One Game At A Time: Resident Evil 2 (2019)

I was a PC kid growing up with a console-owning friend: an ideal situation for a kid in the 90s. My buddy Matt had an SNES and later a PlayStation, so I watched him play a lot of the big 90s console classics. This included the original Resident Evil 2. I had always thought I didn't like horror, since my exposure to film was through my Dad who is a total wuss, though I always got a thrill out of films like Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park. I know I'm not the first person for whom Spielberg was a gateway to horror, but Resident Evil 2 was part of that, too. I recall being totally compelled by RE2. The setting, that ridiculous gothic police station, seared itself into my mind and the feedback of the action was addictive even though I wasn't playing the game myself.

 In the 20 years since the original I've become both a console owner and a PC enthusiast, as well as a massive fan of horror. Horror video games have had a huge resurgence this console generation spanning all budgets, tiny experimental titles like Kitty Horrorshow's Anatomy, small-studio gems like Amnesia, and AAA titles like Alien: Isolation. (Isn't it fun that all those games start with the letter 'A'? What's up with that?)

 Capcom's own Resident Evil 7 was a revelation that totally hooked me: a playable Texas Chainsaw Massacre that masterfully captured both the tension of first person horror with the wild tonal shift and B-movie writing of the best Resident Evil titles.

 So, in preparation for RE2 I played a half hour or so of the PC version of the 1998 original. (Here's a guide on how to do that, if you're interested.) I didn't remember that game being so hard, though to be fair I wasn't playing it myself, but I'm glad I took a little tour into the opening hour. It made me appreciate the remake a lot more.

 January 28 2019:

Last night I finished the Leon campaign, which took me just under 7 hours. The game has two characters, Leon and Claire, each with totally separate stories that occasionally intersect. Upon beating one, you get access to "2nd Run" versions of the stories which slight differences. I don't know what those are yet.

This game is scary! The police station is just as ridiculous as before, but now whole wings of the building are plunged in inky darkness. The storm raging outside rattles the windows, and so do zombies clattering on the glass trying to get in. In a nod to the classic Resident Evil scare tactics, those zombies will eventually smash those windows and tumble into the hallways of the station. You can find wooden boards to carry around the stop them coming in, those these take up precious inventory space.

 The golden rule of Resident Evil is avoid the zombies you can, put down the ones you can't. That's easier said than done, as I often found myself taking unnecessary damage trying to avoid using ammo. The game's pacing is masterful, and when I say pacing I mean the way it doles out ammo and items. You're always short on ammo and healing items, but I never felt stuck. You learn to conserve, but you never end up with a ton of useless junk you'll never use. (Except for blue herbs, which cure poison and can give you a damage resistance buff. I didn't use those very often.) Zombies take a lot of hits, even headshots, which are hard to nail especially when you're under pressure. Knocking zombies down and running past them is the best option, but they might be stood back up next time you enter that room.

You will be re-entering the same places, and often. The game is structured into three large areas (the Police Station, the Sewers, and an underground Lab) and each as rooms and passageways that are initially locked but can be opened. It reminded me of the structure of Dark Souls, as locked doors are often opened from the inside after finding another way around. As the situation deteriorates and more monsters infest the building, the game becomes an exercise in route planning. You'll spend a minute hiding in a save room, staring at your map, trying to memorize the number of turns required to get from point A to point B. Zombies can bash through doors but the more monstrous creatures, like the infamous Licker, can't, so strategically clearing out windowless rooms can be give you some breathing space.

 One monster that can open doors is The Tyrant, and holy shit is this thing a masterclass in horror game enemy design. Tyrant is an eight-foot-tall behemoth dressed like Dick Tracy (complete with a fedora you get a trophy for shooting off) who is completely invulnerable. Bullets ricochet off his trenchcoat, and head shots only make him flinch. Grenades, flashbangs, shotgun blasts to the face--these will knock him down to one knee long enough for you to escape. Taking cues from Alien: Isolation, once Tyrant is unleashed on you in the campaign, he is always around and the game's sound design never lets you forget it. If you're in the same general area as each other, you can hear his heavy footsteps through the floors and ceilings and he can even smash through walls to get to you. Later, the game uses those unmistakable footsteps to announce the reintroduction of Tyrant into the story, and I swear I said "Oh NO!" outloud each time, as he always reappears at the worst moments. In creating the Tyrant, Capcom has accidentally created a blueprint for the greatest Terminator game ever made and someone needs to get on that.

Leon's campaign is sold fun from beginning to end and I'm really looking forward to starting Claire's story tonight. The story structure of RE2 deserves special mention: chopping the story into four (6 if you count the "secret-not-secret" extra characters) chunks encourages replayability for players who only have a few hours a night to play games. It reminds me of the structure of God of War, which used the different realms to chop up its story. I'm really intrigued to see where Leon's actions affected Claire's, and how her actions explain some of the surprises in Leon's story.

January 29, 2018

I put some time into the "2nd Run" of Claire's story last night and it was not what I was expecting.

At first, I thought I had made a mistake and almost went back to pick Claire's "new game" option. The game fast-forwards through the bits of story that overlap, so you get a truncated version of the opening cutscene - anything that you already saw as Leon is all quick-cut edited to give you the gist. I was a little disappointed in this because I really like how the game starts and I assumed that Claire's intro would be different. I now realize that the New Game versions of each story are structurally identical, with a few changes, and the 2nd Run is designed to be played after completing the first playthrough.

