The past week has been incredibly rough. I’m actually writing this the Friday ahead of when it is supposed to be posted, because I’ve fallen super far behind on my blog post buffer and just barely managed to keep my streak of no unplanned skips twice in a row. Two nights in a row, I was struggling to stay awake as I wrote at my computer, giving up on any hope for restful activities in order to keep this blog going and my life in some kind of working condition. I managed it and have begun to slowly rebuild my buffer (I will have two posts ready to go at the end of the day), but I’m just barely keeping my feet under me between still struggling to get enough sleep, the physical therapy I’ve started to help with my back, the intense demands of work (which has gotten super busy again), and my desire to have something I can feel proud of (this unbroken blogging streak and this blog as a whole). As such, rather than prattle on even more about how I’m feeling on a day when I’m struggling to maintain even a neutral expression at work, I’m going to talk about The Legend of Zelda and one of my favorite peoples from the franchise: The Zora.
Continue readingVideo Gaming
Romancing My Least Favorite Character in Dragon Age: Inquisition
I actually had a really difficult time deciding what kind of character to play when I started up Dragon Age: Inquisition. I knew I didn’t want to be a Human, since I’d played a human in both the previous games, and I knew I wanted to be a mage which meant I wasn’t going to play a Dwarf, but I couldn’t decide between playing a Qunari or an Elf. I’d been having a lot of fun learning more and more about the Qunari in my replays of the first two Dragon Age games and, since I’ve apparently never spent much time or energy trying to learn about them in previous play-throughs, thought it might be fun to play through this (currently) final game with a Qunari lens over the whole experience. I was interested to see how the general residents of Thedas responded to my character, to be a giant woman, and to see how those who knew about the Qun responded to my character, a mage who had grown up outside the Qun and absolutely not let herself be collared and leashed in the way that most other Qunari mages were. On the other hand, knowing what I know now about how Inquisition can end and how Veilguard starts, I thought it might be fun to play an Elf and finally go through the romance sequence for Solas. I’d started a playthrough as an Elf, once, and thought it was pretty interesting to see how everyone reacted to an Elven Inquisitor, but I’d never actually romanced Solas before. I tried to flirt with him a bunch once, but I was playing a Human woman and he was not interested. Plus, Elven women are pretty fun! They’ve got the most flirt options and, personally, I’m interested in flirting with as many companions as possible! That said, since I’d be playing an Elven woman and absolutely won’t be playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition again any time soon, I knew that this was my one shot to actually romance Solas and see what its all about before Veilguard made it clear to me.
Continue readingStrong First Impressions In Echoes of Wisdom
After a few days of delay spent finishing Unicorn Overlord, I’ve finally started to dig into The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. While I’ve been mildly excited about it for a while, I purposefully kept my expectations lowered because there’s been just so much interesting fan art for what a Zelda-As-Protagonist video game might look like that any actual implementation of the concept would probably fall short. It was promising that, rather than go with the stylized but fairly proportional look of the two most recent main-line Legend of Zelda games, Echoes of Wisdom was adopting the more cartoony style that was used for the Link’s Awakening remake. I appreciate a game that isn’t trying to take itself too seriously and Echoes of Wisdom’s fairly simple but still highly detailed art has made for a refreshing look at a brand new game. I half-expected to only ever see that art style in future remakes of games from that era (by which I mean all the LoZ games that originally came out on a GameBoy of some kind), so I’m glad to see that they’re continuing to work with the look that they’ve established for that category of Legend of Zelda game on the Switch. In fact, the only issue I have with the visuals of this game (please keep in mind that I’m still not very far into the game, so there might be something up ahead that changes this opinion of mine) is that the game lags pretty heavily when you’re in “busy” towns with water features. I know that they want to make these games look nice, but they absolutely didn’t need to all-in on the water like they did. I’m not entirely sure that this was a “sacrifice performance on the altar of visual splendor” decision, but it sure is starting to feel like they’re expecting these games to be played on a console that’s more powerful than the seven-year-old Nintendo Switch. I’m not really one to dig too deeply into rumors of the Switch 2 or pass around conspiracy theories about making bad games to keep a franchise fresh in everyone’s mind, but I’m starting to feel like ignoring what seems like a bunch of stuff planned for a more powerful console that just hasn’t materialized would be more foolish than contemplating the idea that some new console has been held back for a couple years now.
