Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

This one is a long time coming. Enslaved is just one of those games that everyone who's played it says is good, and yet very few people end up playing it. It just has this quality that says "you don't have to play me right now, go ahead, wait until I'm cheaper". At least, this was the case for me until I finally picked it up for a measly $5 on PSN. Having now played the game to completion, I thought I would talk a bit about it, if for no other reason than to try and get straight my own opinion of it. You see, Enslaved is a really weird case to me... Allow me to explain.

Enslaved starts out really strong. From the get go you are thrown into the action with no expository introductions. The game opens with a tutorial section that is perhaps a little over done, but considering you are at the time escaping from a crashing airship, I feel as though the action excuses the tutorial a bit. Beyond the first chapter, the game does a good job of never really taking you out of the action too long. The game's story doesn't try to be over complicated, and is told largely through or in parallel to gameplay. What's more, the characters are all quite genuine, and listening to them talk is never annoying or disinteresting. In particular, Andy Serkis does a stellar job as the main character Monkey.

Monkey isn't really your average protagonist. He's a big brute, he's very angry, and everything from his voice acting to his fighting style to the dramatic kill cam the occasionally pops up really hammers home this point. He has pretty good reason to be, to. Early on in the game a girl named Trip fits a slave headband on Monkey, tying his life to hers and forcing him to do her bidding. She is terrified of Monkey, but she also realizes that he is her only hope to get home. What I found really interesting about this though, is that it very quickly becomes unclear who is the real master here. Monkey may have to do what Trip commands, but at the same time Monkey has no qualms telling Trip what to do. In fact, giving Trip orders is a somewhat big part of the gameplay. It's not even annoying, like most escorting tends to be. Seeing how the two characters interact in such a strange, stressful situation is pretty cool, even if where it all leads is fairly predictable.

Unfortunately, that's kind of the story of Enslaved I feel. On the surface everything looks and feels pretty stellar. The game actually reminds me a lot of Uncharted, which is pretty high praise. The graphics are superb and colorful, the gameplay does a good job of mixing combat, climbing and puzzles. Even the way Monkey runs around feels similar to controlling Drake. Everything is really well polished and the presentation is excellent. And yet... The game feels lacking somehow. Like they were trying to paint this beautiful picture, and they did, except instead of painting it on canvas they were painting on printer paper. Sure what's there is a work of art, but what's underneath isn't so great, and it drags down the quality as a whole.

None of the issues behind Enslaved are massive, thankfully. Most of it comes down to minor annoyances. The camera is wonky here, jumping from this pipe to that pipe is weirdly picky, there are a few too many platforming sections, the few puzzles in the game, are tedious and not very rewarding, the game feels like it wasn't designed with regenerating health in mind (granted, it's an optional upgrade) etc. Probably the biggest complaint is the combat. There isn't as much of it as you might think, but what's there is pretty simplistic. You just kind of beat on things until they die, and it's way too easy up until about 2/3 of the way through the game. At that point you have to start using your abilities a little more wisely, but combat transitions straight from mindless to irritating. Enemies can decide they want to be blocking or start attacking you at seemingly any time and there isn't really anything you can do about it. Combat just felt tedious, and considering how well Monkey's rage is conveyed, you would think smashing mechs would be more fun. There are a couple hours in the middle where the game really drags, too.

I suppose what I'm trying to say here is that, Enslaved is definitely an impressive game, I enjoyed playing it. It's a much better experience than a game, though. It's really weird to me, to see a game with so much polish have so many little design issues. One would think that part of polishing the game would be also tweaking the design, but the issues are there none the less. Most of them are pretty easily overlooked, but they come up often enough that it feels like there's always something to be annoyed at. It's pretty common to see a game with lots of potential end up being mediocre, but Enslaved is perhaps the first game I've seen that is mediocre at it's core, but polished so heavily that it ended up being pretty darn good. If you are more willing to overlook gameplay flaws (and I'm almost positive that you are) Enslaved is definitely worth checking out.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Combat Analysis

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is a game that was well received critically, but received a somewhat more mixed reception from gamers. This isn't that surprising, considering the game did a lot of things that were bound to upset fans of the series, including retconning the story, being 3D, being level based, etc. That said, the game was still excellent in a lot of ways. The game's environments were all very well crafted, and showed a lot of imagination. The soundtrack was quite epic, but never got in the way. The story was a pretty interesting re-imagining of the origins of Dracula and the Belmont clan. It's a game with a lot of meat to it, and unsurprisingly, a lot of evil creatures to kill. That's where this post comes in. Today I will be taking a look at what the game's combat did right, and where it could be improved.

So to kick things off, what exactly is the combat like? Well on the surface it looks and feels a lot like God of War. Gabriel Belmont uses his trusty Combat Cross to whip at things from a distance, make combos, send enemies skyward, grab enemies for dramatic finishers, etc. On it's own it's a decent imitation of God of War, but things start getting interesting as you progress in the game and obtain the light and shadow magic. These powers each come with their own magic bar, and can be toggled on at any time to add special effects to your normal attacks, and enable the use of some special abilities. Light magic causes your attacks to heal you, while shadow magic does extra damage to your enemies. These attacks drain your magic, and the main way to restore it is using the game's focus system. As you attack enemies focus is gained, with bigger combos generating it faster. Inactivity will slowly drain focus, while getting hit will reset it entirely. While in a fully focused state, any time an enemy is attacked they will generate magic orbs which can later be absorbed to fill your magic.

This system creates a really interesting dance between keeping yourself alive, keeping your magic reserves high, and actually using your magic. A lot of thought can be put into how best to manage the resources available to you to best make it through a fight. Should you use shadow magic to finish the fight quickly? What if you get hit, then you need to heal yourself and you won't have any focus to refill that magic. When do you build your focus? You can't do that and heal at the same time. When do you switch your magic back on when your focus fills? Do you just fill up your magic, or do you generate extra magic orbs in case you need them later? The issue here is that as interesting as this system is in theory, it has some problems in practice. For one, it just doesn't really fit well with the way the game's combat actually works, and for another it rewards perfect play too well while over-punishing imperfect play. Allow me to explain:

The issues with Castlevania's combat can basically all be boiled down to, it's too easy to get hit. Enemies in Lords of Shadow tend to either appear in large numbers, or have very unpredictable / poorly telegraphed attacks, or some combination therein. Most fights consist of enemies dashing and slashing all over the place, and it gets very hard to react to everything going on. When a particularly nasty attack is incoming they are always telegraphed, but the window to react to it without getting hit is small. In fact the reaction window feels very similar in length to how long you are locked into an animation while attacking or rolling. It seems to me that the intention was that the player should block a lot of these attacks, but this is made needlessly hard by the game's controls. For some reason it was decided that the block button should be the same as the roll button. Holding the button blocks, pressing the button while holding the L-stick causes you to roll in that direction. The issue is that in combat you are constantly using the L-stick to move Gabriel, to direct where he should be attacking, whatever. So attempted blocks frequently instead cause you to roll into the attack you are trying to block. I honestly believe that if rolling had been assigned to the R-stick instead (which is not used for anything ever) a lot of the combat's issues would have been alleviated.

