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Its titular feature is the Trial of the Sword sidequest: a three-part series of combat-oriented challenges. Like the main game's Eventide Island, these challenges strip you of all items and equipment -- so, on top of needing to scavenge for weapons and food, enemy attacks deal a shit-ton of damage.
And, each of the three parts is a sequence of rooms where - if you die in the middle - you'll need to restart the whole sequence. Ugh.
The reward for finishing this quest is a powered-up Master Sword, ... when it wasn't already powered-up. Meaning, while it normally deals 30 damage and is increased to 60 against Guardians, this reward will have it deal 60 damage all the time. Which would be pretty cool except it can still break, so even with its "true" power, the Master Sword is no substitute for a stockpile of other good swords.
Given that, the real reward for this sidequest is the challenge of it, I guess. With no narrative motivation, and given the high penalty for death, I lost interest in that challenge pretty quickly.
Other than the Trial of the Sword, this DLC doesn't do anything particularly praiseworthy. There's a new teleportation rune, for setting your own fast-travel location, which is neat?
There are a few new chests scattered around the world, with throwback gear like a Majora's Mask helmet or Tingle's outfit. Following the riddles to these chests was kinda fun, but the equipment is weak and un-upgradeable; their only function seems to be cluttering up the inventory menu.
And there's a hard mode now. Sure, okay.
The Trials of the Sword quest, and the hard mode, might be meaningful for a player who really specifically enjoyed Breath of the Wild's combat, and got bored of farming Lynels. But that seems like a pretty small niche to me. Otherwise, I don't think anything in this DLC installment is worthwhile.
Better than: I don't have a good comparison, as I tend not to review story-less DLC. Not as good as: real downloadable content. At least The Master Trials isn't sold separately: it just comes as a "bonus" alongside The Champions' Ballad.
Progress: did the first part of Trial of the Sword, and collected the shiny armors.
Two years later, many parts of Breath of the Wild still ring familiar to me. It's a trade-off for how awe-inspiring and memorable my first playthrough was; a replay doesn't feel quite as "special."
But that's not to say the thrill is gone, as it was when I replayed BioShock Infinite or Majora's Mask. This iteration of Hyrule remains thoroughly majestic, bursting with wonder, plentiful with activity. So much of Breath of the Wild is just satisfying to participate in.
(The "endgame" stuff I whined about before is still fairly unsatisfying. But hey, I'm trying it this time, so it can't be all that bad ... right?)
One positive of this playthrough is that I'm appreciating the storytelling a bit more -- now that my expectations for it are low. The supporting cast is flat (granted I haven't worked up to The Champions' Ballad just yet), Link doesn't emote, Ganon is an amorphous blob, and Princess Zelda is annoying and kind of shitty. But! when you realize her personal plight, the shadow of self-disappointment that she wallows in, Zelda's shittiness becomes a little easier to relate to and her character can seem borderline convincing.
I think Zelda's backstory probably would have worked better if, contrary to being totally non-linear, some of Link's flashbacks were up-front with that perspective on the princess. ... but since the ending is lame anyway, lacking any sense of payoff for her, maybe it doesn't matter.
On that note, this time through the game has crystallized my thoughts on some parts of Breath of the Wild that could really be improved, and which I hope are improved for whatever comes next. Like, I'm okay with the breakable weapons and the limited weapon slots, but I'm disappointed that there isn't permanent access (like with the Sheikah Slate) to commodity functions like torch-lighting and food-cooking.
Holding a shield is a huge defensive advantage, both passively (lowering enemy damage) and actively (blocking attacks). Which is a dramatic disincentive against two-handed weapons. Link's jump-dodge just isn't good enough; I think two-handers also need a block/parry button.
And there needs to be some anti-rain ability. Rain takes away too many valuable gameplay tools - climbing, lighting a fire, seeing clearly - with no mitigation except to teleport away from it. Here's hoping for some kind of magic umbrella, or maybe even a reverse Song of Storms.
