[Game Review] Fallout 4

Fallout 4 garnered a lot of flak at release, and with good reason.  When quantifying what makes Bethesda RPGs good, it is the freedom to do what you want in an open world full of micro stories (some of which are quests, some of which are oddities to stumble across) and varied locations that usually make up most of the appeal.  For a Fallout game, stretching all the way back to the original 1997 classic developed by Interplay, it is the lore of the world and the breadth of role play that is its most attractive feature.  While many will condemn the death of Fallout with the Bethesda releases, this is only a half truth.  Pretty much every subsequent Fallout game has veered away from what the original was, including what made it so great.  The original Fallout was an incredibly dark and morose game that, while not without humor, was certainly a far cry from the quirky character that Fallout 2 would introduce.  It was oppressive for a lot of it, and it wouldn't be until Fallout 2 that the series would let loose a little in the way we traditionally think of the series.  Fallout 3 restricted things some and felt largely like a mod of Oblivion in its new combat system, but it still had a lot of that Fallout character and humor, with plenty of interesting quests and a good locale in Washington, DC.  Fallout 3 faltered on the role playing that made the originals so great, appealing far more to the Elder Scrolls perspective of "don't restrain the player despite their decisions", but still included several key moments that gave variance to multiple playthroughs.  Fallout: New Vegas lost some of the Bethesda trademarked freedom of Fallout 3 in favor of far more role play and a far better story with more diverse characters and situations, calling back to classic CRPGs while retaining the modern (for the time) RPG shell.  Fallout 4's failure was hardly appealing to the Bethesda RPG enthusiasts while abandoning a lot of what Fallout was traditionally.  Fallout 4 has many sins, but if I'm being honest, its biggest sin was that number 4 at the end of its title.

See, Fallout 4 isn't actually a terrible game.  It certainly isn't a great game, but there is more to like here than there isn't.  What Fallout 4 is is easy to comprehend, and what it isn't is a mainline Fallout RPG.  Fallout 4, as a matter of fact, is one of those odd 'hybrid' RPGs, the kind that have experience points and perks, but little else in the way of a traditional RPG framework.  Fallout 4 has more in common with Borderlands or Rage than it does with Fallout, at least as far as gameplay goes.  You loot and shoot and explore a wasteland to your heart's content, not overly worried (with a few, measly exceptions) about morality alignment or having a definitive place in this world.  Factions exist and vie for your attention while bemoaning any inconsistency with their ideology you dare to commit, but it takes following the main plot of the game quite a ways before any of these factions become off limits.  You can become a prominent member of the Brotherhood of Steel, the general of the Minutemen, and a pivotal if not bequeathed member of various other factions that I will leave out to save from relatively late or mid-game spoilers, all at the same time.  (The Brotherhood of Steel is mid-late game as well, but at this point if you didn't think they would be in this game you are probably also not at a loss knowing they are in here).  The game, frankly, doesn't care about your choices until it red flags you that you are entering the End Game.  Fallout 4 wants to give you the most flexibility it can for as long as it can, and that is because it doesn't want to be an RPG so much as something like an RPG, relying on other strengths instead.

The most obvious strength is in its combat.  The Bethesda Fallout games have been lambasted for being "Oblivian with guns", a not so appropriate simplification of what those games actually were.  Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas had some sloppy combat, partially due to meek feeling guns and partially do to their insistence on using accuracy percentages like this was one of the table top RPG progenitors of the genre.  Aim in a straight direction in one of those games without touching the mouse/joystick, and shoot.  Your accuracy is calculated by what type of gun you are using and your proficiency in that type of gun.  While the varmint rifle in New Vegas will be largely accurate regardless of your skills, it still has an odd inconsistency to where exactly the shots will hit, making even mid-distant targets something of a dice roll.  The older Bethesda Fallout games dealt with this by introducing VATS, a system that allowed you to freeze time, pick out the body parts you wanted to shoot for with the accuracy numbers calculated in, and use AP or action points to execute the action.  It allowed for those that couldn't shoot or were unwilling to wrestle with the awkward game feel to still play the game in a more old school way.  The only real issue with the system is that the amount of AP you had was somewhat neutered to try and prevent you from over relying on the system without pumping a lot of points into certain stats or picking particular perks.  It was a limiting design choice I can't say I totally agree with, but it was certainly serviceable and helped several people I know who are less accustomed to shooters to get into the series.  Fallout 4 retains VATS, albeit replacing a total time stop with a slowed time instead, while also improving the shooting tremendously.  It isn't the end-all-be-all of shooter game feel, but it is at least now up to snuff with contemporaries, and the change this has to how the game feels is huge.  Running and gunning is now fun rather than a means to an end, and can easily be the core loop itself now, although I'm appreciative it isn't alone.  I played a lot of my most recent of three playthroughs using primarily a sniper rifle with a .50 cal modification, a gun with a slow reload time and precise aiming, because I wasn't worried about missing my shots.  As far as immediate game feel, Fallout 4 beats the other Bethesda titles easily.

While Bethesda games have always allowed you to grab anything not bolted down to carry around like you're some walking garbage can, it wasn't until Fallout 4 there was much of a sincere use for the function.  Crafting and the settlement system add a use to all that junk littering the wasteland, allowing you to modify your guns, cook food, make drugs, and build a place for the roaming settlers of the Commonwealth to live in some sort of harmony.  The settlement system will largely be up to taste, as it can be somewhat cumbersome to reckon with the interface.  You walk around placing your generators, water pumps, beds, walls, ceilings, etc. for your settlement, all at the cost of the junk you've hauled from your travels.  The settlement system can be somewhat flaky, with happiness levels sometimes going down without much in the way of direction as to what it is you should be fixing, but it works well enough that if you are into this sort of thing, and always wanted it set in the Fallout universe, you now have it and with enough flexibility to get creative with it.  The new need for junk may put a heavy tax on your weigh limit - a mechanic that is looking more questionable here than it has before - but there are a few perks that can help you with leniency in this department (or, as I've traditionally done in Fallout games, you could become an alcoholic, as alcohol temporarily buffs your strength stat). The crafting works rather well, although it does act as an excuse for low weapon variety, as now you can modify any variation of the pipe rifle into every non-heavy weapon type gun you could want.  The looting of weaponry is certainly a lot more fun than crafting your little plank of wood with a metal pipe and spring, but modifying guns does allow those favorites to scale as you face stronger and stronger enemies.  And stronger enemies are certainly out there.  Fallout 4 introduces legendary enemies, with a guaranteed high quality drop (usually with some above average modification on it) and a big health pool.  Legendary enemies are a neat addition, but they are incredibly common, found in just about every nook and cranny of the Commonwealth.  

