_{[As Zelda Week winds down here at Destructoid, I wanted to dig back into the archives and resurface an oldie-but-goodie. This 2011 piece from Noir seems like a fitting companion to the weird shenanigans of Tears of the Kingdom, and it's also a good blog. So we're bumping it up the feed again today, in 2023, to celebrate that. Happy Zelda Week! - Eric]}

Many people's first Legend of Zelda game was Ocarina of Time or A Link to the Past, but me? Majora's Mask stole my Zelda virginity. I remember seeing a trailer with this kid putting on masks that made caused him to go through a painful looking transformation into something else. I remember a boss that commanded a swarm of moths, an insane looking man with masks, an even more insane looking moon, and of course the enigmatic Majora's ?Mask itself. I don't know where I saw this trailer, I still can't find it to this day. I know I had to have the game after seeing it though, even if those eyes filled me with terror.

As a child I was frightened of Majora's Mask. I didn't want to look at it, doing so filled me with anxiety. I thought I would die just from looking at those massive eyes that stare endlessly into the depths of my soul. I was also fascinated by them though, so I asked my parents to rent it for me. I even got an Expansion Pak just for it, which became another useless peripheral a week later. The point is that I needed this game, the odd nature of it just drawn me to it. It wasn't like my other games. It wasn't bright and light hearted like Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards or Banjo-Tooie, no. Thi?s game was different and I could feel it in my bones. Mind you, I was only about 8 years old at this time. I only had a few N64 games and they were mostly happy, child friendly games rated E for Everyone by the young ESRB system.

So I eventually acquired this accursed game and my standards were met. The game starts up again and there it is, the epitome of my nightmares - Majora's Mask. This was before I played any actual horror games, so I was easily scared by something as simple as a mask. Resident Evil 3's Nemesis and the psychological horror of Silent Hill wasn't something I was aware of at this point. Majora's Mask was my definition of fear, but t?hat didn't stop me from playing the game. This "thing" was all over the game, seeing it was practically unavoidable if you wanted to play the game so I pressed on.

The beginning of Majora's Mask is better than any Zelda game when it comes to hooking the player and forcing them to explore. Your horse is stolen by a masked kid who curses you, turning you into a Deku scrub. After that you encounter the di?sturbing Happy Mask Salesman who may seem a bit too happy despite his predicament. No. He's not happy, not happy at all. He's downright pissed, pissed off to the point where he snatches up Link and shakes him repeatedly. Then your quest to defeat Majora's Mask begins in Termina. It's like an acid trip that ends with "Where am I? Why do I look like this?" and you're forced to find out who's fault it is.

In every other Zelda game the first ten minutes of the game is fairly peaceful and light hearted, awful things just don't happen one after another. Majora's Mask isn't like that though, it beginn?ing pushes the situation from bad to worse and doesn't care how you feel. Then you're finally faced with the fact that the moon is going to crash down on Termina and annihilate everything in sight, including you. This moon...it has the same beating eyes that filled me with the same dread that Majora's Mask did. It was an unstoppable force that continually looked down on you during the entire game with those eyes because it knew you couldn't stop it.

You're able to reverse time fairly early in the game, but I was not a smart child so I never got that far when I had this game. Thus I was faced with this feeling of dread that everything was going to be destroyed, everything I was doing felt purposeless. I made my way around Clock Town, but was never able to stop the destruction. This was before I had access to the vast internet, so I grew mad at the game for forcing an impossibl??e task on me. It was at least six years before I played the game again, but in that time I still thought about it from time to time. It was merely a rental (that I for some reason never bought), but I'd say it affected me more than any of the other games on the N64.

Eventually I did beat Majora's Mask, with a little help from the internet, and all was right with the world. As a teenager I had journeyed through Majora's Mask and discovered that it was a dark game in ways I didn't know. The citizens of Clock Town all had their own stories, along with everyone else in the vast land of ?Termina. The apocalyptic situation I had on my hands seemed even worse after learning of the problems around Termina, many of which were caused by the mask wearing Skull Kid. Skull Kid's story is one of the grimmest out there despite seeming to be the mastermind behind everything. Skull Kid was originally a child who wanted to have fun, but that desire was twisted into a form of destructive behavior after being controlled by Majora's Mask. At that point Skull Kid becomes a puppet, though he retains his mischievous personality.

Skull Kid himself represents what the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask truly is. It is a twisted reincarnation of a children's game that presents itself as a dark and nightmarish experience. Behind the mask Majora's Mask is not as bad as an M-rated horror game, but the mask it dons still manages to make itself appear menacing. As a child this mask is all that appears and that's what I saw. While I wouldn't say that Majora's Mask as a ??game and an object has scarred me, but it's done something definitely. It thrust me into the Zelda series, imbued in me a love for the strange, and made me wish I had a replica of Majora's Mask itself in my home. As long as it ??remains out of sight most of the time!

The post Zelda Week: Fear Itself appeared first on Destructoid.

This article contains themes of trauma, mental illness, and sarcasm

In summer 2020, I had to reassess my situation. The year had been rough on me, as it had for a lot of people, and I was bottoming out. My solution to keeping myself going was to start looking to the future, so I dove into writing reviews for Destructoid. One of the first I picked up was for Rainswept. It starts off with a content warning: “This game contains references to topics such as suicide and? trauma which some players may find distressing.�Somewhere around halfway through the game, I wished I had heeded that warning because I wasn’t in a good place to be distressed.

It had a noticeable enough effect on me that my husband then mandated that I stay away from depressing games �formerly my bread and butter �at least until I was in a better place. That can be difficult these days, as more and more games incorporate heavy themes into their storytelling. Chicory: A Colorful Tale, for example, gave me mild panic attacks as it unraveled my insecurities about the creative process and my future. I recently reviewed The Kids We Were, which, despite having a sunny exterior, might as well have been called, Sorry Kid, Sometimes Life Just Shits On You.

The thing is, Rainswept had a warning before beginning. Chicory has an option to give running content warnings to prepare you for when it’s about to introduce a sensitive topic like depression. For those games, I was warned about the distress they could cause and it was my choice to, well, be distressed. For The Kids We Were there was no warning that I was going to get kicked in the?? biological? clock.

Discussions about censorship have been around for about as long as the video game industry has. Nintendo of America went as far as forcing developers to fit a series of strict standards if they wanted to be licensed for the NES. In the early �0s, games like Mortal Kombat, Doom, and Night Trap were used in conversations about whether or not video games could influence young minds into violence. Decades later and the jury is still sort of out on that. Either t?hey do o?r they simply agitate pre-existing conditions.

Western society has progressed to a point rec??ently where we’ve begun noticing that certain people don’t respond well to certain stimuli. A sexual assault victim, for example, can easily be disturbed by depictions in media, or worse, it can trigger flashbacks in people with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s not that this wasn’t an issue before, it has just become more prevalent in media while today’s connectivity has given people with these sensitivities a platform to express their discomfort.

One solution to this, of course, is to remove the depictions ??from media entirely. While I certainly wouldn’t miss some of it, I would wonder where the line is drawn. Is it? a good idea to fully stop talking about suicide, depression, and anxiety? No, I don’t think so. But there is an effective middle-ground.

In 2018, Valve lifted a lot of its restrictions on its Steam storefront to allow pretty much anyone to publis??h practically anything on the plat??form. There was a lot of concern that Steam would then become an unnavigable, toxic cesspit. The toxic cesspit part is definitely true, but it’s not quite as unnavigable as people feared.

Largely, this is helped by the sometimes hilariously abused community tagging. You can filter out certain types of content such as nudity, hentai, and Rogue-lite. Another ignorable but important facet is their requirement that people publishing on the platform include a content warning for anything questionable in their games. That’s a pretty swell idea. It means I can look at a game like The MISSING and see that it has “This game cont??ain?s explicit content, including extreme violence, sexual topics, and depictions of suicide�and know that I’m not in the right place for it.

This is limited, however. It’s on the developer to create their own disclaimer, and some like to gloss over details that might be important. Killer7, for example, has the warning “Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Strong Language.�That’s nice, bu?t it’s also leaving out depictions of suicide, descriptions of pedophilia, and, my favorite, Kaede’s use of self-harm to reveal secrets. Technically those are all covered under the broader labels, but?? it would be more helpful if it was more specific.

I want to make?? it obvious that I’m not protesting the use of this content, nor the availability of it. If you want to dig through Steam’s adult tags, prepare yourself to be introduced to questionable kinks you might not have known existed. Whatever. It can be filtered out entirely if it bothers you, and I can’t fault you if some of them raise all of your eyebrows. Otherwise, if you find it suitable for your tastes, go find yourself some titillation. What-the-heck-ever.

Being able to see a game’s questionable content is more important to me. I may choose to ignore the warnings and traumatize myself, but at that point, the hazards were clearly marked. It’s like getting on an amusement park ride that causes people to void their bowels. If I get on, I’ve only myself to blame if I shit myself. Trauma is ?a useful character-building and storytelling tool, but people who see their own struggles reflected in those narrative facets aren’t to blame for their reactions. The bare minimum we can do is warn them that the product they’re looking to buy might tap those sore spots.

What I’d like to see is every storefront adopting this. If on Steam, Paradise Killer has to warn of “Cursing and Crude Language, Blood, Veiled Nudity, Mention of Suicide, and General Mature Content�why not on GOG? Why not on the Switch eShop?

A lot of companies try to hide behind the ESRB or similar rating systems for this sort of thing, but I think it’s about time that we acknowledge that there’s more than just "mature content." Blood is something we see all the time in the media, most people are desensitized to the depiction of it. Blood coming from a wound that someone opened on their own body in a period of distress is something entirely different to some people. Likewise, sexual themes are one thing, while non-consensual sex is a completely different situation. One might offend, the other might put someone in a crushing mental state. Another word for it, as used by Chicory, would be sensitive content. ??Someone may be able to handle gore, but there are a lot of different types of viol??ence that go unlabeled.

Beyond that, content warnings empower? the consumer to take their ow?n risks. It’s like putting the calorie count on food packaging, it gives the buyer enough information to know that subsisting on a diet of only Two-Bite Brownies could be harmful.

Not only would I like to see more storefronts making content warnings mandatory, but it would also be more helpful to see developers step up and add warnings themselves. Or better yet, make questionable scenes optional; something that even Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number did back in 2015. ?If removing a theme would kneecap the narrati??ve, then a warning is just fine. I’m just tired of spending evenings avoiding sharp objects because I got blindsided by an otherwise innocent game.

The post Content warnings need to become standard appeared first on Destructoid.

I have to wait how long?

Look, it's no secret that Breath of the Wild is up there as one of my favorite games of all time, so you could say I'm pretty pumped for the sequel. My prayers of some news about the next main entry in the Zelda series were finally answered during the E3 Nintendo Direct, and the new trailer g?ot my mind racing for what possibilities we might see when the ??game is finally out next year.

So, just for fun, let's put on our speculation caps for a minute, and I'll take you through what I want to see from the Breath of the Wild sequel.

More focus on story

Alright listen, I know the hyper minimal storytelling in Breath of the Wild is something I r??eally enjoyed about it, but I'd be lying if?? I didn't say I want a little bit more to work with the second time around. This is mostly because the trailers we've gotten so far have teased more Zelda content (as in we get to see more of the character Zelda herself, not just the series as a whole �you get it).

I love her character so much, especially in BOTW because we got to see a really sorrowful, yet strong side of her. Spending more time with Zelda in the story is something I would be over the moon about, especially if she's interacting with Link in a substantial way. The Zelda series is so rich with great lore, I just can't get ??enough of the different angles and perspectives we get on the main mythology with each incarnation of the story.

The idea of seeing Link and Zelda team up in a new way is honestly what's keeping me going at this point. Just think like the memories from the first one, but all the time. Yup, I would very muc?h like that.

The next evolution of combat and other mechanics

I feel like this is something players naturally want from a sequel, and the new trailer certainly hinted at some really awesome looking iterations of the mechanics we know and love from Breath of the Wild??. It looks like the runes will have new abilities, which is great because they're part of what made exploring the world so fun in the first one.

I was also super intrigued to see some of the new enemy types that were teased, like a? Bokoblin camp that was on top of a Stone Talus. Whoever came up with that, if you're reading th??is, you're a genius. If that's what's being teased right now, with so much time left until it ships, I seriously can't wait to see what other crazy enemy crossovers Nintendo has in store for us.

I have to mention the fact that Link could pass through stone too �what was that all about?! It's a really cool idea, especially considering the world looks way more vertical, a la Skyward Sword. Ninte?ndo's game design is always on point, so I know that new mechanic is going to fold into the already existing mechanics seam?lessly.

A darker, more chaotic Hyrule

Breath of the Wild's Hyrule was still dangerous, sure, but it was also quiet and relaxing. Based on the new trailer, it looks like the sequel is going to be much more chaotic, with Ganon's threat more present than before. With BOTW, w??e also got to see what Hyrule looked like after Ganon won, and how its people were sti??ll able to rebuild regardless.

It looks like this time around, most of that will be thrown to the wind, with Hyrule scrambling for survival in a way that is more reminiscent of Majora's Mask, especially because this looks like it'll be on the darker side thematicall?y. I think that'll make for a great mirror to the first game, and give us some more variety in terms of what the series offers this console generation.

More Ganon!

Who doesn't love a good villain? Ganon is such an iconic part of the series, but how much we see of him has varied a lot from game to game. The blights made for some cool mini-bosses, and there was obviously the final fight with him, but other than that I pretty much forgot he was a thing for most of the game. The sequel's almost mummy-like Ganon (or some aspect ?of him) we've seen in the trailers looks really spooky and cool, so I hope he's a more present threa??t throughout this game.

On top of gameplay, I'd also love to see more story content with Ganon than we've ever seen before. Like I said, I adore the mythology of the Zelda games, and I'd love to see Ganon interact with Link and Zelda in a way that gives ?us a bit more of his side of the story. Antiheroes are really in right now, so who knows? It would definitely switch things up.

A return to more classic dungeons

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the shrines and divine beasts in BOTW. They were a fun diverge??nce from the traditional formula, but at the same time, dungeons are such an iconic part of the series that their absence is felt when they're missing from a title. I would really love to see what more traditional dungeons would look like in this iteration of Hyrule, especially because of how tumultuous the sequel's world looks.

One Redditor posted a theory that an original dungeon might be coming back, too �they noticed that Death Mountain didn't have lava actively flowing out of it anymore, which means it might be accessible. The volcano was home to one of the dungeons in the very first game in the series, so I could totally see this coming to fruition. That's just the tip of the iceberg with fan theories, though.

Well, that's my wish list. At this point it's all conjecture, sure, but half the fun is the anticipation, and we'll have plenty of time to do that before the game drops. There's a ton I didn't even touch on, so let's speculate together �let me know what your ideal BOTW2 would look like in the comments!

The post Five? things I want t??o see from the Breath of the Wild sequel appeared first on Destructoid.

I’m not proud of how tolerant I used to be of microtransactions in general but that’s all the more reason it’s cathartic to write pieces like this

Leading up to Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled’s release, I shared in a Quickpost that its new skins reminded me of a typical, microtransaction-based cosmetic system. I wanted to see these cosmetics as an addition to the original game’s content. But given Activision’s recent history of add?ing distasteful microtransactions into rem??akes of old games, I assumed the worst. Regardless of whether they'd be loot boxes or cosmetic-only or anything else, I’ve become exhausted of them, and I know I will always enjoy reta??il games more without them.

To my pleasant surprise, Nitro-Fueled launched without any such purchases. At the time, I had thought that Activision heeded the public outcry against microtransactions in paid games, backpedaled on whatever purchases it was planning to add, and neglected to remove the design surrounding them. I almost bought Nitro-Fueled to get in on its online events while they were still new, only deciding against it as I try to wait for more price drops on big game releases. It took only a month after release for Activisio?n to announce that microtra??nsactions are coming in a future patch. If I weren't so disheartened, my past self would maybe hav??e gloated at my present self for being wrong on that front.

In retrospect, I should have expected this given the company’s similar treatment of recent Call of Duty launches. But my emotional rollercoaster of skepticism, relief, and disgust put into perspective why this emerging trend in marketing leaves such a horrible taste in my mouth. Nitro-Fueled’s in-game purchases themselves aren’t the most distasteful in the industry – you're just buying Wumpa Coins you can (slowly) earn in-game – bu?t sneaking the??m in after launch is the most blatantly anti-consumer thing I’ve seen.

At a glance, it’d be weird for any game that sells microtransactions to omit them on launch. According to many players, Nitro-Fueled’s cosmetic currency drop rate and rotating shop inventory resembled a freemium game’s economy too much for it to not have? been built with microtransactions in mind. The whole reason micros exist is to make extra money, and they don’t cost a lot of tim?e and money to develop like traditional DLC. In theory, one would make the most out of micro sales by including them from day one.

But that theory assumes micros unanimously coerce consumers into spending more, never less. Most gaming communities, especially ours, are full of people who will proudly boycott any game that features them. These boycotts don’t outweigh the overwhelming profit, but there is a tangible cost to consumers knowing that a game will have microtransactions. Whether you hate micros o?r are indifferent to them, I’ve never met anyone who gets more excited to buy a game after learning they can spend m??ore on micros. If you have…maybe get them a financial advisor. Or a therapist. Or both.

It’s little wonder that Activision wouldn’t want potential customers to know Nitro-Fueled would have them, but that just raises more red flags. While I don’t expect marketing to highlight all of a product’s problems (if any), consumers should know about any additional purchases tacked onto whatever product they’re buying. Yet Activision kept mum on Nitro-Fueled's micros until well after it had stormed the sales charts, even though it hyped up every other addition ranging from the online Grand Prix to new animations. Interviews wi??th Activision developers who said that it wouldn’t have microtransactions have made? this abrupt announce?ment even more scandalous.

Personally, I’m inclined to give these unnamed developers the benefit of the doubt and assume they believed what they said at the time. Regardless, that quote is just as damning for the publisher’s handling of this either way. Activision allowed the misconception that Nitro-Fueled wouldn’t have microtra??nsactions to spread, and it n?ever bothered to correct that belief. 

Unfortunately, Activision isn’t the only company to sneak in micros, but it is probably the biggest and most prominent repeat offender to do so concerning monetization. Another recent example is Bethesda’s Wolfenstein: Youngblood, which stealth-launched with micros in tow. Most of my criticisms here apply to that as well, but Youngblood's micros were on display from day one. Customers could immediately notice and share that news if they knew to look for it. After Nitro-Fueled's launch, we could only guess and assume that micros would come later, at least t??hose of us who were skeptical eno?ugh.

Again, I should have anticipated something like this, but that’s a part of the problem. Consumers like myself assume that if we aren’t told anything about it, a retail game’s default monetization model is a single-purchase that might have add-on content packs. We don’t expect that model to change only one month after a product’s release. The only reason I should have to think otherwise is in my distrust of the publisher’s track record, and if I have to distrust the company I'm considering giving my money to then maybe I'm considering a bad decision. For instance, Activision slipped loot boxes into Black Ops 4 as part o?f a larger update. That ploy also won the company universal backlash and yet here we are ag?ain.

Activision not only demonstrated its awareness of consumers’ opinions on microtransactions but that it is willing to use their distaste of micros to mislead them into buying a game with micros.?? That should be the tex??tbook definition of anti-consumer business practice. And you know what? I’m gonna say the s-word, and I will not apologize for it. This is the prime form of industry bullshit.

The post Activision’s post-launch microtransactions are the peak of anti-consumer practices appeared first on Destructoid.

If baseball mascots are furries does that mean Ballhead is Raptor's fursona?

Like a deconstruction of a shonen protagonist, I admire the spirit of competition, but I'm much more of a casual than a hardcore player. I get a thrill from trying to climb up leaderboards and learning new things about the online versus games I enjoy. But I’m always too intimidated to, for example, attempt to reach a silver rank in Street Fighter V. I never thoug??ht to invest that much time and energy in?to traditional competitive games when I had it.

I generally prefer competing in party games even though they don't have the same edge to them because my losses aren't so discouraging. There’s something about most competitive games that makes me feel like it’s not worth playing them unless I'm as dedicate??d as the players who keep curb-stomping me. It'd be fun to develop those skills, but my interests and passions are already spread across so many games, I doubt that trade-off is worth it for someone like me.

These conflicting interests are a big reason why I ??want fighting games to have better single-player modes alongside robust online competitive scenes. But I've never found a game that satisfies both with just its online play... until Lethal League Blaze’s Switch launch two weeks ago. It ain’t a p?erfect port (I will keep beating the Switch Online dead horse even though I just bought three months of Switch Online for this game) yet it's a thrilling game with a high skill ceiling that always leav??es me excited for another go. Technical flaws aside, it’s the closest thing I’ve ever played to my dream online experience as a competitive casual.

It’d be hard for any game to cater to both cas??ual and competitive play without an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master learning curve. Even though you are fighting other ?players, your attacks only interact with the ball. Once you hit the ball, it deals damage to anyone else it touches unless they hit it back. Thus you remain focused on the ball throughout the entire match, which is much less demanding than, say, memorizing frame data and planning out fighting moves like real-time chess.

The bare essentials of Lethal League are almost as simple as Pong. You hit the ball, aim it to surprise your opponents, and avoid taking a 200+ MPH gravity drive to the face. Blaze’s advanced techniques are similarly straightforward, adding different ways to manipulate the ball’s movement or pu?nish hasty opponents.

As the ball reaches higher speeds, timing your hits becomes less a dexterity game and more of a rhythm game but with more explosions. If you don’t hit that supersonic ball back quickly enough, it could ricochet in a half-dozen different directions, and it becomes much more difficult to time your counterattack. If you try to hit that supersonic ball back too quickly, its holder can eas??ily parry your hit and sma??sh your face.

The longer a volley continues, the more precise timing and positioning the ball demands, and the more damage it inflicts. Once the ball reaches maximum speed, each subsequent hit becomes an impressive feat in itself, punctuated by deafening rumbles and violent tremors. Those explosions are only interrupted by bunts, throws, and special attacks that can toss your rhythm into the dumpster if you don’t keep your wits sharp. Snatching victory from these intense moments is exciting, but I won't win a Nobel Peace Prize f?or telling ??you that consistently winning feels great.

And yet my losses somehow leave me just as delighted. Even losing at other party games usually leaves me feeling indifferent rather th??an c?onsistently enthusiastic for another shot at victory. At the end of a high-speed volley, even if I got ended, I feel bewilderment and awe. How did they hit the ball back while it was bouncing everywhere at blinding speeds? How did they pull off that bunt-smash combo? I applaud after my biggest losses, which would be a much more meaningful gesture if I didn't always play alone in my living room without a mic.

