Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 6

Manga review Spy X Family

Starting with some randomness, a while back someone I followed on Twitter wrote that they’d been told they were saying Hunter X Hunter wrong. I commented that I was doing it wrong too, though I didn’t know what the right way was. But maybe a week later, I recalled that in Italian X is shorthand for per, or for. So a sticker written as 2 X 1 is saying it’s a two for one sale. Then I also remembered that X in Japanese is often used as a shorthand for versus. So, this week’s manga review is really called Spy Versus Family. And now you know.

Anywho, I put Spy X Family on my Manga+ favorites list based solely on the overwhelmingly positive reviews for the manga as well as the anime. The premise certainly sounds great, and it’s summed up several times in the opening chapters as, “The husband is a spy. The wife is an assassin. The child is a telepath.” Meaning husband and wife do not know each other’s secrets or secret lives, but the kid knows everything.

The longer premise is that a spy from Westalis code-named Twilight is given a mission to sneak into Ostania, which has a very shaky truce with Westalis. There, he must make up a fake family, enroll a fake child into an elite private school, and use that child to get close to a member of a known war hawk political faction to learn if they have any plans to ruin the truce. So, taking on the identity of Loid Forger (really on the nose with that surname, by the by), Twilight first adopts Anya, who is telepathic, and uses that power to look like the perfect candidate even though she’s too young and definitely not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. He then uses his contacts to find the “perfect wife,” Yor Briar, who is eager to play a wife because as an assassin she’s worried about her cover being blown if she remains single.

The first few chapters build on this premise with hilarious results. This continues up to the point of Anya being accepted into Eden Academy, and it’s all based on the classic improv comedy tool, “And then?” Right after that, the series begins spinning its wheels with nowhere to go. This is actually part of the point of the story and is a feature, not a bug. Twilight is used to missions where he just puts on one disguise, slips into a role to accomplish one task, and then disposes of his mask and goes on to the next mission. But to succeed at this mission requires actually being part of a family, something he knows nothing about.

Equally important in this slow-down is Anya, who cannot fake smarts for the school even with her telepathic abilities. She has no idea who to copy for tests, and she’s about as adverse to studying as any normal child of four or five. So instead of rising to the upper echelons of school, she’s barely hanging on at the bottom.

At this point, the padding begins, with more “and then” trying to make up for the lack of momentum. A labor shortage for Westalis keeps pulling Twilight away for other missions. An Ostania secret police is added to the mix. Yor can’t cook and worries about getting a divorce. The family adopts a dog who can see the future.

Each of these setups is charming, yes. But they lose the sharper humor of the opening chapters. So instead of devouring each chapter in binges, I might read one or two per week because the plot really isn’t going anywhere, and because it’s no longer hilarious. Maybe one chapter in four might get a really good laugh, but the rest is cute fluff.

I don’t think it helps that Anya is constantly veering from terrified of losing this new family to overconfidence that she can “help Papa save the world.” Because she knows her role is a mission, she keeps assigning herself “oper-ay-shuns,” all of which blow up spectacularly. This is where so much of the friction comes in to drag down the humor. Anya fails at stuff, Twilight goes into multi-thought-bubble mode to over-analyze the mission, and Anya tries to suss out what her next operation is, all while Yor tries to fake being a supportive mother and wife.

Where I’m at with the series is, I don’t see any reason to quit reading. It’s charming and cute, so it’s good for a side read between other comics. But I keep hoping that even if the story can’t get off the “and then” treadmill, it can at least get back to the kind of humor that drew me in.

Would I recommend Spy X Family? Sure, but I’d also advise tempering your expectations. Those first chapters don’t convey how quickly the premise goes from feet running on the ground to jogging on a treadmill.

Game review: Steam World Dig 2 for Steam

Before getting to the review, I should apologize for being so late in posting. The review was in Word, ready to go on Friday of last week, but I got distracted with Dark Souls II. I realized I’d never used a halberd or any polearms, so I figured I’d just dip in to see how they are. Long story short, I’m just about done with the base game boss fights up to King Vendrick, and now I’m debating doing all the DLCs or just going at Nashandra and her two guards to get that pre-DLC experience. But  let’s forget that and look at this week’s game.

I bought Steam World Dig 2 a little while after its initial release based solely on the fact that I’d loved the first game and wrongly assumed it would be more of the same. At the time, my hands weren’t in great shape, and just the tutorial boss was enough to bounce me right out of the game. But I’ve been doing pretty good health-wise, and I just finished a couple harder games, so I thought I’d give this a try again.

The thing is, I got pretty close to the end of the game before realizing I’d invested in the wrong skills, and I had to start over again. So this review is based on two different impressions of the game, the first where I didn’t know what I needed to do to progress, and the second where I knew and just did the thing like Zhu Li.

Part of that first impression is because as new abilities are unlocked, they aren’t really explained well. After failing to climb one moderately short distance, I had to YouTube the segment to see that the grappling hook button can be held down to cling to surfaces, allowing me to ride out the gusts of wind. There were other impasses, but each time, all I needed was ten seconds on YouTube to gain clarity because the game doesn’t do a very good job of explaining the new tools as I got them.

In fact it was watching another YouTube runner that I saw I’d been maybe four meters from a cut scene and kept dying because I had four health hearts, and that dude had ten. (Which, you have to admit means I was doing great to make it so close to the end of the game on a fraction of the available health pool and having no clue of what I was doing.)

But in that second run, I knew where I had to go, and what order of upgrades to prioritize. So while the first run was full of frustration and confusion, in the second I was able to make much faster progress, even though I was moving slower to pick up more minerals to sell and pay for upgrades. I just played the game better with some knowledge that should have been provided, but wasn’t.

Alas, once again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Steam World Dig 2 is a sequel following after Rusty the prospecting steambot defeated Vectron the…robot equivalent of the Borg. He’s since gone missing, and his friend Dorothy has gone searching for him, arriving in El Machino, where Rusty was last seen entering a mine. He never came back from that first trip.

The makers of Steam World games have a clear idea of what art style they like, and they mold it to the game style they want to adapt. The first Steam World Dig was kind of a chill game centered around exploration and resource management, while the second is more like a Metroid-lite. They’ve also done an RTS with their robots in space (I finished it, and already have a review in the queue) as well as a fusion of card game and RPG. (Steam World Quest: Hand of Gilgamech, which I already reviewed.) For any flaws they might have, you have to give them credit for knowing what they like and managing to deliver good games with their own signature house style.

The first impression of this second Dig with Dot is that it’s pure classic Metroid. After all most new abilities are found in pods that mimic finding Chozo statues in Metroid. However, the main deviation is that there isn’t a whole lot of backtracking to use those new abilities. Instead they clear the way forward to new areas, and there’s few roadblocks because the tools you need to progress have already been unlocked. There are some optional side dungeons that might require backtracking after getting a different ability, or at least upgrading an existing ability to be more efficient, but those dungeons aren’t vital to completing the game. They just award cogs, which are used to further strengthen their related abilities. (Which can also be bought in town from a vendor, so again, not strictly vital to completing the game.)

So what abilities are there? Well, Dot gets a dash in the tutorial, allowing her to reach the boss. Once defeated, the boss, nicknamed Fen, will join Dot and become her map. He’s also like that annoying fairy in that Zelda game, so on the second run, any time the game said “Talk to Fen,” I skipped it unless I was in a new area I hadn’t seen before.

Let’s see…after that, the abilities were a lamp that has to be bought from the shop, a sticky bomb that runs on water power, a jackhammer arm for breaking though tougher sections of the mines (and also runs on water, bringing back that resources management aspect from the first game), a grappling hook, and an upgrade to Dot’s pickaxe that imbues it with fire. (This has very limited applications in the closing moments of the mid-game, and doesn’t really do much to improve the damage it does to enemies.) There’s another upgrade to allow Dot to charge a sticky bomb and turn it into a more powerful grenade. (Which doesn’t stick, but the more powerful blast can rip through walls that the sticky bomb is too weak to damage.) Then after a very annoying chase with Evil Robots. Dot gets the jet pack, and that’s when the game finally decides to go all in on backtracking.

