Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 17

Book review: The Boy Who Drew Monsters by Keith Donohue

The Boy Who Drew Monsters was my Halloween read, although I started it a day early. The first few chapters really sucked me in, but near the middle of the book it lost me, and reading the last chapters just dragged on and on because the story both loses momentum and does a terrible job of answering the questions its posed.

Jack Peter, or JP, or Jip, is an autistic boy who hasn’t left his house since almost drowning three years before the start of the book. Only that’s a lie the blurb tells, and he frequently leaves his house for trips to his therapist. Another lie the blurb tells is that he’s just recently started to draw monsters and they somehow come to life. Also not true.

Jack is a boy with extraordinary powers that he has always had, but no one noticed before, somehow. The circumstances of his near drowning are murky, but seem to be an attempted murder that backfired. His parents are friends with the parents of his best friend Nick, although I’m not sure how that can be when Tim had an affair with Nick’s mother, and everyone seems to know it even if it’s never explained when this all came out.

I guess that’s my real problem with the book. All the things I had questions about were glossed over, and the only question that did get answered in the end felt like a really, really stupid answer. I had so little interest in the story that it’s taken me this long just to write up a review.

I’m giving The Boy Who Drew Monsters 2 stars. If this is horror, it’s the kind of crappy PG-13 horror someone might make for a kid’s movie (assuming the one dull sex scene was edited out, that is). It’s never scary and wastes the potential it started out with. I can’t even think of anyone I’d recommend this to. There are better ways to waste time with. Navel gazing, for instance.

Game Review: Bloodborne for PS4

I took every last old game I could pry from behind the entertainment center to the game shop and traded them in for a copy of Bloodborne. It wasn’t enough, so I had to pay half the price in cash to get it. But I figured the game had to be worth it. I mean, I liked Dark Souls III, so From software could do no wrong, right? Wrong. They could do just about everything wrong.

When I first put in the disc I found the patch required 3.9 gigabytes and would take five hours to download. So I said, “Screw it, I’ll play without the patch to see what the difference is.” Without the patch, there is no offline mode. Without the patch, the loading screen will remind you every single time what game you’re playing. Aside from that, I can’t really think of anything the patch did. Either way, my character’s run animation can randomly drop to a treacle slow shuffle for no apparent reason. (I thought this was some kind of loading trick like in Max Payne 3, except I could hit the sprint button and move normally without the shuffle stepping.) My character can still catch the finger of a dead enemy and drag their stupid floppy bodies around like a giant piece of toilet paper. All the wonk I encountered in the first run is present in the patched game. I’m thinking the bulk of the patch was probably the DLC being added in case I felt like buying it, but I don’t. In fact after I beat the game, I ejected the disc and promptly put Dark Souls III back in.

“Aw, Zoe, you didn’t give it a fair chance,” say the From Software lovers. Yes, yes I did. I played every maze-like area with its collections of copy pasta enemies, beat every single boss, and played the chalice dungeons, even. I decided that if I’m going to play this only once, I might as well fight the last two bosses and get the “supa-secret” ending. (It’s not much of a secret for me because I’ve watched the whole game played on YouTube ages ago.) In total I’d spent close to 150 hours playing this, and you can’t give a game more of a chance than to try everything it has to offer.

The real problem is, most of what it has to offer is hours upon hours of boredom. I’m going to be comparing this game to Dark Souls III a lot because I find it incredible how much more enjoyable and accessible it is compared to Bloodborne. Take the first areas as a prime example. In Dark Souls III, there’s a few enemies between you and the first boss, but as you’re not allowed to level up yet, none of them are all that hard, and the boss is relatively slow compared to later boss fights. (In fact you can find a vastly improved version of the same boss fight later in the game that will make you appreciate how slow and simple the first fight was.) In Bloodborne, the first two bosses REQUIRE you to grind for almost a day before you stand a chance of taking them on. The grinding process is a pain in the ass because you can’t just sit down at the bonfire like DSIII to reset the area. No, you have to travel back to the hub world, then go back to the tombstone for the area you’re in, and then sit through another loading screen. As it is, you can’t even start to level up until after you’ve gained one insight, another form of currency used to buy special items or hire summoned NPCs. (You can summon NPCs in DSIII for free provided you are in an “embered” state, and farming embers is ludicrously easy early on in the game.)

Eventually, you start getting an item called Bold Hunter’s Marks that allow you to return to the current lamp without giving up your “blood echoes” (they’re souls, but everything in this game is blood. I swear, I don’t know why they didn’t name the Molotov cocktail a Bloodotov, because everything in this stupid game is bloodied for the sake of the blood-oh God, mother the blood!), but it still takes a while longer before they unlock in the shop, and they’re 1200 echoes a pop. (Compare that to 500 souls per Homeward Bone, and these bullshit prices are on every single item. There is literally nothing in the inventory that isn’t a pain in the ass to restock. Okay, wait, there’s blood vials, the health potion of the game. Everything has a chance to drop those, and the process of grinding means it’s even possible to hit the max amount of your storage space. But other than that, keeping anything else stocked up is a pain.)

In DSIII, when you rest at a bonfire, your degraded weapons repair themselves. In Bloodborne, you have to go back to the Hunter’s Dream hub and repair them yourself. The weapons have the durability of kitten farts, so you have to repair them quite often. Perhaps recognizing that all those loading screens were boring, From added in the same lore index cards that DSIII has and got rid of the logo loading screen. But what they didn’t do was address the length of the loading time. So all that forced grinding time includes a metric fuckton of loading screens. Every new area you enter requires the same tedious process. Grind, load screens, grind, load screens, grind, go check the boss. Yay, five minutes of actual fun with a unique and challenging creature! Aaaaaaaaaaaand it’s over too soon and now it’s back to 10 hours of boring grindy bullshit. In telling a friend about this game, I likened it to a roller coaster that has one really good hill followed by five miles of flat straight track. Each boss represents the hill, and the rest of the game drags down that experience by being so dull.

It doesn’t help that the game has so few enemies to populate its mazes with. In the opening area, there’s a bunch of dudes who all have the exact same mid-transformation physical deformity of one arm being stupidly distorted. They all shout the same slurred lines that sound like From hired the voice talent at a pub and dragged them in drunk to deliver a few random lines. I got so sick of listening to “S’ALL YOUR FAULT!” for the thousandth time that I turned my TV volume to 1. Oh, you say the game has great music? I wouldn’t know because “I’M GONNA DIG UP YOUR GRAVE!” and “BEAST! FOUL BEAST!” and “AWAY AWAY!” You can’t turn this off by turning down the dialog volume. That shuts up the NPCs, but not the incessantly whiny drunks. When I cleared the first area, I even tried turning the volume back up, and I made it twenty yards before another drunk staggered around a corner to shout three gibberish lines all at the same time. Sure, I can’t understand half of what theses guys are saying when one line is uttered, so why not layer up on the incomprehension? And for every new area I entered, I just left the volume down until I could determine if the hairy drunks were present. Late in the game, I even found the same guys, but instead of black clothing, they had beige. Same enemy, same attacks, different clothing color.

The new enemies I encountered failed to impress me most of the time because they were either paired up with the hairy drunks, or they were littered over an area like marks from a hyperactive child’s stamp kit. That’s a shame because there are some really interesting monsters that need time to process. Like for instance, in Old Yharnam, you start seeing these shorter beasts that look a lot like the half transformed beast men in the previous area. I watched videos of guys playing this area and saying stuff like, “I guess these are ghouls or something?” No, mang, they’re children who have fallen victim to the beast blood curse. Yeah, let that sink in and process it. To beat the boss of the area, you have to murder a few hundred children. Unfortunately, because of the grind, that kind of horror loses its impact very quickly.

This is not to say that the enemies can’t be scary. My first encounters with the werewolves and gargoyles were quite nerve wracking because I didn’t know what to expect. But once you’ve seen the same guy a thousand times, you can’t wring any scares out of him even if you set him up for an ambush in a new area. And honestly, From goes to that well so often that I was more genuinely surprised whenever I walked through a doorway and wasn’t ambushed. It’s like the director thought the jump scares from PG-13 horror movies were so awesome, he wanted to put it into his game fifty thousand times.

I should mention that the way health works in this game is interesting and puts a different spin on the method of handling bosses and their cloned minions. When you get hit, the “missing” health is initially highlighted in orange. It’s possible to recover all of that health by attacking that enemy or someone else, and you can even recover it from a dead enemy as they’re going through their death animation. In this regard, it encourages players to be more aggressive. The enemies sometimes hit you again before you have a chance to counter, and that erases some of the amount you can recover. This can make fights an interesting dance cycle. You have to try to sidestep the follow up attack and then wail on the enemy’s flank or back to recover your health without relying on the blood vials.

On that note, you have twenty vials, with a later option to carry a few more with runes. I think twenty is really generous, and I can only think of one boss fight where I needed my entire stock to beat them. (That fight was Gerhman, and that asshole is way too cheap with his tactics.)

I haven’t even covered the story, which for me is unbearably stupid and nonsensical. One could argue that the whole thing is a fever dream, and as such, it doesn’t need to make sense. The dream angle does explain why every level is a random vomit of paths and obstacles, and I can honestly say I’ve had dreams like this, where I’m wandering a house with hallways that keep changing and preventing me from reaching my destination. So I can forgive that.

What I can’t forgive is the staggering amount of backstory packed into this fever dream. The story goes something like this…a “Great One” has created this nightmare to house and protect the lesser great ones. Your character enters the dream to hunt beasts, although you were initially lured into it because you were looking for “pale blood.” (A MacGuffin concept that’s never once explained or expanded upon.) Every time you die, you’re not really dying. You’re coming out of REM sleep and entering a blank spot in your brain’s sleep/dream cycle. This also makes some of the methods of gaining access to levels less unbelievable. (Two areas require finding a specific kind of monster to kill you.)

