General Nerd Shit

Been a while since I wrote anything on here – been a busy few weeks. So, lets see what I can grumble up about Moral Choices in games. They're not as popular as they were in previous years, especially during the PS3/360 era, but they still rear their heads every so often and developers continually make the same mistakes with them over and over again, and the choices always fall flat for the same reasons.

For a start, they're rarely presented as genuine or earned choices. Dating back to the classic JRPG Dragon Quest for the NES video games have had a history of giving the player false choices. Whether it's the option to “join” the villain's side leading to a game over or reject the princess' hand in marriage – an infamous feat you literally can not do leading to her repeating the same “But Thou Must!” line of dialogue over and over until you pick the right option. More modern moral choices are often very similar, and in some ways even simpler.

You see, with the Dragon Quest example, the choices exist to serve the narrative. The player character didn't speak but you didn't have any influence over their personality or development either. It was the only way they could allow the player – and the character – to respond to NPCs. Now take a game like Dragon Age, written and developed by Bioware for the 360, PS3 and PC. You're often given choices to do a mean thing, or to do a good thing. But outside of the big act-ending binary choices of which factions you want to side with the only morality involved comes down to “Be mean and get rewarded” or “Be nice and don't get rewarded”. So if you want that cool sword, you can bully a child and he'll hand it over. But no one will care and there's no long lasting, or even real consequences from it. At worst your party members disapprove but you can give them gifts and they'll never remember it happened. Let a demon posses a small child so you can learn blood magic? Never comes back to bite you in the ass. Absolutely nothing you do in the game affects you outside of the big plot choices because it is safe. It wants the player to be absolutely free to be as good or as bad as they want without ever suffering any consequences. In fact the only time you can ever really screw yourself over by taking a wrong moral choice is by bringing your religious party members along a trip to go defile some saints ashes.

The inversion of this are of course series like Fable, Infamous and Bioshock where the entire morality system is simply a binary choice. Are you The Good Guy or The Bad Guy? You get a Good Ending and reward or a Bad Ending and reward once you max out your good or evil points and finish the game. There rarely is ever a reward for maintaining a neutral state and the rewards in games like these are usually either equal, such as in infamous where at both max good and evil you gain almost identical powers except one is red and one is blue, meaning the difference is almost solely visual alone turning it into less of a moral choice and more of a aesthetic one. Or the rewards are entirely skewed to one choice over the other, like in Bioshock where the upside to not being evil is so overwhelmingly beneficial there's no reason to be evil other than for the sake of it. These aren't interesting choices, they aren't even well thought out or clever choices. They're choices shoved into a game because moral choices were the hot fad at the time and for a period telling someone to go one way or the other and giving it a few arbitrary visual distinctions was a great way to generate marketing buzz.

So, is it possible to do moral choices well, at all, in a game? Certainly! A lot of games do them in a variety of ways. Take my old dead horse Dark Souls for example. You can kill every NPC you meet, most of them drop items and equipment when they die. If you're a jerk or have zero intention of doing their quest lines you can murder them for immediate reward. Or you can do their quest lines and receive more rewards with a greater investment. But ultimately, finishing their quest line leads to their eventual hollowing. So you're given a second choice; Complete their quest and perform a mercy killing or leave a character you might have grown attached to, alive while forgoing the ultimate rewards of that quest line? Going even further there are NPCs who, independent of what you do, will kill other NPCs if you don't kill them. They don't harm you, some of them are even friendly and helpful towards you and if you're observant you can see the foreshadowing of what's to come and choose who gets to live or die. Without a single prompt, scripted sequence or forced choice Dark Souls manages to give you multiple choices more involved than those previous competitors that all hyped up their moral choices and “gray morality”

Even older games manage to execute morality with more interesting results and designs. One of my personal favorite PS2 games, Steambot Chronicles (AKA: Bumpy Trot) is a game where you pilot strange automobile mechs and fight them while working on the side as a musician in a band. By sheer accident you get embroiled in a war between a militaristic crime group and those fighting them and you're given the choice to join them. And you can. You lose your friends, and the game's plot largely changes if you do. There's even a secondary plotline of trying to usurp the crime syndicate and becoming its leader! The game has multiple variations on the core endings, your actions over the course of the game genuinely impacting what happens to your friends, enemies and even potentially leading to deaths in the main cast.

So last week I tried to write a fun article about Kingdom Hearts' crazy story -and it is absolutely nuts- but I just couldn't. I couldn't just ignore the big overhanging issues I had with the series and ultimately scrapped it at the last minute and now I'm writing this here because replaying Kingdom Hearts through the 1.5+2.5 pack on the PS4, hoo boy this series just doesn't hold up. I don't know how, or why, I ever liked it as a kid either since the issues I take with the series now have nothing to do changes made to the games in the Final Mix editions, or changing tastes as I've aged. As such if I do compare them to other games, I will strictly do so to other PS2 games released around the same time frame.

So lets start at the core issue that has continually frustrated me the most since undertaking this task of replaying a once beloved series; the gameplay. It hasn't just aged poorly, but it's extremely clunky and so much of it just feels like an afterthought. The first Kingdom Hearts came out in 2002 and it's a chunky, awkward game with extremely floaty and imprecise platforming. Jak and Daxter, Soul Reaver 2 and Devil May Cry each came out in 2001 and out perform Kingdom Hearts in terms of platforming and combat.

So what's so bad about it? Well for a start you have surprisingly little control over your own character. Once you decide to attack, guard or jump you're just kind of stuck in a slow animation. Enemies, meanwhile, are fast and often have skills that let them just become briefly invincible. Meanwhile basic skills like blocking and dodging have to be unlocked through levelling up. And based on choices in the beginning (you pick if you want to focus on magic, attack or defense and sacrifice one of the remaining two) you might not get those for an exceedingly long time. In fact that whole system is incredibly bizarre since one specific choice gives two additional MP, in a game where maximum MP is not only hard to come by, but determines how strong your magic is and is exceedingly limited otherwise. You can't get those two points any other way than with that specific choice at the start of the game.

Range is also a surprisingly strange issue in Kingdom Hearts and it's not too often to swing your keyblade -a blunt weapon shaped like a key- and miss unless your character's body is nearly touching the opponent as your forward momentum and motion just stops dead. Enemies often freely can attack from range as well, whether it's a charge attack from across the map, teleporting right to you and attacking you, or just throwing fireballs non-stop. Your only ranged offense is magic. Magic is not only severely limited, with it's offensive power dictated by your maximum MP which caps at 19 compared to the 100 cap of every other stat in the game, but it's fairly intuitive to use as well, requiring an entire secondary menu to manage outside of three quick-use slots that will almost inevitably go to your utility spells.

So in the end you've got poor mobility, very little in the way of defensive measures and the game saddles you with AI partners that die almost instantly in every fight. Unless you min/max your stat build most fights in the game just become a matter of  mashing the attack button and tanking hits while spamming the cure spell because there's just genuinely nothing else to the combat system. There's no reward for doing better. No gameplay function that lets you do better. In theory you can guard and counter attacks, but when you have a swarm of enemies that turn into flat textures on the floor, and another swarm of dudes flying through the sky by their nose it's incredibly hard to get the guard timing down because almost none of the enemies have attack tells that are recognizable from the spastic flailing they do when they're just standing around idle -but more on this in a second-. Inversely, however, combat is obscenely easy when it's one on one and no single enemy or boss really poses a threat unless they've got a crazy gimmick where they instantly kill you or something. In short, there's no actual challenge to the gameplay. There's nothing to overcome and learn. When you die it's not “When he does that he's doing a powerful attack, dodge it next time” or “I can't figure out this boss' pattern!” It's simply “Dang, I forgot to heal after he hit me.” It's mindless and uninteresting. You can power through everything.

Enemy design as well is lackluster at best. Visually I like the series, and I'll praise that later on. But fighting non-boss enemies is just tedious. Most enemies have some form of invulnerability. Whether it's the ability to just, literally, become invincible for a bit, invulnerability if attacked from a specific direction, or an annoying ability to just fly/teleport out of possible range -some times even the map- forcing you to sit there and wait for them to come back. This results in a lot of large fights where you kill off half the enemies then have to wait for the other half of the enemies to just let you hit them. Waiting around for enemies in a game to let you fight them is never fun, especially in a game where you don't have any kind of guard break. As I alluded to above animations are a mess as well. Enemies tend to just kind of twitch, wobble and flail around freely and a lot of their attacking animations start almost identical to their idle animations so it can be extremely difficult to tell if the guy you're going to attack is about to punch you, spit a fireball, turn into an icy tornado or just do nothing for another thirty seconds.

Even map design in Kingdom Hearts is unexpectedly strange. I remember loving the worlds when I played the game as a kid, but playing it now, well. Half the worlds are ridiculously short, lasting maybe three or four screens total with very little to do beyond listening to iconic characters talk for ten minutes or so. You could clear half the game in an evening. However some of the stages, the worlds based on Tarzan and Little Mermaid in particular, tend to be almost too expansive in comparison with very little content spread out over far more screens. I don't mean to say the game's story is bad, and that's still something I think would deserve its own write-up, but the way the game presents it is just incredibly awkward and stilted. You play through a few minutes of a disney-inspired zone then a Kingdom Hearts original character pops up, rants about friendship, hearts and/or darkness and goes away.

In the end of it all, I came away hating Kingdom Hearts, honestly. I loved it when I was younger. I completed it 100% somehow. But now, well it all just seems like overly pointless busywork. The combat isn't fun to me now and I really don't want to subject myself to a few hours of grinding so I can make the gear that makes me earn more EXP so I can grind for more hours to hit the high levels and unlock the skills needed to grind for the items to create the best weapons in the game so I can fight the optional bosses. Adding time sinks like that just aren't engaging.

Kingdom Hearts 2 does very little to fix these issues. In some cases it even exacerbates them. It came out in 2005, and while it's an incredibly unfair comparison; Devil May Cry 3 came out earlier that same year. Devil May Cry this series still is not. Combat generally -feels- less clunky than in the first game, but that's not necessarily a good thing. Rather than having stiff and slow attack animations Kingdom Hearts 2 favors long and elaborate ones. It's not uncommon for your characters to launch into massive spinning attacks at one or two presses of a button, it feels like you have almost no control over them at all in this game. Guard makes a return, but the animation is an awkward side-spin that makes timing it more difficult than anything else and dodge roll is gone now as are counter attacks. Instead you have action commands! A cool idea marred by lack of forethought. You see, when enemies do certain attacks or are stunned you can do a special highly damaging skill! Or sometimes they have to be in a specific mid-attack animation. Or sometimes they have to successfully attack you so you can do the counter-command. It's kind of random and not every enemy has action commands and generally speaking they're less useful and in terms of sheer gameplay less engaging than an actual counter system because it just boils fights town to mashing attack and waiting for the triangle button to light up.

Enemy design has actually gotten worse in my opinion. Enemies still love their invincibility, but there's a new fun trick to the overall design of bosses and enemies in Kindom Hearts 2! Stunlock. Nearly every enemy in the game has a whirlwind-style attack they'll just spam to happily stun you for several seconds and do a lot of damage. A lot of them directly home in on you, and follow you around. Without any kind of dodge roll and a flimsy hard to use block, these attacks are incredibly frustrating to fight against because they all take a very long time to play out and do a ton of damage compared to you tiny health pool. Animations are better in this game at least, and you can usually tell what enemies are going to do right away, it just doesn't help too much when almost every attack in the game is either “turn invincible and charge at you” or “turn into an invincible whirlwind and follow you around the room”. It makes every enemy other enemy feel the same. Unfortunately, the more unique enemies that don't do this stuff are the ones you almost only ever see in one world and never anywhere else.