What frustrates me most about losing in traditional fighting games is feeling like I can't play at all. Not just being stuck in a long combo, but the notion that I cannot advance, be still, or even retreat and recollect my thoughts without my every decision being severely punished and immobilized by my opponent. To be fair, this looming threat of puni??shment makes high-level fighting gameplay especially intense. But from a casual's perspective, unless I can play with friends at a similar skill level, that extremely harsh online environment bars casual prospects from playing the same game.

In Blaze, nothing immobilizes you except for losing a stock and waiting for the round to end so you can respawn. Not only is Blaze simple enough that I ??can easily understand what my mistake was when I get KO’d, waiting for my respawn gives me the time to reflect instead of panicking, button-mashing to escape, an??d getting frustrated at myself as a result.

Blaze’s fights get me so pumped regardless of their outcomes that I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been to rise in the rankings. Unfortunately, I’m still hungry because Blaze doesn’t have ranked matches; only quick matches and lobbies. Like many online versus games, players gain arbitrary EXP and level up for playing and winning matches. I'm still uncertain whether this affects matchmaking, but my opponents consistently demonstrated similarly advanced techniques as what I was using and lea??rning. At the very least, whatever matchmaking algor??ithms are in place push me against gradually harder opponents.

Despite how I can tell my skills have improved over time, I’d be arrogant to claim that my victories were 100% my own. ??Random power-ups spawn during every match, and while most of them can be stolen and turned back on whoever first gets them, many can easily give?? the round to whoever calls dibs first. Even so, they ?spawn infrequently enough that they’ve only impacted about 10 % to 20% of my online matches. I’m down with the variety they add, but I do wish I had the option to turn them off for random matchmaking.

Multiplayer free-for-alls are considered another common culprit of Party Game Shenanigans™, but even though most of my online matches were 3-to-4 player matches, I felt they were just as fair as duels. Because you primarily interact with the ball or whoever’s tou??ching it, playing with addit?ional players doesn’t make everyone gang up on the biggest threat. That ball doesn’t discriminate. Once it activates The World, it can take down three opponents about as easily as one.

The most confusing that free-for-alls get is when players dogpile on a slow-moving ball, which deals chip damage at its worst. By the time its speed becomes dangerous, hits have so much wind-up that I never have to ask what's happening. Rather, these pauses enable me to think about what is going to happen and what I will do in response. Blaze’s most critical moments eliminate the frustration of not knowing why I’m losing, always inviting me to do better next time. And then I do better next time, and trade NICEs and BRING ITs with my opponents before ??I smash their face??s in again.

Lethal League Blaze might be much simpler than the likes of the high-level competitive play I’ve long admired. But its low barrier to entry, boisterous gameplay mechanics, and high-stakes showdowns make both my wins and my losses feel as rewarding as I’ve always wanted out of such games. If you’re in the same very weirdly specific niche as I where you love to compete, but only in the friendly way like current generation Pokémon rival characters, I strongly recommend Lethal League Blaze.

Oh, and if you're reading thi??s, Inquisitive Ravenclaw? I'm waiting for our match. Bring it.

The post Lethal League Blaze excites th??e competitive casual in me appeared first on Destructoid.

Hug a Fullmetal bug

Everyone tunes into E3 with a list of wishes because there are few feelings as exciting as that wish coming true. Setting one’s expectations that high is unrealistic, but I personally don’t believe it’s healthy to set your hopes as low as your expectations either. For example, over the past half-decade, my most far-fetched wish has been to play Phantasy Star Online 2 on consoles. Microsoft’s reveal that PSO2 is finally coming west has validated my cravings for the statistically unlikely, the irrationally idealistic, and the robot wizards.

To a lesser extent, I also hoped to see the previously Japan-only Seiken Densetsu Collection get an overseas release. More specifically, to get Seiken Densetsu 3 via that package, as it was the only game in the trilogy to never release overseas. RPG fans have long debated whether Seiken Densetsu 3 would leave Japan, especially after Collection of Mana was trademarked in Europe.

That’s how Seiken Densetsu 3’s remake -- or rather, Trials of Mana’s remake -- demonstrated something even more exciting. It reminded me how it feels to see your lofty wishes not only confirmed but usurped by something still more ambiti?ous.

To explain why expecting something can be more exciting than expecting nothing, let’s make a quick example using horror games. Horror games that build anticipation to create an atmosphere of dread are generally more respected than games that rely on instantaneous jump scares. Nothing catches one’s mind off guard like having your confidence in your knowledge of the truth used against you. The same can be said for surprises that won’t haunt your nightmares. Anticipation is a powerful tool in amplifying surprises, provided that the anti?cipated outcome differs greatl??y from the actual outcome.

Collection of Mana’s western trademark logically led many to believe that Seiken Densetsu 3 might possibly release in North America and Europe. In fact, the conversation had so long focused solely on whether the original game would head west that most had expected to see that long before an HD remake. Many of this E3’s biggest showings were long speculated or rumored to appear, including Trials of Mana... but not like this. 

Because I had instead anticipated a port of the original game, Trials of Mana’s HD trailer left me momentarily bewildered. For a moment, I thought I was looking at a brand new Mana game. The bombastic music and vibrant action RPG gameplay quickly won me over on its own merits, but I kept asking myself, “Could this possibly be a remake of Seiken Densetsu 3?” That became somewhat obvious partway through the trailer and only became even more obvious ??as it showed more of its characters. But the fact that this trailer alone never explicitly said so kept teasing my mind through the entire showing, and a part of me continued to think “No, that can’t be it, but then what is this?&??rdquo;

All the more reason I was excited by the subsequent Collection of Mana trailer. The words “Coming to the west for the first time” simultaneously erased every iota of doubt in my mind and sweetened the deal even further. Not only are we getting a shiny new version of Trials of Mana in English, the version that we were expecting to se??e also became available for purchase right that insta??nt.

In hindsight, some of our community saw this remake coming, and I should have too. Final Fantasy Adventures and Secret of Mana were both given similar treatment, so one could rationally expect their slightly younger brother to get similar treatment. But both were met with such lukewarm reception compared to their originals that they failed to remain in the public consciousness for long, especially with the Collection of Mana approaching. The Collection was simply a far more appeal??ing prospect at the time.

And yet this remake already looks like it’s improving upon many of the previous remakes’ biggest sticking points. Character models are more detailed, the camera is more dynamic, and animations are more lively. Speaking as someone who enjoyed Secret of Mana and passed on its remake because that remake looks so unimpressive, I’m currently more interested in Trials' remake than its original version.

We even see glimpses of how this rema?ke’s gameplay iterates upon the original in new ways. Additions like?? aerial combo attacks and evasive maneuvers elevate it above the limitations of its 2D predecessors. A revised battle system rewards skillful play with SP to use on super-moves and makes normal attacks much more fluid, making it flow more like a modern action RPG with the original’s stylings.

All of this while keeping the original game's oddities intact, if not possibly improving upon them. I’ve long been fascinated by the original game’s modular story structure based on the characters you choose to add to your party. The only modern comparison I can draw to that is Octopath Traveller. Octopath's protagonists were a hit, but even the scarce character interactions we've seen out of Trials' protagonists appear to be more substantial than Octopath's almost nonexistent party interactions. In between this and each character having four unique class upgrade paths, I expect Trials to be far more replayable than most modern JRPGs. I'm curiou??s t??o see how this remake will tiptoe the line between faithfulness to its original and refining its systems.

I loved Trials of Mana’s reveal, but it didn’t quite matter as much to me as seeing Phantasy Star Online 2 coming west, nor as much as seeing Dragon Quest’s heroes in Smash. Instead, it tickled a sensation of bewilderment that is difficult to feel when information is so abundant you can easily find leaks by accident. A feeling of childlike wonder that I’ve rarely felt since I was, well, an actual child. ??Moments like this are the reason why man?y of us care so much about watching E3 live as opposed to treating it as an ordinary news day.

For all of my excitement, I do share some concerns -- for instance, this remake won’t have co-op. That personally doesn’t affect my interest in this game, as I was planning to play it single-player ??anyway, but that is understandably a potential deal breaker on principle. That aside, this reveal as a whole reminded me of that long lost sensation of childlike awe that compelled me to watch E3 in the first place.

Even looking at it from a skeptical lens, the worst case scenario out of Trials of Mana's E3 showing is “The original is better, consider playing that instead”. No matter how you look at it, we finally have a localization of this long-awaited classic RPG. If anything, the simultaneous reveals could even be construed as a statement of Square’s confidence that this remake is worth purchasing alongside the Collection. I look forward to seeing what else warrants that c?onfidence.

The post Trials of Mana was E3’s most magical surprise appeared first on Destructoid.

Did you know EA's Star Wars mobile gacha game went untouched during the Battlefront II controversy? Did you know EA has a Star Wars mobile gacha game?

Despite my rant several months ago about my dislike Dragalia Lost’s overly grindy events, I recently hooked myself on it again. Even in that piece, I admit there’s a lot I like about Dragalia in particular, and I still maintain there are many things I enjoy that are innate to typical gacha game design. Gacha games have an extremely low ba??rrier to entry, I’m excited by multiplayer games where my friends and I are dealt different tools to play with, and I’ve always been a sucker for a perpetually growing grind. I’m not ashamed to admit I enjoy gacha games as they are.

But Dragalia’s future doesn’t look so bright, nor does that of the entire gacha “genre.” Fire Emblem Heroes and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp have just been shut down in Belgium, much like a plethora of prolific gacha games before it such as Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. United States senator Josh Hawley recently proposed &ld??quo;The Pr?otecting Children from Abusive Games Act” to regulate games that practice this sort of model. I'm unsure whether this legislation will actually pass, but even if it doesn’t, it’s amplifying the outc??ry against loot boxes so much that it looks like a matter of time until something like it passes.

My enjoyment of Dragalia Lost is threatened by this push for regulating loot boxes. I could potentially lose hours of progress and so much time I spent on what I consider to be a pretty good game if this bill advances far enough to ban loot boxes entirely. And even more strongly than I wrote two years ago,? I believe this is legislation is exactly what the mobile market needs??.

Before we dive too deep into how it would affect the mobile market, let’s recap what The Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act actually is, assuming it isn't watered down in the legislative process. As its name suggests, it aims to block games played by minors from selling addictive microtransactions. Hawley clarified in an interview with Kotaku that this bill is targeting “both loot boxes and pay-to-win,” which would also regulate microtransactions like buying extra turns in Candy Crush and so on. Technically this spares adult-only games, but I'm pretty sure minors can legally play every game published by EA, Nintendo, or any other company a typical mobile player might recognize. The only ??????????????????????????exceptions the bill outlines are cosmetic items, difficulty levels, and single-purchase add-ons.

Should this bill pass, the gacha game market probably won’t go extinct. The power of waifu-starved adults will make sure it won't. But it will undergo an exodus leaving a Grand Canyon-sized hole in the mobile market. If this bill is successfully enforced, that leaves three foreseeable options for… almost every mainstream mobile game, really. Is Super Mario Run still mainstream?

Option one to simply shut down, at least in North America. Most obscure, low-performing gachas in the endless sea of mobile shovelware ?would probably have no other choice. Massive companies like DeNA and GungHo, on the other hand, have too much of a stake in the mobile market to let that happen so easily. Belgium is a small player in the mobile market, but the US is one of that market's biggest fishes. In the event these companies fail to successfully lobby against the bill, their biggest games will probably fall back on the other options.

The ?second option is to lock these games behind an Adults Only barrier or something equivalent. Yeahhh… no.

That leaves the most complicated option, which I’m hoping for most -- to redesign these games with some other form of monetization in lieu of gacha pulls. Remember, this law covers more than just loot boxes. Given that its goal is to prevent monetization that promotes addiction, we can assume that any repeatable purchase with gameplay repercussions would fall under "abusive." That means no time skippers, no grind boosters, no last-chance revives?, or anything else loathed in pay-to-win games.

Even patching out gacha payments could open a big can of worms. When loot boxes were removed from Belgium’s version of Overwatch without any other concessions, international players half-jokingly demanded the same treatment, joking onl??y in the sense that they knew it wouldn't happen. A free-to-play game would not make that concession without adding a new monetization method in its place.

Any backlash to those additions would be much more serious unless these additions were simultaneously added to non-US versions. We probably wouldn't see any reworks comparable to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Piling up more monetization schemes on top of gacha pulls is still problematic for those other countries, but I expect that to be the most realistic strategy, especially since Japan's hyper-popular Granblue Fantasy already does that by selling character skins.

These limitations herd games taking this option towards using only cosmetic or single-time convenience microtransactions. A select few of big shakers in the F2P market like Path of Exile demonstrate they can find continual success by sticking with that ki??nd of business model. Unfortunately, no such equivalents are popular on mobile, so it may be much more challenging for ?mobile games to convert to a safer model. But to be blunt, the only games that have any reason to take this option are games that mean something more to their creators than only revenue.

That still leaves a metaphorical Grand Canyon-sized hole that future games will try to fill. Given the mobile market's track record for lazily copying trends, we’d see most of those games fall back towards examples that previous mobile games attempted to set. Since this bill is cracking down on so many tools that "games as a service" abuse, I expect many more one-time payment games like Super Mario Run.

Actually, Super Mario Run is technically an example of how expansion packs are exempt from the bill since you can play the first world for free and pay to access everything else. Mobile games have almost always had a massive stigma, and even after introducing this bill, many consumers would be hesitant to drop $10 on a game they expect to be shallow and cheaply made. That's even a part of why Super Mario Run had a (relatively) rocky reception. Mobile players expect they never have to commit their cash to get into a game's meat and potatoes. But shoul?d the US become a country where most freemium "services" are not viable products and most competitors charge up front, this free-to-start model would suddenly be a tool for dealing with that stigma.&n??bsp;Larger and more ambitious mobile games will likely take a similar approach, but with episodic releases like the decently received Final Fantasy Dimensions.

Aside from following whatever current mobile leaders survive the transition to fair monetization, I also expect service-styled games to try one other idea. Since most successful mobile RPGs add content in bulk updates, we might see new ones start charging for major content updates as if they're micro-MMO expansions. It's obviously a long shot to start charging money for things that used to be taken for granted as fr?ee, but that's kinda why gacha games are so reviled in the first place. If the premium MMO market is any indication, only a select few mobile games could thrive with this model (if any), but they would become very notable contenders on that fact alone much like how very few MMOs survive on subscription models.

We’ll also probably see even more idle clickers stuffed with ads than we currently do and we will hate them. Actually??, we might see a lot more games use ads in the place of current payment systems. Many, many more ads. That's...quite scary actually, but it's easier to multitask while ignoring ads than open loot boxes with one hand while using the other to work a part-time job, so... it's the lesser of two evils? I hope?

You'll have to forgi??ve me for using so many maybes. We’ve never seen an entire “genre” of games supported by the industry’s biggest publishers get outlawed. We can only estimate what the most successful mobile games in a post-pay-to-win world would be because so many games that would have been that successful were starved out by the games this law would ban. It doesn&r??squo;t help that this law remains somewhat vague, so people are worried about collateral damage towards games that are actually worth supporting. Heck, I don't want so many F2P games to be banned. F2P and mobile markets are extremely important to people who lack the time or money to play other games.

But by the same token, I would argue people who can’t afford to play premium games are those who have the most to lose should they fall prey to the loot box's indiscriminate temptations. The most disgusting thing about exploitative freemium models isn't that they favor people with too much money to burn, it's that they lure people who don’t have enough money to burn what little they have. Many fewer F2P games will thrive if this bill passes, but those that do will have to do so by leaning more on good game design. We'll still see bad eggs invoke dubious business practices (methinks the? exemption for buying "difficulty levels" is prone to abuse), but with a law that defines abusive microtransactions so broadly, that would be a lot more difficult than it currently is.

Watching the mobile market devolve into further and further complacency with gambling-based monetization has made me a lot more bitter now than when I wr??ote that blog proclaiming my favor of gacha games two years ago. Right now, this bill tastes like three scoops of cotton candy ice cream. And it comes in a waffle cone. We should always be careful of our calories, but right now I just want my ice cream.

The post Without loot boxes, what does the future ??of?? mobile gaming look like? appeared first on Destructoid.

The real living wage was the friends we made along the way

Most career-based games set out to either emulate a job to a T or build upon their most interesting tasks. For instance, American Truck Simulator sets out to simulate a delivery truck driver's experience as accurately as possible. Game Dev Tycoon streamlines and abstracts the game development p?rocess to focus on the industry's unique man?agement challenges, such as striking a balance between art design and technology.

Unfortunately, retail work is notoriously monotonous and offers little (if any) that is intrinsically interesting. We have severa??l games about running an entire storefront, but I've never seen one from the perspective of a minimum wage employee. For many in such work, it feels like the only way to shake off existential dread is to get into a mindless groove through their daily routine. Keeping that groove is the best defense those retail workers have against insanity, but so many unpredictable factors regularly throw that groove off.

The more I think about it, the more I think that retail is like a rhythm game, except the ??gameplay is as dull as a shopping cart that spent the entire holiday season at the bottom of a frozen lake. I want som??e daring developer to correct that by creating the most fun retail rhythm game to ever exist. Or at least the only one. Also, someone needs to get that cart out of the lake already.

The retail world is already chock-full of background music, at least in malls and supermarkets with regularly running indoor speakers. In larger parking lots, even cars will blast radio music so loudly that I shudder to imagine how expensive their drivers’ hearing aids will be in the future. These songs can get tiring in a real retail job -- don't get me started on holiday music -- but when spliced into song-long play sessions and spiced up with a larger selection, they become much catchier. That, and admittedly it’s hard to say I ever got tired of hearing "Bohemian Rhapsody" (the song, not the movie) even while cleaning doors. If you can either license a bunch of ??hits of that caliber or create your own in similar styles, you’ve got an authentic and f?un retail soundtrack.

I don’t picture this hypothetical musical slave simulator to be a traditional arcade rhythm game such as Dance Dance Revolution, Project DIVA, or so on. I would absolutely be down for that, as Final Fantasy Theatrhythm is my favorite 3DS game these days! But my experiences in retail usually have me bouncing ac?ross an entire storefront and repeating monotonous tasks in different areas rather than enacting a single, continuous performance like most rhythm games??.

This experience reminds me more of Diner Dash-style management gameplay. It's a bit of a stretch, but that style of management gameplay could still work in a hybrid rhythm game with Crypt of the Necrodancer movement controls (And yes, a retail-themed Diner Dash clone without rhythm elements would also work, but I have more fun with weirder ideas). For a more creative twist, perhaps instead of keeping a steady rhythm like in Necrodancer, you would have to sync steps with individual song notes like DDR. That could fit the? unsteady yet repetitive flow of retail work.

Beyond the rhythm dictating basic movement, I would expect every retail chore to offer slightly different control schemes. For example, mopping a floor would require back-and-forth directional inputs, scanning a load of items may require ra??pid button presses, and answering customer questions could involve simple multiple-choice dialogue. This could possibly get repetitive even for a rhythm game. But don't worry... the retail life is full of random hazards like inexplicable messes, getting called to drop what you were doing only to be told to do e??xactly what you previously were doing, and more!

To draw some examples from my first couple of years in retail, I found myself easily flustered by unruly customers, and I would sometimes spill mop buckets for no fault but my own clumsiness. These things disrupted my figurative rhythm. That could transl??ate to an interesting game mechanic by, say, temporaril?y speeding up or slowing down a song's literal rhythm.

Of course, typical rewards like new song unlocks are out of the question. That would imply that minimum wage actually gives hard-working Americans disposable income or that dead-end jobs are rewarding. Instead, you’d earn opportunities to chat up with co-workers during breaks between shifts, like the Persona danc??ing games. Because waifus make every unlock system more mass-marketable.

Video games squarely about retail are few and far between, even though it’s a job so many of us are familiar with. Retail workers have a lot of stories to te?ll in between financial woes, discarded dreams, weird happenstances, and the rare wholesome encounter with an empathetic customer. This setting has a lot of potential as a backdrop for both slice-?of-life antics and down-to-earth reality checks.

As much as I would like to see these theoretical game ideas, they may also be too complicated to help people unwind from stressful work. CJ and I tossed around a couple of additional thoughts on this subject, and he proposed a simpler Rhythm Heaven-style game, which also fits extremely well! Rhythm Heaven revolves around performing dozens of simple and repetitive, yet extremely cat?chy tasks through minigames and minigame medleys. A single retail task would work excellently as a minigame, and a whole shift would be great as a medley.

I don’t regret ever starting a retail job, but I'm glad I'm moving onto something else soon because retail careers are usually stagnant by nature. After a couple of years, retail workers want something more stimulating, more engaging, more challenging, and less exhausting. We’ve all done something to try and accomplish that within the confines of retail itself, often something as simple as humming a random tune. Any kind of retail-themed rhythm game could effectively relate t?o such experiences and give them an actually fun outlet. Fun game design has a good track record ??for punching boring realism in the face.

The post A ?monotonous retail job could m??ake for a rad rhythm game appeared first on Destructoid.

Is it creepy that I made my first Lovers of Aether date the self-insert of one of my favorite artists?

My favorite kind of April Fools’ joke is where developers create mock-ups for products so ridiculous they’ll probably never exist. It's even better when they actually release that product and it ends up being great! In the video game industry, these jokes often take the form of spin-offs from existing IPs in different genres. And I see one particular gen??re chosen for faux (and real!) April Fools’ spin-offs more often than most -- dating simulators. Or at least visual novels flavored like dating simulators if you want to nitpick the gameplay differences, but they’re used as common April Fools’ jokes all the?? same.

While this trend could possibly have originated as a derogatory satire of early dating sims, this genre has slowly detached from its stigma over time. Heck, even indie dating sim devs like Boyfriend Dungeon's Kitfox Games willingly joined this year’s shenanigans with a faux Enter the Gungeon crossover. I don’t believe it’s fair or accurate to say dating sims are a common subject of April Fools’ jokes solely to mock them, especially not these days. Rather, they are one of the most feasible and effective mediums for delivering a hilarious prank, especially when g??oing as far as to make it actually playable.

Even the most ambitious of April Fools’ projects rarely have a lot of time and money on their side. There are radical e??xceptions with glowing neon laser dragons, but most April Fools’ games are free mini-downloads or temporary patches that probably got made with a sliver of resources compared to the same developers’ commercial releases. They need a ??small development scope, and visual novels are one of the least complicated ge??nres to develop in.

