Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4

It’s been a fucktastically long time since I’ve mustered the strength to hunker down and write a video game review. My reasons range from straight-up apathy to personal distractions like “moving” and “pools” and “gyms” and other semi-active activities. But the big reason is Persona 4, a crooked-ass, super-silly, super-serious oddity of a Playstation 2 game that made me embrace video game addiction for the first time in decades. And embrace it with a very aloof, goofy smile on my face. It’s the first Japanese RPG that I’ve given half a damn about since the current generation of consoles were released, and I don’t know whether that says something about modern developers, myself or the universe in general.

Part of the innate genius of Persona 4 is that it plays and dances with all sorts of negative Japanese anime archetypes in a way anyone but the most bigoted can get behind. A hodgepodge of divergent-personality high school students are saving the world from a supernatural threat by using supernatural powers and weapons purchased at the corner store. Underaged girls are overtly sexualized in a manner that makes themselves and all parties involved feel very embarrassed. The grown-up police force is very inept. The good guys have a teddy bear mascot because they can.

The actual plot places a nameless, kind-of-voiceless protagonist in a small town, where people have a tendency to get thrown into televisions and come out all nice and murdered. Protagonist Man learns that he and his precocious high school friends can enter the TV land and use magical powers by summoning their outlandishly-dressed super-alter-egos. Protagonist Man and friends decide they are more competent than the police force and take justice into their own hands.

This is a Japanese RPG. So there are heaping flows of text dialogue. Characters tend to feel obligated to summarize the plot over and over again (and ask if you’d like another summary.) Even if the word barrage is a bit much, it’s hard not to be magnetized and charmed by the bevy of unique and personable characters filling the town of Inaba. Not too many small towns house bikers, pop idols and a fox with a heart of gold, but it feels more fresh than what most other RPGs have been delivering lately, Japanese or otherwise.

There’s a whole socialization system built around the idea that having strong social links strengthen your teammates and let the player build stronger monsters. But bulking up your alter-egos is really a secondary reason at best to explore these side-stories. What happens is your protagonist hangs out with either a party member, family member or any of the few people in Inaba with a full name. These side-stories can be cute, quirky, funny, serious, sedimental, melodramatic, but are never not flat. The big flaw with the system is that players are given multiple dialogue choices, with certain choices speeding up the progress in which these events can occur. The only way to find out the correct answer is by way of the internet. Also, the player must have a Persona that matches the same Arcana type as the person he’s trying to socialize with to move things along (oh, Personas and people are categorized by Tarot cards in one of the game’s rare brushed with pretentiousness.)

So I did find myself almost always having a FAQ booted up on my computer at all times, largely because I wanted to get the most out of all of my social events. The game gives the player a calendar with a finite number of days to build your social links and finish the next dungeon, but doesn’t do a proper job of communicating just how much time remains. The path to maximizing all of your social links can be a very specific one that can’t be intuited by the player on one playthrough (if that.) It’s especially frustrating when rainy days happen, and nobody but the sappy drama girl wants to come out and play. What is the pollution like in Japan as to trigger such bouts of acid rain?

Oh, yeah, dungeons. This is an RPG, after all. You can spend your days in the TV land actually rescuing those innocent people from the brink of death. On one hand, this segment of the game represents a welcome return to traditional RPG mechanics. In the post-Final Fantasy 13 world, RPGs have gotten needlessly complex with their convoluted terminology and byzantine gameplay mechanics in an attempt to make newcomers not want to buy their games. Persona 4 feels like a welcome return to the days of “Attack, Magic, Item”, all the while adding its own brand of depth. The game encourages players to strike down your adversaries’ elemental weakness in succession to trigger a super attack. (Which, appropriately enough, is a dust cloud cartoon beating.) It’s a simple concept, but one that works here.

At the same time, the game thematically plays its own twist with those dungeons. There is no fire dungeon or ice dungeon. There is, however, a hot sauna dungeon and a strip club dungeon. The enemies in those dungeons vary from giant lips-and-tongues to S and M freaks to Hulk Hogan. The bosses get even more strange. Even the summoned Personae wind up being real oddities. I don’t feel obligated to tell Persona 4 jokes in this review just because the game itself is an oddity in of itself. One of the key gameplay mechanics is that the main protagonist can equip different Personae, each with their own set of stats and spells. The strategy part of choosing Personas is really just limited to “have the spells the rest of your party don’t have”, but it’s more the spectacle of equipping Personae based on different religions, mythologies and legends that intrigues me. By the end of the game, you can have a stable consisting of Thor, Satan, Beelzebub, Ganesh and a Ghost Rider knockoff.

Persona 4 is a weird game to recommend to other people, just because of the loopholes I had to jump through to get to the sweet center. I had bought this game in 2008 and subsequently sold it because I couldn’t penetrate a kind of difficult first dungeon. It wasn’t until this recent playthrough that I became wowed over by the game’s charms. That it took some internet assistance could be considered something of a condemnation.

But I can’t ignore the effect the game has had on my summer. I spent a combined 130 hours on two consecutive playthroughs. Another 100 hours were spent watching two grown men play through this game and comment on their unusual experience over the internet on a popular website. Not since Chrono Trigger have I made an honest attempt at 100-percenting any RPG. The game’s wonderful J-Pop fight music is my ringtone. This game’s J-Pop soundtrack is on my cell phone playlist, saddled between a lot of Metallica. That’s a rare accomplishment and I don’t know how I feel about that. I do know that I feel really good about Persona 4.