Speaking of the worlds; level design is better. Most worlds will have their own gimmick now rather than just being a series of three to six rooms. The gimmicks tend to range from things like simply having to keep a gauge full for a while, to every area being a rhythm mini-game but it adds some interest to the over all flavor of the game-world. The plot also is much better integrated with the game play and level design, it's not uncommon to run into the primary antagonists and have fights with them throughout the game and see what their plans actually are as you progress through the story. A far better cry than just having your BFF turn evil, then have the antagonist show up out of nowhere because the game needs a conclusion.

The grinding is less bad in the second game as well. Though levels tend to be less rewarding -by level 20 I still only had 40 HP and even basic enemies were taking off half of it with a single hit- you're given a large number of ways to circumvent situations where you might be under levelled such as drive forms and magic. Speaking of which; magic kind of blows in KH2 because someone decided to make most of them melee-ranged for some reason. Your MP, however, is technically infinite since it regenerates slowly when emptied now. Cure uses all of your MP though which is unfortunate.

So it's that time of year again. The sun is hot, weather is dry and video game comedians on youtube are dropping their funnyman comedy acts in an effort to get people to take their totally new and unique views on video game reviews and journalism seriously. After seeing this happen time and time again like clockwork, and seeing the exact same talking points being raised one after another on a routine basis I figure it's time to write a quick, short thing and wave my counter argument like the tiniest flag no one will ever see; it doesn't matter.

You see, since the inception of gaming journalism as a whole there has never been a point where it wasn't incredibly biased or, as was most often the case, effectively just used as a sales tactic. Even when a magazine wasn't directly created and owned by the very company  they were hyping products for, they were usually still in bed with them. At no point did anyone think a game would be getting poor reviews after seeing huge splash pages of advertisements for it for weeks, or even months. Even noted catastrophic 2000 flop Daikatana still managed to come through with middle-ground reviews from most “official” sources. Even E.T. A game utterly infamous in video gaming managed to make some 6's and other middle of the road numbers back when it released (Though admittedly getting a good sample size of reviews is difficult due to the nature of the internet and search results churning out almost nothing but modern youtube hits and memes about the game). There was no mythical golden-age of gaming journalism. The idea of integrity or objectivity in game reviews is something that has never existed -it could never even be compromised because it simply wasn't there.

But, even more to the point. Even far more hard hitting to all of this, is why does it matter to anyone? How does Joe McDudeguy from VidGaemMonthly have a more valuable opinion than XxWEEDLORDxX on Gamefaqs or Steam? There's never any kind of science involved in a game review, rarely ever any kind of critical analysis or discussion about the game's actual content or a serious breakdown of any kind. There is genuinely no reason to let a quote-unquote official review of a game influence your thoughts any more than some rando you don't know and never will. Getting mad that Joe McDudeguy gets paid to give every non-AAA title a 7/10 and anything with Call of Duty stapled to the name a 9/10 won't change anything if you keep giving them ad revenue and clicks. It won't change anything if you sit by and demand integrity while doing nothing to give them a reason to change and it's certainly not going to change the system if you keep just buying deeply flawed AAA titles because McDudeguy, or whatever sponsored youtube personality you're fond of, said it was good.

The only thing that could change the system is if every gamer started thinking. Critical analysis and thought is vital to development of any media as an art form. It's the difference between a film critic who will break a movie -even a movie they love- down and acknowledge its flaws and successes on a technical, narrative and even emotional level. And the eponymous game reviewer, the person who yells at footage of a game while saying over and over that it's bad because it's garbage. Never touching the substance of the game or delving deeper into why. And all of the thousands who follow them, never once taking their own thoughts and ideas into hand and just repeating the same arguments -same talking points- verbatim constantly. My favorite game is good because it's good, it can't be bad because I don't like bad games.

So I finished Super Robot Wars V, finally. I thought it was very good and above and beyond all other cool things it does, know what I loved most about it? It really did make the plotlines, and ending in particular, way better than the original anime and OVAs it used as its sources did. Like, spoilers and all but having Full Frontal not just turn out to be a space ghost of char and burn into ashes was actually really cool because he resolves to become his own person and leaves on a journey of self discovery after coming to terms with the reality of who, and what, he is and that he doesn't -have- to be Char. Then comes back and bails your ass out. Cool Guy Frontal is a really cool moment, and it's way better than anything Unicorn delivered in his arc! That's not the only moment, but this isn't about SRW, and I'm going to have to stop myself there because; Super Robots are still awesome and as a brief companion to my word soup about Gundam last week, I'm here to talk about Super Robots, what they are and why they're rad and then tell you to watch them.

So lets start with something I'm certain I haven't covered covered yet; subegenres!

Super Robots tend to be more split than Real series. There are three major types of Super Robot shows. Traditional Super Robot shows are your Mazinger Z's, big chunky robots that fight off their villain of the week and whatever else the plot may have in store for them.

Transforming Robots, a middling sub-genre that's often forgotten, is best represented by the ever spectacular Getter Robo, tend to feature one or more headline machine that can change its form for different abilities. In Getter's case it has the Getter-1, a very traditional Super type that wields axes and over powers its enemies with its Getter Beams. Getter-2 is a more streamlined machine that wields a large drill on one arm and a claw on the other with a heavy emphasis on speed and motion, often capable of firing off its drill as a missile. Finally Getter-3 is a big, solid tank-machine that makes up for its limited mobility with long stretching arms and a multitude of long-range missiles. Transforming Robot series typically rely on teamwork dynamics and villains that necessitate the various shifts in form.

The third and often well-known and popularized is the Combing Robots sub-genre. Best summed up by shows like GaoGaiGar, a combining robot show features machines that, well, have robots that fuse together to make bigger and better robots. GaoGaiGar not only has its titular machine but most of its supporting cast consist of teams of smaller robots such as EnRyu and HyoRyu who can fuse together to form ChoRyuJin. Typically in these shows they feature a series of progressively bigger, and stronger villains that require progressively more, and more powerful, fusions or powers to beat.

Sub-genre malarkey aside, Super Robots are the mirror to Real Robots, the second half of the Mecha Genre and generally they are the stereotype people tend to imagine when they think about mecha in general. While Real series tend to have the mechs simply act as tools within the setting, no different than any other vehicle, in a Super Robot series the robot its self tends to be the heavy focus. Some series take it further and make the robot an actual character, other times the robot is merely the device which the plot revolves. More often than not a Super Robot will be unique in some manner, rather than mass-produced military tools and they tend to wield more unconventional weaponry such as swords, drills or even transforming their very bodies into weapons.

Narratively Super Robot series tend to differ from Real series as well. Super series, more often than not, tend to be about the tenacity and strength of humanity. About the spirit and ingenuity of mankand in the face of adversity and whatever mysterious force it is that drives us to be whatever we are. Antagonists in Super Robot series also tend to be mirrors of the protagonists. Unlike a Real series where the antagonist is often an ideaology, a nation or a mind-set  in Super Series you're often shown a dark, warped perception of humanity or society. An evil organization, an oppressive alien government or ancient super beings from below the earth's crust! But as the series goes on you're given more in-depth looks at these beings and what drives them and you see that they aren't different from humanity. Often, they literally are humanity – just divergent at some point in time. A Super Robot is less about showing how people communicate and ideas in conflict and more about showing the raw drive of mankind, and the conflict of man versus man on a more primal, almost even tribal level.

So all that being said, let me talk about why I love Super Robots more than Real Robots. On the most basic, shallow levels I like the designs for Super Robots a lot more. A gundam, like the Crossbones Gundam for example, is cool and I love it. But there's just something that I will always love about the huge chunky designs like Mazinger Z, Getter Robo or Big O. Even more than that, the more grounded and believable weapons of a series like Gundam will always have their place in my heart. But no matter how cool a gundam's beam rifle is, it just can't compete with the excitement of a mecha beast being blown to pieces by a rocket punch, or those radical pile drivers in the Big O's arms. Super Robots -feel- cool and exciting. Real Robots, by comparison, don't feel that much different from a jet fight or a car chase. They're still cool, but it's not the same to me.

On a less, but still somewhat, shallow note I will admit that grand spectacles appeal to me. In a show like Gundam, or even Martian Successor Nadesico, the grand finale isn't some rousing speech about how awesome everyone is. It's not going to be a world-ending battle to protect the earth. In Gundam the climax features two pilots desperately fighting for their lives, completely ignoring their broken down machines! While Nadesico features very little in the way of dramatic space battles, but rather tense diplomatic action. Then you take a series like The Big O, where the climax calls reality, identity and everything into question while the protagonist fights for his life against the man who stands against everything he stands for. That's not to say that Gundam or Nadesico weren't amazing in their own rights, in fact you should go watch them if you haven't, but that I am just heavily biased in terms of flash and style.

So, in the end what series do I  like, and do I think you should watch? Well lets start with Mazinger Z. There's a fancy new CG movie in the works and “Mazinger Edition Z: The Impact!” (often referred to as “Shin Mazinger Z”) is an excellent way to familiarize yourself with the grandfather of the Super Robot genre. It also features one of my personal favorite anime openings. Mazinger Z is a story so old, iconic and told so many times there's a good chance you know it already even if you don't know the names and fine details. Koji Kabuto is a young, if somewhat rebellious, teenager living with his young brother in absolute normalcy until one day he discovers his creepy grandfather is dead and left him a weird giant robot, telling him to fight off the sudden onslaught of robots known only as Mechabeasts sent by a strange and mysterious Dr. Hell. It's a very simple story, Mazinger is not known for it's depth or complexity. What it does have is a giant robot with rocket fists. Watch it.

Getter Robo: Armageddon.

An OVA series from the 90's with a distinct flair for ultraviolence, a spectacular OST and a distinct artstyle that I have no doubt held influence over the creators of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (series I'm not fond of but is somewhat of a fan favorite among mecha fans.) You don't even need to be familiar with the greater Getter Robo mythos to dive in to this one as it's a stand-alone story in its own continuity;

Famous Getter Ray professor Dr. Satome is murdered and notable Getter Robo pilot Ryoma is unjustly accused and arrested! Meanwhile a new menace threatens the earth in the form of the Invaders – space faring shapeshifters that seek to wipe out all life on earth.

I'm not going to get into it more to avoid spoiling it, but seriously; it's an amazing show and you can practically pinpoint specific scenes that future Super Robot series would all but ape straight off of it. Also it has my absolute favorite opening.

The Big O

I thought long and hard about this, since I only wanted to write about three series. I almost gave it to GaoGaiGar, but Big O deserves it. The Big O experiments more with the art, the tone and the style of a Super Robot series than the vast majority of others. It's wholly unique and it's something that I think absolutely must be seen, whether you wind up liking it or not, simply because of how utterly singular it is. The soundtrack is outstanding, the art style is amusingly directly influenced by the long-running DC Animated Universe cartoons (Specifically “Batman the Animated Series”.) Meanwhile the character designs, the mechs in particular are incredibly distinct. There are no hotblooded heroes here, no courageous young heroes to save the day and the titular machine looks more like a humanoid steam train with lots of solid, flat surfaces and heavy plates rather than the more rounded, chunky designs of most Super Robot series.

Story-wise it follows Roger Smith, professional negotiator and slow steeping mystery of Paradigm City, a place with no memories and where identity is a fleeting thing. Gradually Roger finds himself sinking deeper and deeper into a strange conspiracy and the mysteries around him start unraveling.

Honorable mentions;

So without going into too much depth I'd just like to say you should also watch the following;

I've written about Super Robot Wars twice now. I almost wrote about some of my favorite super robot series this week, instead I'm going to write about a different flavor of giant anime robot; Gundam. Mobile Suit Gundam is the pillar that launched the second half of the giant robot genre; Real Robots. Generally smaller, more military oriented series where the mechs are often tools, stand-ins for the next big step in warfare or otherwise simply used as weapons. They are, generally speaking, machines like tanks or planes. Not vaguely sentient things driven by alien magic or human spirit like in Super Robot shows. But a means to tell a far more typically mundane story, rather than the fantastical means around which the story revolves.

