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Vidya Game Reviews, The Redux; you know what to do
Topic Started: Dec 16 2013, 07:58 PM (1,560 Views)
Olinea
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Game: Xenoblade Chronicles X
Platform: Nintendo WiiU
Genre: RPG
Aliases: “Oh, that fucking game”

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After looking at my WiiU and realizing I only actually owned two games (Smash and Splatoon) for it, I figured I'd probably like to turn that purchase into more than a Smash machine and set out for something new to add to it. Xenoblade drew my eye because I'd heard great things about the series (mostly from Gil) and because, working nights, oftentimes I can be up at hours of the night where nobody's up for multiplayer. Skyrim was growing old and after almost 800 hours in Borderlands 2 I'd achieved basically all it had to offer. It seemed like a game I could easily boot up for a little while after the Dota clan had dispersed for the night and I still had gas in the tank before bed.

As anyone who plays Dota knows, it didn't really end up like that.

Overview
Xenoblade Chronicles X is set on planet Mira in the year 2054. Warring alien races threatened the safety of Earth – but, fortunately, an enormous pioneer ship we had built named the “White Whale” carried the hope of the continuation of the human race as our planet was destroyed. The White Whale stayed in space for roughly two years before it was attacked and crashed into planet Mira.

You wake up as your avatar (you name and design them, but the player character is referred to as “Cross” outside the game, so I'll just call them “Cross) in a pod two months later, suffering from plot-convenient amnesia as you're rescued by a high-ranking officer named Elma. Together, the two of you navigate back to New LA, the home base of operations for humanity, and you learn about BLADE (Builders of the Legacy After the Destruction of Earth) and its different goals in securing humanity's future. Survival is not easy, and although the planet has a lot to offer, not everything (or everyone) is as willing to see the human race make its new home.

Gameplay
This section seems hard to write because it's an RPG and a comprehensive one at that, but let's try:

Xenoblade is played in a group of up to 4 characters at once. Cross is (obviously) forced to be in the party at all times, but you can take control of the other characters the game provides for you and let the AI use your character if you so desire. The main storyline will have you locked into using Cross, Elma, and Lin, a 13-year-old prodigy engineer, plus one other character of your choice (can be swapped out at any time), but between story missions you're free to use whoever you want. There's a large selection of partners you can choose: newbie soldier Gwin, the xenoform “L” who's fascinated with Earth culture, your pompous, self-proclaimed rival H.B., and others.

Characters differ in fighting styles through the weapons they use. Combat largely revolves around autoattacking with either your ranged or melee weapon and using “Arts” (probably better thought of as spells) with varying effects. Six class specs with their own weapons are available to you: the Samurai Gunner/Duelist uses longswords and assault rifles, Shield Trooper/Bastion Warrior uses shields and gatling guns, Winged Viper/Full Metal Jaguar use dual guns and dual swords, Partisan Eagle and Astral Crusader use sniper rifles and javelins, psycorruptor/mastermind use knives and rayguns, and Blast Fencer/Galactic Knight use photon sabers and psycho launchers. Each set of weapons has their own set of Arts tied to it which will dictate how you battle. The Raygun, for example, uses a lot of debuffing Arts meant to make your opponents more vulnerable to other attacks, while the Dual Swords have lots of Arts that increase in effectiveness depending on your positioning to the target. Cross can choose any class they want, and eventually after mastering the class (leveling it up enough), can freely use its weapons – so you can mix and match as you want. I preferred using my melee weapon, so I settled on a photon saber to provide lots of spammable melee Arts, and paired it with an assault rifle which had a few Arts that I'd grown used to having in my back pocket. Ultimately these classes and weapons are how you fight, so there are no conventional warriors, archers, mages, rogues, clerics, bards, or whatever the hell else – you mix them as you see fit. During the main story it'll take you awhile to fully level up and master your first chosen class, and switching to a new one might gimp you for awhile, but you can play at your own pace so don't really worry – the pairings that the classes give you by default all work well together. The non-Cross characters have one Class that they can't change from, but as long as Lin and Elma are at a decent level (and they probably will be) you're fine for the story mode.

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It doesn't make sense at a glance, but more pictures is a good thing.


What you do with the characters is very open-ended, but the RPG style is still present, so... there's a lot. Xenoblade takes place in an open world, and there's a lot to explore. One large appeal of the game is the diverse levels of monsters (called “indigens”) in the world, and their varying levels of hostility. Tiny squirrel creatures (“Mephites”) may attack you on sight, but dinosaurs 100x your size (“Millesaurs”) are content to drink from the lakes of Primordia and will leave you alone if you leave them alone. Even different variants of the same species will react differently – spider-like Scirpos with red sacs are aggressive, while blue-green Scirpos will let you walk right past them. The continent is massive (as it very well should be – it's a continent) and has diverse regions – from the grassland plains of Primordia, you eventually explore the dense jungles of Noctilum, the ancient dusty ruins of Oblivia, the beautiful and exotic Sylvalum, and the harsh and fiery warscape Cauldros. Lightning has given perhaps the best summary of early-game exploration in Xenoblade as “half-stealth”, and he is 100% right. To explore Mira without being immediately struck down by hostile creatures three times your level and ten times your size requires some careful navigation, creative terrain parkour, and the occasional “maybe I can outrun this thing”. Every part of this world is beautiful and I'm not exaggerating when I say I took at least a 10-hour gap in the story mode, like, 10 hours into the game - just to explore the continent, and I had only seen about 10% of the world in that time. Running (and sneaking) past the diverse wildlife to see this new, diverse continent is extremely fun, and only adds to your bucket list in the game later on when you're a higher level. I can't really do justice to explaining just how much it adds to this game.

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The eyeball next to this Duogill's level indicates it will become hostile if it sees you. If you want to get past it without fighting, stay behind it.

What would an RPG be without missions? They're in this game too, of course. Story missions are self-explanatory – they further the main plot of the game, explain some of the mysteries of human life in New LA, and follow BLADE's mission to recover essential parts of the White Whale while... “meeting” the local xenoforms. Some have prior requirements – certain missions completed, percentages of continents explored, etc. The most common kind of mission outside of Story missions would be Basic missions. Some are simple fetch quests and other simple filler missions – collecting a certain number of a specific item found in the world, collecting a certain number of drops from specific enemies, slaying a specific boss, killing a number of a specific enemy, or getting kills with a specific weapon. There are also story-esque missions which involve the characters in New LA, and are a lot more diverse. Take on the Rise of the Blood Lobster to locate a number of small explosive lobsters placed around the city by a mysterious antagonist, help the budding BLADE Mia get started exploring Mira, investigate some odd pods growing near the water purification plant, and others. The last type is Affinity missions – effectively, these give character development to your party members, and can only be started when these characters like you enough (by responding to their callouts in fights and giving responses during missions that they like). Side characters who aren't necessary to complete the game get to shine here – repair the broken bonds between brothers Phog and Frye, help the ruffian Yelv discover the whereabouts of his lost partner, and learn from where the shady, backstabbing Murderess got her name.

