Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Gendo wrote:I didn't know you could get Cuphead on Switch! I thought it was PC or XBox only. Nice.
Yeah Cuphead only got a Switch release in the last few weeks. I had no idea idea it was even coming until I was looking on the Switch's store thing to see if what new games had come out recently and that happened to be one of them.

It was only like $20 USD too.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Oh btw Gendo, I forgot to mention this but the original Dark Souls got a Switch port last year. If you never played that its very much worth checking out, especially if you're the kind of person that likes challenge runs of Zelda games and things like that.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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I've heard about the Dark Souls remake from streamers playing stuff; Grand Poo Bear actually has a serious of videos of him playing it recently. I don't know anything at all about the games; hadn't heard of the series before a few weeks ago. But I'll check out the GPB videos and see if it's something interesting.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem ~Heroes of Light & Shadow~ (2010) - In this game Marth from the Super Smash Bros. series learns that many subtitles are gonna spoil the stew.

Actually this is a real good game, a shame it was never officially released in English. This is a remake of Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem, which itself is a sequel to the first Fire Emblem game on the NES (Which itself got a remake on the Nintendo DS in Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon).

Unfortunately New Mystery shares a kind of dull visual aesthetic with Shadow Dragon...

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Bleh.

Other than that though New Mystery is just some really solid strategy RPG gameplay. None of the weirdness from Shadow Dragon about killing characters to unlock new ones, maps are quick enough to not drag on but long enough to be interesting, many recruitable characters, many options for how to use your units etc. For this playthrough I based my strategy around ending up with like six dracoknights that I could just have fly anywhere on the map more or less, but there's a hundred other ways you could approach it. I had a lot of fun with it.

The story is pretty standard "Prince has to take back his stolen kingdom with his army" fare but it works well enough for the game that this is.

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Castlevania (1986)

The Castlevania Anniversary Collection came out yesterday, so I sped through a playthrough of the first game. According to PSNProfiles I'm the sixth person to finish the North American PS4 version of this game which is pretty cool.

The game is still super fun. I really struggled against Death this time around though. Must have taken me an hour to kill him.

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Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (2003)

I meant to finish this before the Anniversary Collection came out but the timing didn't quite work out. Aria of Sorrow is another "Metroidvania" in the style of Symphony of the Night (I.e. RPG stats and equipment systems, leveling up, a Metroid-style map you're constantly filling out etc.). Of the GBA Castlevania games I think this probably the best one since it doesn't have the weird ability drop system that can screw you like Circle of the Moon has, and it doesn't feel needlessly elongated the way Harmony of Dissonance does since that game makes you basically explore the same castle twice.

The setup is pretty bonkers here. This is the first Castlevania game set in the future- the year 2035. Dracula has previously been permanently killed in the year 1999. His castle was sealed away inside a solar eclipse (I don't know what this means exactly but it sounds Castlevania as hell), but suddenly it reappears one day as someone has summoned it to gain Dracula's powers as their own. Only a random kid named Soma Cruz who accidentally got caught up in this monster mayhem is left to stop this from happening, though Soma is not so random of a kid after all, as he ends up being Dracula's reincarnation. Most of that comes through the beginning and ending of the game, but its still a little more story than Castlevanias usually have.

I know this game got a direct sequel at some point, so I'll play that here soon.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (2005)

It's a shame there doesn't seem to be a way to automatically resize images into something more reasonable here because this boxart is just too funny not to post.

Anyways this one felt super phoned in to me tbh. I can't quite call it purely a cashgrab because it plays well enough for the most part but after Aria of Sorrow had a decent story this one has like nothing really going on, the method to unlocking the true ending isn't quite as cool as Aria's, and the dumb "Draw mystic circles on the bottom DS screen to finish off bosses or else they get some health back" mechanic is annoying to begin with and the actual drawing itself didn't seem to track super well.

I think that was the last of the actual "Metroidvanias" I had to play and its a shame that I'm ending on a relatively low note.

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Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (2018)

With its more famously Kickstarted older brother soon coming out, I've been playing Curse of the Moon on and off again recently.

Whereas Ritual of the Night is meant to be a spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Curse of the Moon takes its cues from Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, mainly in that much of the game revolves around 2D classic-style Castlevania platforming (As you might expect) and recruiting additional characters. You can ignore them if you want, or kill them to make the main character Zangetsu stronger.

This is a solid game though I still wish you could the HP bars of bosses. Also the first time I played this game I did so on the classic mode (Where you have traditional lives and heavy knockback upon being hit), but for these replays I played on the more casual mode where you don't those such limitations. Its honestly too easy without it- I wish you could get a middleground where you could keep the knockback but have infinite lives.

Anyways this is a fun little retro throwback and I look forward to my last few playthroughs before seeing if IGA can actually push the Metroidvania genre further with Ritual of the Night after it got kind of stale with his run of games on the GBA and DS.

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Super Robot Wars (1991)

The original Super Robot Wars that came out for the Game Boy all the way back in 1991, before I was even born.

This is a weird one since while it is a strategy RPG like later games, mechanically its very different. The robots aren't even piloted (So no Ace Bonuses or pilot stats or anything like that to worry about), you don't upgrade the robots stats directly (Instead finding "parts" hidden around the map, sometimes which come in the form of new weapons), and special abilities are tied to a main unit you select at the beginning of the game (And they work pretty inconsistently tbh. The ones I could cast at any given time seemed random, and sometimes it seemed like merely opening the menu drained my SP).

You begin the game by choosing a team of Gundams, Mazinger robots, or Getter Robos. From those you choose a leader or champion which gets access to special abilities (And you also get a game over if they die) and from there you just go to town killing every enemy on each stage. There's little to no story to speak, so the actual crossover element is pretty light here. Still, SRW1 formed a loose basis for later games to build into something much better down the line- Super Robot Wars 2 on the NES and Super Robot Wars 3 on the SNES did even moreso in that regards (The ladder adding in the pilots themselves and giving the game an actual plot, and the former mechanically expanding on all of the systems SRW2 introduced), but SRW1 was the very early steps.

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Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (1987)

An ambitious and interesting failure. The PS4 release is only the second time I've beaten Simon's Quest and like a lot of sequels on the NES (Including Super Robot Wars 2) it tries a lot of new things- here we've got actual RPG leveling and exploring, equipment and upgrades, a day to night cycle, NPC's to talk to etc. The NPC's are often giving you hints in the form of rumors they've heard and deliberate lying which is pretty ambitious for this era of gaming. Even with that in mind though it can often feel too easy to get lost without a guide and not know what to do.

The platforming is a huge step down from the first game too. Areas often alternate between being far too easy to be engaging and then you'll get these really weird, finnicky jumps you're expected to make.

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^Like this is some Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels shit right there. If you miss any of the ledges I've circled then you fall straight to the bottom of the floor and you have to slowly walk up the stairs and try again. Luckily the save state feature the Anniversary Collection has alleviates this somewhat, but its still pretty annoying. Even Castlevania 1 never required to get this many jumps perfectly when you're just platforming (Dodging a lot of enemies is another story).

The bosses are just terrible too. There are only three of them compared to the six of the first game, and all three of them go down without much of a fight. At least one of them is outright skippable too- you don't have to pull off any speedrunner shenanigans either, you just walk on past them lol.

I'd really love to see a proper remake of Simon's Quest that stays true to the spirit of what it was going for, because its an interesting game and brought RPG elements to Castlevania years before Symphony of the Night did and arguably homogenized the franchise. Order of Ecclessia on the DS is probably the closest to a Simon's Quest reimagining, but even that only has the one hub town area where NPC's gathers instead of multiple towns and the combat feels more like a SotN followup than Simon's Quest emulating the classic style gameplay. It's a good game but not quite the same thing (Not even counting the fact that the stories are completely different and such).

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Castlevania: The Adventure (1989)

Yeah keeping in mind everything I just said about Simon's Quest, The Adventure is worse. It's kind of weird for an 80's Game Boy game to get a PS4 port to begin with but here we are. Despite the rad boxart this game just isn't that good at all- the controls are legitimately stiffer than the NES games. This isn't a problem in Castlevania 1 and 3 at least because like with the tank controls in classic Resident Evil the games are designed around the limitations on your movement. You simply have to be smart about when you choose to jump, when you choose to attack etc. Subweapons in particular are meant to extend your range greatly and knowing which subweapons to use and when was a huge part of those games, and using them smartly you could become very powerful.

The Adventure doesn't have any subweapons at all, so from the beginning we just have less tools to play around with. You can extend your whip like in the classic games but upon taking any damage at all you revert to a smaller form of it. The few enemies you do encounter in the game too are just tedious to fight now, because while Castlevania 1 and 3 give you just enough speed for fighting to be fun you just don't have the viability in The Adventure for engagements to feel good and thoughtful. There's nothing here that rises to the level of something like the hallway before Death in Castlevania 1, for example.

There's a lot of Simon's Quest-esque platforming challenges in this game too (But with instadeath spikes to annoy you, of course) that just aren't great to play. I'd go as far as saying that the game is almost unplayable today without save states, and honestly this might be the worst game in this Collection (Though it's not the worse Castlevania game I've played. That dishonor goes to Haunted Castle, which is sadly also available on the PS4 as a separate purchase for insane people such as myself to buy).

The one thing I'll give The Adventure is that the bosses are better than the ones in Simon's Quest but still not nearly as good as the original game's.

This did get a remake on the Wii about a decade ago, though IIRC the online Wii Shop thing is now defunct so I have no idea how to even buy the remake today. Hopefully that gets a rerelease somewhere down the line because I hear that's actually pretty good...though I suppose its hard to not go up from this original game anyways.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Death Stranding got a new trailer and a November release date.



I don't think I expected Nicolas Winding Refn of all people to be in the game.

I'm still not entirely what the plot of this game is supposed to be exactly though this tweet from Kojima seems to give some insight into what its supposed to be about.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Yeah I think that twitter post is the only thing that made a lick of sense to me, because the trailer was... gibberish... I mean, it looks like the kind of thing that could go off the rails if not handled properly, as much as I liked its visual design and overall creepiness. I remember liking the calm, moody tone and environment heavy visuals of the first trailer. While the gameplay shown here looks interesting, it also looks like they've packed every type of third person mechanic into it - stealth, shooter, platform, vehicle - so I'm just wondering if it's biting off more than it can chew.
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Eh I don't really think you can say its biting off more than it can chew- stealth, shooting, and even vehicles have all been featured in Metal Gear before and worked fine, and the stuff with the platforming looks like the only really new addition to what Kojima has done before. The latter stuff with the ladder (lol) actually kind of reminded me of Last of Us or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so its not like there aren't other similar games to look at and take inspiration from.

The story is certainly hard to get a read on but I'll take something I can't understand at first (Or even second or third or fourth) glance a thousand times over something more predictable, and I think Kojima is usually at his most interesting when he's being coy like that (The MGS2 advertisement campaign that completely and successfully hid who the main character of that game even was immediately comes to mind here).
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Maz, go finish The Walking Dead.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Raxivace wrote:Maz, go finish The Walking Dead.
I'll finish this weekend. I've played some more, but want to finish playing the entire thing and consolidate my thoughts before I post here.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Raxivace wrote:Eh I don't really think you can say its biting off more than it can chew- stealth, shooting, and even vehicles have all been featured in Metal Gear before and worked fine, and the stuff with the platforming looks like the only really new addition to what Kojima has done before. The latter stuff with the ladder (lol) actually kind of reminded me of Last of Us or Zelda: Breath of the Wild, so its not like there aren't other similar games to look at and take inspiration from.
I suppose you're right. Still I'm worried it's trying to do too many things at once. MGS is still, at its core, a stealth game.

As a Last of Us fan, I loved the ladders stuff obviously. [laugh]
Raxivace wrote:The story is certainly hard to get a read on but I'll take something I can't understand at first (Or even second or third or fourth) glance a thousand times over something more predictable, and I think Kojima is usually at his most interesting when he's being coy like that (The MGS2 advertisement campaign that completely and successfully hid who the main character of that game even was immediately comes to mind here).
I agree in principle. I'm excited but also hoping it doesn't become bloated and over-complicated. I should have some faith though, it is Kojima we're talking about after all. Maybe it's just the unfocused trailer I didn't like, lol. (I still listen to the soundtrack they used for the first one.)

It'll be weird to play as Darryl though.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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I have no idea who this "Darryl" is but Norman Reedus was in P.T. so to me I'm just playing as "Guy from P.T." again.
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Also while I can't say for sure I would expect the plot to likely get complicated.

MGS3 Snake Eater is probably Kojima's most straightforward game and even that gets into lengthy detail about its political backdrop, has plenty of double-crossings, tons of weird asides etc. in addition to being a giant love letter to 60's Bond films which themselves get pretty twisty.

No Bond film ever had random jungles in Russia though so Kojima > Eon Productions.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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maz89 wrote:
Raxivace wrote:Maz, go finish The Walking Dead.
I'll finish this weekend. I've played some more, but want to finish playing the entire thing and consolidate my thoughts before I post here.
Please consolidate faster.

I've had no one to talk to about THE FINAL SEASON and its been lonely. [sad]
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I'm probably the only one that cares but Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 finally got a complete fan translation. It's pretty notable as being the final official SNES game to ever be released on a cartridge, being first released through digital download (Yes, the SNES had a digital download system of sorts in Japan) in 1999 and getting a proper cartridge release in 2000. That's well into the N64's life cycle and that cartridge release only happened like a year before the GameCube came out.

Even if we go by the 1999 release date though, to put it in perspective that means its a SNES game coming out after Super Mario 64, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Star Fox 64, Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil 2, Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night etc. and releasing the same year as games like Silent Hill 1, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Final Fantasy VIII, Super Smash Bros., and Shenmue (Shenmue in particular is an odd one to compare it to since that game is trying very hard to look forward while Thracia 776 is kind of a last hurrah for the past).

That certainly puts the game in an odd historical place but it does some weird, neat things. I'll write more about it whenever I get around to beating it. I'm only a few stages in so far, but I'm having a lot fun with it.
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I finally mopped up the rest of the trophies I had left in Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, just in time before Ritual of the Night comes out. Still pretty fun overall, though I have to say the "Ultimate Mode w/ Zangetsu Only" run at the end of the game got kind of annoying when I just could just not beat the last boss until I remembered the charge attack Zagetsu could unlock exists.

Still a fun Castlevania tribute overall, though now I can go back to actual Castlevania games here soon.

I've also been playing a visual novel called Fate/Stay Night and oh boy. I'll have things to say about this one when I'm done. For a game with goofy plotlines as ridiculous as "Guy goes on epic quest to have sex with the gender-bent ghost of King Arthur" they're (Mostly) shockingly positive things I'll have to say too.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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I've finished some video games and have one or two brief thoughts on them.

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Super Robot Wars T (2019)

An actual modern SRW game, and one that's a ton of fun. Most of the mecha anime I watched earlier this year and late last year were featured in this one (VOTOMs, GaoGaiGar, Expelled from Paradise, Magic Knight Rayearth, Mazinger Z Infinity, Gun X Sword as well as mecha-adjacent shows like Cowboy Bebop and Arcadia of My Youth: Endless Orbit SSX in addition to other stuff like GunBuster and various Gundam series and the like.

The crossover action is pretty strong in this one, and while not difficult at all it's very fun as a strategy RPG with plenty of flashy recreations of classic attacks from the various anime.



^I love the one from Spike's here that just turns into the Bebop OP.

This game just actual got a fairly lengthy DLC that I've only just started.

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Fate/stay night (2004) -

Yeah this is an odd one. I'll be using Xard's EGF review as a basis to talk about this (Though he's far more crass than I am), and this will be partially building upon and in response to his review, which I largely find agreeable.

This is a visual novel where the basic premise revolves around magi summoning heroic spirits (Usually of famous mythological and historical figures like King Arthur, Hercules etc.) known as Servants to battle each other in a tournament like setup, with the prize being the Holy Grail, which has the power to grant wishes. F/SN primarily covers the fifth “Holy Grail War" and a young guy named Emiya Shirou who has fallen into it, alongside his servant “Saber" (Later revealed to be the spirit of King Arthur, who is a girl in this story who had to pose as a male in her own time). Most of the story revolves around Shirou and Saber battling other Master/Servant pairs while the player makes various choices that could potentially lead to their victory or defeat.

The nerd in me that took mythology classes in high school and college really likes the idea of Servants. What's kind of neat is that Servants actually go out of their way to hide their identity (The thinking being that if you know their identity, you can plan around their strengths and weaknesses and gain a tactical advantage) and instead are primarily identified by predetermined RPG-ish classes (I.e. people that use swords are called “Saber", magic focused people are “Caster", people that focus on some kind of projectile are “Archer" etc.). This creates fun moments when you realize hey that Lancer guy called his spear Gae Bolg, it's probably Cu Chulainn of Celtic mythology etc. It's a really cool dynamic that adds an almost mystery element to the story that you can try and figure out before the characters do.

The setup of all the Holy Grail War as a story device is already pretty fantastic, but I think what really elevates the game is how (For the most part) is how it alternates between being fairly goofy and fairly serious, and how at times its hard to tell which is meant to be which. There's that there seems to be a weird kind of tonal and moral ambiguity. Moral in the sense of there's clearly exploration of an idea here (In this case, main character Shirou's belief in heroism, what it should be, and whether such an ideal ever worth fighting to preserve or not), and from what I can tell the game never actually comes to a final say on the matter- each route presents Shioru arriving at a different conclusion, but each conclusion seems to be at least a little undercut; Tonal in the way it shifts between seriousness and some extremely goofy things- magical semen being at the top of the list of the latter for me.

To some extent this ambiguity extends to the nature of the setting itself with the idea of the Servants themselves, as much of their identity is actually historical and how much is mythical powers and attributes and historical inaccuracies being granted to them via the Holy Grail is something that's never entirely settled, since various Servant backstories seem mutually exclusive with each other yet each Servant treats their own history as "real". This ambiguity is perhaps best represented by the character of Gilgamesh, the guy straight from mankind's oldest epic who is said to be the strongest Servant on the basis of "All you mongrels are ripped off from ME to begin with".

