While watching Dimension20, I’ve been playing through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom again. I’ve given up on any hope I had for a Master Mode and done my best to accept the game that was sold to us. It feels unfair to say this, but it feels so much less than I hoped it would be. I understand that my expectations were set sky-high by Breath of the Wild, but I feel like so much went into turning that game into An Experience that just wasn’t kept around for the sequel. The sense of wonder and grandeur that Breath of the Wild builds is spent trying to create a sense of horror around The Gloom and Ganondorf’s return instead. All of the early building in the introductory sequence falls flat because all that accomplishes is setting us at what is the common starting-point for almost all Legend of Zelda games and then none of the freaky gloom, horrific music, or creepy visuals come up again as something to be dealt with or feared for multiple hours. Then, when it finally comes up again, it is a minor environmental hazard tied to The Depths, which is unfortunately the section of the game with the greatest squandered potential of all, or a strange and potentially terrifying encounter that is incredibly easy to flee from. It becomes a minor concern only during the final boss fight and, even then, if you’re set up with halfway decent armor, good food buffs, and tons of hearts, it’s trivial. With none of that to rely on to create a coherent throughline for the game (like the mixed wonder of exploration, grief at finding a decayed world you can’t remember but know you failed to protect, and hope for the future that thread their way through all of Breath of the Wild), all you’ve got is an admittedly fun game to play with an interesting world to explore while building all kinds of weird machines.
Continue readingVideo Games
The Lost Odyssey That Got Away
I was talking to a friend about video games a couple weeks ago and we briefly touched on a game called Lost Odyssey that we’ve both played and, coincidentally, stopped playing at almost exactly the same point in the game. He stopped playing at the last save before a difficult boss fight because he was stuck in the lead up to that boss fight and couldn’t figure out how to beat the boss. I stopped playing immediately after winning that boss fight because, after stopping for the night after winning that difficult fight, my Xbox 360 red-ringed and I lost all of my save data. The reason we never went back to try to play through that game again was because that fight was on the third of the four discs for the game and there was just too much game for us to want to play again. It wasn’t a bad game, but it was just so very long. I definitely enjoyed my experience playing it, but it slipped my mind so thoroughly that I never even looked up how the story ended despite it being almost a decade and a half since I lost my game data and decided not to try playing it again. I probably still own that stack of CDs, since I still have my Xbox 360 hanging around somewhere (I haven’t plugged it in for at least a decade at this point, so who knows if it even works still), so I might someday replay it. Probably not, given how little time I’ve got and how much other stuff I’ve got to read, play, watch, or listen to, but I still think about it from time to time.
Continue readingOn My “To-Enjoy” List For 2024
This is my first post after my vacation. I actually wrote it yesterday (which means that everything you’ve read up to this point was written, reviewed, and scheduled before the 22nd of December), because I was so exhausted that I actually got sick for a bit there. Not with a cold or Covid or anything. Just exhausted enough that I felt terrible in a lot of ways. So, instead of taking a long weekend and making up for my days off by spending a little extra time working in the days after my break, I decided to just not do anything and then, starting the first non-holiday of 2024, write two blog posts every day for a week. It will be pretty easy, considering how much time I’ve had for reading, watching shows, playing games, and spending time with people I care about. All of which wasn’t enough to actually make a dent in my backlog of stuff to read, play, and watch even if it did provide me with plenty of stuff to write about. I did make a pretty significant dent in my gaming backlog, though, so that’s nice. It got bigger though, not long after, since I got games as gifts this holiday season. I’ve got so much to do, still. Well, that I want to do. I don’t NEED to do most of it. I just want to do a lot of it.
