Utter irrelevance.

Rule 1: Always post the rules. Rule 2: Answer the questions the person who tagged you asked and write 11 new ones. Rule 3: Tag 11 people and link them to the post. Rule 4: Actually tell them you tagged them.

I was tagged by magister-amoris

Part 4 of BWDC

Solas Manhunter Marsian Manhunter - Solas “The Dread Wolf” Fen’harel DC Comics vs. BioWare (Dragon Age Inquisition)

Bound by Flame was a surprise for me. Reviews are mixed with a tendency to negative. Turns out I quickly labeled the game fun-fun-fun. There are issues but overall I enjoyed it a lot. And I liked the graphical style, though cutscene animations are a bit clunky (and voice acting is on the poor side).

Classes

You can play male or female (with moderate customization, i.e. pick one of 4 or 5 faces and hair styles) and train three different classes, fighter, ranger (rogue), and pyromancer (fire mage), which are not mutually exclusive. You always carry a sword, bow, and daggers and switch between them on the fly. Fire magic is limited to spells, which you can use even if you don’t encourage the demon. I mostly trained daggers and mixed in a bit of fire when appropriate.

Gameplay & Difficulty

Combat is where this game shines. The movements are impressive and it all feels posh and powerful. Shooting an arrow from afar, followed by a jump at the enemy, hitting him with a flurry of dagger blows, before evading with a backward roll and throwing a fireball that pushes him to the ground, instantly jumping back at him to hammer your sword right into his chest. Just a number of button presses and aiming, but it looks so smooth, feels to elegant. Fun!

Many people complained the game were too difficult; I don’t agree. Yes, it felt difficult in the beginning and pulling through “Captain” difficulty was nearly frustratingly tough — at first. That’s mainly because the single enemy types don’t level up; so when you start out every fly is stronger than you and can almost instantly kill you. (Obviously you weren’t one of the good merchs before, maybe your boss only had you run errands or something.) You have pathetic little daggers, basically no protection, and the spiders in the woods just laugh hard when they see you posturing in front of them ready to launch your full frontal assault. But after levelling up once or twice you won't dread traveling from A to B anymore, and by the end of the game you are so overpowered that only a few enemy types still challenge you. (Until the final battle, but I will come to that later.)

Story & Characters

The RPG section offers you companions, romance, and decisions. Most of it is underdeveloped.

The companions are exaggerated archetypes without depth, presented rather one-dimensionally to provoke a quick response. The warrior is sad, broken, and lonely with a very soft core under his rough shell. The elf is a sarcastic idealist revolutionary outcast bound to be the next leader. And so on. I enjoyed them, but they remained shallow representatives of a class, not actual people. But that’s okay because my girl herself was basically an ignorant thug whose mental horizon reached from the wallpaper to the wall.

Overall, characters were not too likeable but maybe that just really makes sense in the world they live in.

I romanced the handsome elf and the weird warrior and it was tough work because you had to pick a few precise lines to get the desired outcome, which was actually nothing more than a few seconds of holding hands and a short static kiss. I wouldn’t even call it romance.

Decisions do have an influence, but not on the story (which isn’t too strong anyway). Mostly they are "demon decisions”, meaning you shape your character and not the world around. If you pick “humane” choices and deny the demon you will still look human and can wear helmets, but you will be a bit weaker in your powers. If you wander on the fiery side your body will change and increase your powers. The first time around I played an undecided mix of both, gaining me no trophies. Then I went for “fully human”, my next playthrough saw the demon path (Screenshots: http://sihavellan.tumblr.com/post/117849436184/the-metamorphosis-of-vulcan-or-why-video-games).

Final Battle

So, I loved the game up to this point. The characters are a bore, the protagonist is nothing short of annoying, the demon inside could be a bit more demony, but overall it’s cool. Now we are off to meet the final boss, the unleashed demon. And this is where everything falls apart. The boss battle is among the worst, maybe even the worst, I’ve ever played. It is tough, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that it’s frustrating. Or let me recall the thought I had after about 10 minutes into my first encounter with the final boss: “Are you fucking kidding me? You can’t be serious..."

It goes on forever. I guess it takes about 20 mins if you get it all right straight away (usually I die after maybe 18 mins). Those 20-25 mins are composed of two phases. First, you fight the demon on the ground. In a few iterations you will run around the arena to evade her fast projectiles. She also charges at you once in a while with enormous speed. Eventually she recharges for a sec and you jump at her as quickly as you can to deal some moderate damage. Repeat this until she hides and her dragon appears. Second, you fight that dragon. It sits on one side of the arena, breathing fire at you, and you must “destroy" all his extremities and the head. This part is easy but lengthy, tedious work. When done, repeat stage 1 and fight the demon on the ground. I am not sure how many of these cycles it takes, maybe 8? It feels forever. Demon - dragon - repeat. Demon - dragon - repeat.

I still die, most of the time, by the demon. But it does not feel like I died because I played bad. It feels like I died because I got tired or because the controls stuck for a moment. The demon’s projectiles will damage you a bit even if they don’t hit you, so I used up most of my healing potions. I’m not a bad gamer but this boss fight is either just really bad or requires much more skill than I have. It seems Spiders just tried to make an epic boss fight without any real idea how to. I don’t think I will ever finish the game again, no matter how often I will replay it.

I personally have no hard feelings toward Solas. I don’t actually want to see him dead. In fact, I’m not even a Solasmancer, I’m just a sucker for fatalism in entertainment media. It started out with the picture I posted a while ago (http://sihavellan.tumblr.com/post/118779726159/dont-look-back-in-anger). But then DJ Shuffle played Tom Jones’s Delilah and that murder ballad idea was simply too intriguing. Throw in some more Nick Cave and Johnny Cash... well, I never stood a chance.