You could, for example, take the sci-fi setting of Mobile Suit Gundam and alter it to make it fit a more realistic one and while some plot points would be lost, the core storyline would be relatively unchanged. You simply can not do the same to something like Mazinger Z, where the sheer fantastic nature of the characters and events -even though the actual physical setting are far more grounded than Gundam's space faring one- are so deeply tied to the narrative that even a small change would render it void.

So, Gundam. What -is- Gundam, then? Well the classic Mobile Suit Gundam is, among other things, a story about how war is bad, how no matter what we do war exists and there will always be people who strive for war, and people who get hurt by it. That one person's just cause is another's atrocity and that ultimately, we can only do what we can to change the future and hope others follow in our footsteps. It covers some fairly unexpected themes for an anime generally expected to entertain kids and market toys. Themes such as PTSD, genocide, war crimes, and the passing of generations.

Gundam's storyline is largely dominated by a war between the Earth Federation, a global government organization, and the Principality of Zeon, an organization of space colony dwelling “spacenoids” dedicated initially to declaring their independence from earth, and ultimately to conquering the earth. This series opens up with this backdrop, with the very first opening narration showing the horrific concept of a “Colony Drop”- wherein the Zeon military forces forcibly knocked a colony out of orbit and sent it crashing down to earth with enough destructive force to annihilate a portion of Australia's land mass. And that's just the narration. The actual plot shows an attack on a colony of innocent civilians for no reason other than the Earth Federation happened to be there. An emergency evacuation that sees a number of civilians, children in particular, drafted into the military to get the one surviving federation ship working or otherwise act as fighter pilots to defend it; and from there the series follows that journey. The one of civilians stuck in a war they didn't want to be part of, had no say in and ultimately didn't even get to refuse as they struggle through attacks from a hostile military force and make their way to earth.

That, the saga of them getting back to earth despite constant Zeon attacks, only make up one fourth of the series. It goes deeper into the struggle of the drafted pilots trying to maintain their grip as they're forced to fight time and time again, to kill other people when they aren't even part of the trained army. The mental toll that killing, and seeing friends and companions die takes on these characters is expressed constantly as the series progresses, not just in the forum of brief emotional breakdowns but in the entire epilogue to the series. The sequels that feature the same characters still show the profound effects this war had on them. No greater example of this is seen than in the most famous two characters of the series Amuro Ray and Char Aznable.

Protagonist Amuro Ray, ace pilot of the titular Gundam, shows up in several later series and each time he expresses his fear and the difficulty he has getting back into the cockpit of a mobile suit. Yet he forces himself into the fight anyway because the alternative is for more innocent lives to die, and he can't bear to live with yet more of that guilty weight on his shoulders. Especially since he feels part of the blame for it, for it is in part his fault that perpetual antagonist and infamous ace pilot Char Aznable survived that initial war. Char, on the other hand, was only galvanized by the events of the war. Initially part of Zeon's army he shows nothing but disdain, even revulsion for the great Zabi family that rules the principality with a leadership, styling themselves after the historical nazi party of earth. Yet his motivations and history slowly reveal themselves over the course of the series and ultimately, despite the intense rivalery between him and Amuro, despite the many battles between them. He escapes. He returns again, and again, and again. Each time with a new dedication to a cause, to his cause, and each time he and Amuro meet they reignite that same old fight in one another, and realize in eachother what they, themselves, lack. For Amuro, he sees that Char has a solid goal and certainty in life, he is always working towards his own ends, he's never lost, never stuck relying on other people to keep him afloat. Char, a man who lived within masks for a lot of his life, meanwhile realizes that Amuro has an identity – a life outside of war and knows he doesn't have anything to go back to. Anything he had, would have or could have is consumed by the charismatic passion that is his desire, and unlike Amuro he can never temper his dreams and just live a normal life.

I could write just about those two for hours and still not have found enough words to describe just how they grow, change and work off one another across three stories but their rivalry influenced manga and anime for decades, and still continues to do so to this day. It is perhaps the ultimate example of two characters who are so utterly, impossibly different colliding head on without either of them being full on good or evil. They are differing ideologies colliding and even the famous ending of their rivalry ends on a unique note. They don't part ways as friends, there is no reconciliation at the last moment. It's two fighters who have a grudging respect for one another on a sheer technical level admitting that no matter what, they will never see, or understand, one another's point of view or even like one another even when forced by circumstance to work together.

A while ago I briefly spilled some word soup about Super Robot Wars, and mech anime in general, and one day I'd like to dig in deep and write more about giant robots because oh snap do I love giant robots. But for now I'm going to talk about Super Robot Wars V because I am still playing this game and loving every minute of it. Hours, really. Stages are taking an hour or more to complete now and it's eating my life away.

So, what makes V in particular so great is that it has an English translation. Bandai has been doing a thing lately where a lot of their series that would otherwise never get localized have been getting English subtitles for their SEA releases, which is fantastic if you're not adverse to paying crazy import prices. Quality of these translations has been a bit rocky, another SRW game “Moon Dwellers” wasn't the best in terms of translation quality, but V's translation is generally decent. There are a few names that are mistranslated such as the Doven Wolf from “ZZ Gundam” being hilariously called the Dooben Wolf. Generally, however, the translation is fine. It's refreshing to be able to play through an entire SRW game where the whole story is translated, as prior to these releases there were only a handful of complete fan patches.

Gameplay-wise V is much like any other of the recent SRW games with a few streamlined quality of life changes. Now you can use Spirit skills directly from the pre-combat screen whether you're attacking or defending. On one hand it's nice to be able to save a unit if you're the victim of an unlucky one-percent hit that nearly wipes them out, but on the other hand it does make the game a bit too easy when you can ensure that every character that gets attacked can always protect, evade or heal to survive an attack.

The only other major change from the typical SRW Format is a fairly large one; pilots don't earn skill points anymore. Before you would have to level up each individual pilot and teach them skills and enhance their stats one by one and it was all very tedious and rather uninteresting in all honesty. That has all been replaced with the “TAC” system, you gain TAC Points by killing enemies, meeting certain requirements (usually events based on the canon-storyline of the stage) and then spend them how you see fit. They're used to buy extra parts for your mechs, such as boosters to add more mobility, or to customize your pilots. And boy howdy has pilot customization been expanded.

Previously you would just upgrade your pilot's stats and that was that. They would learn skills as they leveled up, but nothing too involved went on. Now with the TAC system you can do that by spending your TAC points to level their raw stats. Or you can spend those points on pilot skills. These skills range from the more simple ones such as “Proud Ace” which lets you earn the Ace and Great Ace titles ten kills earlier, and “Save Energy” which lowers energy consumption by a small percentage based on how many ranks you put in. To the hilariously broken like “Attacker” which adds twenty percent to your attack once your pilot gains high enough focus, and “Full Counter” which always lets your unit attack first. You're given more than enough slots per-pilot that customizing them in almost any way you see fit is possible, the only limit is how many TAC points you can save up and spend. Whether you want to dump all those points on your specific favorites, or spread the love to the whole team is up to you.

Otherwise gameplay is largely the same. Each mission you're given an objective, a failure quota and a bonus objective. You gain bonus money for meeting the side objective but it's not required, and you're tasked with hitting your objective whatever it is. Usually it's just to kill all the dudes that show up. Sometimes it's just to kill one dude, and any others that show up are bonus cash and TAC Points. You're given a list of available mechs and choose who to launch and have at it. This game heavily favors the UC Gundam cast, and I love it for that. You quickly get the “Crossbones Gundam” stars Tobia and Kincade  and eventually build up a star cast of Judeu (Zeta Gundam), Hathaway (from the novel series Hathaway's Flash), Amuro (Mobile Suit Gundam, ZZ Gundam, and Char's Counterattack) and even Kamille (Zeta gundam) as well as Banagher from “Gundam Unicorn”. Meanwhile the cast of Getter Robo: Armageddon make an appearance as well with Ryoma in his Black Getter serving as an excellent unit for a third of the game before being replaced by the amazing Shin Getter and later the Shin Getter Dragon rears its head as well.

Stealing the show, however, are the Mazinger Z units. Starting with designs straight out of “Mazinger Z: The Impact!” you have the famous Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger which later upgrade into the Mazinger ZERO, from it's own titular manga series, and the Mazin Emperor G, a new mech created just for this game which they went so far as to produce new figures of timed with the game's release for some boost in marketing. Visually speaking a lot of the game's effort and budget went into designing and animating these two monsters alone, and it shows with how fantastic they look when doing their special attacks.

Other series that make appearances are Martian Successor Nadesico (based on the movie rather than the excellent series), Cross-Ange, Space Battleship Yamato 2199, Full Metal Panic, Neon Genesis Evangelion (The rebuilds, rather than the original series) and surprisingly Brave Express Might Gaine.

There's not a whole lot to say about the plot, for the most part it's an adaptation of a few core series' plotpoints with a decent focus on Cross-Ange, Gundam Unicorn and Space Battleship Yamato while the other series slot in when and where they can. But one really interesting thing this game in particular does is that it improves the endings of several of them vastly. Without spoiling it, I'm just going to say that it doesn't end on the dreary would-be teaser that the Nadesico movie does, and Unicorn doesn't just end on a lame note with the villain vanishing into dust because he was literally nothing but a ghost. Even Evangelion gets a better ending because it doesn't leave players hanging on for a sequel that might never happen for a few years. So in some ways, it's incredibly satisfying to see better endings for series, and especially a few key characters, than the original series ever bothered to.

Horror is a genre near and dear to my heart. I'll never forget the first time I was spooked by the genre. My father had picked up a copy of Pet Sematary and left it open on the couch when he got called away. Being the curious child I was, the book had a cat on the cover and I wanted to see what it could possibly be about, I picked up right where he left off and BAM. He had left off right at the scene where the protagonist comes fast to face with the wendigo. It still stands out in my mind today, though it doesn't scare me anymore, as the first and possibly only time a book frightened me. I was hooked on Stephen King's works ever since, the horror genre as a whole became a fascination ever since and though June is hardly atmospherically a horror climate, I'm really in a spooky mood.

So, let's start with a shallow breakdown of what horror is. A lot of my more weak-hearted friends and family can't understand why I enjoy the genre at all. “Why would you want to scare yourself? That just seems crazy!” Is something I've heard a lot over the years. But it isn't necessarily about being scared. At it's very core Horror is about emotion, like any other work of art. While comedy tries to make you laugh, and drama tries to make you cry, horror wants to surprise and shock you. It's about the excitement that comes with the highs and lows of the narrative, the calm moments where everything is normal and things don't feel weird at all, and the sudden twist where everything just goes wrong.

You can easily divide Horror into two main “types”; Psychological Horror, which tend to be your more suspenseful tales. They're usually slower paced and tend to aim more at making the consumer fear ideas or more abstract concepts rather than a large boogeyman with a knife. Of course not everything that fits under this sub-genre is exactly a cerebral work. For every self-introspective story that questions the darker parts of society, there will inevitably be half a dozen Paranormal Activities or similar works. These are the series for you if the idea of gore and violence does little for you, but you really want to get in on the horror action. Most lovecraft works slot in under here, as do a few of Stephen King's works such as From a Buick 8(another of my favorites of his) and Cujo. Silence of the Lambs and it's related works in both film and novel are excellent contenders as well, being less about up front the things done to people but instead focused on the people that do the things. Outside of the classic mediums of film and writing, Video Games have struggled to achieve a footing under the Psychological Horror umbrella for decades now. Silent Hill was, arguably, the first to do this by facing the player with a lot of upsetting and often uncomfortable imagery, dialogue and character development. It still relied heavily on grotesque visuals, but forcing the player to confront the meaning behind those visuals had always been a staple of the series, and an almost meta take on analysis. Otherwise a very limited number of games try, but generally fail.