I did the thing I was supposed to do, is what I'm saying.

So Claire's 2nd Run is a sort of "behind-the-scenes" of what she was doing while Leon was running around the police station, except it's not really. Some doors that Leon opened are closed, some are still open. Lockers and safes are still closed, enemies are still around. It feels like a ROM hack of RE2 and once I got over the initial strangeness of it, I was able to buy in.

There's a funny side effect of this style of storytelling - since the enemies are tougher and more numerous, and since the player is so much better at playing the game now than they were the first time round, whoever you pick as your 2nd Run character ends up coming across as way more competent than your first pick. In my story, college student Claire just unloads incendiary rounds from a grenade launcher at the first glimpse of the unstoppable Tyrant whereas highly-trained cop Leon ran away like a baby.

The game is also messing around with my expectations. The appearance of the Licker in the original Resident Evil 2 is an iconic video game moment. In the remake, you enter that same hallway, which is still covered in blood, and round that same corner to find… nothing. Only the evidence of the Licker's passing - claw marks, corpses, and gore. In the 2nd Run, not only did they return the Licker to its place on the ceiling, but they even added it scurrying past a window just before you see it in another nod to the original.

Speaking of the Licker, I didn't realize until this playthrough that they're blind and can only detect you with sound. I haven't found a way to fully sneak by them yet, they're too fast, but it would be cool of Capcom had included a (brief) sequence where you have to be stealthy to evade them.

The 2nd Run really picks up when the stories diverge. In Leon's campaign, you face off against the monster G in the bowels of the police station, before joining forces with Ada Wong. Claire meets up with Sherry Birkin, has a run-in with Police Chief Irons, and meets up with Annette Birkin much earlier than Leon. So far, it feels like Claire's story is more connected to what's going on, whereas Leon feels like more of an outsider. The story is happening with Claire, and to Leon, if that makes sense. Just like in Leon’s campaign, you briefly take control of the supporting character: in this case it’s Sherry. Sherry’s sequence is absolutely terrifying as she evades a serial killer through the halls of an orphanage. There are a ton of horror references in this sequence, not the least of which a direct homage to The Shining, and it makes me excited for the recently announced Ghost Stories DLC.

I'll also note that there is some ingrained sexism in this: Leon gets to hang out with a sexy superspy in a red dress, where Claire is stuck looking after a little girl. The writers of 2018 do good work with material that's 20 years behind gender representation, but it's annoying all the same. It's definitely not a deal breaker, it’s actually nice that even pulpy video game narratives have come so far as to make something like this noticeable.

Once I slowed down and stopped playing 2nd Run in a rush to "get to the story" I enjoyed it as much as my first trip through the game. I'm excited to see where things change and where they stay the same, even as I dread taking another trip into the sewers.

Cleaning up before OGAT 2019

I’ve got a huge piece in the pipe for Red Dead Redemption 2 but there’s a lot in there to unpack and I’m not ready to give it my full attention yet. Short version: It’s the game of this console generation, for better and worse, and a towering achievement.

THIS piece is not about that. After slipping out of my self-imposed One Game At A Time restriction in the fall, I’m going to try and get back in the habit of limiting myself to a single game. As I’ve mentioned before this is as much to diversify my off-time as it is to allow me to soak up a particular experience. First up is Resident Evil 2, which releases this Friday, January 25. In the lead up to that, I’ll run through some quick thoughts on what I’ve been playing.

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Dragon Age XI

I was always an arms-length fan of JRPGs. Nobody made JRPGs for the PC in the 90s. I watched my friend Matt play all of Final Fantasy VII and Chrono Trigger but never actually played them myself. Even my first console, the Xbox, had very few JRPGs and my association with RPGs was limited anyway. I think the first CRPG I played was Fallout, which I still think is the best game in the series, and I remember reading about Daggerfall in PC Gamer and thinking it was probably too adult for me. The game that really cracked open RPGs for me was Daggerfall’s sequel Morrowind, which was sold to me by my friendly neighbourhood EB Games manager by comparing it to Thief. I didn’t play another RPG until Knights of the Old Republic on the Xbox.

The first JRPG I played on my own was Eternal Sonata: a turn-based JRPG in the old style with gorgeous art and a bonkers story: you play as French composer Chopin as he retreats into his own subconscious while he lays dying in his sickbed. I have extremely fond memories of this game due to the state I was in when I came to it: after getting kicked out of theatre school, breaking up with my girlfriend, and, crucially, buying my own weed for the first time. I don’t remember the actual game so much as being in my bachelor apartment, nicely day-stoned, the sun streaming in through the window.

I’ve since played the major JRPGs for myself: FF6, 7, 9, & 15, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Fire Emblem, FF: Tactics. The usual. Dragon Age XI is probably going to be the first one of those I actually finish.

Credit must be given to Kotaku’s Tim Rogers, whose nearly-40-minute video review of XI completely sold me on it. Specifically, his insistence that the game is “Chill as heck.” Video games are an exercise in increasing tension. As the player becomes more accustomed to the controls and systems of a game, it will grow increasingly complex and loud. Dragon Quest XI doesn’t really do this. Sure, you start with basic physical and magic attacks, slowly gain party members, and some of those party members are support specialists rather than damage-dealers, but you also gain a spell well past the halfway point that does an insane amount of damage to every enemy on screen and never misses.

