Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 16

Game review: God Eater Resurrection for PS4 and PS Vita

Having sunk a little over 1,000 hours into all three Dark Souls games, (No, seriously, over 1,000, making it the longest I’ve played anything since Diablo II) I decided to trade them in at the game shop, and it turns out Horizon Zero Dan still isnt available for trade. On a whim I got God Eater Rage Burst 2 because I’d recently seen it praised one a gaming site. The game came with a lovely thank you letter from the director, a classy move somewhat similar to The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. BUT, this letter also included an invitation to download a remastered version of the first game and play it to get introduced to the world and characters. That’s double classy. As an added bonus, this is a cross-play AND a cross-save game, meaning the same save file can be shared between my PS4 and my Vita, which doesn’t get nearly enough love these days. (I don’t mention it anywhere in this review, but the PS Vita version plays just as superbly as the PS4 version. No shock, as this was made for the PSP, the other Sony portable that Sony gave up on. Le sigh, and I digress.)

So what could possibly go wrong? Well, there are some missteps here and there, and I’ll tell you now, this is not a game for the casual crowd. It starts off tough and only gets harder through its three story arcs, for reasons that I will explain a bit later. I’ll get to the problems in due time as well, but first, let me cover the story, the controls, and the various game elements. I should mention that while I’ve beaten all the story and free missions up to Difficulty level 13, there’s still a crap ton of extra missions and challenges available after the story is done. I’ve put in 162 hours, and this is for a free game to get me into the next game. Hot damn, that’s a lot of game, y’all.

Starting off, this is a very anime game. The characters are supposedly an elite military corp dedicated to saving the world from monsters, and yet their uniforms are pretty skimpy in the fabric department. Cry sexism if you like, but several of the dudes are showing off as much skin as the women, so to me it’s an absurd form of equality. Or something. Later on, I was able to unlock an outfit that actually looked like something a military officer might wear and used that most of the time. But I was playing a girl with blue hair and black cat ears, and one of my male companions wears a vest and shorts even in missions with ankle deep snow. There’s also a costume to unlock that will let you cosplay as a pink teddy bear with a giant frickin’ sword. This is not a game that’s taking itself too seriously, is what I’m saying.

The story goes like this: the world has been overrun by Aragami, monsters who all are made up of oracle cells. These cells consume just about anything and then mutate collectively to form bodies best suited to their environment. Aragami also supposedly consume each other (I’ll explain the supposedly later) and as a result, larger and more powerful forms keep appearing. The human cities were devastated in a very short amount of time, and the population plummeted as most people were eaten in only a few short months. To combat the Aragami, the governments collectively developed a special weapon made of oracle cells. These living weapons, called God Arcs, feed on Aragmi, hence the term God Eater, and also hence the army’s choice of name, Fenrir.

Still with me? Okay, initially, God Eater weapons only came in melee forms, but later models were crafted into guns. Each weapon has a bias, and as such, it needs to be bonded with a host that resonates with it. Enter your character, a “New Type” whose God Eater holds both a melee form and a gun, allowing you to switch on the fly whenever you need to. Your character starts off as a rookie at the Fenrir Far East Branch in Japan, but quickly ascends the ranks thanks to their skill in battle and soon leads a team of both old type and new type God Eaters.

And that’s the basic premise sans spoilers. As I said, the story is very anime, and having seen enough anime in my time, I was able to see a few twists coming. (One twist I called right away because a certain character’s voice was always just on the verge of an evil muah ha ha, and so it wasn’t a shock when he turned out to be a bad guy.) But there were also lots of surprises in the three “episodes,” even a couple that were foreshadowed and I still missed the clues until they were laid out again in flashbacks.

The gameplay is pretty simple on the surface. You choose a mission from the coordinator Hibari, and then you get sent to a location to fight monsters. You collect loot and use the loot to make stronger gear, and then you go out and kill bigger monsters. There’s a time limit for each fight, and while y’all know I normally hate playing with a time limit, most missions give 30 or 40 minutes to complete them. With relatively few exceptions, I was able to clear missions in half that time or even less, and once I had better gear, I was even clearing high level missions in under three minutes. So the timer here is cool with me because it’s pretty generous, in my opinion. (By the by, those few exceptions were down to the final seconds, and winning had me groaning “OH THANK GOD!”)

When I first got started, one thing that tickled me was how my character and the other fighters often said something that I would say while playing. Early on, I burst out with loud laughter because my character said, “We’re gonna go in there, and we’ll be all ‘watchaaa,’ and they’ll be all ‘run away!'” I lost count of the number of times I asked “Will you die already?” only to have a character ask the same question moments later. I pulled off a sweet sniper shot that put down a monster, and my character shouted, “Oh-hoo, noice!” There are countless other examples, but you get the point. The banter is just the right tone that I was constantly laughing either because it was something I might say, or it was something I just said.

That said, the banter can sometimes be a bit tone deaf with regards to the story. People die, and the crew you fight with never stop cracking jokes. So yeah, that’s the first of a few missteps, although this one is the most minor. As I said already, this game isn’t taking itself seriously.

The controls are carried over from the PSP, so the shoulder buttons are used, but not the triggers. Light and heavy attacks are on the triangle and square buttons, the circle is used for a dodging step move, while jumping is handled with the X button. There’s a couple of tricky moves using the right shoulder button and the triangle and circle buttons. These perform a devour move and bring up the weapon’s shield, although later on it is possible to automate the block in a couple of ways. Even after the full length of my play time, I still fumbled these moves a number of times, either by pressing the wrong button or not hitting both at the same time. In the thick of a fight, that usually resulted in my character’s face meeting an Aragami limb in a most unfortuitous manner. But I fully acknowledge that the fault there lies with me and my horrid affliction, wrong button syndrome. (It is quite tragic, but I persevere in the face of this crippling affliction. I am a brave, brave woman.)

Devouring works two ways. While a monster is alive, devours will put your character in burst mode, and they will do extra damage. With certain upgrades, burst mode will also recover health points and oracle power. Additionally, each enemy you devour will grant your gun a special type of ammo related to that monster. So for instance devouring a fire monster will give you fire balls. (See a doctor if that condition lasts for more than four hours.) After a monster is dead, using devour will leech materials from their body that can be used to upgrade your melee weapon, gun, and shield, or to craft new varieties of weapons and other stuff. The crafting system is hard to explain, and I had to go to the wiki to sort it all out, but once I had the hang of it, I was crafting stuff almost every other mission.

The right and left sticks work as you’d expect. Left moves the character, and right moves the camera. The PS4 and Vita versions vary on how to access consumable items like health pills and grenades, in that the PS4 controller uses the touch pad to pull up the menu at the bottom of the screen while the Vita uses the select button. With the Vita, it’s not quite as comfy to do, but I never had any problems getting to my items when I needed them. With the item menu open, the shoulder buttons let you scroll through your items, and the square button uses the currently selected item. In addition to the aforementioned health pills and grenades, there are also traps to hold monsters in place for a few precious seconds, a healing item to share with all the teammates, and an ampule to recover “oracle power” faster. (Oracle power is what the guns use to fire, and while it can be recovered using melee attacks, someone specializing in gunner roles will often find they need a little help getting back into the fight quickly.)

Now, here’s a caveat that may turn you off of the game: there’s a very limited number of locations to fight in, and only a slightly larger pool of Aragami. Later levels introduce larger monsters, but quite a few of these are just reskinned variants with a different elemental attack and a different elemental weakness. So if you need a lot of variety, this game is going to get dull fast.

Personally, I didn’t find it dull because of the sheer variety of weapon types that I could use for any given mission, and the longer I played, the more toys I unlocked. There’s short blades, which are fast and make up for their lack of oomph with the ability to get in several extra swings before gracefully dodging away from an angry counter-attack. There’s long swords that do great damage and look real purdy to boot. There are buster swords, absolutely massive blades that require a hell of long time to draw back and swing, but reward each connecting hit with a crap ton of damage. There are huh-yuge ass hammers that are just as slow as the busters, but will smash through Aragami and break body parts with just a few swings.

Ah, right, allow me to explain that mechanic. All Aragami have armored bodies, but some body parts are weak and can be broken. Once a part is broken, any attack directed at that limb will do extra damage. The game isn’t always clear on what to hit, but with enough practice, it becomes second nature to aim for the best targets and wail on them until the monster goes splat. Even more tricky is understanding what types of damage work best on certain parts. Some might be broken faster by shooting them, but on a couple of the bigger monsters, the only way to break their limbs is with a super massive hammer. It sounds complicated, but it really just comes down to practice to make sense of it all.

One thing that annoyed me slightly is that a late game monster had breakable parts that removed their offensive capabilities, and after beating that boss, I wondered why it didn’t work the same on all the Aragami. Like, if I break a scorpion monster’s tail, shouldn’t that at least mean the tail attack does less damage? Buh, I dunno. It just feels to me like that mechanic could have been used on all the monsters, thus rewarding you for targeting the most dangerous bits first. Anyway, let’s move on.

The monotony of fighting the same monsters over and over in the same locations is also helped by the fact that most of the monsters are real nice to look at. The early Aragami may not be very colorful, but the variants begin taking on the colors of their attack element, so you get monsters in color combinations that will make you go “Oooh, soooo pretty!” (Well, that’s what I did on many occasions, and one of the companion characters opined of a giant tiger-like Aragami “I know this isn’t a popular theory, but I think it’s kind of cute. I mean, it’s (sic) furry tail and trying to murder us…”) There were a few monsters so pretty, I called hubby over to look at them, and he agreed, they are real damn pretty.

Now, remember when I said Aragami are supposedly eating each other? That’s shown in the opening cut scene and is a key part of a late game plot point, but in the field, Aragami never eat or even attack each other. Regardless of what types you face for any mission, they will all clusterfuck up around you and your crew, and until you get a feel for moving out of trouble, these moments of monster collaboration will quite often lead to a lost mission. Somewhere around Difficulty 6, the combinations of monsters may also include Aragami of opposing elemental weaknesses, meaning you either go in with a weapon sans elemental attacks, or you just accept that one of the monsters will be a harder slog than the other. (Well, much later on you can get weapons with dual elements, but even then some missions will drop in a third monster that the dual element weapons can’t cover.)

As seems par for the course with Japanese games, the camera can sometimes become an ally to the Aragami rather than to you. I’ve many times gone into rifle mode to aim at a monster rushing toward me, only to get a loverly view of the tree or grass behind my character. Tight hallways offer a similar problem in that I can’t see where to move or swing my weapon because I’m looking at the other side of the wall, and I end up spinning the camera uselessly in a vain attempt to see which way is safe to run.

I should also mention that there’s a HUGE problem with the companion AI. If there’s just one monster to deal with, they’re mostly decent, with a couple of exceptional morons who have a tendency to shoot their comrades in the back every 45 seconds or so. But even adding in one extra monster makes your whole crew spaz out and go all derpy. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to kill two or three monsters on my own because my companions were just running in circles, seemingly unable to sort out what to attack.

As to the exceptions, that would be Kota and Kanon. If I had my choice, I would NEVER take these morons into the field with me, and I’m not being mean when I say that. Kota is an idiot who sleeps through training courses during the cut scenes, and in battle, he will fire wildly and miss more often than he hits any monster. He will drop traps that are nowhere near a monster, and he will shoot your character in the back and stagger them, setting you up to be pummeled almost every single time. As for Kanon, after I babysat her though a mission and had her shoot me about 40 times, she declared, “I’ve learned something today! I learned I don’t miss my targets if I don’t shut my ears in fear!” Oy fucking vey, lady.

And here’s the kicker: in free missions, you can take whoever you like into battle, and almost any other God Eater is fantastic at their roles. But the story mode quite often forces you to go into battle with at least one of these morons, and every time I saw I had to take Kota or Kanon, I groaned loudly. I just knew the next mission would involve a whole other level of fuckery because my companion has decided to be an ally to the monsters instead.

After Difficulty 8, I had a mostly easy time of things because I’d built up a big collection of weapons and a memory of what weapons worked best on which beasties. Then the game decided to drop me into a confined space just slightly larger than a walk-in closet with a fucking dragon. I think I put in about four hours into this one fight alone, but coming out on the other side of it, I suddenly found that even the hardest monsters were that much easier to dodge. So in hindsight, I hate that mission, but I’m glad it exists because it helped me git gud.

From there, it was mostly smooth sailing to the end of the story. I’d do all the free missions at each difficulty level before moving up to the next level, and I’d struggle through the story missions that gave me morons. Everything was going mostly honky dory until the second to last story mission against a beast called a Blitz Hannibal, a dragon that moves three times faster than anything else in the game. I got wrecked by this bastard for literally two day before I backed off to grind for gear.

Oh, right, the grinding. Oh come on, it’s a Japanese game, so you know there has to be constant grinding. But there is a difference to this game’s version of the grind. You see, you don’t level up your character. Instead, you grind to get components to upgrade your gear. So you don’t get more health points by leveling up. You equip items that give you more health…to a point. See, you only have 100 health points without upgrades. So you put on a couple upgrades and you get 150. You put on a couple more and you get…150. That’s the upper limit, and as you get closer to the end game, it’s entirely possible to be dropped in one hit. You have Endurance, so once you drop, you can be revived by companions through a link aid. But there’s another catch. Link aid takes half of the companion’s health and applies it to you. So if they had 10 health points when they revived you, you stand up with 5. And unless you use up a ton of health pills IMMEDIATELY, you will get one-shotted right back to the ground again. Good times.