4 ½ stars

WWE All Stars

The revelation that I’ve had over the past two weeks is that not only is wrestling goofy and ridiculous, but that it should be goofy and ridiculous. You take a look at today’s current WWE product and you have guys like Randy Orton speaking in solemn tones about his family and John Morrison staring awkwardly and uncomfortably at the camera attempting to “act”. This is not entertainment to me, John Cena as an inspirational amateur wrestler in “Legend” is not entertainment, Michael Cole berating women is not entertainment, the Nexus/Corre contingent of green bodies is not entertainment, people uttering the phrase “WWE Universe” in every third sentence is not entertainment. I want guys yelling in the camera about how they’re going to throw 29 other men over the top rope. I want exaggerated personalities that can walk into the room, eat all of the chips and dip, throw a television out the window and get away with it on sheer charisma. I want the guys from back in the day that forget more about wrestling in a single coke-addled binge than today’s guys learn in a lifetime.

WWE All Stars is the amalgamation of what we all wish wrestling was. Guys with really large bodies, yelling and spiting at Gene Okerlund’s face, throwing each other 20 feet into the air and then jumping for joy while their heel victim winces in exaggerated pain. This is wrestling with all of the controversy of steroids, concussions and death tucked under the sweaty carpet at Hulk Hogan’s gym. It’s also a gloriously raised Steve Austin middle finger (or perhaps a Juventud Guerrera naked and baked middle finger) raised at the WWE Smackdown vs Raw series.

THQ’s flagship wrestling series has been considerably stagnant and full of itself for the last 5-10 years. That is a franchise that has found itself getting more lost in systems after systems, making controls needlessly complex and chains of animations needlessly lengthy. If you like repeated arm-wringings and headlocks taken out of context, then perhaps you would dig last year’s game. But I consider myself enough of a wrestling fan that a Sim-style game (whatever consititutes simulating a fixed competition) should appeal to me. And yet those games have become so far removed from anything resembling fixed competition for me that I just can’t be arsed to figure out the nuances of analog stick grappling.

The all new WWE All Stars throws out arm wringers in favour of full-bore madness. Your casual weak attacks include the Canadian Destroyer and other ultraviolent indy wrestling moves that the real Steve Austin would balk at doing. Stronger attacks tend to involve some variation of wrestlers jumping 20 feet into the air, possibly with some flips, and then doing something really bad. The Randy Orton punt, a move that in the real WWE would “injure” a wrestler for weeks, can be casually done as a standard specialty attack, repeatedly, while the opponent gets up immediately for more combat. (Post review note: I used to consider that ridiculous, then I saw what fighters got up from after receiving X-Ray attacks in the new Mortal Kombat.) Wrestler bodies in this game are the ridiculous muscular exaggerations that would make the most barrel-chested comic book heroes a little insecure. These are the rubber action figures we all once owned from the 80s come to life, but more vascular.

And all of this cartoon insanity works thanks to what feels like the best wrestling gameplay system in a decade. Attacks are divided into weak and strong strikes or grapples. All attacks come out in a snappy, responsive manner that sparingly leaves you feeling locked in an animation cycle. Likewise, you pull off counters with the bumpers, and they come off just as quickly…as do the counters to the counters. A basic example; a flying arm drag, countered by the two wrestlers flipping in the air, recountered by another mid-air rotation into the actual arm drag. The health and special attack systems have also been brought down to their most basic; you have a set amount of health, losing it all makes you vulnerable to a pinfall or KO by way of a wacky finishing move. You have two meters that trigger special attacks and finishers. You fill these meters by way of administering the pain.

That I can explain how to play this game in a single paragraph speaks sweaty volumes to its accessibility. I’ve had little difficulty when it comes to introducing people who suck at fighting games on how to play and perform leaping top rope 360 flip strikes of doom. Most of these people are also considerably enthusiastic about half of the game’s roster. A decent cross-section of 80s and 90s stars from WWE’s past litter half the roster. Familiars like Randy Savage, Hogan, Warrior, Bret Hart, HBK, Rock, Austin and such are natural fits for a game about amplified madness, and make for easy conversation starters with people on the topic of “when wrestling was good.” Filling out the other half of the roster are WWE contemporaries like John Cena, Rey Misterio and such. Not to insult today’s “sports entertainers”, but seeing someone like Drew McIntyre in this game kind of highlights the thin star power of today’s wrestling. Still, seeing the mannerisms of either era’s wrestlers on screen is a delight, from Jack Swagger breaking into a set of pushups to signify a finishing move, to Roddy Piper delivering a supercharged airplane spin.

