Wow, three requests for this bad boy. This is a great one to crack into as a comeback!

Destiny (video game)

Background: You are a Guardian, one of humanity’s last defenders. In the past, something called The Traveler arrived on Earth and turned human civilization into a utopia, but everything changed when the Fire Na– I mean, when the Darkness attacked. Basically, humanity got rekt. So, you and your fellow Guardians are tasked with defending what little humanity has left, which somehow boils down to running the same missions over and over ad nauseum.

Review: Let me clarify that I’ll be talking about Destiny as it currently is, not from its inception. I can’t cram that many loot cave jokes into one column.

“It’s totally not Halo, guys, seriously!”

That’s true. It’s not Halo. It’s always-online, MMO Halo. World of Halocraft. Except WoW was fun at one point.

Frequent readers of this column know I’m big on writing in games. Needless to say, Destiny has the worst writing I’ve seen this side of Kingdom Hearts. You don’t even get access to any lore in-game – you have to unlock “Grimoire pages” on mobile or online without any indication from the game itself. Oh, and you get bonuses for unlocking Grimoire Pages, which is also left unmentioned. Yeah, that’s not scummy at all, Bungie. I bet some readers might not even have known about this. That’s how stupid this idea is.

Anyway, once you’ve jumped through the hoops to find out about Destiny lore, you become sorely disappointed. It’s a bunch of vague drivel about the Traveler, what humanity lost, and something something Darkness something. Come on, Bungie, you fell back on the most generic terms possible for your “good” and “evil” with the Light and Darkness thing, and you still somehow let me down with your lore. That being said, the Books of Sorrow that came with the Taken King are actually pretty sweet… if they had any relevance whatsoever to the game you’re playing. Instead, they’re decently written entries about things that happened in Destiny’s past that mean nothing to its present. Nice.

I can’t rant much more about Destiny’s writing because it’s hard to fill paragraphs about a thing that doesn’t exist. So let’s move on to gameplay. Of course, by gameplay, I mean grinding. Oh yes, Destiny is just like every other MMO – the actual fun parts of the game are like the world’s worst parfait, thin layers separated from each other by endless expanses of boring, repetitive actions indistinct from each other. First, as usual, you have to level up to do the cool things you were promised. Fair enough, that’s normal, though usually level up missions at least try to be fun. But then the real fun begins once you hit level 40, the cap. Now you get to start grinding for gear!

Gear grinding has always been the most frustrating part of MMOs. At least in Guild Wars you can craft your own endgame gear pretty easily. In Destiny though, you are a slave to the chest drops, and if you’re like me, the chest drops will be nothing but armor. Armor for days. It’s like Oprah did an armor giveaway to me as her sole studio audience member, except the armor I get is always inferior to what I already have. Wonderful. Sure, you get to break it down into crafting materials, but have you seen how many you need to get to turn them into anything useful? You might as well take the time you spend breaking down your armor and just do another run, in which you will certainly get more armor.

It would be easy for you to think I’m being hard on the loot system when the point of the game is to actually play the game, and you’d be wrong. I’ve played my share of MMOs – the aforementioned Guild Wars, World of Warcraft, etc. – and Destiny has, despite its genre shift, managed to have the most boring endgame I’ve ever experienced. Maybe it’s actually because of the genre shift. There are only so many things you can do with an FPS without making it heavily stylized like Team Fortress. Boss encounters invariably become “shoot thing to make enemy vulnerable, shoot boss, keep trash under control.” While these are basics known to any MMO player, Destiny never does anything to put a twist on them. I’m used to bosses with unique positioning and gameplay mechanics requiring a diverse raid group to use their class abilities to their fullest extent, but instead I get nothing but an endless supply of gear checks. You know it’s bad when even the endboss of the Taken King is a friggin’ gear check. I guess it’s Bungie’s attempt to keep things accessible to people playing without dedicated groups, but frankly, that’s bogus. At least some endgame content should require strict coordination and cleverness from an organized group. Stop diluting your game to the lowest common denominator.

The worst part about this is that I never feel fulfilled. When my raid team took down Deathwing in WoW, we let out whoops of joy. Excitement was part of the atmosphere even though none of us could see each other in real life. We felt we had accomplished something spectacular. But no matter how hyped a boss was supposed to be in Destiny, I always emerged with a shrug. This might be paranoid, but I suspect this as a ruse from the devs. The Skinner Box never pays out with quite enough to satisfy you so that it keeps you playing. This kind of design isn’t just bad and stupid. This kind of design is dangerous. This is the kind of design we see with predatory freemium mobile games, except this one you already paid for up front. Next time you go to boot up Destiny, think about that first. Do we really want to reinforce this behavior?