But so, yeah, the grind. You have to grind to get materials to craft and upgrade weapons, and sometimes a material is rare, so you have to keep doing the same mission over and over until it drops. Then there’s grinding for Personal Abilities. Each companion has four slots that you can add abilities to, and those abilities use a currency called AP. That builds up real slow, and the upgrades get real expensive real fast. So to get your companions into shape to face the later monsters, you have to keep taking them into the same missions over and over again. If it sounds like a chore, that’s because it is, and the only positive to be found in this dull exercise is that afterward, they come out with some nifty talents that will keep them and your character alive longer. Mostly.

So, with that explained, let’s get back to the grind and the dragon moving in fast forward times 3. I upgraded my shield and tried again. No dice. Every time, he put my companions down within 5 minutes of the fight starting, leaving me to solo against him and hang on for dear life to around 15 minutes. Then I had a crazy idea to get a short sword and level that thing as high as it would go, and I fought every dragon over again to make sure that sword could put them down. I did the AP grind to give my companions more endurance and lots of other perks, and I hoped that would keep them upright for longer than five minutes. I got back to that fight and my companions all dropped in the same amount of time despite the upgrades I invested in them. But having the short sword meant that I was moving way faster and could dodge most of his attacks. I put him down with plenty of time to spare, so after all the endless ass kicking I took from him, beating that dragon was DEEPLY satisfying.

So cue the final boss fight, and I beat it on the first try in ten minutes, even as my companions were wasted and left lying in the dirt. Here’s a pro-tip to game developers: if you want to make the last boss challenging, don’t make the second to last boss move at the speed of sound. By comparison, the last boss was a garden slug. Granted, that slug had a number of ranged attacks and razor sharp wings, but I’d seen all of this slug’s moves before on a similar monster in at least twenty other missions, and those winged beasties had friends. This poor monster was alone, so I just kept up a simple pattern of dodge, dodge, dodge, PUNISH. Easy peasy. Well, not really easy, but not that hard compared to the dude who came before.

The final credits rolled and the game dropped me back into the lobby with a new set of missions, a pair of unlocked Predator Packs that hold a dozen or so missions each, and a special challenge pack that looks insane. (defeat 8 monsters in under 30 seconds? Dafuq?) I intend to get to those later, after I’ve played the game I actually paid for, but at this point I’m satisfied to put this one down and issue my review. Which I did, just now, as you’ve seen with your very own two peepers. And given that this is a great game for my Vita, I can see holding onto it when I feel like slaying monsters while I’m on the toilet or taking the train somewhere.

As for my score, I’m giving God Eater Resurrection 4 stars. The camera and companion problems take off a star, but all told, I had a lot of fun with this. I liked the story, the graphics are fantastic, and the music is superb. The voice acting is good, and the writing is a great mix of funny, sad, and shocking. So if you can look past the monotony of the reused locations and forgive the reskinned monsters, and if you can handle a game that gets insanely difficult near the end, I’d highly recommend this to y’all.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to crash. Tomorrow I start my journey into the sequel of this bonkers thrill ride.

Game review: Shadowrun Returns for PC

I got Shadowrun Returns during a GOG sale in the fall and played some of it between my other games. To give context for this review, I played almost all the way to the end in short sessions before starting over for reasons I’ll get to in a bit and rolled up two other characters before playing the whole game in a single session. Then I sat on this review for a long time, debating whether or not I wanted to talk about the game at all. I do need to write more posts here, and I’ve been real bad about putting out new stuff. Still, I kinda feel bad having to shit on what was a passion project for someone who clearly loved the original role play game. Kinda. But with time to think it over, I keep coming back to all the things that really pissed me off and I’d want to share that with y’all. Maybe you’ll play it and won’t have the same feelings. Or maybe you’ll give it a pass and play something else instead. That’s really the better option, in my opinion.

So, here we go: Shadowrun Returns is a complete and utter disappointment to play, both from the perspective of a long-time video gamer and as a player of the original old school pencil and paper RPG. The biggest disappointment is how little it tries to do anything resembling role-play. Like many modern triple A games, it gives you a list of dialogue options to choose from, and with the exception of a word change or a sentence at most, every choice leads to the same result. On startup, the game offers player the choice of various “etiquette” training, and depending on which you choose, you may only get to use it ONCE in the whole playthrough. AND EVEN THEN the response you get by sweet talking will be a single changed sentence before you’re right back on the same railed story as every other player.

This could be the one thing that really rubs me the wrong way precisely because there’s no voice acting. It’s all text scripts. So what it comes down to is, someone cobbled together a husk of a role play favorite and sold that old nostalgia song and dance, but couldn’t be bothered to actually make a role play game. Fuck that. Fuck it in every available orifice, and when you run out of holes, make some new ones and fuck those, too.

But let’s set that aside and move on to problem number two: the combat. It’s a standard turn-based system, so nothing much to complain about, but also nothing to gush over. The first few fights will prove mildly challenging as you try to build up enough credits and XP to get better equipment and skills. But the combat really can only go one of two ways from there. Either you go in loaded for bear and wreck the opposition with ease, or you go in with starting equipment and help the competition decorate the locations with your splattered brains. There’s not a whole lot of in between here. Skill or strategy don’t really factor into it either. You either have the brute strength to win or you don’t and you lose.

And okay, I will say the game looks nice, but despite the quality of the art, most area are completely empty of things to do. It’s rare to find any side quests outside of a single bar location, or even NPCs to talk to. This is supposed to be a mega city meant to house millions of people, and yet its streets are almost always empty. Aside from the main story, there’s almost nothing to do. Even if you do find a side quest and get some extra credits out of it, there’s so little variety in the assignments that you might as well skip them. This should be a world that encourages exploration, and instead all it does is pad the length out walking around to look at buildings you can’t enter.

I played the game first as a mage elf because that’s what I’ve been role playing since I was 9. It’s always been my jam, and with a decent selection of spells, I was mostly wrecking everything in the game with ease. Near the end of the game was a mission that required me to hire a decker, someone equipped to jack into a corporate mainframe and break down the security to retrieve some Very Important Data. So I hired one, took him into the job, and then flailed against the security system before realizing that the problem was my decker hadn’t brought any programs beyond the most basic shit. So I reloaded the game before the start of the mission and looked for a better equipped decker. Nope. Not a single one.

What followed was a few sessions where I tried to do a perfect run through the system with a woefully equipped decker. I finally retrieved the information I needed only to have the game go “Oh, and can you also unlock the elevator doors while you’re in there?” Actually no. The system was just about to boot my decker, and even then, all my offensive programs had already been destroyed.

So, I started a new game and played the first few missions using completely different answers just to see what would happen. Then I deleted that character, rolled another with similar stats but a training in police etiquette just to see if that changed my interactions with the cops. Nope. Nothing at all changes, no matter what you do. Welcome to role play in the modern era, y’all. You get five choices, but fuck it, they all do the same thing.

I armed up my decker and hired mages to watch my back, and I bought a whole lot of useful programs. So when I got to that same mission again, I went into the mainframe and fucking wrecked the security, leaving me plenty of time to get the data, open the elevator, and then steal some optional files. I couldn’t have accomplished the same thing even if I’d hired a full team of NPC deckers because the game gives them nothing useful even though you’re at the end game. And this is the case even if you’ve been hiring the same guy over and over. They don’t level up. They don’t get better programs to counter the rising difficulty. So basically if you want those final decking missions done right, you have to be a decker, and fuck every other class in the game.

I’m not sure you can understand my frustration with this game. Having played it with friends, we always had a good game master who gave us options. If we “broke” the story by doing something completely unexpected, they would roll with our actions and change the story. And if we died doing something stupid, the others had to make up for our loss. It was dynamic and fun, a shared storytelling experience.

This is a fraud pretending to offer a similar experience, and it fails in every single way imaginable. The story sucks. The dialogue suck. Your lack of choices suck. The combat….is merely adequate, but when merely adequate is rolled in a tortilla of shit and seasoned with more shit, well then merely adequate isn’t going to cut it, is it?

I got to the end of the game, beat the big final boss with the clumsy weapons handed out by the Deus Ex Corporation, and played through the painfully long epilogue before the game’s real ending goes, “Oh, right, that thing. Nope, you can’t get it. Haha, fuck you for playing.”

So, I give Shadowrun Returns 2 stars and my undying hatred. I’d give it one, but as I’ve said in prior reviews, 1 is reserved for broken and unplayable garbage. This game never crashed or glitched, but it also never offered anything worthy of my time with it. I want to say I got it on sale, but even then, I want my money back. No, I want the time I wasted on this back. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone. Fans of the old game will just be bitterly disappointed, and new arrivals can find ANYTHING better to waste your time with.

Book review: The Humans by Matt Haig

This is going to be a shorter review than is typical for me, mainly because I don’t have much to say about The Humans. I went into it with too high expectations based on my first read of Matt Haig’s work, The Radleys (which I loved), and by the blurbs littering the cover with gushing praise. And I should say that yes, I liked the story. But do I think it is “Wonderfully funny, gripping, and inventive”? No. Would I call it “Hilarious”? No. Would I describe it as “A laugh-and-cry book”? No. (I also wouldn’t call it that because ugh, hyphen abuse.) What I would call it is “Somewhat adequate.”

Putting it simply, The Humans is a retread of just about every “going native” story I’ve ever read or seen as a film. It’s the same as the many stories of tourists visiting another country and being bewildered by culture shock, only to eventually fall in love with the people (usually first with just one person) and coming to terms with their unusual habits. It’s Dances with Wolves, and Avatar, and any other number of examples across multiple genres.

The narrator for this book is an unnamed alien sent to Earth to erase evidence of a mathematical breakthrough that might somehow evolve the human race to the point of space travel. Why? Well because even if the claim is made many times that the whole race feels no emotions, they clearly fear the humans. I’m not even going to argue with their reasoning, because just look at what we’ve done with the internet and smartphones, and it’s clear that we do indeed have a problem with our technology advancing far too fast for us to catch up culturally and socially. So even if it seems illogical that the aliens who feel no emotions should fear humans, I can’t fault their desire to keep us constrained to one planet until we’ve had the chance to mature beyond our territorial pissing contest mentality.

The narrator initially shows up so confused about human customs that he makes himself an online celebrity with a nude walk across the Cambridge campus. Everything humans do is revolting to him, and nothing in the world makes sense. Yet he comes to love his family, and through them, he begins to feel empathy for the whole human race.

And, that’s the story, minus some spoilery bits. It’s kind of cute, and there were several lines clever enough that I felt the need to read them aloud to hubby. But there were no laugh out loud moments, no tear jerking scenes requiring a trip to the tissue box before I could continue. Even the wittier observations feel like retreads of comments made in Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett novels. So if I were to sum this book up, it’s a casserole. The ingredients are all familiar and maybe a bit near their expiration dates, and combined as a whole they make something satisfying. But at the end of the day, a casserole is still just a casserole, and it’s not something I would call “extraordinary.”

That’s why I’m giving The Humans 3 stars. It’s a fine light read for fans of sci-fi, even if most of the story wanders the same path of many other tales before it. Just don’t go in with expectations as high as mine were and you should have a good time with this.

Game review: Dark Souls II: Sins of the First Scholar for PS4

I just finished Dark Souls II: Sins of the first Scholar last night, having gone through all of the DLCs and beaten every boss, no matter how huge of a pain in the ass they were. Most weren’t, and there were only a few bosses that had me swearing violent threats against whoever designed those encounters. But for the most part, the bosses aren’t bad, they’re just…easy? I think until I got to the very end of the game, 75 percent of the bosses I took down on my first attempt. Even for some of the two attempt runs, it was because I pressed the wrong button and could immediately acknowledge “my bad” before the ubiquitous YOU DIED had appeared on screen. Most of the time, the real challenge to any From Software game isn’t fighting the boss. It’s in finding a route to the boss through all the ambushes and “gotcha” traps. The enemies are dumb as always, so for this edition, someone decided to add more of them to artificially crank up the difficulty. But that doesn’t make it hard. It’s just cheap.

Before I go into niggling details about the good and bad, I need to address an issue. With every video I’ve seen of people playing other From Software games, there’s a constant rant going on about Dark Souls II not being “right,” and I want to put that argument to rest first. This is a Dark Souls game just like the first and third. It takes place in the same general continent, albeit with hundreds or possibly even thousands of years passing between each age of the curse reviving. The game still has the same love of narrow cliff ledges, illusory walls, random mimic chests…it’s Dark Souls, y’all. If you’ve played one, you know what to expect from the rest.

There are a few points that the naysayers make with the ring of truth to them, namely that the game has a lot of samey enemies and a lack of varied environments. This is true. You fight a lot of knights in armor, and there’s not as much variety to this world as there are in the first and third installments.

But put that aside because really, the places you go really do look lovely. Take Brightstone Cove Tseldora as an example. It’s an inhabited aquifer brimming with glowing flowers. The first time I arrived there, I just hung out by the bonfire, taking in the view. (Enjoy the silence, by the way. The rest of this area is pure bullshit troll tactics.) And even the many castles have a sense of wonder to them on my first playthrough. I might lose that later, after my tenth run to try out all the possible build and weapon combos, but I can say with my first run through all the pretty that this games looks much better than the first, and the first looked pretty good to me.

There are HUGE improvements to the interface over the first game, and to the bonfire system, making the more tedious affairs of inventory management and fast travel less of a pain. You don’t need to find anything to fast travel from one bonfire to another. You just get that option instantly. Similarly, you get access to a storage box for all the stuff you pick up but can’t decide if you need it or not, and the interface for that is leagues better than the clunky crap of the first game’s attempt. (Which you had to buy from a vendor, BTW.)

