Neverwinter Nights is bad

Dungeons and Dragons is a game I have a fairly limited amount of experience with.  I first played it in 2010 with some people at the university I was at in Nagoya on my exchange year and then again in a basement gaming bar a few years later.  The experience was mostly a negative one, with the exception of the game bar basements early days but rolling dice around insufferable nerds was not an experience I would be willing to sign up for again in a hurry.  Maybe if a tight knit group of buddies got together like in my one decent group I’d be willing to make a character but otherwise no thanks.

But the problem here is not the game itself, it’s just the people.  The game itself is a deeply interestingly made thing that allows for insane freedom for both story teller (the DM) and the players.  This freedom has been regularly scuppered in my experience by aforementioned insufferable nerds but that’s not the games fault.  The solution, in theory, should be to remove the people from the equation and that solution is available to me in the form of video games based on Dungeons and Dragons.  We sacrifice some of the freedom of the tabletop in exchange for the ability to engage with the core mechanics without the need to be around people who don’t pay their water bills. 

So when I got a double game request on my stream for Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 I was sort of excited.  I had played a little bit of the first game in my younger days and thought it was cool and maybe these games will be the titles that get me to respect western made high fantasy RPGs. I was wrong.  What I got was overly long, buggy, badly written unfun bullshit where every cutscene put me to sleep and every encounter made me want to smash my keyboard

Of the two games, Neverwinter Nights 1 was the worst one by a wide margin.  Starting with an investigation into a plague and then expanding out into a larger conflict, the details of which I barely cared about as I was playing and I have mostly forgotten less than 6 months after seeing the credits roll.  The game suffers from 2 major issues that make it feel awful to play.  The first is the wild difficulty swings that can happen in the blink of an eye.  My Monk, 90% of the time, would have no issue punching his way through whatever monsters of the day were being presented in the current quest and then I’d wander into a room and there would be an enemy that would just one shot me.  The worst part of this is that because everything is based on invisible dice rolls, the solution to the combat was not to go level up or change strategies but instead to just save/load until the game gave me a win.  The roll playing game reduced to a slot machine.  

The second issue is the fact that you can only have one companion.  When I played table top, the groups had to be AT LEAST 3 so Neverwinter Nights only having the player character and a single AI partner is underwhelming to say the least.  On top of that you can’t customize the other party member AT ALL.  Gear is pre set, level ups are done automatically.  The whole thing of building a character and messing with the character sheet as you level up is completely removed.  What compounds this issue is that most of the partners you have access to are trash.  The guy I picked for the majority of the game seems to be the guy that most people pick.  Maybe if we could ROLE PLAY in the ROLE PLAYING GAME with our party we’d see some variance.  Even the old Baldurs Gate games, released way before this piece of shit let you kit your dudes out and interact with them in some actual meaningful ways.  Somehow things got worse as the tech got better

Speaking of, Neverwinter Nights 2, despite being a considerably better game in every way, addressing a lot of the gripes I had with the first one is still kind of a piece of shit.  In 2, the difficultly swings aren’t a huge issue and I have a party I can customize and interact with but holy shit the bugs really bog down the whole thing.  From the jump, the game barely worked AT ALL until I installed a community patch and even then it was still a little fucked.  The camera going crazy and characters rubber banding was highly annoying.  Cutscenes not playing properly often pulled me out of the experience and made certain events hard to follow.  The worst bug I got happened in the final dungeon where all my party members had a stroke and would not listen to commands.  The second worst being the story specific legendary sword de-spawning from my inventory upon entry to the final area that nearly caused a massive time loss.  A better game that’s just absolutely miserable to play

The other thing that sucked about the sequel is the ending.  Without hyperbole one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in any game I’ve ever played.  A black screen with the text “You Win” written in 12 point Ariel would have been more acceptable.  The whole game revolves around a conflict with the King of Shadows.  You go on this big quest, uncover ancient secrets, forge a legendary sword, kill immortal skeletons by reading a school register at them and then when you finish all that and win the day, the dungeon collapses and you all die.  There’s a 10 minute cutscene of an intern reading Tolkien fan fiction at you but the core of it is “you win but you died also the end”.  I’m not saying that all stories have to have a happy ending but this was so trash out of nowhere that I had to google if I got a bad ending or not. I found out through that search that even fans of this horrible pile of filth think it sucks so at least we’re united on that front.

I never ever want to play Neverwinter Nights again.  I think I would have had more fun playing the table top game by myself as a one man party where I DM my own game.  If you played and enjoyed Baldurs Gate 3 and thought you might plumb the depths of older DnD based games, avoid these two sacks of garbage.  Just play BG 1+2 and call it a day because if you play Neverwinter you may never want to play a CRPG ever again

Grandia 2: A Deeply Flawed Classic

 

Not too long ago I finished Grandia 2 on the Dreamcast.  It was a game that I had beaten before a long time ago, probably during my high school days, on the PS2 and giving it a revisit in 2024 almost felt like playing it for the first time again.  While my memory of most of the story beats were pretty hazy, going in I remembered pretty vividly really being sick of it by the end and unfortunately by the time I reached the end of the game, that memory had turned out to be correct. 

The game follows the adventures of Ryudo, a "geohound" (a sort of monster slaying mercenary, I think) as he accompanies some chick from the Church of Granas as they go on an adventure to put an end to an evil god called Valmar.  On the way they meet a burly furry, a little boy and a robot and together they have to deal with all manner of evil as they go around beating up Valmar's individual body parts that have been locked away in seals.  It's a simple story with plot twists that you could see coming from several thousand miles away even if you had just suffered massive head trauma in a car accident but for the most part it gets the job of pushing the player from dungeon to dungeon fairly well.  

The game has a number of cool things going for it, mainly in the combat department with one of the most interesting implementations I've seen of the standard ATB that I've ever seen.  Instead of just waiting for a bar to fill and then taking a turn, all enemies and party members in Grandia 2 share the same ATB meter.  The meter is split into two sections with a wait mode and a command mode.  When your character reaches the command line you tell them what to do and then they will either execute right away if you're doing a basic attack or there will be some charge time if you're doing a spell or special move.  What makes this so interesting is that both you and the enemy can knock you out of your command with certain skills so aside from the usual strategizing that one does in every RPG of what to use and when, there's also a timing element to all your decisions.  There was one major boss fight, which I won't spoil, where it had an extremely damaging attack that could bring all of my party members to near death in one go except he was never able to pull it off after the first time because every time I would see him charging it up, I would knock him out of it.  The move I would use to do so would deal less damage, but not having to waste time healing up every time he did it made the fight, overall, much more efficient.  Grandia 1 had the same battle system and the only game I can think of outside of these two examples that does something similar is 2014's Child of Light that basically ripped off the battle system wholesale from Grandia.  

Usually I like to shit on English voice acting in modern games because most of the people that seem to work in that field have about as much vocal talent as a used up kitchen sponge but Grandia 2 has some decent performances going on in the dub.  Mainly because the majority of the main cast is made up of Metal Gear Solid voice actors such as Cam Clarke and Kim Mai Guest as well as many others so even though the script in the latter half of the game is so painfully cringe-worthy I nearly turned myself inside out, its softened by at least having voice actors that are easy on the ears.