But back to the issue at hand, getting hit is especially bad in Lords of Shadow. Sure, you lose some life, but the implications are much more than that. You basically have three resources in combat: health, focus, and magic. As I described earlier, you use focus to generate magic and you use magic to heal health. The issue is that getting hit drains all three resources simultaneously. Damage reduces health and resets your focus, while also necessitating that you expend magic to heal. In other words, even the smallest of hits can mess up your rhythm entirely. It's incredibly frustrating to constantly be low on magic because the odd stupid attack hits you. On the flip side of things, if you do manage to fill your focus you are typically given an absolutely absurd amount of magic orbs in a short period of time - quite possibly more than you know what to do with. In other words the punishment for being hit is too big, and so is the reward for not being hit. 100% of the rewards are at the top of the scale, and anything but perfect play results in starvation.

With all that said however, I will say that there are merits to both extremes of this system. Low magic situations tend to feel very intense and scrappy - you are literally fighting for your life. If you can't keep your combo going, you won't be able to keep healing yourself. On the flip side, when you fill your focus the reward is pretty big and you feel unbeatable. However that said, I personally would have still preferred if the system had a bit more even of a gradient. For example, perhaps every attack should have a small chance to generate orbs once your focus is greater than 50%, with the chance and volume of orbs increasing as your focus approaches 100%. You still have low magic situations, but you at least get something if you're playing decently. You don't feel like you have to play perfectly to survive, but if you are playing really well the reward is still big. That's my thought anyways. It's fun trying to manage your resources, but you can't exactly manage resources if the game is starving you.

In the end of the day, I think Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is still a very competent title. If it's combat was a little better, the game probably could have been great, though. It will be very interesting to see what changes Lords of Shadow 2 makes when the game comes out in the end of February. If the demo is any indication it seems like the focus system has been forsaken entirely in favor of automatically regenerating magic. I wait with bated breath.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Thoughts

Another year, another Assassin's Creed game. Except somehow it seems that I'm perpetually 2 years behind the curve here. Last year I played Brotherhood, and now a year later I've finally gotten around to playing Revelations. I guess the thing is, I have something of a love/hate relationship with Assassin's Creed. I love climbing about historical settings hitting up all the little icons on my map. However Assassin's Creed games always seem to know just how to frustrate the bejesus out of me. It seems to be the trend that, by the time I'm done with one game I'm frustrated enough that I wait a whole year to play the next one. And of course by that point, the latest title will have come out, thus perpetuating the 2 game backlog. At any rate, I knew going into Revelations that it had not been quite as well received as it's brethren. Now that I have completed the game, here are my own thoughts on the matter.

At first, I was actually pretty pleased with Revelations. One of my biggest complaints with Brotherhood was how restrictive it was. It felt like invisible walls were erected at seemingly random places all over the world. On the other hand, Revelations gives you unfettered access to pretty much the entire map and it's activities within the first hour or so of gameplay. However after playing the game, I feel like Revelations actually went too far the other way, at least for my taste. Personally I feel that the answer is somewhere in the middle. The player should have access to side missions, but they should also be encouraged to progress the story. Rather than throwing all the side content at you at once, I would prefer it be broken up a little bit. In this way it feels like your "reward" for completing all the side quests is moving on with the story, and unlocking the next area of the map. With that said, I actually feel like Brotherhood got the free roaming more right than Revelations, despite my issues with it. I just wish that divisions on the map had been more logical and better communicated.

As far as Revelations' gameplay goes, it is, unsurprisingly, pretty much identical to Brotherhood. At least on the surface. The two big additions are the hook blade and bombs. The hook blade creates some mildly interesting additions to how climbing works, but much of it seems cosmetic. The biggest difference comes in the form of being able to ride ziplines. Ziplines are certainly cool, but they really don't come up very often. Outside story missions, I only used them once or twice. As far as bombs, they seem like a fairly interesting addition, but I honestly just couldn't be bothered. The issue is that the bomb system was just too complicated to be worth it to me. It comes with an entire crafting system, three different categories of bombs, and customized bombs composed of three different parts. It's not wildly complex, I just never felt compelled to play with the system. I would use the odd bomb, but most of the time I felt that I would just rather stick with the mechanics that I had been using for the last 2-3 games.

This issue with the bombs is really indicative of a larger issue with the game on the whole, too. One thing I rather liked about Brotherhood was the way it encouraged you to use a wider array of tools to get the job done. Synchronization goals would have you experiment with different tools, and after exposing you to them the game would later give you situations where said tool would be ideal to use. In contrast, Revelations felt like I could just brute force my way through everything. I don't think I used poison more than once, and I'm pretty sure I never used the smoke bomb, both of which were staples in Brotherhood. I never really saw the need. It felt like I could play through the entire game using nothing but the wrist blade and throwing knives. On top of this, I never hired a single group of Thieves, Mercenaries or Romani. They were there, but they didn't really seem to serve a real purpose. It's like all these things are still in the game just because it doesn't make sense to remove functionality, but they didn't take the time to create situations where they would actually be useful.

This is kind of indicative of my feeling on the game as a whole. It feels like it was rushed. It feels like the shell of a game, like Ubisoft just took the engine from Brotherhood, modeled a new town, and shipped it. It's a good example of how important level design is. Good mechanics are great, but without a world that provides you with the proper challenges, they feel superfluous. That's not to say that Constantinople itself is poorly made, because it's a nice city. It just feels like everything about Revelations is lacking the spirit the previous games had. This is not Ezio's swan song so much as a placeholder to finish Altair's story and hold people over until Assassin's Creed III. This chapter of the story could have been skipped altogether and I don't feel like you would miss it. If anything, after the ending of Brotherhood Revelations is pretty anti-climactic. That's not to say Revelations is a bad game, it's just decent.

Character Controls That "Feel" Good

Today I'm going to tell you the secret to making a good video game (or at least, one that isn't text/menu based). The trick is to make a game that feels good to play. The story isn't that big a deal, the mechanics are trivial, the graphics and audio are on the sidelines somewhere. Everything else plays second fiddle to having a game with good controls. Many people don't realize it, but subtle nuances in the way a character responds to inputs can make a huge difference on just about every aspect of a game. You've probably played at least one game wherein as soon as you picked up the controller, your character felt sluggish and cluncky and just wrong. From minute 1 you lose most if not all interest in the game. Even when a game does have good controls, subtle decisions as to how those controls work can change a lot about how the player will play that game.