As someone who puts a lot of time into the games he plays, postgame is also important to me – and, while grindy, there's still a lot to do. Enemies drop materials you can use to craft weapons and weapon augments, enormous tyrants well above the level cap are waiting to be felled, data probes around the world need to be installed to gather information about the planet, parts of the White Whale contain treasure to be discovered in the form of upgrades to earn more money over time, special gear, and superweapon recipes, hidden caves and areas wait to be found, and missions galore still need to be done. Even so, it'll take awhile to get to a point where you can finish off the main story – postgame is just postgame, you aren't missing out on a huge adventure by putting it down after the story's done.

The Good
I'm not extremely familiar with RPGs (I have played Skyrim though so I guess I'm actually somewhat of an expert) so perhaps a bit of my enjoyment came from “wow look at all of the stuff you can do” when that's par for the course in this genre, but there really is always something new to do.

I think what initially hooked me was exploration. Running around the continent, even if I wasn't able to fight 90% of what I encountered or open any treasure I found lying around, is something that really got me to realize how much I'd be able to do when I progressed. Lightning said something to the effect of “you don't really know the true appeal in Xenoblade until you're running for your life from a massive monkey that just killed all of your party members” and it's absolutely true. Frustrating – at times, sure, but you either find a different way around it or just tell yourself to come back to it later. There's so much out there – just come back to it when you're better prepared. Even if you don't feel like you accomplished anything except run around, you're always making progress, bit by bit.

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This is fun.


I never like judging stories so I won't try to sell it as particularly amazing or crappy, but it's very interesting to see this science fiction-y world that's been created – not just with the creatures and area, but how the crash of the White Whale sets the story and how bits and pieces of life on Mira are due to events prior to it. Some of the story chapters are filler, some advance the plot to a pretty significant degree. I don't think it's a game driven by the story but it gives some form of structure to a very open-ended game. “Post-apocalyptic” is perhaps neither accurate nor unique, but I'd use it as a one-word summary of the story.

It touts online play as a major feature but... not really. You're able to encounter other player avatars in the overworld, and recruit/hire them to join your squad for awhile, but the only time that 2+ people will be able to see each other run around and fight stuff together is during certain online-only missions in small, confined areas – so you can't explore the world together or anything. They also have “squad missions” where your squad (up to 32 people playing in randomly assigned groups) is supposed to do a certain task X number of times – i.e. “Hunt Piscinoids/Hunt Terebra/Hunt Insidia/Hunt Yama, the Obliviator/Collect Mizaria Celery”. There's a count of each of those, and when someone kills a piscinoid or kills Yama or one of those, the count drops by 1. If your group manages to complete it, you get “reward tickets” which can be exchanged for collectibles/drops from enemies (to minimize how much you actually need to farm for shit – without these tickets postgame would be way more annoying). I guess that's not a glowing review of online play but I didn't know where to put it. It's overall a plus, I think – the Squad Ticket feature is extremely useful, and because everyone gets rewards when it's completed you somewhat feel like you're working together for stuff.

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Everyone ignores these for some reason, but it's a nice diversion – or source of items.


The Bad
Xenoblade is great – easily worth the money, in my opinion, but it's not 10/10 and I'd find the review is incomplete without highlighting some of its flaws:

Number 1 is that the game is very overwhelming, and doesn't have much of a (or really any) tutorial system. Here and there, you might be introduced to something new via the story, but it may be well past the point when you actually encountered it. Combat took me forever to figure out, and I probably still don't have the biggest grasp on it all. There is a manual you can access with the Home button (remember the days of the physical manuals that came with the game? Imagine my surprise when that wasn't there this time) but it's largely incomplete and going online is really how you'll learn – which comes with its fair share of spoiler risks. The more you look up about the game, the more likely it is that you'll have major plot points ruined. It happened to me, and I wasn't pleased.

I mean, some of the game is pretty intuitive. Run around, collect everything you can get your hands on, do the story missions and if you aren't capable of beating it then take some time (read: grind) and come back when you're more prepared. But you're kinda just thrown in, and the idea of “play at your own pace” is something that can work against you if they give you no direction at all outside of “at some point you may want to do the story missions”. Combat is just a fucking nightmare to figure out because they really don't explain that one. What is TP? Why do I care about appendages? What's a Soul Voice? What is Potential? Where do I see or use my Battle Points? Why does the screen pause sometimes when I use an Art? Why do I care about Overdrive? Nothing's really explained and it makes early combat pretty frustrating to deal with as a result. Sure, mashing every Art as soon as it's off cooldown and autoattacking things to death seemed fine early on, but the only way I could really stay afloat in the main story was by staying pretty overleveled until I could figure out a little more about patterns in combat and figure things out for myself. I'm sure there are guides online but... yeah, spoiler risks abound.

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What the fuck is happening


Number 2 – I'm a Nintendo fanboy. I grew up on it and subscribe to the “Playstation/Xbox have nogaems” because I'm all about muh exclusives. And I'm pretty sure Nintendo doesn't get a lot of other games for a number of reasons, but one reason, I believe, is that it's pretty shitty when it comes to processing things. For that reason, loading times can be a little long and things take awhile to render/appear in the game world. If I have a quest to turn into Eleonora, and I run up to where I know she should be, I can be waiting for 5-10 seconds for my groaning WiiU to say “oh yeah, Eleonora should be here, shouldn't she” and then she appears. I'll see a base camp out in the field and approach it, and then a building suddenly loads in where I'm standing and traps me inside. Texture quality can be beautiful up close, but walking up to some object there's about a 50/50 chance you see a pixelated texture like you're playing on a PS1 or something and have to wait for the texture to load in.

I get it – the game is massive (you can fast travel around, but you can also literally run from point A to point B across the entire world in one go), but it's really annoying to have to wait for the boss or character or whoever to actually appear so you can proceed. It's only a few seconds but still very noticable at times. A flaw I can look past, sure, but something noteworthy enough to make #2 on this list.

Number 3 – and this sounds weird – but I don't really like playing as myself in this game. My character seemed ill-fitting in this world, and it took a little while to figure out – it's because during cutscenes where you're responding to things characters ask/do, you don't say anything. Your character has a voice used in combat where they actually say things, but otherwise in the story they're mute. I understand – there's a lot – a LOT of dialogue that would need to be recorded, but it does lessen the illusion that the hero Derek is saving humanity with every mission he completes. When the side characters in the game have comparable or more dialogue than your character, it's weird. You can express a lot with your arms but it's no substitute for hearing them actually respond to events. Again, minor complaint.

