continuing my jrpg mission which i’ve been very slow on because i’ve started a second mission: to play western games with level design (i’ll get to that in just a sec).
i don’t actually have much to add to my mission rn cos i spent ages on vagrant story and then got sidelined but i need to write my thoughts down before i forget them:
parasite eve 2 (emulated ps1) - it's resi but with parasite even paint.
obvs that’s reductive but i’m here to play pegs not resi clones. as soon as i saw that this entry didn’t have the combat from the original i lost interest. that’s not to say i stopped playing immediately, i think i put like 2 or 3 hours in or something like that, and yeah it seems fine, but dude i want parasite eve 2 not biohazard: parasite.
anyway i’ll probably try out some of the later ones like 3rd birthday (aka: thirps birthday) cos it has a stupid name and also it’s a got darned tps on the psp so what’s not to love.
vagrant story (emulated on my 3ds) - i wish i liked it more.
it’s a real cool game to be a superfan of for sure, but dude this game is not friendly and has way too many systems.
let’s start with the presentation: it’s incredible. the game looks amazing and continues to look amazing all the way through (or at least as far through as i played). especially noticeable are all the fun camera angles during cutscenes, and of course the dramatic rim-lighting on all the characters. it’s a small thing but it makes a huge difference. vagrant story basically looks like a ps1.5 game, which i mean, based on its release date, it kinda sorta is (it was released not even a month before the ps2!).
the plot is also similar to ffxii; granular and serious in a way that’s a bit hard to follow, but quite compelling. and i appreciated that the two main characters, ashley and sydney (cool gender-ambiguous names), are dressed so… slutty? ashley’s cheeks are always out and sydney is only ever wearing a cape (cape? it’s hung off his waist?) and gauntlets. idk, it’s maybe a stupid thing to focus on, but it stood out to me and made me smile.
as for actually playing the thing: i wanted to like this so bad, but ultimately the game is much too strict and pedantic about how it wants you to play, or at least that’s how it felt to me.
i really like the premise of the combat; i like timing attacks, it feels way cooler than button mashing or just sitting back and doing nothing, but i think the window for correct timing could be extended by like, 100%, and still remain very fair. i didn’t have a particularly hard time getting 10+ hit combos going but i could still feel the strictness of the system the whole time.
i really like that each weapon has different attacks with different timings, and that more useful attacks have harder-to-read timings, that’s all pretty standard Good Game Design stuff, but it really wasn’t communicated very well, and it took me many hours before i realised that the different attacks were divided up into the different tiers of timing difficulty, based on how useful they had been deemed.
blocking attacks from enemies is also a point of friction; mostly it’s fine and enemy attacks are pretty easy to read but like, why not give the enemies combos like the player has? so you have to learn a little pattern for each enemy? idk seems like a wasted opportunity.
then there’s magic. how the fuck are you supposed to block any of this shit? it feels like a joke. half the spells have like 10-20 second animations where the (still extremely narrow) block window is thrown in after like 3 false cues (which wouldn’t be quite so bad if it weren’t for the fact that you can only attempt to block once during an attack, regardless of how long the attack is). like what is the point? some spells will just straight up kill you immediately, and you can’t grind to get better health or whatever so you just have to roll the dice sometimes. it feels not great.
none of the above is helped by the fact that the game is extremely pedantic about using the correct buffs and debuffs. if you’re fighting a fire boss and you haven’t picked up, read, and prepared the fire defense spell, then you are just going to get one-shot by this cunt. and you’re required to fight the same bosses but with different elements throughout the game, so if you miss the grimoire that contains the spell you need then idk get fucked i guess.
i just don’t see what this adds. it feels arcane in a way that fell out of fashion a decade before this game was made.
anyway here are some complaints about the weirdly vestigial systems + design decisions that i could not understand:
- the combat is actually kinda spammy. because there’s no like, meter that ticks down to indicate when you can attack again, you just end up standing next to enemies and pressing the attack button until either you manage to bring up the combat isohedron, or they start an attack first. this means that i regularly had an enemy try to attack me while i’m trying to attack them, and then the enemy’s attack will start and i’ll have accidentally pressed the attack button during the defense phase, which causes you to miss your opportunity to defend, because there’s no fucking buffer period to indicate “hey dick head stop pressing buttons, the enemy is about to attack you.” like what is going on here? just put some ui on the god damn screen so i can see when i’m allowed to attack again. also why is the buffer between attacks like… one second? what’s the point of the buffer at that stage? just a total mess.
- risk? when do you ever not have full risk? (risk goes up when you perform any action, and ticks down over time. the higher your risk the more likely everyone is to land critical hits, including enemies) if you’ve mastered (or even got a passable grip on) the combo timing, then you’re just going to be at full risk all the time. idk maybe, like so many other systems, there was some nuance that was not communicated clearly, but i didn’t see a reason to worry about this system.
- block pushing puzzles. no offense but fuck off i’m so disinterested. there’s not even anything “wrong” with them per se, but they completely obliterate the momentum of a dungeon in ways that only ever felt bad. not to mention they really undermine the tone.
