I sat down and played a lot of WoW recently; felt I could write my time off as a business expense, if I wrote something about it. Because I happened to play both Shadowlands, Vanilla, and WotLK in a very short time-frame and I feel like I have something to say on it design-wise, which people might find interesting. Some notes on sandbox MMOs and private servers to boot.
Iâve gotten back into playing World of Warcraft, because of a recent conversation I had with someone playing the gameâs latest expansion â Dragonflight. This quickly spiralled into the familiar entrapment of me levelling yet another Human Paladin up to the level cap, gearing up for what is essentially the most recent tier of content and experiencing all that I had missed since over the course of roughly a week. My legitimate personal experience with the game extends from the beginning of Cataclysm, until somewhere around the release of Uldir in Battle for Azeroth. This for most people would be enough to discredit everything I have to say about the game, as I happen to have been around for what is universally agreed upon and is essentially numerically quantifiable as the downfall of World of Warcraft, missing those golden years from late Vanilla up to the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The other fragment of original sin, which I carry with me into this is that I am also of the vocal minority that liked Cataclysm and have only grown fonder of it as the years have passed.
Outside of my legitimate experience, however, I have over said decade, almost pathologically, revisited every expansion from Vanilla to Shadowlands on almost every private server with a respectable playerbase, including some that barely had people in them to drive the auction house. When it was current, I couldnât have possibly played during Vanilla WoW, as at the time, I would have been at the kindergarten, learning how to write with a crayon shoved up my nose. As such, the only way I could have played Vanilla WoW was at some point past its heyday. While not necessarily a unique position, it is an interesting one nonetheless.
While I do not have any strictly long term credentials that identify me as a hardcore WoW player, like a collective sum of achievement points, rare items, mounts, etc;Â I have raided through most of the raid tiers released for the game with tier-appropriate gear at least on Normal difficulty, acquired currently unobtainable items such as Corrupted Ashbringer, fished up a Sea Turtle, farmed Ashes in The Burning Crusade, got Glory of the Firelands Raider and Flametalon of Alysrazor on now essentially defunct Cataclysm servers. All this, essentially never on the same character, but always a character that is named the same, looks the same, plays the same â carbon copies of the same character in a lineage that spreads across a wild multiverse of every state World of Warcraft has ever been released in. I may not be the best at WoW, but I have put in a lot of time in WoW; enough so to where I imagine, I could pass as, if nothing else, a slightly above average player. Not casual enough to only ever fill the DPS ranks of LFR, but not hardcore enough to be in a guild pushing raids on Mythic.
I am by no means a âold WoWâ purist as this might suggest, although I do have an appreciation for Vanilla in terms of it, in 2004, containing, at its core, most of the fundamental mechanics of WoW, which over the years have essentially been immutable. The moment-to-moment experience of leaving Northshire Abbey, walking to Goldshire, picking up Fishing, First-Aid and Cooking, walking through the gates of Stormwind for the first time as the music swells, just to deliver a package and pick up Engineering and Mining from the Dwarven Quarters â itâs all essentially second nature to me after a decade or so of constant reiteration.
Iâd go as far as to say that those initial ten to fifteen levels, which railroad you through this arc of you just spawning into the world as a recruit, up to you entering your factionâs capital city, is essentially a vertical slice of what the next several hundred hours of the game are going to be â the one thing that has remained consistently true regardless of which expansion you are playing. Going from modern WoW back to Vanilla felt wholesome, in the sense of it essentially stripping away all that sense of rush that comes along with modern WoW, that baggage that came from years of game knowledge becoming not necessarily irrelevant, but just reduced in its scope.
Something I didnât realise I missed in modern WoW was the random mob drops of essentially âtrash itemsâ. Gray items currently are unanimously considered junk by most players - something you canât even equip or sell on the auction house, where at one point you might have found upgrades for you character or something more exciting if luck was on your side. This change in something as inconsequential as random trash, items that exist for the sole purpose of you getting some variety and not just looting raw gold, has devolved to the point of having addons automatically sell any item of that quality upon opening up a vendor, which essentially turns all of these items into âinconvenient goldâ.
The Fargodeep Mine is essentially the first part of the Elwynn Forest, where you can see this, that also happens to have all the trappings of World of Warcraft in one place. It has aggressive mobs, who will for the first time take the initiative on attacking you, meaning that hypothetically, if you are underprepared, you might lose out to attrition, going too deep and not being able to come out without dying at least once. In old WoW, kobolds just happen to drop mining and herbalism reagents, linen cloth, food items and other reagents, various qualities of gear from Poor to Uncommon, and there are also at least two chests with a high chance of uncommon gear â some upgrades, others vendor trash or auction-worthy. In essence, it is a microcosm that is essentially self-sustaining in those early journeyman levels of your class any profession. The mining nodes and kobold drops enable you to sustain and level up Mining, Blacksmithing, and Engineering. The uncommon item drops enable you to practice Enchanting. The linen allows you to level up Tailoring and First Aid. The random herb drops allow you to contribute in a small part to Alchemy. Herbalism, Skinning and Leatherworking do not directly benefit from Fargodeep Mine, but its surroundings, which you need to pass through on your way to the mine, hold the boars and herb gathering nodes for you to get started in those professions as well, if not even more convenient due to their proximity to Goldshire.
It ultimately becomes a place that will be sought after by more than one player, a cornucopia of resources that you can intentionally go out into the world and farm until youâve not only satisfied your own quota, but also those of others. I usually choose Engineering and Mining as my starting professions, which early on requires the murder of Kobolds for Linen Cloth, which is also required for, in my case, First-Aid, but is also required by others as a Tailoring reagent.
In later expansions, I have the vivid memory of making a lot of my gold by selling low-level crafting reagents, which I spent the time gathering as I was levelling, because I realised there was an underserviced niche, where the effort required by a player to go back to a zone, which may be a decade older than the latest tier of content is seen as inefficient by most people, who would prefer the convenience of just purchasing those reagents from the auction house. Me, deliberately making the inefficient decision to not rush through the ageing content in order to to reach max level as fast as possible, something often done by almost all seasoned players, who have ultimately experienced that content when it was relevant, but have since moved on, results in an economical niche to service what essentially amounts to someone going from level one to level fifty in a profession, which for me might be my afternoon collecting the ore and reagents out in the world, but for the client at the end of the line amounts to essentially a minute of staring at a progress bar, before those resources are never needed again.
Modern WoW eventually reached a point where resources such as Copper and Tin become an accidental by-product of the miniscule time spent by players in Elwynn Forest and Westfall, as their addons give them an optimised route, which ignores everything but the essentials in terms of experience points and nothing more.
Going through the same process in Vanilla on the other hand feels like you could be âthat guyâ. The guy who may not have reached level cap or participated in the latest tier of raiding content or reached Gladiator in PvP, but you are THE guy providing the entire server with these low-level reagents in bulk. You are âTHE guy who sells Copper and Tin, so that everyone else donât have toâ. And this service you provide to the rest of the realm is essentially you coming up with your own freelance profession, which might end up with you profiting more than if you were to engage in the oversupplied market for the latest tierâs reagents.
Copper and Tin are never required in any high-level crafting recipes and they become irrelevant essentially as soon as the experience points of the zone dry up. This essentially means that players never have a reason to go back to old zones, making everything but the latest hub city and its associated zones empty and lifeless. In Shadowlands at the end of the expansion, the only zones that actually had any players in them were Zereth Mortis and Oribos. The original four zones and The Maw were essentially made irrelevant within the same expansion. Only players who were levelling and a dedicated few madmen, who are willing to collect the various ores from those zones, who engage in the lucrative profession of âold content farmerâ are paid dividends for taking the time to gather one or all five of the different ores, so that some blacksmith across the realm can make some ingots for items that will already be inferior to common dungeon gear.
The delineation between what is levelling content and what is the current tier of content is not as clear cut as it is in modern WoW, since in Vanilla, those zones in Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor were essentially all there was to the world â i.e., the current tier was the whole world. Yes, there is a functional difference between being in Elwynn Forest â a level 1 to 10 zone, and Burning Steppes â a level 50 to 59 zone, but travelling from one to another for their unique reagents isnât as much of a physical and mental leap as going from farming Progenium Ore in Zereth Mortis, Shadowlands to farming Copper in Elwynn Forest, Vanilla, since youâre not just travelling from one zone to the next, youâre travelling back through roughly eighteen years of content.
What WoW has never really done is give you a good reason to go back to old zones, since the new content is always carved out into some new chunk of landmass, making the old zones irrelevant. Even during the Legion expansion, when the Paladin class hall was essentially put underneath an already existing zone - Lightâs Hope chapel, in the middle of Eastern Plaguelands - a zone that at the time was introduced six expansions ago and briefly refurbished three expansions ago. Yet its location was essentially irrelevant, as nothing in it or in the expansion required you to interact with anything outside of Lightâs Hope chapelâs basement. You canât even hypothesise how players riding or flying there was somehow passively giving old zones new relevance, since most players just teleported there from the latest hub city and teleported back in a much similar fashion.
World of Warcraft isnât actually a persistent world anymore; probably never has been. Iâm more of the opinion that these roleplaying mechanics, statistics and everything alongside them was pure happenstance. It is spottily documented that The Burning Crusade expansion was essentially in development as Vanilla WoW was coming out. Fundamentally, the design from WoWâs inception was to abandon the existing zones in Azeroth and go to Outland. These abandonment issues were for all intents and purposes, planned from the very start.
I could go on, fantasising about how it could be a different game where these more sandbox elements were the at the forefront, where new expansions would not only introduce new zones, but refine and more importantly redefine the purpose of the existing zones for the current state of the game. These arenât necessarily new observations either, as âtheme parkâ MMO has been essentially synonymous with World of Warcraft, as where this exact concept of a âsandboxâ MMO has been realised in other games like Runescape, EVE Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Black Desert Online.
Does this mean that I donât enjoy WoW as it currently is? No, certainly not. There is however a sort of disappointment, which only ever seems to deepen as old and new get farther apart. I think it would be comical of me to suggest that Cataclysm is essentially the golden middle point between the old and the new, but I think it is at least something like that. The reason why so many players yearn to re-experience the good old days and why so many private servers have popped up over the years for essentially every expansion ever released, is because everyone has their own idea of where that golden middle is. Whatâs really important, I believe, is that the player has the choice to engage in that, if they so wish and I think that it is commendable that World of Warcraft is seeing some of that in the Classic re-releases.
I am however aware that as we get farther away from the days of Ultima Online, Everquest, and I suppose MUDs, the more prohibitive it will be for newer and younger players to experience that type of game, or at the very least â see the appeal in it.
Ultimately it is the players acting against that core design philosophy of always moving forward, that breeds the disappointment and the nostalgia that people have about old WoW. Itâs not just mechanics or raid difficulty, itâs people starting to feel themselves and their values left behind by the times. I think itâs essentially foolish to think that WoW shouldnât move forward, but I can also understand the desire for the old content to also be cared for in some way, instead of just being irrelevant and left to gather dust.
If a friend were to come up to you and express the desire to play WoW, would you immediately hand them the .wtf file set to the realmlist of a server running your favourite expansion, or would you hesitate and let them play the latest one and let them find out for themselves? Ultimately nowadays the question is starting to shift from âDo you want to play WoW?â to âWhen do you want to play WoW?â. The answer will likely continue to be either 2004, 2008 or the current year, regardless. And despite this natural design of retiring old content and moving on to greener pastures with every new expansion and everyone rushing through the old zones to get to the new, going back is ironically all that players seemingly want to do.
Finally sat down yesterday to watch Wes Andersonâs most recent film - The French Dispatch. Unlike his previous films, this one went for a more segmented short-story format, which interacts with something like an overarching narrative, but it still retains that fundamental diorama-esque essence; perhaps even in its most refined form to date.
The first story â that of the imprisoned artist, was perhaps the strongest of the three both visually and narratively. I am not entirely sure of that, however, since it might just be the fact that it is the first in line and I, as the viewer, was still energetic and open to new ideas, as opposed to towards the end of the feature. I will say, that this is the first time I can recall of Wes Anderson using black and white cinematography to such an effect, perhaps ever. It takes cues from the cinematography of The Grand Budapest Hotel, as in the 4:3 ratio and the shot composition more than the other stories and builds a strong relationship between the spaces in which it is told, despite being limited to roughly less than ten sets total. The character dynamics move in-between avarice, exploitation, placidity, and playful eroticism - all done very tastefully, as one might expect. It is used in the artistic sense, which only enhances the unrequited romantics in showing that the dynamic between the muse and the artist she poses for is entirely founded in the genuine belief that his talent is worth it. As a result, the typical image of the tortured artist is shaped into something of a parody of the way they are usually romanticised in film, such as commonly the case with adaptations of, for instance, the life of Van Gogh.
The second story â that of the student revolution, was conversely probably the weakest and the most forgettable of the bunch, as I feel it tried to emulate a sense of delinquency, but couldnât really encapsulate it to a satisfying effect. The romanticism of it also felt forced and sometimes even garish. The reasons for the overarching conflict become a bit muddled by the mid-way point, while the small internal conflicts are presented as both fragments of misguided youth and misunderstood philosophical musings. This story is also the only one to not nail the landing, as the world which they inhabit remaining unchanged, due to events which essentially happen off-screen and are narrated to the viewer as the resolution. TimothĂŠe Chalamet and Lyna Khoudri give perhaps the least compelling performances in the entire film, despite what feels like them aesthetically embodying their characters, though I cannot make up my mind whether that is due to the material or down to the actors. Khoudriâs dialogue was mostly in French, but didnât elicit the same sensation as when LĂŠa Seydoux did the same just a story earlier and everything that came out of Chalametâs mouth seemed to fall flat regardless.
The third story â that of the cook, was surprisingly brilliant and emotionally poignant. It is not as visually tight as the first story, but the context of its narrative is probably the best written out of all of them. I had expected things to lull after the disappointing second act, but the third managed to raise the bar yet again. It even features a short animation sequence towards its tail-end, which comes a bit out of left field, but is pleasantly campy with all the subtle humour that entails. The narration also enhances the experience of this story within a story within a story, and adds to the more noire sensibilities, which the story is somewhat anecdotally trying to emulate. The epilogue that calls back to the overarching narrative of The French Dispatch ends up being the cherry on top, revealing a fragment originally omitted from the story itself. This is the story however that probably features the most characters by far, and most of them are shown and tossed aside with a reckless abandon, which I couldnât help but resent. However, the contrast between what the story is supposed to be about and the diametrically opposed vision the in-universe author has for it, results in a very memorable pulp sensibility, which carries the story from start to finish.
In regards to the film as a whole, I donât feel compelled to mention any noteworthy performances, as you might imagine everyone involved, be they part of Andersonâs usual cast or newly introduced, did a fantastic job with the material, and most even appeared more artistically flexible, due to what I imagine is Andersonâs direction. I did, however, feel like some of the more capable actors were underused or appeared in an extremely limited number of scenes. Willem Dafoe for instance gets about two lines across a total of three scenes, before being silent and absent for the rest of the third storyâs runtime, despite what you would otherwise imagine being an important character towards explaining the inciting events of that narrative. The same goes for Edward Norton, Frances McDormand, Christoph Waltz, and even Bill Murray, who admittedly had a more titular role and dialogue to fit that role, which ended up being genuinely memorable, but nonetheless felt like he was present for just under thirty seconds of the filmâs runtime.
Sound-wise the film is very theatrical in its soundscape. Genre-wise, I could describe it as something very vintage in the jazzier, americana (or the appropriate French equivalent) way. The soundtrack is unobtrusive, but oddly most noticeable in the second story, perhaps due to the involvement of a pirate radio station and a more urban, youthful sensibility. Other than that, from what I could notice, featuring only one licensed track, the soundtrack functions as more of an accompanying score which as a whole plays second fiddle to the visual set-pieces. I wish I could say more about it, but I lack the vocabulary to do so adequately, so this will have to suffice.
Overall, I felt satisfied with my viewing. The format doesnât necessarily lend itself to general statements as to its quality, since it more closely resembles something akin to arthouse roadshow cinema, however I still believe that it was a pleasant, if a bit disjointed experience. There are lots of quirky, campy, highly quotable moments, which offer the same wholesomeness that most have come to expect from Andersonâs works. The French Dispatch doesnât necessarily break new ground, but it does feel like a more thematically mature Wes Anderson film, which I believe is novel enough to justify recommending seeing it for yourself.
A visually impressive, but utterly mired experience, which nails the start and finish, leaving everything in the middle up misguided western game design trends, trying to emulate thirteenth century Japan.
The following is a rather stream of consciousness affair, which might not have resulted in an entirely cohesive text. I employed an experimental technique over the several days of writing, which may have resulted in a sub-standard experience for the reader, but for the most part it covers all the remarks I wanted to make. If it turns out that it is too Joycean, my next text will adapt accordingly.
In a GDC presentation, Chris Zimmerman from Sucker Punch Productions stated that âIf you can just hack and slash your way through melee encounters without fighting dirty, the story [of Ghost of Tsushima] falls apartâ. At several times throughout the presentation, there is a noted emphasis on preserving what they call âthe samurai fantasyâ in an attempt to foster immersive gameplay and an overall grounded journey back into thirteenth century Japan.
The general sentiment Zimmerman tries to get across is that Jin (the main character) is supposed to be outnumbered and overwhelmed by the Mongolâs strength and is forced into bending the rules of bushido in order to survive.
Jin adopts backhanded assassination techniques, as well as different tools and gadgets, more commonly associated with the western interpretation of ninjas. The game spends a lot of time on NPCs saying how much Jin has changed, describing how he fights âwithout honourâ or âlike a demonâ. It is no coincidence that the first and closest mission at the very start of the game requires you to stab someone in the back in order to progress, as trying to uphold your honour would render some later criticism from an NPC completely moot. Because of this, the developers felt pressured to have you perform at least one forced kill. Even if you completely disregard the tools and techniques, which are seen as dishonourable, for the rest of the game NPCs will talk of how guards are found stabbed in the back, all recognisably your handywork.