The thing that keeps sticking with me about Tim’s review is this: by his experience, most Japanese people (Dragon Quest is HUGE in Japan; XI sold over 3 million copies there) play Dragon Quest on weeknights between having a bath and going to bed. He calls Dragon Quest games “bedtime stories” and that is a fantastic way to play a video game.

There’s a lot to say about DQXI but I’ll leave it at this: It is a fantastic, maybe the best, “baby’s first JRPG” because it is proudly old school. There is no subversion of tropes or surprising mechanics. No one at Square Enix thought “How can we make a Dragon Quest game for a 2018 audience?” The game is as old school as it gets (The “battle victory” musical sting is in MIDI, for chrissakes!) and it’s all the better for it. This is the video game equivalent of the book on your nightstand: comforting, slow, long, and unsurprising.

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God Of War

The absolute FLOOD of Game of the Year awards bestowed on God of War motivated me to pick it up again. I tried to play the New Game+ mode but, eh, NG+ modes just don’t do anything for me. Starting God of War maxxed out strips away a lot of the narrative tension that is the game’s best element.

It’s still very good, the dynamic between Kratos and Atreus is the best since Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, and the combat is very fun and chunky. I still like exploring and finding chests and it is still ludicrously pretty.

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Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

AC: Odyssey is like the girl you convince yourself you don’t have a crush on until you realize, oh no, I do have a huge crush on her! I was so burned out by Origins that I convinced myself I could skip Odyssey. Then the game got so much press I literally couldn’t ignore it. The best thing I can say about Odyssey is how I sold my Dad on it: Did you like The Witcher 3? Does the idea of The Witcher 3 set in Ancient Greece intrigue you even a little bit? Get this game.

Odyssey has all the Ubisoft problems that it’s fashionable to harp on: it feels like a structure cobbled together by thousands of different people, like the houses in Ready Player One, because that’s exactly what it is. For all the things it borrows from other games, its best addition to the open-world RPG structure is baked into its setting: each island you sail to has its own storyline, characters, and explorable areas. The game calls the story “Your Odyssey” but that’s not an eye-rolling marketing gimmick: it does feel like you’re set off on this sprawling, epic story. Whoever is working on the inevitable new Mass Effect game should take note: This is what Andromeda should have been! A sci-fi RPG, trading this game’s island hopping for planet-hopping, sells itself.

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Golf Story

I don’t have much to say about this game except that it’s super cute and exactly what I wanted: an RPG where you play golf instead of fighting monsters. If that sounds at all appealing to you, you should get it. It’s on everything, but it is especially on the Switch.

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Celeste
Smarter people than me have written plenty about Celeste—the surprising/unsurprising indie darling Game of the Year winner that brings the peanut butter & chocolate marriage of Super Meat Boy’s pixel-perfect platforming with “Grown Up Video Game Storytelling.” GUVGS is what I call games that are praised for their more nuanced approach to characters, which usually means they’re about mental health, by telling stories that are big steps for the industry but are still a long way from, say, The Favourite.

Celeste is one of those great games whose story could only be told properly as a video game. Taken just as a story, it’s a sweet but shallow examination of depression and milliennial anxiety: You play as a young woman dead set on climbing a mountain despite what her (very real) dark side tells her about herself. Playing the game though, persevering with Madeline as she climbs this mountain while struggling with panic attacks, oppressive parental figures, gatekeeping, two different kinds of “nice guys”, and her own demons. It really is great and, like the Souls games, its difficulty should be seen as a feature and not a barrier to entry.

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Spider-man

Only in a year like 2018 would Spider-man not be a shoo-in for Game of the Year. Hamish Black of the Writing on Games YouTube channel said it “Brings joy back to videogames” and that is wonderfully accurate. I take back what I said about not liking New Game+ modes, because playing through Spider-man’s story with all abilities unlocked is a total blast. After seeing Into the Spider-Verse I downloaded the soundtrack and played this game for hours. I haven’t done something like that since I was a kid. That Spider-man also manages to tell a GUVGS (For a Spider-man game packed with supervillains, the tensest moment is Peter and MJ having a misunderstanding over text) in between moments of the absolute best traversal system ever implemented in a game is masterful. This thing drips fun.

To Catch A Thief: Revisiting Deadly Shadows, Thief 2014, and Dishonored's DLCs

Once a year, I'll get an overwhelming urge to play Thief, either the original Dark Project or The Metal Age, it doesn't really matter. Both come from the same golden age of Looking Glass Studios, still the best development house in video game history, and the choice of one or the other is one of the degrees: Dark Project has some better levels, Metal Age has some better mechanics, but they are essentially interchangeable. I'd for love someone to port Dark Project's levels into the Metal Age engine so you could just play both in one sitting. That's because Thief is more than just a great game: it is, like all Looking Glass games, a wonderfully complete world with an unparalleled atmosphere. The hollow, ambient music, the exquisite sound design, the script and lore, and especially its main character, Garrett.

Stephen Russell's performance as Garrett is one of the reasons I became an actor. His weariness, his confidence, his knowledge of when he's in over his head: he's the perfect anti-hero. When I get that urge to play Thief, I'm really getting the urge to be Garrett. It's the same reason I go back to Wing Commander & Mass Effect: not because I love those games, which I do, but because I love Christopher Blair and (my) Commander Shepard.

