The Emplotment of Darkest Dungeon - Life, too, is a game of chance

There are few games that have kept me so enthralled like Darkest Dungeon. I will play the game late into the night, and wake up the next morning wanting to do nothing but play Darkest Dungeon. Chroma Squad, Link between worlds are probably the only games that I can remember having the effect on me thus far. I have owned the game for 5 days and sunk 65 hours into it, and I have literally done no work over the past few days, except grinding and figuring out the deep lore and battle mechanics of this wonderful little thing. My obsession caused this great foulness.

I am writing this because I feel many reviewers of this game are missing the point about what kind of game Darkest Dungeon is. Launch up the game and the first line you see before the title screen reads "Darkest Dungeon is about making the most of a bad situation", and that's what the game is in a nutshell. The game hates you, the RNG is all fucked and the stats, hit rates and damage rolls you see on screen are probably all lies. But that is ok, because that is what Darkest Dungeon is supposed to be. You receive a letter from the Ancestor telling you to clear his hell-infested manor and collect the treasures and heirlooms that remain behind after he was killed by the villagers - and outside the game world, Red Hook Studios is the Ancestor, inviting you to "go to hell" (this is literally the thumbnail of the trailer). You know clearly what you are heading into, and yet in the face of hell you complain it is difficult and unfair? That is really quite strange considering you accepted the invitation from the bloodstained Red Hook and "now, like him, you are a part of this place".

The naming of the game is appropriate too. Some dungeons are dark, others are darker, and in the darkest of dungeons, weakness cannot be tolerated. And this is not only about the weakness of the players' skills - because things will go wrong no matter how well you plan your moves - it is also about the weakness of the heart. Stress is a meter on the heroes that do nothing until you reach a breaking point. What will you do when everything in the game starts going wrong? Will you also become like the characters hitting the 100 stress mark, and start hating on the game for being unfair? Or accept that you are battling the darkest of hellspawns and the evilest of abominations, and it is going to be unfair. Stay FOCUSED, be COURAGEOUS and become POWERFUL, then push on till the tasks' end. This is a game that trains the heart to be brave; and for me, also to accept loss and humiliation and understanding that nothing in the game nor in life will go as well as planned.

Coming out of the Darkest Dungeon, I think it has made me a better person. Strangely enough, I have not rage-quit the game simply because a favourite character dies, or a random crit change chains into a series of unfortunate events. "How quickly the tide turns", exclaims the snarky narrator when a terrible blow lands, and life is like that too isn't it? Life, too, is a game of chance. And my life had been pretty awesome up till this year. Graduating from university this year, I was intending to continue to grad school before everything started falling apart. My father was diagnosed with a disease incurable in the sanitarium and was forced to retire way earlier than he intended to, and suddenly I could not afford going to grad school and not take home any substantial income for the next few years. Job hunting has been excruciatingly hard in this bad economy and things do not seem to be getting any better. I cancelled a total of 4 plans for graduation trips, and while everyone is spending money on celebrations and travels, I spent $25 on this very special game that reminded me that to be alive is a terrible fate in itself. Danger lurks at every corner and things will always go wrong. And when disaster strikes, we try to make the best out of it. I got a game to escape the stress from the outside world, but in turn the game itself stressed me out so much more that made me more determined to make things right in my real life. The task ahead is terrible, and weakness of the heart cannot be tolerated. Rather than sulking and blaming fate to be unfair and cursing the gods who have inflicted this suffering unto my life, I'm going to fight those demons and come out on top. The first step to that victorious end, ironically, is probably to stop playing Darkest Dungeon.

There are more things I want to praise the game about, especially how the cast of heroes seem to be a bunch of social outcasts or demon hunters who are here because it makes sense for them to be here. Thematically, the designers have made such a coherent game inspired by Lovecraftian mythology, and the dark gritty world feels perfectly insane and terrifying. But perhaps that can be left for another day when I have time to analyse why each hero is there in the first place. The backstories you hear from the Ancestor's memories are surprising intriguing and very fitting to the setting. The lore of this game is nothing short of amazing, and I hope I will have time to write about it soon.