I mention all of this because over the past couple days I've run into two games that are perfect examples of the effect that small control nuances can have. Specifically, the games I am referring to are Castelvania: Circle of the Moon and Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Both games star whip-wielding members of the Belmont Clain, who have almost identical ability sets. Both are games on the Gameboy Advance, and thus have the same buttons available to them. What's most interesting though is that while both games have control issues, they are almost opposites in where those issues lie. In short, Circle of the Moon controls a lot more like the older Castlevania games - it's very slow and forces you to be a bit more premeditated about how you attack. Harmony of Dissonance on the other hand feels a lot more like controlling Alucard from Symphony of the Night - it's much faster, but the actual whip control is only so-so.

When it comes to controlling a character who wields a short ranged weapon, I am of the opinion that having precise control over your character is very important. Being locked into a jump arc sucks, especially when you are plunging headlong into the bad guy because you can't shoot him from the other side of the screen. Circle of the Moon manages whip controls pretty much perfectly. The whip is a little slow coming out, but this is a conscious choice that existed in all previous games in the series as well. It forces the player to be a bit more careful, and adds a bit of skill to whip use. Harmony of Dissonance adjusts the delay to the end of the attack, opting for a whip that's faster out of the gate, but doesn't feel anywhere near as satisfying to score hits with. More importantly however is that Harmony of Dissonance affords the player absolutely no mid-air control after your whip has been used. This means that if the enemy alters course after you jump or you realize your jump arc has you bumping into the baddie's big toe, you have no choice but to eat some damage. This one fact annoyed me more than anything else in the game, from start to completion. 

Another interesting comparison lies in the way dashing a jumping works. When it comes to dashing, Harmony of Dissonance is a hands down winner. Circle of the Moon requires the player to double tap left or right in order to dash, meaning that you frequently find yourself walking when you really need to run. This further means that you often will not jump as far or as high as you expected, as dashing increases the distance of both of these. On the other hand, Harmony of Dissonance has movement controls working quite well. At any time the player can hit R or L to dash right or left respectively, making it very easy to quickly move in and out of range of an enemy. What's more, you can dash in the same direction in very quick succession, making basic movement feel significantly faster, more involved and just all around fun. However, Harmony of Dissonance does not allow you to dash-jump, which is very strange and somewhat jarring. When jumping, you go the exact same speed through the air regardless of whether you were dashing or walking previously. This feels really strange when you spend some time dashing, immediately slow down when airborne, and then resume dashing when touching the ground. You lose all sense of momentum, and it feels like jumps don't go as far as they should.

Ultimately, the two games are profoundly different in a lot of ways, I just found these control differences really interesting. Circle of the Moon is significantly harder and contains many enemies and areas that feel downright unfair, and yet it's whip combat feels much better simply because you can better control your movement through the air. Running around Dracula's castle is significantly less bothersome and more fun because of how dashing works in Harmony of Dissonance, and yet as soon as your feet leave the ground things start to feel kind of gross and weird. In terms of skill set, Nathan Graves and Juste Belmont are almost identical, and yet controlling them feels almost completely different.

The Ever Ecletic Saints Row IV

Around this time last year, I played through Saints Row the Third, a game with some strokes of brilliance, and some less than ideal aspects. SR3 was something of a flagship that took the series from being a cult hit, to a wild and ridiculous mainstream success. People decided they were a fan of a Grand Theft Auto style game that didn't take itself seriously at all. Then came the DLC. Then the game's published THQ went bankrupt. Placed in a decidedly strange situation wherin you have a wildly successful franchise, but a publisher who has gone broke, Saints Row developers Volition were put in a pretty awkward place. The result is that what was once intended to be a huge DLC expansion ended up being the standalone Saints Row IV. Some people were thrilled, some people were skeptical. Most just wanted more Professor Genki. As ever though, the question is, is the game any good?

So let's start at the beginning. The story of the last 3 Saints Row games follows the growth of the Third Street Saints from a down and out street gang, to somehow becoming a mainstream media empire. In SR4's opening sequences you become President of the United States, witness Earth be destroyed, get placed into a Matrix-like simulation, acquire super powers, and plot the downfall of the alien overlord Zinyak. And yet, this is all done as a tutorial. Sure, it makes sense to introduce the plot through gameplay, but this stuff should be epic. How do you make defending The White House from aliens boring? Make it a tutorial that doesn't have much to do with the game at all. How do we introduce an open world game? Clearly with a hallway shooter segment. Oh by the way, about that shooting? This game is about super powers, so don't sweat it too much. Now here, have a boring, needlessly protracted turret segment.

Unfortunately, that's really the story of Saints Row IV. It inherits everything from Saints Row the Third, and the new is constantly at odds with the old. Saints Row the Third was about jacking cars, driving in the oncoming lane, shooting rival gangs with ridiculous missions, and doing silly activities. All of that is still in Saints Row IV, but what's the point? Why use guns when you can throw fireballs? Why steal cars when you can run faster on foot? That's cute, you can vault over fences... or you could jump 500 feet in the air, dive into the ground and nuke the fence into oblivion. Don't get me wrong, the super powers are definitely fun, there's no doubt., but being tacked onto an existing engine makes them feel significantly more clunky than in say, inFamous. At least until they throw you into a mission where you are without them. It's like they needed to do that occasionally just to justify guns even existing. At least they are pretty good about providing you with crazy vehicles or power armor to use part way through these segments so you don't miss your powers too much.

As far as the game flow, things feel a lot less coherent than Saints Row the Third, too. You can cruise around Cyber Steelport and do many of the same or similar activities as in real Steelport. Except now there is this whole quest system. Many of the games' quests involve exiting the simulation and talking to a crew member on your ship in the real world. Which seems to me like it doesn't really accomplish much aside from adding travel and loading time to your task. Sure there's a story/atmosphere/otherlameexcuse reason to do it, but let's be real here. Saints Row IV's story is not trying very hard, it's barely there. This game is about being the super powered president. I guess you could say it's making some kind of statement about escapism, but I really don't care. It's just another example of the world with super powers being at odds with the world without. I want to stay in the simulation and run up buildings, don't make me work so hard to get to the fun parts. It seems an odd thing to do, considering a big part of Saints Row the Third's appeal was always making the player feel like they are doing something worthwhile with their time.

As for the non-story quests, most of them simply involve doing the various activities strewn about Cyber Steelport. On one hand, this is pretty cool, because it means you have a little extra incentive/reward for doing said activities. Except I completed most of them before even getting the respective quests. As a result, the activities felt kind of soulless and unrewarding. Then I got a bit farther in the story, and unlocked a slew of rewards all at once. It just seems to me that the way the game is paced out is all over the place. You start out in a painfully linear/lengthy tutorial, pining for the open world. Then you get it, and are given a world with a million tasks and no incentives. Then you go back to the real world to do some story missions, and are rewarded with incentives in the cyber world. Surely at the very least, they should have restricted what activities you can do at the start a little more, and let the player narrow their focus a little. 

