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So that's Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward down. I wanted to delay this post until I'd at least finished up the Warring Triad boss fight mini-arc, and I did!

Heavensward is... okay, look. Right now the Fandom Consensus is that Final Fantasy XIV's first arc, "A Realm Reborn", is a bloated over-wordy piece of shit with terrible writing and way too much filler and there's no reason to actually play it except that you have to, so skip those cutscenes.

I view it as an introduction: Here are the people you'll be spending the game with, here's the plot notes of importance, here's ... okay the Titan arc is really hardcore filler but it's amusing to me anyway... etc. It's about introductions and learning.

Now that you've Introduced and Learned, though-- Heavensward is where the plot really takes off and Goes Places. I started it early last year, played to the conclusion of the expansion pack and took a break, and now I've finished the expansion content and broken into Stormblood stuff. I can judge it as a whole, and while there were some stutter-start plot threads that are obviously dangling for later...

Wow this was a piece of work. This gives me optimism for Stormblood's plotting. Things they WOULD'VE handled awkwardly are handled with some nuance, and the voice acting even improved a little. It's also still got the best music in the business, I've been wandering around singing bits of Sophia's theme to myself since I first heard it.

A heartbeat without harmony
is moonlight without dark.
The heart seeketh equilibrium,
with balance will your worry part.

So I'm... eager to see what happens next, I suppose.

I also resubbed to Final Fantasy XI because I'm a dipshit, by the way.

ANYWAY... This will be the cutoff point for this year of games. You know what that means.

See you next post!

A short but narratively strong text adventure (with graphics) that's mechanically all about asking questions and guiding a conversation, but storywise wanders between mystery and Asimovian science fiction.

This is a smart one, much like Thomas Was Alone before it. Michael Bithell's strengths lie in plotting, characterizing with personality strokes across a tight canvas, and in a game design that flows in one direction while giving the player an illusion of choice. Yes, in many ways this is a very linear experience that could be done in simple text adventure format, but it feels like a reactive one. Characters acknowledge things you say later on and you never have just one way to react to a situation personality-wise, even if you may be squeezed in tight puzzle-wise.

For people who enjoy engaging with a narrative's themes and allowing themselves to consider alternative viewpoints, this is a very interesting game. For people who do not enjoy this, I suspect it'll be about 45 minutes of clicking followed by an arbitrary choice and a sense of dissatisfaction.

Also, there's a developer's commentary robot that joins you on the second playthrough. I ended up going through most of the game again to hear what it had to say. One thing I had wondered, post-game, was "Can this be expanded on?" and it was nice to have confirmation that yes, the development team put this together in only a few months ("only") and more elaborate interactions were surely possible. I look forward to picking up the next game in this lineage to see how that goes.

I felt deeply tired and burned out for a while, so I decided to roll back to one of my favorite older games thanks to the Disney Afternoon Collection.

One of the things I love most about Ducktales is its nonsensical nature, typical of the licensed games of the late 80s/early 90s. Why is Scrooge McDuck on the moon, enjoying Capcom's most memeticly well-regarded music track? Why are Yeti attacking? Why did Dracula steal all of your hard-fought treasures?

The answer is: No one cares shut up.

I'm told the remade version attempts to answer questions like this. That's part of why I've never actually played it.

This is a good game, though.

Ugh.
Ugh, ugh, ugh.
Ugh, fucking ugh ugh AUGH fuck fuck ugh ugh bleah.

Okay so I loved this and I hated it.

Hated: Obtuse puzzles that do not quite reflect the in-game reality.

Example: You have a fishing pole. JUST the pole. No fish visibly on it. You have a magnet. You have a grate with a metal lost object down it. Obviously you magnetfishpole right? No. You need to use your knife on the fishing pole, at which point you get a string (to tie to the magnet) and a whole intact fish skeleton. Excuse me? At least give me a look option on my inventory if you're gonna pull that.

Also hated: The ending. We'll get to that.

Liked: This is a detective noir story about a hard-boiled swearing plush bear and a young girl on an adventure to find her brother and learn who the "Red Man" is that's been burning her city down. The city is made of paper and populated by toys, by the way. It's imaginary, except when it isn't. Amber is treated like a demigoddess creation-myth character, while Ted is treated like an old drunk PI. It's a good dynamic.

It's a hurricane of dumb jokes, some of which land and most of which do not, but it tries.

Decent character writing.

Then there's the ending.

Fuck this fucking ending off a fucking cliff.