I should also mention a major improvement to the camera, in particular for the way it handles objects blocking your view. If a tree or pillar is taking up too much space in front of the camera, it becomes semi transparent. This leaves objects on the other side a little blurry, like you’re looking at them through a thin layer of Vaseline, but it’s still possible to see enemies, and the visual effect is nicer than the version I saw in Ni-Oh. All around, there’s less instances of the camera losing track of fights, so while the camera lock could sometimes be a problem, I felt like this one change was huge enough to deserve a special mention.

Plus, this game has torches! In the first game, that was one of my biggest issues, being sent to one dark as fuck hole after another with no light sources, and not one fucking vendor had the most basic light source known to fantasy games. But no, Dark Souls II has you covered, and that’s good because it too has some dark areas, and without a torch they’re almost pitch black. Littering these dungeons are sconces to light up, providing some relief, but because you are lighting the place up, you’re also alerting the enemies to your presence, and that will lead to conga lines of hollows rushing silently from all directions to snuff out your torch, and you along with it. Being honest, these were some of the most terrifying places to visit, and I mean that in a good way. These are areas rich in atmosphere and that tense kind of dread where you just know some evil thing is creeping up silently behind you. Torches have a time limit to them, as well, so there’s another kind of dread roaming a dark dungeon and watching that timer count down knowing that a snuffed torch will likely mean sticky dark death. So for as much as I hate the dark areas, I also love them. It’s a bit of a paradox, I know.

Pitch blackness, however, was apparently not enough visual fuckery for From, and so there’s an area shrouded in fog where the enemies are white phantoms. Oh, and you can’t camera lock them even when you do finally see them about four feet away from your character and drawing back their swords for an attack. (Pro-tip: Bring a weapon with a slash attack, as lunges are easily dodged, leading to much punishment of your backside.) Again, I hated this area, and yet I loved it. I know this is something I’ll be dreading on my next run, for sure, and yet, I’m also kind of looking forward to it. Maybe I’m developing some kind of masochistic streak.

If I make any of this sound too hard, it’s not, not really. The enemies don’t move around much, so once you know where an ambush is, you can either creep up on it to pull one enemy at a time or use a bow to draw them to you. Or you can rush in with the biggest sword or mace you have on hand and lay waste to them before they know what hit them. Half the fun in these games is planning out your revenge for having been ambushed, and you have a massive variety of ways to revenge yourself. There’s mage sorceries, cleric miracles, and explosive witch pyromancies. Or if you prefer to be more physical and intimate, there are hundreds of swords, maces, whips, scythes, bows, daggers, and axes to choose from. There’s even a pair of boxing gloves if you feel particularly suicidal. There should be something in that vast collection that makes you go “OOOOOH!” and want to level up enough to handle that weapon in delightful mortal combat.

The weapon upgrade system for this game is much more streamlined than the first game, and in a refreshing twist from most From Software games, the materials to upgrade are plentiful enough to allow for some experimentation. Most of their games will punish you for not knowing what you wanted to specialize in because there’s only so much upgrade materials to go round. So if you upgrade say, three starting weapons, you will find yourself tapped for the resources to upgrade the better weapons when you finally find them mid-game. Not so in this installment. You can upgrade the starting stuff up to level 6, and you’ll still find plenty of supplies to upgrade stuff you find later.

There is a caveat here, in that titanite chunks, the material needed to get past level 6, can become somewhat scarce. I made the mistake of fully upgrading my armor before realizing I needed to build up another katana, and I never found any chunks through the last part of the game. And by the last part, I mean all three of the DLCs. This isn’t so much a problem if you start using boss weapons, as they use a different material to upgrade, petrified dragon bone, and that stuff drops like Halloween candy in the later stages. This is ironic, as given my first build’s strength and dexterity limits, I couldn’t handle most of them.

And then there’s titanite slabs. In the first game, these were real, REAL hard to find. In this game, they give one to you pretty much near the start, long before you can even use it. Before you get even one weapon up to level 6, you’ll have found three slabs. I had fully upgraded two swords, two bows, and a full outfit of clothing, and still had 8 slabs in my inventory at the end of the game. This is not a complaint, y’all. This is a gushing song of joy and happiness. THE HILLS ARE ALIVE WITH THE CLUNK OF SLABITES.

I got off track, sorry. Let’s get back to the bosses. Most were extremely easy for me to beat them with one attempt, as I said before, and that makes quite a few of the early fights unmemorable. I think it’s somewhere around the middle of the vanilla game that the bosses decide to take the kid gloves off and start testing me for realsies. Even then, I was beating most on my first attempt. Some of those fights saw me panting (for real panting) and shaking (for real shaking) while looking at my stats and seeing I had no health potions or other healing items left. Those fights were one attempt runs, but they did push me to my limits to stay alive, and those fights are thus more memorable. There’s even one of From’s tradmarked gimmick boss fights that manages to be fun for once, with a chariot racing around a ringed hallway, armed with giant wheel-mounted blades. It’s a glorious spectacle, and after I sorted out how to beat it and put down the crazy siamese twin horses, I set down the controller and declared, “Well, that was a hell of a thing.”

Then we get to the DLCs, which are for me the most uneven set of experiences in the whole series. The idea behind them sounds great. Each of the DLCs tasks the player to collect one crown from three ancient kingdoms and end the cycle of fire and dark for good. Doing this and possessing the crown of Vendrick, king of the base game, grants the player the ability to die over and over without going hollow. Those of you who don’t play From Software games won’t get why this is a big deal, so let me explain. If you die in these games, you lose your humanity and part of your health bar. Each death cuts a little more away, and to correct that you need human effigies. It’s not all that hard to find these, and it isn’t until you hit a really hard boss fight that you may start to sweat losing them. But wearing any of the four crowns means you can die over and over without consequences. So, was there a boss you skipped because they were too hard to learn how to counter? Go back and fight them again. There’s no consequence for failure, so why not?

The thing is, to get the crowns, you have to traverse the worst of the worst in terms of ambushes and traps, and almost every enemy in these areas has such high poise that nothing staggers them. The bosses here are hit or miss in terms of challenge versus bullshittery. In The Crown of the Sunken King, I whacked Elana with ease, while fighting Sihn the slumbering dragon took me many attempts and left me relieved to have finally caught him. (Dude bounds around a lot. This is not a complaint. He is a dragon, and I expect that to be a hard boss.) But then there was the bullshittery with Graverobber, Varg, and Cerah, a triple boss room in which two motherfuckers run around chasing you while the third fires great arrows at you. (Pro-tip: do not go for the archer first. The others will punish you for that with back stabs and instant death.) You can summon two NPCs to “help” but those morons will often commit suicide before even making it to the boss room. Even if they do make it there, they are all but useless in drawing the heat off of your character. It’s really better to go in solo and play a war of attrition. About the only thing that might make this fight enjoyable is changing the orchestral music out for Yakety Sax. (AKA: The Benny Hill song.) It’s an awful fight filled with bullshit, and even the cavern it takes place in is bullshit. When I finally put those assholes down, I wasn’t happy, or even relieved. I wanted to fly to Japan, find the director of the DLC, and kick him in the dick so hard he’d be peeing blood for a month. That’s the level of hate this one boss fight generated.

Compare that to Fume Knight in The Crown of the Iron King. I think I died 65 times to that dude, and I tried multiple weapons and ring loadouts, both solo and with the pathetic pair of NPCs offered to me. (Seriously, here’s a knight with two swords, one of them twelve feet long, and who do I get as backup? A BOXER AND AN OLD FART? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!) I finally took him solo, and yes, there was much relief at being done. I never once felt he was cheap or unfair. Each time I died, it was for a mistimed dodge, or for a misread tell. (It is damned hard to tell whether he’s going for an overhead slam or a side to side sweep because both attacks have near identical starting positions.) I didn’t feel anger at having to fight him over and over because I knew I could beat that guy. I just needed to find the holes in his defense and exploit them. So when I finally did it, I got up, poured a drink to toast my success, and raised my shot glass in honor to the hardest, but fairest boss in the whole game. By comparison, the Blue Smelter Demon was easy, and then there’s Sir Alonne, who…no, let us not speak of that level of bullshit. Because it is a manure factory of pure bullshit.

The same goes for the final DLC, The Crown of the Ivory King. Once I found the item to make the first boss visible, taking the giant tiger Aava down was easy. The optional fight with Lud and Zallen was the “tough but fair” fight, although a bit repetitive because it’s just two more tigers that I faced less than two hours before. Then there’s the crowning achievement in bullshit, The Burnt Ivory King. You’re sent all over this castle looking for four knights of the realm to fight with you, and yet going into the fight, you find three portals spewing out enemies at such a ridiculous rate that within one minute it’s a twelve to four fight. The knights start freezing the portals, taking themselves out of the fight and leaving you to fight an increasingly ridiculous number of enemies. Survive all of that bullshit, and then and only then will you be allowed to fight an asshole with a magical blade that can grow to become twenty feet in length. This fight took me forever to finish, and when I put the bastard down I stood up and said, “And Fuck you too, buddy.”

By comparison, the triple boss ending with The Throne Watcher and Defender, Nashandra, and Aldia, the titular Scholar of the First Sin, was a walk in the park. As for the optional boss I used the crown to finally defeat? The Ancient Dragon. (Again, I won’t complain about a dragon being hard. He’s forty feet tall and can fly and breathe fire while my character is tiny, crunchy, and good with ketchup.) It took me many attempts, but when I slayed him, I knew I was thus ready for the end-game. Which was funny because the final bosses were nothing compared to the DLC bosses. It was like playing in the pro leagues before moseying back into the bush leagues for one final fight.

So, where does that put my final verdict? Well, let me put it this way. I just finished my first run, and I’m already planning another to focus more on the bigger swords. (I love the katanas, but damn, some of the great swords in this game look real sweet.) And if I’m already wanting to play it again, you have to know it’s at least fun enough to get me over the bullshitty bits.

I can’t say I really understand the hate this game gets from the Dark Souls community. Okay, it’s isn’t like the first two Souls games. So what? If it had been exactly the same, you would be bitching for them not trying anything new. From is damned if they do, damned if they don’t. And for the most part, your complaints come across as so much entitled whining. “WAAAAH, IT ISN’T THE WAY I WANT IT!” Yes, and? You play From Software games on their terms, not yours. You learn the rules for each of their games, and then you learn when and where those rules can be broken. That’s the whole point. So if you don’t like this one because it made minor tweaks to the formula, you must have really hated Bloodborne for not being Soulsy enough. And really, you’re missing all the good stuff by whining about little shit.

Finally having played all of these From fantasy games, I have to say, the fans and the company both need to stop talking up the difficulty like that should be the main selling point. The Souls series has a lot to offer players. It’s got great locations with a ton of variety of play styles to suit all kinds of players. It’s got fantastic music and an understanding of when to play it and when to leave it off so the player can (hopefully) hear an enemy approaching their backside. But best of all, it’s got a method of storytelling that only gives as much as the player wants to invest. The player who just runs through hacking and slashing will have no idea what is going on, or how the trilogy’s three installments tie together. And likely, they won’t care, and…that’s okay. They miss out on some fascinating stuff, but so long as they enjoyed the hacking and slashing, the finer details don’t matter. But to the player who digs into the lore notes and really looks around, they will find this marvelously dense story, and they will see how their character has become an integral part of that story. Their character, should they succeed, will become part of the next legends before time erases them, as it has so many heroes before them. I think that’s fucking brilliant. I could write whole posts gushing about how brilliant From is at just giving as much story as I feel like absorbing. It doesn’t need intrusive cut scenes to do it, and most in game dialog is very short. The story is in the details, in the lore notes of every item. To find it, you have to want to know it. That’s awesome.

So, my final verdict for Dark Souls II: Sins of the First Scholar, even with the bullshitty bits, is a strong 4 star rating. I would be hard pressed to say whether I liked this or Dark Souls III more, but the entire series is worth looking into. You may have shied away because you heard how hard it is. I was pushed away by that message too. But ignore that crowd and give these games a try if you’re any kind of fantasy gaming fan. Yes, at first there is a learning curve to really understand these games. But once you’ve got the basics down, every one of these games offers a fantastic voyage that will last hundreds of hours. They are worth every penny you pay for them even if you only play them once, and having played almost everything From Software has produced with the exception of Demon’s Souls, I can say that I love their work and look forward to whatever they plan to publish in the future.

Game review: Let It Die for PS4

Y’all, I want to apologize for this review taking so long, and for not being able to finish Let It Die. I have only nine floors left to reach the end, and yet the thought of playing even one more time fills me with a creeping boredom so intense, I was making up house chores to avoid playing. I have fallen asleep while playing despite having just had a nap. The grind is so dreadfully boring that I actually went back to play Bloodborne, a game I swore I wouldn’t start over because the grind was so dull. I just reached a point where I said to hubby, “If I’m going to be grinding for days on end against cookie cutter clones, I should at least get rewarded with unique boss fights every now and then.”

Before I go on, I want to say that the makers of Let It Die quite often patch the game both to fix problems and to add different events. This has also made reviewing it harder because a lot of what bugged me when I first installed the game was fixed only a couple days or weeks later. This might seem like a good thing, but even the patches create their own problems that I’ll get to later. But I bring this up because within a month of this review going up, it’s possible some of what I’ll criticize won’t be in the game anymore. If you pick it up later and want to comment, “Nuh-uh Zoe, that isn’t how it works,” I’ll rebut that it was how things were when I played, and the patched version you have fixed it.