I don’t mean t??o understate the time? and effort it takes to make a good visual novel, as any writing-heavy medium brings challenges unlike any other form of ??game development. Then again, that’s a part of it. Because most VNs have so little in the way of elaborate gameplay mechanics to program and balance, developers can more easily delegate a VN side-project to team members or third parties that specialize in other skills. The genre is a gateway into novice and hobbyist game development because it’s a much less intimidating medium up front. It's still intimidating in practice, but developers that already have experience in other genres would find it much less so.

It’s also easier to create rapid-fire gags through writing than with visual humor alone. The latter is a cornerstone of just about any excellent April Fools’ project, but developing an original and convincingly high-quality art asset takes much more time than writing a single good joke. Case in point, this piece took me several hours to write, but it's full of a multitude of comedic quips. I can't guarantee t?hey're good jokes, but at least I convinced my ego they are!

If you asked me to create a funny image illustrating the contrary, I’d probably break into my furry art commission funds and hire someone to draw my moth persona treating a lamp to a candlelit dinner. That one image would take about as long to draw as I used to write this piece if I wanted it to be the quality of a VN asset. And furry?? art from artists who charge themselves responsible rates isn't cheap.

I could say those same points about VNs that parody mystery stories, horror stories, or any genre of story to ever be conceived in fiction. What high school dating has that other VNs don’t is an innately casual and awkward atmosphere. It&rsquo?;s much faster to set up punchlines in a premise where comedy is already a norm, especially when juxtaposing that premise against the elements of an IP that were clearly designed for anything but. Seriously, a high school dat??ing sim is about as far as you can get from the traditional gameplay premise of being good at first-degree murder.

Again, I emphasize that I'm not making an overgeneralized claim such as “all video games are violent”, especially while I’m already discussing a genre that revolves around Not Violence. But have you noticed that the images I've used here are from dating sims spun-off from a fighting game (Rivals of Aether), an arcade shmup (Legend of Valkyrie), a 4X strategy game (Endless Space) and a kleptomaniac simulator (Katamari Damacy)? These genres revolve around being really good at skills you can’t use to grab a date without us calling the cops on you for creepin'. Except maybe the 4X game; politicians ar??e evil? like that.

Juxtaposing tones is funny, and nothing juxtaposes high-octane action or dramatic warfare more than clumsy romance. Actually, one thing juxtaposes it more -- action gameplay versus romance gameplay. That forces you to put aside whatever reflex skills you used in the original IP to instead challenge your social skills. Please don’t feel sorry for yourself. I had to look up a guide to get Kragg’s ending in Lovers of Aether. We all have to start somewhere. We all do.

This year’s April Fools’ had several playable jokes, yet none of them made me laugh quite as hard as Rivals of Aether’s dating sim. Dragalia Lost treated players to a shmup, and it’s a fun minigame, but the punchline is simply “this non-combatant mascot character is dreaming she’s strong”. For Honor replaced enemy mooks with Rabbids and it&rsq??uo;s absolutely hilarious to watch proud warriors hack down armies of obnoxious cartoon animals, but that’s all there is to it.

I love these examples just as much as I do Lovers of Aether for different reasons, but I consider them all less funny. And that’s good, I would rather see more variety in April Fools’ celebrations! But if you’re concerned with getting a big laugh abo??ve everything else -- as people often are when April Fools’ is involved -- a comedy-based romance sim is a much better vehicle for successive and varied jokes. It’s little wonder they’re chosen so often. We may one day reach the point where they become an oversaturated and predictable jape… but I think we’re still a long way from that point. Now if you?? excuse me, I have a date with… Elliana? Sure, let’s make it Elliana today.

The post Dating sims are the most hilarious April Fools’ game genre appeared first on Destructoid.

I hope the protagonist of Ni No Kuni III is Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with a shotgun

Ni no Kuni II: Revenant Kingdom is one of those sequels that is unanimously considered good, but less so than its phenomenal predecessor, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch (or Dominion of the Dark Djinn if you count the Japan-only, Nintendo DS version). I prefer Revenant Kingdom by far, largely because I prefer action RPGs, yet even I agree its story has some blatant lulls. I still love its tale it's telling, but more so for a few particular moments rather than the whole thing. I’d hope that any sequel breaks out of its franchise’s established comfort zone, and Revenant Kingdom’s best scenes do exactly that, but it definitely misses or neglects ?so?mething at the same time during its low points.

The disparities between these stories intrigue me considering the sequel’s Tale of a Timeless Tome DLC is adding a new postgame arc packed with references to the first game. It makes me ponder about how the different stories from both games may mesh together. That, and I want to more clearly define my gripes and compliments around Revenant Kingdom. To do that I’m going to contrast their plots, which will require discussing several story spoilers from both games. I’ll avoid touching on the details that made my favorite scenes hit th??e hardest but?? consider yourself warned.

Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch follows a young boy named Oliver living in his quiet hometown of Motorville. In a sudden accident, his mother sacrifices her life to save Oliver’s, leaving th?e boy to cry until his tears somehow bring his favorite doll to life as the fairy Drippy. In addition to teaching Oliver the F word (flip), Drippy informs Oliver of a magical world where everyone’s fates are bound to similar people from the real world. Oliver may be able to save his mom by saving her parallel world counterpart, the Great Sage Alicia. Here’s the kicker -- Alicia’s soul is captive by the Dark Djinn Shadar, who currently rules the magical world with an iron fist by proxy for the much-more-titular White Witch.

So?? Oliver finds a spellbook hidden in his house and teleports to the magical catfolk town of Ding Dong ?Dell, where he learns that Shadar controls dissidents by breaking their hearts. Literally. Shadar uses dark magic to rip out traits such as passion or kindness from hearts, turning his victims into “brokenhearted” husks absent of that virtue. Oliver can use his new magic to mend the brokenhearted, but only if he finds someone with enough of the missing virtue to share.

For?? example, Oliver needs training from the sage Rashaad, but Shadar stole h??is daughter Esther’s courage. By returning to Motorville, Oliver learns that Rusty (Rashaad’s soulmate) is also brokenhearted and lacking kindness, keeping his daughter Myrtle (Esther’s soulmate) locked in her room. He also learns that monsters called Nightmares possess the brokenhearted because solving problems without boss battles is illegal in JRPGs. In beating Rusty’s Nightmare and sharing some kindness with him, Oliver convinces Rusty to apologize and allow Myrtle outside again, filling her with courage that he then shares with Esther. What a poetic coincidence!

Oliver continues to befriend and help everyone he meets in ways like this until he finally confronts Shadar. Upon defeating the Dark Djinn and White Witch, Oliver claims his prize… his peace with the fact that he was too late to save his mother. O-oh. It’s a bittersweet conclusion, but by this point, he’s grown confident enough to continue living on as she would have wanted with his new friends. And he does dethrone two magical dictators, that’s? a pretty rad accomplishment.

Revenant Kingdom’s plot has a lot more recurring characters and gets a lot windier, but I’ll keep it brief. This story begins from the perspective of Roland, the president of what we pretty much consider to be the United States. He gets killed by a nuke. Yes, it is that sudden. Roland wakes up shocked to find himself alive in the bedroom of a half-catfolk boy named Evan. Evan is the soon-to-be-coronated king of Ding Dong Dell (Hey, that sounds familiar!). In his panicked attempts to avert stranger danger, Evan is ambushed in a rat coup led by the deceased king’s treacherous advisor Mausinger. It’s a good thing the president brought a Glock with him!

Evan’s nanny and last surviving parental figure, Aranella, sacrifices herself so Evan can live to become a king that makes everyone happy. After grieving for Evan’s loss of… everything, really, Roland agrees to help Evan become that king. Soon after Evan wins the trust of the boisterous sky pirate lead??er Batu and his tomboyish daughter Tani. Thus the party founds their humble kingdom of Evermore.

The party soon a??fter discovers their real big bad, Doloran, is corrupting leaders across the world with dark magic to weaken and steal their bonds with their guardian beasts, the Kingmakers. The gambling-oriented country of Goldpaw has been cheating its people with weighted dice. The ocean kingdom of Hydropolis micromanages its people with excessive laws and magical Orwellian surveillance. The magitech-based megacorporation of Broadleaf is dangerously overworking its employees. And back at Ding Dong Dell… you guessed it, the struggle between cats and mice is a racism allegory. All of their leaders acting largely on Doloran’s will instead of their own until the heroes break his spells by reminding them of their original agendas.

After all of these trials and defeating Doloran’s own Kingmaker, Evan fulfills his promise of achieving world peace ?under Evermore’s banner. Sure, there were smaller world powers that are never shown in the scope of this story that he had to unite too. And this tale doesn’t demonstrate how he solved universal political issues like poverty, famine, and neo-nazis. But as described by the ending cutscene itself, “it was tough, but (he) solved them too”.

Yeah, that… that’s kinda a shallow note to end on, and I otherwise loved everything else about the ending. I don't eve?n di?slike the fact that Evan gets a less bittersweet ending, the dude already lost as much family as Oliver did. Which brings me to the main reason the sequel hit me less hard, less interesting resolutions for more hyped up conflicts.

I don’t expect a Studio Ghibli-styled JRPG to provide political commentary on par with Hideo Kojima’s tactical stealth espionage thrillers, but most of Revenant Kingdom’s chapters focus on conflicts parallel to concerns in our current international political climate. I would ?think a plot that focuses on how people suffer under topical issues would also show how these problems come to be, or what Evan can do to solve them that others can’t or won’t, or something a bit more meaningful. They chose not to do this for the most part, which is why the aforementioned ending feels a bit hollow, but I can let that slide for the kingdom arcs if we instead get gratifying resolutions to them. The first half of them don't feel satisfying either.

Doloran's corrupting magic is clearly some parallel to Shadar's brokenhearted curses, but the specifics make it a much less interesting plot device. Whereas healing a broken heart required Oliver's emp?athy, saving Doloran's victims just requires the traditional anime solution of  “give the victim the CliffsNotes of their own memories”. Brokenhearted victims are either stuck zoning out or are stuck trying to solve their problems without an essential personality trait. These leaders act like apathetic antagonists that you can only forgive because they magically cannot be held accountable for their own actions. I felt much more disengaged from their plights than, say, the aforementioned incident with Myrtle's family and their parallel counterparts.

At least, that’s how I felt during the Goldpaw arc, because it was only revealed after the fact that their king was acting not of his own accord or that Doloran even existed. That made its resolution feel the cheapest. Every subsequent kingdom arc added another little kink that made their redemption feel a little bit more earned than the last. Remember Broadleaf? Their CEO gets brought back to his senses in part by memories of how hard he overworked himself for the sake of his workers. Revealing these memories before confronting h?im makes him a more empathetic temporary antagonist, and a more gratifying ally to redeem.

In fact, once we return to Ding Dong Dell, it’s revealed that Mausinger himself has been immune to Doloran's magic. Instead, his corrupted chancellor has been preying upon the rat king's fears for his own profit. It’s a twist that makes Mausinger all the more responsible for his contemptible actions by making him a figurative puppet rather than a literal one. This arc’s resolution cannot be handwaved away as easily as “he wasn’t himself”, and while I'll keep mum on the other reasons I loved it, forcing the rat king to confront that fact makes this my favorite? emot??ional climax of the story.

I’ve spent most of this time talking about how the heroes interact with other characters because that’s what stuck out most t??????????????????????????o me from my time with both games. Truth be told, I don’t have as much to say about how their heroes interact with each other. I never got a sense that a party member was essential to ongoing events after their introductory quest in either game. Said introductory quests were great and convinced me I would be happy to keep them along for the ride, and I was! But I expected them to be more involved than just “along for the ride”.

I actually felt that Revenant Kingdom’s Evan and Roland have the most significant dynamic between both parties because they have a constantly developing student-and-teacher relationship. Everyone else has great moments, such as Ev?an and Tani pretending to get married because they need to get thrown into prison (Wait, what?). But most of those moments, as enjoyable as they are, don’t have any greater relevance beyond their self-contain?ed shenanigans.

The main ??difference I noticed is that Oliver has more heart-to-hearts with his companions. He develops a closer camar?aderie with them as he leans on them to cope with the loss of his mother. I never minded his companions mattering less to the overarching plot because their shared friendship felt like an important part of Oliver's growth.

Evan is never seen opening up with anyone other than Roland unless he’s addressing his people as a whole, and even then it feels like some crucial bits are missing. For instance, while rallying his forces, Evan mentions how he previously wanted revenge for Aranella’s death but has since decided otherwise. I never got the sense that Evan ever had the s??lightest interest in killing Mausinger before this point; he seemed more interested in avoiding that conflict. Other party members are also implied to have some backstory elements that never get brought up outside of in-game biography entries. I had the impression some interpersonal dialogue was left out, which is a part of why the sequel’s writing feels lacking.

I’d like to emphasize that I don’t think any less of Revenant Kingdom because it’s less down-to-earth than its predecessor. On the contrary, once I saw the president packing heat against knights and mages with backup from the ninja-like Aranella, I got excited for more bombastic and anachronistic action. Those shenanigans are put back on hold until we arrive at Broadleaf. That misplaced expectation ??may have also dented my interest in earlier scenes. Point being, I love it when a sequel breaks away from established series convent??ions to tell a different kind of story.

King Evan may be a less relatable protagonist than Oliver, but he goes through a broadly similar arc in his quest to accept his nanny’s death and handle the responsibility prematurely forced onto him. He still befriends every monarch and CEO he confronts by coming to understand their problems and acting in their shared interests. Evan’s party just doesn’t do so in an impactful way until after the midway point of his journey, at which point a lesser impression has already long set in. Oliver's party keeps getting hit with solid emotional gut punches from beginning to end, so Wrath of the White Witch wins for consistency.

The lack of character focus is something that both of Revenant Kingdom's paid DLC packs address, with many backstory-centric side stories for both party members and NPCs. I’ve yet to play the first pack and the second is only coming out today, and this may or may not quench my t?hirst for interpersonal dialogue, but I'm intrigued all the same. Both DLC packs also seem to focus on antagonists that resemble mysterious magical threats more than the main story’s politics o?f the week. For instance, the new DLC promises plenty of Nightmares to fight. Huh. Didn’t I write that word somewhere else on this page? Something to do with broken arteries…?

Anyway, I’m expecting the Tale of the Timeless Tome to take more a more personal tone like the first game, combined with the second game’s quirkier cast. As someone who walked away loving the sum of Revenant Kingdom’s parts and wanting more, I’m very curious to ??see how the tome’s pages hold?? up.

The post Ni No Kuni II’s storytelling doesn’t stick the landing appeared first on Destructoid.

I wanna be the very best knight of Ratatosk... oh wait. I'm the only knight of Ratatosk. Where's my printable certificate?

CJ’s review of The Liar Princess and the Blind Prince fas??cinated me bec??ause despite loving it, he found it to be an average game. Experiences like that speak volumes about what we look for most in games because they allow us to identify our ideals in a pile of faults. It inspired me to ask myself whether I love any games that are truly average, mediocre, or unremarkable.

Then I rediscovered my dusty copy of Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. If you remember Carter’s review of Tales of Symphonia Chronicles (which includes a remaster of this game), he couldn’t recommend Dawn over Tales of Symphonia in any way. But Dawn’s original Wii release was my intro to the Tales series, and it’s a game I respected a ton on its own merits. And oddly, many of the design choices that make it ??a lacking game are related to what drew me into it.

For the uninitiated, Dawn of the New World is a direct sequel to the legendary Gamecube title Tales of Symphonia. It introduces a new protagonist in Emil Castagnier, and most Symphonia fan?s cite him as one of their biggest problems with this game. To sum up his personality, he’s a cowardly young man who only fights by forming a pact with the lo?rd of monsters, Ratatosk, that temporarily makes him brash and aggressive. It’s an interesting gimmick for a protagonist, but the plot takes a while to do anything particularly intriguing with it, so for much of the story he’s a timid coward with a generally predictable character arc.

This is rarely an enticing trait for a protagonist, and for the most part, it also leaves a bad first impression. Emil’s motivation to defy his cowardice is a more unique twist as he seeks to confront Symphonia’s previous protagonist, Lloyd Irving, for supposedly decimating the town of ??Palmacosta. But this plot thread is more interesting in its concept than its execution, as it doesn’t develop int??o anything as intriguing than it sounds like.

He’s accompanied by female lead Marta, who develops a crush on him right away and… huh. I… don’t remember any of Marta’s actual personality traits. I only recall that she falls for Emil before he earns the right to have a love interest. That…that’s a pretty bad sign for the character with second?? billing. A quick Google search reminds me that she’s a stubborn tomboy, and I now remember how that personality would make her a catalyst to Emil’s gradual manning-up. But this trait never stuck out to me or else I wouldn’t have had to Google her wiki entry. And I normally like tomboys.

Exacerbating their issues is that Emil and Marta are the only consistent party members. All of the main characters from Symphonia are playable in battle, but they’re rotating guest party members who can’t change equipment or level up. To fill his permanent party slots, Emil can instead recruit monsters like Pokémon, Shin Megami Tensei, or your monster-collecting RPG of choice. That’s a huge step backward for anyone who wanted to play this game to get more out of Symphonia’s?? characters, which is one of the most beloved aspects of that game.

I would say this is better for monster collecting enthusiasts, but actually catching monsters here is a mess. To simplify it as much as possible, you can only recruit a monster after defeating it if the battlefield is “attuned” to any single element strongly enough. This requires spamming spells and attacks of that element while avoiding any other ones. Your AI allies a?nd enemies can disrupt this by casting their own abilities, making this already tedious process much less reliable. Oh, and you still have only a random chance of getting the monster you want after this. Even in my early teens, I knew this process was more annoying than it ever should have been.

Yet after getting that process over with, I was excited to fight alongside my new monsters. That's why I was excited to get this game. I already loved catching Pokémon, and Kingdom Hearts enamored me with action RPGs. But Dawn blended together these subgenres together in a way I never expected, and it tau?ght me to recognize some of my favorite RPG tropes.

I’m a big fan of supposedly weak and generic monsters turning a new leaf and growing in strength alongside the main cast members. It’s a combination of the underdog and heel-face-turn tropes that gets me excited, and it helps that I always fantasize about playing w??ith exotic, cute, and/or ferocious critters in games. While Dawn’s monsters only fight as AI party members, you?? can support their growth in various ways you can’t with humans such as feeding them, teaching them new spells and evolving them.

This enables a weird, asymmetrical dynamic between the main human cast and monster companions, and that asymmetry between my own party members fascinated me. It still fascinates me in many better RPGs like Dragon Quest V and the Shin Megami Tensei series because I find it a thrilling thematic prospect to join the front line instead of making your collectible critters do all the work themselves. Dawn’s monster system is still flawed, and it seems to exist for no reason other than to enabl??e a plot that constantly splits Emil from other party members, but it appealed to many of my sweet spots in gaming before I even understood them myself.

I was also okay with Emil being one of the only regular cast members because I was okay with Emil's character. If I hadn’t played Dawn until to??day, I probably would have found him just as unlikable of a protagonist as most do. But back then, I identified myself with Emil’s cowar??dice, and I empathized with him in a somewhat personal way.

I had no experience with heroes supposedly massacring my hometown, but I shared his generally timid nature and hesitance to shake up his status quo. Seeing him constantly stumble to muster his coura?ge never frustrated me because it constantly challenged me to reflect upon myself. He interested me because he was the kind of character I needed to see at the time.

Frankly, he's not how I matured?????????????????????????? as much as I have today, and this doesn’t excuse him from poor writing. Also, I still have nothing positive t??o say about Marta outside of completely superficial statements like “She's got a kinda cool fighting style.” But Emil sewed the seeds that would eventually allow me to grow up a bit. That was an important step for me to take.

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World has plenty of faults against its older brother, including several lesser issues I've not even touched here, but I loved it because it tried several ideas that meant a lot to me. If it weren't for several baffling design decisions, those ideas could stand much taller instead of sitting in Symphonia's shadow. Saying “this ??game helped me grow up a bit” still ignores whether it’s even an objectively well written coming-of-age story or not. But it takes subjective reasons ??to say I love an objectively mediocre game.

The post Tales of Symphonia: ??Dawn of the? New World is mediocre, but I love it appeared first on Destructoid.

I'm not sure whether I'm disappointed or relieved that Darth Vader isn't a superboss

Before we start, I want to make it clear right out of the gate this post discusses various plot elements from Kingdom Hearts III. Specifically, the Disney arcs. Since a part of this involves inferring the relevance these have on later events, let’s add a general spoiler warning just to be safe.

One of the most exciting things about a new Kingdom Hearts game is seeing how the new Disney worlds interact with our spiky-haired, anime protagonist. It’s a bizarre but fun contrast to see Disney characters roped up in shonen action, and it's part of how this series has shaped my interests from "western cartoon junkie" to "anime game junkie." While they largely remain filler, many of KHIII's worlds experiment with new scenarios that reflect the main plot’s themes and elements. As such, I fou??nd most of these crossovers to be a?? leg up from previous games!

To clarify which ones made the biggest strides forward and how they did so, I want to rank each of them. More specifically, by how they are integrated and adapted into Kingdom Hearts III as story beats and gameplay levels.

#8 -- Arendelle

Unfortunately, this one is a contender for worst Kingdom Hearts world of all time. Not only does Arendelle amount to barely anything more than an abridged retelling of Frozen’s plot, but it’s also a bad retelling. Sora and company barely get to do anything with the cast other than introduce themselves and play hide-and-seek with Olaf. It’s quite frustrating to feel like you’re constantly in reach of Sora actually being a part of this world only for Larxene or the snow golem to repeatedly rob y?ou of that opportunity.

The only interesting part of this world is when you recruit said snow golem into your party. And to be fair, it’s actually pretty cool to have a giant boss monster fight alongside you, I would have loved that bit if the rest of this world met my moderate expectations. But given how rarely Sora teams up with magic users from other worlds, I was looking forward to combatting alongside Elsa too. The fact she never joined me in battle is one of this world's many missed opportunities. Sora never even learns anything about Hans before fighting his Heartless, not even his name or what he did to be a villain. The cutscenes here are a waste of time for everyone except people who really wanted to watch Frozen again, and even they don’t hav??e much to enjoy here.

#7 -- Kingdom of Corona

Much like Arendelle, Corona is a retelling of Tangled that doesn’t add anything to the main plot and is probably just here because Disney said so. But Corona is a big step up from Arendelle by virtue of the fact Sora and company actually spend time with the main characters and stay involved through…some of this retelling. There’s even a handful of optional micro-quests that help cement the party’s camaraderie, roping me further into the movie's own arc. I can only assume Disney’??s executive meddling prevented Square from taking creative liberty with these two worlds. But at least Corona better showcases the appeal of its source material, and as such, it becomes an entertaining romp of a filler episode.