But Grandia 2 also suffers from a lot of issues.  The writing is a big glaring one where it seems OK at first but then turns into a 14 year olds first story in the latter half but the gameplay is where most of the bullshit in this game goes down.  The dungeons are short, boring and uninspired.  There's a few cool ones but the vast majority of them require no thinking and don't even have that much in terms of explorability so after 5 or 6 of them they just become sort of grating.  Not to mention that whenever Ryudo has to climb a ladder or push a block the animations for these things are PAINFULLY fucking slow.  You can go and find a life-partner, have a child, raise the child and watch your child graduate university in the time it takes for Ryudo to push a cube a few inches or in the time it takes for you to watch the party climb up or down a ladder one by one.  Thankfully its not to prevalent throughout the game but any dungeon with cubes or ladders can go fuck itself.  

Another big issue is the grind.  You don't NEED to grind to get to the end, for the most part you can just get a couple of things and get to the end if you want but who plays RPGs like that really?  The game throws so many skills, spells and passive abilities at you that all need to be upgraded using coins you get from combat that if you wanted everything you would be grinding for HOURS.  At first I was trying to upgrade everything to max before moving on but the amount of coins needed to stay up to date was so insane that I ended up just finding one battle strategy that worked and then telling everything else to fuck off.  I didn't even unlock a single one of burly furry mans skills except for his first one that could knock enemies out of there charge time because the amount of coins I needed for Ryudo's "win the game" button along side the passive skills to make sure he doesn't eat shit was just too much.

The combat though is where one of the games biggest problem lies though.  As interesting as the battle system is, almost every skill and spell in this game is accompanied by a long, unskipable cutscene of the magic flying around the battle field doing its thing.  I was playing via an emulator for the Retro Achievements and even with the power of emulator speedup, by the time I was at the end of the game I was about ready to eat buckshot for breakfast if I had to watch that fucking ZapAll spell effect again.  This is true for enemy skills too so while you can kind of make regular combat not as tedious by only spamming regular attacks and the early skills with short animations, if an enemy wants you to watch a 90 second cutscene of the sun exploding then you better hope to fuck your cancel skills are ready or your time is being well and truly wasted.   It's a fun bit of spectacle at the start but by the end of the game you'll be begging for a way to skip them.

But despite all of those complaints I did genuinely enjoy my time with Grandia 2.  It's deeply flawed in a lot of ways but its charming and cozy.  Maybe it wouldn't appeal to todays RPG fans who are far more used to either extremely dull real time combat found in the likes of modern Final Fantasy or snappier turned based systems found in games like Persona 5 but if you're willing to exercise a bit of patience then Grandia 2 is a generally pretty good game that's worth checking out. 

Morality Systems are Dogshit

 

Recently I've been playing Knights of the Old Republic on Steam and as someone who doesn't really give two flying rat fucks about Star Wars, I'm having a really good time.  The game, however, features a morality system of the player either being a light side or dark side Jedi and what the game decides are light side actions and dark side actions are complete bullshit and this is a problem that has plagued games for a long time so I'm going to rant about it a little bit.

The first instance that got me really hard in Knights was when you get to the Wookie planet with the name I can't remember how to spell.  When you arrive there's some kind of trading company that has set up shop and is kidnapping and selling the native Wookies into slavery.  If you ask me, these are some pretty fucking bad people, but some time into a quest line you are given an option to kill a bunch of them or chase them away.  My attitude is that if you come into someones home turf and start selling them into slavery, you sort of forfeit your right to life on account of being a cunt, so the lightsabers and blasters came out and the party put them down.  Upon concluding the fight I was given Dark Side points.  Dark Side points, for killing invading slavers.  I think it has something to do with Jedi not killing people or something but come the fuck on, you can't just go up to people like that and say "um, excuse me, would you mind NOT enslaving a native race of forest people please?" and just expect them to agree, violence IS the answer here.  But even worse than that there's another quest later on, on a different planet, that involves investigating the murder of some women by some dude.  The way the quest is prestented to you, the situation seems pretty fishy (if you know, ha ha, pun intended) and it looks like the dude that's been arrested has been framed.  On your investigation you go to a hotel where you can question some witnesses and during the dialogue options you can choose to use your force powers to get more details out of a certain NPC.  Using your force powers in this way gets you fucking EVIL points.  Investigating the highly likely framing of an innocent man in a way that guarantees that justice can be served in the correct way is considered to be EVIL by Bioware.  This may be another Jedi thing that I'm unaware of but I remember Obi Wan or whatever in a new hope using the force to manipulate people like that and no one really blinked an eye when HE did it.  Either Bioware have a completely fucked sense of morality or the Jedi are fucking lame, either way it sucks.

But at the very least, in Knight's case, there's a discussion of the morality to be had.  Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to use brain magic to get secrets out of people, sure, fine, whatever, but in a lot of other games morality systems are just tacked on lame bits of shit that aren't engaging in any way.

Now I love Bioshock, it's a cool game but it really does highlight just how poorly thought out these things are.  In Bioshock, upon killing a Big Daddy you are granted a "moral choice" of infanticide or to not do that.  Killing the little girl nets you more points to buy plasmids with and not doing it gives you a bit less and a different ending.  The thing to consider though, is that Bioshock, even on hard mode, is piss easy and you can get everything you need by not killing them which makes the choice feel hollow.  The ONLY reason to kill little sisters in Bioshock is to either be edgy or because you specifically want to see the "bad" ending.  

Another big example of this is Mass Effect, a game that presents you with "moral choices" at various parts of the story but the only real options for each situation is to either be the literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ or to be the biggest ball-bag in the galaxy.  No way to be even a little bit moderate or level headed in any of these games.

Morality on a binary scale like this is a stupid, useless feature that feels like padding.  It's a lazy way for developers to claim their game has replay because you essentially have to play the game twice to see everything.  Really bad offenders in this category include things like Dante's Inferno where the game doesn't really change significantly either way, just do it once where you stomp a dude and once where you play DDR every so often.  

The truth of the matter is simple, it would take far too much work to put this into a game in a way that would actually be interesting or even a little bit realistic.  It would involve a great deal of skill in JUST the writing, let alone all the technical stuff that would then have to come from that to then put it in the game.  There are games that have come kind of close, like New Vegas, but really I can't think of a single game off the top of my head while writing that's had a morality system in it that doesn't just come off as lazy dogshit that only lets you play to extremes.  

Just don't fucking do it

CrossCode

 

I'm pretty critical of a lot of games that I play and when there's something I don't like, I can tend to be a little mean about it.  But usually when I play a game like that, I can at least see the appeal of why other people like it, so while I'll be mean towards the game I won't think anything less of the people who do like it.  Breath of the Wild is a good example of this because I think that game is a steaming pile of overly-easy, uninteresting garbage but I can totally get why someone else might really enjoy it.  But every so often I play a game that's so foul, so heinous, so irredeemably shit in almost every way, that if you admit to enjoying it in front of me I will judge you negatively for as long as I know you.  Famously Outlast 2 was one of those games but now CrossCode can be added alongside it in the hall of shame.