What’s funny about this part is that I had to return to the tutorial area, and I spent five minutes looking around before finally seeing a wall that could be opened with the jackhammer arm. I didn’t even know I would be backtracking until the game explicitly told me it was time to do so. What followed from there was finding the secret passage in three biomes and slogging a long, long way to find three MacGuffins that would trigger the big showdown with the final boss. (Which I’m not spoiling, so you’re welcome.)

By the way, that last boss was a huge pain in my ass, with overly long phases of invincibility where all I could do was try to dodge volleys of bullet hell while searching for heart containers to stay alive. Then I had to find the One Right Pixel to stand on and volley back one of the boss’ mega attacks to break their shield and give me a few seconds to hit them with Dot’s pickaxe. If I missed the window to volley the shot, or I failed to reach the boss while they were down, it was right back to another round of Dodge, Heart, Pray.

Also, before I get to the final verdict, I need to talk about how much of a pain it is to play the game the way it’s meant to be played. The first time around, given that I was mining for resources, of course I went in for upgrades to my pickaxe, backpack, and lamp. I need those to carry more stuff, and to just see the area before the lamp burns out and I’m forced to return to town to refuel it. This was what the first game was all about until the one and only boss fight, so I was literally playing the game the way the first game had trained me to play.

But in this second outing, I should have been spending almost everything in armor first, adding more health hearts to make the boss fights and enemy attacks less stressful. I mean, I shudder to think how I would have felt about that final boss if I’d arrived on my first run with four hearts. I’d have been creamed, and then cremated.

But because of that need to prioritize health over everything else until the mid-game, Steam World Dig 2 makes all that necessary resource gathering more tedious. The lamp is constantly running out, making it impossible to see what’s available to mine without returning to town every few minutes. Even if I find an area rich with minerals, I have to keep returning to town because the backpack’s starting capacity is so small. Then there’s the pickaxe, which requires more swings for every level of depth passed in the mines. It makes everything right up to the middle of the game a chore, and these are chores you can’t skimp on, or else the rest of the game gets WAY harder.

But eventually, once I was allowed to spend points on other abilities, the game finally allowed me to really have fun with it. I got a pickaxe upgrade that added XP boosts for killing enemies with it, and another that dropped some cash for enemy kills. That proved real useful in paying for upgrades across the board, and with more health, I wasn’t so stressed about taking on a trio of angry birds or a pair of beetles like I did on my first four-heart run. Oh, I also got a lamp upgrade that prevented it from falling below fifty percent light level, and that was a HUGE game changer, allowing me to focus on exploration instead of constantly running back to town to refuel the lamp.

There were other upgrades too, like killing enemies would restore health, or lamp fuel, or water for my bombs and jackhammer arm. The jet pack gets more fuel and the ability to cool while falling, so that was real useful. And like I said, this was where the game finally set me loose on its world and just let me play instead of doing my chores.

Which is why I arrive to the scoring filled with deeply mixed feelings. Had I scored based solely on run number one, this would have been a 2 star stinker. But I need to balance all of the second run’s mid-to-late-game fun with the very tedious busy work needed to get there.

This is what I’m talking about with the flaws of the Steam World games. They all suffer from the mindset of “It gets good after X hours.” Like, I’m mostly retired, with a side job editing articles and blog posts. If I decide to strap in to spend four hours getting to that good build, I have the free time to invest in doing so. But if you’re a gamer with a full-time job and obligations in The Real World, maybe you don’t want to mess with that lost time.

I will say that the X in time sunk to reach the good part is generally much smaller for Steam World games. At most, they’re like twenty hours to finish, and Steam World Dig 2 only took me eight and a half hours. So yeah, I offer out a weak defense that it’s not as bad as needing to wait twenty hours for the game to get good. Whether you mind spending four hours doing chores to arrive to the joy of free play is up to you. I report, you decide, right?

So, even though I’m so deeply conflicted that I want to break policy and issue a half star, I’m going to give Steam World Dig 2 4 stars. It’s great when it finally opens up, so if you have the patience to wait it out, then by all means, give it a try. As an added bonus, all these games are pretty cheap, so you can play the whole series without breaking the bank.

Revisiting Vampire Survivors post-DLC

If you want to reread my original review of Vampire Survivors or you missed it the first time, click here.

I actually had another review to post this week, but as I managed to get ahead of schedule for once, I decided to get the second DLC for Vampire Survivors, Tides of the Foscari. I’d already bought Legacy of the Moonspell and was left feeling underwhelmed by the experience. It’s less that there’s only one new area to explore, and more that aside from Miang Moonspell, most of the new survivors proved to be difficult to get past their fragile stages. (If you can do it, they get better, really.) On top of that, making unique builds for them felt like a chore. Lastly, given that a third of the new area is mazes, the standard map that works fine for the base game becomes totally useless.

Going into the second DLC, I found a similar maze set up, but then I found a map that actually showed the area properly. I wondered, did they add a map to the other DLC? Yes. Then I thought maybe I was confused and they had always had maps. But no, I checked the patch history, and the game makers added in maps for both new areas. With maps, both stages are vastly improved, leading me to ask, why make me find a map at all? Why not just bake it into the stage and be less obtuse?

Before I go on, I should mention that I have at this point finished one hundred percent of the trophies for this game. Every area, character, DLC character, and secret character has been unlocked. So when I say I’ve thoroughly combed through the whole game, I mean it. Hell, I’ve even taken to doing single weapon challenge runs just to sort out which characters are really OP. (Hint, they’re Pugnala, Queen Sigma, and Cavallo, as well as DLC survivors Miang, Lumaire, and Sammy. Many others are good for a challenge run, but these beasts can be good to go within six minutes of starting a single weapon run.)

Playing the first DLC and having unlocked most of the secret characters from the base game, I started feeling frustrated by many characters and my inability to make decent unique builds for them. But it wasn’t until the second DLC that I realized what the real problem was. As with any game that keeps adding new items to the pool of weapons, eventually the random generator begins tossing out the same options I don’t want and refusing to offer the ones I do want. I can banish and skip twenty times, re-roll another ten, and still end up waiting twenty minutes to get the weapons and evolution items I want. This is fine if I’m playing on endless mode, but when I’m playing the usual thirty minute run for a challenge, that usually leaves me about three minutes to enjoy the build before it’s over. Which sucks pretty bad, in my opinion.

It’s not always bad luck with the RNG, and I’ve had certain runs where I got everything I wanted for the build in the first five minutes, and then I got everything evolved and ready to rock in ten. When that happens, I have more of a chance to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each character, and then to fine tune what would make a better build for them rather than just going with the standard “circles of death” build that I favored way too often in the base game.

(FYI: Circles of Death is King Bible evolved to Unholy Vespers, Garlic evolved to Soul Eater, Phiera Der Tuphello and Eight the Sparrow evolved to Phieraggi. The result is two large wheels of high damage before enemies move into the defensive zone of the Soul Eater. Most mobs never get close enough to make this an issue, and that’s even before factoring in limit breaks to allow weapons to go WAY above their original power levels.)

That’s why I feel so conflicted about games that have huge pools of items. Yes, it’s entirely possible to make something like a “Fourth of July” build with the Party Popper, Greatest Jubilee, Cherry Bomb, and Prismatic Missile. (Very pretty, but good luck trying move or identify items with all the flashing fireworks covering everything.) Or you can go with all the swords in the game, leading to “The Four-Armed Samurai.” (Victory Sword not evolved, Night Sword not evolved, Eskizzibur not evolved, and Cross evolved to Heavenly Sword. Very tricky to make work, but loads of fun on a hyper run.)

