I finally passed one hundred hours in my save file of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m really not sure how much time I’d have logged to the game if I could somehow account for the lost progress due to crashes or the hours lost to reverting back a couple or more save files because a choice without sufficient context was going to ruin my experience with the game. I don’t mind reverting in these cases, given how what sometimes feels like a flippant or jokey answer in a dialogue tree can wind up being taken very seriously and sometimes there’s a mismatch between what the game suggests will happen and what actually happens (which seems to be cranked up to eleven as a Dark Urge character). Overall though, as I’ve looked back at my one hundred recorded hours, I realized that a huge amount of that time was spent incredibly focused on the mechanical aspects of the game rather than the roleplaying and inter-character aspects of it. Sure, the ratio is probably much more balanced than most similar games I’ve played, but it feels odd at first blush to realized that it is closer to a standard video game RPG than to my experiences with the tabletop rolepalying game this CRPG was inspired by. As I’ve thought about it more, especially as I played last night, I noticed that, despite only doing one major fight last night, I spent about eighty percent of my play time focused entirely on mechanics. A couple percent of the remainder goes to puzzle solving and logistics and then the rest goes to watching dialogue play out and doing my best to roleplay my player character.
Continue readingReview
Chained Echoes Is More Fun Than I’ve Had In Ages
Over the past week and a half, I’ve spent what limited evening video game time I’ve got playing Chained Echoes on my Switch. I only heard about the game because a podcaster I follow (Austin Walker of the wonderful Friends at the Table) tweeted about appearing on an episode of another podcast (specifically the Jan 16th, 2023 episode of Axe of the Blood God: An RPG Podcast). Since I’m really into RPGs and I trust Austin’s opinions on games, I decided to give it a listen. Wound up getting myself a new RPG to enjoy and a new podcast to check out at the same time. Unfortunately, for a while there, I was too stressed out to consider trying anything new, especially after the new thing I was most excited for wound up being incredibly underwhelming. Between that and just being generally busy, I didn’t start playing Chained Echoes until last week.
Continue readingPlaying At Righteous Wrath But Only Managing Indignant Pique
So, I finally beat (sorta) Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and started playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. P:K was a bit of a letdown because the alignment system actually factored pretty heavily into the decision-making process for running my kingdom and had some incredibly significant impacts on the “post-game wrap-up” storytelling of the playthrough I finished. I didn’t get the long ending, since my character was content to let things shake out the way they did and just be finished with the whole farce, but my freedom-loving chaos mage apparently was a terrible ruler despite promoting mercy above all else and created a police state using magical surveillance technology. Still not sure what that came from, though I do know some of my advisor meetings kinda glitched through the cutscenes because I was doing a lot of saving and loading to get good outcomes because I didn’t want to deal with that shit. Anyway. I finished that and started the next game.
Wrath of the Righteous starts out pretty intensely, with a decent helping of mystery and stakes that are amped up pretty much instantly, but that was a nice follow-up to the expanded character creator whose UI is… Well, parts of it are better, but not all of it. It’s difficult to get a full-picture of your character when creating them or leveling them up, information is hidden in weird places, and some choices aren’t terribly intuitive. The greater number of options is nice, but the fact that information like which attributes matter most for each class and class variation being hidden in different text windows makes trying to figure out where my points need to be spent a pain in the ass. Especially since some of the class variations change what your primary attribute is. But that’s mostly a problem for Pathfinder as a whole than something tied specifically to this game. They just don’t fix the problem in the game.
After all that, though, the improvements show up. Being able to rotate the camera is nice, though it is made necessary by the somewhat cluttered environment you find yourself in at all points of this game so far. Since things are only transparent in a small bubble around your character, you have to get used to rotating the camera on top of moving it around, zooming, and managing your party. It gets very onerous in large battles that involve multiple angles of approach, too. It is a necessary skill to learn, though, because an object being transparent doesn’t actually mean it isn’t there. Clicking in the wrong place (on the roof of a house that was rendered invisible by your party, for instance) can have nasty ramifications in battle because you think you’re attacking an enemy but really you’re sending your character through an entire mob of foes to be ruthlessly cut down as they walk to the nearest reachable point to the invisible roof you clicked on.
Camera gripes aside, I do enjoy the fact that being persuasive and having a high-charisma no longer feels absolutely necessary to the game. I still made a high-charisma character and didn’t change off it when I got the option to retrain them because I like playing that type of character, but I no longer feel like that’s my only good choice if I want to do everything. I could easily see myself playing a different class some time in the future. Maybe a fighter, barbarian, or something more melee-based than my usual style.
