Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 11

Where the hell have you been, 2020 edition

Obviously I don’t have to explain what’s been going on for most of this year. There’s a lockdown in effect, and with the hubbers working from home, our slow ass internet connection won’t allow me to be online at the same time he’s working. But I was actually off the net for a couple months before that and the reasons may shock you. Or not.

In February, I went out to the plot of land set aside by our landlord for a garden and started digging up weed roots. This took me the better part of four months. For one thing, with the land not being used in years, the top layer of soil was close to 80% roots. I’m not exaggerating, either. On a daily basis, I loaded a wheelbarrow with roots and carted them away, always thinking, “Surely, I’m getting close to the end.” And every day, I dug a bit more and found more damned roots.

There were days when I ignored aches and pains because I thought, “Oh, one more meter won’t hurt.” Then that night, I’d get full body shakes and end up stuck in bed for anywhere between two and six days. I thought because I had MS, this was a job a healthy person could easily do in a week. But then my neighbor, inspired by my work, started in on her own garden, and after turning over one row in a two day flurry, she too ended up confined to bed for two days. She’s a teacher and a soccer coach who still plays with her friends, and this wrecked her. So it shouldn’t be a shock that it took me so long to clear three rows measuring one meter by five.

Once I got past that hurdle, the next was planting seeds, daily weeding and watering, building a frame for my tomatoes, and all sorts of minor tasks. On any given day, I’d get up and decide that I would just play video games all day to get a review in, but then remember one task that couldn’t be put off. That would lead to another, and then another, until I arrived at midnight, too exhausted to play anything.

The thing about tending a garden is, it isn’t an easygoing hobby. It’s an ongoing war with Mother Nature, and that bitch does not play fair. She can keep throwing more problems my way, so much so that some days, I’ve been sorely tempted to say fuck it and walk away.

But I didn’t, and now we’re eating food I grew myself. At this point, I now find I’m able to game a little bit, and as such, I can think about posting reviews again. I can’t say this kind of extended hiatus won’t happen again because when there’s work that must be done here, I only have so much energy and something has to be set aside. I love writing for this blog, and always have. But it’s a hobby that doesn’t put food on the table, so sometimes I have to pause the posts.

I’m back now, and I’ll have a game review up real soon, with a couple more to follow soon thereafter. I hope you enjoy them, and that you’ll forgive my absence. If you do, then I’ll see you around real soon.

Game review: Swords of Ditto for Steam

I’ve put this review off for some time, playing Swords of Ditto several times and waiting for a moment when it might finally click for me and become fun. Sadly, that never happened, and I mean sadly in that I wanted to like this game. It’s a riff on Zelda with cartoony graphics and a cute soundtrack, a randomly generated game world where your weapons are “toys.” (Some really don’t qualify as toys, like vinyl records, but whatever.) Beating the game begins to unlock more characters to play through the story with, each of which has some special stat or starting toy. On paper, it sounds like a good time.

In practice, it’s just not fun. It starts with a tutorial section involving the death of your character, the eponymous Sword of Ditto. A hundred years pass and a new Sword is awakened and told how to fight against Mormo, the evil witch who is bound to the land by a curse. This is fine the first time you play, but even on a second run, it becomes annoying. It doesn’t help that even if you unlock other characters, the first run is always the same.

Combat is similarly tedious until you can manage to retrieve one or both of the toys of legend present on the island. Since few enemies are stunned by your sword’s swing, combat is essentially swing, move back, step in to swing and move back. Higher difficulty levels don’t change enemy behavior, they just nerf the sword’s damage, drawing out every fight to unbearable slowness.

You start off with a nerf gun that does no damage unless you buff it with one of several “elements.” (Fire, poison, and curse, so one element, and two other…things. Anywho…) The problem is, unless you buff the darts with fire, the other two are pretty much useless because they require a meter to build up before they proc, and that meter drains faster then you can fire. Now, later on if you dump all the possible upgrades into your gun, it might become useful. But since you’ll want to put those upgrades into the more powerful toys of legend found in the dungeons, the gun remains useless even after starting a new era.

Setting that aside, the random nature of each run means you might spawn in a world where every dungeon rewards you with money, but offers no upgrades or elements. It is still possible to beat Mormo on these runs, but it takes a lot of long tedious fights and makes them even slower.

Finding some of those toys made the very tail end of a run interesting, but once Mormo is defeated and time advances, every monster on the island advances in levels, rendering all the upgrades to a toy ineffective. So once again, the game becomes a dull slog to get upgrades before almost becoming fun right at the very end.

Another part of the problem is in how the game forces you to fight Mormo once you reach level 6. If you started out slaying monsters to earn money for various items in the shops, you might be forced into the fight without having collected both of the toys of legend, or before using those toys to enter the trial dungeons to break the magical anchors strengthening Mormo. (There is an achievement for beating her without breaking either anchor, and I got that on my first run precisely because I was forced to fight her before I had a chance to enter the trial dungeons.) So if you want money without fighting and gaining XP, you’re stuck running around cutting grass and shrubs Zelda-style to pick up funds at a dreadfully slow pace.

Finally there’s the new era, in which you begin as a new Sword of your choosing, but Mormo shows up and adds some stipulation to fighting her again. I found most of these annoying, but the worst was setting up a timer requiring that I fight her in six days. Note, that’s not real time, but the fast-forward scale employed by most games. So in roughly one hour, I had to somehow level up against lesser enemies who are all so powerful that every fight dragged on and on. Then there’s the hell of dealing with the mini-bosses guarding the toys of legend in the dungeons, who are so far ahead of my level that unless I bring a backpack full of food, I’m guaranteed to fail. This is one example, but I can assure you, all the other stipulations I’ve seen were equally obnoxious.

I really want to find something to praise to turn this review around, but the closest I can come is with faint praise that there’s a brief span of dungeon exploration before the fight with Mormo where the game was almost fun. But almost fun isn’t really fun, and that’s why I have to give Swords of Ditto 2 stars. It’s sad to see a game with so much potential burn it all on a tedious grinding process. This coulda been a contender, and instead it’s a sad pretender.

I’d like to talk about Fortnite Season 2

Starting off with some full disclosure, I did not play any of Fortnite during the first season, and not because I’m antisocial or dreading playing multiplayer games with small children using open mikes. No, I didn’t play because I was afraid my crap internet connection would ruin the game for other players. Still, I kept up on the stories about the many map changing developments, and from a distance, it all seemed so intriguing to me. A shooting game with an elaborate story playing out within the game world, always changing like some great living chimeric island? Yes, this is most intriguing.

With the literal end of the first world, I decided I’d go ahead and download Fortnite and see what all the other gamers already knew about this new social giant. If the lag was horrid, I’d be able to let it go easily enough because, hey, it’s free. If it was as good as everyone said it was, maybe I might be able to stick around and enjoy this in-world storytelling firsthand.

I’ve now played about thirty hours, and I want to talk about it. I wouldn’t call this a review, and I don’t think you can really review something like this, a product that’s always evolving from one month to the next. All I can do is talk about the modes I’ve tried, and offer impressions on this short vertical slice.

Within the first round, I found lag wasn’t a problem. Players moved smoothly around me, and when someone shot at and missed me, it felt more like a proper miss than a lag teleport saving my butt. I went into this knowing some of the “contestants” in the first rounds were bots, which probably explains some of my early victories. But I think it helped ease me into the game before dumping me into matches with more and more real people.