Overall
Rereading the review, I think it doesn't properly represent how I felt about it. I have 225 hours in this game. I love it. I'm still playing it and I've basically done all of the missions and now I'm just shooting for 100% completion.

I'd recommend this game if you're in the market for an RPG that does stuff different from your standard Warrior/Rogue/Mage thing. A lot of the core elements are still there – get new gear, complete missions, kill bosses – but the different settings and the mix between “we're humans” and “everything else is not” makes it unique from my perspective. If you told someone “I'm playing Xenoblade Chronicles X” they'd ask “what's that” and you'd say “never mind” - not exactly a AAA title that everyone's been on the edge of their seat waiting for, but I absolutely found it was worth the money.

It's not a game you can complete in a weekend or two, even if you just sat in front of the TV 16 hours a day. It just takes that long to complete – and at no point does it feel like a grind, because you're always doing something, finding a new area, meeting new people, etc. There's plenty to do in the postgame (even if you're not the farming type – which, even if you feel forced to do, squad tickets help out a lot) if you want longevity beyond the story mode.

It's a fantastic game. I'd say it'll most likely end up being my best game purchase of 2016 but Overwatch already came out so you do the math. At any rate, I don't have any reservations recommending this game to anyone looking at picking it up.

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Romanticide
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Game: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE
Platform: Wii U
Genre: JRPG/fucking weeb shit

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This game was originally billed as "Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem", or SMTxFE for short, and the first teaser from all the way back in early 2013 heavily implied that it would be a straight-up crossover of the two series. It showed characters from both newer and older titles in the series, with a slight bias towards more notable characters as one would expect, such as Demi-Fiend from Nocturne and Lucina from Fire Emblem Awakening. Most people, myself included, expected a crossover that would have featured characters from both series, gameplay similar to both SMT and FE, and a super duper dark and mysterious story/setting because neither of these series is known for being made of sunshine, rainbows, and cupcakes.

Suffice it to say this is not what we got. The first trailer of 2015 showed a teenage girl from neither series (who we would later know as Tsubasa) riding a pegasus in front of Shibuya's famous 106 building. The J-pop music, the focus on idols, and the colorful/stylish aesthetic did not help matters either, being ill-suited to both the Shin Megami Tensei and the Fire Emblem series. It was well-suited to the Persona series (a more popular offshoot of SMT), however, and some hardcore SMT fans hate Persona for supposedly relegating SMT to second-tier status. The hype died almost immediately for many fans of both series. This was not what they had come to expect, and I can't blame them: I never expected this either. However, shit was hype. Atlus took an idea and made it crazier and better than anything I could have come up with. It might not have been the crossover I expected or wanted, but it was the crossover I never knew I needed.

Gameplay is decidedly more inspired by Shin Megami Tensei than Fire Emblem. The magic elements were lifted wholesale from SMT, though FE gets its fair share of references via spell names, such as Fimbulvetr, Goetia, and Imhullu. Fire Emblem dominates the physical side of things with its famed weapon triangle, but a lot of physical attacks have names from SMT, such as Javelin Rain, Heat Wave, and Myriad Arrows. For the most part, the skills work the same way as they do in the series they came from. Enemy weaknesses adhere far more to FE logic than SMT logic. Fliers are almost universally weak to Bows/Wind magic in FE, to name one example, which also applies in Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Knowing the FE games will give you a fairly big leg up on TMS, but it's not necessary to know the series inside and out to succeed.

Battle itself is driven almost entirely by the Session system. As should be evident from the title, this is the core conceit of the game. If you're not doing sessions, you're not playing TMS properly and you're not going to get anywhere. Even normal enemies will take forever to kill if you can't trigger a session, and you won't be getting materials you need for new weapons/Radiant skills. Luckily most enemies have 2-3 weaknesses, which ensures someone in your party will be able to hit a weakness, use one of their skills because Sessions do *not* trigger off of regular attacks, and start a session. To facilitate this, you're allowed to switch party members mid-battle, which is an extremely under-utilized mechanic in turn-based JRPGs. There just aren't many good gameplay reasons to lock players into the party they started battle with.

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Now would be a good time to explain how Sessions *work*. You hit an enemy's weakness with one of your skills, right? Your party members will have Session skills, which trigger if an enemy is hit with a given element and cost you nothing to use. For example, Itsuki (the main character) has a Slash skill that will trigger if a Lance skill is used, which is simply called "Lance-Slash". Another character will have an attack that triggers if a Sword attack is used, and other characters will have attacks that proc off of that attack. Sessions can get pretty long once you get more party members and the skills that allow them to partake in sessions even while benched. However, resistances and weaknesses still apply, unless you kill an enemy with a session, in which case the rest of your session ignores resistances. You'll pick up on this system after the first dungeon or so; it's a system that's a lot easier to see in action than to explain. It's built upon pretty slowly too, at first only applying to characters currently in battle. When you get the hang of it, everyone in the party will eventually be able to participate in sessions. Later on, Ad-lib performances are added, which are basically stronger skills that hit every enemy on the field and have additional effects like Charming/Confusing enemies. Once you've gotten the hang of *that*, Duo Arts are added, which have still more powerful effects like healing the entire party to full and reviving unconscious party members. You can't control when these types of skills are triggered, but they can be incredibly helpful. The learning curve is pretty lenient and the game never throws multiple concepts at you at once, so you should never feel overwhelmed. The only flaw with the system is that it gets tiring to watch every hit of a session as you get farther into the game. It's already long enough, no need to tack more hours on by making us watch every hit.

Beyond that, the battle system is typical Japanese RPG stuff. Every character fits into one of the many various JRPG archetypes, but they all are viable and you'll likely need to make use of everyone at some point, which is good design. You have your aforementioned magic and physical skills, healing because what's a JRPG without a token healing character and her (usually her, yay gender stereotypes) spells, an assortment of status ailments, and stat-up/down spells. I rarely use status ailments both in this game and the various Shin Megami Tensei titles, but unlike in most series, these spells actually work against enemies and are viable options for players. The stat-up spells are essential for bosses, and the stat-down spells can be handy if they're still challenging after you apply your boosts. SMT games are famous for their insanely difficult bosses, and while TMS tones them down a bit, they still hit quite hard and get multiple actions per turn. Mitigating their damage via the various stat-altering skills is almost required just to survive, let alone hit them back and win the fight. There's nothing more rewarding in the SMT series than defeating a boss, and that feeling is still present in TMS because the boss difficulty is high enough to where it's a challenge, but not so high that any one boss feels unfair. It's a fine line to walk, and TMS walks it flawlessly.