Continue readingWringing All The Fun Out Of Unicorn Overlord
In what seemed like the longest conclusion to a mission-based video game I’ve ever played, I finished Unicorn Overlord. I enjoyed the mechanical challenges posed by the last few missions, as the maps grew longer and the fights within each map more numerous, but each one of those missions felt like it just kept spawning a new mission behind it, despite me being certain that each one must finally be the final mission. It wasn’t bad writing or anything, just a sort of endless series of gotcha moments parading as unexpected twists that were things I absolutely expected given the form of the narrative. There were no surprises for me in any part of this ending other than the realization right at the end that there absolutely must be multiple endings to the game. Which makes a lot of sense in retrospect, given how early you can fight the final mission and how, with the right abilities and weapons, you can just cheese your way through most battles, but it just so happens that I lucked my way into the “best” ending since I did literally everything the game had to offer. I wish that had taken less than ninety hours of gaming time to get that far (with the usual caveat that some of that time was me letting the game run while I did other things because I apparently can’t focus on one thing at a time anymore), but I did it all and only have a few small things left to do, like getting alternate endings, viewing the relationship conversations for all the remaining companions, and fighting a bunch of the same enemy that showed up on my map.
Continue readingWrapping Up Dragon Age 2
As you might have guessed while reading yesterday’s post, I’ve finished Dragon Age 2. I had a decent time with it. I genuinely enjoyed the storytelling within it, working my way through the tragedies that befell the Hawke family, and it felt fun to shift Hawke’s personality a bit as more and more stuff happened to them. I went from an aggressive, confident Hawke in Act One to a somewhat aggressive but mostly confident and diplomatic Hawk in Act Two and then an aggressive and quick to strike Hawke in Act 3, all reflecting what had been going on in their life over the total of seven years that the game covers. After all, Hawke learned the lesson that sometimes you need to strike first and ask questions never when someone rouses your suspicions. It’s not like you can see your mother turned into some unholy abomination and perversion of the magic you value so much in your own life without learning that maybe some people just don’t need to be alive anymore. The only time I really felt like the game failed me–or at least fell short of allowing me to take the actions I wanted to as part of roleplaying my character–was at the start of Act 3 when Meredith implies that Hawke’s mother’s death was Hawke’s fault. If I could have pointed out that she was explicitly charged with handling rogue mages or just, you know, struck her down for suggesting Hawke was at fault for what happened to Hawke’s mother, I’d have been much happier. Other than that, I felt like the game did a pretty good job of letting me direct my Hawke freely while still steering the game toward the tragic. I mean, I was definitely leaning into it most of the time, so take my satisfaction with a grain of salt, but I still think the game did a pretty good job of allowing for player choice within a much more contained narrative than we’ve seen in in Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Continue readingDragon Age 2: Legacy Doesn’t Pass The Test Of Time
I realized over the weekend that I was about to start the final mission in Dragon Age 2 and immediately stopped what I was doing so I could do the final narrative DLC first. It was a close call, that, but it wouldn’t have been too bad since I am still compulsively quick saving every few minutes, so I could have easily gone back to do the DLC if I’d accidentally pushed past the point of no return in the main game. All of which feels like an appropriately hurried start to Dragon Age 2: Legacy since it’s a bit of an odd duck of a DLC. Not only was it the hardest thing I’ve done in Dragon Age 2, but it felt somehow both much more direct (mechanically) than most of Dragon Age 2 and much less direct (informationally) than the rest of the game. I know I’m not as clear on all the details since my sleep-deprived brain has been letting go of some of the short-term memory stuff that isn’t super important, but it really feels strange that the entire premise of this DLC was that my character’s father was press-ganged into maintaining a bunch of magical barriers for the Grey Wardens and that now she was needed by a couple factions because of her blood-relation to the guy who made the barriers. The primary faction was a group of darkspawn-tainted people who all wanted my character’s blood in order to disable those barriers so the guy trapped within them could be set free and my character chased them down into the prison such that she got trapped as well, all of which meant that this guy, Corypheus (the main villain of Dragon Age: Inquisition), had to get let free so I could leave as well. There’s no relevance to any other plot, no attachment to the broader world, nothing but some guys attacked me, Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall, so I had to go on a little vacation to hunt them down and murder them, thereby unleashing an ancient horror on the world that was so great that it spawned an entire video game.