And that would be a-okay if the world wasn’t also trying to push a bunch of history lessons at me insisting that this dream has been going on for a few hundred years. I mean, if this Cthulhu wannabe was looking to protect his young’uns, what is the point of constantly slipping hunters into the dream world?

A better question that really bugs me is, why is it that this whole world is so empty save for the clone monsters? If it’s all a dream, why doesn’t the dreamer keep repopulating the towns and villages with new victims? There’s a huge amount of backstory about the Healing Church and its lines of hunters, but aside from a nun and a hunter who goes beastly, there’s no sign of the Church having a presence in the world. The churches are as empty as the villages.

And here’s another thing. You randomly encounter other hunters, but they aren’t actually hunting anything. Nothing is attacking them either. They exist solely because NPC invasions are thing in all From Software games, and so even if it doesn’t make sense to have the hunters be hostile to a fellow hunter, well screw it and just go with the flow.

There’s also a huge backstory for Cainhust Castle and its royal “Vilebloods,” but once you get in the castle, it’s almost exclusively populated by one copy pasta ghost. There are statues and paintings suggesting the Vilebloods have a huge family line, and the story implies that they pulled away from Yharnam over a dispute with the Healing Church. So what happened to them? What happened to all the people in this dream world that so many of them became monsters? If it’s all a dream, why did the dreamer never course correct and reset the world?

You know what I mean, right? You’re dreaming, and suddenly something happens that makes your conscious brain take notice and comment “that doesn’t make sense.” So the subconscious brain resets the dream and starts over with that mistake edited out. The dream still doesn’t make much sense if examined when awake, but that one flaw was just too much.

That’s the thing really puzzling me. You, the player, show up and are pushed into the dream “on the night of the hunt.” You seem to be the sole hunter actually doing your job, but you cannot really change anything in the dream. You may kill the others in the world and return after “awakening” to find they have all revived and gone back to their same routines. This is the eternal state of the world, forever unchanging. AND YET, the story implies that this world is constantly changing. It’s a dream with hundreds of years of history and a huge cast that you never get to meet or engage. So what’s the point of all this back story if it’s all just a dream? When I dream up a nightmare, I don’t add in four hundred years’ worth of notes to explain my tentacle monster’s presence. All I really need to explain that is “I watched way too much tentacle porn as a teen.” (I’ve only seen four of them, but you know what? That’s still way too much in my opinion.)

Even more confusing are the endings. As I said, I took the supa-secret ending, which involves fighting Gerhman, the host of the Hunter’s Dream hub, and upon defeating him fighting the Moon Presence who apparently set all of this up. When it dies, you become a little squirmy Cthulhu baby, implying that the whole world has now became your dream. BUT, if this is a dream you’re inheriting, again, why no reboot? Why would the world remain in a constant state of decay if you get to take over and dream something better?

At least with the middle ending, there’s some sense in the world staying the same because after fighting Gehrman, the Moon Presence eats your character and forces them to become the new host of the Hunter’s Dream. BUT, if this hunting is cyclical, and clearly it is, why does the presence not add more people?

The “good” ending involves dying and waking up, removing the hunter from the dream world after killing the bosses. But it’s implied that they’ll respawn and a new hunt will begin the next night. So, while I hate to sound like a broken record, I have to ask why the reset always seems to come after everything has gone to shit? And if this supposed to be the permanent state of the dream, why even bother having a billion pages of backstory? Just run with the dream premise and forget all the history and world building.

And of course there is an easy answer to why there aren’t more people or more diverse monsters. This was a first year PS4 game, so the team blew all the system’s resources on the vast levels and didn’t have anything left over for the population. They just stamped the same copy pasta baddies all over the place and wrote up a history that implies there was some diversity here, long ago, in a game world where everyone has become a clone.

Okay, I’ve flogged that horse to death so let’s talk upgrades. Want to install some Blood Gems you found? Too bad. You can’t do that until after recovering a lost Blood Gem Tool. Found some runes and want to try them out? You can’t do that until halfway through the game. The same goes for applying anything larger than Blood Stone Shards to upgrade your weapon. (Scabs, by the way. You upgrade your weapons with increasingly larger scabs.) You can’t get the highest level Blood Stone (scab), the rock, until the last area, and there’s exactly one in the whole game. (Compare that to the 5 titanite slabs you can find in DSIII’s normal game play, only one of which requires fighting a boss to unlock.)

The game gives you your choice of three starting “trick weapons” and two guns. The saw cleaver, threaded cane, and hunter’s axe all have a sense of heft and impact within a few upgrades, but the guns are pathetic no matter what you do. Go on and upgrade your gun. Then level up to crazy stupid levels of “bloodtinge.” (No, I have to pause to rant. You’re apparently dipping each bullet in your own blood before firing them because quicksilver itself isn’t strong enough to kill werewolves? And the bullets are made more effective the more your own blood contains the disease infecting the beasts? Buhwhathefuh? That’s a level of stupid that even in a dream, my brain would go, “Nope, too stupid, start over.”) Then take that gun and shoot an enemy from ten yards away. Okay, not so bad, right? Take two steps back and repeat. Throwing a pebble would cause more damage. The decay of momentum is the same regardless of what weapon you choose. There’s even a rifle that the description claims has a better range, and it really does not. Like at all.

…

In your hands. In an enemy’s hands, every gun has a two mile range and hits with the impact of a freight train. Even after leveling up my health, a rifle packing hunter could kill me in two hits if I didn’t dodge roll all over the place while making my way to his location. (Bringing to mind that scene from Galaxy Quest. “Does the rolling help?” “Uh-huh, it helps.”) Then there’s the special brand of NPC hunter I mentioned before, and each one that has a gun will spam it with nigh-ridiculous amounts of damage. It all ends up being a waste of time because you can just go to a tree, or a fence, or a tombstone, and then stab them through the object. Bullets and all projectile attacks can’t pass through any of these obstacles, but weapons and melee attacks can. Stupid? Oh, absolutely.

So what is the gun there for? For the equivalent of a parry. You have to let an enemy get in close enough to kiss you, wait for them to start an attack, and then shoot them in the gut. Do this just right, and you can then do a “visceral attack.” In this instance you will drop your weapon and just use your bare hand to do five times the damage of your actual sword, cleaver, or axe. Stupid? Oh, absolutely.

There’s a back stab that works in a similar manner. You hold down the heavy attack to charge it up, and after the weapon makes contact, you press the light attack to drop your weapon and shove your hand up their ass for some bloody fisting action. There’s a larger window of time to accomplish this, making it easier to pull off than the parry and visceral attack, and I admit, there’s something amusing about shoving my hand up the butts of werewolves and giant pigs. But it’s still kind of dumb how much more effective your hand becomes than actually using your weapon. Critical attacks and back stabs in Dark Souls III make so much more sense than this.

Later on, you have the chance to upgrade weapons with Blood Gems, and the ones that up the physical attack damage or affect the skill ratings of the weapon are damned handy. (Changing a weapon skill rank means it does more bonus damage based on your skill level. There’s possibly some algebra involved in sorting out how the bonus is calculated.) However, many of these gems have elemental damage boosts for fire, bolt (electricity), or arcane. (Fucked it I know what that’s supposed to be.) But here’s the thing: adding an attack for any element instantly negates the physical attack bonuses of the other gems. In effect, adding just one elemental gem effectively cripples the weapon.

And it just goes on and on, the list of bad design choices that all work so much better in Dark Souls III, and with far more variety. Even the method of fast travel is worse. In DSIII, if you have to return to the Firelink Shrine hub to level up or do a weapon upgrade, you can sit at the shrine bonfire and find the last area you were in highlighted, making the return trip much easier. In Bloodborne, there’s four tombstones, and you have to scroll through the list to get back to your grinding spot.

About the only improvement is the separation of the healing potions and all the other items that can be added to the quick slots. This makes it much easier to heal up and keep lobbing Molotov cocktails or poison knives or whatever at the enemies. But that’s about the only design choice that feels like an improvement.

So, is there anything in this game to save it from being a total snoozefest? YES. There’s chalice dungeons. After a boss fight with Vicar Amelia, you pick up your first chalice, and thereafter, you can buy or farm ritual blood to generate a dungeon. Somewhere in the first dungeon is another chalice, a root chalice, as well as some ritual materials to generate another dungeon, and this is where things get interesting. Each time you fill up a root chalice at the ritual altar it generates a different dungeon with a variety of possible bosses. I was thinking this would suck because why would I want to fight the same bosses I’ve already seen? But it turns out there’s actually a number of bosses in the dungeons who aren’t in the story part of the game.

The chalice dungeons are short, with only a few rooms to wander before finding a lever to unlock the door to the boss room, and only a few enemies to harass you. (Well, I say a few, but I generated one dungeon that had like thirty rats clustered up in two rooms. Clearing those rooms out was…slightly difficult.) You kill the boss, take an elevator down a floor and light a lamp before moving into the next area. Each dungeon has three or four bosses, and the deeper you go into a chalice dungeon, the harder the bosses get. It’s huge amounts of fun. You’re never bogged down in the copy pasta enemies for long before you’re into a boss fight, and that’s really the best part of the game. This is true of the story part, too, but the story forces you to slog though vast mazes of tedium before letting you have fun. The chalice dungeons seem to be an admission by From Software that they get what part of their game is the most fun, and they’re offering a way to get to the fun parts with far less of the boring bits.

Which begs the question, if they know their game was dull as dirt, why did they make every single area with the same tedious process?