Subverting Expectations - Papers, Please, the missing 'Happy Ending' and growing up in Singapore

This post will contain spoilers, obviously.

Papers, Please was on sale recently on Steam, so I decided to fork out $20 and buy it for a few friends. The two people who have tried the game liked it enough to spend about 10 hours each getting all the endings and achievements, and I'm really glad that people can relate to why this is my favourite game ever. 

There is probably an infinitely long list of things I want to praise about the game design and narrative, so I've decided that I will break it down and try to go through it part by part. After recently playing Undertale and being a fan of how that game loves overthrowing the player's pre-conceived notions about rpgs, I want to talk a bit about how Papers also did that but in different ways. 

We all want that good ending in some way or another in gaming. Having grey-area-ed, and downright terrible endings, is definitely nothing new in games. But I honestly cannot think of any game that had given me the experience quite like Papers did. The first ending I got was Ending 20, what I like to call the "Arstotzkan Dog" ending. Growing up in the Nanny State of Singapore, I guess that would have made the most sense. In fact, I think I would have gotten the "Too Honest" ending first if I could figure out how to pass the EZIC documents to the Inspector earlier on (yea it's pretty simple, I was just being dumb). It made sense considering the upbringing, anything wrong pops up hand it over to the Police and let the State handle it. Defiance of the law is generally not a good idea, and not intuitive at all. Together with the added consequences of credits penalty and a sickly, starving family, that seem about the right thing to do. When ending 20 played, I felt proud... for a moment. Until I realise the Inspector and his family was probably just stuck to this brutally mundane job forever, and forced to make decisions that betray the heart day in day out. Ending 20 is not that happy ending I wanted. Next.

Escape to Obristan was my second ending. It is the route that you will absolutely fall in love with Jorji, who hands you his forged passport despite you detaining him (at least I did), in order to repay your kindness from earlier. It is the one route that felt powerful, the player can confiscate passports illegally, in order to stealthily bring his family over to Obristan. You can run alone, but the game sends a man to tell you not to forget your family, and the way this shakes up the gameplay mechanics is really quite special. Jorji forces your first compulsory citation unto you (taking away any chance of a perfect run), and the game teaches you to break the rules that it had set for you; I love it when games do that. Speaking of family, this also feels like the most heartwarming of endings despite it being similarly gritty and painful to go through as there is that moment of fear that the rest of your family will get stopped by the Obristan customs, but all of you get through in the end. But what awaits across the borders is another communist slogan in the same vibe, "Obristan above all". We just escaped from one hell to another. Next.

The final 'big ending' is the EZIC takeover. Looking at how the rest of the endings went I had a feeling that this was going to be bad before it came. Perhaps it is clouded by my own perception that such a resistance led by fanatical violence upon innocent border guards will never work out, but I think the ending speaks for itself. You have helped to bring the resistance to victory. The ending slogan "Glory to New Arstotzka" seem to signify that the supposed change that was to come after the violent takeover was only at the superficial level. How will the next regime rule? There is a Chinese saying that translates roughly to how the effect of medicine will not change if you simply change the water used to boil the concoction without changing the prescription first; this seems to apply perfectly here as EZIC seem to have no new solutions to change the nation. You are still the poor border inspector like the end of Ending 20, and the nation is simply being ran by a new ruling class like in ending 18. Nex... But wait, there's nothing else left.

