DAI: Where the stats are made up and the choices don't matter

[Note: midway through writing this entry, I turned to Bill and said, “This post isn’t funny. I have too many feelings about this series to be funny.

Note 2: I started writing this two months ago… and literally, I had so many things to say that I gave up. I’ll see how many I can remember now that it’s not so fresh in my memory.

Note 3: It is now 2016. I kept writing stuff and Bill stopped. It's all his fault.]

So here we are, in 2015, almost two months after the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition, the game that both prompted and ruined this 271 Games challenge, which both of us finished yesterday. I (Dani) put in a good ninety hours, and did everything. Almost literally, everything that it was possible to do. Bill skipped a bit more than me and completed it in a bit under seventy.

The question is, exactly how many of those hours were well-used, as opposed to wasted?

Look, I really don’t want to be a contrarian. I don’t want to be that person who hates everything that gets 10/10 and only likes the ones with bad reviews because ‘they just didn’t get it’. And I don’t think I am. Yes, I find Final Fantasy X kind of dull except for the Blitzball and badly written, and I think the Elders Scrolls games have no personality, I found Bladerunner ham-fisted and rapey (and yes, the director’s cut version), and I don’t think George RR Martin can write women or children well. But by the same token, I think Breaking Bad is amazing, as is Shawshank Redemption, as is Heath Ledger’s Joker (not saying anything about Dark Knight Rises, though). I don’t think I consciously or subconsciously hate things just because other people love them.

I just… want things to be perfect. And if they’re not, I get angry when people say they are.
Now, I know that Dragon Age: Origins isn’t perfect. But as I sit here trying to think of examples of why it’s not perfect, I’m actually struggling. Seriously. There’s one kid who’s got a terribly scripted line early on in the story, but he only exists for that one line and you don’t even have to talk to him. All the characters wear identical underpants, which is a little weird but it’s not like you have to see them often. The combat is slower than the sequels and there are some skills that I never get because I’m pretty sure they’re useless. These are the only problems I can come up with, and I’ve been thinking about it for like twenty minutes now. It is an amazing game, and the first big RPG I really played, and it took all of three seconds of dialogue to make me fall in love with it.

Inquisition… not so much.

After Dragon Age 2 I only had a reserved excitement for Inquisition, but to be contrarian again, I don’t hate DA2. I mean, I was totally dissatisfied with the story and pissed off that I couldn’t form meaningful relationships with my party members and bored with the tiny, repetitive exploration area, but on my second playthrough I appreciated it more. And on the third, even more. Now, in its own way, I really like that game as well. So I figured that maybe I wouldn’t be crazy about Inquisition the first time but I could give it a couple more goes later and it would grow on me.

That… might happen, I guess, but it’s going to take me a while to work up the energy to try. Every part of this game was so exhausting and unfulfilling that I’m not sure if I’ll be able to make it through the first plot point. And since I completed every single possible mission it had to offer, is there really any point spending that many hours doing it again?

Okay, let’s talk specifics. I was going to go through everything chronologically, but instead I think I’m going to split this into good/bad lists. The ‘good’ list may be a little shorter than the ‘bad’, but let me be clear: I didn’t hate this game. It just had an awful lot of ‘bad’.

THE GOOD

• I think I had a pretty good amount of choice in the character creation screen.

• Some of the locations were really pretty. For some reason I particularly loved the Emerald Graves area, so green and full of giants, and an abandoned palace full of undead to eradicate. That was cool.

• Killing dragons felt like an awesome accomplishment. You spend the first half of the game running from them as they kill your companions in two hits, but then you return and engage in a long, drawn-out hackfest that ends with you going, ‘Ha ha! Fuck you, dragon, I’m taking your skull as a keepsake!”
• 
  
• Some of the main missions were excellent! Two in particular: the first being time travel. Time travel is so amazing that it’s hard to really get it wrong – though I hear the latest Sonic game tried its best – and Inquisition did a wonderful job of showing a completely broken future. I was actually really hoping I wouldn’t be allowed back to my own time and I’d actually have to stay and fix the horrible future myself rather than go back to the present and just prevent it. How good would that have been? Not only is it a cool, dynamic shift in the setting, but you’d get to see the consequences of all the choices you made in the past come to life in front of you! 

• The second great mission is when you get stuck in the Fade (because it wouldn’t be Dragon Age without getting stuck in the Fade). In Origins you get trapped by a Sloth Demon, in Awakenings it’s a Pride Demon, in DA2 you fight both a Desire and Pride Demon, and in Inquisition it’s a brand-new type: a Fear Demon. And he is fucking awesome. You wander through the weird landscape while his beautiful baritone voice taunts you by revealing your companions’ greatest fears. I tried to look up the voice actor but had great difficulty as everyone was just listed as ‘additional voices’. From a bit of Youtube stalking, though, I suspect it was either Kieran Bew or James Faulkner. Whoever it was, good on him. Anyway, in this Fade you recover your own fearful memories and stumble through a graveyard where all the headstones list your teammates and what they’re scared of most. And at the end, you actually get to let a character die, in a decision that I hear is actually really difficult if you used your own custom origin story.

• There was one aspect of combat that sounds tiny but really impressed me: the shield. You’re fighting Templars a lot, and very often they are shield-and-sword warriors, and they’re meant to be great at fighting Mages. I was a Mage, and my magic attacks actually bounced off their shields when I tried to hit them from the front. That was amazing, it fit the theme and really made me have to consider moving around and flanking instead of standing still for an entire fight.

• The War Council was a novel idea and solving heaps of problems in real time was kind of cool, especially since you got to choose who spearheaded the missions – should the evil nobleman be addressed diplomatically by your ambassador, sneakily by your spymaster, or confrontationally by your army general? Incidentally, Josephine the ambassador promised to be possibly the most boring NPC to exist, but as the game progressed  I totally loved her.

• Some of the new enemies were quite impressive. I’m mainly thinking of the dragon-like ones, the varghests and the phoenixes. Varghests were essentially big, angry pangolins and phoenixes were like a perfect snapshot of the evolutionary stage between bird and dinosaur. Many demons also got a revamp that was cool, like the aforementioned Fear Demon, who resembles a creepy floating spidery humanoid alien. And by ‘resembles’, I mean ‘is’. There really isn’t any other way to describe it. There’s also a new big, lanky green demon who can travel through the ground to knock you over wherever you’re standing. Annoying, but fun to work around once you can see it coming.

• Val Royeaux, the main city in Orlais, looked lovely. This game is the first one in which you get to visit Orlais, and all you know is that it’s ostentatious and full of rich, pretentious French people. And I think they capture that feeling really well, using bright colours and people wearing masquerade masks in the street and mocking you for being uncultured.

• In fact, a lot of Orlais was cool. The big masquerade ball! I can’t believe I forgot to include that in the good main missions point! Now that was a novel idea. It got rid of combat and replaced it with a crazy etiquette game where you go around eavesdropping on rich people, sneaking into the Empress’s office to go through her mail, dancing with noblewomen to mask the fact that you’re discussing murder plots with them.

