There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this game, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with the series now. It's hard to pinpoint anything other than the world design that it does particularly well, but in a "whole greater than the sum of its parts" way, I left with rather warm feelings about the whole experience.
If you're a JRPG veteran and haven't gotten to this one yet, I absolutely recommend. I think sci-fi fans who want something a bit low-key on the gameplay side will generally enjoy this as well.
2023
Developers Mr. Pig and Sertif were handling the pure essence of the late 90's with this one. This was like the sudden resurrection of the Ren & Stimpy show; a speed run through a Nickelodeon slime obstacle course; a junk food fueled gaming marathon with a bean bag chair and a 32" CRT.
There's a glorious level of detail in every inch of this fairly meaty experience. The Microsoft Paint art style transcends its low technical fidelity through heaps of garnish and fun animation work. Character sprites are memorable and often hilarious. Levels writhe with character, almost literally, and almost all 22-24 of them are unique in appearance. And the music accompanying it all is equally as detailed and varied, with a nice mix of classic chip-tune instruments and more modern beats with sampling.
If you have any nostalgia for the heyday of the pizza and X-games world, you'll have a wonderful time even just watching this game.
And under that is a very solid high-speed platformer.
I can't claim a large amount of experience with 2D platformers, as I've always had an odd hangup with them — thankfully I've been getting around that recently — but I know I like Rayman Origins, and the flow of the levels here is reminiscent of that. More... brutal, but similar. I've been told it's like a spiritual succesor to the Wario Land series, and I can easily imagine that with the vibe this game gives off, but I'm entirely unfamiliar with those games.
For the most part Pizza Tower is a smooth experience, and even when it's not "smooth" it's gratifyingly "chunky" with the combat and box breaking. There's also a lot of great variation in the gameplay with the level specific power ups and gimicks. The way they're tailor fit to the context you find them in keeps them from becoming throwaway "nice-to-haves" that you eventually start skipping because you either never get to the "right" time to use it or because collecting it isn't worth going out of your way for.
Doesn't hurt that they're just fun, too.
But sometimes I do feel like there's a bit too much of a conflict between the game encouraging you to go quickly and follow a clear line and it wanting to throw unexpected obstacles at you and have to learn the layout to earn your speed. The result for me was that, for the regular gameplay, there was a lot of whiplash. I also found a few of the control scheme options were a bit frustrating. In particular, a lot of the interactions around wall-climbing and diving.
I also... think the boss fights are too long. 16 hits was a bit past the point of tedium for me.
But overall that wasn't enough to ruin the experience by any stretch. And if you enjoy 2D Sonic, Mega Man, and the like, I wager you'll be much better off than my 3D brainrot crippled self.
So, unless you are particularly averse to platformers or can't understand the appeal of the art style, I would recommend giving this game a go. And if you're the speedrunning crowd, this seems like a very rewarding course to learn.
There's a glorious level of detail in every inch of this fairly meaty experience. The Microsoft Paint art style transcends its low technical fidelity through heaps of garnish and fun animation work. Character sprites are memorable and often hilarious. Levels writhe with character, almost literally, and almost all 22-24 of them are unique in appearance. And the music accompanying it all is equally as detailed and varied, with a nice mix of classic chip-tune instruments and more modern beats with sampling.
If you have any nostalgia for the heyday of the pizza and X-games world, you'll have a wonderful time even just watching this game.
And under that is a very solid high-speed platformer.
I can't claim a large amount of experience with 2D platformers, as I've always had an odd hangup with them — thankfully I've been getting around that recently — but I know I like Rayman Origins, and the flow of the levels here is reminiscent of that. More... brutal, but similar. I've been told it's like a spiritual succesor to the Wario Land series, and I can easily imagine that with the vibe this game gives off, but I'm entirely unfamiliar with those games.
