Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 15

I’ve been away a while now, so I should explain what happ...

I’ve been away a while now, so I should explain what happened. Last month we changed internet service providers, and due to a number of paperwork and technical problems, we were without internet service for a little over three weeks. We got back online two weeks back, but I didn’t really have anything to review. I’m reading a couple manga series that I have backlogged and can’t do a proper review on them just yet, and the games I’m playing were already reviewed some time back. And so, to give y’all something new to read, I present to you my first anime review.

Parasyte: The Maxim is an adaptation of a manga I’d read a long, long time ago, but I’d only read the first six or seven issues before becoming unemployed and thus incapable of buying the rest. I remembered those first issues quite fondly, so I thought, “Hey, maybe the anime is just as good.” But it’s not just as good. No, it’s actually much better. Being confined to a single season of 24 episodes, Parasyte: The Maxim benefits from compression and trimming of the side stories that were shown in the manga. This story is more tightly focused around Shinichi Izumi and his struggles against the parasite invaders who have taken over human bodies and consume other humans to survive. Shinichi is put in this position when a parasite attacks him, but fails to take over his brain, fusing with his right hand instead. The parasite takes on the name Migi, or “Righty” in the English manga translations.

Because of Migi, the other parasites can sense Shinichi as unique, and given that he knows their secret, they regard him as a threat and attack him. Migi, being an emotionless entity, does not want to kill his own kind, but recognizes that he will die if Shinichi does. So he helps Shinichi fight new threats as they emerge. That’s the starting premise, which blossoms into something far more complex as the series advances. There’s the introduction of a parasite who is more selective in her kills because she desires to blend in with humans better to remain safe, even experimenting with eating human food to reduce the number of humans she needs to feed upon. For this change in perspective, she too is soon regarded as a threat to her kin and is attacked by other parasites. Her story is woven tightly into Shinichi’s, but represents one of the few side stories that is more fully explored, and I have to say, I really appreciated being given glimpses into her development as a character.

The other surprise, at least for me, was how often a show so gruesome and gory could also be so funny. A lot of this humor comes from Migi’s misunderstanding of human culture and in particular their sexuality, but later episodes still manage to find a few places for a quick joke that would make me laugh until I was coughing.

Despite the flashes of humor, though, this is a fairly sad story. Shinichi loses many friends and loved ones over the course of the series, and one loss in particular leads to him being gravely wounded. Migi has to do something desperate to rescue him, which leads to changes in both Migi and Shinichi. Shinichi becomes faster and stronger, with enhanced senses, while Migi is weakened and must hibernate for four hours at a time, leaving Shinichi without a way of sensing his enemies for brief periods. The changes help create a tension in the later episodes, but they also change the relationship between Migi and Shinichi. They are no longer two entities sharing space in the same body, more than mere allies by circumstance. They could even be called friends, and seeing this change take place slowly is in my opinion some great writing.

If I have any complaints, they’re very minor quibbles about the animation. The show uses CGI for many of the vehicles, and it’s obvious now matter how hard the animators tried to match the vehicles’ colors to the backgrounds. There’s also some occasional “wonk eye” and weirdly drawn hands, but I’m going to cut the show some slack for that since hands are the hardest part of a person to draw. (Seriously, just try to draw your own hand. It’s freakin’ hard.)

The big finale leads to a fight between the government an a coalition of parasites who have created a supposed safe haven to gather in, but while the government’s plan to eliminate the parasite menace seems to be working initially, it quickly devolves into a massacre for both sides, leading to a final battle between Shinichi and a truly monstrous “boss.” With one episode left, the series winds down with Migi bidding Shinichi farewell, and with Shinichi trying to settle back into as close to a normal life as he can manage.

When I started up the first episode, I said to myself, “I’ll just watch one to see what I think.” And then, like a bag of really good potato chips, I kept going, “Okay,” just one more,” until it was 5 AM and I had to debate going to sleep or watching the last six episodes. I chose sleep, but only because my head was starting to sway and bob from fatigue. I haven’t binged on a show this hard since Kill La Kill, and the number of times I could predict what was going to happen were far outweighed by the number of times I was blindsided by a twist. This is the total package. It has good writing, good visuals, and a great soundtrack.

So I give Parasyte: The Maxim 5 stars and recommend it to fans of horror looking to get into the darker side of anime. Parasyte can be found on Crunchyroll, and if you don’t mind watching ads, you can see the whole series for free. I highly recommend it and I think I might come back to watch it again in a few months. It’s just that damn good.

Game review: Horizon: Zero Dawn for PS4

You might think from some of my less favorable reviews that I love to complain about everything. And that…is probably true, but what I really want is something to gush at y’all about. I want something I love so much that in writing my review, I have to go back and edit it to reduce the length or cut out spoilers. After waiting so very long to play Horizon: Zero Dawn, I can happily report that this is something I love, and I must curb my enthusiasm or risk spoiling the story for you.

Before I cover anything else, let me just say, the story is easily the best part of this game. In most games, the story seems to be built around the game’s mechanics. Stories in those games feel like they came somewhere late to the development, like, “Okay, we’ve got all these other parts working…so, what’s the plot?” But Horizon: Zero Dawn feels more like the story was developed alongside the rest of the game. It also helps that most characters (with one glaring exception that I’ll talk about later) you interact with could be real people. They’re charming and funny, and I mean really funny, not Easter egg/pop culture reference funny. There were often times that I would laugh at a line, pause the game and relay it to hubby because the dialogue is so, so good. I would love to give you examples, but that’s spoiler territory, and I want you to play this game and experience all its charms for yourself.

I will at least have to do minor spoilers for the beginning of the game. The main character is Aloy, an orphan branded an outcast at birth and raised by Rost, another outcast. The start of the lengthy tutorial has you controlling Aloy as a young child of seven or maybe eight. During this sequence, she falls into a vault-like structure where ancient humans used to live and finds a Focus, essentially a personal computer with a holographic interface. Or in other words, this game’s version of Detective Mode/Enhanced senses.

And I’ll be honest here. Most of the games mechanics have all been staples of other games for a long time. Some reviews and gamers have complained about that. “Oh meh, we’ve seen and done all this before.” Well, with all due respect to those opinions, I don’t feel the same way. Yes, these mechanics are familiar, but that also means I don’t have to struggle to learn a new way to play. I’m almost instantly “at home” with these controls and mechanics, so I can get right into the two things that make this game so much fun, fighting stuff and watching the story unfold.

I think it also helps that despite being a post apocalypse game, the world is so pretty, and there are so many different environments to explore. This is the kind of game world you want to take your time with. Just stop to climb up something and do a slow pan around to take in all these lovely little details. The fantastic graphics are bolstered by a great dynamic soundtrack that moseys along in slower moments before shifting to a faster and more epic sounding fight music. The sound effects, too, help keep me immersed in this world. Everything just feels so right to me.

When it comes to fighting stuff, the “stuff” falls into two categories. There are human bandits, and there are robots. The robots come in a variety of shapes and sizes, and before you’ve even completed the tutorial, you’ll be pitted against one of the nastier robots, the sawtooth. (Think saber-tooth tiger but with armor and military weapons.) As you get farther into the game, you run into robots that get bigger and meaner until you’re up at the top tier robots, giant T-Rex monsters and walking tanks. It’s glorious, really. Every time I managed to bring down one of those brutes, it felt like a major accomplishment. By comparison, the bandits are kind of meh in comparison. Head-shot them and they drop, and you’re done and moving on to some other more interesting mission. Clearing out bandit camps does give you access to another merchant and bonfire to save at, so it’s worth doing. But of all the activities in the game, the bandit hunting is the lower end of fun. Yeah, it’s still fun, but it’s not slaying a giant mecha-alligator fun.

