Dragon Week - Dani

Already I’m having a lot of trouble sticking to a single game long enough to actually finish it. It’s only been a couple of days, but already I’m starting to realise that the reason I have so many unfinished games is because I know my limits. I know exactly when a game has gotten too hard or too tedious for me to continue, and I shelve it accordingly. It has nothing to do with weakness or laziness at all; there just happens to be a lot of games that suddenly, spontaneously, turn terrible about 80% of the way through.

Also, I’m not approaching this very efficiently. I’m not starting with the most enjoyable games and working my way down the fun list like Bill is. I leapt right into the deep end of the ocean. Not the deep end of the pool, but the entire goddamn ocean. Already, I have seen things I would not wish upon anybody, let alone someone with my particular game-orientated rage issues.

But every entry must contain some sort of happy ending, so here I shall present the three games I’ve been playing so far this week, one of which I actually managed to finish, and I’ve decided that the common link between them is ‘dragons’. We have…

•           Fire Emblem: Awakening;
•           Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly; and
•           Mario & Luigi Dream Team.

Okay, I get that Bowser isn’t a dragon and therefore my dragon theme was so tenuous that it couldn’t even survive three dot points, but he’s big, spiky and fire-breathing, so CLOSE ENOUGH. Anyway, let’s go into a bit more detail about these games – and I’m sure I don’t need to give this warning, but you should anticipate any and all games to be spoiled here.

Fire Emblem: Awakening

Status: Complete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Bill destroyed my quicksave.

Comments: Even if my quicksave hadn't ‘mysteriously disappeared’ while Bill was playing, I probably would have abandoned this game anyway. I was pretty close to the conclusion, but by the time I reached Chapter 25, I was getting bored. I like long games, so I wasn't begging for it to end or anything, but I’d begun to hate all the characters and all their stupid children and the Risen could just eat them for all I cared. Everything was so repetitive and enemies did zero damage unless I acted like a complete idiot.

So, when I picked it up again over the weekend, I of course acted like a complete idiot.

This led to my son Morgan dying – not just ‘retiring’, like so many other characters, but fully dying. That hadn’t happened to me in this game since that idiot Donnel. As a result of this grizzly death at the hands of an unimportant zombie, Noire was left a lonely widow living with her ‘retired’ witch of a mother. Lucina was left without a brother and a parent. My entire party’s morale was shattered.

Anyway, life goes on, yadda yadda yadda, and I ended up beating the final boss in a single hit. I spent about ten times longer getting through the final credits. Truthfully, the epilogue material and statistics during the credits were more interesting than the whole second half of the game.

In total, I think finishing the last one and a half chapters of Fire Emblem: Awakening took about half an hour. I probably should have done it earlier.

Mario & Luigi Dream Team

Status: Incomplete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: Because it should have been over already. Like, ten hours ago.

Reason for not finishing right now: Because screw Bowser. Screw him hard.

Comments: Again, I abandoned this one pretty close to the end. But, like when I attempted to read Eclipse, the repetitiveness and unnecessary exposition meant I had to put it down after every ten minutes, which meant I kept forgetting what I was doing and how to do all the strong attacks. And every boss battle is so freaking long that when I inevitably lose the first time, after having just figured out the tricks to it, I just can’t be arsed starting all over again. This is especially the case with any of the ridiculously slow Big Luigi battles.

My big problem with the fights in this game – and a lot of games – is that I hate not being able to see my enemies’ health. It made me hate Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey, and almost every turn-based Mario I’ve played. It’s just a weird personal issue I have; how am I supposed to adequately prepare for battle if I don’t know how long it’s going to take? What if I’m on really low health and tossing up between a last-ditch attack and retreating? I should know how close I am to victory before I have to make that kind of decision.

Especially if that goddamn arsehole craphead wankerface Bowser can heal. I have a right to know. And don’t tell me this is done in the name of realism: if the game wanted realism, I’d be able to see his crushed ribs sticking out of his sternum from how many times I’ve hammered them. His stupid arms wouldn’t magically regain their use every few turns, but would hang their limply, ineffectually, as he realises his impending quadriplegia. And I would enjoy it. I would enjoy his screams of mutant turtle pain.

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Status: Incomplete.

Reason for not finishing earlier: It’s a stupid game.

Reason for not finishing right now: It’s a stupid game.