#6 -- 100 Acre Wood

In a ??way, this incarnation of the 100 Acre Wood didn’t entice me as much as the previous ones. There’s only one minigame this time around, it’s an extremely short episode, and the plot is much less intriguing than previous shenanigans with Pooh. And yet, there are no low points either. It’s a simple but wholesome break from ludicrous anime nonsense with no strings attached. We just have a simple but honest story about how friendships can wear away over time and how they can be restored just as easily. Instead of gating itself behind episodic unlocks, Pooh’s cameo here is one self-contained sequence.

This minigame is extremely easy to pick up because it's rooted in traditional Puzzle Bobble gameplay, and Puzzle Bobble ripoffs are so common you're probably alr??eady familiar. But this game adds many more twists to that formula than those ripoffs, such as using your shot to replace multiple items instead of piling up one at a time. This is on top of the three rule variants? that ask you to approach these mechanics in different ways. Most previous entries had one or two stinkers in their minigame collections, but this one is much more polished and deep than those, and I'm happy to revisit it now and again.

#5 -- Olympus

While this world only teaches Sora that EXP grinding in KH amounts to putting more of your heart into fighting, it’s a rational excuse to jump right into the action. The raid on Thebes is a spectacular introduction that flaunts the technology gap between this and previous games, especially contrasting the fiery destruction against the peaceful revisit. Hades’s Titans are more than extravagant enough foes to test Sora’s new verticality and flashy attacks against. This tutorial level doesn’t have much memorable writing beyond some delightful banter with Herc and Hades, but it’s an excellent introduction to what KHIII has above every other game in the series.

#4 -- San Fransokyo

The wide open space of San Fransokyo shakes up the usual KH level design, but it remains easy to navigate. On the Organization plot side, it fits well to use the aftermath of a movie about a healthcare robot turned emotional support buddy to build upon Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded’s spiels on whether data can have a heart. While this motive doesn’t fully come to fruition later, it makes for a tense episode with higher self-contained stakes than most levels in the series. And there’s plenty of fun geeking out between the Big Hero 6 and Keyblade Hero 3 on top of Dark Riku’s cheesy sass from the first KH.

# 3 -- The Caribbean

Yet another retelling of a Disney movie and its teasing of the black box doesn’t even get fully resolved in this game, but the Caribbean comes with two very interesting catches. Firstly, Sora and company get threaded along a fun side qu??est ??by Jack Sparrow himself… except he's actually a clone made by Tia Dalma's crabs? It's a bizarre twist, but it raises a lot of intriguing questions about an already mysterious and mystical character. Second and more importantly, this world is built around a lot of unique gameplay mechanics.

Here Sora commandeers his own pirate ship, which controls tightly and intuitively despite feeling appropriately weighty too. It even gets special maneuvers to make naval warfare fast and over-the-top like the normal combat. Underwater combat like in KH1 returns, but now Sora can seamlessly transition from land to sea. His underwater controls are more fluid and fast than ever before??, and his attacks and spells radically change to fit this wide 3D space. Both of these mechanics open up the possibilities of exploring the vast open sea, where treasure chests are usually grouped together in troves instead of scattered all over the beaten path. This makes exploration extremely rewarding, as it should be in a pirate-themed world.

While these radical control changes are overwhelming at first, I quickly adjusted to them and found them a thrilling change of pace. These gimmicks don't overstay their welcome, but they're refreshing to revisit again and again. More than any other world, the Caribbean’s gameplay goes above and beyond to make Sora live the pirate’s life fo??r himself.

#2 -- Toy Box

The Toy Box is a curiosity among KH levels in that it challenges our understanding of the original movie's logic: Why are toys alive in this world, but only some of them? As the Organization plots to solve this question, we get some rare conflict and skepticism between Sora and his temporary party members. Yet it fits so well for the themes of testing friendships that drives so much of this franchise’s main story, and it’s one of the few worlds in this game that sets up overarching plot threads to be answered later. Topping it all off with a del??ightful set of playable mechs and Woody calling out Young Xehanort’s melodramatic speech makes this one of the most fun worlds in the franchis??e's history.

As a fun aside, we also have confirmation that Square Enix is a real entity in the Toy Story universe. Does this mean that Rex has played Dissidia NT? Or NieR Automata? Or Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days?

#1 -- Monstropolis

Quite frankly, all I needed to see from this one was an anime protagonist turned into a Monsters Inc. character with an adorable cat face and spiky hair-fins. The wide variety of obstacles and environmental interactions on your thrill ride through the factory helps too. But Monstropolis takes the cake for fitting a KH subplot as naturally as a glove. After all, this is a world that uses the screams/laughter o??f children as electricity. It makes so much sense that it would attract an enemy that literally thrives off of dark thoughts and emotions!

The ending of this world is somehow equal parts Pixar slapstick and Square Enix melodrama, and it blends together into one of the most delightful and memorable scenes in the entirety of KHIII. It re-introduces the Ventus and Vanitas plot and moves it a bit forward without dawdling. Sully and Mike play a proactive role here instead just letting Sora and company deal with the cryptic anime antagonist themselves. This is the kind of Dis??ne??y world climax I always wanted to see from these games.

One of Kingdom Hearts’ biggest strengths as a franchise is it’s such a bizarre crossover that it appeals to all sorts of audiences. By extension, those diverse audiences each look for something different ou??t of its worlds.

That makes me really curious to see what people who view Kingdom Hearts through a different lens have to say. To everyone who finished KHIII, which were your favorite worlds and why?

The post Kingdom Hearts III’s Disney worlds, ranked appeared first on Destructoid.

Nobody is immune to burn out. Not even fire-breathing lizards.

It says a lot about the weary nature of gacha games that I’ve stepped back on my relatively idealistic outlook towards them in such little time. I was already wary of them even&n??bsp;while trying to remain relatively optimistic, and though I still enjoy what I previously said I enjoyed about them, that wariness has grown much more.

Back in late 2018, I considered Dragalia Lost one of the best mobile games I’ve ever played. It had high production values, it scratched my hack-and-slash itch, the cast won me over, and the developers constantly delivered patches in direct response to player feedback. The one major gripe I had at launch was the poorly skewed gacha rates, and even that did relatively little to damage my interest when I became a big fan of most of its common-rarity characters. I held it in much higher regard than CJ did in his review because to me, it felt like a great game that ??kept getting better.

Now I only pop in once in a w?eek or so to collect a login bonus and immediately log off. I still feel there is a good game there, one that’s especially worth playing with friends. But almost every time I suggest pals give it a shot, I add, “Just be careful not to play too much during events.” I say this because I don’t want them to get burnt out through grinding the same way I did. This grindy phenomenon isn't new to the mobile game space, but I want to cast some more light on this issue through a game I used to be much more enthusiastic about.

Like most free-to-play mobile games, Dragalia Lost uses limited-time events to keep players interested. These events usually last about 11 days ea?ch. I have no problem against this principle by itself, but the issue comes from how redundant an event's progression plays in practice.

Also like most mobile games, Dragalia gates exclusive party members, power-ups, and resources behind these events. Getting this loot requires hours of grinding. Dragalia almost constantly hosts these events, usually starting one less than a week after the last. ??Thus, if you don’t constantly commit to the grind, you’ll miss out on something exclusive, or at least you'll have to wait until the next event. While you don’t need all of them to beat every fight, the sheer notion of missing exclusive stuff is nagging enough to spur many players to grind for them whether they'll enjoy it or?? not.

I enjoy grindy games, but one of the reasons why I enjoy them is because I find level grinding a great way to wind down. If that grind is limited to a short time frame, that quality doesn’t apply because I'm tense about whether I'll finish on time. Instead of only using my spare time, I might have to shelve other plans or desires to achieve everything. Condensing that playtime also expedites the feeling of boredom from repetitive ta??sks. Instead of using the grind as a temporary escape, I start wanting an escape fr??om the grind itself.

Exacerbating this problem even further is the lack of variety during event grinds. There are two types of events with different rules, but they can be simplifie??d to one general feedback loop. First, you go through a short story arc with dungeon-crawling stages like the story mode, followed by the main boss battle. After reaching a cliffhanger that gets resolved at the event's end, you collect loot by bashing that boss at one of three difficulties. And… that’s pretty much it.

There’s a bit more to it than that depending on the event type. For example, raid events technically have two bosses: one generic normal boss and one unique raid boss. But getting endgame-level rewards effectively requires fighting the same boss(/es) dozens of times. It’s extremely repetitive for only a week o??r two of playing.

As a specific example, let’s look at the latest raid event’s requirements to max ou??t on Twinkling Sand. This item appears in every limited event, but it's a crafting ingredient for all of the strongest weapons and it’s not available anywhere else. Thus, this acts as our best reference to how much grinding you nee?d to do to continue making power progress after some threshold.

We’ll be generous and estimate that fighting an Expert level raid boss takes 4 minutes on average, including loading screens and matchmaking with teammates. I’ll spare you the number crunching, but I estimate that it would take 85 Expert raid battles to get all of an event's Twinkling Sand. That adds up to 340 minutes or five to six hours, assuming you don't take breaks. Technically you can get most of an event's sands in half that time, but since you need so many of them anyway, the sunk-cost fallacy tempts you to go all-in from there. Even spreading this over the whole event’s runtime, the ennui of fighting one short boss fight that many times settles in long before the grind is over.

All of that is after each event’s lengthy story prologue, which can take an hour by itself if you don’t rush the cutscenes. But one of my favorite things about Dragalia Lost is that the writing has a lot of interesting scenarios and characters. These stories are some of the things I look forward to most in every event. And they all play out before the grind-fest begins, so I don't have to wade through hours of repetitive fights to enjoy them. I didn't rush these as that would be counter-intuitive to why I kept playing Dragalia in the first place.

I would much prefer it if these events would take less time, or at least if their grinds would offer more variety. These lengthy and repetitive grinding requirements don’t provide any tangible benefit to anyone except for Dragalia’s most dedicated players, and even they aren't necessarily getting the best deal out of this system. Gating ultimate upgrade necessities like this means that getting those upgrades is based largely ??on how much you can play in short bursts. It doesn’t reward the players who dedicate themselves most to the game overall, just those who bing?e more at the right time.

That sews unhealthy habits if not done in moderation, and almost constantly hosting events isn’t moderate at all. I even consider conventional mobile game stamina limits a blessing because they put a stop gap on unhealthy binge-grinding, but Cygames keeps giving players loads of stamina refilling items because players keep asking for them. I don’t blame them, either. Hard limits on how much you can play a game you like feel crappy, and generally, alleviating those limits is a good thing. But these limits still helped me recognize that I wanted an escape from the grind because a part of me felt relieved every time they held me back. If I like that a game stops me from playing it, that should raise a huge red flag.

So now I'm avoiding that grind altogether. I don’t even consider Dragalia Lost a bad game per se. I want to play it some more because its strengths, such as its characters and hacky-slashy-ness, outweighed its flaws when I played responsibly. But if I’m compelled to warn everyone against playing it too much like I’m doing in this article, that can only mean that its positive qualities don’t last as long as its negative qualities during these events. I have better uses for my week than smacking the same boss 80 times, and while I never had to do that to enjoy Dragalia, I want to d?istance myself fro??m any temptation of doing that again.

The post Dragalia Lost’s limited-time events burned me out hard appeared first on Destructoid.

Wait... what IS Indivisible...?

Role-playing games are one of the most flexible genres because unlike shooters or platformers or sports games, they are less identified by what the player does and more by how the player does it. RPG elements have become commonplace in dozens of non-RPG franchises, but to classify the genre we use pretty much one rule: “You play as a character (or a party of characters) who gains ‘experience’ that raises their level and stats by doing normal gameplay, and these stats affect most of that gameplay.” Even RPGs tha????t intentionally subvert this convention still follow it to a lesser extent. Eve?rything else is tentative, including what kind of gameplay the user plays with.

Traditionally, RPGs use turn-based gameplay to emulate the tabletop nature of the games that inspired them. But even as far back as Link’s Adventure on th??e NES, games have challenged the notion that these ?character progression and stat-based mechanics need to follow a turn-based structure. Real-time action RPGs have continued to grow more prominent relative to their turn-based counterparts.

So on a curious whim, I asked which of those tw??o styles the jbsgame.community prefers in a Quickpost. Most replies sat on a situational “i?t depends” or otherwise expressed a lack of strong preference, which I should have expected as I don’t believe either is objectively better than the ??other. But out of the fraction of replies that leaned one way or the other, most preferred turn-based. As someone who leans towards action RPGs myself, that piqued my curiosity to dive deeper into the differences between them.

While I enjoy both styles, I have more interest in action RPGs largely because I prefer impulsive and reflex-based gameplay. I get antsy when I’m forced to do nothing, such as when I’m bouncing through the Mushroom Kingdom and I miss a platform that takes 20 seconds to rotate back. That has never ruled out turn-based gameplay for me, but it does mean I have less interest in games where I feel like I'm constantly waiti??ng to repeatedly do the same thing. It feels more engaging to constantly evaluate the positions and animations?? of my enemies alongside the status of my party to react appropriately.

Turn-based strategy is only a small aspect of most of my favorite turn-based RPGs. Mario RPGs taught me? to chan??ge up my strategies to the enemies I fought, but I had little incentive to think ahead. I grew up on Pokémon games t??hinking that power grinding was more rewarding than ??trying to outsmart equal-level foes. Dragon Quest V has a special place in my heart for its writing, but I almost never used most of my party’s spells and abilities. I’m usually able to apply the same few strategies to most battles in these games, so I don’t feel as if making new strategies is worth the effort. By extension, I find turn-based systems less fun, challenging, and rewarding than battle systems based on t??hinking, acting, and reacting ??on the fly.

But that's just my perspective, and as I said at the top of the article, I posted this question to the jbsgame.community through a Quickpost. Right away, several of our most prominent members, including DeScruff, Samhain, Dr Mel, and absolutfreak, responded with varying levels of favoritism for turn-based games and a common complaint about why they dislike action games with multiple party members. In DeScruff's words, "I prefer turn based, but action can?? b?e fun at times. Unless there are other party members... Then it almost HAS to be turn-based, and I have to be able to control them. I hate nothing more than suicidal AI, or AI that always ge??ts in your way. Evil Wizard is about to thro??w big giant F-You fireball? You can count on the AI will find the nearest door and stan??d right there. 'What's that you need help? Na I'm j??ust run around in circles, my Fitbit wants?? me to do 10,000 steps a day.' 'You need to sneak past the guards and not kill them? Is that where you make a bu??nch of noise and char?ge at somebody 50 yards away?'"

I've never had AI encounters remotely as bad as those, so I can't empathize with the exact sentiment, but I am familiar with the general problem. Tech?nically, turn-based RPGs also have a history of making players rely on AI for party members, but today pretty much every turn-based game lets you manually control everyone for good reason. We’ve all watched the warrior repeatedly smack the fire-absorbing monster with his fire-imbued weapon. We’ve all had Donald heal us immediately after we cast Cure on ourselves. AI just rarely keeps up with the human-decision making processes that drive real-time games.

Despite wanting improved AI myself, that complaint has no effect on my preferences because my efficiency in combat relies mostly on my own performance, as I would expect in action gameplay. While all games should iron out the problems above, I think it’s best to balance an action-based game as if the player should be the most competent one in the party. Emphasizing action would be pointless if allies could automatically win the battle (or nearly win) without an active player. Though as a side note, absolutfreak mentioned wanting a return of Final Fantasy XII’s gambits, and that would be ?a great sys??tem to make AI more reliable while still requiring time and effort to master it.

Yet, that was one of the two common explanations in favor of turn-based gameplay. The other is that turn-based combat does more to stimulate and challenge the brain. Another community member, Boxman, stated that many action RPGs are chaotic to the point where you can't do much other than hack and slash, writing, "Most action RPGs for me feel like a bunch of random nonsense is happening and it's hard to keep track of every?thing that's going on." Dr. Mel preferred to think of RPG combat like a puzzle, or as user Perro summarized, "I like strategizing my attacks more than button mashing." Oddly, this also helped me realize why I don’t share that preference for turn-based gameplay. And it's not because I dislike thinking. I think.

It doesn’t surprise me that gameplay revolving around a metric ton of math feels more at home in a system that involves the brain more than the fingers. Some of us even explicitly enjoy action games more without RPG elements, as FakePlasticTree shared. "I like my action games to not have RPG mechanics (eyeing the new God of War) with a few exceptions like the Souls games. I love Atlus RPGs so turn based it is."

I believe that RPG ele?ments can make for a great addition to the right action formula, it's just that statistical elements themselves are difficult to bring to their own potential in a system prioritizing dexterous gameplay. Rather, the number-crunching and resource managing elements of most RPGs is a more natural fit for gameplay that revolves around strategic planning and tactical foresight, much like the tabletop systems they were first derived from.

What did surprise me is that as I've already described, most turn-based RPGs I’ve played don’t reflect that. I basically button mashed my way through menus to win most turn-based fights, and button mashing is at its least interesting in menu navigation. Though, I have experienced one exception more in line with what most turn-based aficionados celebrate. In fact, I already praised Cosmic Star Heroine for this very reason, so I’ll elaborate here.

Cosmic Star Heroine is designed so that it’s impossible to repeat encounters unless you go out of your way to do so through menus, thus it’s much easier to avoid unintentionally (or intentional?ly) over-leveling yourself. This means I more often relied on improving my strategies to overcome harder battles. And thanks to its plethora of simple mechanics, making strategies in this system is easy to learn but hard to master.

Each character has their own “Hyper Mode” rhythm that gives them a huge buff on certain turns, so maybe I should save my strongest attack for that. But I deal more damage as I gain Style from using abilities and my abilities go on cooldown until I defend for a turn, so maybe I can put off my heaviest attack for my second Hyper or spam Style buffs from other party members. But enemies inflicted with the defense down?? debuff will shake it off after a single hit, so maybe I ought to use a shield breaker on the turn immediately before that second Hyper. But maybe Z’Xorv is down to 3 HP a few turns into the fight and nobody but Dave can heal him, so maybe I should ignore that shield breaker to save his life instead. But most enemies also deal more damage as they gain Style, so maybe I should just deck the boss's lackey in the face before it mauls mine off.

My point being, this system made multi-turn ??????????????????????????strategizing satisfying and involving, unlike any other turn-based RPG I’ve played. It even kept me busy during enemy turns because I constantly paid attention to how their actions would alter my plans. So I definitely understand and empathize with the appeal of a strategic battle system! But most of my favorite turn-based RPGs don’t instill a remotely similar feeling in me. Thus, my preference for action games could also be attributed to the fact that my extensive experiences in turn-based games rarely showed me their full potential. Maybe I just have a habit of grinding too much to have an incentive ?to strat??egize. Or maybe more RPGs need to go out of their way to make level grinding less prominent.

Grinding is effectively impossible in the tabletop RPGs that inspired them, whereas it’s normalized in video games. I might be on a weird tangent, but a player’s stats relative to their enemies has a big impact on how much they need to strategize and plan to overcome any disadvantages they might have. This means that the appeal of turn-based s?trategy largely hinges on whether or not a player sits a power level that requires effort to strategize. I theorize that if more RPG designers limit the player's ability to grow outside of the DM's intended difficulty curve, more players would find more reasons to appreciate turn-based combat. I'm not sure whether I would want that to become the new universal norm for RPG design, but I believe it would go a long way in making the true strengths of turn-based design shine.

Either way, I?? am only one person speaking in favor of action RPGs. Likewise, the??se comments speaking in favor of turn-based ones represent a tiny fraction of our community. So I’d like to propose the same question to all of you. Which kind of RPG do you prefer and why?

The post Do you prefer turn-based RPGs or action RPGs? appeared first on Destructoid.

You know, Saki didn't return as an Assist Trophy in Smash Ultimate...

Sin and Punishment is one of the strangest cases in the history of the Wii's Virtual Console. This Treasure Co. project was a Japanese-only Nintendo 64 game set in Japan with Japanese protagonists voice acted entir??ely in English. It was only after the advent of WiiWare that it saw a proper English release, complete with translated menus.

But digital distribution is a double-edged sword. With the impending death of WiiWare on the horizon, Sin and Punishment has begun to fall back out of reach. It remains available via the Wii U’s eShop, but given that the Switch has no Virtual Console in sight as?? of Nintendo's cur?rent plans and it's only a matter of time until the Wii U eShop suffers the same fate as WiiWare, it probably won't be available forever. Which is a shame, because it's one of the most ambitious rail shooters around and my favorit?e game to come out of the Wii Shop Channel.

Each level of this N64 shooter is spliced up with voice-acted scenes that develop Saki’s war against the mutant Ruffians and oppressive Armed Volunteers. My understanding of his comrades, Airan and Achi, constantly changed with new information and developments. For being so short, these scenes arguably take up about 25% of a full playthrough, though they always move along at a brisk pace. It's basically the plot of a 13-episode anime condensed into a ?2-hour game. More specifically, the kind?? of anime whose plot takes many weird turns with every major plot twist. Like the kind of plot twists I'm going to share below!

To be fair, by the time Saki fought an Armed Volunteer captain who attacked by teleporting her own soldiers and throwing them as projectiles, I knew I was in for a weird ride. I did not know that said captain would transform into a skyscraping Ruffian, prompting Saki to do the same as the proceeding boss battle bathes Tokyo in a sea their own blood (quick aside, it’s very bold and progressive for an early 2000s game to feature a kaiju protagonist). One arc later the whole plot is revealed to be a ploy by Achi, who wants to train Saki to be a weapon against her true enemies whom we never see in this game, which naturally leads to her usurping the role of the main antagonist. Oh, and the final boss is a fake Earth that you have to des?troy while protecting the real Earth’s HP bar. Yeah, this plot escalates stupidly quickly. I love it. Did I mention that Saki gains control of his Ruffian form thanks to the power of love? Because that happens too.

This story rapid-fires so much information it's hard to follow everything in a single playthrough. I consider that a part of its charm, though that may arguably be due to the fact that I've replayed it several times and actually know what's going on in each cutscene. At any rate, condensing the plot to fit the pace of the game is a better alternative to dragging out the short playtime with lengthy ?exposition dumps. This way, cutscenes act as breathers from the high-octane gameplay rather than grind ?that adrenaline rush to a halt.