The game even goes as far as having forced stealth sections, where trying to charge in for a face-to-face battle instantly fails the quest, under the pretence that your allies caution you that the number of enemies is too high to confront directly, despite Jin slaughtering multiple garrisonsâ worth of enemies and liberating entire villages from Mongol rule on his own several times in the open world.
Some of these occupied settlements are too important for the story, for them to allow you to liberate them at your own pace, so invisible instant-kill archers are installed around their perimeters, as well as infinite enemy spawners, until you reach the point in the story where it is convenient for them to turn those off and reveal that the numbers were not anything more than you have grown accustomed to, other than you are no longer sequence breaking from the gameâs intended story beats.
On the other hand, there was an attempt at creating a feeling of tangible progression, as one mastered the combat though both the in-game unlocks and purely physical dexterity through exposure to the gameâs combat mechanics.
The main questions, I would like to put forward are: What if you donât feel overwhelmed or outnumbered? What if you never feel like you are too week or unskilled to tackle the challenges before you? What if you never feel pushed hard enough to abandon bushido?
As Zimmerman puts it, the answer is: âthe story falls apartâ.
At the start of the game, it was common for me to struggle with some of the systems I didnât fully understand at the time, as can be expected. But as time went on, it became increasingly hard for the enemy to land a scratch on me, as my own skill and knowledge of the game had grown, much like the progression system is designed to provide.
There was also a noted emphasis on perfect execution resulting in perfect results, which is to say that the game is designed to have a certain emphasis on player skill, where no matter how many enemies you are facing, if you make the right decisions with the correct timing, you will not get hit and deliver lethal blow after lethal blow.
Eventually this leads to common fodder enemies not providing much of a challenge, regardless of size or number. The only situation in which one gets ostensibly blindsided by the enemy is the first time they meet a new type of move, which they couldnât possibly see coming. However, once that move is registered, the player can essentially continue mowing down ever-increasing amounts of enemies with no threat.
Doubly so with the introduction of different stances, which counter a specific enemy type each. Initially the player struggles versus certain enemies, while restricted to the started move-set, which is focused on predominantly dealing with sword-wielding enemies. Shielded enemies or ones with polearms, or brutes require special attention, since they cannot be dispatched as easily and have the potential of dealing a lot of damage if they land their attacks. However, once the stances countering these enemy types are unlocked, the challenge and thrill of encountering them dissipates entirely, as now the only thing one needs to do is open the stance menu, which itself has glaring problems weâll discuss shortly; having a good look at what weapon they are wielding, choosing the stance that counters that enemy type, then essentially stun-locking them into submission as they recoil from stagger after stagger.
The glaring issue with the stance menu is that, for some reason there was the decision to make it slow down time when it is open during combat. This allows the player to essentially dodge every attack, perfectly parry every hit and counter every enemy the game throws at you, as the slowdown gives you more time to react with no consequence outside of you ruining your own experience by turning the game into a borderline turn-based affair. The slowdown is enough to where you can switch stances every time the animation of you killing an enemy plays, allowing you to move between different enemy types with little to no resistance. This ruins the flow of combat, as the constant speeding up and slowing down of time clashes with the hit-stop of the animations and the finishers start looking worse and worse as you get better and better at combat.
This begs the question whether or not there was potential for Ghost of Tsushima to have more fixed set of combat mechanics, rather than the rather wide assortment of tools one acquires throughout the game. By fixed, I mean something more akin to a fighting game, ala Street Fighter or Guilty Gear. That is to say, an alternative combat system where Jin doesnât acquire as many or any new skills throughout the game, but rather the player learns how to better utilise their existing skills with time and practice.
In order to facilitate that customisation, the game uses various armours. Most armours in the game are absolutely terrible, if you are looking to focus on a specific mechanic.
Armour loadouts allow you to assign your selection of vanity items and charms to each armour, so that swapping them quickly is not too much of a hassle. The existence of the loadout system implies that there is the intention for you to swap your gear depending on the activity. Archery-focused missions benefit from one set, sneaking missions from another set, while general combat has pieces of it strewn around several sets, to the point where each one will likely only have two out of three beneficial stats to your desired playstyle. What the developers considered intended playstyles is encapsulated by the bonuses that you get from armours and serves as more of a limiting factor to what the player is able to do build-wise rather than open up possibilities for player choice.
Imagine an alternative system where similar to charms the player can upgrade armours but chose to swap the bonuses on them for something that more closely fits their desired playstyle, instead of purely numerical upgrades.
I would like to mention that there seemed to be an aversion to actually revealing concrete numbers with the player, as I struggled to figure out whether they intended for âMajor damage increaseâ and âMassive damage increaseâ to be easily comparable to one another. This is obviously some quirky western game-design trend where obfuscating the actual numbers is seen as making the game more accessible and less prone to being turned into a spreadsheet simulator. Saying âMajor damage increaseâ and âMassive damage increaseâ instead of â10% damage increaseâ and â15% damage increaseâ feels overdesigned and unnecessary.
Zimmerman also talks of the cognitive load placed on players, who have to not only juggle melee combat versus four different enemy times, each with several versions with increasing difficulty, but also choose and use the appropriate ghost tools.
At the same time there are several sub-menus for each ranged weapon, each throwable weapon, each ghost tool, which all require a different hold on the controller, which more often than not led me to accidentally throwing out ghost tools, accidentally drawing my bow, or failing to block and attack as I fumbled with sub-menus trying to get the exact tool I need out. More often than not, this led me to essentially ignoring everything but the stance menu, unless I was specifically required to by the mission.
Using ranged weaponry as the enemies are close is usually a bad move, so that half of the possibility space vanishes once an enemy is within a certain range for all intents and purposes. This also eliminates thrown weapons as well. This ultimately leads you to only using sticky bombs, kunai, and smoke bombs as ghost tools in combat. Kunai allow you to stagger an enemy or finish them off from a distance, but this is almost never useful, considering that flowing from enemy to enemy is usually always a stagger and always a kill, thanks to the stances and the slowdown from their menu. Smoke bombs allow you to temporarily be able to assassinate enemies for an instant kill or heal slightly with certain upgrades, something which again feels redundant when using stances, as you never get hit and generate more Resolve, which you can use to heal more. Sticky bombs are perhaps the most functionally unique, as they are essentially your only area-of-effect tool, which is capable of dispatching several enemies at the same time.
However, enemies usually follow the hidden principle of 3D action games, where if the camera is facing away from them, they will patiently not attack and try to nudge themselves back into frame, so that they can strike without you feeling like they are attacking off-screen. This essentially gives the player control over how difficult an encounter is, reducing a hoard of, say, twelve Mongols to groups of two at a time, which is a lot more manageable.
This is my very long-winded way to say that there is an identity crisis present in almost every single choice this game makes, design-wise. I honestly wish that this was limited to just the gameplay or mechanical side of things, but it further extends to the story itself.
The story always moves goalposts. Every single beat of the narrative ends with the person or the thing that is being looked for, shifting across the island into a new and unexplored zone as an obvious incentive for you to go and explore those zones. This would be fine, if it didnât happen literally every single time a quest finishes; and some quest chains are upwards of nine quests long, of which there are multiples of per act. This essentially means that from start to almost finish, you will be running around ceaselessly, only accomplishing two to three actual tangible things, in order to progress the narrative, before youâre at the point where youâre already challenging the final boss. Side quests also follow this pattern, making sure that there is not escape from the perpetual carrot on a stick that makes sure you wonât miss any content as a player, because god forbid you donât experience everything on offer, and most importantly experience it in the intended order.
I make emphasis of order, because there is no room for freedom of choice or exploration - as I mentioned earlier, some parts of the map are protected by a mystical squad of invisible Mongol archers, who will slaughter you with a volley of arrows, originating from somewhere beyond the edge of your screen, if you dare to get close enough to a point on the map, which was deemed plot-critical for any reason. This is supposedly signposted to you with a UI element, which says something akin to: âThere are overwhelming forces in this regionâ, which is the developerâs intended way to diegetically warn the player to fuck off or die. However, you might remember from a couple of paragraphs ago that âoverwhelming forcesâ is generally, and by design, a staple of every single combat encounter in this game. I donât believe it is too unrealistic to say that one might easily mistake âoverwhelming forcesâ for a welcome challenge.
I say welcome, because as I mentioned, eventually combat optimises the fun out of itself. That is up until the tail-end of Act 3, where suddenly there is an encounter every two steps, featuring heavily armoured Mongols, who attack in sequences of three attacks, which might all be unblockable, or recover faster than the dodge, which you use to avoid them. Needless to say, it was a shock to my system, which had become so used to not having to worry about anything for the roughly twenty hours, which it had taken to get up to that point. It is essentially the only time the game gets close to the mechanical density and involved decision-making of the early-game.
As you travel around the various settlements around Tsushima, youâll eventually start noticing or be guided towards a peculiar icon near their outskirts â the Legends storyteller. He, or perhaps they are a set of NPCs, who ceaselessly ramble to themselves about various fantastical encounters and battles between warriors and demons from myth and legend. Ghost of Tsushima, by design, is grounded in realism, so encountering and listening to these NPCs, I imagine, piques the interest of most players, simply due to the inherent juxtaposition between what the storyteller promises and what the experience has been so far, outside of the few mythic side-tales which, as the name suggests, involve more mythical, yet still grounded elements, often initiated by conversing with what is often a distressed musician, who later tells you of some folk myth of the island, which just so happens to be a real set of armour or technique. However, I also imagine that most players are disappointed to find out that the Legends storyteller is nothing like those tales, but is rather a haphazardly placed prompt, which only serves the purpose of taking the player out of the game and into the alternate co-op gamemode, which is largely inoperable without a PlayStation Plus subscription. Some people might not mind, but I personally found it jarring how there was this largely useless and fundamentally separate element of the gameâs package, which is given so much attention by having its own unique NPC, which is marked on the map for every settlement they appear in (something which even more important NPCs like blacksmiths or armourers donât get), and are fully voiced with several very long-winded stories, which can be heard from a decent distance, again drawing attention to itself. It is essentially begging you to suspend your playthrough and give it a try, because I assume there was a lot of time and effort put into its development, despite it obviously being the shoe-in multiplayer component for a linear cinematic experience (ala the multiplayer for The Last of Us or Uncharted) and the scope for such an addon would have been relatively small in comparison to the main story experience in terms of budget and development time. There are buttons on the main menu and even the pause menu, which will lead you to the game mode at any point in the game, if you so wish, which makes the necessity for such an NPC questionable. It would be understandable if this was introduced post-launch into the base game, back when it released, but the Directorâs Cut version of the game still has them dotted around the map, as if this was the intended diegetic implementation for what is essentially a menu option.
Another massive immersion-breaking moment is pretty much every time you meet a new nameless villager in need of help. Despite being cloaked in all manner of face-covering masks, straw hats, and scarves you are immediately recognised as Lord Sakai, who for the most part of the story is to be presumed dead by the general populace. The only tangible way for someone being able to recognise him is by the mon on his heirloom swordâs hilt, a small and easily concealable emblem, which identifies him as a member of clan Sakai. This would be all well and good, however there are also tens of collectable vanity sword designs, none of which feature the crest â only the default sword. This even undermines the moment when Jin adorns the moniker of âGhostâ, which is presented as him attaining a somewhat mythical status in order to strike fear into the hearts of the Mongol invaders. The gameâs whole progression system is built on the premise that you are creating your own legend, as various new titles are awarded as you earn technique points. However, despite all of the mystery and obfuscation, the persona of a vengeful spirit is immediately dismissed by even the lowliest of peasant in even the remotest parts of the isle - everyone clearly knows that you are Lord Sakai the instant they lay eyes on you.
A visually picturesque game, which rarely manages to emulate the idealised Kurosawa-esque source, from which it heavily draws inspiration from. The game's story essentially moves goalposts for twenty to forty hours, until it reaches a surprisingly beautiful ending, which ultimately feels disconnected from the rest of the experience. The story also rejects the player's agency and actively takes turns in macabre directions, so that the story does not fall apart. Trying to uphold bushido only leads to disappointment and is clearly not intended as a playstyle. Combat is initially challenging and requires quick thinking and fast reactions in order to succeed with the limited tools available, leading to interesting strategies and skilful and stylish play, but later becomes increasingly bloated and over-simplistic as upgrades remove everything challenging and interesting about it. Trying to immerse oneself into the world requires extra effort on the part of the player, as the tools and interactions to do so are more often than not absent or hidden so deep, one could easily miss certain serene moments. It does however provide a decent amount of iconic cosmetic items from Japanese cinema for you to play dress-up with. The absence of lip-sync for the Japanese audio on the PS4 doesn't do the game any favours either. Ghost of Tsushima unfortunately subscribes to a lot of western game design trends that actively go against the developer-intended experience, resulting in a graphically impressive, but average open-world game. If you're not looking for something too involved or deep, this will satisfy your needs. If you are looking for a more immersive and thoughtful experience - look elsewhere.
Iâm going to be upfront about it - you should just go and bloody watch it. This is especially true, if you have no attachment to League of Legends or anything else produced by Riot Games. Take it on blind faith that it is good. If you are not convinced, perhaps what I will say later on will convince you, but I honestly believe that Arcane is worth oneâs time and that it is worth watching, regardless of the company behind it and the franchise it is based on.
The unbelievable success of Arcane only serves to prove my long-standing theory that the talent, employed at Riot Games, is being wasted on League of Legends. That may initially sound counter-intuitive, considering that Arcane itself exists solely due to the wild success of the video game. However, even a decade ago, the definite outliers in their production were the small acts of creativity: music videos, artwork showcases, lore articles; not really the game itself. Leagueâs characters and world have always had appeal, even if the game could never really boast the same. Nowadays, Riotâs art department seems to be more interested in producing copious amounts of JPEGs of very coquettish men and women, looking particularly tantalising in skimpy clothing. This will generally sell very well, as for most that would be sufficient for character development, even if it is very Freudian. However, I was someone who stopped playing and paying attention around 2015, which coincidentally was around when they stopped giving characters any lore entries whatsoever and decided to either completely strip all of that depth out or unsuccessfully attempt to rewrite existing entries. Hearsay suggests that it was mainly due to a lack of interest on the communityâs part and some say âto avoid creative stagnationâ. Since then, the lore has been rewritten by writers and not the characterâs designers, for better or worse.
The culmination of this rewrite can be seen in Arcane â a standalone show, based on the new lore, not the old. It borrows creatively from the old and the new, expanding on what was previously there with a modern sensibility. When talking among some old and concurrent players, most expressed a distaste for the direction the show seemed to take. The general consensus was that they were attempting to inject an ample amount of melodrama, which reduced previously exciting characters down to something out of a young-adult romance novel. Some even questioned why these characters should be the focus and not a more fundamental part of Leagueâs lore, which hasnât really been explored up to this point. I tended to disagree and was surprisingly open to the new direction. Nothing was too jarring for me to be unable to suspend my disbelief and I honestly believe that Arcane works as a film regardless of your familiarity with the source material.
What is calming, is that the show seemed to be written with people who have no interest or experience with the game in mind. There are references, nods and subtle details to external lore for the veterans, paying attention, but done in a way where it doesnât diminish from the experience if you miss them. If anything, it only makes the experience richer if you donât. Sometimes only the mention of a name would hint what said character will eventually come to be, which I honestly believe resulted in some of the most interesting juxtapositions in the showâs narrative. It presents a lot of different origin stories in its three arcs and does a decent enough job of tying them all together into one relatively cohesive narrative. I say relatively and decent, since some connections are honestly a bit of a stretch. The interconnectedness of the plot attempts to put characters together, even if it is for a scene or two, just to ensure that that visual makes it in, but it goes out of its way for some that makes very little sense in the larger scheme of things.
What is also praiseworthy in my opinion is the seriesâ release schedule â three episodes, once a week, for three weeks. Living in the modern age of television implies that binge-watching is a definite option for almost any newly released show. Releasing only three episodes per week for a total of nine gives you roughly three hours per viewing, wrapped neatly in a pseudo-three-act structure that gets you excited for next weekâs release. The larger three-act structure of the show itself also allows for natural time-skips to occur in the week in-between releases, which really sells the passage of time, especially between the first and second act. Arcane is the first show that really had me hooked on its cliff-hangers in a long while.
This is in part due to the showâs writing, which can be somewhat predictable, but for the most part offers a plethora of new and old characters, each with enough screen time to go through their own little character arc, which tackles existential or ideological questions in a relatively mature way, coated with a several thick layers of melancholy. I think there is enough there for someone to find a character they can relate with on at least some level, despite the inherently fantastical setting. And most people who watched the show clearly have, as my personal Twitter has been flooded with all manner of fantastic fan art â some pieces spicier than others â some brilliantly funny â some genuinely tear-jerking. If I were responsible for bringing these characters to life, Iâd say that would be a sign of a major success.
Another appeal this show has and a big part of why its characters are so likeable is its sensational visuals. I have only ever heard rumours as to the budget, but whatever it was, it must be such an unfathomably enormous sum. The visual fidelity has in and of itself set a new par for animation, in the same way that Akira and Redline had done years prior. The line between 2D and 3D assets is blurred and drawn over so many times with such an eye for stylistic integrity, that I can only admire it. Seeing online discussion from more experienced artists and animators is usually one of shock and awe at the complexity and detail of almost every scene. I was not familiar with the animation studio behind the show â a French studio called Fortiche Production, but they truly deserve a round of applause for their work. Arcane is a feast for the eyes.
The showâs soundtrack is particularly noteworthy in some aspects as well. Due to my distaste for licensed music and vocal tracks, I canât particularly comment on the showâs main theme, which sounded annoyingly popish and juvenile. The same goes for the tracks Playground and Goodbye, which seem to be popular with viewers, but seemed too distracting and out of place for my taste. The score by Alex Seaver and Alexander Temple is subtle and makes use of a lot of leitmotifs to draw parallels between the different acts, making some scenes particularly resonant. Iâve never been particularly adept at talking about what makes a score good, but this one is just really nice and doesnât drone on like anything Hanz Zimmer would make for a big-budget Hollywood schlock film. Itâs quiet and cinematic, and knows exactly when to go loud.