What I will say about Saints Row IV though, is that when it get it right, it does it in style. The game is absolutely littered with delicious nerdy references. They feel out of place in a franchise that started as a gritty GTA clone, but I'll not say no to a tongue-in-cheek Metal Gear Solid segment. What's more, Volition once again flex's it's ability to create moments that are absolutely perfect for certain 80's songs. Those moments where you can just rock out and be awesome to a song that fits the moment perfectly.. Well they are absolutely stunning. Really, that's what this game is all about. It's about being awesome, being silly, being nerdy and being ridiculous. Saints Row IV definitely does all of this, but I would personally argue that Saints Row the Third did it better. I think it comes down to expectations. Saints Row the Third has tons of crazy in it, but it has a lot of the typical stuff, too. In contrast, Saints Row IV is thoroughly ridiculous from start to finish, and when everything is crazy, nothing is. The absurdity is still amusing, but not as much as it could have been.

So I suppose this is a long winded way of saying that Saints Row IV is a decent game, but has a lot of issues. I would say that while Saints Row the Third was a consistently good game, Saints Row IV consistently rocks back and forth between being amazing and being pretty mediocre. Considering the rocky publisher issues Volition experienced during development, it's not entirely surprising that it would end up being a little spotty in places. After all, this was a game that was never intended to be a sequel. I kind of wonder if it shouldn't have stayed as an expansion, it seems to me that a lot of complaints would evaporate had that been the case. In the end of the day though, I did have an overall good time with the game, and I will look forward to any future Saints Row IP. The next time I want to play with super powers though, I'm definitely going to play a game that was built from the ground up with them in mind.

Impressions of Shin Megami Tensei IV

Atlus has some pretty big shoes to fill these days. Over the past decade or so, public opinion of the Final Fantasy franchise (and Square Enix as a whole) as steadily declined. In a time where the JRPG titan can't seem to do anything right, a lot of people are turning to Atlus' Shin Megami Tensei series as the new Messiah. This, combined with a special offer from Nintendo meant Shin Megami Tensei 4 was always going to sell pretty well. However the question is, was Atlus able to perform with all eyes on them? With everyone expecting another legendary masterpiece like Persona 4 (or at least a game to fill the void of good Final Fantasy games) could SMT IV really hit it out of the park? Well, I've played the game for about 25 hours so far, and with that experience I am going to try and answer said question.

Now before I get into my actual analysis of the game, I want to talk a little bit about my experience with the franchise so far. I've played a few hours of Persona 3, but never really sat down and played it consistently. I've also played through Devil survivor, parts of which I really liked, other parts of which I really didn't. The reason I mention these things is because when I first played Devil Survivor, I thought things like the demon fusion, the game's difficulty, earning extra turns etc. were interesting or unique, when in reality they are staples of the entire Shin Megami Tensei franchise. Well, these things are all present in Shin Megami Tensei IV as well, and my opinion on them has not really changed much. Demon fusion is a pretty awesome mechanic, extra turns are really neat (when you get them), and the difficulty is a giant thorn in my side.

So let me talk on the combat/difficulty first, then. SMT games are pretty well known for being hard, and while I don't have a lot of games to compare, SMT IV seems to be no different. Now, I'm all for challenging RPGs, games that require strategy and planning, but there is a very fine line between challenging and frustrating. I would personally say that SMT IV has at least one foot over that line. I think it all comes down to the bonus turn mechanic. Basically, if you hit an enemy's elemental weakness, get a critical hit, etc. you earn a bonus turn, and same goes for the enemies. If you miss, hit an enemy's resistance etc, you lose 2 turns. On one hand, it's super satisfying to assemble a team of ice damage dealers to take out that boss that's weak to ice. You will probably decimate him. On the other hand, if you don't have that team of ice damage dealers, you will probably fail miserably. Heck, if you get unlucky and miss once or twice, you will fail miserably. 

I personally feel that one of the big differences that makes this mechanic interesting in Devil Survivor but terrible in SMT IV is simply the information given to the player. In Devil Survor, you know before you even engage an enemy what their teams strengths and weaknesses are. In SMT IV this is definitely not the case. The first time you encounter an enemy you can only guess what their elemental properties are, and if you guess wrong the entire flow of battle turns against you. If it's a normal enemy then you can probably manage, though there's a good chance you will suffer enough damage to necessitate heading back to base to heal up. But a single wrong move against a boss will likely spell your doom. The only reliable way to beat bosses is to fight them once, use as many elements against them as you can to determine their weaknesses, then immediately reset and go put together a team to counter said boss. That isn't particularly strategic gameplay to me. There are just so many ways for your group to die that are outside of your control, and they are not limited to boss fights. It almost never feels like a death is because you messed up so much as you got unlucky or the enemy was cheap.

Beyond issues with the battle system, the game has plenty of other weaknesses as well. In short: The story moves slower than any other game I can think of. It took ~10 hours for anything of note to happen, many full games aren't even that long. Money is pretty hard to get your hands on, and yet doesn't seem to offer a whole lot besides convenience. I'd rather spend money to summon a demon that I could catch for free than buy a new sword that makes no perceivable difference in battle. You can only have one active quest at a time? Really? Navigating the "world map" is very awkward and usually involves visiting every location to find the one you are actually looking for. Once you leave the starting area, the game barely even tries to direct you any more. Leveling up feels kind of useless, as stat increases don't really make a noticeable difference in battle. The characters are pretty uninteresting and you'r "party members" seem completely superfluous. And that's all that I can honestly think about at the moment.

The game is definitely not all bad though. There are a lot of neat little things about it that kept me playing as long as I have. The demon fusion system is as interesting as ever, and I find it pretty enjoyable planning out the ultimate demon team (including reserves to swap in if one dies, or to heal outside of battle). SMT IV also has a system where demons can teach your avatar abilities, but if the avatar already knows the ability in question, it just gets stronger. I find it really satisfying to plan out demon fusions in order to get the most powerful demons, but also give the avatar +8 in the abilities I want. The app system is interesting, allowing the player to choose which bonuses they value most (extra skill slots, more demon reserves, regen mp while walking, convince demons to give you money, etc). Limiting the number of each type of consumable item the player can hold is a great idea in a dungeon crawler game. Any time you die you can return exactly to where you were (although, resetting the game seems to be faster). Furthermore, another interesting part of dieing is that you can pay to be revived with money, or you can use the 3DS' play coins, making SMT IV the first game I have personally seen to actually use play coins (though again, resetting is free). And finally, what little plot I have seen is fairly interesting.

All in all Shin Megami Tensei IV is a game that I want desperately to love, but so far haven't really managed to. There are periods where I have really enjoyed the game, but far more times where I was frustrated or lost or bored. At this point I have essentially stopped playing because I find I'm not particularly interested in wandering about trying to find where I'm supposed to go, dieing horribly, and then spending the next 3 hours grinding. Chances are I would find the game a lot more enjoyable if I were to drop the difficulty down, but the fact remains that "normal" mode doesn't on the whole feel like a particularly enjoyable game to me. I don't want to drop the difficulty because I find it too hard, I want to drop the difficulty because it feels abusive and punishing and unbalanced. But this is assuming I ever go back to it. On that matter, only time will tell.

