I’m finally able to walk around freely.
Well, mostly.
Category: Video Games
Persona 5: April 21th – May 5th (Downtime + Fallout)
I genuinely thought the resolution might happen immediately this time, but no, once again we have to wait until the deadline to advance the plot regardless of when we complete the objective. What is pacing?
During downtime we’re introduced to a new teacher. I know I said I didn’t want quirky, but he looks about as generic as possible.
Persona 5: Conclusion
I said I was done after the ridiculous padding of the calling card mechanic, and I meant it. I trudged through all of Persona 4 and I’m not making that mistake again. I’m told the story does not get better after this, so I don’t think I’m missing much.
I am genuinely astounded this game got published. I have never seen a script so incoherent and confusing since HEARTBEAT, and that was an indie project by fascist nutjobs, not a AAA release from one of the most popular series in modern gaming. There is no consistency to anything and the pacing is nonsensical when it’s not completely backwards.
Quick Recs
Some cozy works about appreciating the natural world.
Inside: Outer Wilds, Summer Days With Coo, Tonari no Youkai-san
Digimon Survive
Digimon Survive is a visual novel/tactical RPG with horror elements. Despite being largely unimpressed with Digimon’s catalogue, I decided that sounded interesting enough to give it a shot.
Let me tell you, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a game whose mechanics were so at odds with its narrative. This thing is a train wreck.
Quick Reviews
Inside: Death’s Gambit, Ghost Song, Kemono Jihen
Mario & Luigi: Brothership
Nine years after the last entry, Nintendo surprised everyone by reviving the Mario & Luigi series. It’s by a new studio and on the vile Switch, so I had high hopes and low expectations.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it came back wrong. The body is here, but not the soul. The new studio is technically competent, but they don’t have the charm or artistry that Alphadream had, which is pretty dire for the series’ future because that was its main appeal.
Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights
Ender Lilies is a Metroidvania about a little girl lost in your typical Soulslike post-apocalyptic hellscape with the ability to purify the corrupted undead and summon their spirits to fight on her behalf. I was extremely leery about this premise for obvious reasons, not helped by the promotional art that emphasizes how pathetic and moe the girl is. (Notice that she is pigeon-toed in the above picture; that is her default standing pose.) Fortunately, the game never got creepy about it, but the aesthetic does still annoy me. The game itself is very good and I recommend it if you like Soulslike Metroidvanias.
Angels With Scaly Wings
I don’t often return games, but I gladly made an exception for this one. It was such a staggering disappointment on every level.
The premise: You are an ambassador to a parallel dimension where dragons are the dominant species instead of humans, but also there are murders and dark secrets to uncover; basically the dragon version of Hatoful Boyfriend. How could that possibly go wrong?
The writing is so, so bad, and the art is worse. The backgrounds are clearly stock art that makes no sense with a nonhuman environment — the indoor environments make no sense with the skills we’re told the dragons have (low dexterity to fire breath) or their size (they shouldn’t even be able to fit through the doors), and the outdoor environments make no sense when we’re told we don’t know whether this is an alien planet or an alternate universe but there’s regular trees, grass, and bacon. Repeatedly, the characters look up in the sky and never think to realize you can use stars to find out where you are. The character art is terribly inconsistent — one dragon wears clothes while all others are nudists and no one comments on this, they have furgonomic hats but no furgonomics anywhere else, and of course they include all the dragon subspecies with no acknowledgement of how little evolutionary sense this makes or how their society can possibly function with both bipeds and quadrupeds (including wyverns with no hands). They even specifically bring up in dialogue how badly paper letters work for them when they’re constantly shredding them by accident, but we’re apparently not supposed to question how little sense this makes.
All this despite the fact the protagonist is supposedly a biologist, but they never think to question any of this because they are the stupidest, most incompetent, and most incurious VN protagonist I’ve had the displeasure of piloting in a very long time. “There’s just been a murder and my only other human contact is the prime suspect! I should spend the rest of the day reading a book inexplicably sized perfectly for my hands. Oh, but not that one, it looks like actual history, I should read trashy novels instead. No, not that trashy novel, it looks like it’s referencing something relevant.” They just stand there gormlessly listening to dragons explain how utterly nonsensical their society is and then say, “Sure, that makes sense.”
At least they don’t have lizardboobs.
World of Final Fantasy
Having briefly gotten back into Final Fantasy while investigating the modding scene, I was informed that the franchise actually had a mons entry, World of Final Fantasy. That sounded interesting to me, as Final Fantasy has a lot of iconic monster designs that would make for a good mons collector.