Two tracks, which caught me off guard, however, were Dirty Little Animals and Snakes. Like, FUCK if I am not cranking those. The only good tracks were saved for two of the most bombastic scenes in the entire series and they all centre around the character Vi, which in those scenes absolutely stands for Violence, not Violet. Snakes by MIYAVI and PVRIS is this absolute banger of a fight-scene anthem that just cracks ribs and knocks skulls in for three straight minutes, synched up beat for beat with every punch thrown on screen. Unfortunately, Dirty Little Animals by BONES UK is left as a credits theme for one of the episodes, but is equally aggro in all the good ways, sending a particularly potent message, that these arenât the same fragile and powerless characters from just a week ago. Both tracks are what I like to call âpunch people musicâ â high BPM, pumping bass, echoey vocals, distorted guitars, all cut to shreds into borderline noise â tracks that make you feel like you can lift heavier weights and kill a motherfucker. Absolutely brilliant.
All of these disparate elements just fucking work. This is unusual for anything that has been adapted from anything even remotely connected to a video game. Arcane just pulls it off with so much style and so much substance that it stands alone atop a mountain of poorly adapted corpses. Considering the advertising budget that is being thrown around, even they know that theyâve struck gold and how impressive their feat actually is. They should be commended for it and they should be stimulated to do more of the same, rather than contributing their talent to a decaying decade-old video game. The characters and world of League of Legends work, the game itself doesnât. More of this â less of that. People will be talking about this show, even when League is dead, buried and forgotten by time. Leagueâs name will perhaps even be seen as a blemish on an otherwise pristine show. Makes it that much better, knowing that thereâs another season already greenlit, coming in the next couple of years, which, Iâll admit, Iâm already avidly looking forward to.
Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 - Thrice Upon a Time (2021) - A Finale so Blissful, yet Flawed, It Might as Well Be Symbolism
The long wait is over. The last of the Evangelion films ties up the series after nearly two decades with equal amounts of spectacle, nostalgia, misery and maturity.
Plot spoilers for Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and The End of Evangelion, as well as minor structural spoilers for 3.0+1.01.
Watching this, I came to understand that the rebuild series is apparently not just a theatrical cut of the original series from â95. I will be completely honest with you, I just went straight to 3.0 after watching through 1.0 unimpressed, which might explain why Iâm of the few who actually like 3.0. I discarded the thought of 1.0 as merely a redraw and a recut of the original series to fit within the confines of a feature-length film. In my mind 3.0 was the continuation of Evangelion post Death and Rebirth and End of Evangelion. I believed that it was this drab, miserable, post-apocalyptic world that formed after Shinji reversed instrumentality.
Perhaps in an indirect way, I truly did watch Evangelion: 3.0+1.01. Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo and Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone were my only point of reference before seeing Evangelion: 3.0+1.01: Thrice Upon a Time, outside of Anno's original run.. I honestly feel like I accidentally stumbled my way into an extremely cursed watch order.
When Asuka appeared at the start of 3.0 with a repaired plug-suit and a missing eye, I believed it was a natural progression from her damaged plug-suit at the end of End of Evangelion. Her change in attitude towards Shinji was also in my mind the natural progression from her saying âKimochi waruiâŚâ (âHow disgusting...â) at the end of End of Evangelion.
The lapse in time seemed like a stylistic choice, rather than the consequence of me literally missing out on an entirely new continuity. Perhaps misguided, I loved the new questions that arose from this clash: Why was EVA-01 there? Why did it need saving? Does everyone hate Shinji because of his selfish decision in End of Evangelion? What happened in those fourteen years?
In fact, You Can (Not) Redo arose so many questions that it felt like it was building up to an eventual grand reveal in 3.0+1.01, which I eagerly awaited for nearly a decade.
So, there I was, finally able to see it on the 13th of August, 2021. I watched as the misery of 3.0âs ending was slowly washed away during the first part of 3.0+1.01, giving us perspective as to what exactly has happened in those fourteen years of absence after Near Third Impact, which I assumed was called that way, because it was eventually reversed in End of Evangelion. I got to see characters that I hadnât really thought about in a decade, all grown up with families and almost entirely new lives. WILLE wasnât batshit crazy nor had they done a complete heel turn, as they had found a way to forge a new path through the remnants of the decaying world, be it step by step. It almost looked hopeful.
A lot of people will probably find the first half of the film to be slow, boring, and treading old ground, but for me it was the answer to some of the questions I had piled up for over nine years.
The second half is where I started to become slightly disenchanted with 3.0+1.01, as the peace and tranquillity is interrupted by âGendo is at it againâ and âGendo done wanna do another impactâ, which obviously felt slightly rushed, but also expected as to where the conclusion of the entire series would end up being resolved.
I feel like it is necessary to split the second half into several parts, but this is mostly due to an awkward middle bit, where a hyper-realistic head is next to a beautifully hand-drawn End of Evangelion body and the awkwardly obvious 3D assets used to substitute what would previously be proper animation, which would just pull me right out of my immersion. I was specifically bothered by a fight, which honestly felt so undercooked that it might as well be symbolism. I honestly debated if it was, but it just looked too terrible to be true. There were even points where the 3D render would stutter from the weight of all the particles and models that were being flung across the screen, which got a sympathetic chortle out of me, but was objectively jarring to look at.
Outside to that awkward middle bit, the experience was mostly blissful. It honestly made me tear up at times, especially when you hear those familiar dreadful drums from ShirĹ Sagisuâs âDecisive Battleâ one more time. I was just overjoyed to be able to see Evangelion again.
Overall, the sound design was non-intrusive outside of a select few scenes, in which the voice-over seemed to be done outside of a studio environment, introducing a barely audible tinny whine.
On a side note, I also noticed that Ryoji Kaji was voiced by KĂ´ichi Yamadera, whom I know as the voice of Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop and Shun Akiyama from the Yakuza series. I really do love that guy. Can you believe he was married to Rie Tanaka, who voiced Mitsuru Kirijo? Two of the sexiest voices in Japanese VA, just saying.
The rest of the soundtrack is also a little too heavy on vocal tracks for my liking. There was a point where it became slightly distracting, as I mostly associate Evangelion with the ambient, slightly jazzy and almost military soundtrack by Sagisu for the original series.
The ending was expectedly truly Evangelion in every sense of the word. It made clever nods to the seriesâ past and tied everything up in a somewhat neat way. In retrospect, however, I feel like most of the same sentiments were already resolved in End of Evangelion. Yes, there were new shocks and reveals along the way, but it ultimately ended up not expanding upon the moral philosophy the series is known for, which made the whole film fail to reach the heights of previous entries. I canât help but feel like the decentralisation of Hideaki Annoâs directorial duties, might have soured the finale.
Ultimately, it is sad to see Evangelion go. Evangelion: 3.0+1.01 Thrice Upon a Time will most likely be seen as a flawed film, which put a middling end to an already contentious series of rereleases. However, I enjoyed my time with it, despite my proprietary watch order. It functions well in the grand scheme of the series and provides long-time fans with more of what they know and love, and perhaps some of what they regret, along with the acknowledgement that it is ok to let it go.
An extremely potent linear cinematic experience, which invites the player to personally deliver a thousand punches to quench the wrath of a man who is literally too angry to die and experiencing the strain of what that would entail in their very own hands through a controversial set of mechanics and jaw-dropping spectacle.
I picked up the game on a whim, in part influenced by a retrospective video essay Iâd listened to several months prior. I had faint memories of it from when I was a kid, mostly related to some of the standout moments of spectacle, which I remembered were likely reserved for the end of the game, but I was surprised to find out that they were in fact in the very beginning of the game, which meant that whatever was going to happen next would be even grander in scale. Just that thought alone â that the spectacle most games would save for their climax is being thrown onto what is for all intents and purposes the end of the tutorial; it was enough to convince me that Asuraâs Wrath was worthwhile. It seemingly aimed to be a âspectacle fighterâ (what nowadays some call a âcharacter actionâ game) in the same vein as a God of War or a Devil May Cry, including some almost-opaque inspiration from Berserk or something like Shin Megami Tensei or God Hand. Some of the music choices teeter on the edge between those inspirations, resulting in a very familiar, yet new blend with some standout tracks that weâll mention later on.
Asuraâs Wrath is one of those games that I can only imagine were dismissed on release under the pretence of âitâs more movie than gameâ, similar to the games of the Metal Gear Solid and Yakuza series, namely in the way that some cutscenes can range anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. Herein lies the fact that the latter two do indeed have a robust set of mechanics and systems to accompany the âmoviegoingâ experience. On the other hand, Asuraâs Wrath is an incredibly focused linear experience, which also has a rather simplistic brawler-type combat system, but it intentionally plays second fiddle to the narrative.
The game is divided into what I would consider three segments â shooting galleries, brawler sections and cinematics. The gameplay usually revolves around causing sustain damage in order to fill up Asuraâs Burst metre, which ends the encounter and transitions to the utter spectacle of completely annihilating your enemy, which would regularly be impossible to render gameplay-wise, but the game has a rather interesting way of involving the player in:
One of the standout mechanics of the game are in my mind the quick-time events, which are not necessarily contextual, but rather fundamental to the gameâs sense of style. Normally, games shy away from these sorts of mechanics because they feel rather cheep and unnecessary. However, in spectacle fighters they seem to be an essential tool to allow the player to contribute and, in a sense, experience the necessity for quickly reacting to an enemyâs blows and feeling the strain of prolonged bouts in their own hands, as mashing the button for what feels like minutes emulates the test of endurance that Asura himself is experiencing. The time-sensitive nature of some inputs is sometimes played on to create impossible situations where hits can sometimes not be dodged or surfacing an enemyâs own button prompts to show their own struggle against Asuraâs unrelenting assault. While some people are prone to complain that the prompts distract from the action on screen, I would counter that by saying that there is a rather artful use of guiding lines and a consideration for where the player is going to be looking whenever these sequences play out, giving you that sensation of wanting to make that one last hit on a difficult enemy a perfectly timed one to really seal the deal.
Another interesting titbit is how you can customise certain modifiers of your experience by unlocking and equipping, of all things, different health gauges. Modifiers range from minor changes such as âtake less damageâ and âlower cooldownsâ to completely game-changing challenge run content with some of the more obscure hidden gauges. It is definitely a weird design choice, but it adds a lot of replayability and customisation to an already hefty game, which is always welcome.
Visually the game makes use of a combination of sci-fi-looking mechanical constructs meshed with a Buddhist (sometimes even Shinto) aesthetic that works incredibly well. The closest thing I can somewhat compare it to is some of the architectural design in Final Fantasy XIII, with its mix of futuristic metallic textures and rustic European designs. Initially I wasnât that much of a fan, but it slowly grew on me. The game features an extras menu which gives you access to concept art and illustrations for the game with flavour text and some descriptions of the process behind them, which really helped sell the overall visual design. I understand that most players wonât be interested in going through all that, but it is a nice addition, which you receive a little bit of after every episode. The character designs in particular are astounding and highly memorable â some even having several different styles and configurations depending on how far you are into the gameâs story.
Every once in a while, the game will apply different types of shading to emphasise some story beats. A personal favourite of mine is one that posterises down the colours to just a few key tones, such as red, black, and white, which really works to show Asuraâs blinding rage, even if for a moment.
When it comes to sound design and music, the game is almost impeccable. Demon Ruination, Demon Curse are practically tracks ripped directly from Devil May Cry 4 and they function exactly as youâd expect â pure hype generation. All three versions of Orphan Wolf Legend are all certified bangers that build into each other and play during some of the most climactic scenes in the game, which elevates them that much higher to the point where I would consider them an unofficial theme of the game. The official theme In Your Belief is also fantastic whenever it is used to signal the start of a new chapter with a modified start menu screen. There is of course the use of Symphony No. 9 from âThe New Worldâ 4thMovement, which I initially didnât know was a piece of classical music, but recognised Iâd heard it somewhere before. It nevertheless contributed to one of the most memorable fights in the game, lodging it into the folds of my brain like a sword through the centre of the Earth.
The game emphasises every single button press with a rather meaty thud sound every time you successfully time a quick-time event, making every punch have a real nice sense of weight and impact. Most of the in-game sound effects fit well, except one that I found particularly hilarious â a slow quiet creaking sound every time Asura would move even slightly, as if he was an antique wooden table being slid across the deck of an old ship.
The voice acting in the game is practically superb, leveraging talent such as Liam OâBrien, Robin Atkin Downes and Steve Blum, the foremost of which leverages his years of experience in dubbing anime to bring out a lot of nuance in Asura himself. One can only express pity over what his vocal cords must have been like after presumably screaming at the top of his lungs for several hours of recording time. Downesâ performance also plays a large part of the more emotionally hitting scenes in the game towards its latter end and is wonderfully subtle in its mix of completely confident and vulnerable.
The game (at least on PlayStation 3) has a lot of performance issues and small visual and sound glitches. With all the spectacle it needs to render, the game suffers from a low framerate during some of the more effects-heavy sequences in the game, running below 30 FPS several times per episode. This is compounded with a noticeable screen-tearing, despite the low framerates on a 60 Hz screen. The DLC episodes fair somewhat better, as they are set in a somewhat void-like environment which leaves out some of the more demanding visuals, retaining a tolerable framerate for the climax of the game. Perhaps with some time work on their optimisation Capcom and Cyberconnect 2 figured out a compromise that was too late for the majority of the game but enough to fix its ending. On the other hand, I experienced some audio issues with the DLC chapters, as the music files would sound distorted and as if a lo-fi filter was applied over them. This was most noticeable whenever Orphan Wolf Legend would play, as the high-pitched whistling would really emphasise how distorted the sound was.
The DLC episodes were kind of a mixed bag of content. The half-episodes were 2D animated featurettes, which I didnât particularly like, as the design of the characters and the artwork seemed to have nothing in common with the rest of the game, as they were likely outsourced to a third-party studio. I found them to be poorly drawn, if not even ugly to look at. Understandably the framerate was perfect for those as it was literally just a video playback with button prompts for the quick-time events. Ironically, however, the framerate being good meant that my usual timing for the prompts would not work, as the added slack to compensate for the low framerate now meant that I was slightly too early or too late on every prompt. I personally found it funny rather than annoying, but it goes to show how fundamental the framerate issues are. At an asking price of $2 per episode, Iâd say that these are worth missing out on as they are not worth your time or money.
The Lost Episodes are two pieces of crossover content which a particularly enjoyed, since they featured Capcomâs flagship title at the time Street Fighter IV. The gameplay is a blend between the two, and I believe it was an amazing middle ground for two fundamentally different genres. Iâd even go as far as to say that the difficulty of some of the encounters was greater than that of bosses in the main game combined. The episodes also featured a somewhat confusing post-game mission system which gives you reason to replay the chapters with specific conditions in mind. I didnât delve too much into them, as accessing them seemingly required a new standard run of the episodes before the menu would show up and couldnât be accessed through the menu. I can only imagine that their difficulty would even farther surpass the base game content. It also features some really nice remixed tracks that also mix both gamesâ tracks in interesting ways. At an asking price of $2 per episode, Iâd say that these are completely worth it, especially if youâre into fighting games or Street Fighter specifically. They feature a good amount of content, their own little story arc and some good little moments of fan service. Overall, an enjoyable little side activity that can add several hours of playtime onto an already meaty base game.
The Nirvana Episodes were notorious for locking the true ending of the game behind a $7 DLC purchase. Even nowadays it feels like an asshole move, despite the prevalence of downloadable content. The base game has its ending and it neatly ties up all the plot beats. I was personally satisfied with what I got and would have been completely fine if that was the only content ever released. However, it does play to the completionists within us by teasing a TRUE last episode, gated behind some gameplay conditions. Once unlocked it is for the most part identical, excluding the very end, which substitutes the neat ending with a cliff-hanger for the DLC episodes. Ultimately it features some of the mechanically hardest content in the game, which continues the trend set by the latter part of the base game of increasing the complexity of encounters and perhaps most importantly â their length. Some of the episodes start feeling like a test of endurance, which ties into the plot in a very diegetic way. I donât regret playing through the Nirvana episodes, as they essentially offer more of what was already good and a conclusive ending to the game and the series as a whole with less spectacle but more emotional impact than previous chapters. The DLC also features a post-game intermission scene, which is even after the post-credits scene, which seemed like a thrown in little bit of fan-service, which I felt kind of ruined the impact of the ending, feeling more like a âwhat ifâ situation, rather than an actual canonical part of the gameâs narrative. Regrettably, Iâd say it is a worthwhile purchase, despite the greedy practices by what I could only assume is Capcom. Perhaps I would have been more disappointed by it had I played it a decade ago.
Overall, Asuraâs Wrath is fantastic. I wouldnât suggest that it is for everyone, but if you enjoy spectacle fighters, anime bullshit or games with a more cinematic flair, or just plainly looking for a short 6- to 10-hour experience with relatively minimal effort required on lower difficulty levels â play it. It is certainly worth your time, even if only as the base title. If youâre looking for a more complete experience, go through the Nirvana and the Lost Episodes content, skipping episodes 11.5 and 15.5, unless you really want absolutely everything. The only way I can see it improved is with a complete technical remaster to improve the framerate and fix the screen-tearing, which is usually an impossible feat for PlayStation 3 games, considering their reliance on the systemâs multithreading SPUs. I can only hope that I will see the day this game climbs out of licensing hell.
A postmodern role-playing game for a much different audience. A combination of skillful artistry and unfulfilled potential. An attempt at tackling difficult topics and pandering to different tastes. A full package, with deceptive contents...
I enjoyed playing through Disco Elysium, but for completely different reasons than those that initially sold the game to me. Going in, I believed that it would be the type of RPG that I had been looking for quite some time â one that is not burdened by most of its interaction with the world happening on a grid, scanning through a list of spells and abilities, franticly pausing every frame, trying to min-max numbers as to not get destroyed by a pack of menacing farm animals of a slightly higher level. Examples of that in the genre would be classics such as Baldurâs Gate or newer re-iterations like Divinity: Original Sin and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. What I would habitually find myself doing is picking up the game, sinking my teeth into it, eventually hitting a numerical roadblock in some quest, and almost immediately retiring to a life of ânot playing that game ever againâ, as I am faced with the option of either save scumming and beating my head against the numeric wall, until by some fluke of the numbers I get the âgoodâ number and am allowed to proceed; or could just stop doing whatever thing I am currently invested in and go somewhere else on the map, where the numbers are not as disagreeable, so I can get my personal numbers high enough to where the numbers I was having difficulty with before seem less impressive and I can pick up that quest again, but this time only halfway through, struggling to remember contextual cues that were relevant perhaps a few hours ago, but are now a forgotten footnote in some journal entry.