But I’m relatively confident that the game’s biggest problems cannot be fixed, and that’s the monotonous grind combined with an overly repetitive design.

Oh, also, this is a very long review. Consider this a fair warning that you’re gonna be here a while to finish this post.

Let’s start off by examining the game world and its positive points. Let It Die is a very meta game. You’re in an arcade in hell, playing a game set on Earth after an apocalyptic event known as “The Earth Rage.” This apparently jams some continents back together or sank a few, and in Japan, a giant tower of buildings grew out of the rubble. This “Tower of Barbs” has become an iconic site of pilgrimage where people try to climb to the top to find…something. Nobody even really knows what’s at the top. They just want to climb it because “it was there.” (I’m not being sarcastic, and that’s actually a philosophy of some mountain climbers. So I’m not faulting the game for its premise. It seems legit to me.)

When you load up the game for the first time, you find a lot of clone bodies piled in mini-mountains, clones much like yourself, and that right away sets the tone of your journey. You are not a chosen one fabled to make this ascent. You are one of a million entrants to a contest that has seen many, many losers, and very few winners. At the conclusion of the initial tutorial, your character is shot in the back without much ceremony, and you are invited to try again by “Uncle Death,” the wacky Suda 51 version of the Grim Reaper who wears x-ray glasses and rides a skateboard because…because.

Then once you start the game properly…the tutorial continues. This almost put me off the game, the constant intrusion of yet more envelopes hanging off off balloons to tell me how to play. Once they finally went away, I…almost gave up because of the “multiplayer” side of the game. I’ll get to that later.

But first let’s go over the combat, which is the main reason to stick around and try the game out. And hey, it is free, so there’s no harm in seeing if it works for you or not. At the start, you have to pick up weapons from the fungal-infected clones wandering the floors because the shop in your waiting room has nothing to sell you. The weapons you pick up will have almost no durability to sustain them in a fight, and this makes you switch frequently every time something breaks. In this way, it’s a bit of a learning process that shows you what each weapon can do and allow you the chance to decide what weapons and fighting styles work best for you. During this early phase, it’s best to play the field and try everything.

You can equip a weapon in each hand and use the trigger buttons to attack. This does not lead to any crazy left-right combos, though, so mostly you’ll equip both sides to have a backup available when your main hand weapon breaks. Additionally, you can equip up to three weapons for each hand and switch between them using the d-pad. The ability to loot a body and move a weapon directly to an available slot gives you a lot of options on hand, pun intended, so you don’t always have to play around with the inventory menu. This is a very cool feature and I liked it a lot.

There are also two-handed weapons, though at first they are even more fragile than their single-handed kin. Nevertheless try them out too, because all the time you spend with each weapon raises your mastery levels with them. Unlike Ni-OH, which uses the same idea, once you’ve gained extra mastery levels, that experience converts into extra damage and combos for every weapon of the same type, and for all your fighters. So if you die and lose a clone, don’t sweat having to level up your weapons again. The mastery levels carry over for all your clones.

There are a few guns in the mix, I think two in the early floors. One is a Magnum with a ridiculously long barrel that can be fired single-handed using the camera lock (oh yeah, let me rant about that later) or aimed two-handed. In both cases, you will miss a lot with this until you put some levels into dexterity, so I don’t recommend using it until your first clone is somewhat close to their level cap. There is a fireworks launcher that you need to use the camera lock to aim, but again, low dexterity combined with the slow speed of the “bullets” will make this a weapon to try after your clone has come close to the level cap.

Later levels grant you access to a crossbow, an assault rifle, a sniper rifle, a shotgun and, I shit you not, a baseball pitching machine. (This thing is wicked fun to use, by the way.) While the assault rifle and baseball launcher have plenty of ammo to spare, the other ranged options tend to run out fairly quickly, and this combined with their high cost makes them difficult to recommend. In particular, the shotgun has an annoying tendency to miss even at point blank range and with fully leveled up dexterity, and given that it only has twenty rounds of ammo, every missed shot had me gritting my dentures and growling “Oh fer fuck’s sake!” (Oh, and pro-tip: do level up the sniper rifle a bit, as that will eliminate the weapon sway it has when you first start using it. After the sway is gone, that gun is a BEAST of one-hit head shots.)

The controls are okay. I’m not real fond of the dodge roll and block being on the same button because I can’t block without standing perfectly still something that isn’t a real good idea when I’m fighting more than one opponent. And like many other games, the dodge roll is iffy about whether it will roll my character back and away from an attack, or hurtling forward to take a saw blade in the face. The direction I was pushing on the left stick seems at best to be a suggestion where to roll, and it’s a gamble that quite often doesn’t pay off.

The vast majority of the enemies you fight are basically well armed zombies who have been reanimated by the various fungus molds that fill the tower’s corridors. They will run at you as soon as they see you and use whatever weapons they have, even their fists if they don’t have anything else. In a refreshing change from most games, they can harm each other, so it is entirely possible to kite a small group of clones and let their wild swings wreck their comrades. You don’t get XP for these kinds of kills, but in the early stages it’s pretty quick to reach the level cap, and after that, you don’t get any XP.

Scattered among the undead clones are…you know, I’m still not sure how to describe these constructs collectively known as tubers. The in game lore talks about a scientist who took the mangled bodies of clones and converted them into a kind of zombie cyborg. Their intended use is for fulfilling various menial services for the remaining humans, so they’re kind of a robot. But they’re also kind of a cyborg. Kind of. Anyway, let’s just call them zomborgs, m’kay?

Zomborgs come in a variety of shapes, and each one fights differently. The first type, called a “scratch tuber” in game, has a pair of forklift arms that it will sling at your clone. They’re really not that threatening, as they are very slow and they have a tendency to freeze and shudder for long periods of time.

The second type hovers around on a pair of jet engines and attacks very quickly with a giant drill, and these appropriately named hover tubers can wreck you many times over until you sort out the best pattern of dodging and striking only after they’ve gotten their drill bit lodged in the ground. (I do find it kind of sad how a zomborg with two jet engines has a pathetic jump animation when it needs to climb platforms, but this is common to a lot of games where an enemy who should be able to fly is somehow still forced to remain on the ground due to bad video game logic.)

There’s a bone tuber who attacks with a fan of lightning fast blades attached to its fingers, and it can curl those blades around its upper body, rendering them invulnerable to your attacks. It can hurtle forward with alarmingly fast motion to put itself right up in your clone’s grill, or it can roll up in a flashy Metroid-type ball and slam your clone to the ground and knock off a huge chunk of health.

There’s a bullet tuber who has a machine gun sticking out of its chest that also has a flame thrower added for extra chuckles. (But I have to ask, why, for the love of God, are they wearing red high-heeled shoes? Because sexism, that’s why. Ugh.)

And then there’s the reversal tubers, who…no, I’ll just let you discover the joys of fighting those hulking brutes on your own.

You will take a lot of damage on each floor, so luckily for you there’s a variety of mushrooms and critters to eat and recover health from. I gotta admit, some of the critters are so cute that I felt bad for eating them. I got in the habit of apologizing to the frogs and mice I had to eat. (Silly, I know, but they are pretty damned cute with their little crowns of mushrooms sticking out of their heads.) As for the scorpions, lizards, turtles, and snails, fuck those evil assholes. I chomped them all to death with gleeful malice. The fish and crabs, I’m ambivalent about. I’ll eat them, sure, but I don’t harbor any resentment toward them, nor do I find them so cute that I need to apologize for munching their deliciously squishy bodies.

Along the way, you can also find open fires, and by cooking mushrooms and critters, you gain extra health by munching the resulting grilled varieties. You can find “golden” varieties of these critters, and in addition to offering a full recovery of all health, consuming them gives a metric fuck-ton of extra XP. The golden critters are rare to find in game, but they are often given out as rewards for logging in daily. I suggest eating them right away if you haven’t reached a clone’s level cap because even one golden frog can help get up to three levels without the grind. Muy helpful, yes. (If you have reached your cap, stick those goldies in your bank and save them to level up your next clone faster.)

Some mushrooms are not food, though, and they instead work as weapons. Grilling them will boost their potency, and that’s kinda cool. The problem is, even at their upgraded levels, most shrooms lack the kick to really kill enemies. It doesn’t help that you access these items using the PS4 touchpad, and that the interface is, being nice, fiddly as fuck. I’ve often selected a boomshroom to throw at an enemy, and then my attempt to press the touchpad made the interface select a mouse and throw that instead. (Some enemies low on health pick up the mouse and eat it, meaning I just helped give my opponent another chance to kill me. Oh, joy.) Conversely, I’ve intended to eat a grilled mouse only to have my tiny thumb movement select a boomshroom and kill me instantly. (I reiterate, oh, joy. Also, oy vey.)

There is one weapon shroom found later in the game that is totally worth farming them, the brainshroom. When grilled and thrown at enemies, this will stagger them with a brain fog, making it possible to do a Mortal Kombat style fatality on them. Not surprisingly, these kinds of shrooms are very rare, but when you find them pick them up! Trust me, and you’ll thank me later for pointing them out.

One last twist on the critters is that they are all carriers of fungal spores, so by killing them, they cause a different kind of shroom to grow out of their bodies. Some are weapons, and some grant useful abilities to your clone. By killing a pillbug and eating the resulting lifeshroom, you can survive a fatal attack and get back 25% of your health. (Or 50% for the grilled variety, or 100% for the ultra-rare gold variety.) This is a life insurance policy, and believe me, you’re gonna need it.

Even with these helpful shrooms and critters, death will happen inevitably, and upon each death, you’re given a prompt to spend a rare currency called “Death Metal.” This is given out randomly during certain events or as a reward for collectibles and some quests, but the primary way to obtain it is using real world money. This is where the game hopes you will spend big, but it is possible to keep progressing without using Death Metal to buy continues. (Death Metal is also used to purchase storage upgrades for your bank in the waiting room, and you WILL want to do that to avoid running out of space to hold crafting supplies.)

After turning down the offer to continue, the player is returned to the clone storage freezer, and they have they choice of rescuing the fighter they lost for a certain amount of money. The higher up in the floors they died, the more the cost is to rescue the clone. Reviving them means you get to keep all the equipment and items they had in their inventory, so most of the time, you just have to take the financial hit to retrieve them. There is also the option to go find your own clone and kill them again, which returns them to the freezer, albeit in a semi-naked state. Obviously, this is not ideal and may be considered a last resort unless the clone died without anything worth keeping in their inventory. You can choose to remove the fighter entirely, but mostly this is just to free up space in your freezer for higher level fighters. (You can also upgrade the amount of space in the freezer, allowing you to hold a collection of up to ten fighters.)

In between all this looting, dying, and fighting, you’ll begin to find lock boxes with blueprints, and taking these down to the shop in the waiting room unlocks plans for various kinds of weapons and clothing. You won’t know what blueprint you have until it’s examined at the shop, or unless you’ve already collected that item before. This becomes the initial core loop of the game, finding blueprints so you can then search for the crafting supplies to unlock items in the shop. Blueprints are distributed across a set range of floors, although some of them are very rare, to the point that you may only buy them at a traveling shop found on specific floors. These purchased blueprints will eat up a lot of funds quickly, so again, you get into a loop of collecting kill coins to buy blueprints, taking them back to the waiting room shop, and then collecting crafting supplies to unlock them.

The benefit to unlocked weapons is two-fold. First, anything you buy starts off with a full “health bar” of durability, meaning it will last longer than the junk you loot off of enemies and from lock boxes. Second, you can invest more crafting supplies to level up weapons and give them more damage. When an upgraded weapon is paired with a maxed out mastery level (All levels cap at 20) it can make even the crappiest weapon into a wicked killing machine. So it pays to keep upgrading all your equipment, even if the grind quickly becomes a chore. (By the way, you can also level up your fists to make bare-handed fighting more damaging, but this takes a really, really long time, and punching enemies to death takes much longer than even the meekest melee options.)

In addition to weapons and clothing, you can also buy decals in another shop in the waiting room. (The game calls them decals, but I kept referring to them as tattoos.) Each decal offers a different benefit, but initially you can only equip one. You can opt to add more health to your clone, or boost their damage in various ways, or upgrade their defensive stats for wearing a certain “brand” of clothing. At higher levels a lot more decals are available, and you can wear more of them, which can make a huge difference in easing your struggle to unlock new floors.

As the clones ascend floors, they soon encounter mid-bosses and bosses. The first mid boss, COEN, will prove extremely challenging because he’s got more than enough health to break your first tier weapons, even the stuff you buy at the shop. You have to beat him, and then a second mid boss, Jin-Die, who is a huge pain to fight with melee weapons because she’s armed with a gun that fires the heads of defeated clones. Don’t think to use a gun on her, either, because she will see you and launch a barrage of heads your way before you even have a chance to take aim. Besting the mid bosses, however, is only half the battle. After that your clone has to survive to find an elevator on a higher floor to unlock and return to the waiting room to restock. Those elevators are vital to survival because if you try a climb back up using the escalators, you will have to keep fighting the mid bosses over and over. And then you will die. Like, a lot. (Or alot, as the kids are fond of writing these days.)

At the tenth floor, you meet the first real boss, Max, and that bastard is a real bastard, let me tell ya. He’s got a ranged missile attack, and his melee drill is electric, so he can stun lock your clone and pummel them into pulpy goo in a few seconds. Good luck trying to eat anything to heal between attacks, because with the tiny size of the arena, you will need luck to do it. To make matters more complicated, the tiny area you face him on is surrounded by a border of electric bolts. You hit that field and it’s one stun-lock leading into a stompening of your poor clone. Good times.