To fight these beasties, you have quite a few options available to you. There are bows from each tribe or faction in the game, each with increasing numbers of module spaces. The slots are filled with damage coils or elemental coils, all of which are harvested from robots. Coils have levels of rarity, and obviously the bigger robots will drop the better coils. So obviously this creates an incentive to hunt down the bigger threats instead of sneaking around them. (Something I wish I’d realized earlier in the game.) In my opinion, it’s really best to hunt down the Carja and Shadow Carja bows as soon as you can because with the extra mod slots, you can add additional pierce and tear damage. Tear damage is particularly important because that represents how effectively you can tear off the armor plates of the robots to get at their more sensitive inner hardware. There’s a huge difference in damaging an armor plate and their inner hardware, so yeah, you’ll want to use a high tear damage bow to make some holes in their armor and exploit that weakness like a boss.

In addition to bows, there are trip casters, which can launch metal cables and anchor the two ends into most surfaces to create element infused trip lines. There are rope casters that work sort of like the trip caster, but are used to tie enemies down. I admit, I never used these because attacking enemies tied down by rope casters decreases the time the cables will hold the robots. If you like using them, you do you, but I preferred taking a different approach that I’ll get to in just a moment. Moving along, though, there are slingshots that lob elemental grenades, and these can be useful once you know what each beast is weak to. (You can learn this by scanning the robots with your focus, but many of the larger robots have multiple weaknesses depending on what body part or subsystem you target. It sounds complex on paper, but in practice, it quickly becomes second nature to do a two second scan to decide which elements and weapons to use in the fight.) Finally, there are elemental traps, and of all my arsenal, I ended up using these the most. It turns lots of fights into a more tactical encounter, with me surveying the area for places to sneak to and lay traps before plinking a few of my weakest arrows at some giant robot. I get it to chase me, and then lead it from one minefield to the next until that robot has had every armor plate blasted off of its hide. THEN I break out the bow and the good arrows to finish the fight. That’s my way of doing it, but the beauty or the game and its arsenal is that you can choose how you want to fight, and if it leads to victory, you go with what you like.

All your weapons will require crafting ammo from various robots, so you might find yourself running low on stuff from time to time. For me, that ended up being wire, one of the components needed for my good arrows. This can be bought from merchants, or it can be pulled from demolished robots. There were whole gaming sessions where I just wandered around whacking robots to gear up, and where this kind of farming might annoy me in other games, here I found the hunts so mesmerizing that I several times looked away from my TV to find the sun rising outside and only then realized I’d spent the entire night grinding for loot. It’s a damn fine game that can get me over my dislike of grinding.

But then there’s the spear. At times, this was my favorite weapon, and at many others, it left me groaning at how weak it is compared to the brutes I had to fight. Aside from one side quest early in the game, there’s no way to upgrade the damage for the spear, and no way to get a better spear until very late in the game. The spear does get one nifty ability early on, the override. With the right module attached, Aloy can sneak up on robots and override their programming to make them allies. This effect can wear off, but as you level up and unlock new skills, there is a skill to make the effect permanent.

There is a catch, though. To learn how to override all but the most simple machines, Aloy has to enter cauldrons. I won’t spoil what these do in the story, so I’ll just say these are more like classic dungeon crawls with a sci-fi twist. You go in and decide whether to sneak past the security or clear the place out for XP, reach a final boss, and then override a computer to gain access to overrides for more robots. The first couple of cauldrons are a piece of cake, but that will surely lead to false confidence, and the later cauldrons can easily wreck you before you even get past the security at the front door. The cauldrons are just one more part of the game that have been done before by others, but this game does them so well that I’m happy that they chose to add them in. The puzzles aren’t real hard, but they’re just challenging enough that I can feel pleased with myself for solving them.

Another mechanic we’ve seen over and over in open world games is the tower that unlocks part of the map. You might think there’s no way to make this interesting or new, right? Wrong, the twist here is that the tower is a giant robot, and before you can access its internal map, you have to figure out how to climb it. Each of the tall neck tower robots has a different spine configuration, so once you find a way to jump on, you also have to sort out how to reach the head. I found out the hard way that a mistimed jump can lead to a fatal fall even from the lower portion of the neck. It makes these tower climbs tense, interesting, and yes, fun.

Is there anything I didn’t like about this game? Yes, Sylens. Ugh, Sylens. In a game where almost every character, even a certain raider slaying psychopath, can be charming and interesting, Sylens is a bland asshole who can’t be bothered to have a personality. He’s so much more grating because he takes up so much of the game, acting as the director to Aloy through most of the middle and late stages of the game. I was glad to finally be rid of him, but also annoyed once I realized he didn’t leave until the story had less than a half an hour left to it. (I say the story because had I wanted, I could have stretched out the end game indefinitely by hunting robots.) All the best characters in this game are memorable even if they only have fifteen minutes of fame. Sylens is the crap actor who won’t go away and makes so much of the story less enjoyable with his overbearing presence.

But, as much as I hate that guy, it still doesn’t bring down my overall positive impression of this story. I wasn’t able to predict where the story would go, something rare in games for me. (To be fair, I am a fiction writer, so I study the craft and have learned most of the cliches that game writers still think are surprise plot twists even though they’ve been overused going on two decades now.) When a certain plot revelation didn’t make sense, even risking ruining the start of the story, another later revelation had me going “Oooooh, I see. That’s very clever.” And it is very clever writing. Competent, even. I cannot stress enough that this is a game you go into for the story as much as for the game play. It is the full package, and I haven’t enjoyed a game story this much since The Last of Us. And there’s a huge reveal about what Zero Dawn really is that…it’s just fucking brilliant. I want to gush and tear apart the concept, but really, it’s best to let you discover the truth for yourself.

Something else that I want to touch on briefly is the graceful way the game handles the issue of prejudice. When walking around a town or village, you’ll often hear random parts of conversations among the NPCs where they are bad mouthing another tribe or culture. If you believed these points of view, everyone else is sneaky, back stabbing, and worthy of scorn. But then you go to this other culture, and you find out most of those opinions aren’t even remotely true. They’re all just people trying to make their way in this world, and you get to see that firsthand. And yet, even as you get a better impression of that culture, they also have their NPCs lamenting “oh, those other people are just deviant savages.” Everyone holds some kind of prejudice, and it’s a realistic representation of our flawed human nature to always need a Them to act as a foil to the goodness of Us.

In conclusion, I want to say that there is so much more I want to gush about. I can’t because it’s all spoilers. I want you to go into this blind, so that every discovery is your to enjoy. I want everyone to play this game, and so it is a small regret that this is a PS4 exclusive. I mean, it’s a really small regret, because good for Sony for having a console exclusive game that actually makes the case for buying a PS4. But yeah, I’m also sorry that the Xbox and Nintendo people are going to miss out on this, because it’s so fantastic.

I give Horizon: Zero Dawn 5 stars, my highest possible score, and yet I kind of want to tack on one more star just because it’s just that good. I recommend it to everyone with a PS4

Book review: After We Collided by Anna Todd

After We Collided, the second book in the After series, is a slow train wreck, but I don’t mean that in a negative sense. I mean it’s a story in which I know something bad is going to happen, and yet I can’t look away. But actually, it may be more accurate to say the book is a series of slow train wrecks, as it is a very long story with several smaller disasters for Hardin and Tessa to alternately create and then overcome. I must be a sucker for reading about these kinds of disastrous relationships because while book hunting around town, I picked up a spin off featuring a side character whose relationship had seemed so stable as seen through Tessa’s eyes, and the prospect of that story turning into another train wreck had me running to the cashier with ridiculous enthusiasm.

In this second installment in the series, Tessa is often just as responsible for the friction in her relationship with Hardin. But I’m perhaps getting ahead of myself. After the first book ended with Hardin and Tessa seemingly separated for good, Tessa attends a book convention in Seattle as part of her internship working for Vance, and after a night out on the town, she drunks dials Hardin, who of course comes running to see her. This encounter ends about as well as I expected, but it does get them back on a path to becoming a couple again.

Their relationship is never going to win the feminism seal of approval for totally healthy relationships. Hardin is a jealous jerk with a tendency to speak first and think later, and Tessa has a few really dumb moments, usually inspired by drinking more and thinking less. Alcohol plays a big role in a lot of their mistakes, which is sorta hypocritical given the histories of both their fathers. But the kids of alcoholics statistically do have more problems with alcohol, so I’m not saying it’s unrealistic, just hypocritical.