The chalice dungeons really raised my opinion of the game, and during my first few runs I was blown away by how much better it felt to play once all the crap was stripped out. But is it enough to encourage me to experiment with different builds or to unlock the two easier endings? No. As I said, right after I finished, I ejected the disc and put Dark Souls III back in. I’ve beaten that game three times, and I’ve stopped several runs near the middle simply because I’d had a revelation about a weapon or armor set and wanted to start over to experiment with different stats. I don’t like the grinding in that game much either, but there’s a lot more variety to the enemies so the grinding isn’t as dull, and it’s possible to reset an area without two loading screens or spending a small fortune on “reset marks.” I don’t have to keep going back to the hub to repair my weapon. I just get in and play. This is what I mean by accessible, and I am so, so glad I played Dark Souls III before I played Bloodborne. Had I played it first, I would have assumed Dark Souls III was more of the same shit, and I would have missed out on a game I truly love.

I’m giving Bloodborne 3 stars. I want to give it 2 for all the ridiculous wonk and tedium that bogs down the boss fights. But most of those boss fights were really fun. (Oh, and I beat two thirds of them on my first try. Cause I’m hardcore, y’all.) The chalice dungeons also help bring up the score because they give me what I want without all the extra crap. Maybe sometime down the road, I’ll load the disc back in and do some chalice dungeon runs with my current character. But if I feel like grinding up a new character, I’d much rather do it in a game that doesn’t feel nearly as clunky or meandering.

Book review: The Ice Twins by S.K. Tremayne

The Ice Twins is one of the books I picked up to try and read outside my comfort zone, and the blurb certainly made it sound interesting. Nearly a year after a twin dies in an accident, the other twin suddenly starts claiming that her parents have mistaken her identity. Yep, interesting.

I was maybe 75 pages in and really not liking it when Cinzia, a friend of my husband, came over for dinner and was raving about how this was so, so good. I told her, “I’m trying to read it, but nothing is happening.” She said, “Yes, it’s slow to start.”

I think we have vastly different tastes and understandings of slow to start, because this book continues to grind on and on for roughly half its length before it decides to attempt shifting into second gear. And it fails and slips back into first before making another attempt one hundred pages later. It doesn’t help that the whole book is one long struggle with unreliable narration, or that the book has some really strange choices about comma and colon placement that had my inner editor making baffled sounds like “buh-wha-da-fu-is-dis-shi?”

That blurb gave me the impression that this was a happy family until the accident, but much like most of the book, that’s a lie. This was an unhappy family long before the death of Lydia Moorcroft. Sarah and Angus are now close to openly hostile to each other even as they talk about wanting to start over and patch things up, and it’s not until very late in the book until their various sins are brought to light. To be sure, once it’s clear they’re both assholes, I had an even harder time caring what happened to them. Angus’ unreliable narration even makes their daughter come out looking like shit, and in the end, it turns out she wasn’t half as bad as his story made her out to be. He’s constantly saying or thinking things that made me think “Well, that’s certainly ominous.” But it’s all pointless misdirection, an artistic attempt at making a pair of shitty people seem more interesting than they really are.

At least with Sarah, I could feel some sympathy for her problems, but Angus didn’t help himself because everything he says is often soon thereafter revealed to be a lie. So even if he eventually must be telling the truth, it’s all but impossible to believe him. He’s an alcoholic asshole, a constant liar, and he’s just…so…angry, but can’t be bothered to let the reader in on the joke, even in his private thoughts, until the very end of the book.

Starting somewhere around the middle of the book, the story drags on with this question “Is it really a ghost haunting the family?” There’s lots of “spooky” events and spooked people suggesting it might be, and then the ending goes for what some will think is a clever twist, but just made me sigh. I’d complain about it in detail, but I’ll just leave this one spoiler free. Maybe you’ll like it and think it’s clever. I felt it was cliched.

To me, there’s so much fluff and filler here that I just didn’t care about. I slogged on thinking it had to get better if Cinzia was gushing over it so much, but nothing in the story clicked for me. I felt nothing for the characters, or even the writing style, although the subversion of the style for the last chapter’s twist was….irksome. I didn’t quite hate the story, but I never felt invested in it, either. I’m just glad it’s over and I can move on to reading something I might actually enjoy.

I’ll give The Ice Twins 2 stars. They call this a Thriller, but to me it ought to be filed in a new genre, “Needless Melodrama.”

Game update: Galak-Z for PS4

Let’s get out of the way that this is not a proper review. If you want my review of Galak-Z, you can find it here. But as I wrote in that post, I planned to come back and give this another shot when season 5 came out as a patch, something set to coincide with the PC release. That came to pass finally and…folks, I am so, so angry.

The patch notes listed a new Arcade mode that claims to make the game less punishing, and a new endless mode with daily challenges and leaderboards. This sounded okay to me. Spelunky has daily challenges and leaderboards, and while I don’t play them every day, it has given me a reason to keep dusting it off every few weeks on my Vita and PS4. It adds life to a game I might have otherwise deleted long ago. It shows promise, in other words.

So I fired up Galak-Z after a lengthy 1.8 gigabyte patch downloaded, and I went to look at the story mode. Wait, where’s season 5? I thought maybe the problem was, I needed to play season 4 over again to unlock it, and because it’s been forever since I’d played, I thought it best to just start over on the new Arcade mode to get familiar with the controls again before taking on the tougher levels.

This reintroduction was a painful reminder of why I ended up disliking a game I wanted to love at release, and it’s actually much worse in several ways. The lag that plagued the game even in moments with no enemies on screen is now even worse, with the screen randomly freezing for upwards of two seconds. With nothing on screen, this is already enough to get me swearing. In the middle of a dogfight with multiple enemies, it’s a death sentence. And it happens CONSTANTLY. How can a game get a patch this large and still not address one of the biggest issues the core game had? No, better yet, how can a game get a patch this big and feel even more broken than it did on release day?

Let’s just set aside the lag for a moment to talk about the enemy fighters. The insects are still mostly okay, so nothing to report there. But in the case of the Imperials and the Void Raiders, their ships’ movements are now so spastic that it looks like someone is controlling them through an epileptic seizure. This was already a hard game to play because I could roll the thumbstick up and down along one side and not once hit the enemy even if they were stationary. Now I’m trying to hit a target that skitters around slamming into walls and traps, often dying due to its own incompetence instead. How is this an improvement?

Around season 3, I ran into a familiar problem, with the game’s available upgrades making my gun weaker and weaker, and with no ship upgrades that could level the playing field. I was forced into playing stealth style because fighting even one ship required such a huge amount of time as to be a pain in the ass. If there was more than one ship, attempting to engage meant dying and starting over.

Imagine if in Dark Souls III, with every new area unlocked, the game took away all your equipment and levels and demanded that you fight tougher enemies with the starting equipment and first level stats. It would be extremely demoralizing. That’s what this game is, and no, Arcade mode does not address that problem. All Arcade mode does is allow you to start a level over instead of having to replay the whole season. I have to be honest, if I’m stuck in a bad build, I might as well start over and hope for a slightly less painful loadout.

I should also mention that during this playthrough, I had only one season with a genuinely good, FUN, build. Even that was hampered by the constant lag. I’m okay with a little bit of jitter now and again. But a total freeze for one to two seconds? Oh. My. God, y’all.

I also had crashes at the worst possible times, including a doozy where I had beaten level 4-4 and was in the process of warping back to the mother ship. There was a lagging screen freeze, and I started chanting, “No, please don’t crash.” My powers of persuasion failed, and it crashed. SO I GOT TO PLAY THE LEVEL AGAIN.

Before I did 4-5, the damn thing crashed again. Instead of going back into it, I decided I’d try out that endless mode. The Void starts off with a little animated trailer that says there is no season 5. There is only endless mode. WHAT?

I tried playing the endless mode, which now restricts the combat to extremely narrow corridors, and many of these areas have barriers that will instantly strip the shields off the ship if they’re even so much as grazed. This already had me groaning, but while waiting for a pair of enemies between me and the end of the level to dogfight to the death, I realized those cloudy barriers were collapsing, and I had to race past several enemies and through a collapsing pile of debris to reach the warp point. I may have accidentally made that sound fun. Let me assure you, it is not.

So I went back to the game and played through 4-5, and that doesn’t unlock season 5. That’s because there is no season 5. The conclusion to the story is an endless mode that cannot be beaten. Fuck you for paying us for a story mode, you get bubkes.

I was furious. I put down the controller and stomped off to dinner, and after calming down, I thought, “Well hey, maybe season 5 is coming later and this is something tacked on to entice the PC crowd to buy into a year-old game.” So I got on Twitter to ask 17-Bit would there ever be a season 5, and would they ever address the lag and bugs? I got my reply back today that The Void IS season 5, and the bugs are all but taken care of.

No, they are not.

So now I’m back to being angry. I just wanted closure on this game, a chance to see if A-Tak, Beam, and Admiral Akamoto defeated the Empire and saved Earth. I suspected the same things that annoyed me would still be there, but hey, if the maker wants to have a game be stingy and cheap, that’s their call. But The Void feels like a total cop out. It’s like reading a series of books, only to have the last book never come out. The author announces they’ve instead started a comic series with the same characters in a different setting, but they will never complete the series even though the last book ended on a cliffhanger.

There’s no score to offer this time, folks. I might try to play endless mode a few more times to see if the tighter corridors at least address the lag problems. But I just want to conclude this by saying how cheated I feel by 17-bit with this patch release and update. There is no end to an endless mode. There is no closure, no final boss fight or trophy for beating the game, and it’s far too late to ask for a refund.

So, okay 17-bit, you got your money out of me this time. But I can promise you this: you will never see a dime from me for any future games you release. You had a chance to turn this around and at least give me some closure on the story, and you decided that even that wasn’t worth doing right. So no, I’m not buying whatever you publish next. You killed my interest in your company forever.