Visceral Horror is the other end of the spectrum. It tends to be what the genre is most well known for, the slashers and killers. The monsters and massacres. It's not that this sub-genre is always a mindless blood show, it's that it's branched out so much within, developed subcultures and identities within its own that even within this umbrella an entire essay could be written just about bloody slasher films, grotesque body horror or the symbolism behind monster flicks. Because of its ease of access, for both creator and consumer, and up front nature it's been far easier for this sub-genre to grow, and for the consumers to pick up on the messages within to make themselves known due to the often shallower presentation than in the more psychological works, where creators and consumers alike are expected to be more engaged with the whole process. Hellraiser, Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street. The big names in horror film tend to be here, Stephen King's more famous works such as IT and Pet Sematary engage in a lot more visceral themes and ideas as well. The bulk of Video Games that attempt the horror genre tend to wind up under this umbrella, whether they try to or not, because it's often hard for a developer to create a Horror experience without resorting to cheapo visual elements and audio scares. To that end you get Resident Evil, a genre mainstay that whether intentionally or not comes across as a videogame B-Movie for the first four or five games and Fatal Frame. Even comics have gotten in on the action and over in Japan, Junji Ito is a master of body horror. His most well known works tend to be Uzumaki and Gyo but anything from his catalog is spectacular. This isn't a comprehensive list, I could be here all day if I wanted to list every good horror film, book, game or comic, but suffice to say, it's not hard to throw a stone and hit a work that has an interesting take on visual horror.

Ultimately, horror fans can be as different as music fans. Someone who loves watching Jason murder teens, might not find any entertainment out of the slow, plodding descriptors that Lovecraft uses to slowly build the world of suspense around the reader. But they might have some really interesting input on the deeper ideas behind the subtext of Jason murdering those teens. Some people are in it for the shock value, some people are in it for the mental engagement. Some just like watching dudes get got. If you don't like Horror at all, that's cool. I love it, I don't see that ever changing and will continue to love it until I die I guess.

We all know the jokes about Krillin's many deaths in Dragon Ball Z I'm sure. But lets take a more expansive look into the attitudes towards death that many anime series, some out of date shonen in specific, have. So to start off lets delve a bit further than Dragon Ball Z.

It's an age-old trick of any fictional series to kill a character only to reveal later on that they're secretly alive. Whether it's the eternally non-secret that Racer-X is actually Speed Racer's presumed dead brother, or the question of whether or not the Green Goblin really is dead or if that's just another guy pretending to be him. On many levels it's easy to understand why a creator wouldn't want to just permanently get rid of a character they might like, or be tempted to give in to fan demand to bring back a deceased character as happened most famously with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. But what does it mean for the tone of a story when this starts happening more than once, what happens to the consequences and emotional investment of a narrative when death as a potential outcome becomes nothing?

Dragon Ball, and Dragon Ball Z as an extension, tend to be the prime example of this. For most of its run the only people who died were villains or side characters. However the titular dragon balls tend to just hang over the subject up until Goku promises to bring a kid's dad back to life and follows through. We see that death is easily thwarted but at the same time there do seem to be some limits to the power of wishes as there were efforts to keep the body intact and the dragon balls have a year between uses. Then Krillin dies.

It's a pretty big surprise when you're reading or watching for the first time, you don't really expect Dragon Ball to get that serious but here's the main character's best friend dead and a quest for revenge begins. Except it's not just revenge, is it? Because the main stated goal of the arc is the revive Krillin. Throughout the course of the arc Master Roshi and other characters die, even the Dragon from the dragon balls dies and things seem pretty dire. But then Goku just talks to god and what do you know, he can just make more. Everyone is brought back and at once, death has no meaning in this world. Dragon balls can just bring people back as they see fit, the dragon balls can be remade and there are no consequences.

Cue Dragon Ball Z. This one opens with Goku dying, which isn't a big deal because everyone knows they can just bring him back to life. There is no tension until piccolo dies and whoops, turns out if he dies the dragon balls die too. But it's okay, there are more in space. Turns out those ones give you three wishes too. What I'm getting at here is that, that first moment where Krillin died in the original Dragon Ball? That was a serious turn for the series. It had emotional weight and impact, right until the characters turn around and remember they can just bring him back to life. It's even less of an issue when Goku dies, despite him being the main protagonist, because gathering the Dragon Balls is an absolute non-issue by the time Z happens. Finding out there are more dragon balls in space that give more wishes just further saturates the issue - death has no meaning in this universe now. How can any viewer feel worried about whether or not Goku will win a fight if we know he'll just come back within a year? Even if you can only come back once with each set of Dragon Balls, apparently anyone can just make a new set on another planet. So there's no emotional investment in the show after a while, you're just watching an immortal shirtless ape-man laserbeam a weird looking alien to death on occasion.

So now that I've laid out the crux of this issue, what about other series? How do other popular big name series handle this subject? Well, it's a mixed bag. Take Naruto for example. Death was mostly permanent in that series for the first half, but in the later half dead characters just came back thanks to ninja magic and every meaningful character development and arc just started to unravel bit by bit. Even one major antagonist who had spent the whole series being slowly punished for being evil before dying, just kind of pops up as good as new and receives little more than a raised eyebrow before being shrugged off under the spectacle of zombie ghost ninja wars. Bleach had a strange problem where no one but middling antagonists ever seemed to die. By the end the only a handful of notable protagonists had died, easily less than five. In both series case death once again has very little meaning. In the former, everyone dies but comes back and dies again so it's the dragon ball issue all over again. There were so many ghosts, zombies and ambiguously sentient memories/illusions just kind of showing up so often in Naruto that the only real answer to whether or not a character was dead, was “probably?”. Bleach on the other hand, the answer was a firm “No” if they were part of the main cast. No one of popular note died in bleach and it once again took the stakes out of the fights, and interest drains quickly when that happens. The whole series became predictable in its forumla of losses, victories and how no matter what happened the protagonist would gain some new power to win at the last minute. But none of the main cast would die of course, no matter how often the author would leave that on a cliffhanger. So you knew any time they, or any of the other popular characters, were in a fight they would come out relatively unharmed and generally undamaged.

Then there's One Piece. One piece stands out from the crowd because it doesn't feature a lot of death. Most deaths occur as a show of a villain's power or malevolence, the heroes them selves almost always leave the antagonists alive after a fight. This doesn't stem from some prudish attempt at being child-friendly or anything, in fact One Piece touches on many darker themes than many of its former peers ever did, rather because the author understands the impact death can have on a work and that too much of it can weaken the impact of a well done scene. To that end, in the middle of the series it hits a turning point where a massive battle takes out and in rapid succession two important and beloved characters die. It shocked the readers to say the least, these things didn't happen in One Piece! But it did, and unlike Dragon Ball Z and other series, these characters weren't coming back and the impact of their death could still be felt through the series in later arcs. It also left a hanging axe over other characters. Even if it's unlikely that the main character will die, the fact that the author was willing to kill such loved characters without warning leaves the rest of them on shaky ground. Unlike other series, One Piece's deaths are few and far between, whether it's a background character giving drive to a smaller arc, or one of the main cast. And that is all the difference in the world between this and the series previously talked about.

For a moment, however, lets talk about the deaths themselves. Typically speaking I find you can break a death in a shonen series down into one of the following three categories.

A. Deaths for the villain's sake. These are deaths which usually serve to show how evil or strong a villain is. Rarely they're the deaths that motivate a villain to become what they are. These are deaths like Krillin and most of the Dragon Ball cast, really. Their only real purpose within the narrative is to make the antagonist of the current arc seem stronger, because they're usually supposed to be a major game-changer of a villain such as a series or season finale villain.

B. Deaths for the hero's sake.

These tend to be heroic sacrifices that give the hero more time to complete their goals, such as charging up a spirit bomb or escaping an exploding building. Sometimes it's Goku dying so he can come back stronger and fight the stronger villains.

C. Deaths for the plot's sake.

These are deaths that are, at the time at least, largely irrelevant to anyone but the narrative at hand. A conveniently dead soldier here, crashed jet fighter there. Maybe it's just an assassination that sets off the whole arc, but generally doesn't directly tie in to either the protagonist or antagonist.

In most of the series I listed above, deaths are generally in the villain category. In Bleach the only time a protagonist dies at all is when the series introduces a bunch of new characters only to have the new godly villain kill them all one by one. It comes across as very shallow and disingenuous when the only time your characters die is to make another one look better.

You know what's always interesting? Bad, but creative games. I don't just mean the disappointing big-name affairs like your bioware blah-fests or no man's whatevers. I mean games that set out to do something unique or new but whether it's because they're done by small-time studios, unpopular names or just never got the attention and budget they deserved they didn't come out quite how they deserved to. So, that being said I'm going to talk about three titles from three different consoles that were objectively bad games in varying ways, but in other ways were completely awesome and I feel the world desperately needs more games like them.

1. Drakengard. Better known as the prequel to Nier (which was the prequel to Nier: Automata, because lets face it the first Nier wasn't even that popular at the time of its release), Drakengard is a deeply, deeply flawed game featuring dull, repetetive “Dynasty Warriors” style gameplay, muddy graphics prominently displaying a pallete of reds, browns and greys and a soundtrack resembling a symphony stuck in a tornado. Sounds like a real treat, doesn't it? That's not even the worst of it. You see, the game had a special malevolent spite for completionists. Anyone who wanted all of the endings had to be prepared to not only play through the game like four-odd times, they had to do all kinds of arbitrary and esoteric things to unlock a variety of weapons as getting all of them was required. Some of them had requirements as obtuse as standing still in a specific room for over a minute, and then guessing where the item spawned in the map. So what could possibly be redeeming about this game?

Well, it was interesting. Without getting too much into my love for Yoko Taro and his games, especially since it's a pre-Nier game, it's main character is set up as an exploration of what kind of horrific monster a person would have to be to fit the role of your typical ~warriors type game protagonist. Rolling into a battlefield, slaughtering hundreds and taking off to the next one. So you play as Caim, a psychopath who cares about nothing, not the world nor the war at hand, beyond his personal goal of saving his sister and doesn't especially care who or what gets destroyed along the way. You pick up a motley crew of party members along this trip including an even more unstable woman who eats children, a blind pedophile who acts as the group's moral compass and an immortal child who's only there because he has a minor beef with the main antagonist over who their parents loved more. The characters aren't functional people, there's no ~destiny~ guiding the main character to save the world or anything. It's just a story about one bloody minded jerk who goes from point A to point B doing the only thing he knows to do; kill.

The game is graphic and the plot goes completely off the rails halfway through and every ending beyond the first one just gets more and more unhinged. Someone playing the game for their first time could be told, in complete detail, exactly what the final ending of the game is and without any prior knowledge of the game and its developer, probably wouldn't believe the would-be spoiler fiend. It's an unpredictable ride and I tentatively recommend it to anyone who can look past the utter trainwreck the actual game is to see the juicy morsel of weirdness it is inside.

2. Deadly Premonition. All internet memes and flavor of the month youtube popularity aside, I love Deadly Premonition. I love it right down to it's wanna-be Twin Peaks soul. You can see the game's budget while you play, but the game is just oozing with charm and a certain detailed heart to it that makes it really feel like it was a labor of love as if the developer, SWERY, really wanted to make the game and tell the story even if the game its self had to be cobbled together. The gameplay is dated, featuring classic survival-horror style tank controls and floaty third-person over the shoulder aiming it feels like a poorer version of Resident Evil 4 except with actual melee weapons instead of just the combat knife. Visually the game is extremely dated. It came out on the 360 and looks like it could have been an early Xbox or even mid-PS2 game. Textures are often just straight up photos of things applied to models, or otherwise just generic tessellations applied to landscape you're not supposed to look at, while the animations are incredibly limited and the same few are used for almost every situation through the entire game for every character. I could keep going on, but I think I've nailed it. The game looks, and feels, like it's several generations out of date and hasn't aged well. It felt out of date when it was first released.