Exploration is where we start to get into muddy waters with Fallout 4.  The areas in post apocalyptic Boston have their places, with torn up schools, repurposed monuments, and, yes, vaults to explore.  There is certainly plenty here to play around with, but what you want from those places is where we are going to find the divergent path on whether you will like this game or not.  Fallout 4 is more or less an open world action game within the Fallout universe, rather than a true-to-form RPG.  Exploring these areas is fun because exploring destroyed areas is fun, but if you're looking for kooky stories from before or after the bombs fell, you are going to be sorely dissapointed.  There are certainly cases here and there, such as finding out what a group of quarry miners were digging for and why everyone was acting so weird while they were doing it (with your own, oddly hallucinatory flashes of the past as you progress), and there is that neat quest involving a flying pirate ship populated by robots, but those types of things are few and far between when compared to past titles.  There is a strength and weakness to exploration in Fallout 4.  The stories are largely lacking (none of the vaults here match with the best of any previous game), but the locations themselves are interesting.  The glowing sea is one of the coolest locations in a Fallout game to date.  It is a massive, radiated zone in the southwest corner of the map where the bombs outside of Boston fell, that stretches well beyond that proposed map limitation, making the map quite a bit bigger than it appears on your pip-boy.  The place is heavily radiated, but definitely traversable so long as you come prepared (either with a lot of drugs, a hazmat suit that weakens your defense, or the power armor, which has been revamped in this game).  The sorta-but-not-exactly biomes of Fallout 4 are more diverse than recent games (and I'm including Skyrim in that assessment).  You have a lightly forested northern section, the urbanized area in the middle that quickly becomes a full-on city, the irradiated wasteland of the glowing sea to the southwest, and the marshlands to the straight south and southeast.  You could even snip at this a bit more, including islets to the east, as well as the beach areas along the eastern coast.  The variety of locational aesthetic helps the game along where neither of the previous Fallout games ever let up in their monotone style. 

Graphically, Fallout 4 is probably the best looking Bethesda game out there, but that comes with the usual grab bag of caveats.  Graphical glitches are a plenty, as is pop in, and looking at a texture too closely - but not so close as you would venture in a more polished game - and you'll be seeing blurriness.  There is a massive free DLC pack for higher resolution textures, but I didn't bother, and as such won't criticize the texture work too much.  What I will say is that the Creation Engine once again shows its age.  That isn't age in the traditional sense, where the engine is just not up to snuff for contemporary graphical output, although I'm sure that's true as far as I can tell, but moreso that the engine has been tortured and twisted so much that there are inherent problems from over a decade ago that still make its appearance here.  High refresh rates will lead to glitches such as not being able to access computer terminals sometimes, requiring some finesse (and a quick save that you will absolutely use at least once through your playthrough) in order to trick the game into performing the required animation to access the computer.  That isn't all as far as frame performance is concerned.  Framerate tied to animation execution is a cardinal sin for game programming in my book, and I'm at a loss as to how this happened here.  It may be that the creation engine requires enveloping the game logic within the frame drawing loop, as is apparently happening here, but you honestly cannot be sure.  I'm willing to apply blame to the engine for this, in lieu of the programmers, since those developing this game absolutely must know better, and so this must be a limitation rather than an amateurish oversight.  Regardless, its affect on the game is minimal, although noticeable if you are keen to that sort of thing.  When the graphics do decide to work properly, they can often look really good.  The blue skies on a clear day are sharp and add a beauty to the landscape, one of wiry dead trees and rusted cars sitting tireless on the road.  It reminds me of winters in Oklahoma, with little adjustment on my part, if I'm being frank.  Rain will come occasionally, and while it isn't the best rain I've ever seen, the variance adds some much needed life (no pun intended) to the wasteland.  The most impressive addition is radiation storms, milky green clouds that will irradiate you as lightning snakes through the lumpy clouds overhead (as long as we are making Oklahoma comparisons, have you ever seen clouds before a tornado?).  Fallout 4 has a decidedly more realistic atmosphere as far as the environment is concerned, and it works wonders in lubricating the fun of exploration.

As this review has progressed, we've slowly slipped into more and more critical waters, and now is the time to strike at the heart of the issues with Fallout 4.  Role playing is absolutely out of the question, and not just that, but variance in character creation means little if anything from playthrough to playthrough.  Dialogue has been restricted to four dialogue choices, usually following categorical guidelines of (clockwise): ask for further information, be a jerk or say no, be nice or say yes, and say something sarcastic (the most made fun of choice) or, more accurately, some pathetic attempt at humor.  If you play through this game continuously hitting "down" on the dialogue trees, you are hardly going to run into any problems.  Hitting "right", the jerk route, will almost always get you to the same outcome.  Your choice is almost entirely an illusion, except where persuasion checks are concerned.  Asking for further information is just about the only real choice you have, and while it certainly has its uses, the asking does not an RPG make.  Persuasion checks, the one outlier, do not gain you much information at all, or even change the course of events except in already telegraphed "important conversations", usually to do with the main plot.  Usually, they simply elaborate a little more on their intentions than they would normally.  It is perhaps the most limited dialogue system I've ever played within an RPG, outside of, maybe, a text adventure game and even then I feel like I'm stretching criteria.  The make-it-or-break-it of Fallout 4 is whether or not you like the world or the game of Fallout.  My preference is most certainly the game, but, as Fallout 4 proved, I like the world a heck of a lot.  My inability to inquire with the world's inhabitants was a constant annoyance, but the world was still out there, and I was able to explore, to read old emails and notes and discover the little touches of environmental storytelling that always permeates Bethesda games (one of their few subtle strengths).  If that compromise is one you think you can make, you may just like Fallout 4, but it is such a big ask I'm not surprised at the ire that coated the game's reputation at release.  This isn't Fallout 4, it's a massive Fallout side game, one worth your time if you love the world and the lore, but one that equally is not going to scratch the same itch.

The dialogue system has an out by the merit of what the game is.  It isn't really an RPG, truly, but an open world shooter with RPG mechanics.  And that's fine with me, for the most part.  Unfortunately, what hasn't changed from previous Bethesda RPGs is a total lack in the main story.  Fallout 4's story is abysmal.  Not just bad, which it certainly is (I'd argue similar for Fallout 3 and Skyrim, though I have a profound love for the former and an appreciation for the latter), but mind numbingly frustrating.  There is a crossroads Fallout 4's story seems to want to meet at, one were plot inconsistencies clash with choice inconsistencies, with character issues and with so many leaps of logic you can hear the writers panting as they try to quickly tape over the messy bits as you go.  There's an attempt at subversion I won't get into (to keep away from spoilers) that feels so sloppy all motivation to see the end of the game drained for me.  I did see it through, all the way to two of the endings, with most of a third done as well, but to no satisfaction.  Elements of this story could have worked, and if they wanted to retain a twist I had one in my head I thought would have been cool that I'm sure most people probably thought of during their playthrough, but everything lands with the thud of necessity over passion.  They needed a story, they relied on pulp science fiction while forgetting the fun you're supposed to have with it, and what we got was a mess of ideologies and sloppy surprises that, in retrospect, shouldn't have been much of a surprise.  What's worse, is that the plot is nearly a rip off of another Bethesda game's plot, although one I won't mention out of respect of not spoiling the game.

Fallout 4, in a striking contradiction, relit my appreciation for the Bethesda RPG after The Outer Worlds had made me think that the genre had long since passed out of my appreciation.  The Outer Worlds, make no mistake, is the better game, but it had missing elements that left me feeling a tad bit undernourished.  Fallout 4 has similar, if more severe, issues to it as well, but reconnected me with the exploration and world tone I'd missed during The Outer Worlds, and it turns out that means a lot to me.  I think the genre is largely dying still, but there is a faint possibility for its future.  Their freedom, mostly in exploration and breadth of world, are their strengths, strengths that are difficult to maintain as the gaming industry continues to blow hot air into the bubble surrounding it that will, inevitably, burst.  But with attention to detail and story, this genre can carry on, because that's where we are sparse the most.  I don't care who does it, whether it be Fallout 5 (stop, don't mention the number 76 to me again) or The Outer Worlds 2, there is a place for this type of game.  I just hope they focus on what we appreciate, and not what they think will dazzle us.