Also, the way the Servant characters sometimes go on about chivalry or whatever and how out of place and time it seems adds to this ambivalence about them- sometimes it makes them seem cool, sometimes you want to laugh at how of date it might seem.

There are three primary routes in the game.

Fate: This is the most straightforward route of the game, following a version where Shirou and Saber more or less steamroll their way to end, undoing various plots against them and such.

The main point of development here is in regards to Shirou's idealistic desire to be a “superhero" (Xard's review says something like “champion of justice" is likely more accurate translation but I'll stick with superhero for time being), and to an extent it seems like Saber, who being King Arthur is the very epitome of heroic and knightly self-sacrificing ideals, becomes a figure that Shioru himself seems to emulate and continue the traditions of (And it probably explains why he develops romantic attraction to her in this arc). I think what makes this arc work beyond being a fun bit of fluff is that despite an ending where Shirou reaffirms his committment to being a "superhero" the epilogue of this route is Saber returning to her own time to die a rather lonely and miserable death as King Arthur. This entire segment made me vastly reconsider what exactly this game was trying to do thematically, as it seemed to suggest self-destruction is still the only thing that awaits Shirou despite seemingly positive portrayal and endorsement of his beliefs throughout the rest of this part of the game.

Anyways this is a solid route and successfully introduces core concepts and ideas that the next two parts of the game will present variations on. From what I understand this arc also forms the basis for the 2006 anime adaptation of Fate/stay night, but isn't regarded too highly today.

Unlimited Blade Works: This arc starts out fairly similarly to the Fate route, though an early battle goes slightly differently (Namely Saber injuring Archer in Fate whereas in UBW Shirou calls out to Saber in time to stop her from injuring Archer), which causes the entire story to play out very differently, as more motivations are revealed and different conclusions are come to by the characters. I won't go into specifics because of heavy nature of spoilers, but even though this route isn't a sequel in terms of plot to the previous one, it very much makes the implications of the ending of the Fate route a central focus of the drama here (While being smart enough to never offer a concrete answer to what is essentially an ambiguous moral decision) and UBW is probably my favorite bit of this whole game as a result.

Interestingly, UBW has received TWO separate anime adaptations from two separate studios- a feature film in 2010 and a television series in 2014. I'd like to watch them both at some point if only for sake of comparison.

Heaven's Feel: The route where things go even more badly than they did in Unlimited Blade Works. In UBW that happened because a single event at the story played slightly differently than in Fate- Heaven's Feel approach is just have a particularly nasty of a diabolus ex machina inserted into the story from the beginning. As a result this feels like the most distinct route of the game- if Fate and UBW work in a question/response type of setup, this is something separate altogether.

Anyways the earlier mentioned devil causes the entire genre to change from action/shounen into a somewhat bizarre psychosexual horror story. Most of the Servant characters are killed off early in the story, and the alliance of the surviving Master characters spend their time underpowered and hopelessly outmatched against the few Master/Servant pairs that did survive. In addition there's an odd monster that appears at night (And it appears to be a Mr. Hyde or Wolf Man-esque repressed id of one of the characters based on the narration we receive describing it) given physical form and terrorizing the city. It's some Silent Hill 2-esque shit, in addition to plot elements involving cults and demon-esque summoning already being in play. There's additional horror genre elements in Zouken being described as a vampire, Assassin 2's skull mask etc. so it really seems to be an idea they commit fully to here.

Also there's a lot of gross shit in this arc involving worms. I'm not going to describe what worms are for or what they do, but it's fucked up.

This is probably a good point to bring up how the sexual content of F/SN has been a point of contention among fans of the game, to the point that most releases of the game don't even feature it. While the excuse they come up with to insert sex scenes in Fate and UBW is fairly goofy ("Shirou, Saber needs to absorb the magic from your semen so she can get stronger right now!!!!" is admittedly hard to take seriously and I think contributes to the kind of weird tone in the first two routes of the game. I mean seriously magical semen wtf.) it does take on a new significance when the genre shift into psychosexual horror comes into play in this last part. It really reminds of a lot of how classical horror monsters and stories can be read as being about sexual anxieties, which again, kind of makes sense considering we've already gone back to more ancient stories of heroes and mythology in earlier parts of the story. While it definitely can be uncomfortable at times (The worms) I do think its relevant to the game overall (And I think HF is probably incoherent without them).

The issue I personally had with this arc is the “True Ending" honestly just seeming fairly upbeat, too happy, and straightforward when the rest of this arc is fairly miserable drama. Even though Fate and UBW are ostensibly lighter in tone their endings were more ambiguous (Shirou's resolution to remain idealistic possibly being undercut by Saber returning to her original time to die rather pathetically, which is sad not only in its own right but shows a possible future that awaits Shirou should he continue to walk a similar path, and in UBW Archer's seeming to never escape having to continue to fight in Holy Grail Wars forever while his goal to have prevented himself from ever having become Archer in the first place isn't necessarily fulfilled- HF's True Ending is by comparison is not only incongruous to the tone of the rest of the route but the conclusions Fate and UBW come to as well.

Some have suggested that Shirou losing most of his ability to use magic is meant to balance out how upbeat everything else, but is it much of a sacrifice? He seems pretty happy to return to domesticated lifestyle that he was already kind of in at the game's beginning anyways. I can't help but negatively compare to the ending of Telltale's The Walking Dead: THE FINAL SEASON where Clementine survives terrible zombification through stroke of luck more or less, but loses her leg in the process, not only remove the near ninja like physical abilities she's had for several games by that point but also arguably becoming even less capable than she was a little kid in Season 1, while the rest of the world meanwhile is getting caught up in ambiguously large civil wars, which of course are only going to lead to the creation of more Walkers. I otherwise prefer Heaven's Feel and F/SN as a whole to anything Telltale does but it seems like Clementine's fate is a more meaningful take on the same concept. With the Fifth Holy Grail War at an end, it's not like Shirou should have many more enemies either whereas you certainly can't say the same for Clementine.

OTOH there's argument to be made that Shirou redefining himself for someone else (“I will become Sakura's superhero") isn't exactly heatlhy either, so perhaps there is still some ambiguity there. He still dies once in the True End, and while revived ends up weaker as a result. Another death could await him for all we know. People like to say Shirou abandoned his ideals in HF but it seems more like he redirected them toward a single person first and foremost.

Of course this is all about what is merely the “True Ending", which stands in contrast to the “Good Ending" where Shirou remains killed in the final battle and everyone moves on without him (Though notable Illya seems to just vanish from the narrative here, unless I missed something). I found this to be the far more dramatically satisfying ending that feels far more in line with the the Fate ending and the UBW True End, but why is this is labeled as the “Good End" to begin with? The “Good End" of UBW by comparison was so much more obviously tacked on fantasy ending (Being a silly harem ending where lol Shirou has two girlfriends now) whereas the True Ending there was the far more bittersweet acknowledgement about the possible futility of idealism and Archer's acknowledgement that his nature as a Servant he means he probably won't retain anything himself that he learned from the Fifth Grail War.

Heaven's Feel inverting this setup where the “True" End seems much more line with the ridiculous fantasy of UBW's “Good Ending" and HF's Good Ending feeling more like UBW's “True" is something I can't really make sense of and have seen no reasonable explanation for. Though, perhaps this is the kind of thematic crack in Heaven's Feel's narrative that, while more easily notable in Fate and UBW, makes the story more interesting to me.

This arc is currently being adapted as a trilogy of feature films. From what I can tell only the first two have been released, with the second one not being quite released on blu-ray yet. I'm particularly curious to see how this one gets adapted.

Some closing thoughts on F/SN as a whole: Another point of contention is the English translation versus the quality of the prose in its original language. Frankly I have no idea how much of the prose is the unofficial English translation or the original text, but it did lead to some very goofy likes like “People die if they are killed" (Some spoilers in this link, be warned), “[The sex is] so good I want to vomit" (Seriously wtf at this one), and my personal favorite:

Image
^I laughed for a good minute at this last line here when I first came upon it.

These lines make enough sense in context (Maybe not the vomit one, though considering the sheer absurd focus on food and cooking and dinner preparation in this fucking game, to the point there's an entire cooking manga and anime spinoff of F/SN based around the freaking cooking, perhaps there's something to be said for main character indulging in passions to the point he inverts the significant activity of cooking and eating), though while a lot of them still goofy I think they're earnest enough to work.

To return to a more positive note, something I think Xard's analysis of the Fate/stay night really missed is that the game more than anything seems to be making the point that whatever our values and personal philosophies happen to be, they seem to be shaped more by random events and happenstance more than anything else. Despite a multitude of choices the player can make in the game, its little seemingly inconsequential things that end up spiraling out into shaping how Shirou develops as a character and not grand moral conundrums in the form of player choice (I.e. as opposed to games like The Walking Dead where you have to spread three pieces of food among a group of 8 people or whatever). So despite hours of Shirou discussing and questioning his ideals and morals between all three routes its more reacting to events and NOT logical reasoning and weighing pros and cons that really shape us, which is I think it an interesting distinction for the game to make. Beliefs and assumptions are taken for granted until they just can't be anymore- I think that's the greater idea rather than whether Fate Shirou or UBW Shirou or HF Shirou are ultimately the "best" version of the character, something fans seem to debate.

Anyways despite some hiccups about prose in the English fan-translation and mixed feelings about the Heaven's Feel route ending I think Fate/stay night was very much worth the time and one of the more enjoyable visual novel games I've played. The game also generated a boatload of spinoffs in more traditional genres (Fighting games, RPG's etc. Apparently it got to the point that the Fate games have generated more profits than the entire Legend of Zelda franchise.) and I'll be checking some of those out here soon.

tl;dr - I hope Saber becomes DLC for Smash Bros. Ultimate.

EDIT: I have to say in thinking about it more I've come around on the Heaven's Feel True Ending. If Shirou is powerless or whatever, then yeah he may not be immediate danger from any kind of threat, but it also keeps him physically incapable of doing the heroics and such he goes off to do at the end of UBW and presumably Fate routes. Of course there's ideological reasons he has as well for rejecting heroic adventures, but that's potentially a lot of future good Shirou is trading to save Sakura. Hell, in UBW route Archer claims he saved the world. By forgoing the chance to even become Archer (Or even the middle ground that Shirou seeks with Rin in UBW's ending), Shirou may have potentially allowed something very bad to happen down the line in Heaven's Feel.

That thought has me feeling a lot better about the route thematically at any rate, and fixes what was my biggest issue with the entire visual novel.


Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (2019) -

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Igarashi's followup on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It plays incredibly smoothly and honestly I have little trouble saying this is probably the best of the SotN-style games that he's made since it fixes a lot of the problems I've had with them.

The only real complaint I had is that figuring out how to get into the train area was a little more complicated than it needed to be (How are you supposed to figure out to talk to the librarian character?) and needing an actual enemy drop to get through a flooded underground cave area is a decision that probably shouldn't have happened since you don't need any other drops from regular enemies in the game just to clear the story.

Still other than two slight bumps this is an excellent game and very much worth playing. Supposedly my user name is somewhere in the credits since I donated to the crowdfunding campaign to make the game, though I wasn't able to spot it when I beat it the other day.
Last edited by Raxivace on Wed Oct 25, 2023 12:29 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

First of all, man, that F/SN writeup was epic! I didn't read the spoilers because I very well may get around to playing it myself, but even from the other stuff you wrote it still sounds really fascinating.
Raxivace wrote:On kind of a whim (And since the Switch is so convenient with its portability) I went back and played through the NES version of Super Mario Bros. 2. The one that started out as Doki Doki Panic, not The Lost Levels.
The first SMB game was the first video game I played as a kid, and my cousin and I spent countless hours trying to beat it... so imagine our surprise when we finally got to play SMB2 and how utterly different it was. I remember way back as a little kid not liking it, and when I got SMB All-Stars on SNES (which also had The Lost Levels) my cousin and I also spent the better part of a summer playing/beating all four games and my opinion on SMB2 didn't improve much. OTOH, SMB1 and SMB3 remained stone cold classics. I still remember how mesmerized I was when SMB3 was released. Even as much as I loved SMB1 it was really SMB3 that turned me into a real fan of that franchise. SM World 1 was great too.

For whatever reason, I don't remember much about The Lost Levels. I know we beat it too, but it's probably because, of all the SMB games, it was the one we spent the least time with. It did seem like a much more sensible sequel to SMB1, though, and it makes sense now why SMB2 felt so different back then. About the only thing I liked about SMB2 was the "feel" of the level designs. Hard to explain it, really, but it had a cool atmosphere to it that was really different than the other SMB games that I dug. FWIW, I honestly don't remember The Lost Levels being super difficult, but that also may be because all these games seemed difficult to me back then. It took me ages to finally beat SMB1, but that was because I was like 5 when I first played it, and wasn't too much older when SMB2 and 3 came out. The Lost Levels just seemed kinda par for the course. That might've also been the same summer I played through the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, which may have had something to do with my perception of difficulty.

Speaking of which rax, you really need to get to Ninja Gaiden games on NES if you haven't. As difficult as they are, they're still really great. The mechanics of the first game are semi-broken at times and often frustrating, but still beatable. Thankfully they fixed most everything by the second and third game... not that it made them a ton easier, but at least they were difficult for the right reasons.
Raxivace wrote:Zelda 1
I remember not enjoying this much as a kid, much for the reasons you listed as I think it's one of the games I gave up because I got lost and had no way to continue in the days before internet and guides. It probably put me off Zelda for quite a while until I finally played and loved Link to the Past and (later) Ocarina of Time.
Raxivace wrote:Image

A weird shoot-em-up that Square of all companies made back in the 90's. Again it was pretty damn hard but I had fun with it. One of the bosses from this game was in KH3, interestingly enough.
Oh, man, I'd completely forgotten about this game. I still don't remember much but that cover/title definitely wrung a bell. Undoubtedly one of those I rented on a whim. I don't remember a ton about it though... *watches some online footage* Yeah, OK, it's coming back to me a bit better. Still don't remember what I ultimately thought of it, though.

I also picked up the first Bloodstained game in one of those sales. Can't wait to get back to Castlevania myself as that's another series I generally enjoyed when I was younger. I remember playing, eg, Simon's Quest but don't remember too much other than that.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Since we're posting covers now:

Image

After well over 250 hours I'm almost finished with this one. It's a ginormous game with ridiculously huge ambitions, and as befitting a game this large some of it works really well and some of it doesn't. To start, I must say I've never played another AC game, and I know this game (and its predecessor) took the series into a new, RPG direction, so I won't be able to make comparisons with the other games in the series.

Superficially, the RPG elements are quite streamlined compared to, say, The Witcher 3. You have three basic builds--assassin, warrior, hunter--and the game is well-balanced so that all three are useful depending on the situation (I ended up having five different builds; one for each, and two that utilized fire and poison). You just have your armor/weapons (8 total pieces) and 5 types of crafting material that you use for everything. As you level up you spend points on abilities and (later) "Master Points" that you can increase your base stats (and there are a ton of them). I actually really like this system because, since enemies level along with you, gaining abilities and increasing your stats is the only way to feel like you're actually "leveling up."

However, one of the game's worst flaws has to do with the leveling system too, because your weapons/armor doesn't level with you. That means if you find a set of armor/weapons you like with the right stats to suit your preferred build, you will eventually level past it so that it's too weak to function. This leaves you with a few options: go do some looting and hope to find another set that suits your style, spend your gold/resources to upgrade your gear (and it's prohibitively expensive to keep doing so), allow the game to get really difficult with your underpowered gear, or keep buying new gear from the in-game store. This makes the game feel incredibly grindy at times, or, at worst, a cheap cashgrab attempt. My "solution" was just to keep swapping loot the best I could until I got to the max level (99) and THEN I went after all the "legendary gear" so that it would be level 99 as well. This was probably a bit OCD on my part, but it made the game much better when I no longer had to worry about keeping my gear leveled up and could just focus on playing.

The actual gameplay I really enjoyed. Control-wise it smoothed out a lot of the problems I had with Witcher 3 and made combat really fun but still challenging. Stealth perhaps seemed a bit on the easy side once you got the hang of using your Eagle to scout/mark all your targets, but you could still get caught if you weren't paying attention or missed someone. By far, the most challenging parts of the game were the legendary animals/beasts, in particular a poison-farting boar was a real bitch to beat. I think most of them were made to be fought with a hunter build which I didn't have at the time, but trying to whack away at them with their speed and deadly up-close attacks was ridiculously hard. Disappointingly, most of the later bosses seemed much easier, but that might be due to the fact that by then I had so many abilities/stat boosts that they were less of a challenge. There's also a whole naval element that's quite well-designed and a fun challenge in itself. You can more-or-less choose to utilize it how much you want to (or even almost ignore it completely), but I often found the naval battles a breath of fresh air after long periods spent doing other stuff. The only time the naval battles were required were in hunting down certain cult members that were out on the ocean.

Another interesting gameplay element would be the mercenary system; basically a tier of mercenaries that you can hunt to move up the ranks (to give you bonuses/discounts at blacksmiths), but the mercenaries will also come after you if you steal, murder, destroy merchant ships, etc. This can get progressively challenging to the point you can have up to 5 mercenaries after you at once. I actually thought fighting the mercenaries was one of the highlights of the game, as you could play a bit of cat-and-mouse with them, trying to sneak up on them as they were stalking you, and trying to utilize the best strategy depending on their strengths/weaknesses. Because the game's set during the Peloponnesian War, you could also effect the power balance by "weakening" either side depending on who ruled the region you're in by, eg, destroying resources and/or killing leaders. This would trigger conquest battles where you'd choose to fight for either side (the invading side would be harder). These were sections where a good warrior build was almost a must-have.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the game was just the rendering of the classic Greek world. It was really cool just going from region to region and witnessing all the Greek architecture, statues, cities, etc. I've read/heard elsewhere that the designers did painstaking research and received praise from historians on its accuracy so, kudos on that level. However, while on one level being in historic Greece is really cool, after a while it starts to feel really samey. Much of this is due to just how big the world is and how frequently certain design ideas pop up. After a while, every mountain, valley, small town, etc. pretty much looks the same, and even the big cities start to feel indistinguishable. Compared to something like Witcher 3 where every region seemed to have a distinct feel, atmosphere, and personality to it... so much in AC:O just feels grey and lifeless by comparison even when you're admiring the recreating of certain architecture or sculptures. I guess you might say it's a weird combination of impressive but lifeless.