And I want to say to my regular readers, I’m okay with hard games. I’ve played a few recently that I really enjoyed, both AAA and indie. I’ve played the hell out of Dark Souls III until my hands were swollen. I’ve played every class in Salt and Sanctuary except the Paladin, and I plan to give that a run sometime in the near future. Transformers: Devastation was intense and hard, and I WANT to play it again even though I had problems with certain levels. It’s not the being hard part that makes me dislike Galak-Z. It’s being stingy and laggy, and now, it’s being denied a proper ending even though I’ve waited a year for the final season. I’m so angry that I have to take breaks from angry typing because it’s hurting my fingers. So if you were on the fence about Galak-Z, please don’t buy it and support this kind of bait and switch behavior. There are so many better games to spend time with, in my opinion.

Game review: Transformers: Devastation for PS4

Okay, so this really, honestly should be my last game review for a while because at this point I don’t have many games left to trade in, and I want to keep most of those to replay when I need a diversion. As it turns out, this last game is one of those keepers. I’d read some unkind reviews of Transformers: Devastation that turned me off of it initially, mainly because they said the boss fights were ridiculously difficult. But hey, it’s a used copy for cheap, and I did beat Dark Souls III. So I can probably hack whatever the game throws at me, right? Yes, actually, I can. And I liked most of what I played.

I’m in agreement that some of those boss fights are ridiculously hard. It’s not so much the bosses themselves that make it hard for me, though. Sure, they have massive health bars and a plethora of attacks, but what makes it hard is the game’s intentionally wonky camera. It seems to me like if a game isn’t hard enough, the game makers mess with the camera to make it harder. Buh.

But so anyway, I should move on to the praise, because there is quite a lot to like in this little sliver of gaming goodness. First of all, being a fan of Transformers going back to the original 80s cartoon and comics, I can attest that it successfully nails the “feel” of the show and comics. The cut scenes merge pretty well with the combat, and the rendering style is almost a perfect match. While the game is really chintzy with ranged weapons ammo, the melee combat works pretty well, or at least well enough that I don’t feel like griping about not having more opportunities to shoot stuff.

It’s a standard control scheme with a light and heavy attack, and jump and use on the face buttons. It’s all very easy to keep track of, and arranged in a logical way that allows for a fluid jump and attack combo. The d-pad selects weapons, and the trigger buttons handle the ranged shooty stuff. The shoulders are used for transforming, for a nigh-ludicrous vehicle attack, (How on earth can a wheeled vehicle peel out on thin air to launch itself at an enemy? Ludicrous. But hey, not any more zany than being able to jump in vehicle mode, something I only sorted out I could do four hours into the game.) and for a Transformer-specific special ability that recharges slowly after each use. There’s also an ultimate attack that is launched by pressing both the analog sticks at the same time, and that ended up being pretty useful in a few situations where I couldn’t sort out how else to deal with certain enemies.

The game follows a standard cartoon plot, with Megatron being his usual arrogant self and attempting to convert Earth into a new Cybertron. As there’s only so many named Decepticons to go around for the various boss battles, the game tosses out what I started calling Genericons. These enemies are all copy pasta warriors who help pad out the various arenas the game locks you into. This is not my favorite style of game, but the limited number of baddies in each locked arena was manageable and never felt too hard that I wanted to give up. There WERE some fights when my hands got sore and I started asking, “Man, how many of these guys are left?” But that was usually the time when the last Genericon fell and gave me a chance to breathe before I moved on to the next arena or boss fight.

The bosses are sometimes ridiculous for the size of their health bars and the increasing number of extra attacks they can do. On several occasions I remember groaning, “I didn’t even know he could do that.” So some of this stuff isn’t canon, yo. But again, it’s manageable, and not a deal breaker for me. (And okay, with such a large cast of possible Decepticon bosses, I did find it annoying that I had to keep facing the same bosses multiple times.)

What almost was a deal breaker were a few sections where the game started messing with the camera angle. I get that they wanted to add some variety, but the top down and side view levels drove me a bit bonkers because I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Another few level took place in space, and the bosses were moving all over the place so fast that even trying to keep the camera stick moving, I rarely got a lock on them for more than a second. I didn’t win those fights through skill. It was truly dumb luck.

I will pause to complain about this just a little. As I said to my hubby after a really stressing sequence, if you’ve got a competent core game that’s fun and challenging, why would you want to mess with that simply for the sake of some forced variety? Stick with what works, and don’t worry about bolting extra bits onto it.

There’s a fight with Shockwave later in the game that took forever because he clones himself and I had a hard time telling who to hit through all the freaking special effects. Soundwave has a similar fight, with me trying to keep track of him and his many cassette tape buddies and their many ranged attacks all while the floor kept rising and falling to blind me. This is a literal case of fighting on an uneven playing field.

But these were only a few instances of frustration in what was an otherwise enjoyable six hour romp through the land of shiny cartoony nostalgia. This is helped by the fact that the game didn’t suffer from lag or any glitchy behavior. Well…okay, one fight with Devastator and Menasor was a bit wonky, in that these two giant robots were walking through each other, but that’s about the only time I saw any wonkiness.

The controls are good, with no instances of wrong button syndrome striking even in the heat of combat. And with my fat thumbs, you know that has to be the mark of a very good control scheme. The graphics are nice, and the soundtrack really hits the sweet spot for making me feel like I was watching a marathon of the old series.

It’s also good in that it’s a short game, and I finished the whole thing in a single six hour session. (Three hours, followed by a dinner break, followed by another three hours.) The frantic fighting style could easily overstay its welcome in a longer game. This gets in, does its thing, and gets out without making me think “Thank God that’s over.” There’s even a nice little cut scene at the end that hints at a tantalizing direction for a sequel. I saw it coming, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t look forward to seeing a game cover that “episode.”

This is part of the reason I can see playing it over again. Even the parts that drove me nuts were mercifully short, and going through a second or third time, I will at least have a better clue of what those sections wanted me to do. There’s stuff I can try to collect, and even some side missions and challenges that I left alone the first time through that I might give a chance on a replay.

I’ll give Transformers: Devastation 4 stars. It’s almost but not quite good enough to earn that last star, but it is fun and something I can see pulling back out from time to time when I’m feeling the need for Peter Cullen to deliver some classic cliche cheese.

Book review: The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

Oh, my God, a book review! FINALLY, I finished a book and can issue my report on it. I know at this point the Goodreads Challenge app is extremely disappointed in me for my crappy reading numbers. I’m 9 books behind schedule for Pete’s sake! But this year, reading and retaining anything hasn’t been my strong suit. It’s damned hard to read for pleasure if you don’t remember what you’ve read just a few minutes later, yanno?

The Raven King is the last book in the series that started with The Raven Boys. I actually got this on the day it came out, and I’ve read whenever I could manage to get my brain to play along. Was the ending worth the wait? Um, that’s kind of a loaded question.

In the previous books, the big bads for each book were always kind of a letdown. It’s more of a series about four private school friends and their relations to a certain public school girl named Blue. With this last book, a lot happens in the build-up that suggests that these big bads are really different. People are dying left and right. Every member of the Raven boys are being attacked by the forest they love so much. Blue gets a badass scar in a shocking fashion. So yeah, as the book reaches those final chapters, there’s a building sense that these big bads are the really real deal, y’all.

Then they fizzle and fall over like a sparkler mistaken for a bottle rocket. Piper Greenmantle in particular may be the worst villain in this series or ANY of Stiefvater’s previous books. It’s not just that she lacks any personality, a trait common among the Stiefvater villains. She’s also painfully stupid and shallow. In a series full of colorful primary, secondary, and even tertiary characters, people like Piper stand out because they exist solely to give the others something to do besides have a good time all the time. They have no interesting thoughts. They have no personal lives or dreams. They make no brilliant observations or reveal interesting facets of their past lives. They exist only for this moment. And that’s why there’s no emotion when they exit stage left never to return. They simply never earned it.

But the demon at least…the demon seemed custom made for a big final battle. It was shaped like a wasp, the thing that killed Gansey before as a child, and the thing he still feels paralyzing fear for. So surely it had this form to terrify him and make the final fight harder, right? No. Gansey never even sees it. None of the core crew ever does, fighting with it long distance before a plan is put into place and the “fight” is over. No epicnessness to be had. This war does not end with a bang but a whimper.

And maybe it’s better this way. Maybe this was always meant to be low key from start to finish. It just felt to me like this final book was building to something bigger, and the actual ending was more like a pop than the boom I had my ears plugged in anticipation for.

This is also not to say that I’m deeply disappointed after all that waiting. The series ends with closure. Some of the arcs end in surprising ways that are very pleasing to me. I am so not going to spoil any of those surprises, either. They’re worth the wait if you’re reading the series. In fact, that’s why this review is so short, because I can’t talk about a lot of what happens in the story.

So I’ll stop here and give The Raven King 4 stars. Yes, the book itself was worth the wait, but that ending…it wasn’t what I expected.

Game review: Far Cry 4 for PS4

“Wait, Zoe, how can you do a game review RIGHT AFTER you said the Watch Dogs review would be your last for a while?” you may ask. Well, silent commenter who may potentially live in my head, I took the rest of my old games up to ye olde game shoppe and traded them in for a pair of “new” games because with the change of seasons, my brain isn’t up to the tasks of reading or creative writing. The alternative was sitting on my couch all day blowing raspberries, and while I like raspberries as much as the next random non-offensive example person, I can only do that for an hour or so before it becomes tedious. “But you lied to me, Zoe!” you say. “How can I ever trust you again?” Well, helpful commenter who helps keep these things moving along, life is full of bitter disappointments. For example, there’s Far Cry 4.

There’s so much in this messy little package that left me groaning “this game sucks,” and I did so often enough that my long suffering hubby was asking “then why don’t you stop playing it?” And that’s a fair question, but once I’ve got a game, I’m honor bound to see it through…no, wait, honor bound isn’t the right term. I’m flat broke and can’t afford to drop a game right after I buy it, even if I hate it. On the plus side, it means you get more reviews out of me, and that can’t be a bad thing, can it?