In both cases, the immersion gives way to the idea of gameplay, as the perhaps flawed ideal of an RPG is that which is based on table-top role playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, the aforementioned Shadowrun, or anything else that follows the same formula. From my personal experience in TTRPGs, the same issue persists, namely in having meaningful choice and character development take second fiddle to massive 3-5-man 1-2-hour combat encounters in between the more immersive moments of dialogue between players, non-player characters or story development. Iâve always felt that combat is so abstracted from everything else in TTRPGs in the way that it suddenly shifts into an entirely different game, which unlike the elements of role-play is less free-form and bound to a rigid set of rules. Youâre no longer interested in how things look, feel or act, but rather how large a number is on a sheet of paper; and this contention of mine seems to always be translated into the video game counterpart of this genre, carrying the same problem from one medium to the other. Games even seem to compound upon the issue, by putting you in charge of multiple characters, where your custom created character is somehow not only equal to them, but at the same time the savior of the universe and all that is holy.
I cannot help but believe that the party ought to be AI controlled pawns, considering that they are supposedly different people with their own goals and aspirations; thus leaving the player to micro-manage their singular character â their avatar in the game world, rather than developing a form of psychogenic schizophrenia by having to deal with each and every one of the partyâs members (now, admittedly the remakes of both Baldurâs Gate games have such a feature, but the combat AI is so poor, that you still have to go and remind them that they actually have a whole list of spells that they could be, in fact, using to⌠for instance, heal you, as you sit there bleeding profusely, crippled and powerless on the ground).
The only games which I have seen managing combat and RPG elements successfully are listed as a fundamentally different genre, known as âimmersive simâ or â0451 gamesâ. To name a few, that would be games like those of the Deus Ex, Dishonored and even the Fallout series. Most of those are first-person, for the most part shooters, with some emphasis on a singular characterâs development through dialogue and stat point distribution. My main point can roughly be exemplified by comparing the naming convention and the reality for both genres: one is a ârole-playing gameâ, the other is an âimmersive simulationâ; the first being used deceptively, as you could be playing a multitude of roles at any given time and also suspending that role-play to participate in some rather lengthy tactical combat for what could be 50% of the gameâs runtime. On the other hand, you have âimmersive simâ, which according to Warren Spector (game designer of Deus Ex and Thief fame) is a game in which âyou are there, [and] nothing stands between you and [the] belief that you're in an alternate worldâ. I simply cannot emphasize enough how even the most engaging narrative and the most skillful writing can be tarnished by this type of abstract combat, which feels so fundamentally foreign and somehow still intrinsic to the idea of role-playing games and immersion.
Disco Elysium seemed to be the odd one out â a RPG that has no combat, except that, initiated by your choices in dialogue (more akin to playing an animation than actual combat). It was also advertised to me as having quite an in-depth ideological system, that was affected by your choices in-game and would automatically adapt dialogue according to your flavor of politics, philosophy or culture through a series of thoughts, which you would internalize, if used often enough. Frankly, it seemed like wish fulfilment for a jaded immersion-loving straight-edge centrist such as myself.
Upon launching the game, I was quickly introduced to the persona that I would be inhabiting â a deranged, drunken amnesiac, who in some cases would pass as a cop, but only if oneâs notion of law-abiding is that of a drug-fueled abusive lover; also known as - the farthest thing from me. I already knew that my journey through the game would be that of a redemption arc, where this horrible piece of shit human, was going to become the most squeaky-clean, drug- and alcohol-free centrist known to all of Revachol. A true test of the gameâs systems in action â from deranged and corrupt, to the straight and narrow. To my eventual surprise - I could do all of it, and very successfully at that. By the end of my nearly 24-hour playthrough, I had achieved my ideal vision for the character, with only a bit of resistance, which I will briefly mention further down the line. For now, I had succeeded in using all the tools available to me in order to internalize the thoughts for centrism, rejecting any form of drugs, and by the end almost managing to squeeze in the time to internalize being sober, cut short due to the spontaneous conclusion of the game.
The thoughts system was not entirely what I had initially imagined. Namely, what I had envisioned was a system, which converts whatever responses one made throughout the game, into non-internalized thoughts, which would begin to alter the dialogue options available, and only after choosing to emphasize said options, would it eventually internalize and give you a lot more radical options based on said thought. What it would turn out to do instead is make the acquisition of thoughts work in a similar manner, but make the process of internalization a menu, in which you âequipâ thoughts into available slots. It seems like a minor inconvenience, but it makes the thoughts feel like yet another item that you just set and forget, rather than the thoughts of a person being actively developed over time, based on what kind of discourse they engage in. I suppose the idea of having it take anywhere from thirty minutes to six hours to internalize is there to be the substitute for the drawn out process of internalization. It is in a way saying âI feel like turning into a centrist in the next thirty minutes.â, while going around doing investigative work around a crime scene. The more active process I envisioned, would indeed take a lot longer, but it would be massively more immersive, as more and more options become available to you over time, rather than after some arbitrary timer has gone down.
Another big detractor is having to use skill points to unlock new slots for thoughts, which would otherwise be put into your more practical skills. Theoretically, one would think a human has an almost infinite capacity for new ideas; and one is surely not going to want to internalize them all. A good example would be the âVolumetric Shit Compressorâ thought you gain early into the game, which mainly fulfils its purpose in one skill check for less physically able characters as a part of a single quest and is never made use of again, beyond its flat stat bonuses. No other thought in my playthrough had a temporary pragmatic function like that, which feels like a missed opportunity. Its temporary nature is where the skill-point cost seems absurd, when they could be better used to improve oneâs skills. In what way would the character becoming more skillful help them stop âgetting their shit togetherâ? Wouldnât one discard the though immediately after itâs no longer useful? The way the system works currently, meant that I spent most of my points on slots and playing around with thoughts, rather than improving my character until the very last parts of the game, which in effect made the game more difficult than intended. The decision to make thoughts equipable and not persistent passive perks that can upgrade into more radical or complete versions of themselves is perhaps one of my main disappointments with the game. The effect on scope would be minimal, as the game already has the dialogue options for those thoughts written and would only need to change their acquisition and internalization to be less menu-driven and more player-driven.
I tangentially mentioned not having skill-points to freely use until the latter parts of the game: That in turn made skill checks a lot more difficult and perilous, by making white skill checks (ones you can fail and retry upon increasing the skill they require) harder to re-unlock once failed and making red checks (ones that you cannot retry once failed) almost impossible, if not clothed in every stat-boosting piece of apparel in oneâs inventory or seasoned with every potentially hazardous bottle of booze or glowing fairy dust left lying on the ground. White checks also do not unlock after one has used a consumable item or changed a piece of clothing to boost said stat, which encourages save scumming, as there is no way to change clothing in the middle of dialogue or knowing what the skill check will be, leading to one of the many pitfalls which I described earlier.
An even greater fault is that some quests just drop dead in their tracks, if the stat check is not completed. Moreover, since one cannot be proficient in all four skill categories, I would regularly hit a brick wall, upon being faced with a Psyche or Physique skill check, as my character mainly specialized in Intellect and Motorics. The thing about hitting a brick wall in Disco Elysium is not so much that you fail and have to face the consequences, but rather cannot continue at all and the narrative stops dead in its tracks until you can succeed the check. Sometimes quests are tied to each other, so not being able to progress in one of them means that you canât progress in any of them. Suddenly an entire quest chain can just be gone at the click of a button. It got to a point where I would prefer to hear that all my efforts were in vain, fucking everything up irreversibly, rather than having a white check get locked and sit there in my journal, waiting for me to miraculously gain five points in some sub-skill of Physique. One way to fix this would be to have more obfuscated red checks with uncertain odds that lead to failure states. At least that would be more immersive than the current offering, as one could live with the consequences, rather than be left guessing what it could have been if one had slightly higher skills. This, however, could be difficult, as there is a dice roll to every skill. Not being skilled merely means you have less of a chance of succeeding or, alternatively, a higher chance to fail and lock the skill check.
The one thing that the game does great when it comes to skills is the addition of secret tasks. If one were to follow particular lines of inquiry, they often lead to some skill check down the line becoming easier, due to the things learned beforehand about that topic. This system rewards being thorough and attentive and is, perhaps, the best feature of the game. However, observations made through the âshiversâ system (where orbs of information will show up contextually above the protagonistâs head, revealing information about the environment or elaborating on something relevant) do not appear to factor into these skill checks. This often leads to you reading something important when it pops up in the overworld, but upon engaging someone in conversation one must often select benign lines of dialogue, acting like one hadnât made those observations to begin with. The dissonance is even more infuriating whenever Kim (your companion throughout the game) tells you that you are obviously wrong, because he also made those observations but (unlike you) could talk about them. It would have been a lot more diegetic if there were dialogue options available for you to repeat the observation to Kim instead, perhaps as you talk to him in the overworld (a feature that is woefully underutilized, and shows the same five or so options throughout the entire game, except whenever Kim wants to talk to you about something he deems relevant â an ability, which you would think the player should have had as well).
Speaking of the overworld, Disco Elysium does quite a lot with the small real-estate it has on its map. For what feels like a small neighborhood, it packs tens of hours of content, a varied cast of characters and lots of places to explore. Walking around is encouraged by the game, almost to a fault. At many points during the game Kim will remark upon your seemingly absurd ability to run around without getting tired. There even comes a point where you are injured, and are told not to run to avoid further harming yourself. After about twenty hours I realized that this was in order to signal to the player that if they run all over the place, trying to finish everything as quick as possible, they would be left with a lot of extra time at the end of the day, which would have been perhaps better spent looking into side-quests or other optional activities. However, the walk speed is woefully slow and with the amount of backtracking one needs to do, means that you will be seeing the same places plenty of times, which only tempts you even more to not waste your precious time RP-walking. The game has benches, which you can use to pass the time, but they are only available whenever Kim is not with you, which is only durring the night, meaning you canât make any meaningful progress by resting on one, effectively making them worthless. That and the presence of time-gated tasks, means you will most likely be trying to find ways to waste your time, prompting Kim to berate you even more for straying away from the main focus of the narrative, as he often does. If youâre a fast reader, the game luckily fast-forwards time based on how many options youâve selected, rather than real-time. This is most apparent whenever youâre save scumming and going though entire trees of dialogue youâve already read.
And you will be reading a lot, as this is what you signed up for when you relinquished the combat systems of your typical RPGs. A welcome change, I might add, as the dialogue is beautifully written and engaging for tens of hours. (The end credits even thank Chris Avellone for what is probably him lending a bit of his Midas touch when it comes to game writing.) However, there are of course flaws in the way Disco Elysium decides to portray some of its characters, as it is sometimes more interested in making political statements in a very one-note way that might shock some people, rather than what one would think are nuanced and fleshed out personas. A large part of the cast is wearing a thick layer of existentialism, which they seem to flaunt upon every given opportunity. The same goes for characters who clearly exhibit some variety of political radicalism; youâve got your racist nationalist, your bourgeois-eating communist, your fence-sitting centrist (dubbed moralist) and a whole swath of colorful opinionated people whom you either interact with or endure. Everyone else is mostly pleasant to be around, if not a bit saddening, due to the overall melancholic way of life people of Disco Elysium are forced to lead, influenced by factors that they alone cannot control; an overall sense of futility present at every turn. Most of them have quirks that help them cope with their predicament, which you can explore in full detail through in-depth dialogue trees, leading to some intriguing interactions and ultimately some interesting consequences down the line. Every line of dialogue seems to have a lot of those, which is surprising for a game that so haphazardly makes you select dumb questions for answers you already know. An example of that is the one occasion in which I used a particular brand of alcohol to boost my âPain Thresholdâ in order to open a certain mission-critical freezer. Which towards the end had Kim labeling me as someone who âdrinks on the jobâ, even after becoming sober and internalizing the thought that removes all positive effects from alcohol, as well as the action leading to us retrieving an item, which we would later use to further the plot. Instead as a one-off sacrifice of oneâs principles, it was seen as a major transgression that would only lead people into thinking of me as even more of a raging alcoholic, rather than someone who is trying to recover and âget their shit togetherâ, as it were.
A major part of the gameâs rhetoric is lost to those who do not have a dictionary that has been well tempered through copious forms of political jargon, coming from a various selection of manifestos, academic political analyses and some of the more famous philosophical works for the last century. I would go as far to say that some of the sentiments the game presents are absolutely impenetrable when it comes to wording. Iâll give you an example:
Heartache is powerful, but democracy is *subtle*. Incrementally, you begin to notice a change in the weather. When it snows, the flakes are softer when they stick to your worry-worn forehead. When it rains, the rain is warmer. Democracy is coming to the Administrative Region. The ideals of Dolorian humanism are reinstating themselves. How can they not? These are the ideals of the Coalition and the Moralist International. Those guys are signal blue. And they're not only good -- they're also powerful. What will it be like, once their nuanced plans have been realized?
If you immediately recognized that it was about centrism, then congratulations â you are a lot smarter than me and probably everyone else around you. For you Disco Elysium is the perfect college-level textual experience for your Tuesday-night 1960âs poetry club. For the rest of humanity, itâs a bunch of gibberish. Flowery prose and poetics are riddled everywhere and you're never really sure what you're doing, what thoughts you're thinking or what's happening to you.
I mentioned briefly that the game tries to depict centrism as a form of moralism (a term which it prefers over the former). Even so, it presents centrism as less of an effort to hold multiple perspectives and act with a full and informed range of understanding, but rather as the stereotypical âfence-sittingâ argument, where no decision can be made now, and progress can only be obtained through a slow, incremental process. While on the surface, it would seem so â as a self-proclaimed and passionate centrist, I cannot help but disagree with the outsider view that the game seems to be promoting, favoring critique of the right and an emphasis towards the left side of the political compass (making small but insignificant jabs towards both throughout). Contextually, the gameâs developers Studio ZA/UM, have displayed a clear favor of the political left in their public appearances, which may explain this somewhat skewed perspective. While itâd be lovely to go on about the politics of ideology, itâs better not judge the contents of the game based on the developersâ ideological affiliation, but rather on its own merits.
Considering the amount of reading one needs to do, I would hesitantly say that Disco Elysium is part RPG, part choose-your-own-adventure visual novel. I say RPG, because of the aforementioned brick walls, inhibiting progress in a way that no immersive sim ever would, as there would be multiple ways to get the same information, which is sadly not a thing Disco Elysium does well. The sheer volume of the text is also a cause for some, I would suppose, aesthetic concerns about the game. Graphically, the game is stunning with its unique painterly style, but it often values it over function, namely in having the UI serve little to no purpose, as Kim and your portraits take up the entire bottom left of the screen. At the same time the dialogue panel is put on the far right side of the screen, even though two thirds of it are spent zoomed in on some 3D models doing their idle animations, instead of having the text front and center, as the thing you will be most likely looking at for 90% of your time with the game. Other technical issues include shadows being displaced from where they should be, especially on stairs, as well as being incredibly jagged for a game that doesnât really have high hardware requirements and very little real-time lighting, but all of this is frankly unintrusive, compared to the cramps in your neck from looking to your right all the time.
Every once in a while, you get to enjoy not having to read, as a select few scenes are entirely voice-acted by a talented cast. I am unsure, however, of the production team behind the recordings, as they seem to sound as if recorded in home studios with different microphones and sound processors. Other than that, the quality and range of the performances is wonderful, especially since it is coming from some lesser known actors in the industry.
When it comes to sound, the game does a fantastic job of establishing a lot of varied soundscapes for an admittedly small plot of land. The music is ambient, droning and subtle in all the ways that make you not think about it, until you are sitting there listening to the soundtrack on your own time, remembering all the scenes that every piece of music has lifted from monotony. All of the tracks have this aging, somber tone to them, much like the world they are written for, making the music an unavoidable essential part of the experience, as you walk the fields of Revachol with the wind blowing and the small creek near you emitting a slight babble. The only downside is that the mixing of all these layers is often horribly unproportioned. Everything will be quiet, until some random intercom plays two straight minutes of loud white noise into your ear. Those parts are few and far between, but still leave a surprisingly large impression for an otherwise spotless execution of foley and ambience.
Overall, Disco Elysium is a full package. While not necessarily the game that I hoped it would be, it was still an enjoyable experience with an incredible main quest, memorable characters and side quests, elevated by wonderful sound design and fantastic ambient music, with writing that will be unparalleled for years to come. While it is not without its flaws, and some of them are quite major - it does what it set out to do with flying colors and is sure to appeal to a lot of people, who have been looking for an experience such as this. For me, however, it also represents a lot of squandered potential. It is by no means an ideal game â far from it; but I would still recommend you play through it for yourself, just to see where it takes you. It has a way of challenging you intellectually, that not a lot of games can pull off, especially nowadays. It is an admirable endeavor in tackling difficult topics, whilst also spinning an intriguing narrative that keeps you invested until the very end.
Knives Out is a film in which Rian Johnson, formerly of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Looper fame, redirects the main points of contention from his previous outings into a more suitable genre for his particular brand of directorial vision â a whodunit Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery. As such, the less one knows about it - the better, but since this is a recommendation, perhaps the deal needs to be sweetened, before you are fully convinced that the film is worth your time. What follows will probably diminish your viewing enjoyment.
Featuring a star-studded cast, Knives Out spins a delightful web of intrigue surrounding the sudden death of the eldest member of the Thrombey family - Harlan, a writer and proprietor of a publishing company as well as vast amounts of wealth. Contentions arise concerning his will and the distribution of inheritance, as things usually go.