One side achievement one can attain, and by far the best one in my opinion, is for upgrading one's apartment. The upgrade does virtually nothing for your family except making rent and heat become more expensive as your house gets 'better' without ever showing you any visual representation of an upgrade. But we all want to climb that ladder to the top, a drive that I think is inherent to all humans, and we try whenever possible to make our lives a little less grim even if all we get are bragging rights and nothing substantial. We want to have reasons to convince ourselves life is getting better, perhaps to eliminate any desire to end it in a state of despair. So you keep upgrading the flat from grade-8, to grade-7, 6, 5... and the game stops you right there. "Grade 5 is the best for workers." Oh. I didn't know to be thankful for putting a stop on that fantasy that my in-game family can live in luxury one day, or should I be pissed off that this is different from this apparent 'meritocratic' nation that I live in? I sit down and question the state of meritocracy in Singapore from time to time, how skewed the system is towards people of higher classes, how terrible it is to be a late bloomer and how prejudiced people are by race, gender and place of birth for no apparent reason. In the end, regardless of what kind of meritocracy Singapore claims itself to be, I will be staying in a grade-5 apartment one day till death, and at least Arstotzka is kind enough to say that is because it is the best apartment I can get, while the Singapore government will wag its finger and tell me it is because I didn't perform well enough. And by that they mean my scores at the national examinations at 12 were not amazing enough (despite being in the top 10% of scorers) because the top schools don't need anyone else other than the 1%.

Before I delve any deeper into whine-zone I want to again thank Papers, Please for helping me rethink my life. Growing up as a pessimistic boy and plunging deeper and deeper into the depths of fatalism had helped make the connections I had when playing Papers. The happy ending does not seem to be there, at least not in this life, or not in this world. Perhaps I will need to find my answer in religion, or perhaps I am just looking at the wrong life goals. Or perhaps we will just fade into oblivion after we are dead, and even this sadness is a pointless emotion. 

Undertale - Something Special

Is Undertale the greatest game of all time? Hell no. Is it perfect? No. But I'll say the premise and setting it gives itself makes it almost faultless or immune to most criticism. Did I love it? Totally. Did I enjoy it more than Invisible Inc. (Fuck you Invisible Inc., btw)? Not at all. Invisible Inc. is a well polished, beautiful to look at, and immensely addictive and competent game that is right up my alley with its turn-based and grid-based combat. Undertale is some weird shit that made me cry, twice, while playing a video game - something I've never experienced before. If anything Undertale is different, it's that game you have never played before, it's the game you never have to play again after you are done with it, but it is also the game you may never forget. 

There is no way to discuss Undertale without spoilers. So there won't be a disclaimer but I'll state it because I want to. 

Like almost everyone, I went into the demo knowing nothing and wrecked shit up pretty badly. I killed Toriel, killed some other monsters, stole all the candies and did some other stupid shit. By the time I bought the real game I knew I wanted to try the Pacifist run, but at the same time, I told myself to just be myself. When the game started I noticed that Toriel actually tells you not to whack the Dummy, something I didn't realise in my first playthrough. I realised one of the frogs told you to use mercy even if names didn't turn yellow, and it turned out to be the key to sparing Toriel. I love Papers, Please, I love details, and once I notice them I'll follow them. And upon exiting the ruins it was not really about playing a Pacifist run anymore, it was about learning the weird ways you could end a battle non-violently because honestly the Fight mechanics is pretty lame. I knew about Undertale, but it didn't bore me to play the run to get a True ending, with all the little hints and the cooler mechanics in the Act option, it almost felt like that was Toby Fox's intention, and the proper way to play the game.

In the ruins I (me, the person playing, and not the playable character) bonded with a small monster called Migosp. Migosp only attacks you because his friends are there and he doesn't want to feel like a loser beside his friends. When all his friends are 'defeated', Migosp stops being aggressive. For the most part, I am Migosp, I try to do things to impress people all the time, and frankly speaking it is when people are not around and I don't have to pretend and entertain others, I'll feel really at ease. That's part of the reason why I write on this blog that no one reads and no one judges - Migosp is not a monster, in fact none of the monsters are monsters, they are just like us - and the only monster is, well, you, you who True Reset-ed the game and started a Genocide run. You, that Papyrus and Sans couldn't identify as a human. 