7.0     

[Game Review] The Forest

Survival games have a particular design that, while promising open and changing gameplay, is relatively restrictive when you look into its design principles.  Survival games are meant to be open ended, with worlds full of craftable resources and harsh elements.  You are meant to fight for persistence in this world by using your abilities to manage your various meters always inching downward towards death.  Survival games are, in essence, games that aren't meant to have a definite meaning.  They are systems set to balance on top of one another and you are tasked with managing them.

It is an interesting conceit to take a genre that would seem to be poorly suited for a narrative or goal driven plot and give it just that.  I love survival games inherently, because I love managing a myriad of systems and love making my way through various tech trees trying to better automate my life, or make it to the next branch of technology that allows me to better explore the world.  The Forest upends a lot of those notions of the survival game in order to feel focused, to give you a goal with an end and to utilize the systems within the survival genre to act as means to that goal.

In The Forest you play as a father who is on a plane with your young son, Timmy, when your plane suddenly crashes.  You wake among the wreckage with your son (and most of the passengers on the plane) missing, on a forested peninsula in which you will need to survive.  Finding where Timmy has gone is complicated, as first you will need to make a shelter and find food and water.  Soda cans, alcohol, and even medication can be found in various camp sites on the peninsula, long abandoned and, by the looks of things, ravaged by the locals.  It doesn't take long into the game before these locals make themselves known.

The peninsula of The Forest is inhabited by a tribe of cannibals, and these cannibals are as interested in the meat on your bones as they are in you as a stranger.  The Forest plays out like an odd cross between a survival game and a horror game, two genres that go so well together I'm surprised I haven't seen more games in the same vain (not including zombies because, let's face it, zombies are almost never scary).  The cannibals have an odd AI, somewhere between terrible and brilliant.  They can be relatively easy to take care of once you've progressed far enough into the game, but their AI can also be unpredictable.  It is not uncommon to be chopping down trees and suddenly notice three of them standing at the top of a hill, watching you.  It's eerie, and places a constraint on your actions, because if you get too close to them, they may attack, and turning your back to them may cause them to rush you.  You can't ever be sure of exactly what they will do.  Sometimes pointing a bow at them will cause them to retreat a little into the forest.  Other times it will leave you open to one slinking up behind you.  While walking through the woods, you can hear them call to one another, which may mean a group might be on your trail, or it may mean they've found your camp and are attempting to destroy your drying rack full of food.

The cannibals in The Forest add an interesting twist to survival gameplay.  While you could pick one base and fortify it, upkeeping the various traps and walls needed to keep out unwanted visitors, being in one place too long will attract more and more cannibals at higher and higher frequencies, encouraging you to play far more nomadic.  This makes the crafting part of the game something quick and as-needed, an interesting take on a genre that has routinely been about stockpiling and fortifying to the point of little threat.  This nomadic life serves another purpose as well, encouraging you to explore the world you're in.  Exploring makes it inevitable that you will eventually find one of the many entrances into the sprawling cave system.

The caves are incredibly dark and full of enemies, but they also boast some of the best loot in the game.  To progress you will need certain objects such as the climbing hook or a diver's rebreather, all of which are found in the caves.  Drawings and notes can be found as well, piecing together the story as you explore.  It goes without saying, but something weird is going on or was going on in this peninsula, and discovering what that may be is a lot of the fun of The Forest. 

That focus is what makes the game so unique, and one of the better survival games I've played in a while.  It is interesting to see what a direction can do with a genre, even as it upends certain known aspects.  For example, while The Forest could be endless if you so wanted it to be, the game is heavily encouraging you to progress through the story.  The peninsula is small, only with a handful of locations, and can be spanned in about one in game day.  There are some interesting secrets to uncover that will unlock some truly ridiculous crafting recipes, for those that wish to stay and play in this sandbox, but it is obviously discouraged by the constraints of the game.  There are hard limits to what you can carry, making building anything a management of resources within a much more narrow field than most survival games. 

Everything in The Forest that is craft-able is aesthetically represented with what materials were used to build it.  Rather than grabbing a hundred wood and being able to make a log cabin, in The Forest you need actual logs, of which you can only carry two at a time, which come from chopping down trees.  You can build a log sled with sticks that can help your building go faster, but sticks are also needed to build the cabin in the first place.  It's a neat literal translation from crafting material to crafted object that gives a sense of reality to a game that is still rather gamey.  Likewise, the game's aesthetic goes for realism, allowing night to be almost unbearably dark and day to be washed out by sunlight.  It is one of the best depictions of wilderness I can think of, matching up so well with my experience that I almost felt the sun beating down on me as I rustled my through brush looking for blueberries.  The aesthetic does a lot for your immersion, but the sound design sends it into the atmosphere.  The wind will brush plant life and hiss in your ears realistically.  Chopping down trees lets out loud, rounded thumps that sound as though they carry farther than you'd be comfortable with on a cannibal infested peninsula.  There's an inclusiveness that you feel apart of in its design that really sells this world, even as the game starts to tip into conspiracy as you progress.

The Forest was made by a team of four, and as such has a myriad of glitches you will have to be patient with.  There are collectibles that would sometimes glitch out, some of the physics would turn severe, and in general it seems the game is only loosely being held together.  It makes sense, as most if not all survival crafting games I've played have felt this way (the only exception coming to mind is Subnautica, but even that has performance hiccups here and there), but it can briefly disrupt what is otherwise an incredibly immersive game.  The story will also more than likely leave you without much sense of overarching meaning.  The plot is interesting, but I felt as though what made it interesting took a back seat in favor of a smaller story with questionable ethics that tried less to provoke and more to cinch everything up into a conclusion.  Still, there are elements within that make the concise nature of it more than just it's definite conclusion. 

The Forest can be difficult if playing alone, and too easy if playing in multiplayer, but will still be rewarding regardless.  It shows what a contextualizing agent can do to focus a game's mechanics into something more than just their surface appeal.  It allows for everything to feel more synchronized, to give a sense of progress outside of just mechanical knowledge, and gives a fullness to the experience that can often feel thin in games such as Ark.  The messy aspects of The Forest pale against the great, and it stands as one of my favorite games in the genre to date.  Here's hoping the upcoming sequel retains what was good about the original, while expanding on the odd lore that I only got to briefly pass through.



8.5 

[Game Review] Viva Pinata

Viva Pinata released in the worst context for people to take it seriously as a good game.  Developers Rare hadn't had a hit in years.  After their legendary run with Nintendo on the SNES and Nintendo 64 with classics like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo Kazooie, and Goldeneye, they were bought out by emerging competitor Microsoft for development on the Xbox during the sixth generation of consoles.  During that generation, they only managed to release two games on the big black box, the cult game Grabbed by the Ghoulies and the remake of their N64 cult classic Conker's Bad Fur Day.  While both became or maintained a cult status, neither was a tremendous success for the company (although numbers are hard to find), and generally Rare were trending downwards in popularity, with some hope for the ensuing seventh generation of consoles.  Rare managed two release titles for the Xbox 360, the middling Kameo: Elements of Power and the derided Perfect Dark Zero, cementing the opinion the "good days" of Rare were now long gone. 