Some of those people are very little kids, and they have open microphones. This means on any given match, you might be teamed up with some five year old singing nursery rhymes AND at the same time with a random twelve year old swearing in ways that make this salty redneck blush. But for all their endless chatter, they can sometimes be efficient little boogers, grabbing enough loot and materials in their first drop zone before tearing their way to the storm’s center, dropping opponents like so many unsuspecting prey. Watching some of those kids play led me to offer this possible back-box quote: “Fortnite, the most fun you can have with a six year old handing your ass to you!”

I choose not to game with an open microphone precisely because I don’t know who on my team is a kid, and when I get shot by a sniper from out of nowhere, I tend to let loose with several choice words. Then again, sometimes I get teamed up with other kids with open microphones, and it’s clear they’re not good team players. So one gets shot down, and I run to revive them, the whole time with them wailing at me, “Save me, please!” I’m yelling back, “Yeah, kid, I’m coming! Just calm down already.”

So I get to where they are, start to revive them, and then I see the other team was camping his butt, waiting for me to be a good person so they can snipe me, too. Then I look at my map and see our other two teammates have abandoned us and…yeah, I’m glad I don’t have a voice in the game cause I’d be a terrible influence to the youts.

Keep in mind, I’m not really complaining about any of these kids. I’m just as hyper excitable about firefights and finding sweet loot. So if some kid from France or Germany wants to constantly narrate their match to me, I’m cool with that. And hey, twelve year old dude cussing up a streak…dude, chill out a little. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack with all this hyper-tension.

Setting that aside, there’s a satisfying loop going into any mode, be it solo, duos, or teams. You pick a spot to jump, search frantically for items while waiting to see if you’ve picked a spot within the first storm ring or if you’re going to need to make a panicked run across open terrain where snipers will have a field day with you. It’s tense and exciting, and I like playing it even when I lose. If I lose, I either hit Ready Up to go straight to another match, or I go into the lobby to switch modes and get right back out there. It’s got the right amount of “just one more try,” and I can see why Fortnite has captured the attention of so many people.

Before yesterday, there was an added mode where all the players were teamed up together against a giant boss called the Storm King, and that mode was fantastic. I loved fighting this boss and it’s minions, frantically scrabbling whatever ammo I could find between panicked dashes to pick up fallen allies and carry them to safety and revive them. Win or lose, it felt like we were all together in some epic struggle, and it’s brilliant. That mode is gone now, and I will miss it, but I appreciate modes coming out for a limited time. It keeps the game fresh and always makes me wonder what they will throw at me next.

If I have any complaints, it’s with the slow, agonizing pace of getting the good prizes. I’ve got two different styles of umbrella parachutes, some loading screen art, and some music to play while I’m skydiving into a new map. No custom outfits or picks or gun skins. I want those things. I want more V bucks. But despite the hours I’ve put in, I’ve only got 100, and that won’t buy me anything. I get what the game is doing. It wants me to whip out my debit card and buy some V-bucks and buy the battle pass. But I can’t because I’m too broke to do it. And that does suck, seeing other players looking all cool, and I’m stuck playing a rotating roster of nobodies.

But that loot is all “just cosmetic,” and even if I don’t know how long I have to play before I get enough V-bucks to buy a better outfit, I like playing it. I can see why there’s so much hype about this evolving beast, and I admit, I’m feeling swept up in that hype. So for now, count me among the hordes, and if you also play on the Europe servers, maybe I’ll see you around.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to play just one more round.

Game review: Code Vein for PC (Steam)

Two years ago, a teaser trailer dropped for a game from Bandai Namco with a bloody theme that caused lots of folks to guess it was Bloodborne II, but which turned out to be Code Vein, a work-in-progress described by both the director and producer as “anime Dark Souls.” At the time, I had just finished the Souls trilogy and Bloodborne, so that elevator pitch worked for me. It also helped that the director was responsible for the God Eater series, and so it all sounded like a great idea to me.

In delivery, it’s just as good as I expected, although I would describe it more as “anime Bloodborne” for several reasons, some good, and some bad. The simplest way to explain is that Bloodborne is a game outside of the Souls series, and yet shares some ties to the undead world while using a new blood-based theme and a story about werewolves. In the same vein, pun intended, Code Vein also has a link to the God Eater series while using a new blood-based theme and a story about vampires.

Before I get to the gushing praise, let me warn you, this is a very anime game, meaning there’s a lot of fan-service cheesecake to the design of characters. If you find huge jiggly boobs or clothing that defies the laws of physics to expose as much flesh as possible offensive, this is DEFINITELY not the game you. And, I respect your desire to avoid that. Personally, I was more in the “taking the piss” camp while playing this, every time shouting something like “Woohoo, boobies!” whenever a cut scene somehow landed on a jiggly pair of impossible gravity defying mammaries.

Much like the God Eater series, with Code Vein you have to be okay with anime fashion and some of its writing quirks. I’ve been an anime fan since a very early age, so all of this was fine with me, even if some of the more ridiculous fashions made me roll my eyes. The story starts out with a fantastic character creator that let me go crazy making a thick-thighed vampire goddess in black leather, who is then dropped into a limbo-like place for a quick tutorial section.

It’s really too quick, though, failing to mention some important options available to you. The only way to find these is by going to the Hints menu, and for me this was a tad annoying. God Eater games make the first several missions tutorials, covering a lot more of the controls, and then later on they introduce new concepts and ease you into how they work. Code Vein opts instead for the Soulsborne method of tossing you in with only the barest understanding of how any of this stuff works. Which I suppose is the point, but I do prefer the God Eater method. It’s not exactly hand holding, but it does let me know more clearly what my character is capable of.

The newly arisen vampire is thrust into a prison world, a devastated city surrounded by a red mist that will cause vampires to frenzy from blood thirst and become Lost, monsters who slowly mutate into larger and ever more dangerous monstrosities. The first area, taking place mostly underground in hunt of “blood beads,” sets up the player with Oliver, their first traveling companion.

This is a good way to let player decide whether they want to have a wing mate for the rest of the game or not. A lot of folks don’t like having an overly chatty partner in the field, or they just like being mauled by everything and want the full “hurt me good, baby” experience. And, I respect your masochistic urges. Personally, I like having someone there to bail my ass out when fights go south, and I found it funny how often my partner would say exactly what I was thinking, or was saying at the same time. It’s funny to get wrecked by a boss and both real life me and my in-game partner shout in stereo, “Are you kidding me?” They DO tend to repeat certain inane things over and over, so even if I like the idea of having them talk to me during our missions, at times it can be grating.

With or without a partner, your character must wander maze-like levels searching for items while keeping an eye out for the ever ubiquitous ambushes from monsters. It’s a tried and true part of the Souls formula, where if you see a twinkling item in the distance with no one guarding it, you can expect an ambush. In Code Vein, many of these ambushes involve lots of enemies, and they have that annoying video game quirk of not needing to worry about hitting allies, swinging weapons right through their fellow Lost. They also can hit through walls, because of course they would, and this means that you can be fighting one enemy, only to be attacked by a longer range weapon you couldn’t see behind your camera locked opponent. Or you can be approaching a door and suddenly someone is smashing an axe through the wall and into your face.

Which may make the game sound very hard. It is aiming for that Souls formula, so “difficulty” is a selling point to most folks interested in it. You fight tough enemies while trying to find shortcuts or save points. Each time you rest at “mistle” (AKA: the bonfire), all the enemies respawn, and there actually is an in-game explanation for this. When you die, you return to the last mistle you rested at sans your “haze” (AKA: souls), which you then have to go back and recover. (There is an option to go back to the home base and recover half your haze in a bathhouse, but I never really used it. Because I’m apparently also partly a masochist.) Once you have the save points and shortcuts mapped, you make mad sprints to the boss of the area and do battle, dying repeatedly until you either nail their patterns or give up and summon an online companion to help distract the vicious bastards.