Story wise... this is probably where the game falls flattest. It's obvious that they were trying to go with a classic Greek tragedy angle, with your character being the victim of a prophecy that force your father to attempt to kill you and your brother/sister (depending on which character you play), only to have you come back for a kind of revenge... but the game makes too many concessions for modern audiences for the angle to really work. Much like the final DLC of Witcher 3, I felt like the best ending just didn't work at all. Basically, the best ending involves the reuniting of your entire family, including the father who tried to kill you, and the brother/sister who'd become a homicidal maniac thanks to being manipulated by the Cult behind everything. This just felt incredibly hollow and shallow after everything that had lead up to it. Further, it's a shame that most of the side-characters are more interesting than the main ones, especially Barnabas and Sokrates (it's also really cool to have these historical figures as characters). I played as Kassandra, and while I do think she was interesting personality-wise I don't think her character is ever given much depth, complexity, or nuance and the same goes for almost all the characters. After a while, the main missions also felt like they were kind of a mindless "go here, do that" just to advance the plot. This ended up making a lot of the side-stuff more interesting for me, especially given that you're given the freedom to shape your character's sexuality however you want so you're given quite a few options of both sexes to romance (though most the guys seemed to be douches compared to the girls, so my Kassandra ended up mostly being a lesbian save for a few exceptions). That whole element of being able to play a male/female character and have the romance (or not) the same male/female character is quite an interesting angle in itself and I'm not sure how many (if any) other games have tried it.

Strangely enough, I'd argue the DLCs were far better story-wise than the main game. The first DLC adds an interesting serious relationship, and while it's incredibly emotionally manipulative and incredibly obvious in its beats, I still felt it was overall well done thanks to the solid (if still shallow) characterizations. In a way, I think it suffered from them trying to cram too big of a story into three relatively short DLCs, but I still think they did surprisingly well with what they had. At the least I felt much more invested in the characters here than anything in the main game. The second DLC is so different it almost felt like a different game. This is where we get into Greek mythology, the first taking part in Elysium ruled by Persephone, the second in The Underworld ruled by Hades, and the third in Atlantis ruled by Poseidon. Despite the superficial political intrigue of the main game, that element was, strangely, much better utilized in the third DLC, with all the gods (called "Isu" here) plotting and conspiring against each other, and you given a lot more leeway in terms of whom you side with and support. The design of these worlds also had all the color, imagination, and atmosphere that the main game lacked... the only downside being that the designs were so convoluted it could often make traversing them a chore. Still, this third DLC essentially did almost everything better than the main game and has ended up being the highlight of the game for me.

Ultimately, it's incredibly hard to rate this one. It does a lot of things right, but the few things it does wrong are almost ruinous. I also don't think there's anything here that truly "wow"ed me, but the fact that it's kept me entertained for over 200 hours has to count for something. I guess I'd land on giving it a 6/10 overall. It's a shame that they didn't make the DLCs their own game as I'd almost recommend people playing them and just skipping the main games, but that's not possible.

Image

I'll have much less to say about this game. In a way, this is the opposite of AC:O in being a really short game that's almost entirely about the incredible atmosphere. As far as I remember, it's a pretty damn faithful remake of the original RE2, so if you liked the original, you can expect that with modern day graphics and controls (like being able to actually aim your weapons). Like the original, the opening section at the Police Station/ex-Museum is one of the most interestingly designed locations in the history of gaming (along with the mansion from RE1, of course), and the combination of crawling through this zombie infested place while trying to solve these bizarre puzzles is incredibly unique. Like the original games, much of the survival horror aspect comes from trying to manage your ammo against surprisingly resilient enemies that don't do down/stay down easily. The tension really goes into high gear when you start being stalked by an invincible "Mr. X," but even before then the game just does a phenomenal job of making everything feel more terrifying than it actually is (given the difficulty of the game, I mean).

I don't think the sections after the Police Station are quite as compelling, but they're still excellent. In any other game the sewers would've been a highlight, but they feel a little bland compared to the Station. The highlight here are those terrifying G-monsters in the waters that are nearly impossible to kill, though I eventually figured out how to just run around them and use herbs if one caught me. After the sewers is the Umbrella laboratory that had a Metal Gear Solid vibe to it to me. The only new monsters there were ivies, basically plant zombies, but they were pretty easy as long as you'd saved some flamethrower/flame rounds. Boss fights were overall pretty easy (except for one), but still rather cool and definitely creepy.

One thing I loved about this game, just as with the original, is the ability to play the game as two different characters twice and, depending on who goes first/second, you basically play two different stories and experience things from two very different perspectives. Both stories are completely different, too, with Leon's having more of a B-movie detective/horror vibe, and Claire's story being more emotional and about the various relationships (her relationship with the young girl, Sherry, and Sherry's relationship with her parents, who are the ones who created the G-virus.).

Essentially, it's a tightly, expertly designed game with almost no real flaws or nothing out of place. About the worst I can say is that it's quite short. Even playing slowly/carefully I managed to finish my first run in about 13 hours and my second in 9 (once I became much more familiar with the layout of the place and wasn't constantly trying to figure out how to get from one place to another). However, that brevity allows for multiple playthroughs and, given how great the game is, it's definitely one worth playing through multiple times.

Solid 8/10
Last edited by Eva Yojimbo on Sun Sep 01, 2019 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:First of all, man, that F/SN writeup was epic! I didn't read the spoilers because I very well may get around to playing it myself, but even from the other stuff you wrote it still sounds really fascinating.
I'm shocked that sounded sensible to anyone, even without spoilers.

But yeah its a neat game. I usually don't talk about visual novels like that much since they're such a niche thing but despite the flaws that it does have I think F/SN is pretty easily one of my favorites.

Also I don't think I specifically mentioned before but the last King Arthur-related media I saw before playing F/SN was Bresson's Lancelt du Lac of all things. Going from that take on King Arthur to F/SN's was...sure a thing lol.
Raxivace wrote:For whatever reason, I don't remember much about The Lost Levels. I know we beat it too, but it's probably because, of all the SMB games, it was the one we spent the least time with. It did seem like a much more sensible sequel to SMB1, though, and it makes sense now why SMB2 felt so different back then. About the only thing I liked about SMB2 was the "feel" of the level designs. Hard to explain it, really, but it had a cool atmosphere to it that was really different than the other SMB games that I dug. FWIW, I honestly don't remember The Lost Levels being super difficult, but that also may be because all these games seemed difficult to me back then. It took me ages to finally beat SMB1, but that was because I was like 5 when I first played it, and wasn't too much older when SMB2 and 3 came out. The Lost Levels just seemed kinda par for the course. That might've also been the same summer I played through the Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, which may have had something to do with my perception of difficulty.
Yeah I think if you go back to The Lost Levels now you'll find it doesn't really hold as well as SMB1 (Or SMB3 I'm assuming. I played that a bunch as a kid but never beat it. I'll definitely go back one of these days...). There's just a bunch of little annoying BS all throughout Lost Levels that SMB1 doesn't really have.

And yeah I do like SMB2, it's just...such an odd thing.
Speaking of which rax, you really need to get to Ninja Gaiden games on NES if you haven't. As difficult as they are, they're still really great. The mechanics of the first game are semi-broken at times and often frustrating, but still beatable. Thankfully they fixed most everything by the second and third game... not that it made them a ton easier, but at least they were difficult for the right reasons.
I think the first Ninja Gaiden is on Switch's NES library thing already, so I'm assuming II and III will come eventually. I'll definitely get to them at some point.

I do know the Ninja Gaiden guy is in the Dead or Alive games as a playable fighter, but I'll never know for sure since I always pick the female characters in those games, for some reason.
I remember not enjoying this much as a kid, much for the reasons you listed as I think it's one of the games I gave up because I got lost and had no way to continue in the days before internet and guides. It probably put me off Zelda for quite a while until I finally played and loved Link to the Past and (later) Ocarina of Time.
One thing I should mention is that after making my post about Zelda 1 I learned the NES version's manual apparently came with a partial map that had location of like the first 4 dungeons. So I guess it did give you some direction, though it would have been nice if that had been in the game itself more.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Oh, man, I'd completely forgotten about this game. I still don't remember much but that cover/title definitely wrung a bell. Undoubtedly one of those I rented on a whim. I don't remember a ton about it though... *watches some online footage* Yeah, OK, it's coming back to me a bit better. Still don't remember what I ultimately thought of it, though.
Wow of all the games I've ever posted about freaking Einhander is one of the ones you've actually played? Wow, I thought that was one of the most obscure ones I've ever mentioned even with KH3 slightly bringing back into the public consciousness.
I also picked up the first Bloodstained game in one of those sales. Can't wait to get back to Castlevania myself as that's another series I generally enjoyed when I was younger. I remember playing, eg, Simon's Quest but don't remember too much other than that.
Both Castlevania and Bloodstained are great. Will be curious to know what you think of entries in both of those franchises when you get to them.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:Since we're posting covers now:
Btw do people actually like it when I/we post covers? I only started doing it because I thought it might help give off a general impression of the game (At least in tone), or in the case of older games give a nostalgia rush or something.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Raxivace »

Anyways nice reviews on both AC and RE2.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Superficially, the RPG elements are quite streamlined compared to, say, The Witcher 3. You have three basic builds--assassin, warrior, hunter--and the game is well-balanced so that all three are useful depending on the situation (I ended up having five different builds; one for each, and two that utilized fire and poison). You just have your armor/weapons (8 total pieces) and 5 types of crafting material that you use for everything. As you level up you spend points on abilities and (later) "Master Points" that you can increase your base stats (and there are a ton of them). I actually really like this system because, since enemies level along with you, gaining abilities and increasing your stats is the only way to feel like you're actually "leveling up."
I have to say I don't think I've ever liked it in a game where enemies directly level up alongside you. Why even have a leveling system at all at that point?

Or you could just do what KH games do and enemies levels will only increase if you pass certain thresholds in the story (And by time that happens you'll usually want the increased EXP you'd get from fighting the stronger versions anyways).
However, one of the game's worst flaws has to do with the leveling system too, because your weapons/armor doesn't level with you. That means if you find a set of armor/weapons you like with the right stats to suit your preferred build, you will eventually level past it so that it's too weak to function. This leaves you with a few options: go do some looting and hope to find another set that suits your style, spend your gold/resources to upgrade your gear (and it's prohibitively expensive to keep doing so), allow the game to get really difficult with your underpowered gear, or keep buying new gear from the in-game store. This makes the game feel incredibly grindy at times, or, at worst, a cheap cashgrab attempt. My "solution" was just to keep swapping loot the best I could until I got to the max level (99) and THEN I went after all the "legendary gear" so that it would be level 99 as well. This was probably a bit OCD on my part, but it made the game much better when I no longer had to worry about keeping my gear leveled up and could just focus on playing.
I was a little confused by this part. So in this game weapon/armor stats are all based around the level you happen to be when you find it? It isn't just flat numbers for everything?
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Raxivace wrote:Anyways nice reviews on both AC and RE2.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Superficially, the RPG elements are quite streamlined compared to, say, The Witcher 3. You have three basic builds--assassin, warrior, hunter--and the game is well-balanced so that all three are useful depending on the situation (I ended up having five different builds; one for each, and two that utilized fire and poison). You just have your armor/weapons (8 total pieces) and 5 types of crafting material that you use for everything. As you level up you spend points on abilities and (later) "Master Points" that you can increase your base stats (and there are a ton of them). I actually really like this system because, since enemies level along with you, gaining abilities and increasing your stats is the only way to feel like you're actually "leveling up."
I have to say I don't think I've ever liked it in a game where enemies directly level up alongside you. Why even have a leveling system at all at that point?

Or you could just do what KH games do and enemies levels will only increase if you pass certain thresholds in the story (And by time that happens you'll usually want the increased EXP you'd get from fighting the stronger versions anyways).
I kinda agree about levels being somewhat pointless if everything levels with you, but with a huge open-world game like this it's difficult to imagine another approach. If you drop levels entirely then you'd have access to every region immediately and be able to handle the enemies there; but if you do away with level scaling then you can easily level beyond the enemies in certain regions by just grinding, making everything too easy. You can actually set "level scaling" in options so that enemies can be anywhere from 4-levels lower to on the same level. If you allow them to be 4-levels lower they'll be easier, but the downside is you get less EXP from beating them and they drop lower-level loot, so I just allowed them to be at my level.

TBH I didn't like this at first either, but as I slowly got stronger thanks to the abilities and stat boosts it actually started to feel more realistic. I mean, those base stat increases start out really small, but once you pump 8-12 levels of points into several they start to add up and feel significant. It also became interesting in terms of balancing having certain abilities VS using those points for stat boosts. I ended up just keeping the bare minimum of abilities that I found really useful and pumping most of my points into the stat boosts.
Raxivace wrote:
However, one of the game's worst flaws has to do with the leveling system too, because your weapons/armor doesn't level with you. That means if you find a set of armor/weapons you like with the right stats to suit your preferred build, you will eventually level past it so that it's too weak to function. This leaves you with a few options: go do some looting and hope to find another set that suits your style, spend your gold/resources to upgrade your gear (and it's prohibitively expensive to keep doing so), allow the game to get really difficult with your underpowered gear, or keep buying new gear from the in-game store. This makes the game feel incredibly grindy at times, or, at worst, a cheap cashgrab attempt. My "solution" was just to keep swapping loot the best I could until I got to the max level (99) and THEN I went after all the "legendary gear" so that it would be level 99 as well. This was probably a bit OCD on my part, but it made the game much better when I no longer had to worry about keeping my gear leveled up and could just focus on playing.
I was a little confused by this part. So in this game weapon/armor stats are all based around the level you happen to be when you find it? It isn't just flat numbers for everything?
Essentially yes to your first question. Gears' stats are based on their level. The level of gear you loot is based on your level, and the gear enemies drop is based on their level, so by the time you hit level 99 all the loot you find is level 99 too, and the loot enemies drop is level 99 if they're scaled to your level.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:First of all, man, that F/SN writeup was epic! I didn't read the spoilers because I very well may get around to playing it myself, but even from the other stuff you wrote it still sounds really fascinating.
I'm shocked that sounded sensible to anyone, even without spoilers.

But yeah its a neat game. I usually don't talk about visual novels like that much since they're such a niche thing but despite the flaws that it does have I think F/SN is pretty easily one of my favorites.

Also I don't think I specifically mentioned before but the last King Arthur-related media I saw before playing F/SN was Bresson's Lancelt du Lac of all things. Going from that take on King Arthur to F/SN's was...sure a thing lol.
Sensible is overrated in comparison to making something sound really interesting (if, indeed, it's really interested). You certainly succeeded at that!

I've never actually played a full visual novels though I think I downloaded a few back in the day and thought about going through them. I wonder how much (if any) influence they've had on modern games that emphasize the story aspect to the point where the "game" just comes down to choices and perhaps certain quicktime events?

LOL, yeah, can't imagine two King Arthur depictions more different than those two! Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois is also a really weird Arthurian-type film. Maybe a middle-ground between Bresson's realism and F/SN's OTT fantasy.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah I think if you go back to The Lost Levels now you'll find it doesn't really hold as well as SMB1 (Or SMB3 I'm assuming. I played that a bunch as a kid but never beat it. I'll definitely go back one of these days...). There's just a bunch of little annoying BS all throughout Lost Levels that SMB1 doesn't really have.
I might get back to it someday. I don't know if I've played any Mario games since Mario 64, and that was ages ago back when it first came out! I do remember The Lost Levels having some really difficult platforming sections.
Raxivace wrote:
I remember not enjoying this much as a kid, much for the reasons you listed as I think it's one of the games I gave up because I got lost and had no way to continue in the days before internet and guides. It probably put me off Zelda for quite a while until I finally played and loved Link to the Past and (later) Ocarina of Time.
One thing I should mention is that after making my post about Zelda 1 I learned the NES version's manual apparently came with a partial map that had location of like the first 4 dungeons. So I guess it did give you some direction, though it would have been nice if that had been in the game itself more.
It would've been nice if back then rental places included manuals but almost none of them did. I'm guessing because people ended up stealing/not returning them. Some of those manuals were probably really helpful for playing the games.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Oh, man, I'd completely forgotten about this game. I still don't remember much but that cover/title definitely wrung a bell. Undoubtedly one of those I rented on a whim. I don't remember a ton about it though... *watches some online footage* Yeah, OK, it's coming back to me a bit better. Still don't remember what I ultimately thought of it, though.
Wow of all the games I've ever posted about freaking Einhander is one of the ones you've actually played? Wow, I thought that was one of the most obscure ones I've ever mentioned even with KH3 slightly bringing back into the public consciousness.
I'm sure the game is obscure, but it was one that was available to rent at Hollywood Video back in the day. I'd completely forgotten about it until I saw that cover/read the title.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Since we're posting covers now:
Btw do people actually like it when I/we post covers? I only started doing it because I thought it might help give off a general impression of the game (At least in tone), or in the case of older games give a nostalgia rush or something.
I dig it. It's always nice to add some visuals to these WOT. And, yeah, the nostalgia is strong for some of the older entries.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Raxivace »

Eva Yojimbo wrote:I've never actually played a full visual novels though I think I downloaded a few back in the day and thought about going through them. I wonder how much (if any) influence they've had on modern games that emphasize the story aspect to the point where the "game" just comes down to choices and perhaps certain quicktime events?
Stuff like Telltale games might have some influence from VN's, though I'd imagine they take as much from American text adventure games (Stuff like that Hitchicker's Guide to the Galaxy game) and their descendants.
LOL, yeah, can't imagine two King Arthur depictions more different than those two!
Yeah for real.

