Game Time - January 2018

I decided to take December off from writing and now I'm back to start 2018 with a bang! 2017 was a stellar year for Video games, and 2018 looks like it's going to be great as well. 

To start I'll talk about Xenoblade Chronicles 2, which is the last game I started playing in 2017, but the first game I beat in 2018. It's the first new expansive RPG for the Switch and it delivered in all the ways I wanted it to. 

As for some hot new 2018 releases I've got Dragon Ball FighterZ and Monster Hunter: World. Sadly I have only played a bit of DBZ, but it seems like it's actually a good fighting game. Monster Hunter on the other hand has pretty much consumed my life since its release. Boy do I love me some Monster Hunter. 

It's game time!

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

I played the original Xenoblade Chronicles for over 100 hours before getting burned out. I forced myself to do everything I saw, until I just couldn't do it anymore. I came back to it a few months later and finished it. For my initial 100 hours of play I loved that game. The MMO like combat pulled me in deeper than I ever would have expected. The real draw for me was the interesting story though. That's why I bounced off Xenoblade Chronicles X. There was barely any narrative whatsoever, but Chronicles 2 brings it back.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 returns to the originals narrative heavy roots.

I don't even really know where to start with this game. The combat system is a more simplified version of the original with a ton of complex and slightly convoluted systems are layered on top of it. To start the original game had you using a fairly large pool of skills that once used would go into a cooldown state. Depending on your style of play you could swap out skills when you needed. Chronicles 2 cuts down drastically on the skills known as artes and each character only has three they can use in battle at a time. Each character auto attacks like an MMO and then you use skills to do more damage and inflict status effects. At first it sounds more simple until you get into the combo system.

The world of Chronicles 2 revolves around beings called blades. They are essentially sentient weapons. The characters you control are called drivers, who bond with crystals to make the blades appear. Once summoned they are bound to the driver and you can use them in battle. They each have different elements, which leads us back to the combo system. Each driver can have three blades equipped. In addition to their three skills they have a special attack that can level up from 1 to 4 by using skills. Once you use a special a combo meter will start and a branching path will appear on screen. You then need to find the next element in the chain in order to continue the combo. Once you complete a full tree which takes three special attacks an orb will begin floating around the enemy with the color of the last element you used in the chain. You can then "burst" by filling another meter. Once you do that you get a chance to break the orbs you have on an enemy in order to do massive damage.

The UI is just as overwhelming as the battle system!

Confused? I certainly was for the first few hours of the game, because the tutorials are not super great and you can't really review them. The entire system revolves around working to built these combo chains, which takes a long time. Due to that even battles with weak enemies can take upwards of ten minutes because your meant to do a ton of damage with your burst. At first it seemed tedious but once I got the hang of it every battle seemed like a puzzle. The battle system is the core of the game. Overall the game is fun, but man does it have some huge flaws. The map is atrocious, and getting blades revolves around random chance, but the entire experience as a whole was something I greatly enjoyed. It's the first real AAA rpg for the switch and it's at least worth a look.

Dragon Ball Fighterz

I'm going to be real here, I've played this game three times. Twice during betas, and once to get trounced by my brother and a few friends because I focused all my time on Monster Hunter instead. What I have played of the game is very fun though. I kind of knew what to expect from a DBZ fighting game made by ARKSYS, but I have been pleasantly surprised by it. Just like Xrd the game looks beautiful in motion and in stills it looks just like the anime. In terms of gameplay it was a lot of intricacies you'd expect from.an ARKSYS game, while remaining assecible for the average player. If you just want to have some fun with DBZ characters you can mash one of three attack buttons to do cool looking auto combos. On the other hand if you want to go wild with super long combos you make yourself it's got you there too.

Like Guilty Gear Xrd before it FighterZ is a beautiful game. 

I'm excited to really dive in and see what the story is all about. It introduces a new Android character (21) and she seems pretty cool. You have to beat the story to unlock her as a playable character so I haven't seen much of her on streams. So far people seem to really like the game and I hope it succeeds in a huge way for ARKSYS.

Monster Hunter World

Monster Hunter World came out last Friday. I have played 80 hours since then. I have killed monsters for approximately two full work weeks now and I don't regret a single moment of it. As some of you may know I fell down the Monster Hunter rabbit hole for the first time with Tri Ultimate on the Wii-U. The thrill of the hunt caught me and since then I have put over 1,000 hours into the franchise as a whole. What's a bummer is that most of the time people are dismissive about the franchise because it doesn't do a good job of explaining a lot of it's systems and it can get overwhelming fairly quickly. Now we have Monster Hunter World, which does a lot to try and make the series appeal to a wider audience, and for the most part I think it succeeds.

I could list the quality of life changes World makes, but that's not going to mean anything to a lot of people. What I can tell you is that there has never been a time to start playing the series. For once it has a tutorial that is serviceable enough to get you into the swing of things. It is by no means perfect and misses a few things, but at least it does enough to get prospective players started.

The scale of the monsters and the world are much larger than ever before.

Just in case you don't know what Monster Hunter is, the title says it all. You hunt large monsters and use their parts to craft weapons and armor. This is all done in service of hunting more monsters! There are 14 weapon types which are all very different, and I equate them to different characters in a fighting game. At first glance their movesets seem very limited, but under the surface they are all very nuanced. Finding the true potential of a weapon is a large part of the fun I find in the game.

In previous iterations you would travel around various maps and travel through loading zones to attack monster. In World each map is one contiguous zone, and there is an emphasis on everything being more like actual nature. Everything is lush, and the monsters interact both with the environment and each other. Capcom took a calculated risk by moving Monster Hunter from handhelds to home consoles, but after selling 5 million copies worldwide in just three days I think their gamble paid off. The franchise is seeing success on a global scale like never before and I can't wait to see what kinds of updates this new formula receives. It just might be the best Monster Hunter yet.

2018 is Going to Be a Banger

Every time a new Monster Hunter comes out I get sucked in for a long time. In my extreme hype for World, i decided to import Monster Hunter XX for the Switch. Going to back to a game without all of the improvements and quality of life changes that World made has been rough so far. Despite that I've been sticking with it and continue to play two Monster Hunter games at the same time...

When I get completely burned out of Monster Hunter I'm going to transition back to playing the new Digimon game. I have a lot of thoughts about it... As a turn based RPG I like it a lot, but as a story based game I can't stand it. It's the equivalent of playing a filler episode from an Anime.

Most of the new releases on the horizon that I care about are in March. So it's entirely possible that I'll just continue to play a whole lot of Monster Hunter.