You have a few single player options. “Fantasy Warfare” is where you unlock hidden wrestlers by competing in a series of dream matches between yesterday and today’s stars. Some of them make sense, like a clash of giants between Big Show and Andre the Giant, or an alcohol-morality battle between Steve Austin and CM Punk that makes you really wish that feud does happen soon. Some of them range from forced (Kofi Kingston fighting Ricky Steamboat over who is the bigger innovator?) to outright preposterous (John Morrison has no business being deemed as charismatic as Randy Savage, nuh huh) but all of them are preceeded by sweet video compilations of past events in wrestling history. Likewise, “Path of Champions” has you fighting a series of opponents leading up to a confrontation with either Randy Orton, the Undertaker or D-Generation X. During your rise to the top, cutscenes of your future adversary play as they taunt your rise to the top. If nothing else, a great deal of care went into the creation of these brief interludes, and there may have never been another moment in history where more programmers spent more time and energy rendering a digital Paul Bearer.

Admittedly, the above mentioned boil down to a series of fights against the AI, and can be breezed through relatively quickly. This is better served as a multiplayer experience, both online and off. Up to four people can compete in handicap, tornado tag, free-for-alls or cage matches. It’s a small selection of match types in comparison to the Smackdown series, but all of them are viable and entertaining options. You can play all of them online, and notwithstanding the bizarreness of having ranked handicap matches (and a leaderboard dedicated to handicap matches), the online play is a mostly smooth, only occasionally-laggy experience.

There’s a create-a-wrestler option, and it is barren compared to other wrestling games in regards to customization options. But long gone is my passion to spend many an hour fine-tuning the chin structure of my created Bret Hart. (Plus the game has the real Bret Hart in it.) My only actual issue is that I wish the load times were a tad more brief, though an installation helps some.

I’ve gotten a surprisingly amount of mileage playing All Stars. I got this at launch and that it took so gosh-darned long to get around to reviewing it attests to as much. Your enjoyment will depend on whether or not you dig muscle-busting dudes online or have a posse of buddies to clash with. But the unanimous consensus amongst everyone I’ve played the game with is that All Stars is stupid-crazy fun, the version of wrestling everyone can hop into with little sense of shame.

4 stars

Dragon Age 2

Without reading any previews, I had this grand vision in my head of what Dragon Age 2 would look like based on my experiences with its prequel. I had imagined another countrywide trek across the faraway land of Ferelden, centuries after my past quest. The darkspawn would be a returning threat, as they are wont to return every number of years, with a new generation of heroes trying to figure out WHY they keep coming back. And all of the decisions I made in Dragon Age 1 would be manifesting themselves, what with the werewolf plague in effect, mages laughing at templars and maybe an army or two of golems lying around. Maybe I shouldn’t have let my imagination run wild with the possibilities. Maybe I shouldn’t have stuck my nose so deep into the game’s codec.

But alas, Dragon Age 2 is not that game. Where Origins felt like a weird anomaly transported from 1998 to introduce players to the joys of invisible dice rolls, Dragon Age 2 is a little more current-generation. You can feel the claw marks on the game where Electronic Arts stuck their talons in Dragon Age 2 with input. For example, the game development’s Herbalism Budget was slashed in favour of the Violence Budget. Enemies have a tendency to explode for no biologically conceivable reason other than for comedy, and I was never not laughing when an enemy combusted from my dagger stab. Combat feels a little more involved and interesting, in part because you now press a button to make your hero attack, followed by him or her ACTUALLY ATTACKING. This shocking departure from the days of watching canned sword-swinging animations need not worry devoted role playing players, as you’ll eventually hit a point where the game starts demanding you to pause the action at every opportunity to administer specific team commands. That was the point I started cursing and set the difficulty to Casual.

Because I am, after all, a casual player of RPGs of all kinds. And I can appreciate the mild casual-izing that EA and/or Bioware opted to make in the name of smoothing out the game. Trap-making? Gone. Herbalism? Of course not, Grey Wardens don’t do drugs. The Skills part of leveling up has been removed to make the game feel less like World of Warcraft. And all of the universe’s pieces of armour and clothes are custom-fitted to only fit your main character and no one else in your party. ‘Ye Olde fans of Dragon Age: Origins have every right to be irate at these omissions, but I was merely content to spend less time navigating menus and more time navigating my sword in someone’s chest.

And fight you will. I personally don’t think players should be particularly up in arms over the game’s simplified nature as they should over some of the real shortcuts. Remember how Origins had you travelling far and wide across large landscapes into a variety of medieval, Tolkienianish settings? Dragon Age 2 is not quite that. No, Dragon Age 2 takes place entirely with the city of Kirkwall, a single city with more enemy mercenaries, gangs, slavers, demons, blood mages and giant spiders than actual civilians. You’ll visit the shopping district, castle, slums, super slums, seaside slums and other medieval ghettos and barrios. The vast majority of the action takes place in the same locales, be it the city streets or in the exact same warehouses, basements, mountainsides and caves. The complete 180 in scope from the first game to this is rather discouraging.

Likewise, you can expect your characters to almost always be soaked in sweet red blood, just like in the first game. There is no shortage of enemies to combat, and no shortage of sidequests to undertake, and no shortage of time to realize that all of those sidequests will ask you to cut down a portion of the Kirkwall population. Some fights are annoying in the sense that they unceremoniously dump waves of previously unseen enemies in your direction. This makes creating strategic…okay, hypothetically, if I were the type of player that paused the game every turn to issue teammate commands, it would really throw off my gameplan to have a second wave of goons appear on the field. The first major chapter of the game is particularly off-putting, in that the game seems to throw 300 sidequests at you, with the goal that the player will raise 50 gold coins. Now if only the game were courteous enough to waypoint the location of the target of that 50 gold coins quest once I had raised the funds instead of leaving me to wander the streets of Notslumstown.