Bresson: Image

F/SN: Image

Like Bresson's version of Arthur doesn't even run up the side of skyscrapers. Wtf are you even trying Robert?
Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois is also a really weird Arthurian-type film. Maybe a middle-ground between Bresson's realism and F/SN's OTT fantasy.
I'll have to check it out.

After I saw Lancelot du Lac I thought about checking out that movie Excalibur for contrast's sake too but never got around to it. Maybe I'll pair it up with this Rohmer film instead.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:It would've been nice if back then rental places included manuals but almost none of them did. I'm guessing because people ended up stealing/not returning them. Some of those manuals were probably really helpful for playing the games.
Yeah I don't remember any of my local rental places ever having manuals though this was well after the era of the NES.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I kinda agree about levels being somewhat pointless if everything levels with you, but with a huge open-world game like this it's difficult to imagine another approach. If you drop levels entirely then you'd have access to every region immediately and be able to handle the enemies there;
FWIW Zelda: Breath of the Wild did exactly this and made it work. It didn't have a traditional leveling system (Well it sort of did but you only increased either your hearts or your stamina) and most of your stats were based on the weapons/armor/items you happened to have on you- that's what made the difference between you and harder enemies though you could still do clever things to kill guys stronger than you.

If you wanted to you could even go straight to the final boss as soon as you're done with the game's prologue section but you wouldn't be prepared to really fight him unless you were an insane speedrunner-tier player or something.

Gendo could probably give a more in-depth answer here since he's put more time into that game than I have.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Essentially yes to your first question. Gears' stats are based on their level. The level of gear you loot is based on your level, and the gear enemies drop is based on their level, so by the time you hit level 99 all the loot you find is level 99 too, and the loot enemies drop is level 99 if they're scaled to your level.
That just sounds so weird to me. For all the games I've played I don't think I've done one where gear levels like that.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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BTW Jimbo, have you decided what you're going to play next after you finish up Assassin's Creed and RE2?
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:Like Bresson's version of Arthur doesn't even run up the side of skyscrapers. Wtf are you even trying Robert?
[biggrin] The Rohmer film may be even weirder given how it's a live-action film where all the sets are (intentionally) high-school-play-level in terms of their realism, the characters tend to speak in rhyming poetry, and there's an actual chorus that accompanies much of the action. I mean, I really didn't like the film, but there's no denying how original/unique it was.
Raxivace wrote:After I saw Lancelot du Lac I thought about checking out that movie Excalibur for contrast's sake too but never got around to it. Maybe I'll pair it up with this Rohmer film instead.
I only vaguely remember Excalibur. I remember not liking it much, but I have no idea why. Come to think of it, I don't know of any Arthurian film I thoroughly loved. Most all of them have had problem, or just been, in general, not how I imagine that mythology.

[quote="Raxivace"
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I kinda agree about levels being somewhat pointless if everything levels with you, but with a huge open-world game like this it's difficult to imagine another approach. If you drop levels entirely then you'd have access to every region immediately and be able to handle the enemies there;
FWIW Zelda: Breath of the Wild did exactly this and made it work. It didn't have a traditional leveling system (Well it sort of did but you only increased either your hearts or your stamina) and most of your stats were based on the weapons/armor/items you happened to have on you- that's what made the difference between you and harder enemies though you could still do clever things to kill guys stronger than you.

If you wanted to you could even go straight to the final boss as soon as you're done with the game's prologue section but you wouldn't be prepared to really fight him unless you were an insane speedrunner-tier player or something.

Gendo could probably give a more in-depth answer here since he's put more time into that game than I have.[/quote]I can imagine it being done, but I can also understand why some designers wouldn't want to do it, precisely because they wouldn't want players just going right to the end immediately, or at least trying to put some impediment to stop them from getting to certain parts of the world they want to reveal/save for later.

[quote="Raxivace"
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Essentially yes to your first question. Gears' stats are based on their level. The level of gear you loot is based on your level, and the gear enemies drop is based on their level, so by the time you hit level 99 all the loot you find is level 99 too, and the loot enemies drop is level 99 if they're scaled to your level.
That just sounds so weird to me. For all the games I've played I don't think I've done one where gear levels like that.[/quote]I couldn't think of one either, and I absolutely hated how grindy it made the game feel. I mean, probably 1/3 of my time playing was spent just working to get to level 99. Of course, there's lots of fun stuff in the game to do so getting there wasn't all bad, but I felt like it took away from focusing on the main quest to start.
Raxivace wrote:BTW Jimbo, have you decided what you're going to play next after you finish up Assassin's Creed and RE2?
Nope. Any recs? I'm certainly open to whatever (except another huge-ass RPG).
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:I only vaguely remember Excalibur. I remember not liking it much, but I have no idea why. Come to think of it, I don't know of any Arthurian film I thoroughly loved. Most all of them have had problem, or just been, in general, not how I imagine that mythology.
The closest I've come to loving one is probably Disney's The Sword in the Stone. Maybe Monty Python and the Holy Grail I guess if you want to count that. Even with those two though the Disney film is covering a very limited portion of Arthurian mythology and Monty Python are doing a satirical takedown. It seems film never really got any definitive versions of a more straightforward take.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I couldn't think of one either, and I absolutely hated how grindy it made the game feel. I mean, probably 1/3 of my time playing was spent just working to get to level 99. Of course, there's lots of fun stuff in the game to do so getting there wasn't all bad, but I felt like it took away from focusing on the main quest to start.
Yeah in these kinds of games I usually don't level grind super heavily like that, and when I do if there's a "Get to Level 99" trophy or something there's usually some kind of method to make it go quickly. AC's version just sounds a bit frustrating to me.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Nope. Any recs? I'm certainly open to whatever (except another huge-ass RPG).
Hmmm...

Why not Shadow of the Colossus? I'd be interested in getting your take on that game since it gets cited in "video games are art" discussions online all the time. I've been pretty all over the map on that game myself, going from loving it on the PS2, hating it on the PS3, and then landing somewhere in the middle on the PS4.

If you just run through the story it's only like 12 hours long, so its another quick one too.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I only vaguely remember Excalibur. I remember not liking it much, but I have no idea why. Come to think of it, I don't know of any Arthurian film I thoroughly loved. Most all of them have had problem, or just been, in general, not how I imagine that mythology.
The closest I've come to loving one is probably Disney's The Sword in the Stone. Maybe Monty Python and the Holy Grail I guess if you want to count that. Even with those two though the Disney film is covering a very limited portion of Arthurian mythology and Monty Python are doing a satirical takedown. It seems film never really got any definitive versions of a more straightforward take.
Those being such unique/different takes is probably why they didn't cross my mind. Monty Python is certainly more Monty Python than King Arthur (as it should be).
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:Nope. Any recs? I'm certainly open to whatever (except another huge-ass RPG).
Hmmm...

Why not Shadow of the Colossus? I'd be interested in getting your take on that game since it gets cited in "video games are art" discussions online all the time. I've been pretty all over the map on that game myself, going from loving it on the PS2, hating it on the PS3, and then landing somewhere in the middle on the PS4.

If you just run through the story it's only like 12 hours long, so its another quick one too.
Sounds good to me. I probably would've gotten to that one sooner but I tend to think of what genre sounds fun to play next and because that game doesn't really have a typical genre it easily slips my mind. After that one I probably need to get back to MGS as that was probably the franchise I looked most forward to catching up on when I got back into gaming.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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An MGS game might be a good one after SotC since those games aren't Assassin's Creed length behemoths (Well Peace Walker and Phantom Pain sort of are) and Kojima's style is basically the exact opposite of what Ueda is doing in his games like SotC.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Quick update:

I was going to play through those REmake 2 "Ghost Survivors" scenarios, but it turns out they were completely different from the main game. Basically, they're just challenges where the goal is to get from point A to point B with limited supplies where each area has its own baddies/group of baddies to get through. So it's a bit of an old-school gaming notion of memorizing how best to get through each area and slowly getting better over time. I also died about six times trying the (supposedly) easiest one before finally saying "fuck it" and realizing I wasn't in the mood for a hard-as-fuck RE game where the skills I'd relied on in the main game weren't working... which means I'm sure there are already some douches who've ran through all of them in 30 seconds. *slow sarcastic clap*

So, I started Shadow of the Colossus instead. I proceeded to immediately transfer my RE2 rage over to the controls/camera of SotC. After a day to cool off, I came back to it tonight and, now that I've adjusted to how utterly unique (and un-modern) the mechanics are, I'm really enjoying it. I can also understand why the camera/controls are how they are; the camera having a mind of its own is what makes the game so immersive and cinematic. Were it a typical player-controlled camera there's no way I'd be appreciating the world/atmosphere as much as I am. The controls are a little awkward, but make sense considering that, with more responsive controls, many of the colossus..es? colossi? would be too easy. Even as is most of them haven't given me too much trouble. But the whole process of hunting them down and then figuring out how to get to their weak points, and then fighting them/the controls to get there while always hanging on for dear life is fascinating and utterly unique. It's like a movie had a 3-way with a puzzler and platformer. Anyway, I'm through 8 of them so far, and most difficult challenge thus far was the bird, because it took me about half a dozen tries to make it past that gap in his fur from his back to his left wing to finally take him down. Also took me a while to figure out how to take down the fire lizard, but once I noticed I could shoot him off the wall it was pretty easy.

Anyway, after the adjustment I'm really liking it and can totally understand why this game crops up in the "video games as art" debate because it's so much about the atmosphere, immersion, and cinematics than typical gameplay mechanics.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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I think "colossi" is typically accepted as the plural form.

And yeah even on the PS4, SotC is still definitely a 2005 game. I think there is an alternate control scheme option somewhere in the menu which might make things play a little more smoothly, though if you're halfway already it might be better to keep on with what you're used to by this point.

Most of the colossi are pretty easy, though trust me its definitely preferable to having them too difficult. The PS3 version of SotC was based on some obscure version of the game where the colossi would basically immediately go into trying to shake you off as you grabbed onto them and would do so for long stretches of time, which proved to be more frustrating than anything (And I think contributed to the period of time I mentioned where I really turned on the game). The PS2 and PS4 versions are way more reasonable about it.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Anyways while Jimbo has been playing SotC I've been playing Fate/Grand Order, one of the F/SN spinoffs that's a free to play RPG on iOS. And uh...

Image

Image



[gonemad]
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

^ Those screen caps are made of lol and win.

Image
I finished SotC. Just to get the bad out of the way first: I never did really gel with the controls/camera. Really, I say controls/camera, but most of the time it was just the fact that I couldn't control the camera that made certain aspects of gameplay incredibly awkward, especially when you're trying to precision run/jump and moving too far in either direction will result in you getting bucked off a colossus. I don't think I realized until this game just how awesome an innovation the player-controlled camera in games was, and I'd gotten so used to just holding forward on the left-joystick and using the right-joystick to control the camera that I never quite got used to doing most everything with the left-joystick in SotC. Most of the times it wasn't a bit deal, but every now and then I'd really, really need the camera in a certain place and I'd end up fighting it more than the colossus. There were some other minor quibbles too, like the fact that it takes your character ~10 seconds to get up after he's knocked down, but most everything else I think could be justified. EG, though I hated the controls of the horse at first, it also made total sense that, when you're riding a horse, the only "controls" you have are being able to lead him to go left or right, and squeeze him to get him to run. The kind of control we get over horses in most video games is utterly unreal by comparison, and it's one thing that makes Agro feel like an actual companion rather than just a car with four legs.

OK, so that's really the only negative I have to say about this game. Visuals? Spectacular. Atmosphere? Immersive. Music? Haunting. Story? Beautiful. Overall? Truly artful. Perhaps what the game made me appreciate most was just how minimal it was. There's one main character (plus a horse); the girl he's trying to save, the people who are chasing him, and the world that's nearly void except for the colossi (and the occasional lizards and birds). It's also minimal in how much of the story is revealed: all you know to start is that you've brought a dead girl to a forbidden land and are told by a god that in order to bring her back you must slay the colossi, and that's almost the entire game is just going to the next point and figuring out how to bring down these massive, breathtaking beasts. Despite the simplicity, the range and types of the colossi are impressive, as is the puzzle aspect of how to actually beat them. I'm not going to lie, I did have to consult a walkthrough a few times to figure out how to beat them. Though I could complain about how obscure the game is in terms of telling you how to beat each colossus, I also get that it would be nearly impossible to balance the game so that the puzzles are challenging but not impossible to figure out. In retrospect, there were only a few that I thought seemed TOO opaque, like the one with the bull where you're meant to pick up a torch (the only time you use this mechanic in the game) in order to scare it off a cliff.

I also love that the game definitely leaves room for thought and interpretation, and the way it engages the player by suggesting a lot through a little is probably another reason this game is considered an artistic breakthrough in gaming. I've been mulling it over in the last day-or-so since I beat it, and while I don't think I have any single, definitive interpretation, there are definitely a multitude of interesting elements. For one, the game may be the best embodiment of Nietzsche's famous "battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you," as that's literally what happens in the game. It's also not just that it happens, but the way it happens; specifically, the fact that each time you defeat a colossus you are inevitably swamped by the shadow/spirit of that colossus and become a darker version of yourself. Each battle, rather than being heroic and triumphant, feels melancholic, and much more like a death than a success. Not only do the shadows consume you after each battle, but your "transition" is that of traveling down a tunnel of light where you'll often hear a faint voice, only to arrive back at the place you started. This repetitive sequence seems to suggest something about fate, inevitability, and the notion that this character is trapped in a perpetual, purgatorial loop. Even if you're "advancing" by defeating colossi, you're not actually advancing in any meaningful way.

Perhaps this could be seen as a kind of allegory for coping with death, how not allowing yourself to let go just leads you into a barren purgatory full of shadows (ala Jung, perhaps) that are just dark reflections of yourself (it's a coincidence that the colossi "weak point" runes kinda resemble the symbol on the scarf that the hero wears?). What happens when you go down that rabbit hole is inevitably that you end up becoming the darkness that you were trying to fight, and this is precisely what happens. The end of the game does two things that I love: the first is that it allows you to engage in a fight from the perspective of the colossi--and this can be seen one of two ways: one is that it allows you actually understand what it is to be the beings you've killed, or two is that it allows you to become the darkest aspect of yourself--and the second is that your ultimate "entrapment" is played out by you failing to "hold on" as you're pulled into the magic. How awesome is it that in a game that was so much about holding on--the hero holding onto the dead girl, the hero holding onto the colossi in order to scale/defeat them--that the game ends by forcing you let go. Sure, I guess one could perpetually walk/jump forward, but it quickly becomes clear there's no progress to be made, there's no way to actually escape the fate/inevitability of your demise.

Then we get the "epilogue" of sorts where Agro returns to the temple (as he always has), the girl wakes up, wanders about a bit, finds the horned child, and wanders further out into a Edenic landscape. I must admit that I find this sequence more difficult to read than most of the game... perhaps, if we return to the allegory, that it's the life that's found once one is able to let go and move on? The barren wastes of the forbidden land becomes the lush, and vibrant Eden. I guess that fits, but I'm a bit at a loss to figure out exactly what the girl and the baby are meant to represent. It could be that this whole allegory business is BS and that the game is actually just telling a more traditional fantasy story that just happens to be quite minimalistic--and this might make sense given that I've heard this game is a kind of sequel/prequel to Ico, so it could be there's a larger mythology that I'm not quite grasping. Still, even without the intention I think much of what the game does with the theme of fate, letting go, etc. is extremely moving and, yes, very artistic.

Overall this is a tough one to rate because, as much as I can gush about all the artistic elements, I think gameplay-wise I didn't find this one of the more riveting, exciting games I've played. I ended up enjoying it much more as an experience than a game, but surely if we're to make a case for games being art then the actual gameplay, and the enjoyment/experience that creates, has to be as big a part of one's assessment. Just going on gameplay this might be a 6-or-so, but art-wise it's an easy 10 and definitely one of the most original and memorable games I've ever played (certainly not one I'll be forgetting any time soon). So I guess I'll have to average that out to an 8. Still, it's one of those cases where an 8 belies how special the game is, and that specialness probably makes it better than a lot of "funner" games that I also might give an 8 to.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

So, Raxi was talking about the recent pervasiveness of video games dealing with fatherhood, and I saw this recent YouTube video that tackles that via TLOU and Witcher 3. It's surprisingly insightful and points out a lot of interesting things I'd never considered or noticed in both:
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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^I'll get to other responses later but I thought a fair amount of this video was kind of bad.

Well The Last of Us section is alright for the most part but I found it kind of ludicrous when the guy in the video said that a twelve year old should be put in equal position with an adult. Of course she shouldn't, she's a twelve year old. What makes Joel disturbing is that he's a psychopath exploiting a child, not that he isn't pretending the child is actually an adult. Predators and the like are the ones who pretend children are adults to justify abuse.

The Witcher section struck me as kind of silly overall, particularly when it got to the sections on choices with Ciri. Like I'm sorry but trying to say that its good have a childish tantrum and trash someone's home with the justification of "lol self control is bad if a guy we don't like does it" is just silly on its surface to me. Same with the snowball fight bit- I would call anyone who does that at or right after a funeral a jackass, not empathetic.

I guess my fundamental problem though with the critical appraisal of these "dad games" is that a lot of them are still fundamentally a power fantasy despite what the guy in YouTube video says (Though Last of Us actively tries to be an exception here, good on it for that). Geralt is still a power fantasy character no matter how many stock inclusions you get of NPC's making fun of his cat eyes or whatever, it never gets in the way of you doing cool shit like monster slaying (Likewise James Bond didn't stop being a power fantasy just because of scenes like the one in GoldenEye where Judi Dench makes fun of him). There's no bits where Geralt having crippling anxiety from people making fun of him his whole life prevents him from fulfilling a hunt and earning those sweet sweet orens.