Continue readingViolence As A Vehicle For Progression In Video Games
Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of violence in video games. Pretty much every game I’ve played this year requires some degree of violence in order to make forward progress. In my beloved RPGs, it is the central pillar of almost every game. Sure, there’s usually a story and some excellent character work, but almost the whole thing still revolves around violence. My favorite RPG from the past year, Chained Echoes, features combat as the main mechanic of moving around the world and the method of resolving every bit of story tension in the game (even if the story isn’t really about violence and is actually critical of how “the ends justify the means” style philosophies are almost always an excuse for power getting what it wants through violence). Perhaps the biggest game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, is incredibly violent, sometimes moreso than others because there are entirely legitimate, if digustingly evil, paths through the game that involve indiscriminate murder. Sure, both these games involve violence against monsters and people with little to distinguish the two groups from each other (and next-to-nothing to explicitly point out that maybe you’re the greatest monster of them all, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3), but games with violence exclusively against monsters aren’t much better since they still require violence in order to progress the game. Even one of the cutest, most-delightful games I’ve played (Lil Gator Game) involved violence, albeit violence against cardboard “monsters” rather than against other people. There’s almost no escaping it, which is unfortunate because one of the things that drives my escapist desires the most these days is the amount of violence in the world.
Continue readingBack To Baldur’s Gate 3 Again
Larian, the studio behind the incredibly popular and much-nominated-for-game-awards Baldur’s Gate 3, released a new major patch to the game today (well, a week ago today). There’s a whole lot of stuff in that patch, but the thing I’m most excited for is the opportunity to return to my only complete save file and beat the final boss again so I can see the epilogue they’ve added! My main criticism of BG3’s ending was how abrupt it felt given that you sorta just get through the final cinematic, see a couple other scenes, and then it’s over. No idea who followed up on what and how anyone is doing since, like, the last I saw of Asterion was him running from sunlight as it slowly burned him to a crisp. So now I can go back and see how it all wraps up an appropriate in-game six months after the final battle! I’m very excited for this, which is important because I still haven’t gone back to playing ANY of my other BG3 save files since I stopped playing after hurting my own feelings with how evil and awful I was in my Evil Dark Urge file. I’m finally almost ready to get over that. Ready enough to update the game, anyway, though it might take a bit for me to actually play it since I’ve still got Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars and Spider-Man 2 to finish [I actually played it for too many hours the day after I wrote this and haven’t stopped playing it since]. And Armored Core VI at some point, though I might not make myself wait until after I’ve played that since it’s entirely possible that I might just not really enjoy it. I still haven’t played more than the first level and a couple training things.
Continue readingAppreciating Brevity In Media Via The Local Superhero, Spider-Man
I spent almost all of my free time last weekend playing Spider-Man: Remastered (originally for the PS4) and then Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I actually 100-percented SM:R (though there’s technically 3 trophies I’ve yet to collect since they were added as part of an update that added a New Game + mode that I’m going to do eventually, once I’ve had a break from the game), which makes it the first game I’ve ever gotten all of the achievements for. It makes a lot of sense, though, since most of the non-story achievements involve exploring, traversing the world, and taking the time to look around or find interesting places to perch. I’ve always been about that stuff, which I wrote about extensively in my review about three months ago, but going directly from Spider-Man: Remastered to Spider-Man: Miles Morales has really made me reflect on my experiences with these games as a whole.
Continue readingVenturing Back Into Sanctuary For Seasonal Updates in Diablo IV
Over the weekend, I played a bit over twenty hours of Diablo IV in a period of almost thirty hours. My friends and I, the people I played the game with during the closed beta last Spring and who I started to play with when the game fully released over the summer, have been too busy to play much, with each other or alone. Since this was the final weekend of Season 1, when I suggested we do something, my friend (the one who works on the game) suggested we try to get through as much of the seasonal content as we could. I said I was up for it and we launched into it once we had all finished with work and eaten dinner, at which point we realized I had not cleared the campaign on any of my characters. I was ready to tell them to go on without me for now, but they opted to pile into the campaign behind me and the three of us cleared the whole thing in about five or six hours. It was honestly impressive, how quickly we blasted through it (especially since they could use their horses to ride places and I could just teleport to them, which helped cut down on a lot of running around until I got a horse of my own), even with taking the time to watch the cutscenes. I still missed some nuance here or there, I’m sure, but it was a far more complete version of the story than I’m used to getting from my experience of being powerleveled through Diablo III. I really don’t feel like I missed much in Diablo IV (other than the hundreds of side quests, of course) and while I’m sure some of the story will fade in time, I actually have a pretty clear understanding of what was going on and why it was going. Conversely, I barely remember the story of Diablo III and I’m not sure I ever really understood what was going on in that game other than “angels and devils bad, fight them so they stay away.”