I feel like these are all unfortunate flaws that devoted Origins fans will take offense to, which is tragic since I feel like this is a game that Origins fans should experience anyways. This is still very much a Bioware game with a very Bioware-like plot. You play as ________ Hawke, a custom-created male or female Warrior/Rogue/Mage, whose family leaves Ferelden during the first game’s events. The game does a really great job of portraying your character’s rise to power, from struggling refugee to wealthy noble to being the Man (or Woman) of the town. Meanwhile, your character surrounds his/herself with interesting personalities, from a wise-cracking dwarf to a wise-cracking pirate to characters that aren’t as wise-cracking but still present interesting personalities and sidequests. Just like Mass Effect 2, the most rad of rad segments within Dragon Age 2 are the quests you do to earn the love of your teammates. And like Mass Effect 2, having sex with your teammates is a PG, all-clothes-on affair. Do you really want a video game programmer to render the pixels on your dwarf mage’s nipples?

You may remember how Dragon Age: Origins had your character dealing with complex moral issues involving fantasy characters and dilemmas based on real hot button topics. (The dwarves had a fucking Indian caste system! The insanity!) Dragon Age 2 doesn’t quite hit on as many potential high school essay topics, but it does a great job focusing on a select few. The whole matter of templars controlling mages is very thoroughly explored, and the writing of the game is sure to inject as much grey area into the debate as possible. You also have to deal with tensions relating to a group of Qunari refugees (think the Klingon if they were commies) that hate living in Kirkwall but have no desire to go anywhere.

Naturally, there will be many instances where the player will have to make some kind of moral choice. And like its predecessor, Dragon Age 2 handles this more appropriately than any other game on the market. Since you don’t have to worry about filling a Good or Evil meter to unlock any achievements or special abilities, and since most of these choices aren’t exactly clear-cut, the game gives you the freedom to decide based on your own opinions and feelings. I appreciate that. Especially since your choices will inevitably lead to you making a profound impact on the world.

And there are but a few callbacks to Dragon Age 1 and some of the moral choices you may have settled on. I was at least content knowing that Dragon Age: Awakening gets some acknowledgement and that my time spent on that expansion was not wasted. My last gripe? Not to spoil things, but the game uses an interrogation of a central character as its narration device. And these interrogation sequences ultimately serve little more than to advertise the next Dragon Age game. Call it a Desmondizing of the game, if you will.

Dragon Age 2 brings to the player a very compelling rags-to-riches-to-messing-up-the-city tale. Getting to witness that tale requires a whole lot of patience and compromise, and accepting that this is not the amazing anomaly of an RPG the first game was. It can be frustrating, it can be a chore. And yet the moment I reached the end credits, I immediately started a new game, just to see how some of my previous decisions would pan out differently. So on that strength, fans of the first game should try it anyways and brace themselves for a very positive, enjoyable disappointment.

3 ½ stars

By the way, I did promise a review for Awakening a long time ago. So here it is: adequate but disposable.

Marvel vs Capcom 3

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 strikes me as an emotionally polarizing game in the sense that its fans seemingly loved it and its makers seemingly despised working on it. You’d have to loathe the action-packed, explosion-fueled anime violence-fest fighting game you were developing to have included such grating lounge jazz music and the carnival motif stage. That game rather haphazardly threw just about every other set of character sprites from all of the Versus games with no regard to resolution quality or balance. The end result was something of a cluttered, convoluted mess that fans still made themselves play for over a decade. Despite the dreadful-on-all-fronts audio and how only 3-5 characters functioned on a competitive level (with one being a giant purple robot), people still loved the frantic, super fast, motor-skills-pushing action. And even if you’re the kind of person that thinks Evo is a Super Nintendo RPG about dolphins with razorblades, the game still had the appeal of letting you pit together comic book hero dream teams in a violent cartoon deathmatch. Want to see Wolverine match wits from the mummy from Darkstalkers? If you didn’t before, it’s because your childhood was deprived of Darkstalkers and for that, I feel sorry for you.

Proving that tenacity pays off sooner or later, the people who have spent the last decade lavishly and begrudgingly playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 have been rewarded with a sequel developed by people that actually seem to enjoy the work they put into it. In fact, it seems like the folks who made Marvel vs. Capcom 3 seem to like that game for some of the wrong reasons. Within the training menu screen, there is a remix of the last game’s “Take you for a ride” theme song. The Sentinel not only makes a return, but returns in its purple form, complete with “strike a dramatic finger poke pose and summon mini-sentinels” super attack. The game’s new announcer has repeatedly threatened to take me for a ride. I don’t think these are the aspects of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that people look back upon with admiration.

Though the parts of that game that people do admirably look back upon fondly are still very present. You still assemble teams of three heroes to battle someone else’s team of three heroes. The heroes can still throw fireballs the size of the laser blast that destroyed Alderaan. Your teammates can still make apperances in battle to insert their own sets of Alderann-blasting lasers. There are still air combos that garner more hits than most video game user reviews. Shuma Gorath is slated to be downloadable content. So yeah, everything you like about Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is very much present.