Beating Max grants you the chance to hire a new grade of fighter with more health, better stats, and a higher level cap. The floors beyond Max have new blueprints to unlock, and a new mid boss named GOTO-9. All of these mid bosses, by the by, are initially terrifying, looking like something straight out of a horror manga. The shock wears off after facing them too many times, and you will have to do so because they randomly drop crafting materials you need to upgrade your equipment. (Again, that’s the core loop; unlock items and upgrade them to boost their damage.)

By the twentieth floor, you’ll know whether or not you want to keep playing the game, and this is also when the game pulls one of the dumbest ideas out. The next boss, Colonel Jackson, has his severed head planted on a giant grenade. To even get close to him, you have to run around a massive arena and find the devices to disarm the grenade. But that’s only the first part of the fight. Once you’ve done that, a Jin-Die will rise up behind Jackson and rip her own head off before putting Jackson’s head on her body. So you’re really just fighting an upgraded version of a boss you’ve already seen many, many times by this point.

I’m going to drop another spoiler on you now: every boss after that is just an upgraded mid boss. This game could have had some truly unique end bosses to give you a reward for climbing another ten floors, and instead, it’s all cookie-cutter clones all the way up. The game gets very dull at times because no matter how high up you go, you’re always fighting the same things over and over. The zombies get better weapons and more health, and the zomborgs change colors on their outfits to go along with upgraded health and damage, but they’re all the same enemies.

Combine this with the repetitive level designs and it leads into a kind of apathy to keep playing. I felt this way on floor 21, and nothing changed that view even after I’d defeated the third boss, Crowley. (Who places his severed head on the body of a GOTO-9)

But it’s what happened next that led me to quit playing, or more accurately, what didn’t happen. Fighting Crowley didn’t unlock the next grade of fighters, and I had to go online to find out they don’t unlock until floor 35. So hesitantly I moved on to the next floor, and within one minute had used up all my weapons. It’s near impossible to continue on using scavenged weapons because they will inevitably break fighting just one enemy, and then I’m stuck being the moron who brought fists to a gun fight.

I took the elevator back down, spent a couple days grinding to buy more weapons and armor, and then went back up. I hadn’t even reached the next escalator before all my weapons had broken. I did this again and again for a week before I gave up and went to YouTube to watch someone else play the final mid bosses and boss. (No shock, the final boss is another mid boss upgraded with a different head.)

The biggest problem with the game is, for all its quirkiness and variety of weapons and clothing, it does very little with the levels and enemies. There’s little reason to go back to floors once you’ve collected all the blueprints and crafting items you need, and even the hidden collectibles aren’t all that compelling. Oh sure, you can take quests at the arcade to obtain certain crafting items as rewards, but even that starts to lose its appeal when a quest is tasking you to run naked and unarmed up five floors for a paltry reward of one Death Metal.

Now, the makers seem to recognize this flaw, and so they’ve added in events that take place on certain floors. One recent event offered a new weapon, a scythe with a chainsaw on the top and a power drill on the bottom, and a new set of hockey themed clothing. To unlock these, you had to wander floors 11-20 looking for a certain type of enemy invader who had a chance to drop the blueprints. And yes, wanting to get that full set gave me a reason to go back to those floors.

But…but the cost of crafting and upgrading the new weapon was so high that it took me three weeks to get it up to level four, and I lost interest in attempting to get it to grade two because I had many better options already available from the higher floors.

And to be sure, a lot of fun can be had in unlocking the new equipment and leveling it up. But even the biggest baddest weapons break easily on the higher floors, and with each upgraded level, they become so prohibitively expensive that it hurts to have to stockpile them knowing they won’t last more than a few minutes.

There is a HUGE problems with the addition of these events, and it’s that each “patch” intended to add them requires downloading the entire game over again. The first time I downloaded the game, it was 18 GB and it took six hours. Each patch added more gigs to download and increased the wait to play. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game updated less frequently, but it happens quite often, and each time, I had to wander off and do something else while waiting for it to add maybe one new thing and fix a couple of mistakes. This is how I ended up going back to Bloodborne, and it ended up looking better by offering me a lot more variety in the level designs and bosses. When a game is so tedious that it makes another game I found boring look fun, that’s not a good thing, you know?

I have to mention that while the game doesn’t crash often, when it does, it counts as a death and you have to pony up the cash to rescue your fighter. If you’re on floors 1-10, that won’t seems so bad. But if you’re on an escalator heading to floor 30 and the game crashes, well that’ll be 95,000 kill coins, fuck you very much. It’s extremely demoralizing to have to rescue a fighter and then spend a couple hours rebuilding my cash supply when it wasn’t even my fault for dying in a crash.

I haven’t even touched on the problems created by this game’s version of asynchronous multiplayer. Very early on, you’ll begin to encounter “haters,” the reanimated bodies of other player’s clones. These haters will have all the equipment they died with, and if a player chooses to leave a hater active, they can later collect money and another currency called SPLithium gathered by the hater. It’s for this reason that trolling players will often take a level 100 fighter and kill them on the first floor because that hater can then kill a ton of lower level fighters, and it’s all pure profit for the player. It’s a legally sanctioned form of bullying. And apparently, the makers didn’t feel like enough people were trolling the game, so they inserted their own army of bots to do the trolling in the absence of real world bullies. (You can note the company’s bots by the lack of a TDM team flag and computer generated names like YtTM-CatMeow or YtTM-SheepBaa.)

Then there’s hunters. I’ve seen people on YouTube promote this as “a great way to collect rare mushrooms and crafting supplies.” What they don’t mention is that sending a clone on an expedition means targeting a specific player on a specific floor. I’ve had players repeatedly hound me all night with an increasingly higher level hunter each time I defeated them until they sent someone so tough I couldn’t win. Then they just kept sending that clone after me to repeatedly steal my stuff. Again, it’s legally sanctioned bullying.

Next is Tokyo Death Metro, where a player can invade someone else’s waiting room to steal money and lithium from their banks. (You also gain ranks for yourself and for your team.) Very early on, you’re forced into this scheme and forced to pick a team. The interface isn’t that intuitive, so I ended up on Team Spain, and was forced to stay with them for something like four days before I was allowed to swap over to Team Italy.

The thing to keep in mind is, no one ever goes for someone with too high a TDM rank. That’s because losing a match means your fighter loses everything. Armor, weapons, decals, food; all gone, requiring somewhere around 100,00 kill coins to restock and recover. That kind of punishment encourages bullying of lower level players, and I saw a massive dip in invasions right after I ranked up to a silver medal. Instead of being raided every five minutes, I went a whole week with only one invader, and that guy was at a diamond level rank. See the problem? The whole system is set up for people to prey on the new kids. It’s a constant reminder of my early life in public schools, with people constantly bullying me until I reached a high enough level to hit back.

And, it’s not fun, no matter what the game may claim. It’s not fun to be working my ass off to build money for a trip to the upper floors, only to return to my waiting room to find I’ve lost half of my earnings to a pair of raiders. It’s not fun to be prevented from crossing a level because a bully has parked himself in my way. It’s not even “part of the challenge” because nothing can be done to deter diamond-level bullies from stealing your shit in the waiting room. (You can assign idle fighters to defend your waiting room, but what are your level 20 fighters going to do against a level 115 invader? Die. Or possibly get kidnapped. Yes, you can have a fighter stolen, robbing them of all their equipment. It’s a huge pain to deal with, and it happens frequently.) You can’t fight a fourth grade hunter with a second grade fighter when you have to hit them fifty times to kill them, and all they need is a glancing blow to kill you in one hit. And I repeat, it’s NOT FUN.

But I could tolerate the player abuse and focus on the climb right up until it became too ridiculously expensive to keep going. And yeah, maybe I could bully the lower level players to make money faster, but I find the whole idea so repulsive that I would rather earn my shit then steal it from someone else and make their game harder.

Before I forget, let me rant about the so-called camera lock. In most games, when you lock onto an enemy, the camera is fixed over your shoulder, and you will track only that one enemy. Not so here. The lock selects an enemy, but the camera is still free roaming. You have to fiddle with it using the right stick to keep your opponent on-screen, and against higher level enemies, that can prove to be fatal nine times out of ten.

It doesn’t help that the lock is so bad about which enemy it selects. You might want it to lock on the guy about to stab you in the face, but it will most likely select someone twenty yards away who is posing no threat to your well being. You can press the right stick over and over to try and get the right enemy, and it will select the same harmless guy over and over before MAYBE swapping to someone else who is also off in the distance and thus not a threat. Most camera locks in any other game use the right stick to let you select a different opponent if it chooses the wrong target, but there is no such option here. It’s like Suda 51 heard there was a contest to make the lousiest camera lock in all of gaming, and he went all in to get the gold. Let me tell you, when it comes to the suckiest camera lock EVAH, this bad boy is a real winner.

As a final side note, the whole “climb the tower” concept felt like a MacGuffin on floors 1-29 because at any given time I could look up and see the tower somewhere off in the distance. It’s only on floor 31 that I could look down over the edges of floors and feel like I was actually on the tower itself. (The final floor leads to the world’s longest escalator, so all the previous claims about the height of the tower and the challenges within feel kinda misleading, in my opinion.)

Ultimately, I’m left feeling very mixed on how to score this game. At its core, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the combat and the variety of ways you can deal hot sticky death to your enemies. But that fun is constantly being dragged down by the lack of variety in enemies and bosses. It’s further dulled down considerably when I have to fight the same mid boss fifteen times just to get them to drop one crafting item. (And I need five more of the same item to finish leveling up a weapon or armor component, AND I need to do it fifteen more times to finish upgrading other items.) It’s more of a chore than a diversion when I have to keep going to the same so-called trap room to open a gold metal chest for the twentieth time in one day and STILL not get the crafting item I need. I toughed it out for as long as I could, but I just can’t do the grind anymore, especially knowing I have another loop of grinding to face with the blueprints and crafting supplies found in those final floors. It’s not too tough to play, and I beat several bosses on my first try. But I’m done with this tired slog for little to no rewards and I’d rather spend my time grinding in Bloodborne and Dark Souls III. At least with those games, I feel like I’m getting somewhere even when I’m running the same floor for the hundredth time.

I’m going to give Let It Die 3 stars and suggest that you try it out to see if you can stand the game’s flaws. It is free, and the premium options don’t really do anything to change the experience into a pay to win fiasco. (The game offers up day passes at regular intervals so you can see for yourself what the premium services do without spending any cash.) If you find it’s dull and too repetitive like I did, you’re not losing any money to give it a chance. Maybe you’ll like it and make it to the “twist” ending without cheating to look it up on YouTube like I did. (Which I totally saw coming from the tenth floor, by the way. The writing isn’t very subtle about what’s going on.)

Anywho, that’s my review, and again, I’m sorry it took so long to get it up here.

My thoughts on the weapon durability game mechanic…

Zelda: Breath of the Wild has a lot of people raving about how good it is, and watching people play on live streams, it certainly does look fun. And yet, there’s a problem that even people who like it have called out, and that’s the introduction of weapon durability. The problem isn’t that it’s a part of the game, though. No, the real problem is the exaggerated fragility of the weapons.

I’ll have to wait quite some time before I can play BotW, but I have played a number of games recently where durability is a mechanic in them, and I think it’s a good idea if it’s done right. For instance, it’s mostly okay in Dark Souls III and the original game (I still haven’t played the second installment so I can’t say how it is, but it’s on my “want to play” list.) while it’s decidedly more frustrating in Bloodborne, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Let it Die.

In particular, Let it Die has constantly annoyed me with how fragile the weapons are, especially in the higher levels. I can carry a supply of four or five swords for one level and still not reach the next floor before I’ve used up my supply. This is a problem for many reasons. One is the high cost of the upgraded weapons, requiring a half a day of grinding for cash just to afford a decent supply. But even with cash on hand, the game blocks additional purchases of the same weapon type with a timer, so gathering my arsenal requires upwards of two hours sitting around and doing nothing. So imagine the “fun” of wasting a whole day to buy a weapon cache, only to have said cache be wiped out in twenty minutes.

We’re not talking about first level weapons, either, or low-grade trash I picked up from slain enemies and out of item boxes. These are weapons that I had to spend whole weeks upgrading to their fourth levels, and while the damage improved with each upgrade, the durability only shows marginal improvements. To even get to the next level requires finding materials on a much higher floor, and as I said, I can’t even cross one floor without ending up with an empty inventory and a drained bank account. (Keep in mind, you need money to act as an insurance policy if you die or else you lose all the stuff you collected. Where I’m at, the highest floors require having around 100,00 to 120,000 to recover a downed fighter.) Where’s the reward for investing my time? It’s hard to find in weapons that seem to be made from tin foil.

I haven’t even touched on guns, which have a finite supply of ammo. You can’t pick up another gun of the same type and take the ammo to reload. With the assault rifle, there’s enough ammo to last for several floors, but the other guns can end up being emptied with just one floor. It’s prohibitively expensive to buy a high level gun, and once you have it, you’re afraid to use it because it only has around 20 shots before it’s a fancy club. (One that does lousy melee damage.) Let it Die also has a “rage move” which will shred any weapon’s durability, so it’s possible to have that twenty thousand credit gun blow up with over half of the ammo unused. Frustrating doesn’t even begin to cover it. If you want to encourage me to use a rage move, don’t punish me with such a huge hit to the durability of my weapon. If I know I’ll be wasting precious money on one attack, I’m never going to use it no matter how powerful it is.