Obviously I’m making up the names of these builds, but the point is, when I get an idea for something I want to test out, I want RNG to be nice and just let me do the thing. But sometimes, it doesn’t work and I have to restart. Sometimes, I have to restart several times to get a build set up.

And I know, I do. You’ll ask, “Why not just play with whatever you pick up?” Well I already did that for the first hundred hours I played. I’m now in hour two hundred and nineteen, so no, I want to test specific ideas to see if they work or not. It’s like how I’m still playing the Dark Souls games after sinking in thousands of hours. I need to go in with a plan if I’m going to see it through to another finish line. I mean, if I’m trying to play as a tree with the walking speed of a half-dead slug, I need to know what I’ll be picking up before shit hits the fan at the fifteen minute mark.

(I’m not kidding, y’all. There’s a playable tree in the game, and even after collecting wings to improve its speed, that tree is SLOW.)

Plus, now having unlocked everyone in the game, I feel like most of the secret characters just weren’t worth the effort, especially when you compare them to the crew of survivors found in the base game. Yes, there are exceptions like Boon Marrabio, who starts with an evolved weapon, Thousand Edge. Playing with him the first time, I was grinning over how insanely powerful he is. But for every glorious beast, there’s a whole slew of hidden survivors who are just annoying to try and build for.

I will say this, though. The second DLC did a much better job with both the unlockable and secret characters. Eleanor, Maruto, and Keitha all have a story built into their stages, Lake Foscari and Foscari Abyss. Each one needs to find and break a special magic crystal so Eleanor can fight a monster boss called Je-Ne-Viv, which unlocks the much less monstrous Genevieve. After that, anyone can go to the other side of the abyss to unlock Luminaire.

Both of these DLC characters are amazing. Every time Genevieve levels up, she triggers an ability to pull all XP crystals to her, making it really easy to keep leveling up. Every time Luminaire levels up, she wipes the entire screen clear of enemies, so in the closing minutes of a thirty minute run when she’s pulling in crystals like a Hoover and limit break is set to Always Random, she can wipe the screen every two seconds.

(Oh, but Keitha is fucking awful. Her base weapon has a rate of fire slower than a musket, and it’s hard to tell where she’s even aiming. I lost time of how often I shouted “Are you fucking kidding me?” because an arrow went flying off the screen without hitting a single enemy instead of huge mob I thought I was aiming at.)

I realize that if you haven’t played the game at all most of these terms are going right over your head. To explain it all, I’ve have to write a review about half as long as a Wiki. The point is, when you start the game, you have a character, and one challenge: survive for at least fifteen minutes. Then you unlock someone else and do it again to get access to their weapon. Then you start finding coffins to unlock even more characters. Then you find relics that all unlock other features in the game. It’s all fed to you in little bites, so it’s never overwhelming, and for the most part, all those unlocks feel very satisfying. They’d have to, or else why would I spend over two hundred hours getting to one hundred percent completeness?

And yet, at the same time, getting to this point means that the huge pool of options also takes away from the fun of those earlier runs. It gets harder to build what I want, or it takes a lot longer, forcing me to sit through a long dull wait before finally granting me my dopamine supply.

A lot of the trophies I’ve collected in the last few days, only three to five percent of all players have ever completed. I don’t think that speaks to how awesome I am as a gamer, either. Instead, I think it speaks to the problem that creeps in as players progress. What kept those first hours feeling fun and fresh were the discoveries that led to instant gratification. Oh boy, here’s a new character and a new weapon. Woot, this survivor is really cool and fun to play! Gee, I wonder what’s coming next!

But once you’ve reached the point of unlocking all the base characters, building original combinations instead of just making the same thing over and over gets a lot harder. So I think rather than try to struggle through that grind to find new ideas, lots of players decide to wander off and play the next new game.

That’s a shame because now that I’ve truly finished the whole thing, I can say Vampire Survivors was worth both my money and time. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t test my patience many times recently. So if you played it, but bounced off of it without unlock all its best toys, I totally feel for you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to see if I can make a viable tree build one last time before I give up and go play a different game.

Game review: Party Hard

It’s probably not going to be much of a surprise that immediately after playing the last game with a near total “kill everyone” mindset, I decided to get a game where the objective is to literally kill everyone. The main difference is, in Party Hard, your character is allowed to be seen by all their potential victims. They’re just more concerned with making the stabby bits stealthy.

I had tried to play the mobile version back when I was sampling Google Play Pass, but it kept throwing up a debug error menu that blocked the entire screen. Despite the PC version also being made in the Unity engine, it doesn’t have the same errors, and it was a whole lot more stable than Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, another Unity game with far worse performance. While there were a few glitches during my playthrough (more on those later), Party Hard was a mostly smooth gaming experience. Even better, despite its grim premise, it’s a mostly fun, if somewhat difficult game.

What makes one hard game fun for me, while another drove me nuts? I can’t offer a blanket explanation, but I think Party Hard succeeds because of the way every run is slightly randomized. The placement of items, traps, victims, and guards changes each time the killer fails to get the job done, so rather than try to look for a pattern, I just went with the flow and improvised until I found the right plan to “Kill them all!”

Before I go any further, let’s cover the story. The killer is a guy who just wants to get some sleep and partying people MUST DIE. Other killers can be unlocked later, but the cut scenes and plot all revolve around this killer and his relationship with a certain hard-boiled cop.

Similarly to the easy to explain plot, the controls are super simple, and are covered in the tutorial in a little under a minute. I did find it weird that I had to set up a Steam controller configuration to get the game to recognize that I had a controller plugged in, but once I did, the game worked fine.

So, as I said, I played the phone version before, so I had a slim idea of what I was supposed to do. After finishing the tutorial, I got to the first house party, and I was still looking over my options when a SWAT van rolled up and a squad of dudes ran into the house to kill five guys in the back. (I later realized they were cooking meth.) Another party-goer walked in on the carnage in progress and shouted, “I’m calling the police!” So they ran to a phone to do that, and the arriving patrol car ran over my killer and spread him like so much raspberry jam across 20 meters of road. After a few more seconds of contemplation, I asked the most relevant question that came to mind: “What?”

On the following play-throughs, I had to learn to sort out when to move in fast, and when to take my time to see how the rest of my crimes were going to play out. Poisoning the punch bowl is great for a lot of kills, but if one of the victims falls dead in front of the killer, odds are good someone will pin the blame on him, even if no one saw him by the punch bowl. This is ridiculous, yes, but it can also work in my favor. If I can steer the killer away from the rash of dropping victims, the cops or the other party-goers might misidentify someone else as the killer, leading to them being arrested and taken away.

For a game with simple controls, there’s a surprising number of ways to use tools, traps, and the environment to the killer’s advantage. There’s also the ability to make a phone call in each stage, which summons “help.” In the first stage, I summoned pesticide fumigators, and they went right to the room I was standing in. I hadn’t figured out who they were because they were dressed just like the meth cooks from the previous failed run. So they poisoned me, and I died. On another stage, I summoned a chainsaw wielding madman, who cornered my killer in a bathroom and unzipped him. On yet another, I called and got a couple zombies. So I was laughing as I watched the zombies slowly take over the beach…until I realized I was the only food left. Yep, dead again.

None of this bothered me. I had a blast making those phone calls to see what would arrive, and then deciding if I could maybe plan around them for extra mayhem. Each stage took me several runs to get a feel for the best ways to mow through the party, or to escape the police if I happened to get caught. Running from the cops isn’t easy, either, as the killer has all the stamina of an asthmatic elderly bank teller. But it can be done, and it all has to be factored into pulling off “the perfect crime.”