- crafting??? fuck off i am not building weapons out of other weapons who could be fucking bothered.
anyway it’s an intensely fascinating game but it’s so thoroughly riddled with bizarre design decisions that i feel no desire to return to it. i’m really glad i played it though. it feels like one of those games that heads like to yell about but not actually play.
majin tensei: spiral nemesis (emulated snes) - lmao it's a tactics game idk it's fine lol.
i didn’t play it with any great seriousness, i mostly just wanted a palette cleanser after vague rant and i had a good time looking at the sick digitised photos used as battle backgrounds but otherwise sorry i’m not the right person to review this. the only tactics games i’ve cared about have been tactics ogre and its ilk cos they have like cool elevation and each lev looks like a little diorama, so these flat, super zoomed out cities and buildings don’t really do anything for me.
i technically also started faifan nine but i haven’t actually done anything more than fuck around in the starting town and try to get the emulator to work properly lole (fake edit: since beginning to write this i have since played for about 2 hours and got through the opening sequence and yeah it’s cool! i love art style so much it’s very charming). seems chill. great town! i’ll get to it eventually, but at the moment i’ve been waylaid by my other mission:
so because i teach level design at uni i kinda felt like i should engage with some contemporary “good level design” games so that i’m more familiar with the general scene. i also decided to look specifically at “western” (non-japanese) games because it’s a blind spot of mine. some of these games were chosen because i’ve heard they had good level design, and some were chosen simply because i’ve heard of them but never actually seen them played. it should be fairly obvious which is which.
approximately in the order i played them:
dishonored (ps4) - what a nice surprise.
i had multiple unrelated people tell me that this was their favourite game ever, which set me up to not like it (
), but i had a good time basically the whole way through and remember a lot of each individual level, which is a good sign imo.
i deliberately never used the see-through-walls ability cos it was immediately apparent that it would make the game painfully boring. and i tried my best to kill as few people as possible, unless i thought someone was particularly horrible.
i think the game looks really nice too; i liked the horrible french character models, the painterly textures, and that cute trick they do to make the windows opaque without feeling like you’re in a basement.
my favourite moment was in the masquerade level, you’re given a letter to deliver to someone you’ve never met, and you don’t know the contents of the letter. when you find the person and deliver it, it turns out that the letter is a challenge to a duel, and you are the surrogate dueler, so you have to fight this guy on the front lawn of the party. it’s so cool and unexpected and they never do anything like that in the rest of the game! it felt the most like what i imagine imsims are aiming for. once again i am reminded that i should probably just play all those hitmans i have access to.
anyway yeah really cool game. not my favourite but i’m glad i played it. i’ve got dishonored 2 as well, and i played that for a few hours (extremely good starting town holy moly) and i’ll come back and play the rest of it sometime.
call of duty 4: modern warfare (ps3) - it's pretty chill, and i do remember a lot of the levels.
some of the designs felt a little… messy i guess? and some of them felt kinda obligatory, as though someone was going through a checklist of different level types that must be included. like, the stealth levels aren’t really very interesting, especially when you’re basically just dead if u fuck them up so it kills the momentum pretty hard. but it had good gunplay and did a pretty solid job of guiding you through different shooting galleries (a staple that it leans really hard on), but ultimately it’s not really something i see myself pulling from too much. it feels more like a game with good scenario and encounter design, more than good “level” design. not a bad thing, just a different design focus.
doom (2016) (ps4) - yeah dude i mean it's doom 2016.
i don’t really remember a great deal about it honestly, at least in terms of its levels. i remember i had a really hard time seeing the explosive red barrels which were everywhere, and as a result i had an unnecessarily hard time with some of the fights.
the action was good and all, but i think the game is a bit visually samey. too much red. i need a break dude. pop like a greenhouse in there or something, mars swamp, anything.
it didn’t like, blow my mind or anything. it’s just a good shooter with nice kinaesthesis and balanced encounter design. i’m not compelled to play eternal.
haze (ps3)
wow this is the first time i’ve ever heard someone say faggot in a videogame.
the order: 1886 (ps4) - sure is a thirps i guess.
idk it didn’t really inspire me much and i’m even less interested in coming back to it after seeing that bgolus tweet lmao.
prey (ps4) - ehhhhh idk man.
after talking to a few prey enjoyers i’ve decided that the reason i didn’t like it is because i was playing it as tho it were a shooter with stealth elements, not a stealther with shoot elements. still, i feel like the mimics were very poorly done. they have such great potential but the game felt too gun-oriented for them to land properly, and eventually they stop feeling like this ever-present threat and more like random encounters with level 1 enemies. it’s a shame. i liked the environment quite a bit, and of course the glue gun was pretty cool and it’s an admirable thing to include (and to give you a billion ammo for), but ultimately this just kinda felt like worse dishonored.
wolfenstein: the new order (ps4) - i like this game a *lot*.
it’s pretty rough and definitely could use a touch-up in places, but god damn its got some really nice gunplay, lots of excellent levels, and the best writing out of any of the games listed here.