Viva Pinata didn't seem to have a lot of hype, partially due to a marketing campaign directed at anyone but die hard Rare fans.  Viva Pinata decided on a kid-focused marketing campaign, with a childish (and rather awful) tie-in TV show on cable.  The release of Viva Pinata was one of secret admiration, where the reviews were stellar but just about everyone, whether teen or adult, didn't seem to like to openly admit they liked the game.  Jokes on sites like Roosterteeth were common, about how they secretly loved the game but were afraid of publicly being known to play it.  The identity of Viva Pinata was somewhat alienating, partially due to its colorful, cute art style that heavily contrasted the trend of gritty, violent "adult" games at the time, and partially for the concept which was difficult to make appealing in words: you built a garden to attract colorful pinatas to take residence.

Viva Pinata is a great game, an unsung cult classic to be that still gets underrepresented whenever Rare or the seventh generation of consoles are mentioned.  It's the sort of game that would have done well if it had come out today on the Switch or Steam, but alas its timing was too poor.  It's mechanically simple, but remarkably busy without feeling as though it was wasting your time.  The premise is pretty well as simple as it sounds: build a garden and try to attract pinatas to take residence.  The goal of the game is virtually nonexistent outside of whatever thing it is you take interest in.  The closest the game gets to a specified goal is by throwing obstacles in your path, primarily something called the Tower of Sour.  Sour pinatas will show up as you level up, and will try to disrupt your gardening or your pinatas to some degree or another, each having a different annoying mechanic to overcome.  In order to stop these annoyances, you must meet some requirement to convert them into normal pinatas and take residence in your garden.  Then, a new totem will be added to the Tower of Sour, blocking the sour form of that pinata from showing up again. 

Outside of that, however, you are set free to do as you please.  Getting pinatas is a multi-step process, and will easily take most of your time if you have particular pinatas in mind.  You must reach a certain requirement for them to show up, then another for them to visit, and then yet another for them to become residents.  Often these tasks are linear, such as they will show up if you have a fruit tree, visit if you have a certain amount of that fruit in your garden, and become residents after they've eaten so much of said fruit.  You're given a journal where your stats are kept track of, whether that be what awards you've gained or what pinatas are currently residents.  Awards can be given to you for the appear, visit, and resident requirements, as well as awards for getting them to romance and breed, and to be a "master romancer" (which, in truth, is just having seven in your garden at a given time, regardless of whether you bred them), and to discover the three variants most species have.  Variants are usually discovered after you make a pinata eat a certain thing, which will change their color.  Some pinatas don't have variants, rather changing into different pinatas altogether, such as the butterfly.

Viva Pinata is a series of accomplishments you are never asked explicitly to achieve, making the play of this game more or less a sandbox.  Master romancing is a sincere challenge for several of the species, and some species, such as the dragon or the eagle, can be a challenge just to resident.  If you are a "catch them all" type of person, you'll quickly realize that one garden isn't enough.  The game virtually encourages you to make several, each with a different theme for different pinatas.  Some need a lot of grass, for example, while others need a lot of water.  A myriad of plants are needed if you compile the requirements for every species, more than the limit of plants you are allowed in a particular garden.  Managing multiple gardens can be difficult, but your level and money carry over between them, like you are some garden entrepreneur.  Making multiple gardens, however, brings up one of the biggest issues with the game.

There isn't much in the way of "ease of use" in Viva Pinata.  Getting your garden ready means whacking the hard dirt that takes up much of your lot, which can take quite awhile, upwards of 15 or more minutes.  There is no convenient way of going about it, unfortunately, making it an extremely slow process.  Making water features, likewise, requires you digging in small amounts with a relatively slow animation, which makes gardens with a heavy amount of water relatively exhausting to landscape.  Menus also have a series of animations the game wants to go through, making any sort of menu-led task arduous, especially when all you want is a simple seed to plant.  To buy and plant a seed, you need to first hit X to bring up the menu, point to the town along the dial, then find the right town person along the next dial, wait for a time consuming transition to play out, select "buy", wait for an animation, pick the seeds, wait for an animation, pick the seed of choice, wait for the transition animation, then pick where you want to plant the seed, hit Y to checkout, hit A to select "yes", then hit select to back out and return to your garden.  You have to do this with just about anything you want to buy.  You can buy multiple of the same thing without returning to a menu if you so like, but if you want, say, multiple types of seeds,  you will have to hit Y again after checkout to return to the shop, and go through all of those animations again.  It is a slow process, one you get rather better at as you progress through the game, but it never really softens the blow of how tedious this design is, even though the character in the shop is pleasant.  

The tedium of the game's menu system and of setting up your garden is, at least, somewhat forgivable when you consider the context of the game.  This was a year after the Xbox 360's release, and pushing the presentation of the seventh generation of games was all the rage.  A lot of AAA games of the time were trying out lots of fancy menu animations and style to try and really sell that "next gen" feel and set them apart at the outset from the games that came out before.  It's not an excuse, certainly, but it is grounds for an understanding.  It was almost like creative experimentation.  Games would only add more ease-of-use features as the generation would plod along, attempting to strike a mid-point between the hardcore and the casual that would end up creating more of a divide than anything.

The dated aspects of Viva Pinata aside, there is a tremendous glee while playing, trying to get your disobedient pinatas to live together.  It's like a collect-a-thon met a management sim and made a colorful, joy-filled mess on your screen.  There's a lot of character you can give to your gardens as you improve, and you can individualize (up to three) pinatas of a species through their variants.  It feels personalized and fun, and can easily eat away hours of your day if you aren't careful.  Collect-a-thons and management sims are two of my favorite genres, and I relish their combination here and with such style.  The game has a quirky character unique to itself, from the snarky villagers that joke about their inadequacies or their superficial relationship to you, to decidedly multi-cultural design of most of the models in the game.  Viva Pinata has that oddity quality you get from creative Japanese games like Katamari Damacy, where there doesn't seem to be contemporaries, either before it or after it.  Looking for games like Viva Pinata is futile except for games that have one minor aspect that appeals to a certain mechanic, such as the farm life of Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, or the indirect play of Animal Crossing.  There are snippets everywhere, but no one else has them all in one place the way Viva Pinata does, outside of its sequel which seemed to release silently with little fanfare in 2008.  Viva Pinata is a lovely game, original in concept and easy to pick up, hard to put down.  It swaddles you with management and self-imposed objectives provoked from its systems, and coos you into a gentle peace with its color and style.  It has its problems, but the delight far outweighs the burden.



9.0   

[Game Review] World of Final Fantasy

It is rare that I review a game that I didn't finish.  For what it is worth, I sincerely tried with World of Final Fantasy, reaching a little past the mid-way point before I couldn't bear to put up with it any longer.  This isn't to say that World of Final Fantasy is an outright awful game, just that it isn't remotely engaging.  World of Final Fantasy is in the Pokemon vein of monster collecting RPGs, where you are set loose on a world full of colorful and powerful monsters to fight, collect, and train to use as the story progresses.  Obvious from the title, the game utilizes Final Fantasy monsters and summons to fill out its collectible world, an honestly great idea for a game.  The issue is . . . well, there are a lot of issues.

Firstly, and probably the least offensive, is that the story is bad.  You follow two twins, Reynn and Lann, who are supposedly prophetic characters that can capture 'mirages', this game's name for the monsters, and use them to save the world.  The plot itself is standard Final Fantasy fare, but its execution is decidedly not.  Reynn and Lann aren't remotely likable, making cringe-worthy jokes about body odor or how Lann is the dumber twin.  Phrases like "What the honk?" are a common occurrence.  It's painful to get through, but the game is at least somewhat apologetic for this, allowing you to fast forward through the cutscenes at your leisure (and the battles, thankfully, but more on that later).  There's a thesis point I'll get to that will forgive this plot later, for the most part, so for now mark that it is bad and grating.