It took a lot longer to level up a new character in D4 than it did in D3. I have vague, hazy memories of trying to avoid dying as my more powerful friends ran me through one nightmarish dungeon after another in D3. It was always tricky to stay close enough to get the XP I needed for my level count leap upward but not so close than I’d get caught in the crossfire or aggro some enemies. What I remember more is feeling like this was the video game equivalent of eating my steamed mixed vegetables before I could have any casserole. Sure, it was nice to be at the table with my friends, but I don’t really remember enjoying the meal much. There was no sense of accomplishment from hitting the level cap and starting to gain paragon levels. Gear meant nothing since it was constantly being thrown aside for something better. I never once altered the cosmetics of my character since it didn’t matter what I did so long as I was there and mashing buttons. There was no strategy to the tier of play I ever got to and little I ever did seemed to make a difference in what happened on my screen. Everyone murdered a bunch of enemies, everyone got big numbers, and everyone got a cut of the loot.
In D4, though, I actually feel like I accomplished something special when my friends and I managed to get my brand new season character from level four to level forty-five in just over twelve hours. Sure, we didn’t make a huge dent in the seasonal stuff, but it was still impressive how we managed to get strong enough to handle a helltide even if I was about fifteen levels too weak for it still by the end of thirty hours of gaming. It was a great place to get experience, though, since I got my last five levels in the hour that we participated in the helltide. If we’d been doing it at a time other than half-past midnight, I might have even gotten to access some of those cool chests since I wouldn’t be making foolish, exhausted mistakes that got me killed. I mean, I was also playing the party’s tank so I was always in the thick of it and that meant that, when we were doing high-tier stuff (like the capstone dungeon and the helltide), I was going to be dying a bunch anyway since I was the lowest-leveled character in the party. We still managed to get through it all alright, though there were a lot of close calls (which felt like a real accomplishment, given how underleveled we all were for the capstone dungeon).
I’m excited to launch into the next season (which will have already started by the time you’re reading this). I will probably try to play the game by myself a bit more than I did during season 1 [I’ve already played it twice by myself, which is double the number of times I played Season 1 by myself] so I can work on getting my map completed, but I expect to still be mostly playing it with my friends. Unless there’s a new Baldur’s Gate 3 style single-player game to drag me away from Diablo, I expect I’ll actually be able to stick to my plans of playing it on regular rotation. I would really like to avoid a repeat of last weekend, since I absolutely do not have it in me to have another weekend as chaotic and sleep-schedule-destroying as this past one.
I know D4 doesn’t really have the incredibly intense loop of leveling and loot of Diablo III, but I think the promises of what changes are coming to the game show that the people making it are paying attention to what their players want and are working on making Diablo IV the excellent game I think we all know it can become over time. After all, it took several years for Diablo III to become the game people loved and even then they were complaining about “missing” classes the entire time I was playing it. Anyone trying to tell you that IV is worse than III is either stuck in nostalgia or just wants to be mad about something. It is different, for sure, but not worse. Considering it’s barely a year old and most people are comparing it to a game that was over eleven years old (and supported via constant improvements and new seasonal content for all of the later years of that period), I think people are just being pissy. I mean, if they wanted Diablo IV to be the same thing as Diablo III, then they never would have stopped playing D3 no matter what D4 turned out to be. Which, you know, is pretty much what happened with those folks.