I fell for the whole build up to Papyrus' Blue Attack. And when it came, I couldn't stop laughing for whatever reason and quickly texted my friends who dropped the game to quickly pick it up again. The new mechanics introduced with Undyne, Mettaton and Muffet were all really fun, and may I just point out how smart Toby Fox is when he fucks with rpg standards yet again. In other games, some bosses have attack you can dodge and block, which makes no sense, if I'm a boss I'll polish my skills so hard to ensure I hit 100% of the time and kills shit. That's why Photoshop Flowey's attack hit so hard and are mostly undodgable, and you win because the other 6 humans interfere in the battle. For the rest of the game, NOBODY is trying to kill you unless you are on Genocide run (cue Undyne battle) and that is why their attacks are full of holes. Think about the Asgore fight, it wasn't hard at all. 

In the end, Papyrus remains my favourite Undertale character, but everyone who has played Genocide will quickly fall in love with Undyne too. Too many stories these days are driven by the sole fact that characters have IQ of 0; none of the mediums - movies, dramas, animes and games - are spared from this form of poor writing and narrative these days, and that is why I strongly believe that writing needs to begin with writing characters. This is where Toby Fox really got it right, from Flowey to Toriel to Sans, hell even Vegetoid, Aaron, Temmie and all the monsters I still can name despite them being so irrelevant to the main plot, all of these characters are unique with agenda. I'm currently watching this cartoon called Adventure Time and up till this point it is just being weird for weird's sake - if any character is even half as interesting as Snowdrake, Ice hat or The bird that carries you over an disproportionate distance, it would be a better show - but writers these days don't seem to understand having majestic plotlines and shocking twists is boring as hell without characters consistent to the world and plot to play out the story. I believe I've talked about this before in a previous post, needless to say, I think Undertale really nailed it with the character driven narrative here. 

At the end of the long journey on the Pacifist route, Sans congratulates you for enduring all the pain believing that this was the right path despite it being so tough. This was the first moment I broke, and I honestly don't know how to explain why. To some extent it felt like Sans was talking to me about my life, and the rest of it was how the bullet hell boss levels were really damn tricky and made you want to give up and just whack the shit out of the opponent. When the Asgore boss fight started and he broke the Mercy option, my heart broke. I didn't cry, but seeing him hold his head down to not face the player, and trying to force himself to kill the player is really painful to watch. The ending boss fight of the True Pacifist run was fun and at the same time such a satisfying end to the game, learning that Flowey kept you in because he just wanted you to keep playing. "Let me win", cries Asriel, and tears flowed down my face a second time, as I lifted my hand from the keyboard to take Asriel's hit. But the world refused to give up.

Too many good things have been written about Undertale, and this piece is probably an unnecessary and poorly written piece compared to all the amazing articles on the internet documenting this amazing feat. But Undertale was something special that clicked with me on an emotional level, and really shows how narrative in gaming is so, so reliant on mechanics, and how narrative in general needs to take into consideration of writing good characters. I'm officially adding Undertale onto my List of games that I'll force my friends to buy and refund them if they didn't like it, alongside Papers, Please. And to this date, no one has asked me for a refund for these 2 games. 

Just one last point, Spider Dance = tune of the year. 

Tweek x Craig x Love

It took me about a month but I finally managed to finish my first watch of the entire South Park series. Part of the reason for this long journey was to play its spin-off game The Stick of Truth - which was an awesome experience - but I'm more glad that I finally watched South Park. As one journey ends, I found something special in an episode that is now my favorite episode of the show. 

Tweek x Craig (Season 19 Episode 6) came at a pretty bad time for me. This is my last year in school, and because of that I'm leaving a part of my life behind, including someone whom I dearly adore but have no wish to contact ever again upon leaving school. I have always believed that Love is a tricky little bastard who likes to play with our lives. I've had faith that Love will finally get tired of the endless trails it has led me upon, and set me on the right track one day. But slowly I think I'm honestly getting too old for all this shit, these endless cycles of hope and despair, excitement and disappointment, joy and tears, and tears, and tears. In some ways I'm turning into the whiny little emo bitch I was at 17, and I really think anymore of this nonsense with love will simply degrade my character further and straddle me away from the person I want to become.