Also guy in the video says Geralt doesn't save the world but I guess he didn't get to the part where Geralt defeats an alien king from another planet that's been riding around terrorizing people- how is that any different from any other video game or action story?

The only difference now is that these dad games make having a legacy through "badass" children a part of the fantasy, and I guess somehow that makes it progressive.

Just to be clear I don't have problem with people liking these kinds of games, I liked Witcher 3 well enough, but let's not pretend they're something they're not.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:^ Those screen caps are made of lol and win.
The special attack that's just the Fox logo is what really kills me.
There were some other minor quibbles too, like the fact that it takes your character ~10 seconds to get up after he's knocked down, but most everything else I think could be justified.
Yeah this is one of those aspects that I'm mixed on. I've heard some people cite this as evidence that the main character (People seem to call him Wander a lot so I'll do that here) is just some dude and not some big hero or something so of course he'll need time to get up. Same thing with the rather goofy way he carries his sword while running.

I dunno that I really buy that since apparently "some dude" can still kill 16 giant monsters anyways, and I'm not sure that long knock down time actually makes the game more fun or interesting.
EG, though I hated the controls of the horse at first, it also made total sense that, when you're riding a horse, the only "controls" you have are being able to lead him to go left or right, and squeeze him to get him to run. The kind of control we get over horses in most video games is utterly unreal by comparison, and it's one thing that makes Agro feel like an actual companion rather than just a car with four legs.
Yeah once you realize you're controlling Wander controlling Agro it clicks a little easier.

Still it was often frustrating anytime you had to jump from Agro onto a moving target- though perhaps that should be a bit hard to pull off. I certainly felt a bit of satisfaction anytime I was actually successful at it.
OK, so that's really the only negative I have to say about this game. Visuals? Spectacular. Atmosphere? Immersive. Music? Haunting. Story? Beautiful. Overall? Truly artful.
Fun fact about the music: it was done by Kow Otani, the guy that did the score to Gundam Wing of all things.

And yeah I love the visuals and such. It's partly why I wasn't very impressed by Witcher 3's visual design since SotC was the game I played like right before.
I'm not going to lie, I did have to consult a walkthrough a few times to figure out how to beat them. Though I could complain about how obscure the game is in terms of telling you how to beat each colossus, I also get that it would be nearly impossible to balance the game so that the puzzles are challenging but not impossible to figure out. In retrospect, there were only a few that I thought seemed TOO opaque, like the one with the bull where you're meant to pick up a torch (the only time you use this mechanic in the game) in order to scare it off a cliff.
Yeah the torch one is a bit obscure the first time through. Part of me wonders if that isn't some kind of weird holdover from Ico since you're often just picking up whatever you find on the ground in that game but it's true that SotC doesn't really prime you to do that beforehand.

Like a normal game would have use a torch on regular enemies before testing your skill with it on a boss, but being a game of only boss fights I guess SotC really can't do that. Maybe they could have forced you to scare an animal away or something with a torch at some other point in the game but that would really go against the design ethos they had set up.

I gotta say the hardest ones for me to figure out were either 4 or 15. To this day I'm still not entirely sure how to trigger 4 into looking down into the Hobbit holes, whereas least 15 I mostly get now.
I also love that the game definitely leaves room for thought and interpretation, and the way it engages the player by suggesting a lot through a little is probably another reason this game is considered an artistic breakthrough in gaming. I've been mulling it over in the last day-or-so since I beat it, and while I don't think I have any single, definitive interpretation, there are definitely a multitude of interesting elements. For one, the game may be the best embodiment of Nietzsche's famous "battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you," as that's literally what happens in the game. It's also not just that it happens, but the way it happens; specifically, the fact that each time you defeat a colossus you are inevitably swamped by the shadow/spirit of that colossus and become a darker version of yourself. Each battle, rather than being heroic and triumphant, feels melancholic, and much more like a death than a success. Not only do the shadows consume you after each battle, but your "transition" is that of traveling down a tunnel of light where you'll often hear a faint voice, only to arrive back at the place you started.
Most I've seen interpretations argue that what's meant to be tragic is the death of the Colossi as they were innocent victims or whatever (Though I think that line of thought ultimately leads to weird incoherent rabbit holes since nothing at all in SotC seems to stay dead. Colossi themselves seem to appear as shadow people of course, but there's also an additional white bird in the temple for each one you kill, implying some kind of dual rebirth it seems), but I like this idea of the tragedy more being how the killing changes Wander.
This repetitive sequence seems to suggest something about fate, inevitability, and the notion that this character is trapped in a perpetual, purgatorial loop. Even if you're "advancing" by defeating colossi, you're not actually advancing in any meaningful way.
Wander's dream halfway through the game seems to precall the ending as well.


(Unfortunately I couldn't find an easy clip of the PS4 version of this scene).

The way the camera pulls back so hard in particular really seems to echo the ending of the game when Wander is finally pulled in.

What Wander actually makes of this (And if he thinks it is a legit vision of the future or not) of course remains ambiguous.
It could be that this whole allegory business is BS and that the game is actually just telling a more traditional fantasy story that just happens to be quite minimalistic--and this might make sense given that I've heard this game is a kind of sequel/prequel to Ico, so it could be there's a larger mythology that I'm not quite grasping.
There's definitely some kind of connection to Ico since that game revolves around a child with horns, though if anything SotC's ending provides somewhat of an explanation for why horned kids exist in Ico rather than Ico really explaining anything about SotC's plot or setting.

Even so, I think SotC is still trying to communicate some kind of idea about letting go, death and rebirth etc.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:^I'll get to other responses later but I thought a fair amount of this video was kind of bad.

Well The Last of Us section is alright for the most part but I found it kind of ludicrous when the guy in the video said that a twelve year old should be put in equal position with an adult. Of course she shouldn't, she's a twelve year old. What makes Joel disturbing is that he's a psychopath exploiting a child, not that he isn't pretending the child is actually an adult. Predators and the like are the ones who pretend children are adults to justify abuse.
First, Ellie is fourteen, not twelve. Second, it's possible to argue she earned being in a position nearly equal to Joel. Keep in mind we're talking about a post-apocalypse where the name of the game is survival, and Ellie proved herself more than capable by managing to get Joel out of the university and to safety, nursing him back to health (and taking out a troop of baddies to do so if we consider the Left Behind DLC), and then basically taking on/down the leader of a cannibal cult. Yeah, Joel had to teach her to use a gun, but by the end of the game I'd say she's earned the respect of being treated as an equal, as opposed to a kid who must be shielded from the truth.

I also think that's mostly what the game meant by "equal;" i.e., not just an immature kid who can/should be controlled and lied to because they're too immature to understand and face reality. Ellie has faced reality all her life and has managed to survive, often entirely on her own. What else would she have to do to prove her equality? How would just getting older do that? We're not talking about a teenager learning to navigate a typical society, after all. The only way I think Ellie shouldn't be considered "adult" is that she will undoubtedly be physically weaker than most people she encounters, so she still may need Joel for that; but what else, really, in this world would she need to be considered "adult?"

Finally, I actually think both you and the video is hard on Joel. Psychopath is a really strong word for someone trying to survive in such extreme circumstances. Likewise, I'm not sure how he's "exploiting" Ellie. One can argue that he's using her to fulfill his desire to have a daughter, but he spends the vast majority of the game fighting against doing that very thing, going so far as to explicitly tell her that in the bedroom scene. It's not until he's racing to get her back from the cannibal cult pedophile that he realizes how much he cares for her despite his desire not to, despite his attempts to NOT have her replace his daughter and just keep their relationship as her being a part of his mission and promise to Tess. AFter he's gone through hell with her and reached the end of the game, he's then faced with an impossible choice between losing his "daughter" again, or sacrificing her for mankind. If anything, he reminds me a lot of Shinji in EoE, who's received so much criticism for "giving up" and not sacrificing himself for the good of mankind when he's had everything taken away from him. If we agree that Shinji was in no psychological place to fight for mankind, then how can we say differently of Joel whose entire life for the last two decades has been shaped by that loss and is now asked to go through that all again when he actually has a choice this time?

Is Joel being selfish? Yes, but I think it's a selfishness that almost anyone should be able to sympathize with. His lie to Ellie at the end is a failure of his to respect her independent agency, her equality as a conscious human being who can make her own decisions and choose to sacrifice herself if she wished; but it's also entirely understandable from the perspective of someone who's life has been defined by loss and who's been given a pseudo-second chance at recovery. I think it's what makes that ending so great because it's easy to sit in judgment at Joel from a logical distance, but it's also easy to sit in sympathy with Joel from his perspective, and that's very, very Shinji-esque.

Finally, I kinda feel much of that was a tangent in terms of what I actually liked about that video, which was more about him pointing out how much Joel and Ellie's relationship had been defined by violence, and the parallels between Joel and David.
Raxivace wrote:The Witcher section struck me as kind of silly overall, particularly when it got to the sections on choices with Ciri. Like I'm sorry but trying to say that its good have a childish tantrum and trash someone's home with the justification of "lol self control is bad if a guy we don't like does it" is just silly on its surface to me. Same with the snowball fight bit- I would call anyone who does that at or right after a funeral a jackass, not empathetic.

I guess my fundamental problem though with the critical appraisal of these "dad games" is that a lot of them are still fundamentally a power fantasy despite what the guy in YouTube video says (Though Last of Us actively tries to be an exception here, good on it for that). Geralt is still a power fantasy character no matter how many stock inclusions you get of NPC's making fun of his cat eyes or whatever, it never gets in the way of you doing cool shit like monster slaying (Likewise James Bond didn't stop being a power fantasy just because of scenes like the one in GoldenEye where Judi Dench makes fun of him). There's no bits where Geralt having crippling anxiety from people making fun of him his whole life prevents him from fulfilling a hunt and earning those sweet sweet orens.

Also guy in the video says Geralt doesn't save the world but I guess he didn't get to the part where Geralt defeats an alien king from another planet that's been riding around terrorizing people- how is that any different from any other video game or action story?

The only difference now is that these dad games make having a legacy through "badass" children a part of the fantasy, and I guess somehow that makes it progressive.

Just to be clear I don't have problem with people liking these kinds of games, I liked Witcher 3 well enough, but let's not pretend they're something they're not.
I think we really just took away different things from that video. The point with the Ciri decisions was less about what they actually do (trashing the place, the snowball fight) and more about the fact that Geralt is acknowledging Ciri's independence and legitimizing her feelings rather than just dismissing her/them or trying to control her. I thought his contrasts with the "bad dads" in the game, and how they link to the "bad decisions" from Geralt was quite insightful, actually.

The video also acknowledges that Witcher 3 is still a power fantasy, but I also agree that by changing these characters' core motivation you're definitely adding a new dimension that hasn't been there before. We may disagree over how much, or how relevant, of a change that is, but it's there. Personally, I felt it much more in TLOU (and even Silent Hill) than in Witcher 3 and God of War. The "problem" with the former is that it's just so swamped in its RPG world that the Ciri stuff is only one part of what Witcher 3 is about (the video acknowledges this as well by mentioning how the game is about so much stuff), which is otherwise the stuff of more typical high fantasy. To me, Witcher 3 is just high fantasy done at an extraordinarily high level for the most part, but I think if we're going to talk about character depth and familial motivations than even something like Critical Role is far better in that respect.

So I don't think I'm pretending Witcher 3 is something it isn't. The father/daughter plotline is one (important) part of the game, but only one part, and not, IMO, the main thing that makes that game a masterpiece.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
There were some other minor quibbles too, like the fact that it takes your character ~10 seconds to get up after he's knocked down, but most everything else I think could be justified.
Yeah this is one of those aspects that I'm mixed on. I've heard some people cite this as evidence that the main character (People seem to call him Wander a lot so I'll do that here) is just some dude and not some big hero or something so of course he'll need time to get up. Same thing with the rather goofy way he carries his sword while running.

I dunno that I really buy that since apparently "some dude" can still kill 16 giant monsters anyways, and I'm not sure that long knock down time actually makes the game more fun or interesting.
The knockdown time doesn't even make sense for the sake of realism. Unless you're knocked out or have broken some bones you aren't going to lay there that long while fighting a dangerous beast. At that point the adrenaline would be pumping so hard even in a "normal dude" that you'd be jumping to your feet like a cat receiving an electrical shock.
Raxivace wrote:Still it was often frustrating anytime you had to jump from Agro onto a moving target- though perhaps that should be a bit hard to pull off. I certainly felt a bit of satisfaction anytime I was actually successful at it.
I didn't have too much trouble with the horse-based maneuvers. The hardest one IMO wasn't any of the jumping, but trying to shoot the burrower colossus's eye while riding the horse and facing backwards. [gonemad]
Raxivace wrote:
OK, so that's really the only negative I have to say about this game. Visuals? Spectacular. Atmosphere? Immersive. Music? Haunting. Story? Beautiful. Overall? Truly artful.
Fun fact about the music: it was done by Kow Otani, the guy that did the score to Gundam Wing of all things.

And yeah I love the visuals and such. It's partly why I wasn't very impressed by Witcher 3's visual design since SotC was the game I played like right before.
Cool little factoid. I think I still would've been impressed with Witcher 3 after SotC. They're very different designs, with SotC being more fairy-tale esque and Witcher 3 being classic high fantasy. Very different in concept, style, and execution.
Raxivace wrote:I gotta say the hardest ones for me to figure out were either 4 or 15. To this day I'm still not entirely sure how to trigger 4 into looking down into the Hobbit holes, whereas least 15 I mostly get now.
I think I lucked out with 4. I was running away from him and got the voiceover advice of "going underground," and I was right on top of the thing and did that, and when I emerged the tail was on the ground for me to run up. 15 was a PITA too. It's one of those where I knew what I had to do, but not how to do it. By that point I'd realized most of the colossi required using your surroundings, and I knew the sigil was on its head, so I knew I had to climb the arena around him but had no clue how. Got lucky when he did one of his stomps that raised the floor... got lucky again when a club swing brought the rocks down to climb up, and I think most everything from there on was pretty easy once I realized I had to get to the bridge. The burrower one was another one I had to look up because, even though I was getting him to chase me I thought it would be like the water eel where you jumped on it when it emerged, but it never fully emerged. So I looked it up and found you had to shoot the damn thing's eye while riding away.
Raxivace wrote:Most I've seen interpretations argue that what's meant to be tragic is the death of the Colossi as they were innocent victims or whatever (Though I think that line of thought ultimately leads to weird incoherent rabbit holes since nothing at all in SotC seems to stay dead. Colossi themselves seem to appear as shadow people of course, but there's also an additional white bird in the temple for each one you kill, implying some kind of dual rebirth it seems), but I like this idea of the tragedy more being how the killing changes Wander.
It also doesn't make much sense because aren't the colossi just "seals" for Dorman? As in their spirits are just pieces of his spirit? I'd forgotten about the birds; it's probably not a coincident that the game opens and closes with an Eagle flying into/out of the realm, though it's probably one of those cases where it's meant to be cool/evocative more than explicitly symbolic.
Raxivace wrote:
This repetitive sequence seems to suggest something about fate, inevitability, and the notion that this character is trapped in a perpetual, purgatorial loop. Even if you're "advancing" by defeating colossi, you're not actually advancing in any meaningful way.
Wander's dream halfway through the game seems to precall the ending as well.

The way the camera pulls back so hard in particular really seems to echo the ending of the game when Wander is finally pulled in.

What Wander actually makes of this (And if he thinks it is a legit vision of the future or not) of course remains ambiguous.
Cool stuff, I'd forgotten about that scene.
Raxivace wrote:
It could be that this whole allegory business is BS and that the game is actually just telling a more traditional fantasy story that just happens to be quite minimalistic--and this might make sense given that I've heard this game is a kind of sequel/prequel to Ico, so it could be there's a larger mythology that I'm not quite grasping.
There's definitely some kind of connection to Ico since that game revolves around a child with horns, though if anything SotC's ending provides somewhat of an explanation for why horned kids exist in Ico rather than Ico really explaining anything about SotC's plot or setting.

Even so, I think SotC is still trying to communicate some kind of idea about letting go, death and rebirth etc.
Do you make anything more or anything else about the ending? To me, that's the most inexplicable part that I can't seem to fit with the rest in terms of subtext/meaning.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

PS: I'm too tired from writing this to proof-read it, so sorry for any errors and for a complete lack of editing. I didn't intend to write so much but, damn, this game has not left my head for the last day and, even more than SotC, I just feel completely exhausted from the experience. Also, I tried to spoil tag where necessary... not that I think anyone who hasn't played the game will actually read this monstrosity, but if someone can think of anything else here that should be tagged, let me know.

Image

Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty - 10/10 Masterpiece

MGS2 was the first game I played on PS2. This was, perhaps, the last time I remember being unbelievably hyped for anything. The first MGS was (and remains) one the most profound gaming experiences I'd had. No game I'd played before had been so plot-heavy, and, even today, the sheer labyrinthine nature of that plot--its unpredictability and refusal to go where any media of a remotely similar genre would--is mind-bending. I'd played the original MGS at least 4-5 times, and every time I'd find myself forgetting this or that twist. The gameplay itself was just as original, as stealth games were non-existent back then, and the notion of playing a hero who sneaks into a compound and around enemies was unheard of, and was extremely exhilarating. It was basically a suspense/thriller in video game form.