Released in 2018, CrossCode follows the adventures of Lea who wakes up on a cargo ship inside of a fictional MMORPG called Crossworlds and is told that she must follow the main quest line of the game in order to regain her memory.  From there she meets other players, gets involved with weird villains and uncovers a bunch of schemes and conspiricies which she must get to the bottom of.  I dont want to spoil the story too much JUST INCASE there's some massive twat reading this post who has decided that the extremely generic sounding plot sounds interesting but that's the basics.  Presentation wise that game has some decently pretty pixel art but the whole thing is done in this faux-anime style and the story writing and dialogue has this weird aura of smugness about it like the devs are constantly jacking off somewhere quietly behind you as you play because they are so fucking pleased with just how "clever" they are.  

But whatever, smug and shitty writing aside, the game play is arguably the more important factor here.  Well when you first start CrossCode you may be tricked, like I was, that the game plays pretty well.  The world seems fairly expansive, there seems to be a lot of quests to do and the combat feels pretty tight at first.  However the more you play the more it all falls apart.  The combat being the biggest offender here which starts out OK and then becomes repetetive and obnoxious with almost every encounter being an absolute chore.  You can throw little balls at enemies by clicking and then if you pull the mouse near to Lea you can change to a melee attack.  You get a sort of Pound Land Sphere Grid that you use to upgrade various things like shot power and aiming speed so you can sort of build Lea to fit your play style.  Also on that grid are various skills which seems cool and look very flashy when you do them but most of which are an absolute ballache to pull off in the heat of the combat.  Not hard, mind you, the actual execution of the moves is very simple but awkard to do when under fire and ultimately not that useful with the exception of the spin attack you can perform by just holding down the space bar.  After a while the game will start to demand that you hit enemies with various elemental attacks or in specific parts of their body which doesn't really add any challenge but sure as fuck adds heaps of annoyance.  

The quests are another problem because there are plenty of side activities for you to do but almost all of them are uninteresting and the rewards you get for doing them are PATHETIC.  I spent the first few streams of the game trying to dilligently do all the quests I could find as I got them but they were so boring, so samey and the rewards so bloody useless that I stopped and just powered through the game as fast as I could.  Although the world design didn't make that easy because while the world seems large, its not very interesting.  Every area has a unique theme but every part of that area looks the same so once you've spent 10 minutes running around its very easy to just get bored and glaze over.  The world is also very cluttered and hard to navigate with the game demanding that you run across platforms and up and down different elevations but there are numerous points when that becomes a real pain the ass because the perspective is dogshit and the graphics are muddy as fuck.  These smug pricks KNEW this was a problem as well because they showed some footage from a new, very similar looking game they are working on via twitter where the environments have shifted to proper 3D graphics to make that shit clearer.  

The game is also mind boggingly long for absolutely no good reason.  When its not wasting your time with shit exploration and shit side quests, its having you navigate maybe the most annoying Zelda-esque dungeons I've ever played through in my life.  All of them essentially the same fucking thing just with a different coat of paint depending on what the flavor of element you're getting is and filled to the brim with the most long winded, tedious and sometimes painfully obtuse puzzles you've ever seen.  Each dungeon is extremely formulaic with them being structured like puzzle→combat→puzzle ad nauseum until you get the dungeons specific element power, then repeat again until the boss.  The puzzles are are quite samey to, usually involving pushing blocks, bouncing balls into targets or clearing a path for a slow moving ball to hit a thing to open a door.  The bosses at the end of each dungeon are also extremely uninspired so if you've played basically any Zelda game since A Link To the Past you've seen basically everything that Crosscode has to offer.

There is SO MUCH more detail I could go into about why I hate this game but if I did that this blog post might be the size of a Russian Novel (that means over 200k words, by the way) so to sum it up for you Crosscode has shit writing, shit world design, shit gameplay, shit dungeons, shit progression and some quite pretty yet very busy and annoying pixel art.  Somehow this game is quite well liked within the indie scene and I just don't get it.  One day I'll replay CrossCode and actually write that Russian Novels worth of a critique for a YouTube video but for now consider this the TLDR version of why I think it sucks

Fuck this game

First Impressions of Mistover

 Technically I started this game yesterday but the only thing I did today was stream Iron Tank and SMT V so I'm taking a chance to talk about my first few dungeons in this game I got for free on PSN.

The first and most obvious thing about it is that the moment the game starts you realize that you're just playing Darkest Dungeon again.  The dungeons play out a bit more like a Mystery Dungeon type deal, sure but the overall vibe of the game just screams Darkest Dungeon clone.  I'm not really saying this as a bad thing either since I loved Darkest Dungeon and more of that with a twist is always a good thing.  The game is also anime as hell with a lot of the characters being moe blob anime girls with large lances and stuff like that.

It may look and feel like a Darkest Dungeon clone but it seems to have ripped its plot, however, right out of Demons Souls.  There's a big pillar of fog that's been wreaking havoc, adventureres go in the fog to try and stop it and those that go in don't usually come back out.  A bog standard reason to have an adventure but we're more here for party management and fighting with RNG more than anything else.

You have a town where you manage your team of anime people and kit them out with stuff as well as prepare for your travels into the mist.  There are all sorts of shops and upgrade places that all get thrown at you at once and right now it feels all a bit overwhelming.  It's not so much that the systems are hard to understand, so once you spend a little time with it, it all falls into place but the game just backs up a big dump truck of stuff at you and leaves you to work it out.  I'm almost sure this is intentional to make you feel like an out of place adventurer whos in over your head but from an actual game play perspective its just annoying to have to sit there and sift through all this shit before I can really get going.

Once you're ready, you grab a quest from the anime girl in town and head into a dungeon.  Dungeons are randomly generated affairs filled with monsters, obstacles, traps and loot.  Each of your characters has a unique skill to help traverse the place and while you're exploring you have to manage hunger and your light source.  I think if your characters fall while you're doing these dungeons they are gone for good but I've not lost anyone yet so I'm not entirely sure if the game has perma-death.

The most interesting feature though is the Doomsday Clock.  When you finish a dungeon, depending on how much of it you explored and how well you did finding chests and such, a big old clock will tick up towards midnight.  If you get everything in the dungeon then it doesn't move and if you leave with a bunch of shit undone then it progresses.  If it gets to midnight then the games over and you lose.  I've heard it can also tick backwards if you do REALLY well but I found everything there was to find in a small dungeon and it didn't happen so I guess I have to do the bigger levels for that. 

Either way, I think I'm going to have a good time with Mistover, only time will tell if the RNG makes me rip my hair out or not but for a game I got for free on PSN, so far I'm impressed

SMT: If...

 

Persona is now a pretty popular series for RPG fans.  Persona 3 roped in a few weebs with it's dating sim elements, Persona 4 got even more popular with it's Scooby Doo-esque setting and story and then P5 really came along and really got people excited.  It's sort of a joke about the fandom ignoring the first two games in the series due to a lack of social links and much clunkier game play but the one game that next to nobody talks about is Shin Megami Tensei If..., the entry in the series that sort of kicked the whole thing off.

Shin Megami Tensei If... starts out with you doing a personality test which will decide a bunch of stuff and then you are thrust into the halls of Karukozaka high school where you do a bit of wandering around and all hell breaks loose.  You find a partner to join you on your quest and then you go dungeon crawling around a bunch of areas loosly based on the seven deadly sins.  For people who have become confortable with the more modern entries in Persona or even mainline, SMT If... may be a little hard to play at first since it's a traditional first person dungeon crawler but if you can stick with it you're in for a good time.