As for the Switch game's advantages over its Wii U version, without putting them side by side, it's hard for me to say if the display resolution, or level of detail, or frame rate are any better. Far-off objects are still indistinct; long gliding sessions still show plenty of pop-in; and busy areas like Kakariko Village or the Great Deku Tree still drop frames prodigiously.
But as before, the game experience is compelling enough that these shortcomings are easy to ignore.
In short, I think that on revisiting, I'd say yeah: Breath of the Wild is still the new "best Zelda."
Progress: Killed the evil shit again, 120 shrines, all the sidequests, bunches of Korok seeds, more equipment upgrades than were really useful.
I'm disappointed in Smash for Wii U, but not for good reasons. It isn't my kind of game -- but I don't think it was ever supposed to be.
[...]
The modes that I wanted are gone, and a lot of their replacements are ... inscrutable.
Above all, it was the lack of a single-player campaign (like Brawl's "Subspace Emissary" mode) that made the last Smash Bros. feel minimally applicable to my own tastes.
Which is fighting. A lot, a lot, of fighting. Twenty to thirty hours' worth. ... and that makes sense for a fighting game, but World of Light both lacks a sense of variety (as with Subspace Emissary's occasional platform-ey sections), and hammers on its singular note for far too long, severely wearing out its welcome.
World of Light isn't completely without charm, in some highly-themed sections like the Jungle Japes sub-map with a bunch of Kong-themed fights, or the sub-map that has you flying across a globe and HP-battling Street Fighter characters. The game is at its best when these sections keep the nostalgia flowing continuously.
But the overwhelming majority of fights feel phoned-in, by comparison. Like someone made a list of all the video game characters they could think of, and then mapped all the "Man Wearing a Coat" characters to Dr. Mario, all the "Athletic Woman" characters to Zero-Suit Samus, and just threw in a group of Yoshis when they ran out of ideas.
The difficulty pacing of the mode is also kind of a mess. Each fight has a numeric challenge score associated with it, and up to the very end, I was still encountering 1,000-level fights right before and right after 12,000-level fights. This slapdash, random-feeling arrangement of difficulties wasn't merely disorienting, it actively harmed my ability to learn how to play better!
And while I appreciated the first several fights that felt legitimately challenging, some of them were just absurd. At a certain point, taking on multiple simultaneous full-strength opponents crosses the line from "unfair" to "ridiculous." I'm not ashamed to say that I turned the difficulty setting down about halfway through the campaign.
Which sorta leads into a key feature of World of Light: the Spirits. (Hell, the mode is listed under "Spirits" in the main menu.) These collectible little doodads, all accompanied by the name and image of some random game character, increase your fighter's stats and give them special abilities to better-weather challenging fights. But that's not all!
There are hundreds of them. And many of them level-up.
Choosing the best spirits, and playing the minigames (and visiting the ... item shops) to increase their power, is a whole other game on its own. But not a good game. It's of the caliber you'd expect from a "clicker" or a "time management" mobile game: repetitive, shallow, and totally brain-dead. There's nothing fun about it.
Between those mind-numbing spirits and the seemingly never-ending amount of fights, World of Light gets real, real tedious. I could only just suffer through it to unlock all of Smash Ultimate's playable characters.
That roster of characters, and the stages they can fight on, are by a fair margin the most impressive that this franchise has ever seen -- not to mention the unbelievably huge soundtrack. It's intimidating how much fighting-game content is in Ultimate, and if I had an active group of friends to regularly battle, I would be beyond thrilled at the amount of stuff that this game could give us to play with.
As someone who likes unlocking things, and who wanted to see some surprising single-player gameplay, it's a "meh" at best. Much as I appreciate the nostalgia, it's no match for World of Light's tedium.
The Last Guardian doesn't feel like a game that took ten damn years to make. At least, not in the typical sense.
Titles stuck in development hell tend to come out as a scrambled mess of unrelated ideas, as a result of being left "in the oven" for so long; and often, after being rushed into a releasable state, end up unpolished and obtuse. But that's not the case here: The Last Guardian has a fairly-direct presentation, appropriately-spartan mechanics, and a focused theme. It's a lot like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus in those ways.
