Game Time - March 2017

Here we are on the precipice of April, and 2017 is already shaping up to be an incredible year for video games. However, I feel that while March had some incredible highs for me, there were also a few lows. To start, the Nintendo Switch came out alongside Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I love Zelda with very few caveats. Nintendo took a rick and tried something new. The payoff was a video game that's completely on another level. I recorded a podcast with my thoughts on the game, but it's always good to document them in text form as well.

Then there was Horizon: Zero Dawn. It released on the last day of February, so I only played it for a few days before moving over all of my time to Zelda. What's a bummer is that I don't know if I'll ever go back to it. Personally it didn't really grab me, which seems to go against the grain.

Finally, we have Mass Effect: Andromeda. This game causes me to get upset just thinking about it. It has so many issues, but somehow I can't seem to pull myself away from it. Perhaps my love for the original trilogy is clouding my judgement?

There's a lot to talk about, so let's get right into it. It's game time.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Nintendo is a company that is famous for rehashing a lot of its ideas. While that has brought them a lot of success in the past I feel that myself and many others have been craving something new. I got my first taste of new Nintendo goodness with Splatoon and now they have followed it up with Breath of the Wild. Initially I was skeptical that Nintendo would be able to pull off a compelling open world, but somehow they nailed it.

See that mountain? YOU CAN TOTALLY GO THERE!

I feel like I say this all the time, but Ocarina of Time is the game I can point to as the one that got me to continue playing video games. The sense of adventure I felt while traversing that world is something that has stuck with me. Now they have replicated that with Breath of the Wild. You can go literally anywhere in the game with some effort. If you can see a place, then you can definitely go there. Link can climb up almost any surface, and stamina is essentially his only limitation. The world is vast, and filled with areas that are exciting to explore. While there certainly is a lot of empty space, there are also many hidden villages and treasures to be found.

In terms of combat and plot, Breath of the Wild isn't spectacular. At first the weapon durability annoyed me, but in the end I grew fond of it. Since every weapon is breakable it encourages you to use a ton of different kinds. It's functional, but exploring the world was the main draw for me. If you want to hear me babble on for close to an hour about the game and all of its systems I recorded a podcast, which you can listen to here.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Have you every felt left out, because you don't love something that everyone else loves? That's how I feel with Horizon. Initially I was super excited to see Guerilla games making something new. The reviews hit a bit early for the game as well, and they were all glowing. I still hear people talking about Horizon with a reverence that I don't know if I'll ever be able to understand. I would have chalked it up to being tired of open world games, but then Zelda came out and I absolutely loved that. I feel like I'm missing out on something and its very frustrating.

Horizon centers on a girl named Aloy who is born as an outcast. At a young age she finds a device called a focus, which is essentially a Bluetooth earpiece that shoots AR things around that explain the world to her. The world of Horizon takes place after the apocalypse where machines have taken over and humans have gone back to a much more tribal state. Things like the focus that Aloy found are considered forbidden relics from the metal age of humans past. The people of the world seem to believe that humans in the past ruined the world. I find all of this to be interesting, but in what I played it never really took off.

I hope you like shooting robots with a bow.

The gameplay takes place in third person and focuses around a bow. You can get different kinds of arrows, which will affect the machines in different ways. You gain other tools as well, but the bow seems to be the number one way to take down your foes. The combat seems to be the thing that most people praise above all else, but I personally find it to be tedious. Where I am right now the bow does too little damage, so I find myself running up to enemies and using a melee attack until they die. Eventually I'll get back to this game, because I honestly feel like there has to be something I'm missing. Hopefully the plot picks up in a way that I can get behind.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

I love the original Mass Effect trilogy. I'd be willing to go so far as to say that Mass Effect 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. As a huge fan of Star Wars it was awesome to see Bioware essentially create a new Star Wars RPG without the Star Wars license. I immediately found myself enamored with the universe and its characters. Yes, the ending of Mass Effect 3 is awful, but it was not enough to taint the journey I had along the way.

Now we come to the 4th entry in the franchise, Mass Effect: Andromeda. If you've never played the original trilogy then the conceit of Andromeda might not make sense to you. Without spoiling the whole plot, let's just say that things in the Milky Way went sideways, and a few of the races decided to try and settle a new galaxy, Andromeda. A little bit of me feels for Andromeda while it's being railed on by almost everyone. When you're making the 4th thing in a franchise beloved by many, it's automatically going to be hard for it to succeed. Even if the work stands on its own it will always be held up against the original trilogy. Despite that, Andromeda feels like a straight to DVD sequel that no one really wanted.