But, it’s not really as ultra hard as it sounds. If a boss fight isn’t working out, there’s usually an option to go do something else and gain some levels or upgrade your weapons. Or you can swap companions and find a partnership that makes most of the fights less taxing. (I say most because certain bosses laughed at whoever I brought in with me, until I relented and sought help online. These particular bosses have virtually no tells on their attacks and are capable of dashing across an arena in half a second, so dodging is nigh-impossible.) Also, if a boss has two phases and you die during the second phase, relax. You don’t have to do the first phase over again. That’s a huge relief with some of these bosses, who otherwise would have been much, much harder.

As for the rest of the enemies, they’re much less tough once you’ve had some time to learn their attacks. In a way, you’re building up a mental map of each zone, learning where to expect trouble, and then learning how to trivialize the threats.

I haven’t even touched on most of the story. Your character is contacted by Louis, who along with his small crew of revenants are investigating blood beads, which are the only source of food for most revenants living in the city. During the first boss fight, your character reveals the ability to absorb memory fragments from fallen revenants, allowing them to access other blood codes (character classes) and Blood Gifts (spells and special melee attacks that use Ichor, or mana in magic RPGese) as well as share the memories with others in a virtual plane similar to how The Memory Den worked in Fallout 4. But where as that gimmick was only used twice in Fallout 4, here it’s an ongoing method of telling side characters’ histories and gaining new powers. It’s often fascinating, but inside these simulations, your movement is dropped to a slow walk, and running is disabled. (I can’t wait to see the speed runners decide what powers to pick up so they can skip a bunch of these cinematic walking simulators.)

In addition to these chimeric powers, your vampire can also make blood bead trees bloom anew and cleanse areas of “miasma,” allowing other vampires to return to the area. In short, you’re vampire Jesus. Again, very anime, so if you just rolled your eyes so hard they fell out of your head, pick your eyes up and go look for a different game to play. But if you just said something like “Oooh, sweet!” then this could be the game of the year for you.

For a moment, I want to split from the story and talk about the world itself. Having played all three of the God Eater series, I couldn’t help but feel the damage of the surrounding buildings looked very familiar. I admire the creative team’s skills in making this apocalypse look very pretty while at the same time making it so broken and ruined. In many places the graphics are so good that I might be running to my next boss fight, only to stop and spin the camera around because I just suddenly noticed how amazing a certain level looked.

This kind of pretty does come at a cost, though, and I frequently had both visual and control lag while my computer struggled to keep up. Visual lag meant stuttering or even a complete freeze on the action for one to two seconds. Worse than that, though, were the moments when I had controller lag, hammering the same button three to four times before the input finally got through. My system is now on the lower end of most games, though, so your mileage may vary.

On that note, let’s talk about controls. You’ve got a setup very similar to God Eater, with the upper face buttons used for light and heavy attacks. Depending on the weapon you choose, there are combos that best use all of the features of that weapon. For example, with a giant two hand sword, swinging the sword with a heavy attack back and forth require hitting the button for one heavy attack, and the the light attack button to sweep it back. Hitting heavy twice will have the same swing in the same direction, and with a long time between swings leaving the character vulnerable.

There’s the parry on the left trigger, while the left shoulder button is used for blocking. Using the right trigger in combination with the D-Pad or face buttons allows for activation of eight blood gifts, while the right shoulder button held in combination with light or heavy attack pulls out a special attack. You can also hold down the right shoulder to “dash” while moving, and after executing any attack holding down right shoulder and A or X (depending on your controller type) will launch a quick drain attack, allowing you to drain ichor from enemies. Holding down A or X results in a charged drain attack, pulling more ichor from enemies, and pressing X while behind an enemy unleashes a backstab drain. (Oh, and for all these drain attacks, go into the settings and turn of the cinematic drain. Trust me, you’ll get tired of all that camera panning and swooping roughly half an hour into the game.) It’s not the worst control scheme I’ve ever used and I didn’t suffer as much from wrong button syndrome, though it still happened. But it’s serviceable and doesn’t make my hands go “owie.”

BUT, and this is a big but, the way in which the emotes menu is pulled up is infuriating. In theory, it’s clicking the left analogue stick twice, but I could never get it to work when I wanted to use it with an online partner. On the other hand, every fourth or fifth time I’d circled an enemy for a backstab, the emotes menu would pop up, preventing me from using any face button until I backed out of the menu. That usually meant I took a sword, axe, or hammer to the face, and in a game where even the smallest minion can wreck your shit in a few hits, this happening so frequently is…it’s just awful. I even tried to remap the button so it wouldn’t keep happening, and it still was a major issue throughout my playthrough.

Getting back to the story and the world, as you cleanse areas, NPCs begin showing up with little fetch quests and their own side stories to tell. This is very much like Bloodborne in execution and in terms of the stories told. I had a mission to help a man find his friends, and without exception, they were all dead. Which is a bit of a bummer. But it’s a common trope in side quests, and in addition to Bloodborne, I also found it a bit irking in Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s an apocalypse, I get it. But at least make some side stories where people get to have a tiny ray of happiness before you squash them under your narrative thumb, okay?

In the same vein, pun intended again, (sorry, not sorry) just like Bloodborne, completing these side quests can often be very convoluted, so it’s hard to know if I’ve finished any given NPC’s story or if they’ve just moved somewhere else and I’ve yet to relocate them for their next mission. This is important because some of the rewards from completed side quests are maps to “the depths,” a special dungeon crawl where players can find more memory fragments and upgrade materials.

On that note, The Depths is basically the Bloodborne Chalice dungeons, for better and worse. Yeah, it’s nice to have some shorter levels leading to faster boss fights, but in both cases, the rewards for beating a dungeon are skimpy. Code Vein suffers more for this because once you complete a dungeon, the rewards don’t reload. So don’t expect to go into them and grind up materials for all your weapons. They’re not bad, but every completed dungeon left me wanting something more substantial.

I feel I’m neglecting to mention more about enemies and their variety. There are copy-pasta monsters who will be found in every area, but most areas also introduce something new to keep players on their toes. I’d say it’s a good amount of variety, though it would have been nice to have even more mutant Lost. They made a smart choice to very sparingly use recently frenzied revenants. This makes the world feel more “real” to me as I encounter other vampires who are likely just as powerful as my character, but have tragically failed to keep their sanity.

I can’t explain much more of the game without getting spoilery, and how you go about collecting memories and dealing with the bosses will ultimately change which ending you get. (Obviously, not knowing this, I got the bad ending on my first run. I’m cool with that, and I’ll try to get the good and supa-secret endings very soon, possibly in New Game+ or in a fresh start.) I will say there was a certain point near the end of the game where the link between Code Vein and God Eater is revealed, and it was so sudden that I shouted “Oh shit,” and then spent the next minute covering my open mouth. It’s all very anime, so again, you either love it or loathe it. I loved it. (Also, if you’ve never played God Eater, this scene will be meaningless without proper context. In which case, I feel bad because you won’t get the same thrill out of one cameo as I did.)

In the end, I’ll give Code Vein a very solid 4 stars. There were enough quirks and flaws to keep it from earning that last star, and I admit this is a very specialized cup of tea that won’t appeal to everyone. But if you love God Eater, the Soulsborne games, anime, or all three, this could give you a hundred hours or more of fun time. (And also maybe a dozen of hours filled with agonized screaming. Which is very fitting for a game about vampires, I think.)