That’s really the key point that made this one of those “one more time” experiences. I might get really close to clearing a stage, only to fumble at the last moment. It might be because I got greedy and was convinced I could pull a three-fer, or it might be that one of the last victims had gone into full on panic (indicated by a red flashing bar over their heads) and decided to kill the killer. And it might just be some random thing I couldn’t have predicted. In all cases, I’d utter a short curse and press the button to reload the stage and try again.

It wasn’t a perfect experience, though, as there were a few glitches here and there. On one stage, if I killed the drummer of the band before the singer, the cop who arrived would accuse the singer, and then lock up trying to sort out a path around the drum kit. This was a repeatable glitch, and the only way to reset the cop was getting close enough to get his attention, which resulted in arrests and restarts every time. The other glitch involved a final party-goer who somehow got stuck in a walking cycle on top of a tree, and nothing I could do could get him down. So I had to reload and start again.

Then there’s the final level, which spawns a pair of federal agents, and these guys are pure bullshit. Even sneaking up on their backs and stabbing them did nothing. They would kick out in front of themselves, and even though the killer was behind them, he would still go down. I won the game by way of dumb luck because I’d set up a trap for a guard, and the two agents spawned and ran right past me to both take the blast face first. But before that? I’d had maybe twenty runs, every one of them ending to those assholes curb stomping my killer.

Setting those complaints and lamentations aside, Party Hard was a surprisingly good time in spite of its difficulty. The story is bog standard horror fare, so if you’ve watched a few films, odds are you’ll figure it out long before the final cut scene spells it out for you. The acting is hammy, but eh, its mimicking B horror films, so that’s fine, too.

I’ll give Party Hard 4 stars and recommend it to folks looking for something chaotic, absurd, and utterly addicting. It’s definitely worth your time if you can learn to embrace the chaos and become one with your hockey mask sporting madman.

Game review: Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun

Let’s just get one thing out of the way first: I don’t really care much for stealth games. As a mechanic added to other games, it’s…mostly fine, though still quite badly implemented. Pick any example you like: Fallout, Skyrim, Far Cry, Horizon: Zero Dawn; they’re all the same. You shoot one dude in a camp, and all his buddies jump up to start searching for the killer…for 30 seconds. Then they all say something dumb like “Guess it was just the wind.” Yes, it was just the wind that put an arrow in your buddy’s skull.

Pure stealth takes away all other options and tells players, “No, you do it my way or you’ll die horribly over and over.” But it still falls back on the thirty second search and forget formula, so all it takes to win is buttloads of patience and save scrubbing.

But as I’ve mentioned before, our connection is slow due to technical difficulties and keeping me from the games I want to play and review. I saw Epic Games Store had a summer sale going on, and I figured why not get something out of my comfort zone? It had controller support, and a tactical stealth game certainly seemed like it had potential.

Enter this week’s hit piece, Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, or as I prefer to call it, Bobble-head Assassins: Scrub Savers of the Shogun. Before I really get into the negativity, I will point out the things I thought were nice. Just know that it’s a real short list of likes before I dive right into a full-on hate rant.

So, first, this game manages to do something that few others even bother with, character development. The protagonists often talk to each other during their missions, getting a feel for each other in ways that feel natural and well written. Since I’m down on so much of this game, I need to pinpoint why this is so different. Take as an example Diablo Immortal, a game I’ve praised for having that lovely “one more quest” feeling. But every character interaction is the same pattern. “Hi, person I just met. We’re friends now.” And five minutes later? “No, person I barely know! Your death is so tragic to me because we were such close friends.” Feh. So when in a much later mission, a character says, “I’ll do it because he’s my friend,” I can believe it because the writers did the work to show me their relationship growing. That’s damned impressive in video game writing, y’all.

The graphics are nice, with the game played in an isometric presentation that makes it relatively easy to sort out who are bad guys, heroes, and hostile or friendly civilians. The music, while not really period specific, is pleasant and helps make each level feel distinctive.

It’s a shame then, that everything else going on with this hot mess ruins the good things it had going for it. I’d say I don’t know where to start, but I do. Because the game was made with Unity, it has a tendency to crash VERY frequently. Most of the time, a crash leads to an empty error box that just says “Oops!” But just this once, I got the very illuminating error message: “The game has crashed. The Game.” Yes, that explains everything, thank you.

I think the game’s constant prompting to quick save (a prompt I turned off shortly into the first mission because I don’t care to have a flashing timer keep reminding me to save scrub. I’ll do it in my own time, game.) is partly a workaround to save people too many headaches from crashes. For me, it was always at the worst time, like finally getting a guard to go along with my intricate plan to kill him, only to stare in horror as the lag spike began, followed by another crash or hard lock. So, no save for me, and it’s back to the grind for another ten to twenty attempts to get the finicky guard to die in the exact moment I need him to before his comrade can turn around and spot his gurgling, crumpling body.

Okay, let me stop there and establish the plot. It’s the Edo period, and the Shogun has won the big war, bringing peace to the land. But a secret rebel group wants to go back to war because “War…it’s FANTASTIC!” Okay, it’s more like, “We are men of war, and we have nothing else to do now that we’re at peace.” Which sounds dumb, but given the period, I can go along with it without even so much as minor lamentation. Plus, the rest of the story helps to hold this premise up in an admirable way.

The game starts at the final battle, where the player takes control of Hayato, a Shinobi working for the Shogun behind enemy lines. The tutorial moves along at a mostly decent pace before Hayato meets Mugen, the Shogun’s most loyal Samurai. They team up and there’s more tutorial about coordinating attacks and timing before they meet Takuma, an elderly sniper who is quite conveniently placed to aid in solving the level’s trickiest puzzles.

On the controller, lining up these coordinated kills is made possible with Shadow Mode. After pressing up on the D-pad, each character can be moved around and given one other action. This can also be tricky, because after say killing three guards, the characters have to be controlled separately to pick up and hide the bodies. Given the very short patrol routes of the guards, even using Shadow Mode can require timing so exact as to be measured in quarter seconds.

From the tutorial collecting the crew together, you might think the game planned to build up to using all five of the characters shown on the starting screen, but no, that’s not what this game wants to do. In the next mission, Hayato wanders off on his own to spy on rebels shipping guns in secret, where he meets a little thief girl named Yuki. Together, they have to wipe out a lot of rebels before Mugen can show up. (And in the end, I felt really bad for Yuki having to kill so many dudes in a time period where PTSD therapy hadn’t been invented yet.)

In the mission after that, Mugen meets up with Aiko, and as close as I can get to describing her profession is courtesan. Her disguises allow her to slip through some secure areas, but because she always has to find a kimono from the area instead of just bringing a disguise along, she is frequently more of a hindrance until the game starts offering three persons squads. After that, it’s Yuki and Takuma on a mission together, and so on and so forth until you’re finally allowed to play with a three person squad.

In only one level are all five characters used, and because the makers thought that big ass team was so unfair to their hundred enemy army, they stripped out most of the terrain that might give even slight advantages to the squad. The sniper is set up on a hill where trees and rocks will block 90 percent of the map, there’s no shrubs for the others to hide in, no disguises for Aiko, too much space between buildings and patrols for Yuki to lay her taps and bait them using her whistle, and too many mixed rifle men and samurai patrol squads for Mugen to be of any help. But right after this, the game gets rid of Mugen altogether, and it forces players to fight with no weapons and even tighter security than the previous level.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself again, but it’s because I wanted to cover the story and characters rather than jump right into the rest of the mess. So, now where do I begin? First of all, people don’t walk with their heads constantly swiveling left and right. It might be argued that an alerted guard might walk like that after he’s been spooked. But even old ladies doing their laundry walk around searching the environment like bobble heads set up in a car slaloming along an eternal obstacle course. It’s a terrible idea that I haven’t even seen in pure stealth games like Metal Gear.