So, part 3 - Vivienne!

I don’t know how Ms Perfect managed to mess up her fishnets, but tough battle is tough, obviously. (At least I managed to stay reasonable enough to not draw a ranged fighter bathed in blood.)

Part 2 of my BWDC:

Green Sera  (Green Arrow - Sera) BioWare vs. DC Comics

Recently I’ve felt the motivation to draw a bit. I’ve seen some Dragon Age / Marvel crossovers and this made me think of doing something similar. I’m a DC girl, so I decided to go for a series of DC / BioWare crossovers. I don’t know how many I will actually come up with, but this is the first entry: 

Wonder Cass (Wonder Woman - Cassandra Pentaghast) BioWare vs. CD (BWDC)

This is my first attempt at using an image manipulation program to draw (and my first time drawing at all in 15+ years). My stuff is always tagged “photoshop”, but in fact I don’t own Photoshop. I use GIMP 2.8 instead, which is great open source freeware and deserves even more credit than it already gets (and I can’t even use it right).

I am not really content with it, but I fear this is the best I can come up with. (Click opens larger picture in separate window.)

The lines are from:

Solas made Cole forget. About his plans, his intentions, and his most dangerous secrets. So much is hinted, but Cole cannot remember any of it, so there goes our only eye witness.

But how? How can Solas erase somebody’s mind? Relentless investigations helped us find the answer. Solas used a top secret device called “neuralyzer”, to which he only had access due to his former employment with a secret non-government organization named MIB. See an archive photo, supposedly taken by a civilian around the year 1997:

Due to the clever disguises used by these ominous MIB associates we were unable to identify the individuals on the pictures. However, a reliable source confirmed that Solas is seen on the right of the following photo (at that time he wore hair, which makes it harder to recognize him).

"You should have seen me when I was younger. Hot-blooded and cocky, always ready to fight.", Solas said, but what he didn’t know is that there’s actually photo documentary evidence...

Welcome to the next episode of “Siha babbles about Tripple-B games”. Well, Blades of Time isn’t even Tripple-B, it’s C, at best. A while ago, I set out to play all action/stealth games with female protagonists that I could find. It was expected to be a bumpy ride, and Blades of Time fits right in. It’s a cheap game all-over. I didn’t expect to like it and when I started playing I felt confirmed. But I changed my mind somewhere around the end of the first level.

Graphics & Setting

The graphics aren’t too good, especially the characters look unpolished and exaggerated. The heroine's body model is typically deformed, and she (Ayumi) walks like a duck with a hip dysplasia. (However, her first outfit features the coolest boots.)

But the linear environments are done well. Most of all, the single levels actually throw you into completely different settings, so neither the environment nor the gameplay gets boring too quickly. You have chaos regions that slow you down, icy winter worlds where you can’t slide well, a desert where you must avoid sunlight, in the Sky Islands you can fly and so on.

Gameplay

The game borrows heavily from other games -- a bit of shooting, some Tomb Raider style platforming and puzzles, hack’n’slash combat, and some fake RPG skill tree overlay. Most of the time I went with the hack’n’slash. You can build combos after filling your rage meter through successful hits. While first-tier skills include weapon enhancements and AoE strikes, second-tier skills allow for powerful crowd control. In addition, you have a rifle (or machine gun), and you can temporarily pick up rocket launchers in particular regions. Which weapon, ability, or fighting style you use is up to you. Usually many approaches will wield positive results.

The one gameplay element that was new to me, but probably has been done before, was the time rewind ability, by which Ayumi can create duplicates of herself, which she can use to distract enemies, double damage inflicted, or be in two places at once (e.g. to solve puzzles). In fact, this ability is so powerful that it massively helps beating a few of the tougher enemy types. Using it effectively however still requires a bit of thinking.

Difficulty

It’s one of the games that force you to play on medium before unlocking the hard difficulty. (I don’t know why the first of two difficulties is called medium, but anyway. At least they didn’t come up with ridiculous names like other games do. Then again, I am far too uncreative. If I designed games, difficulties would be called “easy”, “normal”, “hard” on my better days, usually probably only “1”, “2”, “3”.) I haven’t yet played on hard, but medium is fairly easy. I died a few times, but only because I jumped to my death or because I didn’t figure out what to do at first, thus not evading quickly enough. Most bosses I could kill on my first attempt and even the final boss went down without much of a fuss. Overall it was a cakewalk.

Story

The story is simple, a rather typical “chaos rules the world and you must try to oppose it” setting. They tried to include twists at the end, but they didn’t actually surprise me. However, while the ending was stereotypical, the story progression kept me invested enough throughout the short campaign. It was interesting to learn about the world itself, the final confrontation was not actually relevant. In the levels you pick up notes and diary pages and those peaked my interest. I was a bit disappointed that the ending didn’t pick up on them. But probably that’s the price you pay if information are collectibles. In general, I played worse and while nothing came as too much of a surprise, I was also never bored.

So Siha can’t art. But who needs to drawn when you can set a few coordinates and angles? Well, maybe drawing would be better still... but you have to take what you can get. Or do. Or whatever.

Age-old man? Check. (One of) the last of his kind? Check. Travels different worlds (at least two, considering the Fade)? Check. 

Solas who?

Alright, I see it myself, I pretty much messed up Ten.

But as Twelve he’d basically kick ass, wouldn’t he?