However the sound track is amazing, at least if you're not off-put by the limited number of tracks, the voice acting is pretty decent  and the writing is great. The plot, however, is where the game really shines. It's a fairly predictable murder mystery wrapped in survival horror trappings. You play as Agent Francis York Morgan, an FBI agent who can apparently see Shadows, weird ghost/zombie-like creatures, and sets out to investigate the murder of a young girl in a small town out in the woods called Greenvale. The game tries very hard to be Twin Peaks. Early beta screenshots and videos of the game were almost literally Twin Peaks. It's probably the best deliberately twin-peaksy game I've ever played because it feels like SWERY got it, and ultimately rather than just doing the Twin Peaks thing, he put his own spin on the whole thing.

I could go on more, I want to. But it's very hard to talk about this game's plot without spoiling it, and that is arguably it's strongest and weakest point. You can't really replay it. Once you know the story and solve the mystery, there's nothing really driving it. There's no particular reason to replay it. But it -is- a very nice self contained tale and for that, I love it.

As a final note I'd like to say avoid the ports. The 360 version is the “best” version available, the least buggy and most complete. The PS3 port introduced a ton of strange new bugs and removed a lot of neat visual features and the PC version is borderline unplayable with the number of crashes and other issues.

3. Illbleed. Here's a game a lot of people might not have heard about before. Or maybe you have, I don't know what's popular on the internet anymore. Illbleed was a survival horror game on the dreamcast. Or at least it wore the costume of a survival horror game, in reality it was a complete and loving mockery of everything Survival Horror typically stood for at the time. The game whole heartedly embraced all of the weirdness about horror games of the decade and rolled around in it like a dog just gleefully rolling in its own feces. The game took place in a giant haunted house themed amusement park and your characters wore goggles that let them mark traps at the cost of energy. If you spotted a trap, nothing happened and you gained energy back. If you failed to mark one, you'd get a goofy jump scare and your character would incur a health penalty. If any of your stats got too high or too low you would die. If you ran out of energy and were unable to mark traps, you would get hit too much and die. Illbleed was a mockery of horror games that expected you not to panic and rush through an area, but to slowly and methodically crawl through an area and predict where obstacles would be. You were expected to avoid the surprising and quote-unquote scary elements by diffusing them and even the characters were largely in on the joke in knowing it was all a fake trip through an amusement park.

So I started playing Overwatch for the free weekend and it convinced me to buy the game and decided to write a quick, short thing about it. It feels a lot like what team fortress 3 might have been if Valve wasn't allergic to the number. Now, because I'm sure everyone is tired of the comparison, I won't mention TF2 again.

The characters, or Heroes as Blizzard likes to call them, are all very well defined and for the most part have a solid defining gimmick to them as well. They're grouped into categories of Attack-Defense-Tank-Support which helps newer and unfamiliar players learn who specializes in what. Tank characters generally have some kind of defensive skill and specialize in absorbing or blocking damage, Defense characters are best suited to area of denial tactics and blocking the enemy's progression while support tend to be the healers or otherwise undefined skills such as team armor generation and teleportation. Attackers are fairly obvious, they do the bulk of the killing. You certainly don't have to use a character in their suggest role, but a defender's skills typically make getting a large string of kills more difficult than the attackers who have almost entirely offensive or mobility oriented skills.

Even among the similar character types their individuality seeps through. Mercy, a support character, has a healing tether and can fly towards allies from long distances, whether it's a fatal fall or fleeing combat. Another support unit, Ana, is a sniper who can heal or buff her allies with a shot and still disable and snipe her opponents. No matter what “class” you pick, you can easily find a character who's playstyle fits you, whether you like to be fast and dodgy, slow and tanky, a distant sniper or anything else.

I, admittedly, haven't had much time to play this weekend but I am somewhere around rank fifteen and I never really feel like the game is unfair, or frustratingly skewed in my opponent's favor. In fact I've been getting better at playing the characters I like at a fairly good pace, I'm always playing against people who are slightly better than me but it's rarely ever a complete one-sided stomp. The matchmaking is largely automated, but it can be a bit frustrating when you get constantly matched with people in groups of three or so, because communication and coordination tend to give people a slight edge in gameplay.

One thing I'm not a huge fan of, however, is the loot boxes. I'm sure a lot has been said about them elsewhere but I'm just not sure why a multi-million(or is it billion?) dollar company needs to corner the gambling market by hiding away all the cool rewards behind RNG. I was pretty lucky and got a cool event skin for a character I liked within my first ten or so boxes. I have a friend who hasn't gotten any of the event stuff yet, and they play way more than I do! It's really disappointing to know you have a pretty good chance of not getting things, and missing them forever, no matter how much you play or how many boxes you open. It doesn't even really inspire me to buy loot boxes because I'm not guaranteed to get anything in X number of boxes either. There -is- a system where duplicate items are cashed in for currency which you can use to buy other cosmetics, ones you might want. But the rates on that are really bad. You get like 25 of this stuff for a common item, and like 100 for the rarest rarity. Meanwhile buying one of the event skins costs 3000. It's disappointing but not bad enough that I would want to quit or anything. Just an unfortunate stain on an otherwise fun and good game.

So! I feel like the past few posts I've made have been disappointingly negative. I don't like writing negative things, it's too easy. Anyone can write a few pages about how bad everything is! So lets get the good thoughts back on track by writing some dumb words about something I love. Giant robots. Specifically, Super Robot Wars.

For the unfamiliar Super Robot Wars is a franchise largely consisting of turn based strategy games wherein your units consist of giant robots. In the main series these robots are largely from various series such as Gundam, Mazinger Z and Getter Robo, in fact they are the three main pillars of the franchise. Whereas in the Original Generation games your units entirely consist of new, original creations but the gameplay is otherwise the same. Units are also typically segregated into two categories. “Super Robots” which are generally big, tanky and more implausible robots such as Mazinger Z or Gurren Lagann, usually powered by their pilot's willpower with a penchant for unrealistic weaponry and a heavier focus on flashy skills. And “Real Robots” which tends to encompass series like Gundam and Martian Successor Nadesco, they're usually smaller, faster with a focus on dodging things and using ammunition instead of energy with far less of a focus on the pilot's willpower and a heavier emphasis on the machine's capabilities.

Typically speaking the gameplay is straight forward on the surface. You're given a large field to move your units around in and each unit can move a number of spaces and can take one action per turn. Your turn ends when all  units have moved, or if you wish to end it prematurely you can while the AI typically has the same restrictions you do. Each unit has a small list of attacks they can do, restricted by range, energy cost and “will”. “Will” being a stat that goes up and down based on each pilot's individual personality, but most characters will gain will by attacking and defending their allies, but lose it by being hit or watching friends die. Each pilot has their own skills they learn as they level up as well. Generally those range from simple skills to increase your aim or reduce damage, to crazier high-cost skills that double your attack damage or refill your health completely.

After each map is complete you're given a wide array of options from swapping pilots mechs around, to upgrading mechs and pilot skills or even changing the equipment of your unit, if at all applicable. The series tends to be decent about letting you use your absolute favorite units even if the units you like aren't the objective best. Balance is, however, a minor issue. So units like the Evangelions tend to have some very unbalanced skills and stats due to their defensive AT field with Evangelion Unit 01 in particular gaining access to several different forms over the course of the franchise. But due to the fact that you can upgrade units to your preference, field whoever you want and equip the ones you want the natural imbalances are hardly an issue.

Then there's the approach to the story the games take. They usually tie the stories together based on a common theme or idea and mesh them together using characters, events or plot items from one story as  replacement for similar ones in another. The main arc of each story the game focuses on follows through as expected, however, but the background details tend to shift slightly to better fit the strange amalgamated world the game takes place in. At least, usually. One really cool thing the SRW franchise does is fill its games with secrets and alternate paths, protagonists who die are often able to be saved or recovered. Even villains can occasionally be turned hero if the player figures out the right options and requirements. There are occasionally even entire game-exclusive redesigns and upgrades to pre-existing series mechs like Zeorymer hidden fairly deep in the game.

As for why I, personally, like this series so much? Well largely because it's just fun to play around with cool robots from my favorite anime and blow up a bunch of lame generic evil minions before fighting a boss to the awesome themesong from that show. It's also always rewarding when you manage to figure out a great strategy to finish a tough stage with no losses and gain a bunch of cool bonuses, or discover a neat hidden unit somewhere. There's also always the chance of discovering a new series you've never  heard of with a cool mech design or something. I didn't know what Tekkaman Blade was before playing SRW:J but I know now, and I love those designs, or Blue Comet SPT Layzner. I absolutely love that the series will just bust out less popular, even occasionally obscure, series and it's always a treat to see something you're completely unfamiliar with among the old favorites.

There are downsides, however. As far as I can tell only six SRW games are in English. Super Robot Wars: Original Generation, and it's sequel Original Generation 2 for the GBA were released in America. Super Robot Wars: V and Original Generations: Moon Dwellers for the PS4 were given English subtitles for their SEA releases. And at least two games, SRW: J, for the GBA, and Alpha Gaiden, for the Playstation, have fan translations. One of the biggest reasons the series can't make it over seas is licensing, a lot of the series are owned by multiple different anime studios so they can't legally bring it over. The OG games, however, were met with lackluster results on the GBA so they haven't bothered translating any since. At least now we will likely get more translated subtitles with the SEA releases, as they seem to be doing with all of their Gundam games as well.

With Hollow Knight done I have a great excuse to not have to think of a more interesting subject to write about! I have some very self important opinions to talk about regarding this game. I also plan to go over my first impression of it and see what held up and where I was wrong. Spoilers; I was pretty wrong about some stuff. Also, spoilers. I'm going to be talking about the end of this game and other plot bits.

So lets start with the things I was way off base and straight up incorrect about from last week;

“there’s no dodge skill.“

Turns out there is a dash! So I was presumptuous on that one. You get it after the second real boss. However it only launches you forward, not backwards. So it's not especially great for avoiding enemy attacks. You also only get one air dodge before you have to touch ground and traversing the map before you get it is a pain in the ass, you're slow and your mobility is crippled.

Personally speaking, I think you should have been given a limited form of the dash before beating that boss. Start the player off with the ground dash at least, give it a longer cooldown even. Let the upgrade obtained after the boss fight unlock the air dash and reduce the overall dash cooldown or something because the simple act of getting the dash upgrade made the game go from frustrating and miserable to play, to enjoyable and fun at once. I also wouldn't say no to making the dash do a backwards dodge if you're not holding forwards.

“Breakable walls are in no way indicated until you hit them “ I was just straight up wrong! Turns out this game is just like Symphony of the Night, Metroid and basically every other game ever in this regards. The walls I was annoyed with are just regular secret passages. You didn't have to attack them. Walking through them would reveal them, enemies could reveal them. Basically anything would. Breakable walls, on the other hand, were clearly marked with cracks and reacted when hit. I don't have any issue with this now.

Also I didn't explicitly say it in the post as far as quick glance tells me, but I was wrong about quick travel too. You don't have to pay every time you want to use the quick travel spots. You just have to pay once to unlock a few of them. Not even all of them, just a few of them. I presumed and made a presumption out of pres and ume again. Or however that saying goes.

However I do take issue with the quick travel options offered in the game. For one thing, we're not given any kind of simple teleport back to the main town. That would have been a life saver, even if it cost you all of your money or something dark souls style. Instead if you want to warp you have to find the nearest Stag Station and ride a giant stag beetle around. Except those are usually in the far back corner of whatever zone you're in, assuming the zone even has one. There are several zones that don't have one, and they're usually zones you're going to spend a lot of time traveling to and from. So every time I wanted to go to one location, such as The Abyss, I would have to warp from the nearest Stag Station to King's Station in the City of Tears, walk several screens and then jump down a spike filled chasm and fall into the Ancient Basin then climb down another spike filled pit and reach The Abyss. Getting back out took twice as long and the only other alternate routes required me to go to the Deepnest, a place which is dark, maze-like and full of annoying enemies, or the Edge of the Kingdom which doesn't have a Stag Station so I would have to hoof it across like three zones to get there anyway. And boy howdy do you have to go to The Abyss a lot.