Let it Die compounds the issue by giving armors a similarly weak durability, so instead of buying the best armor, I’m always grabbing cheap stuff because I know it’s going to get wrecked either way. (And okay, I might not be such a cheapskate if the game didn’t also add mugging by other players to make earning coins even more of a painful slog.) Between needing to carry armor and extra weapons, my inventory is already so full that I barely have any room left over to collect crating supplies. It’s busy work and inventory management, and it sucks all the joy out of the game like a starving vampire biting into their first meal in a year.

With Let it Die, I feel like the durability is an intentional hobbling mechanic, forcing me to play slow. If I could use the same weapon for a more reasonable time limit, the game would be over pretty quickly. (Well, maybe not, given the slowness of the grind for crafting items. Then again, really skilled players might be able to whack higher level bosses with low level weapons if they didn’t break so easily. Then it would just be morons like me who had to play the long way to get better weapons.) The rate of breakdown is so ridiculously fast that I get frustrated with the grinding needed to keep from fighting with my bare fists. That means that I’ve gone from playing in longer sessions down to shorter and shorter bursts because I can’t handle the boredom of the grind combined with the constant need to buy new gear to keep going. I do like the game’s combat, and I think a lot of the weapons are wickedly fun to use. But the looping cycle created by weak equipment durability is killing my interest in pushing through to see the end of the game.

Durability can take me out of a game if it’s done poorly because instead of being “in” the game and planning my fight with the next boss, I’m stuck doing menial inventory management and trying to guess how many weapons I need just to make it across one floor. This isn’t fun, and it’s frustrating to have a game where the core combat mechanic is solid and interesting, only to cripple itself with weapons that break way too easily.

The Witcher 3 had a similar inventory accounting problem. I think it was shortly after hooking up with Tess that I had a lengthy mission I had to abandon and go back to side questing because my swords both broke and I had no way to repair them and no replacements on hand. From then on out, I had to cram my inventory with extra weapons of both steel and silver varieties, and so every single loot drop prompted the same lengthy examination and debate. What will I drop to have space left over? Do I keep this weapon with lower damage but slightly better durability? Or do I take this more fragile but higher damaging model? I should be focused on hunting monsters, but every single new loot drop pulls me out of the action and into menus to do middle management. Which probably explains why it took me almost four months to play. (It’s only one factor, though as the game was, being nice, tediously repetitive and dreadfully grim.)

Then there’s the case of Bloodborne, where the durability wouldn’t be so much of a problem if I could repair weapons at the lamps like I can with the Souls series of games. But to repair anything requires a trip back to the hunter’s dream, and that’s a long loading screen for no other reason than to keep using my chosen weapon. (Using others would require many, MANY hours of grinding for the scabs I need to make their damage viable, and I’m already doing a lot of that just to upgrade my pistols and primary weapon.) Even this wouldn’t be a hang up for me if the durability was better, but just a short circuit around the opening area can build up enough damage to make the weapon less effective. So it always has to be on my mind, “Do I need to stop playing to repair my shit?” instead of, you know, actually playing the game.

Bloodborne also has what I feel is a stupid mistake in durability, in that the melee weapons always need repairs while the guns never do. Oh sure, the fire forged steel axe made for whacking stuff will fall apart after a bit of use, but that complex machine with a dozen moving parts that uses dirty black powder is always in perfect working order. Sure, I totally believe that. If anything, the guns should degrade at the rate the melee weapons do, and the melee weapons should last longer UNLESS I use the trick transformation often. (I rarely do.) The way the game handles durability as it does is just…it’s totally bonkers.

It’s not that I think the games would be better off without durability. (Although that would be one less thing to distract me from the good parts.) I just feel like the way some games implement the concept pulls me out of the game rather than immersing me into their worlds.

To conclude, I don’t think item durability is something that needs to be abolished, and I think done right it can add a little touch of realism to a good fantasy or sci-fi setting. But done badly, durability can wreck a game and make it much harder to enjoy. Clearly it’s not quite that bad in Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But if the mechanic is noticeable enough that reviewers and streamers feel the need to bring it up, it suggests that perhaps Nintendo went a little too far in weakening the available arsenal. That’s a shame because the last thing I want to think about while hacking and slashing monsters is inventory management.

A “Where the hell have you been” update…

Yeah, I know, I’ve been a very bad writer lately, but I want you to know, it’s not just you blog readers left isolated out in the proverbial cold. I’ve been just as horrid keeping folks in the loop on Twitter and Facebook, and if you think you’ve got it rough, the poor souls following me on Tumblr and Wattpad haven’t heard a peep from me in over a year. I would love to say things will change for the better for all parties soon, but I can’t quite make a promise because things here are still iffy. But with warmer weather coming, I hope my health will recover somewhat, and then I can devote more time to you lovely peoples whom I love, respect, and admire. (You’re looking very good, by the way.)

With butt smooching and apologies out of the way, I finally have the brain cells to sit down and whack out an update to let you know where I am and what I’ve been up to. First, I should explain that this winter has been pretty damned nasty to me, with several bugs tag teaming me like some kind of sadist Wrestlemania of flus and colds. I’d just start to get over one thing when I’d get something else, and so I spent a lot of time on my couch.

In theory, that should have meant another game review for y’all, only Let It Die has proved to be a lot longer than I would have expected from a free game. That’s not an issue with the difficulty, though. It’s the absolutely dreadful RNG for crafting item drops, leading to instances where I have spent whole weeks looking for one fucking item to upgrade a weapon ONE level, and then I got to look forward to hunting for that same rare item twice or even three times. I’ll talk more about this when I can finally do a proper review, but I’ll just let you know, I will not be kind to the grind of this game. Like, at all. Fucking hate it, actually.

I don’t have a book review ready yet because in the few times that I felt okay sitting upright, I dedicated to editing stuff for release in the near future. I’ve even managed a bit of new writing here and there, although not much. But this is not really a problem because I’ve got a couple books in the pipeline, giving me some breathing room before I have to start flop sweating over not having new stories to offer you.

I do have a book I’m reading and liking, so eventually there should be a review for that. I also have a fat stack on the TBR pile, so once I can get all my brain cells corralled and working together again, I should be able to post a few more reviews for your perusal and entertainment.

I also have been working on some paid editing jobs, and while this isn’t enough to get me back into a steady supply of games to review, I ought to be able to get one or two of the new releases and talk them up after picking them apart. In particular, I’m looking forward to Horizon: Zero Dawn, Nioh, Flinthook, and Rain World, and I’d also like to take a crack at The Last Guardian if I can afford it. We’ll see how it goes.

I’d hoped to have a new series completed at the end of last summer, but I hit a creative wall, and while I was waiting out my writing block, I went back to the start to read the first three books before realizing that I had to add extra chapters for one character. In the first book and partway through the second, her role was mostly secondary because I didn’t expect her to step up and become a leader the way she did. (Writing can be a fun journey of discovery like that.) Since then it’s occurred to me that she and her friends deserve just as much early time to develop as the two main characters I’d started off with. This will also help with the later books because that character will have her own “big bad” to deal with, and I think it’s better to establish why they’re fighting early on.

This will also mean that a series I’d intended to be a trilogy will blossom out into a much larger project, but I promise, I will finish the whole thing before I start releasing the story. I don’t want to leave y’all hanging on a cliffhanger like some jerky jerk. I wish I could say with certainty how many books will be in the series, but I’m not sure of that anymore. I could say they’ll be six big books, but my inner editor is suggesting it might be wiser to split them up further into smaller and more easily consumed sizes. So it might by eight or nine, or it could go as high as twelve. Again, no matter how big it gets, I will finish the series before I start the dumpening. Because I respect you and your time, and I want to treat you right. Because I love you.

And finally, I’m excited to announce that I will have a new book out sometime in the next few weeks. Wolf In the Headlights is the fourth Alice the Wolf book, and as I get closer to the release date, I’ll post some previews to give y’all a sample of what to expect. For now, I’ll just say that Alice is going to be forced into a dangerous new role by her enemies, one with earth shattering consequences for all mystical races. (If you read the last book, you already have a few clues about what’s coming, but even you might be surprised by what’s coming next.)

So that’s my update. I apologize for my lengthy silence, but these sort of things can’t be helped when bad weather and poor health gang up on me. Hopefully soon I can give you something new to feast your eyes on.

Pre-review: Nioh Last Chance Demo (PS4)

I’ve got this pre-review and a new game review coming in the near future, and this is possible because both games were free. I’m looking to publish a new book in the coming months, so that may help the financial crunch that’s keeping me strapped and gameless. (and bookless)(guh, being broke sucks)(I am incidentally attempting to go overboard with parentheses))

But so let me digress and talk about Nioh, which put out a last chance demo over the weekend. It is a demo and a beta, so there’s no guarantees that some of what I’ll talk about will be in the actual release. And in breaking with tradition, I’m going to give a verdict upfront. When the demo locked me out at 1:00 AM on Monday, my first question was “Would I buy this if this were the finished product?” The answer is yes, but I will probably wait a few months in the hopes of finding it at a discounted price. That’s more to do with me being broke and needing to be choosy about what one game I can buy in any month, and as Horizon Zero Dawn is also coming out in February, I would much rather get that first.

I played through the first mission twice and had two very different impressions of the game as a result of RNG. Given that the second playthrough was far more favorable and less negative, I kinda want to talk about it first. But some of those impressions won’t make sense if I take them out of order. So just be aware that while I’ll initially have a lot of bad things to bring up, eventually this review will get around to saying something nice to balance it all out.

Nioh is a game that draws inspiration from two sources, Dark Souls and Diablo III. It tries to mimic Dark Souls in terms of hard combat and grinding for levels, and it imitates Diablo III for the loot drops. There’s a lot to find familiar in the Dark Souls inspired bits, but to me it seems as if it’s all drawn from the first game, and it’s not all good. Unlike Dark Souls, this is not a single world with different areas connected to each other. There’s a mission map, and once you’re in a mission, it’s hard to figure out how to exit. In fact, it wasn’t until my second playthrough that I found the items that would let me exit a mission. One is a branch that lets me keep amrita, this game’s equivalent of souls, and the other is a harikiri sword. To leave the mission, you have to disembowel yourself. That’s…interesting?

Maybe later levels are more varied, but the level I played and the levels I saw on YouTube are almost all a maze of very narrow corridors that rarely open up into wider areas, making combat something of a chore. Enemies with long weapons can swing right through the cliff walls, but you will find your attacks often collide with the walls, meaning you have to be positioned just so to make a connection. I don’t really mind having the added mechanic of my swings hitting walls or rocks, but if I’m bound by this rule, I’d appreciate if the enemy had to follow the same rules.

Finding buildings is also rare, so there’s no sense of this being a living world. It’s mostly just a series of paths that all wind back and forth on each other. Because these paths are all so narrow and there is a potential for camera issues, many objects in the game will dither to translucency, and it’s not a good look. It makes for a jarring contrast because most of the time, the graphics look quite detailed, and then suddenly here’s a tree dithering and looking like something from a 90s era game.

One thing I like and dislike at the same time is the ability to change controller configurations. For the first hour, I was struggling to do anything because my brain now seems hard-wired to the Dark Souls controls, with the attack buttons being on the right shoulder and trigger. The default configuration in Nioh makes them square and triangle, and I kept hitting the upper buttons before groaning and dying in embarrassing ways. So it was nice to find I could change the controls to work with my habits…sort of. See, the use and dodge buttons are reversed in Nioh, and there is no way to invert them back to where I want them. This meant that half the time, I would go to press x to interact with something, only to jump backward. Conversely, I would hammer the circle button over and over before remembering that it’s x to dodge. (And dying again.) In the final release, I would love to see an option to swap those two buttons, but I suppose that with a few hundred hours of game time, my dumb ass might be able to adapt. And, by the way, I chalk this complaint up more to my shortcomings than the game’s.

In place of bonfires are shrines, and at these shrines, you can replenish your stock of elixirs, the health potion for this game. You only get three in each mission start, and to get more, you need to find these cute little guys called Kodama. The thing is, even if you collect all nine, you still only get six elixirs without a supply stocked in your storehouse, and eight if you can manage to bank them. Let me put that in perspective to From Software’s games. In Dark Souls and Bloodeborne, you can carry up to twenty health potions. In Dark Souls III, you get fifteen, although you may have less if you’re a magic user because you need to allot some of the health potions to recover focus points instead. So, Nioh expects you to fight through an army of monsters that all do nigh-ridiculous damage on less than half of the health potions you get in most From Software games. Oh, joy.

Shrines are where you level up and prepare items for use in your shortcut items menu. You can use magic or ninjutsu weapons, or both, I suppose, if you don’t mind grinding to pay for them. You can summon another player if you have a tea cup, and you can receive various kodama blessings that will increase the drop rates of items, armor, weapons, and crafting supplies, or to increase the amount of amrita you get for each kill. Now in my opinion, the item drops blessings are just as useless as the item drop rates in From’s games. I did try the other blessings, but mostly stuck with the added amrita bonus to make grinding slightly less of a chore.

What you can’t do at a shrine is fast travel, but then I suppose that because none of the missions are connected to each other, Team Ninja felt there was no need for it. But I just find it sad how they took inspiration from two games that both have a fast travel system, but decided that making the player walk everywhere was better. But let’s move along to leveling.