The gameplay is standard first person dungeon crawling affair where you wander around, get lost, find gear, blunder into traps and so on and so forth.  The usual Megami Tensei mechanic of demon negotiation makes an appearance where almost every enemy you come across in a dungeon can be talked to and if your negotiation goes well they well join your party.  Right now it sounds almost entirely like a mainline SMT game and not like a Persona title at all but the seeds of the franchise turn up in something called the Guardian System.

In SMT: If... there are no game overs, death just isn't a thing for the protagonists here.  When you die you are instead given a nice mode 7 sweeping shot of some grassy lands and then an old man gives you a guardian.  A guardian will give your characters stat boosts (or reductions) and in the case of your partner, the guardian will dictate what spells they have throughout the game.  Entering the status menu allows you to see a "guardian meter" which fills as you defeat enemies.  If you die when the bar is yellow then your guardian gets downgraded and if you die while it's red it gets upgraded.  So while you'll never have to worry about a nasty insta-death spell killing you and sending you back to your last save, dying before you're ready for an upgrade can be just as, if not more annoying than a traditional game over.  

The guardian system is pretty much what laid the foundation for the personas in the Persona games.  Obviously later games would do away with demon negotiation and just have full parties of human characters but it's very clear to see where all the inspiration came from.

Aside from that, SMT If... is also bursting with content, with slightly different story routes depending on which partner you pick at the start of the game as well as a special New Game + character that does away with the sin themed dungeons and instead has a completely different dungeons to explore and bosses to kill, it's almost like having two games in one.

There are some annoyances though that come par for the course with a Megami Tensei game.  For example it's extremely easy to get blindsided by a nasty Mudo or Hama spell in some of the later dungeons, instant death attacks that will have you tearing your hair out although there is at least some counter play when you know it's coming.  The worst part of the game that isn't well known to MegaTen fans is the Dungeon of Sloth.  A slow, boring part of the game where you have to wait for students to dig tunnels by just mindlessly walking up and down the level until the in game moon cycle ticks enough times.  If you were going to get pissed off and give up on the game, it would probably be in this exact part and I absolutely couldn't blame you for doing so.

That said though, Sloth dungeon aside SMT If... is an pretty good game and if you're a Persona fan looking to experience a bit more MegaTen, this is a pretty good place to come since it's challenging but not overly brutal.  The game was never officially released outside of Japan but if you're willing to get your emulation on then a fan translation does exist for this game so you can enjoy it in English.

So go check it out, go see where it all began

EVO: Search for Eden

 

When I think about the games in the SNES library that the lame retro game fans on Twitter like to talk about, E.V.O isn't one that gets talked about all that often.  That's not to say it's completely forgotten, when it does get mentioned people do usually like to chime in with an "oh yeah, that game is awesome!" but unlike your Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers and Marios, E.V.O isn't brought up all that much.

The story is simple, you play as a small creature and you must evolve your way through various time periods to reach Eden and become Gaia's right hand man.  Eat your way through a bunch of fish, dinos, mammals and birds and get to her to win.  It's a simple premise but the plot is sort of secondary here, we're not here for story time, we're here to eat some smaller, weaker animals.

The game starts you off as a fish and you must bite a few creatures nearby to kill them and gain Evo Points. Once you have enough Evo Points you can open a menu that has a pretty high number of options (later on at least) and you must evolve your creature to bring up its stats so you can kill and eat more things to evolve even further.  As you do this, you'll eventually reach a boss and upon killing the boss you'll be teleported to the next age where you'll do it all over again but as a different animal instead.  Later on in the game it's possible to evolve in specific ways to get specific creatures but I never worked this out.  For example I know for a fact you can become a human at some point but I ended up finishing the game as a weird horse-lizard thing with massive fangs.

The game has a fair bit of jank to it though, with stiff controls and pretty awful jumping even with all the upgrades to make your jumps better but the game is so pathetically easy overall that it doesn't really feel like much of a problem.  Some of the bosses can be a bit annoying but doing an evolution fully restores your HP and there's usually an option that costs basically nothing so once you work this out dying is ALMOST impossible.

The other irritating thing is that whenever you enter a new age and become a new animal, your stats are decreased into oblivion so while in the previous section you had massive teeth and a billion HP, once that area is over your back to being a small rat with 5hp that does no damage to anything.  This means that you have to do some annoying grinding which brings down the pace of the game but once you get going again the fun comes back pretty quickly.

So despite its pretty glaring flaws E.V.O is a really good game that's very much worth checking out.  I don't think it's been released on anything so you may have to get dodgy about it but in my opinion, it's worth the effort.

Sweet Home

 

Sweet Home for the NES has quite the bit of buzz surrounding it with it being a sort of inspiration for the Resident Evil franchise and finally I got to play it.  This is not to be confused with the recently released Sweet Home TV series on Netflix which is a Korean drama about a monster based post apocalypse, I made that mistake when looking through my listings but more on that another day.  

Sweet Home is an RPG about a group of people going into a haunted mansion to try and un-haunt it.  To do so you must solve a bunch of puzzles and fight a bunch of monsters gaining strength through levels along the way so you can exorcise the big bast ghost at the end.  It's a NES game for fucks sake, the plot isn't that involved.

What is quite involved however is the gameplay.  At the start of the game you have 5 characters, all of which you can name yourself.  Each one of those 5 characters has an item that is specific to them.  For example one guy has a lighter for opening paths, one guy has a medkit for curing ailments and one gal has a key for opening locked doors.  On top of that each character gets 2 free inventory slots and a weapon slot so managing equipment and puzzle McGuffins/healing is an integral part of the gameplay.  But, to make things just a little more intense, the game features perma-death.  So if one of your guys falls in battle, they are GONE, for good.  You won't find yourself stuck because the game provides regular versions of the character specific items so you can progress, but if that happens you are two inventory slots down, a weaker party AND you have to manage your shit even more meticulously than before.

The puzzles Sweet Home range from insultingly obvious to so obtuse I have no idea how the fuck you are supposed to solve them without a guide.  There's one bit in particular where you have to use the look command on a fountain and on the second or third try the fountain starts spurting blood which changes a thing for progression.  What I imagine most people do there is look at it once, decide it doesn't do anything and then get stuck for HOURS until they look at a guide and find out they have to spam the look command a few more times for it to work.

Overall though Sweet Home is a pretty good game and you can see the little aspects of it that were lifted for Resident Evil, almost like looking at the rings on an old tree stump.  The inventory, the way items are managed (identical to RE0 pretty much) and even the little animation that plays when you unlock a door for the first time.  Yeah, it's got some jank to it but it's not that long either so go give it a try. 

Shin Megami Tensei 4

Hoy!
 

I just finished this game and I had to rush to my computer and type out this post because HOLY SHIT is it good.  If you need a monster collecting game on the go, put the Pokemon shit away and get yourself some of this hotness

The game follows the adventures of Flynn (or whatever you chose to name him), a strapping young man who has come to the prosperous city of Mikado to become a Samurai.  After doing a sort of test to see if a mystic gauntlet will allow him to become a Samurai, he joins the ranks of the soldiers sworn to protect the people from demons that dwell in a cave just under the town called Naraku.  It doesn't take long faffing around in there though before OOPS! You're actually in a post apocalyptic Tokyo and you must explore the ruined city and continue an adventure that will end up shaping the entire world.