That's the problem. The Last Guardian is too much like the games that Fumito Ueda has been making for the last 20 years or so. And without Colossus's thrilling puzzle-parkour boss fights.
It might be fascinating, to observe the development of this auteur and his craft, if The Last Guardian played like a generational improvement (or... two generational improvements?) over his previous work. But it doesn't. I could offer the compliment that its dog-bird beast has some surprisingly-lifelike animations, and that's about it.
Otherwise, it plays a lot like one of today's Unreal Engine 4 "art games," but older. The controls haven't got much better since Colossus. The gameplay is flat, carried almost entirely by familiar and shallow environmental puzzle-solving. The environments look overly similar to those muddy-looking ruins we've seen so many times before. And the storytelling is vacant, in a way that may once have been mysterious, but is now just boring.
That's my net takeaway of what I saw in The Last Guardian: nothing it's doing is interesting. I've seen practically all of it before, and it's no longer novel or engaging. Maybe there's something good buried later in the game? ... but I wasn't motivated enough to stick around and find out.
What The Last Guardian showed me wasn't an advancement of Ueda-san's ideas, but a re-iteration of his old ones. In that context, spending two decades making the same game over and over again, it seems a little bit more like a typical development-hell production; one that should have been abandoned quite some time ago.
Netflix is a game platform, now. What a time to be alive.
Black Mirror is a fantastic and haunting series, with great production values and excellent writing -- but its most distinctive feature (like its spiritual predecessor, The Twilight Zone) is how it subverts the expectations of the sci-fi viewer, and challenges the assumptions - especially the optimistic, happy ones - normalized by its contemporaries.
Bandersnatch does that, too, but it also subverts the expectations of the adventure game player.
Narratively, and here be spoilers:
Bandersnatch isn't just about selecting a path through the story -- the choice-making mechanic is intrinsically part of the story, itself. The point at which Stefan starts to believe he's being "controlled" by an outside force felt like a BioShock twist moment to me; I'm absolutely tickled by how my agency was integrated into the story itself.
And like the best Black Mirror episodes, Bandersnatch revels in its misleads. Early choices set the story up as though your choices are trivial, or meaningless; and Stefan's realization supports the idea that you, the player, are "being played" by Bandersnatch's writers. This set-up makes the effects of later choices feel all-the-more dramatic.
The pair of "Netflix choice" endings felt a little overly silly, but I can't really disparage them for having some fun with themselves.
Mechanically, Bandersnatch has some room for improvement, but also gets some things surprisingly right. Specifically, regarding how you can find and view alternate paths/endings.
Con: There's no "save file" equivalent, so once you've reached the credits, Netflix can't tell you which endings you've seen and what choices you might want to re-attempt.
Pro: In many cases, before the credits, Bandersnatch does give you the opportunity to return to a pivotal moment and try something else. It uses smartly sped-up/re-cut footage to start the story over, and bring you quickly back to the moment of choice.
It ain't perfect, but Bandersnatch is wonderfully entertaining; it has real, meaningful interactive qualities; and it treats its Adventure game heritage with respect and awe. This is an all-around treat for the game aficionado.
Also, Jeff Minter is in it. (I did a double-take when I saw his name in the credits.)
Last January, I posted about eight oft-delayed games that had been sitting in my "upcoming" list for a number of years. And - much to my surprise - four of them finally managed to be released in 2018.
The results were ... let's say, "mixed."
My hopes for Chasm were low going in, but I was still disappointed with just how uncharismatic it was. An absent story, boring (procedural) level design, and flat combat mechanics left me with no reason to keep playing it.
CrossCode was, at least, extremely memorable. Some of its systems and ambitions were really cool, and the production values were surprisingly good -- I just hated how slow-paced and filler-stuffed the final package was, and how hostile the difficulty curve became.
Miraculously, Timespinner was actually good. I had a few gripes about its storytelling, and its Igavania inspirations were blatant, but the game was well-executed and I seriously enjoyed playing it.
As for the other four titles, they appear to still be plodding along.
A.N.N.E. released a backer-only demo in December, so maybe it'll actually make progress, this year.