Come with me to spoiler-space.
( Down here. )


...just ... ugh. Every part of the game I liked was designed to waste my time, in the end. That's how I feel about that.

What a shame, for a promising, intelligent premise to fall that low.

[EDIT]

You know, I try not to really go off on games, but this demonstrates what it takes to upset me. I'm not upset because I DISLIKED the ending, although that's part of it. I'm upset because I thought it really had something interesting going, but then it fell back to cliche. That hurts and offends me, and I just get frustrated.

Bear With Me isn't terrible. It doesn't deserve that kind of anger and frustration, but it got a dose anyway.

This is where I usually say a few words about the game I've just played.

In actual fact, a lot of QUBE doesn't need much said about it. You are in another Goddamn White-Walled Facility with another Goddamn Puzzle Solving Device strapped to your hands, so you go solve some Goddamn Puzzles. They're all over the place, man. It's like they live here or something.

Then there's the narrative, which I am led to believe was added at the last minute and at some expense in the Director's Cut.

I don't need to discuss the narrative, because someone else has taken it apart piece by piece and laid it out nicely on a tray I can link to. And so I have.

It's a very spoilery essay but it takes this game to pieces and then builds it back up to show you what was going on. Amazingly sharp. Nothing but respect here.

Anyway I had a good time solving puzzles, except for one godsawful sliding box physics THING that was even labeled in the achievements "the hardest puzzle in the game". That was like five hours of my seven hour play time right there.

The rest was good.

I think this suffered a bit from being broken into two sections. Somewhere between the first and second part, Double Fine possibly listened to a little TOO MUCH feedback or something and changed the course of the game drastically. That's the problem with Kickstarters, I suppose. So many hands driving the bus.

The first half of Broken Age is a lazy little romp through a fantasy world (which has a serious 'monster kidnapping maidens' problem) and a sci-fi world (which has a serious 'this place is run by patronizing parents' problem.) It's very easy and breezy and quick, you have a lot of wacky conversations, the animation is charming and the characters are likable.

The second half, particularly the END of the second half, becomes Myst Puzzle Nightmare, with the most heinous offender being a puzzle repeated several times where you're:

Wiring something.
What you wire it to matters.
There are six points and any connection between the six is allowed (but not necessarily correct).
The DIRECTION you run the wire FROM matters.
There is a trial-and-error element, you have to experiment to learn how the puzzle works mechanically.
It is randomized, so you can't use a walkthrough to solve it.

And perhaps most egregious to people who don't like adventure-game logic:
You have to use information gathered as one character to solve puzzles as a different character with no chance for them to in-character exchange information. It is entirely player-knowledge based.

That isn't a dealbreaker for me, but I've seen people get real angry at that in the past, so I figured I'd mention it.

Anyway two thirds of this game are QUITE easy and charmingly cartoonish and the last third becomes Puzzle Hell.
If that's what you're looking for, here it is.

Shenmue is a strange, gently plodding beast of a game that we'll never see the likes of again. Even when Shenmue 3 comes out, it will likely focus on different things, different aspects of gameplay. Shenmue is currently gaming's one and only kung-fu small town life simulator, and that's commendable.

This makes the fourth time in my life I've finished Shenmue 1 and every time I've played it I've seen different scenes, talked to people and discovered what to do next in different ways. I've gotten different toys out of the capsule machines and won different prizes in the lucky-dip draws in the stores. The plot of Shenmue is the same every time, the way you work through that plot is different and organic.

Shenmue came with a disc on the Dreamcast called the Shenmue Passport. (Which sadly is not replicated in the Steam release.) The Shenmue Passport had every NPC in Ryo's hometown. Name, age, blood type, Zodiac signs. Every NPC follows schedules that make every one of them seem something more like a real person. You'll never know the name of that one blonde girl in the coat, but she'll happily tell you to stop asking her so many questions, because she's busy.

In other games, NPCs materialize from the ether whenever you're not looking in a particular direction. Those NPC do not have a story behind them. They're a random collection of assets: Hair, facial features, clothing, body type, that was generated ten minutes ago. They may be doing things but they were created two minutes ago when you swung the camera around and the game needed to populate the street.

The NPCs in other games are exactly as functional as Shenmue's NPCs. Doing all that work for Shenmue was, perhaps, unimportant and wasteful. Whether you think so or not kind of defines how you'll feel about Shenmue in total.

Shenmue is about drawers full of clutter you can pick up and look at. Shenmue is about hours standing in a vacant lot punching the air to rank up your kung fu moves, because Ryo is a martial artist and needs to practice his moves to get good at them. It's about playing Hang-On and Space Harrier in an arcade because those were arcade games around in 1986, which is when Shenmue takes place. It's about forklift racing every morning and Ryo being memeticly emotionally dead towards people he actually likes.