Through a series of interviews with his decedents, one begins to paint a picture of the events that transpired on that very night. Said interviews are so cleverly bolstered by the films clever editing scheme, displaying just enough information to keep you interested, but reward you for being observant as well. One could go as far to say that part of the subtle humor of the film is a direct consequence of one paying attention to details and remembering what seemed to be insignificant red-herrings beforehand. It is honest to god fun to see Rian Johnson subvert and twist away in a genre that was built on exactly that ever-shifting foundation, rather than more generic linear narratives. The amount of foreshadowing and Chekhovâs guns littered around is nothing short of amazing, whenever the guns do in fact go off in the third act.
The film isnât without action, as everyone scrambles to uncover the truth, usually getting themselves caught in situations theyâd rather not be in. There are thrills and suspense waiting around every corner, as you begin to believe youâve finally got it and a new lead opens up unexpectedly from the unlikeliest of sources.
This is no less a product of the filmâs wonderful script, which features clever word-play galore, giving everyone a wonderfully fleshed out persona with its own unique quirks and still maintaining a level of realism in their depiction as real people. The performances also lend themselves nicely to the often quippy nature of every line of dialogue. Many battles of wit are held with a level of wordsmanship that leaves you laughing or shivering on a constant basis.
The film even pays homage to the pieces of media that inspired the genre in some less that subtle ways; like the single-color attire everyone seems to wear and the wildly different personalities, reminiscent of Clue (1985) or the bearded sailor dummy referencing 1972âs Sleuth, and many more.
The soundtrack is frankly very traditional, in the way that it plays it straight, by relying mostly on orchestral strings and short spurts of piano. It serves its purpose well in establishing tension whilst also maintaining this ever-present whimsy, but regretfully falls on the not-so-memorable side of things. A fitting score, but probably not something you would be listening to in your free time.
An overall fantastic time with a film that wraps up nicely, accomplishing everything that it set out to do. If not one of the best original screenplays of the year, it is definitely one with heart and a good sense of humor. A wonderful murder mystery that keeps you asking questions and rewards you for noticing its intricate details in a way that nothing has done for quite some time. Rian Johnson shows his true talent in this flamboyant display of filmmaking, that will keep you enamored until the very end. Watch it!
Death Stranding (2019) - The Incoherent Ramblings of a Porter
Death Stranding is an equally flawed as it is innovative. Hideo Kojimaâs new entry, unbound from the chains of his previous corporate affiliation is a divisive one, but offers much, both technologically and narratively. While perhaps not as memorable as the former Metal Gear series, it is an attempt at an experience that would otherwise be immediately shunned, were it not for the name and talent attached to it.
Death Stranding, much to no oneâs surprise, is one of the most divisive titles to release among critics and players alike. As a longstanding fan of Hideo Kojimaâs work, I too was questioning whether or not the experience of going through Death Stranding was worthwhile, as some notable review websites, following the lifting of the review embargo, refused to rate the game - let alone play it. There is some fault in me reading reviews prior to experiencing it for myself, but I believe it is necessary to disclose that particular bias, in spite of my somewhat feverish favor of Metal Gear and my almost instantaneous pre-order of the title upon it becoming available. I would go as far as to say that my acquisition of a PlayStation 4 had been somewhat influenced by the announcement of said new âindependentâ Hideo Kojima game all the way back in 2016. To say that I had nothing but expectations, would be an understatement. The reception being as divisive as it is makes it difficult to be objective on the topic, so I will allow myself the irregular personal remark every once in a while, if need be â consider that what you will. Think of this as less of a review, and more like the condensed ramblings of a madman. Alongside that, I will attempt to be as spoiler free as possible â at least for a time. I will make it clear whenever that is no longer true. If that sounds good to you, let us move onto the brunt of the topicâŚ
Death Stranding is a spectacularly boring game. The eternal debate whether games should innately be fun or engaging comes to mind almost instantaneously upon first impression. Youâve most likely heard it: âMindless busyworkâ. âWalking Simulatorâ. All signifiers of the core gaming demographicâs displeasure with whatever the fuck Death Stranding is. Its director Hideo Kojima, calls it a âstrand gameâ â the first of its kind. Something I would consider to be one massive taunt towards the public, as if saying: âWeâve made something that didnât exist before - a new color of game.â How much of that is true remains to be seen, as the future of strand games as a genre will likely be decided, depending on whether there will be many new strand games entering the ecosystem, or if the originator of the term remains the only example of their existence. The fundamental idea of the strand game is not an unfamiliar or an unappealing one â itâs what up until now was called âasynchronous multiplayerâ or ânetwork/online featuresâ. Death Stranding is a single-player game at its core, but these online features are somewhat more integrated into the experience. Another term comes to mind that could perhaps adequately describe how that online element is integrated, and I believe its derivation from an antiquated term for a certain subset of MMO games is not coincidental - Death Stranding is a âpersistent worldâ. Looking at Death Stranding as a type of MMO is not too farfetched, I believe. The importance of social aspects in that type of games is not to be understated and it just so happens to be one of the core themes not only of the strand game, but Kojimaâs recent beliefs as a whole.
Surprisingly for some, the thematic elements of Death Stranding are not so obtuse and impenetrable like in the Metal Gear series, but rather surface level in comparison. In essence, it is a game about reconnecting people in an age of social isolationism. Kojima hints that the internet has served to connect people, but also widen the gap in actual physical connections through its ease of use and accessibility, making people more likely to stay at home and connect via all manner of messaging services, rather than meet face to face. This topic is also likely more culturally significant to members of countries like Japan and the USA, as the notion of isolationism in general has had a greater effect diachronically, as domestic interests outweighing the need for more outward connections has been at the center of both countriesâ foreign policy at one point or another. It comes as no surprise then, that a Japanese studio sets their game in a ravaged American wasteland where conversations and physical contact are merely superficial, goods and services are delivered via a third party, and the outside is seen as hostile and the idea of connection is seen as dangerous.
The gameâs story, however, seems to be disconnected from all of this. I would go as far to say, that you could change the themes for something else entirely and the implications would remain the same. The writing seems more interested in revealing the deciphered cryptic marketing materials shown prior to the gameâs release. Phrases such as âCreate the rope.â, âTomorrow is in your hands.â, âStick vs. Ropeâ and just the word âStrandâ are littered everywhere, drawing vague lines between plot events, real world history and cultural practices, and Kojimaâs own brand of conjecture. The naming conventions for people and things remain as campy as theyâve ever been, as the translation from Japanese to English seems to yet again have been the difference between something that sounds cool and western, to completely banal.
On a technological level, the game is a masterpiece. From simple rendering, to the way physics is implemented, to the effects and lighting. Kojima Productions (often abbreviated to KojiPro) have mastered their 3D scanning technology, since the creation of the Fox Engine and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Death Stranding was practically sold on the idea of featuring notable voice and film actors such as Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen, LĂŠa Seydoux, Troy Baker, Margaret Qualley, Tommie Earl Jenkins, Lindsay Wagner and directors such as Guillermo Del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn. Most people will likely see this as Kojima boasting about his connections to Hollywood celebrities, but the fact remains, that this is a star-studded cast of an incredibly high caliber. Particularly commendable are Troy Baker and Tommie Earl Jenkins, who through use of this technology enhance the fidelity of their in-game performance to almost life-like proportions.
The individual systems that make up the core mechanics of Death Stranding are made with the same level of attention to detail as one would expect from KojiPro. The same maximalist control scheme that spans the entire controller that was made infamous with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater makes a return in all of its âhold three different buttons and time a fourth correctly to perform an action you will have to do repeatedlyâ glory. However, the amount of menu time one has to indulge in has increased tenfold, as any and all rejiggering one has to do with their inventory and or interacting with the world requires about 2-3 button presses, holding a button to confirm and waiting through about 3-4 âmicro-cutscenesâ which are individually skippable by pressing 2-3 buttons per scene, even if youâve seen that particular animation play thousands of times. And you will be seeing some of these animations thousands of times, because they are there for everything and anything, from the most core of mechanics, to the things you would never care to even see, let alone do. This is a very long-winded way of getting to perhaps the gameâs biggest detractor:
Death Stranding does not value your time. Everything is very laborious, slow, monotonous and sluggish. While eventually you could get into the grove of things and begin to look at it in a different light, the fact remains, the game fundamentally works against you in every way, because the as view of it all likely reveals how little there is of Death Stranding to actually experience. Some have expressed that it should be looked at as more of a meditative experience, where the journey is not merely a means to an end, but rather time for you to be with your own thoughts and explore. While I wholeheartedly agree that that is somewhat of the core Death Stranding experience, I have to disagree that the gameâs meditative nature and exploration are player-driven. Even the story itself has glaring pacing issues and it often wastes massive amounts of the playerâs time through tedious backtracking, just so there can be a few hours of game in between cutscenes, even when everything is clearly urgent. Even some of the more appealing set pieces, get cut short as a spontaneous blurt of synth noises plays whenever even an insignificant gameplay event takes place.
Ludvig Forsellâs original score for the game is simply fantastic. While it doesnât have the character of the scores for previous Kojima titles like those by Norihiko Hibino and Harry Gregson-Williams, it does retread the familiar cinematic tropes that seem to be more of what Kojimaâs vision is shifting towards nowadays. Forsellâs prior work for Kojima on MGSV:TPP was forgettable, save for maybe one or two tracks, but for Death Stranding he seems to have had free reign to compose for this new IP, and has made some highly moving tracks that play sparingly in important plot moments, giving them that extra punch. Ludvigâs heavy use of synths is highly welcome, as it seems to be more of his specialty, rather than the grand orchestral compositions. In addition to the score, Kojima has picked out some select licensed tracks. Those seem to be of varying and sporadic quality, and barely any thematic connection to the game. It appears to be Kojimaâs new thing; to just put in whatever he thinks will sound good and hope that it fits with little consideration as to its cohesion. Hideoâs recent displays of his taste in music seem to be embodied by the inclusion of one Icelandic band - Low Roar, whose entire discography is seemingly included, and frankly is the only one of the musical choices that seems to fit the tone and atmosphere of Death Strandingâs world, featuring somewhat melancholic and subdued vocals, backed by mellow synths and pads, slow drum beats and droning guitar. Low Roar seem to even have the range for more imposing tracks, as shown in the reveal trailerâs âIâll Keep Comingâ and the in-game track âGive Me an Answerâ. If Low Roar were to be the only inclusion, I would frankly be happier than the menagerie of tracks that the in-game player provides. It is one of those cases, where less would mean more, as it would indicate a clearer vision than the strange assortment of tracks seemingly pulled straight from Hideo Kojimaâs incredibly expensive Walkman.
I recommend you play Death Stranding for yourselves, despite my bold claims. I wish I could tell you why, but it is a Hideo Kojima game after all. Much lies in context and that frankly is as much as I can muster without going into it deeper. This is the point where I will not so reluctantly have to go into spoilers. And when I say spoilers, I actually mean âbeat the gameâ. We will have to retread on some of the previous points with the benefit of hindsight. Iâve intentionally barely said anything about the actual content of the game but the briefest remarks, which you might find disappointing, but I assure you it is necessary. I would go as far to say that this is where the real review actually begins. Read beyond this point at your own peril:
Death Stranding is a spectacularly boring game⌠and it has to be. The ending of Episode 2 is what shifts the paradigm irreversibly. The moment Higgs â the particle of god that permeates all of existence, reappears following his brief appearance in the inciting incident with the corpse disposal team and kicks you in the head with the words: âSo how âbout it? Arenât you tired of the grind? Isnât this what youâve been waiting for this whole time? A game over!?â Up to that point, I could understand the frustration that most people had with it. I myself even contemplated if this is worth my time, and was considering quitting the whole endeavor, genuinely seeing it as pointless busywork with little to no variation. But after it? Boy, was I reinvigorated to endure just a little bit more. Higgsâ fourth wall break was just a subtle wink, a hint that all of this was intentional. It recontextualized the sluggishness and the drab grinding, where it was used to make the eventual reveal hit harder, the reveal that there is so much more to Death Stranding, so much we people donât know. It makes you feel like youâve passed a trial by fire, where youâve been forced to use only the most basic mechanics for the first twenty or so hours, delivering everything by foot with no aid, only to be among the few who have shown the resilience to be rewarded with confirmation that it was not all in vain. The world is miserable, depressing and unforgiving. Small mistakes can be irreversible and that carries the weight of constant hypervigilance. But with Episode 3 Death Stranding shows its true face. Suddenly you have more structures than you know what to do with, you can build roads, you can drive vehicles, you can enhance your abilities with exoskeletons, you can customize your backpack with actual useful trinkets, covers and pockets. From a game that was slow and drab, it turned into a game about actually âRebuilding Americaâ piece by piece, creating infrastructure and using the online features to make the game better not just for yourself but for everyone!
What a strand game truly is, is very akin to an MMO, in more than one sense; and in my opinion it is frankly better. There is this anecdote I read on Twitter while I was playing through the game. It was about how the simple act of placing down a rope over some difficult terrain carried weight, because you wanted to throw the rope back, so someone else who is following your path, can use it too; how no other game does that or makes you think of feel that way. And that is what I think is at the core of Death Strandingâs gameplay loop, distilled into one meaningful choice. No longer do you have to thing only for your benefit, but for those who will follow in your footsteps.
Building structures is your stake into the future. When you finish the game, you will most likely not come back to it for a long time, but those structures will remain, even after youâre gone (at least until the timefall eats away through them) and other people will make use of them to accomplish their goals. I can say that there are few experiences as immersive as creating a path, that evades a camp of MULEs and a BT field though a perilous mountainside and seeing that someone else is using it. That single message that pops up onto your screen, makes it feel worth it. Even the simple act of walking down a path makes it so that if enough people walk along it, it will turn into a beaten path, which is much easier to see and usually has no snow on it making traversal less difficult â a mechanic that I do not know how I will live without in other exploration-based games. And KojiPro have made an effort to make sure you know that is intentional, as seen in some of the interviews and e-mails you get, where they discuss how things like oxytocin and âlikecinâ are produced from physical contact and receiving likes as a porter (or even how receiving too many can lead to addiction, like in the case of MULEs and Homo Demens). There is one particular correspondence with the crew of the first waystation you ever connect up to the chiral network, and how theyâve slowly stopped using the synthetic oxytocin that you delivered to them and began producing it naturally, because youâve given them hope and theyâve been going outside and celebrating with each other â restoring physical contact. I canât even explain the weird sensation of meeting your first set of NPC porters out and about. After such a long time of speaking only to holograms, beginning to doubt if there even is anyone out there â meeting two confused porters, running around doing deliveries with tools strapped to their suits and being able to wave to them (or even trade items) is such a surreal experience.
Those are some of the more immersive elements of the game and frankly, I wouldnât mind to see those explored further. However, Kojima had other intentions, and that is where I and the gameâs story diverge. Sam Porter Bridges is so far from me as a player, that he might as well not even be controlled by me. His actions in the plot are so oblivious, that it is hard to sympathize with him, especially so during the final hours of the game. Fragile literally forces into the plot your love for Amelie, as if the estranged brother, who does not give a single fuck about his family or his country that (mind you) no longer exists, cares about this âsisterâ of his, that he is even somewhat forced into going to save. The way she manipulates him into kicking Fragile to the curb is also one of the moment that drew an even larger divide between where I was and when Sam supposedly was, and I surmise most players felt the same. There is this sentiment that most people donât even refer to him as Sam, but rather as Norman Reedus, since Sam is not even an empty vessel for the player, but something even more abstract; something like a character that you only get to pilot in between bad decisions made in cutscenes.
The eventual reveal that the entire main goal of the game was in vain from the beginning, that you were being manipulated by Amelie, who was never in danger and needed no saving, just so that the overly forced End of the World plotline can take place, presented as a major subversion, felt expected. âJust like how The Patriots turn out to have been manipulating Snake in Metal Gear Solid from the beginning.â, I told myself when first listening to that pivotal Mario and Princess âBeachâ dialogue. The fight with the big BT with Higgs stuck to it, firing rockets at the middle section and the radar dis-- I mean right shoulder of the BT genuinely felt like fighting Metal Gear Rex - especially with Troy Baker screaming in reverberated pain like Cam Clarke did in MGS1. That, followed by a hand to hand fistfight atop Re-- I mean, in a sea of tar with fighting game health bars and stamina meters to save the woman in the background â just like in my Metal Gear video game. Itâs pretty blatant and it doesnât really take a keen eye to see it.
âGetting a little touchy-feely there, Mr. Aphenphosmphobia. Well, congratulations. You won the game. Too bad you didnât stop shitâŚâ is where the game probably should have ended. What follows is what I would consider to be Kojimaâs weirdest decision to date â explaining everything that was confusing and tying up loose ends in the same game that creates them. The next four-five chapters are just that â exposition dump after exposition dump. Nothing left for consideration, no pondering as to what something means. Kojima singlehandedly offered a MGS4 to his MGS1. A key to all questions at the very end, so that nothing is left uncertain.
Which takes me to my next point â the interviews. Slowly but steadily, the idea of the âcodec conversationâ in Kojimaâs repertoire is phased out by optional cassette tapes or in the case of Death Stranding, actual text exposition dumps. Previously youâd at least get to appreciate someone reading them to you in character, but now you have to go through hundreds of emails and interviews by yourself. I canât begin to imagine what understanding some of the concepts of the game is like without going through the interviews, even if I havenât gotten to read them, as it most likely requires 100% completion. In Metal Gear, seeking out new codec conversations in random parts and events of Metal Gear, ensured there was quite a large amount of replayability and youâd usually find new details about characters or helpful tips and strategies on repeat a playthrough, but now, once youâve completed the game, there is nothing new or different â Itâs always going to be the same interviews, in the same place, at the same time. Death Stranding has no replay value whatsoever. Once youâve seen it, youâve seen all of it.
Speaking of in-game players and Walkman earlier reminded me that there is also the surprising absence of a portable music player in-game, for what is probably the most musically saturated Kojima title in years, as music is only available to you while resting in your private room or in a safe house, where you can listen to the ownerâs collection of tracks, even those obtained later in the game. This is in a game, where about 90% of your time with it is in complete silence, save only the odd interjection by Sam, mumbling something to himself and the sounds of the wind and falling rocks in the distance. I feel like I would genuinely feel so much better and could stomach most of the detracting elements of Death Stranding, if I could only play some Low Roar, as I discover a nice view and decide to take a short rest to take it all in. If a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 could have an MP3 player in it and even load some podcast in for you in the goddamn war-ravaged Middle East, then surely we could have had one in this one as well, right?