This episode, alongside the two perfect song cues The Book of Love and Say Something, opened up a lot of things that I have been meaning to say. On one level it is the typical South Park nonsense - a non-issue is invoked and escalates way out of hand because of misunderstanding and confusion, and ends in a non-typical ending that can only be described as 'weird'. The sub-plots, that helped explore different characters' developments by showing their reaction to this issue - Craig's dad, Tweek's dad, Randy, Stan, PC Principal, and Cartman (who struggles with his own homosexual tendencies) - were well placed to balance the plot and bring in other opinions in this conversation on sexuality. I quite enjoy South Park's style of toilet humor, and watching an episode warrants sometimes a chuckle, and sometimes a round of hysterical laughter. Tweek x Craig was the first episode that I cried throughout.

Where friends saw how the two poor boys were forced together as a gay couple by societal pressure in order to showcase and represent South Park's newfound politically correctness and progressiveness, a real love story bloomed beneath this strange twist of events. 'Love doesn't follow a plan', screams Tweek when he was staging a break-up with Craig, and it doesn't. Tweek, a boy who is literally named after his twitchiness and jumpiness who claims everything is 'too much pressure' for him, becomes a confident actor that pulled off a heartbreaking performance in front of the school after Craig told him he could do more than he thinks he could. In retrospect, the Yaoi painters probably got it right, the tsundere Craig who is lonely, strong and nonchalant is a protector, and the twitchy, scared and meek Tweek needs that protection. In a scene where Tweek watched Craig plays Assassin's Creed: Syndicate, Craig is smiling and Tweek is talking normally - a rarity to both of these characters throughout the last 200 episodes.

Love works in the most unexpected ways, some fall in love but regrets it forever, some are forced into an arranged marriage but finds love anyway. What hit me, I think, is the transformation of Tweek and Craig's character from the one dimensional scaredy-cat and emo-boy respectively to the vibrant characters they were at the end of the episode; because that what love does to you, I guess, bringing out who you are, whom you thought you could never be. Sometimes I still wonder what I can become if I do find Love one day; but what the heck, it's really not for me to decide, and I'm starting to stop caring.

Say something, Love, I'm giving up on you. 

How Papers, Please managed to create more memorable characters than Naruto: Characterisation and its relation to Plot and World Building

I recently completed Lucas Pope's Papers Please, thrice, to unlock all endings, and I'm convinced that it is probably the best game I've played all year. Many have praised the plot, but I think it is the narrative and lore that really makes this game exceptional as compared to cutscene-reliant triple As that are still hopelessly trying to imitate film.

2 weeks after completing it, what surprises me is how memories of the characters still linger, and it is even stranger when anyone who has played the game knows we, the Inspector, sometimes have but a few lines of exchange with these people. The more major characters, Jorji and Sergiu, are probably characters I will never forget despite their design being so plain, and their chracterisation and lines they say supposed to be nothing unique and unmemorable. The many side-plots, the prostitution ring, the couple escaping from war, the child murderer, and Elisa, oh Elisa, are epsiodes that will stay in my mind for a long time, ones that will make me exclaim "Ahhh..." when someone mentions them. What works, I think, is the consistency of characterisation, plot and world building (or lore, in some cases). In Papers, Please there are no backstories, flashbacks, because they will be redundant. Stories are opened to interpretation and imagination but I believe any human with a beating heart will imagine a tale that is grim and hopeless within each character and the plot in its entirety. The aesthetics with its gridded, grey and unpolished sight is intentional to create that impact, the lack of music to simulate the laborious work environment (and this world, in general) in all its dullness and sadness, and that mundane work that punishes you with the gritting sound of the fax machine citation at every mistake are all part of the world building. What the characters say do not have to directly relate to what is happening, but there is a strong consistent in the narrative between the characters and the world when someone tells you, please let me through, they will kill me if I go back to my country, or this man promised me and my sister work, but I think he is trying to sell us as prostitutes.

