Twenty Two Token Nutshell

Well it's time for my one and only post for the year, the one time I even try to attempt some sort of writing and keep my blog alive.

Actually its kinda funny, one of the podcasts I've been listeining to have been talking about how, with the implosion of twitter and his typical outsource of creative talk, he has decided to return back to his blog and revive it there.

It's part of what got me jumping back this year, and then the numerous other posts I've half written up and drafted because I can't seem to keep my own subject focus. i'm barely able to keep my own sentences here going, having to backspace every few words just to make it sound "right". i just deleted the word unquote becaue I couldn't be fuckin arsed going back and typing quote.

anyway, I want to talk about video games. there's been a bunch I've played and I've had thoughts galore that are just drivels on epiphanys and just wanting to rave about games Ive had fun with.

Like Metroidvanias. so I've had little experience with them growing up. i didn't have a Nintendo so Metroid and the like weren't in my pervue. So when I started playing Hollow Knight and having the time of my life, which is fair because it's a beautifully crafted piece of work, I wanted to delve more into the genre.

I now have a Switch Lite, combined with a relatively cheap comfort grip, I grabbed a few of the popular and interesting Metroidvanias available: axiom verge (1 & 2), Blasphemous, and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom.

I'll start with axiom verge because they are the most like the original metroid game, literally taking the 8 bit style and going gangbusters with it. the black backgrounds with weird tiled platform environments; tunnels circling about and confusing me until I happen to find one tile that isn't quite right and either shoot it or use a weird wave gun that changes a bunch of walls and floors because everything seems to be a biological but digitally real. It's a weird kinda game, where your character is thrown into a weird dimension of gigantic automaton trying to save themselves from another human who killed almost every other living creature. naturally you're tasked with fixing the issue, while also futzing about killing off minibosses that dont do an easy job of dying.

I havent said anything about the plot twist, because frankly that is something I was really confused and surprised about, and you should too.

Axiom Verge 2 is much the same, but jumps up to 16 bit era, and really pares down on faff. the first game had like 16 weapons, whereas now you've about 4 to work with, and maybe a few more tools after that. But again, the plot twist and the surprises, the fascinating levels and designs, just kept me going until I finished it off and moved on to the biggin.

Blasphemous is a fascinating game. It's a hard 15+ game because throughout the game, including the first few scenes, are very gorey. After you kill the first boss, you cut open his belly, pour the blood into your helmet, and put it on as the red pours down your bit-art body.

the appeal in it is that it's an interesting take on religion, and this in particular is a very old and spanish catholic art style, doused with literal examples of what are called miracles, like a boy the size of a building having the face of an old man growing in his chest, and as the game progresses the old man grows more and climbs from his chest until the one are two and they both die In The Name Of The Lord.

Weird and strange and horrific things that people and creatures allow to have happen to them because their faith demands they do it. Its a heavy theme and because it's so obscene in how it goes, it's fascinating to discover and learn, to read stories found by collecting bones of different saints across the world, to speak to different characters who are dumbstruck by everything out of the ordinary. It's a curious and gorgeous world to explore. genuinely, the art is phenomenal for something that could have been on a sega 32x.

Then there's Monster Boy. I actually haven't played much of this, truly about 3 or 4 hours in? Even that feels optimistic. And the reason is incredibly petty: I'm jaded by a related title.

So one of my favourite games from my Sega days is Wonder Boy III: The Dragons Trap. It's a fun game that has you changing forms to solve puzzles and reach different dragon bosses to return your character to normal. It's really the closest thing to a Metroidvania style game that I can attest to playing, because it has a hub area and a bunch of regions you can branch out to explore from there. It's more like a star than a series of infinity loops, but you get the idea. I'm going to have to find a name of that type of loop now, a magnus loop or something?