There’s also a sloppy triangle romance with Zed still trying to win Tessa, but while Tessa seems not to notice that he’s just interested in getting in her panties, I had the dude pegged as a jerk even before the end of the first book. So when he steps in to create more friction between Hardin and Tessa, I wasn’t the least bit surprised.

Let’s see, what else? Tessa’s mother is still a self-centered asshole, Hardin’s father is still bending over backwards to try and make things right with Hardin, with little success, Landon is still Landon…oh, and Hardin’s mother has a new man in her life. But enough about the side stories, lets get back to the train wrecks.

The real eye rolling mistake is on Hardin, who leaves the country over the dumbest reason imaginable, and when he finally decides to come back home, it’s damned near too late for him to fix his fuck up. During this last part of the story, Tessa is given a big opportunity to work with Vance by moving to Seattle, but she neglects mentioning this to Hardin, who still has plans to return to London. This is likely to be the first train wreck of the next book.

Or not, because the very last page of the story ends on a cliffhanger moment that could also be the next source of conflict for Tessa and Hardin. I can’t be sure of what these two will freak out over, but I can say for certain that I’ll be down for another installment in their messy misadventures.

I give After We Collided 4 stars, although I’m not quite sure who I’d recommend it for. In fact, I’ve got it categorized as romance, and I’m not even sure that’s the right box to fit this mess into. But I know I liked it, and I know I can’t wait to dig into the sequel.

And now for something a lil’ different

These past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with Twitch and YouTube, trying to stream games to them. This has not worked out well because our internet connection is pure shit. We’re working on getting that fixed, and today we signed a contract with another provider who in theory will be installing a fiber optic line in the next few weeks. (I say in theory because transitioning from one provider to another in Italy can sometimes take several months.) In the meantime, I can’t really stream without the video quality being horrid.

However, I got in my new PC, and I can record videos to the hard drive and upload them to both Twitch and YouTube. The quality is much better, and now you can see me play games instead of just talking about them in my reviews. I’m starting off with Dark Souls because I apparently still haven’t gotten tired of it.

You can watch my videos on Twitch or YouTube, but be aware that Twitch archives only last for 14 days. Also, if you want to know what I’m playing and when, it might be a good idea to follow me on Twitter if you haven’t already.

You may wonder why I’m bothering with YouTube when they’re screwing over lots of gamers with decreased ad revenue, and the answer is, I don’t really expect to make any money out of this. To even get ad revenue, I’d have to pull in a lot more viewers than I could reasonably expect with my tiny social reach. (Also, I’d have to work at being “family friendly” and I drop way too may f bombs for that to ever happen.) I don’t even care about getting ad funding. I like to play games, and if you want to watch me play them, great. I’m using YouTube because they won’t delete my videos unless I say something offensive like the McRib needs to go away forever, and that means you can watch them whenever you like. Yes, I’d prefer if you watched my videos on Twitch, but if you watch them on YouTube, that’s cool with me.

Maybe in the future, if I build up enough of an audience, I’ll set up a Patreon to help me cover the costs of a premium Twitch account and buy new games as they come out instead of waiting for sales. The premium Twitch account will keep videos up for 60 days, and I like that. I just can’t afford it right now, so I’m stuck on the basic plan while I sort out all this streaming stuff.

For now, the “stream” will be all Dark Souls all the time. I got all three games on sale on Steam this weekend, and there’s quite a few mods I’d love to experiment with. But first, I’m just playing them with a few graphics fixes and that’s it. Now once I get switched over to the new ISP, that will allow me to stream from the PS4, and that’s when you’ll see more variety. Just on the list of games I can stream for you, there’s Absolver (Love this game, and even sprung for a PS Plus account to play it online), Horizon: Zero Dawn (Another amazing game, the glowing review is coming soon), Fallout 4, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and The Wither 3: The Wild Hunt. (Side note: video game makers sure do love them some colons, don’t they?) There’s a lot to look forward to in the coming months, and a whole lotta Dark Souls in the coming weeks.

For now, there’s just one video to watch, but after I post this, I’ll be recording another episode and uploading it. The video sizes are a bit of a problem for my crap connection, so what I record tonight will probably turn up sometime tomorrow afternoon. But I’ll keep at it until I beat the game, and I’d love for you to join me on the journey to link the fire and save the world, again.

Game review: Dragon’s Dogma for Xbox360

Dragon’s Dogma is yet another game that I initially balked at playing due to near unanimous reviews talking about how difficult it was. I have always considered myself a mediocre gamer at best, so buzzwords like “insanely difficult” have always turned me off. But in the last two years, I’ve discovered that most of the games billed as “insanely difficult” really aren’t. It’s not that my skills as a gamer have gotten better with time. I still suffer from wrong button syndrome with most controls schemes, and I can screw up even the simplest missions by going the wrong way for upwards of an hour or two. But what I’m discovering is that I’m in pretty good company in the mediocre gamer wagon, and a lot of these people talking about games as “insanely difficult” are just really bad players.

Having conquered all the Dark Souls games as well as dusting off some older games and cranking the difficulty slider up to maximum, I now feel more confident in choosing titles, and so Dragon’s Dogma became a viable choice.

As far as Western Fantasy goes, Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t take any risks. You create a character who is a simple fisher, but destiny pushes them to become “the Arisen,” a fighter of monsters and slayer of The Dragon. Only, you’re not really slaying it so much as giving it a dirt nap before it comes back again. This same story keeps playing out every few years, so your character’s role as the chosen one isn’t all that special.

Similarly, the story playing out isn’t anything special. It’s a serviceable plot, sure, but there’s only one major surprise, and the rest is just your stock standard fare.

What was supposed to set Dragon’s Dogma apart from other fantasy games was the introduction of the pawn system. Early on in the game, you are allowed to create a secondary character to compliment your main, and this pawn could be sent into a rift to be hired and used by other players, while you can also hire two more pawns to join you on your travels. Considerations of slavery over mind-numbed fighters aside, it’s not a bad premise, in theory. In practice, though, pawns take most every aspect of the game and wreck them so thoroughly that I can fairly say Dragon’s Dogma’s best idea is also its worst.

The main problem with pawns is that even as they repeatedly claim to have learned new tactics against enemies, they remain hopelessly incapable in most fights. Though the game pitches the idea of hunting monsters, the bigger threat to your party is usually human bandits. Regardless of the level of the pawns, even a low level bandit with a sword and shield can easily kill all three pawns, leaving your character to play babysitter and keep reviving them.

At one point I loudly declared that I’d have an easier time running the game solo, and shortly thereafter, I dismissed my hired pawns and tossed my pawn over a cliff. (She revives any time I get near a rift stone, so I only felt the slightest tug of guilt over doing this.) I then went into the same area filled with bandits and proceeded to massacre them along with two cyclops (cyclopses? cyclopsi?) and a gryphon. I later on repeated this same experiment, and each time the results were the same. I could easily solo areas that were giving me fits with a full party of “hired help.” The game really is better without the need to constantly babysit morons.

The pawn system is also hampered by a strange design choice concerning their health. As they take damage, more and more of their health bar is rendered unusable. This makes them progressively weaker and more useless. Also, even if you stock all your pawns with healing items, they have the tendency not to use them until they’re near death, or to not use them at all. They’re quite literally too stupid to live.

AND they talk all the time, and it’s almost always the same inane chatter that has very little to do with the current quest. Now I admit, at times, they might have something useful to say. Hiring a pawn with knowledge of an active quest will cause them to declare, “I know the way,” and then guide you to your destination. And, this is fine. What’s not so fine is the constant comments about our surroundings, most of which gets repeated every single time we pass a certain area. Yes, it’s a lovely view, Rook. You’ve said that fifteen times already, so please shut up.

The version of the game I played had an optional “HD textures” package to install, but honestly, I’m not sure if that worked or not because the game looks bad. Like, worse than vanilla Skyrim bad. Textures on rocks and castle stones look blurry at any distance, and the night sky has some really ugly banding that made any night quests super-extra-meh.