For the most part Pizza Tower is a smooth experience, and even when it's not "smooth" it's gratifyingly "chunky" with the combat and box breaking. There's also a lot of great variation in the gameplay with the level specific power ups and gimicks. The way they're tailor fit to the context you find them in keeps them from becoming throwaway "nice-to-haves" that you eventually start skipping because you either never get to the "right" time to use it or because collecting it isn't worth going out of your way for.
Doesn't hurt that they're just fun, too.
But sometimes I do feel like there's a bit too much of a conflict between the game encouraging you to go quickly and follow a clear line and it wanting to throw unexpected obstacles at you and have to learn the layout to earn your speed. The result for me was that, for the regular gameplay, there was a lot of whiplash. I also found a few of the control scheme options were a bit frustrating. In particular, a lot of the interactions around wall-climbing and diving.
I also... think the boss fights are too long. 16 hits was a bit past the point of tedium for me.
But overall that wasn't enough to ruin the experience by any stretch. And if you enjoy 2D Sonic, Mega Man, and the like, I wager you'll be much better off than my 3D brainrot crippled self.
So, unless you are particularly averse to platformers or can't understand the appeal of the art style, I would recommend giving this game a go. And if you're the speedrunning crowd, this seems like a very rewarding course to learn.
2022
"Tony Hawk with Guns" is one of those meme concepts that is an immediate sell but your aftertaste depends entirely on the small details of its execution. Rollerdrome, rather surprisingly to me, nailed all of the core parts with polish and distinction. It feels just a bit of a shame there isn't much after that, but I'm certainly glad what's here feels very focused.
It's been a long time since I've played the original Tony Hawk games, so my memory of the details are hazy, but the core player controls in Rollerdrome are at least 80% what a I remember and implemented perhaps even more smoothly than those games. The shooting elements are then grafted on with a more "vehicle combat" style where movement is disjoint from your aim. That combination probably sounds rather intuitive to those familiar with both genres, but I was still worried that on its own that would prove overcomplicated to play, resulting in either a steep learning curve or overly simplistic objectives.
Thankfully, they infused just enough Max Payne into the shooting to make it approachable. Namely, bullet-time on the aiming and a dodge. Even better: a dodge that can trigger super-bullet-time with a damage boost. A nice extra detail that gives it an appropriate, action-sport flavor when used with precision but not demanding it when you're just trying to get back on your feet.
Oh, and you do tricks to reload, briliantly creating a natural rhythm between the two objectives of the game. Shoot someone in the face to get a multiplier, then perform a trick to score points and ready your guns for the next face to shoot. Grinding and wallriding are in, too, which always feels awesome.
Levels consist of skateparks with enemies that spawn in waves to harass you, and they end when you've killed the last one. The cleaner you chain kills and tricks, and the faster you do so, the better your score. The layouts are quite solid and the enemy variety is satisfactory.
Simple, effective, easy enough to do but plenty of room to do better.
There are about 10 levels with gradual increases in complexity, then an "Out For Blood" mode unlocked after the first go-through to bring everything up to the end game standard for replays. Very nice.
I do have a nitpick with the gameplay side, though, which is the "Challenge Objectives" on each level which are tied to progression of the game. For the most part they make sense, and they unlock as soon as you do the thing, so there's no frustration with a run ending prematurely after finally getting a tricky one... but that also makes them feel very arbitrary.
There were a few times where I unlocked very few of them naturally and so had to load back into a level and just cheese a few more without regarding anything else. That'd be fine in some kind of freeplay mode, but it feels like a waste with the semi-directed levels. I think it would have been better to tie progression just to a minimum average score, then have the level challenges be things that had to be done in one run to get either a massive score bonus or "extra" unlockables.
As for the rest, the graphical style of this game is wonderful. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe it properly, but it has such a great 70s-80s Euro-sci-fi-kinda vibe with clean graphic design work and excellent movie-poster rendering.
The soundtrack I'm not sure I would be able to distinguish if I heard it in the wild, save for a few key notes in the main menu theme, but it's still a vibe appropriate bop.