I started out by doing the so-called secret ending, which isn’t much of a secret and hasn’t been since the day after it came out. That more expedient ending provides some much needed context for everything else that happens in the proper game. You are Ajay Ghale, a young man tasked by your dead mother to return her ashes to Lakshmana in Kyrat. You’ve barely crossed the border into your home country when your bus is detained and you meet the king of Kyrat. And cue the secret ending. (To get said ending, just wait a few minutes when the king tells you to stay put. Yes, it’s boring, but it is quite enlightening, too.)

If you play the game right, you will spend almost the entire romp thinking Lakshmana is a location. Not so. For those who hate spoilers, let me stop you now. After the cut, I’m going to spoil this game like a spoiling thing left on the kitchen counter to spoil forever. Or something.

Still here? Lakshmana is Ajay’s half sister. His father, Mohan Ghale, decided he didn’t like his wife whining about the war, so he shipped her and Ajay off to King Pagan Min to act as a spy. The plan backfired and Ishwari and Pagan fell deeply in love and had a child, Lakshmana. Mohan found out and had Lakshmana (still a baby, by the way) murdered, and in a rage, Ishwari murdered Mohan and fled to America to avoid getting killed by Mohan’s army, the Golden Path.

Still with me? Okay, so now Ajay has returned to Kyrat, formerly the world’s biggest importer of bunting flags, and now a country where the most commonly uttered phrase is, “Hey, I’m going out for milk, cover me.” Kyrat is in the grips of a civil war between the Golden Path and King Min’s royal army. To put this in context, it’s like you went to Iraq and had to choose whether to back Al-Qaeda or IS in helping to overthrow Saddam Hussein. There is literally no right choice because every choice sucks. This is like being asked which STD you prefer to contract, and “none” isn’t an option. You either take the “secret” ending and walk away or commit yourself to fighting for the army of a baby murderer.

Your choices in the game come down to specific missions that must be taken for Sabal, the dude who thinks the sun rises and sets on Mohan’s grave, or Amita, who thinks religion and tradition have no place in rebuilding a new Kyrat. No shock, I chose Amita, a choice I only felt bad about at the very end of the game. But knowing that Sabal is just as shitty a leader at the end…again, which STD did you want to contract?

Kyrat itself is a foreign country portrayed through the eyes and ears of a tourist. It’s all stereotypes and little substance, a place of strife where the “answer” to the country’s problems lies in good old American “superior firepower.” This is not a game that will let you stop and take in the view, either. Oh no, you will spend every single minute shooting at something. If it isn’t troops from King Min’s army, it will be the animals. Sometimes you won’t even be doing it because someone attacked you. You’ll do it to get them before they get you. Or sometimes, you’ll kill animals because you need a new wallet.

This is a huge, HUGE sticking point for me. It’s not enough that I kill some tigers or leopards, something that’s trying to kill me. To upgrade the various loot and ammo bags and your wallet, you have to kill even the most harmless animals. There’s even a wallet upgrade that requires killing four rhinos. Pause for a minute and let that sink in. Four huge-ass rhinos for a fucking tiny-ass wallet. If that wasn’t bad enough, the top level upgrades require killing “ultra rare” animals. What’s another word for ultra-rare? Oh, I know. It’s endangered. This shit has to have been thought up by an upper middle-class white guy with no appreciation for what he was tasking players to do.

Now to be fair, some of the animals will attack you on sight, so that makes the choice to kill them somewhat easier, but my god, this game goes to extreme lengths to make almost all the animals assholes. You cannot go anywhere without hearing these phrases every two hundred meters:

“Look out! Wild dogs!”

“Look out! Tiger!”

“Look out! Yak!”

“Look out! Honey badger!”

“Watch your heads! Eagle!”

Wait, eagle? Yes, the fucking eagles in this game are the biggest assholes of all time, dive bombing and murdering everything. I watched eagles swoop down and carry off animals four tines their size, only to drop them from a great height. To eat their splattered guts? Nope, they’re just assholes like that.

Don’t even get me started on the honey badgers. Those things are pure evil. To give you an appreciation for how bad they are, I once saw a tiger and a honey badger in the same area, so I tossed out some meat to bait them. The tiger went for the meat, saw the honey badger, and turned tail and ran like demons were chasing him. That’s how dangerous honey badgers are. Even tigers won’t fuck with them.

Now, one could get into a car or truck to stay away from the animals, but getting in most vehicles presents another problem: the radio. Not the music, which is fine. Compelling, even. No, the problem is Rabi Ray Rana, who will talk over every song every thirty seconds. I never thought I’d say Bethesda got something right, but when it comes to the game radio for the Fallout games, they got this right. DON’T TALK OVER THE MUSIC. Let the song play, fade to quiet, and then give me the same status update for the umpteenth time. But don’t ruin the song by talking over it. That’s the dickiest dick move in the whole bag of dicks.

Let’s talk about the combat. Every gun sucks and lacks a sense of impact. It would be one thing if the enemy soldiers wearing body armor and battle helmets were the only bullet sponges, but the bare chested dudes with a rolled bandana on their heads take almost as many shots to put down, and I have emptied whole clips into a single medium-sized dog before finally putting it down. It makes every gun feel ridiculously wimpy. It doesn’t help that the “good” guns aren’t unlocked until very late in the game and require some seriously ridiculous requirements to unlock. (By the way, even the good guns can lack any sense of impact unless you do all head shots all the time. Just try making that happen on a running target with an automatic weapon. And good luck with that.)

Oh, and here’s a fun fact. Even after you unlock the ability to put a silencer on weapons, it doesn’t change the enemy’s ability to hone in on your location. You used a sniper rifle with a silencer from half a mile away? Doesn’t matter, everyone knows where you are. Every. Single. Time.

The main repetitive task of the game is liberation of outposts and fortresses, which involves taking out the alarms to prevent reinforcements from being summoned, and then killing every last enemy. You can try the stealthy approach, but as that’s typically doomed to failure, I usually just found a good place to hunker down with a rifle and plow through everyone. If the reinforcements happen to include helicopters, well that’s what Mister RPG is there for.

What’s really amusing is how if you get the soldiers outside the fort or outpost, and then they see you, you can still get an award for being undetected because technically they didn’t detect you inside their fort. Stupid? Oh, absolutely, but that’s par for the course with this game.

If for some reason a mission seems too tough for one person, there’s supposedly an option to call in some guns for hire, but I never got this to work. Each time I felt like I needed help, I would press down on the d-pad and find the option to summon help inactive. I don’t even really know when and where these guns for hire tokens come into play because I could never use them. So to me, they were completely useless. If you got them to do something useful, please tell me.

As this is an open world game, you also must complete side quests, and most of those are pretty much the same thing. Kill everything, rinse and repeat. Well, no, there’s races too, because of course there are. But mostly it’s all shooting all the time. There’s a set of missions where you go to Shangri-La, and even then, your assignment is killing everything. I didn’t think it was possible to make a visually stunning location boring, but kudos to Ubisoft, because they managed that trick quite handily.

These side quests have to be done at some point to unlock Ajay’s underwhelming set of abilities, and this is another sticking point for me. There’s a dude in this game who can tame any animal and make them attack you. Do you ever get this kind of neato power? Nope! You get stuff like collecting double rations of “leaves” when you pick flowers. (They’re called petals, by the way. Some moron at Ubisoft couldn’t even sort out what those things flowers make are called, so he just called them leaves. And while I’m bitching, how is it that every plant of the same color has the same beneficial qualities? Are no plants toxic in this part of the world? I find that hard to believe.)

There’s a section of the game where a villain doses up Ajay with a hallucinogen, and I was violently nauseous trying to play during this section. The drug makes Ajay think a demon is attacking him, and each time the demon was near, the controller vibrated. It vibrated so hard my palms were itching. So, this was a half hour of game time that made me sick to my stomach and suffering from vertigo and itching palms. Who thought this was a good idea?

I want to try and find some nice things to say, and I actually do have a small collection of items to highlight. First of all, when the game offers up something culturally different for music without Rabi Ray talking over it, it’s catchy and worth stopping to listen to. One mission where I had to drive a truck had a great song that I just pulled over and jammed out to for like ten minutes. That happens maybe four times in the game, and every time it happened, my mood perked up.

It’s a shame that so many missions offer up the same bland 80s movies soundtrack to work with. I mean sure, it’s not bad, but there are missions that give you an enticing alternative before going right back to the same old soundtrack you can hear in most every action game or movie in the history of ever.

The enemy patrols aren’t just walking circuits, and I’ve seen guards wander off to have a smoke break, sneak a sip from a flask, or even wander around the back of a building to pee. At a party, some drunk guards had to stagger off to vomit. It makes them feel more real and human, and it’s something I wish more games would do. Furthermore, once an outpost has been alerted, they don’t go back to their old routines. Even after they go back to patrolling, they remain more agitated, looking around and making sneak attacks much more difficult. They also don’t return to their original circuits, so they have to be watched to make sure you aren’t going to stumble into a mess of them at what was previously a safe blind spot in their defenses.

(But I would like to mention that like most games, they continue to shout at each other about where they’re going and what they’re doing. I get that this is a feature of combat games to make them less difficult, but I would love to see a game where trained military fighters used hand signals and didn’t constantly spout lines from The Big Book of 80’s Movie Cliches.)

When you can get a four second chance to look around between attacks, Kyrat looks pretty good. The sky boxes for the night sky are crap, but the mountains and forests are really something to behold in the few moments of quiet that the game allows you to have.

Eventually you take out all the outposts, liberate all the radio towers, and kill all of Pagan Min’s governors, leading to a big final fight. You choose to side with Amita or Sabal, kill the other, and then head off for the last fight with Min. If given a chance to speak, Min names you the king of Kyrat, tells you the truth about your family, and then attempts an escape that can be thwarted. Then after the credits roll, you find out nothing has really changed. If you sided with Sabal, he’s having people put to death for not joining him sooner. If you sided with Amita, she’s forcing children into service and probably murdered a girl who had supported her throughout the game. I chose Amita, and after she tried to walk away, I shot her. After that, it’s all back to normal. Min’s men are wandering around shooting people. The Golden Path doesn’t seem all that bothered by me assassinating both their leaders, and no one is bowing down to me as king. Rabi Ray doesn’t even have anything to say about this new Kyrat. It’s literally the same shit on a different day.