The music at least is pretty good, but it’s not really memorable like something from Dark Souls. I’m currently playing Absolver, and even an indie studio with only a few people can manage to crank out music more memorable. All I can say is, the music of Dragon’s Dogma is okay, but not great.

What is great, and I mean super-fun great, is the monster fighting. You find creatures like cyclops, ogres, chimeras, drakes, golems, and gryphons, and these massive beasties have multiple health bars that you need to chip away. Each monster has a different weakness and thus requires a different strategy to beat. So every time I saw some massive monster in the distance, my mood perked up as I thought “Oh boy, here we go.”

It’s a shame there isn’t more of that kind of fun to be found all over the map. Until very late in the game, there’s actually not that many monsters to fight, and most of the enemies encountered are humans. Outside of missions, the monsters can be fun challenges. But inside a quest, they often get some ridiculous added problems. As an example, after meeting with the Duke of the land, I’m given a quest to slay a gryphon. I’ve done this a dozen times right outside the castle, so I figure this is no biggie.

Except, this gryphon requires killing a goblin and dragging the corpse to a specific spot to bait it down to the ground. When its health is halved, it flies away, and by away, I mean WAY far away to a tower that requires a full day of walking to reach. If that wasn’t bad enough, the final fight involves a forced chase sequence up through a tower before you’re finally allowed to fight it, and in that time, it’s apparently found and scarfed down some health potions.

That’s also the same kind of problem plaguing the fight against the titular dragon. By this point in the game, I’ve fought many drakes, smaller cousins of the dragon, and I expected a pretty straightforward but tough final battle. Instead I got a long, long series of chase sequences and QTEs that slowly chipped away at the dragon’s health and my patience. When the game finally did let me fight the dragon without these distractions, it was pretty much what I expected, tough but manageable. (Well, I was also annoyed by the fact that the dragon spent half the fight monologuing. When it finally shut up and was reduced to simple roars of pain and anger, I was hugely relieved. Then again, my pawns also shut up, so that was like double the pleasure.)

But, that’s not the end of the game. The end of the game unleashes a whole slew of meaner, tougher monsters on the land and covers the skies in a cloudy canopy that effectively makes it twilight all the time. Returning to the castle under these conditions, the player is plunged into a hole in the world and must splatter land on various platforms to dungeon crawl until they’ve recovered a certain amount of an item, and then…then shit just gets weird after that. I can’t say anything without spoilers, but trust me, it’s weird shit. The actual end of the game had me scratching my head and going “buh?” repeatedly.

I should mention that while I did try to play the Dark Arisen DLC, I did not make it very far. I was maybe five minutes into it before running into a giant skeleton who killed my character in one hit. I made maybe a dozen attempts to defeat this thing, never once managing to do so before I decided I would just skip the DLC. (Hey, I said I was a mediocre gamer, okay?)

I should also mention that while I played a little as every available class in the game, the only one I felt confident enough to complete the game with was the magic archer. Armed with a magic bow that can auto target up to ten enemies or ten points on the larger monsters, the magic archer made most challenges fairly simple to deal with. I wanted to like the mage, but the slow casting speeds for all spells annoyed me, so I left that role to the hired pawns. The warrior classes aren’t bad, but there’s often enemies immune to physical attacks, and that leaves me running around waiting for my one magic user to do all the heavy lifting. So, yeah, in the end, being able to fire off magic beast-seeking arrows ended up the only way I wanted to play.

Maybe someday in the future, I’ll come back to this for another attempt with a different class, maybe even give the Dark Arisen DLC another shot. There is now a PS4 remaster, so that might address the crappy graphics. Maybe someone at Capcom might have toned down the pawn chatter for the new version or improved their AI. Who knows?

But in conclusion, what I want to say is that this is another game I avoided because I thought it would be too hard, and what I found playing it is that the difficulty isn’t in slaying beasties or bandits. It’s difficult to enjoy the story or the quests when you’re saddled with three hyperactive four-year-olds in adult bodies.

I’m giving Dragon’s Dogma 3 stars. It could have easily been a 5 with more work on the pawn system, but their addition makes the overall experience so much worse.

Book review: Days Long Dead by Gina Rinalli

Amnesia as a starting point into a story is a trope so often used that it is mocked for being a cliché, but there’s a reason so many stories return to it. That’s because amnesia is the perfect unreliable narrator. Someone with amnesia can’t tell you if they’re good or evil. They can’t tell you who is friend or foe, and so every connection they make is viewed with the same nervous tension. Amnesia can make even the most mundane character instantly more thrilling.

Days Long Dead uses amnesia to bring the reader into an event that could have been far more terrifying if it had been allowed to expand into a full-sized novel or even a novella. Julie Travis wakes up from a car crash and discovers her passenger is dead. Closer inspection reveals that he has been dead a long time, and Julie must trace her path away from the crash to find help. At first, it seems she has, but then the people she encounters are just as suddenly long dead for no explainable reason.

It’s hard to explain more than that without spoilers because this is a short story that explores three locations very briefly before revealing the truth. It’s not a bad way to finish the story either, but as I said, the main problem is, it’s not nearly enough running time within this world to properly build a sense of terror or even dread before the final revelation. Normally I’d say this is the best kind of complaint, that I want more, but in this case, the story doesn’t have enough time to explore its setting before the finale. It desperately needs more time to develop a connection to Julie so that I as a reader feel invested in her well being. I’m not, so when the truth is revealed, I can only react with a shrug and, “Well that was a thing, I guess.”

Days Long Dead is still a pretty good story, so I’ll give it 4 stars and recommend it to fans of mysteries and ghost stories. It could have been a great horror story with more time to build tension, but maybe the author wasn’t aiming for the full horror show.

Game review: Rain World for PS4

Hoo boy, where do I even begin with this game? Let’s start with this. Before playing Rain World myself, I watched several YouTubers try it out and quit early on, some of them ending in tearful apologies for not being able to go on. Let that sink in: this is a game that has reduced grown men to TEARS.

Rain World had the potential to be a great game, something iconic that we might all collectively look back on with fondness and nostalgia. But it is consistently hampered by the decision to marry demands for perfection with a control scheme that frequently ignores inputs and does whatever the hell it wants.

I feel I need to justify myself in your eyes before I can even get into the review. I have unlocked several trophies in this game, among them a trophy called Dragon Slayer. This trophy requires killing one of each type of lizard from the green, violet, blue, white, orange, and black varieties. (There is a red lizard, too, but its rarity is such that the game doesn’t require killing it for the trophy.) To even find orange and black lizards requires making it to the farthest end of the game’s many levels, and at the time of my winning this honor, 0.6% of players had managed this feat. I’m in some rarefied air for having made it to the end of the game. AND YET, I could not actually reach the end.

Keeping that in mind, let me backtrack to the beginning, which is so much easier to explain. Rain World starts with a slideshow introducing the player to a family of slugcats. These cute little critters were migrating from somewhere when a sudden rainstorm sent the parents scampering for cover, and in climbing a ruined building, a little slugkitten slipped and fell off its parent’s back. That’s who you’re guiding then, a cyoot widdle slugkitten who got separated from his totes adorbs family. From there the game starts, and a very short tutorial guides you through the basics of the game play. Find food, find shelter to get away from rain, rinse and repeat. Here’s how to do a charged jump, oh, and you can throw stuff in straight lines to the right or left. Aaaaand good luck surviving!

Nothing else is explained through actual text, and while a pair of flowers sometimes show up and project images offering some kind of direction, it’s often impossible to understand what message they’re trying to convey. A lot of the mechanics of the game can only be discovered through experimentation, trial and error. Some of it comes down to observation of the environment. For instance, I noticed how the moth-bats slugcat used for food were attracted to a certain red weed, and he could pick up and carry that weed, making the food practically fly into his mouth. Less obvious and harder to understand was the mechanic of eating and regurgitating an object to keep it in storage. Slugcat can hold two items in his hands, and one in his belly, and this extremely limited inventory system means you either have to leave behind stuff or have a very good memory about which shelter you dropped an item in. (Many, but not all, items dropped in a hibernation point will remain there until slugcat carries them out. This is useful for stockpiling food or spears, or pearls which are used as a form of currency in certain situations that I’ll briefly touch on later in the review.)