The 36 character roster consists of both popular favorites and my personal favorites. You’ll get your Spider-Mans and Wolverines and Ryus and Dantes and such. But then the game impresses you with unlikely surprises like recent comic book leather freak X-23 or Viewtiful Joe (of Viewtiful Joe and Viewtiful Joe 2 fame). There isn’t an Amingo in the bunch, as nearly every character seems to make sense within the setting. The characters have similar enough input command sets (almost everything is a quarter-circle motion) as to not make any individual character too inaccessible, but each one feels distinct enough to not be labeled the cheap imitation of a Street Fighter character. Super Skrull fights in a way that you’d expect Super Skrull to fight (which is to say that he could handedly wipe out the Fantastic Four unless they used the power of teamwork to overcome.) MODOK fights in the way that you’d expect MODOK to fight. (Which is to say that he doesn’t fight well.)

Likewise, the controls have been worked in a way to reduce the amount of memorization needed to figure out a character. Punches and kicks have been stripped down to three different attack strength buttons and a single “launch the sucker in the air” button. Basic combos tend to be executed by rolling through buttons from weak to strong, and thus the intimidation of learning elaborate ten-button sequences is gone. I’d consider myself something of an intermediate-level player, someone who’s competent enough to not mash the pretty buttons and hope for flashy things to happen, so Marvel vs Capcom 3 is perfect for someone of my play level.

Really, the biggest issue I found with the game is that it the purple Sentinel extends his giant mechanical middle finger at beginners. There is no tutorial to explain the various controls and gameplay systems. I didn’t even learn how to tag in and out my partners until a chance finger slip. I’ve been teaching a friend of mine the basics of Street Fighter 4 for about a month now. We played a single session of Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the rapid pace of which Wolverine darted around the screen slashing fools was so overwhelming that she swore off the game after a single round. I’ve since been trying to ease her into concepts like Hyper Combos and chain air combos. It’s a slow process, and I wish the game would do this stuff for me.

Likewise, the game does little to teach players how to up their game to that proverbial next level. The “Mission” mode is similar to the one in Street Fighter 4 in that it gives the player a set combo to learn, but doesn’t present an option to let the AI demonstrate the very combo. Mind you, the internet Youtubiverse does an adequate enough job of covering that base, but Youtube will only do so much to help you compete at a competitive level. People playing this game online right now are good…really good. Really good as in, they’ll air combo you while eating a bologna and Swiss cheese sandwich good. I don’t know how imbalanced the game really is, but it seems from my experience that the only recurring character is Albert Wesker (which could have more to do with the competitive scene relating to a trenchcoat-wearing creeper than anything else) so that’s enough of a step up from the Sentinel/Storm/Magneto days of past.

It feels like a lot of the online woes from the game’s launch have been ironed out. You can comfortably search for a ranked game and wind up finding it, a problem that plagued the game early on. And it seems as though the game looks specifically for players of similar win/loss records, and thus there comes a point where you’ll find players of similar expertise levels (and the occasional Wesker-fueled thrashing.) While Super Street Fighter 4 has more robust online options, there’s enough here to last until the inevitable Super Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

It’s nice that the option to look for online matches while you play Arcade mode is back, and it’s hilarious how impossible it is to finish a single Arcade mode match without a New Challenger interrupting the proceedings. About the Arcade Mode; it’s a fighting game arcade mode. You fight computer-controlled opponents of underwhelming intelligence, then you fight a visually impressive but intellectually underwhelming battle with Galactus, then you get two screens and some text’s worth of an ending. I shamefully wasted a lot of time unlocking all of the endings and I can tell you that there are three kinds; “good guy admirably saves the day”, “bad guy is going to take over the world” and “some witty rib on the character”. I would say that you should go out of your way to see how Deadpool, Spider-Man and Hagger’s journey ends, and not too many other characters.

Honestly, I think the best part of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is simply how it allows me to never have to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 again. Here is a game with a very strong visual consistency (which is to say that you are consistently bombarded with giant laser blasts that look awesome) and a soundtrack that doesn’t have any god-awful jazz music. Sure, the Sentinel is still kind of way-too-powerful, but this game’s Sentinel seems to exist as a parody of the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Sentinel, and I’m cool with that. So I think this game works great for people like me that want a version of smarter, more tolerable Marvel vs. Capcom 2. This is a very fast, very energized and exciting can of whoop ass and very different from the current sect of fighting games on the market.

4 ½ stars

Fallout: New Vegas

So I feel like I’ve just mortgaged my house on a game of Blackjack and drew 22. Now that I’ve lost anything, I’m left lying despondent in front of the casino entrance, hat stretched out asking for chip donations from incoming patrons before security escorts me to the broom closet for an ass kicking. Now with two black eyes and a disgruntled family with no shelter, I have but nothing to do but…go on the internet and write a negative review about the casino! Yeah, they’re the ones that put me in this predicament, not my lack of restraint!