I had this same feeling about Watch Dogs at the ending, and it’s like Ubisoft can’t be bothered to come up with a decent ending to their games. Once the credits finish rolling, you’re plopped back into each world to do mop up operations, but no one in the game seems capable of recognizing that the big bads have been taken care of.

But in the case of Far Cry 4, the return of the status quo has me feeling even more disappointed than I did with Watch Dogs. I’m supposedly the king of the country, but I’m running around to do petty mop up operations? No, mang, it’s a crap ending to a game full of crap.

I’m giving Far Cry 4 a measly 2 stars. It’s a lousy game that feels shallow and pointless throughout its entire run, and the ending only reinforces that feeling. Given that I’ve now played two Ubisoft games in a row that felt so hugely disappointing, it may be a long, long time before I pick up another. Pretty graphics are meaningless if the gameplay is weak, and that’s my biggest problem. I didn’t have fun playing this. I spent a lot of time bored or annoyed, and that’s a much bigger sin to my mind than having sub-par graphics.

Game review: Watch Dogs for PS4

This will likely be my last game review for a while, and not because I’m flat broke. I have a huge stack of old games I could trade in for something new. The problem is, I haven’t seen anything new or used that I want to play. This last review is for a game I was tepid on to begin with, but decided to get it because it was steeply discounted.

Watch Dogs got a bad rap right after release because Ubisoft gave it a graphical downgrade from the demo shown at E3. Personally, I feel like bullshotting is so common among the big publishers that it’s not worth my anger. HOWEVER, there is something that pissed me off about this game, and that was the fact that it doesn’t work with the rest mode on the PS4. On all my other games, I could put the console to sleep and come back the next day at the same spot I left. But no, this game would shut down and drop whatever mission I was in. More infuriating was the intrusive U-play sign up. I actually have a U-play account, but I didn’t want to use it. I had to skip the setup on every. Single. Startup. UGH.

So, with that out of the way, Watch Dogs is a wannabe Grand Theft Auto with some phone “hacking” puzzles thrown in. This is hacking in the same vein as that 90s movie was, but I actually liked the puzzles, even the ones on a timer, and you know how I feel about timed missions. (If you don’t know…I hate them with the burning passion of a thousand supernovas.) The driving is mostly decent with some caveats that I’ll get to later, and despite the graphical downgrade, the world looks pretty damned good.

It’s a pity I can’t praise the story, because the story is pure shite. A lot of the blame is on main character Aiden Pearce, who is a tool in many different ways. He’s a tool in the sense that it’s impossible to like him, and he’s a tool in that everybody uses him so easily. The writers want me to believe this guy is so smart and capable, but in the story he is so stupid that he deserves everything that’s happened to him. But he can’t take all the blame for this. The other characters around him all hail from the book of action movie cliches, and every time the story went, “Ah ha, here’s a twist,” I sighed and thought, “Yep, saw that coming from the intro.” This is a clumsy string of delaying tactics, and as the story progresses, they just get more and more stupid as they go along.

So…without spoilers. Aiden is a fixer, a hired gunman working for a hacker named Damien Brenks. At a routine job stealing digital cash from a hotel lobby, they pick up some data that gets them both put on a hit list. The guy meant to hit Adrien ended up killing his niece instead, and Adrien goes on a an epic angry white boy tantrum. I’d say his is the worst, but when Damien finally shows up in the story, his white crybaby antics are even more pathetic. “Boohoo, they made me a cripple!” he cries while pointing to his leg brace. Yep, he’s still walking fine, with no limp whatsoever. But man, that leg brace is just soooooo unfair that he needs to come up with this convoluted plan to get back at the whole city.

No, man, I ain’t believing this.

“Gee Zoe, I notice you mentioned white twice. Why is that?” Well, helpful invisible commentator, this game is…if it isn’t racist, it’s got a huge blind spot for how it portrays race. The “good” hackers are all white, and the only black hackers shown are gang bangers in a slum living up to every possible black stereotype. The only other black character is also a criminal. It’s ridiculous that the game went to such huge lengths to make comparisons between Aiden and gang leader Iraq because Aiden is a serial killer with delusions of moral superiority. He’s not a good guy. He’d happily murder a clean cop if it meant reaching his goal. He ain’t no hero, yo. So pitting him against a war veteran who returned home with a plan to blackmail corrupt officials into compliance…yeah, I’m not feeling it, man.

But let’s set the story aside and talk about the game. A lot of the time in Chicago is spent doing GTA style driving. Oh sure, at first I tried obeying the law to get to places. Problem is, everyone drives ten miles an hour, even on the highway. They still manage to get into accidents all the damned time, and I often laughed out loud watching one car rear end another in what felt like slow motion.

Problem two is, even driving ultra slow, the pedestrians are constantly whining at me. “Oh my god, whist is he doing?” a woman screams. I’m driving five miles an hour behind all this other traffic. If I was driving on the sidewalk, or at least speeding, I might understand the complaints. But these people whine about your driving even when you’re going with the flow of traffic. Do that for ten or fifteen hours, and suddenly you snap and drive onto the sidewalk and over several of those whiners while screaming “NOW YOU HAVE A REASON TO COMPLAIN MOTHERFUCKERS!” (Or, at least that’s what I did after fifteen hours of putting up with it. Your mileage may vary.) After that, I had no problem speeding everywhere GTA-style, because it meant I was blasting past the whiners before they could even react to my presence.

But even if you drive the same way as GTA, this is totally not GTA. Oh sure, the wanted system might give you the impression, as could the need to steal a car every time a mission gets hairy. But this is totally a wannabe. In GTA, if you want to deal with another driver in a chase, you can pull out a gun or a bomb and blow them away while driving. In Watch Dogs, you either have to wait for the chance to use your phone on some environmental trigger, or you have to bash their car into submission, get out, shoot them dead, and then get back into your now highly damaged car and try to make a run from Mister Popo. (And the cops are all men, by the by. Not a single woman officer anywhere. Another blind spot? I’d say yes.)

The chases are a core part of the game, and they just keep getting dumber as the game goes on. At one point, I was in the game’s equivalent of a Ferrari chasing a van, and the van was moving like a much faster exotic car. If I was in the same van, it would handle like shit, and rightly so, being top heavy with that portable antenna. But in the hands of an AI driver, it’s suddenly supa-van, and even the fastest car in the game has trouble keeping up. After running this guy off the road, I have to get out while there’s fifty police shooting at me, kill this guy with a billion witnesses, and then get back to my car and outrun the entire city’s police force.

These chase scenes often only have one very narrow path that I’m allowed to take, and I have to sit through a long dialog scene before I’m even allowed to move, giving the other guy a huge headstart. Fail to catch up, and the whole dialog and wait has to be done again. Oy vey.

In one particular chase, I actually went outside before triggering the cut scene, and the dude’s car was there, but he was not. He doesn’t even appear until after I’ve triggered the cut scene. Similarly, the cops who chase you weren’t on patrol in the hood before they start the chase. They just appear all around you. Apparently this ctOS also handles instant teleportation. Who knew?

The in game navigation suffers from two problems, both of them hugely ridiculous given the setting. First of all, there’s no street signs or street names. If you’re making a driving game in a modern city, how do you fuck up something this simple? This goes hand in hand with the second problem. There’s no search feature on the phone for locations. On my real life phone, I can enter an address into the search app and get a map with my current location as the starting point. In the game, if I miss the two second window to mark a waypoint, I may never find what I’m looking for. It doesn’t help that the game is often covering up the prompt I needed with other distractions. Oh, look, here’s a crime to stop. Here’s a gang hideout. Here’s a criminal convoy. That mission prompt you needed? Gone forever. Hahahahahaha.

Fun times.

Speaking of the crimes and criminal convoys, this too is a feature taken from GTA, and it didn’t make any sense to me in that game either. I’m stealing money from people’s accounts through their phones every two or three minutes. Why should I care if this dude stole a wallet and got his cash the old fashioned way? I kill people all the time just because they’re in my way, so why am I supposed to chase down every murderer in the city?

Actually that leads me to another random issue that’s not quite a complaint. This game could do without a lot of the distractions. I’m supposedly on a race against time to save my little sister from being killed, so why am I’m constantly getting pinged with distractions. This isn’t Person of Interest, and Adrien isn’t Reese. (He’s not nearly as compelling a character, really.) I know open world games need side quests to pad them out, but mostly I just ended up driving around the distractions even though it meant not unlocking several achievements.

Also like GTA, Aiden is constantly whining about how “this isn’t like him,” but frankly the game never veers from pushing my decisions towards murder and mayhem. If you want to make a game about criminals, that’s cool. Go ahead and do that. But don’t hand me bullshit about the character feeling conflicted when his in game actions tell an entirely different story. Aiden is a cold-blooded murderer, a thief, and an all around asshole. Don’t hand me a sob story about a “heart of gold” because it doesn’t exist.

This reminds me of a certain battle in the game. I’d had to murder my way up through a building to take on a boss, and one of his armored goons comes running out at me with guns blazing. I slipped around behind him, and in searching for me he stumbled over the bodies of all his friends. Now I’d done this same fight three times before without success because of this dude’s armor combined with his mega machine gun. But this time around, he lowers his gun and goes, “Dead? They’re…they’re all dead. Oh my God.” Then he turns to me and says, “Hey man, just please, make it quick.” I didn’t want to kill him at all after seeing his soul torn out like that. But this isn’t a game that affords me mercy as an option. I am the bad guy, and this poor dude is just another victim.