All the familiar elements are here, but it just doesn't feel right.

If Andromeda felt new, I would feel a little more hesitant to criticize it. The main issue I have is that every character and many of the locales are trying to be things from the original trilogy. For example, the Citadel was a space station in the Milky Way where many alien races gathered. It was a central hub where you got to experience all kinds of interesting scenarios. In Andromeda it's the Nexus, which is almost the EXACT same thing as the Citadel! The characters are the same, they each fit into an archetype of characters from games past. So far I've had fun talking to them, but no one seems particularly interesting. Hell, even the plot is about finding ancient alien tech again.

The one praise I'll give the game is that the combat is fun. It's essentially the same third person shooting of the original trilogy, but it adds a lot of mobility through the jet pack. You can jump and dash, which adds an additional layer to combat scenarios. It's fine, but that might be the only place that the game is "fine." I feel bad saying this, but Andromeda is the buggiest AAA game I've ever played. Yes, some of the animations are bad. I don't think that's a bug though. I've had issues ranging from not being able to talk to someone because their prompt won't show up to not being able to interact with literally anything in the game. It's crazy. Most of it is the kind of stuff that would never get through QA. I had the game literally become unplayable, how is that okay? Even with the bugs aside, the underlying game seems uninspired. I'm going to see it through to the end, but that's really only because of my love for the franchise.

IT'S HAPPENING!

My level of excitement if through the roof today! Persona 5 comes out in four days! I have been waiting for this game for years. Usually games I wait this long for don't live up to my expectations, but I knew from the very first trailer that Persona 5 was going to offer everything I wanted from it. I have been craving a JRPG with a compelling plot for a while now and now it's finally here.

There's a slight chance that I'll talk about something other than Persona 5 next month, but like I said it's a very slim chance. The estimated time to beat is currently hovering around 150 hours so I don't know that I'll have much time to do anything else. Find out what happens next month!

Podcast Episode 25 - Breath of the Wild

Who's ready to get wild? I have once again recorded a podcast. This time it is about the brand new Zelda game Breath of the Wild. Enjoy it!

Game Time - February 2017

Normally I find a break in my free time to write these at the end of every month, but the past few times I have had to stop playing a dope video game in order to do so. You might see that as a complaint, but it's definitely not. All it means is that awesome video games have been coming out at a rapid clip!

I only played two new games in February, because the ones I played in January were super long, and I had to continue playing those as well. I ended up beating both Gravity Rush 2, and Yakuza 0. They were both excellent and I would highly recommend them. I'm only going to talk about Yakuza 0 again this month though, because a lot of interesting stuff happened after my initial few hours with it.

Like I said last month Digimon World: Next Order came out the last day of January and I played it a TON. I thought the original Digimon World was super cool and ahead of its time, and this new game continues to be super great! 

As a surprise to me I also ended up playing all the way through Night in the Woods. I did it in two play sessions, because I was so engrossed by the world. I found out about it a few months ago from an ad on the PlayStation blog, but completely forgot it was coming out in February. Lucky for me I had some credit sitting on my PSN account, so I was able to pick it up. 

It's game time!

Yakuza 0

Last time I talked about Yakuza 0 I had only played a few hours of it. Now that I have completed it, I can say for certain now that it is my favorite Yakuza game. The story picks up quite a bit, and it doesn't have the insane pacing problems that a lot of the other games have. The previous Yakuza games were much less savage than this one. I think that the 80's setting allows the story to be a little bit more vicious, because Kiryu and Majima are technically not fully established at that time. Like the previous games in the franchise it goes on for a long time, but unlike the others I never found myself lamenting that it overstaying its welcome.

The main reason I'm writing about this again is because I had not played the two central mini-games. When you're Kiryu you become a real estate mogul. The goal is to take over five areas of Kamurocho that are being held by a group called the Five Billionaires. You do this by going around to buildings to purchase them. You can then upgrade them to raise their profitability. This is almost done entirely through menus. Since there are five districts you need to assign them managers and bodyguards. The managers will raise or lower the profitability of an area, while the bodyguard will keep thugs from stopping your progress in money collection. It sounds complicated at first, but once the initial setup is complete all you do is wait for a bar to fill up and then collect your money. This allows him to get stupidly rich, which makes it very easy to upgrade all of his combat skills. 

Buy ALL the real estate. 