I’ll also say I’m a bit frustrated that so many characters seem to be good at rogue skills early on because I built my sorcerer to be good at those things as a fun build idea and it wound up being so incredibly redundant. Half the characters I got initially could do those things as well as, if not better than, my character could. And not one single character was smart until I got through the whole long introduction section and into the exploration section. I actually missed a bunch of stuff early on because none of my people had any of the knowledge skills. I even got a whole pile of magic items I couldn’t properly use because no one had a decent Arcana skill. Seems like a bit of an oversight to me, given the importance of magic items to this game.
Well, I’ve aired all of my grievances now, so I think I’ll wrap up. I’m a bit too early in the plot to really comment on that (I had some install troubles and started the game 72 hours after release, but I’m not sure I can blame the game for this one since one of my hard drives might be corrupting), but it seems interesting so far. Much more so than P:K’s was since that amounted to “become a king and find out who is fucking with your attempts to become a king!” It’s definitely worth playing and hopefully future patches will continue to iron out the problems. If nothing else, P:WotR is in a much better place at launch that P:K was. Solid progress.
Still, as the title suggestions, I’m not sure where “Wrath of the Righteous” enters into the equation. Sure, demons are bad and they shouldn’t be in our world, but that’s more of a “fighting off an invasion” type thing. Righteousness has nothing to do with fending off a murderous invasive species. So far, the only “Righteousness” I’ve seen is the kind that is Good twisted to commit acts of Evil that has me wondering how all these god-empowered assholes could still be granted powers by their gods when they’re torturing and executing people without trials.
Octopath Traveler Was Pretty Alright, I Guess
So, I’m willing to admit that a certain amount of my “underwhelmed” reaction to this game is because it was hyped so much by friends and the few advertisements I saw. That being said, the game I was sold via recommendations and the advertisements does not, at all, feel like the game I actually bought. The game I was promised had tons of choices and all this variation and wonder and the game I got has fun battle mechanics and a rather stunted plot with little variety available to me. Because, if I’m being honest, the plot is kinda boring, even for a JRPG. Honestly, I’m still not even sure what the plot is beyond individual quest lines that have nothing tying them together.
Your character has a skill. They use the skill to complete a task in order to resolve a conflict that has interrupted their routine. They are prompted by some minor portion of their personality to pursue some greater task elsewhere. You move on to the next town. You repeat the whole saga for a new character. They join your party. You continue until you get to another portion of one character’s mission and then stuff happens that really doesn’t differ.
For how convoluted the skill crap is, in terms of actually completing the side quests, there really isn’t a whole lot of explanation. If you’re playing through this, I recommend ignoring the side quests until you’ve unlocked all of the characters so you understand what all the abilities are and can figure out how the shit you’re supposed to get fresh ingredients for some whiny-ass baker who can’t go talk to the shop keeper 50 pixels away from him. I mean, c’mon. Literally hiding them all behind these stupid skills that, for the most part, do nothing but force you to tap a bunch of buttons on every character who has the ability to talk? That’s super frustrating!
And don’t even get me started on how many unnecessary clicks there are in this game? Want to sell something you only have one of? First you have to select it, then you have to select the quantity, then you have to push up to say you want to sell it and then you have to tap the “A” button again to actually sell it. This mechanic is present EVERY TIME you have options, most of which mean nothing beyond choosing yes or no on selling something or saying if you’re reading to move on in the dumb little plot bits. Also, while I’m complaining, the writing is super cliché. There’s no real depth to the characters and they’re about as interesting as a cardboard cutout.
Now, all that being said, the game is still kind of fun. The battle mechanics are fun, the powers are interesting, and it’s got a rather smooth grind (in this case, grinding is the act of completing repetitive tasks in order to level up characters or gear in a game) without being entirely mindless. It’s basically a step up from Final Fantasy (auto-attack to grind and win), so about the same as Pokemon. You need to use the weaknesses of the enemies in order to gain an advantage over them, dealing more damage and preventing them from acting for a turn or two. Some enemies are weak to things you won’t have in your party, so it’s usually best to make sure you have a wide range of magic abilities and physical attacks so you can handle whatever comes your way. There’s a lot of grinding that happens early on, unfortunately, because all of the areas around the towns, the main areas you travel through as you pick up the characters, are really low-leveled. It quickly became pointless to fight those battles and it was frustrating to continuously have to run or to have to remember to equip a character’s special skill that lowered the chance of a random encounter (which I didn’t want in higher leveled areas because those areas were worth grinding in).