Radiant Historia Thoughts

It's no secret that the JRPG genre isn't exactly flourishing as it once did. Not outside of Japan anyways. Yet while the well dries up and the big franchises flounder, a little company called Atlus has our backs. It's thanks to them that we have games like the Shin Megami Tensei and Etrian Odyssey series. They were the ones who published the likes of Ogre Battle and Growlanser. The were even responsible for bringing Demon's Souls and Disgaea to the north, where they were wildly successful. In recent years Atlus has become the west's biggest and best source of the JRPGs that AAA studios won't make any more. So when I was told that they had made a superb Chrono Trigger inspired JRPG for the DS, I knew I had to play it. In fact, the game was so popular that Atlus had to do a second run of production because it was so in demand once people knew it existed. I've finally managed to find the time to devote to the game, and so I thought I would give my impressions, having beaten it in it's entirety.

Radiant Historia is a game about timelines, and as such evokes a lot of comparisons to Chrono Trigger. The basic idea is that the game is split into two timelines, and the player has the ability to jump to any key event experienced in either timeline. The idea is that if you play a single timeline, you end up running into roadblocks, and to progress you much either go back in time or spend some time in the other timeline in order to acquire a new ability or change a key event. The idea is that the world is quickly charging towards it's end, and before the game has even begun the world has been doomed several times. It up to the protagonist, Stocke, to manipulate events and lead the world down a different path. Interestingly enough, this leads to a lot of interesting situations where the decision that keeps the world alive isn't necessarily the decision that is best in a given situation. Many choices you can make will lead to a scenario where the world ends, resulting in a "game over" ending. 

What's interesting about these endings is that none of them are all bad. They all give the impression that your decision had a positive impact, but in the end it did not divert the world's path to destruction. You won the battle, but the war was ultimately won. Then you simply go back in time and pick the other option, and unfortunately this is where the game's cracks begin to show. As intriguing as the time traveling system is, it's both incredibly repetitive and surprisingly linear. The game may seem wide open at first, but you quickly find that the way forward is always to play one path until you hit a dead end, then switch paths until you hit another one, and repeat. Similarly, because you spend so much time jumping between key events, you end up covering the same ground over and over again. There are many points where you cannot avoid the intermediary events between key points, and all the scene skipping in the world doesn't mean you won't be running through Lazvil Hills and the Gran Plains a dozen times over. 

This goes doubly for the side quests, unfortunately. Side quests tend to be a lot more interesting, and a lot more fulfilling, but also a lot more frustrating. Many quests will require you to progress much further into the timeline before you can complete them, and some even require you to skip between timelines. When you stumble across an object and think "oh hey, that guy back in that place at that time needed this thing", it's very satisfying to make that connection. But for every time that happens, there's two where you completely forget who wanted the object, where they are located and what exact time window you need to be in to talk to them. What's more, after jumping back and forth in time so much it becomes very easy to forget what happened in what timeline, what you need to actually do to progress from event A to event B etc. Actually completing all of the sidequests without a walkthrough is an extremely monumental task, but it really didn't have to be if the game just had a proper quest log and a better indication of how to progress along a timeline you've long since forgotten about.

But enough about timelines and all that jazz. One of the most interesting parts of Radiant Historia is that it has one of the most interesting takes on turn based combat I have personally witnessed. It goes a bit like this: Your team of three faces off against opponents who are arranged on a 3x3 grid. Some enemies take up 2 or 4 or 6 or even all 9 enemies, but most only take a single spot. Among your arsenal of abilities are skills which can knock enemies about, allowing you to position them in opportune locations for killing expedience. Knock an enemy on top of another one, and subsequent attacks will hit both enemies. Further, you can also do things like knock them into the air, onto traps, out of buff tiles on the ground, etc. Adding to this is the fact that every party member has the ability to switch places in the turn order with any combatant. This can be used to switch the order your guys attack in, or you can swap with enemies in order to try and bunch all your allies' turns together for big combos. It's a novel system that in many cases feels as much like a puzzle as anything else. What's the best way to group up the most enemies as you can? Or is it faster to burn one down at a time? Which character has the best abilities for this situation? Will you need buffs more than movement abilities? etc.

However, as with the timeline mechanic, this battle system is definitely not all roses either. First and foremost is the fact that the game seems to have rather poor battle pacing. Each area contains a TON of enemies, and especially considering how much time you spend walking back and forth through the same old areas, the fights can get old fast. While you have the ability to avoid most enemies on the area map, towards the end of the game you start to need experience quite dearly. Couple that with quite low availability for some of the party members, and it becomes a question of, "grind now or grind later?". Now if you had told me this in the first 15 hours of the game, I wouldn't have minded. The battle system is pretty fun. But eventually around the half way mark through the game, battles just get very grueling. The average number of enemies you fight goes up to about 5, and weird things start happening with the turn order. All of a sudden it becomes apparent that how fast your characters are doesn't matter as much as how close their speed is to eachother (so they can build proper combos). When enemies ambush you, you start seeing battles where you can't even attack until you've hopefully survived all 5 enemies attacking 2-3 times. The result is battles just get less desirable, you want to avoid them more, but bosses actually start getting pretty hard. Thus the aforementioned grinding conundrum.

As far as the plot is concerned, the game presents a pretty compelling story. As I mentioned earlier, the idea is that you have to try and nudge the world's destiny on a path that doesn't lead to destruction. Unsurprisingly this involves all the tropes of an evil empire, beast tribes that hate humans, people misusing mana etc etc etc. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot I can actually say without spoiling it. What I will say though is that as the game went on, I was very interested to see where each plot line would lead, and how they would inevitably join back up again. Around the 1/3 way mark things start to get really interesting and it really motivated me to push on through the lul that comes soon after. However the plot, too, is not without issue. Once again we come back to the repetition the time mechanic brings. Because you have two separate timelines that advance in parallel, things often seem like they are going at a snails pace. Until you near the end of the game, it's often really hard to see how things are relevant in the big picture, especially when you start mixing up the history of each line in your head. In the end of the day the payoff is pretty good though. I found the ending to be very touching, in a way that very few games ever are.

I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say here is that I'm very conflicted on my final opinion of Radiant Historia. It's chock full of really interesting ideas. At times those ideas are very well executed. At other times the game drags like nobody's business. There was a stretch of about 8 hours within the game where I went from loving it, to hating it to loving it again. In the end of the day I would probably conclude that Radiant Historia would be amazing if it was about 25-30 hours long rather than 40. I think the truth behind Radiant Historia though is that, judging by the lack of advertising and the limited initial run, Atlus probably just had some crazy ideas they wanted to play with. I doubt it was ever intended to be more than a fun little experiment, and I suppose in that regard it succeeded. Whatever the case may be, I would still recommend that any avid JRPG fan give it a go. If you are willing to overlook some of the issues I outlined above, then it could easily classify as one of the best JRPGs released in the last 5 years. Even if you can't see past the flaws, it's a one-of-a-kind experience. It truly has the makings of something great. Whether you think it achieved that or not may well vary from my own opinion.