The story is an interesting bit. It's more of a background element, but I like its delivery. There are these fun little first-person exploration bits before each major group of levels where you snoop around a room uncovering notes, interesting objects, and voice lines. No more than 3-5 minutes there then a smooth transition into the level proper when you're ready. It creates a cool gap between the action and the context underlying it, which your mind naturally tries to fill in with speculation for that extra texture to the experience.
So, while it's a fairly small experience and feels like it hasn't reached its full potential, this is a hearty recommendation from me for action game fans or those nostalgic for the classic skateboarding games. It's a very unique experience, but not so "unique" that it's a pain to play. If you're a score chaser, then I imagine you'll really have fun with this.
It's been a long time since I've played the original Tony Hawk games, so my memory of the details are hazy, but the core player controls in Rollerdrome are at least 80% what a I remember and implemented perhaps even more smoothly than those games. The shooting elements are then grafted on with a more "vehicle combat" style where movement is disjoint from your aim. That combination probably sounds rather intuitive to those familiar with both genres, but I was still worried that on its own that would prove overcomplicated to play, resulting in either a steep learning curve or overly simplistic objectives.
Thankfully, they infused just enough Max Payne into the shooting to make it approachable. Namely, bullet-time on the aiming and a dodge. Even better: a dodge that can trigger super-bullet-time with a damage boost. A nice extra detail that gives it an appropriate, action-sport flavor when used with precision but not demanding it when you're just trying to get back on your feet.
Oh, and you do tricks to reload, briliantly creating a natural rhythm between the two objectives of the game. Shoot someone in the face to get a multiplier, then perform a trick to score points and ready your guns for the next face to shoot. Grinding and wallriding are in, too, which always feels awesome.
Levels consist of skateparks with enemies that spawn in waves to harass you, and they end when you've killed the last one. The cleaner you chain kills and tricks, and the faster you do so, the better your score. The layouts are quite solid and the enemy variety is satisfactory.
Simple, effective, easy enough to do but plenty of room to do better.
There are about 10 levels with gradual increases in complexity, then an "Out For Blood" mode unlocked after the first go-through to bring everything up to the end game standard for replays. Very nice.
I do have a nitpick with the gameplay side, though, which is the "Challenge Objectives" on each level which are tied to progression of the game. For the most part they make sense, and they unlock as soon as you do the thing, so there's no frustration with a run ending prematurely after finally getting a tricky one... but that also makes them feel very arbitrary.
There were a few times where I unlocked very few of them naturally and so had to load back into a level and just cheese a few more without regarding anything else. That'd be fine in some kind of freeplay mode, but it feels like a waste with the semi-directed levels. I think it would have been better to tie progression just to a minimum average score, then have the level challenges be things that had to be done in one run to get either a massive score bonus or "extra" unlockables.
As for the rest, the graphical style of this game is wonderful. I wish I had the vocabulary to describe it properly, but it has such a great 70s-80s Euro-sci-fi-kinda vibe with clean graphic design work and excellent movie-poster rendering.
The soundtrack I'm not sure I would be able to distinguish if I heard it in the wild, save for a few key notes in the main menu theme, but it's still a vibe appropriate bop.
The story is an interesting bit. It's more of a background element, but I like its delivery. There are these fun little first-person exploration bits before each major group of levels where you snoop around a room uncovering notes, interesting objects, and voice lines. No more than 3-5 minutes there then a smooth transition into the level proper when you're ready. It creates a cool gap between the action and the context underlying it, which your mind naturally tries to fill in with speculation for that extra texture to the experience.
So, while it's a fairly small experience and feels like it hasn't reached its full potential, this is a hearty recommendation from me for action game fans or those nostalgic for the classic skateboarding games. It's a very unique experience, but not so "unique" that it's a pain to play. If you're a score chaser, then I imagine you'll really have fun with this.