Sin and Punishment has a simple but surprisingly deep control scheme for a 3D shmup. In addition to aiming, running, and shooting, you can jump, toggle aiming types, dodge roll, and use melee attacks. Saki's context-sensitive sword strikes are extremely intuitive as they'll occur automatically while you keep rapid firing against close-range threats. Yet despite ??the simplicity of this move set, it’s ??hard to master thanks to the plethora of creative bosses that interact with these abilities and their environments.

Every stage is full of encounters that bring new gimmicks and challenges, but they all build upon one’s understanding of the core mechanics in an easily understood way (okay, with one exception of a rapidly regenerating jerk). One early boss is resilient to shots but is vulnerable to falling off the stage, as hinted in the cutscene before it. Another scampers around in a circular arena filled with obstacles, requir??ing you to outsmart its movements to line up your shots. Yet another is most vulnerable to its own projectiles, which you’ve probably accidentally learned you can reflect with your sword just by attacking normally. These fights feel so intuitive yet diverse that it feels as if you’re const?antly learning new tricks, constantly making the gameplay feel fresh.

Adding this learni?n??g curve with various difficulty options and the freedom to practice any single stage from the main menu makes Sin and Punishment one of my favorite score a??ttack games of all time. There’s so much unique nuance to each encounter that I always feel there’s room to develop better strategies, and by extension, room to rack up higher scores.

Sin and Punishment is one of the most delightfully unique games I’ve ever played. It embodies a niche of older game design that was ambitious enough to garner a cult following not unlike a certain other Nintendo game. The difference is this game finally saw the light of an Engl?ish release. ?And that light is fading.

Digital-only games can only circulate as long as their storefronts exist. Should those storefronts not account for their hardware's inevitable phasing out, they'll eventually lose the accessibility they offer. When their stores go down, digital-only games instantly become impossible to play without tracking down a console that already has it. That is f??ar more ?expensive and cumbersome than finding a single copy of an old game.

I don’t resent Nintendo releasing one of my favorite games only through digital distribution, as otherwise, I would never have even played it. But I am disappointed that their Virtual Console policies keep pedaling backward and expedite the shop’s intrinsic ??flaws. The fact that I cannot freely re-download the Wii U releases of the exact same WiiWare titles or vice versa makes keeping my collection secure unnecessarily more costly than it is on storefronts with cross-buy support.

Nintendo announced that they aren't bringing the Virtual Console to Switch because they already have several other ways of selling classic games on it, but all of those methods lack many previous Virtual Console releases. What most collectors and consumers want is a single, reliable platform that will host an entire catalog of classic Nintendo games, not a bunch of incomplete platforms. And comparing Wii and Wii U Virtual Console titles alone, all of the Switch's classic game options combined are incomplete because they are missing so many games that have not been delisted from the others. Even the Wii U only saw a gradual trickle of older WiiWare releases, a fraction of them at that. If the Switch continues on its current trajectory, we have no reason to assume Sin and Punishment will?? ever come to the Switch, or even any of Nintendo's more popular N64 rel?eases.

An online storefront itself has little say in ??how long its games remain availab??le. But at least others preserve most of their libraries for longer than their hardware's shelf life. If Sin and Punishment were a PS1 game that ??otherwise had the same localization woes, I wouldn’t fear for?? its future as I do right now.

Sin and Punishment is a fine example of why Nintendo should adopt better digital distribution policies…or better online policies in general, really. It’s unrealistically idealistic to hope for a future where all games will be perfectly preserved forever before they pass into public domain next century or so, but Nintendo is…Nintendo. They&r??squo;re known for producing and publishing many of the most beloved games ever made. Their history with consumer unfriendly online decisions doesn't excuse them from being held to the standards of their competitors, if not higher thanks to their monolithic presence in the game industry. It would be a shame if something as great and unique as this game's English release faded out of existence just because Nintendo doesn’t meet the standards set by Sony and Microsoft.

The post With WiiWare going, Sin and Punishment’s English release is on life support appeared first on Destructoid.

Holding the bag

[Update: Bethesda says it is now "finalizing manufacturing plans for replacement canvas bags" for Fallout 76 Power Armor Edition owners. Customers will have until January 31, 2019 to submit a ticket on this support page and will be sent a replacement "as soon as the bags are ready."]

In one of the weirdest controversies of the gaming year, Bethesda came under heavy fire following the launch of their open-world MMO Fallout 76. A lot of this heat was directed at the quality of the game itself - which has left many fans and critics disappointed - but this glumness was only increased by the launch of the Power Armor Edition, which replaced its promised canvas duffel bag with a bog-standard nylon replacement.

As if that wasn't enough, it has since been reported that some decent-looking Fallout 76 bags were indeed produced. These found their way, as free gifts, into the hands of online "influencers" (a bizarre buzzword of the modern era). It must be noted that these bags are not the same bags originally planned for the Power Armor Edition. It's not as if Bethesda ran out of bags because they gave them all away. But handing out neat-looking bags, gratis, to unofficial advertisers, whilst paying customers get a cheap replacement for the one they paid money for, was never going to result in a gre?at look, and has left some fans understandably peeved.

While the whole of Fallout 76's "bag-gate" drama is pretty much a first-world problem, it's not really about the bag itself at all. It's a case of broken faith between paying customer and provider. Fallout 76 has been the subject of a string of controversies in its launch period, from in-game quality, to a supposed class-action lawsuit toward 76 itself, a "deal with it"-style response from a customer service rep (which Bethesda has since apologised for), and the bizarre compensation of a few dollars of in-game currency.

It goes beyond being merely about the material made to produce some bag, and into the realms of the Fallout community feeling a lack of respect earned for their ongoing support, both vocally and financially, of the franchise. Those Power Armor Edition bags likely aren't getting made, but 76's bad press goes beyond that particular issue, and the damage done by Fallout's fallout could weigh ??heavy on Bethesda's should??ers for some time.

Fallout influencers given actual canvas 76 bags [Resetera]

The post (Update) Bag-gate continues as canvas Fallout 76 bags find their way into influencers’ hands appeared first on Destructoid.

Charizard used Earthquake! Charizard used Earthquake! Charizard used...

I’ve grown increasingly exhausted of Pokémon with each generation, despite feeling the games are improving overall. From Gold through Pearl, I had unyielding optimism to "catch ‘em all" and excessively grind my team up for however many or few trainers awaited me in the postgame. Yet, even though I consider Sun and Moon among the best Pokémon games to date, I've b??een too hesitant to actually complete?? my own playthrough.

I had a hard time pinpointing why I felt this way other than age until Pokémon Let’s Go addressed a part of the problem. It replaced battles against wild Pokémon with Go-styled capture encounters. Strangely, I felt a bit relieved that one of this long-running franchise’s main gameplay styles was being downplayed in favor of what many consider a minigame. Even Chris Carter’s review agrees the removal of random battles feels relieving, cutting down on the feeling of grindiness in a beneficial way. It’s a sign that something about Pokémon’s battle system has aged poorly, which is odd given that it remains an enjoyable centerpiece ?of the franchise.

For being one of the most iconic RPGs on the planet, Pokémon uses a battle system that feels extremely different than most others. On its surface, it’s mostly straightforward and traditional, being a turn-based RPG where you only use one of your six party members at a time -- barring occasi?onal exceptions -- alternating turns with your opponent to attack, swap party members, or use an item. Other battle mechanics greatly increase damage relative to max HP as you level up, making one-shot KOs increasingly common as long as players make optimal decisions. Combining the limited action availability with the risk and rewards of offense-heavy gameplay means that every decision you make could drastically shift the battle for or against your favor, which is ideal for exciting reversals and tense comeback stories.

This is a major reason why the competitive Pokémon scene is so popular. High-level play is a battle of planning and mind games, calculating both what an opponent can do and what that opponent will do. It makes for exciting and tense matches about both sides trying to predict each other but never being certain what will actual??ly happen.

But those intrinsic design strengths mostly apply to multiplayer. The same cannot be said for an average single-player Pokémon battle. AI opponents tend to be far more predictable both in the options they have and what decisions they make. Without a human opponent, the tension between move animations instead becomes a waiting game of selecting the same moves over and over while the exact result you expect keeps playing out. Just raising teams to expected levels relies on repeatedly knocking out simple enemies, which becomes more time consuming the more 'mo?ns you're trying to raise, yet no less predictable.

That doesn’t mean single-player Pokémon battles are bad per se, but it does mean they can get overly routine with age. When we were first introduced to this gameplay, it was a brand new idea to toy with so many possibilities in this unfamiliar system against hundreds of wild and NPC Pokémon. Even if we just spammed Earthquake on our fully-evolved starter (I did), we were constantly learning more things to take into account such as the fact that Flying-Types and Levitate users require other? moves. There was just so much data to parse that there was always something new for kids like our previous selves to discover about this system, so it didn’t get old for a while.

Times have evolved, and the internet now allows us to parse entire libraries of information with ease and convenience. The fun social aspect of battling other kids on the playground during the days of Red and Blue is now an onli??ne ph??enomenon that people dedicate years to studying and mastering. And similar to the feeling of constantly discovering new Pokémon and moves in the single player campaign as a GameFAQs-less kid, keeping up to breadth with the metagame’s strategies and planning around them invokes a similar thrill of constant discovery and learning.

But little has changed to evolve the single-player battling along a similarly interesting path, and I worry that this system’s age has begun to show. Now, spamming Earthquake and occasionally Flamethrower feels a lot less interesting because we’ve already learned all we need to know about that strategy two generations ago. Given that these games are designed expecting players to spend dozens, often hundreds of hours in single player training to prepare their teams for multiplayer, this is a huge problem that future generations need to address for the sake of all veteran Pokémon players. Single-player superfans will have a less interesting time sweeping armies of Team ?Rocket grunts with similar teams, while multiplayer maniacs have to play solo for hours anyway just to prepare a te??am for online play.

I probably don’t have to tell you guys this next part, but Let’s Go doesn’t provide a permanent solution. Even if i??t makes for a great spin-off experiment, replacing one gameplay style with a completely unrelated one leaves this awkward feeling of something being missing. Future games should instead revise these battles in some way to make them more refreshing in a normal playthrough.

The caveat here is Pokémon’s sin??gle-player battle system is also its multiplayer ?battle system. Giving the system itself a radical paradigm shift towards single-player-focused design would risk collateral damage against the multiplayer side. Instead, it would be best to address the specific issue of how single-player battles play out so that they can draw upon similar excitement ?as multiplayer battles.

Game Freak has been trying to spice up their random encounters for years, hence their pushing for new wild battle types such as horde battles and SOS battles. To their credit, SOS battles make for many of the most strategically challenging boss battles in the franchise, even more than most trainer bosses, and I consider them at least comparable to the exciting risky-and-rewarding decision making you can get out of a good multiplayer battle. As random encounters, they’re a hearty helping of EXP but otherwise can feel like padding. They're trying to do something about how repetitive and mindless AI battles feel, but they haven't quite nailed it yet. That's probably because they haven't sufficiently addressed the? one common thread between them that isn't shared by multiplayer battles: the AI itself.

Refining trainer and wild Pokémon AI and capabilities can allow them to more closely resemble the risk-and-reward challenges of a human opponent. Actually, Game Freak is already halfway there. Ever since Emerald, sometimes-recurring postgame facilities challenge players in restricted battles against trainers who fight closer to real players than any other AI enemy. They still don&rsqu??o;t entirely solve this problem since they&??rsquo;re limited to postgame battles with temporary level restrictions, but they're onto something.

Applying smarter AI and broader move sets to every wild and trainer battle could finish the job. A difficulty curve that gradually introduces more complex battle strategies in regular encounters can keep things feeling fresh. It's true that its simplicity is a part of how most of us got into Pokémon in the first place, but a difficulty selector (one available from the get-go unlike Gen V's, please) can satisfy both worn-out veterans and youthful newbies. Also, it’d be great if you could finally skip the catching tutorials by playing on a higher difficulty! Or on a??ny difficulty. ??Or ever.

Smarter AI could arm themselves with a broader variety of moves, not unlike Let's Go's Master Trainers. It could recognize a player Pokémon's role by its spe?cies or by observing its behaviors and attempt to counter that role. Smarter AI could also rely on mechanics usually only seen in competitive play and throw veteran players for a loop and make more memorable encounters. Simply put, smarter AI could help players tired of single-player battles have more fun.

One of the big appeals of this franchise is how you constantly work with your Pokémon to overcome increasingly bigger trials. These games emphasize the journey of training because that is at the heart of their themes. By proxy, they will probably remain grindy. And that’s okay, 99% of great RPGs are grindy in some sense, but there's a difference between an enjoyable and rewarding grind versus an exhausting and stagnant one. A grind that does more to challenge and entertain veteran players on their way to the Pokémon League ?would serve the heart and soul of these themes much better.

The post Pokemon’s single-player battles are aging poorly appeared first on Destructoid.

You are here

For some time, I felt that my excitement for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate was much more subdued than usual. With 99.9% of games, I’d see that as a good thing. I’m trying to manage my time and money more prudently, and despite how much I enjoy getting excited for what I anticipate will be a good game, it’s a better practice to avoid riding any hype train recklessly. Yet Smash is one of my favorite series, and a new release usually feels like a celebration that I want to be a part of, especially given I enjoy every new thing I’ve seen out of Ultimate.

Sure, I got excited to see the new characters on the principle of seeing my favorite crazy crossover get even crazier. But for once I was thinking of waiting for a discounted used copy. My intense pre-release hype for Smash for Wii U and 3DS died off shortly after I started playing them, and while I easily got my time and money’s worth out of the titles, my actual experience fell short of my anticipations. They were missing something I loved from Melee and Brawl, but I had a hard time pinpointing what, and even my favorite news out of Ultimate didn't? quite fill that void. Maybe I shou??ld practice some restraint this time.

Then the last Ultimate Direct hit me like a freight train forged from the passion of Plant Boy fanart and I shamelessly leaped aboard the hype at full speed once again. As I previously wrote, I’m not much of an online competitor in fighting games and I consider single player content important to them. I wasn’t hooked on the previous Smash's solo options on either 3DS or Wii U, but among other things, this month has shown off plenty more than I saw in possibly any other Smash game. I’m not excited just because of the sheer volu??me of s??ingle-player gameplay, but also because of how these modes differ from previous offerings.

Of the two modes, the one most single player enthusiasts will jump into first will likely be the adventure mode, which many have anticipated since Brawl. Brawl’s own adventure, the SubSpace Emissary, is hailed as one of the most unique things in any fighting game. This single mode boasted production values similar to a standalone game, and it downplayed traditional brawls (but still featured several of them) in favor of platforming, mook smashing, and dozens of cutscenes. I love SubSpace and I think it’s an objectively great campaign, but to this day, the internet hasn’t come to a common consensus thanks to some of its more controversial moves, such as platforming as heavyweights or writing cutscenes in "Silentprotagonish." The one thing everyone agrees on is that they want an adventure mode of some sort, the detractors often citing the more arcade-like adventure from Melee as something they enjoy much more.

In light of that, it seems fitting that World of Light would downplay SubSpace’s experiments while committing to a similar scale of ambition. In focusing on more Spirit battles and big bosses, it stays closer to the core Smash gameplay (including the occasional climactic boss fight, not unlike Master Hand at the end of a Classic run) while? still offering enough variance to make each step of the journey distinct and memorable. The gorgeous world map, filled with various thematic dungeons of exploration-based challenges and puzzles, heightens the spectacle and sense of adventure.

Sakurai implied there won’t be as much of a story this time, so it’d be rash to expect cutscenes other than the intro we already saw and probably an ending. That should be enough given the intro alone has already done so much that many of us ar??e invested in every character’s simultaneous “death,” despite the foregone conclusion that Kirby’s gonna rescue them all because he’s a good boy. I saw the memes flood our community Discord and how everyone reacted to it, I think the intro did its job as a tone-setter for a minimalistic yet entertaining story if so many people are already sold on that tone.

For that matter, I’m also extremely interested in the standalone Spirits hunting mode, even if only for the sake of being able to fight more Spirits. Smash is no stranger to gimmicky fight conditions, but most single player battles stick to the same core ruleset. The exception has usually been Event Battles, preset scenarios with altered rules ranging from ability modifiers to win conditions and more. Event Battles have been a staple of the series since Melee, and each imposes their own cha??llenge that has been a thrill to discover and learn to overcome… except for that one where you needed to protect a Yoshi egg on Rainbow Ride. Fudge that escort mission.

Spirit Battles fill an extremely similar role both in its standalone mode and World of Light, with a few changes. Firstly, much like the campaign, characters can be outfitted with Spirits to alter their stats and abilities. Customization was one of the more mixed features in the past few Smash games, but emphasizing their use in lengthy single-player modes like this and World of Light is going to solve the big com??plaint of having limited places to use custom load outs.

Secondly, instead of being themed around a scenario, a S??pirit Battle is themed around a specific character, imposing conditions and behaviors based on that character’s traits. Some simply use quirky and distinct strategies, such as favoring melee weapons and taunting as much as possible. Others bring enough modifiers to make normal battles feel like something entirely different, such as attacking an unmoving foe while an immortal assist trophy constantly teleports and fights you. These themed conditions are even more impressionable and memorable than most Event Battles, and given that there is one for every single Spirit, it’s going to be far more expansive than previous event modes. I agree it’s a mood killer that trophies are being replaced with flat images, but from a gameplay perspective, Spirits excite me in a way that neither event matches nor trophies never did.

The one issue I take with thi??s mode is that because Spirits are only available on a random board (excluding World of Light), it’s impossible to repeat any favorite battles at will. Not that I mind having a random assortment of countless allies to collect because, uh, that’s kinda one of my weirdly specific favorite things. But the occasional record-chaser in me is a bit disappointed that I won’t be able to track and challenge my own high scores as I did in the past. In fact, several score-attack based single player minigames seem to be absent, including the fan favorite Break the Targets. I believe the sheer amount of single player stuff to?? do is enough to make up for that, but it is a bit of a buzzkill that there isn’t anything to scratch quite the same itch as they did.

Even the tried-and-true Classic Mode is getting a major makeover. In most previous Classic Modes, many opponents are chosen at random. The exception was the first game, which assigned preset challengers to each character’s Classic lineup. Ultimate is returning to the first game&rsq??????????????????????????uo;s idea, but with the added caveat that entire rulesets may change for certain characters. For example, Ryu’s Classic Mode pits him in Stamina duels on Omega stages, probably because his own series is all about Stamina duels on flat stages.

The fact that all of these single-player modes are doing more to lean into Smash’s other rulesets leads me to expect more variety than the typical solo Smash modes while reinforcing what makes multiplayer battles fun. That is, punching other people really hard, adapting your playstyle to their strategies, and punching other people e??ven harder.

Single player content is even more important for any given Switch game now that online play has been put behind Nintendo Switch Online’s subscriptions. Months ago I wrote this p??iece elaborating on my lack of fa?ith in Nintendo's online, and the Splatoon 2 community's regular concerns over their own game's online stability persist even after Switch Online subscriptions began. I got my own Ethernet adapter and tried out Switch Online’s 7-day trial, and my stability improved as I expected thanks to my wired connection. I still wasn’t impressed with how regularly errors punched me in the face. I’m not buying into Switch Online unless I hear from players after Ultimate’s launch that it is a much more reliable online experience than I expect it to be… say, on par with most other online fighting games, which have never given me these problems.

That means I’m locking myself out of online multiplayer, and since almost none of my local friends and family are interested in video games, local multiplayer was never on my mind. Now on my Switch, I’m a single player. On my Gamecube, I was also a s??ingle player. Before online play became the norm, meeting up with friends was only sometimes possible (heck, it’s still only sometimes possible online), so it stood to reason that people often want to play w??hile they have nobody to play with. I once said that single-player content is important for a specific audience of fighting games, but thinking deeper about it, a good single player mode in a multiplayer focused game is evergreen content for everybody.

I played Melee for years by myself, never getting tired of it thanks to the enthusiasm of youth and its plethora of modes, and yet I never “completed” anything other than the character roster. I never obtained every trophy, randomly dropped or otherwise. I wasn't even diligent enough to unlock every stage. I definitely don’t expect to get that close to completing any of Ultimate.

Then again, I'm more of a softcore completionist, one who enjoys the journey of discovering as much stuff as I can equally satisfying as actually getting all the stuff. The design behind Spirit battles and World of Light quenches that thirst with cameo-driven battle modifiers and an atlas of overworlds. I think anyone who sticks with single player in Ultimate will be able to keep themselves entertained for a very, very long time. And that's before they get to the ski?ll tree and stare at it for over a week before deciding their fi??rst upgrade.

The post The World of Light has lifted my Spirits f??or Smash Bros. Ultimate appeared first on Destructoid.

The night club equivalent is a Barbie dollhouse

After Star Fox Zero flopped, I feared that Nintendo was going to leave the beloved space shooter series in the dust. So when I saw that Star Fox would have a major cameo in Ubisoft's Starlink, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s a far cry from the sequel fans are asking for, but when I was expecting the worst for the series’s future, it gave me a breath of relief. Probably not as much as I first thought, given the kinks outlined in our review, but it at least shows Ninte??ndo is willing t??o let other studios experiment with IPs they’ve become hesitant to work on themselves.

It’s led me to ponder about the fate of an even more niche but fervently beloved Nintendo IP --and one that I have more of a personal history with -- Skip Ltd.'s Chibi-Robo. Similar to Star Fox Zero, it was stated if Chibi-Robo Zip Lash didn’t s??ell well, it might be his last game. Zip Lash also flopped even harder than Fox's last outing, having littl?e to no resemblance to anything his fans found appealing and charming in the first place. But just as the Star Fox team was gi?ven a new lease on life by Ubisoft (as well as the SNES Classic), I'm hoping Nintendo could also give another studio a shot at this oft-neglected IP.

But if Chibi-Robo is to return to its original gameplay style (or at least something new but fundamentally similar), most studios wouldn't be willing to tackle its bizarre niche. He’s known for his wholesome charm (barring the occasional can-butt), exploring a “massive” house, doing mundane household tasks, scrambling his way across furniture with various simple tricks, and helping a cast of lovable weirdos through their relatable emotional side quests. And sometimes, extremely weird weirdos with weird but still endearing side quests. It’s a niche that most developers don’t even touch, let alone make successful. Naturally, the first candidate for this job to come to mind was the studio that developed Yakuza, a series well known for that move where Kiryu neuters his enemies w??ith a gondola.

Okay, so maybe there is some kinda sorta extreme tonal dissonance between these two IPs. Disregarding that, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio’s already won a lot of fame in areas parallel to where Chibi-Robo has endeared its fans. While it’d be a ton more work to make their design philosophies mesh with Chibi’s formula instead of adapt their own engine towards another franchise (like they did for Fist of the North Star), I’m confident they’re one of the few non-Nintendo developers who could do Chibi-Robo’s concept justice. In fact,?? infusing Chibi?’s chill but weird world with their own brand of high-energy hijinks could elevate it to the mainstream success that producer Kensuke Tanabe wants this series to become.