The manga in this article's title can be One Piece, Bleach, HunterxHunter or any long running manga series for all I care, but I chose Naruto because I hate it the most passionately. The majority of characters in many of these series are very much similar to each other, flat, typical and honestly falling into one "manga-character-trope" or another. That is not to say there are no interesting characters in these mangas, but even they suffer from how the ever expanding world that loses consistency with itself slowly detaches itself from the characters. To mitigate this issue, flashbacks are often used to reattach important characters to the world; but mangas have became overly reliant on this single method in introducing characters and their relation to this world. Sometimes the flashbacks do not even make sense, and other times they are just a dread to read as they drag out stories way too much. In recent One Piece chapters, I resonated with the backstory of Senor Pink and Law because their stories melded well with the circumstances they were placed into, but it was Bellamy, the character that did not have his own dedicated flashback chapter that left the greatest impact because his words and action was not only consistent with the current plot, but also previous plotlines in general and even the story of the main character. He became the anti-hero that Luffy did not become because he followed a different role model. In Naruto I had no idea what was going on from Shippudden onwards and everyone that appeared can be classified into a typical manga character category, and the story kind of got way out of hand to make any sense. Random characters get dropped in to supposedly incite emotions or something but I honestly didn't care because their existence made little sense in that world, they were equally uninteresting, and felt less like characters prepared for the story than last minute ass-pulls.

None of the characters in Papers felt like ass-pulls. If I had one complain, they could have been more often, more mixed around like having prostitutes from other rings pass u their cards later in the game (after the first ring is dissolved) without having any actual subplot relating to these special border-passers. Other than that, all the characters felt genuine and fitted well into the world without needing to say much. Elisa for me was the most surprising character. As the Inspector we were expecting to see her for days after Sergiu passes you the locket, she arrives shortly after without the proper documents to enter Arstotzka, but throughout my three runs I was never able to steel my heart to reject Elisa because of one line of dialogue she said. "Please, my family is dead, I only have Sergiu." I remember reading this line on screen and having to walk away from the computer immediately in attempt to dispel the heavy emotions brought out by this line. In the game we are about a month from the end of a long bitter war between two nations, the premise makes clear the circumstances Elisa was in, and there was no need to explain more. 

What worked in Papers is how world building and characterisation perfectly complemented each other - characters can still be wacky and unique like how Jorji is in the game, but even he made sense in the world that Lucas Pope had set up and helps to strengthen the grim and grey theme holding the plot and world together. Such a world makes even the plainest of stock characters, the everyday person holding a forged document, feel understandable, believable and sometimes even relateable It is certainly not a lively world, but it certainly feels more alive than the Narutos out there.

I have an endless list of praises for Papers, Please I hope to post on this blog one day, but it will have to take time; the list is simply too long. 

Valiant Effort: The Great Failure - A Review of Valiant Hearts: The Great War

I try go into every game with the exact same attitude, I will try my hardest to love the game, but at the same time not get blinded by the obvious flaws that impedes the experience. A few years back I forced myself through a school term of work knowing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity was at the end waiting for me during the holidays. I had every reason to love the game, I love Pokemon, loved every Mystery Dungeon up till that point, and that game was the pillar of inspiration I held onto the entire term. I lied to myself for a good 3 days that I was enjoying what the game was putting out for me, but after those 3 days I broke and stopped playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon ever since. From that day onward I refused to get hyped for any game, and I feel that skepticism is well justified considering how disappointing many titles I looked forward to failed so terribly in recent years.

So on came Valiant Hearts: The Great War. I was quite excited to play it, and for the first 4 hours all so I honestly quite enjoyed it. But when the puzzles started repeating themselves, all the problems started becoming obvious to me.

This game is terribly dull - not a single puzzle can be considered fun and some like the button QTEs are overly simplistic and annoying. The puzzles are very, very brainless, consisting of mostly QTEs, fetch quests, and reaction puzzles. Any puzzle you are unable to solve is probably due to bad game design; for instance, there was one puzzle in Chapter 3 where you needed to create a diamond shaped object, I handed in a square and was denied, and only the diamond is accepted. The characters' individual 'powers' make little sense, because apparently only the old grandpa with the big ladle can dig through mud but the muscular soldier cannot pick up a shovel and do the same, or why does one character has a pair of pliers that never breaks while all the others can only pick up one use pliers to force the problems unto the player instead of presenting interesting puzzles. This necessity for detailed solutions shows how lack of attention to details game designers gave it. Thankfully the game is very forgiving with checkpoints, and frequent deaths due to unfair situations can be forgiven. Simple and forgiving however, makes a good game for children. 

