Look, I knew for years that we were never going to have jet packs by now, but dammit, 2014 being here makes me feel that we should be further along or something. Just look at this, for God's sake. Where's my bio suit and seedy intergalactic watering holes? Where's my instant wall climbing wall-breaking laser blasts? Science is bullshit.
So it's been a while, right? Yes, internet, it has. Dry your eyes, though; a new year means new beginnings and other spastic lies that I'm prone to breaking. Still, now that certain months-long obligations are taken care of, it's time to get back to my fighting weight writing-wise. That was an absurd and stupid thing to say. Resolution 2: we'll keep that jive to a minimum.
So let's use this precious time that we have together at the moment for a bit of catch up. The last few weeks have been a typhoon of lousy weather, vacations from work, on and off illness, and mmmyes a few holidays. Now that my family has finally figured out that video games aren't something I'm going to eventually outgrow, they've succumbed to years of reminding that it's perfectly fine to bestow nerdy gifts for Christmas as opposed to a Christmas tree and nativity scene, monitor cables, and place mats.*
Since the whole month of December is typically written off as a gluttonous mess not unlike whatever goes down at Pizza the Hut's place, and I just mentioned that I wasn't exactly feeling tip top the whole time, gym hopping was kept to a minimum over the past several weeks. Typically, that drives me a little nuts, but you can't fight Mother Nature when she says, "you know, you should be throwing up right now. Go do that." Naturally, this left plenty of time for the interactive digital entertainments. A few of them were wacky or fun or stupid or smarmy enough that I wanted to write about them individually, but I thought I'd save you some eye strain and just run them down as a list.
Behold, then, what I've been doing for the past three weeks:
Batman: Arkham Origins
Full disclosure: I love Batman perhaps more than I love my parents (and they know). But, you know, I'm just not in to the open world Batman games. Akrham Assylum was totally my thing, though. It did the whole "metroidvania" schtick better than recent Castlevania games had done at that point, and it just felt like playing as Batman, which pretty much no other game starring the character had ever pulled off at that point since most of them were either platformers or brawlers. Arkham City was still a good game, but the explorability of the city seemed to step on what made the first game so good; the focus. So I wasn't really super psyched to play Arkham Origins, especially after some kind of middling reviews.
Annnnnd....I was kind of right. Still a good game, but I found that I was only interested in the story missions, which was basically a series of indoor levels that you simply had to traverse a large city to find. I suppose it's fine to have Gotham as a large backdrop for things to do between plot-driven adventures, but everything that I was given to do was just busy work. Blow up 40 of these. Find sixty of those. Beat up some guys and then disarm a bomb. Now do it over there and over there and over there. Snore.
The stuff that I wanted out of it was really good, though. The Joker stuff was great, and the inclusion of a couple of other irregular DC characters in the world of video games was handled pretty well (I'm talking specifically about Deathstroke). It was a fine looking game, too. The facial models were kind of lousy, but since pretty much everybody whose anybody wears masks in Gotham City, it wasn't really that distracting. There was a few things that pissed me off, though, but that's mostly due to common problems with free-running games and the unreliable combat.
Batman: Arkham Origins: Blackgate
The overuse of colons in the title should alarm you. Eff it, I'll just answer the question running around your head for you: Yes, Blackgate actually came from a man's colon. Ostensibly a more "true" metroidvania game, Blackgate did its best to cram all of the controls of it's console sibling into a 2.5D environment, which means that the player must have the finger dexterity of a concert pianist to play smoothly. Or it would, if anything actually worked according to plan. The control and button inputs were about as responsive as screaming at a deaf person at a Mastadon concert, and Batman would routinely take bullshit damage from randomly-placed strips of spikes in the ground when he should have rolled over them. The Dark Knight would recover his health after a second, though, so it was all good. Why were the spikes on the ground at all, then? You're not seeing this, but I'm shrugging my shoulders and making obscene hand gestures right now.
Structurally, the game was a total mess. Boss fights were less of a visceral feeling of accomplishment and more a series of trial and error stumbles until I figured out whatever puzzle-like nature the game all of a sudden decided to throw at me. Some of them were timing-based, so the lack of reliable control was sort of a thing. Others were riffs on previous environments and encounters so left field that if they weren't handled with surgical precision than it would spell instant Bat-cadaver. Let's not even talk about the least intuitive map in video game history, either. Jeeeeeebus.
Ni No Kuni
People that I like hate this game. People I don't like love it. If I didn't get it for a song, I would never had formed an opinion either way. As it stands it was actually alright. Pretty, but really kind of shallow, it was as close as I'll probably come to playing a Pokemon game since it's big draw was the monster taming and training (which I thought was handled weakly). It had been so long since I've played a console JRPG, though, that everything just felt comforting; the grinding, the dialog, the tiny mental benchmarks you make for when you know it's time to put it down and go to bed. It felt good to be immersed in something like that, even though most JRPGs make me feel totally detached anymore. If you had met me ten years ago, that last sentence would be kind of a shock.
Probably what helped me keep up with it to the end was the plot, though. Now, let's be clear here in that it in no way is good, but Ni No Kuni's biggest strength was it's noticeable lack of anime stupidity. You can probably hand that to developer Level 5's partnership with Studio Ghibli, but this could have fallen apart under a lot of weight, and it really didn't. To be honest, I'll never, ever play this game again. But for a modern console semi-real time menu-based RPG, I was as satisfied with it as almost any game in my PS2 library. That's a compliment, right?
Guacamelee!
People, you should be playing Guacamelee! Then you should finish it and play it again. Luchardors out to save El Presidente's daughter from the undead in an interconnected metroidvania game makes sense. Hell, even just simply that sentence just feels right. If there was an official winter jam, it would be Guacamelee! So let it be written.
Bravely Default demo
If Ni No Kuni was comforting, the now week-old Bravely Default demo for 3DS was warm post coital cuddling. I get that Square Enix, in it's weird Square Enix way, didn't want to name it a Final Fantasy game (but I'm a little baffled that it's not picking up the label now that it's coming West), but that's exactly what it is: job systems, Firaga, phoenix downs, the whole bit. If that tickles you the same way it does for me, than you've probably already played the demo or need to start paying better attention to release dates.
I played through the demo to its most ludicrous extent. All of my characters maxed their job levels, the social town-building mechanic had no place left to build, and no single creature in the game was any kind of threat when I finally closed the book on it. I don't really dig the fact that I had to wait hours (days, actually) for me to build a quasi-village to get strong enough gear to take on the demo's final boss, and I use that in the present tense because I'm hoping against hope that this doesn't surface in the full version of the game outside of optional boss fights. In no way does mean that I'm taking a pass on the game when it hits in February, but if there had to be a criticism, that would be it.
Street Fighter III: Third Strike
I'm playing this all the time. No, I'm not in front of it. You and are squaring off right now in my head. You just lost.
*All actual gifts. For real.
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