So, the hype for MGS2 was profound. I bought the game, I played the game, I beat the game... then, a funny thing happened over the last ~18 years; I basically forgot about the game. What shocked me most during my playthrough this time was how little I actually remembered. I remembered starting as Snake on the tanker, I remember then playing as Raiden, and I remember bits and pieces of the Big Shell design... but I'd forgotten the bosses, I'd forgotten the plot, and I'd forgotten just how much of a mindfuck this game is. In a way, my forgetting it is almost eerily resonant with the games' themes itself, the idea that we're bombarded with information and lack the capacity to make sense of it via context. The grand design of the villains was nothing less than censoring all the useless, irrelevant, and false information that prevents people from being able to easily access/comprehend the truth, and the fact that I'd forgotten that that's what the game was even about has to say something about the theme itself. That the game also makes this point by doing exactly that--ie, bombarding the player with information faster than they can process it--doesn't help either. It's also only now I realize what immense balls it took for Kojima to make this game, which is probably as close as any video game has come to replicating what NGE tried to do in terms of making a (largely) metafictional work that's as much about the audience/player as it is about anything. So for that I have to say:

This one goes to 11/10

Yet, for all the game's brilliance, it's hard for me to shake the feeling it's more movie--or perhaps more accurately given the dearth of cinematic cutscenes and wealth of Codec conversations, an interactive novel--than game. It took me about 9 hours to complete, and I'm guessing only around 2-3 hours of that were gameplay. The gameplay that's here is largely a refinement of MGS1, with most of the sneaking mechanics in place and an AI that is much smarter and much more difficult because enemies work together rather than working solo. Compared to the first game, the boss fights feel less original and interesting, in part because the bosses themselves feel less original and interesting. None of them have the compelling backstories as those from the first game, and the battles are more typical but with a few tweaks (like having to disarm bombs while fighting Fatman). The "special sequences" are also less prevalent here, and while some are quite good--the lengthy sniper section--others are just horrendous (like the underwater stuff). Though I wouldn't have minded back then, the static, typically-overhead camera also makes the stealth sections (before you activate the nodes, which activates your radar) nearly impossible because you have no way of seeing enemies other than awkwardly switching to FPV. Luckily, most of the nodes are pretty easily accessible so this only ends up being a minor and short inconvenience. I noticed this a while back, but I had far too many Game Overs. So to be blunt, I really stink at this game:

Now it's more 6/10

That said, it's possible to argue that, from an artistic perspective, that was kind of the point. We learn late in the game that the entire scenario was designed to be a simulation of the Shadow Moses incident (aka, the events of MGS1). So we're supposed to be playing a shadow of a Shadow, of sorts. This feeds into the themes on multiple levels, including Raiden essentially being a "shadow" of what Snake is; the soldier trained in VR but a virgin when it comes to real life missions. So we're literally a player playing a shadow who's playing a shadow of a Shadow. The levels of unreality have already started to mount before we even start getting to the twists and turns of the plot. Just as Anno was making a series about how Otaku's use fantasy to escape reality via a work about characters using fantasy to escape reality (in the very genre that's most about fantasy escapism), Kojima is doing the same but with gamers, essentially saying: "You seem to get a real thrill out of slaughtering the enemy. Are you frustrated about something?"

Much like NGE, the game is methodical in how it unravels these layers. The game's intro has us playing as Snake sneaking into a tanker housing the new Metal Gear. We're thoroughly in classic "safe" MGS territory here. This rug is yanked when the mission fails and Snake "dies." Introducing us to Raiden is the second rug pull, but it's mild compared to what will happen later. This large "middle" section of the game seems to exist between the intro's comfort and batshit insanity of the closing; its oddities are, in a way, precisely in how much it resembles a funhouse mirror of the first game. It's familiar enough not to completely disorient us, but eerily odd in its own subtle ways. But by this point, honestly, I had played the game for a long time. Didn't I have anything else to do with my time?

5.5/10

Then the walls crumble down and, just how NGE violently rips through its established narrative in its second half and ending, MGS2 rips through its fiction in its final third after the virus is uploaded to the computer. In particular, the most classic, comforting part of the game, the Codec calls between the Colonel and the player/Raiden goes nuts, revealing that the Colonel doesn't exist/never existed, it was the AI all along. In essence, The Patriots, the "real villains" behind everything, were controlling Raiden to test the AI's ability to manipulate him/us via the information it gave him/us, and it was an astounding success. Even my patience has its limits. I just couldn't leave this thing up to them any
longer. I'll do the fighting and they can go home!

So the game has lead us down the rabbit hole only to reveal to us how games manipulate us precisely to do just that, and we do it typically without thinking, without questioning. Kojima must've seen a parallel with how this would happen with the dawn of the internet age. So much so that many of the game's quotes about life in the digital age were eerily prescient of today, especially in how people have insulated themselves in their own bubbles and only receive news or process information that already fits with their beliefs and ideals. One solution to this is what the game suggests: an AI that filters the information that people are able to receive. In the age of internet search algorithms, this is, in a way, precisely what happens; except instead of an AI filtering a single reality/truth for everyone to access and comprehend, everyone is living in their own AI-controlled worlds where what information they encounter is filtered based on whatever they already think and believe. So what the game predicted happened, but almost in reverse. like Shakespeare said: "Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content." Basically, it means that your desire can get you into trouble if you're not careful.

3.14159265359/10

It's possible to say that the game profoundly depicts the classic "chaos VS order" duality/struggle for the digital age. The pros and cons of both extremes have been explored in art throughout history. We've typically seen "order" as the "good" (one can say that gods/religions are society's interpretation of the ultimate "order" of reality and society itself) and "chaos" as the "bad;" but chaos is what brings change, and what happens when order solidifies is you end up with tyrannies where too many people are repressed. In those depictions, "chaos" is the good that's often depicted as rebels or freedom fighters (think Star Wars here). In the world of MGS2, The Patriots are the order, while Snake, Solidus, and the other Dead Cell members are the chaos who's trying to overthrow the "tyranny" of the Patriots. Raiden, the player, is caught between them, unknowingly working for The Patriots against the very people who are trying to free America from their control. Remember what De Gaulle said: "The graveyards are full of indispensable men." You're all alone and surrounded by bad guys.

One of the central questions the game asks is: who's the real hero and villain? It's difficult to say. In the abstract, a secret cabal who control almost everything in the US, attempting to censor information and maintain control would seem to be the obvious villains; but it's impossible to deny that the concerns they express are not outlandish and, again, are eerily prescient of all the negatives of the world we find ourselves in today. Were it possible to have an omnipotent, omniscent, and benevolent AI who filtered information so that only the truth remained, would that not, indeed, be better than just allowing humanity to wallow in the mire of lies, half-truths, and distortions that we now find ourselves in? Likewise, Solidus and co. are fundamentally committing terrorists acts, but all in the name of freedom in its truest sense; they're literally trying to free the country from the control of this "tyranny," but doing so means the inevitable killing of millions, including innocents. Is such "terror" worth it for the greater good? Actually, I am in really bad shape financially. I pay money to my ex-wife as part of our divorce settlement, among other bills... I just had no choice but to make you pay for lunch the other day. I'm really sorry.

In truth, chaos and order are just yin and yang. They need each other. Order without chaos turns into tyranny; chaos without order is unlivable. The entire conservative/liberal dichotomy is one of society--even, metaphorically, the human mind--trying to mediate between what aspects of the status quo to maintain and what to change. We know from evolution that change can be for good, for bad, or for neutral, and we humans are woefully inadequate for determining what the ultimate effect of any such changes will be or, indeed, whether our traditions are themselves, good, bad, or neutral. That's the proof of our incompetence, right there. We lack the qualifications to exercise free will. Mind the gap.


ψ/10

The game ends with Raiden removing his dog tag, which has taken on the name/birthday of the player if the player has been using his/her name/birthday on the nodes in the facility and throwing it away. This suggests a lot, especially coming on the heels as it does with Snake telling Raiden that we have to bear the responsibility of not just passing on our genes (which the first game was all about), but passing on our memes (which is what this game is about) in the form of philosophy and culture. Raiden himself was someone who's ran from his past, essentially entering the game as a blank slate that the player controls. Rose keeps bugging him about what tomorrow is, which turns out to be the anniversary of the day they met, but also the day that George Washington gave his inaugural address as the first President of the US. The significance of this parallel is subtly brilliant: essentially, by running from his past (his girlfriend), Raiden is also us, running from "the past" of the US's principles of freedom. Raiden gave up his freedom to be controlled by The Patriots, we give up our freedom when we play any video game designed to limit our choices but, on a deeper level, we give up our freedom when we allow ourselves to be controlled by the AIs that determine what we read, buy, research, view, listen to, etc. The danger is that in embracing that freedom we drown in the chaos of information out there in the world, the opposite is a comforting kind of slavery. So again we return to NGE: the comforting lie or the painful truth? Infancy or adulthood? The Jack/Rose relationship is also strongly reminiscent of the Jeff/Lisa relationship in Rear Window, with her constantly trying to coax him back to reality and him being lost in his own world created by his limited perspective that he "half creates and half perceives." Listen, you haven't reported in for a long time until now. You think you can just CALL only when you want something?

That the game leaves us questioning reality is another notable layer, and perhaps the most important one. Our realities are defined by our memories, our history, our perceptions, the information we receive and context with which we receive it. The game goes a long way towards demonstrating, not just telling us, how all of this is eminently manipulatable and unreliable. When our reality is controlled by the context with which we absorb information, and that information is determined by how AI's filter our searches, or even by the biases and values of those delivering the information, it's easy to question how it's possible to really know anything. The game drills this home through a multitude of devices including its eerie fourth-wall breaking. The virus we end up feeding to the AI might as well have been administered to us as the Colonel addresses us (the players) directly with unforgettable stuff like "turn the game console off right now, the mission is a failure. Don't worry, it's just a game like usual." it's hard not to get chills down your spine. Not to mention when the "mission failed" (or "Fission Mailed"screen shows up when it shouldn't, but with everything scrambled. Essentially, the created world of the game crumbles in on itself at the same time the character's (and our) perception of reality is shattering as well. Again, this is very NGE (and also quite reminiscent of Silent Hill; though that game was always questioning its reality).

∞/10

Ultimately, the game is a masterpiece work of art, so much so that I think whatever failings it has as a "game" are insignificant, and it's easy to argue that many of those "failings" feed into the game's themes so strongly that they're actually successes. This is just one of those ultra-rare works where you had a visionary with the money to make a Triple-A games with all the media hype/promotion in the world, but also with the guts to completely subvert everyone's expectations with a work that would ultimately leave them thinking and questioning rather than fully satisfied as an expectant fan wanting "more of the same, but better." If that weren't enough, the game may be the ultimate philosophical document of what it means to live and know in the digital age. There's just so much here to digest that it's nigh impossible to make coherent sense of it all... but that's precisely the point, both in the game, and in what the game says about contemporary life. And that the game ends not with an ultimate resolution, but with a haunting and surreal stillness (that may or may not be real) is all the more potent, because it's not triumphant, or tragic, or anything immediately comprehensible in classic fictional terms. Again, like with NGE it seems to end with a new beginning, and new beginnings are filled with that combination of anxiety and immeasurable possibilities, and, at the end of the day, that may be exactly what life in the digital age is all about.

I can't believe it -- that someone who has committed all those twisted acts in the woman's bathroom would make it this far... this is the end of the world. I need scissors! 61/10
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:First, Ellie is fourteen, not twelve. Second, it's possible to argue she earned being in a position nearly equal to Joel. Keep in mind we're talking about a post-apocalypse where the name of the game is survival, and Ellie proved herself more than capable by managing to get Joel out of the university and to safety, nursing him back to health (and taking out a troop of baddies to do so if we consider the Left Behind DLC), and then basically taking on/down the leader of a cannibal cult. Yeah, Joel had to teach her to use a gun, but by the end of the game I'd say she's earned the respect of being treated as an equal, as opposed to a kid who must be shielded from the truth.
My bad on Ellie's age. I very much disagree that her being good with a gun makes her mature though- it just makes her good at killing. Child soldiers in Africa are good at killing too, and aren't better off for it.

At a certain point you have to ask, I think, if there is any real difference between Joel and someone like Joseph Kony. I'm not sure there is ultimately that much of one.
The only way I think Ellie shouldn't be considered "adult" is that she will undoubtedly be physically weaker than most people she encounters, so she still may need Joel for that; but what else, really, in this world would she need to be considered "adult?"
I think she needs stability and solid support structure to reach mature adulthood.

Even in the world of TLoU such things already exist to some extent and should continue to be developed. She needs that, not a gun.
Finally, I actually think both you and the video is hard on Joel. Psychopath is a really strong word for someone trying to survive in such extreme circumstances.
He does not need to survive in these circumstances. The game goes out of its way to show you several alternatives to the life Joel leads, some of which seem to be okay.

Like he could have stayed with his brother and probably should have. That would have probably been the happiest ending of the game.
Likewise, I'm not sure how he's "exploiting" Ellie. One can argue that he's using her to fulfill his desire to have a daughter, but he spends the vast majority of the game fighting against doing that very thing, going so far as to explicitly tell her that in the bedroom scene.
Well I think he's doing not only that, but continuing to rely on her combat prowess is itself very bad thing in my eyes. It's not just that he's lying to her, but I think in general he sets a terrible example and if Ellie adopts his lifestyle, I think she'll only continue to be scarred as a result.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying Joel should have sacrificed Ellie, but rather he should have never gone on this entire escapade with her to begin with. If even with the benefit of hindsight Joel can't realize how needlessly destructive that journey was, I think that's a very, very, very bad sign.
His lie to Ellie at the end is a failure of his to respect her independent agency, her equality as a conscious human being who can make her own decisions and choose to sacrifice herself if she wished;
Is she conscious of what exactly that entails? Young people are very susceptible to suicide ideation even without throwing in qualifiers like "Your death would save the world" and such. The military exploits this vulnerability in young people as well through emotional appeals to protecting the country and such- I remember having to sit through several such lectures of their bullshit when I was in high school. And sadly, such lectures work on people.

Joel shouldn't have lied to Ellie, but asking "Hey do you want to kill yourself to save humanity? Y/N" would be a horribly irresponsible thing to ask her. In fact, I will go as far as saying he would be a bad dad for that too. A good dad would sit Ellie down, explain wtf was up, and that she shouldn't throw her life away anyways.

At least an actual adult with actual ability to discern what's just propaganda and emotional decision making might be able to come their own decision. I don't think children whose brains are even fully developed yet are equipped to do that.
but it's also entirely understandable from the perspective of someone who's life has been defined by loss and who's been given a pseudo-second chance at recovery. I think it's what makes that ending so great because it's easy to sit in judgment at Joel from a logical distance, but it's also easy to sit in sympathy with Joel from his perspective, and that's very, very Shinji-esque.
I'm sympathetic to Joel, and I don't blame him for saving Ellie. It's the life of violence I think he's bringing her into that I question.
Finally, I kinda feel much of that was a tangent in terms of what I actually liked about that video, which was more about him pointing out how much Joel and Ellie's relationship had been defined by violence, and the parallels between Joel and David.
Well I don't disagree that violence defines their relationship, that's not really a point I'm contending.
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I think we really just took away different things from that video. The point with the Ciri decisions was less about what they actually do (trashing the place, the snowball fight) and more about the fact that Geralt is acknowledging Ciri's independence and legitimizing her feelings rather than just dismissing her/them or trying to control her. I thought his contrasts with the "bad dads" in the game, and how they link to the "bad decisions" from Geralt was quite insightful, actually.
I got what his POV in the video was, I'm just saying what Witcher 3 thinks is a "bad" decision is often kind of dumb in my eyes, and that harms the connections he points out.

Like if I was making a terrible decision I would hope my friends and family had the kindness to say so instead of merely "respecting my independence" or whatever. I don't have to agree with them, but I can appreciate that they at least care about my well-being.

IOW there's a middle ground to these sorts of things that I wish Witcher 3 had more of.
The "problem" with the former is that it's just so swamped in its RPG world that the Ciri stuff is only one part of what Witcher 3 is about
This is a fair distinction, I don't mean to imply that the Ciri plotline is all that Witcher 3 revolves around.

However the Ciri plotline has been one of my bigger issues with the game since I played it- I think maz and I went back and forth over it at some point too (Which reminds me, I need to harass him with some more e-mails to get him back here again).
So I don't think I'm pretending Witcher 3 is something it isn't. The father/daughter plotline is one (important) part of the game, but only one part, and not, IMO, the main thing that makes that game a masterpiece.
Just to be clear I didn't mean to say you specifically were pretending, I was using the royal you there.

EDIT: Uh why is there a fire icon in top corner of this post? [confused]
Last edited by Raxivace on Tue Aug 06, 2019 5:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:The knockdown time doesn't even make sense for the sake of realism. Unless you're knocked out or have broken some bones you aren't going to lay there that long while fighting a dangerous beast. At that point the adrenaline would be pumping so hard even in a "normal dude" that you'd be jumping to your feet like a cat receiving an electrical shock.
Yeah I dunno.

Thinking about it some more it could just be an attempt to balance around the fact that your health regenerates in SotC but that would still be weird.
I didn't have too much trouble with the horse-based maneuvers. The hardest one IMO wasn't any of the jumping, but trying to shoot the burrower colossus's eye while riding the horse and facing backwards. [gonemad]
Oooh yeah, that one was tough too.
It also doesn't make much sense because aren't the colossi just "seals" for Dorman? As in their spirits are just pieces of his spirit?
Maybe? It's hard to say and I'm not sure how much agreement on this point there really is. Like the colossi have to be unnatural in some fashion since they're partially made of stone, right? OTOH why do they attack you if Dormin wants you to kill them (Besides video game reasons of action content needing to exist)?

Perhaps this is an area where SotC's minimalism gets in the away of crafting a real interpretation. At the very least the lack of a clear answer seems to cause the game to resist a singular interpretation somewhat.
I'd forgotten about the birds; it's probably not a coincident that the game opens and closes with an Eagle flying into/out of the realm, though it's probably one of those cases where it's meant to be cool/evocative more than explicitly symbolic.
Good call on the eagle thing.
Do you make anything more or anything else about the ending? To me, that's the most inexplicable part that I can't seem to fit with the rest in terms of subtext/meaning.
The only other thing I can remember that Agro seeming to die before the fight with 16 but reappearing in the ending with a mere limp seems to tie into the rebirth theme as well. Like really, that horse should be dead.