Observation and experimentation are key in all facets of the game. The game won’t tell you a certain flower consumed will give slugcat the perception of slower time, allowing you to evade predators more easily, or to hunt them in turn with less risk. You have to just eat stuff to find out what it does. The game will vaguely tell you about certain enemies, but it is careful observation that reveals which poles are climbable, and which are mimic-like predators waiting to pull you into their nests to be eaten later. (Pro-tip: the mimic poles occasionally “bristle” with red spikes, giving themselves away.)

It’s ideas like these that could have made Rain World into a classic title, but what undermines the brilliance of the world are the procedurally generated animations for slugcat. It is impossible to convey how bad of an idea this is if you haven’t played the game, but I can try to sum it up this way: slugcat is first and foremost a cat, and that means that sometimes despite your best intentions, he will ignore your controller input and do whatever he feels like doing.

Several sections of the game require holding the jump button until slugcat arches his back, cluing the player in that he is ready to do a charged jump. And yet, even after he arches his back, he may just decide to roll off the ledge you perched him on and plummet several screens, erasing what little progress you’ve made.

Similarly, slugcat is supposed to briefly stick to walls, making it possible to leap from one wall to another. This wall jump is lodged in my muscle memory from countless other games through the years, so this should be a piece of cake. But Rain World has vertical shafts two screens high, requiring something like ten to fifteen wall jumps, and at any given time, slugcat may decide not to stick to a wall, sliding all the way back down to the bottom of the shaft and ignoring any frantic efforts to get him back to wall jumping.

But even the simplest act of jumping can be hampered by slugcat’s arbitrary nature. He might do the full jump that you need to clear a gap or jump over a charging predator, of he might do the most pathetic hop possible, sending him plunging down several screens or into the waiting mouth of a lizard. It’s agonizing enough screwing up a good jump by the tiniest miscalculation, but there’s a special torment in knowing you pressed the right button and your on screen avatar went, “meh, I don’t feel like making the effort.”

Then there’s slugcat’s arbitrary aim with spears. You may think it’s simple enough, that he throws in the direction he’s facing, and about two-thirds of the time that is the case. And yet, there are times when for no reason whatsoever, slugcat will chuck his spear back behind himself. Launched spears have a tendency to stick into objects and become lodged, making retrieving them impossible. While this mechanic can be used to build ladders of sorts, it’s also a huge problem if you’re trying to kill a much larger predator and that was the only spear in the area.

(On a side note, I would like to proudly point out that I was able to kill multiple lizards using only one spear, a trick that requires leaping over a charging lizard, throwing a spear into its back before it can flip over to face slugcat, and then running up quickly to retrieve the same spear to repeat the process three and four times depending on the breed of lizard. It was only much later that I discovered the combination of explosive spears and the aforementioned slow-mo flower that fighting lizards became somewhat less fraught with perilous DHOOM.)

Failure will often mean death, and failure due to an arbitrary decision by slugcat to ignore your input can already be demoralizing enough. But this is where the karma system steps in to make every defeat that much more punishing. To unlock the various areas of the game, you must feed slugcat and send them safely into hibernation chambers before each spot of rainfall. You have to keep doing this to raise karma, and each day you survive, your karmic symbol is upgraded. Those symbols correspond to symbols locking the doors between areas, so to travel to a new area means you need to have the right symbol or something of a higher value. For each death, you lose one karmic symbol, and it it is possible to slide so far down that slugcat becomes trapped in an area. Making this more problematic is that sometimes, food resources can deplete completely from an area, so it becomes a frantic and vicious circle of trying to find food and race back to a safe spot to sleep before another rain comes crashing in. Just when you’ve finally got the right symbol to exit the area, slugcat decides to bunny hop into a lizard’s mouth, and you’re right back in the same fine mess. Oy vey.

If slugcat dies in a new area before findings a place to hibernate, he will return to the last place he rested. Losing one karmic point, it can sometimes become a struggle to find enough food to pass a gate check, and then find another spot to sleep. There is a rare yellow flower that when consumed will create a “shield” around the current karmic symbol. This means that when slugcat dies, the shield prevents him from losing karma. But that’s only good for one time, and to keep the shield, slugcat needs to find and eat another yellow flower.

There is a visual timer on the interface to let you know when each rainfall will come, and I’ve seen many folks incorrectly refer to this as a day cycle. But it’s not a timer lasting a full day. It is simply the time you have until the next rainfall, and sometimes that timer can be very short, while other times it can be extremely generous. What you get is random, but knowing where to look to see your available time means being able to judge if this is a good chance to push ahead and open a new area or to just find enough food to nap again and wait for a better time cycle. Again, keen observation rewards the more cautious player, while the casual player may very well never know why some “days” are longer than others.

I need to mention that unlocking various trophies will grant players a set of fast travel tokens. These can only be used one time, and in any given run, it seems it is only possible to unlock six trophies at a time. The first trophy you will always pick up is the survivalist, which requires keeping alive at the highest karma level for six cycles. (Not consecutive cycles, as it is possible to die and not lose all progress toward earning the trophy.) After this is unlocked, you can get other trophies. There’s one earned for eating only meat, another for eating only fruits, another for not killing anything to survive, and yet another for trying to kill everything. There is the Dragon Slayer trophy I mentioned, and another which requires resting once in every area of the game. Once an area has been unlocked in any play through, it is possible to travel there in a new game once you have a fast travel token. But as you can only get six in any given run, mostly you have to hoard them until you have no other choice but to backtrack.

Oh, and one other benefit to these tokens is that using them resets your karma to the highest level. This is something of a reprieve from the crushing difficulty, but again, as it is a finite resource, you have to consider whether it will be harder to regain karma and backtrack the hard way or just fast travel to a slightly less grueling area.

Now add to this mix a group of semi-humanoid scavengers who are, putting it nicely, fickle as fuck. The scavengers run toll bridges that require you carrying and dropping a pearl in front of them. Do this and they let you pass. This also opens up a potential relationship with them and a chance of unlocking another trophy if you’re accepted into a new tribe. Trouble is, even after paying the toll, scavengers will frequently turn hostile for no apparent reason. I’ve tried dropping gifts in their camps and helping them to slay bigger monsters, and invariably after all my efforts to curry favor with them, one of those bastards will bean slugcat with a rock to make him drop his spear, run over to take the spear, and then unceremoniously stab him in the head. It is for this reason that I later on said “fuck it” and went to their camp to steal a glowing stone to light my way though the darkest areas of the game. Thereafter, I at least understood their hostility and could respond in kind.

If I’ve at any point made this sound fun, allow me to set you straight. This is not fun. It is agonizing. Each area I opened only led to further agony and frustration, but the height of this came when I reached the end of the game. I had uncovered an area where no rain fell, and where I had all the time I needed to explore and slowly map out a dungeon until I could suss out where the real exit was. But guarding this exit were a series of giant figures who would not let me pass. I made several attempts, and each time they used some kind of magic to hurl slugcat across the screen. Eventually this led to a fatal impact with a wall, and to my dismay slugcat was transported several thousand meters back with me having no understanding of why he was denied access.

I ended up having to use the wiki to see where I’d gone wrong, and it turns out you need to have a certain karmic symbol to get past. Which symbol? The wiki didn’t say. Where would I get that symbol? again, the wiki didn’t say.

It was at this point that I decided it was time for me to give up and stop torturing myself. I’d spent way too long feeling aggravated for little to no reward, and while I could theoretically backtrack to see what I missed in the other areas, I simply cannot work up the desire to keep bashing my head against this proverbial brick wall.

I will not say I’ll never play again. There was a patch applied to the game that eased some of the demands from the release version. For instance, in the original release, dying would erase all progress made on the map, and now that is no longer the case. Perhaps a future patch will tighten the controls and make slugcat more responsive. Perhaps a future update might make it possible to earn more fast travel tokens. Anything is possible in this age when a game might be a patch away from greatness. But as it stands now, this is less of a game and more like an endurance test for masochists.