Continue readingAuthorial Intent Versus Player Interpretation In Unicorn Overlord’s Support Conversations
Now that I’ve finally cleared Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, I’ve returned to playing through Unicorn Overlord in whatever spare gaming hours I’ve got that aren’t dedicated to playing through the Dragon Age franchise (which have been a lot, lately, since I’ve been too tired to engage with Dragon Age). In fact, I just cleared one of the two major plot beats introduced after the initial setup–forming the rebellion that would make up the core of the game and rescuing the childhood friend who got kidnapped the instant they got off the boat in one of the most infuriating cases of “don’t just stand there, jackass. Do something!” I’ve ever seen–and unlocked a massive slew of support conversations that I’d been sitting on since I realized I could just spend the ample money I earned in the game to increase everyone’s support levels. While the plot doesn’t reflect the writing chops brought to bear on giving voice to the characters, it’s impossible to deny that this game knew what it wanted to provide and provided it: excellent character writing (and voice acting!). As I worked through this bevy of unlocked conversations, I was reminded anew of how much I enjoyed the incredibly unique depictions of each character via their writing and the interesting mix of subtext and text sprinkled into the conversations between all of them. I’m fond of saying that the writer can only bring half of the work to any storytelling and it is up to the reader to provide the other half, but that’s not exactly true. Readers can bring much more, overwhelming the writer’s work, and writers can work in such a way that leaves the reader with little room to interpret. Unicorn Overlord has a bunch of interesting examples of both explicit and implicit information, as some character relationships are defined in fairly clear terms, some are left ambiguous enough for the reader to interpret, and some give so little information that it is almost entirely on the reader to see more than what is shown.
Continue readingRunning Through The Dragon Age 2 DLC: Felicia Day’s Big Trip
You know, I’d heard at one point in my life that Felicia Day was somehow associated with the Dragon Age franchise. I’d never looked up how or why, since it made sense that she would be based on what I knew of her career up to that point, but I found the answers to those questions recently when I decided to launch myself into the first of two narrative DLCs for Dragon Age 2. All of the story-based DLCs for DA2 are in-game narrative asides rather than entirely separate campaigns like most of the DLC had been in Dragon Age: Origins, so I’d planned on waiting until I felt confident in my builds during the latter part of Act Two or early Act Three before I tried any of them out. So, with having reached Act 3 a couple weekends ago, I decided to spend a Sunday evening playing through one of the DLCs and was surprised to see Felicia Day’s Dragon-Age-ified face staring back at me from my monitor. It was unmistakably her from the very beginning and entirely surprising that they essentially stuck her face onto a character in the game. I know that’s a bit more common in modern video games, what with motion-capture technology and all, but I was surprised to see it from a game from the very early teens. I haven’t really looked up most of the other characters and their voice actors to see if any of them look similar, but I’d be kind of surprised if they did. It really wasn’t that common of a thing back in the day and, frankly, I found it rather distracting the entire time I spent playing the DLC since I’ve watched Felicia Day in a lot of other things and seeing her in rough animation was unsettling.
Continue readingWrapping Up Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
Spoiler warning for the recently re-released twenty-year-old video game, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. They’re casually sprinkled throughout, so best skip this post if you want to remain unspoiled for some reason.
Continue readingDragon Age: Origins – Awakening And It’s Messed Up Little Guys
I try to avoid swearing in my blog post titles, but this post was titled “DA:O-A and It’s Fucked Up Little Guys” while I was writing it. Which is to say that my overall impression of Awakening was that BioWare looked at the darkspawn they’d created and asked themselves “how can we absolutely fuck up these little guys?” They then went on to completely knock it out of the park, too. Sure, we’ve got our standard flavor Hurlocks and Genlocks (and their Alpha and Emissary subvariants), but we’ve also got some messy little guys who burst out of tubes, freaky little guys that are the messy little guys but with really long crab legs, some horrific little guys who are the freaky little guys but More, and then tons of flavors of normal Hurlock but with special paint and decorations so we know that this is one of the Darkspawn What Can Talk. All, of course, without mentioning the stars of this show, who are the most fucked up little guys of all: The Architect (who is a fusion of a Hurlock and a Normal Guy With Avant Garde Shades) and The Mother (who is what you’d get if an early 00s Manic Pixie Dream Girl replaced the “humanoid” half of a Broodmother). Absolutely wild choices that any big Triple-A game studio would be too much of a coward to make in a modern game. Video games as a whole are lesser for it.
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