• And I think that’s it. Now for the bad. What’s the best way to order this? Chronologically based on when in the game they occurred? Biggest problem to smallest? Smallest to biggest? Quest by quest? I guess we’ll see.

THE BAD

• Yikes, what’s going on with the text size? I’m playing this on a 55-inch TV and I can barely read them. My eyes still hurt.

• The opening. You have a funny dream-like vision, then find yourself in prison. Cassandra, a minor DA2 character, yells at you that you killed a bunch of people in a magical explosion while you say tearfully that you have no idea what she’s talking about. Then… she takes you for a walk to the nearby temple full of demons. Okay? Not sure why she thinks that’s a good idea considering she believes you’re a magical mass murderer, but whatever. And sure, she gets a little pissed off when you grab a weapon for yourself, but from that moment on she defers to you for all decisions from here on out. Because even though you’re her prisoner, you just have that natural air of a leader about you.

• To add to this, you now get two more companions right away, without any personal dialogue or any real idea who they are. I mean, one of them is a main character in DA2, but that doesn’t tell me why he’s suddenly become my fighting buddy. In Origins your first companion is usually your best friend, your parent or your dog, and in DA2 it’s your sibling. True, in Awakenings your first partner is a random stranger lady, but she dies quickly so it doesn’t matter. But the three companions you now have in Inquisition – Cassandra, Varric and Solas – can be your party for the entire rest of the game if you want. You don’t have to convince them to help you or scrutinise them to figure out if you’re on the same side. Nah. The game just throws them at you and tells you to go play.

• As for going and playing, why did the designers decide that every button needed to change? They changed the goddamn attack button. Seriously, you’ve made three games in this series with the same controls, why the hell would you change them?!

• Oh wait, I know why. It’s because this game has no fucking clue what genre it wants to be. It still calls itself an RPG because that’s what everyone expects it to be, but just because it’s in a fantasy setting and has dialogue does not make it an RPG. For one thing, if you can’t make any decisions about your character’s personality, I’m sceptical that you can call it role-playing. Plenty of people are describing it as an MMO, and that was definitely the impression I got.

• Also, realistically, I know they changed the attack button because it was ‘A’ and they wanted to include a jump button in this one. And jump is always ‘A’ as well. A could begrudgingly accept that, but you know what? I don’t think adding a jump option made the game better in any way. In fact, all it did was make it so that the designers could stick quest markers and items in really hard-to-reach places that you could only get to by awkwardly jumping around a pile of rocks for fifteen minutes feeling like you’re exploiting a bad jump mechanic. They tried to make the jumping necessary, but all they did was make it clunky.

• Speaking of clunky, for the most part they did the open world thing well. The large-ish maps were cool and instead of invisible walls they surrounded the explorable area with insurmountable mountains, sandstorms or huge bodies of water. Oh, and invisible walls, too. Yeah, they couldn’t quite surround every bit of the area with mountains and storms and water, so you still get stuck like that bit at the end of The Truman Show.

• So this intro prologue-y section gives you all the open worldness that you want. You can leave the path, go exploring, jump off cliffs to your heart’s content! Only, there’s nothing to do. Not even a herb to collect (and trust me, this game has a lot of herbs to collect). It’s just a big, blank, white mountain. Basically, if you want to play this like an open-world RPG, go for it, but could you just give them an hour of sticking to the path first? I know games like their rigid introductions, but then why give us the option? Why not let us be unable to leave the path until it matters, like in DA2? Or give us stuff to do off the path, like in Origins and Awakenings? It’d be like if Skyrim let you wander away from the executions to play in a river when the dragon turned up.

• Back to the plot. Your character was at the centre of the big explosion, yet has amnesia about what happened. And since this game doesn’t mention anything else about your character’s past, really, they might as well have complete memory loss about everything, and I for one am getting sick of protagonists with memory loss. It is so fucking lazy.

• But hey, at least the game lets you visit the Fear Demon’s domain and recover your lost memories. Y’know, if your only memories of the event are someone yelling, “Run!” and someone else yelling, “No, stop running! I’ll kill you!” I played ninety hours of this game and I still don’t understand what new information was meant to be offered here. It was like some big secret was hidden in the memories – which would be true in most games – but in this one, nope! No secret! At the start of the game, all you know is some demon-y dude traps and kills the leader of the Chantry in the Fade, then the explosion happens and you get spat out of it somehow, with a brand new magic power. At the end of the game, you know who the demon-y dude is (which was revealed to you long before recovering the memories), and you know that Grey Wardens were helping him (which was revealed to you long before recovering the memories), and you know that he caused the explosion with some elf artefact (which was revealed to you long before recovering the memories). So basically, they gave your character unnecessary memory loss, explained pretty much everything about it to you very early in the game, and then tried to make it a big reveal when you learn the truth. The truth that you already knew. Like, fifty hours ago.

• But you know what’s never explained? Well, a lot, but specifically? Why you were there at the explosion. It happens because the baddie is trying to open a hole in the world that will apparently give him godly powers, and for some reason you walked into the room and stopped it happening. It is never explained why you just walked into the bad guy’s lair. Great.

• Anyone you knew from previous games, like Varric and Leliana, have had complete personality transplants.

• You know who else had complete personality transplants? Apparently the entire Qunari race. This really, really pissed me off, actually. Everyone on the Internet seems kind of psyched about this Iron Bull character – is Freddie Prince Jr really still that popular? – but you realise they retconned an entire race to make him happen, right? Sure, DA2 gave them horns when they didn’t have them in Origins, and I wasn’t crazy about that either, but at least they still had the same confusing, cult-like hive mind going on. That’s the whole point of the Qunari! That they are basically human, but with a society so completely different to ours that they might as well be aliens! And now we’ve got this might-as-well-be-Texan Iron Bull telling us, “Naw, we’re an alright folk, just got a couple o’ fucked up rules, y’all. Wanna bang?” No. No, I do not want to bang, and you know why? Because Origins told me that having sex with a Qunari would kill me. Fuck you, Iron Bull. Fuck you.

• Glitches. I’ve grown more tolerant of glitches in huge games over the years – it irked me in Fallout, pissed me off in Skyrim, but by now I’m happy to laugh when random villagers hover and spin like demented yo-yos. But good god, there were a lot of quest-breakers. You’re meant to get an achievement when you kill all the dragons in the world, but apparently I didn’t deserve that honour. In the Fear Demon’s domain I had to go around picking up lost memories, but no matter how many times I clicked on it, I couldn’t pick one up and had to restart. A minor side quest, finding mysterious shards all over the countryside, just didn’t work at all in Bill’s game. And one that was actually just as hilarious as it was enraging, in Bill’s final boss battle, the boss just disappeared from the fight and left him unable to continue. I can’t decide if that’s better or worse than what I hear about being able to kill it in one shot with an arrow and breaking the ending.

