Fate/EXTELLA Link (2018) - The sequel to
Fate/EXTELLA: The Umbral Star. Or at least, it seems like its going to be for the first 10 hours you're playing it but the main villain from Umbral Star shows up at one point and everyone is just kind of cool with him, there's no comment on any of the chicanery he was up to in the first game, so I guess this is actually some alternate universe or something where the events of Umbral Star went waaaay differently.
Anyways regardless of that, EXTELLA Link just does not have very much going on in its story. New bad guy appears. Everyone goes to beat him up. That's kind of it. This game has three endings across two main routes, and the third ending of the game does admittedly give the bad guy an interesting beat (Namely in that
while he's the historical Charlemagne, the guy calling himself "Charlemangne" on your side is based on the myths and epic poetry and such, and as a result the two Charlemagnes have a contested relationship with ideological differencesas one believes in idealism and the other in saving the world through cold pragmatism and force. That's pretty interesting, but only really comes up in the final ending of the damn game). You can tell this game has different writers than this Type-Moon stuff usually does.
Thankfully the gameplay is drastically improved across the board (See my Umbral Star review for the basics of the gameplay, as the core ideas are the same here). Your playable servants now have special attacks, which help shake up combat as you have more flashy attacks to pull out at any given time than just your Noble Phantasm (Which is much easier to charge up now too, as you're not restricted to finding items across the map to charge it now, as instead attacking while in Moon Drive can charge it up too).
Likewise just clearing zones on a map is much quicker now, as enemy Plants are MUCH LESS frequent and don't generate enemies nearly as quickly. There's none of the loops in the first game where you would go to fight a Plant, and as you're fighting it a second one would pop up. Then as you go to fight the second one a third would pop up etc.
Additionally, ally NPC's aren't restricted to defending a single zone now and will actually move across the map to invade other zones or to actively go protect other ones that are currently being contested.
To make up for this, there are other changes to the gameplay. While you control your Servant during these combat sections, the “Master" character that you play as during story segments is an NPC on the map whom enemy NPC's will try and kill, and you must occasionally protect him as well.
Likewise enemy Servants often have gimmicks they will use against you now. Francis Drake is probably the most annoying here as her cannons allow her to damage the Master from anywhere on the map (And fairly frequently too), but other characters will buff enemies with either invulnerability, increased mana, or just generally buffed stats. Others will just spawn additional NPC's. Others will roam around disguised as a more generic enemies, or hide themselves in some random sector. One of the more obnoxious of these abilities that starts appearing around halfway through the game is distorting your map, which makes it much harder to zoom around and actually find whoever you need to kill at any given time (Though usually you'll just beeline toward whatever enemy is causing this).
While I liked the gameplay in Umbral Star well enough, its definitely improved in EXTELLA Link. It's just a shame that story is much less developed, as I certainly have a higher opinion of Umbral Star's now.
Lost: Via Domus (2008) - This is not a good game but ended up not being
quite as bad as I expected. I think that's because the basic intentions and ideas behind the game are fine, however the execution is pretty bad.
Basically, this is an adventure game. You play as an amnesiac survivor of Oceanic 815 (Who you later discover to be a reporter named Elliot Maslow), and you basically spend the game exploring the Island (Though mainly several DHARMA stations), talking with people and trading items with them, solving a few puzzles (Mainly puzzles where you have to redirect electricity through fuses. Reminds me a lot of Resident Evil actually) etc. As you uncover Elliot's memories, you go into flashbacks where you gain more details about his past (Which maintains the flashback structure from the show). The game is also split into seven Episodes, which each even begin with “PREVIOUSLY. ON LOST."
Some of the actors from the show are even here (Henry Ian Cusick, Emilie de Raven, Yunjin Kim, Michael Emerson etc.), but others are voiced by traditional video game voice actors. The biggest standouts to me were Locke being voiced by Paul “Colonel Campbell" Eiding (Who also voices a few other characters) and Jack being voiced by, of all people, Steve Blum.
So the basic ideas are solid, and you can tell the people wanted to make a Lost game that actually makes sense as a video game. Its just a shame they sucked at it.
Like the night after the crash some asshole in a suit just pummels the shit out of Elliot, and even though the other Losties chase him off, somehow they're suspicious of you for this and your claims of having amnesia and not the damn guy that ran off into the jungle. This sets a baffling tone where everyone is either just a huge dick to you for no reason or just weirdly indifferent. The one exception here is Kate, who I guess relates to you because she was a fugitive, and Juliet when you meet her later on in the game.
Like at one point you find your old laptop in the crash wreckage. You need batteries to power it. Locke knows where you can find batteries, but refuses to tell you, so you have to blackmail him because in a flashback you learn he was in a wheelchair. So Locke sends you on a path to find the batteries…through jungle where the damn Others are taking potshots at you, and you have to dodge around their gunfire.
What the fuck Locke. At a later point in the game, you fall down into a pit, and Locke starts a fucking fight with you over it because you don't immediately give him a dumb compass (Not the one from the show) that you find down there, while fucking danger is approaching.
What the fuck Locke you damn asshole.
The flashbacks suck too, because the gameplay gimmick behind most of them is that because Elliot is a photographer, you have to take a photograph during a weird hazy sequence of whatever significant thing that flashback revolves around to start the proper cutscene, but the photography mechanic is just weirdly janky and it's not always clear what specifically you're meant to take a picture of.
The puzzles are also kind of annoying, because you have to actually find the fuses you use in them. You can either trade other Losties for more fuses, but really what you're best off doing is after you solve a fuse puzzle (Except for in the Swan Station where you have to solve three of them first), you should just immediately take all of the fuses out of the puzzle itself so you can use them on the next one. The game is just too much of a hassle otherwise…of course, this means that the final fuse puzzle of the game has Elliot robbed of his own inventory, so you have to pixel hunt around the Hydra Station to find more fuses to solve the last of such puzzles in the game.
Also, there are these annoying setpieces in the game. The first type I mentioned earlier, where you roam through the jungle as Others just randomly shoot at you. There's a worse version where the Smoke Monster chases you through the jungle, and if he gets too close to you have to hide in banyan trees for like 30 seconds until he goes away.
The people that made this game really did seem to have Resident Evil on the mind, because later on in the game you have to deliver dynamite through the jungle, however you have to do it without running because it will explode otherwise (Its just like that part in REmake 1 where you have to move that explosive thing while only walking. I can't remember the specific item in Remake but it's the same basic principle). Of course, they make you go through one of these Smoke Monster sections with the dynamite and its tedious as fuck, having to walk from banyan tree bunch to banyan tree bunch and slowly wait for the Smoke Monster to go away each time.
Starting in Episode 6, they start making you do autoscroller chase scenes too that, while not too bad on their own, are just kind of janky. Especially the very first one the game throws at you because if you screw it up, you have to sit through “PREVIOUSLY. ON LOST." again since its at the very beginning of the Episode.
There's also the graphics and general look of the game. Even for 2008 its just not very good looking at all. The jungle looks worse than some PS2 games, like Metal Gear Solid 3. Some of the character models are just bad too.
^That's supposed to be Desmond.
^They're not all that bad though. Like Hurley actually comes out looking pretty good. I'll also add that the DHARMA stations generally looked okay.
Also the ending of the game is stupid.
I understand this is a budget tie-in game, but man you can tell the people really wanted to make something special, and its just unfortunate they could not pull it off. 'Tis a shame.
"[Cinema] is a labyrinth with a treacherous resemblance to reality." - Andrew Sarris