Netflix Nosedive: Maniac

I have to confess that doing these Netflix reviews are a lot harder than I anticipated, particularly for any series with more than one season. How do I talk about anything in season two of The Good Place without spoiling the big reveal at the end of the first season? I can’t talk about season two or three of Stranger Things, nor can I even talk about season one because most of the things I want to gush and rant about are also too spoilery. Don’t even get me started on Dark. (Seriously, don’t, unless you want me to spoil every episode for you. I love that show, so, so much.)

But at least with Maniac, I can feel secure offering a spoiler-free review. It’s a limited series, so there’s no pesky second season to deal with, and the way the show was made, I can talk about their “formula” without actually spoiling the episodes themselves. It’s win-win for you and me.

Based on the trailers, I expected Maniac to be grim sci-fi about a drug lab harming patients by tinkering with their brains. But it’s not very long into the series before it becomes clear there’s going to be a lot of humor of both the dry and wacky varieties. There’s also occasionally some creepy humor too, the sort where I laughed, and then felt bad for laughing. Oh, but the part about scientists tinkering with their patients’ brains is accurate.

The story centers around Owen and Annie. Owen is a schizophrenic who sees a “missing brother” named Grimmson, and this brother constructs elaborate plots that he wants Owen to get involved with. Owen knows he’s not well, but he isn’t taking his medication. He’s on the verge of cracking up and either harming himself or someone close to him, so a new drug trial comes at just the right time for him.

Meanwhile, Annie is a depressed addict who has illegally obtained a new mind bending drug and used her last dose. We the viewers don’t get to see what the pills do at first, but for Annie, running out of the A pill is so bad that she desperately concocts a plot to get into the drug’s final trial phase so she can steal more.

In the drug lab’s lobby, Grimmson points out Annie to Owen, telling him that she is his handler, and together they will save the world. Annie, scared of being discovered and ejected from the drug trial before she can find her next bottle of A, initially agrees that she is Owen’s handler and advises him to stay calm or he’ll blow their cover.

Through Annie, the effects of A are finally shown, as it provides a neural path directly to one’s most painful or traumatic memories. Annie is addicted to returning to this one point in her life because she’s unable to let go of her little sister years after her death.

The lead scientist recognizes Annie’s addiction, but a random quirk of fate saves her from being booted from participating in the B and C pill phases.

It’s during the B phase that things get weirder, with each episode diving into the fantasies of Owen and Annie. These scenarios are constructed by the lab’s AI computer G.R.T.A., who is referred to by several scientists as Gertie. Gertie is responsible for linking Owen and Annie’s minds, allowing them to share these fantasies to the bewilderment of the scientists.

Of the two main characters, I liked Annie a bit more than Owen. They’re both rough around the edges and hard to identify with at first, but Owen hates himself so much that even late into the series, he is still unable to make any progress. On the other hand Annie comes through these shared fantasies in both the B and C phases with a better understanding of why she’s been so hostile to everyone in her life. She heals, and while she’s still an asshole, she becomes a nicer asshole than the one who entered the trial.

As for the rest of the patients and scientists, I loved them all, and my only regret about this series is that I would have loved to get the chance to also see their mental movies. One of the scientists does use a VR sex simulator, granting a view into his private life, but with most everyone else, they’re taking a back seat to Owen and Annie. It’s not a problem, certainly. I’m just saying that I would have loved more episodes granting views into the other patients and the lab workers.

I haven’t even covered the world lore created by the writers, and I should. The time period seems to be around the eighties, but there are robots and advanced computers capable of virtual reality. Beyond that, there are services that are both intriguing and horrifying. Take for instance Ad-Buddy. If you’re low on cash, you can get Ad-Buddy to pay for what you need, in exchange for having a person follow you around reading advertisements to you until you’ve paid off your current debt. Then there’s Friend Proxy, which lets you hire someone to pretend to be a friend you already know so you don’t feel guilty for losing contact with your real friend. Like I said, intriguing AND horrifying. There’s a couple other short glimpses into this world, but I’ll leave those buried for you to discover for yourselves.

All in all, I had a good time with Maniac. It does have a rough start, but once you get past that, it’s an amazing story and well worth a dive or a binge depending on how you prefer to consume Netflix content. I give it 4 stars and a hearty recommendation for anyone who likes their sci-fi with a side order of humor.

Game review: Moonlighter (Epic Store version)

First, yes, I know it’s been a long time since my last review, and you would not believe the technological hell I’ve been through in the last few months. It was like Murphy’s Law decided to ride all my electronic devices at the same time. I’ve finally started to get everything replaced and working mostly properly, so now I hope to get back to some nice reviews and shtuff for y’all.

Up first is Moonlighter, which was free on the Epic Store. Let’s just get this out of the way: yes, the Epic Store sucks. It will someday stop sucking, just like Steam and GOG did, but for now, all I really use it for is downloading games that I was iffy on until they were free. Moonlighter certainly fit into that category, and as it was free, almost akin to a review copy. I will be as nice as I possibly can be while at the same time still being honest.

So, Moonlighter tells the story of a shop owner, Will Moonlighter, who by day sells stuff taken from a mystical dungeon, and by night plunders his merchandise from said dungeon. At first, only one dungeon is available, but by reaching the third floor boss and defeating it, a key is found to unlock the next. There are four real dungeons in total, and a fifth door that is unlocked with all four keys to reach the end-game boss.

There’s a lot to like initially in the game. The graphics are fantastic, evoking any number of old school top-down dungeon crawlers. Enemy animations are lovely and smooth, as are the moves of Will. There’s a good variety of weapons, though I admit once I found the big ass sword and bow, I didn’t really look much at the others. I tried them, yes, and found them adequate. But they weren’t a big ass sword and a bow. That’s my jam, y’all.

The music too is very good, the kind you can set the controller down and just listen to appreciate it. The controls are…mostly good, though I sometimes found the dodge roll/jump to be a bit finicky in crossing gaps. Aside from that, it was good enough to get me to the end with a minimum number of shouts like “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

Then there’s the shop keeping side of the game, which is interesting at first. As you lay out items on your shop table and price them, customers come in and appraise them. You have to watch their reactions in the form of a thought bubble forming over their heads. After a few seconds of thought, the cloud will either show some kind of happy face, meaning your prices are good, or a sad face, meaning you overpriced your stuff. One of the smiling faces indicates that the customer thinks the item is super cheap, while another indicates it’s the perfect price. So the goal is learning what that “Goldilocks price” is to get maximum profits out of each item.

The design of the dungeons are something like a mix between Enter the Gungeon and old Zelda games. The layout of the dungeons change with each run, but the boss is always the same, and your layout can stay the same unless you want to try something new. One nice touch is that Will finds a pendant very early on that allows him to teleport out of the dungeon in exchange for some gold. So say for instance that you’re on the second floor with a full bag of loot but with low health and no healing potions, you can bug out without risking your haul.

After opening the second dungeon, the enemies get a lot tougher. Will’s weapons and armor can be upgraded by using materials found in the dungeons and turning them over to a blacksmith, who has to be unlocked by paying him to come to town and set up shop. It’s here where I started to sour on the game. After bribing new merchants to come into town, I found all their prices to be astronomically insane. The costs are so high that I needed almost two days of grinding to afford upgrades to all my equipment for every upgrade cycle. For the first three dungeons, I ended up just saying screw it and going to the final boss fight with under-leveled gear. Then with the loot from the next dungeon offering better profits, I did the upgrades.