As a student of history myself, the factoids and trivia is interesting to look at, but honestly does little to the story but you can argue it is there to sell the anti-war message. It gets a little annoying when the aesthetic choices used for the game and the 'facts' section are different, but overall the choice of style is much appreciated. The music is mostly spot on, but when an upbeat tune plays when I'm the Frenchman bombing the Germans I'm not really sure whether I'm getting the anti-war message or not. With remixed classical tunes and some well composed new tracks, I have to say I am a fan of the music in this game.  

The characters are likeable, they have some nice backstories and developments throughout the game but there is nothing exceptional and memorable about any of them. Sometimes the use of French, English, German and Belgian in certain situations between certain characters makes sense, but sometimes they don't. And it will make you wondering why two particular characters are not communicating in French instead of English considering the setting. The Diaries section is an interesting addition, but I would have liked to have more entries for more interesting character development. They are mostly there to summarised what happened, in case you put down the game too long and forgot - I think they would have served greater purposes in storytelling if better implemented. I can't comment much about voice acting, but I really liked how Emile's lines were delivered.

The collectibles contribute absolutely nothing to the story, and I feel they are just added to pretend that there is a replay element when there really is not. If you need a game that has a lot of padding to distract your children, tell them they have to collect all the collectibles and remember some of the factoids to get a present. Sometimes, these trinkets you collect are immersion breaking too - why would you bend down and collect a small trinket amidst gunfire, or running to save someone crying for help? For a 'completionist' run one would have to ignore all logic in situation and try to search for places that these meaningless items are hidden, why such an option is added is puzzling. All it is, I think, is useless padding to make the game seem longer.

The story, love it or hate it, is completely devastated by poor game design. Emotions sessions are padded with boring puzzles that breaks up continuity, and doing the same old chores simply makes one feel frustrated, but not frustrated in the way the story wants you to feel. Bugs and the distraction of collectibles aside, the lack of attention to scenes, characters and puzzle design is especially disruptive to immersion because that makes up the bulk of the game. There is a part where your character is supposed to pick up the pliers from the floor at the midst of battle, if you press the action button but miss the sweet-spot you have to stand on to prompt the action, your character will scratch his chin and think - all in the midst of heavy gunfire - like he does during other puzzling moments. Why was this overlooked? How could this have been overlooked? This constant immersion breaking experience is probably the worst sin this game has committed. I tried killing the dog, throwing grenade at people, but the world seems to ignore it and never had I gotten a gameover screen other than getting the character you control killed. You can't kill anything in this game. Drive the tank in chapter 3 and do the logical thing and fire the cannon at the German soldiers - guess what - nothing happens. Good games send anti-war messages by forcing the player to make painful decisions that would not have been necessary if it was not because of war, and make players regret the decisions they make, make them feel pain for the people they killed and the buildings they destroyed. Turning everyone invincible to the devastating elements of war and battle, or making the characters unable to pick up weapons and gun down enemies to save their own lives when it makes perfect sense to do so, is not the way to deliver the message.

The narrative in this game is so atrocious that the game feels like an afterthought than an integral part of the plot. It seems like the developers were thinking, how do we make this game an arbitrary length long so that it can justify the price tag, instead of thinking of how the game-play can help to complement the story. There is so much wrong with the narrative that I don't think the game should have been made in the first place. It was a very disturbing experience for me, but probably not in the way the developers wanted. I wrote this review concurrently while playing the game, not because I wanted to write a review, but I felt the need for a rant every time the game breaks me out of the immersion. As for the story, I think it is good, the message is good, but it is honestly nothing exceptional and I would have rewritten some parts of the ending just to knit together some game-play elements and the story to better create that devastating sensation felt from the quote uttered at the end "War makes men mad". The game has a message, but it is as though the developers did not understand that message themselves at all. Chapter 4 is probably the best chapter, but the whole game could have been condensed into a much shorter experience to make Chapter 4 feel more impactful - because a bored man can't feel any other emotions, he just feels bored.