So yeah, I don’t like Fallout: New Vegas very much, and I’m not exactly certain if that’s my fault or the developer’s. On one hand, I grew up with the values of 16-bit Japanese RPGs instilled in my gaming blood; spiky hair, mythril weapons and massively illogical, melodramatic plots were more the norm to me than anything in the early Fallouts and Baldur’s Gate games. On the other, that never stopped me from fully comprehending Oblivion or Fallout 3, and Dragon Age: Origins becomes more co-operative on the Easy setting. New Vegas doesn’t want to give me that chance. I think the game secretly resents me for never getting past the first rat in Fallout 1 or 2.

For reference, I gave up on the post-apocalyptic universe at around the 8 hour mark. This was a point in the game where the New California Republic and the Legion suddenly took interest in my female character’s adventures and exposed midriff. I don’t know how early in the campaign that is, but I do know that, this being a Bethesda game that I spent a hardy amount of time dabbling in side-quests. The game has a whole approval system where towns and gangs can either like you and give you rapid-speed discounts, or hate you and give rapid-speed bullets. This struck me an interesting concept at first, until I realized that once you earned the approval of a town or gang early in the game, you’ve probably also done every useful mission in that area and can move on to somewhere far off.

But for me, the reason that I drew snake eyes on Fallout as a whole is the game’s reliance on its many, many statistics. Blasphemy, I know, an RPG that depends on your character’s numbers! I thought numbers and dice rolls fell out of favour around the time people mistook Mass Effect 2 for an RPG. Fallout is a game that has many stats; stats for the many different offensive weapons, ways to talk to people, surviving in the wasteland, tamper with equipment in the workforce, and don’t get me started on the perks system. On paper, the idea of the game giving you so many options for playing it is kind of intriguing. Do I want to be the slick talker, the wild gunman, the resourceful hack, the sleazy prostitute? Some of these stats in perks come up in very unlikely ways. The Black Widow perk, for example, gives your female character a seductive edge against males in theory. And this perk never manifested itself until I ran into a major game character at a major point in the story. An unusual, but satisfying payoff.

Not so clever are the 10-odd other statistics that I have neglected during my time. I had originally thought to play the game investing all of my stats into Guns and Speech. My rationale is that if I can’t sweet-talk my way out of a fight, then I sure as hell can sweet-shot my way through. That logic failed to me in a spectacular manner. The speech option only manifests itself in certain dialogue trees. For others, you need a good science rating, or a good barter rating perhaps. The worst is when a dialogue option only opens itself based on your stats on the SPECIAL system. “SPECIAL” are the base-level stats you assign your character at the beginning of the game, and aren’t so easily altered as your 16-odd other character stats. And it sucks to be told you are short two Strength or Intelligence stats necessary to sweet-talk a certain individual. Thus, I found myself shut out of a bevy of the game’s missions due to the lack of clairvoyance in knowing what stats I ought to be upgrading.

Likewise, I learned quickly that the end of a gun is not always the solution to a problem. Many enemies, typically, have immunities to bullets. And I found myself wishing that I invested in an alternate statistic for combat for said enemies. But even having a higher rating in explosives, energy weapons or melee offense assumes requires physically possessing such tools. So I would have to theoretically invest in a good Barter or Survival rating, and cave my skull in as I cringe at the statistical balancing act that would ensue. I don’t know what it would take to overcome this issue, whether it be prior experience with Fallout games or playing through this game twice as to know what stat issues await the player.

Which is a shame, because I think New Vegas has some pretty interesting things going for it. Once you build up a decent Guns rating, VATS-based slaughter becomes an enjoyable pleasure. It is both highly amusing and illogical to use your small pistol to cause giant scorpions and hooligans to explode in a sea of limbs. And for all intents and purposes, the setting of the game is fantastic. “Post-apocalyptic 50s” is quickly becoming a tired cliché in video games, but visiting a region of the world that never stopped loving the Rat Pack is a little heartwarming. Also, the Fallout-humour is in full effect. A gang of hoodlums with customs rooted in Elvis impersonation, robot killing machines with Walt Disney-illustrated cops for faces, a sniper positioned inside a giant model T-Rex…like any good Fallout game, the only resource that isn’t in short supply is raw irony.

But there’s something frustrating about realizing that there is a right and wrong way to play a game…and finding out you were on the wrong end of that spectrum. Instead of trying to rectify my mistakes, I think I’ll just go on Youtube and find out how the game ends proper. I imagine the PC version of New Vegas being the right version to play. Not because of any false sense of tradition but because you can hack and cheat your way through all of the stats and let no numbers get in your way. So go add an extra star if that’s the version you elect to play. Otherwise, approach with caution.

3 stars

Vanquish

So I can envision in my head a meeting between Shinji Mikami of PlatinumGames and the president of Sega, whom I presume answers to the name “Supreme Asshole Man.” I envision Mr Asshole Man giving Shinji and his friends permission to have their crazy niche action game about the librarian stripper with the guns on her heels and old arcade games in her heart published by Sega. But in return, SAM demands that Shinji make a game custom-built to succeed in America. A third-person, cover-based shooter based on all of the things that Americans like (most of which involve bullets in the hearts of Russians.) And then Shinji Mikami said “okay!” And he made that third person shooter, and it was called Vanquish. And that Vanquish went on to sell a fifth of what that niche stripper game did at retail.

While I normally wouldn’t shed a tear over the financial failure of another bloody third person military shooter, this game is rather different. Vanquish proves to me that PlatinumGames is so talented, so strange, that they can make even the most rote concept a spectacle.