Now I reach the difficult point of needing to score the game. I want very much to give it 1 star, but I reserve that score for something broken and unplayable. The shoddy controls are not broken; they are working as intended, and I think the developer considers the crap controls part of the challenge. I waffle on giving it a 2 or a 3 because even a 2 feels horribly unfair. The ideas behind the design are pure genius. The visuals and music are sublime. The whole conceit of the game rewarding observation and experimentation is fucking brilliant. So how can I punish the game with a 2 when there’s just this one nagging problem? At the same time, the nagging problem is central to my enjoyment of any game, the need for responsive controls.

In the end, I have to give 3 stars to Rain World. I genuinely hope that a patch will one day come out to address the biggest problem with the game, and I hope that the developer takes to heart the criticisms offered by countless reviews before making their next game. Because even if Rain World doesn’t quite make the leap to being “best game evah,” there is still the potential that the next game could take that award. I for one look forward to seeing if the developer can learn from their critics and deliver a better game with their next release. (And I also wouldn’t mind trying this again, and even reviewing it again, if a patch fixed this one glaring flaw.)

Book review: Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale

When a Hap and Leonard TV series was announced, I picked up the first book to read it first, and Savage Season got lost in the virtual ebook pile on my Kindle (I have a TBR pile so big I may never finish it, but that never stops me from buying new books. I’m an addict for sure.) We had a work-ish trip to Spain come up, and I figured what better way to pass the time than with a crime story?

The Hap and Leonard stories take place in Texas, a place I’m intimately familiar with. Although I live in Italy now, I’ve spent the vast majority of my life in Texas towns both big and small, so I know Texas in all its forms. This then, should be a series that I would enjoy, right? Unfortunately, Savage Season never really worked for me.

Before I get into the problems, I’ll describe the basic plot. Hap Collins is a former 60s hippie who refused to go to Viet Nam and went to prison to prove his principles. As a result, his wife left him and he lost everything. His college degree was worthless, and so Hap came out of prison with no work, no house, no truck, no wife, and no pet. If the pet had been a dog, his life would be considered fair game for a classic country song.

Leonard Pine is Hap’s best friend, a gay black man who went to Viet Nam and came home almost as disillusioned as Hap. Leonard has often acted as Hap’s crutch to keep him going through life, and at the start of Savage Season, both are working together as rose farmers. I think. I’m not quite sure on that point.

In any case, the story starts when Hap’s wife Trudy shows up once again to spend the night with him, something Leonard isn’t too happy about. Trudy claims she’s come to make things right by bringing him in on a job that will pay two hundred thousand dollars, tax free. The job involves finding a boat crashed by a group of bank robbers in an area that Hap knows from his youth. Hap decides to bring Leonard along and split his share of the take, and so the caper begins. What follows is a pretty standard story of double crossing and dirty deeds.

But that’s not why the story didn’t work for me. It had the potential to work, but a large part of the dialogue is hampered by Hap and Leonard, both of whom seem to think they’re stand up comedians showing up to an audition for amateur’s night. They’re not funny, and even the other characters in the book keep telling them this. But the attempts to wring humor from every moment never stop, and the only thing worse than bad comedy is a bad comedy act that doesn’t know it has overstayed its welcome.

The book’s villain arrives late to the party, and his dialogue is almost as painful as Hap and Leonard’s. He keeps pausing everything he says to do word checks with his minion, and he comes off as a moron, not as a major crime boss.

I have to give Savage Season two stars. The setting is authentic, certainly, but the cast of characters rubbed me the wrong way almost from the start, and I’m not sure I’ll try any of the later books in the series. I like a bit of gallows humor in fiction, but only if the jokes are funny. Not one joke in this story got a laugh out of me, while most resulted in resigned sighs. That’s not the sort of sound I want to make while reading a crime thriller.

Game review: God Eater 2: Rage Burst for PS4

I have mixed feelings about God Eater 2: Rage Burst for several reasons, all of which require explaining what this particular package offers. Like God Eater: Resurrection, Rage Burst is a repackaging of the original game plus two DLCs that add to the story and provide closure in a way that’s more satisfying than just playing the first “episode.” Before I talk about anything else, I will say the story here was just as satisfying as the first game. It’s just that unlocking the story through missions is a lot more of a chore this time around.

Resurrection was repackaged after Rage Burst and features new moves that are not available in Rage Burst. Because of this, playing the second game feels like a downgrade. It doesn’t help that the animation of the Aragami feels choppier, with monsters often popping from one pose to another without any fluid animation in between. These two factors often make Rage Burst feel less polished than the previous game, which is kind of weird, but is likely the result of Resurrection being upgraded after Rage Burst.

Some of the things that bugged me about the first game are here as well, and the one I failed to mention in my prior review is the way aragami ignore physics whenever it’s inconvenient for them. My character can’t walk through an aragami or my teammates, but they can walk through each other. They can also park themselves partway through walls, often preventing you from attacking their weak points while getting pummeled by their stronger bits.

And then there’s the aragami who make your upgrades feel useless. Oh sure,if you hit a weak spot, it does massive damage. But if you miss by even a pixel, damage values plummet to such pitiful levels that it can feel discouraging. You can’t control where your weapon hits very well, so you will more often than not see attacks miss their target by a few pixels. Instead of doing 500 damage, you do 65. So, you upgrade your weapon and go back to the same enemy. The attack on their weak point now does 650, very nice, but the attack on an armored bit does…65. Because of this, fighting larger aragami often feels like the improvements you make to weapons aren’t doing anything at all.

Finally, there’s the same problems with the team AI. Against a single target, they’re fine. But as soon as a cluster of aragami arrive, they get all derpy. This was a problem in the first game, but I was hoping there might be some improvement to team AI in the sequel. Sadly, that is not the case.

The story of Rage Burst opens with a mobile city wandering the wastelands. Friar is home to the Blood unit, a team of third generation God Eaters initially led by Julius Visconti. The team includes a ridiculously under dressed “cat girl” named Nana Suzuki who is wearing different clothing in the opening credits. While those clothes are still a bit skimpy, they’re not as nonsensical as her starting outfit, a tube that barely covers her breasts supported by suspenders wrapped around her throat and clasped only on the left side, a pair of shorts so tiny they could be mistaken for panties, and cowboy boots. You might want to change her default outfit to the Blood uniform seen in the opening movie, but you can’t get that option until after beating the whole game. Her fan service outfit annoyed me mainly because everyone else has more clothing on, and even the male characters from the first game who were in skimpy outfits have decided to put on more clothing. So Nana’s questionable fashion choices make her stick out even more.

The team’s other members are Romeo Leoni, a perpetually annoying buffoon who seems to be subbing for Kota’s role from the first game, Gilbert McClane, an accentless Scotsman transferred from the Glasgow branch of Fenrir with a tragic past, and Ciel Alencon, a stock standard tsundere.

While it seemed at first like this game might move in a welcome new direction, taking place on a mobile platform that could offer new locations throughout the game, the story quickly takes the Blood unit back to the Far East branch. There are some new locations to fight in, but the return to the Far East means most battles take place in the same maps used in Resurrection. Similarly, most of the aragami are the same types found in the first game, although there are a few new types. There are also so-called psions who are reskinned aragami with added abilities. In any case, what this means is that just as in the first game, the small variety of the locations and enemies can quickly create a bland game play. So if your preference is for more variety in your games, this probably isn’t a great choice for you.

Another problem for me was the way the upgrade system has quite a few less stages of growth. I suppose this might have been done to encourage more experimentation with other weapons, but I was really annoyed that a weapon I liked had to be set aside for a long, long time because every attempt to upgrade it brought up the message that the upgrade was still being researched. Even after I finally could upgrade it, it was lagging far behind the newer weapons in heft. I didn’t get it up to a usable state until I was damn near the end of the game. Boo hiss.

Getting back to the story, the special gimmick of the Blood unit is that each member supposedly possesses a special blood talent, but each takes time to develop said talents. Your character’s talent is called evoke, and that means they can awaken blood talents in others. In terms of use in the field, it is completely useless, but it remains a strong part of the overall plot of the game.