Wind Water and Making Travel Fun

As any fan of the Zelda series likely knows, an HD remake of the game is coming to the Wii U this October. This announcement sparked a bunch of discussion among people I know, and as with most Wind Waker discussions, this eventually lead to a conversation about traversing the open ocean. It's a pretty notorious and ill-loved aspect of Wind Waker, and a direct source of a lot of hate on the game. So after some discussion and some thinking, I thought I would spend some time talking about this aspect of Wind Waker, and travel time in video games in general.

So at it's root, the issue here is pretty obvious. Travelling for large amounts of time is typically uneventful and boring. This isn't always the case, some games manage to make it interesting, but I'll talk about that more later. Essentially what it comes down to, is that there needs to be something to occupy your mind continually while travelling. Sometimes this can be as simple as having something really pretty to look at. Travelling can in itself occupy some brain power too, especially if navigating something like a city, which would also them have traffic and such. However if you are crossing a distance large enough for it to be labelled as "travelling", then chances are the points in time where you need to wonder "which way do I go now?" are far enough apart that there is plenty of time for boredom to creep in. And yet, other times you may be travelling by air or by sea. In which case, you are likely moving in a straight line and navigation isn't even a worry. 

So let me give you another example of a game that does travel time poorly. You may have heard of Just Cause 2. It's an open world game with a massive world which focuses on blowing up property and doing silly things with the grappling hook. However it also so happens that the world is so large, getting from one point to another can take an agonizingly long time. To make matters worse, being set in the fairly rural island nation of Panau, the roads are fairly unoccupied, and more to the point it's almost always better to fly places anyways. Flying awesome jets is cool and all, but soaring through the skies in a straight line for 5 minutes at a time is pretty dull. It's to the point that, dying is really only annoying because it means you are going to need to make that journey again. The only times that travelling is fun, is when you discover a secret of some description (which only exist on the ground), or you are grappling hook jumping (which is slower than most vehicles). I've personally never dreaded travel more than in this game.

With that said, let's now move on to the other end of the scale. I've never not dreaded travelling as much as in Saints Row the Third. The game does 2 main things to keep travelling fun. First off, it's entire city is designed to be dense rather than vast. It never really takes that long to get from one place to your destination. The other, is that it offers constant opportunities for rewards along the way. Going on foot? Might as well go streaking at the same time. Going by car? Drive in the opposite lane and dodge cars. Going by air? Fly close to the buildings, barely missing. All these things reward the player with Respect points, and this means that you always have something to do no matter where you are going. What's more, it adds challenge to travel - it's certainly harder to drive against incoming traffic, but if you are rewarded for doing so why would you ever not do it?

So the question then becomes, where does Wind Waker play into all this? Personally I feel like it depends a lot on how you play the game, but for the average player it probably lands closer to the Just Cause side of things. The Great Ocean is doubtlessly vast and mostly empty, but It's not devoid of distractions. To me, being something of a completionist, I never found the ocean that boring. It was always enough to always be on the lookout for baddies, treasure and the splash of fish in the distance. There aren't always a lot of active things to do, but for those that care about them, there are plenty of things to be on the lookout for. By the time you start to feed all the fish and find all the treasure, you start getting warp spells to aid in your travelling. For someone who maybe doesn't care about dredging up every sunken treasure or  feeding all the fish to uncover the map, I definitely see why this seafaring would be dreadfully boring though.

In the end of the day, the only reason Wind Waker's ocean was ever so big was really because of the technical limitations of the Gamecube. The game's engine needed enough time to make sure nearby islands were properly loaded before the player came in range, and increasing their travel time was the way to do it. The HD remake will have improvements in place to make the experience more painless, and it's unquestionably for the best. I think we all know that the game's real bugbear was that money grubbing &*$% Tingle anyways.

Thoughts on Penny Arcade's on the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness 4

Over the past couple of years there have been few games that I've looked forward to more than those put out by Zeboyd Games, the 2 man crew responsible for Breath of Death VII, Cthulhu Saves the World, and now episodes 3 and 4 of Penny Arcade's series of games. Their work just contains a certain quality to them that few games do -  a quality that says that the people making these games love JRPGs as much as I do. So having beat Rainslick 4, and knowing that Zeboyd is looking for feedback, I thought that I should compile my thoughts on their most recent game in one place.

Easily the biggest thing that I enjoyed about Rainslick 4 is all the different ways to approach a battle. As someone looking for that depth of gameplay, I really appreciated coming up to a battle, losing, adjusting my strategy and switching some equipment, and then winning. It's like a puzzle, but not the annoying kind, it's a puzzle that involves doing the things I actually enjoy. Solving the puzzle can be very satisfying, although I do wish it was a little easier to switch out accessories once you've seen what you are up against in a given battle. 
However on this note I feel I should also mention that, by the end of the game there were actually too many different permutations of party members and equipment. With 20 or so party members, all with unique abilities, it get's really hard to keep track of who can do what, how you have their equipment set up etc. Not to mention that the game's UI really doesn't work when dealing with that many characters.

On a similar (though somewhat ironic) note, I was not a fan of the way the party was separated in 2 until the end. It really messes with the pacing when you jump back and forth between the two. It works well narratively to say "ok this group is stuck doing this for a bit, let's see what the other group is doing". It's frustrating in terms of gameplay though. Every time you switch you are going from a stronger group to a weaker one with a totally different set of abilities, plus it makes managing your equipment fairly awkward at times. However where the irony comes in is that, I actually felt like this part of the game before the two parties merge was the best. Reason being, the game felt a lot tighter and more coherent when dealing with groups of 6-8 monsters. There are lots of options without being overwhelming. When all is said and done, I ultimately prefer the Rainslick 3 model better over all. Having a larger degree of customization on a smaller number of characters get's rid of a lot of the issues facing the system. It's a lot easier to keep track of what each class / person has available to them, it's a lot easier to build UI for, and I think it just builds a better narrative.

Beyond all this, I also felt like the game's pacing in general was a bit off, and it could have done with being a few hours shorter. Zeboyd has always done a good job of keeping the pace up in their games, with snappy combat systems. In Rainslick 4 it just felt like the variety of gameplay was very thin, and in some places it really started to wear thin (most notably, the back to back battlefield and Q'atra dungeons). It just feels like 95% of the game is spent in combat or exposition, which is odd because objectively that's been the case in all Zeboyd games, but I never really felt it before. Not to mention that there is more exploration and secrets to find in Rainslick 4 than any of their other games. I think what it comes down to a few things. In previous titles you could spend more time examining objects and such which makes the environments more interesting and gives you something else to do (As much as I'm sure it was a giant pain writing and coding text for every gravestone). I also felt like the areas in Rainslick 4 were just less interesting in general. They looked and sounded amazing, but there just felt like a lot less variety and creativity. As a result it feels more like a really pretty funnel to the next point of interest.