• It wasn’t just controls that got completely changed to be less RPG-like: what about levelling up? In the earlier games, along with possibly every RPG in existence, levelling up means upgrading your stats. Basic, right? I mean, that’s just a basic tenet of the genre. Enter Inquisition, destroyer of worlds. Am I being too harsh on it? It does have stats, after all. But they determine nothing of significance and you don’t get to choose which ones you upgrade: the game just automatically assigns them to you when you learn a new ability. Let’s say I played a Mage – which I did – and let’s say I’m a weirdo who wanted to challenge myself by increasing my strength and dexterity but not my magic. I don’t think this game would let me. Just think about that. This is a goddamn Bioware game, a high fantasy, based-on-Dungeons-and-Dragons role play, and it has taken away my ability to screw up. It’s so incomprehensible that I’m almost lost for words.

• Now, I won’t say that the health system was terrible, because it wasn’t. It was actually quite interesting: you have very little health, but multiple barrier systems (Mages can cast shields, warriors develop armour that can leave you bizarrely invincible under certain circumstances). But again, WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO USE IT IN FAVOUR OF AN ALREADY FINE HEALTH SYSTEM? Why not use it for your next huge blockbuster? Why not leave anything, anything, the same as the previous games that were hugely successful and wonderful? Even the second one gets like an 8.5 on IGN! It’s like they did the reverse of the Hangover movies, which didn’t change anything at all, and risked every fantastic thing they had, sometimes getting it right but more often than not just becoming a confusing mess that leaves me screaming, “What was wrong with the old one?” I didn’t think this really had to be spelled out, but it’s totally okay to have the same health bar as your predecessor games. That’s not being lazy. It’s being normal.

• The inventory. Oh god, was the inventory unintuitive. Now I’ll admit, whenever I start a new game I get confused and angered by the menu system – I still don’t understand any Elder Scrolls or Fallout ones completely – so I patiently gave Inquisition a chance. A ninety-hour-long chance. And I still don’t like it. It’s slow and messy and you can’t swap between characters well and for some reason I couldn’t craft certain items even though I’m pretty sure I should have been allowed to. And even on my second playthrough, I’m still reluctant to go through my inventory unless I absolutely have to because it’s such a convoluted mess.

• Skyhold, your main fortress and essentially your home world, is a convoluted mess as well. It’s huge and insanely difficult to find anyone you need. Realistic? Maybe, but then I didn’t see any toilets so I guess realism wasn’t their ultimate goal there.

• You still have an approval/disapproval rating with your party members, but you can’t see it, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t actually do anything.

• Pretty much all minor characters from the earlier games have mysteriously disappeared. Oh, you’re going to Redcliffe? Um… the leader whom you know from Origins has… gone… somewhere far away. Yeah, that’ll do.

• Why did they change how money worked in this game compared to the earlier ones?? What was wrong with the fucking money?

• In the final battle, there’s a dragon fight. In my playthrough, the good dragon was Morrigan, one of your earliest companions from Origins. So, naturally, when she received a mortal wound in that fight, which prompted my character to yell that we needed to help her right away or she would die, I assumed I would have to go and help her. Ha! Why on earth should my emotional attachment and the game’s own suggestion mean anything? I didn’t help her. She was nowhere on my map. Instead I continued fighting the enemy dragon for about fifteen real-time minutes before casually stepping over its corpse to fight the main bad guy Corypheus. And after that battle, there’s the big, victorious cutscene in which Morrigan is walking around totally fine and cheering about how you’ve won.

• Incidentally, Corypheus? A pretty shitty villain. I’m not entirely convinced that Bioware knows how to do final bosses very well. Watch out, Corypheus has invaded! Nah, don’t worry, you can just run away for a while and he won’t ever come after you. Watch out, Corypheus has been gaining powerful servants! Nah, it’s cool, you can convince them that they were wrong to serve him and they should serve you instead. Watch out, Corypheus is going to an ancient temple to gain unforetold power! Nah, you can inexplicably beat him into the temple and take all the power for yourself! The poor bastard doesn’t get a break! He literally has no victory in the entire game, and it makes it less like you’re fighting a soon-to-be-unstoppable god and more like you’re kicking an ugly child when he says he’s going to grow up to be handsome.

Now, for my final negative point, which is so important that it deserves more than a mere dot point. It needs its own real paragraph, not to mention a couple of tiny paragraphs of build-up. Are you ready?

Yeah?

So, in this enormous RPG in which you have to make a variety of decisions…

Nothing you do matters.

Remember how annoyed everyone was at the ending of Mass Effect 3 because it didn’t really matter what you did, you always got the same ending? This is exactly the same. For ninety hours I was given the illusion of choice only to have it taken away when it really counted. Dragon Age 2 had a similar problem: you had a big choice about whose side to take in a fight, and in the end you had to kill both sides anyway, in exactly the same order, in exactly the same way, and then game over. In Inquisition, every choice is as fake as this.

You choose to send your ambassador out on a mission instead of your spymaster? Eh, you get 100 gold as a reward instead of 102. And then you can forget about it because it will never be brought up again.

You choose to travel a route that is more direct but will probably let some scouts die? Don’t worry, nobody cared about those scouts anyway, apparently, because nobody will mention it and you have no moral repercussions.

You stand in front of delegates of the church and announce that you don’t believe in their religion and everything they believe is false? They’ll shrug it off, never be bothered by you, and keep insisting that you’re a messenger from their god.

One that really bothered me was regarding my favourite character, Cole, who’s a spirit. He’s worried about possibly getting possessed by evil in the future, so you can either: emotionally mess him up but make him impossible to possess; or, be emotionally supportive but deal with the risk that he might still get possessed one day. I was being a bleeding heart nice person, so I chose to be supportive.

My fallout?

After the final battle, Cole said to me, “Hey, the bad guy tried to possess me and it didn’t work! I’m fine!”

What the fuck? Why did I even have a decision to make if he wasn’t going to get possessed anyway? I knew I’d made a bad choice; I was terrified that he was going to turn evil and I’d have to kill him! How did you not make that happen? That’s how you emotionally invest someone in their decisions! You don’t pussyfoot around hurting your characters to make every option as happy as it can be. They already showed they were willing to kill off characters by doing it a grand total of once throughout the story, so why didn’t they follow through with any other daunting possibilities?

Again, the only conclusion I can draw is that Bioware saw Skyrim and a couple of MMOs and decided that they were the best things ever, so they might as well mash them together and throw in a few words like ‘Andraste’ and ‘Qunari’ so that we’d still know this was set in Thedas. But that meant it was no longer really an RPG, and all the elements that made this series great have been squashed so hard that they’re barely visible. Again, Inquisition is not a bad game in and of itself, but it represents so many terrible decisions that it baffles me how it ever came into existence.

The spirit of Origins is apparently long dead. And that sucks, because I fell in love with that game. I don’t know how anyone could fall in love with Inquisition.

Dani Doesn't Finish Anythi

So, I’m not exactly fast at playing games. I know that, I’m happy to admit it, and quite frankly I believe it just means I enjoy the games for longer. But it comes with a bit of a sad realization that I would be a terrible game reviewer, because no one ever feels like reading a half-assed summary of a game you only got five percent of the way through in a month.