True Feelings: The last paragraph isn’t parody for once – it really sums up what I think about the game. It’s not bad per se, but it’s poorly designed and implemented. It’s a grindfest with little to reward you at the end. Take that as you will.

Okay, I need a break from studying. Let’s do this.

Dark Souls (video game)

Background: You are, well, some guy who became Undead. Being Undead sucks because you get wrangled to an asylum and eventually lose your mind and kill everything around you. Thankfully, you’re the “chosen” Undead and embark on a pilgrimage to take down the source that’s corrupting the world and causing the Curse of Undeath in the first place. And you die a lot along the way.

Review: Dark Souls is the video game equivalent of an abusive relationship – you know it hurts, but you keep telling yourself that if you could just get better, maybe it will change.

Well, it won’t. It’s not you, it’s Dark Souls.

Dark Souls is made to be punishing and difficult, and I can respect that. I’ve played enough Touhou to like and embrace brutal boss encounters with ridiculous attacks while you have practically no defenses. The difference is that in Touhou, you can see everything coming at you. In Dark Souls, it’s completely trial and error. Granted, the end result of most difficult bosses in all video games boils down to “trial and error,” but I don’t see how it could even be theoretically possible to beat the first boss demon without any prior knowledge of how he works. Come on.

Anyway, the world around you sucks and has fallen into disrepair, which makes me wonder – who the hell lived here? We’re told it was once a nice place, but everything around you is either a fellow Undead, a demon, or some other kind of monster. Where the hell did you even come from and how did they manage to get you all the way to the Asylum through this crap? Where did all of these (impressively designed) bosses come from and how? If the demons here are THAT strong, why haven’t they gone out and struck at the rest of the world already?

Central to the game are Humanity and Souls. They’re currency in an attempt to be as 3edgy5me as possible, and when you die, they all disappear. You better go back to your corpse – er, bloodstain – ASAP because if you die again, you’re boned. And you WILL die. Lots. However, the exact nature of how these work is handwaved. Come on, if you’re going to give me a grimdark excuse for currency, at least flush it out a bit.

Combat is actually pretty fluid, and the choice of weapon actually matters, which is nice. However, even the most powerful attacks don’t mean jack against bosses, who are pretty much all health sponges. As a result, your defenses and especially dodging mean more than any offensive power you can muster. Again, I can respect that – Touhou – but the “endurance” system is aggravating.  Your best evasive moves share what amounts to a cooldown bar, the idea being to force you to use them wisely, but the result is that you get forced into exactly one “correct” option to avoid most bosses’ attacks. Creativity takes a backseat to efficiency to an absurd degree.

While your choice of weapon matters, your armor really doesn’t mean jack. It’s the equivalent of “will this boss 2-shot me or 3-shot me?” – a distinction that possibly matters, but not one of critical importance. Shields, on the other hand, are essential. I can’t begin to describe how much my shield saved my butt. This seems like a strange phenomenon to me though – how can the shield in one of my hands be so vital but the armor over my entire body is useless? Because Dark Souls said so, I guess.

The PvP system is really hackneyed. The “invade” mechanic just doesn’t make sense, and the game was very much not designed to have players fight each other.  It is kinda cool that combatants have an unspoken agreement to bow politely before a fight, but “fight” is too generous a word – either one person blows the other away with magic or lag happens and you find yourself being backstabbed from the front. Not a thrilling experience.

The most disappointing part of the game is without a doubt the ending. If you usher in the Age of Dark and stop the Curse of Undeath, you become the ruler of a dying world, and that’s honestly pretty badass. There was a lot of design space for this. However, if you kill Gwyn and replace him, nothing has changed. Period. All the stuff you did meant nothing. What a great conclusion to my arduous quest. And thanks to the sequel, this garbage ending is the canon one. Why go through the process of being dynamic when you can rehash the exact same ideas and sell it twice?

Man, my very firstupdate last week and I missed it.  Better make up for it with adouble-header!

Part 1: Deus Ex: HumanRevolution (Video Game)

Just so you know what you’re getting into, here’s a sample:

Kingdom Hearts.