#ji games

[jishinsjourney]

The downside to finally getting into Critical Role is that I am having a mad attack of needing to play tabletop RPGs.

This is not really a bad thing, since I love tabletop RPGs, but finding the time to do so is a bit of a bear.

(No favorites in the cast yet. Phrase of the day remains ‘Jester please. Nott please.’)

[jishinsjourney]

So I recently played Journey for the first time, and now that I’ve had a few days to think about it, I might be ready to talk about it. Spoilers under the cut.

Let me first say that I love a good exploratory game. Journey delivers that in spades. My favorite stage is definitely the Desert, although I enjoyed all of the early stages, and the Tunnel is heart-pounding goodness. (I have not yet found the flower in the desert. I need to do that too.) I don’t like the more-vertical stages as much as the flatter ones. I have a tendency to lean on my controller and it screws with my camera badly for those stages. There doesn’t seem to be a way to turn that off.

I love exploring. It took me much longer to complete the game than it probably takes most people. I poked into almost every nook and cranny that I found. I know I missed some, because I didn’t get the white robe at the end of the game.

I don’t particularly like playing the game partnered, at least with the people I was partnered with. I play slowly and deliberately, and felt like I was being rushed most of the time. I would rather play solo and take my time. Eventually all of my partners left me behind, which I guess was good for both of us.

I spent hours on the Mountain. I fell off repeatedly because of confusing myself with my partner. I also got eaten by the dragons on the mountain, not once but twice, the first time because I got confused with my partner and my camera put them in the center of the screen, not me. That sucked. I had a gorgeous full scarf that I lost.

And to be frank, I nearly threw my controller at the screen when my character froze. After all that effort and reclimbing and reclimbing and losing my scarf, that felt like insult on top of injury. I tried so hard, and felt like everything I did up to that point was basically pointless.

You can take that as a metaphor for life, I guess, that eventually things just don’t go your way and eventually we all die, and the important part is the journey, but that disappointment was so great that it currently is overshadowing the things that I did like about the game. And then the pat little ‘oh you died but we’ll send you to robed-dude heaven anyway and then send you back to start over’ didn’t feel like a reward in the slightest. It felt like being humored for putting up with that struggle.

It left me angry and hurting. You know that if you do it again you’ll just die on the mountain again. Is the journey worth it? Maybe it’s not. Why struggle and fight and then just get cut off? 

I don’t need a big glorious finale at the top of the mountain. Surviving the trip and maybe a warm fire at the end was all I wanted. You don’t get to tell your tale if you’re dead. 

I don’t know. I guess I’m whining a bit, and it’s personal taste in storytelling. But for an exploratory game where I know I didn’t find everything, I’m finding a surprising reluctance to play it again at the moment. I don’t know if that will change as the emotional response to the ending fades. I still liked most of the game, but I’m very dissatisfied with the Mountain and don’t feel like I reached a decent emotional cartharsis with the game.