I applaud the team for trying to do a non-FPS war game, but as the game stands now it should have just been at most a graphic novel and not a stealth-puzzle game. The puzzle style can work, because there are parts where the interactive elements of the game actually contributes to the narrative, such as the final battle in Chapter 4. Having a good plot is important, but having little to no game-play elements to support that plot almost makes this title a non-game. The experience feels toned down and censored, prepared for mass consumption but cannot be considered a breakthrough because of the extremely poor narrative. Valiant effort, but still not enough effort. 

FFXIV and the changing nature of summons

I have not played this game, largely because it is not out yet. Currently writing a review on Minecraft: Story Mode and I think I should totally turn this " I have not played this game" into a seried on this blog.

So on to Final Fantasy 15 and the Ramuh summon that was revealed earlier this year. As a fan of jrpgs I played many of the classics, like the old FFs and the Tales series, with Golden Sun 1 and 2 being the ones closest to heart. Many of these games lets the players' character summon gods and beasts from various mythologies as their most powerful attacks to deal good damage, and the Golden Sun series' djinn setting and summon system makes it very unique within the sea of jrpgs. But here is the issue I have, these summons don't seem to FEEL powerful. Yes the summons do destroy the sun and earth and solar system in the process of the summoning animation (You know what I am talking about), but in the end the damage shown done by these powerful summons is merely represented by damage on the opposing player. FF15's open world style and way superior graphical fidelity, I feel, has allowed it to let summons mean something. Here are a few things that I think it did right:

Firstly, the use of contrast. Noctis being picked up by Ramuh during the summon shows to us the size of the summoned creature. I remember Ramuh being just a tiny old man when playing FF4 and for whatever damage he does the summon itself doesn't feel powerful. The contrast between the epic summon music and the quiet atmosphere during the summon charging time gives one the sensation that shit is going down when Ramuh appears on the field. Golden Sun does have specific summon animation, but the same tune playing just makes the summon a part of the battle that is nothing special, instead of the "Man invoking the power of Gods" sensation FF15 gave.

Secondly, the use of space and more specifically environmental destruction. In a classic rpg style summons can't really do much to show impact because of the nature of battles, and most of the time when a summon destroys the world and yet your character is still standing there simply breaks the immersion than making it feel epic. In FF15 nearby trees are burnt and the game environment in such an open world setting allows for such an implementation. They need to work a way out on how the summons don't hurt the teammates not picked up by the summons, though.

Now a caveat to this is the reasonable assumption that one will get bored of long summon animations after a few watch. And the way to mitigate this is to switch off animations, but I suspect this game has another trick up its sleeves. And that will be item number three, the use of conditions. Noctis seems really injured before being able to perform the summon, so it may be that summons can only be invoked when certain conditions are met, such as being of low health, or can only be used once per a certain period of time. Firstly this resolves an old problem I have with summons in the old games, how spending 10mp gives you small ball of fire and maybe 50mp gives you the roaring God of Thunder bringer of storm and destruction. The God of Thunder feels nothing more than 5 fireballs, and probably took up that much sprite space on the screen too. Making it hard to call upon summons allows them to feel special, and justifies the use of over the top music, animations, and dealing way too much damage to the opponent and the environment. Making them not so much a part of core gameplay mitigates the problem of seeing them too frequently, and perhaps it can be a thing to fight with normal spells and finish off with a chain of summons (it will be cool if one can use multiple summons and have them animated at the same time too!). Dedicating a specific summoner in the party in the Tales and FF game does help, but when they are just dealing the same damage as other characters are it diminishes the power of the summons so much they become pointless and boring. Summoning, if FF15 manages to pull this off, becomes something that is special again. 

If any other game has already done this, then good for them. I'm simply excited for FF15 and maybe I'll buy a console just for it.