For the vast majority of the game, villages don’t feel lived in. There might be one or two civilians tossed in to pay lip service to the idea of a village, but the rest are all guards and samurai. It isn’t until very late in the game that a village is presented with a more realistic balance of guards to villagers, and that level stands out precisely because it’s so different from the previous uninspired designs. I’d even go so far as to say I was having fun playing that one level. Too bad that couldn’t last.

Every level, the game has the characters talk out ideas about how to solve the puzzles to get to their targets, but the suggested solutions are often too finicky to be done without memorizing elaborate walking patterns for everyone. Some of you may like trying to remember the movements of ten or twenty people in an area of the map, but I can barely remember to get five items at the grocery store with a list in hand. So instead of going with whatever clever plan the game wanted me to do, I just poked at the defenses to find the “lynchpin guard” who would allow me to kill everyone else until I reached my goal. That’s a long, slow, tedious process, and sometimes ended with me killing everyone. No, like everyone, even the civilians.

The thing is, almost every level sets up a main goal, and then once that has been done, there’s a cut scene that goes, “Okay, that happened, so now we have to do another thing.” As an example, one mission had me tracking a rogue Daimyo, and the first goal was to get my whole crew up to a certain hiding spot. In my head, I had a aplan for the sniper to save his grenade because I was going to toss it at the Daimyo. But then the cut scene had the sniper climb some scaffolding and kick down the ladder, taking him out of range for bomb chucking. What I wanted to do and what the game wanted me to do were at odds, and this was quite often the case.

Oh, and a lot of the enemy units have dialogue to show they’re evil, which would be fine if it played once. Let me give you an example.

Drunk Guard: Hey! Get over here! Bring more sake!
Frazzled Tavern Worker: I’m sorry! We had to bring up another barrel.
Drunk Guard: Do I look like I care? When I call, you come running!

That shit loops every thirty seconds. So imagine having to sort out a tricky order of who to kill and when, and how, and this motherfucker is whining twice a fucking minute. Which is why I decided to turn down the voice volume and keep it off right up until the game’s ending scene. I have to ask, who play-tested this, listened to this drivel over and over and said, ”This is fine.” Because it was easily one of the main reasons the early levels were so horrible.

Lastly, there’s the ridiculous plot armor fitted around taking down the samurai. They can’t be trapped, or tricked by tossed rocks. Without Mugen to fight them, the standard method is having one character shoot them, and then having another move in for a melee attack. It’s bullshit. Samurai do not wear kevlar, and bullets should kill them just like anyone else. But it goes beyond that. Even in a crowd, samurai can spot Aiko in her disguise. HOW? Do they have perfect visual recall of every civilian in town? It’s all just layers of plot armor to make them harder mini-boss level nuisances.

In conclusion, I’ll tell you the answer to the question that both my husband and sister-in-law asked, “If you hated it that much, why play it?” There are two reasons. The first is that with all the online games I wanted to review being off the table, I desperately wanted to have something to post. I absolutely hated that stretch of time where I only made a post every two months or so, and I like making this a once a week habit. So I reviewed this game start to finish, for you. And you’re welcome.

But the other reason is, by the midway point, I wanted to finish so I could see how the story ended. The writing quality was so good that even as I suffered through level after level of slow grinding death, I stuck with it to find out who the real bad guy was, and if he got properly murdered.

And you know, there were some cute moments, like finding an illusory wall with a bonfire behind it that triggered an achievement called Praise the Shogun. (Cute Dark Souls reference.) There were moments when I used the games shadow mode to make a perfectly timed attack, raising my left hand to count down; four, three, two, one, before pressing Y to set off the plan. Once I confirmed I got away with it, I’d start shouting that one meme: “Perfect! perfect perfect perfect!” Then I’d get right back to wrestling with all the stuff that made those small drip-fed moments of fun so hard to remember.

And you know, I’m sure there’s a taget audience who thinks all the thing that annoyed me are their brand of fun. That’s totally fair, but to thos folks, I’d ask, “And the game crashing every hour or so? Is that also fun? Or how about glitches like Shadow Mode just stops working for a while, and not even a quit and restart can bring it back. Is is fun to be unable to use a game’s most important feature at random? How about enemies who can see and shoot through walls as another random glitch?”

None of that is fun, and it further detracts from what was already a slog for me. That’s why I’m giving Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun 2 stars, and I would only recommend it to die hard fans of the genre who are slightly masochistic enough to play through all the crashes and bugs.

What has always been, and will always be bad about always online games

You may know from my recent blog posts and my Twitter stream that I have been playing Path of Exile. You may have also heard that this week there was a freak flood in Milan that involved hail and a “river of ice.” These two things may not seem related, except the local server for Path of Exile is in Milan.

In an update post, I’d already written how problems with TIM, our internet provider, had forced me to take several days off from the game. But this latest problem with the flood isn’t just affecting Path of Exile. No, I can’t play a single online game right now because bad weather has reduced our online speeds back to “digital dirt road” levels.

I’m not knocking TIM, because even if they have some slow times, they are rarely down and gone for any length of time. I’m not even knocking Path of Exile itself, as it’s been a pretty good time. (Although the last act I played was pretty unbalanced, with a boss fight so terrible, I was shouting “That should have been a cut scene!”) No, this time I want to talk about how this current local disaster highlights the logical flaw in pushing for all games to be always online or live services.

First, the flood wasn’t the only thing stopping me from mainlining Path of Exile. In the days leading up to ExileCon, there have been several DDOS attacks that forced me to quit for a few hours or the rest of the day. But this flood was bad, taking our high speed connection back down to the kind of crawl we had with our ADSL connection. Which makes sense. We might have a wireless modem, but the signal travels along towers back to a wired hub, and that hub is smack dab in the middle of the latest freak weather event.

However, this time, the downtime also made it impossible to play Diablo Immortal, which has previously proved stable even with speeds that made Path of Exile laugh and boot me back to the login screen. Then I thought what I could play instead. Fall Guys? Nope, always online. Fortnite? Nope. Elder Scrolls Online? No. Fallout 76? (There was a sale for 9 Euros, so hubby and I both got it.) Also a no. Even my go-to good time, Dark Souls has an always online component. Yeah, I can put that one in offline mode, but I kind of like the potential to be invaded, or to summon a partner if a boss proves too difficult for my current build. (Fucking FromSoftware Clerics, man, am I right?)

I looked over my current library of games, many of which I’d like to review, and almost all of them are currently unplayable. I actually let out a sigh of relief to see Epic Games Store had a summer sale, giving me the chance to buy a single player offline game to review next week. Everything else has to wait until TIM can repair the damage done during the flood.

So, contrast this reality with the gaming industry’s desire for more live service and always online games. For that matter, contrast this reality with the push for digital only titles that need to check in with a server to run, or with game streaming services.

What they all have in common is an industry that takes the Internet for granted. They treat it like some kind of endless resource that never goes down, and that kind of thing doesn’t exist. A storm comes and power lines go down, creating a blackout. A gas main explodes, and a city goes without heating or hot water. A water main bursts, and thousands of folks suddenly have to run to the store just to keep a supply of fresh drinking water. That’s reality. There is no infinite resource.

The fact is, we need single player games for those times when the Internet shuts down, or at least gets so jammed that we can’t play online. And please understand, I’m not saying we need all games to have a single player mode. There’s a lot of fun to be found in multiplayer FPS and RPG games, and also in MMORPGs.

But when the shit hits the digital fan and those aren’t options, we still need something to play as an alternative. Otherwise we might think about how that flood last week is coinciding with a massive infrastructure meltdown due to record temperatures a few provinces away, mass forest fires, flash flooding, and the general rapid decline of the human race due to corporate hubris and governmental indifference.

Welp, that got dark quickly. Anywho, see you next week.

Versus series: Diablo Immortal PC VS Phone

This topic completely slipped my mind for several weeks, and I really could have used it last week. But between juggling Path of Exile, two Fallout games, and playing the new Blood Knight class on Diablo Immortal, I’d completely forgotten that I’d been planning to pit the phone version with the perpetually Beta PC version.