But the fourth dungeon, the Tech Dungeon, had enemies launching electrical attacks that drained my health so fast I couldn’t make it to the third floor without depleting my stocks of healing potions. (Which have their own insane price structure, so you don’t want to be chugging them like Kool-Aid.) I ended up having to grind in the lower dungeons for four days to get all the upgrades, at which point the newer insulated armor was able to take a lot of the sting out of the enemy attacks.

Before I get to the end game boss, I want to talk about the bosses in the four dungeons. The main bosses on the third floors are cool, but once you beat them, their area is filled with an assortment of regular enemies. The two mid-bosses on each floors are the same, and that’s what makes the grind get stale very quickly. The first time you fight a golem, it’s cool. Then you get to the second floor, and it’s the same boss, except now he can teleport. It’s not any harder, so even on the first run, there’s a bit of disappointment before getting to the Golem King, who is VERY different, challenging, visually appealing, and most importantly, fun. But once he’s gone, you won’t see him again until new game plus.

Likewise, the angry tree, flaming…dice(?), and Plasma Globe of Dhoooom all come in two flavors, and those flavors are the same as the first golems. There’s a need for variety to make the grind more compelling and for me, these bosses aren’t doing it for me. They’re too easily beaten, and the rewards they drop are the same junk I can take off most common enemies.

I got into this pattern of trudging grudgingly through the grinds so I could reach those third floor bosses, and without exception, they were great fun. Were they worth 48 freakin’ hours of grinding to reach them? Well…no, not really. I think if the folks making this had cut out the grind and just made a shorter game, I’d look at it more fondly. Or alternately, if they wanted to stick with the random loot grind model, they should have developed more bosses and made the boss encounters random like Enter the Gungeon or The Binding of Isaac. But fighting the same two bosses and doing a “horde mode” over and over to earn cash for upgrades is so tedious that it pulls down everything I found appealing about this game.

Then there’s the final door, which calls itself a dungeon, but is really just a long hallway that leads to the last boss. And that last boss is underwhelming because I beat him just by standing in one spot right next to him while spamming the charged attack. I looked at his health bar plummeting and said out loud, “This is too easy. He’s got to have a second form.” He does, and it’s just as underwhelming for the same reason. I didn’t have to dodge or learn a pattern of attacks like I did with the four previous bosses. I just stood in a spot where he did little damage to Will and spammed the charged attack.

Once the reason for the dungeons’ existence is revealed, I was just left asking “Wow, really?” And I don’t mean that in a good way. It’s like the game’s structure was fully fleshed out before anyone thought to write an actual story, and the big finale is…it’s like expecting a big fireworks show, only to get a sparkler, and the sparkler fizzles out shortly after being lit.

I also need to get back to the shop keeping portion of the game to talk about another problem. Eventually, lots of items become unpopular, meaning what used to be the prefect price is now too high. This happens right when you need funds the most for equipment upgrades and potions. So you’re now making less money and needing to make even more loot runs for diminishing rewards. At a certain point, I just gave up on selling stuff, using an item found in the dungeon to junk everything for money rather than waste time trying to hawk it to the locals.

I should mention that there is another way to make money late in the game, someone labeld a banker who is more like a vetnure capitalist. To use him, you have to wait until he’s ready to take your money. Sometimes he says “Come see me in one day,” so you go back to the shop, sleep twice, and then go back to the town center to give him your money. But other times, he says “Come see me in six days. Yeah, because rich people would totally be like “I’m uniterested in taking a million gold pieces off of you today. Come see me next week.” Immersion totally broken. Jokes aside, after taking your funds, you have to wait another six days to take back your money with the highest percentage of interest earned. If you miss that last day, you get…nothing. Bubkes. Again, because that’s totally how investments work. Granted, I never lost my money, but each time I got warned that if I didn’t take my funds out I’d lose everything, I rolled my eyes so hard I caught glimpses of my brain, and my brain was shuddering at how dumb this investment service is.

I often talk about how long I played a game as a benchmark of whether I consider it worth the money I spent, but in this case, no money changed digital hands. Additionally, while I might have spent 60 hours playing this, I’d say only four or five of them were truly fun. That’s why I feel like Moonlighter would have greatly benefited from being a more traditional retro game. Let me go in to play those six fun hours of dungeon crawling and battling bosses and then let me get out and do something else. But making me fight the same four bosses over and over for no good reason ruins the experience, and this could have been easily one of my favorite games without the mind numbing grind. That’s a shame because it really does check all the quality boxes in most respects.

In the end, I have to give Moonlighter 3 stars. It’s not a terrible game, but the grind built in to pad the length takes what could have been a 5 star winner and turns it into a slog with little rewards and a disappointing finale. I’d only recommend for people who think grinding is the best part of video games. For everyone else, you can find better ways to waste your time.

Game review: Nioh for PC

Oh, my God, y’all. It’s taken me forever to get this review out even though I bought Nioh in freakin’ December of last year. I got well over a hundred and twenty hours into a first playthrough when the game broke my resolve to keep going, and I ended up beating all three Dark Souls games in the next two weeks. I never would have called any of that trilogy short before, but they’re practically minuscule compared to Nioh. That’s not a good thing.

I forced myself to start a second run, this time with a better idea of what kind of build I was aiming for, and another hundred and thirty-seven hours later, I reached the end credits. Does that mean I played everything? Nope, there’s still some end game missions I can’t do yet because they’re way above my current level, and there’s also several DLC additions I will eventually dig into as well. But at this point, I need a break from this game because it’s felt quite often like a job rather than something I do for fun.

You might think the problem is the game’s difficulty, but you’d be wrong. Aside from random cheap attacks (for instance, a monster appears from out of literal thin air and one-shots my character) I didn’t find most of the game to be too hard. Part of this has to do with my play style, in that I know there’s going to be ambushes, so I creep along with my guard up at every corner. I use my bow and rifle to snipe anything I see at a distance, and in general, I crawl at a snail’s pace to suss out the threats ahead of me long before they know I’m in their area. I’m sure it would be harder if I just ran at breakneck pace into every trap and ambush. But that’s not how I roll. I roll slowly, yo.

No, what I consider Nioh’s biggest flaw is the grind. For some of you, that’s actually a big draw, and if so, you do you. I’m okay with most games asking me to grind a bit to raise my level, but there’s four flavors of grind to this game, and all of them kinda suck.

Before we continue on that line of thought, I should talk about the stuff I did like, because obviously I had to like something if I put up with a total of (checks Steam) 262 hours and am still willing to go in and do more. First, the combat works just as everyone has said. It’s fast and fluid, with each weapon having multiple combo options thanks to the stances. Basically, you can hold weapons high for maximum damage, in trade accepting maximum risk by draining stamina. (I know it’s call ki, but it’s stamina under a different name.) A middle stance is a combo with decent damage and faster time to recover and start another combo, while low stances are often very fast but deal the lightest damage. You could in theory just pick one and stick with it, but there are times when some stances are more useful than others, so it pays to learn what they offer early on.

As for the weapons themselves, they’re all good. I developed a preference for the tonfa as my main weapon and kusarigama as my secondary choice, but I also played with every other weapon class and couldn’t pick a loser from the crowd. If you have a preference for a particular play style, the game probably has an option to please you.

The music is pretty good, enough so that I’d frequently stop playing just to listen to the music. Some of it is nice and peaceful, while other tracks just scream “THIS IS EPICNESS UP IN HERE!” Like the weapons, I couldn’t point to any tracks I disliked. It’s all good.

This is where I would normally begin with the gripes, but I need to be clear this time. I don’t hate Nioh. I plan to play it again sometime in the future to dig into the DLC. But I didn’t love it either, and while it’s going to end up with a high score based on the core game mechanics alone, I very much want to give a harsher score for all the other problems I had.