Aside from that I only really have 3 other, smaller complaints. The first is that I felt like the rewards from optional end-game content were gravely insufficient. It was really rewarding to me personally to complete these challenges, but it seemed like each of these areas gave very little exp (understandable, given the game's balance philosophy). I never ended up using the ultimate shoe weapon, the "secret" monster or the "secret" monster trainer. The only reward that really felt substantial was the ability to face Fish Force again, and steal their mascot. This leads me to the second complaint. The game is way to focused on magic. Which is fine to a degree, magic has a tendency to be more interesting, and is somewhat balanced in that magic users tend to be more squishy. It just feels wrong that once the groups meet up, there doesn't seem to be much use to strength types. And the final complaint: the game's writing took an odd turn in this title, though being as that wasn't really Zeboyd's role in this game I won't expound on it.

Ultimately, Rainslick 4 just wasn't quite as awesome as I was ultimately hoping. It has amazing art, amazing music, a lot of really funny moments, tons of cool secrets and very good core gameplay. It's held back by a fair number of things here and there though. Many of them are small issues that are kind of niggling things that are hard to put your finger on. Many of them are quite possibly just personal preference. In the end of the day though, I would not hesitate to give Rainslick 4 a hardy recommendation to anyone who enjoys RPGs the way they were meant to be made.

Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement Thoughts

I am a big fan of Strategy RPGs, in fact my favorite game just so happens to be one. SRPGs just seem to have a way of offering me all the things that I want. I get a lot of joy out of creating a fighting force that is customized to my specifications. Creating a long term plan for what I want my team to look like and then gradually seeing that come to fruition is really fun to me. So when I heard about Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement, a game that was suggested to me because ever character's stats and proficiencies are directly tied to your actions, I was instantly interested. Of course it's a $15 game from 3 years ago, but I just recently got around to playing through it. Having beaten the game, I thought it was worth taking a look at what it did right and... everything else.

So what does it get right? The first thing that comes to mind is that the battles are all pretty varied. There are a fair number of them for such a cheap game, and very few of them feature the simplistic "kill all enemies / the boss" objective. Even the missions that do have you simply murdering all the baddies almost always have something else to spice things up, often some object on the map that can be interacted with. This can mean a boulder you have to push down a hill, or a flaming brazier you can shove over to block off a path, or a variety of other things. Between those, and all of the treasures scattered across each map, every battle stays pretty fresh. Beyond that, the only other positive thing I can really say about the game is that it's stat system really is quite extensive, offering a ton of potential customization to each character. However... it's not so simple as that.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that Flames of Judgement is a game with a list of issues a mile long, a list that I couldn't possibly sum up in this post. But ultimately, most of the big issues end up relating back to the stat system in some way. Which is unfortunate, because I've always really liked the whole "your stats grow based on your actions" kind of systems. I think the issue Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement faces however is that it just went way overboard. At a guess, I would say that each of your 6 characters have something like 45-50 stats. These include your core stats, your combat stats, your weapon proficiencies and your magic proficiencies. Many of them make perfect sense and are no surprise. Sure, you get better at using swords the more you use them, and melee attacks while your at it. Sure, your MP and magic stats go up the more you cast spells. The combat stats are just silly though. Why do we need a stat the indicates how much damage you do when you move more than 3 squares before attacking? Or when attacking from a higher elevation? More to the point, why do we need to care about these stats increasing?

As I said, the overwhelming depth of this system ends up causing several issues. For me though, I think what really killed it for me was the fact that, each character has so many stats it's hard to get a good impression of how strong they currently are, and how they are progressing. There is no one screen you can look at and see "oh, he has 12 strength, that's pretty good". In fact, each character has a strength, mentality and agility stat, but as far as I can tell they don't actually do anything but indicate the suggested route the player should guide that character along. These stats never change, and within a couple hours of starting the game the character with the second lowest strength was my best physical attacker. Now this may seem like a small issue, but I believe that in a game such as Vandal Hearts, progression is everything. If you can't get a good idea where your characters stand, then your system has failed. These systems work when you have a good idea where you want your character to go, how to get there, and how far along that path you currently are. Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement fails to varying degrees in all three areas.

The other big issue to me was simply the game's usability and just the general feel of it. Just about every aspect of the game feels obtuse and lackluster in some way. Sure, I can understand if a $15 title uses still images for it's story scenes. But I don't understand why it takes as long to load some static images as other games take to load entire 3D cities. Why is it that the only time I can save is when in camp, but I have no ability to enter the camp menu myself? Do I really have to fight and win a battle just to save the game? Easily the worst offender in this regard is the game's inventory menu. It's understandable to some degree that it's hard to display so many stats, but it really wouldn't have been that hard to make a more usable menu system. To do just about anything requires you to scroll to a tab within a tab within a tab, then scroll all the way down a menu. Heck, I didn't even know how to equip items until 1/3 of the way into the game because the equipment screen requires you to scroll down to a second screen, but offers no indication that you can do so.

In the end of the day, Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgement is a game that exudes mediocrity from every pore. I could spend all day typing and still not list every minor issue I take with the game. You'll notice I didn't even mention the game's plot or it's characters, but I've detailed the most offensive issues here. Ultimately it's a game that is at it's best mildly interesting, and at it's worst an obtuse sack of annoying. Much of that is forgivable in a $15 title, but the most grievous issues plaguing the game are as a result of bad decisions and bad design, not because of a lack of budget. I'm glad that I did play the game, however. It's games like Flames of Judgement that we learn the most from - games with a few interesting ideas followed by a massive list of things not to do. With that said though, I wouldn't recommend it if you are looking to y'know, have fun with your video game.

Fire Emblem and Player Choice

So I've been on a bit of a Fire Emblem kick for a while now. A couple of months ago I finally played through Path of Radiance, and following that I made my way through Awakening. More recently, I'm in the middle of re-playing plain old Fire Emblem, the GBA game from 2003. I've found it kind of interesting to look at how the series has evolved over the past 10 years. Of course the series didn't ever leave Japan until 2003, but since then it has picked up significantly more widespread appeal. I can't help but feel like several of the changes made to the series since then were made in the interest of appealing to the new fans rather than the old. So with that said, today I wanted to talk a bit about choosing characters, and why it was better back in the day.

