Broken Age Review

My wife and I recently finished playing through Doubefine’s crowdfunded point-and-click adventure game, Broken Age. If you’ve ever played other adventure games directed by Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, etc), you probably already know what to expect from Broken Age. For those unfamiliar, the game consists exploring the environment as one of two different playable characters, collecting miscellaneous junk used to solve puzzles, and having snarky dialog with NPCs.

The game starts out strong by introducing you to its protagonists, Vela and Shay: two reasonable people trapped in two very different, but equally, absurd worlds. The game’s visual style, which looks like moving children’s book illustrations, gives the world and characters plenty of personality while still making items and objectives easy to discern. Snappy dialog, featuring the signature LucasArts/Doublefine sense of humor, further adds to the charm of the game world.

Pretty pictures and quirky characters aside, Broken Age is a game that’s all about puzzles. The puzzles are all initially of the pretty straight-forward “use item X on environmental object Y” variety and gradually increase in difficulty and obscurity throughout the game. This is all part of the standard point-and-click progression that one would expect from a throwback adventure from Tim Schafer. In the second half of the game, a different type of puzzle is introduced in which long sequences of actions must be completed in a very specific order for the game to progress. This is where the game makes the transition from clever, but occasionally arcane, to tedious and frustrating. Many of sequential puzzles require traversing the map in-between steps and switching between characters, with a single incorrect step resetting the entire puzzle. Compounding this issue, the game often isn’t particularly good at conveying what you did wrong. As a result, for the last handful of puzzles, my wife and I resorted to using a guide to spare ourselves the aggravation of using trial and error to finish the game.

Overall, Broken Age is an adventure game with a strong sense of style and personality but suffers from gameplay mechanics that fall apart in the second half of the game and make the game feel like it’s dragging on. I expect that players that are already fans of Tim Schafer’s work will find enough to like here to make the game worth playing, but newcomers will probably find it too discouraging.

Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Completion Time: 11 hours

DragonCon 2017

This past labor day weekend, my wife and I attended DragonCon for the first time and really enjoyed it. While the Con covers a huge variety of fandom topics and doesn't really focus on gaming, when you get over 80,000 nerds together in one place, you can pretty much guarantee there will be video gaming happening somewhere. Here's a synopsis of the gaming-related things we saw at the Con:

Japanese Arcade

One of the exhibit halls was set up as an arcade stocked with imported (and mostly untranslated) Japanese arcade games. Best of all, the cabinets were all set to free play mode. I worked in Japan for several months a few years ago and found the selection at this DragonCon exhibit to be a pretty good representation of the modern Japanese arcade scene. In my experience, non-redemption Japanese arcade games generally fall into 4 categories: fighting, rhythm, mech battle, and button-mash/novelty. I’ve included some photos and brief description of the games I was able to try.

Reflec Beat – A touchscreen-based rhythm battle game. Notes are fired as projectiles downward by an enemy at the top of the screen and they must be tapped in time with the music to reflect them back.

Gundam Pod – A first person mecha battle arena with enclosed cockpits. Each cockpit features a panoramic curved screen and controls with a combination of joysticks and foot pedals. The screen between the pods allow spectators to watch the battle in 3rd person. The game is 100% in Japanese (which I can’t read a word of), so I had to make educated guesses when navigating menus and monitoring the HUD. I was most excited to be able to play this game at DragonCon. I played it briefly when I was in Tokyo, but at ~$10/play, my prior experience was fairly limited. That being said, my limited background knowledge was enough to give me an edge and wreck most of the other players during the match.

Upend The Tea Table – This is where things get weird. The player pounds on the table until a meter fills and then flips the table over (it’s attached to the cabinet with a hinge). On the screen, the table is sitting at home plate in a baseball diamond and then gets launched into the air. Players compete to see who can launch the table furthest.

The Bishibashi – A collection of competitive minigames that are all based on button-mashing. Each minigame features cute animations and objectives such as trying to hit the button exactly 100 times within a time limit.

Cosplay

I saw a lot of fantastic cosplay at DragonCon. The most popular game used as cosplay inspiration was definitely Overwatch. I’m generally not into competitive multi-player games, but seeing the passion people have for the characters definitely has me more interested in trying it. One of the top-ranked cosplayers in the DragonCon masquerade contest was dressed as D.Va:

Photo credit: Crescent City Cosplay

However, my personal favorite video game cosplayer, was this dedicated gentleman cosplaying as Beedle, the shopkeeper from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. “Oh, thank you!”