More offensively, the game's mechanics are interesting, but hardly utilized.  The game uses your basic type-weakness system you'd expect from any JRPG, let alone a monster collector game, but with a twist.  Monsters you collect don't fight one-on-one, or even in a party, as you would in Dragon Quest.  Instead, you create a 'stack', where you literally stack the monsters on top of one of the two twins.  As ridiculous as this looks, it allows for some interesting mechanics.  When monsters are in a stack, their stats are overlayed.  Health is compounded, resistances will overlap weaknesses and weaknesses will overlap null modifiers on elements, allowing you to do some neat customization as far as party makeup is concerned.  You get two stacks - one for each twin - but stacks aren't unrestricted.  To stack creatures on top of one another, you have to pay attention to their size.  Small stacks on top of Medium, Medium on top of Large, and XL acts as brief summon that will temporarily replace your two stacks as one, powerful creature in which to fight with.  You can have up to two monsters per stack, as the twin of your choice takes up a place size.  The twins have two sizes, called (ugg) Lilikin, where they are medium sized chibi-like design, or Jiant, where they are large and with a design even Kingdom Hearts would reject.  You can always have a small monster in a stack, but large and medium are dependent on which size you want for either twin.  You can pre-load stacks for each size, and switch between them with the press of a button so long as you are not in battle, allowing for two stacks per twin to better prepare for different situations.  In theory, that is.

Monsters each have a skill tree associated with them.  As they level up, they are granted skill points to be spent on the skill tree, and, if made far enough along the skill tree, can even transfigure, or evolve in Pokemon terms, into the next form, unlocking another skill tree.  There are several variants for most of the monsters, each with their own skill tree, all of which can be overlapped to better tweak your monster the way you want.  This mechanic is incredibly cool, and, when you consider that you can also devolve your monsters so as to retain certain sizes for certain stacks, you are given quite a bit of leeway for customization of your party.  The skill trees trivialize some aspects of gameplay, however, making it easy to stick with only a few monsters for a bulk of what you will encounter, but it's still a unique mechanic and without multiplayer, I don't see this as much of a problem like it would if it were implemented in Pokemon.

The issue with these mechanics are in how little they are challenged, if you could call anything within the game a challenge anyway.  Pokemon is easy, sure, but you still need to know type advantage in order to play.  I was able to use two fire builds against a fire boss without so much as using a potion.  There is nothing in this game to properly challenge your understanding of the mechanics, making the mechanics purely masturbatory to those who want to use them.  The enemies and bosses are, essentially, in mock of progression, because otherwise this game is little more than a gimmick.  This is furthered by the railroading of the game's progression. 

While an open world is certainly not necessarily needed for a monster collecting game, the genre feels odd without it.  You are hard-lined into narrow hallways throughout World of Final Fantasy, with minor detours for chests and optional bosses (of which are equally easy).  Given the game's primary mechanic is in catching monsters, it seems odd that the game would feel so narrow, rather than wilds that would contextualize the monsters.  It feels ultimately gamey in the worst way, even if that isn't an overtly bad criticism.  You can go back to previous areas with little blocking your way, so in a sense the sentiment is there, but it is a thin sentiment at best.  A minor criticism that feels ballooned due to the game it is contextualized within.

Your primary reason for playing, the monster collecting, is an arduous task at best.  Collecting monsters has some neat mechanics involved, primarily having to meet certain conditions before a monster can be caught, such as lowering its HP or causing it a specific status ailment.  The conditions are interesting, and add a level of skill and know-how in order to pull off, something I genuinely liked, but the catch rates are extremely low.  Catch rates are modified by several factors.  Certain monsters have a "Once Per Battle" condition, which, when met, has a high catch rate, which makes sense.  Others will have their catch rate modified by the amount of health and how many times in a battle this particular monster has reached its catch condition.  If the health isn't low and the catch condition hasn't been met more than once, you could be looking at a 10% catch rate, even for a lowly little monster.  This makes catching most of the monsters in this game a trial of patience at best.  Worse, the skill trees and stack system make a lot of monsters more or less a lateral change, not worth the effort unless you have a fetish for using type weakness, since the game is obviously not going to challenge you on that front.  What all of this coalesces into is a lot of interesting ideas that don't work together and actively try your patience in its attempt. 

I think laziness would be the easiest answer as to how this game came to be what it is, but I don't think that is the correct answer.  The game had a lot of work put into parts of it.  The models generally look good, the concepts underneath the hood are interesting, and the appreciation shown for different games in the Final Fantasy series is a nice touch (even if there may be ulterior motives).  The port itself is bad (locked, ugly framerate and one of the worst keyboard configurations I've ever played - note: play with a controller), but that is a different category of laziness than the design.  My theory is that the game was designed as a gateway for kids to get into Final Fantasy, as the series can be difficult to get into if you haven't been initiated.  The humor of the game is decidedly 10-year-old vogue, the story played more for goofy hi-jinks than for drama or character, and it provides familiarity with the greater Final Fantasy franchise through monsters, summons, characters, and locations from just about every game.  It is a marketing ploy, an investment in a new, less JRPG savvy market that won't be motivated by nostalgia of Final Fantasy's multiple golden ages in order to follow with the newer series' output.  It's the anime or card game that is released along with a new game.  It's a non-intimidating introduction for those wishing to dip their feet in and check what this dynastic franchise is all about.

Largely, I can forgive aspects of the game for this.  The plot was aimed at a younger audience, fine.  The design is cute, fine.  Several of the characters look like they were drafts of Kingdom Hearts characters, fine (no offense to Kingdom Hearts, a good series in its own right).  But to introduce newcomers to the franchise without also easing them into any sort of mechanical know-how makes this a failure.  Interest in the series is not going to help newcomers wrap their head around the materia system, or the odd programmable thing going on in Final Fantasy XII.  The mechanics don't have to introduce every system known to the Final Fantasy universe, but it should at least shoehorn newcomers into the basic principles of JRPG combat and stat management/gear.  There is more than one way to skin this game, and no matter which approach you take, the game fails.  It's a disappointment, not just because it wasn't particularly fun for me, but because there is little here to be fun for anyone.  There's enough here to mess around with, but it will be a futile effort.  If anything, the game made me, someone who is already into the series, want to play another Final Fantasy game just to wash this game's taste out of my mouth.



5.0 

[Game Review] What Never Was

It feels disingenuous to review What Never Was just as it feels disingenuous to call it a game.  What it is more than anything is a playable demo, a proof of concept, or a teaser.  In What Never Was you play as a young woman who is burdened with packing away her late grandfather's things from his attic, but what you find is essentially a puzzle.  Journal entries can be found around the small attic, and it becomes quickly apparent there is a mystery to be solved, something started by your grandfather that you have unknowingly inherited.

The game plays much like most escape-the-room type games do, albeit without the central drama encouraging you the need for escape.  Escaping is not the central goal here, but mechanically it works very similar.  You look around the small room for interactable objects and try to see what changes you can make to them, slowly progressing towards some sort of solved state that then redirects you to another object in the room.  All the while, through journal entries and the proposed solutions to the puzzle-objects in the attic, a story is being alluded to you, one of your grandfathers obsession of mystical objects and runes that carry some significance you can't quite grasp.