Outside of battle, you'll need the materials you procured from all that fighting to build weapons and acquire Radiant skills. Weapons have a more direct effect on the game, since acquiring weapons is also how you acquire skills. The gist is that each new weapon allows you to learn four skills. If a skill is new or not in your skillset, you have the option of learning it. If it isn't new or if it already is in your skillset, you can make said skill stronger by +1, all the way up to +9, which will make the skill either stronger or cheaper to use. It's not essential by any means but it is a nice way to give yourself a slight edge in combat. Radiant skills often have less obvious effects, but for the most part they're very handy skills to have. This set of skills includes the previously mentioned Session participation skills, healing after a given amount of steps, more health/magic, special spells for use outside of battle, more skill slots, amongst others.

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Every main character other than Itsuki has three side stories, which are reminiscent of Persona's social links. Generally speaking, each cast member has one side story where you fight a boss and two others that can be just talking with said character, killing X number of a given enemy, or a fetch quest. I'm no fan of fetch quests, but the few you get in Tokyo Mirage Sessions are all relatively short and easy. Your reward for each side story is a bit of much-needed character development and usually a skill that makes the person in question more useful in or out of battle. The characters are still all very trope-y even after their side stories, but their existence makes the cast a bit more likeable/relateable, so they're worth doing. The gameplay rewards speak for themselves and are worthwhile. This is a much better system than Persona 4's social link system and I hope to see something similar to this in Persona 5.

Story is just... Kind of there? One of Tokyo Mirage Sessions' biggest flaws is the absolutely wonky pacing. The game has the prologue, six proper chapters, and the epilogue. This would normally be a workable structure, except the prologue and the first four chapters are almost entirely dedicated to meeting the playable cast and recruiting them. The story proper begins at the end of chapter four, which leaves two chapters to tell the story of the main antagonists, to SAVE THE WORLD because that's how RPGs go, and to wrap up other plot threads. The story of the last chapter is told almost entirely via bas-reliefs (wow such amazing storytelling!), and after that little bit of story development, you're sent out to fight the final boss. The plot would have been better off with at least one more chapter to further flesh it out or one less chapter dedicated to recruiting the characters, but for whatever reason(s), we only got two chapters fully dedicated to the main story.

Outside of structural critique, it's still just kind of there. It might as well be a modern re-telling of the first and eleventh Fire Emblem games, the latter of which is a remake of the first. The plot of Shadow Dragon wasn't great but it's not exactly fair to criticize 1990 games (or the subsequent remakes) for being weak on the storytelling front; the technology just wasn't there. I never play Fire Emblem or Shin Megami Tensei for the plot so it's not much of a knock on my part, but for more story-driven players, the plot will probably be a letdown.

As previously mentioned, the cast is mostly comprised of tropes. It wouldn't be entirely inaccurate to call Itsuki a stand-in for the player, but he is given more characterization than most player substitutes, so that's something. I don't mind his existence; he's inoffensive if not a bit boring. Perhaps more dialogue options would have given the player an opportunity to define their own Itsuki, I don't know. Most player stand-ins are pretty boring though because they have to be bland enough for the player to project themselves onto. In many ways, Tokyo Mirage Sessions might as well be Tsubasa's story. Nearly every chapter is dedicated to her journey as an idol in some way. She starts out as a hapless newcomer, and doesn't get much better. She falls into plum roles despite lacking the resume and the skills to justify such roles. The game tries to criticize this in chapter 4, but it wasn't particularly effective given the ease with which the conflict of that chapter was resolved. She eventually earns them via the power of plot and friendship because TMS is cheery and upbeat at heart. Even so, it would have been better for the story if she struggled more to get there, or even if she failed once.

The rest of the cast is less integral to the plot but still relevant. Touma wouldn't be out of place in a shonen anime, having a fiery temperament and wanting to play the role of hero. He has his reasons for wanting to do so, which are elaborated on in one of his side stories, and the whole arc with the younger kid (I forget his name) was a nice touch. I can say this for everyone, but I think it most fits Touma: His character is cliche but executed well. Kiria's arc is probably the best one in the game. She feels trapped by her "cool" image but she also enjoys cute things, and the entirety of her arc is coming to terms with that side of her personality. It's probably the most Persona-esque of any of the character stories and that might be why it resonated with me. Eleonora might as well be Touma's female counterpart, just with a Hollywood obsession instead of wanting to be a hero. Their Duo Art hilariously pokes fun at this dynamic and it's probably one of my favorites to watch. The game brings up her bi-racial background and obviously wants you to feel something, but again, it's not particularly effective. Perhaps because you don't *see* how her bi-racial background factors into her story at all? You're just told and expected to take her at her word. Show, don't tell. Mamori is token cute little girl and she does a great job at this. Her story is pretty much what you'd expect: Young, talented girl isn't taken seriously. The ending of her story is one of the funniest in the game, in large part because she looks like she went Super Saiyan God. Lastly, we have Yashiro. When you first meet him, he seems to be a typical stoic, which is one of my least favorite archetypes in all of entertainment. And then he joins you. After joining the party, he only opens up to the main character, but that's good enough to see that he has reasons for being the way he is. He's suffered tragedy but unlike most stoics, he doesn't seem defined by that character trait alone, which is probably the reason I came around on his character.

Even though these characters don't break the mold of their archetypes and tropes, they're all still enjoyable characters. They might not be original, but their interactions are all great (especially any Tsubasa/Kiria interaction, star-struck fangirls are the best) and the side stories do just enough to make me give the slightest damn about this cast. Won't go down as the greatest of all time but it works for this game.

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Characters should have been borrowed from more Fire Emblem titles than Awakening and Shadow Dragon. The Mirage choices for the main cast were all appropriate, but as a fan of FE I would have liked to see characters from other games brought to the West, like Radiant Dawn and Blazing Sword. No Shin Megami Tensei demons appearing in the game is far more understandable because some of the designs are flat-out weird, but even so, you could have featured humanoid characters as their Mirages. Demi-Fiend or Raidou Kuzunoha especially would have been a nice bone to toss to that fanbase.