This time around the winner is easy to declare, with lots of reasons why I prefer it. But that doesn’t mean I shun the other option. The winner, PC version, has so many benefits going for it that I place it with a comfortable lead over the phone version. But having said that, I still frequently play the phone version, quite often as a diversion for when I’m in the bathroom. (I’m old, so even peeing takes longer now.)

Plus the phone has another good thing going for it: the size of updates to download are much smaller than the PC version. Obviously, all the graphics are down-scaled for the little screen, so if I fire up the game on the can and see it needs an update, odds are good that the game’s download will be done before my download is done, metaphorically speaking.

But yeah, aside from that, there’s quite a few reasons why the PC version is superior, and right at the top are those gorgeous up-scaled graphics. The game looks great on the phone, but on a big monitor, it’s a joy to see all the detailed work that went into every town, every dungeon, and every character and enemy. I even love following other players just to take in all the details in their equipment.

But what I really love is how much easier the controls are. I can use my controller for fighting and looting, but when it comes to fiddling with menus, I can just sit up to grab my mouse, and the game is like, “Sure, whatever works for you.”

I need to stress this point because for instance, Path of Exile will only let me use the mouse and keyboard or the controller.  Oh, it leaves the mouse cursor on, implying that I should be able to use it. But no, it’s as useless as a defense attorney for Jason Voorhees. Same goes for any 3d Fallout game. I either use the keyboard to get access to console commands, or I give that up in exchange for the joy of lounging back in my super comfy gaming chair. (Which is mostly fantastic, except it’s too comfy, and I have frequently fallen asleep on it when I was supposed to be working.)

Beyond that, there’s more precision to the combat using a controller. A lot of abilities require aiming a cone in the area where you want that ability to be cast. On the phone, that means holding the on-screen button and sliding your thumb to aim. But at least for me, quite often the aim would slide off of my target when I lift my thumb from the screen. On the controller, I can still keep aiming at my target with the right stick and release the shoulder or trigger button mapped to the ability. I’m not saying I haven’t missed a few smaller targets due to last second moves of the right stick, but my miss-to-hit ratio is WAY higher on the phone version.

Before I conclude, I want to mention three places where both versions are good, and one where they both suck. First, the sound quality with headphone on both versions are exquisite. The music is lovely, the spells and weapon sound effects are punchy and crunchy in all the right ways, and almost every enemy has distinct sounds letting you know what’s coming even before they’re bum rushing you. (They’re a few silent bastards lying in wait for ambushes. We’ll call them the smart ones.)

Second, the online components for both versions work quite well, with very little lag except in the busiest places like Westmarch. At any time, I can choose to find a party for a dungeon or rift or raid, and whether I’m playing with a team of four or eight, the experience is smooth as butter. Yes, I’ve seen lag on some occasions, but only for a few seconds at a time before everything goes back to normal. Whether I choose to go solo or bring some random strangers along, the connection is rock solid. Considering how many other online games that I have to close down and wait through high traffic hours to play, this is pretty close to a technological miracle.

Third, both versions always keep the current time on screen. That great because all the side questing and “one more thing has a huge risk of making me forget tom take out the trash or make dinner, or do my real work. So it’s nice to think, Is it okay to do this quest? look down, and confirm, no it is not.

But, there is one thing that sucks in both versions, and that’s the near constant push toward the storefront. Every time you beat a boss or open a new area, the game pops up a little flashing beacon, and opening it reveals the annoying message “A one-time bundle is available in the shop.” Now as I mentioned in my review, I don’t have free cash, so it’s easy for me to click the little X without even looking at what’s in the bundle. But setting that aside, it’s still annoying that every ten minutes of gaming leads to another freaking pop-up ad for those bundles.

And it also bugs me, the use of “one-time.” Like, people who genuinely suffer from FOMO have to keep taking time out of playing the game to check the shop and debate whether or not they need the crap they’re being sold. But they don’t need it to enjoy the main game, and even a good bit of the end game content. No one needs it, but to make sure they catch them some whales, the developers felt it was essential to constantly shove that store in our faces like an unrequested dick pic from a geriatric politician.

Anyway, that’s the verdict and the reasons given, plus a bit of TMI. I’m not sure what the next contest will be for the versus series, so for now, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time.

Procrastination update…

I’m closing in on the second week without a post, and it’s a combination of issues preventing me from getting out a proper review, for games or for manga. So rather than just try to power through without an update, I’ll tell y’all some of what’s going on.

Obviously, one of the main issues is this freakin’ heat combined with random drops in temperature following rain storms. This has always been a problem for me, but lately, it’s sent me to bed for long, long naps. The last one saw me go to bed at a normal 1 AM and wake up at 5 PM the next day. It’s kinda hard to stay on schedule when my body keeps going, “Or we could nap.”

So, first of all, I’ve been playing Path of Exile. I’ve tried it before in the past, but long load times plus our crap internet connection made it nigh-impossible to review fairly. Yet, even with a much better connection, there have been many times where the game is unplayable due to lag. This problem is unique to PoE, as I was able to fire up other online games and still use them. So maybe they just have bad net code or something.

The thing is, I’ve been waiting out the lag to complete the third act, mainly because I owed some payback to a certain boss who teleported away from our first encounter when I got them down to a sliver of health. I’m glad I didn’t give up because the dungeons leading to that boss followed by their boss were just fantastic gaming all around. But there’s still four more acts to get through before I can review the game, and it remains to be seen if the review will be a rant about always online gaming being a bad idea even for brilliant games, or it that will just be a side note to an otherwise positive gush fest. If every act has to be paused for upwards of four days due to minor internet hiccups, it will be a shame, because in most ways, PoE is an amazing game that starts out looking like a Diablo clone and then goes off to do its own thing with style to spare.

Moving on, I’ve been wanting to try modding Fallout 4 using the unofficial bug-fix patch for ages, and this wasn’t possible without buying all the DLC. Well I got the DLC, and in addition to the patch, I chose a few other mods to tweak the game in little ways. What’s followed is possibly one of the most broken runs I’ve ever had in Fallout 4. One quest had to be abandoned because the NPC I needed to escort kept freezing at the door of their starting room. Another had an NPC go through the same dialogue leading to the end of the quest, pausing, and then running back to a terminal to do it again. Then one of the mods meant to reduce the thickness of fog bjorked and turned everything except the sky white, and the only way to fix that was delete two hours of save files and disable the mod. (Seriously, it somehow retroactively broke save files before the  bug occurred.)

I’m debating about whether to expand on this in a post because one, a Bethesda game being a broke POS isn’t exactly a news break; and two because the folks who make these mods do so for free, and they can’t possibly account for every hardware and graphics configuration. Still, it is frustrating to finally get to try mods, only to have them blow up quite spectacularly. I dunno. Maybe one day I’ll try the Frost mod with nothing else added, just to see if I can review that.

And finally, I’ve been reading Chainsaw Man, which has had some pretty glowing reviews. That was the main reason I tried it, and I have to be honest and say it isn’t working for me. There’s a really squicky aspect to it, something I’m surprised wasn’t mention in most reviews. Yes, eventually that thing becomes explained in later issues, but even so it still left me less than enthusiastic to read anything past the first arc. Beyond that, I’m struggling on how to review it without major spoilers. It’s a difficult situation because the squick that put me off is already many chapters in, and the supposed payoff is a massive spoiler. But at the same time, I really feel like writing something on it, because so many reviews are like “Oh, this manga is action/gore perfection!” and I’m over here thinking, Seriously? No one’s going to mention the squicky elephant in the room?