The way stats work in this game are just…they make-a no sense. In Dark Souls, if you want to make a weapon hit harder and faster, you need to level dump in strength and dexterity. But in Nioh, each stats affects a different class of weapons, BUT there’s also some overlap that isn’t really clear at first. To raise up the damage of the swords, the game says to level up Heart and raise your ki, which is this game’s version of stamina. Heart also gives you life points where as Body only gives you life points and improves spear use. Strength is supposed to boost the damage done by hand cannons, but it can also eek out minor gains with other weapons. See the problem? It’s confusing as hell which stats do what. Maybe with more time to experiment, I could sort out some method to this madness, but having only played for a weekend, it just looks like a hot mess.

Adding to this confusion is the skills tree. You get skill points by gaining familiarity for weapons, and for leveling up certain stats like Skill or Magic. Skill points are spent in a different menu not connected to the shrine, so for a good hour or so, I couldn’t tell what to do with them. The points are spent on each weapon type, and there’s even a split between swords and dual swords. So you have to spend a lot of points to unlock similar skill sets unless you plan to specialize in only a few weapon types. This confusion isn’t helped by the fact that after getting a single level in certain skills, the next level says “additional training needed,” but it doesn’t say what kind of training. Do I need to keep leveling up a certain stat? Am I supposed to purchase other skills? I have no clue.

Weapon familiarity is also another pain because you only get a damage multiplier bonus for that one weapon. You will constantly be switching weapons and returning to the base familiarity level, and it’s just one more grind you have to keep doing over and over for minor performance gains. This could have been better if I got a bonus for a weapon type and each new sword of the same type with slightly better stats allowed me to carry my previous skill bonus. Instead, each time I got a new level of sword, I had to debate whether the two extra points of damage was worth the grind time to raise my familiarity with it.

Skills can unlock combos, but with most weapons, it’s almost impossible to stagger or stun opponents, so without using any jutsu skills, the combo or added attacks after said combo are useless. You basically get one hit in on most enemies before you need to back off and wait for another opening. And God help you if you get three or even two enemies fighting you at the same time because that means right about the time you see an opening, another enemy is going to swing his weapon through his comrade and take your head off. (And this is something Dark Souls also does that bugs me. If you put a sword through your comrade, it should hurt them. Even setting that aside, it never fails to break my immersion in any game where the enemies can stab or shoot through each other just because the coders can’t be bothered to develop a better enemy AI.)

In addition to two melee weapons, you also have in your starting equipment a bow, a matchlock rifle, and a hand cannon. Ammo can be sparse for all three at times, but they really can be a huge help for picking off one enemy from a distance and evening the odds in your favor. The arrows are far more common as loot drops, but their effectiveness against armored opponents is considerably less so than the other two ranged weapons. For instance, you can pop a rifle shot off that will decapitate a soldier with a helmet, but an arrow will just knock his helmet off and do minor damage. Obviously you’ll want to use the gun or the cannon, but you’re at the mercy of RNGesus to deliver more ammo, and you don’t have much storage space.

(And before I forget, why is it that I can send the elixirs to a storehouse and bank them up, but I can’t do that with anything else?)

In addition to the human and yokai enemies, the game is littered with bloody graves. These are the spots where other players died, another idea cribbed from Dark Souls. But instead of seeing how they died, you summon a revenant to fight against. The thing is, don’t summon someone based on their level thinking you’ll have an easy fight, because they are HIGHLY aggressive and can kill you within two hits, even if they’re level one and you’re level nine.

And really, one of the things I said to hubby in summing up my first playthrough was, “Do you want to fight ninjas with real swords while you’re armed with a wiffle bat?” The damage any enemy does to you is WAY out of proportion to what you can do to them, even armed with the same weapon.

Another idea that sounds neat but ends up being dumb is stance. The three stances give you a different move set for each weapon in high, mid, or low positions. Sounds cool at first, but mid and low stances reduce the damage you can do to such a ridiculous degree that it will take eons to kill even one yokai. I really tried to take on the final boss of the first mission using the other stances, but when it was possible for her to take two thirds of my health in one swing, I really wanted to make every hit count. So for the most part, I opted with high stance for all weapons, and damn the cost of ki per attack.

So, I got out of the first mission area and was told I’d been challenged to a duel by a human general, and I thought I’d go through another maze and level up before reaching him. NEWP! You’re dumped into a tiny ass field and have to face an inhuman bastard who doesn’t obey any of the rules established by the game. Even the demons have to stop moving once they’ve depleted their version of ki, granting you a chance to move in and do some extra damage. But not this guy. Even with his ki bar empty and flashing red, he was pulling off ten or more extra attacks. He can run at you and teleport the last ten to fifteen yards, so it’s impossible to time his charge and meet him with a counter. You can’t block him because almost all of his attacks break your guard and instantly drain all ki, leaving you unable to move. You can’t dodge because he will veer in mid-air and hit you wherever you are.

As I said, I didn’t know there was an item to leave a mission, so after banging my head on this guy for five hours and rarely managing to get him to half health, I said “Fuck it. I’ll start a new game and just keep grinding until I’m at a level high enough to deal with all this cheap shit.”

And for the record, I didn’t get a second chance because the game locked me out when I was just getting back to the level I’d originally faced him at. I’m not going to complain about that. I got to try the game out for a weekend, and I’m okay with them pulling the plug. I will say that I am glad I came back for a second attempt because otherwise, I might not have seen how just a few small changes in the loot drops could make a world of difference. It’s that second playthrough that changed my buying verdict from “OH HELL NO” to “maybe after it’s got a little discount in a few month’s time.”

But so now we get to the second half. This time around, I was very early on given a Mino-Den Uchigatana that had paralysis as a special trait. The effect only lasts half a second, but that half a second means it now becomes possible to chain moves into an actual combo. Once I realized this, I also put skill points into making hemlock broth, and this could be applied to all weapons to get the same effect, even with the big nasty yokai minibosses. So I went from very long fights with little damage done to shorter faster fights with me having the advantage in most situations. Even when I briefly lost my advantage, it was still much easier to back up and wait for another opening, allowing me to get back to pulling off full combos.

The second play is where I realized I could level up my ki and equipment load and still upgrade life points without actually investing in the body stat. I had more health the second time around, and more ki, so it was easier to keep chaining moves and jump back out of the enemy’s range to recover ki without a risk of staggering myself. The fights were still tough, but I was actually dishing out some punishment instead of pecking out a few points whenever I could manage to find an opening. I was able to make openings and then exploit them like a boss.

Now, there is a ki pulse mechanic that will supposedly let you recover lost ki, but I’m way too much of a klutz to get that to work reliably. There’s even a mechanic where you’re supposed to press one button to do the ki pulse and then another two to change stances, and this will add bonus damage to your next attack. But yeah, I’m not even going to attempt that with my tendency to always press the wrong button at the wrong time.

And on a random note, while I was playing the second time around, I got a notification that someone from my friend’s list wanted permission to watch me play, so I started streaming, and for the next forty minutes, I looked like I actually knew what I was doing. I took down the biggest enemies with ease and pretty much cleared the whole level without making any mistakes. I think mainly it was because someone else was watching me, and all I could think the whole time was “don’t do anything stupid.” And so I didn’t. I really have to try that more often.

When the notification came up that I was at the end of the allotted time for the demo, I did some math and figured I’d put in around twenty-two hours over the course of three days. The first half I pretty much was ready to dismiss this and not bother with the final release. But the second time through, I learned a few new things that made the challenges less daunting, and I admit, I am interested enough in the setting to see where the story goes. I will say, this is harder than Dark Souls, and the learning curve may be even steeper. Additionally, unlike Dark Souls, familiarity with an enemy’s location and tactics does not make encounters any easier. Even the slightest lapse in judgment can be instantly fatal. So I can see the hardcore gamers embracing this and calling it “brutally hard,” and for once, I would agree that this is the perfect description. This is something you play when you feel confident in your skills as a gamer, and if you prefer games to be easier, this is totally not the game for you. But I think I could get into it some time in the next few months. After I’ve emerged bloody and battered on the other side, I’ll do a proper review.

Extended re-re-review: Fallout 4…modded like a boss! (PS4)

It took FOREVER for Sony and Bethesda to get mod support on Fallout 4 on the PS4, at one point even looking like it would never come to pass. I was actually in a really long run on Dark Souls III when the update came out, and then I got Dark Souls, which also distracted me for a while before I could finally give this much desired feature a chance.

At first, I couldn’t get mods to work, but that wasn’t the fault of the mods themselves. For some odd reason, I started having lag in many indoor areas, lag so bad that I was seeing single digit frame rates and really bad instances of rubber banding. My character would literally take two steps forward and then one step back, and this was the case even after I deleted all mods and started a new game with the vanilla setup.

But after a few days of searching, I found a mod that cleaned up some extra debris, and that improvement in performance allowed me to start putting on other mods, some of which were for visual flair, like Simple Green. (Adding grass and leaves to the environment so it doesn’t look so barren and lifeless.) Another one I added allowed me to make any gun I wanted, just to see what I could get away with. (Funny story in that. I made a badass rifle before groaning in dismay because I had no ammo for it. I ended up having to craft a much less wicked .38 pipe pistol because that’s the more common ammo found in the early areas. Once I had some ammo to test my monster combat rifle, oh, baby, was it fun to use!)

I gave the mods a test run, completing one game on normal mode before I downloaded a mod that changed the time scale of the world to real time. Then I started a new game in survival mode to see if having a longer day/night cycle would address my problems with the constant prompts for food and water. Oh, and I also made a ring that gave me crazy amounts of XP for kills, making it much easier to level up and try out new perks that I’d previously left alone because I didn’t consider them essential. More on that in a bit.

So, yes, the change in the time scale made survival mode more immersive. I would get prompts to eat and drink at far more reasonable intervals, and because I had more time to explore between prompts, I also didn’t need to drag along twenty meals and water rations with me all the time. Actually, with time slowed down, I could walk to even distant settlements and find only an hour had passed. If a mission required waiting for nightfall, I just had to sit somewhere and skip ahead. This was much, MUCH better, and I cannot stress enough how a change to the time cycle made the hardest mode more fun and immersive for me.

Unfortunately, diseases are still dumb. I can be fully fed and watered, have a good sleep schedule with no use of Rad-Away or drugs, and still have the game ping me with diseases and conditions out of nowhere. And it’s frankly stupid that antibiotics cure everything, including insomnia, fatigue, and lethargy. Seriously, this is pure Bethesda, the implementation of great ideas in really, REALLY stupid ways.

You might think that with me being able to perk out all my skills rapidly, it would take away the challenge, and you would be wrong. It was still quite common for me to make a mistake and get killed by an enemy, or by something in the environment. My gun might hit a car and make it explode, and even with damage reduction perks and the highest endurance, an explosion is instantly fatal. (As it should be, so I never had a problem with this.) Because I was on an extended time scale, I sometimes forgot to rest at a bed and save, so those deaths often meant hours of backtracking. So yes, it was far more challenging, but still fun. And anyway, any progress I lost was my fault for being a dumb ass.

Having the freedom to try most of the perks in a single run, I got to see a lot more potential for other builds where I don’t use the XP boosting ring, or even mods. In this way, it’s become much like Diablo II, where my enjoyment of the game is more about experimenting with various builds than it is about the story. (I have similar feelings for Dark Souls III, which is why I’m now close to 800 hours of play time on that beast. I’m up to NG3 on one build and plan to go to NG4 before posting an extended thoughts review sometime soonish.)

I should say that like all my previous runs, this particular trip through the Commonwealth had a crap ton of bugs and glitches. But what I find curious is how through each run, I’ve encountered vastly different problems. Stuff that didn’t work on prior runs worked fine this time, but other stuff that worked fine before was now acting wonky. As an example, ever since my first run in survival mode, I’ve always made it a habit to build water purifiers at all of my settlements to ensure I have radiation-free water while I’m cavorting and looting. Only this time, the purifiers at my camps stopped pumping out extra water to the storage. At first it was just Sanctuary Hills that wouldn’t produce water, so I was wandering up the road to the drive-in theater to stock up. But then halfway through my playthrough, that stopped working too. Soon thereafter, I couldn’t find clean water at any settlement, even in places where I had no settlers. Just…weird. Luckily by then I had a full Lead Belly perk, so I could drink from any water source without a penalty. But it still bugged me that I should have had enough water to trade, and even having four industrial purifiers in an empty settlement didn’t bring in ANYTHING extra.

I also started running into indoor lag again. Not as bad as single digits, but still enough to be distracting or even irritating in some locations. As near as I can tell, it was most apt to happen in places with fog and green lighting. It happened elsewhere, but this particular combination seemed to make the lag much worse. So going into a story-centric location like the Railroad’s North End Church base could inevitably result in some choppy gameplay.

As a random side note, in every past play through, I’ve noticed that the baby Shaun was kind of dark-skinned even with two white parents only to come out pale white at the end of the game, and this time around, I had a random thought and modified both my character and her husband to be black. I wanted to see if Shaun was still white at the end, you see. This end up being kind of funny because while he does end up with dark skin, he still has straight hair in the same style as white Shaun. Mom’s got an afro. Dad’s got a military high and tight. Shaun? He’s got white boy hair. So he’s either ironing that shit or my character has some ‘splaining to do.

And another side note. On the previous playthrough, the first time I went to the Institute, I murdered everyone. No, I mean EVERYONE. I wanted to see what would happen if I got rid of all the Institute bigwigs. As I was going with the Minutemen, it wasn’t too hard to get back into the Institute for the final mission, and sure enough the place was mostly populated by synths, with only a few unnamed scientists left over.