it’s wild to me that machinegames (the devs on this entry) took B.J. got darn Blazkowicz, the most football helmet lookin dude on earth, and gave him time to be tender and warm and human. it’s so good. i appreciated the down-time between missions way more than i expected – the hub zone in berlin is really chill, i like it a lot – and the story gets good mileage out of what is actually very few characters. i was a little disappointed to discover that if you make what is clearly the wrong decision right at the start of the campaign (saving fergus instead of wyatt) you get a significantly worse npc in the hideout (fem tesla instead of hendrix??? i do not understand the dichotomy here), and i still don’t exactly understand what the point of the timeline split is supposed to be. but aside from that the writing is really admirable and a huge part of why i love this game.
my main criticism is that i think the level design suffers from having multiple difficulties instead of one well-designed difficulty. it wouldn’t be such an issue if the difficulty options were just “easy, normal, and hard” instead of whatever the fuck is going on w id games, but as it stands i feel like the difficulty of encounters fluctuates wildly enough that it’s probably worth playing on normal or lower (the only thing difficulty changes is damage numbers so like… who cares) to smooth over the rough patches.
the thing that really makes this game land for me (apart from the surprisingly good writing) is its lean system, which i’ve never seen the like of before: when holding the left bumper you get locked into place and can use the left stick to lean left and right as expected, but also up and down! so you can peak over, under, and around obstacles that would otherwise be slightly awkward to navigate. idk why more games don’t do this (lookin at you, dishonored), it seems to me like a really easy way to make a cover shooter more interesting and flexible, and reduces the burden on environment designers to accommodate a more rigid player controller (you can have much more naturalistic environments without compromising playability). it also slows the pace of the fights a bit, which i like, and it feels more suited to a console shooter (which is kinda strange cos there’s no aim-assist to speak of, idk why).
anyway yeah this game owns. it’s by far my favourite game i’ve played this year and such a lovely surprise. if u have gamepass give it a go (i recommend using a controller), it’s awesome.
wolfenstein: the new colossus (ps4) - i hate this game a *lot*.
joss whedon fuckn game.
ok so the first level is extremely strong: you’re in a wheelchair (which controls, more or less, like a wheelchair; you move in bursts of speed rather than a constant pace, and you move slower and faster depending on whether you’re on a slope, it’s great!), and you’re trundling around this submarine turning nazis into paste while having to contend with the fact that you’re in a wheelchair, and it feels like a really coherent (and fun!) message about empowering you even though you’re physically disabled. it’s really excellent!
after that, everything goes to shit. the writing is so painfully marvel-y. everyone is a shtick or a stereotype, and all the wonderful work that went into humanising Blazkowicz and making his relationships feel grown-up and nuanced is frittered away in favour of being a stupid husband who’s sad about being disabled because he can’t fuck his wife or whatever, so he has to avoid her and not talk about his feelings. dude what the fuck did u even play the previous game??? the B.J. in wolfenste1n would never be such a loser.
the tone fluctuates so rapidly that everything is undermined; neither serious nor funny sections get sufficient space to breathe so they’re constantly overlapping in ways that mean neither of them land. it’s astonishingly bad.
the game is also way worse to actually play! there are some surface-level improvements like automatically picking up ammo, and being able to select a weapon for each hand, but those aside everything else is significantly worse:
the levels are much more open and stealth-oriented. if you are seen by anyone then the alarm will be raised an a million guys will descend on your position from every direction. when this happens you’re basically just fucked. maybe this is not the case (or less the case) with mouse+keyboard, but with a controller (still no aim-assist) there is no way you can deal with that many enemies in that kind of space. in the previous game this was not a problem because the levels had a much clearer sense of direction (you weren’t constantly getting flanked) and because the stealth aspect was basically just a way of making the fight a little easier if you wanted, but if you didn’t engage with it then the level still worked just fine.
you also can’t actually avoid these problematic fights because sometimes that’s just the level and there is no stealth aspect. very early on there is a fight in a donut-shaped room and it fucking sucks because there is no way to orient yourself so that the enemy isn’t constantly sneaking up behind you!
most heinous of all: the lean system is worse. your lean range is greatly reduced when both standing and crouching (in the previous game you could use the lean to stand up from a crouch, or crouch down from a stand, thus allowing you to easily return to your desired stance while still taking advantage of the environment) and you almost never get to use it because you never have time to actually hunker down and shoot guys cos there is always some dick head right behind you!
i’m so mad at this game.
wolfensetin: the old blood (pc gamepass) - it's the new order but like worse.
it’s all the same stuff just with new characters who aren’t written well (or at all, really), worse levels with too many enemies, and a shotgun that feels about as impactful as saying the word “bang” in a nice, soft, indoor voice.
my one compliment is that it has really great environment design; every space looks really cool and has such rich atmosphere. it’s a really nice game to wander around and look at.
i played all the way through and it was a dumb little halloween game just for me, but i don’t think anyone else needs to play it. turns out writing is important! who knew.
i’m tired.