 Game play wise, for people familiar with SMT, it's more SMT goodness albeit slightly easier compared to previous entries.  The game does however have an expert mode that, at time of writing, I have not tried yet due to it being locked behind a game clear but I suppose for real die-hard fans the challenge is there.  For those not familiar with SMT, the game is sort of like a demonic Pokemon where you run around, recruit demons and use them to fight enemies and bosses.  To get demons you have to negotiate with them, answering their questions or giving them money and items to convince them to join you.  From there you can also fuse demons together to create newer, stronger demons which you are going to want to do if you don't want to make the game incredibly hard for yourself.

Usually here, with most SMT games I'd be warning you about the games difficulty as this series is sort of notorious (outside of the Persona spin-off franchise) for being quite difficult but if you were looking for a place to start, 4 is a good bet as it has a weird reverse difficulty curve.  The first parts of the game in Naraku are tough as nails with certain enemies and bosses just destroying you and your demons.  But after a while the game starts to get easier and easier.  For me personally, I was so pumped up and overpowered that the final boss could barely touch me and even when he did get a few good hits in I was able to fully heal it off in a single turn.   

The game is also pretty replayable with it's 3 (technically 4 but one of them is for little babies) endings.  The game will pose a number of questions and situations at you and depending on what choices you make you will either go down the Law or Chaos path which have different bosses and such during each.  For people willing to look at a guide you also have the choice to do a True Neutral path which involves doing a bunch of side quests and making some very specific choices at very specific times which is a good goal to go for on a second run I feel. 

As far as criticisms go, of course I have to shit on the game for locking the expert mode behind a game clear.  I'm VERY familiar with this series and the games normal mode after the opening area was pretty much a joke.  Probably perfect for newcomers but for a seasoned veteran it's very easy so if the story doesn't sweep you up like it swept me up, then the game MAY get boring for you. Also I can't quite place my finger on exactly why but I hate the interface for demon fusion in this entry.  I just find it clunky and annoying to deal with.  My final big criticism is that the "Challenge Quests" are extremely uninspired and boring.  I was trying to be diligent and do as many as possible at first but after a while I got so sick of them that I just ignored them entirely.  Due to this it would EXTRA piss me off when you try to do a demon negotiation and instead of doing that they would waste your time with "hey guy wanna do a quest for me?" but once you accept it they stop bothering you about it so its a minor issue really.

Seriously though, if you're into these kind of monster collecting games I HIGHLY recommend SMT4, it's one of the best of it's kind and probably the best game I've ever played on the 3DS.  So stop wasting time and go hunt some demons already

Lisa: The Painful

 

Last night I finished Lisa: The Painful RPG and if you can't be bothered to read any longer than this first post the the only thing I really want you to know that this game is probably one of the best RPGs I've ever played in my entire goddamn life.

And you know what? You probably shouldn't read any more than that if you've not played the game for yourself, because similar to games such as Undertale, it really is the kind of thing that you just need to experience for yourself knowing as little as possible.  This game is actually incredibly hard to talk about without spoiling a lot of key moments that make it so great but I'll do my best to give you a fast outline.

The game follows a man called Brad during the post apocalypse.  Only this apocalypse wasn't caused by some kind of viral outbreak or nukes falling on the world, it was caused by all the women just sort of up and vanishing and then things falling apart pretty hard as a result.  Brad however, comes across a baby girl in the desert one day and being a man of many emotional burdens, takes it upon himself to raise and protect the girl.  However, pretty much every other man in the immediate area sees that the discovery of a woman in God knows how long means that maybe there can be some.....relief....along with a chance to save humanity and she is promptly swiped from you and you must embark on a journey to rescue her.

While that's what you get in the opening of the game there's A LOT more to Lisa than that.  Each area that you go to has you encounter various groups and individuals, all with their own stories to tell and experiences to share (in the form of spoken word or baseball bat to the head depending).  A lot of what goes on in Lisa is grim, morbid, disgusting, reprehensible stuff but there's a weird sort of humor going through the whole game so when you come upon this stuff it raises more of a nervous chuckle then a feeling of disdain.  

But enough about the plot that I don't want to spoil because the gameplay is also really good.  It's a standard RPG on the surface.  It's made in RPG Maker for fucks sake so on a surface level you don't really get more standard than that.  But don't let the "made in RPG maker" line turn you away because the engine has been tweaked for some real interesting effects.  For example Brad is a karate master so you input his moves with keyboard strokes like a combo system.  Some characters have MP based moves to do damage or inflict ailments and some characters have TP based moves so you have to spend time either doing or taking damage in order to fill a meter before you can let the big guns go.

One thing to note though is that Lisa is not an easy game.  It's not impossibly difficult either but it will attempt to kick you up and down the garden path if you don't try to spend at least a little time learning what everything is and what it all does.  Combat has a sort of Shin Megami Tensei feel to it where a debuff or an unlucky roll (or a lucky one) can turn the tide of a battle extremely quickly.   For example there was one enemy that was absolutely shitting on my party, one shotting them with most of its attacks so in an act of desperation I decided to inflict "pissed" status to the guy.  Pissed makes him crit more often but also gives him a chance to just smack himself in the face for the damage he was about to do to you.  The fight came right down to the wire but in the last turn he crit himself and died from the attack, letting me live to fight on another day.  

But individual encounter difficulty and decent strategy isn't the only thing you have to worry about.  Lisa throws quite a lot of party members at you over the course of your adventure but I think that's to counter-act the fact that the game has perma-death.  If a characters HP is brought to 0 they are KO'd and can be revived with an item or by resting.  However some enemies have attacks that will just flat out kill a guy and when that happens they are gone from the game forever.  These enemies are few and far between but when you know that you could lose a guy for good in one bad turn of a fight, it makes you think quite differently about your approach to the battle.

The one bone the game does throw at you is a difficulty option at the start.  Normal mode lets you just play the game as standard but Pain mode has some different encounters and save points will just explode upon use.  Save points are frequent and nicely placed but the fact that they are a 1 use commodity on the games harder setting really ramps up the tension.  Personally I recommend the games pain mode because there are a few situations that can leave you feeling a bit helpless but a quick reload sort of sucks the impact away from that.  Being a decent distance away from your last save, only to have the cruelty of the wasteland leaving you in a bad spot sparks a certain tension in the player that you just wouldn't get on normal.

 So play Lisa, it's a damn good game and it's a damn shame that I don't hear more people talking about it.  Saying any more than I've already said would start to get into the spoiler zone so I'm going to end here.  

 

The soundtrack is amazing too, by the way. 

Final Fantasy 7 No Materia Final Bossfight [Stream Highlight]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo Thoughts

I'm not usually one for demos.  When I'm even remotely interested in an upcoming title I try to avoid as much of the hype and marketing as possible and then just go into it on release day completely blind.  However when I caught news of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo dropping onto PSN my curiosity got the better of me in a BIG way and I practically ran home from work to download it.  Now having played it through I'll share some of my thoughts on it.