The quality of Kojimaâs writing also varies wildly, as genuine moments of subtlety and clever world-building are followed by incessant amounts of tutorialization, presented as dialogue that an actual human is supposed to produce in a way that sounds natural. All of that, mixed with hundreds, if not thousands, of different ways of saying âThank you, youâve really saved us out here!â, âCould you deliver this for me?â and âBoy, we sure do feel connected out here, thanks to you!â, littered with thousands of emoticons and expressions of adoration for your skillful and vitally important delivery of a couple of packages of old magazines and some rocks. This, complemented by the late realization that the world of Death Stranding isnât actually that large in scale, so much so that I would bet you can pinpoint exactly were on the map a location is, given only a screenshot of a random assortment of moss and rubble; all makes the over-exaggeration of the effects of your feats seem like genuine lies, placed there to make you feel a false sense of accomplishment. Perhaps they do it with good and earnest intent in rewarding you for the things youâve done for them, but you know what youâve delivered, and you know itâs not that important most of the time.
A section of the game that I was particularly fond of was Episode 11 â i.e. the final episode for Cliff Unger in Vietnam. I recommend you all play that sequence again via the figurines behind Sam in his break room, but with âThe Endâ by The Doors playing in the background. The whole bit is clearly an homage to Apocalypse Now and it almost feels timed to the beat. I felt like it was supposed to play, but they couldnât get the license to it, so I added it on top myself and at that point I could feel Kojima and I enjoying the sentiment on the same wavelength. This is also the episode where Mads Mikkelsen finally gets enough screen time for you to really get an appreciation for his performance, which up until now had been quite subdued. Cliff is fear-inducing and nightmarish upon introduction, his voice reverberating throughout the battlefield, but with the events of Episode 11 you begin to see his more tragic side of the storyâs main events. Mikkelsen lends his talent completely to the whims of Kojima, and that makes for an outstanding performance, much like those by Troy Baker and Tommie Earl Jenkins, yet somehow felt misused and underplayed, as Cliff simply fades away from existence.
The gameâs ending has me holding conflicting opinions: at the same time, I genuinely do not understand why anyone would care enough for Amelie, not to empty a clip into her back, much as I did immediately upon being given the option, and at the same time despising having to just witness the non-decision you have to make in the gameâs final moments. Having no choice but to hug her and listen to her ponder upon existence, and eventually having her make the decision herself whether or not to initiate judgement day. You only have to run around aimlessly and listen to her monologue about how much she cares, as your trigger finger is still itching to end it all, as the game eventually wins itself. Stylistically impeccable and unnerving, as the uncertainty of what is going to happen, continues to grow, only to climax with a whimper of what feels like a glorified deus ex machina. This is followed by Tommie Earl Jenkinsâ powerful final scene, breaking down a character that up until now had seemed one-note and bereft of any emotional depth, only to reinvigorate him and shed any doubt as to who and what he represents in the world of Death Stranding. That however is thrown away, as it steps aside for the epilogue with Lou, as Sam has somehow synthesized a connection to him exactly as Deadman takes him away to delete his memories and their connection, yet Sam manages to carry it to the very end, where it is ultimately revealed that after all the displays of his renewed connection to the people and the world around him, he still doesnât care for anyone or his country, burning his cuffs and forgoing it all, yet Lou is somehow exempt from Sam Porter Bridgesâ final moment of decicive introversion. Even after all of this, Kojima adds one final series of subversions, as Sam is revealed to have been Cliff Ungerâs son, through whose eyes weâve been seeing those dream sequences, finally stitched together into one cohesive whole at the very end, revealing a backstory that ties up loose ends no one was really asking to have tied up. And also, Lou is apparently Louise â a girl. The ending is divisive, because you have the actual tangible story of Sam growing to accept people in his life, getting used to the taste of Fragileâs cryptobiotes and building a relationship with her, ridding himself of his phobia and getting in touch with the people around him like Deadman and Die-Hardman, connecting everyone in the UCA into a whole and living to see another day â only to throw it away at the last minute, but not entirely, out of fear that something would be left unaccounted for. It could have been so much more, or if not, at least somewhat better executed.
When it comes to technical execution, the game is spotty, but ultimately very well made. The physics of just walking from point A to point B are probably the most impressive thing youâll probably experience this decade, even if it is sometimes unwieldy and comical. The whole element of keeping balance and the implementation of inverse kinematics to any terrain, is a marvel to behold and it will frankly be difficult to play anything that doesnât have that much depth anytime soon. One could only wish they had put that much attention to detail into the vehicles, which drive like a load of bricks even on flat ground. When it comes to pure visual fidelity, the Decima Engine is stunning in its execution of photorealistic graphics when in the hands of KojiPro. The amount of landscaping that has taken place is probably mind-blowing, as a lot of the routes that the game takes you through are plotted in such a way as to lead to wide open areas of land, where the gameâs more introspective moments occur, where youâve just crossed a difficult to pass field of BTs or hostile terrain and the camera pulls back from Sam and captures the vista that unfolds before you, as the melancholic tones of a Low Roar begin to pierce the silence. I say it takes you there, because for those who have tried to make some more extreme routes, will know well that there are actually quite a lot of invisible walls all around you at all times, allowing routes to mainly take place in certain sections of the map. You still have the freedom to place whatever items in whatever location you wish, but there is almost always a clear alternate route that you can take, which more often than not has been placed there by the developers and only needs you to place the ladders and ropes along it. This is what I meant earlier in the piece by the exploration not necessarily being player-driven. The invisible hand of KojiPro is there to guide you at all times, as you can never really stray too far from the intended path, believing that you are doing so of your own free will and creativity.
Death Stranding is a divisive game because it really tries so hard to be this artistically extravagant video game with great implications, but ultimately renders its greatest threat as a Mary Sue very late into the game, way beyond the average span of interest, while it already has a very charismatic and well-defined villain in the face of Higgs from the very beginning, who gets somewhat shortchanged into being the self-insert fourth-wall-breaking tool, who is only played as a means to someone elseâs end. Everything past Episode 11 feels unnecessary and diminishes from what the game had already done perfectly until now. The gameâs length in pacing are all over the place as well: Excluding what I would consider to be the mandatory grind of Episode 2, everything else genuinely seems like padding for time, going back and forth across the whole map multiples of times for seemingly arbitrary reasons, haphazardly going into BT infested zones for items of sentimental value, while the threat of annihilation looms over every encounter with them, and by the time something actually engaging happens, youâre often too exhausted to do it.
At the same time, it is also offers this incredible amount of progression and gradation compared to how you started out merely two chapters ago with your ever-expanding arsenal of infrastructure changing the fundamental core of the game. It features all-around outstanding performances (excluding some awful line-reads by LĂŠa Seydoux, which is a shame, because her character could have been so much more, only to be reduced to a fast travel NPC with a catchphrase, which she never seems to be able to pronounce). There is the amazing social strand system that takes the game from a regular single-player slog, to a somewhat indescribable social multiplayer experience, where everyone it working towards the same goal, but helping each other along the way, making travel more efficient and hauling larger loads easier. It also presents this horrifying yet beautiful world, that gets easier to traverse the more you know about its hazards and people, and in a way builds sympathy for the plight these people endure in their post-apocalyptic dystopia. Death Strandingâs world is somehow empty, yet full of substance, yet one-note in scope, yet thematically rich. A game that is equal measure incredibly gratifying, boring as shit, visually and mechanically impressive, a surface level social commentary, a love letter to war and kaiju films, an Icelandic alt pop album and a walking simulator â truly a feat only Hideo Kojima himself and Kojima Productions could accomplish.
Film Review - Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a shining display of the skills of the talented artists and animators who worked on it, but they are used on a film with little to no direction, except for repeating the same clichĂŠs it aims to subvert in a franchise that is already becoming oversaturated by its own offerings in an attempt to reinvent itself for a modern audience, relying purely on fan-service and relatable pop culture references. It boasts a colourful cast of characters which it spends little to no time developing due to the haste with which the plot moves in an incredibly small timeframe of events. Ultimately, an experience that is pleasing to the eye with its skillful execution, but vapid in substance due to poor screenwriting choices.
To preface this review, one ought to know that review will not be from the perspective of an avid superhero aficionado but rather from a viewpoint of one with little to no exposure when it comes to the Spider-Man comic books, graphic novels or anything besides the Sam Raimi film trilogy and the 1994 animated series for that matter. As such, there wonât really be any discussion as to the quality of adaptation when it comes to characters and how they relate to existing plot lines as compared to those of the film; however, to compensate, that would contribute to a more objective viewing of the picture on its own merits. Also of note, the film was viewed in 2D through the digital home release and not the 3D version in theatres.
Of course, there is no denying that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is one of the most aesthetically impressive animated features of quite some time. Everything from the models, to the lighting, to the shading is made with immense artistry and lends itself nicely to the diegesis of what an animated comic book would look like if one were to exist inside it. While the animation itself has its flaws in terms in terms of consistency, there was a noticeable and considerable effort put into the use of shaders in effects such as chromatic aberration, the simulation of halftone patterns in the flares of lighting and hatching instead of flat colour shading; while the animation makes use of some classical techniques, such as squashing and stretching movement, shifting between 3D and 2D through rotoscoping, and motion smearing. One could point to the visual fidelity of the film as its strongest asset - and it most definitely is; however, one could easily gloss over some of the inconsistencies, owing themselves to the bewildering amount of framerates at play in some of the scenes. The production company behind the animation process cites a variation from 24 to 14 frames per second, which some have attributed as a stylistic choice to represent a form of character development throughout the plot as movement becomes less bold and more fluid along the heroâs journey. However, on first viewing, the initial minutes of the filmâs runtime were quite the eyesore, requiring some adjustment before being able to completely immerse oneself in the experience. Human vision still processes images individually at around the 10 to 12 mark and even if these 14 frames of animation are done âon twosâ, it feels like a slideshow most of the time. What especially makes this jarring is that two characters can be animated using two different framerates in the same scene, which would usually be a massive red flag.
One other contentious aspect of the film is its music. The influence of the east coast hip-hop culture is written into the DNA of the protagonist and the filmâs setting, and the soundtrack reflects that by making liberal use of licensed music, featuring heavy breakbeats with an electronic flair. Daniel Pembertonâs score is a more classical offering, mixing orchestral and synthesized sounds to elevate moments of humor or tragedy, but taking influence from 70âs funk, as well as more eastern or ragtime infused bits from different styles of animation. The main failing of the soundtrack is the use of the aforementioned licensed tracks, as they usually play over dialogue. These tracks, coming from a style of music which values quick and high tempo vocals doesnât match with the slower more narrative pace of the underlying dialogue and ends up overpowering it, making the dialogue hard to hear. The instrumental score makes great use of leitmotifs and gives every character their own theme with about 2-3 variations, which usually get played with good timing in moments of distress, surprise or in the many comedic points throughout the film, and it usually made more of an impression than the licensed tracks that just seemingly bound the main character to a stereotype more than anything.
The main weak point of the film is perhaps its plot development. To be brief, the film has too many characters to sufficiently develop any of them into anything more than a single archetype with slight variations. Even in the script (now available publicly), once can notice the emphasis on allusions to pop culture tropes and internet memes as a nod to veteran fans of the series, rather than an attempt to establish something more meaningful. In its defense, it does make strides on being free of the now clichĂŠd origin story of Spider-Man, however it also makes a point to repeat it three more times than usual, rendering the whole effort of being brief and self-aware pointless, as it would have taken up about the same runtime as just going through with it in its entirety in the first place.
The events of the film take place in two days in their entirety, including massive character-defining shifts in confidence, ability and skill as well as long term relationships forming over a mere few hours. In the end this makes any growth from any character appear as if they embody a Marry Sue/Larry Stu archetype, who develops whatever the plot requires to progress almost instantly. Tragedies take place, which feel like obvious tear-jerker moments for characters weâve merely known for a whole 10 minutes, seemingly requiring at least some familiarity of the source material or a long term devotion to the series as a fan to grasp the severity of their plight. Alongside that, characters appear in and out of places at the plotâs convenience, ruining any idea of continuity, especially near the end. Even so, the relationships between the characters only have an effect in the aftermath of the main conflict, uninfluenced by everything that has happened, as if these paradigm shifts in their personal lives were going to happen regardless of their presence in the events of the film. No one ever really grows in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; the closest thing being an equivalent to a B-plot of a parent drifting away from their child, which ultimately gets played for laughs.
The screenplay follows The Heroâs journey to the last letter, only differing in the many references it makes to other properties of the Spider-Man franchise, which show up sporadically throughout the events of the film. Even the idea of the âMentorâ is present, but effectively thrown out of the window, since the trials and failures, the growth of new skills and the death and rebirth of the main protagonist happen in one single scene, skipping an entire essential quarter of the journey.
Everything in the plot moves with such haste that it has no time to go anywhere. By the halfway point of the filmâs runtime it is still tying up the loose ends of its inciting incident. As said before, it has too many characters that get introduced too quickly and in bulk. Drama is experienced and is immediately forgotten, since there is no time to dwell upon it. Motives are not questioned and are washed away.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a shining display of the skills of the talented artists and animators who worked on it, but they are used on a film with little to no direction, except for repeating the same clichĂŠs it aims to subvert in a franchise that is already becoming oversaturated by its own offerings in an attempt to reinvent itself for a modern audience, relying purely on fan-service and relatable pop culture references. It boasts a colourful cast of characters which it spends little to no time developing due to the haste with which the plot moves in an incredibly small timeframe of events. Ultimately, an experience that is pleasing to the eye with its skillful execution, but vapid in substance due to poor screenwriting choices. Nothing more than another origin story.
Game Review - Risk of Rain 2 - Early Access (2019)
A plunge into another dimension of roguelike action with ever electric music and infinite hardships â now in Early Access.
 Please note that this review represents my thoughts on the game, based on its initial patch on Steam Early Access. Everything mentioned may and will probably be subject to change in future versions of the game and should be taken as simply a matter of the current state of the game. I will endeavor to follow up this review with and errata and final review of the game upon full release, which is announced to be in about 12 months. Thank you.
Risk of Rain 2 released on Steam Early Access just a few days ago with little to no fanfare beyond the mention of the initial release window of Q1 2019, announced by developer Hopoo Games late last year. However, the game is already boasting massive player numbers, running at about 70,000+ concurrent players on March 30th, 2019 (according to SteamSpy); with hundreds of Twitch broadcasts, peaking at around 28,000+ viewers.
One could say it is a good time to be a Risk of Rain fan, as Hopoo Gamesâ partnership with Gearbox Publishing has aided the game in reaching a wider audience than the original.
Instead of being somewhat barred behind requirements of technical knowledge, the addition of Steamworks multiplayer, compared to the somewhat archaic peer-to-peer multiplayer of the original, now allows players to experience its co-op roguelike action with ease. That no doubt will play a massive part in Risk of Rain 2âs success among its playerbase, as it will move the game from the originalâs frantic singleplayer roguelike chaos to even greater and more frantic roguelike chaos, which one can now share with friends or other players around the world via quickplay lobbies.
The initial 48 hour sales period also featured a promotional âbuy one, get one freeâ deal, which I may add was a brilliant way to emphasize the new multiplayer suite, allowing you to not only purchase the game at a reduced cost, but also gift a copy to a friend, so that one may join the gameâs co-op experience and be acquainted with Risk of Rain 2 without the need for an initial financial investment. This however lead to what I can only describe as a lot of âe-beggingâ, as my dives into the Risk of Rain community on Twitter and on the gameâs official Discord server uncovered an incredible amount of people just sitting in wait for loose copies of the game. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing; however, it pollutes the conversation around the game, as even I was so helpfully instructed in the replies of my tweets containing my first impressions for the game, that I should be aware that I own an additional copy and that it would be lovely if I were to trade it for some of their other Steam games or simply charitably donate it to them. This however should not be seen as the fault of the developers or publishers, as they cannot be responsible for the actions of the amorphous mass that is the ânot-even really-the-gameâs-playerbase-but-really-want-to-beâ. My reason for pointing this out is simply as a word of warning on the effect of such promotional deals, as I believe that would usually not be talked about and I have seen many members of the community express their disdain for such beseechment.
So far, my issues with the multiplayer are that due to the nature of quickplay, I am often put into groups with people that are geographically far enough from me as to create massive amounts of latency, which for an action roguelike is usually fatal, as most shots appear to miss, even if standing right next to an enemy. Chests and lunar coins appear to take almost 30 seconds to open or pick up â by which usually someone else has already come and picked them up, leaving you with little to no items and more likely to be waiting out the next teleporter event as a spectator.
But, I digress â let us talk about the elephant in the room:
Risk of Rain is now in 3D. A jarring shift from the pixel-art platforming of the original to fully three-dimensional flat-shaded environments, switching out the GameMaker engine for Unity. For those of us who have been following Hopooâs blog on Tumblr, seeing his experiments with 3D modeling, the announcement that Risk of Rain 2 would be in 3D came as something of an âahaâ moment. That said, the core concepts of the series translate very well, leading many to jokingly say that Risk of Rain 2 has âmore depthâ than the original.
Items you pick up during gameplay now even display on your character, making the end result of your runs look visually distinct from how you began, reflecting the increase in power and your new abilities; a features that was long talked about, I believe ever since the original game came out.
The addition of full mouse aim and 360-degree movement have increased the skill cap of the game tremendously: as well as the difficulty of now having to aim, enemies can now sneak up on you, or attack you from above, or below, or anywhere really. Most of the enemies from the original make a return, but have changed from simply making melee attacks, to appropriating projectiles and lasers into their arsenals, making the predominant strategy in the original of âjust jump and shootâ into something that requires a bit more thought and involves some calculated risk. So pray to Hopoo you donât get  c l a p p e d  by the Magma Worm.