Anyway, a few years ago a company made a remaster of it and I fucking loved it. The core game is exactly the same, I could play the game on both a Sega Master system and whatever modern consoles side by side and I would literally have the same results. What's changed is the visuals and the soundtrack, all perfectly crafted for the game, adding so much more character to levels that weren't much more than plain blue backgrounds, but all the while making them feel like they were always there. Like they had built rose tinted glasses for this game, to make it feel in every essence the same game I played when i was a kid.

as such, Monster Boy is related in that it has the same ideas as The Dragons Trap, but sets it in the future of the characters life and allows him to change into different monsters on the fly, and having a whole new world to explore and delve into.

And my petty problem is that it's just not a similar game except by name. The controls and feel are different, the art is more of an anime cartoon style than the slightly gritty style of The Dragons Trap, and the soundtrack is just... so yeah, it's really surface level things that I don't like, and nothing I can really do about because it was all made by a different company.

All it really makes me wish is that The Dragons Trap gets a DLC addition to tell a story they want to tell, but after so many years I assume they're onto bigger and better things.

there's been a lot of that lately, last year brought in a good handful of blockbuster games that I was keen to get my hands on except for a few, and for the most part i was left disappointed early on.

Halo Infinite is really the biggest heartbreak. It's my own fault, I set up expectations that it was going to be a lot like Destiny, with having an open world that becomes incredibly deep and complex and interconnecting and having secrets in any nook and cranny you care to gawk at.

it wasn't that. it felt like a halo game, don't get me wrong, and it was super pretty in a lot of places, but... it really just felt flat.

part of that I blame on the grappling hook. that's been a big gimmick of late, to launch a grappling hook and traverse levels and encounters constantly. And it's a good thing in combat, you spot a vehicle running past and you grapple hook yourself to it and board it with ease. or you can pull an explosive barrel to you and launch it away into an enemy pile just to see them scatter.

But if you can use it to travel about, you're about to find that everything is easy to reach and youre going to spend a fair chunck of time just ninja roping your way around town.

But knowing that, you work around that. there's a bunch of different collectibles across the world and good handful of them are designed for that consideration. One type of collectible that didn't is the High Value Target (HVT), an individual enemy that carries a specially designed weapon you can pick up and use. So when Im about to cross a Jackal who carries an alien sniper rifle, standing at the top of a long slope littered with cover, brutes, shield jackals, and grunts, I would expect to run the gauntlet while he's spamming shots at me and driving me mad with each headache. Not reverse abseiling behind him and clocking him with the scifi equivalent of a boxing glove with nails in it and calling it good.

Its been a year and I havent really returned to it, partly because my Game Pass sub ran out and I havent renewed it, partly because I'm not even sure I want to yet. They have online coop implemented to the game, but I'm not finding it worth the time until they add something new or different to the game.

In the same vein, I keep thinking about Borderlands 3 and just came to the conclusion that they should just give in and become an RPG. They have all these characters, and these whole worlds they wanted to introduce, and all you're doing is just dakka dakka dakka. Which is cool, but for whatever reason it just isnt fun.

That's why I want a Tactics RPG, so you can get both hand in hand. Fix their writing, expand everyones story, have your Combat that you delve harder into to build stronger strategies than "this has big DPS", and have a god damned campaign the setting deserves that isn't just a bunch of popular memes strung together.

And while you're at it, take a look at the Mario and Rabbids games and build from that. They tackle, they slam, they shoot the shit out of stuff, all things you can do in the FPS, so why the fuck not?!

Tactics games have been pretty good of late. They re-remastered Tactics Ogre again and put them on every console available (actually I should check if it's only available on Playstation and Switch or not); Mario and Rabbids is actually pretty good, the sequel I'm playing has a LOT of improvements, especially in the free roaming where there are puzzles galore; I rebought Darkest Dungeon on my Switch so I can run that while something plays in the background on TV; Also rebought XCOM 2 when it came to the Switch because I do like a lot that it has to offer.

I did grab up Warsaw, the Darkest Dungeon-like rpg, and I've been bouncing pretty hard off it, mostly from information paralysis. It doesn't exactly ease you into the game very well and I want to learn more about the occupation of Warsaw more through this like i learnt about World War 1 from Valiant Hearts, which is getting a sequel on mobile through Netflix's service, which is a bit hurtful.

