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Mar 9th, 2024 at 10:43:37 - Yakuza 0 (PS4) |
My first Spring Break completion. I’d been working on this one for months. I played the original (!) Yakuza way back when on PS2 and was vaguely aware that the series kept on going. I wanted to try another one because I remember liking the first one and the games tend to be well reviewed. Yakuza 0 seems to be the “if you’re going to play one of them, play this one” entry. And I totally see why. There are a hundred positive things to say about it. It’s an extremely well-written crime drama with a compelling story that twists and turns and great characters, and the voice acting and animation is top notch. The game’s music is outstanding. The word I kept thinking of was “cinematic” as I watched the (numerous) voiced dialogue and cut scenes. It’s serious when it needs to be serious, but can be really funny too. I’ve heard that later games lean into the silliness of the franchise, which I’m a bit ambivalent about. I usually appreciated the humor, but often it felt childish or “video-gamey” (in a very JRPG and/or cringy way), so I hope that they lean into the kind of silliness that resonates with me.
You’re basically doing three things in the game: (1) listening/watching the story unfold; (2) fighting; and (3) side quests and minigames. The first two are mandatory, and I spent most of the time going from cut scene to combat and back. Unfortunately, combat is the weakest part of the game. You’ll switch between two protagonists, and each has three combat styles. For example, Kiryu has a normal style, one that focuses on speed, and one that focuses on strength (all straightforward). Goro’s are weirder, including one where he wields a baseball bat and one where he breakdances. There are a variety of combos and special moves to pull off, but for me, combat boiled down to XXXY, XXXY, XXXY, L2+Y once Heat gauge is full to curb stomp someone (Kiryu) or bash their heads with a baseball bat (Goro). Or if I was in Kiryu’s strength style, I picked up bicycles, signboards, and whatever else in the environment and swung them around like a tornado. There are big upgrade trees for each combat style, which costs Yen, though I probably unlocked like 25% of the trees. I don’t know why you would need to unlock more, and the amount of money you’d need to do so is absurd. Though that brings me to #3…
There are literally over 100 side quests to complete. Help your fellow citizens with their problems, including: teach a punk band how to be cool; recover a stolen video game for a child; win a toy from a claw game for a child; help a man connect with his estranged family; bust a teenage sex ring; help a man propose to his girlfriend; etc., etc. I was doing these early on, but some of them take forever, they are often silly (so my complaint about the humor missing its mark is about this optional activity, which is good!), they generally involve running to and fro talking to people and fetching items, and quickly felt like a waste of time. But they do reward you with items and cash. Then there are the minigames. Amuse yourself with batting cages, RC racing, classic Sega arcade games, a plethora of gambling games, managing a cabaret and investment company, and so on. So yes, if you want to get rich, this is how, but all of it is totally unnecessary. One could easily spend twice as long as I did doing side quests and minigames. When I finished the game (37 hours), it told me I had something like 17% completion.
I had two frustrating experiences earlier in the game that almost made me quit. First, the game requires manual saving at telephone booths. I definitely thought that it also auto-saved. One time, I had been playing for like three hours, then stepped away from the PS4 for a while. I came back and it had turned itself off. When I reloaded, I was surprised that my day’s progress was gone! Luckily, I had mostly been exploring, doing side quests, and minigames (won the batting cages!). So, I decided to skip all the side stuff from then on, and I was back to the main story beat in like 15 minutes. The second time I almost quit was because of a bizarre difficulty spike. I had been doing well in combat, but suddenly, enemies were insanely difficult! I could barely get a punch in and died over and over and over. “This is weird!”, I thought, and changed the difficulty to easy, but still got pummeled. Then the frustration came, and I put the game away and thought I was going to retire it. But I kept thinking about it and decided to ask the internet why the combat was so brutal. I mean, this isn’t supposed to be Dark Souls: Yakuza! I saw a Reddit thread that saved the game for me (“Help: Yakuza 0 - Enemies going Berserk all of the sudden?!”); I wasn’t the only one having the combat difficulty spike issue. Apparently, there is an item you can equip that makes enemies frenzied. The item description does not indicate this, and I had equipped it for its stats. For some reason, this item is awarded early on. Why would new players not equip this?! Apparently all Yakuza games have such items, called “charismatic” whatevers, and someone on this thread suggested that the devs bait new players into equipping it and getting their butts kicked. Mean!
But I am so glad that I didn’t retire the game. Despite the lackluster combat and the time-wasting side stuff, I loved it. The plot and characters are seriously phenomenal, and I see why they've made so many games and built a following around the franchise. But it is long. I would play another if the combat were improved. I saw that the last two entries (Like a Dragon and Infinite Wealth) have more of an RPG-ish combat system, and have been positively reviewed, so I will probably check those out later, maybe pick one to play. (It’s almost time to buy a PS5, woooo!).