Julius’ blood talent is called control and it puts other team members in burst mode. Just as in the first game, burst mode grants god Eaters extra attack strength, although this time around it seems like the benefits are much smaller. Juluis’ burst stacks, so if your character was already in burst mode by using a devour move on a live aragami, his bonus will move you up to burst level 2. Julius gets taken out of the team roster pretty early in the game, so this is really just a small help for the first story arc. It’s useful, sure, but not nearly as much as two other teammates’ talents.

Sniper Ciel develops a talent for altering regular bullets into Blood Bullets, which are eventually unlocked for your character to use and edit. The most useful of these for me was the piercing bullet, which made it possible to fire a single bullet through multiple targets. In a sniper rifle, this particular flavor of hot sticky death was VERY useful in dealing with the inevitable clusters of monsters that choke up narrow corridors.

Gilbert’s talent is the next most useful upgrade in the field, as his blood art will give everyone a short boost to attack strength. He can do this several times in a fight, and that can often make a tougher enemy much easier to dispatch.

Nana’s talent is not useful, and in my experience, it’s iffy whether or not it even works as intended by the game makers. Supposedly, her blood will call all the aragami in an area down on her, but in practice, even after it was evoked (as noted by the team operator announcing it over the radio) the monsters don’t pay any more or less attention to her.

And then there’s Romeo, who doesn’t get a blood talent during the initial phase of the game, and who is removed from the vast majority of the three episodes for plot reasons I won’t spoil. It’s only after completing the last episode that his blood power is applied, and like Nana’s I could never tell if it had any useful applications in the challenge missions that make up the end game.

I need to talk a bit about devours and how they lack the options found in Resurrection. The added devours found in the upgraded first game allow for fast devours, step devours, and flying devours. As it is possible to use one of each devour style in Resurrection, the first game gave players more freedom in movement. For instance, it is possible to get around the lack of an air step module because one of the flying devours propels your character forward by roughly ten yards. This is very handy in getting out of the clusters of aragami, and used properly it allows you to completely dominate entire groups of monsters by literally eating them to death.

In Rage Burst, the only devour available is always slow. There is the possibility to perform a fast devour by arming the larger buster sword weapon, but it’s a trick of sorts that involves pressing the heavy and light attack buttons at just the right tempo to cancel their animations before activating the devour, and thus canceling its animation as well. I was able to do this and confirm that it works, but I could never do it consistently. What’s more, there are all kinds of missions here you will want to use a different weapon, and the buster swords are always hampered by their long windup animations.

This translates in the game play as a significantly lowered amount of devours, and as such much less time is spent in burst mode until your teammates develop enough of a connection to you to begin sending burst bullets your way. Certainly, I tried to use the devour as often as possible, but with such a long charging time, I frequently got hit by aragami before my weapon had finished charging for the attack. Even in situations where I could get the charge finished, I often got hit by enemies, and that cancels out the burst mode before it could activate.

I forget exactly when the option for blood related weapon skills are unlocked, but these are skills applied to each weapon type, with more frequent use of each skill unlocking higher levels. To list some examples, there’s a short blade skill that allows for unlimited light attack without having to pause at the end of the standard combo (VERY handy for hitting aragami after they’ve been knocked to the ground), a long blade skill that sends out arcs of energy related to the element your weapon is infused with (fire, ice, electrical), and a buster sword skill that adds additional elemental oomph to the already impressive damage they do on their own.

(I need to apologize for how rambly all this will seem, but the way this game work, new abilities and characters unlock with each of the three episodes, and despite just playing it, I’m already fuzzy on some of the order of the unlocks.)

With the changes in the game play mostly out of the way, I want to talk about the first episodes story arc and how it felt to play. As I mentioned earlier, Friar travels to the Far East branch to assist the first and second gen God Eayers is dealing with their many problems. The older unts cannot fight with psions because these newly eveolved aragami resonate a type of energy that makes the old arc weapons ineffective. So whenever a psion is detected, the blood unit is the only option. In between those missions, Blood members can also fight the more standard variety of arami and may choose to bring along members of the Far East branch. Among these are some interesting surprises.

Kota, former moron who couldn’t shoot straight to save his life, is now the captain of the first unit, which your character was leading in Resurection. He can now shoot with reliable accuracy, and time has tempered down most of his goofiness into a mellower character. There were missions where I had him locked as a teammate, but the improvement in his skills made it much less frustrating to bring him along.

Then there’s Erina. In Resurrection, she was just a little girl who spent a long part of the game in denial ver the death of her brother. In the final episode of Resurrection, she vowed to become a God Eater to keep people safe, and in Rage Burst, she’s made good on that vow. While she can be a bit irritating in her headstrong nature, she’s fairly effective with her spear and shotgun skills, and I think it’s kind of cute that she named her arc Oscar.

There are other teammates new to the branch, but I won’t spoil those. I will say that one is ridiculous in his delusional view of the world, and another is just…weird. Also, I feel like asking what happened to Annete and Frederico. Most of the old teams show up or have an explanation for where they moved on to, but the two next-gen God Eaters from Resurrection just vanish. My only guess is that like the added devours in Resurrection, Annette and Frederico were part of the remake and as such weren’t part of the story canon.

Oh, and I cannot forget Kanon Daiba. Despite years of service. Kanon is still a lousy shot known for her ability to hit her teammates more frequently than she does the enemy. Time has made her grouchy though, and so instead of apologizing profusely for hitting them, she now growls “STAY OUT OF MY LINE OF FIRE.” Her story missions have you taking her out on training missions that do nothing for her skills. BUT, after you completely beat the game, she gets a special skill module that improves her accuracy. It’s annoying because she could have been an asset if that module had been available after her training missions, and instead she’s a liability whenever you’re forced to take her along. Sure, she’s great for the challenge missions at the end game, but those are only a fraction of the content, and…buh, never mind, my rant is just sour grapes, I guess.

In Resurrection, it was fairly easy to pick out the character who would later become the villain, but in Rage Burst, the writers introduced a similar character, only to reveal that they were just another pawn to the real villain, and the reveal of the villain was genuinely surprising to me. (Although in hindsight, I should have seen it coming.) Less shocking was that the villain’s master plan revolved around the same plot to initiate a worldwide “devouring apocalypse,” the same goal of the first villain. Their reasons for doing so are different, and the villain of Rage Burst has a plan so complex that it even takes multiple failures into account. But despite their cleverness, the blood unit manages to thwart the apocalypse and kill the villain. So cue the credits and the world can at long last….suffer more tragedy.

Ahem. So, despite having a lot less movement options, the first episode’s missions felt easy to me. The first episode tosses in some aragami who were late game bosses in Resurrection, but in Rage Burst, they’re lacking some of their moves and abilities, making them less threatening. Even the final boss of the first episode was easy to defeat on my first attempt, so it was something of a disappointment.

The second and third episodes are where the challenge comes in, but it’s because so many missions have multiple parts that all must be cleared on the same supply of items. It can be hard to play perfectly enough to make healing items last for three consecutive missions, but there’s also four and five part missions, and some of these multi-part missions will limit you to taking one teammate. This makes the game much, much harder, and several of these missions stalled my progression through the story for several days at a time. Which I suppose is okay, but with the multi part missions becoming more and more common in the later stages of the game, it can feel even more like a tedious slog.

In the socong episode, most of the story focuses on using your character’s evoke abilty to awaken blood talents in the various members of the Far East branch, and this was a HUGE pain in the ass because most require doing missions with that one character as your only teammate. Missions that might have been easy with a full crew become unbearably painful when you have to fight multiple aragami and play babysitter to a weaker teammate. It’s even worse when you have to watch over a first gen gun user because they will run out of ammo and be unable to do anything besides run in circles and try not to become some monster’s lunch. When everyone is finally trained, the second episode ends with a multi-part mission with each phase bringing in a different set of teammates. Every phase of this assignment is damned hard, so it took me three days to finally hit upon the right strategies for dealing with the waves of enemies.