And grasp you shan't, because this game is a teaser for a game that hasn't so much as announced its development, which makes you wonder if there is a follow up at all.  The game is apparently made by one or two individuals (one, by my rudimentary research), and for a first release the game shows some promise.  There is a Myst quality to the grandfather's brief tape recording that got me thinking of Atrus, and I was hoping to learn of other worlds, but the game is too short to make anything of its allusions.  There's the usual amateurish rough edges here and there - stiff voice acting, repeated lines to the point of annoyance, rough looking 3D models - but given the context these are things you shouldn't really judge it on.  They are necessary stepping stones, and as the game was released for free you can hardly judge them for not spending the money to refine what they have.  The price equally indicates my feeling that this is more a proof-of-concept than a game, and reinforcing this is the fact the game can be completed, all achievements collected, in about 30 min.

I went in expecting a walking simulator, and was surprised to be given a puzzle game, but the puzzles aren't worth much.  I have a general rule of thumb that I try to review everything I play so long as I beat them, but here I feel a bit of mixed feelings.  The game is apparently not finished, and not meant to be taken under critical consideration, but it also represents a promise to a final product (in theory), and that promise is not particularly well made.  I'd be interested in seeing what the end result is simply because I've played the teaser already and have some kind of minimum level of investment, but the game shows little in the way of promise that it will be anything better.  The puzzles were obvious, the plot muddied with mysticism that didn't indicate much depth, and the one thing it may stand on is its atmosphere, which isn't great but is worth mentioning as a positive.  That said, I have good will towards the developers for releasing this for free.  It makes it harmless, which is furthered by its short length.  While I found nothing particularly noteworthy in the game itself, it doesn't mean the premise couldn't be worked into something interesting in the future.  Four elements are discussed within the game's mythos, and if those represented, say, four major segments of a full release, each with major puzzles spread out over a world, I would definitely be down for that.  As such, despite no evidence to convince me, there are enough elements here that I've convinced myself into anticipation.  As much as I would like to give the game a rating for posterity, so I could look back and know what I felt at the time (the primary reason for this blog), I would feel guilty if I did when the game is simply not asking for it.  So I'll leave this score-less, and say I don't think it's worth playing, but it is worth looking forward to whatever these developers work on next.     

[Game Review] Persona 4: Golden

Persona 5 may have made the series a household name, but it was Persona 4 that broke the ice.  The Persona series, a spin-off of the cult-classic JRPG alumni series Shin Megami Tensei, struck a unique niche in the JRPG genre.  It managed to thread monster catching, life-sim, JRPG, and visual novel games into one complete package.  The Persona series has been around since the PS1, but it was the PS2 counterparts that gained traction in the west.  The odd synergy of genres, as well as their dedication to story and characters, made it stand out as a unique, niche game.  It also made the games incredibly long, furthering their niche appeal.

Persona 4 released on the PS2 in 2008, well into the early years of the PS3.  An updated version of the game, adding two new characters to befriend as well as more in game and post game content, was released as Persona 4: Golden on the PS Vita in 2012.  The idea of PC ports for the Persona series has been long asked for by fans, and after years of waiting, Persona 4: Golden has been ported to Steam. 

Persona 4: Golden follows a protagonist canonically named Yu (though you get to name him yourself), as he is suddenly shipped to the small town of Inaba from the city to live with his uncle for reasons that don't matter.  Yu is forced to integrate with a new school, make new friends, and get used to the simple, small town life, when a a series of murders start to disrupt the tranquility of Inaba.  When Yu realizes that he can enter a TV realm that acts as a dark reflection of Inaba's hidden and suppressed feelings, he finds the killer is using the realm to murder his victims, and Yu and his friends are the only ones who can stop them.  The realm is full of shadows, unaccepted shades of people who are hostile to anyone who enters, and when the fog rolls into the floodplains of Inaba, anyone in the TV world is killed.

The game plays out like a detective story of sorts.  You gather a group of friends as the plot progresses, each being party members for when you go into the dungeons in the TV world.  You and your friends try to thwart the killer by saving those thrown into the TV.   The killer's victims' subconscious manifests itself as a dungeon where you must climb until you reach a final boss battle that represents their repressed persona, the 'face' they use to interact with the world and the ego struggles that lie beneath it.  The persona and shadow angle is taken from Jungian psychology and his theories on the collective subconscious, and the story gets some mileage out of this.  The search for the killer while traipsing around in the town's repressed subconscious allows for societal and cultural reflection, albeit through the lens of (somewhat tame) anime.  Subtlety is in Persona 4, believe it or not, but its a subtlety you will have to work for.  The game will want to spell out most of what it has to say through its plot, but leaves gaps for you to speculate and tie in all of the themes together.  Persona 4 is extremely story focused, meaning you will read easily a novel's worth of text just going through the main story, let alone finding and working through all of the various side stories tied to your social links.

Before we get into social links, however, we have to talk about how this game works in the first place.  Persona follows a calendar system, where the game and some of its objectives have to be completed by a certain date or it is game over.  Time passes on a given day either by story beats (which can take weeks from you, so plan accordingly) or by activities done in that slot.  On most days, your mornings will be spent at school, where you may have to answer a question in class, or you may just skip forward to after school.  After school is the time slot you can hang with friends, shop, take a part-time job, or join a school club.  Managing your time is paramount to doing well in Persona, and is one of its many defining traits.  Knowing which social links to grow, when to run through the dungeon to get it done before the allotted time (usually you have a couple weeks to finish a dungeon before game over), and when to get stats up is a majority of the game.  Each one of these life-sim aspects will feed into another part of the game in one way or another.  Your social stats, being courage, knowledge, understanding, etc. will help you with certain social checks when trying to grow social links.  Some social links cannot be grown without having the proper stat to engage with them, meaning working on these stats is important for the early and mid part of the game. 

The social links help in persona fusion, allowing for you to make stronger personas to use in the dungeons.  Personas are basically Pokemon, where you can get them from battle in dungeons.  You can sacrifice multiple personas together into a fusion to make stronger personas, so long as they don't exceed your level when they are fused.  Social links allow you to get around this by gifting a huge experience bonus to a fused persona corresponding with the social link's typing at the time of fusion, allowing for personas to level up past you at creation if you have a corresponding social link leveled up high enough.  Persona fusion also allows for unique personas, such as those of the Tower arcana which can only be acquired through fusion.  The strongest personas in the game are fusion only, as well.  Fusion also has the handy mechanic of allowing you to inherit certain spells, attacks, and buffs from the personas comprising the fusion.  This can allow you to build personas with unique builds to better face future dungeons.

Persona 4, and the series in general, has always had a fun angle on the monster-catching JRPG.  Utilizing weaknesses in a Persona game is an absolute must.  If you exploit a weakness, the enemy is downed and you get a "one more" which allows you another attack.  If all enemies are downed you get an "all out attack", which does a lot of damage.  It's nothing terribly unique, but it makes the sometimes sluggish nature of turn based combat more involved than it would otherwise, giving you great strengths and great weakness to type exploitation.  The JRPG side of the game has never been Persona's strongest suit, but it's not particularly weak either.