I hope to break the slump next week, but with it already being Friday, I’ll make no promises. I wish I could just pick up a quick indie game to play and post a review for, but the last three I got, I bounced out hard. The most recent was Carrion,  and I bounced because both the controller and mouse methods of playing were so finicky that I kept getting killed just trying to escape the first area. (Which continues my streak of Devolver Digital games that I like the idea of, but kinda hate the execution.)

Anyway, we’ll see how next week shapes up, and thanks for reading my stuff.

Game review: Diablo Immortal for Android and PC

Once upon a time, back when forums were individually moderated communities instead of corporate hoarded content farms, someone I respected told me not to read a certain book series because it was awful and everything wrong with the publishing industry specifically and in the universe in general. I read the first book and reported that actually, I kind of liked it. “Oh,” they said, “just read the second, and you’ll see why it’s a dumpster fire with extra grease.” So I read that book, and then kinda like grew into love. This ping pong of assurances that I would hate the next books and my rebuttals that they were awesome led me to being a vocal fan of the series, to which another fan base declared that I was everything wrong with the universe in general. The books they stanned for were so much more superior, and besides that, the writer of my books was a homophobe.

(The author of their beloved books later wrote more books that suggested they might be slightly racist, and then publicly came out as a transphobe, leading some of said fan base to write very long articles about whether it was okay to separate art from artist. Which, if I were pushed on that subject, I think it’s okay for anyone to decide that. I just find it funny that I was expected not to make that distinction for the thing I loved, but now they need me and everyone else to understand that they like the art, not the asshole behind it. Aaaaand I digress.)

This leads me to the HUGE wall of hate surrounding Diablo Immortal, a game subcontracted from Blizzard to NetEase Games, but which bears a striking resemblance to the newly released Diablo IV in terms of how the always online features and battle pass work. The hate for this game stems from many flaws, both within the game itself, and with the parent company that’s been revealed as Not A Very Nice Place To Work, all of which is valid criticism. So even though I knew there was a PC version, I said, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so I’m gonna stick with the lynch mob on this one and avoid that game like the plague.”

But then time passed, and I got a new phone that could play all the shiny big games that my previous phones couldn’t (because apparently the difference between three and four gigabytes of RAM is a very big deal) and I decided to just give it a chance. I named my first character AynGonaLasLong because I expected to dip in and bounce out, as I had with so many mobile games.

Didn’t happen. No, I played the first three areas of the game, and then I started again with a different character class. I got that new character up to around the same level, and then I started another, and then another. Then I installed the PC version and linked my account to allow me to choose where to play. I’ve since then filled my whole roster, and even deleted a character class to sample another. Most of my characters are level forty-five to fifty, but I got one up to a Paragon level of one hundred and beat the main campaign. I’m still playing on Hell I difficulty, but that’s only because I haven’t been able to find the right time to join a raid to unlock Hell II. I’ve played hundreds of hours and technically have beaten the game, so know that what I’m about to say comes from a deep, deep pool of research.

I fucking love Diablo Immortal.

Whew. Okay, with that out of the way, let me scuttle some debate points right now. First of all, I cannot enthusiastically encourage everyone to play the game because yes, it is a mobile game, and yes, it has certain practices that might prey upon folks with addictive personalities, or those who are prone to throw cash at a digital object rather than deal with slow grinds. I don’t have to worry about that because being broke, I ain’t gonna buy any loot or currency. I will be tossing the developers €5.99 for the battle pass, but not because I want what’s in the pass. I just think that after getting a couple hundred hours of fun out of the game, those developers should get a little something from me to say, “Thanks for the laughs.”

Next, I can acknowledge that the story is crap. But, to be fair, I play a lot of games where I love the gameplay loop, but I cringe every time a “brilliant” plot point is revealed. This game features a whole lot of the same recycled ideas, and it has the balls to repeat them. You want examples? Here’s two:

We need to cast a spell to do the thing, so go gather three MacGuffins and return them to me so I can do the thing. Oh, great, you’ve got the things. What? The spell didn’t work. Oh, you need another MacGuffin to fix the spell. Fetch quest, doggy! Okay, now we do the spell. It didn’t work? Must need another fetch quest.My former pupil/friend has rebelled and now leads an army against us while hoarding the MacGuffin of great importance. We must work together to stop them, so let me run up ahead to set up a cut scene. Oh noes! I’m not strong enough to defeat them. You’ll have to do it and stop them from doing the thing. Oh noes, they did the thing! You must stop them in a boss fight.

On that second point, I hate traveling with someone who’s supposed to be a badass, but mostly they just stand by and watch me do all the work. Even if they do attack something, their abilities all pack the power of a super wet spitball.

Toward the end of the game, the new antagonist Skarn even pulls out the old chestnut, “You’ve done everything according to my plan.” Really? So you planned for me to storm your fortress, slaughter your whole army and royally kick your ass? Because if that was your plan all along, it’s a pretty stupid plan. (Side note: Remember in Borderlands 2, Handsome Jack says, “You think I’d protect Angel with just some robots and a couple turrets?” And then he reveals Bunk-3R…a robot with a couple of turrets bolted onto it. So, remind me again why so many game writers think this idiot is really a genius? Aaaaaaaaaaaaand I digress yet again.)

And finally, for a game that’s constantly pushing players to join clans, warbands, and factions, there are a lot of dungeons and boss fights where I get separated from everyone else for “solo story” sections. Frankly, it’s a terrible design choice. I might be more annoyed by it, except I’d already played a hundred hours solo before deciding to try the multiplayer offerings, and I was fine with going solo no matter what the game threw at me. It still doesn’t change the fact that a major feature of the game keeps getting broken intentionally for no good reason.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in to why I loved Diablo Immortal to the point that none of these flaws could shake me off of the path to Play Everything. I need to start with AynGonaLasLong, a Crusader who was out of my usual comfort zone for a starting class. I picked her precisely because I wanted to see if they could make me like a class I wouldn’t normally play, and they did.

The tutorial starts out with just the main attack button, adding four other attacks slowly to ease players into the flow of combat. Then they toss in healing potions, which are limited to three, but can be refilled through attacks or opening treasure chests. (After learning this, I developed a habit of topping off my health bar before opening any treasure chests.) Then the Ultimate Attack is added, a charging meter that unlocks a more powerful primary attack that’s usually pretty great for dealing with large mobs or bosses.

The first bosses are stupidly easy, so even if they do hit the character, their attacks do so little damage that they might as well not bother fighting. But once the tutorial is done and the kid gloves come off, the bosses get a lot better. One early dungeon crawl features three bosses on three separate floors, and they’re all great. The second boss shows up under a glass floor, clawing and pounding at the character like they can’t get through, and it’s a visual treat that hasn’t gotten old even after I’d seen it a hundred times. (Boss dungeons can be replayed for extra XP for characters and for their season pass, so I played that same dungeon almost daily to be able to earn gold and platinum. Sometimes, I even went back in right after beating it. It’s just that good, in my opinion.)

New skills unlock at certain levels, and while I do still prefer a proper skill tree over this kind of ability swapping, most new abilities are fun to experiment with. Then the game tosses in Legendary gear, which modifies the way abilities work. One for the barbarian class changes their hammer strike to summon a giant spectral warrior to fight alongside the character. There’s one for the wizard that changes their relatively weak air blast into a slow moving tornado that follows enemies and does damage over time. The demon hunter’s spinning volley of crossbow bolts can be upgraded to a ridiculously OP shower of grenades. All of these modifications encourage experimentation and most are pretty damned fun.

As an added bonus, if you find an ability you love and don’t want to give it up, you can visit a vendor to extract it and then inherit it onto a stronger piece of gear. Since the extraction option stores abilities without taking up inventory space, you don’t have to worry about losing them, and that means there’s no harm in trying new modifications even after finding something that makes you grin every time you drop an entire horde with that One Perfect Shot.