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Mar 9th, 2024 at 09:37:32 - Wildermyth (PC) |
I finished this about three weeks ago, got ridiculously busy with a grant proposal and faculty evaluations and didn't write about it, then was on Spring Break and went all in playing other games and still didn't write about it. As Spring Break comes to an end, it's time to write about all the games! And then get back to work...
Wildermyth sunk its teeth into me for two campaigns. The campaigns are long, but of the “just one more turn” variety. Wildermyth is at its core a turn-based tactics RPG like XCOM. You build a band of adventurers in a campaign, starting with three and recruiting more. The adventurers level up, learn skills, improve their gear, and can die. Except unlike in other games of this type, death isn’t always permanent, and they don’t always “die” in battle. Rather, your characters age throughout chapters in a campaign, which ultimately leads to their “retirement” from adventuring. When this happens, they become “legacy” characters and are recruitable in future campaigns. So, you may begin a subsequent campaign with your favorite character from the previous one. Their age will be reset for the new campaign, and the perk of the legacy system is that they level up their renown and can begin campaigns with more and more abilities already learned.
The practical character-building aspect is only part of the allure of the legacy system. The other is that, unlike XCOM but like many other tactics RPGs, your characters develop relationships as they adventure together. These can be romantic, friendly, or rivalries, in addition to developing shared histories of participating in campaigns, defeating ancient evils, discovering magical secrets, or whatever. The cool thing about the relationships, unlike other tactics RPGs, is that they’re outcomes of the procedural narration and the rather transparent ways in which characters are created with personality attributes. Characters who fight together and who are “romantic” may be more likely to fall in love with each other, whereas a sarcastic or competitive character may be more likely to develop rivalries. Either way, these relationships persist over time, and each character’s history persists over time. It’s really, really cool to see two characters have a kid, to see them interact over a campaign as parent and child (even as the parent ages into their 70s and the child into their 40s and perhaps even has their own child), and then it’s really funny to see this break across campaigns as your legacy characters may not recognize one another as family, or they might, but because you started the campaign with the child and then later recruited the parent, the “child” is like 50 years old and their “parent” is like 20 years old, and the parent will treat the child as a child.
The character traits also impact the procedural storytelling. There are many scenarios that unfold as your characters traverse the map, and character traits have an impact. A bookish character may trigger the party stumbling upon an abandoned library and get a chance to unlock some arcane knowledge; a garrulous, wanderlusting character may trigger chance encounters with NPCs as they explore new parts of the map. By shaping your characters’ personalities (getting a variety of them!), you can see more and more of the scenarios. In my two campaigns, I started to get some repetition, seeing a handful of the same scenarios twice. This is bound to start happening the more you play, but is more likely if you are using the same characters because their same character traits are triggering the same scenarios. But I was always looking forward to seeing the next little scenario. So, a strength of the game is certainly this discovery aspect, but a drawback is certainly repetition. Again, I played two (of five or six) campaigns, and was already starting to see repetition in the second campaign.
The campaigns themselves are longer than many whole games, so it is quite a commitment, and is why I stopped after two. I feel like I understand the game and have pretty much seen all it has to offer, with the knowledge that there are some more stories to hear and however much combat challenge I want by increasing the difficulty or letting campaign enemies level up. I do wish that I had looked at how players ranked the campaigns before I just blindly did the first two. I mean, the first one was a tutorial, so that was the right choice, but it seems that the later campaigns (which came later in development, perhaps after the devs and writers got in their groove) are far more upvoted than the second one I played. It was still good, but would have been cool to play a more highly regarded story.
The campaigns (except the tutorial) are split into five chapters each. In each chapter, you traverse the overworld, securing tiles from the enemy to fight back their invasions and gain resources, and progress toward whatever the chapter quest is. The challenges here are in how you split your party to accomplish tasks in the overworld (generally, two parties of 3-4 are ideal so you can do two things at once and never get ambushed) and balancing between how quickly you finish the chapter. The more battles you fight, and the longer time you take, the stronger the enemies get. On the other hand, the more battles you fight, and the longer time you take, the more experience and items you receive. This was well-balanced in my campaigns. One quirk I noticed is that given the five-chapter length of campaigns, your first (and therefore strongest) characters will often reach retirement age at the end of the campaign, when the monsters are hardest, you're fighting the final boss, and you need them the most! Part of the strategy then is, just like in real life, planning for retirement, making sure the rest of your party will be strong enough without 70-year-old Grandpa Joe the Warrior there to bark orders and one-shot enemies. But the overworld isn't very interesting, and the combat isn’t very deep or exciting (it’s really just the basic “warrior, ranger, caster” triumvirate with straightforward strategy) so my real motivation was seeing more stories and seeing how characters level up. Perhaps I'll pick it back up and play another campaign in the future (the highly rated one!) and see what my legacy characters are up to.