The game kicks off with the old opening that everyone whos even has a passing knowledge of the game is familiar with only this time its an absolute trip to see all that 1997 FMV done in all new PS4-O-Vision.  Not long after that cutscene ends you're in control of Cloud and are set upon by a couple of dudes to hack at.  I was playing with the combat on Normal mode but when you start the demo you are given the option of Normal, Easy and Classic and I will be going back to the demo very soon to try out the classic option but at time of writing I've not tried.

There's not really a lot to do in this demo since its just the bombing mission from the start of the game so the focus is really on getting some hands on experience with the combat.  At the start of the demo you have just Cloud to play with.  He can hack away at things with this Buster Sword in 2 modes, one for speed and one for damage or he can do an ability or cast a fire spell.  As you hack at things you fill up at ATB gauge which lets you use those spells an abilities and you can store up to two.  So for example, using the fire spell, a potion or hitting something with Braver uses up one of your meters and then you either have to wait or do some more regular hacking and slashing until you can do it again.  The more you hit things the more you fill up a little stagger meter and when that gets full you do extra damage to your opponent and exploiting weaknesses of enemies helps raise that meter even faster.  Things get real interesting when you get Barret into your party and you then have to manage a second character.  You can freely switch between your two guys and while your inactive guy while wander around the area killing enemies for you, their ATB fills up at a much slower rate than if they are actively fighting under your control.  So while, at least for the demo, its perfectly viable to control Cloud pretty much the entire time (outside of a tutorial when Barret first joins), if you really want to maximize damage then you'll want to be switching between your party members to fill up their meter and then take full advantage of a stagger when it happens. 

The one thing I didn't like about the demo was the English voice work for the characters.  It was hammed up and every time Jesse opened her mouth I got the pangs of cringe through my chest.  I'm sure the full game will have selectable voice tracks but the demo version just uses whatever language your system is set to.  My Japanese PS4 is set to English so everything was in English which means that if you're living in Japan the game will probably have full English support but its a little concerning for those that want the English text but the Japanese voices as there are no language options in the settings for the demo.  

Either way, the more I see about this game the more excited I'm starting to get.  I'm still a little skeptical of the whole, being split into multiple games thing but as far as gameplay is concerned its a solid action RPG experience and I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the "full" thing.

Earth Wars: A Godawful Mess

Earth Wars is by far one of the worst indie games I've ever played and I'm the kind of Steam user that spent 25p buying a game called "Oppai Girl" so that's saying A LOT.

Earth Wars is a game that I played on PS4 after getting it for free as part of my PS+ games one month.  I finished it last week after nearly a solid year of chipping away at it because playing it for any more than about 20 minutes at a time made me want to vomit in my mouth.

The story is set after some aliens show up and make a mess of planet Earth so you and your squad have to get in there and get rid of the aliens.  Truth be told, the story had a lot more going on than that but by the 4th area or so I was so sick of it's technobabble that I just started skipping everything.  Aliens are bad and the power suits used by the Earth forces may or may not also be killing them or something like that, who knows and who cares?

Earth Wars really falls down though in it's gameplay department.  Each major section of the game is bookended by a mission where you'll kill a big boss alien.  After you kill the boss alien you are given a real timer that usually counts down from something absurd like 60 hours.  From there you play sub missions which usually involve finding an item, racing around a zone or killing a certain enemy and you are rewarded with skills for completing these quests.  The missions start to get dull and samey right in the first zone but by the end of the game every missions is basically "hey, go kill this major boss again" and it becomes even more tedious.  Finishing a mission reduces the timer by a handful of hours so clearing a few missions gets you to the next big story beat but you actually have to CLEAR the mission for it to count.  Meaning if you spent 20 minutes on one mission only to fail it near the end, then have fun doing that all over again unless you want to leave the game running for 60 ACTUAL hours.

The gameplay within these missions is even worse.  Imagine a game like Odin Sphere or Muramasa but as if it was designed by a guy who was extremely high on very powerful painkillers for the entire development cycle.  It's wooden, unresponsive, nonsensical, confusing and a whole ton of other adjectives that mean bad things.  Your character controls like your controlling one of those paper puppets with the butterfly pins so that the child who made it can manipulate the joints.  The enemies animate just as atrociously so usually combat is dreadful yet manageable but there's one clawed enemy in particular that is so fast and powerful that you are guaranteed to lose about half your life bar to one EVERY TIME.  Everything is just so janky and difficult to control and for a fast paced action game like this that's very clearly trying to be Odin Sphere or Muramasa but IN SPACE it's a massive letdown.

I do want to end on a positive note so I will say that the backgrounds and nicely drawn and the does use an interesting skill system.  You sort of have this network of nodes where one half is stat boosts and the other half is your movements.  So you can junction +X attack to the first, second or third swing of your sword so you can either spread that damage out or just do what I did and make the first attack hit like a truck and then everything else just be a shitty follow up to try and proc the death effect from my sword.  There is also a crafting system that I expect wanted you to make elemental weapons to exploit weaknesses and stuff but you just make a weapon have a death attribute that you can just smack a normal enemy until it gets the effect and then dash around the field until it dies, rendering all non boss combat trivial.

Clearly the developer of this game had their heart in the right place.  It's a terrible, horrendous, irredeemable shitty mess but a clear effort was made and I can respect that.  However that doesn't excuse the game itself from being as bad as it is.  I got it for free and I want my money back

Dungeon Crawler Mis-genre-ing

Like all things I seem to really enjoy, Dungeon Crawling is one of those niche genres that doesn't have wide appeal but does have an insanely dedicated following of fans.  I'm almost certain that in the past on this blog I've gushed, at length, about how much I love this style of game but for this post I'm here to complain about something that really chaps my ass which is the misgenre-ing (if that's even a word) of games in this genre.

A dungeon crawler is typically an offshoot of the RPG genre that revolves around an individual or group of people navigating a big maze, solving puzzles, killing monsters and surviving with what little resources they have all usually in first person.  Famous titles in this genre include Dungeon Master (Pictured above), Shin Megami Tensei, Legend of Grimrock, Etrian Odyssey and many more.  The real interesting part about this genre is that a large number of titles will require or ask the player if they want to draw their own maps.  Back in the day if you wanted to effectively navigate these dungeons you'd have to break out some square paper and get drawing.  More modern titles have an automap but, for example, Grimrock will ask the player if they would like to turn the map off or Etrian Odyssey actively forces you to draw your own map on the bottom screen of the DS.

You know what isn't a dungeon crawler though? Diablo, Zelda, any of those roguelikes on Steam.  Diablo is the one that comes up most of all whenever I go looking for dungeon crawl recommendations.  I don't have a problem with Diablo, it's a good game, but Diablo is an action RPG loot fest, extremely far removed from the style of game I'm usually looking for.

The reason this gets my back up is because dungeon crawling is an extremely niche genre and it's been mislabeled so much that now, finding a traditional style dungeon crawl is extremely difficult.  If you go on Steam and type in "dungeon crawl", you get a mix of classic RPGs and rougelikes with the occasional actual dungeon crawl peppered in there.  If I wanted a fucking roguelike, I'd search for fucking roguelikes, but I want a goddamn dungeon crawl.

Still, despite seemingly no one know what a proper dungeon crawl is, all is not lost.  There's a website dedicated to enthusiasts of the genre

http://www.dungeoncrawlers.org/

Not a hack and slash or action adventure in sight.  It's dungeon crawling heaven in there, from old to new, so go check it out.