New tasks and side hustles are doled out alongside new powers, including the Bounties Board, Horadric Bestiary, Elder Rift, Challenge Rift, and Demon Raids. A lot of the reason I didn’t whip through the main story is because these side jobs became an almost daily habit once I realized I could earn three hundred platinum coins for completing these daily tasks. Those platinum coins can be used to buy gems from other players at the market, or to buy crests to power the Elder Rift dungeons, but I needed three thousand to make my own clan. (Which I named iDonWanaClan and added all my alternate characters to so other players would stop inviting me to join their clans.)

The thing is, some days, I earned 900 coins because I just went on that hamster wheel, doing nothing but daily tasks. Not because I had to for the grind, either. I did it because I genuinely loved just grabbing a job and getting shit done. Clear out sixty werewolves? Sure, why not? It’s time to go kick King Leoric’s ass for extra XP? That punk and his minions are going down again, buddy. Oh look, I unlocked another Legendary Crest, so it’s back to the Elder Rift for another run with a randomly generated party.

I cannot stress enough that I like the core loop so much that I didn’t even think about finishing the game for the longest time. The only reason I finally did think about it was when I started contemplating writing a review, and then a little nagging voice said, “But can you properly review it if you haven’t seen the end of the main quest?” So I took my barbarian to the final area in Hell, and I tracked down Skarn and whooped him real good. Only, that wasn’t the ending. I still had one more mission unlock in Hell I difficulty, brokering a peace treaty and removing a curse that was covered earlier in the main quest line. Then the little quest tracker said I’d beaten the main game and changed the new quest to Reach Hell III difficulty. Despite me not yet reaching Hell II, I actually want to get there because it will unlock new areas and quests. So even if I have to grind and find a good time to schedule Demon Raids, I’m pretty sure I’ll do it with at least two or three of my characters.

Diablo II was one of those games that I sunk thousands of hours into, but Diablo III broke me long before I got to the season ladders or Hell difficulty content. It just didn’t grab me the same way. So when Diablo Immortal came out, and even when Diablo IV started showing off sneak peaks at gameplay, I wasn’t swayed. Obviously you can imagine my genuine surprise that Diablo Immortal has rekindled my love for the franchise. It’s because I loved this game that I was willing to try the Diablo IV server slam, and it’s why I’ll be getting Diablo IV once they sort out some balance issues and the level of XP earned through daily play. I mean, seriously, a freakin’ mobile game has me wanting to buy a different game in the same franchise just because they share some online similarities. That’s just crazy.

And lest I forget and leave this out, it’s so cool that I can close the game on my PC, take my phone to the laundromat, and open the game to keep playing the same character. I wish all games would do that, building a mobile version with downgraded assets that you could download with a special code after buying the game for PC or console. Then whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted, I could play the thing I love. What a beautiful world that would be to live in. (*sniffle*)

We arrive to scoring, and I’ve already laid out the flaws in Diablo Immortal. Even so, I can’t bring myself to give it any less than 5 stars. I can’t think of any other game in recent memory where I got off the main story and just wandered around doing busy work because I loved the grind. If a game can make me love something I normally consider a chore blocking my progress through the plot, that’s not just a good job. It’s a genuine miracle. So yeah, I’m gonna spend €5.99 at least once to pay the developers for making this game, and hell, I might even buy another pass later because I want them to know I think the game is worth a bit of cash now and then.

Would I recommend it to everyone? No, because if you’ve got gambling habits or inclinations to spend too much on predatory digital tat, I wouldn’t want you to put yourself in any financial risk. All I can say is, I went in knowing I would hate it because everyone said I would, and I’m coming to you and saying I couldn’t be more in love with this amazing hamster wheel. Ain’t love a hell of a thing?

Manga Review: Mashle – Magic and Muscles by Hajime Kōmoto

Mashle – Magic and Muscles (Henceforth shortened to just Mashle) first hit my public radar with the launch of the collected chapters here in Italy. When I read the premise in Wiki, I wrote it off as a Harry Potter knockoff. That was a mistake because while Mashle is a parody of Harry Potter, Mash Burndead is more closely related to Goku than he is to JK Rowling’s now massively saturated franchise. (Bee tee dubs: I’ll be referencing Dragonball a lot for this review.) What’s more, Mash Burndead proves over and over that while he’s lacking in the brains department, he has so much heart power that even his enemies are eventually swayed by his convictions.

So, let’s set the stage with some minor spoilers from the first chapter. Mash Burndead is a person without magic in a world where everyone has an affinity for it to some degree. This is because people born without magic are killed at birth. But Mash was found abandoned by a magicless hermit in a forest and hidden away from the world. His Pops began training him to be at peak physical condition in case he needed to defend himself, and as the story opens, teenage Mash’s workout routine is…it’s a lot.

After finishing his staggeringly impressive morning workout, Mash decides to go into town to buy cream puffs, where he is identified as someone lacking magic. When a detective shows up at Pops’ cottage to deal with him, Mash simply swats away his spells. Impressed by his level of physical strength, the detective suggests that if Mash wants to keep himself and his Pops safe, he will enter magic school and become the Divine Visionary, an honor bestowed upon one student every year for being the most powerful magic user. The detective’s logic is that if Mash can reach this hallowed peak in the wizard world, everyone will have to accept him. And so hilarious hijinks ensue.

The comedy is what initially pulled me through binge reading the first chapters, waiting through the smaller chuckles to get to the one really hilarious punchline. (Sometimes even involving an actual punch as their punctuation…punchuation? I digress.) Mash passes his first entrance exam by literally intimidating a magic spell into compliance. He makes it into the school and soon makes friends with Finn Raymes and Dot Barrett. Finn is very much a Ronald Weasley  mixed with Krillin. He’s the only one who can see Mash move at superhuman speeds, so as the villains of each chapter ask “How is he beating me?” Finn is narrating internally how each trick was accomplished.

Meanwhile Dot has no Harry Potter equivalent, but he is a bit like Piccolo. At first a rival to Mash, Dot hates all “pretty boys” because they are hoarding all the ladies. (Compared to the school’s many truly pretty boys, Mash is kinda plain.) Dot wants to see himself as the main character of the story, but can’t escape his place as a sidekick and so eventually accepts it. Normally he’s not that powerful, but when motivated by the right emotion, his power level can spike to challenge enemies normally way above his pay grade. You know, like Piccolo.

There’s so many other characters I could gush about, but they’re all spoilers that should be enjoyed as they arrive. What’s important to note is how each new arrival is dismissive of Mash until he trounces them. Then he either helps pick them up off the ground, or when another magic user tries to exterminate them, Mash trashes that new arrival, AND THEN helps pick up the wizard they just saved. And that kind of heroism blows each character’s mind. Even if they were just bad mouthing him, he has such respect for them and their point of view that he ends up converting them to his team. You know, like Goku does with so many of his enemies.

I’m up to chapter 100 of 170, and by that point, Mash’s origins have already been revealed, and it’s a nifty twist indeed. Also, at these later chapters, every threat has reached the point that Mash is being genuinely tested rather than treating the fights as an endless cake walk. Because I’m binging this, I expect to reach the current chapter in a few days, at which point, I’ll be forced to read chapters as they come out, and man, that’s gonna be some low-level torture, for sure.

The art style is somewhat similar to One Punch Man, in that lots of scenes are very detailed and dynamic until some point when Mash has a simpleton moment, and the artist plays up his dumbness by simplifying all the details around him. It’s cute, and adds a lot of charm to the jokes in these moments.

I give Mashle – Magic and Muscles an enthusiastic 5 stars, and I would recommend it to fans of superhero comics who like a bit of levity blended in with their boss fights and drama. I really want to gush more about all the characters and the best fights, but again, that’s the kind of spoilers that would ruin both the action and the jokes. So get on Manga PLUS and add this to your favorites, or get them in the collected print versions. Either way, it’s a great story with plenty of surprises in store.