What I'm trying to say is that this game desperately needs either some kind of Library Card equivalent that warps you to a specific place, or an ability that returns you somewhere useful because navigating the map blows, and the stag stations ultimately don't help as much as they should unless you need to straight up get across the entire map. There aren't many shortcuts to unlock, and the ones you do unlock are usually so out of the way there's never any reason to bother using them because they are, more or less, just shoved in there at the end of puzzle rooms that leave you with no alternative way out than to just smash a wall down which just reeks of awful level and puzzle design.

Most of your abilities are also just glorified keys. To bust out the tired old Symphony comparison; when you got the super jump you could reach places you couldn't before. You could reach travel upwards faster, but you had no control over it. You couldn't really move left or right so it was ill suited for proper exploration. As the game progressed you unlocked the Double Jump, which let you reach new heights and control your jumps better and eventually fully developed the Bat Form which allowed you to freely fly and explore as you saw fit. Using these abilities you could go anywhere. You could speedily climb, change form and explore the greatest heights. Fall, use a double jump to catch yourself and hunt out any secret there was.

In Hollow Knight, however, the closest to this kind of thing you get is a single air dash and a rather flimsy double jump. Your double jump takes a while to pop off so you lose some height on it. There have been times I've fallen onto spikes mid-jump animation because you continue to move downwards until mid-way through the animation. So it's not really great for catching yourself. As mentioned before you get a single air dash which while useful for platforming, doesn't really help in the mobility department. It's really only useful for making longer jumps the likes of which the game will toss in your path specifically so you can't progress without unlocking the air dash and double jump yet. Then there's the third “jump” type upgrade. Called the Crystal Heart you charge up and just rocket across the screen until you hit something. It sounds really cool. In fact I was really excited the first time I used it and blasted across like three screens. But here's the big flaw with this item. You can only travel horizontally with it, you can't move while flying and literally any obstacle will stop you dead. Even enemies. You would think it would kill enemies, or knock them out of the way. But no. You just hit them and fall down, usually into spikes. It's not even a great item to use to quickly get past screens you've walked through a million times because there are very, very few screens that don't have enemies buzzing around everywhere, platforms randomly decorating the scenery or just walls sticking up in the middle of the air.

In fact the only upgrade I can honestly say was genuinely useful through the entire game since getting it and didn't really feel wasted at all was the Mantis Claw. Because all it was, was an upgrade that let you wall climb and wall jump. Grabbing this thing made the game amazing. Dodging became easier because now I could bounce off a wall and get behind enemies, avoid their attacks and actually be aggressive freely. Climbing wasn't a miserable experience of hopping onto tiny platforms, then getting knocked off because I didn't see an enemy flitting on the edge of the screen. I could actually grab ledges and recover for once. There were even tricky segments I could approach in more than one way thanks to the wall climbing letting me maneuver around obstacles more freely.

The non-mobility upgrades honestly aren't anything to write home about either. You can upgrade your sword to do more damage. I guess that's why every enemy feels like it has way too much health? Because they balanced the whole game around having the ultimate weapon upgrade? Because by the end, after I scoured most of the map and got it there were relatively few enemies I wasn't one-shotting. But until I got it, the game was miserable. Bosses felt immortal until I just hit them enough and they stopped being. Even basic enemies that respawned every screen took two-three hits and something just feels off when enemies have that much health. The combat in this game didn't feel fun at all, and not in any kind of moral way either. Just in kind of a lame “I'm not having fun playing this video game” kind of way. You do learn special techniques for your sword, but you have to charge your sword's attack for that and it takes so long there's no particular reason to ever use them. In fact the only way I found to make the melee combat in this game tolerable at all was to exploit the AI. You see, if you jump over an enemy and use the downward slash you just bounce off of the enemy's head. Most enemies in the game don't have an upwards attack. The ones that do usually can't hit you because the attack won't track you while you're bouncing back upwards through the air. Even the last boss in the game succumbed embarrassingly easy to the tactic of “bouncing off of his dang old head for a few minutes.”

You could just use magic though. Magic does more damage than your sword attacks, but eats up a lot of your energy. Hitting enemies with your sword gives you energy back. Magic is also the only way to heal outside of sitting at a save bench. There are things you can do to augment it all though. You see, you have this entire equip system of charms. They're basically just badges you equip that have a value of one to like, four. You start with three slots, gain up to ten or so by the end of the game. Being able to see your icon on the map is a charm that costs one slot to equip. As is a charm that lets you gain a lot of energy by taking damage. It costs three points to increase your distressingly narrow melee attack range and there's only one charm in the game that straight up increases your melee attack or damage. In fact the whole system reeks of wasted potential because a lot of charms do gimmicky things, and a few do cool things. But there's almost no reason to use any of them other than the ones that just make you do more damage and recover more energy, or the ones that give you more health. Turning into a snail while I heal is cool I guess, game, but why would I do that when I could just kill everything faster and never need to heal. Like with so many other gameplay elements of this game, it's a cool idea that just feels kind  of wasted because it doesn't feel like the most was made of it.

Speaking of wasted potential, enemies and hazards! This game has some spectacular enemy variation and I love that most areas have a unique cast of creatures to fight. However there are some frustrating things that go along with this. Like the exploding, screeching bat things. Why are they in almost every area of the game? Why do all of the environmental obstacles make the most obnoxious noises possible? And was it really necessary to make so many things in general explode, and give them such massive blast radii at that? The bosses are all pretty great though – seeming immortality aside – they all definitely feel unique and I would much rather have had more of them in the game over a smaller map. Personally, the Mantis Lords are still my absolute favorite fight, it keeps you on the move constantly but never really throws too much at you at once so you can always react and play aggressively without the game just slapping your hand for having fun with it. The Broken Vessel is easily my second favorite, but it does a bit too much with the balloons spawning in and then just occasionally stands there spitting poison goo while you smash it to death making it way too easy. I really wish more of the combat and enemies in general had taken after the bosses than just been annoying slogs against flying enemies always floating out of range spitting poison, or against big guys with shields. Because most of the bosses are fast, aggressive whereas the enemies are always just kind of there. In your way, annoying. Even with all their health, the bosses are fun. The enemies aren't. All the regular enemies have going for them are their cool visual variation from zone to zone.

Okay that's getting to be a bit of a downer. Let me take a moment to talk about things I liked instead. Hollow Knight's visuals from beginning to end are still spectacular. Each area is well defined visually. Even when two areas are similar, like Queen's Garden and Greenpath, they're still distinct enough that you always know where you are at a glance. As down as I am on the actual physical map design, I think their atmospheric world design was spot on. The Fog Canyon is a fantastic area with almost unearthly purple tones and filled with weird jellyfish. All the sounds are given a filter that makes the whole zone sound like it's underwater and it messes with you because it, clearly, isn't. The Fungal Wastes are just a mushroom infested cave and I love me some mushroom designs. Deepnest, on the other hand, is a genuinely creepy and almost stressful area. The whole zone is filled with an undercurrent of gross crawling sounds, and all the spikes in this are are living, writhing centipedes. Most rooms have this aggravating rushing noise of gigantic horrible bugs crawling across the screen, you can't hurt them either. They're just obstacles. Half of the zone is a giant spider nest filled with eggs and parasites that crawl out of corpses. The other half is just a dark centipede filled hell hole. I love the Deepnest. My favorite area, however, is The Abyss. Dark and silently menacing the only bugs there are just passive crawling things. The more plot relevant enemies at the bottom of the pit are fantastic though and I loved every moment of the game's story.

In fact, let me take a moment to praise the story. This game, it's developers really, manged to very clearly tell their story while still being delightfully ambiguous about it. Even going for the “true” ending you only find out what you absolutely have to, unless you look for it. There are a ton of little secret rooms hidden around the game that contain information. Very little of it bluntly handed to you on a text dump or item description. But most of it told through visuals. You also get an item fairly early on called the Dream Nail. It lets you read thoughts and enter dreams. Almost every enemy in the game will have their own thoughts. You can use it on corpses too, presumably to read their last thoughts, fears or desires. You can piece together what happened in an area, what happened to the world before ever reaching the point where the game its self tells you. Even after the game spills its guts you're still left with several big unanswered questions. Nothing quite so frustrating as “who are these people” such as Dark Souls tends to leave its audience with, but rather questions as vague as “But why?” And I love it. So kudos to the writer for managing to make a game fascinating enough that even though I was not a fan of the gameplay, I still stuck through because I was enthralled. And to the artists too because the visual design is spectacular. I just really hope the next game, if there is one, is a bit fuller. Not necessarily bigger or anything. Just more fleshed out in the gameplay department.

So, in lieu of anything interesting to say I've been playing Hollow Knight. I do love the metroidvania genre and people have been telling me it's fun, charming and “like Dark Souls”. So far, I can kind of see it I suppose but not necessarily in the best ways. That's not to say it's a bad game, no I'm enjoying it a lot. It's just got some problems I'll go over in a bit. And before I start talking about the good bits I've got a bigger thing to blather on about; Metroidvania games and why I love them.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night was an excellent game, and personally speaking it is the pinnacle of the genre and the holy grail I compare all other metroidvania games to. Progressing through the castle and earning more abilities to progress deeper actually felt like progression. Even if half of your abilities, like the dog and mist forms, weren't especially useful beyond their specific one-off implimentations. Bat form, double jump and less flashy survival skills like the one that let you not take damage in water were amazing to uncover because they let you dig through the gameworld with more ease. But at the same time it was very rare that the game would straight up block you. Outside of a few very specific doorways, very little in Symphony was made so you absolutely had to follow a strict path through the game and you never really had to play according to how the game wanted you to, you were free to do whatever you wanted and abuse the game's mechanics however you saw fit. This was something it inherited from the Metroid line of games which were infamous for their sequence breaks and tricks to simply skip huge portions of the game. Symphony of the Night made exploring one big area an absolute treat, you gained more and more ways to make backtracking easy and bearable while uncovering new paths and areas that utilized those same abilities to traverse them. Then, just as you finished it all you uncovered an entire second map! Even if it was just the first map flipped upside down, it introduced new challenges to just getting around without having to wall off segments of the game behind glorified keys.

I could keep going on about Symphony, I really could. But this is about Hollow Knight! So lets get this party started right. This game looks great. The art is nice and the level design sets up a really nice world that flows fairly well, for the most part. The character and enemy design is awesome as well. I especially love that they went with a bug theme for everything, it makes the game stand out a bit from the rest of the crowd. I also enjoy the music. None of the tracks I've experienced so far stand out to me especially, but it's a nice ambient soundtrack that fits the areas you traverse very well. I don't think I would ever listen to it outside of the game, but at the same time I don't think I would ever mute the game because it's pleasant on the ears. Also the NPCs are all pretty cute and I'm pretty eager to play more and see how this unfolds with them.

Gameplay-wise Hollow Knight is a fairly simple hack and slash sort of affair. No real combos or special attacks thus far, the only special skill I've gotten is a kamehameha sort of skill where I shoot an energy blast that consumes my energy, as well as the default special skill. That default skill, however, is something I think is really cool. Rather than relying on health drops, pickups or anything you can just heal whenever. You have a shared pool of energy that all of your special skills rely on, but it recharges any time you damage an enemy. It's a bit of a double edged sword though. As far as I can tell, there's only one weapon in the game with a linear upgrade path which isn't necessarily bad and the game gives you nearly every tool you need for combat right off the bat.