So tell me if you’ve heard this concept before. Russians declare war on America. America fights back by sending armoured space marines to the Russian space station. The Russian space station just happens to be shaped like a ring. Two of the biggest franchises in video games today are already being gypped, games whose ideas already were stolen from many sci-fi movies, books and tabletop games. And then you put that idea within the confines of a cover-based shooter. Major video game franchise number 3.

And Vanquish approaches these ideas with what is either a very knowing and careless attitude, or unintentionally bad, straight-laced attitude. I can’t quite tell. The dialogue is the kind of improbably melodramatic speech that normal human beings wouldn’t say under any condition outside of an anime. The main character is a cross between the Master Chief and Solid Snake, right down to the button on the countroller that lets him pop a cigarette. Other characters include the perky girl with the short skirt, and the salty commander who responds to all facets of life with pessimism. Then the game’s big plot twist takes a turn for the political, with about as much intelligent social commentary as a Sylvester Stallone movie. The dialogue is so unnatural that I can’t ever invest in the plot or characters, and yet it’s just cheesy enough for me give it a pass.

It’s also very easy to forgive Vanquish for all of those pratfalls and poor imitations, on account of how the gameplay of Vanquish kind of surpasses all of those American shooters.

No, really.

Seriously.

This is probably the best third person, cover-based shooter I’ve played to date. Better than Gears of War. Better than Uncharted. Better than Red Dead Redemption. Better than Mass Effect 2.

Now, don’t take any of that as a personal insult if you feel strongly about any of those games. (And if you are taking that as a personal insult, you need to re-evaluate your virtues.) Mass Effect has a more interesting fiction. Red Dead has numerous other gameplay systems coupled with shooting. Uncharted has the parkour climbing that Drake looks so sexy doing. Gears of War has more doo-rag. Vanquish does one single thing, and it does that one thing better than anyone else in the world, which is to hide behind cover and shoot things from a comfortable distance.

Any given war scenario will pit you and your squad of soon-to-be-dead Marines against a fleet of Russian automatons. These automatons come in various sizes (sometimes with transforming capabilities) but they all have the one common objective of riddling the sky with hundred of bullets, hoping that one in a thousand will headshot you. So battle is already something of a fireworks show made of lead, and that’s not assuming one of the handful of scripted events is happening. On the very first mission of the first level of the game, a spaceship will crash right at your toes. That’s as good a mood-setter as any.

Your character, whom I should perhaps tell you is named Sam Gideon, is using a futuristic space suit with semi-strategically placed rockets. These rockets allow him to do an accelerated rockstar slide across the battlefield at a blistering pace. While doing this rocket slide, you can slow down time to aim at enemy heads…or flying rockets and grenades. Whatever you think you would look cooler shooting at while in slow-motion doing a rockstar slide.

Despite being all kinds of superpowered and nasty, you will still need all kinds of skill to overcome the game’s many challenges. In keeping with the PlatinumGames tradition, there are big bosses. And PlatinumGames has no problem rematching you with these big bosses…or throwing two giant bosses in a room and making you deal with both at once. And both of these bosses may or may not have an attack that sows the Earth with hundreds of grenades. You can equip three different kinds of guns at once, but you’ll probably want two of those guns to be the two different machine gun variants on account of all the ammo you’ll need to take one boss down.

This is a game that loves its spectacle, and its challenge. You know how in Kinect games, the console will periodically ask you to take a break because it thinks you’re tired? I think Vanquish needs that warning more; this game is the kind of sensory overload that could do some retinal demage.

I would suggest that some segments of the game should have more checkpoints. There are a couple of really challenging boss fights in particular that I wish the game would cut me and slack with. My biggest issue with the entire game is an odd one; when you get too liberal with your suit powers, you’ll overheat and need a few seconds before you can use them again. (This also happens after your suit automatically triggers bullet-time when you are near death. The kids still call it bullet time, right?) I can understand that, but why does your suit overheat after using a melee attack? It creates the embarrassing scenario where I found myself rocketing away from smaller enemies that attempted to bayonet-charge me.
The game is about 6 hours long, which might be a little sparse for gamers on a budget. There’s no multiplayer, and the alternative game mode is the all-too-popular horde mode concept. So your best source of replay value is competing on the leaderboards with all of your no friends that are playing Vanquish.

Which is a shame, because I think everyone that has an affinity for cover-based shooters should look at Vanquish. It’s a very singularly-focused game that has one gameplay style, and one style that it does better than just about anything on the market right now. And I don’t think you can properly form an opinion on any other third person shooter until you give Vanquish a whirl. There’s something rather…unlikely about the impersonator outdoing the real deal.

4 stars

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

So I’ve never read Journey to the West, the ye ‘olde Chinese storyline that Enslaved is claiming to be inspired by. Though I can extrapolate my experiences from the Dante’s Inferno game and pick out the parts of Enslaved that were altered for the American video game-playing public. I don’t think Journey to the West has, for example, a post-apocalyptic setting, or a hero so chiseled that he can regenerate health by flexing his traps. (Though the game’s one single homage to Asian fiction may be that the dude has spiky Dragonball Z hair.) And I loosely recall hearing that Journey to the West is about a Buddhist monk and not a shapely female whose tube top is eager to explode and reveal its contents. And I doubt China had gun-toting mechs or an electrical hoverboard back then, but I have no proper evidence.