So, in the spirit of cleaning my backlog and One Game At A Time, I decided that instead of playing through T1 or T2 again, I should really try and give the rest of the series one last shot. And yes, I am including Arkane's excellent Dishonored series as part of the Thief continuum. Arkane has built literally their entire company off refreshing the Looking Glass classics and I'm all for it. They even went ahead and just cast Stephen Russel in Dishonored 2, making the homage official.

Thief: Deadly Shadows

When Looking Glass folded in 2000, Warren Spector brought a lot of people over to John Romero's new company Ion Storm, where they would continue the Looking Glass legacy for a time. Spector, of course, hit the ground running with Deus Ex. Deus Ex changed games forever and I've always seen it as the ultimate Looking Glass game: it has the all the world building, tension, storytelling, and mechanical depth of the great LG titles.

Ion Storm also brought over most of the Thief team and a lot of the concept for Thief III. However, despite Ion Storm's rockstar developer mentality, they were still living in the same industry that killed Looking Glass, and that's how we got the Thief: Deadly Shadows that we did: a clunky, buggy, poorly-optimized mess that was jointly developed for the PC and Xbox. 

I ricocheted hard off Deadly Shadows when it came out. I hated how small the levels were, it ran like shit on my PC, and it looked like shit, especially compared to Splinter Cell which took everything I loved about Thief and Metal Gear Solid and turned it into the game my 17-year-old self had always wanted.

Fans have put a lot of work into Deadly Shadows over the years, culminating in the Thief 3 Gold upgrade which is easily downloadable and comes with a handy installer. Gold includes the famous Sneaky Upgrade which, among many improvements, removes the mid-mission loading screens, returning one of the best things about Thief to Deadly Shadows: those huge, sprawling, labyrinthine levels.

So playing Deadly Shadows in 2018 is a much more pleasant experience than it was in 2004. The best thing about it and the thing that no other game on this list has is that it's just so fucking Thief, man. The atmosphere, the storytelling, the watercolour cutscenes, the Keepers, and the Hammerites and The City and fucking Garrett are all here and they are just as good as they are in the first two games.

The City hub is the best innovation and it recalls the best missions in T1 and T2. Wandering the City streets, avoiding the Watch, eavesdropping on people for tips on loot and ripe, fat targets for burglary, Deadly Shadows has the best sense of immersion in a series that is known for immersion. The hub City is also the best thing about the 2014 reboot and if there ever is another proper Thief game, it needs to be this: What Cyberpunk 2077 is doing to Deus Ex, someone needs to do for Thief.

So I definitely enjoyed my time with Deadly Shadows a lot more this time around, but I didn't get very far into it before I had another hard rebound. For all the fixes that Gold and Sneaky Upgrade bring, the game is still buggy and rough. I encountered a massive bug in that very same hub area: for some reason, everyone in the world was not only totally aware of where I was but hostile to me and to each other. This led to pure chaos and violence on the streets which, while admittedly kind of cool, made it impossible to progress and forcing me to start over. While I'll give it another another shot soon, I decided instead to cut my losses and try...

Thief (2014)

No one was expecting Deus Ex: Human Revolution to be any good. I didn't even buy it, my friend Josh, who got me into Thief in the first place, (We did a project on it in English class. We went to an art school.) Actually bought it for me on Steam. I was expecting an action-heavy, watered down experience. I was totally wrong. I couldn't believe someone had made a first-person stealth game in 2011, so much had the genre moved towards the third-person action thrills of Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid.

I was really looking forward to Eidos Montreal's attempt at a new Thief, as I'm sure was everyone who enjoyed Human Revolution. Sure, HR had some rough edges, but it was a really confident statement, and a much greater improvement on the Deus Ex formula than Invisible War was. Despite being, narratively, a prequel, it feels like the follow-up Deus Ex always deserved.

Thief 2014 is not the follow-up Thief deserved. While Deadly Shadows was able to hold onto a lot of its spirit in its transition to consoles, and Human Revolution proved there is a market for slow, steadily paced first-person stealth RPGs, Thief feels like a step back. It feels like it should have come out before Human Revolution.

There's some good stuff in here, for sure: gone is the optional third-person view, returning to the series that unbeatable first-person tension. The console-first development focus allows for one major innovation over its PC-first predecessors: vibration-based gameplay mechanics. Thief 2014 has the best lockpicking mechanic in any game, vibrating the controller as you find the sweet spot, and I love that you can look around while you pick a lock, watching with held breath as that guard inches closer down the hallway to you, before you set the last pin by feel alone and swoop into the room. This feedback applies to finding hidden switches behind picture frames and in bookshelves. It's great.

The swoop mechanic is another fantastic addition, possibly borrowed from Dishonored, giving Garrett a quick, silent, dash in any direction. It's not invisible and you won't be silent on broken glass, metal, or through water, keeping it from being overpowered. It speeds the game up but can also get you in trouble: it's easy to swoop out of one guard's way and right into anothers, or to accidentally cover too much ground and end up in bright light.

Speaking of Dishonored, I wonder if the team at Eidos Montreal got a cold feeling in their stomachs when footage of that game started surfacing. Dishonored's Dunwall is a fantastically well-realized world, a decidedly Steampunk vibe with a heavy influence of whaling culture and the oppression of a city under quarantine. Much like the prior Thief games, the fantasy elements are pushed to the margins and when they are brought to the forefront, they are more occult than mystical. Thief 2014 flattens the world of The City, going for a more direct steampunk vibe, and a lot of the character of the earlier games is lost. That Thief 2014 took one of the most intriguing worlds in video games and turned out this generic, too-dark Steampunk world is especially egregious considering many former acolytes of Looking Glass had, in the interim, created some of the most memorable spaces in gaming, not the least of which was BioShock: Infinite's Columbia, which came out a year prior to Thief 2014.