Nearly every tool you need. I'm having fun with Hollow Knight but it's got some pretty frustrating issues and a big one I find is that there's no dodge skill. Symphony of the Night gave you a back-dash right off, you could hit triangle and just back dash forever. Great for avoiding hits, great for travel and great for being stylish. In Hollow Knight, you don't get anything. You can't dash, you can't run. You're slow. Combat is kind of frustrating because if an enemy is going to attack you, all you can really do is jump out of the way and that's just not good enough sometimes. Plus there's the aforementioned double edged sword of healing and offensive skills taking from the same, limited, pool of energy. I find myself almost never using my offensive magic because I never know when some annoying really hard to kill enemy is going to pop up and take off most of my health leaving me in dire need to heal. Because get this; no invincibility after you get hit. So not only do you have poor mobility, but half the enemies in the game are designed to just hit you into other enemies or instant death spike traps so you take two or three times as much damage because there's nothing stopping you from getting combo hit. In fact the game's favorite environmental trap is to just have a tight platforming section over spikes and just drop a spike on you from the ceiling, so that if it hits you you fly into the spikes on the floor and get sent to the room beginning taking extra damage.

I also take issue with the world design. Unlike, say, symphony of the night where every breakable wall was clearly marked with a crack and there were usually multiple different ways to tackle a path that might look like it needs a specific mobility upgrade to get past, Hollow Knight's world feels like it was designed for the sake of placing all its secrets first and then how you get around to unlock them was an afterthought. I'm constantly just finding ledges I can't reach with no way to get to them. Breakable walls are in no way indicated until you hit them and then there's the map.

Oh snap this game's map, guys. So you know how in Metroid, any of the metroids really, and Symphony of the Night you have a really nice grid that shows you where you are, updates and just generally manages to be vague but at the same time tell you everything you need to know about a room (except that one room you have to enter from a secret back passage in Metroid Prime. You know the exact room I'm talking about.)? Yeah none of that here. First off you have to buy maps in this game, otherwise you just don't have one. You have to buy upgrades to let you see NPCs, important interaction points and other things on maps. You also have to buy an item that lets you see yourself on the map because otherwise you can't -and- you have to equip it. Right now, I have three points to spend on equipment and this thing takes up one. A thing that every game with a map ever has by default. That's still not all though. Because the map is still, still just plain bad. It tells you nothing and gives you zero indication for size or scale. More than once I've accidentally wandered into a boss fight because I thought I was in an entirely different area of the map. Also the map only updates when you rest at a save point. That’s real bad.

Oh and the game is inconsistent about things in ways that feels slightly off. Some enemies respawn instantly. Small flies and other enemies that you would expect to. Some don't, like bigger enemies that take more hits. Then there's this big knight miniboss type enemy that respawns every time you enter the room. What? No, seriously, what? Why, that thing nearly killed me the first time it showed up and I got locked in a room with it. Now I have to fight it every time I want to pass by this room, this room which is dead center in the middle of the map. Backtracking in this game is a nightmare because your mobility is so abysmal and enemies all take like twice as many hits to kill as it feels like they should. Like you could cut down every enemy's HP by half and the game would flow a lot faster because then you'd stop having to, well, just stop and stand there whacking an enemy three or four times before it died. Funny fact; enemies get invincibility frames, you don't.

So I guess what I'm saying is that it's a cool game but the gameplay is frustrating? Like I really like everything except the gameplay because it feels like the developers just kind of didn't do the metroidvania thing good. In fact it feels like they went out of their way to do it bad. It reminds me of Valdis Story in a lot of unpleasent ways, and that game was a huge disappointment.

So, despite my constant and no doubt irritating fellating of Dark Souls' narrative style my favorite game in the series is Dark Souls 2. I love the gameplay of two way more than any other game in the series, including Bloodborne and Demons Souls. So that's where I'm at on that one. So, what does that have to do with Dark Souls 3? Nothing, I just really wanted to inject some positivity into what I'm worried will turn out to be a mostly negative word pile here. It was really fun and aside from Soul Memory a lot of the changes 2 introduced to the series were for the better I think, especially Power Stancing. Power Stancing let you not only dual wield two different weapons within the same class, but it gave you a third moveset to bust out for sheer variation.

Lets just hop right into it then. What do I think about Dark Souls 3? Well I think it's unfinished, uninspired and uninteresting. Okay that's a bit unfair I just wanted to use triple U words there. It's not uninteresting, it's just the least interesting game when compared to any of the four that came before it. I feel like I need to enforce the fact that I don't think it's a bad game. It just falls flat on many levels.

Tackling these thoughts one at a time; I'll hit the unfinished angle first. Dark Souls 3 is full of dropped plot lines, multiple systems and stats that just don't function and NPC quest lines that just kind of vaguely end despite there being in-game audio files that contradict where the game stops the gameplay. Poise is perhaps the most infamous one of these. In Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 your Poise was determined by the armor you wore and what it did was prevented you from being stunned by attacks or knocked down by really strong enemies. Someone in a full suit of the heaviest, sturdiest armor would be able to face-tank a dozen blows without batting an eye while someone in light leather armor would be rebuffed at every shot.

In 3, however, poise just isn't. You have a poise stat. It goes up. But it isn't active. There are third-party cheat engine tables and other shady tools you can use to activate it and make it work like it did in the previous two games, but otherwise it doesn't. The only time poise has any effect in Dark Souls 3 is when you use one of a very select handful of weapons, or if you cast a few select spells on yourself. As a result there's just straight up no functional reason to wear heavier armor in Dark Souls 3. It makes you slower, the defense increase is negligible and you still get knocked around as easily as someone wearing no armor. Even if this is a deliberate choice, it feels like they just forgot to turn on a major part of the game after playtesting and doubled down on arguing that it's working as intended once the game launched like this.

Poise isn't even the only thing! In the previous two games your armor and weapons had durability. Some enemies attacked exclusively with durability reducing attacks, there were entire spells based solely around reducing your PVP enemies durability so you could break their armor and weapons. Without armor and weapons your opponent would be defenseless. In 3 you still have durability but it takes literal hours to make any kind of notable dent in your durability and bonfires are so frequent that it's virtually impossible to take more damage to your equipment than your health. Durability reducing spells still exist, but likewise they do so little durability damage that you can waste hours, and I emphasize actual hours as it's been tested, doing nothing but hitting another player with them and not even break the weakest armor in the game. What makes this even stranger is that they still modeled individual broken and repaired states for each armor set and weapon in the game, textured them differently and everything! But it's nearly impossible to ever find that out through gameplay because you have to intentionally try to break your equipment in three durability is such an obtuse non-issue.

Similar to the durability issue, NPCs in three seemed to have been a bit of a side thought. Despite the game being presented in a way where you frequently are given branching paths, the NPCs questlines are structured so rigidly that it's incredibly easy to just not notice a flag trigger and have a character just vanish from your world forever. This includes multiple vendors, at least one of which will leave and take most of the spells in the game with him if you don't find him a specific item in the poison swamp next to him before beating the next boss. Not only are the questlines themselves just awkwardly structured and triggered, but they have an unfortunate tendency to just terminate in ways that leave you wondering if you finished it or not. Characters will turn hostile and you can never be sure if you messed up or if this is supposed to happen. You can even be locked out of entire covenants because you didn't notice that one enemy wasn't hostile or you fought a boss too early. It feels very disjointed and poorly thought out, even considering how vague NPC quest lines tend to be in this series tend to be to begin with.

That's just on the mechanics side of things too! That's not even getting into the wide variety of armor sets and weapons that are just sitting in the data files fully usable but not implemented, more than in any previous souls game to date, or the hilariously common occurrences of rocks and other objects with no textures just sitting in plain view. Even the stages themselves tend to feel kind of rushed and unfinished. The first half of the game we get big, fully developed zones from hollowed out villages and poisonous swamps to a gigantic cathedral filled with corrupted clergymen. The latter half of the game? We get zones that are very short and can be completely cleaned out in less than an hour Anor Londo even makes a return, except it's just one room and half a courtyard now. It's frustrating when genuinely cool areas like the Profaned Capital are effectively reduced to two chambers filled with re-used enemies.

Speaking of the Profaned Capital though, the game is just filled with dropped plots and nowhere is this more annoying than in the Profaned Capital. We're treated to a place detailing how this evil out of control flame just burned everyone to death and transformed the women who summoned it into horrifying hand-hippo hybrid monsters. We learn that the people who lived there were horrible, that the lord who sacrificed his life to link the flame was treated like garbage and was willing to give his people, and his friend, a sword specifically meant to kill him in case he failed in his duty. And finally we learn that this shifty self-appointed pope from another land found this corrupting flame and thought it was really cool and wanted to use it for...reasons?

Then that just kind of stops there. The Pontiff gets some more development, but at no point do we ever actually get any insight in to what he wanted to do, or why he wanted the profaned flame to do it. We're told he wants Aldrich to eat gods, but that just kind of fizzles out. “Oh, hey. Here's this guy who eats gods.” There's some weird subtext about angels, guess what never really gets resolved? If you were about to say “anything regarding the abyss” you're right! The abyss gets mentioned a lot in Dark Souls 3 but we don't really hit any story beats with it. Here's an NPC who might be another manus fragment? Hey, what about that big cool skeleton guy who's being hunted by the abyss? Maybe we should have some more abyss related stuff in that area? No? Why not just introduce an entirely new abyss-like malevolent force while we're at it and tease all sorts of stuff about that but never, ever resolve that in any way! Dark Souls 3's narrative is like a rubber band ball built around a single core of “Go kill these dues because I say so.” Everything just seems to be separate from one another, you're never really going to see the conclusion to any of it and it all just sits atop your general “go kill a dude” quest.

Man, it really bums me out talking about how Dark Souls 3 just kind of, feels like people stopped working on bits. So lets talk about why I find it so hard to actually engage with the parts of it that aren't straight up not functional instead! Because that's a huge problem. Fortunately, I can summarize most of this issue with one sentence. “Hey, remember this from Dark Souls?” Because that's what Dark Souls 3 does non-stop.

Alright I'll expand on that a bit. The first major location you reach is Firelink Shrine, inside is Andre the exact same blacksmith from the first game and you can travel via weird white imp demon like you did from Sens Fortress. The like fourth area of the game is literally the dark moon forest and you can even see the corpses of the mushrooms as well as get Dusk's armor set. But that's not all! Izalith is back along with a few landmarks from that, you can see the corpse of the spider lady from the first game, and Anor Londo just straight up returns albeit in a slightly reduced capacity. They even brought the silver knight archer run back! You can even fight a bunch of Dark Souls styled giants like the ones from Sens Fortress, and there's a boss who has an electric spear who fights very similarly to Ornstein and even absorbs his partner's soul when they fall in battle. You get Ornstein's armor afterwards. The first DLC is a bigger version of the painted world and you revisit a few of its landmarks. That's not even a comprehensive list, this is just off the top of my head. Like, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Dark Souls 3 doesn't try to be its own game? Despite taking place in another land we just revisit large portions of Lordran because. We conveniently run into familiar characters, NPCs, invaders and enemies for no particular reason. It feels phoned in and as lame as some of the stuff in 2 could be, like the inexplicable dark-themed Ornstein boss fight was, it still introduced us to a world where the darkness had taken human form and was actively trying to rule, a mad scientist was artificially making dragons and the undead were culled for sport by a crazed ruler who built a castle over an active volcano. The sheer volume of samey “just like in the first game!” routine stuff in 3 is really off putting. You just play as a dude who has to link the flame because that's what you do. Half the locations are just the same places as in the first game, and the other half are very similar in design to places from the first game with one exception.