What makes the game the most fun for me is how easy it is to pick up and put down. There’s a bit of a long loading time when you start up the game, but that only happens whenever you fully exit the game. On a Switch, the only platform that supports it right now, that’s incredibly easy to avoid. I haven’t left the game in a week, despite only playing for half a dozen hours in that time. It’s a great unwinding game because it requires little input from me beyond actually pressing buttons and, if you get enough distance, the cardboard cut-out quality of the characters can actually be quite amusing. Hell, one of them seems like something straight out of a bad anime and I laughed my butt off as his super-serious and grandiose voice actor butchered his way through the lines. I don’t know if they just didn’t give the voice actors the context of their lines or what, but a lot of the emotive responses from this guy seemed a little out of place.
Aside from gameplay, the best feature is the beautiful pixel art of the game. It is a callback to old 16 bit games, but only in artistic style. The trees blow in the wind, the waves shift the water along the short, and there’s a level of detail to the environment that older games could only dream of. You move in two dimensions the entire game, but the backdrop and scrolling as you move around give an amazing approximation of three dimensions. The sound design is also impeccable. The music fits each scene perfectly and even the sort of off-key voice acting doesn’t negatively impact that.
Fun as it can be, I definitely understand that this kind of grindy game isn’t really everyone’s cup of tea. It’s barely my cup of tea. With a price point of sixty bucks, I wouldn’t really recommend it. If you can get it on sale for forty or less and want something to eat up some time, then I’d recommend it. There are plenty of hours in the game, they are just grindy hours with small steps in the plot that are so far apart that it seems like they just drop the stories between plot points (which they basically do).
Also, don’t let the demo fool you. Going through the initial arcs of the various characters gets old real fast. Just make a bunch of different profiles on your switch and play the demo once for every character. That way, you can experience most of the game without actually paying for it.
Vermintide 2 is (Sometimes) a Delightful Mess
As often happens with my friends, one of us found a new multiplayer game and subsequently convinced the rest of us to buy it. My roommate watched some of the promotional videos for Vermintide 2 and decided that he was going to buy it. One evening of play later, he was telling my and our other roommate that we should get it, even going so far as to offer to loan our other roommate (who is slightly more broke than either of us) the money to buy it. Not convinced by his ringing endorsement (he has a tendency to get very excited about things at first, no matter what they are), I decided to sit down and watch him play through a few matches.
It seemed fun enough, while I watched him. Vermintide 2 is a sort of fantasy remake of Left 4 Dead with an extra character and advancement options for your characters as you leveled them up. The gameplay looked solid, the levels looked fun, and all of the people he got matched with online seemed to have a basic amount of decorum so that the voice chat wasn’t completely horrible. After a while, I decided to buy it. It was only $30 and I needed a multiplayer game other than Overwatch since I’ve been getting kind of burned out on it.
Once I bought it and started downloading, I ran into the first hurdle. Part of downloading the game on Steam is automatically downloading the Test Server version of the game. It is at least the same size as the full game but it doesn’t tell you while you’re picking your download location that you’re downloading two things. You just get notified that the download will take up approximately 65GB of space and that it will take X hours based on your internet. Once you make peace with giving up that much space for this game and pick a location, the download screen on steam lists two separate items. While it is relatively easy to stop the download of the test server client and prevent it from trying to install every time you open Steam (right-click it in your library and pick the uninstall option), it is still super annoying that it starts it by default. If you’re like my roommates, just starting the download and walking away, you won’t even know you’re wasting 30+ GB of space for a version of the game you’re never going to use.
After the download was done, I loaded up the game, started playing, and ran into the second hurdle, one which I continuously run into. At the end of a mission, my game has crashed all but two times. First it plays really terribly synth music as the mission-end stat screen displays itself and then it eventually just shuts down, notifying me that an error report has been sent to the developer. As of today, nothing I’ve tried to fix the problem (based on message board posts and comments from the developer on Steam) has worked. Almost every mission I play ends with the game crashing and me loading up the game again for the next mission.
Aside from that, the game really is a lot of fun. The characters are excellent, each with their own voice and general style of combat. Within the characters, the carious class options and abilities are different enough that each feels different and refreshing. All together, it allows you to create a party that can fit almost any mission type using the same four characters every time. The weapon varieties are fun and easy to understand, so you’re never left wondering what is the difference between two types of bow or two types of polearms. Probably the best part is that, even with the class variation and unlockable abilities, the individual skill of the player counts for a lot. Sure, being higher leveled is a huge advantage in terms of damage output and survivability, but no amount of gear of levels is going to save you on even the beginner missions if you’re terrible at the game.