But it is not only the enemies who have adapted: The playable characters, or âsurvivorsâ, have been retooled for the new gameplay, featuring some of their most memorable skills and abilities along with some new ones. The one that sticks out in my mind is The Huntressâ new ability, which launches her into the air, raining armor-shredding arrows in a small circle on the ground, which replaces her explosive incendiary bolt from the original.
The starting lineup of characters features the iconic Commando, a HAN-D type robot named MUL-T, Huntress, Mercenary, Engineer and an entirely new class, named the Artificer, which I am yet to unlock, but I have a hunch on how to do so.
As it stands, one of the main complaints that people have gameplay-wise is the newfound difficulty in finding the teleporter, which now can hide in all sorts of nooks and crannies. However, I believe this is mostly due to the to the lack of tutorialization, as the difference between aimlessly wandering for 10-30 minutes and finding it almost immediately, came when someone pointed out that there are unique particle effects surrounding the teleporter, which are colored brightly orange/red, but are not immediately noticeable if you donât know what to look for. I suppose that is a communication issue, but in their latest blog post Hopoo Games have noted the problem and will be working on making exploration easier.
Another new addition to Risk of Rain 2 is Prismatic Trials, which can be considered something akin to a weekly challenge, where everyone plays on the same seed, meaning that all items and teleporters are in the same place. In addition, there are mutators, such as more gold at the very start of the game or the sequence of levels becomes random, ensuring that each week is different from the last and makes it different from the default game experience. The end goal is to just beat the game, as you usually do, but with the added incentive of getting a faster time than everyone else. Currently there is no reward for being among the top players for the week, but the wording on the menu indicates that in the future there may be something beyond just bragging rights.
On another note, the music for the game, provided by the wonderful and talented Chris Christodoulou, who previously worked with Hopoo games on the original Risk of Rain and Deadbolt, has succeeded yet again to provide the haunting and alien atmosphere of the game, mixing ambient synth soundscapes with hard-hitting distorted guitars and bass. The track âEvapotranspirationâ, featured in the first trailer for the game encapsulates this the best in my opinion, beginning with a somewhat celestial motif, slowly distorting as time passes and the difficulty of the game becomes higher and the action ramps up, layering on an echoey guitar and heavy drums, creating a sense of pressure, only to finish off with a bang, by adding a distorted electric guitar and a frantic semi-drum-and-bass rhythm, that sound as much out of place as exactly on signature, creating this uneasy tension.
But â real talk Chris â where the fuck is Coalescence 2? Thereâs creative pursuits and the need for the new and different, but you just canât notâŚthat tune was electric.
The so called Early Access OST is now available on Chrisâ Bandcamp page for a discounted price of 4⏠(or your regional equivalent) and features a total of 11 tracks. Purchase of the album is also considered a pre-order for the final album, said to be released later in 2019 (according to the PDF included with the purchase of the album). Your purchase also nets you discount codes for the original Risk of Rain soundtrack (which is amazing and you should own, if you donât already), along with the so called Engineer Editions, featuring the sheet music, stems and other goodies for both games (the Engineer Edition for the sequel pending release, stated to be around Q1 2020).
Overall, Risk of Rain 2 looks and feels like a worthy successor for the franchise. The new 3D gameplay and visuals may alienate some of the fans of the original, but I believe that most will agree, that as of its current state, Risk of Rain 2 shows massive potential and will probably stand as an example of sequels done right. The new art style is appealing (even though there is something to miss in the pixel art of the original), the animations are fluid, the landscapes and level designs are diverse and colorful, the music is more of what was great before and more nuanced than its predecessorâs, the gameplay is more action-packed and difficult than ever. The issues with the game are not on the core level and will probably be fixed in future content updates. Risk of Rain 2 has something for both fans of the original and newcomers alike and with the promised future content updates, featuring more survivors, items, enemies, bosses and levels, one could expect hours of fun gameplay upon release. Highly recommended.
All thatâs left to say is â whatâs the forecast today?
A thrilling and ultraviolent neo-noir film, that is guaranteed to get your adrenaline pumping, whilst also giving you a good laugh with itâs sheer ridiculousness .
As a fan of Mads Mikkelsenâs work, I was instantly drawn to this gritty neo-noir film, which cover depicted a drenched and snow-soaked Mads with gray hair and an eye-patch, looking suspiciously a lot like Big Boss from the Metal Gear series, which by now you should know is near and dear to my heart. Upon watching the trailer out of curiosity, I found that this was going to by one of those films over which the word ultraviolence was pasted in big bold and blood-red letters. I was instantly hooked and I anticipated the release with glee.
Upon viewing it however, I canât help but wonder whether I think Jonas Ă kerlundâs Polar is simply a lower budget attempt to emulate the success of the John Wick franchise, by melding it stylistically with the Dark Horse graphic novel Polar: Came from the Cold, or a great, straight to the point action film, that is enveloped in Tarantino-esque storytelling, gratuitous violence and beautiful cinematography. In the end, I believe it is a bit of both. The parallels that can be drawn between Polar and John Wick are clear as day, as both their plots revolve around a retired assassin being forced back into action; however, the difference is that in John Wickâs universe, there was some semblance of cleanliness and professionalism to assassination, a sort of class act per se. In Polarâs world, however, assassination is this act of gratuitous bloodshed, where everyone but the main character seems to believe killing the target to be secondary to killing each and every innocent bystander on the way to the target itself.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Duncan Vizla, referred to as The Black Kaiser throughout the film; a renowned and ruthless assassin, who I couldnât help but see is a somewhat different manifestation of Mikkelsenâs other role as Hannibal Lecter, sharing the same sensibilities of professionalism and showmanship in murder. His persona is built as this scarred, yet carefree veteran in his field, who seems to inspire awe in all of his peers. The only somewhat sane character in the film â Vivian, repeatedly warns that people ought to ânot fuck with himâ (which, ironically, every second woman featured in the film seems to do or has done previously), shining a light on his dangerous nature, much like the stories about John Wick and his infamous pencil, that are constantly retold throughout that filmâs dialogue. And yet he is this kooky old man, who inflates balloons and hangs cardboard âHappy Birthday!â letters above his fireplace, chops and sorts his neighbor Camillaâs firewood, has difficulty picking what brand of sweets to buy at the shop and accidentally shoots the dog after being woken from his PTSD-infested dreams, only to replace it with a goldfish, as well as going to a local school to show kids knife tricks and pictures of sun-dried corpses, and presents Camilla with a goddamn gun as a heartwarming gift. Iâd go as far to say that he is bloody lovable in a twisted and endearing way.
On a side note, after he shot his dog after the first shown occurrence of said dreams, I had this expectation that as a man who always sleeps with a gun in his pocket, heâd continue to perform the same accidental ballistics after every subsequent dream. To my immediate shock, the next time he decided to doze off was in a bloody passenger plane. I was just bracing for that inevitable moment where some innocent bystander was about to bite the bullet, but for better or worse it never happened.
The overall visual presentation of the film is probably its strongest asset. I canât speak to the accuracy of the recreation of scenes from the graphic novel, but there is a distinguishable picturesque quality to every frame in the film. Even throughout the marketing material, one can see the clear comic-book-esque symmetry. The color grading is a whole topic on its own. Scenes with Duncan are show in this very high-contrast low saturated gray, while most scenes featuring the supporting cast feature this very vivid neon saturation where the colors pop and sometimes bleed into each other, showing this clear contrast between the old and grizzled Kaiser and the newer younger blood out to get him. The only thing that has any color to it in Duncanâs life is perhaps those dreams he keeps having, which are bathed in saturated dark reds and a lot of glitchy, distorted visuals. Even the typography used throughout the film shared that iconic VHS displacement. The addition of Gothic lettering among the brief flashes of titling is very stylistic in referencing the Germanic origins of Duncanâs nickname â him being The Black Kaiser. The layers of effects however made it almost impossible to read the text in the split second it is shown on screen, which left me waiting for characterâs names to appear in dialogue, so that I can confirm that what I read was right. The cinematography is usually amazing, each shot being framed and lighted in a way that only a graphic novel could entail. However, the film features a lot of fish-eyed lensed drone photography which clearly differs in quality to the cinema-grade cameras used for the rest of the film, leaving it looking amateurish at some of the key points in the plot.
Another aspect of the visuals, which some may find refreshing in the current politically safe age of cinema, while others can find it to be incredibly jarring and distracting, is the generous displays of gratuitous sex and/or T&A featured liberally throughout the run-time of the film. It seems that each and every character in Polarâs universe has slept with each other, or is yet to do so. The difference with other graphic novel adaptation, Sin City, which by any other mean can be cited as a direct influence on this filmâs style, can be drawn in a sense that even in a city filled with vices, there was this tasteful approach to the sexual, often being purely implied. Polar on the other hand has no such restraint and appears to flaunt it at every opportune moment, which I found to be garish and unnecessary, as it provided nothing to the filmâs substance.
One of the best aspects of Polar is dedmau5âs amazing soundtrack. With heavy lingering synth melodies and energetic electronic beats, it creates an amazing atmosphere of tension and serenity, especially in scenes of intense drama. The tracks that stood out the most on my first viewing were âsombâ, which was used in the serene and calm opening to the film, followed by âcabinâ; with its very nostalgically charged synth, rhythmic drums and haunting baseline, introducing us to Duncan. âchillâ features a very tense and unnerving piano tune, signaling that not all is right as a sign of what is to come. On the more action-packed side however, the heavy hitters are âmidas heelâ, âmainâ and ânosediveâ, each used in some of the most visually intense bloodbaths you will ever see, pumping with adrenaline and keeping you on edge with heavy electronic beats and whining synths. And none of that youth dub-step shit, that one could expect â dedmau5 provides an honest to god EDM soundtrack with his staple melodic progressions and no-nonsense sound, mixed to perfection.
The last point of contention I could think of is probably the ending. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I would describe it as initially surprising, but well hinted at throughout the film on second inspection. One could see it as an attempt to generate a sequel, though I am not familiar enough with the original graphic novel to say what that could entail.
Overall, I believe that Polar is a fantastic film, that wears its inspirations on its sleeve and creates an ultraviolent romp of revenge and drama, filled with all the staples of a gritty Neo-noir setting, featuring larger than life humans, able to withstand a lot of punishment, but dish out a lot as well. Even though that some aspects of its plot seem unnecessary, along with the purely visual bloating, Iâd say it is worth it to sit down and watch through, but probably not with your parents, especially if you are a fan of Mads Mikkelsen or films like Kill Bill, Sin City and John Wick. Iâd go as far as to say that if you enjoy video games like Hotline Miami, this can definitely be a nice intro into that type of cinema.
Two movies, that juggle the same ambitions to adapt the comic books and present them to a larger audience, but take radically different approaches.
I need to preface this review on both Judge Dredd movies, released almost one decade apart, with the disclaimer that I am unfamiliar with the source material of the Dredd comic books, created by writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra. Though through word of mouth Iâve come to understand that the 2012 reboot Dredd is infinitely more faithful to the graphic novels, rather than the more mainstream blockbuster approach of the 1995 film. Despite that, having watched both in quick succession, I must say that the original does a better job of involving the viewer in the world of Mega-City One, immediately starting the movie off with a credit sequence featuring stills from all the various comic books and introducing the lore of the world in a very Star-Wars-esque text crawl, even featuring James Earl Jones himself as the narrator for the film.
In all its nineties over the top fanfare, it almost instantly builds the atmosphere of an uninviting, uninhabitable world, reminiscent of other techno-noir settings, such as that of âBlade Runnerâ, filled with civil unrest, crime and other assorted scum and villainy. In the first five minutes of the film, you get to see Judge Dredd himself (played by Sylvester Stallone) dispense the law like no other, showing complete control of the situation and demonstrating his mastery of the judgeâs high-tech gadgets, which feel like an extension of himself and his duty to the law. Although, even if he is built to be this legend amongst men, keeping the streets of Mega-City One clean, he is shown to lack the same proficiency in ethics as he does in combat, which is later played on to humanize Joseph Dredd in his darkest hours yet. Despite his hard exterior, Dredd upholds the ideals and is aware of the commitments that are expected of him -- to bring the law to the lawless when the time comes. His antithesis â Rico (portrayed by the coarsely handsome Armand Assante) is built to be this cunning, almost unstoppable force that is coming for Dredd, and despite, at first, the villain for this movie being planned to be Judge Death, a monster from the comic books who makes "living" illegal, Rico had more to do with Dredd's past, almost appearing as his equal in strength and wit, which in my opinion served the filmâs story well.
In the Dredd comics, tradition dictates that Dredd does not take off his helmet, thus his face has mostly only fleetingly appeared in full, although in the film adaptation this was almost absolutely thrown out of the window, in favor of showing Sylvester Stalloneâs face for the majority of scenes in the movie, causing a lot of controversy, but oddly fitting for this closer to heart approach to the dark dystopian universe of Judge Dredd. But Dredd is not alone in this harsh world. His companion throughout the film - Street Judge Hershey (played by the absolutely stunning Diane Lane) often looks after Dredd and saves his back on multiple occasions, eventually even becoming a love interest for the main character, which again I would suppose is not very faithful to the origin material.
The inciting incident of the film is Dredd being sent to court over the false accusations of murder, betrayed by his higher ups and Chief Justice Fargo (played by the amazing Max von Sydow), being Josephâs longtime friend and mentor from the Academy, seeing Dreddâs defense crumble, sentenced to death, retires as Chief Justices and the council grants his last wish â sparing Dreddâs life, as the former Chief Justice goes on his long walk into the Cursed Earth. This sets Judge Dredd on a course for revenge, eventually revealing his true origins and confronting Rico.
The filmâs plot manages to keep up appearances, showing Dredd as the immovable object and Rico as the unstoppable force, clashing both together in a thrilling story of revenge, sacrifice and uncovering oneâs past. All of this, accompanied by the amazing score of Alan Silvestri, which more often than not emphasizes the internal struggle of Dredd to uphold the law, whilst also learning the truth of his origins and the evil that surrounds him. Dreddâs theme music is ultimately memorable and a cast of colorful accompanying characters, well placed comedic moments, an atmosphere that oozes with unflinching conviction, bolstered by the best of nineties CGI, along with the fairly clichĂŠd, but thrilling story makes for a really good movie, but perhaps a bad Judge Dredd adaptation overall.
On the other hand, the 2012 remake âDreddâ, starring Karl Urban, starts with much less fanfare, substituting the techno-noir CGI of the original with a much more grounded and seemingly present-day atmosphere, the only difference being the massive protruding skyscrapers, called Mega-Blocks. It almost looks like theyâve taken stock footage of New York and in post-production just applied CGI towers at random, which makes for a fairly boring landscape, compared to the cyberpunk mesh of cultures that usually goes with the territory.
The original spent more time fleshing out the world outside, while the reboot is set in a single building that almost immediately gets closed off to any outside influence. I could only imagine that being due to budgetary constraints, but sadly that seems to have an effect on the whole movie. There is a noticeable drop in the quality of cinematography from the 1995 film, which boasted a large quantity of varying shots and scenes, compared to âDreddâ, which I had noticed almost always framed Judge Dredd and Judge Anderson in the same way, often against bland backgrounds and lifeless dĂŠcor.
Speaking of Anderson (portrayed by the enchanting Olivia Thirlby), she is almost immediately shown to possess some kind of ability that would make her useful as a companion to Dredd, unlike Judge Hershey, who was usually the inferior judge in the situation, but proved to be there in the right place in the right time more often than not. Judge Anderson is a psychic, due to her inborn mutation from living near the outer rim of Mega-City One. Although her ability is only used to further the plot, where otherwise nothing would happen. Her ability to enter minds was also played for a bit of shock factor, as the movie was going forth with yet another stab at political correctness. I didnât find her presence in the movie to be to preachy of the female-forward narrative, as she really was just doing her job.
Which also seems to be the main thread of the film â another day of fighting crime for Judge Dredd and his band of pals. The original had events, which would have an effect on the world and characters changed for better or for worse â Chief Justice Fargo sacrificed himself for the law and his apprentice, Rico wanted to free himself and create others like him for him and his brother, Judge Hershey wanted to prove herself as capable and also save Dredd. Meanwhile, the 2012 film simply had a baddie, selling drugs to people, so that we could have some aesthetic slow motion scenes, a rookie Judge wanting to again prove herself, some rogue Judges looking for money and a hacker who just wanted to run away -- characters who either die during the movie or get a single chance at redemption.
I find it necessary to compare the villains of the two films, despite them serving different functions in the larger story. Ma-ma (played by âGame of Thronesâ star Lena Headey) is simply brooding and disinteresting, compared to the charismatic antics of Rico in the original. We get a brief glimpse into her origin story, which sadly failed to garner any sympathy or establish a gray line, like that of Ricoâs story. Her entire existence is to simply provide a goal for Dredd and to create a few pretty scenes where he says a few good one-liners and then proceeds to beat people up. Ma-ma believes to be smarter than Dredd, but poses no actual threat to him herself, since her posy of bodyguards are her only effective means of defense. Rico on the other hand is almost a direct clone of Joseph Dredd himself â (and as I repeat myself) equal in strength and wit. Perhaps only differing in his ideology and perspective on the world, which just happens to be quite evil. And let us remember that Rico was not alone in his endeavors, as he had inside help from some corrupt Judges, similar to those mercenaries in the reboot.
Overall, both films try to adapt the stories and characters from the original comic books and perhaps put them in front of a larger audience. âJudge Dreddâ (1995) doesnât burden itself with upholding some of the stricter traditions of the origin material, but instead builds a rich world with interesting characters with questionable ethics, plays to the strengths of the action genre and of the comic books and provides an entertaining hour and a half of intense action scenes, betrayals, twists, sacrifices and thrills, set in an unforgiving dystopian world.
While âDreddâ (2012) upholds the traditions of the origin material, it railroads itself into often feeling drab and too focused on being faithful to the source, whilst also trying to have some aesthetically pleasing scenes with Judge Dreddâs signature one-liners. Though in the process and perhaps due to budgetary restrictions and the emphasis on 3D effects, which arenât present outside of the theatrical release, it sacrifices developing its own characters and showing little to nothing of the outside world and somehow appearing more clichĂŠd than its predecessor film.