The list of complaints has to start with the story. The big draw for me was that William Adams is a real person, someone with a fascinating history who, by luck and skill, managed to turn a bad situation into a lifetime career in a foreign land. I encourage you to look up William and absorb all of his life, AND THEN look at the garbage fire that is William in Nioh. An immortal psychic Irish pirate has his “guardian spirit” kidnapped by by a super evil wizard. (The game calls him an alchemist, which I think proves they don’t know what that word means.) He travels to Japan to save his spirit, and along the way he reads a book about samurai, which gives him the skills other men normally train for years to gain. He then arrives in Japan, where I can’t be sure if the locals are giving him the “Steve Martin treatment,” or if they’re trying to kill him, or if they’re just that fucking incompetent.

Every other mission ends with some character saying something like “Gosh, a ninja yokai! I’ve never heard of that before.” Oh, sure, despite this being a country full of these things, with some characters pledging their entire lives to fighting said monsters, this mission giver and several others somehow don’t know a fucking thing about the beasts that roam their land.

This story strains even further when you actually fight any of the humans in duels because they have super powers granted to them by guardian spirits. They will casually kick William’s ass in these fight without breaking a sweat, but these demons, who I wrecked easily, somehow are too powerful for the locals? Yeah, I’m not feeling that.

I can never be sure if the game is playing out a “dances with white man” routine, but I feel like the locals have to be trying to kill William so they can get back to being royal assholes. In the first three regions of the games, there’s always one mission that goes, “Hey I lost my sword to some yokai. You can go fetch that for me, right?” These swords are supposedly so important to these people, and yet the first region has me go fetch the same sword three times because the owner keeps losing it. At least with the next two missions of the same type, I get the sword as a reward after the first fight, but that in itself is a problem. If the sword is so important to the quest giver’s family, why are they handing it over to a stranger they just met? It doesn’t make sense.

Later missions drop the “I lost my sword” joke, but they’re not much better in terms of story. One asks me to fetch an incense burner, and both the intro and the ending of that mission had me asking, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

This brings me to my other big gripe: I have to keep playing in the same areas with slight variations. Any time I’d get to a new region, there were levels that were fun to play the first time. But then I’d have to go back over and over for sub-missions, or Twilight missions, each of them rearranging the locations of shrines and monsters. It’s all a bit too samey after a while, and yet, I had to keep going into these levels for other reasons.

This is where the grinds come in. Yes, grinds, as in plural. The biggest needs to grind aren’t for levels, at least not until around level 70, when the cost of each new level becomes ridiculously high. Instead it’s to collect equipment to scrap for materials to make new armor and weapons. Part of this is my fault because I opted to go with light armor. That requires an item called leather kozane, and most armor dropped in the game instead yields iron kozane. So I might have to do the same level ten or twenty times to get enough leather for a full new set of armor, and sometimes the blacksmith would bang out one crap item after another, forcing me to go back on another collection quest. The result of that is armor with slightly higher defensive numbers, but rarely offering any new bells or whistles.

Supposedly, you can use soul matching to upgrade an older set of armor to a higher level, but the cost of doing so quickly becomes impossible. I had one armor that I loved because every time I killed an enemy, it would activate a healing ability. In effect, I never had to rely on my healing items because the armor was doing all the work for me. The first time I had to soul match the entire set, I was out roughly three hundred thousand gold. No big deal, but the second time I wanted to upgrade the same armor, the price for the upper body armor alone was three million. I’ve seen prices as high as 45 million for a second upgrade on a weapon, and there’s no way I can make that kind of money without engaging in other kinds of grinds, none of them being fun.

After grinds for materials and cash, there’s also grinding for honor, a currency used in a hidden teahouse shop. You can get honor by fighting revenants, a form of asynchronous PVP where you fight other players’ slain Williams. But the honor amounts rewarded for these kinds of fights are rarely worth the trouble, so the other option is to join a clan and donate items in exchange for honor. Each clan will have two items to donate, with one of those being the clan’s chosen weapon, while the other can be just about anything. The second selection changes every twenty-four hours, so you have to collect enough of this one item in a day to get gold. So for instance, one day I might need to hunt down 30 rifles to get my 60,000 gold, and the next I might need bows or exotic armor. In any case, I have to keep going out on these collection runs to pay the blacksmith, and to have enough honor to pay for stuff in the teahouse.

When it came to getting new weapons, I rarely used the blacksmith to forge them, and I rarely found them from loot drops in the levels. What I did was trade honor for weapons, and I’d keep doing that until I got an exotic item. Then I would go to the blacksmith and use reforging to get the weapon loaded up with abilities that suited me. On average, this meant I’d spend around 2,000 honor to get something good and then sink 300,000 or more gold to get it into a usable state. This is because with reforge values being random, it is possible to keep rolling the same shitty abilities over and over before finally getting something useful.

You can use another rare material to pick abilities from a list of three options, but that has two problems. The first is that sometimes all three options suck, so you have to use the random reforge, then back out of that menu and go into the tempering menu to see if the three options are any better. I’ve spent ten minutes fiddling with this process and still had the same three tempering options. But problem two is that the material, umbracite, only comes from doing twilight missions, and you can only do two per day. You can still do the mission over, but until the twilight missions reset, you can’t get any more umbracite. It’s not worth the trouble, especially when the list of tempering options end up being so very meh most of the time.

Before I move on, I should also mention that the teahouse will let you buy “disguises,” or skins of other characters in the game. Most of the skins are dudes and go for around 7,000 honor. I wanted to play as a woman, but just to unlock one required 66,000 honor. None of the dudes are that expensive, so it just feels like the makers are punishing me for wanting to play as one of two women in the game. (Side note: (Yes, I know the DLC offeres another woman to play as, but I have yet to see her or the cost for her skin. I’d wager though that it’s much higher than any of the dudes.)

But then we come to the final grind, the amrita grind, or the XP. I have to compare this to the amount of souls I need to level up in the Souls games, the inspirational source material for Nioh. In any of those games, the grind can be pretty mild unless I’m working on some kind of hybrid build. Levels come easily as a natural result of fighting the bosses, so it’s entirely possible to level up without running through one area over and over to get extra souls.

This is not so in Nioh, where the prices on each level quickly spiral to ridiculous amounts, and where the rewards for fighting bosses is so skimpy. As William moves to new regions, the minimum recommended level for each mission gets to the point where he has to go back to the previous region and repeat the same quests over and over to make an additional five or ten levels. As I neared the end of the game, I’d try pushing into these higher level missions even though I was 15 to 20 levels too low, and the result was that I’d do shit damage to everyone, while even the weakest human bandit could shear off two thirds of my health in one hit, while the yokai could all just one-shot William.

Because of the forced grinds, even the coolest levels end up becoming boring because I have to keep doing them. The final mission takes place in a floating castle, and it ends with a boss rush leading up to a giant multi-headed dragon. It’s fucking awesome, but it ends with a shower of an entirely new class of weapons, Divines. If I want to reforge those and get the abilities I like, I need to disassemble them to get divine fragments. That means that at least until I can increase my character’s level to take on the end game missions, the only way to get these divine weapons is running the final level again, and again, and again. Just the thought of doing that boss rush all for a four measly weapons that I won’t even use fills me with the kind of apathy I felt trying to play the higher floors of Let It Die.

I come to the end of this review feeling extremely conflicted about giving a score. There were some nights when I was playing that I would be immersed in new levels and loving the combat. But for every night like that, there was another where I was just going through the motions because I needed to do one grind or another. I’d go from having fun to wondering when I could get back to having fun because of all the grinding, and that combined with the shit story has me very tempted to give the game a low score.