Accessible Gaming Demonstration
We attended an interesting panel about the inovations and challenges involved with creating specialized gaming equipment for players with physical disabilites. We saw everything from controllers meant to be used with one hand to those that could be controlled with the tongue. This panel really gave me an appreciation for how gaming can be an important recreational and social outlet for people with disabilities. For more information about this topic, check out Able Gamers.

Hololens Demonstration
This panel was hosted by some developers that are working on software for the upcoming Microsoft Hololens augmented reality (AR) platform. While the tech definitely has some cool applications, it was very clear from the live demonstration that we're still in the very early stages of AR. I didn't get a chance to try on the headset myself, but from what I was able to observe watching the developers use it, the performance of the equipment looked rough compared to the heavily produced presentations seen at events like E3.

Demo Hotness: Octopath Traveler

 After teasing the mysterious new RPG, Octopath Traveler, over six months ago, Square Enix hasn't said a word about the game since. However, much to my surprise, not only was the game prominently featured in the September 13th Nintendo Direct, but it also had a demo released on the eShop that very same day! I immediately dove into this meaty demo, here are my thoughts on the 2-3 hours of gameplay on offer:

• First, a warning: Octopath Traveler may feature seemingly innocent looking 16-bit graphics, but do not be mistaken; this game features very dark themes such as murder, slavery, and rape. This is NOT a family-friendly game!
• The structure of Octopath Traveler is very similar to Saga Frontier. You start the game by picking one of eight protagonists; two are available in the demo: a knight and a dancer. Each protagonist has their own unique story and starting location, but their quest will eventually intersect those of the other characters. When you meet another one of these characters, you can add them to your party but continue along your original character's quest line.
• Even though it's clear that this game is still unfinished, the production values are very high. The 2D/3D hybrid art style is very striking and most of the cut scenes are fully voiced. However, what grabbed me the most was the beautiful soundtrack.
• The combination of 2D sprites and 3D background has a cool old-school look to it but also uses advanced lighting and particle effects. These effects generally look really nice but sometimes obscure certain details like character facial expressions and staircases in dungeons. It would also be nice if the character sprites had a broader range of animations to make cutscenes a bit more dynamic. There's a good chance a lot of these things will be polished up in the full version of the game.
• Octopath's combat system features random encounters and straight-forward turn-based battles with the turn order displayed at the top of the screen (similar to Final Fantasy 10). The unique wrinkle is the boost mechanic in which boost points can be stored up to allow your character to strike multiple times per turn. Also, enemies have weaknesses to certain elements and weapons that can be exploited to stun your foes and gain additional turns.
• The demo only featured single-character scenarios, so I wasn't able to get a feel for how the game's combat will work with a party. With only one character available at a time, combat strategies were pretty limited, but there's probably potential for interplay between characters in battle once a party has been formed. With what was shown in the demo, I'm not really able to determine exactly how deep Octopath's mechanics will be.
• Olberic's path presents a pretty generic RPG story of a disillusioned former knight. While his plot is something I've seen in many games, his unique ability, dueling, makes for some fun possibilities: Olberic can challenge pretty much any NPC to a duel, including those that are blocking access to doors and passageways. Thus, I was able to duel a guard, win, and then step over his unconscious body to enter a restricted area.
• I found Primrose the dancer's path to be much more compelling from a narrative standpoint. It covers the mature themes I mentioned earlier to set up a dark revenge tale. Between the two paths available, the writing and voice acting are much stronger in her story (Olberic's is still ok, though). Her special ability, alluring, allows her to recruit NPCs as temporary companions to join her in battle.
• Each path in the demo features some lengthy opening dialog scenes, a town, a short dungeon, and a boss battle before coming to an end.
• It was clear that a lot of features that will be available in the full game are not available in the demo. These include the world map, a quest log for managing side quests, and a character status screen. Also, the demo lacks the ability to change the text speed or skip cutscenes. Even though these basic features were all missing, I still feel like this bare-bones package was enough to give a representative taste of the game.