That said, what if only the first few minutes are all you need to form an accurate opinion? Like a lot of people, I tend to make snap judgements based on any tiny facet of a game, and usually those judgements are highly negative. If I hate something, I hate it quickly. And I don’t mean to brag, but I could tell from its thirty-second trailer that Dark Shadows was going to be a stupid movie, so I’m pretty sure my quickly-formed opinions are completely correct.

In lieu of me actually finishing any games recently, I thought I’d make a snappy list of all the games I’ve attempted in recent months and not finished for one perfectly valid reason or another. Now, ‘hate’ is a sensitive word, so I’d like to preface this by saying that when I use the word ‘hate’, I only sometimes mean it. Sometimes I really, really mean it and hate a game so hard that I hope my Xbox red rings and my PC blue screens, but other times I only hate it the way we all hate that stupid sound Mario makes when he runs into a wall.

Also, I am very aware that many of my problems could be solved by using a walkthrough, or having any kind of persistence. But that is not the point.

Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

When I first suspected I hated it: “Wait, so, to unlock the door, I have to push a boulder. But there are a million boulders in this dungeon, and none of the other ones move. How – how the fuck was I supposed to know? I understand that older games have slightly impossible solutions, but this is basically the first area! Why are you such a sadist, game?”

When I actually gave up: “Woohoo, I got the Rod of Seasons! And… it doesn’t work. Fuck, that dialogue I just skimmed over probably explained this.”

Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

When I first suspected I hated it: “Look, game, I get it. You’re excited about being on the DS and having a touchscreen. But would it really have been so fucking hard to give me the D-pad for movement? Using a stylus to run feels kind of like my fingers have a walking stick.”

When I actually gave up: “Please, game! I’ve told you before, I get really stressed out when I’m on a timer! Why must you keep making this same temple get harder and harder and insist on giving me a deadline?”

Kirby [something something]

When I first suspected I hated it: “Now I know from Smash Bros. that Kirby can steal enemies’ powers. But this being a very old game and me not having a manual, I don’t know how to do that.”

When I actually gave up: “This is awfully repetitive. Maybe I’d like Sonic better.”

Alone in the Dark

When I first suspected I hated it: “Hmm. I can’t help but notice that the first five minutes of this are a tutorial on how to blink. Am I going to need to control my character’s eyelids for the entire game, or did the developers just think this was a cool, flashy detail? You know what, don’t answer that; I can’t decide which is worse.”

When I actually gave up: “Oh. You froze. Good work, Xbox. Like hell I’m going through all of that blinking shit again.”

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

When I first suspected I hated it: “Yeah, customization! Woohoo, choices about whether to kill or be sneaky! Woohoo, different weap- what? Wait, you’re telling me that my stun/sleep/whatever darts only work for a limited time before the enemy wakes up again, and I don’t even have unlimited ammo for that? Um… game… I think you’re overestimating me, here.”

When I actually gave up: “Well, the enemies all woke up and I’m out of ammo. I’m pretty sure they’ve seen me and while I think I could take out one of them, the rest would all see the body instantly and I’d be shot. I guess Mission One is a miserable failure.”

Dragon’s Dogma

When I first suspected I hated it: “Huh. This is like Dragon Age if none of the characters had souls.”

When I actually gave up: “NPC party members, you not only lack souls, but you lack any ability to help me in battle. Oh, look, you’re both dead and I’ve been eaten by the giant hydra! Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.”

Eco Draconis Divinity 3 whatever it’s called???

When I first suspected I hated it: “You’re cool, game, but unless your map actually has any writing, symbols, or identifying features of any kind whatsoever, you’re not allowed to call it a map.”

When I actually gave up: “Ooo, a skeleton! I haven’t fought anything crazy like that befo– aaand I’m dead.”

Red Dead Redemption

When I first suspected I hated it: “I love this game. This is the best game ever. I could keep playing it until the day I die. Oh, a mission! I love missions! Hello, Sir, I hear you have a mission for me? Ride on my horse alongside a moving train as it travels through the land of people who hate you? That – that’s not an escort mission, is it? B- because if it is, you have to tell me. I hate escort missions. Can’t do them. Too stressful. Okay, you’re not saying anything. I … can take that as a no, right?”

When I actually gave up (first time): “YOU KIND OF SORT OF LIED TO ME, GAME!”

When I actually gave up (second time): “Phew, I’ve restarted this whole thing and I feel great! Maybe by the time I get up to that escort mission I won’t hate them so much! Oh, hello, Mister Coyote, how are you today? I’m feeling very – wait … wait, you’re not a coyote. You’re a fucking mountain lion. YOU’RE A - *gargles as throat is ripped out* Okay. Let’s try that again. So I’m looking for a treasure in the middle of nowhere and OH MY GOD NO GET AWAY FROM ME, MOUNTAIN LIO- *gargles* All right! Again! Maybe I won’t go looking for that treasure right now. Maybe I’ll just get off my horse and sit at this campfire to save my progr- ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WHY DO I NOT REMEMBER GETTING KILLED BY SO MANY MOUNTAIN LIONS IN MY LAST PLAYTHROUGH?”

Arkham Origins

When I first suspected I hated it: “Huh. This feels somehow different from Arkham City. Is it the glitchiness? Nah. That’s annoying, but it’s not the main problem. Is it that Black Mask isn’t interesting enough to be the major villain? Hmm, getting warmer. Is it the fact that when I heard this game was going to be a prequel, I expected an amateur Batman learning how to batman properly, and instead I got a clone of the second game only with less plot? Yeah, I think I’m close.”

When I actually gave up: You know what, I can’t even remember. Was it Shiva? Deadshot? Another game-breaking glitch that left me stuck inside the GCPD with no doors working? The fact that they somehow managed to make briefly playing as Joker annoying? I honestly don’t know. I keep picking up this game, playing it for fifteen minutes and then putting it down again, always with more of a headache than before I started. I couldn’t even tell you how close I am to the end, because the plot is so dull that I have no investment in it whatsoever. Batman has no reason to be out chasing these guys except for the fact that they exist, and while that might be fine for some games, it’s not okay for the third installment of a series that usually gives you more than that. Hopefully Arkham Knight fixes everything.

Oblivion

When I first suspected I hated it: “Oh Jesus, I’m being attacked by something. I can hear myself being attacked by something but this dungeon is too freaking dark to see it! What if I just swing my – no, swing down – why the hell can’t I aim? This combat is so – hey, I got it! Oh. Oh, it’s just a rat. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a big rat, but that doesn’t mean I had to go and cut its head off like that. It probably lived here with its rat wife and rat babies and was boldly defending its nest. (Do rats live in nests? My parents always used to describe my hair as a rat’s nest, but maybe that was only because there’s already a hairstyle called bird’s nest?) I am a horrible person. Well, fish-person.”

When I actually gave up: “Hello again, game. That’s right, I’m back for a fifth attempt. You’ve bored me and irritated me in the past – mostly bored me – but this time I’m going to make sure it’s different. I’m going to play you for ten hours straight so that I’m so invested in the universe and story that I can’t possibly abandon it.”

