Child of Light Mini Review

A couple of weeks ago I beat Child of Light so I'm going to do that thing I always do a write a little bit about it.  I made a post previously talking about how the combat was basically a poor mans Grandia and used it as a basis for the idea that games are getting dumber and dumber but I actually quite enjoyed Child of Light.

The game follows Princess Aurora who kinda, maybe but didn't really die and was sent to the land of Leumeria.  There she is thrust into an adventure to rid the world of a dark queen by gathering the sun, the moon and the stars and then shoving a sword into her big ugly face.

You spend the whole game exploring 2D environments and fighting monsters for EXP.  Once you reach the end of an area you will fight a boss and once that's all said and done you get some story.  The exploration is fun since Aurora can fly freely around the map and there is quite a lot to find in each area.  Some areas even have little sub areas that involve traps that could potentially kill you or a special enemy that will drop a nice prize if you manage to kill it.

The combat, while simplistic, is fast and never I never really got bored with it.  You level up at a stupidly fast rate but the monsters remain challenging as long as you keep moving forward.  You could hang back and grind a little but I feel that if you did that then the fun behind the challenge of combat would be diminished somewhat.  Just as a note, I played the game on hard so I can't speak for the lower difficulty levels, but for a game like this playing on anything less than hard is just a bit embarrassing, quite frankly.

I was told going in that the story, while not bad, is annoying because almost all the dialogue is delivered in rhyme.  It would be really annoying if it was voiced but only a small number of key scenes have any voice work and the rest of the story is delivered in text, so I don't really know what people are moaning about.  The story is pretty basic but it's driven by some pretty good characters with well fleshed out personalities.  You get to know your squad pretty well over the course of the game and since each one has a unique function in combat then it's rare for any one character to get truly sidelined and forgotten.

I would recommend Child of Light to fans of the RPG genre.  It's a lighthearted little adventure with some nice characters, interesting art direction and fun game play.  While some of it's features feel underdeveloped such as the skill tree and Oculi stat boost stuff, it's not intrusive enough to ruin the whole experience.  It's also just the right length for this kind of thing wrapping everything up before things start to get stale.

Go give it a go. 

The Dumbing Down of Games

The dumbing down of games is something that I feel has been going on for a good while now.  However it's sort of difficult to point out exactly where.  I mean there's the general things that everyone knows about like regenerating health or some games not punishing you for dying whatsoever.  Recently I started playing Child of Light and I think this game really does hammer home just how dumbed down games have really become.

Just as a disclaimer I am enjoying Child of Light quite a bit actually.  I'm not too far in but it's definitely one of the more interesting RPGs I've played in recent memory.  However, the problem with Child of Light is that while I'm playing it there's one other game sitting at the back of my mind and gnawing away.

Every time I enter a fight in Child of Light, I keep thinking about fucking Grandia and just how much better that games combat was.

On a very basic level, Grandia and Child of Light have the same system. Check it out

At the bottom of both those screens there's a bar.  The bar is split up into a waiting part and an acting part.  Basic attacks are pretty quick but doing spells require some charge time and getting hit during that charge time may cause an interrupt.  This adds some strategy to timing attacks and such on your enemies to interrupt their shit while protecting your own casting characters so they can get their big moves off.

But here's where the dumbing down is, Grandia's combat had SO MUCH MORE than Child of Light.  In Grandia things like positioning, equipment, what magic to use and when, what skills to use and when, which characters are on interrupt duty and all sorts of other things were important.  While in Child of Light all that shit goes out the window and it's just a case of "hit them in the cast zone to interrupt" and combat becomes kind of monotonous as a result.

Not to mention that the number of enemies is different because it CoL it seems to be a max of 3 while in Grandia you could get absolute clusterfucks which had to be dealt with in a different way to smaller groups of enemies.  The choice of spells and skills was also much wider which gave much more room to create a strategy but in CoL I'm always doing the same fucking thing for guaranteed success.

Child of Light isn't a bad game by any stretch but it's such a shame because I was under the impression that as gaming grew as an entertainment medium it would get smarter, not dumber, so it's a shame to see a title do significantly less than a game from 1997.

Child of Light is just one example but it's a damn good one.  Another good example would be to compare any modern FPS title to Doom and fucking Doom will win out basically 100% of the time in pretty much all fields.

I'm not saying modern gaming is bad, it's just noticeably stupider and I don't like it. 

Fuck Off Ubisoft

Back in the day I used to quite like Ubisoft.  I still remember that little jingle that would play when you popped in Rayman and their logo came up and things were great.  But holy shit this company has turned into one of the biggest groups of assholes I've ever seen.

Ubisoft, in my opinion, are just as bad as someone like EA except because their games aren't as obnoxious and crap they get off a bit easier.  For all the shittiness that comes out of these guys at least they have some degree of respect for some of their stuff.  Rayman Origins is a great example of how there is still a few gems left inside this pile of shit, but I wouldn't have titled the post the way I did if I was here to give them praise.

So last night I'm watching some YouTube videos when I come across this shit.

Now I think I've already talked about how much I hate season passes but this shit is the fucking worst.  It's not just me who thinks it's the worst either, go have a trawl through those comments and have a see for yourself about how unhappy people are with this shit.  Now, why are people unhappy with this trailer? Well it's because it stinks, and I mean fucking STINKS of cut content.

I thought the idea of a season pass was so that after the games launch you didn't have to deal with buying and downloading all the DLC, it would just be automatically added to your game as it was released.  But no, in the case of Watch Dogs the season pass is "hey, look at all the shit we cut from our final product so we can nickle and dime you a bit more"

But Watch Dogs season pass bullshit isn't the only thing that's come to my attention.  Look at this shit.

 This game has just come out and look at this shit!  All this fucking DLC for a game that's just come out and the worst thing about it to is that the Golems Plight pack is about the only one worth a shit, the rest are just fucking packs of items or boosts or whatever.  It's just a case of Ubisoft cutting a quest and charging 3 euros for it and then on top of that money grubbing all the players who suck at the game by offering all this other shit.

Let's not forget that Child of Light is apparently forcing people to log into UPlay, and UPlay is a collossal piece of shit that shouldn't be forced on anybody.  Oh but of course there is no mention of this on the Steam, you can only get this information if you scroll down and look at some of the negative comments regarding the game of angry consumers who can't access the fucking thing they PAID MONEY FOR because UPlay is fucking playing up.

I want to like Ubisoft, I really do, they are just about the only big name developer/publisher that isn't afraid to put out a new IP like Child of Light but this constant money grubbing just pisses me off.  Fucking stop that shit!