But…I mean, I got around sixty hours of good times out of that laborious run, so it was worth the money, and yeah, I can see myself eventually going in to try the endgame missions and DLC. So if I strip away the annoying bits, I end up wanting to give Nioh 4 stars. I don’t consider it to be an extremely difficult game, although it could be if I opted to do every mission under-leveled. By the time I got to the final region, I’d likely be doing 5-10 damage regardless of my weapon type, while the enemies would all be able to kill William in one hit. But playing at the minimum level is usually manageable. It’s a good time, if you don’t mind putting up with days-long stretches of work just to get back to the fun.

In the end, I doubt this review is worth much. By this point, you’ve either played the game and know how you feel about it, or you’ve decided not to bother, in which case my impressions aren’t going to sway you. But if you liked the Souls games and were for some reason still on the fence about Nioh, I’d say give it a shot. The combat is a lot faster and more fluid, and every weapon has true combos, while most Souls weapons are limited to a much smaller range of moves. There is a good time to be had in there, but the makers apparently expect you to put in a lot of hours of work to make it to those fun parts. If that’s not your jam, I don’t blame you for skipping this.

Netflix Nosedive: Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories

There comes a point in most evenings where my hands are too stiff to play games, or when my brain is a bit too far along the path to sleep for me to make snap decisions. It’s usually around this time that I swap from games to YouTube to watch cooking videos or something similar. I saw the trailers for Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories and felt that might be the perfect nightcap for a few nights. I was right, but now I’m curious to see everything set in this world.

The thing is, the Netflix series is actually part of a larger collection of movies, both theatrical releases and made-for-television, and a televisions series as well. All of them star Kaoru Kobayashi as the diner owner, known simply as Master to his patrons. This series was adapted from a manga written by Yaro Abe. I only recently learned all of this, and now I want very much to locate more of these stories because they’re so vivid and charming.

The premise of the series is simple enough. The Master runs a diner in Shinjuku from Midnight to 7 AM. Though The Master has a tiny menu, he has a policy of cooking whatever his patron request, provided he has the ingredients. Each episode features a different patron who requests a specific dish, which usually has some emotional significance to them. From that starting point, each episode blossoms and develops in ways that often defied my expectations.

Frequently, a couple might be introduced or reunited, and you might think “Ah-ha, so they’ll get together by the end.” But that rarely happens, and what I love about Midnight Diner is how it subverts expectations like that while still providing closure. Indeed, there are even episodes that end in calamity, and yet they’re still satisfying because that’s where the story needed to go, not where I wanted it to end up.

I want so much to cite specific examples, but it’s all spoilers, and in a series this short and sweet, I’d much rather send you into it with little more than vague pointers. Sure, now you know not to expect the obvious conclusion, but when each story reaches its critical points, you’ll be as surprised and hopefully as delighted as I was.

I guess I can mention that in addition to these special guest patrons, there are a host of diner regulars who interact with the guest and each other. These exchanges might be tense arguments or playful banter, but they’re always a highlight of each episode. Some of the debates among the regular patrons are the moment that had me laughing the most.

I give Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories 5 enthusiastic stars, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a fun show about normal people with normal problems.

Game review: God Eater 3 for Steam

Oh my gosh, y’all. I don’t even know where to start gushing about this game. From the moment it first got announced, I was excited, but I said it needed to do two things to make me truly happy. One, it needed to get the story away from the Fenrir Far East branch and into some new territory; and two, it needed to fix the AI on companions so they weren’t such a problem in missions where the monsters got together in clusterfucks. (That’s a scientific term, by the by.) I am happy to report the team working on God Eater 3 did both of these things, and so much more.

When I first started the game, I wasn’t sure how to feel about the story, with my character’s crew being slaves viewed as subhumans, sent out to die by ungrateful masters. Taking place roughly ten years after the second game, the world has gone even farther down the drain, and in these desperate times, people began forcing orphans into the God Eater program. These new breeds of Adaptive God Eaters (AGEs) are viewed as more monster than human, and they are treated like disposable resources by the ports that imprison them.

Just a few missions into the main story, the crew is taken on by Hilda Enriquez, the owner of Port Chrysanthemum. Hilda is apparently one of the few port owners who feels like treating AGEs as people and equals, so she hires my character’s crew in a temporary capacity to help her deliver some precious cargo. The cargo turns out to be a humanoid Aragami, someone very much like Shio from the first game. At this point, I thought I knew what to expect from the story, and at every turn, I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

The first two games followed pretty much the same formula for their plots. The crew is introduced before the original leader goes MIA, presumed dead, leaving my character to become the new leader. A bad guy shows up and makes plans to reboot the whole planet, even if it means killing a few million people in the process. Their plans are thwarted, and the crew goes about trying to survive in this harsh monster-filled world.

The third game eschews most of this formula. The established leader never dies, so my character effectively becomes the co-captain of the unit. There were characters I pegged as bad guys who were arrested and sent away early on with little else to add to their stories. Their exits left a vacuum for someone to fill the role of the super evil big bad, and yet the remaining actors in the story wouldn’t take that role. They do horrible things, but it’s because they think it’s the only right path left open to them, and they fight with each other because no one in this escalating war can afford to be wrong. It’s so much more complex and nuanced than the previous two entries with their obvious shades of good and evil, and I loved every new revelation that shed light on both sides of the growing conflict.

There’s more I’d like to talk about in the story, but it’s all spoilers, so I’ll move instead to the much welcome change of locations. The whole story takes place in Northern Europe, with Fenrir now being a distant memory. A new threat known as ash storms have swallowed up Fenrir HQ, and in the absence of the old government, a new organization made up of military forces rises to power. This new group, called Gleipnir, hopes to one day locate Fenrir HQ and use the lost technology inside to save the world. (Maybe.)

What this means is that all the same areas used in the first two games are retired in favor of new areas. Yeah, I admit, there’s still too few of them for my liking, but the new areas are gorgeous, and there’s quite a few new Aragami added to the lists from the previous two games. Psions the big bads from the second game are spread out more evenly along with many new arrivals, called Ashborn, and so there’s a great deal more variety to all the missions. The added variety meant that when I ran into series staples like Hannibals and Chi-Yous, it was a welcome sight because they’d been used so sparingly.

That said, I did find it a tad annoying how sometimes optional missions used similar enemies to the kinds used in the story missions. I’d just got done fighting a certain kind of Aragami, and now I can fight the same monster, only this time with a different elemental attack. In that respect, it sometimes got a little irritating. Not so much that I’d take off points from my final score, though, because even those repeated fights were fun, if slightly repetitive.

Before I move on to other major points in the game’s favor, I just want to say that there were many times when I would find myself drawn out of the action of a fight because the new areas were just so beautiful. You’d never suspect the apocalypse could be so pretty, but somehow, God Eater 3 manages to do just that.

Now it’s time to talk about the two biggest improvements in this third installment, both of which made me deliriously happy. First is the improved movement options, and the fact that those options are available right from the start of the game. The previous two games doled out movement options, sometimes at as crawling pace. I went back to play those games over again before the release of the third entry, and the early missions ended up frustrating me because “Oh right, I can’t do that until I hit rank 6.” But right from the start, I can double jump, provided I’m in “burst” mode, and there’s an added air dash that allows for closing the distance between my character and the latest giant monster. The result is that there’s no early level frustrations about not being able to move quickly. From the very first level, I felt like a super-powerful bad ass.