For everything Thief 2014 does right there is something it does wrong, and the account ends up feeling unfinished, as many reviewers have said, but there are lots of things that should have been nixed in pre-production. The game's hub world, which sees Garrett breaking in and out of buildings to get through the City, is a great idea, but it's married to a terrible minimap. This is a particularly bad bit of design because all three prior games had much better solutions: static, hand-drawn maps and an on-screen compass. This small-scale Hub was handled much, much better in Eidos Montreal's next game, the criminally underrated Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

So the official follow-up to Thief has its flaws, what about the spiritual?

Dishonored: The Knife of Dunwall and The Witches of Brigmore DLC

I loved Dishonored and I have no idea why I never played these two DLC episodes. I guess I never cared much for Daud as a character? These extra episodes, narratively, are actually a lot more satisfying after playing Dishonored 2, as they do a much better job of making Delilah Copperspoon a fully realized character.

The best thing about both of these episodes is playing as Daud, who is 100% a killer, even if they do make his motivations clear and understandable. It's always liberating to play a character who has no moral quandaries about killing, it's the whole reason Trevor is in GTA5, but leave it to Arkane to also make the 'rampage guy' a character with enough depth to be worth exploring. Doing a "high chaos" run as Daud fits the character but also the situations the player is put in: when the Overseers invade your hideout, there's really no reason to be shy about killing them all.

If nothing else, Brigmore adds some great levels to the Dishonored toolbox and it definitely worth playing if you’re a fan of the genre or the series.

Clearing Out My Backlog: Assassin's Creed: Origins

Part of the mission of One Game At A Time is to refocus my energy and start experiencing games on their own merits, not as examples of trends I have to keep up with. When I decided to start this, I knew one thing would play a major part. I'm calling it triage.

A habit I've carried over from my younger days is binging on video games when I have the time to do so. When my life was heavily structured by outside forces, like school & work, I would relish the opportunity to close the blinds and tuck into a game for hours, or days at a time, when I had the chance. Now that I'm freelancing and setting my own schedule, it's easier for me to burn a day playing a game rather than fulfilling my own deadlines, which can always be pushed back. Working creatively on a long deadline is weird, it's easy and sometimes beneficial to fuck off and not work for a day, then have a love affair with your project the next day. You can also work whenever in the day you like. I've been on a routine of waking up early, playing a game for an hour or so with my coffee, then writing until the early afternoon.

This is all fine, except when I fall into an old trap: playing a game compulsively "just because I have the time." I realized just now that I've been doing that with Assassin's Creed: Origins.

Origins made a big splash when it released last year because it was a big refutation of what Ubisoft had been doing with AC for a long time. To grossly oversimplify things, they turned Assassin's Creed into The Witcher 3, adding sidequests, crafting, gear, a truly massive open world, and improved combat. All these improvements and the intoxicating Ancient Egyptian setting was enough to really get its hooks in me when the game first released. The one thing they didn't learn from Witcher 3, was how to tell a story.

In my Backlog entry on Horizon, I talked about the storytelling in open world games being flawed. Assassin's Creed has always struggled to tell a compelling story, bloating its narratives with tons of characters who pop in and out of the story, low-to-no emotional stakes, and sprawling storylines that go dormant for hours to spring back up again as if no time had passed at all. Witcher 3 addresses this with its storytelling-style quest log, giving you a new paragraph to read for every event that occurs in every questline. God of War handles this by having Atreus, Kratos, and Mimir chat about what they're doing and why- an organic approach to Witcher 3's solution.

Origins does neither of these things. Its quest log is barebones: "Bayek and Aya race to Siwa to stop..." I actually can't remember the name of the Third Act bad guy and I literally just turned the console off. The death of Bayek's best friend, who walks you through the tutorial, is handled as a major emotional climax dozens of hours after he last appeared in the story. I get that Bayek is upset by this character's death, Abubakar Salim's performance is one of the best things about this game, but I'm not!

Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton covered Origin's Third Act expansion in a positive light but it was the breaking point for me. I kept repeating "Who are these characters?" And "Why am I doing this?" Long after where I expected the game's climax to be.

I was looking forward to Odyssey, the sequel to Origins, but a recent IGN video and this week's experience with AC:O has dropped it from my schedule. In adding choices to the dialogue, it seems they've just given you the option of skipping through the BS, and the appearance and performance of the male lead (You can now, finally, choose between a male or female protagonist ala Mass Effect) is cartoonish: the guy reads like he's in a community theatre production of 300.

Here's hoping the next big three open world games, Spider-man, Red Dead Redemption 2, and especially Ghost of Tsushima, pick up where God of War left off.

Clearing Out My Backlog: Horizon: Zero Dawn

Much has been written about Horizon being overshadowed by Breath of the Wild, which released one week after Guerilla Games' robot dinosaur hunting simulator. I remember going back to HZD after sinking about a months' worth of time into BotW and being shocked by one major addition Zelda made to the open world formula: being able to free climb anything, anywhere.