Graphics won't blow you away, which is a boilerplate Wii U statement but it's almost always true. However, the artstyle is breathtaking. Even from the first actual trailer, I fell in love with Tokyo Mirage Sessions' artstyle and that hasn't changed after finishing the game. Everything is just so full of color and life and style and detail and... Well, you get the point. Tokyo looks bustling and active, and the colored silhouettes representing the citizens of the city was a very impressive touch. Probably easier than rendering models of people, but it's one that contributes a lot to the game's style. The dungeons look every bit as spooky and foreboding as you'd expect them to be, considering they're in a parallel world of sorts. Last but not least, battles take place on a stage, which fits the general aesthetics and themes of the game. The audience is surprisingly detailed and the little touches like screens on the stage, neon signs with scrolling text, the moves being displayed as if they were song titles, and of course the massive amount of glowsticks, all contributes to the illusion that battles are really performances. Basically everything about this game is a visual treat. In spite of the low power of the Wii U, it's quite clear Atlus pushed the system to its limits. There are points where the system is lagging, usually in battles with 4+ enemies and in some rare overworld situations. It's nothing game-breaking but worth mentioning.

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In a shocking Revelation, the game heavily focused on music has good music. Good is underselling it, really. Every track is great. Each character has a theme song and a short video that goes along with it, and these are the highlights of the soundtrack. My personal favorite would be Kiria's "Reincarnation", and it's no wonder they featured that in the first trailer. The collector's edition came with a good number of these songs on a CD, which was totally worth my extra $30 for the music alone. Everything else was a nice bonus. The dungeon and battle themes aren't on the same level of awesome, but they still work pretty well for the game and I didn't grow sick of them during the sixty hours this game took me to beat. I'll probably wind up buying this OST at some point; it's too good not to own and listen to outside of the game.

All things considered, it's a great game for a certain type of person. If you're a fan of Shin Megami Tensei and/or Fire Emblem and don't mind lighter fare, this is a game you need to own. Tokyo Mirage Sessions might play a lot more like SMT than FE, but enough gameplay elements of both are present to where the influence of both series is recognizable. If you enjoy the Persona series, I'd recommend this to you almost unconditionally. The general aesthetic and themes will be right up your alley, and the gameplay is reminiscent enough of Persona that you won't be lost. If you enjoy difficult RPGs/difficult games in general, this is a fairly hard game by JRPG standards, which tend to be on the simpler end of the difficulty spectrum. In the end, this will probably hold a similar place in gaming history to The Last Story: A great RPG lost to the end of a console's lifecycle. Nintendo wants to move on to the NX and understandably so, but if you're a JRPG fan, I feel like you owe it to yourself to look into Tokyo Mirage Sessions.

Also fuck the anti-censorship crowd. It's called "localization", chucklefucks.
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Romanticide
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Game: Persona 5
Platform: PS3 (reviewed, not that it matters), PS4
Genre: JRPG


I mean, you knew this was coming. Slight spoilers, nothing too big.

How do you "objectively" review a game you've been waiting an entire console generation for, a game that's the follow-up to one of your favorite games of all time, and a game that is the very reason you own a PS3?

You don't, of course. You should take this with a grain of salt. Maybe a mountain of salt, depends on your personal tastes and all.

If you're not familiar with the Persona/Shin Megami Tensei formula by now, the series is built on a turn-based battle system. Nothing new or innovative there; you've seen this in many other JRPGs. Where Persona and SMT differentiate themselves from most other series is that you need to take advantage of enemies' elemental and sometimes physical weaknesses. If you hit a weakness or land a critical hit, you knock the enemy down. If you knock all the enemies down, you can launch an all-out attack, which usually does enough damage to end the fight in one shot early in the game. However, in Persona 5, after knocking all the enemies down, you have another choice ripped straight from the SMT games: Demon negotiation. You can ask a demon (well, Persona, but y'know) to join your party, cough up the cash, give you its loot, or forgo this altogether and knock the stuffing out of the group. The biggest complaint people have against this system is that it sometimes feels random in the SMT games, which is 100% true: It's fucking random. You'd think the same answer given to the same species of demon would net you the same result, but it does not. It can be a frustrating experience trying to recruit a demon in SMT, so thankfully Persona 5 tries its damnedest to make it less frustrating. Generally, picking the same choices when negotiating with a given species nets you the same results, but this is a very lengthy game with plenty of negotiating and I can't say that they always react the same with 100% certainty. Later on, as you advance through certain social links (Sun/Tower), you're given options that make it even easier to recruit demons. Suffice it to say that this is the least irritating that demon negotiation has ever been, which is great because this is how you'll recruit many of your Personae and find information on your enemies.

Bosses throw all that out the window. They usually have no weaknesses for you to exploit and are tests of your endurance. A few of them also have a gimmick that's more interesting than simply beating them to a bloody pulp. As an example, the first boss fight has you sending one of your characters (PROTIP: Don't send Ann, it will only end in sadness) off to try and steal either his crown or Treasure, your choice, but the end outcome is the same: After a given number of hits, the character you sent off on their covert mission will succeed and the boss will get discouraged. This is your cue to end the fight, because after this point he takes far more damage and stops attacking altogether. I wish more of the bosses had something like this, and I also wish the objectives were more varied than "hit the boss a lot to keep it distracted", but oh well. Like, say, maybe having to use certain types of skills or certain Personae to keep the boss distracted, I don't know. Even the more traditional boss fights are still quite fun and difficult because Atlus bosses are almost always fun without veering into bullshit territory. Most. I was not a fan of the penultimate boss fight; Recarmdra is a bullshit move and frankly bad game design. A full heal once is one thing; a spammable full heal by endlessly summoned enemies is another altogether and it's simply not fun to have a fight erased by one mistake/one low damage roll.

Eventually your Personae will get old and outdated. What to do with them at that juncture, you might wonder. Very early on in the game, you'll be introduced to fusion, which works exactly as it says on the tin: You fuse two (and sometimes more) Personae together to create a stronger one. You won't get to keep all their skills, but you'll be able to choose which skills you wish to pass on. This isn't a new change in SMT, but it is new in Persona (though maybe P4G had it, I forget) and it beats the Persona 3/4 method of endlessly mashing X and circle until you get the skills you desire. For my money, this is the biggest improvement in all of Persona and SMT. It saves you so much time and makes resource management more about "what do I want?" and less about "what skills do I absolutely need and what can I live without?" Being able to choose the skills you wish to pass on makes the inheritance system finally tolerable and puts it more in line with what I'm sure was its intent all along.

Dungeons are finally good. Instead of the randomly generated, completely unmemorable messes that were passed off as "dungeons" in Persona 3/4, they now have defined layouts, which makes it easier to design them around a given theme and makes them more interesting than a set of hallways with slightly different textures. There's also more gameplay involved with these dungeons than in Persona 3 and 4. Playing Persona 3 and 4 well meant ambushing 99% of the enemies anyway, and Persona 5 just formalizes that. If you get spotted by the enemy, the Palace's security level will increase. If it hits 100%, which it should never do if you have a pulse/aren't completely trashed, you'll get thrown out of the Palace for the day. How to avoid getting spotted by the enemy, then? There's a very simplistic cover system utilized throughout the Palaces, and most objects exist just to give you cover. All you have to do to take cover is press X when prompted, and the enemy will never spot you, even if you should still be completely visible to them. From there, all you have to do is hit X, again when propmted, to ambush an enemy. It doesn't make much sense but you'll grow accustomed to it soon enough. That or you'll just run up behind the enemy and get the ambush that way, whatever works.