*Interlude*

“Well, that was an interesting ten months. Hey, you know what game I never actually hated that much? Oblivion. I wonder where I got up to in that. Ah well, it’s far too late to continue an old save file now.”

Skyrim

When I first suspected I hated it: “Okay, we’ve got this new Elder Scrolls game and everyone’s been hyping it up like mad. I may not have been able to get into Oblivion, but this time it’ll be different. I’ll be converted. I’ll be optimistic. I’ll – wait, what do you mean I can’t skip the intro? B-but I just watched Bill play through it. I don’t want to watch the whole thing again. This is like the blinking thing in Alone in the Dark, only instead of blinking all I can do is tilt my head in stupid directions. You haven’t even made the characters any less ugly than they were in the last game, and you’re forcing me to look at them!”

When I actually gave up: “You want me to turn right after escaping from the executioners and dragon? Well, since this is a massive sandbox, surely you won’t mind if I turn left instead! Why, hello, armed guards! You’re going to extort me and kill me for having no gold? And you have a magic-user in your group! Nice! Maybe once I reload I’ll just take a nice, little arc around you – oh, hello there, heavily-armoured bandits! Oh, I see, I accidentally wandered into your fort and you’re going to shoot me. Fair enough, I’ll reload again. Hey, cool, an abandoned ruin! I should totally go inside and – woah, what the hell is that? Some kind of glowing ghost thing? Some kind of glowing ghost thing that’s sapping my health and taking no damage? You know what, game, I’m starting to think you didn’t want me to go left at all. And you call yourself open world.”

Final Fantasy X

When I first suspected I hated it: “Um … I think it wants me to go and play Blitzball, whatever that is, but I don’t see anywhere to go. This is the most confusing first five minutes of a game I’ve ever played.”

When I actually gave up: “Well, it’s taken me eight years, but I’ve finally gotten past the first island and figured out how magic works! Not only that, but I’ve proceeded to grind until I can annihilate any boss that stands in my way. Now all I want before I finish are these Celestial Weapon things, only not Lulu’s or Tidus’s because those challenges are ridiculous. I’ll try Yuna’s, hers is easy. Almost there … wait, what? I … missed a Destruction Sphere? I missed the first Destruction Sphere? And now the only way to get it is to beat the first Dark Aeon, which is about twenty times more powerful than the non-optional bosses?! O-okay, no worries, I’m not going to have a tearful breakdown and play Blitzball for the next fifteen hours… ”

Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines

When I first suspected I hated it: “This game is so fucking awesome. I love everything about it. Oh, a haunted house? I’ve heard about this. I suppose it does look sort of creepy. Oh my, the stairs collapsed and now I’m trapped in the basement boiler room. Excuse me for a moment, I’m suddenly about to wet my pants in fear.”

When I actually gave up: “Hey, I’m making pretty good progress and I’ve only cheated once and gotten Bill to help me about three times. Oh, a cemetery? And zombies, you say? Excuse me for a moment.”

Pokemon White

When I first suspected I hated it: “Cool, so this Lillipup gives me 28 EXP. That’s pretty good! So good I gained a level! I think I’ll fight anoth- wait, what? This other Lillipup on the same level only gave me 16 EXP. What just happened? Are – are you scaling my experience?”

When I actually gave up: “Okay, I don’t hate this game that much. Sure, I’ve given up twice, but I have a feeling this time will be the – oh my god, Dragon Age 3 comes out in two weeks?! Holy shit, I have to drop everything and replay the first two RIGHT AWAY!”

And, yeah, that’s about where I left it. Now Dragon Age 3 has just come out and all the rules of this 271 Games challenge are completely forgotten. Nothing, not even self-imposed purchase limitations, will stop me from playing the shit out of it non-stop for the next three months. Not even –

GODDAMNIT, MOUNTAIN LION

http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/Red-Dead-Redemption/Red-Dead-Redemption-porting-question/td-p/10749648/page/4

Professor Layton vs Ace Attorney vs Dani

[Warning – this post was originally just about the one game, but now that it’s easily doubling the length of any other post so far, I feel I should mention that at least seven games get discussed, and all of them spoiled. And all of them are Professor Layton games.]

I love things that make me feel smarter – I love puzzles, brainteasers, riddles, trivia competitions, Trivial Pursuit, quiz shows (the British ones, too, because they’re clearly the smartest) – so along with Puzzle Agent, Puzzle Agent 2, an awesome DOS one from my childhood called Blockman, and just about every point-and-click game in existence, it was inevitable that I’d love anything Professor Layton. I’ve also read every Poirot book, so clearly Phoenix Wright would be my thing, too.

Well … sort of. The Layton games hardly ever gave me any trouble, but goddamnit, for a game that the Internet tells me is aged “10 and up” for complexity, Phoenix Wright kicked my arse. I got stuck on the third trial of the first game, then had to return it to my friend from whom I’d borrowed it because I was taking too long. She told me I’d need a walkthrough, and I didn’t believe her, so I staunchly refused to use one. On the one hand my pride is intact, but on the other, I never cleared Edgeworth of murder, so I guess my arch-rival got lethally injected, like, a year ago. Uh … victory?

Thankfully, Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney let you use Layton’s hint coins to help you with Phoenix’s trials, so I only had to consult a walkthrough once to find out when to present evidence – and that was only because I’d accidentally clicked the wrong thing, and then didn’t know if I’d mis-clicked or whether my real answer was just bad. I can’t believe how smart Layton makes me feel, while at the same time Phoenix makes me feel like I drank ferric chloride because I thought the iron boost would help my brain think gooder.

The game: Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney

Why I didn’t finish it earlier: Like Stick of Truth, I broke the rules and bought it last week. I knew it would only take a couple of days. But if something were going to stop me from finishing it, it would’ve been the ending. OH MY GOD WHAT GAME NEEDS AN EXPLANATION THAT LONG?

Comments: I haven’t really played enough Phoenix Wright to know how well this one performed in comparison to the previous games, so I’ll be mainly talking about the Layton side. That said, both lots of characters and playing styles seemed very true to the originals, so good on them for not totally sacrificing either.

Now, I won’t go out of my way to say that the Layton games are the best. I love them, but let’s just say if we were in a relationship, they’d be calling the police on me for abuse every night as I took them to bed, professed my love, and then threw them against the wall while ignoring their cries for mercy. I absolutely adore the first and third games, don’t mind the second and fifth games, kind of dislike the fourth game, and utterly loathe the sixth game. Jesus, I didn’t realize there were so many of them until I typed it. If you don’t know, the structure of the Layton games is basically, the Professor and his apprentice Luke arrive in some mysterious location (aptly named something like ‘St. Mystere’), discover that some weird crap is going on, and spend ten to fifteen hours solving small puzzles in order to find the solution to the overarching mystery of the weird crap. So, I only have three criteria for these games:

1. The small puzzles are good;

2. The big mystery has a good, airtight solution; and

3. The ending has to make me cry.

I’m not sure how many other people cry at games aimed at pre-teens, but I say it’s as acceptable as crying at a slightly worse written, somehow less plausible version of Toy Story.