The question that naturally arises from both these points is whether it is more important for a movie adaptation to stay faithful to the source material and not stray too far for the sake of appeasing the devoted fans or sacrificing a bit of that strict tradition in order to produce an overall more enjoyable film, which would probably appeal to a larger audience, that would most likely be unfamiliar with the source material in question, despite only being inspired by or drawing from the original comic books.
I believe the answer lies in the balance of both, since if you would rather be completely fateful to the comic books, youâd most likely be more interested in the books themselves, more than watching the movie, which with some creative license could enhance and extend the already rich world of the âJudge Dreddâ comic books. One or the other should be looked at as a supplement to an existing work, rather than a replacement for the other. The important is that itâs Judge Dredd⌠he is⌠the law! Drop⌠your weapons! These blocks⌠are under⌠arrest! This is⌠your final⌠warning!
A bad tech demo for a game that should have broken boundaries, but instead alienates its new playerbase by expanding to the PC games market.
The Destiny 2 Beta has come to PC and it looks greater than ever, boasting higher framerates, enhanced texture quality, postprocessing and particle effects. If I were to judge Destiny 2âs debut on PC just on its graphics, Iâd say it was a rousing success. Having been liberated from the dreaded 30 FPS lock on consoles, people with a more competitive edge will welcome the higher refresh rates and lower response times in the predominantly PvP focused open beta with open arms. PvE players also get a taste for what is to come with an intro mission, revealing a new threat to the players and the new antagonist - Dominus Ghaul; along with a new strike - âThe Inverted Spireâ. Due to the linear nature of strikes, it does not offer a lot of replayability and therefore you could expect only about an hour or so of content to get your feet wet, if youâre not interested in partaking in PvP. Currently, the two available player versus player maps involve either a âCounter Strikeââesque deploy/disarm the explosive or a standard capture points gamemode. And judging by the current Twitch viewership for the game, PvP is the single driving force for the open beta. Which warrants another question â where is the rest of Destiny 2?
Considering that the original Destiny featured a semi-expansive open world with procedural questing, which are weirdly not present in the current build, leaves the beta looking like more of a tech demo for the PC crowd, rather than a representation of a game that is set to come out in less than a month. The original had hub spaces where you could meet other players, visit vendors, socialize and go off on missions, while the beta for the sequel finds having an expansive open world MMO completely unnecessary and forces you to play either with your friends over Battle.NET or with random players similar to World of Warcraftâs group finder, completely killing any involvement in the games story and world. Bungie and Activision seem to be unaware that expanding their horizons to PC involves selling this new playerbase the world of Destiny and not just pertaining to the people that have bought and played the original on console. On multiple accounts Iâve seen people refusing to part with $60 in order to play, what they think is a full AAA game, consisting of just a single strike and two PvP modes with no word of the gameâs story or open world. I wouldnât be surprised if newer players consider Destiny 2 to be something akin to the Call of Duty franchise â an extremely linear single player campaign, designed to be a tag-along to the multiplayer PvP modes, providing nothing that hasnât already been seen on the PC games market for years.
More seasoned players can expect four new planets, featuring Io, Titan, Nessus and Earthâs European Dead Zone, which is said to twice the size of the originalâs Cosmodrme. But oddly enough, there seems to be no word of this in the gameâs promotional material, which proudly displays the pre-purchase or digital deluxe bonuses, yet the actual information on the gameâs content is sparse. The Destiny 2 store page on Battle.NET simply mentions an epic campaign and the presence of cooperative and competitive multiplayer gameplay. Yet, you can clearly see that preordering gets you an experimental exotic trace rifle and a mysterious legendary sword, which for all we know might be the most overpowered weapons in the entire universe, putting you at a disadvantage compared to players, who are willing to part with some more money in order to get these desirable weapons. And the erroneous idea that selling an expansion pass for the so called Expansion I and Expansion II, for which there is no information whatsoever, solidifies the notion that players are still willing to put money on the table on the basis of a promise for future content, that may or may not be utter garbage.
The game itself gives you a choice of three classes, each with their own unique abilities and exotic weaponry â the Titan, the Hunter and the Warlock. Each class also features two sub-classes, which change up the abilities almost entirely. During my time with the beta, I managed to try all but the Titan, which is the designated tank of the three, boasting higher health and resistances, along with a small deployable shield or a charge, which makes him a preferred class for many players interested in PvP. Both the Hunter and the Warlock class seem to share a general damage dealer archetype, where the Warlock is seemingly more focused on using abilities, rather than the high mobility gunslinging of the Hunter.
Upon choosing your flavor of character, you are given an exotic weapon according to your class and you are thrown into the intro mission, where you are attempting to save the day and protect âourâ home from that pesky Red Legion, determined to destroy âusâ all, as if the writers are begging you: âPlease empathize with our world and like our characters!â. Speaking of the characters, in the intro you are introduced to three plot significant individuals, representing the three player classes. Weirdly enough, I struggle to remember even their names, due to two thirds of them feeling like the brownest of cardboard cutouts, which are yet again begging you to empathize with the tragedy that is befalling âyourâ home, despite making no effort to explain anything at all and promptly disappearing in a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again. The other third of the cast is composed of the overly quirky comic relief character - Kay, who is always about two seconds before breaking the fourth wall and play opposition to the really serious and life-changing events about to unfold before your eyes, as if the writers are making a desperate attempt for their characters to have any appeal at all.
As you are taken by surprise by Ghaul, who strips you of your âlightâ and proceeds to reveal his genetic superiority by beating you to a pulp and eventually kicking you off the platform of his spaceship, you are magically launched into orbit by way of falling to your death, just after being shown how completely limp and powerless you are. I suppose the marketing team couldnât be bothered to show any of the European Dead Zone, where I would suppose you would fall right after the intro. Instead of that you are sent to what I could only describe as a mission select screen, where you are again given the rich assortment for three entire modes.
PvP is divided into a âlow intensityâ and âhigh intensityâ variant. The former of which is a supposedly casual capture points experience, which oddly enough isnât all that low intensity. The latter competitive mode, called âCountdownâ puts you in a âcops and robbersâ scenario where one team has to set off an explosive, while the other team has to stop that from happening by either disarming the bomb or killing the entire enemy team. There is of course the caveat that upon dying in this high intensity mode, you are left waiting for upwards of thirty seconds in order to see if anyone is going to revive you or will the entire team get wiped out, trying to save a single dead member, which in term leaves you waiting a lot, rather that the quick kill â quick respawn action of the supposed lesser intensity mode. Despite that, it seems that Hunters get a very slight advantage, since both modes often take place in close quarters, and every hunter has increased maneuverability and gets an exotic hand cannon, which is more of a miniature shotgun, rather than a pistol.
The included PvE strike is a little bit more interesting, by featuring some colorful writing and actually showing a bit of the world this game inhabits. The Inverted Spire sets you on a investigation of a mining site where the Red Legion have apparently unearthed something ancient and terrible. Even then, you still need to traverse a fairly large map that provides multiple occasions for you to completely utilize your characterâs kit. You are given platforms to double jump towards or tactical positions where you can take out enemies at long range by using your sniper, or even tight spots with high enemy density where you can utilize your abilities. You would think that The Inverted Spire would be the single redeeming quality of the Destiny 2 Beta, but upon closer inspection and a few more playthroughts, you start to notice that some design decisions were seemingly made on a whim. For instance, somewhere around the middle of the strike you start getting thrown about by jump pads, which sometimes negate fall damage, while in others they outright throw you against a wall, leaving you to fall to your death. Even one of the final bossâ mechanics involves him deleting the floor, yet being dealt fall damage is hit or miss, often killing you in zones with restricted respawn when you least expect it.
In the end, I have no doubt that Destiny 2 will be a great game, but seeing how Activision and Bungie are treating their sequelâs debut onto the PC games market, by botching an essential beta period, filled with bugs, pre-order and digital deluxe malarkey and overall bad developer practices is not going to be in their favor when the game eventually releases onto the platform. But then again, it might turn out to be a pleasant surprise for those, who are willing to give it a shot, despite the horrible pre-release.
You canât keep up? Well, get off the treadmill and start moving forward!
Online multiplayer is not what it was back in the day. Sure it still has the elements we all love â socializing, player versus player combat, leaderboards or overcoming difficult challenges together with friends; but then again that is all fed to you along with a plethora of daily quests, seasonal achievements, cosmetics, limited time content or hero rotations. Your favorite gameâs content is constantly changing at an ever increasing rate and for you that means having to invest the time into collecting all the bits and pieces, jumping through all the hoops and experiencing all of what the game has to offer. But there are certainly few among us with the completionist attitude, capable of doing so; not for a single game, but for multiple ones, all seeking your attention and rewarding you with even more shiny baubles in order to persuade you in choosing them among many of their competitors. It is very noticeable how the idea of lootboxes and chests has crawled its way up from the nether that is the free to play development scene onto games that even ask for a sum of money akin to the usual AAA release.
Blizzard Entertainmentâs Overwatch is a prime example, much like every other Blizzard game out there. You are not meant to simply be a World of Warcraft or a StarCraft player â you are meant to be a Blizzard player. This is reinforced by the regular events that crossover content from one game to another. For instance, playing a few games of Heroes of the Storm will reward you with content for Overwatch in the form of exclusive portraits or limited edition skins. Then again, you are also offered a new seasonal reward in Diablo 3, while the leaderboard in Hearthstone has just reset for the month and there are two new card backs to be ground for, while there is the new StarCraft 2 battlechest is being released, that offers you even more exclusive content that requires your attention and itâs all going away at the end of the month.
It is reasonable to think that most people who work or go to school cannot afford to spend another 40 or so hours a week across multiple titles, in order to eventually get all those items, cosmetics and loot. In the end you are left missing out. And the amount of missed content gets bigger each and every week, month or year you decide to not partake.
I realize that having a constant feed of new content stimulates the playerbase to remain invested into their favorite game â in the end itâs not a bad thing at all. More content is always better for the players. But then again, do you really need that card back? Do you really need all 100+ Overwatch skins, voice lines and sprays? Is it worth grinding to level 70 in Diablo 3 every month or so for another portrait frame and another weird pet to collect coins for you?
At some point online multiplayer games stopped being about actual experiences, about grand new expansions, and about playing with friends to overcome challenges despite the odds, but a Skinner box, where you are drip-fed the same content and are rewarded with massive amounts of JPEGs with slight variations in order to pad the drought that occurs in between major patches â meaning it could be months in between this and the next fresh batch of content. Online games have become burdened by playing for the next biggest reward, rather than for play itself. Itâs liberating to just skip a month â to miss out. To wait for something that actually has substance, rather than settling for anything they put on your table. Getting a new cosmetic wonât make you a better player, because youâve gone through the same hoops again and again, enough so that theyâve become rudimentary repetitive tasks that you follow on a set schedule. Nothing is stopping you from not pressing the button, because there is no electric grid, like in a usual Skinner box. But maybe instead of offering the same treats for pressing the same button over and over again, you may find it better to provide different methods of acquiring new, more varied items by pressing different buttons or adding even more switches and knobs to turn. Itâs frankly difficult to be original all of the time. In fact, it is easier to setup a system that is proven to work with no questions asked. You are always given the ability to speak with your money, if you are not willing to part with your time. But is that really an excuse for game design that relies on monotony, on repetitive tasks and meaningless hours spent playing something that is more akin to work than to proper leisure time, just for the sake of making a little more money on top?
Having an original idea will grant you more money that any of these systems will, but taking the path of least resistance wonât, and may very well turn your playerbase off, rather than keeping it online.
I want to be as transparent about my review scores as possible - the simple X/10 rating is what allows me to effectively place a game on the spectrum.  I do include decimal  âpoint fiveâ scores, for I believe I have a strict view on which category each game falls into. Please keep in mind that the lower half of the scale will be used selectively, since I as a human being enjoy not wasting my time or my money at bad games. If at some point I am financially and personally capable to purchase and review any and all games, you may see the entire spectrum being used to itâs full extent.Here is what each score represents and what I will generally be looking for when rating a game:
1 (Godawful) - The absolute worst. Barely playable or barely definable as a game. Lacking core features, dysfunctional or completely insulting to the genre it occupies. No thought or effort has been put forth and displayed - no mastery of the craft - nothing of value or even worth the intellectual exercise. A product with no future, nor a present - best left forgotten by time.
2 (Bad) - An idea that was attempted and rendered absolutely unsuccessfully. Be it a product of amateur craftsmanship or a lack of skill and inability to execute. It shows no promise outside of the idea for a game. Broken or barely playable. Unremarkable by any means.
3 (Poor) - A promising idea for a game, rendered broken by circumstance or simply being affected by bad design choices. Might rarely be of interest to a really dedicated audience, that is willing to overlook major flaws, glitches and such.
4 (Substandard) - An unremarkable game, that suffers from minor inefficiencies and is noticeably flawed is some of the design choices put forth. Playable, but nothing more or of interest.
5 (Neutral) - Nor bad, nor good. Nothing gamebreaking, nor anything worth worthy of higher praise. Possibly of interest to a niche audience with particular tastes. Often situational and subject to the current industry environment.
6 (Fine) - A solid execution of base design principles and a good well-rounded idea, backed up by a display of craftsmanship that does not intrude on the senses. Generally okay for purchase on a large discount.
7 (Good) - A finer display of game development. Not necessarily the best of the bunch, but worthwhile and worthy of oneâs attention. Possibly great if subject to oneâs particular taste in games.
8 (Great) - A generally enjoyable and well put together game. Minor and usually ignorable flaws that do not come into conflict with oneâs enjoyment of the game. Sometimes worth at full price.
9 (Excellent) - A truly excellent display of the craft, no noticeable design of technical flaws. Generally liked or praised or a solid entry into its genre. Absolutely worth purchasing and deserving of high praise.
10 (Exemplary) - A pinnacle of the medium. Something that will age in time, but remain a classic. Developed an polished to the finest level possible for the technology, available at the time. Although this score is not given lightly, it represents the best of the best and will most likely be worth your time and money, even at full price.
A delve into the darkest corners of oneâs psyche. And a dungeon too.
At almost a year after the original, Red Hook Studios have released The Crimson Court - a full blown expansion for the award winning RPG Darkest Dungeon, featuring a new hero class, a new dungeon - The Courtyard, new bosses and a whole new system for the playerâs Hamlet - Districts.
Sadly, I am a bit late to the party...
Hence the introduction of this new series - Better Late Than Never, reviews of games that may be a few years old and have still managed to crawl up my Steam library.
Today we will be discussing Darkest Dungeon, released January 16, 2016.
I recently picked it up during the Steam Summer Sale, knowing that I was in for a descent into eldritch horrors, pig-men and hand-drawn gothic monsters galore. Even at a first glance, Darkest Dungeon captivates you with itâs stunning art style and deep, haunting narration by the great Wayne June.
First and foremost, Darkest Dungeon is a rougelike that takes a twist on the classic dungeon crawl formula and takes inspiration from board games like Eldritch Horror and Call of Cthulhu, putting an emphases on party morale and the effects of being near to a lot of tentacles and one of your party members shouting some eldritch runes at you while youâre burning away at your last torch. In a way, the developers intend you to build an emotional attachment to your strongest heroes, bolstered by an ever-expanding list of quirks that really give every single hero in your roster a sense of character, just enough so that in a moment of absolute hopelessness you are at the edge of your seat, crossing your fingers for that clutch critical hit or heal, âless you hear the words âMore blood soaks the soil, feeding the evil therein.â.
In the world of Darkest Dungeon death is something that you ought to expect. The gameâs brutal difficulty is something that may turn people away, despite having a fair amount of randomness and dice rolling, which in this game it to your benefit, not your detriment. hence it calmly reassures you every time you launch the game with this small text box:
The fun thing is - The Darkest Dungeon (i.e. the final dungeon) is available to you from the start. The difficulty of said dungeon is not derived from high health monsters or insanely high damage attacks, but rather the stress of the dungeon itself. For the purposes of this review I sent the first available party in a fresh new save straight into The Darkest Dungeon.
Killing the enemy packs was trivial, especially if youâve played a bit of the game beforehand. But the stress from sending unequipped, badly trained characters shows even before you enter the dungeon itself with character barks, such as: âI DONâT WANT TO GO IN THEREâ or âITâS SUICIDEâ. I suppose I didnât get the memo, so I just sent them in willy-nilly. To say the least - they almost all died of heart attacks. Only the Vestal lived to tell the tale.
This is the reason why Darkest Dungeon provides you with The Hamlet - a place where you can train up and equip your heroes with better armor and weapons, trinkets, new skills and a plethora of facilities where your characters can recuperate after delving into one of the four lesser dungeons. The Hamlet also hosts a sanatorium, where you can treat your rosterâs illnesses or negative quirks.
Each of these buildings can be upgraded by the use of heirlooms, which in turn you get from partially or successfully completing dungeons and quests. Collecting those heirlooms will make sure that each subsequent run gets a bit easier and even if for instance you loose one of your stronger characters, upgrading the Stage Coach to provide you with higher level characters from the start. Upgrading the Blacksmith or the Guild will improve your rosterâs equipment better and cheaper.
I very much enjoy the premise of Darkest Dungeon. It is dark, sadistic and unforgiving. Itâs mechanics and turn based combat add the invaluable element of strategy. Choosing your party carefully, equipping them with your best gear and provisioning them enough to last through the toughest battles demonstrate the element of preparation and knowledge needed to ultimately descend into The Darkest Dungeon and fell the most horrifying and disgusting creatures of them all.
If you are willing to delve deep into what this game has to provide, you will find yourself with countless hours of content. Some may say that it is quite repetitive, but if you enjoy turn-based combat, micro management, rougelike progression and tough decisions Darkest Dungeon is indeed the game for you. And with The Crimson Court out, you have no reason not to get this at a fairly large discount.
And with the addition of Steam Workshop integration, a plethora of mods and enhancements have been developed for the game, potentially adding hundreds of hours to an already massive campaign.
Mastering Darkest Dungeon is and will be hard, but in the end it is a landmark in what it attempts to do, successfully. It is stressful, engaging and ultimately a gruesomely awesome game.
                                                Score: 9/10