I finished the Octopath Traveler demo hungry to experience more of this unique Switch-exclusive RPG. As much as I enjoyed titles like Saga Frontier in the PS1 era, the lack of a cohesive narrative and quest structure often led to dead ends and reliance on guide books to make progress. Octopath seems like it will deliver on the intersecting multi-adventure premise of the Saga games but use modern story-telling techniques and structure to hold the game together in a more statisfying and complete package.

Ever Oasis Review

Studio Grezzo proves that they're ready for prime time

After chipping away slowly at this summer’s 3DS desert epic, Ever Oasis, my journey is finally complete. During #JRPGJuly, I wrote fairly complete impressions for the game and most of the points I made there stand true for the experience of the entire game, so in this review, I’ll primarily be sharing my reflections on the later portion of the game.

One of my concerns during the early portions of Ever Oasis was that dungeons and combat felt a little too easy and simplistic. As the game progressed, these concerns were largely alleviated as the later dungeons definitely provide a steady but significant increase in difficulty and complexity. While the dungeons attain the level of design seen in the Zelda series, I found the ones in the back half of the Ever Oasis to be a satisfying level of challenge for a lighter handheld experience. Often times, later dungeons would include segments where specific characters or weapons would be needed to progress and the fact that party and gear can only be changed in town meant that I would have to fast-travel between the dungeon and town several times to complete a story quest. Thankfully, fast-travel can return you to the exact position where you left the dungeon. While I think the game designers set this system up to ensure you’d check the status of your town at regular intervals, it did become mildly irritating toward the end of the game. The ability to make at least some changes to equipment and characters while in the dungeon would have streamlined things considerably.

While the combat scaled up in difficulty, it ultimately remained fairly simple. Aside from a handful of combos Tethu can learn, (s)he doesn’t learn any new moves and enemy strategy never gets especially deep. However, as the game progresses, choosing the right party members and weapons for the situation can make a distinct difference in how smoothly battles go. Coming into the confrontation with a good supply of healing items also helps. Alternately, leveling up your town provides an HP boost and the ability to revive your party in the event of an unexpected wipe.

Much like how the dungeons grow in scale and complexity, so does the task of maintaining the Oasis town. For most of the game, as your town expands, so does your tool set for managing it, thus keeping the process of satisfying your townsfolk's needs efficient. Eventually, however, the introduction of these efficiency tools tapers off as the Oasis continues to expand, eventually becoming a sprawling metropolis filled with businesses that each require regular deliveries of a myriad of crafting supplies. As a player who was primarily focused on being an adventurer rather than a mayor, it became clear that there was no way I could please every citizen in the Oasis while still making progress through the campaign at a reasonable rate. Thankfully, in the course of dungeon crawling and battling, I picked up enough supplies to keep the town's happiness gage (it's an RPG; everything can be quantified) at 75% or more with only minimal upkeep required. This proved more than sufficient to keep my town prospering and get all the necessary perks (HP boosts, crafting recipes, etc) I needed to help me on my quest. For players with a perfectionist streak, however, I could see this never-quite-full meter driving them absolutely crazy and compelling them to waste time tediously micro-managing the Oasis just to max out the happiness gauge with minimal benefit. Ideally, the game would grant Tethu the ability to delegate more of the town management tasks to NPCs so that the town would run like a well-oiled machine, allowing Tethu the ability to concentrate on saving the world.

Quibbles about gameplay mechanics aside, Ever Oasis is a really high-quality package. As I noted in my impressions, the game's character design, music, and script are all very strong and were consistent throughout my entire playthrough. The plot is fairly simple (again, think 90s Zelda) but provides a reason for fun characters to interact and gives purpose to Tethu's quest, so it gets the job done. The game's length will vary depending on how many sidequests the player elects to do, but I found my playthrough to be long enough to feel like a good value without burning me out on the game's systems. With Ever Oasis, Grezzo proves that they're capable of creating quality original games rather than just being Nintendo's remaster factory. For their sophomore effort, however, I hope they can better integrate and streamline the management-sim/RPG hybrid design, and if not, split these two disparate gameplay styles into separate games. I would recommend Ever Oasis to players who like their action RPGs light and their characters adorable.