I … tend to cry at stuff.

The first one (Curious Village) had excellent puzzles because the game was fresh. Finally, puzzle writers could exercise their creativity and unleash all their head-scratchers into the world! The overarching mystery had a satisfying ending that tied up all the crazy loose ends (turns out, the secret of the curious village was that it was robots). And I don’t remember if I actually cried, but it had dead parents and a sad orphan girl being looked after by freaking robots. Come on, the only thing that would make it sadder is if a seven-leaf clover and a dog with a time-travelling owner was involved.

The second one (Pandora’s Box) still had great puzzles, and mini games that were way cooler than the first one. Making tea for disgruntled villagers? Yes, please! Spot-the-difference? Hell yeah! But the overarching mystery was less cool. This strange town was weird because the residents believed a vampire lived in a creepy, old tower, but it turned out there was a massive gas leak and everyone who came near it started hallucinating and … thinking they were immortal or something. Still, the ending involved an old man who didn’t realize he was old meeting the granddaughter he didn’t know he had, and then maybe dying on her. My memory’s a bit fuzzy on this, possibly because I was watching it through so many tears. So it was pretty good; I just found robots more believable than mass hallucination.

The third one (Unwound Future) was about time travel, which immediately made it awesome. Also, by this stage I was used to the games revealing that whatever ‘magic’ seemed to exist was total bullshit, so I spent the whole time going, “Okay, it’s probably not really time travel. So how the hell do they have a future-Luke, future-Professor, and a whole goddamn future-London? And also, if it’s not really time travel, who the fuck is this future-Luke that brought me to the so-called future in the first place? I don’t care how smooth-talking and Yuri Lowenthal-voiced he is; I don’t trust him!”

And … well, I was so correct that the pride still hurts sometimes. It wasn’t the future: it was a massive underground recreation of the city made by some rich kid with enough money to exact revenge on people he hated. Otherwise known as, the ultimate fantasy of everyone ever. There was also a dead girlfriend involved, so hooray, more crying!

Then, by the fourth one (Last Spectre), things started going off the rails a bit. For starters it was a prequel, which rarely bodes well for anyone (I’m looking at you, Arkham Origins). Second, the puzzles were running out of steam: they’d used up all their tricks and classics and resorted to things like puzzles that involved counting cat silhouettes, an easier version of a Sudoku with cat-shaped paperweights, and running a cat through a maze. Even for Japan, this was overloaded with felines. Seriously, I haven’t even brought up the puzzles ‘Cat Catcher’ and ‘Coax the Kitty’, nor the fact that a cat is a somewhat-major character. But hey, when a franchise has given you almost seven hundred puzzles, some of them are bound to be duds.

The real problem with Last Spectre was that the big mystery – what is this spectral monster that rampages through the city at night? – doesn’t involve robots, nor hallucinations, nor spoiled rich kids. No; the solution to this one is that it’s actually a monster, just a slightly different monster than everyone expected. Um, right. That gave me no pridegasm whatsoever. Also, there’s a dying girl that people don’t like for some reason, who’s actually not dying for some other reason, and she probably lives happily ever after, but I didn’t care about her enough to really remember that part. There may have been some vague anti-pollution implications at the end, too. You think that’s going to make me cry, game? What do you think you are, Animals of Farthing Wood?

Jesus Christ. Just … I can’t believe that show existed.

Sigh. Okay, I decided to give the fifth game, Miracle Mask, a chance. And it was a bloody big chance, because I bought a 3DS specifically to play it. Looking back on it, I’m not entirely sure why I had so much faith.

Thing is, I really liked the overall story. Not necessarily the mystery about this amazing, magic mask (shock horror, it’s not magic, and doesn’t really do anything at all), but the fact that it’s all about Layton’s dead childhood friend, Randall, and the fact that his (Randall’s) butler got rich and married his (Randall’s) college girlfriend. Only, as they find out at the end, Randall wasn’t really dead, and he was pissed off. How good is that? I mean, dead-guy-who’s-not-actually-dead is overdone, but who cares? By the time it was revealed, it was pretty obvious what was going on, but just imagining all the horrible guilt and pain all the characters must have been going through as all the hints and signs came together … I wanted to write the goddamn movie.

Only, the game is a kids’-and-only-kids’ game, and as such doesn’t like to go too overboard with characters experiencing emotions besides inappropriate enthusiasm and mild bewilderment. So when Professor Layton finally came face-to-face with the man he now knew to be his long-dead bestie, he gave nothing more than a bemused frown and a chastising speech because Randall had been mean to the butler.

The puzzles were adequate, although weirdly action-y. I had to run away from spinning, slicing robots and ride horses through an obstacle course. Normally most of the Layton gameplay is staring at the screen, so I was not prepared for this amount of finger-moving and button-pressing. The overarching mystery was … well, irrelevant, really. The ‘miracle mask’ was of no value to anyone, especially me. So all this game really had was its cry value, and it had so much potential. Like, all the crying fuel in the world was contained in a few boxes of text, so much so that I wanted Layton himself to burst into tears. And when he didn’t, I was upset. I was angry that the opportunity had been wasted. I wanted more sobbing than my last Toy Story marathon, and instead I got all the sobbing of a Legally Blonde marathon.

You might think that meant no sobbing at all, but you clearly haven’t seen me watch Legally Blonde. There were still some sniffles here and there, but more at the concept of what the game could have been, rather than what it was. What it was, was an affront to emotion itself.

All the bad stuff aside, this one energized me for the sixth one, Azran Legacy – the first game that I ever watched Bill play over his shoulder just to see if he’d get as furious at it as I did.

It got high ratings on all the review sites, so I can only assume the reviewers had never played another Layton game, nor any game that wasn’t designed by molluscs in vaguely-humanoid form. There was practically no big mystery, only about three of the puzzles had any kind of difficulty, the mini-games were awful, and most irritating of all, the characters stopped to have a conversation or give you a tutorial on every single screen. You move from one back alley to the next – and believe me, in these games, you do a lot of alley-scrounging – and suddenly Layton is teaching Luke the wonders of tapping your stylus on garbage can lids or reminding him how feet work. Worse still, the previous installments laugh at you if you haven’t clicked on every man, woman, child and object at least three times, so you can’t possibly just skip over certain locations.

This just … wasn’t a Layton game. It felt so utterly different, didn’t even care about revealing that magic was fake, and didn’t make me cry even a little bit. Not one stupid tear.

So.

That was my last thought about all things Layton before buying Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney. I had been burned, but I remained optimistic. The tables had turned: now the game was my abusive partner that had somehow managed to convince me to not only stay, but also to give it heaps of money. And … it was all right.

Well, actually, I can say it’s all right now, but it’s the sort of game where if I go to read reviews and they’re all overwhelmingly positive, I’ll start to get annoyed and talk about how shit it is and how it’s insane that people don’t see it. Kind of like Final Fantasy, or The Dark Knight Rises.