I’m not going to prattle on too long about narrative details, but just in case, minor spoiler warning for both series? Only for two Yakuza side stories and a little of the first Chibi-Robo's main plot.

Though its over-the-top antics are what Yakuza mostly advertises itself f?or, fans of the series regularly praise its more personal side stories. These are no less over the top than its gameplay, ranging from role-playing with a dominatrix to faking membership in a bizarre cult. Yet they are grounded in char?ming and emotional struggles, such as the dominatrix’s desire to overcome her submissive personality or a mother’s desire to reconnect with her daughter that fell into the cult.

While a boy as pure as Chibi would never step foot in a BDSM parlor, his games are known for thei??r own brand of wackiness and relatability. Instead of episodic side stories, Chibi interacts with a cast of characters over the course of his journey, gradually building upon each of their sidequests until he finally draws them to their conclusions.

The Sanders?ons from the first game are a quirky bunch with various hobbies, but it gradually becomes apparent how these quirks drive their struggles with escapism and financial stress, and how seriously problematic they truly are. Meanwhile, the dozens of side characters Chibi meets come with a plethora of over-the-top personalitie?s, yet their problems are usually as simple as yearning to find happiness in their own relationships with other characters or meet other basic needs.

Spoiler warning over. Bottom line, both of their narr?ative tendencies are simil??ar enough that I could see Ryu ga Gotoku Studio easily cook up new stories for the tiny robo buddy.

Another cornerstone of Yakuza’s brand is its plethora of fleshed out minigames, many of which are complemented by their own side stories and mechanics. While they’re optional, they serve as an interesting side attraction to get more out of the city setting and its people. Chibi-Robo doesn’t have any mini-games that drastically change controls, but it is worth noting the bot does a lot of different little things (pun not intended). He collects trash. He cleans stains. He fetches lost items. He gardens. He cooks food. He plays with pe??ople. And much more.

All of these mundane side activities are central to his goal of earning Happy Points (which help upgrade Chibi), like how the rewards of side activities in Yakuza games are various items. Optional as they are, they’re still a centerpiece at the heart of their worlds and the progression of their game mechanics. Comparing the two, I wonder why the former shouldn’t have minigames or at least little controls and normal gameplay mechanics as involved as the latter? Chibi-Robo Park Patrol already danced with the concept of building chores around goofy minigames like dancing with flowers to make them sprout. Fleshing these activities out with more depth can do a lot of go?od, especiall??y when they make up the bulk of Chibi’s day.

But we still have to address the polka-dotted elephant in the room -- combat. Everything that I’ve just described only overlaps with a part of what makes Yakuza such a well-known series. If it weren’t for Yakuza’s frequent beat-em-up gameplay and over-the-top combat styles, it might have remained as obscure as Chibi-Robo. Kiryu’s violence works well in the context of a man with ?criminal ties who just wants to help people in need, especially in a shady town where innocent people get jumped by not-so-innocent people every minute. Chibi is a tiny adorable robot designed to help one small family (and their toys) be happier by solving their problems, 95% of which can’t be solved with violence. Kiryu and Chibi might be similarly altruistic, which shapes many of their stories and activities, but the former’s main gameplay and the latter’s nature are not a great match.

And yet in each of his adventures, Chibi also has some sort of micro-menace he fights part-time. This combat ha??s never been a highlight of these games, but it exists. In all my time playing through the GameCube original, I never disliked random Spydorz encounters, nor did I look forward to fighting them. They were just kinda there, barring a few strong set pieces that unnerved me and got me in the mood to confront them. I think Ryu ga Gotoku Studio could make a great game without any of that at all if they so wanted. Even so, I insi?st it’d be best if they gave the pint-sized robot a similarly rad combat system of his own, albeit a significantly toned-down one compared to their usual work.

For an adventure game protagonist, Chibi doesn't have many moves to optimize his travel from point A to point B. It can be a bit of a drag to carry your plug all the way across the floor to the next room. Normally the easiest solution to this would be to just add fast travel, but since managing time and battery levels are some of Chibi-Robo’s main mechanics, that on-foo??t travel time is actually very important to plan your day around. He does have several tools to speed this travel up, including a few actual teleporters. But circumventing those limitations altogether runs counter to the point of making you feel like a tiny robot helpe??r trying your hardest to help big people with bigger problems.

I feel those enemies were added mostly to make that trek from point A to point B just dangerous enough to feel less tedious. And I think that helped, but it would help a lot more if such encounters felt more engaging themselves. While Zip Lash didn’t satisfy my cravings for action, an expert at action games could take the idea of using Chibi’s plug as a weapon and give it the polish to become somethi??ng very fun. Combat shouldn’t steal the spotlight from everything else, but featuring it as an infrequent pillar supporting the exploration and/or character stories might be enough to add that mainstream appeal Tanabe was looking for without removing Chibi from his native gameplay formula. Plus I’m a sucker for any polished and clean beat-em-up or hack-and-slash gameplay!

More exciting gameplay would help Nintendo to buy into the pitch, given what Zip Lash said about their faith in the series, but it’s not what matters most at the heart of Chibi-Robo. What endeared the Gamecube original to me and its other fans is less its gameplay and more its world and writing. That’s a major reason why Zip Lash, a game wholly focused on platforming gameplay at the expense of character interactions, did little to interest Chibi-Robo enthusiasts. It’d be hard fo?r anybody other than its original creators to recreate such an intentionally bizarre charm. But if anybody can do so, Ryu ga Gotoku Studio’s resume is qualified enough to give it a shot.

A heartwarming 3D happy-em-up doesn’t exactly need thrilling gameplay to be lovable, and I’m still a bit heartbroken by Nintendo’s decision to the contrary (let alone how little Zip Lash thrilled me in my entire playthrough). Yet regardless of whether Chibi-Robo needs it or not, in the proper hands, I'd love a return to the character's roots with his own antics dialed up to 11. Yakuza’s shown that adrenaline-filled combat or juggling dozens of over-the-top side activities doesn&rsq??uo;t have to be at the expense of heartwarming narratives, and given tweaks that fits his character, I could only be even more excited for a return to Chibi’s origins with a hand like Rya go Gotoku S??tudio's. Maybe it could even convince Nintendo that the little guy’s got a lot more potential with his original formula.

Or maybe I’m just so hyped for Yakuza Kiwami on PSPlus next month and also so desperate to revisit Chibi’s roots that I’m stretching my imagination. That could also be it. Shame that I only rented Chibi-Robo instead of buying it. I wonder how Photo Finder stacks up…?

The post The Yakuza team could make a pretty rad Ch?ibi-Robo game appeared first on Destructoid.

I reject my humanity, Jojo

Ever since I started blogging on Destructoid, I’ve not bothered to keep it a secret that I’m part of the furry fandom. I mean, yeah, it’s weird to say I like pretending to?? be ??a giant moth man with extraneous kaiju-like features, but have you seen everyone else here? Destructoid is a bunch of lovable weirdos!

For obvious reasons I’ve downplayed it since I became a front page contributor, but I continue to own it because, well, that’s just me being honest about my other hobbies (not to mention some of my favorite artists who identify with the fandom like Marc Knelsen and Alberto Hernández are responsible for some pretty exciting work on games). I enjoy donning the online persona of an anthropomorphized insect. That's why I feel slightly disappointed that I ??can’t find a single MMO where I can play as a sufficiently insectoid bug person.

People play MMOs for many r??easons, but one that’s rarely discussed is to express oneself in a massive community. Hence the joke of people spending hours in character crea??tion fine-tuning their avatars to be exactly what they want them to be -- because that avatar is a part of their in-game identity in a sea of never-ending players. One of the quickest decisions in that process is selecting a race or a species due to how broadly that impacts everything else. It’s also one of the most important parts of defining a player's connection to their character identity.

Obviously, not every MMO even needs a race selector. They run the gamut of genres and premises, many of which don’t fit anything other than humans, and I think we can agree humans are a rad species (not that we humans are biased or anything). But the vast majority of MMOs are themed around various fantasy settings, drawing upon imagination to create worlds where magic, sentient AI, or other such conventions are accepted as a universal norm, as?? are any creatures that depend on those conventions to exist. And yet their playable rosters mostly stick to humanlike archetypes and neglect possibilities that players such as myself find much more interesting, even when other such races are written as a vital part of their worlds.

Most of us are overly familiar with the typical fantasy stereotypes. Every fantasy MMO needs humans, elves, and dwarves because that’s just what fantasy is, even though that??’s an extremely limiting and often useless self-imposed constraint. There are often slight variations on the formula, your occasionally bunny person in lieu of an elf, but pretty much all character models are based on the composition of the human body. That’s not to say that lizardmen, wolfmen, fishmen, and rockmen are any less tropey, because they regularly play close to their own stereotypes. But they’re much more distinct and varied tropes, and yet much less common than the aforementioned trinity of fantasy clichés.

One reason often given against them is because equipment-based character models are much easier to design if every character has a similar body shape. Unusual body shapes like digitigrade legs, large antennae, or othe?r peculiar protrusions could easily mess with models built for others. While this is a constant challenge for many concepts, it's one that can be mitigated by downplaying design elements where race design clashes with character model system design.

For example, we take for granted that MMOs change our characters' appearances with our equipment, but many MMOs never?? change anything about their players' appearances except equipped weapons. And that's fine if it fits a game's vision, as long as character creation gives us enough options. Several prolific MMOs already demonstrate how they can make such odd creatures work as playable characters, wit??h varying degrees of customization and radical design elements.

World of Warcraft is extremely iconic partially because it hits as many fantasy staples as possible with some of its own twists. Interestingly, this includes some races that fantasy worlds regularly pivot around but rarely make playable, such as orcs and trolls. These are more exotic and monstrous looking than most, and while the furry fandom i??s also fond of them, there are three more obvious candidates in the Worgen, Tauren, and Pandaren. All of them as fluffy and beastly as their animal counterparts, yet all of WoW's wardrobes and hats fit them as snugly as any other race because they were designed to fit within those constraints.

The long-running Phantasy Star series has a much smaller roster. Excluding the typical humans and space-elves, it also plays with the anime RPG trend of beastfolk who may have slight beastly features. At least, that’s what Phantasy Star Universe’s Beasts look like at first glance, but their ability to transform into powerful and monstrous forms using Nanoblasts places them further into furry territory. And you may already be familiar wi??th my enthusiasm ?for CASTs, who run the gamut from traditi??onal anime androids to mecha anime machines scaled down to human size. Fun fact: robots, golems, and other “clearly neithe?r a human nor an animal” beings are also accepted in the furry fandom even if they have no fur!

Wildstar offered the most cartoonishly varied roster of playable races I’ve ever seen, all stylized within a cartoonish space opera. Both factions had their equivalent of humans, and one had a? selection of slightly furry forest folk, but more than half of its playable races stood out as something that I rarely see. To run by them all quickly, this included golem-ish rock people, friendly space zombies, more robots but they’re less anime and more western cartoon villain, hairy reptilians tha?t look more like aliens than any recognizable lizards, and maniacal gerbil engineers. I'm gonna miss them all.

Even small MMOs occasionally get in on some weirder race designs. One I used to play, Eden Eternal, greeted me with a choice between humans and the precious nugget-sized Zumi who were literally just hamsters. Later updates added the grizzly Ursun and froggy Anuran, the latter of which quickly became my race of choice. But the fifth and final player race was teased with more mystery than any other, and I was anticipating its reveal. Was it one of the NPC ??races like the turtles? The boars? The lizard-taurs?

Nope, it was Halfkin, aka humans but they look like children. Lolis and shotas out? of nowhere.

I still feel a bit cheated by that reveal to this day. It’s extremely petty of me to hold it against Eden Eternal years after I lost interest in it for unrelated reasons, especially when I?? already had a race I wanted to stick to for my ma??in character. But that reveal embodied everything that irked me with how most other MMOs of its kind treat its playable races.

I get that a younger variety of humans has much more mass appeal than some li?zard-taur, especially for an art style shooting in the general direction of anime fans. That’s also a part of why the typical fantasy stereotypes are more common. Nor does it help that being associated with furries often comes with nasty stereotypes (I’m tired of reminding people that these same stereotypes exist in most fandoms, furries are just the most vocal/open about them by pr??inciple and they remain only a fraction of the fandom).

But there’s an issue with promoting mass appeal through cherry-picking the options players have. It stunts creativity and makes a pretty lame bullet point to stand out in a sea of similar games. There are already 20 thousand MMOs wh??ere I can play as an elf or a shota if I want to. It’s way harder to find any, let alone ones worth investing much time into, where I can play as a frog or a lizard-taur or a moth.

Final Fantasy XIV’s playable races are more than diverse enough to make a great character creation system and a wonderfully varied community, but I’ve always felt like they were lacking relative to the exotic designs of the Beast Tribes. Eorzea is a fantasy world where lizards, plants, birds, crab-ants, fish, and more are all capable of talking and walking upright and forming their own societies. I get that the story is written in such a way as to make them unfeasible player race choices,?? they’re alien cultures who made decisions that make them hostile against other civilizations, that’s a good plot element.

But then I see the pockets of allied beastfolk from every tribe. And then I ask myself why there can’t be just one beast-looking tribe that never decided to worship a Primal, much like Ivalice’s Bangaa or Viera or Viangaa. Heck, Ivalice is now canonically a part of FFXIV’s world, including Bangaa. Seeing so many interesting races relegated to enemies and NPCs feels like a sorely missed opportunity relative to what I’m offered. Not to talk down FFXIV, I consider it the best MMO I’ve ever played, but that’s one of a few personal rea??sons why I have little interest in returning to it.

In my passive observance of the WoW fandom, I’ve noticed that some players insist that Pandaren are a pointless addition. My knowledge of Pandaren only goes as far as that they were originally showcased as an April Fools’ joke that was received so well they were added into Warcraft canon, so I can understand that neg?ative impression?.

But then I read tales of Pandaren players being harassed because their harassers insist they’re out of place. To that I say…seriously? It’s okay to bully someone because they wanted to play as a panda? In a video game where players sling spells, send text messages across the world in a medieval era, and stab elder gods in the face? Some of those players being werewolves and minotaurs? I’m pretty sure the actual problem regarding harassment isn’t whether or not you can play as a panda, and having playable pandas does more good for people’s enjoyment of WoW than any justifiable harm.

People often say it’s weird to want to play as something like an animal in an MMO because they aren’t animals. And that’s correct! It’s also every bit as weird as wanting to play as an elf, because nobody in real life is an elf, and nor is it a bad kind of weird in either case. Very few people play MMOs to present themselves as a carbon copy of their real s??elves. Instead, we design our avatars as alternate versions of ourselves. As our ideals, our fantasies, our whims, our curiosities, or any number of other desires.

That same desire to explore alternate identities is one of the many driving appeals behind the furry fandom. They simply remove self-imposed limitations of what their online personae should be. The easiest way to demonstrate that extreme is to use nonhuman species like do?gs, sharks, bees, and abstract eldritch abominations. And much like character creation in any game, furries associate their characters or avatars as various species for a laundry list of reasons -- symbolism, favoritism, gut instinct, artistic intent, whatever!

To a limited extent, picking one's character in any game is an act of expression. Not every Lucario main in Super Smash Bros is a furry, nor is every Peach main female, but they see at least one thing in those characters that they want to be associated with. Maybe they like their personalities. Maybe they l?ike their playstyles. Maybe they just want to broadcast that they are their main's biggest fan. Whatever the?? reason, people take pride in claiming "that's my character."

Creatin?g our own character amplifies that sense of expression and ownership to the point where “that’s my character” is replaced with “that’s me” in our minds, even if we never intended to make our character resemble our selves. It’s unrealistic to expect every conceivable possibility, but there is a certain threshold where many of us feel as if the choices we want most are being explicitly excluded. At that point, that sense of ownership becomes?? something within our sight, but not quite our reach. That's why I want to see more MMOs include more rarely seen character options. I want to see my moth friends. The hive must flourish.

The post MMOs would benefit from more playable furries appeared first on Destructoid.

Hate the game, not the player... except, it's actually hate the microtransaction, not the game. That metaphor doesn't work so well in this context huh

I think we can all agree microtransactions never do more good (if any) than harm for retail priced games. It’s one of those issues we as a community are so collectively done with we automatically expect the worst out of it. We tend to marry the inclusion of microtransactions with a worse game because that’s the natural extension of leaning further on a business model that encourages them. That’s why many of us were disappointed to see them put into Devil May Cry 5.

In this case, the very instant it was revealed that players will be able to buy red orbs with cash, many of us translated that to mean red orbs will be earned at a slower rate relative to upgrade costs in previous games. And yet that feels like a premature conclusion. Technically, there is no immediate evidence that DMC5’s progression rate has been stunted to aggressively push mic??rotransactions onto players, at least not yet.

Reports from Gamescom demo players say that it felt right, but of course, that is just a trade show demo. Everything else that looked awesome before such as dual-wielding motorcycles remains intact. The only basis supporting the conclusion that DMC5 as a game will be worse because of this is precedent set by dozens of other modern IPs retroactively shoehorning them in. By itself, that would be strong enough to justify that conclusion. But in Devil May Cry 5’s case, there is also precedent to the contrary from a more specific counterexample. Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition already had microtransactions that were treated as an afterthought, and very few pe?ople even acknowledged that.

Three years ago, DMC4 SE’s online storefront quietly launched alongside a handful of add-ons. In order, these are Blue Orbs (heart containers), Proud Souls (new move currency), Red Orbs (item currency), Super versions of the dudes, alternate costumes for the ladies, and an instant unlock for every game mode. The Blue Orbs, Super forms, and modes remain available through the same unlock methods they had in DMC4 SE (and buying Blue Orbs cannot raise life beyond the limit possible in a normal 100% playthrough). The cos?tumes are purely cosmetic additions for brand new playable characters, and as such don’t do anything to deliberately alter game balance. That just leaves the Proud Soul and Red Orb economy to have possibly been changed.

Even though DMC4 SE was my first game in the series, I never bought any of these and I still had enough orbs and souls to unlock everything I wanted through normal progression. I never even noticed that DMC4 SE had these until I coincidentally glanced at the PSN store page for it. Complaints about a lengthier grind for unlocking moves and items are nonexistent from my search into discussions of this game, probably because costs and drop rates were untouched from the original DMC4. Thus, we have a precedent for Capcom adding microtransactions into a DMC game and leaving progr?ession a??t the same pace as it would be otherwise.

Not that their inclusion is a good thing either way, because buying these as a fast-track to victory is a counterintuitive idea. The entire appeal of Devil May Cry, from an aesthetic and gameplay perspective, is the notion of feeling like a… wha??t’s the word you people less prudish use? “Badass?" Yeah, that’s the most appropriate word to describe it. It’s all about using stylish and complex combos with careful timing to outmaneuver hordes of foes that can quickly deplete your health if you don’t know what you’re doing. The rank-based reward system compliments this by rewarding mastery of simpler techniques with unlocking more advanced and radical techniques, dude.

Using real money to buy currency for those same moves skips that learning curve, more for a character action game than it does in others. These power-ups are more tangible in RPGs or other games where character progression is done through bigger numbers, but very few Devil May Cry upgrades work like that, and even then, only the weakest ones like handguns. The purp??ose of new moves usually isn’t to simply buff your DPS, it’s to expand your options and to give previously learned techniques new applications that push their usage farther. They mostly make you ??stronger in the sense that they raise the skill ceiling higher.

Quite frankly this is far less unethical over the othe??r kind of progression-accelerating micro, but more to the point, this system just doesn’t benefit buyers as much as it appears on paper. It’s really a lose-lose situation to have these because skipping the grinding curve ignores the learning curve that’s equally necessary by design.

Even though I finished my own playthrough of DMC4 SE, the skill ceiling still went far higher than I went using my time with it, on Human difficulty. I never fully got the hang of switching styles on the fly, I still hadn’t nailed down the timing for Royal Guard, and I struggled to pull off Nero’s Exceed moves. If I had less time and was desperate t?o unlock more moves, buying souls wouldn’t give me the aptitude to apply those moves to any useful effect. It’d effectively be a waste of money.

This assumes that the learning curve matches up with the currency grinding curve, which it has in DMC4 SE. It would be a more tempting purchase if the grind is long enough that player could master their current skillsets and still have too long to wait before they upgrade their arsenal. Which again, to our relief, has not happened in DMC’s recent past.

Even so, precedent is little more than that -- a past that can predict but not guarantee the future. The whole reason microtransactions are so outrageous is because they’ve steadily become more and more aggressive over the years, up to the point where governments are banning certain types of them. There’s no guarantee that Devil May Cry 5 is an exception to that rule until we see how the final product will apply that practice, especially since this is a brand new game being shipped with them as opposed to a remake being retrofitted with them. It’s still pretty fishy to retrofit them into DMC4 in any capacity at a??ll, that’s a red flag in itself.

But the simple fact that the worst didn’t happen with DMC4 SE gives enough pause to remind us that it’s too early to assume the worst for the next game. DMC5 is still up to scrutiny specifically because of this, but we should scrutinize the product we can actually see??, not the pr??oduct we expect to see.

Capcom’s history with microtransactions is an annoying one, as is any history with microtransactions in fully priced games. But lately, it's taken a less aggressive path in favor of a passive one. Even Monster Hunter World has a handful of them like character edit vou??chers, and while I wish that was touted as a free new feature instead, it’s still a brand new feature that didn’t exist in previous Monster Hunters. Until any brand new evidence in DMC5’s development points to the contrary, I’m going to anticipate that it will have a progression curve similar to the rest of the series. As long as that holds true, DMC5 looks like it&r??squo;ll be ?a fun ride no less worthy of previous expectations.

Though, I do appreciate the caution and skepticism against the micropayments all the same. This news still doesn’t add anything good to Devil May Cry’s future, nor would quietly letting the issue slide under the sofa with last week’s pizza. We’ll all have more reasons to enjoy DMC5 and Capcom's ot?her games without this excessive monetization, anyway.

The post Despite microtransactions, I’m still hopeful for Devil May Cry 5 appeared first on Destructoid.

If I own this Nintendo then why don't I have any stocks in the company

For months we’ve been hungry for more information on the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service, and even now that it’s launched, there’s a lingering “and what else?” feeling among us. Details up until the day it launched were scarce and not exactly forthcoming. One particular bit of info we learned prior to its debut explained how the service ties in with one of Nintendo’s other services. My Nintendo, Nintendo’s replacement rewards program for Club Nintendo, will allow Go??ld Coins earned from game purcha??ses to be spent on Switch Online subscriptions.