I have just now, this morning, in fact, completed the main storyline in Horizon after dabbling in it for a year and a half. With God of War fresh in my mind, I found myself reluctantly comparing Horizon to another game again. Whereas Breath of the Wild blew the doors off open world game design in general, God of War has done a similar feat with character-driven, linear stories.

Horizon's story is great on paper, though the execution stumbles due to the limitations of the technology. While the game looks stunning, character animation in cutscenes is stiff. Aside from Aloy and Sylens, played by veterans Ashly Burch and Lance Reddick, the performances are pretty weak. Horizon also slams headfirst into my biggest complaint with open world games: their pacing.

I don't mean gameplay pace, which in Horizon is pretty excellent: giving you a steady drip of new combat options which slowly build your confidence to tackle bigger and badder enemies. The pace of the story is all over the place due to the game's fragmented, scattered design. Because players can take hours, days, or (as in my case) months to get from one story beat to the next, there is a sense of disconnect between the Aloy you are controlling and the Aloy that appears in the cutscenes. The game also, thankfully, refuses the rush you, so even with the world at stake, if you want to spend weeks hunting for collectibles, you are free to do so.

God of War handles this nicely, in having Atreus encourage you to explore when there is time to explore, and the truly ridiculous amount of incidental dialogue between Kratos, Atreus, and Mimir filling in backstory or Atreus literally asking the two older men what the hell is going on.

Aloy doesn't really have that, even in Sylens, who is an exposition machine more often than not. So the story, although definitely on the high end in terms of video game narrative, is hamstrung by being bolted onto a game with few limits or constraints. I believe limitations are a necessity in creating meaningful art. There are plenty of great filmmakers, Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky off the top of my head, who made a name for themselves with a tight budget, who drown in their ambitions once the studios give them a blank cheque. You can, and I did, garner a lot of pride from watching Aloy grow from a precocious young outsider to the confident, heroic saviour of Meridian, but the impact is lessened than it would be if it was delivered in a more concise way.

Maybe it's because I blitzed God of War in less than a week, but I do think the writers found a good way of keeping the story relevant and interesting throughout its entire length. God of War's story is also quite a bit simpler than Horizon's, for the latter is really telling two stories at once: the struggle against the machines in both the present and the distant past. It would make for a killer 8-to-10-episode series, but stretched across dozens of hours (My final time ended up being something like 45 hours) certain moments feel thinner than they should. Assassin's Creed has always had this problem, it's definitely one I've felt in Origins which I plan on finishing this week as well.

I'll be interested to see how Incomniac's upcoming Spider-man handles this. If they play it safe or if they, too, found a solution like Sony Santa Monica did with GoW. Looking further ahead, we'll see if Red Dead Redemption 2 can tackle Rockstar's pacing problem.

One Game at a Time: God of War (2018) - Updated August 25

Putting Octopath Traveler on the shelf for a bit as the repetition is getting to me. I wanted to dive into God of War before the flood of fall releases. I'm hoping to blitz through it this week while my girlfriend is out of town, then turn my attention to my backlog (AC: Origins, Horizon, Evil Within 2) before Spider-Man hits on Sept. 7.

We'll see how that goes.

But, for now: God of War. This game doesn't need much of an introduction: videos of game director Cory Barlog weeping at the review scores (Which is actually a great metaphor for the game's main theme, but I'll get to that) popped up once it was clear this was going to be one of the PS4's biggest games of the year and one of the better games of 2018 in general. I've always had a passing appreciation of the franchise. Although I bought a PS3 late in the cycle, I never dove too far into the series other than playing it at friends' houses. The series main hook of "Major asshole kills everyone" shouldn't work as well as it does, but the consistently high-quality gameplay and incredible spectacle elevated its heavy metal album cover premise.

It got me thinking about the Sony/Microsoft argument. Sony's exclusives are of a vastly superior quality to Microsoft's, judging by review scores, though they tend to be 3rd person character action games, like Horizon, Uncharted, and now God of War. While both companies have tried to 'mature' their franchises recently: Halo 4 and 5 attempted to inject a pathos and emotional heart into Master Chief and I guess Gears of War is trying to be a family story? But both of these efforts fell flat. It's very similar to the Marvel/DC cinematic schism: Sony's putting a lot of money and care into giving creators a lot of freedom to take their time, make the games they want, and take risks in their storytelling. Microsoft seems to just be throwing buzzwords like "gritty" and "emotional" at stuff and seeing what sticks.

So God of War hits and it immediately reminds me of Horizon, in its ancient folklore feel, its wintery deciduous locale, and its strong lead character. I was really surprised that this isn't a reboot: you're playing the same Kratos, the Spartan warrior turned God of War, who impaled Zeus and killed all the Olympian gods. He's got the same ashen skin, the scar through his eye, the hideous pucked gash where Zeus impaled him at the beginning of the second game. I'm not up on my lore, so I don't know if GOW3 ended with Kratos going into exile, but in exile he is: your default armor is all "...of the exile" or "exile's ..." there is even an early wink at his forearms, which have been covered in bandages and whose info panel in the inventory reads "...hide a dark secret."

