my take has always been that they are fairly good at doing bathos and melodrama and big contrived liberal triumphalism – every bioware game is attempting to hit the same beats as the worf arc in TNG (as misremembered by someone who had it on in the other room while playing final fantasy 8) with varying degrees of success. I thought Mass Effects 2 and especially 3 were fairly good at that, as was kotor; almost none of their other games particularly have been. but it seems like that’s what they’re trying to do here, so I’ll give them that.
critical perception of their work has typically been orthogonal to the work itself, it’s a total projection (which is why reactionaries fixate on them)
my fondest memory of Andromeda is the Eurogamer review which mentioned a boss cutscene playing and then the boss briefly being nowhere to be found until he came into view jogging around a corner, like he was late coming back from a smoke break. Great image
Dragon Age 2 permanently broke many bioware fans so I’m not really sure this is necessarily true. All the freaks who loved origins love going on about how dragon age hasn’t been DARK and GRITTY ever since and that’s why it sucks now.
Veilguard is completely inoffensive bullshit. It’s like kingdom of amalur or something, extremely Xbox 360 core, you can tell they restarted the project a billion times. It mainly bothered me because it treats you like you have a traumatic brain injury with nearly non existent puzzles your party members usually explain to you how to solve before you even see them and pop ups that tell you the subtext of a conversation you are currently having
I did like when Morrigan showed up and acted like a completely different person, it probably sucks a lot more if you’re invested in the ~lore of Dragon Age~ and choices from past games which the game is largely not interested in outside of a narrow section relating to the lost history of the elves and the dread wolf shit. But the whole series has handled those things relatively poorly, I mean origins lets you do a lot of hilarious shit they just immediately refused to ever acknowledge as being possible in later games.
Bioware fans gained some temporary sanity but they were quickly replaced by all the people who insisted that da2 was a deep and well written story instead of jokerface “I like dragons”
da2 is not a deep and well written story. but it played to their writers strengths and had a good concept, plus the party members were all interesting/funny losers minus the DLC dipshits. friendship/rivalry was a good idea too! this is literally more than you can say for a lot of their output since then, now their games are just kinda nothing, shit like andromeda and anthem just completely went through people
Also, of all the game companies that could have fucked up the top surgery scars option, it is no surprise Bioware did. They posit that only people with masc bodies can have mastectomies. So much for woke!
The writing in Veilguard really is a step down even from past Bioware games though. The way your party members will all give the same explanation of a thing multiple times in the same conversation, it’s this weird circular way of speaking that isn’t really present in their other games. Why is it that the first thing the ultra powerful elven god with a dragon thrall does is introduce monetary corruption into some village, like the game has been going off about the insane magical abilities of these motherfuckers and she’s tactically deploying a cartoon cart full of gold to sucker in Mayor Asshole. You follow a literal trail of coins to him! And then she uses her powers to turn it into tentacle hell town where she’s mind controlling all the inhabitants anyway. If she can just fucking mind control people, which the mayor blames for his greed, why did she need to bribe him anyway?? It’s completely bizarre!!
There’s a part early on where your character is like putting some mementos in their room and you can reflect on this, doing some roleplaying in a damn roleplaying game, but you’re like looking at a fucking chess set and your options are “I have to save the world” “War is bad” and “I like travelling.” Such amazing interiority you can give Rook.
I am now really far into FFIV and I think it’s pretty bad actually. I used to appreciate the consistent difficulty of the battles, but now I understand how essential to breaking up the monotony it is that you occasionally play a few hours of a JRPG in a really powerful state that lets you just steamroll random trash encounters. This basically never happens in FFIV. Maybe it would if I would grind, but I’m not going to do that when the other games seem to just have this sort of thing built into their progression and pacing. Magic just feels severely underpowered in this game and your party composition gets shaken up so frequently that I can never learn the nuances of how to best fight using them. I dread random encounters in this game more than any other FF.
And while FF2 had obscure systems on top of some conventional ones, it seems like all the conventional systems are super obscured in the SNES version of FFIV. Like, I can’t even find equipment, spell, or item descriptions within the game. I have no clue why I should use some items over others, or if there are tradeoffs I’m just not aware of. I am guessing some of this would be in the manual? But sheesh… I’m ranking this the lowest of the mainline entries I’ve played. Almost don’t want to finish it now that I’m at Eblan. Maybe this is because I am playing the Namingway Version.
Played the Namingway version a few years ago and just wished I’d play the OG US release. Just give me a fucking easy type, there’s not enough meat to the game to justify making it harder
I wish I knew what I was getting into to compare, but you must be right. This would probably be a perfectly fine and brief JRPG to slide through in 10 hours. But someone thought it should be harder? The combat so dull but also stressful at the same time. Not a good combo!