Shenmue is about Ryo taking one last walk down the street before leaving his hometown, before his adventure even truly begins, and the dull aching realization that you know every face he passes. Maybe not the names (or the blood types or where they live) but you know those people and it's time to say goodbye to them, just like Ryo is.

It's Shenmue, and there's never been anything like it since. I'm about to move on to Shenmue 2, which is Ryo as a fish out of water in Hong Kong. I've never actually played it before.

There may not be anything like that out there either.

I'll let you guys know.

[EDIT] - This Eurogamer article says the same thing I did, but better.

(If you're past a certain age, I can just say that this is Take Two Interactive's "Bureau 13" game, except actually done WELL. If not, keep reading.)

Technobabylon was one of the best games I played in 2017 (yeah I know it came out in 2015, shh). Wadjet Eye has done it again with Unavowed, one of the best games I played in 2018 and an amazing capstone to all of their work so far. You can play this game without having played the Blackwell series, but you'll get a little more out of it if you have.

It's also a rather dark piece of work, with a tone somewhere between Sleepy Hollow (the TV show) and something like Buffy. Your character (whose gender and former profession are chosen by you) gets possessed and goes on a year-long murderfestival rampage across New York City. Eventually the Unavowed, a brave supernatural-evil-fighting duo show up, and with the body back in your own control you sign up to fight evil with them.

As the game goes on, you recruit more characters in Bioware style, solve mysteries (all of which center around that year of hell your character went through), make Tough Choices and work to make the city a better place. All in absolutely gorgeous 640x480 resolution pixel art.

There were a couple of puzzles that slowed me down (the word "LEGS" is going to cause me to make faces for weeks) but this mostly flowed very smoothly. If you're at all a fan of past Wadjet Eye creations, this game needs to be in your life. If you're not, it's a good starting place, maybe the best starting place except that its quality might spoil you for the rough patches of past games.

This game contains some gore, some body/existential horror that might be jarring to some, and a lot of swearing.

As a sequel to Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite continues the themes and ideals of its prior work, namely it's a mashed-up messy arthouse collage with a really weird ending and a lot of interesting themes at play, presented in a style that's suited to a 90s early-CD-ROM multimedia playhouse where being Interesting is more important than being coherent.

It makes a lot of advancements on the prior game -- you've got an actual inventory now, for example -- but it also regresses a little. The entire game is a system of keys and fetch quests, picked up by listening to the rambling diatribes of the hotel guests.

The achievements are also slightly buggy, one of them outright refused to trigger for me. This is not really the kind of game you play for achievements, though. You're here to explore the quirky cast, form theories about what's going on, and have your face implode at the ending.

Really, it's all a game like this should be.

I have not finished all the quests in this, but I have finished the "main" game. So let's have an entry.

If you've spoken to me lately, you've heard me go on about this because I fricking love it. If you haven't, let me go on about it a while, because I fricking love it.

Jazztronauts is an add-on module for popular dicking-about simulator Garry's Mod, and to my surprise it has a legit plot. While exploring a fairly generic Half-Life 2 map, you discover a gang of literal cat burglars hanging out chatting about their latest scheme. They take you back to their interdimensional headquarters/bar and quickly conscript you into being their latest dimension-diver. You fiddle with a machine, it sucks a world up (from the Steam workshop) and you and your magical item-stealing superbaton charge in there to yoink everything. Furniture, people, wall textures, etc.

It beautifully re-contextualizes the maps away from shootman adventures to a playspace where you can just run around, do urban exploration, suck all the light fixtures off the walls, and have genuine fun.

Then you pull a lever back at base and get money to upgrade your stuff, all while running fetch quests for your new feline employers. Could you in fact... find a partner among them?

Well probably not, or at least I'm not sure how. But they're a fun bunch to hang out with and really well-characterized for a fan mod.

Plus, Jazztronauts is near-infinitely replayable, because of the sheer scope of maps you can find on the workshop. Every mistake or someone's first map is a new adventure, every mess of godawful texturing mistakes is something you can yank down and sell off. If you've been a FPS dork for years, you probably have all the Half Life games, maybe Counter Strike Source, and Garry's Mod. If so, I really advise you to try out Jazztronauts. This thing's gonna show up in my game of the year awards for sure.

And if you do try it out, give me a yell and I'll join you in stripping the walls off the wall.