Score: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Completion Time: 32 hours, 15 minutes (Main quest with Oasis level 22/30)

Implosion Never Lose Hope Impressions

This past weekend was my first time traveling by plane this year, and as the original Nintendo Switch reveal commercial demonstrated, I knew I had to bring my Switch with me to play in the air. Since most of the recent big releases for the system are online multiplayer-focused affairs, I found myself browsing the eShop for an affordable and light-weight single-player experience to play on my flight. After having good experience with Kamiko and Mercenary Saga from Circle Entertainment in the past, I decided to pick up their newest mecha-themed hack-and-slash, Implosion Never Lose Hope. Here are some thoughts on the first few hours of gameplay:

• Implosion's combat starts out with very simple mechanics: combos of light and heavy melee attacks. However, the game quickly introduces ranged attacks, special moves, and evasive maneuvers to keep things interesting.
• Controlling the mech feels pretty good and cycling through its various types of attacks felt like second nature after playing through the first few levels. Cutting through swarms of enemies is very satisfying now that I'm able to make use of the full arsenal.
• Initially the enemies are pretty dull slow-moving zombies, but the challenge level and enemy variety ramps up. Eventually there are some big boss monsters to tackle that keep you on your toes.
• The levels are mostly linear and each can be finished within about five minutes. Most of the levels have secondary objectives that earn badges that can be used to unlock mech upgrades. This gives the levels a little extra replay value.
• I like that I can customize my mech's load out but I'm not always sure what the various new parts and upgrades do.
• The graphical style looks sort of like a HD-remastered PS2 game. For a $12 game, however, I'm more than happy with how it looks.
• I was surprised to find that a budget game like this has a fairly involved plot with fully-voiced cut scenes. However, due to the engine noise on my flight, I wasn't able to hear the dialog very well, so I can't really comment on the quality of the acting. For the same reason, I don't have much to say about the music either.
• The only downside to Implosion so far is that there's no option for co-op play. As the old Gauntlet and X-men arcade machines proved, hack and slash games make for some great local multiplayer. 

During my travels, I was able to put about three hours into Implosion Never Lose Hope and have been pretty happy with it. It's been a fun arcadey experience that's well-suited for those times when I don't want to play something too engrossing.

Note: This post marks the 1-year anniversary of this blog! Woohoo! Many thanks to everyone who's stuck with me!

Dropping GTA 5 for Witcher 3

 

Of the remaining games in my backlog, the two largest games (both in terms of acclaim and scope) were GTA 5 and Witcher 3. Since I’ve been playing a lot of fantasy RPGs lately, I decided I would tackle GTA 5 next. Having been a fan of GTA since GTA 2 on the PS1, I was pretty disappointed to find that the new(ish) and insanely popular entry just didn’t grab me, but I’m not sure if it’s the series that changed, or if it’s me. Some thoughts:

• From a technical standpoint, the size and level of detail of the game world are very impressive.
• The cars and aerial vehicles all handle far better than they did in previous GTA games. Even when using mouse and keyboard.
• While the story production values are clearly high, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about any of the characters. Of the 3 protagonists, only Franklin is even remotely likable and he quickly gets sidelined in favor of Michael and Trevor. Michael’s family drama, in the beginning, has the potential to be interesting, but the game doesn’t really do much with it after the first few missions. Trevor’s antics were amusing for a little while but got old very quickly.
• The game's FBI vs CIA vs corrupt businessmen plotline fails to be engaging since each side is equally despicable. Earlier GTA games and their progeny (especially 2012's Sleeping Dogs) did a better job of showing the motivations of each of their respective factions and managed to include a few interesting characters in each.
• The game’s snarky cynical tone just doesn’t jive with me; maybe this just isn’t a game world I feel like spending time with in 2017. The humor and attempts at social/political commentary don’t feel like they’ve evolved at all from 90s GTA.
• After playing a high-octane open-world action game like Just Cause 2 last year, it's become painfully apparent how much time is spent in GTA doing mundane tasks like chauffeuring characters around while they chitchat. I do enough boring commuting in real life, I don't need it faithfully simulated in my virtual life of crime.