Fuck Mementos though. It's the worst aspect of Persona 3 and 4 all over again, the randomized dungeon. I get that Atlus needed a way for the player to grind post-Palace and a place to stuff all the requests you get during the course of the game, but I think they should have written the story so that Palaces remained intact after you concluded their related story events. Anything is better than going to Mementos. Mementos is basically a different, worse game. The cover system is gone, the window of opportunity to ambush enemies is smaller, the level design is non-existent, the sense of style that pervades the rest of the game is replaced with a 3edgy5me Hot Topic aesthetic, and everybody forgot the fine art of shutting the fuck up for more than fifteen seconds. It's a flaw on an otherwise well-polished gem. I die inside every time I have to go to Mementos. Mementos is why I drink.

The last gameplay aspect involves social links, errrr... Confidants. Confidants are just social links with a more thematically fitting name for this game. If you've played Persona 3 or 4, you already know what to expect. If you don't? Confidants are most akin to playing a visual novel, or reading one, whichever parlance you prefer. This is where the bulk of the game's character development occurs. While most party members get some development in the story, they're further fleshed out in their links. If they're not party members, their links are obviously all of their development. You meet up with them whenever they're available (they have their own schedules, like NPCs in Skyrim or what have you), and if you're able to rank up, you'll be treated to a very one-sided conversation about whatever is on the character's mind. Making the right choices in these conversations grants you more points towards the next rank up, but during your first playthrough you should prioritize what feels right to you over getting every single point. Optimizing confidants is what the second playthrough is for. As you rank up, you'll get various gameplay perks, such as being allowed to fuse Personae above your own level, carry more ammo, prepare better food for your excursions into Palaces, and so on. There are a *lot* of bonuses, and they work to make Confidants feel more integrated with the core gameplay than in Persona 3/4. It's not always this simple, though. Some confidants are walled off by your real world stats: Academics, Charm, Kindness, Proficiency, or Guts. If your rank isn't high enough in the appropriate stat for that Confidant, forget advancing past whatever rank you're on, or even unlocking it. You'll have to dedicate time in the real world to improving these stats; they aren't just handed to you through story progression. You can watch a DVD, read a book, hang out with someone, take batting practice... The ways to increase your stats are many and they all *feel* interesting, even if you as the player are not actually doing anything in most cases.

Persona 5 is an exercise in time management: Do I go to the Palace today? Do I hang out with my friends? Do I study/work on improving a given stat? Do I work because I'm short on money and need to buy equipment/items? No matter what you do, you'll feel like you missed something, which is part of the charm of these games. It might be weird to say such a thing, but your decisions are what make it *your* playthrough and not just following a set of optimized directions. I'm perfectly okay with how my first file turned out, even if I have a number of regrets. I wish I had maxed Proficiency so I could take my true waifu Haru, instead of "settling" for Ann. Hell of a settle, if you ask me. I wish I had known how fertilizer worked so getting Kindness wasn't such an ordeal. I wish I had maxed the shogi player's/the teacher's links. There will be missed opportunities and regrets, and that's alright. That's life, to put it simply.

Speaking of confidants and social links, the varied casts of Persona games are the series' real allure. There are a lot of games with passable to good stories, at least good enough to compel you to finish the game, and even some games with great stories, but there aren't many games that make you feel like you're helping its characters through their trials and tribulations. It's great that characters in games have their reasons to save the world or get their revenge on the Big Bad or whatever else, but that's not the entirety of the human experience y'know? It's a testament to the writing team's talent that a storyline about, say, a doctor who was framed and lied to by a conniving chief of staff, can feel as compelling at times as the picaresque tale that is Persona 5. Whenever you're doing social links, you're not worrying (much) about the fate of whoever is ensnared in the Palace ruler's schemes; you're fully immersed in the story the Confidant is trying to tell.

This is one of the times where the struggle with how to frame my experience with this game rears its head, though: I've seen some of these characters and their archetypes in this series already. Ann is a better Rise, Makoto is a better Mitsuru, Ryuji is a better Yosuke (if not a better Junpei), Morgana is a better Teddie, Goro is a worse Naoto (Naoto will always be bae), Sojiro is Dojima all over again... In reminding myself of who all the Confidants were for this review, I realize that this feeling of "I've seen these characters before" is mostly limited to the party. However, your party members are the ones who you'll spend by far the most time with, and thus I find it hard to shake the feeling of deja vu. The formula *works*, as demonstrated in Persona 3 and 4, and it still works incredibly well here because I like everyone in the party (and the rest of the Confidants, for that matter) but I'd like to see Atlus write a new party with new dynamics instead of rehashing the previous parties over and over again. I don't need another "best bro" to be my first friend and party member, I don't need another cute mascot navigator who later gets replaced by a superior navigator, I don't need another gorgeous girl who people wrongfully assume is just a dithering airhead, and so on. I want a new party, even if this is arguably the best executed vision of that party. I'm still *very* partial to the Persona 4 cast because it was my first Persona experience and one of the most mind-blowing games I've ever played, but I can accept arguments that this is the best cast. I would also like new events to go along with that new party, or at the least new spins on those events. I get we're probably going to get a beach trip every game, but do we seriously need a fourth "Operation Babe Hunt"? It's amongst the most cringe-worthy shit every game. It was some of the most cringe-worthy here.

Special mention must be made of the gay NPCs in Shinjuku/on the beach trip. They aren't very prevalent characters; you only have to see them in the previously mentioned scenes. HOWEVER. Each time you see them, they make the scene they're appearing in worse by virtue of being some of the worst and most outdated gay stereotypes out there. They exist solely for the player to laugh at, even though hitting on obviously underaged boys isn't fucking funny. It's gross and exploitative, and Atlus can do better than this. I recommend just hitting start and skipping this shit; their existence literally subtracts from the game. In my headcanon they don't exist. Lara, the Crossroads bartender and local crossdresser (it's not exactly clarified what that character is in-game, unless I missed it) is treated with more respect from both the writers and in-game characters, which only makes the gay NPCs' treatment more jarring.