For the size of Kratos and how close in the camera is, similar to Resident Evil 4's claustrophobic OTS angle, I was surprised how fluid Krato's movement is. I expected him to handle a bit heavier but he's quite nimble. He's not as loose as Kiryu/Majima from Yakuza 0 but he's not as deliberate as Senua, from Hellblade. Hellblade is another game that I keep thinking of while playing God of War. There are similar themes of guilt and redemption, and the dark fantasy twisting of Norse mythology is close as well, though God of War is a lot more of a video game than Hellblade: you collect health gems and upgrade your armour and weapons and unlock new skills.

The combat is fantastic and gets steadily more complicated as you go, unlocking new abilities for you and your son, Atreus. All the options can be overwhelming in busy fights, but the game strikes a great balance between being an unstoppable killing machine and running into brick walls of stronger enemies.

Atreus is not just a useful tool in combat. He is maybe the best character representation of a game's theme I've ever seen. He takes the role of Elizabeth in Bioshock: Infinite and builds on it. He's a kid: at times annoying, inquisitive, charming, funny, and moody. He's also got to spend all his time with Kratos, probably the saltiest motherfucker in video games, and their dynamic is incredibly well written and performed. 

I have no idea how far in the story I am, but I've almost filled out the skill tree and I've hit an obviously major milestone in the story. However, there is still a ton to do and see, so I'm expecting another curveball to be thrown at me. The game has already introduced an entirely new combat mechanic during an incredibly effective emotional moment which proved I was maybe a bigger fan of this series than I thought I was.

Update: The End and New Game +

No surprise, but God of War stays as strong through its final few hours as it is in its first. This is one of the very few games that I have bothered to chase down all the collectibles and minor quests. (The only game I've ever 100%ed is South Park: The Stick of Truth.) While I didn't actually 100% God of War, because killing all of those ravens isn't worth my time and I'm not interested in grinding through the Rogue-like realm of Nifelheim, I came very close.

The story wraps up very nicely and the final twist is great mostly because it was staring you in the face the whole time. I won't spoil anything but I will lay it out for you as clearly as the game does from the get-go: the antagonist is Baldur, who is a God, and Kratos has a bit of habit of killing Gods, and if you know anything about Norse mythology you know what happens when someone kills Baldur. There is some play with time right at the end that is handled really nicely.

This new GoW does the same "all the Gods are assholes" dance as the previous ones, but the storytelling has matured so much. While the game stops short of introducing the two major players of Norse mythology, Odin and Thor, despite giving Mimir a ton of dialogue building them up as murderous, ambitious psychos, this is clearly the set-up for a new series. The ending-ending, triggered after you walk all the way back to your humble house and go to sleep, sets up the next installment perfectly.

So last week they introduced a New Game Plus mode, which is usually not my bag as I actually like being under-powered at the beginning and getting stronger as I go, and I got my fill of the fully powered combat system by closing all the Rifts, completing the Muspelheim trials, and beating all the Valkyries before the ending. New Game Plus does add some new items to find and craft for both Kratos and Atreus, but I played the prologue and was satisfied. Blitzing the game in a week was plenty and, though I expect I'll play it again someday, that won't be for a while.

I actually wish I had held off on the Valkyries until the story was over because the final boss of the main story is a cakewalk compared to the Valkyrie Queen, who is one of the toughest bosses I've ever fought in a game like this. I had serious flashbacks to fighting Alma in Ninja Gaiden, my very first "hard game."

Anyway, yeah, God of War is spectacular and well worth a purchase if you have a PS4. With Red Dead Redemption 2 looming on the horizon it's a bit early to call this a definite Game of the Year, but Rockstar is going to have to step up their storytelling big time if they hope to grab me the way this journey did and, based on their previous efforts, I'm not optimistic. Sitting here at the end of August and looking ahead, I can't see anything topping God of War's story before the end of the year, not just in terms of the quality of the writing and acting, but in how the storytelling synergizes with the gameplay, the world building, and the exploration. I've written a lot about 40+ hour video games having pacing problems and God of War comes closest to addressing or even negating them. That may be a side effect of me playing it exclusively for ten days, but even the fact that I was happy to do so speaks volumes.

One Game at a Time: Octopath Traveler

Approximate Time Played: 10 hours (Not including pre-release demos)

System: Switch

Thoughts:

I didn't play any of the "big" 16-bit RPGs in their time. I had a PC and my friend had a SNES, later a PS1, so my experience with most of the 90s classics was through him. I would either watch him play most games or we would trade the controller back and forth.  While I most fondly remember playing FF7, being as how it was the biggest game on the planet the year it came out, I spent a lot of time watching Matt play Chrono Trigger.

While Octopath is much closer to FF6 than Chrono, the sensibilities of the Square RPGs of the time are ubiquitous and their presence in Octopath is so obvious that it's easy to take them for granted. Octopath has random battles that take place on a "battle screen" like FF6 but instead of a huge overworld, there is more of a "dungeon tunnel" feel like Chrono: You move between towns into enemy-infested exploration areas, each of which is labelled with a "Danger Level" warning you as to the strength of the monsters within.

So is Octopath a marriage made in heaven between the two great Square RPGs of the 90s? Not at all and the differences are both to its benefit and detriment.

Of course, the game looks amazing. The decision to tilt the perspective of the world, from the classic top-down, slightly isometric view to a tilt-shift look with a heavy depth of field effect, gives the game a gorgeous dreamlike quality. The character sprites strike a cute balance from an almost chibi style for the heroes to the big, detailed sprites for the monsters. My favourite touch is the boss monsters, which are all twice the size of the normal monsters, even if they're just humans. The boss of Primrose's story is a big fat guy in a chair with a glass of red wine, and he looks amazing.