The plot is rather forgettable (you gotta destroy some kind of hoard of vermin?) and the world is basically a giant crater you spend your time wandering through, but the strength of the game lies in your group’s ability to just murder hundreds of rat creatures as you make your way from point A to point B. All of the fun is in running through these relatively quick missions, killing tons of enemies, and seeing if you can get cool loot for picking up handicaps throughout the level (things that fill your health restoration slot or that lower your total HP significantly).
While that is tons of fun to do, I find myself struggling to enjoy spending time playing the game since I have to restart it every mission and wait for the horrible, screechy synth music to stop (I’m not joking when I call it music. It has a rhythm and a beat to it that I could really get into if it wasn’t make entirely of metallic screeches and feedback noise). If I can figure out what is wrong or the developers patch the game so it no longer crashes all the time, I could really get into it. Until then, I’m mostly going to save it for when I get frustrated with Overwatch or we want to play with my roommate who doesn’t really play Overwatch anymore.
Ultimately, I can’t really recommend buying it right now because of how often it crashes, but I’d put it on your wishlist and wait for the recent reviews to pick up before actually buying it.
Saling Away
One of the most frustrating experiences for me, in a definite “First World Problems” kind of way, is being in a bookstore during a sale and not being able to take advantage of it. Not because I lacked the funds to buy more books, of course, but because I couldn’t find more books I was willing to buy for full price.
I was at my local Barnes & Noble just yesterday, Starbucks coffee in hand, looking for the next volume of a manga I’m readying. While lazily scanning the shelves, I found that there was a sale on manga: buy two, get the third for free. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find another series that looked super interesting to me based on the cover and a quick skim. For those of you who read manga, you know that’s a pretty terrible way to judge them, but there’s not much else to go off of other than that without a recommendation from a friend or trusted reviewer. My go-to friend was busy ignoring his phone and none of the review sites I checked could help with my selection, so I had no help at all.
After futilely wandering the manga section for another 10 minutes without a reply from my friend, I made my peace with my single purchase only to go over to the mass-market paperback section and find a similar sale. Buy two, get the third for free. There was only one Terry Pratchett book in that section that I didn’t own and none of the other books looked terribly fun or engaging.
Being a somewhat picky reader, I couldn’t find any information from my trusted sources without searching every title individually and I had been standing around for long enough already that any more time would have felt awkward. Especially because a whole slew of people had come and gone while I dithered. I skimmed around for the other books I wanted–a replacement copy of Red Rising since I stuck my old copy in a Christmas grab bag and the third book in the trilogy, Morning Star–but none of them were a part of the sale.
There I was, standing around with two books that were a part of identical sales but didn’t qualify for each other’s sale (yeah, I asked), and zero inclination to buy anything else I could find. So I took my four books, grabbed two more Pratchett books that weren’t a part of the sale, and cried bitter tears as I said good-bye to my chance at cheap new books. It was a tough thing to do, to walk out of there with a sale whispering sweetly into my ear and wallet, but I had nothing to buy.
If you should happen to find yourself in a similar place, I’ll make some recommendations now so you can avoid my pitiable fate. I highly recommend checking out Tokyo Ghoul if you don’t mind a little gore and would like a refreshing and well-written take on zombiism. It follows the life of a young man who gets turned into one of these “ghouls” as the result of a life-saving surgery and how he struggles to find his place in both societies. There is plenty of action and drama, but the characters are endearing, believable, and worth the wait for each new volume.
As far as sci-fi goes, I recommend the Red Rising trilogy–by Pierce Brown–if you like sci-fi and social commentary. It’s a bit heavy-handed at times (nowhere near as heavy-handed as some of the older sci-fi is, though) and a bit dense to read because of the stylized language Brown uses, but it’s definitely a pleasant read and a very engaging story. The protagonist is a young man from the lowest caste of society, a Red, who is the chief earner for his clan, who takes his place in a rebellion against their Gold overlords after his wife is killed for singing a particular song.
In less detailed terms, Brandon Sanderson is always enjoyable and anything by Jim Butcher is worth a read. Terry Pratchett is great for humor, as is Douglas Adams. Stephen King is great if you enjoy macabre stories and crude shock-value (seriously, the guy breaks/challenges social rules purely for the shock value they bring to his stories). Brian Jacques is one of my first favorites and Terry Brooks has a large series out that is now drawing to an end. I’ve got plenty more where all that came from, but dropping all those names would double the length of this blog post, so I’ll leave it at that for now.
Happy Saling!