Another special mention goes to the female objectification in this game. It's just... Wow. There's so much of it. When you first meet Yusuke, his goal is to get Ann to pose nude for a painting, and it comes off incredibly sketchy. It *is* incredibly sketchy, even if it turns out later that Yusuke is a decent if eccentric person. On the aforementioned beach trip, Ann and Makoto get hit on by a couple of older guys and it feels disgusting as hell. I guess at least Makoto's swimsuit wasn't unecessarily sexualized; it wouldn't have fit her character. And of course Ann and Makoto are the only ones who wear sexualized outfits (Ann gets sexualized poses too - her Baton Pass pose is the most obvious one) in the Palaces. Man, Yusuke is fucking handsome why can't he be put in something that emphasizes that he was designed to be the game's fujoshi bait. At least it'd be somewhat equal opportunity objectification instead of merely exploiting the girls for us degenerate (male) weebs. I get that some objectification is par for the course when it comes to telling stories with these themes. I don't have a problem with it when it's actually furthering a plotline and/or trying to make a point. Even so, the level of objectification felt ridiculous and unnecessary at times. The female characters are well-written characters in their own right; they don't need to be sexualized at every opportunity.

The story is decidedly darker than Persona 4, and the game wastes no time in establishing that fact. It's almost as if Atlus got the message that many players felt Persona 4 was too happy and light-hearted and wanted to address that ASAP. The very first arc's antagonist is a physical education teacher who treats the school as if it's his own castle, abuses his own players (somehow they still win - this is so implausible it physically pains me), and he's trying to sleep with Ann. Even for all of this, that's not the game's "shit just got real" moment. I don't want to spoil that for anyone, but trust me when I say you'll know it when you see it. It's quite early, within the first 3-4 hours. So what does your motley crew of Phantom Thieves decide to do about this situation? Well, what any self-respecting group of thieves would do - invade his Palace and steal his Treasure, which in theory should cause him to have a change of heart and confess his sins. I think. As you might have guessed, this plan goes off without a hitch and a new legend is born, the legend of a group of thieves who steal the hearts of society's most rotten and powerful adults. They eventually attract the attention of some very powerful enemies, and seeing exactly how they thwart these enemies is incredible. The plan they devised to escape a seemingly inescapable situation is the most audacious plan in the game, and seeing that play out is immensely satisfying.

Unlike Persona 3/4, Persona 5 starts off with a bang. You aren't waiting two hours to actually play the game; you're playing from the first five minutes. It's a short tutorial sequence, sure, but it's a bit more involved than suddenly awakening to your Persona, hitting a few buttons, and winning a piss-easy encounter. However, after the exciting start it's a very slow burning story. During the first two Palaces, you're still meeting everyone, growing acclimated to city life, and you have an early curfew and a bossy cat that never misses a chance to tell you that you need sleep for tomorrow's story events. The game will feel closed and restrictive, and the overarching plot is barely existent at this point, but you should stick with it. Once you get through Palace 4, the game's finally opened itself up to you and it becomes apparent that, somehow, there's more than meets the eye to this story. By this point, I wanted to find out what was really going on here. The story had sunk its claws into me. After Palace 6, well... It's fucking insane. In a good way. In the best of ways. It finally reaches the highs of previous Persona games. The ending is handled better than Persona 4's ending too, which helps a lot. I would have ideally liked a bit more exposition on that front, but at that point you've put damn near (if not over) 100 hours in. I finished in 105 hours and probably played for more like 110, for reference. That's an awfully big ask. I'm satisfied with how it all played out in the end and how all the lingering questions were answered. The story is great, easily the best in the series yet, but the pacing is pretty awkward, especially early on.

Graphics can be summed up in one word. Well, three: Stylish. As. Fuck. This might not be a technically impressive masterpiece in 2017, but Atlus games never are. Atlus games have always had a great sense of style, but Persona 5 just blows all their previous efforts out of the water. It's not even fair to compare previous titles to this in terms of style, even Tokyo Mirage Sessions, and that was an incredibly beautiful (and fun!) game. Persona 5 is a feast for the eyes. It's visual ambrosia. It's menu porn. Like, I don't think I'll be able to go back to regular old post-battle menus, with their drab and clinical listing of experience, money, and drops. I want to see paintings in motion from now on. Tokyo feels incredibly vibrant, crowded, and generally *alive*, unlike most cities in most games. Even the loading menus are somewhat interesting, and they're loading menus. It's probably the most artistically beautiful game I've ever played. The design of just about everything is top-notch. Except Mementos, but I've already established fuck Mementos. Also not the biggest fan of the anime cutscenes, but they serve their purpose well enough and don't really detract. They just don't feel as amazing as everything else. This is, simply put, a game I will never get tired of looking at. It will always age well because the artstyle is heavily stylized and doesn't lean on muh realism as a crutch.

The differences between the PS3 and PS4 versions are small, if not non-existent. I've heard you would have to be comparing them side by side to see any kind of difference. Don't buy a whole new system for this game unless you were going to buy a PS4 anyway.

I've been listening to the OST while I write this, and on my headphones (which are decent - not audiophile tier but not regular person tier either), the difference is night and day. There are a lot of subtleties to this music that I would have never caught listening to the songs on my old, fat CRT. I need to replace that thing and get a PS3 that will work with a new TV, might do so with tax refund/other money. I digress. Much of the OST isn't as immediately catchy as Persona 3/4, but the OST is also in a jazzy style, which is far different from anything I've heard from Shoji Meguro. It's still great, just in a different way. Even if this doesn't convince you, rest assured that the important songs are bangers. The opening theme? It fucking rules; what you hear in-game isn't the half of it. The battle theme? YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT COMIIIIIIIIING. The boss theme? It took a bit to grow on me, but once it did I fell in love with it. The Palace 6 theme? Hook that shit up to my veins fam. The theme for the Palace 7 boss? My favorite song in the game; I'll probably blast that like 50 times. Today. The final boss theme feels underwhelming, but don't get it twisted: It's still a good song. The credits song is incredible though; it more than makes up for the final boss theme. What I'm trying to say is I'll buy this once I get a spare $30. Throwing money Atlus's way always feels good.

I don't know how to sum up the entirety of my thoughts. If I had to try, I would say that at once this is and is not the game I have been waiting on for so many years. It's a game that I can acknowledge is objectively the best of the Persona series, but it's also one that did not blow my mind because I've seen the general formula before. I was hoping for something mind-blowing, like how Nier: Automata blew my mind, not just a refinement (albeit a damn great refinement) of the Persona formula. That sounds a bit like a personal problem, does it not? For anyone without an attachment to a particular Persona title, I would confidently say this is the best Persona game and probably where you should start. It is *that good*.
Edited by Romanticide, Apr 20 2017, 10:13 AM.
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LightningBolt
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Game: Hollow Knight
Platform: PC and eventually PS4/Switch
Genre: Metroidvania

So one day I saw Day9 streaming on Twitch and saw that he was playing a game called Hollow Knight. Usually I'd just watch a Dota stream instead but it must've been a slow day on that front and I decided to watch. The game looked really damn fun, but 9 times out of 10 I'd think to myself "I should get this" and then proceed to never play it. I'm really glad this was the other 1 time.

Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania game, and anyone who has played one more or less knows how the formula goes. For those who haven't, you're thrown into a map and basically just start exploring it with some kind of loose plot going on in the background. You eventually start fighting bosses and unlocking abilities that will allow you access to previous parts of the map you couldn't get to before. It's a really fun formula in general and a genre that I should really play more often. Hollow Knight in particular follows the player character who is basically thrown into a world in ruin as you gradually learn more about this ruined world and why it is that way and, of course, eventually attempting to save it. The game tells most of its story through optional dialogue and optional events and I enjoyed this very subtle storytelling and world building a lot.

The first thing that sticks out with Hollow Knight is how great this game looks. To the best of my knowledge, the game is largely hand-drawn and it just looks incredible. There are a lot of varied locations, from lush forested areas to a beautiful rainy city to some horrific and desolate caverns. The art style of the characters starts on the cutesy side but you start to find some really disturbing-looking characters and enemies as you go, which fits some of the more horrific late-game areas. Overall, the game is visually very impressive and definitely a positive takeaway for the game.

I generally don't give a shit about sound in video games outside of music (only if it's exceptional) or voice acting (only if it's exceptionally bad), but Hollow Knight stands out as having top tier sound design. The sound effects, music (and knowing when and when not to use it), and even the game's unique "voice acting" all stood out to me as being very strong. Major props to whoever the sound director was for this game.

Gameplay-wise, I adored this game. It's a fast-paced game with suitably fast-paced combat that's fairly basic at its core. Most of the time during fights you'll simply be jumping, dashing, and slashing. You also have access to various charms you acquire throughout your journey that do various things (increased slash range, more health... a literal layer of shit protecting your character...), and it's cool how different charm builds can be very effective against various bosses and how changing your build can make a boss you may have trouble with much more manageable. It's a simple system but it works and that combination is probably the best one possible. The game also has some pretty difficult and fun platforming sections, usually along optional/hidden paths, that make use of the game's solid jumping and dashing mechanics.

Content-wise, there's a lot here for a $15 game. I put 23 hours into my true ending playthrough with a 91% completion, so there was still stuff I never discovered even after running through every path I could find. Every bit of it was fun, too. Nothing felt like grinding for some kind of achievement or anything like that. I'm pretty sure there was a least one optional boss I missed, as well. The devs posted yesterday that they're going to have 3 free content packs coming out this year, as well.

I'd say I only have one legitimate issue with this game and it's that it has a somewhat subpar fast travel system. Trying to get to a specific point on the map (which is pretty freaking big) can be a pain in the ass depending on where the closest stag station is. I didn't mind it too much because I loved the world, but there's one area called the Deepnest that is filled with cramped paths, spiderwebs, squirming sound effects in the distance, and a bunch of spider enemies that I didn't particular care for running through if I had business there.

So yeah this game is awesome. More than worth the $15 price tag and I'll be looking forward to any future titles from Team Cherry in addition to any future content packs for Hollow Knight. This game will fit snugly behind Breath of the Wild as my second-favorite game of 2017 for the foreseeable future and I'm interested to see if either Mario Odyssey or the Crash Bandicoot remakes can unseat it. I won't hold my breath.
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Olinea
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According to Oli, this is a better game than Brawl, Guitar Hero 3, Portal 2, and TWEWY.


You pick up the game from a bargain bin of old Dreamcast games and eye the wacky, obtuse art style with one eyebrow raised, quizzically. “Ooga Booga? What is that?” you ask the charming, John Hamm-lookalike Californian next to you. He laughs. “Art.” he replies.

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Art.


You look back at the game. You feel compelled to purchase it, as well as one of the many Sega Dreamcasts still on the shelf at the local shop. You purchase it.

Six months later, your investment portfolio has tripled and your high school crush calls you out of the blue to ask you out on a date. You refuse. You are too busy playing Ooga Booga.




I mean, in all honesty this game is not a AAA title and the only reason you're getting it for higher than cents on the dollar is because Dreamcast has gone by the wayside. Nonetheless, Ooga Booga remains an entertaining (if nothing else) party game and one of the most memorable games of my childhood, parked in front of the TV with an awkward white controller in my hands. You could pick it up on Steam for $10.00 on a sale and it'd be worth the money.

Ooga Booga features four different starting fighters – Hottie, Twitchy, Fatty, and Hoodoo. The four of them compete for supremacy on a small island in the middle of nowhere in the lovingly dubbed game of “Smackahuna”. Smack your opponents with whatever you can find and rake in points.

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The shrunken head is a popular weapon of choice.


There are no health bars or ways to die in Ooga Booga, so everyone's always playing until the timer counts down to the end. Instead, hitting opponents with anything (your stick, a tossed shrunken head, fireballs, lightning bolts, boars, birds, living tikis, mines, etc) earns you a point or two. Most points at the end wins.

And, well, that's kinda it. But there is a certain charm to the unfolding chaos that is the game of Smackahuna. The odd art style and characters' exaggerated reactions just make it a game that's... funny without a punchline. Abe's comment of ”Four score and seven years of hurt!” after winning a round. Fatty hopping around the place. Sharks eating you if you get too far out-of-bounds.

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Plus you can make them dance if you win the round!


While the game doesn't feature many comeback mechanics, there is a lot an inexperienced player can still benefit from. Boars sometimes get rowdy and run around knocking people around without any warning. Fireballs bounce around like green shells. Tornadoes and thunder cloud spells provide dangerous, but ultimately risky, power plays. And the extreme knockback from certain attacks lets you quickly disengage instead of being picked on if you're not quite prepared to fight yet. But the strategy in Ooga Booga remains the same: get back out there and commit to the fight. It's what makes the game a proper slugfest; nobody has to worry about dying or preserving a health bar, and you can't end up in first place by sitting at a distance and hitting people with whatever you find. It's a constant hunt for spells, shrunken heads, and other players so you can get into the melee. And sometimes you gotta be ruthless to get your points.

Posted Image
Hoodoo, running for his life after being set on fire, gets chased down by Honest Abe on a boar.


We still have our old Dreamcast, and this is almost always the first game we pop in when we're all at the house and have a 4th player with us. When recommending Dreamcast games (happens all the time), it's generally “If you're getting one game for the Dreamcast, get Power Stone 2. If you're getting two games, get Ooga Booga.”
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