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Feb 16th, 2024 at 14:08:43 - Ghostrunner (PC) |
Completed! I powered through my nausea and played this in like 30-60-minute chunks for the past month-and-a-half. I was usually good for a level or two at a time. I'm definitely feeling a little barfy right now, but I had to finish. I would power through the nausea again to play the sequel if it's an improved version of this one.
Ghostrunner was really novel for me. It's a first-person melee parkour game (Mirror's Edge-ish). You are basically a cyberpunk ninja, the titular Ghostrunner, who awakens at the bottom of a dystopian cyberpunk city, having fallen from a great height. A voice in your ear, called The Architect, guides you along and feeds you story. The story was whatever (big bad overlords of shitty cyberpunk city repress the people, resistance movement, fight fight fight, overlords go wild with power to further repress the people and realize their insane version of humanity, etc.). It didn't matter what I was doing anything for, really. I was content with wall-running and slicing enemies with my sword and feeling like a badass. The set pieces of levels in this game are where it's at.
And that's what the game was for me, a "badass simulator." Especially while feeling nauseous, it was nice to play as a badass. The melee parkour action took some getting used to, especially the slo-mo stuff, but once I got the hang of it, it was great. The game is sort of Hotline Miami-ish or Superhot-ish whereby death is not penalized. You'll restart immediately where you were and try whatever combat and/or parkour sequence over again. I'd finish levels with 75 deaths or more. No problem! As you play, you do unlock some special abilities, but I didn't use them often because your running, slicing, and dicing is efficient enough. After you get the best/last one, the mind control ability, the game is basically over anyway.
There were a few boss fights that were a bit lackluster. In the first one, you basically just memorize a samurai's sequence of sword attacks, execute what you memorized a few times, and you're good. The second one was a platforming puzzle and probably the most interesting, climbing a death tower. The third and final one was kind of like the first one, but more complex. Learn a few patterned enemy attacks, avoid those attacks enough times, and win. It was kind of weird that the final boss stands in one place and does some easily avoidable repetitive attacks. You'd think she'd be more adept in combat, more creative, more powerful. But she died, just like the samurai first boss and the death tower second boss, easily enough.
So yeah, definitely neat and worth checking out. I'll play the next one in 30-60-minute chunks too, and hopefully won't blow chunks while doing so.
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Feb 9th, 2024 at 09:11:58 - The Last Campfire (PC) |
I would describe this game as "pleasant." I read someone describe it as "soothing," to which I would also agree. It's a little puzzle and adventure-lite game with cute art direction, a colorful world, a positive, hopeful story, and a narrator whose voice was certainly soothing.
You play as an "ember" trying to find its way home. You get thrown off course and have to find your way back. In so doing, you meet a variety of other embers who are lost and wandering, many of whom have given up hope of ever finding their way back. When you encounter one of these "forlorn," you must solve an environmental puzzle to inspire them. The puzzles were generally easy, yet thoughtful. Occasionally the difficulty would shoot up or down. Most puzzles took probably 5 minutes. One time, I was stumped on a puzzle. I'd spent 20 or 30 minutes poring over it. Finally figured it out (and felt very smart!). Got to the next puzzle and solved it in about 10 seconds.
Another thing that made the game difficult for me is that there is no map. There is a world that you're (using the term loosely) exploring. It's not that big, and the game begins linearly. Then it opens up and you'll be doing all sorts of backtracking, looking for forlorn, bringing items here and there for characters. Since I was generally playing this like once a week, I wasn't constructing a very solid map of the world in my mind. I'd get turned around, forget which paths led where, where characters were, and so on. It led to a fair amount of extra time spent wandering around (which I guess gels with the theme). But I would have rather had a basic map. By the time you get to the last chapter though, the game is linear again. It was strange having it be linear, then more open, then linear.
To the point about it being open in the middle, the amount of time you spend in each area varies based on how many forlorn you care to save. Each area has a campfire, with a ghost, and the forlorn whom you rescue go sit around the campfire. The ghost will give you hints as to where the forlorn in the area are located. When you get enough (I think it was four), then you can request that the ghost open the path to the next area. Or, you can continue asking for hints to find all the forlorn (usually around eight). I liked this option to spend more time searching for forlorn and solving additional puzzles. In a couple areas, I found most of the forlorn, and in a couple I went straight to the next area once I had my required amount.
Overall, yes, cute, cozy, soothing. If you like this kind of thing, you'll probably enjoy this. It is nothing I needed to play, but it was nice.
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