I love the puzzles, and I love the trial mechanics, but let’s be honest: this game had problems. Weird problems. At one point it actually glitched out on me, not giving me the correct answer options for a puzzle. I didn’t even know hand-held games still had glitches, but then, I guess I haven’t been on the lookout for them since Missingno. Luckily, like the previous Layton installment, this game pretty much removes all possibility of actually getting a question wrong and gives you infinite attempts without any punishment, so it wasn’t exactly a GTA-style gamebreaker.

Another issue was the instructions in the puzzles. Normally this is very straightforward: you get a box of text on the top screen of the DS, telling you in about three sentences what you need to do to solve the puzzle, and a nice little picture on the bottom screen to admire and maybe click on.

Example.

http://firsthour.net/screenshots/professor-layton-and-the-unwound-future/professor-layton-and-the-unwound-future-shape-puzzle.jpg

Now admittedly, that was an easy one. But compare that to this one, in which you have to shuffle sixteen dolls of a variety of colours around a grid of rooms:

Or maybe that doesn’t seem too bad, either? Well, there’s always the fact that no, in this puzzle each doll does not speak for its entire colour set, and you have to only focus on one specific doll for the entire thing, ignoring literally all the others. If the blue doll said, “Don’t put me next to a red one,” then that just means one blue doll has to be not next to a red one. All the other blues and reds could deal with it. I mean, I thought that might have been an important detail, and that by saying the exact opposite the game was kind of lying to me, but whatever.

Some puzzles’ instructions, I just didn’t even understand. I’m not sure what was going on, but it felt like the Japanese-to-English translators had given in their two weeks’ notice and had just stopped giving a fuck. And some of the puzzles introduced mechanics that were never explained, nor ever used again – right at the end there’s one where you can scroll left and right between multiple screens, and it took me far too long to figure that out, but seriously! I spent the entire game not scrolling, why would I suddenly do it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world now?

I just never had this kind of trouble with the other Layton games. They made sense. The instructions were clear, and if they introduced any new methods of puzzle-solving, they at least strongly hinted to you what you were supposed to do. I may have had issues with the stories, but the technicalities were always solid. I’m not sure what was different here. Maybe if I actually read the credits I’d be able to pinpoint whom to blame.

Okay, enough about puzzles. Let’s get into the incredibly mediocre story.

Basically, the main characters from both original series get sucked into a book that takes them to a weird village. The weird village is medieval and likes to hold witch trials and murder adolescent girls. The characters happen to take a shine to the most witch-accused girl in the village and spend the game trying to prove her innocence, while also getting accused and murdered themselves.

Now obviously, with my Layton mindset, I assumed all the magic was bullshit and there’d be some eccentric rich guy paying a lot of money to kill the women he didn’t like. I mean, you actually see women getting locked into boxes and thrown into flames; they wouldn’t put that kind of brutality into a kids’ game, would they? But the thing is, I don’t know much about the Ace Attorney games, except that one of the characters is an honest-to-god spirit medium who can channel the soul of at least one dead person into her body. Would the writers of those games object to having real magic in this one? So I had to be tentative about calling bullshit.

And, well, the magic at the start was pretty convincing. Statues come to life and start attacking a guy’s car, crazy alien-looking witches fly around London, and you actually see the characters get sucked into the book after seeing their own pictures in the illustrations. I don’t think there’s any non-magical way to explain away all that.

Well, this game has a very nice, neat way of getting around that little problem. Queue drumroll…

and…

They just ignore it!

That’s right. Of course, the witches and murder in the mysterious book-village are all fake and given an extremely tenuous explanation involving hallucinogenic flower juice and the inability to see the colour black. But the thing is, all that only applies to the book-village, which of course is actually a top-secret government research facility. The entire introduction to the game takes place in normal, everyday London, and not a goddamn word is said about how witches were able to fly around the Tower Bridge? How the fuck did regular English statues come to life to attack a protagonist’s car? Because that was kind of the moment I assumed that at least a little bit of magic was real, and I feel pretty ripped off that my right to correctly solve the game’s mystery was impeded by a total plothole.

Googling ‘Layton Ace Attorney plot hole’ yields a number of results that must be awkward for the designers, but quite frankly most of the complaints are things that even I know you have to let go. Layton games are based on the premise of ridiculously-implausible-but-kind-of-possible-I-guess, so issues like, “Why didn’t anyone ever run into the invisible machines?!” aren’t really on the same level as, “If the magic was a result of invisible machines and hallucinogens, how did Layton see the magic before he’d set foot near a machine or inhaled a whiff of hallucinogen?”

As a side note, to all those people posting on forums that the court cases were too easy: fuck you. Seriously, fuck you all hard.

I had other gripes, of course. Mainly about how they completely disregarded the coolest character in the game, Inquisitor Barnham, after all the awesome work they did building him up at the start. He was the prosecutor in almost all the court cases, hell-bent on burning the witches, yet also sympathetic to Phoenix Wright’s insistence that truth is more important than creating more teenaged girl ashes. But then at the last moment, one of the maybe-evil characters has him arrested so he can’t be involved in the final trial. And then... nothing. He just kind of sits around in jail until a cutscene right before the credits shows him driving a boat. Um, good for him, I guess?

Also, while most Layton games involve a little bit of cry-worthy death, in this one, death was handled kind of clumsily. While no witches were actually burned, a shit-ton of people die. A dude commits suicide and is subsequently strangled by a kid who didn’t know he was already dead, for one thing. More importantly, the whole witch fiction exists in the first place because two girls accidentally caused a fire that engulfed the entire fucking village, killing everyone who lived there and traumatizing the aforementioned girls for life. This is serious business. And yet, the only time a main character is faced with death, the interaction goes a little bit like this:

DYING GUY: Daughter, I’m dying.

DAUGHTER: What? But our fraying relationship was just starting to get better!

DYING GUY: It’s incurable.

DAUGHTER: My fragile heart is breaking!

DYING GUY: But don’t worry, I was lying about it being incurable. I’m going in for treatment tomorrow.

Yeah.

It’s easy to talk about the bad parts of a game. Usually more fun, too. But to give credit where it’s due, there were some things I really loved. They balanced out the Layton bits and the Phoenix bits quite nicely, crossing them over well. I loved having Layton in court and Phoenix solving puzzles. It was extra great when the characters were split up due to geography or being fake-murdered, so you got to laugh a bit at Phoenix being crap at puzzles. And when Phoenix was sucking in court, it was amazing when Layton came to the rescue. Actually, a lot of the game was at Phoenix’s expense. I’m okay with that.

The voice acting, even though there wasn’t much of it, was actually really great. It’s really weird being so used to high-class English Layton and then being given a giant dose of American in the form of Phoenix, but I liked it. There was one particular actress, Carina Reeves, who voiced one of the main witches, and there’s a fantastic scene of her character being interrogated in a trial, when she just snaps. She’s laughing maniacally, repeating her defence over and over again while taunting you that you can’t find any holes in her story. And she just sounds excellent. It was only like three sentences, but it was a real highlight for me.