Which brings me to the big hook of Octopath: the octo-path. At the beginning of the game, you're given a choice of eight characters to start with. Once you pick your lead character, you are locked into having them at the head of your party, and the others become the NPCs you will recruit as you travel the world. Think of it like Mass Effect, if you could choose between Shepard, Garrus, Tali, or Liara to start with.

Unfortunately, the comparison ends there. Considering all the work that went into creating these 8 characters, most of whom are really well-written and developed, there is almost no interaction between them at all. When my main, Therion, rolls into a new town to meet one of the unchosen PCs, the same thing occurs every time: We play a brief introduction to the new character, often some running around town and talking to NPCs before being sent to a dungeon. At that point, the narrative jumps back to the present, as this new character has run into our party. What follows is simply a single line of dialogue amounting to "So, you'll help me? Great!" and the character joins the party. There is no dialogue between the characters, no need to convince Therion, the self-obsessed thief on a quest to pay off his debts, to gather snakebite venom from a giant viper in a cave. For a game with such lavish detail, such care given to its characters, each one exists in a vacuum and is slammed together in a way that is as purely mechanical as it gets.

I was expecting, with Octopath's focus on character and honouring the greats of the past, for an experience similar to the airship war room debates and family histories of FF6 or the Spielberg-like "friends on a journey" comradery of Chrono Trigger. I was at the very least expecting some incidental dialogue like Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity. Instead, we get something more like Elder Scrolls: the world is just there for you to experience its content, with a certain ludo-narrative dissonance required to get through it all.

So far, having just completed each of the eight introductory stories, the game I'm most reminded of is The Old Republic, the BioWare-developed Star Wars MMO. My first ten hours with Octopath have felt very similar to playing all of the starting areas of Old Republic one after the other, with little to no story connection and the same gameplay loop for every one.

I know that it would have been a lot of work to have unique dialogue for every character to interact with every possible lead character, as well as to have interjections between whoever was travelling with you at the time but... not that much work. We've seen that many, many times, for years, in games with comparable budgets. As much as I'm enjoying my time with the game (The combat is really great, I'll touch on that more next time,) I'm having to stretch my imagination to fill in some of the gaps which, considering the era Octopath is invoking, isn't entirely unwelcome.

Update: After 14 hours

I've just completed Part 2 of Primrose's story after having previously completed Part 2 of my main man Therion's story a few days ago.

Pretty much immediately after publishing my last thoughts, the game opened up in a few surprising ways. Each Part 2 story quest has a recommended level attached to it but it was far above Therion, who will always be higher level than the rest of the party because he's locked in there. I was afraid this meant I had reached the dreaded 'grinding' phase of the JRPG, though I have issues with that term. It also proved to not be the case.

I have often heard fans of the old JRPGS lament the grind period, where you're forced to dash around the overworld looking for fights to get your level up before you can fight the next boss. Western RPGs often avoid this with sidequests or level scaling, so I have never really experienced this problem. For the JRPGs I've played the most (FF6, 7, & 15, and Chrono Trigger) I assumed I'd never gotten far enough in any of them to need to grind. Now I'm thinking that grinding is a misnomer.

I made a decision last year, around the time I decided to switch to the one game at a time model, to do as many sidequests as I could, with exceptions. I'm not big on crafting or collecting useless items, for example, but I'd do my best to see as much story content as possible. I picked some good titles to practice this with, namely Assassin's Creed: Origins and Yakuza 0, which feature side quests that seem worthy of the character and player's time and are fun to do. Breath of the Wild also has excellent sidequests that are worth completing. There's an argument to be made that BotW is all sidequests, I suppose, considering you can run right to the final boss from the moment you leave the tutorial area.

Part of this decision included not using fast travel. If I like a game enough to play it for more than a few hours, I like it enough to soak up the world, to treat it like an experience, and not just blast through it checking items off a list. I call the latter "Playing the UI" because the graphics, animations, sound, & music are all incidental, running the background to the climbing progress bars and increasing numbers. It seems a lot of people in the critical space play this way, a side-effect of deadlines and games critique as buyers guide. Octopath has a generous fast travel system, you can warp to any visited town, but I opted not to use it.

Crucially, while I arrived at Therion's Part 2 still four levels below the recommended level of 22, I was tasked with some errands in town in what has identified itself as the 'main story mission loop' of Octopath. While none of these tasks give XP, they do present lots of opportunities to gain items. Once you do enter the dungeon, while your party is underlevelled, the challenge is not insurmountable and the enemies give lots more XP than they do in the wild. By the time I reached the boss, I was still only 21, but the fight was the right amount of challenge.

Also new is the discovery of secondary jobs, allowing your characters to multiclass. This has made Alfyn, my Apothecary, much more useful as he is now also a Cleric, giving him potent all-heals for the party along with his base class' buffs/debuffs. I have also made Primrose a Scholar, giving her access to four different elemental spell types which target all enemies. She's a beast at taking out groups of weak monsters.

The stories are good, too, Primrose's is a pretty basic revenge quest but it's well written. The environments continue to stun (I was just in a snowy landscape cloaked in perpetual twilight and sparkling ice that was particularly breathtaking.) The 'dungeon tunnel' overworld I mentioned has opened up: both the areas leading to the Part 2 towns were much larger and wider than the beginning areas.