Technically, this is just spending gold coins on the eShop the same way as anything else on there. For technicality's sake, I'll keep referring to it as a "rewar??d" even though it's not listed as a reward because it's an option for exchanging coins, and coins really only exist to be exchanged for rewarding things. But this isn’t really a reward most of us want as much as it is a reward we need to get the basic functionality we previously had.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate the option. In fact, it’s possibly the best idea Switch Online and My Nintendo currently have&nb?sp;going for them. But it’s only a good idea in the sense that it covers for some of the flaws of My Nintendo and allows us to avoid spending money on a lackluster online subscription rather than turning either into a positive experience. It’s a step in the right direction, but their legs remain just as deep in their own problems.

Many of our recent articles and comments agree that Switch Online’s features are underwhelming, so I won’t beat that dead horse any more than I already have. My Nintendo could use more of a spotlight, mainly because this news is the first time many of us have even thought about it for several months, if not longer. Not only are there very few interesting rewards going for the program, but out of those few interesting rewards, the only one that complements its design is the one? we just got. And it's not that complementary anyway.

The bulk of My Nintendo’s rewards are discounts for games (and a few full downloads we only got this July). Most of these games are several years old by the time they become available, but they are an ?excellent option for late adopters. The problem is My Nintendo coins expire over time -- gold coins in a year and platinum coins in half that time. The program is built around earning coins and redeeming them in less time than it takes for most potential software rewards to become available. So saving up coins in anticipation for any given game to get a deal later is a moot point.

Most other rewa??rds are digital?? themes/backgrounds and mobile game loot. The former are nice to have, but they pale in comparison to themes purchasable on the eShop, making them easy to ignore. The latter are just handfuls of items that can be acquired by playing Nintendo’s mobile games normally, assuming you play them in the first place.

There are also a handful of simple software downloads, which have scarcely been updated since the program’s launch. These are Zelda Picross (actually a great offering, just a very small one for being the most costly Platinum reward), Flipnote Studio 3D (nice to have that back, but emphasis on the “have that back” part), and a Smash cont?roller app to use your 3DS as a controller on the Wii U (... wait, why?).

Compare that to Nintendo's former consumer rewards program. Club Nintendo had more original games like Doc Louis’s Punch-Out and Grill-Off with Ultra Hand, on top of its constantly expanding lineup of?? full game downloads, and it continued to get more original content over time. In addition, while Club Nintendo's ranking systems enc?ouraged earning plenty of coins within a time frame, those coins did not disappear as time passed. 

That just leaves the option to use gold coins for Switch eShop purchases. This works at an exchange rate of 1 cent per 1 gold coin, which... isn't a valuable exchange rate, given that they are earned at a rate of 5 coins per $1 spent. This is by far the least cost-efficient use of coins when compared to the discounts on 3DS and Wii U software. It's extremely baffling that the Switch has been Nintendo's most prominent console for over a year, yet it has the least valuable support with Nintendo's customer rewards program. There aren't even any discount rewards for the Switch on My Nintendo's sit?e.

But this option does have the Nintendo Switch Online subscriptions going for it. Given the expiration date on My Nintendo coins, t??he most efficient way to collect them is to continually spend them within that time frame. Conveniently, gold coins last approximately as long as a yearly subscription. Even though buying a subscription with nothing but gold is unrealistically expensive, gold can be used to partially cover any eShop purchase, thus putting every last coin to use even if it's not enough by itself.

Since it happens to be for such a vital service, it makes sense to make a Switch Online subscription one of the first things to spend gold coins on. Even though coins can’t renew subs (but why), one could continually purchase new subscriptions and guarantee those coins would be put to use ????(just… make sure your hardware saves are up to date first). It’s a safe bet this will prevent large stockpil??es of coins from vanishing due to? neglect over time.

The underwhelming part (aside ??from the inefficient exchange rate) is that this purchase bri?ngs us back to the status quo before this option was available for purchase, rather than giving us something we didn’t have before. That’s what makes most of these rewards so underwhelming -- there’s nothing ambitious enough to be appealing compared to what we had before My Nintendo. The status quo is lower than it was back when we had Club Nintendo.

I'm aware that excluding the integration with Switch Online, several of my points are comparing this program to one that is long defunct, but that’s kinda sorta exactly what the problem is. We have a frame of reference to something that Nintendo on??ce did before this, and that frame of reference offered so much more. I haven’t even mentioned the plethora of physical merch that Club Nintendo featured such as playing cards, bags, accessories, and other things completely absent from My Nintendo.

The online subscription purchase is a bandage for the symptom of not spending coins. But that’s never been the real problem with My Nintendo, or else we'd actually celebrate the horrible eShop gold coin exchange rate. The real problem is that when we compare Club Nintendo to My Nintendo after it, the former had a wider selection of unique rewards with a system that rewards patience and saving coins instead of punishing it. In other words, the former system is a more rewarding rewards program t??hat gives more options and freedom for users to redeem their rewards at their own leisure. This new program has little to no ambition to provide anything that people can't get anywhere else, yet it punishes indecisiveness and frugality.

I would assume Nintendo shut down Club Nintendo because it became too expensive to keep running. Nintendo never provided an official explanation, but it's the most logical assumption I can make. These rewards programs are odd business practices in that while they are obviously built to encourage people to spend more money, their costs become harder to maintain the more people within a consumer base redeem them. I imagine the thought process of whoever designed My Nintendo was to make something less ambitious and to play it safer with expenses, hence why 99% of these rewards are downloads of previo??usly existing content. The issue is that this program doesn’t feel as if it’s trying to play safe, it feels as if it’s trying too little.

Not that we need a better rewards program for our own sake. It’s unhealthy to sign up for a rewards program and buy a lot of things you don’t want just because y?ou want the rewards. Most of us don’t sign up for rewards systems purely for rewards, we sign up because we already were buying related products. And Nintendo’s exclusive games for the past two years have been some of their best yet. So long as Nintendo keeps up their current A-game, we don’t need these imaginary coins we keep collecting in the process (and even if they didn&rsq??uo;t, it’s not like Nintendo Bitcoins are a proper compensation for sub-par games). A good rewards program should be designed as an extra, not anything more.

But it feels like a waste of resources and time for Nintendo to keep pushing a program that offers so little of interest. It’s intrinsically bothersome to think that something you’re collecting is getting wasted, ev??en if you weren’t going to use it anyway. And the current state of My Nintendo is causing bad PR towards Nintendo’s most loyal customers, the very group a loyalty program should be designed to ?reward. Nintendo is making more money than they have in a long time thanks to the Switch’s incredible success. It’s hard to imagine that they can’t keep up with whatever demand Club Nintendo garnered, or at least that they couldn’t dial it down partially instead of pushing the brakes all the way.

Given we spend nothi??ng to participate in it, it’s safe to say that neither the average consumer nor Nintendo wants a customer loyalty program that we don’t enjoy. We don’t necessarily need Club Nintendo 2.0, but that seems like the most straightforward solution to My Nintendo’s problems. Until then, I’m planning to buy just as many Nintendo games as I would otherwise. I’d just feel a bit happier if all of these imaginary coins I’m collecting could be put to better use than buying an online subscription service I still doubt I'll be satisfied with.

And no, Smash doesn't c?ount until? we know whether it's getting dedicated servers.

The post My Nintendo’s online sub option is a bandage for its unambitious rewards appeared first on Destructoid.

Five years of abject failure

I remember back in 2013 when Man of Steel came out. It was meant to be the big return of the Blue Boyscout to theatres after 2006's groan-worthy Superman Returns. After its release, people were split on whether or not Man of Steel was a good depiction of Superman to the point where people either loved it or hated it. I enjo??yed it quite a bit, but I could easily acknowledge how some people had gripes with it. But I never once had an issue with Henry Cavill as Superman. He never came across as arrogant, smug, holier-than-thou, or any words used to negatively describe Superman. He was just a good Superman.

And then this happened.

And then he lost goddamn his mind.

We've endured five years of the DC Extended Universe, but if you were to ask a??nyone what they thought about it, at best you'd have people say that it was okay. At worst, it's a dark, mishandled, poorly planned, poorly executed cinematic universe that is trying to ape Marvel but doesn't understand why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is as successful as it is. The DCEU, from its inception, was a slapdashed franchise that failed at handling any of its characters properly unless they were named Wonder Woman. And DC needs to take it out back like Old Yeller and do what they do best; kill things.

From birth, the DCEU was slapped together to carry on the success of Man of Steel. Hell, it wasn't until DC released Man of Steel that they began to plan their cinematic universe. And you know what, that's fine. If you're a multi-media company and you want to establish a cinematic universe that ties together hundreds of beloved characters, then it would clearly take time to establish a universe that fans can grow to love filled with beloved icons and you'd want to start that after gauging a general interest. They used Man of Steel as a barometer. That's exactly what Marvel did. They slowly rolled out solo superhero films and brought those superheroes together four years after Iron Man ??debuted in 2008. Time was taken to have audiences get to know Iron Man, Hulk, Captain ??America, and Thor in their own adventures. 

Conversely, the DCEU was created a few days after Man of Steel hit theatres and that was all DC needed. In the span of five years, DC released five movies in the DCEU of wildly different quality with very little cohesion to them except for bleak aesthetics and a distinct lack of joy. Hell, only three of the movies share a single story. However, when compared to the MCU, DC actually took a much more conservative route. Fiv??e? years into the MCU, fans were given eight movies to nerd out over. DC had five in the same time span. You can't accuse DC of rushing their products out, so why is the DCEU such a joke compared to the MCU?

You could argue that it has to do with th??e aesthetics and how every character is gravely serious in all of their movies. You could argue that the constant change of leadership at DC is to blame. I'd even buy that DC shouldn't have chosen Zack Snyder to helm three of their movies, setting the initial tone for the entire project. But at the end of the day, the reason why the DCEU is failing is because they're desperate to be liked and they'll do anything to prove it, even if it means bad publicity.

Case in point, Suicide Squad! When Suicide Squad had its first trailer shown off, it was a dark, serious, and again, very bleak. However, it worked for the Suicide Squad because it's a movie about a group of killers that need to do suicide missions against their will for a chance at parole. That original trailer released in July of 2015, but the trailer that we all associate with Suicide Squad debuted in January of 2016. You know the one. 

After the fan reception was so overwhelmingly positive, Warner Bros. decided to make the rest of the movie more lighthearted like in the second trailer. They filled it with more? gags, more bright colors, and made it a black comedy but they didn't change the release date of the movie. Production on the movie actu??ally ended five weeks before the movie was set to release, costing DC about $22 million in post-production costs. And the result? The movie had clashing tones, terrible character designs, and plenty of cut scenes that resulted in fans hating it. Ironically, the changes were made to please the fans. 

It didn't stop there. Justice League had its own publicly criticized post-production saga, this time in the form of Henry Cavill's legendary mustache as well as Joss Whedon taking the helm after Zack Snyder stepped down due to a personal family tragedy. Joss Whedon's scenes stuck out like a sore thumb, same with Cavill's CGI baby face, which resulted in even more fan backlash to the point where people are still demanding Zack Snyder's original cut of the film that apparently doesn't exist. Also, fun fact, Justice League was under heavy editorial ??mandate to be under two hours and had to release in November of 2017, putting even more pressure on the pro?duction. 

But really,  DC's current woes all comes down to bad publicity. The DCEU has a publicity problem where any news that comes out about any of its projects are bad or uninteresting. I know there's the saying that "All publicity is good publicity," but when your publicity involves your massive crossover event bombing at the box office, becomi?ng the worst peforming movie in your franchise, ?and sets your company back $60 million?, that's not good in any definition. Especially if you're an investor. 

The only DCEU movie that has nothing but good publicity is Wonder Woman, which I'd argue was the biggest movie released last year that everyone universally liked. Wonder Woman became a role model to plenty of young girls, the action was great, the movie had colors in it that weren't grey or black, and it was a cultural touchstone for a generation. DC actually beat Marvel to the punch for the first female directed superhero movie starring a woman. There was nothing but good news for Wondy, but all of that went to waste when Justice League debuted. 

And then you have the casting problems. Alec Baldwin was hired ??for a day before quitting production on a new Joker movie. Ben Affleck left too, leaving the DCEU without a Batman. But mo?st importantly, Cavill is gone. The man who has been with the franchise for the longest has now parted ways with DC. You can't get much w??orse than that.

So w??hy am I making the call to have DC just erase their extende??d universe like it never existed? Well, let's look at all of DC's upcoming titles. 

Now just to be clear, I am talking only about DC live action movies that either have a confirmed release date, director, production crew, or was announced by DC themselves. We have Aquaman, due for release this December, Shazam! and Wonder Woman 1984 are both coming out this next year as well as th??e mysterious new Joker movie starring mild-mannered Joaquin Pho??enix, and then we have The Flash, Green Lantern Corps, Black Adam, Suicide Squad 2, Birds of Prey, Cyborg, and The Batman, all of which are in the nebulous 2020-2021 release wi??ndow. 

But we're not done! See, those are ones that are officially being worked on, but DC has also spent the past several years announcing more movies in their cinematic universe! There are going to be movies based on Lobo, Justice League Dark, Booster Gold and the Blue Beetle, Supergirl, multiple Harley Quinn movies, one of which will star the Jared Leto's Joker, Deadshot, another Jared Leto Joker movie, Batgirl, Nightwing, Deathstroke, and do you see where the problem is? There are way too many movies that are going to come ??out and none of them have been confirmed with solid details!

"But Jess?e! What's the difference between DC and Marvel's approach? They both had plenty of movies come out with a huge roster of characters in a short time frame, but Marvel made it work!" Yes, Marvel made their cinematic universe?? work by keeping everything simple and clean. Every movie had a clear purpose and connected with each other fairly well. But there's the problem; Marvel is keeping everything in one continuity. DC? I don't even know anymore. 

It's been made public that Joaquin Phoenix's Joker movie is not going to take place in the DCEU, and that is good news for the movie but bad news for the DCEU. That essentially means that all of those movies I just listed may or may not take place in continuity. Hell, with t??hree other Joker movies in development, one for the Harley Quinn/Joker movie, one for a Jared Leto Joker movie, and one for Suicide Squad 2, who can say that he's going to stay around long enough to play the Joker in all three of those movies? Who can say that they won't tie the Supergirl movie into the CW's Arrowverse. The same for Nightwing if Titans prove to be a hit. And with the turmoil at DC over casting and leadership cha??nges, who knows if any of these movie?s will see completion.

Whenever a Marvel property is not a part of the MCU, there's a clear reason why. You don't see the MCU casually throwing out mutant references because they don't have the film rights to the X-Men characters (for now). Those are firmly in Fox's hands. Marvel is well known for having a clear and concise plan for its storylines to the point where all of their movies were building up to Infinity War for the past six years. DC has shown no signs of having clear control over their cinematic universe or even an endgame. Hell, is there an endgame? Is everything leading up an adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths? Cause I highly doubt it. 

Then again, did you know that the DCEU isn't actually called the DCEU? DC apparently called their cinematic universe "Worlds of DC" back in?? July, but they never confirmed nor denied that their cinematic universe was even called that! The phrase "DCEU" was just created by fans to give the franchise a name. At le??ast with Universal's failed Dark Universe cinematic universe, they announced it had a freaking name. DC can't? even be bothered to tell us what the hell franchise its movies are under is called!

Now you'd expect at this point that I'd say that there's some magical, super easy way ?to fix the DCEU and make it profitable, but nope. I'm fresh out of ideas. Any suggestions t??hat DC could have taken have been thrown out the window with nearly all of their releases facing critical scrutiny, post-production woes, underperforming numbers at the box office, production hell, and fan backlash on a weekly basis. 

At this point, DC should honestly try to go back to doing individual superhero movies without any need for a cinematic universe. Just make great movies that don't connect with each other. Make Shazam! a great movie period, not a great DCEU or whatever the hell DC wants to call it. Focus on telling the Green Lantern story that we deserve. In fact, you can make an entire franchise out of Green Lantern an?d base it on Geoff John's run on the seri??es. Lord knows you'll have material for years of quality GL movies. 

DC should probably use Wonder Woman as its framework for future movies. It was removed from continuity, focused on creating a likeable hero that actually felt like a s??uperhero, and didn't bother with any of the Doomsday, Steppenwolf, Lex Luthor, Superman's dead bullcrap of the modern movies. It told an engaging war movie that focused on being a good movie above all else.

Stop trying to ape Marvel, DC. Admit that you tried, you failed, and just make movies that fans want to see. You'll never replace Marvel. That's statistically impossible. Just do your own thing, man. And stop le?tting Jared Leto be the Joker. We'd all be grateful for that. 

The post The DC Extended Universe needs to die appeared first on Destructoid.

God have mercy

_{[This piece was originally published in 2015. In light of recent rumors about the next Nintendo Direct and an ensuing eyebrow-raising tweet from Nintendo of America today, it just felt right to revive it. -Jordan]}

Chibi-Robo is a refugee from GameCube country, born from the co-mingling DNA of the industry's most well-known publisher and one of its least mainstream-friendly developers, he was ready to die from the moment he hit the ground, aiming to please at every turn. It’s actually a gosh darn miracle that he’s still here. After a commercially tepid GameCube outing, a Walmart-exclusive handheld follow-up, a Japan-only return to housecleaning, and a largely ignored AR photography title on the 3DS, it’s seemed that every Chibi-Robo release has been poised to be his last.

Now Chibi is back for what may be his final grasp at success. This time he’s in a 2D action platformer, a historically popular genre on Nintendo consoles, wi?th a pack-in amiibo to boot. If he doesn’t make it this time, ?he likely never will.

A small but dedicated fanbase who covet strange, silly, and sincere video games are currently on the edges of their seats, preparing to either cheer for Chibi-Robo's long-awaited triumph, or mourn his final passing. Maybe he'll live, ?maybe he'll die, but no one will be able to say he didn't try.

The unwanted child of Nintendo’s surrealist empathy experiments

When talking about Chibi-Robo, or a variety of Nintendo's other more interesting games, you really have to start with EarthBound. The game defined a side of the company that has endeared it to many who might otherwise pass over its largely safe and child-friendly catalog. Ironically, the thing that makes EarthBound special is the way it cares about little aspects of regular life that many other games may ignore. Not many mainstream games prop up understated emotional connections between seemingly incidental characters like EarthBound does. 

That's a big part of why the game struggled to find an audience with Western gamers in the '90s, but they are also why EarthBound has grown to have one of the most passionate fanbases in gaming today. While the game failed at its initial Western release, it's now a bigger hit than ever. Despite its initial struggles, EarthBound proved to be emblematic of the direction Nintendo wanted to take narrative-based games as it moved into the industry's polygon era. It was while facing in this direction Nintendo published other empathy focused, minutia-hugging titles like Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Elite Beat Agents, and perhaps most of all, Chibi-Robo.

 While Majora’s Mask cares very deeply about small moments between characters, it covers that priority behind the false face of an Ocarina of Time spin-off. That caused the title to disappoint many who expected it to follow the same epic structure of Ocarina, though like EarthBound, the game has gradually built an audience over the years that loves it deeply. Likewise, Animal Crossing touted itself as a real-time life sim about town management and i?tem collection, though beneath those marketing campaign bulletpoints lies a game that is mostly about enjoying moment-to-moment interactions with a small and sweet world.

What makes Chibi-Robo different is that it didn’t have any of those surface-level selling points to draw new players in. The first game in the series was unabashedly unusual, putting the ??player in the role of a newly purchased pint-sized robot whose owners have a variety of emotional problems.

The father is an exuberant and well-meaning nerd so intimidated by his real-life problems that he spends much of his time and energy fantasizing about a super sentai TV show. His daughter is an escapist too, though instead of dreaming of being a hero?, she has decided that she is a frog, speaking in 'geros' (the? sound that frogs make in Japanese). The matriarch of the clan is unable to relate to either her husband or daughter. All she wants is a normal life, though there are times when divorce is the only option she can fathom. Then there’s the dog, who is forced to watch all this in relative silence, unable to talk sense into anyone around him.

_{[Comic by Zac Gorman]}

T??his is the world Chibi-Robo is thrust into, a new toy who's expected to somehow make all these people happy. Codependence is in his programming. Selflessness is in his circuits. Optimism in the face of ever depleting energy and dysfunctional family dynamics is his only choice. He charges into fate headfirst without hesitation, determined to help, ready to fail.

And he did fail

The first Chibi-Robo wasn’t a total bomb, but it didn’t do nearly as well as other newly published Nintendo intellectual properties on the GameCube like Pikmin and Animal Crossing. The game was a little hard to understand for new players, mixing open-world 3D exploration, action, resource management, and puzzle solving. Much like the PlayStation 2 hit Grand Theft Auto III, Chibi-Robo was a jack of all trades and master of none. The difference is, Chibi-R??obo doesn't know how to carjack.

The games also share structural similarities. They both begin with a limited tool set and mostly menial tasks to take on, slowly drawing you into a larger and larger world filled with colorful characters and more empowering and elaborate methods to meet your goals. The big difference is, Chibi-Robo starts you off cleaning stains off the family carpet with a toothbrush, while GTA III has you staining the streets red with blood. The joyful sociopathy and unrepentant worship of the American Gangster mythos proved to be enough to compensate for the lack of focus or polished mechanics of the first 3D GTA releases. Chibi-Robo’s joyful selfles?sness and unrepentant worship of people pleasing w??eren’t able to pull off the same trick. 

One might also argue Chibi-Robo had a messaging problem. While Chibi himself looks cold and unfeeling, he lives like a guardian angel, brought down from technology heaven to save us all. He's the polar opposite of the in???creasingly soft and alive-looking humans engaging in increasing inhuman behaviors that populate the generation of AAA games that were born on in the PS2/Xbox/GameCube era and the generations that followed.

Since day one of his career, the tide of the industry has been turning against Chibi-Robo. Given the relatively limp response to his first game, and little reason to believe that more games about pint-sized care-taking robots could thrive in a post-GTA III market, it's nothing short of a miracle that Chibi is still around today. Yet here we are, in the year 2015, on the cusp of the release of the fifth Chibi-Robo game.

Prior Chibi-Robo titles never swayed from their focus on spreading joy. In parks, under couches, or in the disorganized den of an an old nostalgia hound, Chibi-Robo never stopped trying to make people happy. From the sound of it, Chibi-Robo! Zip-Lash may be the first game in the series where happiness is not a pri??ority. If so, it would be hard to blame Chibi for giving up on his largely unappreciated pursuit of altruism.