This is a problem in itself, but you wouldn’t know this without multiple runs through the various endings. The Institute was still way behind on their projects when the character arrives. They need her/his help on two important missions to accelerate their progress, and in playing the Institute or Railroad endings, it’s implied how vital the character is to their success. The problem is, if I kill everyone, EVERY project should slam to a screeching halt. There’s shouldn’t be a reactor to destroy because I didn’t get them the nuclear materiel or the surface-dwelling super-genius they needed to complete their plans. In fact, so few people are left alive using this method that the game ought to just go, “You know what? Fuck it, you win.” Instead you take the exact same steps on this ending as you would for any other faction.

That’s how much of a ride on rails this plot is, and it bugs the hell out of me that Bethesda calls this an RPG. There’s absolutely no role play to it, because no matter what you do, the plot continues on to the same endings. The only changes in the endings depend on which faction you choose to support late in the game, and even then, the differences between each ending is only a few sentences changed. In my mind, this should just be called an action adventure FPS, and there’s nothing wrong with those being rides on rails. Maybe this just bugs me because so few RPGs actually have anything resembling role play in them. The last good RPG I played was Dragon Age: Origins. Everything after that is just action adventure with skill trees.

So, this is likely my last Fallout 4 report, but it will not be my last run through the game. As I said, having mods like the XP ring have given me all kinds of crazy ideas for other builds, and I can see doing that for some time before I get bored with building out various perk trees. Yes, I hate the story. Yes, I hate the bugs. But the shooting is good, and with a few mods here and there to spice things up and iron out some wrinkles, I might even be playing this until 2018.

Game review: Dark Souls for Xbox360

I got a little amount of cash for Christmas, not enough for a proper new game, though. But as I’ve played something like 600 hours in Dark Souls III, I figured why not get the first game and see what’s changed? So I went to the local game shop, and as luck would have it, they had exactly one copy of the Prepare to Die edition in stock.

Before I get to the proper review, I want to address some complaints about the third installment. I see a lot of fans complain that Dark Souls III is totally different from the original game, and I gotta say, I’m not in agreement with that opinion. The third game is in many ways a refinement of all these ideas that started in the first. The menus and interface are more intuitive to use, the camera is less wonky, and the fast travel system is much, much better in the final installment. But almost everything else is quite similar. Many of the items and enemies found in the first game are in the third installment, and now having played the first game, and then gone back to play the third over again, I can see all the ways From Software is elbowing me in the ribs and going “Remember that? Wasn’t it great?”

And it can be great at times, when it isn’t being clunky or clumsy. The controls are so slow to react, and the dodge roll is pretty useless in most situations. I could hold the stick to the left, press the dodge roll four times, and go every direction EXCEPT to the left. I couldn’t reliably roll and execute a thrust attack because rather than thrust at the camera locked enemy, my character would instead attack thin air in whichever direction she was facing when she finished the roll. The camera lock is even more wonky than the later From Software games I’ve played, but I had to use it because attempting to fight without it often resulted in a gloriously clumsy dance where my character and the enemy both swung half a dozen times without either ever once connecting for a hit.

I also have to say, having played the final chapter, I am amazed that this was ever considered a hard game because all the enemies, even the bosses, are so damned slow. But having played Bloodborne and two installments of Dark Souls, I now know that these games aren’t hard, not at all. They’re cheap. They rely very heavily on the ambush or surprise attack, and once you know where an enemy is, they’re actually pretty dumb. The thing is, in all cases, you have unlimited lives with relatively few penalties for failure. This is nothing at all like the NES days of limited or no continues and a frustratingly finite number of lives to beat the many levels of any given game. What I’m saying is, if there’s any game series that’s been overhyped for its difficulty, this is it. This isn’t the hardest game ever. Compared to really hard games of the past, this is a freakin’ cake walk.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the story in the first Dark Souls. In this first installment, you are a zombie who has been captured and corralled in an asylum to wait out your remaining days of sanity, only to be freed by a knight who is himself on the verge of “going hollow.” This knight pleads with you to complete his mission, something he doesn’t elaborate on and which you must spend a third of the game puzzling out before you’re clued into the answer. You must collect an item known as the lordvessel, and then kill the original lords to take their place and link the fire, thus “ending the undead curse.” (But obviously it’s only a half measure, as there’s two more games that task you with the same mission.) There’s also an alternate plot where you join the dark wraiths and snuff the fire permanently, thus beginning a new dark age. I can’t say I’ll ever try this ending because it requires being the bad guy, and I don’t like going that route when I can avoid it. Eh, I’m just weird that way.

For an older game, you might think I’d comment about the graphics being dated, but overall, I rather liked the look of Lordran and its many varied areas. I like the designs of the enemies and the bosses, and I thought the graphics were rather good for their time. One of the ways I try to remain objective about graphics is by asking “What would nine-year-old me think of these graphics?” The answer is, nine-year-old me would be creaming their jeans at the amazing settings and their inhabitants.

Nine-year-old me would probably also appreciate how very, very slow the enemies move. Everything has such an amazingly slow wind up on attacks that I had all the time in the world to decide whether to block, dodge, or attack in the time frame given to me. There’s only a few times when the enemies get faster, and that’s exactly when they get cheaper. An enemy who normally moves slow may suddenly leap ten yards for a sucker punch-like attack. They can veer a full ninety degrees mid-jump, leaping around walls, around bridges, or course correcting mid-leap should you attempt a doge roll. And frankly, it’s bullshit. I see all the time people commenting how “the enemies in Dark Souls follow the same rules you do,” and it’s a nostalgic distorted lens these people are looking through. The enemies follow a completely different set of rules to the player, and to hell with the laws of physics.

Then we get to the bosses, and perhaps if I had played this when it first came out, I might have felt differently about them. But having come very late to this party, most were a huge MEH for me. They’re extremely slow and their few patterns are easy to read. There’s only a few bosses in the whole game that I needed more than one attempt to defeat, and those few exceptions were more because of cheap tactics or gimmick fights than actual challenges to overcome.

Most boss fights have the option of summoning an NPC companion, but their AI is really dumb, maybe even worse than the enemy AI. In one particular fight, my companion was a witch who could get stuck at the stairs above the boss’ chamber. Even if I could get her down to the fight, she would fire off a spell at the rate of once per minute, making her completely useless. This was one of the boss fights I had to do over repeatedly because despite being called The Four Kings, the boss generates multiple copies on a fast timer. So because my companion couldn’t attack, I ended up with five, six, or even seven of the so-called four kings. Cheap? The cheapest, yeah. But let’s move on.

There’s some things I liked about the items in this first game, like the ability to upgrade armor. Once I found a new set with numbers that are a little on the meh side, I could pay in souls and titanite to bulk up the protective qualities. The same is true of weapons, but making weapons with elemental damage is a bit more fiddly because titanite comes in a variety of colors, and each element requires finding titanite chunks and slabs in the right color. Some of these are such rare drops that it’s only possible to get the highest level weapon at the very end of the game just before the final boss fight. The other alternative is to spend days fighting a small number of high level enemies over and over. To make matter even more complicated, some weapons require “demon titanite” and that can only be farmed in one spot late in the game. The demon who drops it has a bigger health bar than several of the bosses, so unless a character has pyromancy and a fully upgraded pyromancy flame, it’s a long, clumsy fight.

One thing this game gets right is the grind. During the first few levels, you do have to grind a little bit and collect souls to bulk up for the challenges ahead. But around the first third or so, you don’t need to grind for experience at all. The bosses are all scaled in such a way that you can handle them with only a few levels added as you get souls for them. Later From Software games screw the pooch on this. It’s like they’re going “You know what the best part of our games is? It’s the grind!” And they are so totally wrong. What’s great about their games is the exploration and discovery. There’s this emotional impact that comes from entering an area for the first time, encountering enemies you’ve never seen and not knowing how to handle them. It can lead to feelings of nervousness, fear, or excitement, and those are all so much more effective without the grind. Once you’ve been through an area for the hundredth time to level grind, everything loses that impact. You can’t appreciate the graphics or the tactics of the enemies. You’ve seen it all before, so the details become background noise. The best part is NOT the grind. The best part is the discovery of something new.

This is not to say you don’t need to grind in the latter half, it’s just that the grinding you do is more about paying for upgrades or buying stuff like arrows or new spells. Each new item you get has to be upgraded to be effective, so there’s also grinding to find various types of titanite and the souls to pay for the upgrades. But it is nice to be able to play many areas without needing to level up all the time.

Speaking of spells, they’re a bit different than the third game. There’s no focus points, so each spell has a set number of uses, which is sort of D&D-like in how that works. With some spells, it is possible to buy multiple copies of the same scroll, and by assigning the duplicates to other attunement slots, a character can double up on the number of times a spell can be used. But there aren’t many vendors selling duplicates, so some of the best spells are extremely limited in use.

Something else this game lacks is a central hub. Vendors and blacksmiths are scattered across multiple regions, and because you can’t fast travel until late in the game, even something simple like ascending your weapons can require a long trek back to the right NPC. It doesn’t help that each class of elemental weapon upgrade requires a different blacksmith, and a couple are a huge pain in the ass to reach.

Setting that aside, it’s amazing how much better Dark Souls III is for the simple change of allowing you unrestricted access to fast travel between all the bonfires. In the first game, until you collect the lordvessel, fast travel isn’t an option at all. Even once you’ve collected it, there’s only a few bonfires that you can travel to, and you have to walk a long, long way to get to the areas you may need. You also have to rest at these locations after obtaining the lordvessel to unlock them, requiring a lot of aimless walking just to obtain what you get by default in the final game of the series.

And there’s more tedious complications. Every bonfire requires collecting humanity to “kindle” the fire so you can get the full amount of health potions for each region. Granted, it’s not all that hard to farm humanity in a few areas, but it amounts to yet another bit of make busy work that gets in the way of the good bits. And to get the highest level of kindling requires finding a “rite of kindling” item that’s found in the darkest region of the game. This is a huge pain to find precisely because there’s only three light sources in the whole game, and they all kind of suck. You’d think a torch would be a basic item to include in one of the vendor’s stocks, but no, you either have to get enough intelligence to handle low level sorcery and use cast light, or you have to traverse the harder, darker levels without light in search of a skull lamp, or you have to wander through a lava filled level in search of a “sunlight maggot.” (It’s not a maggot, by the way. It looks more like a flea. Don’t know if that’s a mistranslation or if From Software just doesn’t know what a maggot is.)

Humanity is a huge, HUGE problem for this game because in addition to needing it for kindling bonfires, you also need humanity to improve resistance to curses and up your “item discovery.” I put that in quotes because it’s a bullshit stat, and it’s always a bullshit stat in all of From Software’s games. You are at the mercy of a random number generator, and whether you have a high item discovery or low, the actual item drop rate is pretty much the same. Which leads me to ask what the point of the stat is when it doesn’t work in ANY of their games?

Add to this the problem of inventory management. The many vendors scattered throughout the areas only sell items, and there’s only one NPC to “sell” items to. He doesn’t arrive until halfway through the game, and half the time you need him, he’s asleep with no way to wake him up. Even when he is awake, the rates he offers for all equipment is at best pathetic. It’s so much easier to sell stuff in Dark Souls III, and the rates on items make more sense. Until you unlock that selling vendor, you’re stuck using a really crappy storage box to keep your inventory from growing out of control. The interface for the storage box is….let’s just say not good and leave it at that.

Repairing equipment at the bonfires requires buying a toolkit, and thereafter it is possible to repair all your stuff with souls. This often requires a small amount of grinding, but so long as you remember to do it frequently, the cost isn’t worth more than a few hundred souls. That’s around five or six enemies per repair cycle, so it’s certainly better than the way repairs worked in Bloodborne.

The final fight is a mixed bag for me, but it’s mainly because I came late to this party. I’ve already beaten the Soul of Cinder multiple times, and Lord Gwyn has only one move set that’s slower than the same pattern Soul of Cinder uses. It’s also really easy to get Gwyn to attack near a stalagmite, making most of his attacks slip just over the character’s head. So far from being the hardest boss of the game, Gwyn is more like a mid-level challenge. He’s not super easy, but it wasn’t that hard to finish him off in three attempts. (And the first two were my fault because I was carrying too much equipment, resulting in a lovely “fat roll” that got me hit every single time.)

You might think that with my many complaints, I didn’t like Dark Souls, and you would be wrong. In spite of all its blemishes and problems, I really did like playing this. I spent 108 hours on my first playthrough, and I know I’ll be playing again to try out the other classes and the DLC. (No, I didn’t do any of the DLC for this run. There’s already so much to do, and I didn’t want to go into those new optional areas with an overpowered build.)

I don’t think it’s fair to label it as brutally hard because that kind of hype scares off gamers who might enjoy this for the many hours they will spend exploring new regions and uncovering new enemies and items. I know that the hype turned me off of playing this when it came out, and now having played the game to the end, I can say the hype is overrated. Is Dark Souls hard? Not nearly as hard as some fans would lead you to believe. Is it fun? YES. Is it a good game? Yes, although each installment improves on past problems and adds new options.

Overall, I’d give Dark Souls 4 stars. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s fun and just the right amount of challenging to keep me engaged from beginning to end. I think it’s a shame the core fans spend so much time talking up its difficulty as its best quality because what they should really be talking about is the many hours of fun it offers. I would recommend this to anyone who is a fan is fantasy games regardless of their skill level.