Factorio's roadmap is pushing it at least through a good chunk of 2019, now.
And Indivisible is looking pretty good to release soon, ... but then again, Shaq Fu was saying that for like, two years.
On the subject of year-on-year disappointment -- let's look at the Glog stats from 2018!
2017's games-played count was pretty high, and I failed to reach that same bar in 2018. But, hey, not bad.
A lot of that 2017 count came from replays, including remasters. And even though one of each (Ōkami HD and Diablo III) carried over into 2018, I didn't end up replaying much, last year.
Reiterating my previous praise, Ōkami's HD facelift was gorgeous, and its beauty really helped overcome some of the game's more awkward components.
The Shadow of the Colossus remake didn't age quite as well, due to its sprawling yet barren world, but taking down colossi was still a blast -- especially at a stable framerate.
Red Faction: Guerrilla Re-Mars-tered has a brilliant name, but the game itself is suffering from the ravages of time. (The world needs a new drive-trucks-through-buildings game.)
Compared to all those, the high-def re-release of Vanquish felt like a misfire. It wasn't enough of a visual spectacle, compared to today's games, to distract from its sometimes-broken mechanics and its always-dumb story.
I'm kinda sad at what happened to Diablo III. People have told me that it's a fun game to come back to over and over, but the re-balancing they've done - to emphasize seasonal endgame grinding, I guess - turned it into a total bore, for me.
And Portal 2 is still good. Not as revolutionary as back in 2011, but Cave Johnson is a timeless treasure.
On to DLCs. My 2017 included a lot of them, largely thanks to Borderlands 2; 2018 was more tame, although still substantial.
I guess that Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales is considered a "Standalone Expansion" for the Gwent digital CCG. Thronebreaker was pretty great, albeit lacking the narrative heft of Geralt's own adventures.
Speaking of, the Witcher 3 expansions Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine were highlights of my year. I just ... can't effuse enough about Witcher 3. Though I will still do more effusing later in this post.
In 2017 I played games on seven different platforms, retiring my DS and Wii U. My platform activity in 2018 was less varied, covering only four, including the ever-predominant PC.
Paper Mario: Sticker Star was almost certainly the last thing my 3DS will ever see. Not a great send-off, unfortunately. But, the system overall had a pretty good run.
Speaking of Odyssey, it was one of fairly few games that I rated "Awesome" in 2017. In 2018, despite playing less games overall, more of them felt Awesome to me.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War, like its predecessor, wasn't revolutionary but was a shit-ton of orc-murderin' fun. Prey had some imperfections and annoyances, but blew me away with its mechanical depth and interactive world. Horizon Zero Dawn needed a better inventory system, but had plenty of thrilling combat, and an amazing story.
And God of War expertly immersed me in its rich mythos and charming characters. It's easy for me to see why this game won so many "best of 2018" awards.
But the best thing I played last year was definitely The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its aforementioned expansions. In addition to being a more acccessible, more exciting, and more stable iteration on Witcher 2, Wild Hunt achieved something that few games have: it made my story choices feel both meaningful, and interesting.
God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Witcher 3 all impressed me with incredibly well-built worlds and well-told stories. But where most choice-based games fall into a trap of making one option "correct," and the others narratively unfulfilling -- Geralt's story was rewarding throughout, regardless of how I played it.
So what's on the docket for 2019?
Well, if they actually make it this year, maybe those other four long-delayed games. I'm unsure about Rage 2, but it's starting to look like a more zany and fun take on Mad Max. And it's possible that Crackdown 3 will turn out okay.
If I'm smart enough, hopefully I can finish Alchemia. There's all that Switch stuff I mentioned, above. I've still got a deep, deep backlog, particularly in terms of PC RPGs. And it's been a while since I replayed Sleeping Dogs, The Saboteur, or Chrono Trigger (whose PC re-release has been calling out to me).
And, maybe if I get tired of waiting for the inevitable PC version, I'll consider picking up Red Dead Redemption 2.
Here's to a joyful and game-ful 2019!
Footnote: The first Glog post will turn fifteen years old this week. Wild, right?