Anyway, I’m having a good time and I have no plans to stop any time soon. I will freely admit to a little bias since my adopted family sister-in-law works on it and I will always show up to support the endeavors of the people I care about as long as I can do so without sacrificing myself but, as I told said friend, I was going to be playing this game anyway. Diablo is the only game like this (adventure looter or whatever they’re calling the genre these days) that I actually enjoy, but I do genuinely enjoy it. It can be a bit overwhelming at times due to all the action and violence, but it really is an enjoyable experience since it’s so much less fiddly than other similar games. Sure, I can look up a build that is guaranteed to work for any similar game, but I can also do a bit of freestyling or experimentation in D4 and still enjoy my experience as long as I’m taking care to maintain a cohesive build. It’s so much simpler than the absolute mess and chaos of the similar game my friends tried to get me into when they’d gotten tired of D3 and craved that kind of gameplay. I really did not enjoy Path of Exile. It was far too finicky and messy for my preferences and the experience playing through the story was not just boring and largely unintelligible, but also incredibly time-consuming. D4 is so much more fun to play that I’m only ever tracking the hours in retrospect and I do that for literally everything I do.
Baldur’s Gate 3 On The PS5 Has Awoken Something In Me That I’d Long Forgotten
Over the course of the last couple years, I’ve noticed I have a tendency to write a “My Final Thoughts On Video Game” blog post once I finish a video game. Pretty much every game I’ve played and written about in more than one post falls into this pattern. Except for Baldur’s Gate 3, which is probably good because this is the sixth time I’ve written about the game since it was fully released in early August and I have no doubts in my mind that I will write about it again. Today, I’m condensing another month of playtime into a single post because I not only returned to the game much sooner than I exepected (likely because it is a more manageable investment of my time to play it on my PS5 than on my PC since I can more easily kick myself off my couch than I can kick myself out of my desk chair), but I’ve moved from playing a single file to playing through several at once. It is a significant depature from my gaming habits with games of this size and complexity, though I’ll admit that this falls more closely in line with how I used to play games back in college and high school. What is most noteworthy to me about all this is the last time I played a large RPG with significant story variability on a console was in college. I’ve played every major RPG (and any other game with a story that is altered by player choices or moral alignment) on my PC since 2012 and don’t know if I’ll ever going to go back to that now that I’ve broken away from it.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 22
It has been almost three months since I wrote the last entry in this series. I thought I’d probably hold off on more entries in this series until I’d spent more time in Tears of the Kingdom, but I’ve yet to have a reason to return to that entry in the franchise. All of my video game time has been spent on new games (or at least new to me, since Ni No Kuni is absolutely NOT a new game), so I haven’t felt much call to return to any old games, other than the sort of on-going repitition of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (though I’d argue that doing alternate storylines isn’t exactly the same thing) and a desire to do a New Game + of Chained Echoes because I still don’t have anyone to talk to about that game. There isn’t as much beckoning replayability in Tears of the Kingdom as there was in Breath of the Wild. BotW had DLC already planned for it, that you could pre-purchase the day the game came out, after all. It has now been four months since TotK came out and there’s no word on DLC other than Nintendo’s usual “we have no plans at this time” statement. Which, you know, feels like it is misleading a lot of the time, but I’ll admit that this feeling might be a bit misdirected because Nintendo probably doesn’t get asked about unannounced DLC for small games that are unlikely to have it. They probably only get questioned on big games that don’t have DLC already announced, which feels like an incredibly skewed data pool to be used as the basis for drawing any kind of conclusions. So who knows what there will be, if anything, for TotK in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.
Continue readingResurfacing For Air After A Weekend Lost In Baldur’s Gate 3
Other than preparation for and then hosting a Pathfinder Second Edition one-shot, I spent my entire weekend playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I was finally able to play it in more than drips and drabs (which, for me, meant an hour or two at a time, since I won’t bother to turn my computer on for anything else). I wound up starting a new game with two friends and then taking this large chunk of time to wrap up loose ends, finish map exploration, and, in the wee hours of the morning, finish the main quest points of Act 1. I rescued Halsin, helped the Tieflings, dealt with a swamp witch, got to absolutely wreck some weaker enemies with my brand new level 5 abilities (still haven’t cast Fireball, though, since I mismanaged Wyll’s spell slots and forgot to short rest before the next fight), and prepared myself for an underground adventure. After this, I’m moving into entirely new territory (I never did the Underdark stuff in Early Access) and I’m excited to play chunks of the game I’ve never encountered before.
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