Persona 4 is quite a bit lighter than other entries in the series, including its follow up.  There's a summery feel to the experience, of hanging out with friends and trying to hold onto youth as some psychological horror rears its head, threatening to make you grow up faster than you want to.  All of the characters are rather likable, though they rely heavily on anime cliche, and largely this has to do with their chemistry with one another.  Going through the social link plotlines of the characters usually gives predictable results, and is easily the most disappointing thing about the game, but when they are in a group playing off of one another there is a synergy to them that is delightful.  This being anime-type writing from the late 00s, your mileage will certainly vary on the problematic content in the game, although all of it stays in the shallow end for the most part.  You have your sexually confused masculine character the game can't seem to just call pan (or bi, in this case, as it was the 00s and that's what they would have said), and sexism is, of course, played for laughs.  But only sometimes and with certain characters does it risk to tip over into annoyingly pathological.  I was able to stomach it, but I had to sigh my way through chunks of its plot and character development.

Persona 4: Golden threads together its gameplay and plot remarkably well, but if I had a criticism to level at it it would be its absurdly long runtime.  While your average runtime will more than likely range in and around 70 hours, I found myself, despite playing at a relatively quick pace, running into the 90 hour range before the end.  Part of this has to do with the way the plot dances around possible endings before carrying on, and part of it has to do with an epilogue (plus bonus dungeon I accidentally got stuck doing) that lasts several hours, long enough for a relatively brisk game in and of itself.  And while the plot does have a nice wrap up in the end (depending on your ending), there is a lot of messing about before you get there.  This comes a bit as a double edged sword, as the times when the game takes our characters on a trip, such as to an outside town, the beach, or skiing, it really lets the characters run wild and it is incredibly fun, paying off the visual novel aspect wonderfully.  But it bloats the time greatly with little gameplay involved.  Again, this will come down to taste, and I lean towards positive, but it did nag me the closer I got to the end and I was beginning to stress about all of the small tasks I still wanted to complete.

Persona 4: Golden has far more fun characters than in Persona 5, but it will hardly convince an acolyte of the latter game of its superiority.  Regardless, Persona 4 is an all-encompassing epic in just about every meaning of the word, full of activities, characters to meet, an addictive monster catching loop, and a mystery with a surprising amount of detective work once things start to tail.  It's mechanics interweave with one another in a way unique to the gaming sphere, and with its quality of life improvements over Persona 3, it is hard not to recommend Persona 4: Golden as your first game in the series, even with Persona 5's stylish look.  Persona is a Goliath of a JRPG, one that is both large and incredibly strong, and Persona 4: Golden just about reaches its perfect potential.  

 

9.5

[Game Review] Batman: Arkham Asylum

Batman: Arkham Asylum was released at an extremely fortuitous moment.  It released in 2009, a year after The Dark Knight blew expectations out of the water for superhero flicks and gave the Batman IP a new lease on life, and about a decade before the MCU released its umpteenth entry, furthering superhero fatigue (also, it was a year before the first Avengers film, which would change the direction of superhero films, and thus media, to come).  It released in the middle of the seventh generation of consoles, where the likes of Assasin's Creed and Bioshock had already started trends that would soon take off (at times to the point of annoyance), but whose trends still felt fresh and interesting.  It wasn't just that Arkham Asylum was a good superhero game, it was that it was a good superhero game at the right time.

Batman: Arkham Asylum's nearly universal praise at the time of its release is certainly something to take into account when talking about the game, because many of its elements have dated somewhat and an examination of the game can feel oddly dissonant if not properly considered with the time in which it was released.  What I mean is that several of the things Arkham Asylum got praised for - its combat, its exploration, the way it feels like you are actually Batman - can be turned on its head from a modern perspective, but the seventh generation of consoles has an identity that is easy to forget since much of what comprised that identity has become vilified in the eight generation.  In particular, heavily marked maps, sticky, almost one-button combat, and general gameplay decisions meant to invoke a feeling rather than mechanical depth.  The seventh generation of consoles was obsessed with making games as approachable as possible, while trying to shrink the tutorial times of the previous generation.  It was about streamlining, about making things have a nice smooth feel at the expense of depth, and Asylum isn't much different.

Arkham Asylum plays with a few types of genres that it lightly threads into one another, though without much depth that progenitors of these genres had.  The asylum itself has metroidvania aspects, requiring backtracking with new gadgets in order to see everything, get to the next objective, or grab collectibles.  The game also has a sincere lineage in collect-a-thons, with 240 collectibles in the game.  When the game wants to be more action focused, it plays like a combo-brawler (like Double Dragon with a dash of Devil May Cry for flavor, but without any of the depth the latter could give) or like a stealth game, albeit one with extremely easy outs if you're ever caught.  It toys with the genres for the excitement the idea brings, but does not give in to their more challenging aspects.

Largely, this is okay.  The combat doesn't have much depth mostly because it can be exploited, even on the hardest difficulty.  There is actually a nice myriad of combat options to enhance your combo, but rarely are any of them needed, and more often than not they can lead to your combo meter resetting rather than making it climb.  Honestly, this is fine.  The combat is enjoyable enough and has enough variety to remain fun to the very end.  What the combat fails at is in enemy selection during combos.  The game wants the combat to feel silky smooth so you can feel as badass as Batman, but what this does is it sticks you to an enemy and when they group around you, as they do when they are in greater numbers, it can be incredibly difficult to get Batman to stop focusing on one guy and refocus on another.  A lock on feature could have helped this, but that would have inhibited the smooth play that the game is going for.  The solution, as the game presents it, is either to do a counter or to jump over the back of whatever enemy is behind you.  Each of these presents its own problem.  Jumping over enemies can be exploited to get around enemies and has virtually no weakness except it won't increase your combo meter and it won't hurt the enemies.  But it can still be exploited to maintain your combo meter, even if it is a boring way to play.  The counter system is a bit more tricky.  It's easy enough to pull off a counter, but when swamped with groups of enemies, you will find yourself having to chain counters together with no way out.  Counters do very little damage, so it can exacerbate the combat time, which means you need to get out of the area in order to start walloping enemies again.  There are tricks that can be used, such as a stun, throwing a batarang, or using the bat claw to displace enemies from attacking stances, which adds to the depth, but in higher numbers this will not get you out of the woods of a loop of counter attacks as there will be enough people needing to be countered that by the time you are done with them, those you stunned are back on their feet and swinging.  The combat is nearly very good, but just misses the mark by making things feel too sticky for you to reliably use attacks, making counters far more required than they should be.

Stealth sections feel extremely simple.  There are easy stealth objects to interact with such as gargoyles to hang from, or grates in the floor to hide in, making being caught less of a big deal.  The game starts to exploit this reliance toward the end of the game, but only a little.  Most of your stealth is essentially placing explosives or waiting for enemies to walk alone.  You can send a batarang that emits a signal to lure someone to their lonesome end, but that's about as complicated as things get.  Take the agency in The Last of Us Part II or the planning of Splinter Cell as examples for different, more complex styles of stealth play.  Arkham Asylum wants to give the impression of stealth more than the mechanics.  It does its job, but they are rarely a challenge in the main story.  Challenge modes outside of the main story are better, requiring certain knockout conditions to get the highest score.