About the only thing that separates Watch Dogs from GTA is the “hacking,” which is are puzzles where you have to reroute signals through a series of locks to open them. It’s dumb and has nothing to do with real hacking, but I admit, I liked it. This is no shock, as I’m a fan of puzzle games. When I had to do these in the course of story missions, I mostly found them fun. They’re also used for “privacy invasions,” side quests involving getting into the routers of NPCs to peep on their private lives. I did this exactly twice, and both times I felt like I needed to shower right afterward.

There’s also a subplot that goes nowhere about the company behind the citywide software service using it to monitor everyone everywhere…somehow. Aside from one video making fun of Assassin’s Creed, I stopped scanning these because they gave me the same feeling of needing to bathe. Which may say something about me. I’m perfectly okay with gunning down a crowd of bad guys, but I feel ill playing a peeping tom, and damn the trophy I might get for doing so.

There’s also a mission where you have to have multiple devices to find a boss in a nightclub, but it wasn’t the puzzles that were dumb. It was the fact that I could easily see the boss and didn’t need to do the puzzles to find him. “No no,” the game insists. “You must play along and pretend you’re blind and can’t see the guy with a neon mask on.” If you want me to do the puzzle, at least put the boss in another room nearby. Don’t stick him right out in the open and then tell me I can’t find him. He’s. Wearing. A. Neon. Mask. That’s kind of hard to miss, yo.

(I had another thought about this mission. The story had me chasing him because he had supposedly vital data, and it required that I stay very close to download data from his…something. I was standing not ten feet away from him in the club, but couldn’t actually start the download until after we were in cars doing 150. Why? Because video game logic, that’s why.)

For most of the game I was praising a random detail, and that’s the clear camera. In a lot of games these days, if it starts to rain, water drops appear on the screen and distort the view. This is stupid in my opinion and it makes no sense when playing a third person perspective game, (It makes more sense if the game is first person and the character is wearing a helmet, but I digress.) so I was glad that this game didn’t do that. BUT, late in the game, the bad guys start throwing digital artifacts up, sometimes even blotting out the whole screen for upwards of one second. This may not be an issue when my character is on foot, but in a car doing 180, that shit can wreck you. Which I suppose is the point. But it’s a stupid point because why would my vision be impaired with a system hack? Is Aiden watching the world through his phone? Is he driving with his phone taped to his face? No? Then this is bullshit, plain and simple.

The final chase of the game uses this along visual fuckery along with a trick that renders the navigation system virtually useless, throws in random camera swerves, and adds another fifty cops to the mix. I had an ability to disable helicopters, but the camera refused to swivel up, something that had NEVER been an issue until that mission.

The whole time I was struggling through this final mission, I kept asking, “And the cops don’t notice their system has been hacked?” It’s the kind of plot device that could only fly in a video game. Even a Hollywood movie would acknowledge the fact that the cops have their own cyber specialists tracking incoming traffic. They might have the specialists be stumped because “this guy’s too good,” but they would know they were being hacked. But in a game? Nah, this kind of thing is handed out with a straight face. It’s stupid, and when I got done with it, I was mad even after doing the final mop up operation and watching the credits.

And speaking of the credits, despite Aiden uploading evidence implicating the big corporate baddies of all kinds of crimes, they don’t even get a slap on the wrist. Well, that’s one way to thank me for playing. “Your whole campaign was useless. Ready for the sequel now?” Um…mang, I dunno.

This was very much a mixed bag for me. When I was doing the sections asking me to be sneaky and tactical, I really had a good time. My enjoyment plummeted every time the game set up a chase and demanded that I murder someone using the clumsy methods available to me. The story always sucks, but at least it was well acted. The graphics are good. The city is okay to drive around even without street signs, and the puzzles were mostly fun.

So I’ll give Watch Dogs 3 stars. It’s not something I’d want to play over, and I don’t even want to finish mopping up the various side quests. But it filled about a week of play time, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of it. But if I fell the urge to drive fast and crazy, I’ll just pull out Grand Theft Auto V. Sure, those guys are criminals too, but they don’t spend nearly as much time trying to convince me they’re really the good guys.

Game review: Mad Max for PS4

I know, I’ve been away a long while, and in the last few weeks I dusted off the Xbox to play every Bethesda game from hubby’s collection to completion. We’ll just skip those reviews, m’kay?) I’ve played Fallout 4 six times now, and I finished that last run with a melee build and took a stack of games to trade them in. I got Mad Max because I guess I’m not totally sick of post-apoc games, but I felt like maybe they were missing some driving quests. So, what would I define this game as? A real shit show, that’s what.

It’s hard to know where to begin in listing all the problems with this game. I feel like all the work went into making the game look as pretty as possible, but actually being fun or diverse wasn’t on the checklist. And to be sure, this is a game designed by checklist. It’s got an open world, (check) pointless side quests, (check) endless piles of collectible crap, (check) completely forgettable NPCs, (check) and copy pasta enemies and bosses. (check, check, checkity check.)

The story starts off with Max losing his car again, something consistent with every one of the movies. The big bad, Scrotus Scabrous takes a chainsaw to the brain, but somehow survives. Max gets led by the boss’ cast off dog to a hunchback named Chumbucket, who has a plan for building the ultimate car, the Magnus Opus. Off to a good start, so how could this possibly go wrong? Every way possible.

To begin with, the controls are terrible. For the most part I was willing to forgive the car controls. I’m driving on sand with bald tires, so yeah, handling is going to be iffy. But on foot, Max controls like a tank with a busted tread, and everything has to be pressed and held for a long, long time before he actually responds. I lost count of the number of times I hammered on a button repeatedly with no effect until it was too late to do me any good. Max is also apparently incapable on doing anything with his left hand. If he’s holding a weapon in his right hands, almost any other task will make him drop it. Keeping a weapon is a tedious affair. It’s so tedious that until I got to the middle of the game, I just most melee weapons unless I was nearing a boss fight.

And there’s lag, and it never fully goes away. The game makers spent a ton of time making sure the game looked so pretty, but between the volumetric dust clouds and all the random particle effects, the frame rate can often dip so low as to reach a pathetic ten frames a second. This mean the visuals are hindered by stuttering whether on foot or in the car, and it also means that sometimes button presses don’t register as all. They just get eaten up somewhere in the lost frames.

When lag isn’t an issue, there’s texture pop in problems. It’s hard to know if I’m on the road or not because the road textures may or may not be there. I’d end up having to watch the compass in the lower left corner most of the time to make sure I was still on the road, and so that means most of the pretty surroundings were lost on me. I rarely had time to appreciate the game’s visuals because my gaze was always trapped on that one little circle in the corner.

Even if I wanted to ignore the missions and just drive around, I can’t because there’s always some patrol showing up to trash the car and make me run back to a home base for fuel and water. One of the loading screen hints says to reduce the number of patrols, I needed to lower the threat level in a region. But even reducing it to zero has no effect on the patrols. I could roll four feet out of a base and be attacked every single time. Which might be fun, except again, lag makes the car combat a chore. Half the time, I just got out of the car and forced the baddies to stop and get out to fight me on foot, where the lag was reduced, but not removed.

The car combat is also wonky because enemy cars are all light and nimble in the enemy’s control, but slow and pathetic if I drive them. There’s all kinds of weird rubber banding going on, where enemies running a four banger can catch up to my car even if I have the fastest engine and lay on the nitro repeatedly. Conversely, if a car is running away from me, it can outrace my car no matter what speed I’m going.

I will say that the enemy AI has one improvement I feel is sorely lacking in most games, and that’s a survival instinct. While being pursued by a group of cars, I could blow one up and watch the others run for their lives. That’s something most games never consider, and I think it’s worth mentioning.

Of course, that only applies to car combat, and enemies on foot will all swarm in to the last man, even after I’ve wasted most of their allies. There’s a checklist of enemies that every game seems to need. There’s the brawler, the guy with the shield, the suicide bomber, and the feral crazy. Every faction has their own variations on the same themes, so once you’ve seen one flavor of bad guy, you’ve seen them all.

Then there’s armor. An enemy driving an armored car has two health bars, one representing the armor plating, and one representing the car’s health. But if I get in the same car, there’s no second bar, and the armor becomes tissue paper thin. The same problem applies with adding armor to my own car. It adds to the overall weight and makes acceleration and handling harder, but provides no protection. I should also mention that with an enemy driver, even the highest armor rating has zero effect on their driving. They can turn on a dime and outpace my car even if I have a lighter build with a beefier engine. It make-a no sense.

One of the armor features is boarder spikes, which the upgrade claims “makes it virtually impossible for boarders to jump onto the car.” But in truth, even with spikes all around, boarders almost always jumped on my car to stab Max through the front gap where the windshield should be. It makes the cost of upgrading feel useless.

But then that’s the case with several upgrade options. Some of them were useful with just a few points spent into them. Stuff like making water collection and fuel conservation more efficient had a tangible effect right away. But then there’s stuff like collecting bonus ammo from loot crates. I spent one point in that, and I might get one extra shotgun shell. But then I spent the maximum number of points…and I might get one shotgun shell. What’s the point of upgrading a skill to its maximum value if it never seems to do anything useful to begin with?

Oh, and Cumbucket never stops talking, and his small repertoire of quips gets grating fast. “Aim for the gas tank!” he yells out, despite the fact that there’s no enemy remotely near me. “Oh, here it comes, the mighty duster!” Yes, I can see that weak ass tornado just fine, Cumbubble, please shut the fuck up. I got so tired of him that I turned off the dialog soundtrack for around twenty hours before turning it back on because I also couldn’t hear the bad guys alerting me to their presence. This made ambushes more frequent, and while this was rarely fatal, it did get slightly more annoying than hearing about the mighty duster for the thousandth time.