It is an offensively dull and soulless game that thoroughly killed any remaining hope I had for this franchise. I trudged through about two-thirds of it before giving up, and honestly I regret not cutting my losses sooner.
Prey (2017)
I’ve heard lots of people insist this is the bestest game ever. I was dubious since I’ve never been able to get into FPSs, but a while back Epic Games gave it away as a freebie, so I picked it up on a whim. While going through my Christmas games I remembered it, and decided to give it a try.
File this away next to Fallout: New Vegas in excellent stories that were tragically packaged with terrible gameplay. Because by god the gameplay is terrible. I can tolerate simple FPSs, but ones that try to get fancy with verticality and exploration and platforming are just painful.
Shujinkou (Demo)
Shujinkou is an edutainment game that teaches Japanese through the medium of a jRPG, which is such a clever idea I’m surprised it hasn’t been tried before. I’m always a bit skeptical of edutainment, but it can be effective when done well, and given how much Japanese media I consume, I figured it would be worth trying out.
Educationally, the game is solid. A central mechanic is that your characters fight with kana characters, and striking an enemy with a kana from their name does more damage, which is a great game-mechanical incentive for understanding. Additionally, it’s possible to highlight most items and game terms to convert them between English and romaji (or kana, if you’re a more advanced learner), which is very helpful for learning those words. Unfortunately, the game itself is weak; it falls into many standard jRPG pitfalls while also making a number of questionable aesthetic choices that work against the educational goals.
Pathologic: Intoduction and Gameplay
Pathologic was a game reviewed here by illhousen… a decade ago, god we’re old. He had the advantage of being able to play the game in the original Russian instead of its bungled English translation. However, recently several years ago the game was rereleased on Steam with a much better English translation, alongside its sequel/reimagining Pathologic 2. Farla and I have been interested in the game for a very long time (even attempting to play the old incomprehensible version), so we thought we should play both the whole way through and give our own thoughts.
If you’re not familiar, Pathologic is a survival horror/immersive sim… thing where you play as a doctor trapped in a rural village during the outbreak of a strange, supernatural plague. It is known for being incredibly grueling and punishing, requiring you to manage survival meters like hunger and exhaustion in addition to janky combat where you can die from a single hit, all while you must complete objectives under the yoke of a strict real-time clock that’s always ticking — think Majora’s Mask, but you can’t time travel. It flopped on release for obvious reasons, but became a cult classic among those of us who appreciate weird, deliberately counterintuitive games. Unfortunately, it ended up a bit too weird even for us; it felt like it tried to do too many things at once and as a result it’s hard to tell what the story was even trying to say.
Also, what it does say is… questionable. As is usual for games of this type, much of the popular analysis just stops at “Wow, isn’t it amazing that it has themes and asks hard questions?” without evaluating the answers it provides to those hard questions. They also tend to gloss over how deeply weird the games are about women, especially the second one.
Pathologic: The Bachelor
Previously, I discussed the gameplay and aesthetics of Pathologic. Now, I’ll delve into the plot, which is a more complicated beast. As I said in the first post, every healer has a unique plotline, and each one warrants their own post.
Before we begin, I will note that the writing of this game is deliberately opaque, ornate, and confusing, with one early character literally saying, “Forgive me if my speech is strange,” to establish this is deliberate. This means that even with the revised translation, many aspects of the story are unclear and have open-ended interpretations. I think I grasp most of the central themes and messages the story is going for, but here’s a disclaimer that I could be wildly off-base.
Each of the healers has a different hook for coming to the town. The Bachelor, Daniel Dankovsky, wants to uncover the secret to immortality, and is told by the town doctor Isidor Burakh he should study Simon Kain, the patriarch of the town who has is supposedly hundreds of years old. He is immediately given lodgings in the good part of town by local woman Eve Yahn, who, uh, looks like this…
…and heads out to visit the Kains first thing in the morning. They tell him Simon died the night before he arrived. Off to a great start!
Pathologic: The Haruspex
Where Dankovsky begins the game well-fed and rested in a fancy house, Artemy arrives in town after walking for multiple days straight, having not slept or eaten in all that time. He is immediately greeted by a bunch of knife murderers, who he kills but not before sustaining wounds himself. He quickly discovers this is because he has been framed for his father’s murder, so his reputation is at rock bottom and everyone in town is ordered to kill him on sight. Fun!