Majima's mini-game has him managing a cabaret club (Hostess Bar). In order to do so you need to recruit ladies from around the city to work for you. Once recruited they will have stat values, and abilities that can increase as you use them for work. This game is a little more involved, but you are locked into it for around five minutes at a time. There are six tables in the club and people come and sit down. You assign them a hostess based on their likes, and the more they like them the more money they will spend. Issues can arise, and you have to help the hostess by guessing the correct menu option. It's not super deep, but it is definitely more involved than Kiryu's. However, he makes waaaay less money. They're both interesting additions to an already feature rich franchise. Like I said, if you have liked any of the previous Yakuza games you have to play Yakuza 0. 

Digimon World: Next Order

Last year I played the original Digimon World for the first time. In fact, I recorded a podcast about it. In my opinion it was way ahead of its time with a lot of the elements present in it. Digimon World: Next Order is essentially that same game from many years ago, but with a ton more in it. As someone who thought the first game was really cool, I really like Digimon World: Next Order. I found myself with the two days following the game's release. This led to me playing it until 6AM two consecutive days in a row while drinking way too much Red Bull. Now that I work full time I tend to not do that kind of thing much anymore, but the game's core loop took a hold of me in a way I didn't expect.

In Digimon World you raise a Digimon from its inception to its death. In Next Order you raise TWO Digimon at the same time. It doesn't sound very different, but it makes things a little more complicated. Both of the creatures won't necessarily like the same foods or sleep at the same times so it adds new challenge to the old formula. Outside of that it's essentially the same concept as the original game. Your Digimon need to eat, and go to the bathroom. If you don't take them to the toilet they'll go right in the ground and if you don't feed them they'll get angry. In order to train them you take them to the gym and pick the stats you want to increase. It's kind of like Monster Rancher if anyone has ever played that. Days are limited, so you have to manage your time between training and exploring.

Now you have TWO Digimon!

The world is huge and very fun to explore. As you traverse you'll find Digimon who used to live in the main city. Most of them can be recruited by meeting certain objectives. Once they go back to the city they will open a shop, or offer some type of service to you. I love this kind of mechanic in games. The thing that bothered most about the game was the combat difficulty. It starts off fine enough, but by the end game enemies are so strong they're almost impossible to defeat. Even with almost maximum stats on both Digimon it is now a challenge for me to defeat most regular enemies. Don't even get me started on bosses... Since the battles are mostly AI controlled sometimes the Digimon do really dumb things, but that comes with the territory. With that said I still really liked the game. It got its hooks deep into me. 

Night in the Woods

I was browsing the PlayStation blog to check out the new releases and saw an article about Night in the Woods.It captured me immediately, and I decided I was going to get it. I am very glad I got it. If you haven't seen it the only way I can describe it is an adventure game where all the people are animals. You play as Mae Borrowski, a 20 year old cat who dropped out of college. She has come back to her home town of Possum Springs to find things very much the same, but different at the same time. It is an adventure game, so the crux of the gameplay is to look around the environment and talk to people. The town is small enough and the characters are interesting enough that you'll want to look at every nook and cranny. You traverse the world by platforming around the sidescrolling map. It's odd, because you never really have to platform. You can get to some special events that way, but most of the time there's really not a reason for it.

These are the central figures in the story.

This game resonated with me in a way that I definitely didn't expect. It delves deep into mental issues and depression in a way that most games don't. It's expertly written and the art is top notch. In the end I found myself wanting to play through it again, but just haven't had any time for it yet There is a ton of stuff you can miss, but it's only necessary to get a sense of the characters and the world. Anything to do with the overarching mystery you'll be funneled into eventually. It's weird, because in the end the real plot kind of let me down. What made me fall in love with the game is the way it doesn't tell you a whole lot, but fills in the gaps through dialogue and interaction with the environment. 

As usual with this type of game the story is the entire thing, so I'm not going to talk about it a whole lot more. If you're into well written dialogue and dope art, then you should play this game. I will probably write a more in depth piece on this in the future.

Switch Time

I picked up the Switch this past Thursday night, and I absolutely love the thing! I LOVE IT! It's exactly what I wanted it to be, except for the part where there are like two games I want to play on it at the moment. That means that you can expect me to talk all about the Switch and Zelda for the next edition of game time. 

Other than that Mass Effect Andromeda will be out, which I still find myself not believing. The marketing has been so sparse for it up to this point that I have yet to properly process that it's even coming out. They're ramping up the marketing now, so it's probably going to come out right on time. I am very ready for a new Mass Effect, so I bet I'll be very excited. 

I have to get back to playing Zelda for obscene amounts of time, so I'll see you next time!