Top 5 Reasons Why the AAA Market is Crashing

Back in the 1980s, when the video game industry was young, it suffered a pretty massive crash. Between 1984 and 1985 total revenues dropped by a whopping 97%, and people thought the fad had passed until the NES came around. Back then the industry had no infristructure and basically subsisted on Pac Man clones. Things are very different these days, but still people constantly claim that the market is headed for another crash. I don't personally believe this is possible any longer, now that we have things like indie developers, digital distribution and a generation of people who grew up playing video games. None the less, I do believe that the AAA market, big budget games, are headed in a bad direction. While I don't think you could call it a "crash", it seems to me that AAAs are in the process of "crashing". In no particular reason why, here are my top 5 reasons why:


1) DRM / Piracy

Piracy has become an incredibly common thing in recent years. It's quite easy to get an illegitimate copy of anything digital, and the chances of any real repercussions are incredibly slim. As a result, there is a large number of people playing games for free, depriving the developer of that sale. I don't think there is any question that this is a bad thing, good games can't get made if developers go broke. However at the same time, there really isn't any proof that piracy actually negatively effects a game's sales. It can be argued, for example, that a person who pirates a game may have never bought it to begin with. Nobody can say for certain what effect piracy has, but what we can say for certain is that game makers (understandably) don't like it. In fact many of them end up sinking ridiculous amounts of time and money into trying to prevent their game from being pirated. This is known as DRM.

DRM comes in many forms, but all of them are designed to bar illegitimate owners from playing a game. The problem is, it doesn't work. Not for video games. There are some very smart people out there who treat DRM like a challenge to be overcome, and working pirated games are usually distributed on the internet within hours. So if DRM doesn't restrict pirates, who is there left to restrict? Only legitimate users. The issue here is that while piracy probably isn't good for the industry, DRM definitely isn't. Game makers obsess over the potential loss of income that piracy may or may not cause, and as a result waste time and money fighting a battle they will always lose. The fact of the matter is that it's not uncommon for legitimate owners to suffer at the hands of DRM, while pirates have no such restrictions. The game experience is actually better for the people who obtain the game illegitimately.



2) Publishers

Now I want to start by saying that publishers get a pretty bad rap. They are often seen as "the enemy", the evil greedy businessmen pulling the strings from the shadows. In reality however, publishers are not all bad. In reality, many (perhaps even most) exceptional games would never have seen the light of day if not for publishers. However with that said, which games publishers do and do not choose to fund has a very real effect on the direction that the industry goes.When all is said and done, publishers invest their money in a game in order to see a return on that investment. AAA games are expensive, and publishers have to choose very carefully where to spend their money.

Creating high caliber games is a risk. The reason this is a problem is because it means publishers aren't as likely to invest in a game that can't guarantee success. Games that aren't a sequel or a Call of Duty clone could lose a publisher a lot of money, those risky investments aren't attractive. However on the flip side we see mobile games rising to prominence because they aren't so expensive. Big studios can sink a relatively small amount of time and money just spitballing. The problem with all of this is because the market is now being driven by things that don't necessarily appeal to "core" gamers. As the risks inherent to a AAA title increase, the kind of titles we see become less and less creative, and more and more samey. Gaming has become a mainstream hobby, but those that made the industry what it is today aren't who publishers are worried about any more. It's not wrong for publishers to want to make their money back, but the unfortunate fact is that ever increasing aversion to taking risks is leading to a market that is increasingly stagnant.


3) Pre-Orders

The issue with pre-orders is actually one that has only really cropped up in the last couple years. I've never really seen an issue with putting money up front for a game I know I want day 1. I still don't see an issue with the core of this concept, but the problem is that publishers (and retailers) are catching on in a big way. It seems to me that the entire way that a game is marketed is shifting. Perhaps I'm just being naive, but I feel like the focus used to be on selling copies by making a good game, whereas now it's more about hype. It seems like every game these days needs to have some fancy pre-order bonus, and a different reward for buying from Gamestop, Best Buy and Amazon. It's all about convincing the consumer how much they want the game before it's even released, and some games sell millions in pre-orders.

That's really where the problem lies here. Publishers want to cement the financial success of their game before it even has the possibility of being panned by reviewers. That's ok, marketing, building hype, and selling as many copies as possible are all their job. The problem is that the consumers are falling for it. We get so wrapped up in the hype, we have pre-order bonuses waved in our face, and we don't even know if the game will be any good. We live in an age where mediocre, or even bad games can be financially successful if they are marketed well. Apparently we can't even trust the truthfulness of trailers and demos. Why would we then continue to pre-order games instead of waiting at least a few hours after release? Maybe if consumers had a little more patience and were a little less obsessed with pre-order bonuses we wouldn't have to worry about another Aliens: Colonial Marines.


4) Bad DLC / Microtransactions

I want to be very clear upfront here: DLC and Microtransactions are not inherently bad things. The concept of spending $5 on a game I love is actually pretty appealing to me. If the developer did a good job, then they deserve a little extra from me. Having that secondary form of monetization can go a long way too, and it makes selling a $60 title a bit less of a crapshoot for the developer. The problem is that microtransactions have proven to work pretty well, and now everyone wants a piece of that pie. As a result it feels like every other game out there is either pay to win, or chopped up and sold as DLC. It's surprisingly rare to find a game that lets you spend $60 and be done with it, and even more rare that the base price is dropped as a result of them nickle-and-dimeing you.

The problem here is that the core of a game has to be able to stand on it's own, and has to be a complete package. If you chop off an important part of the story just to charge $5 for it, that's only going to make people mad. If you chop any piece off, really. DLC is supposed to be an addition to the game, not something that say, is already on the disc, but can't be accessed without a fee. Poorly implementing your paid content is one of the best ways to really wreck an otherwise decent game. I don't want to get a megabeamsword +6 when I pre-order the game, I don't want to pay for an in-game currency for a title I already spent $60 on, and I don't want to feel like my game is incomplete without the $20 season pass.


5) Graphics Over Gameplay

This is an argument that has persisted for a long time now, and yet it only gets more and more true each year. Graphics are always marching forward, it's virtually the only reason we even need another generation of consoles or better graphics cards. Yet if you were to ask anyone who has been gaming for at least 10-15 years, chances are they would say that the best games were released in the 1990s and 2000s. Granted a lot of that is likely nostalgia, a lot of those games were graphically impressive for their time, and there are certainly recent games that are also very good. However despite all of this, it seems like the AAA industry doesn't know how to make a game without blowing most of their budget on polygons. Plenty of people will tell you that gameplay is what makes a game good, and they aren't wrong, but the spending is where I feel the real issue lies.

The fact that AAA games are so expensive to make isn't doing anyone any favors. Good graphics can add to an already fun game, but they can't make an experience. If anything, style and aesthetics are more important than fidelity, and they are both less expensive. This all leads back to what I've already talked about in regards to publishers. Expensive games are risky, risks are bad when you want to make money. When you can sell 3.4 million copies of a game and still consider it a failure, then you have a real problem. It's hard to imagine a world where AAA games having lower expectations and more reasonable budgets wouldn't produce better games.When every title doesn't have to be a smash hit to succeed, you can afford to take bigger risks. That is the path back to an industry with imagination, niche appeal, and AAA titles that can actually make games that are as good as the indie developers who have a fraction of the budget.  It sure would be nice to see more titles that focused on fun instead of explosions.