But that's just level design and narration. Even the gameplay feels lackluster than in 2. In 2 you could just do anything. The world was your oyster and if you wanted to dual wield the biggest sticks in the game and run around with no health, more power to you if you could actually pull that off. Even being a caster in 2 was awesome because there were four magic schools and you could mix damage types and you did enough damage to compete with melee characters. In 3, well the devs didn't seem able to decide if they wanted to be Dark Souls or Bloodborne. So all the enemies are very aggressive, very fast and never really tire out. They just attack non-stop. But you're still just kind of a clunky Dark Souls armor man so it just feels kind of like you're in the wrong game, constantly.

Not that there's a whole lot of tension anymore because your character's healing animations are so fast now that you can just heal in the middle of an enemy attack, recover your health and eat the oncoming attack and just heal again. The stakes aren't really there when you can just heal through everything without having to worry about whether or not you'll be able to get the heal off. Combined with the game's love of enemies that just kind of fart damaging clouds and record number of status effect inducing enemies it's almost like every level is starting to become Blight Town again. Dual wielding is gone as well, your left hand is once more relegated to being nothing but a shield/caster tool slot, and enemy resistances are screwy so being a mage type character is awful. In fact, casters in 3 got the shaft big time.

You see, they did away with hexes for a start. Now they're just some nebulous “Dark Magic” and some are sorceries, some are miracles and some are pyromancies! Except they all scale different and weird which makes them almost worthless to use because there's almost zero support for using them. Damage types are all over the place too with miracles having every major damage type in the game under their umbrella as well as four different buff spells but sorceries being limited to dark and magic with three buffs that all do the same thing with bigger numbers. But you'll almost never want to use sorceries anyway because the number of enemies vulnerable to magic is pitiful. Pyromancy is good as always, but at that point you're just investing more stats for less damage and reducing your total number of estus healing. You might as well just go melee because magic sucks in Dark Souls 3.

So I love Dwarf Fortress. It's a fun game that never stops being insane. Whether it's a dwarf being savagely beaten to death by a carp because it turns out fish never stop flexing, or having to flood the whole world with lava because elephants have been laying siege to your fortress for a year and everyone is going insane because of the corpse stink. However, the learning curve is super steep and the UI is like being beaten over the head by an angry typewriter. So it's really hard to figure out how to actually play the game and reach a point where your dwarves don't all die because the only liquid available to drink was lava.

Enter Rimworld. It's very Dwarf Fortress-ey but with actual graphics. It's simpler in some, okay most, areas but a bit more complex and detailed in others. It's so enticing I went back on my usual anti-early access stance because oh man this game is fun guys, it's so dang fun. Not that it's without flaws. But I'll get to those later. For now, let me ramble about how much I love it and why.

First off I'll explain what's different about it I guess, the major bits at least. To keep it short; You can't expand vertically, colonists don't have to drink (but they do have to worry about the temperature) and gardening is largely automatic. You don't have to worry about buying individual seeds in Rimworld, which makes food production way easier than in Dwarf Fortress. I would say that it's easier, but there's other things to consider too. There's also power management. It's a pretty huge aspect of the game compared to Dwarf Fortress, since this game takes place in a more sci-fi spaceship sort of setting you will eventually need to find some way to power everything and power management becomes almost as important as food or any other resource. Oh, and jobs don't get canceled. So you'll never run into the problem where a colonist stops eating and starves to death because they can't find the food room, or where your planned bedroom never gets built because the guy building it is thirsty. The game manages priority work pretty well for the most part. So from here on out I will do my best to treat it as its own game without mentioning Dwarf Fortress again.

Rimworld has a bunch of cool features though. Like colonist backgrounds. Each colonist is generated with two backgrounds attached to them. Their childhood, and their adult profession. These govern their stats and skills, so even two colonists who have the same job might have a different childhood that causes them to have wildly different traits and skill sets. This offers a small bit of variety in your little dudes, and also makes it easier to pick and choose who gets to live and who doesn't. If, after a raid, you have a choice of prisoners but one of the prospects has a trait you don't like, you can easily just let them go. You don't have to worry about getting useless characters and being stuck with them. So if you really want you can just wantonly murder anyone who isn't perpetually happy, and anyone you do pick up who isn't can be sent on suicide missions with little to no penalty. This makes gimmick setups like an all cannibal colony fairly easy to maintain.

Building a base is incredibly easy too. This game even has a neat feature where if you click on a craftable item, such as a wood wall, there's an option to “create duplicate” which lets you just make the same item over again without having to deal with the crafting menu. It's great for making quick fixes to damaged walls or when you're building something with multiple materials. Animals in Rimworld are also very easy to manage. You just assign someone to tame a wild creature and they'll keep trying until either they succeed or the animal goes crazy and attacks them. Once tamed the menu is as simple as clicking a check mark on whether or not you want to train the animal and from there on out they can do really useful things like hauling materials around, rescuing injured colonists or even attacking enemies. There's very little in the way of complicated menus and submenus. Which is something I really like about Rimworld, it manages to keep the menu clutter relatively low for a game of this type.

Progression is done largely through research. You make a bench out of wood and a dude starts researching which unlocks more things for you to make. Eventually you unlock a better research bench which requires electricity to work, so you need to research power by then and so on and so forth. A secondary factor is your colony's wealth. How much your colony is valued at determines what kind of attacks you get. The more valuable you are the more raids you get, the more people will be in these raids and the more dangerous they'll be. So you go from one lone guy with a knife eventually all the way to twenty dudes crashing through your roof in escape pods. If you haven't been keeping your weapons and defenses prepared then a raid can easily crush you when you don't expect it.

I'm having a blast with it, but there are some issues. The RNG can be completely crippling when you're first starting out. The game pulls no punches and getting too many raids can screw you over because dead raiders leave their weapons behind which counts towards your wealth score, causing more raiders to show up next time. And if you get certain diseases early on before you research better medical tech then there's nothing you can do but watch as the sick colonists die. Medicine in general is really bad in Rimworld currently. It takes way too many resources to make your own, and medical operations have an absurdly high rate of critical failure. So something as simple as sticking a peg leg on someone has a 9/10 chance to kill them for no particular reason. It doesn't help that all of the tech to make any of this slightly more reasonable is locked behind some of the longer research tiers. Base self defense is also a bit of a crapshoot. The turrets in the base game are really bad. Most of them either require a colonist to man them, or the automatic ones just don't have enough durability to really make them worth the investment especially since they explode once destroyed so they'll damage anything and anyone around them as well. Oh and temperature adjustments are really weird. It just seems a bit off that if my guys step outside for a second in 40 degree weather they come down with crippling heat stroke. But that's just me.

So, as an apology for the delay here's a first ever follow up about a fantastic series: Boku No Hero Academia. Last time I wrote about this I tried to convince anyone who stumbled on this blog that it was awesome and they should read it, and if you haven't read it; go do so, it's awesome. This time I'm going to talk about some stuff I briefly touched on in that bit. Namely, what exactly makes it so awesome. The thematic choices, the character development and just what sets it apart from most shounen series in more detail than I did before. So, without further ado lets get to this.

Before I get into the meat of what's so spectacular about MHA, let me talk about other series. Because I think it would be best to get all this garbage out of the way first. So, to elaborate on a point I made before; a massive difference between MHA and another equally good series One Piece, and the vast majority of shounen series is the very basic structure of character development, the premises of the world and the core beliefs of how things work. That is to say, most shounen series have characters simply be born strong.

Take a series like Naruto for example. We are constantly told and shown that many, many characters simply are better. Genetically speaking they are objectively better because of their bloodlines. Other characters give up fighting because there's no way to compete, many times over the main titular main character is told there's no way he can win against these magical bloodlines, and later on in the series we find out that even Naruto himself is the product of ancient magical bloodlines that explains all of his powers. Rarely does a character just working hard and training themselves to be the best actually pay off. In fact there is a character who's entire gimmick is just that, he has no secret bloodline powers or anything and ultimately he achieves virtually nothing in the series because as they keep hammering home; you just can't compete with people who are objectively genetically superior to you. How can the guy who can kick harder than normal, or control bugs ever hope to be as good as the guys who can warp the very fabric of reality.

That's the biggest issue with most shounen series. They eschew characters the reader base can identify with or relate to in favor of power fantasies the reader would want to be. Not that this is necessarily bad. It just feels shallow. Even timeless classics like Dragon Ball, a personal favorite, are guilty of the exact same thing. Goofy, fun-loving Goku was just plain better than his equals like Krillin. Going on into Dragon Ball Z they introduced the saiyan concept and characters like Yamcha and Tien just stopped being relevent. This doesn't make Dragon Ball a worse series, don't get me wrong. It just makes it harder to relate to, but it doesn't really try to engage with its readers on that level. It's an entirely different approach and so, just to clarify, I'm not saying any of these series are worse or better than one another. I just want to establish why they're different and why it makes something like MHA such a breath of fresh air.

So, what exactly makes MHA different in presentation? It actively rejects the idea that people are objectively or inherently better. Whether it's a character rejecting their father's obsession with breeding a superior child, a character with a naturally powerful set of abilities learning that their ego and raw strength isn't enough to to get ahead in life, or someone simply realizing that because they were lucky doesn't mean they're the wrong person for the job. MHA puts a far heavier focus on individual growth and development and shuns the idea that someone who has an advantage from the beginning is set for life. One of the major themes of this series is that of identity.

The very first thing we learn about the main character, Izuku “Deku” Midoriya, is that he was not only born without a quirk(the term for everyone's natural born super power in this world is a quirk so I'll be using that from here on out) but despite this he was still determined to be a hero. He idolized not only the most prominent super hero of the age, Allmight, but his fellow classmates despite their negative attitudes towards him. During the early chapters before the story proper kicks off, we learn that all he wanted was for someone, anyone, to tell him that he could be a hero despite his handicap. We see him mocked and bullied for his determination to be a hero, we see his mother guilt ridden for being unable to support her child. We even see Deku himself start to lose confidence in his own path. Until a villain attacks one of his classmates.

At a moment where none of the professional heroes can help and someone he knows is in danger, it's the powerless Deku who rushes in recklessly to save someone. Thanklessly as it might have been, stupidly even, he alone forced action in this situation and finally someone acknowledged him. This event is what led to Allmight choosing him as his successor, led to Deku gaining a quirk and ultimately reaffirmed Deku's faith in himself. Not through being born with a totally awesome powerset that made him the strongest, not because sheer random luck made a radioactive spider bite him. But because he, at that moment, embodied all the values of heroism that Allmight respected and saw in himself. It's this, a character finally proving their worth to themselves or to the world, that makes a series far more identifiable than all the sad teenagers casually murdering entire armies will ever be.

The entire series is built around a structure like this. Most characters have the same long term goal of becoming a hero. But they all have different short term goals. Whether it's being “the best”, learning to control their quirk or learning to accept who they are despite their origins. Every single character comes to term with their goals, their realities and has to face difficulties regarding this along the path. In keeping with my talk of Deku (though I could easily talk at length about any of the other primary characters) I'm going to cut to one of his most important recent arcs.

After a major plot arc he, and the other students, are faced with a more advanced class where they're training to better hone their specific skills and Deku has to come to terms with the fact that so far his quirk usage hasn't been great. Largely due to his hero worship of Allmight and desire to be Allmight, his fighting style copied Allmight's. Except Allmight was very strong, physically, and before getting his Quirk had trained extensively to fight. Deku on the other hand is far more tactical and focuses more on strategy rather than brute force. So every attempt to punch a villain like Allmight would, or leap as far as Allmight can, would just destroy his body. He's forced to accept that he isn't Allmight. As obvious as this is, it's a massive personal step for Deku who hadn't yet started putting his own personality into his quirk usage yet. So in order to save his body from further destruction and better learn how to compensate for his weakness while still using his quirk, he adapts to a faster more motion-based style incorporating techniques taught to him by both of his mentors without wholly copying them. Combined with the fact that he starts to actually wear his hero costume, it's a sign that he's finally come to terms with his personal limitations but works around them rather than trying to force his way through to being someone he isn't. He doesn't want to be Allmight anymore. He's forming his own identity.