Diablo Immortal: Just let it die quietly

So recently Blizzard announced Diablo Immortal and fans are PISSED.  In case you saw that banner and got excited because you didn't catch the story yet, don't get your hopes up too high because it's only a mobile game.  Here's a trailer

If you view it on YouTube instead of in the blog, HOO BOY that dislike bar.

Now I get it, oh boy do I understand your rage.  A series with such a long and respected pedigree being reduced to yet another cash grab, probably gatcha in some way, premium currency pay to win mobile dogshit.  The fact that it's not just some little extra thing that Blizzard developed on the side but a thing that was shoved in your face at fucking Blizzcon like it's something you should be excited for.  The condescending attitude when an audience member asked "will we get it on PC?" and the guy, when booed for saying no, replied with "What, don't you all have phones?!".  You have every right to be boiling mad but just stop and think for a second.

There are tons of generic shitty hack and slash games on mobile already.  I hate to admit it but I sunk quite a lot of time into a hack and slash RPG on mobile called HIT for a pretty significant amount of time about a year ago.  All that time ended up being wasted though since it's just another deleted free game on my app store account now.  At the very least, we know that Diablo Immortal will have a degree of polish to it, so if you're going to play a shitty mobile hack and slash game at least a Diablo flavored one might be worth keeping on your phone for the occasional fiddle with on a bus or while you're dropping a fat shit.

Plus it's not like Blizzard are dropping everything to focus on this one mobile game.  Diablo 3 just got a Switch release so if Immortal really disgusts you that much but you want portable Diablo anyway, just go play that.  You don't see Final Fantasy fans losing their shit over Record Keeper or Brave Exvius, you can at least be happy that Blizzard are still giving D3 the love it needs to keep going for another console generation at the very least.  If you hate the look of it that much, it really is as easy just not downloading it from the app store.

Booing, disliking videos on raging online won't really do anything.  If no one downloads it though, if that game is dead from day 1, THEN Blizzard will know they cocked up.  I get that your mad but calm down and let it die quietly instead of giving it publicity so that all the know-nothings and curious children with a tablet don't end up keeping the game alive for years to come.

I personally will never play it because it'll never stack up to Dragalia Lost.

Dragalia Lost

So this is a game that came out last month for mobile devices that kept popping up on my Facebook feed after a few of my friends started playing.  The first thing I noticed is that it's an original mobile game that has a big fat Nintendo logo on it and along side that a big fat Cygames (Shadowverse, Grandblue Fantasy) logo.  After umming and arring about it for a while thanks to it's MASSIVE 2.5gb download size from the app store I decided to just give it a go.

Dragalia Lost has absolutely NO BUSINESS being this good of a game since it's just your typical mobile gatcha affair but for some reason I just can't get myself off the damn thing.  I have no idea what the story is since following a mobile story is like choosing to eat a bowl of shit but the game play is fun and the amount of stuff there is to do is just staggering.  The sheer amount of content is important considering the games recent release since usually newly released mobile games are a little thin on the ground at first and flesh out later but Dragalia is going all out right out of the gate.

The game itself is the same gatcha bullshit you see on the app store all the damn time.  Pull stuff, power up stuff, do dungeons to power up stuff even more rinse and repeat and grind grind grind ad nauseam.  There's two cool things about it though that set it apart from other games in the genre which is one, combat that's actually more interesting than just tapping until everything falls down and two, a level of polish that is rarely seen in the entirety of mobile gaming.  The combat has you using the touch screen to actually move characters and have them hack, slash and dodge through the environments.  When enemies attack the game will put these sort of markers on the floor, something I've seen done in other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 which means that paying attention to things like positioning is very important. 

There's a lot going on in Dragalia that would take far too much time to type out so instead I'll just recommend that you go download it and give it a whirl.  It's free so worst case scenario is that you'll just be unimpressed by yet another gatcha title and best case is that it drags you in and holds your attention as violently as it has mine.

Excited For Sekiro

Usually when there's a big upcoming release I try to not get myself too excited for it.  Call me elitist or snobby or whatever but big AAA games, while enjoyable, don't usually live too long in my memory after all the release hype has died down.  However if there's one thing that does consistently impress me with every release it's From Software and it's Souls games.  Now from what I gather Sekiro isn't STRICTLY Souls, but it plays close enough for me.

Just straight off the bat I love the setting and the general look of the game.  Not because it's all Samurai and I'm a huge weeb (that much is only partly true) but I kind of like the idea of having a From Software covering as many thematic bases as possible.  We've got the high fantasy setting of the Souls games, the Euro-Horror feel of Bloodborne and in Sekiro we get a nice eastern touch, it's pretty cool.  Ni-Oh was great and all but now we have an ACTUAL Souls type game in an eastern setting rather than just a souls flavored action game from another company.

Setting aside though, I heard that this game has no real kind of leveling system which excites me greatly.  Some might lament the loss of this but as much as you might hate to admit, stats play a HUGE role in the way a Souls game progresses.  Sure, you CAN go fight those skeletons at the start of Dark Souls 1 but you're going to die in 1 hit and deal no damage in return just because your stats aren't there.  With Sekiro it sounds like it really is a true test of skill.  No more complaining about "artificial difficulty" if that's even still a thing, if you suck at Sekiro it sounds like it'll be because you ACTUALLY suck and now you have no excuse.

The feature that seems to have replaced straight up leveling is the prosthetic thing where you can equip different arms that do different things like a sort of grim-dark samurai Megaman.  I've been avoiding stuff because I want to experience as much of it for myself as possible but there seems to be one item in particular that acts like a grappling hook.  That alone is interesting because Souls have never really had much verticality so how the level design changes to suit this new found mobility is really exciting. 

If you've never played a Souls game before then you should go try one.  If you can't be bothered trying to get into a series 3 games deep then Sekiro (or Bloodborne really) might be a good place to start.  Fingers crossed that From really knock this one out of the park.

I Hate Blitzball

If you've been watching the stream you'll know what I'm about to say already.  I'm in the final part of my FFX playthrough but this involves some HEAVY grinding to get the stats and gear needed to kill the Dark Aeons and ultimately the games hardest boss, Penance.

In order to make life a lot easier for yourself you get acquire the best weapons in the game known as Celestial Weapons.  The only drawback to these weapons is that when you first get them they are useless with the only skill on them being "No AP" which basically means no experience.  Once you do power them up though using a crest and a sigil they do crazy stuff like break the damage limit or charge your overdrive meter at triple speed and shit like that.

Now for the Dark Aeon stuff Wakka is a very important character because his limit Attack Reels is basically one of the best moves in the game.  With Wakka fully powered up and geared out he's doing 12x99,999 damage which is a hell of a lot of hurt.  Getting him to this point is the annoying part though.

Getting his crest is easy, you just go to a locker in Lucca and press X and you have it.  The sigil on the other hand requires you to play an absolute shit ton of blitzball, which might be the single most boring mini game in Final Fantasy history.  You need to play it 10 times in a league to get Attack Reels, then play games until a tournament with Status Reels pops up THEN finish the league you were in to start a new one with Auroch reels AND THEN play 10 more league games for the sigil.  This doesn't sound so bad but Blitzball is just eye gougingly dull and shouldn't be forced upon anybody like it is here.