Despite my issues with GTA 5, I was still having some fun with it for the first 10 - 15 hours. At about the 20 - 25 hour mark, however, it was feeling pretty stale, so I decided to look up how many main story missions were left since I figured I was pretty close to finishing the game. Turns out I was less than halfway! With that revelation, I promptly dropped the game and moved on to Witcher 3.

I'm only about 8 hours into Witcher 3 and am enjoying it a lot so far. Some early impressions:

• After playing the first two Witcher games last year, this one doesn't feel like the revolutionary leap forward that some people had lead me to believe it was. It's more like a quality iteration built on an already strong foundation.
• The combat has a slightly different feel to it than the previous two entries, but there's enough similarity for me to still be able to take out enemies several levels above me when playing on medium difficuly. 
• Like with the previous two games, I'm playing with keyboard and mouse controls and doing pretty well, though I may remap some of the harder-to-reach keys to my extra mouse buttons.
• There's a good mixture of familiar characters from the first two games and new faces.
• I was initially concerned the new open-world format would lead to a lot of back-tracking, but so far this hasn't been the case. Also, there's finally a convenient fast-travel system!
• I have no idea how to actually win a game of Gwent, but it seems far more interesting than the dice game in the earlier Witchers.

Witcher 3 is a very lengthy game, so it's too soon to say if it'll manage to stay engaging for its entire duration, but for now, I'm looking forward to exploring it further. 

Four Job Fiesta Wrap-up

 My Four Job Fiesta campaign came to a close last week and I can say that the experience has cemented Final Fantasy 5’s position as one of my favorite games of all time. The game is already tough, but playing with the Fiesta rules has pushed me to become not only a better Final Fantasy player but a better RPG strategist as a whole. Here are some developments from the last segment of the game:

• Initially, having a white mage based party meant having a team full of cream puffs. That all changed once I acquired the Holy spell. This turned my once docile healers into savage damage dealers, especially Lenna, who had also learned Dual Cast from having been a Red Mage for most of the game. During late game boss fights (including the final boss battle), she became my primarily offensive character, dealing over 8000 damage per turn.
• As I had mentioned in a previous post, the importance of using defensive buffs to improve character survivability cannot be understated. As a fairly grinding-averse player, properly leveraging Protect, Shell, and Reflect was often the key to victory. It’s hard to imagine what I’ll do next Fiesta if I don’t end up with access to White Magic.
• While I spent most of the game using the Elven Mantle accessory to help my characters avoid physical attacks, switching these out for Hermes Sandals in the late game was the right move. Having everyone in a perpetual state of Hast” allowed me to do more damage while taking fewer enemy hits. It also made it much easier to recover if a boss used a devastating attack that hit the full party.
• Partly for nostalgia’s sake, I frequently consulted with my “Final Fantasy Anthology” guide book that I used for my original play-through of Final Fantasy 5 back in 1999. While the dungeon maps were still somewhat useful, the Fiesta rules coupled with the higher-level strategies used by modern players have largely made this book obsolete. In some cases, using it slowed me down because having full dungeon maps made me feel compelled to get every single treasure chest even though most of the items in these chests would end up being gear for classes other than those I was assigned. Thus, I think I will allow this guide book to enjoy a much-deserved retirement on my bookshelf next year.
• It took me a while to warm up to it, but I ended up really liking the PC version of Final Fantasy 5. The higher resolution graphics make spotting small objects easier, and the auto-checkpoint system it uses prevented unexpected party wipes from resulting in a significant loss of progress.

I had a great time revisiting Final Fantasy 5 and participating in the Four Job Fiesta. I already find myself thinking about next year’s Fiesta and what challenges a completely different set of classes might bring. I’m also considering trying out a mobile/handheld version of FF5 next time so that I can fit multiple shorter play sessions into my schedule rather than relying on longer sessions on nights and weekends to progress through my campaign. As a result, I’ll probably be reducing the number of Twitch streams I do for future campaigns (I streamed nearly all 42 hours of this year’s campaign) and will instead focus on streaming a handful of major events/battles in the game. Quality over quantity.

Regarding the charitable side of the Fiesta, my campaign raised $50 between myself and Twitch viewers, while the Fiesta overall raised over $18,000 for Child’s Play Charity! Thanks so much to everyone who participated, donated, or tuned into the streams!

See below for the stats of my end-game party:

 

Enjoy your retirement, trusty old guide book!