Those feelings are then further encouraged by the return of burst arts after a few ranks into the main campaign. These enhancements are dependent on the weapon class you choose, initially starting with an upgrade for the weak attack. But that quickly opens up to new attack for aerial and “step” attacks, and leveling up one type of each burst art further unlocks other new techniques. As if this wasn’t enough, unlocking new level of bust arts also unlocks new oracle bursts that are unleashed at the end of your combos. For instance, you might finish a combo of weak sword slashes and unleash a tornado of oracle energy that continues to deal damage for several seconds after you stop swinging your weapon.

Once this system is introduced, the game begins offering incentives to try more weapon classes. Each time you level up a new burst art in another weapon class, you unlock new oracle attacks that apply across most weapon classes. This in itself becomes a very satisfying loop of unlocking a new oracle energy pattern and then applying it to every weapon just to see where it becomes most effective. Some patterns might not work with a long blade, but they’re fantastic with a hammer, or a spear. At that point it’s up to you to experiment until you find a combination that makes you declare, “Ooooh yes, this is my jam!”

The second improvement is something I’d longed for after playing the first two entries. The problem was that in those games, if a mission brought in two or more monsters, the AI for my crew would go wonky, and they would run around without committing to attacks or defense. That’s no longer a problem, as even a single teammate can hold their own against multiple monsters. There have been times when we all got separated because of a massive clusterfuck of enemies, but I was able to draw off a few and fight them safe in the knowledge that my crew was doing their part somewhere else on the map. The few times I got overwhelmed, it was because I had “kited” too many high level enemies while my AI teammates were occupied culling the smaller riffraff. Even then, I could hold out and play dodge ball until help arrived in a few minutes, and that is a massive improvement over the derpy AI of the previous games.

Something else to praise is the way the monsters now respect the laws of physics. They no longer pass parts of their bodies through walls, and they no longer run through each other the way they used to. It feels like a massive improvement, although there are still rare times when smaller enemies will launch an attack through another Aragami. But it’s now rare, where it was previously the norm, so I’m happy with the change.

There’s so much more I want to gush over, like the new Heavy Moon and Biting Edge weapon classes, or the very satisfying conclusion to the main game. I want to praise the makers for announcing upcoming FREE DLC with 100s of new story missions. I could easily triple my word count with all my gushing, and all of it would amount to the same thing: buy this game; it is worth the money.

In fact, there’s only a couple of things I want to complain about, and the first is purely superficial. Someone decided that the new fashion for all outfits was “electrical tape everywhere.” I’ve lost count of how many uniforms I loved, or I would have if they didn’t have random pieces of black tape added for “fashion.” It’s a stupid thing to obsess over, yes, but I hope that one of the later updates offers clothing completely free of tape. It’s nothing to make me quit playing, but it is annoying nevertheless.

Another complaint is more substantial because sometime enemies will spam the same attack over and over. One might keep firing homing missiles, for instance. This might not seem so bad until you find yourself in a position where you get knocked down, and as soon and your character stands up, they’re knocked down again and again and again without you being able to do anything except hope the spam ends before you run out of health. (There have been times where I got knocked out and had to wait for a teammate to revive me. Trust me, the spam is salty and aggravating when it happens.)

As for my final gripe, several upgrade options got removed from this game. In the first two games, it was possible to craft two “control units” that had many useful functions. You might upgrade your health and stamina, or reduce the energy cost of ammunition for your gun. But those options have been taken away, and even the slots on your weapons have been crippled until very late in the game. Worse still, the skills offered by each completed mission are usually crap. I’m now 60 hours in, having repeated many side missions multiple times in the hopes of scoring some helpful skills, and at every turn it’s the same four skills, all of them level 1 or 2 when I need a level 5 bind, venom, or oracle. All the good stuff seems impossible to access without grinding for a ridiculously long time.

Even with these complaints in mind, I’m going to give God Eater 3 an enthusiastic 5 stars. It’s everything I could possibly want in a video game: great graphics, fantastic music, satisfying controls, and a gameplay loop that keeps me chanting “one more mission” hours after I should have gone to bed.

That said, it’s not for everyone. You might not like the story if you aren’t already a fan of anime plots. You might get tired of the same maps and enemies used over and over. You might want more weapons or clothing options that don’t involve electrical tape everywhere.

If you don’t like God Eater 3 for those reasons, I can’t argue with your decision. But if you’re willing to look past those minor speed bumps, this is a fantastic game that will give you easily 30-40 hours on your first play through, and that to me means it’s well worth the asking price.

Netflix Nosedive (Binge, actually): The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy marks the first show that hubby and I binged, though that wasn’t the initial plan. We put the first episode on and sat down for lunch, and it was so good we just went into the second, and then the third. After that we were both racing to press the button to move to the next episode. Aside from pauses for bathroom breaks or to grab snacks between episodes, we were hooked. When the final episode ended and we looked up and realized it was bed time, neither of us had any regrets.

The Umbrella Academy is basically Uncanny X-Men, if the writers had dropped the metaphors for prejudice and admitted that Professor X was a child endangering bastard. Reginald Hargreaves is one such bastard, ill-equipped to handle raising children. But on a certain date, all around the world, 43 women give birth to babies despite not being pregnant the day before. Hargreaves buys seven, takes them to his place, and begins training six of them to be super heroes.

In the “present day,” Hargreaves has kicked the bucket, and the remaining members of the disbanded Umbrella Academy gather for a funeral. Luther, or Spaceboy, or Number 1, is the last remaining person still feeling loyal to their estranged father, and he suspects that Hargreaves did not die of natural causes. He has a hard time convincing the others, who mainly want to get in, say a few words over the old man’s ashes, and get back on with their disastrous lives.

Two members are missing from the house initially, Ben, AKA: The Horror, AKA: Number 6, who died under mysterious but apparently gruesome means; and Number 5 (No real name taken, it seems) who disappeared after a fight with Hargreaves. However, Five shows back up through a temporal wormhole, obsessed with a mission he grudgingly shares with his sister Vanya, AKA: Number 7. The world is ending in seven days, and he has no idea what causes it or how to stop it.

From this point forward, it’s hard to talk about most of the story without major spoilers, and the series hasn’t been out long enough that I feel right about dishing those out. Instead, I’ll just mention some general impressions and then close with a score.

First, I have to wonder what became of the rest of the children born on that day, but no mention is made of them, not even obliquely. I wonder if later seasons will bring them in as collections formed by rival rich assholes, or if they’re just a MacGuffin that never gets brought up again.

Secondly, of all the members of the team, I like Klaus (The Medium or Number 4) the most. Some of it may be his inclinations aligning with mine, or his habits, but I suspect much more it’s his gift for saying the right thing almost every time he has the chance to steal a scene. By the end of the second episode, I had declared him my favorite, and my loyalty never wavered throughout the rest of the season. Don’t get me wrong, every member of the cast is fantastic. But Klaus is my current fictional boyfriend.

Finally, I wish I could talk at length about THAT ENDING. Ho-oooooly shit, what a way to close a season. It’s a cliffhanger, yes, but it also grants closure in a way that leaves me satisfied even if this turns out to be the only season ever produced. This is not to say I don’t want to know what happens next, because I do. I have so many questions left over, none of which I can mention here because they’re spoilers. But if this is it, and I’m left to my own imagination to fill in the blanks, I’m okay with that. Unlike that ending to Kingdom. (Those rat bastards better have a season 2, or I’m gonna freak out.)

I’m going to give The Umbrella Academy 5 stars. It might not be fore everyone, but it struck the right balance between dark and funny to keep me coming back for more through my first binge session, and that says something when I normally stop after two episodes because I have other stuff that needs to be done. This was so good, I put everything else off for a day. Take that as the highest praise possible from me.