Comments: Okay. Deep breaths. I need to take several deep breaths before talking about this game because otherwise my brain turns into a garbled mush of hatred. To sum up my experience, I will tell you that whenever I turn this game on, I end up yelling at my TV so hard that my puppy runs out of the room, scared. It is so rage-inducing that I estimate that my blood pressure has just about doubled since attempting it.

Look, I’ve played the first three Spyro games, the ones on PS1, more times than I can count. I can do various segments with my eyes closed. When Bill plays them and fails at something, and I sympathetically say, “Yeah, this bit’s really hard,” I’m lying. That bit is easy. Those are my games. So although I remembered Enter the Dragonfly as a piece of crap that controlled about as well as a car with marshmallow wheels, I figured it wouldn’t take that much effort to make it to the end.

Good God, I had no idea.

It’s like the game itself realises how bad it is, and therefore is trying to forcibly stop me from progressing and figuring out that it only gets worse. I have nothing good to say about it except that the Amazon reviews page for it is a satisfying read. At least one person has called it ‘an unplayable trainwreck’, and most of the others instruct you to rent it, not buy it (hey, video stores still existed back in the early ‘00s). The more recent reviews, from 2013, are actually much more forgiving; I can only assume they approached this game with the attitude of, “Bad graphics and bad gameplay? Well, all old games were like that, right? Five stars!” But no. All old games were nothing like this.

A lesson that anyone whose favourite franchise has been destroyed is able to tell you is, DON’T SELL. Don’t sell, because it screws everything up. Don’t screw with Rareware, don’t screw with Naughty Dog, and absolutely for crying out loud don’t screw with Insomniac. I didn’t want this humble rant of mine to turn into a full-on review and finger-pointing session, but from what I can tell, the new company who produced the fourth Spyro game has only done one other project apart from this game, and it got cancelled.

I haven’t yet finished this game because I need to catch something like thirty more dragonflies until I can progress to the next level. Also, there are only nine levels in this entire game, compared to around thirty-six in the original. Also, catching those dragonflies is nearly impossible because the controls don’t work, you can fall through every second platform, and the game shuts itself down whenever it feels like it.

Seriously. I tried to enter a level for the first time, and this is what I saw:

Obviously, that’s just a stock photo of a TV, but that’s exactly what my screen looked like. Some of the game’s sound effects were still working – like, I could hear wind blowing – but I certainly couldn’t move, or pause, or quit. So I had to reset. Thus far, I’ve had to reset three times, and all for slightly different reasons:

1.      Inexplicable black screen instead of level.
2.      I tried to skip through dialogue and got trapped in the cutscene.
3.      I died while catching a dragonfly, so it tried to respawn me but this somehow broke the camera and it refused to follow me.

On top of this, here are my complaints from the first level – the first level only – of this game:

•          I turned off tutorials, but I see no evidence that the tutorials have stopped.
•       My normal flame accidentally got stuck on superflame, somehow. I don’t think I’ve even seen a superflame yet in this game.
•         The noises the bad guys make have been ripped exactly from different bad guys in the third game. (I later discovered the same is true for good guys, too.)
•          Huh. This level started out Japanese, now it’s turning Chinese, and now Vietnamese. I’m not very quick to pull the racism card, but this just screams of some director shrugging, “Eh. Close enough.”
•          The frame rate. If you so much as move, the whole game slows down.
•          Some people praised the graphics, like the water rippling as you swim or the grass bending as you walk through it. Well, those things also happen if I’m nowhere near the water or grass.
•          There are portals that lead to mini-games, and also a portal that leads to the exit. In Spyro 3, the mini-game portals were black and the exit portals were, like, purple. In this, they’re both purple and the only difference is a slight shape redesign of the exit portal.
•          You can’t catch some dragonflies. The ability you’re meant to use just straight-up doesn’t work sometimes.
•          Also, why are the dragonflies taunting me? They’re meant to be my friends.
•         Now I’m in a tank. The aim appears to sometimes be heat-seeking, and sometimes ground-seeking. It varies.
•          Oops, glitched out. Reset time.
•          Oops, the background glitched and now the whole level is purple space.

·         Incidentally, the whole storyline of this game makes absolutely no sense. This isn’t a complaint about the level specifically, but it really needs to be mentioned. They brought a bad guy back from the dead, he tried to capture the dragonflies but failed and scattered them around the world instead, my ally tried to give me superpowers but failed and scattered them around the world instead, and these sentient dragonflies can’t get home without me, yet they run away from me and taunt me when I try to catch them.

And THAT is why I haven’t finished Enter the Dragonfly.