Regardless of what Chi??bi turns toward for this next outing, we would do well to pray for him. If the roles were reversed, you can be sure he'd be praying for us. In fact, he'd probably be sending us prayers while cleaning our carpets, planting our flowers, and fixing our marriages, all before tucking us in for the night with the last of his power, even if he had to spend all evening traversing our bed sheets with his meager four-inch body. That’s just how much he cares.

Also, this is probably the b?est bass line in music history. ?;

The post It’s time to pray for Chibi-Robo appeared first on Destructoid.

Everyone else is wrong

It’s officially the year 2018 and not a whole lot has changed so far. I’m still a bald, broke, and excessively sweaty college student with an unheal??thy obsession for video games. Luckily, that means I actually took the time to play quite a few of them.

There were a ton of great games las??t year, but I had to whittle this list down to just five entries that really left a lasting impression. These are the releases that, at the end of the day, left me rock hard and w??anting more. 

5. Yakuza 0

This game took me completely by surprise. I loved every single goddamn second of this thing. It had been staring at me for a while, on my book shelf, in that “you know you want ??to fuck me&r??dquo; sort of way, but nothing could have prepared me for just how hard I fell for these characters and the world that they inhabit.

It started out a bit slow in the early hours, teasing me and seducing me more and more with each passing minute. The way that Kiryu constantly whispers, “Tachibana” sent sensual shivers down my spine. By the time I reached chapter ten, everyone was looking for any opportunity they could get to rip their shirts off and get the party started. Yakuza 0 disco? danced its way into my heart, and I don’t see it leavin??g anytime soon. 

4. Yakuza 0

The main story is fantastic, but it’s the delightful substories which give Yakuza 0 its true ide??ntity. Between the over-the-top, action-packed boss fights, you’ll find the meat and potatoes of what makes the experience so damn great. Kiryu and Majima take turns getting to know the local residents, and they’re some goofy motherfuckers.

Whether teaching a woman how to be a good dominatrix, pretending to be? a movie producer, joining a cult, or getting creepy with Mr. Libido, these encounters were never anything short of mesmerizing. No matter how deprived the journey was, they almost all had this magical way of ending in a manner that made me feel all warm and f?uzzy inside.

There were so many Full House-style “aww” moments it’s insa?ne. This is a game with tons of heart, and it wears it on its sleeve?? proudly. 

3. Yakuza 0

This was my first entry into the Yakuza series, and I’d always just assumed it was some cheap, Grand Theft Auto clone previously. Until recently, nobody had told me that these games were straight up Fighting Force-style 3D brawlers. The combat is glorious, and picking up a motorcycle to ??smash into waves of enemies?? never gets old.

Switching between the different fighting styles to best tackle situations, based on your surroundings and varying enemy type??s, kept things feeling fresh throughou?t too. Have you ever seen an eyepatch-wearing man breakdancing through hordes of gangsters in the streets of Japan? Well, I have, and it’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.

Every hit has a crunch to it, and slamming your opponent's face in a car door is dow??????????????????????????nright liberating. We don’t get nearly enough of these types of games anymore, and that’s a goddamn shame.

2. West of Loathing

Hey, look! It’s a game that isn’t Yakuza 0! West of Loathing made me giggle uncontrollably, and that alone is enough for me to include it on this list. It might no?t look like much, but its biting sense of humor overshadows any qualms I had with the mediocre combat system. The dialogue is gleefully surreal, a??nd the most inane actions can lead to completely unforeseen punchlines.

Much like some of it??s best ?jokes, it caught me off guard in a year absolutely smothered with quality games. If you somehow managed to let this one pass you by, you should fucking change that ASAP. It’s worth every penny.

1. Yakuza 0

This joke may be getting old, but so am I (“Get off my lawn!”). Seriou?sly, this game made me feel such a wide variety of emotions, while simultaneously never abandoning its quest to keep me entertained and having fun. Despite the brutal, blood-filled story, it delivers everything in a way that’s so obscenely ridiculous that it almost feels believable. It’s unafraid to be dumb, and it never failed to bring a smile to my face. 

The story is fantastic, but it’s the outrageous atmosphere, situations, and characters that make this a MUST PLAY experience and my personal game of the year. I loved a lot of the stuff I played over the past three hundred and sixty-five days, but nothing else in the industry resonated with me in quite the same way. Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild were certainly cool games, but Yakuza 0 was just a whole lot fucking cooler. If it weren’t for West of Loathing, it would have taken ?all five spots. It&r??squo;s just that good.

The post Kevin Mersereau’s Top Five Games of 2017 appeared first on Destructoid.

Let the Past Die

Another year, another Star Wars film to over analyze and get all nitpicky about. While I found The Last Jedi to be a weaker film than The Force Awakens, I had a good time with it and was surprised at how many tropes the film subverted. Instead of going for the obvious, we got a Star Wars film that was ??unafraid of making new choices and taking the story in some interes??ting directions.

Obviously, this post is going to be loaded with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the film yet, please don’t continue on. I d?on’t want to be held liable for ruining any surprises for you and there is one moment, in particular, which made me? incredibly happy. Anyway, this is your formal warning, so proceed with caution.

The biggest theme from The Last Jedi is one that I find very intriguing: “Let the Past Die.” As the franchise currently stands, Star Wars is all about trying to recreate that wonder of that original trilogy and playing up nostalgia for cheap thrills. As good as I found Force Awakens, the fact that it was a pseudo-remake of A New Hope is basically the opposite of what The Last Jedi is trying to tell you.

A bunch of moments in the new film are direct callbacks to The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, but they don’t end up at the same conclusion. You have a master reluctant to teach a new pupil, said pupil questioning her master at every step, a confrontation with the supposed big bad guy and even the student entering a cave to seek out their lineage. All of these, though, are ta??ken in bold new directions that call back to the theme I mentioned above.

When Rey arrives on Ahch-To and hands Luke his saber, he tosses it over his shoulder and tells her to leave. You’d be forgiven for assuming this would be a direct parallel of what Yoda did in Empire (dismissing Lu??ke as too old to learn the ways of the Force), but the truth is that Luke is actually scared. He essentially created Kylo Ren (by attempting to assassinate him and backing down) and that fear nearly consumed him and led him down the path of the Dark Side.

His reason for staying secluded is because he is holding onto the past. Luke can’t come to terms with how he failed his sister, his best friend, his nephew, and his own legacy. He was the Jedi that brought order to the force and stopped the insidious Emperor Palpatine; how could his man fall s?o hard? How can he look into the eyes of his admirers and tell him he is the reason for their doom?

Rey is propelled through the plot not because she is courageous or even destined to help the world, but because she wants answers to her past. Rey might be skilled at a lot of things, but she holds a tremendous amount of anger at her parents for abandoning her. She has a propensity towards the Dar??k Side because of this, which is exactly what Luke fears the most.

Kylo Ren, on the other hand, is aggravated that people keep comparing him to his ancestors. Lord Snoke constantly reminds him of the death of his father, Han Solo, and berates him for not living up to the name of Darth Vader. Kylo also can’t get over his ?mis??interpretation of Luke’s intentions on the fateful night that sent him spiraling out of control.

If you look to the past, you’d believe that Luke eventually sees the power in Rey, Rey ends up being a distant ancestor to Obi-Wan or Luke and that Kylo Re??n would turn on ??his master and see the Light Side. Everything you think is going to happen doesn’t.

Luke, for instance, is reluctant to actually destroy the Jedi. Even though he hates the order for causing a tremendous amount of grief in his life, it is the only thing he has known for 30 some odd years. Despite saying he wants the Jedi to die, he has trouble letting go and can’t give up that part of his life. It takes a surprise visit from?? Yoda’s spirit to change Luke’s tune.

Once Yoda comes and destroys the Jedi text against Luke’s will, he drops some great knowledge (“The greatest teacher, failure is”) and gets Luke to understand that the old ways are no longer relevant. Luke can only see the event that changed his life, but has failed to learn anything from it. Instead of letting the past go?, Luke has held on and caused more troubles.

He does eventually come to Rey’s aide, though. Luke overcomes his own weakness and uses the last of his power to give the resistance a chance. He appears at the end, confronts Kylo and distracts the First Order long enough for everyone to escape. With his past resolved and his embrace of the new complete, Luke fades away to joi??n the Force a?s his master did before him.

Rey, on the other ??hand, has focused too much on what her past might mean. While she ?possesses a lot of skill and has been a competent fighter, she is so fixated on who her parents are and what that could mean to really see that she is fine without the knowledge.

The truth is that Rey, unlike what you’d expect, is nobody from nowhere and that doesn’t do a thing to change her present. If Rey was able to let go before discovering this, she could have better harnessed her powers and rejected all of the hatred in her heart. Even knowing she is nothing, she still believes in the good that Kylo has and tries to change h?im.

Once she tries and fails to actually get Kylo to change his mind, she knocks h??im unconscious and leaves to save her friends. If she can’t make Kylo see the past is holding him back, at least she can save the ones who will change the galaxy. This then leads to her finally adapting to the power within her and harnessing that strength without fear.

Kylo, while having a good ideal, ultimately learns nothing. He does turn on Snoke and ends up killing him, but the reason is b??ecause he is trying to erase his past. Instead of accepting his failures and moving on, Kylo wants them eradicated so that no one can remember them. He embodies the whole idea of “Letting the Past Die,” but with the wrong execution.

Kylo is right about starting new and allowing the next generation to flourish, but he still has all of the resentment of his past. He holds on to the moment he killed his father and how his uncle potentially wanted him dead. He can&rsquo??;t g?et over how far he has fallen and even admits he is a monster as if that will justify his choices.

This film doesn’t just follow the main characters, but a couple of the side ones. You have Captain Poe, a sort of Han Solo like rogue, becoming irate with Admiral Holdo because she isn’t General Organa. Poe is so used to l??ooking at Leia’s past successes that he can’t accept someone stepping in while she is incapacitated.

That eventually comes to a head when Poe leads the charge through the resistance’s final base. They’ve discovered a way out while Luke is di??stracting the First Order and instead of anyone listening to his battle cry, they all look to Leia for confirmation. She simply rolls her eyes and says, “What ar??e you looking at me for?” Even she understands that everything old isn’t automatically better.

Finn and Rose don’t really serve the overall narrative, but even their escapade echoes back to the main theme. They basically do everything the way Luke and Han did in A New Hope, but that fails spectacularly against the First Or??der. Finn and Rose don’t anticipate that reusing old tactics would??n’t work against a new foe and that ultimately leads to them nearly dying.

Finn even assumes that sacrificing h?imself, kind of like Obi-Wan, would deal a crushing blow to the First Order, but Rose stops him and c??lues him into a different line of thinking. Don’t destroy that which you hate, but protect that which you love. While a cheesy statement, that new approach is a sentiment that hasn’t been tried up to this point.

All of these sacred images, phrases and scenarios from the past are thrown out to wipe the slate clean for Episode IX. The Last Jedi isn’t just a neat name to refer to Luke, but also a message to audiences that this will be the last Star Wars with direct parallels to older films. The main takeaway you should get is that whil??e the ol?d is good, we now need to make room for the new.

I’m actually convinced that this film is also a meta-critique on The Force Awakens and the general Star Wars fan base, as well. At this very moment, you can find a lot of fans crying foul about The Last Jedi because it doesn’t follow the tropes set up by the past. These are the same people that rip Force Awakens apart for being a remake of A New Hope. It is almost funny how they seemingly missed the entire point of th??e movie.

While I won’t just ignore the faults that Last Jedi has, it more than lives up to the legacy of the franchise it is a part of. That the movie does something new and fresh with established ideas is also a real treat, since that is becoming increasingly rare in this current Hollywood era of cinematic universes and fran??chise building.

Maybe I’m over analyzing things and putting meaning where it doesn’t belong, but I walked out of my showing of The Last Jedi with glee as ?the movie practices what it preaches. Now if only Disney gets the message and stops with all these inter-quels and needless prequels.

The post How T??he Last Je?di challenges our notions of what Star Wars can be appeared first on Destructoid.

It's beginning to look a lot like Inaba

Quite shamefully, I only saw Die Hard for the first time two years ago, in December and in a packed movie theatre. It was only then that I could fully appreciate the classic argument that rages about the film. No, not whether Hans Gruber is actually a bit tasty (RIP Alan Rickman), but whether Die Hard is a Christmas film or not. 

The argument is really just an example of how the seasons and religious holidays interact with both films and computer games. If we happen to play something during our Christmas break, or it happens to be on in the background while we're opening our presents, then of course we begin to associate it with Santa and his reindeer. In my case, there are quite a few games that I will always look at as Christmas games, whether it's due to their atmosphere, certain levels or simply when I first pla?yed them. So, cut yourself a slice of stollen and pour a glass of mulled wine, and let's get festive.

To find out about the (largely not very good) Die Hard games for various systems, I'd recommend watching this video and this video.

1. SSX 3 (Play?Station 2/GameCube/Xbox/Game Boy Advance/Gizmondo, EA Canada, 2003)

I'm not fortunate enough to have lived in any place where there is powdered snow on the ground throughout the whole of December. My hometown occasionally gets a bit of snow in January, but I've seen perhaps...one white Christmas there? Where I currently live, it just rains all the time, and when I lived in the south of Germany, the snow was sludgy and my bones hurt because of how cold it was. Anyway, time for less typical British talk about the weather and more talk about games. A game that revolves around snow typifies Christmas for me, and SSX 3 is precisely that game.

SSX 3 and its predecessor, SSX Tricky, weren't just games that allowed me to enjoy frosty surrounds with the radiator cranked up and a mug of tea; they are special to me because they were the first games I was genuinely any good at. As a child – and this is something that STILL comes back to haunt me  – I didn't own a wide variety of games, and played overwhelmingly during the school holidays. This meant that I was quite weak compared to my cohort, who would play a range of classics for hours after school and every weekend. So I carried this millstone around my neck of being "terrible at games". But I did play the SSX games for hours in a row during ??these holidays, if trophies had been a thing back in 2003, I definitely would have got Platinum in both of them.

But why is SSX 3 on this list instead of Tricky? Well, I think I played Tricky a lot during the summer holidays, so it got that tag attached to it instead. I also remember a level that involved snowboarding through arid canyons in Tricky, so it felt less tied to winter. It might have even been because SSX 3 felt more sedate and peaceful, as Christmas should be, while Moby Jones had definitely downed one too many Red Bulls in Tricky.

2. Pokémon Crystal (Game Boy Color, Game Freak, 2001)

As a child, Christmas time was always Pokémon time. Until I got Pokémon Yellow and Pokémon Pinball for Christmas 2000, I was the insufferable kid on the playground who would beg to borrow other people's handhelds. While those two games should, by rights, be Christmas games in my head, I actually played them to death the following summer instead. As a result, they will always remind me of a carefree summer holiday full of Mini Milk ice lollies, potato smiley faces and re-runs of the worst docu-soap ever made, Airline. 

But its older brother, Pokémon Crystal, strongly reminds me of the jolly fat man. I think by then I knew just how great playing through the whole of a Pokémon game would be, so I was hyped about getting it and spent a lot of chestnut-roasting time tied to my Game Boy. For reference, my Game Boy Color was always plugged into the wall at home so I wouldn't bankrupt my mother burning through millions of AA batteries (she got wise to rechargeable batteries by the time both me and my sister got Nintendo Wii). Of course, I soon realised Crystal was pretty much the same game as Pokémon Silver, which I'd already gotten for a previous Christmas, but hey, I was a dumb nine-year-old, and he?y, it w??asn't my hard-earned salary I was squandering. I was the WORST child.

3. Persona 4 Golden (PlayStation Vita, Atlus, 2012)

This is a fairly recent Christmas association for me, in part because I spent all of last Christmas – aside from the 25th, of course – playing it from start to finish. The PS TV is the perfect "portable home console", if such a thing can even be said to exist, so in a genius/idiot move, I brought it back to England with me. And I quickly resumed being The Worst Child Ever™ by telling my sister "No, you can't 'have a go' while I'm in the middle of the Kusumi-no-Okami boss battle, please go back to Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games".

It's also very Christmassy to me because I had already played the original Persona 4 release, so my goal was to experience everything new to the Vita version. This meant going on the ski-trip, as well as going for the True ending. Of course, all modern Persona games have integrated seasons, so there is always a Christmas section, but going away with the lads to faff about on wooden planks felt like a genuine Yuletide celebration. Admittedly, a Yuletide celebration with fighting and bloodshed (and GOOD GRIEF I hated going through that dungeon with limited SP – by far my least fav?ourite in any of the games that I've played so far), but a cosy celebration nonetheless.

A special recommendation

OK, so ?by this point, your blood is probably boiling from the amount of CLEARLY non-Christmas games that I have haphazardly associated ??with the holidays. So, how about I recommend something that is genuinely tied to Xmas?

NiGHTS Into Dreams is the perfect game to play once the advent calendars and elves on shelves come out, even if you don't buy the Christmas-themed sampler disc. I had the pleasure of playing it on the Saturn at an exhibition a few months ago, and all the acrobatic, fast-paced gameplay is a great distraction from figuring out what to put under the tree for Great Aunt Flo (another set of knitting needles, perhaps?). What's more, you don't have to splash out on an unloved-thus-now-quite-rare-and-expensive console from yesteryear to experience the game: it's available on Steam, including the Christ?mas Nights additional ma??terial, for less than the cost of a giant Toblerone. 

***

As we've seen, what counts as "festive" is very subjective and often has a lot to do with childhood memories. I have a lot of fond recollections of Decembers growing up, and a lot of this is all thanks to video games. This Christmas, I'll be following in the footsteps of Die Hard somewhat by finishing Metal Gear Solid 2 HD – because, really, getting the hostages out of Big Sh??ell feels like John McClane freeing his wife from Nakatomi Plaza. That, and because "Christmas s?pirit" is absolutely what you make of it.

Oh, and Die Hard is DEFINITELY a Christmas film.

Which games do you associate with Christmas? Are there any games that you play every December? Let me know in the comments down below!

The post Christmas games that aren’t Christmas games appeared first on Destructoid.

X-Men, prepare for an all out attack!

X-Men has been one of Marvel's biggest properties for a long time, and not just in comic books. Before the days of the MCU, Marvel actually seemed to enjoy putting X-Men? on a pedestal. The mutant team had a character almost everyone could r??elate to and the plight of being ostracized by the masses is pretty timeless.

I'm here today to talk about the mutant superheroes in video games, but not their past or even necessarily their future, just one specific, hypothetical game that seems like it could be damn near perfect. What if the X-Men starred in a Persona style RPG?

It may not seem like a perfect match at first, but the more I thought about it, the more it fit like a blue and yellow glove. I didn't read a whole lot of comics until I was in high school (cool dude here) so up until then most of my knowledge on the team came from the animated series. It was the show's play up of that "high school" drama, and later X-Men Evolution's doubling down on that idea that makes Persona's formula lend itself to the team so well.

For those unfamiliar with Persona, it's a long-running Japanese role-playing game with a premise that sets it apart from the typical Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest formula. Your party is composed of high school students who attend class and form relationships during the day and expl??ore dungeons in a fantastical world by night.

Imagine having a party of classic mutants in their first year at Xavier's Institute. Attend class d??uring the day, from a basic English and Science lessons, to Mutant history and Danger Room drills, then fly off in the Black Bird on covert missions as the X-Men by night. Going to class could help you master new abilities for combat and forging personal relationships with teammates could help build cooperation and maybe even some combo moves. Colossus throwing Wolverine into a Sentinel is pretty badass.

Persona's time management aspect has always made it one of my favorite parts of the game, and it's easily applied to the X-Men universe as well. Do I want to train in the Danger Room tonight, or study for my science test? Having a ticking clock on stopping The Brotherhood but knowing that finals are coming up could be a real factor for tee??nage superheroes, even if it is a little bit silly.

On the combat end, Persona's turn-based combat system would lend itself just f?ine to a diverse team of young mutants. Finding the perfect team could become a labor of love, I kno?w Cyclops and Nightcrawler are already in my party.

The most exciting ??part? of the premises is how you can place it basically anywhere within the comic's timeline. You could have the first class of Xavier's students like Iceman and Beast, or even do an entirely original team. Multiple games could span different years for the class, seeing new mutants come and go or even explore spin-off teams such as the New Mutants.

I tried to do some digging, but couldn't find out exactly who the X-Men video game license rests with at the moment. My dream game for everybody's favorite mutants seems pretty unlikely, but then again Square Enix is putting out an Avengers game. This is just one idea for a franchise with almost limitless potential, Wes did a pretty great piece a while back bouncing around similar game ideas, but I couldn't let this idea of mine go unmentioned. Maybe one day we will see X-Men back in the spotlight, though with Marvel's Cinematic Universe making money hand over fist without them they'll probably be play??ing second fiddle for some time. 

The post Persona mi??ght have the formula for the perfect X-Men game appeared first on Destructoid.

Either that or they're completely oblivious to fans' disdain

GameStop are running an animated advert for Ubisoft's upcoming title Assassin's Creed Origins that's either completely hypocritical to its own practices, or blatantly tone-deaf to its co?nsumers.

In the ?ad, we get a shot of protagonist Beyak in action, suddenly followed by a gurning camel face and then the following image:

I'm not one for OUTRAGE, nor am I outraged here. I'm more just baffled by the advert's intent.

The issue with this "joke" is that it's an open admittance of consumer frustrations, satirised, then perpetrated by a company that gladly falls in line with pre-order culture's annoying tactics, heavily pushing them on gamers with zero hesitation. As if GameStop is saying "Man, isn't it bullshit that publishers do pre-order stuff like this?" before immediately following it up with "Please pre-order Assassin's Creed Origins".

However, the alternate scenario here, is that I may actually be giving too much credit to the advert by suggesting that it is, in fact, sat??ire.

On further investigation, the corresponding TV commercial to this?? campaign unashamedly pres?ents those who do not pre-order the game as people who will be genuinely left out of all the fun, and isolated from the supposed great times that everyone else is having.

In my opinion, this whole campaign is either mocking GameStop's own practices, or is just completely ignorant to its consumer's unhappiness. In either case, that's a terrible campaign. Satire is only satire when it's an outsider making the joke. You don't get to be part of the culture that encourages and enforces the problem and also be the hip cool-kid that pokes fun at it.

"Power to the Players". Indeed.

The post GameStop’s Assassin’s Creed pre-order campaign seems to poke fun at pre-order campaigns appeared first on Destructoid.