And I don’t think there was any of Andy Serkis’ motion capture back then, but who knows. The events of Middle Earth could easily predate any of the four great Chinese novels. This is the labour of love of Gollum’s native studio in Ninja Theory, the people that brought us the great looking, not-great-playing Heavenly Sword. Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is teaching me the lesson that people climbing the corporate ladder already know; that you can overcome a whole lot of weaknesses if you are very attractive and flaunt it. The environments are both technically stunning and aesthetically built to tell a story. Even without an official explanation, we know that some apocalyptic war happened in the game, and that it happened so long ago that humanity doesn’t quite know what any of this wreckage means. The motion-capture of the characters is done convincingly enough that emotions are conveyed and you can look them in the eyes to see a soul not buried beneath the uncanny valley. Enslaved is a very easy game to find yourself emotionally linked to.

So protagonist Monkey finds himself narrowly surviving the crash of a slaver ship, only to be reenslaved by the skimpy Trip and her mind-control headband. Thus, Monkey must navigate the wasteland that was…I mean is New York to take Trip home. I was half-relieved to find out that there little-to-nothing in the way of escort missions. There are sparse moments where Trip is in danger, but they are almost all pre-planned and never feel cheap like a typical video game escort mission failure. Likewise, Trip sometimes makes herself useful; she can create a hologram distraction of…star-thingys to get the attention of not-very-smart gun turrets while you sneak up behind them to perform a mo-capped Andy Serkis-style fatality. And she provides the hub for you to upgrade your abilities. (Believe me when I say that the sooner you get the Focus Attack, the sooner you will find the secret to inner peace.)

So you do most of your fighting with Monkey’s funky staff. Combat is less preoccupied with improbable air combos than it is watching your back and breaking the enemy mechs’ defenses. So there’s a slight sense of strategy in trying to fight your foes. You’ll have to forgive the camera though, for it finds Monkey’s hair to be so entrancing that it takes every chance to zoom in and pay no mind to the enemies that are about to ambush you. The good news is that, except for maybe one or two segments near the end of the game, the combat sequences are spread out far enough that you never feel a sense of mech-fatigue.

The other literary-inspired game that I kept finding myself comparing Enslaved to is Beyond Good and Evil. (A game that has damn near nothing to do with Fredrich Nietzsche’s piece.) This is more of a positive comparison; Beyond Good and Evil didn’t do any one gameplay element great, but was smart at mixing them up in a larger, cohesive adventure. Enslaved has about four different gameplay modes that are wisely intertwined together with dialogue of Monkey and Trip bonding. If you’re not evading gun turrets or smashing up robots, maybe you’ll be riding your hoverboard across aquatic terrain and through the minefields.

Or perhaps you’ll undergo the most dominant of the gameplay mechanics, the traversal. Monkey can earn his name and leap around on ledges and cliffs as good as any Persian royalty can. The thing about this game’s parkour is that all of the ledges and pipes that you can navigate are glowing so that you can actually see them amidst all of the game’s Unreal-engine textures. And the game dictates that Monkey can only jump and climb to designated locations. You cannot, for example, jump off a cliff to your death, or make a blind jump into a wall. Thus the game leads to two different scenarios; either you will feel like the king of swing as you Serkis-jump from one nudge to another with relative ease, or get annoyed as you flip around the analog stick mashing the A button looking for the next ledge to climb.

Though again, you may not mind. Just like you may not mind the simplicity of the puzzles, which are almost all entirely about flipping switches and telling Trip to flip switches. (And Trip can lag for many seconds are you ask her kindly to pull that lever.) Part of it goes back to the game’s great sense of variety, but part of this is also the investment I found myself having with the main characters. The game is very good at developing the relationship between Monkey and Trip, two entities that gradually begin to trust each other in spite of their forced bond. More than most games, Enslaved seems to have a bit of a spirit.

But I found myself losing a lot of the goodwill I amassed by the game’s ending. A disclaimer; I am the kind of person who’s entire experience can be soured by a poor ending. Thank you very much, entire Assassin’s Creed franchise. The bulk of the game gives no identity to the villains, other than that they have murderous robot minions and like to take slaves. The ending makes a spontaneous attempt to paint the evil force as sympathetic in an illogical, very Serkis-like manner. The epilogue (which I guessed correctly about halfway through the game) clashes entirely against the gameplay experience you’ve been having thus far and kind of taints the rest of the game. I was decidedly pissed off, and it wasn’t until I started writing this review that I started remembering the better parts of Enslaved.

Not to give business advice to highly-paid corporate executives at Namco-Bandai, but do you think you could’ve waited a few months to release Enslaved? Besides giving Ninja Theory some time to smooth out the rougher parts of the game, it would also had a good deal less competition in the market, and thus garnered more attention. I wasn’t going to give Enslaved the time of day until recently anyways, and I was willing to pay full price. In its current form, Enslaved isn’t a mandatory playing experience, but one worth examining if you have a week or two that needs filling between your soulless first person shooter of the month.

3 ½ stars