After that I have The Banner Saga which I hear is really good, it looks absolutely Captial-G-Gorgeous, but Im having trouble hitting that epiphany point with the combat. You have Armour and Strength, Strength Doubles as your Health, but the less Strength you have the less damage you deal, and you can counter it by having higher armour, which the enemies tend to have along with matching strength, so when I'm having my hard hitters get attacked first from either ranged enemies or just getting the first strike, I end up being on the back foot the whole match. I know the game is supposed to be a bit hardcore, but I just need that epiphany moment.

What I've learnt through the last few years though is that my Switch is an MVP. There's a lot of people ragging on about how it needs a hardware update and Nintendo should try to rival Playstation and Xbox in capability, but I don't really think so. It's become an Indie machine and it'll play just about any Indie that gets thrown at it.  

Speaking of Indies, Sega should let others get involved with the Sonic IP more. Sonic Mania when it came out was absolutely lourded for being a fantastic rendition of the Sega Mega Drive games made into one fun package.

i enjoyed it for the most part, some of the new levels felt a little too goofy and I didn't particularly like them, but that's a small complaint compared to the positive. Really, it's a fun game and I hope those teams dip into more of the Sonic games. Rather than the latest collection they put out.

So Sonic Origins is a bundle of the Sega Mega Drive games including Sonic 1, 2, 3 & Knuckles, and Sonic CD. Only Sonic CD I haven't actually played, but it's nice to have such a collection of games available. The problem is that they put out their purchasing options and they were Horrendous, items clearly for a cheap cash grab on top of an already fairly expensive game. Background menu Items? The option to move cosmetic things around? A Hard Mode sounded good but should have been part of the base purchase. Same with Remastered Music.

I had a plea written out that if you're going to release a remaster bundle and then offer up downloadable content, why don't you just keep remastering other games? Get the Sega Master System games and remaster them, use the Mega Drive Assets to zhush them up into something more interesting to the eye and tack it on! You'd get more than your moneys worth with remastering those underappreciated classics than you would trying to offer up the same fucking music played on a better synthesizer.

The only other big thought I had this year was of Elden Ring. It came out early 2022 to mass appraise, even got game of the year I think, and it kinda has me curious to get into it. It's a hardcore game and I can think that the only game I've played similar to it is Monster Hunter World, which I had a bunch of fun with. Next down would be God of War, but that is very much a Souls-lite, not to it's detriment though.

About a month or two later a Final Fantasy game came out called Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin. A strange name for sure, pun not intended. It had a cool idea, a prequel to the first Final Fantasy game played out in an Action RPG, running around with your party and casting spells between whapping away with whatever weapon you had equipped. There seemed a pretty good variety of options at its core, some pretty environments as you would expect of its ilk. But it fell flat at it's writing. It was dreadful. Not because of the translation, but genuinely just... just terrible. I only watched a few hours of it in play, watched the scenes on youtube, and laughed with pity at the memes generated from it because it's really that bad it's not particularly funny.

Well, to circle back, quite a few of the reviewers I follow were comparing this game to Elden Ring, saying it's Square Enix's answer to Elden Ring because of the style and combat. I couldn't agree any less. Actual gameplay in hand might be different, but looking at it I was immediately thrown into thinking of Kingdom Hearts. It may not be as zippy and floaty as Kingdom Hearts is, but I would rather that comparison than with Elden Ring.

Thinking of a Final Fantasy Soulslike just puts Vagrant Story front and centre: A single character running around a labrynthian city; using different weapons and equipment against a variety of enemys, large and small; a dark mystery surrounding all characters involved in the world. It all adds up and falls short when the combat comes and you're showing the difference between a strange turn based game, and an action game.

I think that's a wrap up. My 2022 thoughts that were half baked in the first place and just didn't have much more point than what they do here.