Exploration is probably the game's greatest strength.  Checking every nook and cranny of the asylum is quite a bit of fun, even if the island's general design doesn't make much practical sense (those botanical gardens look extremely expensive for a place made for super villains).  Most of the exploration is used to hide the Riddler collectibles.  These collectibles are mostly good, but generally a mixed bag.  Most of the trophies to collect are obvious, and are as simple as waiting for you to get the proper tool that allows you to reach them.  Smashing Joker teeth as a part of the collectibles feels like XP padding (as though this game really needed XP in the first place - another seventh generation trend).  Collecting tapes of the super villains in therapy is actually one of the best uses of this game cliche, so they get a pass for their inclusion.  The best collectible in the game, then, is the riddles themselves and the Chronicles of Arkham.  The Chronicles of Arkham are notes left by Amadeus Arkham, the asylum's founder, and his gradual loss of sanity.  The story revolving around these collectibles is somewhat interesting, even though the payoff (which I won't spoil) is somewhat disappointing.  The other riddles, which usually have you taking a picture of a particular location as the answer, are actually a lot of fun, usually playing on your knowledge of Batman villains.  As a fan of the comics (though not all that dedicated), I can't tell if they are easy for the uninitiated, but several gave me the impression that they would be solvable by most anyone.  It helps that because there are so many reused assets, seeing anything unique usually indicates it has something to do with a riddle.  The riddles can be aped this way, but largely I'd have to give a win over to the riddles.  They were fun, they rewarded my enjoyment of the subject matter, and they added fan service in a meaningful way by making them collectibles.

Arkham Asylum's biggest claim to fame, however, was in how it made you actually feel like Batman.  It's hard to make this into any sort of objective statement, but the game feels immersive as a piece of Batman lore.  Even though it is obvious the game acts as a parallel universe to the comic book Batmans, it feels believable as a Batman story.  They want monsters, they use a Batman resource to make them.  They want chaos, they use Batman lore to instigate it.  They utilize the IP for just about everything they want to include, and it feels very snugly Batman with few if any outliers that give it a "game" feel over a Batman feel.  Key to this is casting several voices from the Batman: The Animated Series show, one of the best non-comic representations of the character and his world to date.  Some of the designs feel a bit overdone here and there, but largely they appeal to the aesthetic and presentation you'd expect to a faithful Batman production.  Saying the game makes you feel like Batman feels pretty apt, because the game is concerned first and foremost with being a Batman property, and utilizing that property to make a game.

Despite my criticisms about how it has dated, Batman: Arkham Asylum holds up as an incredibly fun game, even if it isn't quite up to snuff on the game front.  Asylum is about a feeling more than it is about mechanics, and that can be a success it takes with it.  It feels distinctly a game of its generation, almost to the point of being a poster boy for certain design trends of the time, but that gives the game a certain nostalgic twist I wasn't expecting.  It may not hold up as the classic many remember it to be, but it remains debatably the best Batman game to date, with only its direct sequel giving it contention.



8.0           

[Game Review] Firewatch

Firewatch has been on my short list of walking simulators I want to play for some time now.  I like narratives, and I particularly like experiencing them in an interactive way, so walking simulators have become a few of my favorite (albeit not the greatest) games of the last decade.  They rarely wow you unless their story is engrossing, but occasionally you find a Gone Home or a What Remains of Edith Finch brewing up a storm of inspiration deep within the drawer of the genre.

Firewatch was one of those like I mentioned that had caught the eyes of critics and players alike.  Partly this is for superficial reasons, because the game was easy to make look good with in game photos.  It was often joked to be a "wallpaper simulator" because of its pretty rendition of the Wyoming wilderness.  And while the game can look rather nice here and there, I wasn't overly wowed by it.  I usually come for story, so if the graphics look a bit clunky (such as the remarkable Sagebrush) it isn't much of a deterrent.

Firewatch's story is . . . fine?  It becomes almost hard to critically review it because of how little there is to really say about it.  That hasn't stopped many from praising it, though if you look carefully that praise comes without much in the way of explanation.  For part, I get the reason for this since the game is best experienced without spoilers, but even describing the plot in detail would only fill out a couple of sentences.  It's straight forward, with a bit of intrigue and a charismatic back-and-forth between our protagonist and the faceless Delilah to fill in the middle.  But the game's story works on a simple impression of an idea, and fails to really make that mean something.

The game ropes you into its narrative very well, spelling out a situation to your character's past and allowing you to make one of a couple of choices here and there, feeling your way through a rather difficult past that would inform the character for the rest of the game.  It's a good set up, and it gets you caring for this guy, Henry, early on before you've so much as walked a few feet in his shoes.  He's had a rough go of things, and his taking the job of firewatch at a Wyoming national park is his way of putting it behind him for the time being, letting himself breath life again.  It's obvious from the outset that, at some point, Henry will have to go back and confront what he is running away from, but until then you get to experience his attempt at brief, escapist therapy.

Rather quickly, you get roped into a friendship with Delilah, the firewatch in the zone next to yours, whose tower you can only just see to the north.  Firewatch wants us to find the chemistry between these two charming, and for a lot of people it succeeded, but it took a long time before I warmed up to either of them.  Henry comes out hostile and rude, right out the gate, and Delilah is sarcastic and far too interested in talking to someone who is plainly being an ass.  Throughout the game you will be given chances to talk to Delilah, either in noting observations around the national park or in response to comments she's made, and there's quite a bit of wiggle room here. The game is, more than it is a walking simulator, a talking simulator, where you choose how to approach the conversation you're having and choose the tone.  To my annoyance, the sarcastic choice was extremely prevalent throughout, but I can't blame the game too much for allowing for a different playstyle, regardless of my personal taste.  I went relatively kind, although avoiding one particular avenue I could tell the game designers were desperately trying to attract me to.  So while you can steer the individual conversations to your liking with a bit of fidelity, overall the game is really railroading you toward two particular 'personalities' for Henry and how he approaches his relationship to Delilah, with a third (my route) that the game puts up with but you can tell the weight at the end might have deflated a bit because of it.  Despite this, I found myself becoming attached to both Henry and Delilah, even as I began to realize that both had sincere flaws I knew I'd never see them confront.

Unlike most walking simulators, Firewatch makes an effort to feel as nonlinear as possible, although from a technical aspect it is incredibly linear.  They give you a map and a compass and let you walk around as you please, exploring the wilderness and what abandoned structures and such are out there, although there isn't really much to see.  The game will give you direction as to where to go for a given scene, while Delilah delightfully chats you up along the way.  Firewatch is smart to make this walking simulator feel more than just "hold forward to see story", asking you to also navigate with basic tools rather than dressing up a hallway with theming.  Edith Finch, for all the praise I gave that game, was technically just a hallway with nice set dressing, but that game also touted much more detailed meis en scene.  Asking for another level of engagement, even so little, is welcome in a genre that threatens to feel too samey over the course of its history.

This nonlinearity is a sham, however, and the game railroads you through a day system in which you follow a plot that gets more paranoid as you go.  The finale left some cold, and while I liked it in that it allowed the story to end without needing something extreme or wild to close up its narrative, I couldn't help but think the game didn't have much to say.  The characters you talk to or hear about are all looking for escape from something, and the theme of confronting that thing permeates the game without much of a payoff.  You are given a request at the end right before the credits roll, but it has all the impact of someone saying "the conflict of the game is X".  If the point of the game is to reflect on this habit, one of trying to breath when life suffocates you under grief and unfair responsibility, then it fails because the meat of the game has little to do with that.  If instead the spoilerriffic plot in the middle is meant to imply something about our characters or some intermingling theme about bonding, it also fails because it has nowhere to go with this theme.  The game is ideas, floated about because giving them weight would mean having to struggle with them.  Instead, the game would rather give you emotional excuses for its intrigue, even as it has no intentions of paying those off.  I enjoyed the game for what it was, but it left me feeling the whole experience was rather thin.  It's hard to make a game about escapism when your game escapes having something to say.



6.0