At my most cynical I've previously argued that this rebirth theme is SotC tacitly admitting that video games are basically hollow as a storytelling medium. That death in video games narrative are basically meaningless, because you can always contrive some reason for a character to come back, that even if the player is a monster for killing the colossi you can always enter New Game+ to bring them back to life, or run Time Attack more or whatever (Where you'll get new and cool weapons to kill the colossi with). That even if you cry when Agro falls down that cliff, she can wander on into the ending anyways.

I don't subscribe to such a nihilistic read of SotC as some kind of anti-art game these days (Your Jungian view of the colossi in particular really makes me reconsider the story), but I also struggle to come up with an actually compelling reason as to why all of this rebirth stuff is there all throughout the game.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Eva Yojimbo wrote:PS: I'm too tired from writing this to proof-read it, so sorry for any errors and for a complete lack of editing. I didn't intend to write so much but, damn, this game has not left my head for the last day and, even more than SotC, I just feel completely exhausted from the experience. Also, I tried to spoil tag where necessary... not that I think anyone who hasn't played the game will actually read this monstrosity, but if someone can think of anything else here that should be tagged, let me know.
I'm glad you wrote this post after that Witcher 3/Last of Us one because not only is it a good review but its something we can largely agree upon!!! Hooray!!!!
I'd forgotten just how much of a mindfuck this game is.
Oh absolutely. I remember when I first played MGS2 and the Ninja appeared I was like "Really Kojima? Are we just repeating MGS1 again?"

Oh boy did he get back at me HARD for thinking that.
In a way, my forgetting it is almost eerily resonant with the games' themes itself, the idea that we're bombarded with information and lack the capacity to make sense of it via context. The grand design of the villains was nothing less than censoring all the useless, irrelevant, and false information that prevents people from being able to easily access/comprehend the truth, and the fact that I'd forgotten that that's what the game was even about has to say something about the theme itself. That the game also makes this point by doing exactly that--ie, bombarding the player with information faster than they can process it--doesn't help either. It's also only now I realize what immense balls it took for Kojima to make this game, which is probably as close as any video game has come to replicating what NGE tried to do in terms of making a (largely) metafictional work that's as much about the audience/player as it is about anything. So for that I have to say:

This one goes to 11/10
Yes! Yes! Yesssss!
Yet, for all the game's brilliance, it's hard for me to shake the feeling it's more movie--or perhaps more accurately given the dearth of cinematic cutscenes and wealth of Codec conversations, an interactive novel--than game. It took me about 9 hours to complete, and I'm guessing only around 2-3 hours of that were gameplay.
Well if you want more gameplay you can always do the VR Missions.

FWIW looking at YouTube cutscene compilations, the videos appear to be about 5.5 hours long.
Compared to the first game, the boss fights feel less original and interesting, in part because the bosses themselves feel less original and interesting. None of them have the compelling backstories as those from the first game, and the battles are more typical but with a few tweaks (like having to disarm bombs while fighting Fatman). The "special sequences" are also less prevalent here, and while some are quite good--the lengthy sniper section--others are just horrendous (like the underwater stuff).
They're not as original though I quite like the boss fights.

Also I actually think Dead Cell is probably the second best boss squad in Metal Gear overall, with MGS1 probably being ahead of it. The MSX games are the MSX games (Who feature bosses such as RUNNING MAN, the man who runs in a circle), and as much as I like MGS3 the bosses there have way less than even MGS2's bosses do going on.

MGS4 has even less than MGS3, though its intentionally playing up the "dehumanization of soldiers via technology" angle. Even if they're not as well written I can't completely hate that boss squad since they're all hot babes anyways.

MGSV doesn't really have a boss squad though. There's Peace Walker too which has you mainly fighting robots and vehicles.

I can't remember Portable Ops too well, and Revengeance didn't do much for me in any capacity.
Though I wouldn't have minded back then, the static, typically-overhead camera also makes the stealth sections (before you activate the nodes, which activates your radar) nearly impossible because you have no way of seeing enemies other than awkwardly switching to FPV. Luckily, most of the nodes are pretty easily accessible so this only ends up being a minor and short inconvenience. I noticed this a while back, but I had far too many Game Overs. So to be blunt, I really stink at this game:
I dunno, I don't remember ever having too much problem with sneaking though having played MGS2 like 7 or 8 times (In addition to VR nonsense) I got a pretty good feeling for those maps.

About the only thing I didn't do was clear European Extreme mode.
"You seem to get a real thrill out of slaughtering the enemy. Are you frustrated about something?"
Agreed with this whole section.
Much like NGE, the game is methodical in how it unravels these layers. The game's intro has us playing as Snake sneaking into a tanker housing the new Metal Gear. We're thoroughly in classic "safe" MGS territory here. This rug is yanked when the mission fails and Snake "dies." Introducing us to Raiden is the second rug pull, but it's mild compared to what will happen later. This large "middle" section of the game seems to exist between the intro's comfort and batshit insanity of the closing; its oddities are, in a way, precisely in how much it resembles a funhouse mirror of the first game. It's familiar enough not to completely disorient us, but eerily odd in its own subtle ways. But by this point, honestly, I had played the game for a long time. Didn't I have anything else to do with my time?
One thing to mention here is how the trailers for MGS2 hid the Raiden twist by having custscenes with Snake running around the Plant and such. Kojima really went all in on this game.
Then the walls crumble down and, just how NGE violently rips through its established narrative in its second half and ending, MGS2 rips through its fiction in its final third after the virus is uploaded to the computer. In particular, the most classic, comforting part of the game, the Codec calls between the Colonel and the player/Raiden goes nuts, revealing that the Colonel doesn't exist/never existed, it was the AI all along. In essence, The Patriots, the "real villains" behind everything, were controlling Raiden to test the AI's ability to manipulate him/us via the information it gave him/us, and it was an astounding success. Even my patience has its limits. I just couldn't leave this thing up to them any
longer. I'll do the fighting and they can go home!.

So the game has lead us down the rabbit hole only to reveal to us how games manipulate us precisely to do just that, and we do it typically without thinking, without questioning. Kojima must've seen a parallel with how this would happen with the dawn of the internet age. So much so that many of the game's quotes about life in the digital age were eerily prescient of today, especially in how people have insulated themselves in their own bubbles and only receive news or process information that already fits with their beliefs and ideals. One solution to this is what the game suggests: an AI that filters the information that people are able to receive. In the age of internet search algorithms, this is, in a way, precisely what happens; except instead of an AI filtering a single reality/truth for everyone to access and comprehend, everyone is living in their own AI-controlled worlds where what information they encounter is filtered based on whatever they already think and believe. So what the game predicted happened, but almost in reverse. like Shakespeare said: "Nought's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got without content." Basically, it means that your desire can get you into trouble if you're not careful.
Yessss!!!!!!
3.14159265359/10
Image
One of the central questions the game asks is: who's the real hero and villain? It's difficult to say. In the abstract, a secret cabal who control almost everything in the US, attempting to censor information and maintain control would seem to be the obvious villains; but it's impossible to deny that the concerns they express are not outlandish and, again, are eerily prescient of all the negatives of the world we find ourselves in today. Were it possible to have an omnipotent, omniscent, and benevolent AI who filtered information so that only the truth remained, would that not, indeed, be better than just allowing humanity to wallow in the mire of lies, half-truths, and distortions that we now find ourselves in?
Yeah the older I get, the more what the appeal of the Patriots is supposed to be becomes clear to me especially as the problems it describes become more and more of an issue. It's a problem I'm sure I'm not immune from either.
Likewise, Solidus and co. are fundamentally committing terrorists acts, but all in the name of freedom in its truest sense; they're literally trying to free the country from the control of this "tyranny," but doing so means the inevitable killing of millions, including innocents. Is such "terror" worth it for the greater good? Actually, I am in really bad shape financially. I pay money to my ex-wife as part of our divorce settlement, among other bills... I just had no choice but to make you pay for lunch the other day. I'm really sorry.
Hey man its all good, I don't mind paying a bit extra here or there for a buddy... Wait a second... Why am I paying for your lunch when I'm the one who has been trying to steal your credit card information this whole time? I don't understand anymore...
ψ/10
Same, tbh.
The game ends with Raiden removing his dog tag, which has taken on the name/birthday of the player if the player has been using his/her name/birthday on the nodes in the facility and throwing it away. This suggests a lot, especially coming on the heels as it does with Snake telling Raiden that we have to bear the responsibility of not just passing on our genes (which the first game was all about), but passing on our memes (which is what this game is about) in the form of philosophy and culture. Raiden himself was someone who's ran from his past, essentially entering the game as a blank slate that the player controls. Rose keeps bugging him about what tomorrow is, which turns out to be the anniversary of the day they met, but also the day that George Washington gave his inaugural address as the first President of the US. The significance of this parallel is subtly brilliant: essentially, by running from his past (his girlfriend), Raiden is also us, running from "the past" of the US's principles of freedom. Raiden gave up his freedom to be controlled by The Patriots, we give up our freedom when we play any video game designed to limit our choices but, on a deeper level, we give up our freedom when we allow ourselves to be controlled by the AIs that determine what we read, buy, research, view, listen to, etc. The danger is that in embracing that freedom we drown in the chaos of information out there in the world, the opposite is a comforting kind of slavery. So again we return to NGE: the comforting lie or the painful truth? Infancy or adulthood? The Jack/Rose relationship is also strongly reminiscent of the Jeff/Lisa relationship in Rear Window, with her constantly trying to coax him back to reality and him being lost in his own world created by his limited perspective that he "half creates and half perceives." Listen, you haven't reported in for a long time until now. You think you can just CALL only when you want something?
You know for all I played this game, I don't think I caught that parallel about the inaugural address before. That Jeff/Lisa relationship is really good too.
That the game leaves us questioning reality is another notable layer, and perhaps the most important one. Our realities are defined by our memories, our history, our perceptions, the information we receive and context with which we receive it. The game goes a long way towards demonstrating, not just telling us, how all of this is eminently manipulatable and unreliable. When our reality is controlled by the context with which we absorb information, and that information is determined by how AI's filter our searches, or even by the biases and values of those delivering the information, it's easy to question how it's possible to really know anything. The game drills this home through a multitude of devices including its eerie fourth-wall breaking. The virus we end up feeding to the AI might as well have been administered to us as the Colonel addresses us (the players) directly with unforgettable stuff like "turn the game console off right now, the mission is a failure. Don't worry, it's just a game like usual." it's hard not to get chills down your spine. Not to mention when the "mission failed" (or "Fission Mailed"screen shows up when it shouldn't, but with everything scrambled. Essentially, the created world of the game crumbles in on itself at the same time the character's (and our) perception of reality is shattering as well. Again, this is very NGE (and also quite reminiscent of Silent Hill; though that game was always questioning its reality).
Yeah. I know Kojima is an NGE fan too (He's posted pictures on Twitter of him wearing a NERV t-shirt), so I wouldn't be surprised if that was an inspiration.

Come to think of it, I wonder if the AI stuff in MGS2 wasn't partially inspired by Godard's Alphaville. Kojima has mentioned liking that movie before too.
∞/10
Ş̷̧͇̬͎̙͉͙̤̰̩̙̱̿͂̓͌͗Í'̿͆͜͝ą̷̧̳̮̥̼̤͓̗̈́͛̆̿Í'́̔̈̆̌͜m̸̡̨͚͙̮̟̭͖̮̝̀͂̓Í'̄͌̃́́̎́͜͝ḙ̴̚͝,̵̫̣̮́̎̀̍ ̴̡̛͚̤̣̻̻̜̙͓͖̥̆̄̈̉̋̂͂͝͝t̵͇̥̗̱̱͔̞͇͎̘͇̋̆̅b̷̻̮̫̙̻̯̄̐̈́̚h̴̙̱̄́̋̂̇̕͘͝.
Ultimately, the game is a masterpiece work of art, so much so that I think whatever failings it has as a "game" are insignificant, and it's easy to argue that many of those "failings" feed into the game's themes so strongly that they're actually successes. This is just one of those ultra-rare works where you had a visionary with the money to make a Triple-A games with all the media hype/promotion in the world, but also with the guts to completely subvert everyone's expectations with a work that would ultimately leave them thinking and questioning rather than fully satisfied as an expectant fan wanting "more of the same, but better." If that weren't enough, the game may be the ultimate philosophical document of what it means to live and know in the digital age. There's just so much here to digest that it's nigh impossible to make coherent sense of it all... but that's precisely the point, both in the game, and in what the game says about contemporary life. And that the game ends not with an ultimate resolution, but with a haunting and surreal stillness (that may or may not be real) is all the more potent, because it's not triumphant, or tragic, or anything immediately comprehensible in classic fictional terms. Again, like with NGE it seems to end with a new beginning, and new beginnings are filled with that combination of anxiety and immeasurable possibilities, and, at the end of the day, that may be exactly what life in the digital age is all about.
I don't know how many more ways I can agree but this is exactly how I feel.
I can't believe it -- that someone who has committed all those twisted acts in the woman's bathroom would make it this far... this is the end of the world. I need scissors! 61/10
lol

Anyways again this is a pretty excellent review.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Raxivace »

Anyways I'm really curious to see what you'll think of MGS3, Jimbo. It's been more popular than MGS2 for the longest time but I feel like it just has way less going than MGS2 does.

It does play up the Bond influence more than any other MGS game though, and there is still a lot to like about it.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

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Also can I just stress what a good fucking year 2001 was for video games?

-Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
-Silent Hill 2
-Ico
-Super Smash Bros. Melee
-Luigi's Mansion
-Pikmin
-Original Japanese release of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
-Halo: Combat Evolved
-Final Fantasy X
-Sonic Adventure 2
-Animal Crossing
-Jak & Daxter
-Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons
-Gauntlet: Dark Legacy
-Zone of the Enders
-Shenmue II
-Devil May Cry

These are just ones I've played too.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Raxivace »

As far as some games I've recently beat go...

Image

Kill la Kill The Game: If (2019)

A fighting game based on the anime Kill la Kill. As a fighting game its pretty straightforward- you move around 3D environments, attacks are simple to pull off etc., but through its flashiness it keeps the over-the-top style of the anime pretty well. I had fun with it.

Image

Fate/EXTRA (2010)

An F/SN spinoff that's going to take some explaining. This one is a JRPG similar to that Fate/Grand Order game I mentioned.

This particular game follows a Holy Grail War that uses a tournament setup as opposed to F/SN where it was a free-for-all among a group of 7 people. EXTRA on the other hand starts with 128 participants. Also, it takes place in a computer. And that computer is on the Moon. And if you lose a round you die for real.

The prologue features your character waking up, and going through an elimination round of sorts to even get counted as one of the 128 participants. Your character, no matter what you do, loses the match and dies. You then control a completely different second character who actually wins their way into the proper Holy Grail War and you get a choice of among three servants- a Saber class, an Archer class, and a Caster class. I went with the Saber class and my Servant ended up being the girl in the middle of the boxart above, who's later revealed to be Nero Claudius.

From there you start fighting in the tournament proper. You get one in-game week to gather information on your opponent and acquire two keys to actually get into the match against them, which always takes place on the seventh day of the week. During the day you do actual information gathering throughout a virtual school where each combatant spends their, and during the night you do dungeon crawling where you look for these keys and get involved with other shenanigans, such as occasionally getting attacked by other Master/Servant pairs who want to risk taking you out early before the computer system this all takes place in and detect what's going on and force the illegal fight to end early.

The battle system here is kind of strange. Basically, you and your opponent take six actions per turn, and you have one of six options per action. The three main actions you have are "Attack", "Guard", and "Break". Similar to rock-paper-sciossors, you have to pick which of the three will beat whatever you think will beat whatever your opponent is going to use on any given action (Attack beats Break, Break beats Guard, and Guard beats Attack). However what makes this tricky is that you only start out knowing one out of the six moves your opponent is going to use ahead of time, meaning you have to either get lucky, play defensively, or do both of those long enough to figure out the patterns the enemies use and exploit that.

For regular enemies, if you keep defeating them enough you get more of their moves revealed ahead of time (You can eventually get all six of their actions revealed), and for the actual Servant/Master battles if you collect enough information during the week you can get up to three of their actions revealed.

This all matters even moreso because win three successful actions in a row, you get to use a fourth attack against your oppnonent that they cannot block. This means that on any given turn you can theoretically attack your opponent eight entire times, though they can also do that to you (And you will likely not survive four direct attacks, let alone eight).

It's very much a sink or swim kind of system.

In addition to Attack/Guard/Break, you also use fairly traditional Items, or Master or Servant skills which can heal you, buff you in some ways, a special attack in its own right that the enemy can't guard etc. However using Servant skills will often leave you open to getting directly attacked, while Master skills or Items can be used whenever (But you can only use one per an entire turn, and it has to be an Item OR a Master skill you can't use both during a single turn). The most useful skill I ever found allowed me to stun regular enemies for their first two actions in their first turn, while another item I had allowed me to stun them for a third additional turn. This usually allowed me to get 4 attacks in right off the back and kill regular enemies before they could even attack me once, though I wasn't able to do so until endgame.

The only real problem with this battle system is that by the end of the game it was pretty exploitable and made the game a little on the easy side. Still, it does a solid job turn what the basic goals of characters from the F/SN visual novel (Namely information gather/exploitation) into actual gameplay mechanics.

The story I'm similarly mixed on. I like that they don't shy away from the fact that this is a death game and I appreciate the darker tone the game gets as a result (Which some amount of levity thrown in from time to time. In my playthrough for example, Saber references something about how she would try to impress the Roman citizenry when she was alive by wrestling bears in the nude). Like the first opponent you fight doesn't even think the Holy Grail War is real and is just some kind of weird MMO he's hacked into, though after you beat him and he's dying it's revealed that for as much as an asshole he was he was just an eight year old kid and uh yeah. The game never tries to pull a fast one on you and save him either, which genuinely kind of shocked me, and you only have to keep fighting from there on.