Each region is run by a fort holder, and Max has to help each of them in order to use their bases. In each base, resources have to be gathered to build projects that will provide ammo, water, and fuel for Max, but there’s also projects to pick up scrap from wrecked enemies, eliminating the need to get out and pick stuff up all the time. This might sound fun, but it’s actually quite tedious to look for the project parts and drive back to assemble them. Each base requires building the same projects over and over, so really it’s a lot of make busy work to pad out the game with extra hours.

To get most of the project parts requires sacking enemy bases, and the way the game wants this done is to drive to an intel source nearby, and then take the base using sneaky side entrances and the like. But it’s not like skipping that step changes anything. One you’re in the base, you still have to blow everything up and kill everyone. So it really makes no difference going through the front door, the back door, or the crack in the side.

Once inside the base, the game also has optional challenges to look for hidden scrap and “Scrotus Insignias.” What this amounts to is spending twenty minutes looking for those last few hidden objects. Again, more make busy work with no tangible benefit.

Another source of information is hot air balloons, an idea hampered by two problems. First, it’s entirely possible to look all the way around and still not have stuff show up on the map. You have to stumble over landmines and bases to know where they are, and because they all have to be eliminated, sometimes you can waste several hours driving around to look for that one last threat.

The other problem is that the game makers add more and more steps just to use the balloon. In one case, I found a balloon out of fuel with no gas can anywhere near it. I had to drive to an ally camp, pick up a gas can, and then drive back to use it. Then in another case, I fought through a horde of enemies to find the balloon up in the air, with the wench control across a long bridge back the other way. The wench control didn’t work because the generator was out of gas, requiring another long walk to get a gas can at the front of the camp, another walk to refuel the generator, another walk back to the wench to fetch the balloon…and the balloon is out of fuel, so keep walking, yo. This doesn’t make the process harder, just longer. (I feel there’s a dick joke in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it alone.)

The enemies inside the bases are all pretty much the same in every region, and combat is a one button affair. They get different colors of face paint or different clothes, but nothing else changes. This also extends to the so-called top dog camps, where the boss is the same guy over and over and over. The intel gatherers will tell you each one is different because they have a supposed weakness, but those weakness apply to every boss. Oh, this boss doesn’t like fire? They all don’t like fire. This one is weak to shotgun shells? EVERYONE is weak to that. This one is weak to being stabbed with knives? You don’t suppose that’s the case with everyone? Maybe? You can safely ignore the advised attack methods because the same tactic works for every boss. Wait for them to charge, roll out of the way, and then keep hitting them until they shove you off. Rinse and repeat, over and over and over.

It’s only near the end of the game that there are different boss fights, but guess what? There’s only three unique fights in the whole game, and one of them is you on foot versus a car. Ugh. There’s a race story mission too, but the race is dreadful, a victim of lag, bad camera controls, and constant enemy spawns that make reaching the boss’ car a pain the the gas can.

I haven’t even touched the story, because I’m just not sure what to say. There’s information in the character bios that suggest this is a sequel to Fury Road, as Immortan Joe is named dropped, and his war boys are the dominant fist fodder. But if I’m understanding the time line, that would put Max in his fifties or even his sixties, and he looks younger than Max from the first movie before the world completely fell apart. I suppose there’s some reason he’s damned near immortal. Maybe a dose of radiation made him live longer? I dunno.

And here’s something I don’t understand. When did Max have a daughter? This is in the game and in Fury Road, but in the original movie, Max had an infant son. Yet in the flashbacks of both the game and the most recent movie, Max had a daughter of around nine or so. When in the timeline does this happen? Is it from a book that never made it into a movie? What’s the deal, doh? Buh, I dunno.

There also has to be something said about the lack of any compelling female roles. There’s four women in the entire game, and fort holder Pink Eye is hardly an Auntie Entity. Her story missions revolve around sending off half her camp to die on a suicide run out through the big nothing. (AKA: the dry ocean floor) The others are a slave and her child and a junkie who Max has to kill in a thunderdome, apparently so they can give a knowing wink to that film. There’s further nods to Auntie with many war boys calling Max raggedy man, and clearly a lot of this plot is taking cues from Fury Road, a film which had a lot of strong women. But there’s no women in antagonist roles here and only a handful of women NPCs, most of whom die to service the weak plot.

There’s the glimmer of a possibly good game in all this mess of fetch quests and laggy car combat, but it’s bogged down by technical problems and endless repetition. There’s no fun to be had in freeing the regions of all threats, no fun to be had in looting a few more pieces of scrap to build the perfect car, nor even in the offering of death run races. Playing this was a chore, and if I wasn’t flat broke, I would have happily tossed this aside after the first few boss fights. It’s a shame, too, because with more polish and variety this could have been an epic game.

In the end, I have to give Mad Max 2 stars. It’s a dull and tedious game that gets bogged down in mundanity far too soon after the start. I’d have a hard time recommending it to anyone, even fans of the Mad Max films.

Game review: Adventures of Mana for PS Vita

I know what you’re thinking. “Where the hell have you been, Zoe?” I’ve been here, actually, and I’ve been busy writing. How busy? I’ve written 100,000 words in two weeks, and averaged about 9,000 to 10,000 words per day. That kind of dedicated work doesn’t leave much time for anything else, but as I’ve gone three seasons without writing anything new, I had to take advantage of this sudden productive streak and hold onto it for as long as I can.

But I did spend a few minutes here and there gaming as a reward for meeting chapter goals, and my game this time around was Adventures of Mana, which was ported over to PS Vita from the iOS/Android version. At this point, that makes it a port of a port of a port, and the game itself is fairly old. So, how does it stand up after the passage of time? Not well at all.

My experience with the Mana series stops with the SNES title Secret of Mana, a game I liked so much that a few years ago I got a ROM and emulator to play it back through. In playing Adventures of Mana, I can see the story attempting to hit some of the same notes, and it doesn’t do a very good job of it.

Right off the bat, the hero (who you can name or go with the default choice) is a slave gladiator who after fighting one exotic beast is told by another slave that the tree of mana is in danger, and that he must seek out the last of the Gemma Knights to learn how to SAVE THE WORLD. Rrrrrrrriiiiiight. Additionally, someone a room over from this trite death scene totally heard this guy’s last gasping whispers and suggests that the hero can escape during his next fight because the gate the fighting animals enter the arena from leads directly outside to the front of the castle. (Which has no guards or traffic to notice an escaping slave.) I don’t care how generous you want to be, this is a level of stupid so powerful it generates its own event horizon.

And it never gets any better. I know JRPG writing is more a method of getting you from one dungeon to the next for the XP grind, but this story is just shit. You meet a girl meant to be your companion, walk her through five screens, and then she vanishes. Then you meet another companion and quest with them to save the first, who is promptly kidnapped again. And then you save her….aaaaaaaand she’s brainwashed and kidnapped again. All through this, you’re given other companions to fight with, a couple of which die, and the hero is going “NOOOOOOOO!” like we’re supposed to feel anything over the day of someone we spent all of five minutes traveling with.

In Secret of Mana, when my heroine gets kidnapped, I’m upset because I’ve been fighting with her for the better part of the game. I’m invested in her. In Adventures of Mana, I’m expected to have the same level of investment even though zero effort is given toward making me give a shit. So, big surprise, but I didn’t.

The combat in Secret of Mana let you use any of your weapons and level them up for better attacks. Certain weapons were used to overcome obstacles, but you could use any weapon on any enemy, and so long as you didn’t mind grinding to level it up, you could still do decent damage.

In Adventures of Mana, weapons don’t level up. You do by choosing among different pre-configured stats categories. (Warrior, Monk, Mage, and Sage, I think. I’m too bored to open the game and check.) If they’d kept the rest of the weapon system consistent, this might not be a problem. But no, they made it so that some enemies are completely resistant to most weapons, and it’s not always consistent about who is resistant to what. This means that sometimes you end up scrolling through a wheel of all your weapons looking for the one damn thing that will get this stupid enemy out of the doorway you need to go through.

And there’s puzzles that require a specific weapon, but you might have to travel in a long, LONG loop for a while before sorting out what the weapon you need is, and then you’ll do even more loops trying to get that weapon to connect with the one little target you need to trigger an event. Oh, and because enemies randomly spawn, it’s entirely possible that the one time out of a hundred that you finally have the weapon lined up with the target, an enemy will walk up to block the shot. And they’ll do it on every single circuit after that for a dozen loops, just to mock your growing anger.

The random enemy spawns can break other puzzle rooms by not giving you enough enemies to trigger the floor switches, or by spawning enemies resistant to the one spell you have to use to safely immobilize them. If you kill the enemies in the room before seeing the puzzle, you may have to go all the way out of the dungeon to reset the enemy spawning, or else the room just remains empty.

Oh, and half the time, the enemies don’t seem to be able to recognize walls or barriers. They wander around passing through stuff like it’s not there. With the ghosts and flying monsters, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. But way too many walking, non-flying creatures also ignore borders, so I feel like this was yet another issue that slipped past QA without being addressed

The boss fights are all laughably pathetic. I can’t think of a single boss who I was worried about facing, and I never died fighting any of them. I compare that to Secret of Mana, where the bosses were nightmares even after grinding up to raise my hit points and weapon strength. But this is just a lazy, dull design, with one crap encounter after another all the way up to the final pathetic boss.

I really can’t think of anything to praise here. The story is crap, the combat is a joke, the level design is terrible, the controls are meh, and the bosses are pathetic. Hhmmmmmm…oh, okay, the music is nice. Peaceful and relaxing. But also kind of forgettable; so not great, just nice.

I have to give Adventures of Mana 2 stars. It’s not a game that’s aged well over the years, and I regret spending my money on it based on my nostalgia for Secret of Mana. I’d much rather go play Super Stardust Delta for the millionth time than play this again, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone except the most die-hard JRPG fans who would look on its many, many flaws as features.