A Criminal Past is both longer and more story-driven than System Rift was. But the execution of this DLC turns those could-be-positives into some slightly-negatives.
A Criminal Past is narratively framed as a story that Adam Jensen is telling to an Interpol psychologist, who is definitely a character from Mankind Divided that I've totally forgotten about. (A mark against the main game, for how un-memorable she was.) A "present-day" conversation between her and Adam introduces the mission as a flashback; and at some plot moments during this mission, the two will provide narrative voiceovers to recap the story so far.
While I admire the ambition of this storytelling technique, its implementation just isn't that good. The dialog between Delara and Jensen is generally dry and un-engaging. And, if Adam dies during the mission, Delara will cut in with a "That's not what happened, try to remember" line -- much like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time did, but in the serious and professional context of A Criminal Past's story, it sounds very out of place.
Writing for the mission's characters is similarly ambitious, but insufficient. Key characters tend to lean on a single defining personality trait: Flossy is a dealmaker, the Fixer is neurotic. Stenger, at least, shows some signs of character complexity as the story moves forward. But other characters are too one-note to be believable or interesting.
Partially as a result of these flat characters, the back half of A Criminal Past comes across as stretched-out.
The first half is pretty exciting: Jensen is dropped into a fortress-style prison, and must figure out how to move around freely without being shot at. Sure, it bears some resemblance to System Rift's bank vault, but the presence of other prisoners - especially when you're doing favors for them - and the architecture of the cell blocks and the outdoor "yard" area, have a very different feel. I liked developing a familiarity with the cell blocks' maps as I snuck between them to carry out errands.
Remember how I said that System Rift streamlined itself by giving you a bunch of Praxis Points to start? Well, A Criminal Past doesn't; you're reset back to a baseline Adam Jensen. But I actually liked that restriction, here, because it helps encourage mechanics that are thematically appropriate for a prison break. Like hiding from guard patrols, rather than always taking them out; and tracking down keycodes and computer passwords, instead of hacking them.
Unfortunately, the second half of A Criminal Past reverts to more familiar, rote scenarios. Largely, getting past guards in otherwise-empty office floors, with no objectives other than navigating from one end to the other. These later areas felt inappropriately sprawling, and while I typically like to methodically search a floor and collect everything in it, I skipped a few areas because I was ready for the game to be over.
At its worst, though, A Criminal Past is still "more Deus Ex." And at its best, in the initial prison-break scenario, it ticks all the same boxes that I enjoyed in System Rift.
Despite its pacing problem, this is another worthy excuse to dive back into Deus Ex.
Two years after I said that resetting talent points was "an instant turn-off" for DXMD's System Rift DLC, I've gotten over it. ... Well, I've also forgotten what most of those talents were, anyway.
Unlike the previous game's The Missing Link DLC, though, this one gives you a bunch of initial Praxis Points; so instead of starting out as a hobbled newbie, you get to build a moderately-powerful Adam Jenson from the beginning. I definitely appreciate how this streamlined the introduction.
And I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was for me to get back into my Deus Ex "groove" -- before I knew it, I was sneaking into the map's nooks and crannies, finding hidden paths around security checkpoints, incapacitating hostile guards, and obsessively hacking every terminal and laptop I could find. I guess it's a credit to the main game that my instincts came back so quickly.
After a few errands that set up the plot, the primary activity in System Rift is infiltrating a Palisade Blade installation (datacenter bank vault) for some cyber-espionage. And this stealth op ticked most of my favorite boxes from Mankind Divided itself: the aforementioned sneaking, hacking, et cetera. I had a lot of fun finding my way around the bank's defenses, and reading all of their employees' email.
On the flip side, this DLC is kinda short, and - though there are a couple optional objectives inside the bank - doesn't have any side missions or other significant secrets to uncover. While it does pack a meaningful amount of detail and choice into its single mission, it's still just a single mission. I found myself missing the open-ness of Mankind Divided's world map, a bit.
But, as a side-story to the main game, System Rift is pretty engaging and satisfying.