For as bleak as it gets though, I feel like thematically there just isn't much going on. Likewise the characters don't get quite as much depth as I would like. In F/SN for example, King Arthur actually being a girl was not just a surprising change but a significant part of her character. Other historical figures have their genders changed here (Not only Nero, but Sir Francis Drake of all people too) and it never feels quite as thoughtfully done. Not that every other character needed to repeat what F/SN did but it should probably be a little more significant for some of them. More than that though, I think it kind of highlights how some of these characters didn't have that much going on otherwise (Though I thought Saber/Nero was decent if not as good as F/SN's Saber/King Arthur).

Also, one of the Servants in this game is just "The concept of Nursery Rhymes" and that's maybe the weirdest idea for a boss I've ever seen in a video game. Naturally you kill the Nursery Rhymes and the ghost of the dead young child Master she was meant to give comfort to.

This is a pretty bleak game all things considered And it features an ending that's arguably more bitter than sweet, since despite winning the Holy Grail War you and your Servant still die. The one character who does actually survive only does so through something of a fluke, though I still feel F/SN was probably more interesting overall since it had a nice tension between extremely goofy bits and darker moments, in addition to stronger general character writing.

Beyond the game itself though, I have to say the localization here was kind of half-assed. There's a lot of inappropriate use of the word "retard" early on that I found pretty offputting, but what really bugged me was how this game, which features no English dub of any kind, lets in-battle dialogue go entirely untranslated. And there's a lot of dialogue in these battles! They could have surely put some subtitles in!

Last thing I'll say is that I found several of the battle themes pretty catchy.



[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... lQIbHsT3Ik[/youtube]

Fate/EXTRA is a decent game and I like that its ambitious (Especially so for what was clearly a budget title), I just wish its writing was a little more fleshed out and that the gameplay was a little stronger.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:First, Ellie is fourteen, not twelve. Second, it's possible to argue she earned being in a position nearly equal to Joel. Keep in mind we're talking about a post-apocalypse where the name of the game is survival, and Ellie proved herself more than capable by managing to get Joel out of the university and to safety, nursing him back to health (and taking out a troop of baddies to do so if we consider the Left Behind DLC), and then basically taking on/down the leader of a cannibal cult. Yeah, Joel had to teach her to use a gun, but by the end of the game I'd say she's earned the respect of being treated as an equal, as opposed to a kid who must be shielded from the truth.
My bad on Ellie's age. I very much disagree that her being good with a gun makes her mature though- it just makes her good at killing. Child soldiers in Africa are good at killing too, and aren't better off for it.

At a certain point you have to ask, I think, if there is any real difference between Joel and someone like Joseph Kony. I'm not sure there is ultimately that much of one.
It's not just being good with a gun. Being able to survive everything she went through was more than just being good with a gun. Getting Joel out of the university, nursing him to health, having to hunt for her food, having to think on her feet after she's captured by David, being able to get away from him... how many adults would be capable of doing that? I mean, I get there are different types and levels of maturity, but one of the main goals of raising children is to teach them to survive/thrive on their own, and Ellie is very much capable of that, and even beyond that given that she also takes care of Joel.

I... honestly can't believe you're making a comparison between Joel and Kony. Joel isn't recruiting kids and turning them into soldiers in order to fight in a holy war for a cult where he's the messiah. Him teaching Ellie to use a gun/fight was mostly out of necessity given their situation.
Raxivace wrote:I think she needs stability and solid support structure to reach mature adulthood.

Even in the world of TLoU such things already exist to some extent and should continue to be developed. She needs that, not a gun.
Yes, in a normal world she should have stability and support from a loving family, gone to school until she was 18, then either gone to college or got a job. TLOU isn't a normal world. The parameters for what maturity means will vary depending on the world and society you're in. A good chunk of what we'd call "mature adults" wouldn't be able to survive in the world of TLOU because our definitions of maturity is predicated on the society we've set up. In our world, being able to manage a credit card is a more valuable survival skill than being able to shoot Clickers in the head.

I think to say such things exist in TLOU is pretty tenuous. Pretty much everyone we meet is fighting for survival or living in a kind of totalitarian nightmare. Even Tommy, whom you suggest they should've stayed with, is hardly ideal; it's basically a military complex that's regularly raided by enemies. I fail to see how that's safe and stable. Perhaps it's better than many alternatives, but I guarantee that for him/them to survive the children are also going to be growing up quite fast and learning how to use guns.
Raxivace wrote:Well I think he's doing not only that, but continuing to rely on her combat prowess is itself very bad thing in my eyes. It's not just that he's lying to her, but I think in general he sets a terrible example and if Ellie adopts his lifestyle, I think she'll only continue to be scarred as a result.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying Joel should have sacrificed Ellie, but rather he should have never gone on this entire escapade with her to begin with. If even with the benefit of hindsight Joel can't realize how needlessly destructive that journey was, I think that's a very, very, very bad sign.
I don't know how much Joel intentionally "relied" on Ellie. They're trying to get across country with tons of enemies in their way. Without a gun, Ellie is nothing but a liability. With one she can at least help. It's less that Joel's "relying" on her and more that she's helping rather than hurting.

The notion that they should've never gone on the mission to begin with... the world has gone to hell because of a virus, you've found the only person who's immune and may hold the key to a cure, and the right thing is to just lock her up without even trying to get her to people who could possibly create a cure? That seems even more selfish and fucked up then what ends up happening. I get why Joel does what he does in the end, but to not even try at all?
Raxivace wrote:
His lie to Ellie at the end is a failure of his to respect her independent agency, her equality as a conscious human being who can make her own decisions and choose to sacrifice herself if she wished;
Is she conscious of what exactly that entails? Young people are very susceptible to suicide ideation even without throwing in qualifiers like "Your death would save the world" and such. The military exploits this vulnerability in young people as well through emotional appeals to protecting the country and such- I remember having to sit through several such lectures of their bullshit when I was in high school. And sadly, such lectures work on people.

Joel shouldn't have lied to Ellie, but asking "Hey do you want to kill yourself to save humanity? Y/N" would be a horribly irresponsible thing to ask her. In fact, I will go as far as saying he would be a bad dad for that too. A good dad would sit Ellie down, explain wtf was up, and that she shouldn't throw her life away anyways.

At least an actual adult with actual ability to discern what's just propaganda and emotional decision making might be able to come their own decision. I don't think children whose brains are even fully developed yet are equipped to do that.
I don't see why she wouldn't be conscious of what that entails. I'm not sure why you think young people would be more prone to suicide idealization than others. I looked up the statistics, and though suicide rates jump the most after the age of 15 (it's almost non-existent before then), all age groups after are still more likely to commit suicide than those in their teens, and the highest rate of suicides is among the middle-aged. I accept that young people can be brainwashed into believing ideals that they then put ahead of their own health and safety, but regular people can do this too without brainwashing. It's not as if it's only teens that go into the military, and it's not as if all of them do so only because they were subjected to emotional appeals from the military. This kind of thinking just seems a pretty common/normal biproduct of being a young person (including a young adult) looking for some greater ideals. Given the suicide rate is so low among kids/early-teens, and given what Ellie's already gone through to survive, and given that nobody is trying to convince her to sacrifice her life for "the greater good," I don't see why you think she wouldn't be capable of considering that and coming to an unbiased (as possible) decision.

I'm also curious as to why you think it would clearly be better for him to "explain" that she shouldn't throw her life away. If someone wanted to sacrifice themselves to save humanity, I don't see why that's innately a bad thing. About the worst you can say is that she'd really just be sacrificing herself for a CHANCE (not a guarantee) to save humanity.
Raxivace wrote:
Eva Yojimbo wrote:I think we really just took away different things from that video. The point with the Ciri decisions was less about what they actually do (trashing the place, the snowball fight) and more about the fact that Geralt is acknowledging Ciri's independence and legitimizing her feelings rather than just dismissing her/them or trying to control her. I thought his contrasts with the "bad dads" in the game, and how they link to the "bad decisions" from Geralt was quite insightful, actually.
I got what his POV in the video was, I'm just saying what Witcher 3 thinks is a "bad" decision is often kind of dumb in my eyes, and that harms the connections he points out.

Like if I was making a terrible decision I would hope my friends and family had the kindness to say so instead of merely "respecting my independence" or whatever. I don't have to agree with them, but I can appreciate that they at least care about my well-being.

IOW there's a middle ground to these sorts of things that I wish Witcher 3 had more of.
Well, sure, the people who are there to support you should try to step in when you are making terrible decisions, but what genuinely terrible decisions is Ciri making? Also, I think part of the difficulty in this is being able to know what are terrible decisions and what aren't.
Raxivace wrote:(Which reminds me, I need to harass him with some more e-mails to get him back here again).
As long as he's back when the new Taylor Swift album is released I'll be happy. :)
Raxivace wrote:EDIT: Uh why is there a fire icon in top corner of this post? [confused]
Pitters knew you were fiery about our disagreement. ;)
Last edited by Eva Yojimbo on Tue Aug 06, 2019 9:44 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
It also doesn't make much sense because aren't the colossi just "seals" for Dorman? As in their spirits are just pieces of his spirit?
Maybe? It's hard to say and I'm not sure how much agreement on this point there really is. Like the colossi have to be unnatural in some fashion since they're partially made of stone, right? OTOH why do they attack you if Dormin wants you to kill them (Besides video game reasons of action content needing to exist)?

Perhaps this is an area where SotC's minimalism gets in the away of crafting a real interpretation. At the very least the lack of a clear answer seems to cause the game to resist a singular interpretation somewhat.
Think Rei in NGE but split even more so. Perhaps the reason the colossi attack Wander is because by being fragments of a soul they're more animalistic/instinctual rather than conscious. Though it's also worth pointing out some DON'T actively attack Wander. Though it also makes one wonder exactly how Dormin is communicating with Wander if, indeed, it's his spirit is actually in the colossi.
Raxivace wrote:
Do you make anything more or anything else about the ending? To me, that's the most inexplicable part that I can't seem to fit with the rest in terms of subtext/meaning.
The only other thing I can remember that Agro seeming to die before the fight with 16 but reappearing in the ending with a mere limp seems to tie into the rebirth theme as well. Like really, that horse should be dead.

At my most cynical I've previously argued that this rebirth theme is SotC tacitly admitting that video games are basically hollow as a storytelling medium. That death in video games narrative are basically meaningless, because you can always contrive some reason for a character to come back, that even if the player is a monster for killing the colossi you can always enter New Game+ to bring them back to life, or run Time Attack more or whatever (Where you'll get new and cool weapons to kill the colossi with). That even if you cry when Agro falls down that cliff, she can wander on into the ending anyways.

I don't subscribe to such a nihilistic read of SotC as some kind of anti-art game these days (Your Jungian view of the colossi in particular really makes me reconsider the story), but I also struggle to come up with an actually compelling reason as to why all of this rebirth stuff is there all throughout the game.
Yeah, Agro plummets of the cliff when Wander is riding him across a collapsing bridge. His survival strains credulity a lot, and it doesn't make sense why, if he was reincarnated, he's reincarnated with a limp.

LOL, that cynical interpretation of SotC does remind me of what I've come to love about watching Critical Role so much, because death is a real threat and (in some cases) irreversible. It's also much more impactful when you spend that much time with characters that you come to love.
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:
Yet, for all the game's brilliance, it's hard for me to shake the feeling it's more movie--or perhaps more accurately given the dearth of cinematic cutscenes and wealth of Codec conversations, an interactive novel--than game. It took me about 9 hours to complete, and I'm guessing only around 2-3 hours of that were gameplay.
Well if you want more gameplay you can always do the VR Missions.

FWIW looking at YouTube cutscene compilations, the videos appear to be about 5.5 hours long.
I might check them out, though I didn't care too much for the original VR missions.

Do those cutscene comps include the Codec conversations? I assume they'd have to. In that case the actual gameplay would be closer to 3.5/4 hours. Still pretty darn short, but given how much of what I love about MGS is its emphasis on story that actually seems like a reasonable balance.
Raxivace wrote:They're not as original though I quite like the boss fights.

Also I actually think Dead Cell is probably the second best boss squad in Metal Gear overall, with MGS1 probably being ahead of it. The MSX games are the MSX games (Who feature bosses such as RUNNING MAN, the man who runs in a circle), and as much as I like MGS3 the bosses there have way less than even MGS2's bosses do going on.

MGS4 has even less than MGS3, though its intentionally playing up the "dehumanization of soldiers via technology" angle. Even if they're not as well written I can't completely hate that boss squad since they're all hot babes anyways.

MGSV doesn't really have a boss squad though. There's Peace Walker too which has you mainly fighting robots and vehicles.

I can't remember Portable Ops too well, and Revengeance didn't do much for me in any capacity.
Ah, well, it'll be a shame if none of the later MGSs have better bosses than MGS2. I know MGS3 has always been heavily praised for its bosses... I guess I'll just have to see for myself.
Raxivace wrote:
Though I wouldn't have minded back then, the static, typically-overhead camera also makes the stealth sections (before you activate the nodes, which activates your radar) nearly impossible because you have no way of seeing enemies other than awkwardly switching to FPV. Luckily, most of the nodes are pretty easily accessible so this only ends up being a minor and short inconvenience. I noticed this a while back, but I had far too many Game Overs. So to be blunt, I really stink at this game:
I dunno, I don't remember ever having too much problem with sneaking though having played MGS2 like 7 or 8 times (In addition to VR nonsense) I got a pretty good feeling for those maps.

About the only thing I didn't do was clear European Extreme mode.
Yeah, I imagine after playing it that many times one would quickly get a feeling where the enemies are and their patterns. First time through it's not as easy when you've got to flick back and forth between FPV and the overhead camera.
Raxivace wrote:Yeah the older I get, the more what the appeal of the Patriots is supposed to be becomes clear to me especially as the problems it describes become more and more of an issue. It's a problem I'm sure I'm not immune from either.
Who could be immune from it? It's also easy to say that what they propose is ultimately wrong/immoral (who would want to give up their free will to an AI-controlled overlord?), but what the hell is the alternative solution? I watched one YouTube analysis tonight that essentially said the solution is for everyone to take moral responsibility for caring about the truth and not allowing bias to distort that. That's great as an ideal and, in fact, it's a big reason why I promote rationality so much and try to warn against cognitive biases; but I'm extremely cynical that this ideal will ever be close to realized in any large-scale way. As I've mentioned elsewhere, we're the products of millions of years of sloppy evolution, and the very biases that lead us into the kind of contemporary dystopia that MGS2 foretold are also the ones that have allowed us to survive and reproduce for those millions of years. Evolution is slow, and because most people can get along with just following their biases there isn't a huge impetus to change or to value rationality and truth. This is even more true given that we've essentially conquered most of the existential crises that our distant ancestors faced, so there's not even much of a punishment for not adapting optimally to our radically new environments. Essentially, our very own prowess for survival and reproduction exacerbate these problems with no "natural" solution possible, and the only solution being a conscious course correction that, again, we're not terribly incentivized to do.
Raxivace wrote:
ψ/10
Same, tbh.
Are you both alive and dead, Raxi?
Raxivace wrote:You know for all I played this game, I don't think I caught that parallel about the inaugural address before. That Jeff/Lisa relationship is really good too.
It also occurred to me: by throwing the dog tag with the player's (supposedy) name on it, isn't Raiden essentially breaking free of OUR control too?
Raxivace wrote:Yeah. I know Kojima is an NGE fan too (He's posted pictures on Twitter of him wearing a NERV t-shirt), so I wouldn't be surprised if that was an inspiration.

Come to think of it, I wonder if the AI stuff in MGS2 wasn't partially inspired by Godard's Alphaville. Kojima has mentioned liking that movie before too.
I could definitely imagine both of these as influences. Even the method of ending the game with essentially this metaphysical, existential conversation is very NGE and and Godardian.
Raxivace wrote:
I can't believe it -- that someone who has committed all those twisted acts in the woman's bathroom would make it this far... this is the end of the world. I need scissors! 61/10
lol

Anyways again this is a pretty excellent review.
Thanks. I'm assuming you picked up on the crazy Colonel quotes immediately given how much you've played the game? I thought maybe I could weave a few of them into my review before it became too obvious.
Raxivace wrote:Anyways I'm really curious to see what you'll think of MGS3, Jimbo. It's been more popular than MGS2 for the longest time but I feel like it just has way less going than MGS2 does.

It does play up the Bond influence more than any other MGS game though, and there is still a lot to like about it.
I'm definitely looking forward to it, given it'll be the first MGS that I haven't played (at all) in ages. My instinct is that it might be a better "game" in some respects, but will probably be far more traditional as well. But that might not be bad given my love for MGS1, and it didn't have any of the metaphysical/metafictional trippiness of MGS2 either.

I was thinking of trying something completely different next like a fighter or FPS. I picked up the new Wolfenstein in the last PSN sale so I may try that just to have a fun palette cleanser after all the heavy artiness of SotC and MGS2. Yeah! Time to blow up some Nazis! U-S-A! U-S-A!
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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Eva Yojimbo
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Re: Rax/Maz/Jimbo 2019 Video Game Thread Specatular Spectacular

Post by Eva Yojimbo »

Raxivace wrote:Also can I just stress what a good fucking year 2001 was for video games?

-Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty
-Silent Hill 2
-Ico
-Super Smash Bros. Melee
-Luigi's Mansion
-Pikmin
-Original Japanese release of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney
-Halo: Combat Evolved
-Final Fantasy X
-Sonic Adventure 2
-Animal Crossing
-Jak & Daxter
-Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons
-Gauntlet: Dark Legacy
-Zone of the Enders
-Shenmue II
-Devil May Cry


These are just ones I've played too.
Only played the bolded ones, and only finished MGS2 and DMC. I played a lot of Halo on a friend's console (I never had an Xbox), but a good chunk of that was multiplayer (though I did play some of the solo stuff when he wasn't around). ZotE and Shenmue (can't actually recall if it was the first or second) I rented and couldn't quite get into either one. I have a feeling I'd like Shenmue much more now and actually picked them up in another recent PSN sale.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." -- Carl Jung
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