The third episode introduces a new Blood team member, Livie Collette, and her special ability is being able to use other God Arcs, although doing so causes her intense physical pain. (In the story lore, handling someone else’s weapon is supposed to cause a fatal oracle cell infection, but in the first game, your character manages to handle another God Arc without becoming infected.) Livie has been referred to by other players as Little Red Riding Sue because her power does feel a bit Mary Sue at times. Her back story reveals a connection to Romeo, and her use of his God Arc is what builds the third episode up to what should be the final battle.

Buuuuut first the game adds in a twist where the other Blood unit teammates are captured by the viallain, and to free them, you have to endure a series of multi-part missions that each end in a boss fight with newly reskinned aragami who mimic the blood powers of the team member you’re rescuing. What makes these frustrating is that until you’ve fought and defeated these new aragami, you have no idea what element to use on them. Even if you’ve somehow guessed the right weapon to bring, your supply of healing items by this point will often be so low that you have no choice but to quit and start over. Or lose and start over if you feel that winners never quit. Either way, it’s a major pain in the boot.

To be fair, once the new Aragami become part of the free mission cycle, they can often be some of the most fun and challenging single mission targets. But placed at the end of multi-part missions as they often are, they can wreck even the most perfect runs. And again, because there’s so many of these kinds of missions, the end game is painfully tedious.

But so at long last the team is all assembled and ready for the final fight, and the last boss is really, REALLY cool. It’s a huge new aragami that has all kinds of attacks, a few of which can inflict poison damage. Beating that giant beastie felt truly epic and led to a final cut scene that made me shout “Wow!”

In reaching a score, I have to take into account my desire to replay the game, which I do not. I uninstalled the game to save space on my PS4, but I kept Resurrection. It’s not so much the increased movement and upgrade options Resurrection provides as it is the slog that Rage Burst’s late game turns into once multi-part missions become the only way to create a sense of challenge. Resurrection is to me far more challenging from the start, and the late game creates challenge in a more satisfying manner.

I did enjoy the sequel, but not nearly as much as the first game. That’s why I’m giving God Eater 2: Rage Burst 3 stars. It’s not a bad game, and I loved the story. But the second and third episodes are a long slog that I wouldn’t want to repeat. I’d still recommend it to fans of action sci-fi games, provided those fans don’t mind dealing with grinding monotony at times.

And here I pause to ramble a bit…

Delays between reviews on my site are something most of you should be used to by now, but this time around, the delays have to do with a number of disasters that I knew were coming. The biggest of those is that my beloved dinosaur PC died, and now I am stuck trying to steal time on hubby’s computer. Hubby is both a gamer and an internet addict, so this is really quite hard. (He really is an addict, by the way. We had service go down for half a day, and within two hours, he was wandering around the front of another provider near our home.)

So while I have some time during one of his naps, I wanted to let y’all know what’s going on here. (Besides the PC breaking.) Those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook may know that I lost my wallet last year, and that I have been languishing in the bureaucratic hell that Italy puts all immigrants through. I finally got my sojourn permit back, and so now I can hopefully get my debit card reinstated. This is important because without it, I can’t sell any books. Or rather, I can, but I can’t get access to any profits I make from those sales. There is a chance that I still won’t be able to get my card without a carta identita (ID card), but I don’t know that just yet.

Even if I can get the debit card, it may still be a bit longer before I can sell new books because I need to get a PC of my own to finish editing and formatting the next book to go out. This should take a few months at the very least. So if you’re one of the people who have been waiting patiently for the next book in the Alice the Wolf series, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait a little more until I can sort out this mess.

I will have some money coming in that may cover the cost of a new PC, as I was invited to travel to Spain to attend a company exhibition and act as a journalist for hubby’s company. I’m working on the article for that event now, and if my work pleases both the boss and the company that hosted us, it’s entirely possible that I will be sent on more assignments in the coming year. I also have a couple upcoming short term assignments editing the company’s news articles for their web site, and that pays really good even in the short term. I can’t say exactly when I’ll be able to afford a new PC, but I do believe it will happen sometime in the fall.

While I have this time to write, I also want to assure you there are reviews in the queue, both for games and for books. I’ll be trying to space those out a bit to give y’all something to read about once a week. I will say that there is one game I’d mentioned wanting to play that won’t be getting a review, I Want to be Human. As a platformer, one of my favorite genres of game, it does most everything right, with one deal breaking exception: the shooting sucks. The main character has a shotgun, and it’s aimed with the left stick. Most games that put aiming and movement on the same stick provide a button so the character can aim without moving. Not this game, and if I had a nickel for every time the game misinterpreted the direction I wanted to aim, I’d have a shit stack of nickels. I spent way too much time wiggling on a ledge trying to aim at a downward diagonal, only to fall off the ledge because the controls are way too fiddly. I reached a point about three hours in that I said out loud, “Okay, I really hate this,” and then shut off the game and deleted it. It really is a shame, too. This could have been something special, like a new Super Mario Bros. to treasure forever in my mental archive of great platformers. Alas, it slips away from my memory like a fart in a tornado.

There is another game which I’m debating reviewing unfinished, and that’s Rain World. I want to be clear, this is a game that I’ve seen break the most hardcore YouTuber’s, even bringing some to genuine tears of frustration. As for myself, I have picked up half a dozen rare trophies, among them Dragon Slayer. You get this for killing one lizard from each of the five colors, and two of those can only be found later in the game. It’s an ultra-rare trophy, with only 0.6% of the players being able to do it. I did it. I also reached the very end of the game, only to be rebuffed and tossed aside. I had to go to a wiki to look up why, and it’s apparently because I have not fully explored some other area of the game, and thus I lack the right Karmic symbol. I’m not even sure where to go to get said symbol or what the symbol looks like because the wiki is vague on details. So if I do review this, I might have to do it with the game unfinished simply because I have no clue how to get what I need to reach the true ending.

But here’s the thing: I kind of hate the game. The source of my hate can be attributed mainly to the controls, which are unforgivably sloppy. This is a game that demands pixel-perfect precise movements, and you cannot do that with a character who on a whim will decide to do its own thing and ignore whatever command you just put in. There are places where you must wall jump Slug Cat up thirty feet of pipe and then super leap across a wide chasm to reach the next save point. I did that the first time, only to realize I didn’t have enough food to hibernate. Thereafter, I have been unable to reach the save point. Slug Cat will either decide he doesn’t want to stick to the pipe wall and send himself plunging back to the bottom, or he will deign to reach the top, only to ignore the super jump command to plunge headfirst into the chasm. This is but one example of a soul crushing experience that’s never fun. There’s a reason so many review sites gave this a low score, and why so many YouTubers who started it enthusiastically have given up after just a few sessions. The reason is, this isn’t a fun game. It’s a cheese grater meant for grinding away bits of your soul. So if I do review it, you can be sure it will not be a glowing praise post, and will likely be full of more examples of what made me hate it.

About the only other news is that my web host has sent me a bill to renew my contract,and I’m going to have to ask hubby for the money rather than pay for it out of my book sales. Sales have not been high enough to cover the cost, and even if they were, I don’t have a way to consolidate and access those funds. The faults for this are entirely on me. I’ve done a terrible job of promotion the last year, mainly because I feel awful having to constantly drone on about buying my books. But this is something I have to do, or else how will anyone know I have something new out? I can’t put all of this on my faithful minions, who have done so much for me over the last couple of years. Word of mouth advertising can only do so much, and I need to get over my dislike of advertising and get my ass back in high gear if I want to be able to afford the web hosting fees next year. So on that point, I want to apologize to my Twitter and Facebook followers. I’m going to have to annoy y’all with more ads. I don’t want to do it, really, but staying quiet isn’t doing me any favors, either.

And that’s about it for the updates. I’ll have a review up for God Eater 2: Rage Burst in the next few days, and after that there will be a book review, followed by another game review, and then another book review. I can’t say what comes after that, but with the right spacing, that will at least be four weeks worth of content.

And as always, thanks for being here and for reading my rambling. Y’all are great, and I really appreciate your continued support.