Finally, you can’t ignore the fact that this game is a crossover, and any crossover has to have massive amounts of gratuitous fanservice. Not, like, in the cleavage-y sort of way, but more in the Thor-fighting-Captain-America way. The audience wants Layton in a court room, and that is what they get, and it is freaking amazing. Layton shouts, “Objection!” Layton and Phoenix yell, “Take that!” simultaneously. There’s one point where Layton hints that he’s going to go against Phoenix in court, and when I saw that, I got little happy chills. Then it actually happened, and I started squealing with happiness. In the game Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney, they actually did go versus each other! It was wonderful. Layton wasn’t as ruthless a prosecutor as would have been hilarious, but still. What more could you want?

I mean, y’know, apart from all that plot and puzzle stuff.

It was very good, apart from that.

Aaaand maybe the ending was a bit too ridiculously drawn out. I also lost the last trial on the last possible decision of the game, and had to go through all the explanation of the entire solution twice. That was a bit of torture.

Aaaand one little thing that bothered me was that there was a baby in the book-village research facility. Who lets a baby be born in a research facility centered around hallucinogens? What a bunch of psychos.

Aaand the game was a little bit sexist. I get that Layton’s all ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘chivalrous’ like he is in the other games, but in this one he turned it into overdrive and didn’t think girls were capable of doing anything for themselves.

But somehow that moment of Layton and Phoenix shouting, “Take that!” makes it all better.

The Censorship Totally Made it Better - Dani

Maturity comes in many shapes and forms. For instance, I am a married woman, but I still laugh awkwardly and get a weird lump in my throat whenever someone calls me ‘Mrs’. I’m old enough to buy my own dog, but if anyone describes me as that dog’s mummy, I go through a sort of white-out experience. Once, while tutoring some kids, I accidentally said ‘nipple’ instead of ‘nibble’ and I didn’t get so much as the urge to snicker, but I still make a happy mental note every time I see the number sixty-nine.

As for where South Park fits into that… well, let’s just say that I stand somewhere in between Backdoor Sluts 9 and Human CentiPad. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show as a kid, so when I was sixteen and I finally realised the freedom of having a computer in my bedroom, I binged on all eleven (at the time) seasons. I’m not immune to being grossed out, but I think I have pretty acceptable tolerance. Not to brag, but I do have photos of a dissected possum on my phone from my third-year biology class that I use to surprise people scrolling through to find cute dog pictures. So I kind of figured that Stick of Truth would be a pretty good candidate for the first game to break our oath to not buy any new ones until we finished all our existing games.

We knew it was a short game, so we kind of figured that if we finished it quickly, it wouldn’t count as breaking the rules. Besides, I really needed a break after seventy-something hours of Final Fantasy X. Apparently I forgot a destruction sphere and now I can’t get Anima unless I beat Dark Valefor and … ugh, well, that’s a discussion for another post.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

Status: Complete.

Why I didn’t finish it earlier: Hey, I only bought it like a week ago. I haven’t played anything else since getting it. I think I did fine.

Comments: Honestly, I thought it would be a bit of fun, but also kind of cheap. Maybe a few throw-backs to jokes from old episodes, very few actual laughs, and a mediocre story. And glitches. I expected a lot of glitches.

I don’t really know how else to begin critiquing this besides by saying I loved this game. It was so true in spirit to the show that I felt like a fangirl just by walking around the town, raiding people’s cupboards. One of the first lines of the game made me laugh out loud, as did the entirety of the last long cutscene.

http://au.ign.com/wikis/south-park-the-stick-of-truth/Jesus

And Jesus. When is Jesus not funny?

In the second act (I assume I don’t need to say it, but there will be pretty intense spoilers here), I actually felt intense, radiating happiness at betraying Cartman for Kyle. I wish my friends were as awesome at LARPing as these kids, because they’re better at it than the professionals. There are professional LARPers, right? Well, they suck compared to the South Park kids. Like Craig. Freaking Craig, that kid is so awesome. His detention mission felt like a goddamn heist movie and I loved it. When I was in year four, the only dressing up I did was a self-made eye patch for the time I got conjunctivitis.

The game wasn’t perfect, though, and in ways I kind of expected: namely, in the gameplay. They put such a huge amount of effort into the story and into keeping the atmosphere authentic that a couple of technical issues may have slipped through the cracks. Combat wasn’t exactly difficult, but there was a very specific section at the start of Day Three but before reaching level fourteen and getting the katana, in which my warrior could do virtually no damage because every enemy was super armoured. I just had to set them on fire and wait. Meanwhile Bill, playing a mage, could completely ignore all armour and defence while simultaneously setting them on fire and freezing them for quintuple damage. Oh, and healing him at the same time, so he could literally never die.

I know the warrior has some abilities that could have potentially helped me here, but even by the end of the game, I still never managed to successfully pull off the very first ability you learn. Or the second. So you can understand why I was a bit soured off them by the time I got the armour-destroying third one. Or was it the fourth? I lost track of how many I sucked at. Meanwhile, the mage’s first ability just needed you to mash the A button.

My point is, warrior was way harder than mage, and Bill is not just better at games than me.

I think some of the enemies could have been a bit more exciting, or required a bit more tactical sense on the player’s behalf, because I was pretty much following the exact same routine in each battle. Except at the beginning when Butters was my only companion and the enemies were riposting, but I had no choice but to attack with him anyway and watch him almost die.

Also, I don’t know how much I appreciate having my level capped. If I want to drastically overpower myself, I think I should be allowed. As it was, I just had no reason to get into fights (which the game helpfully pointed out), so I ran out of side missions much quicker. And with no extra cool post-campaign quests, running out of side missions was a big downer.

I felt I was pretty lucky with glitchiness – I only had one problem, in which Cartman had a line that he didn’t actually say, like he’d been temporarily muted. It was kind of a crucial line for the story, too, so it was lucky I had my subtitles on. Well, that was my only problem, until right at the end, when trying to abort the Snuke. I looked it up and saw that many people had problems during this sequence, but none the same as mine. In the third step of the abortion process, my vacuum just didn’t work. I couldn’t change the direction it was facing, so it just sat there, with me feeling gradually more awkward as the minutes passed, wondering, “Um… is this going for really creepy realism or something?”

From what I saw, Bill didn’t have many issues either, though when he did have them they were pretty noticeable. He was invisible for the entire gnomes cutscene, and his bed vanished for half of it as well. And of course, he just had to get the Hasselhoff makeover, which appears to trigger the most common glitch in the game by screwing up the aesthetics in your next save file. And that is why plastic surgery is evil.

All in all, I think this game is freaking awesome, and even though I have serious doubts about its replayability I fully intend to play again as a thief on nightmare difficulty, because I read that thief is the hardest and I’m a masochist.

http://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2014/03/South-Park-AU.jpg

I hope one day to show my parents the bossfight in the abortion clinic and say, “And you thought watching South Park would mess up my morality and decency!”