Last time, I praised Cypher's ability to make me feel like an idiot. Now that I've looked up some of the solutions online, I feel like adding an important clarification.
When I fail to solve a puzzle due to outlandish leaps of logic - like collating binary bits into groups of five?, or arranging planetary symbols by the lengths of their days - that doesn't make me feel dumb. It makes me feel ... nothing. Or at worst, like I'm playing Monkey Island 2.
Granted, there were some puzzles that I just hadn't applied myself hard enough to. But most of the ones I "missed" had solutions that I'd never, in a million years, have figured out on my own. And while I can respect the kind of "way outside the box" thinking that these puzzles were asking, that isn't something I look for in a solo game.
But I don't want to dwell on those puzzles too much. The first 45-50% of the game was a blast to solve using only in-game guidance -- and, in the case of the Vigenere ciphers, a web-app for automating the rotations. I felt really satisfied with this part of the game, and with Cypher's museum-like ambience along the way.
I'm still overall impressed, and excited for more from Matthew Brown. ... like Alchemia, I suppose.
Better than: Sethian Not as good as: given I can't think of a great comparison, Human Resource Machine Actually: I think the leaps-of-logic would have been more fun if this was a co-operative multiplayer activity. I wonder if a Jackbox-style mobile UI for note-sharing collaboration would work for this kind of game...
I'll confess that I didn't come into Paper Mario: Sticker Star with a very open mind. It's the last 3DS game in my backlog, and I really wanted to pack the system up before the end of the year.
That being said, the 30 minutes I spent with Sticker Star were enough for me. While I might not call it an outright "bad" game, it certainly didn't offer anything I'd call "good," either.
An interesting story? Nope. This narrative setup is less complicated than many of Mario's platform games. That is to say, in Sticker Star, an opening cinematic establishes - almost wordlessly - that Bowser interrupted a Mushroom Kingdom event, a magic macguffin split into six pieces, and Peach got herself kidnapped. So ... I guess it's time for Mario to do that thing, you know, the thing he always does. With the princess saving.
His only traveling companion is an annoying talking crown, who provides some gameplay tips a'la Navi the fairy. And since Mario himself remains mute (as is tradition), there isn't much in the way of dialog. NPCs have some light-hearted throwaway lines, but the humor feels underwhelmingly mild.
As far as I remember, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door had a surprisingly complicated plot. And while the story of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story wasn't very good, I respect that it at least existed. Sticker Star, in spite of its predecessors, clearly never intended to tell a story at all.
So does it make up for that with some thrilling combat mechanics? Eh... no. Its sticker-based combat is based on, well, your inventory of stickers. Mario doesn't have any default attacks, or abilities that he can learn by leveling up -- because there is no leveling up. Nor are there equipment slots, stat upgrades, or ... even character stats, really.
There are just the stickers, which you find in the world, or buy with coins; and which are consumed when you use them.
Your mileage may vary, but I found this combat system to be particularly shitty. That the stickers are consumable makes me worried about using them incorrectly, or running out of "good" ones; and the lack of permanent character upgrades makes me concerned that battles won't change very much as the game goes on.
Sticker Star does, at least, retain the Mario RPG mechanic of real-time button presses bolstering your offensive and defensive moves. (Even though the annoying talking crown didn't explain this. I guess it's a good thing I've played the previous games.)
But it's otherwise thrown out a significant portion - the storytelling, the combat depth, the character growth - of what made the Paper Mario games, and the Mario & Luigi games, compelling. What it replaces those elements with feels hollow and insubstantial.
The message I got from Sticker Star, loud and clear, is that it doesn't want to be an RPG. It would rather be an adventure game in the Mario universe, that happens to share a paper-cutout aesthetic with some other games that were RPGs. And that doesn't sound interesting to me.
As a tangent: what made me shut the game off, and formally retire my 3DS, was when I filled my sticker book by accident. I didn't even know it had a size limit - let alone one I could reach so quickly - and the sticker I tried to pick up just ... disappeared. (A precious, expendable sticker, gone forever, because I didn't realize that I'd be unable to carry it. Tragic.)