I think for me, the main reason it's so disappointing is that in that opening cut scene Blitz looks like this sick, crazy underwater rugby with people being flung out of the arena and people smashing each other in the face every which way.  When you actually get into proper blitz though it's a boring turn based affair where you just pass to Tidus and Jecht Shot every few moments to win matches against incompetent AI.

What's weird is that I know people who actually LIKE Blitzball.  I don't get how one possibly could because it's already an easy mode snoozefest if you put no effort into it but if you actually research how to get and use the best players then the whole thing becomes a joke.  I guess it must just be relaxing or something but as far as I'm concerned Blitz can just fuck off forever.

Some Persona Fans Piss Me Off

I can feel the hate mail coming just from the title so hold your fucking horses and let me start with a clarifying statement.  I fucking love Persona 5, it was an amazing experience with both style and substance and is probably my personal favorite game on the PS4 right now with very little chance of being overthrown any time soon.  I'm also a big fan of Persona 3 and Persona 4, also great games that I sunk many many hours into and loved dearly.  Persona 4 Golden (and Dancing all Night) was pretty much the entire reason I bought a Vita.

But with that said, god DAMN some of you Persona "fans" on the internet piss me the fuck off.  Now I'm not talking about the legions of Weaboos that seem to make up the games fanbase, that's just sort of par for the course when it comes to titles like this and while they are cringy as fuck their slightly overzealous enjoyment of games in this style aren't really the problem.  My problem comes when I see posts from supposed "fans" shitting on mainline SMT or Persona 1 and 2.

First I think it's important to understand where I am with this series.  Way back when I lived in the UK, I remember my mum telling me about this game called Lucifer's Call on the PS2.  God knows how she came across it but it piqued my interest and I grabbed a copy and went from there.  This game blew my goddamn mind.  It was a bit like Pokemon but instead of shitty little woodland animals coming out of my balls and winning the day with friendship the whole game was basically a struggle to survive in a harsh world of demons that you had been thrown into (there's more to it than that, but for another day).  So I played the fuck out of that and then I don't remember playing much of the series until Persona 3.  It wasn't until that game that I realized that I wasn't just playing "Persona 3" but I was playing "Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3".  So I did some research on the series at large and the obsession grew from there.

Now the reason I can't stand the people who shit on Persona's 1 and 2 is just because I'm a ponce.  Those games are harder and a bit dated but it just seems silly to shit over the first two games and then go around the internet touting yourself as "a fan of the series".  Let's face it folks, Personas 3 and up and designed for ages 3 and up.  Easy mode SMT for people new to the series, a nice little way to break you in.  It's a great place to start if you've never played a MegaTen game before (although I'd argue that Digital Devil Saga is better) but by ignoring the rest of the series because it's "too hard" for you is just a crying shame.  As Souls fans say, "Git gud" because you're really missing out on so much and if you just spent even a LITTLE bit of time learning the basics of these games even notoriously hard entries like Strange Journey won't seem so impossible.

The people who get my back up though are the ones who shit on SMT as a whole.  The ones who are elated to point out the fact that ATLUS dropped the "Shin Megami Tensei" off the front of Persona 5.  The ones who will type out pages and pages of stupid, backward reasons about why the series sucks and Persona is the only thing keeping it alive (untrue).  These people are a bunch of stupid fucks that need to shove a Mara up their gaping assholes.

I can get why one might say "I don't like these games, they are hard and dated" because they are.  I'm currently replaying Megami Tensei on the NES (not even Shin) and coming off the back of P5 GODDAMN it's taken some readjusting.  But to turn around and say that SMT sucks is just fucking stupid.  Without SMT there wouldn't even be a Persona and as much as you probably don't want to admit it you are just playing easy mode MegaTen.  Hell, you could rename Persona "Shin Megami Tensei USA" because that's almost what they are at this point.

For those of you who didn't get the joke

Persona as we know it today wouldn't even be a thing if it wasn't for a very specific Shin Megami Tensei game called Shin Megami Tensei If...

It wasn't a hugely successful or popular title but two things in this game were direct inspirations for Persona.  First was the high school setting and the second was the guardian spirit system but if you think Persona 1 and 2 are dated you don't stand a chance with SMT: If...  The point is, everything that you love about the later Persona games has been tried, tested and perfected throughout the rest of the series at various points.  Disliking it is fine but shitting on it just makes you look like a fucking moron.

If you've tried the games and felt that they are dated or too hard, I implore you to go give them another try.  Use a guide if you have to or play the next best entry game after Persona in terms of difficulty, Digital Devil Saga.  If you think that SMT in general just sucks and you aren't willing to try again or even accept the massive impact its had on your so called "favorite" game, then have Morgana put you to bed and then do the world a favor by never waking up.

Persona 5

Well it took a fucking age and a half but last weekend I finally beat Persona 5 and HOLY SHIT it's actually one of the best RPGs I've ever played.  I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as a can but there's a CHANCE that some may get dropped at some point, I'll mark them appropriately if I get into that but just be on your guard since people seem to be very uppity about spoilers for this game.

So here's a short version of my thoughts for people who are familiar with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei as a whole.  Persona 5 doesn't actually do anything particularly new with the franchise but it has an absolutely INSANE amount of polish on it.  If you like Persona you'll adore this game and if you are a mainline SMT snob then even you will find it hard not to get a kick out of this one.  It's just generally a damn good game.

For those that aren't familiar, Persona 5 is half monster breeding JRPG and half school life simulator. The story begins with our protagonist being set up for a crime he didn't commit and then getting sent to some shit school in Tokyo where everyone hates his guts.  From there he runs into a couple of other outcasts and they discover that they can enter an alternate universe where they dress like gentlemen thieves and can invade the hearts of certain people to change them from shitty people to not shitty people.  When you aren't doing that however, you have to go around making friends various folks around your school and Tokyo which has a knock on effect of making your Persona's stronger when you fuse them together to make new ones.  When you aren't doing THAT you can go around a number of places raising stats like charm, courage and academics in order to make you better at doing stuff/providing chances to deepen your friendships with the people mentioned in the sentence before.

The monster breeding, JRPG side of this game is where it really comes to life though.  When you are wandering around the hearts and minds of your targets you run into demons.  If you beat them up in just the right way and knock them down you can hold them at gunpoint and "negotiate" with them.  If you're negotiation is successful they will give you money, items or best of all join you so that you can use their skills in battle.  Once they've joined you can go inside a prison in order to put them under a guillotine and fuse them together to make new ones that are even better which in turn makes stealing  the minds of your targets much easier.

This is just a basic overview of the main two parts of the game but there's so much going on in P5 it'll make your fucking head spin.  There's no way I can do it justice in a short blog post like this, just go and play it.  The fact that I've not dedicated a paragraph to things I didn't like should say a lot about how I feel.  The only "complaint" I do have is that this game is fucking LOOONG but that wasn't really a negative for me and won't be for a lot of other people.  Just be warned though you will be probably at this one for at least 90 hours just for the main run through.

If you like RPGs, play P5
If you don't like RPGs, play P5 anyway
Just if you like games in general, play P5.  Just play fucking P5, right now