Quick Hits! Vol. 4: Cozy Comfort Gaming

Astro Bot! Astro Bot! Astro Bot! Now that game of the year has been settled…

My Apes Gone Again

So many good costumes for these monkey fellas.

As many have pointed out, Astro Bot is essentially the modern Ape Escape game Sony was too cowardly to give us. So heck, why not play some Ape Escape right afterwards? I already replayed the original this summer (to get that sweet platinum trophy). So, it’s on to Ape Escape 2.

We have found it - the ideal Steam Deck game. Throw some upscaling on this puppy, and you’re living it up. It’s a lot better than the janky version available on the PlayStation store. I’m only playing a level or two every night, but I think I like Ape Escape 2 even more than the first. The environmental design feels more intimate and welcoming. The beautiful snow level, their Monkey Europe world, heck, even the spooky castle… they’re all places you would like to explore and hang out in. Each stage has been wholly unique. Of course, they’re packed with monkeys doing silly things which always elicit a smile. It’s clear the developers poured a ton of passion into the settings.

Less groundbreaking are the mechanics, which are almost identical to Ape Escape 1. Pick from a variety of gadgets and swing them around with the right stick. Grab a set amount of monkeys in each stage and you’re good to go! There’s enough novelty elsewhere that the recycled gadgets haven’t really bothered me. That said, I still suck at actually capturing the monkeys. I’m too impatient to sneak up on them and I end up getting monkey fists in my face every time. While the camera is better than it was, I still wish I had more control over it. I also wish the game didn’t boot you out of a level immediately after hitting the monkey quota. Sometimes I want to explore some more! And it’s doubtful I’ll go back to catch every single ape, since they’ll just escape again in the third game. While always being high-energy, Ape Escape 2 has still maintained a cozy atmosphere that makes me long for a more experimentally-minded Sony.

Dream of Electric Butterfly

Once I was finished with Astro Bot, the expansion to Persona 3 Reload was out. Based on the controversial Persona 3 FES, I was determined to go in with an open mind as a newcomer to the story.

A new party member is always cool.

First, you can’t buy Episode Aigis: The Answer outside of a season pass with a bunch of other superfluous junk. I got it through Game Pass, so no skin off my back. But if you want to know if you should buy this at full price, I would direct you to the new battle theme, simply titled “Don’t.” Against popular opinion, I really enjoy the expansion’s story and think it justifies itself. But this could have been an email. All the meaningful events are stuck after 15 hours of repetitive dungeon crawling.

The S.E.E.S. team is ready to close up shop, but they get trapped in a time loop and can’t leave their dorm. Their only option is to delve into a mysterious labyrinth that’s appeared below. If you’re interested in this epilogue, you’ve probably already put 60 to 80 hours into Persona 3 Reload. For those people, there is almost nothing in the dungeon content that deviates from the main game. There’s only one twist on a mechanic: Those optional doors that had strong enemies behind them? Well, now you can pick from one of three doors. That’s it. The expansion is divided into seven dungeon chunks, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been three, or 23, or any number. There’s no building of momentum, you just clear floors until they run out. I’m harsher on this content because the party’s levels are reset. Leveling up and getting the same abilities isn’t as exciting, and it feels more like a handicap until you do. You can import your Persona compendium from the main game. However, between needing to match levels and higher summoning prices, it’s not a cure-all.

At the start of the expansion, I was clearing out each floor and just thrilled to be back. By the two-thirds mark, I was avoiding combat as much as I could. Episode Aigis underscores that the two halves of Persona work because they are balanced. Take one away, and the other fizzles out. There are party interactions back at the dorm, but they’re nothing to write home about. You just have to carry on with the thin premise until the game decides it’s time to let loose.

By the end, I got tired of finding weaknesses through trial and error. The same enemy will appear later with different attributes.

Before playing Persona 3 Reload, I had already been spoiled on some story beats. Unbeknownst to me, those spoilers were specifically from FES and not included at launch. I was immensely confused when the credits rolled without those events. It blunted the impact of the ending for me until I had time to sit down and think about it later. But before that, I wasn’t able to gel with Aigis as a character. Her complete devotion of her life’s purpose towards protecting the protagonist read as one-sided and unhealthy to me. In The Answer, Aigis gets her own hanger-on, her new sister Metis. She is ten times as obsessed as Aigis ever was (to the point of being creepy). The synchronicity couldn’t be a coincidence. I just had no idea how the writers would handle it. Ultimately, I was satisfied at how the story demonstrated turning love towards an individual towards the world at large. As for friends supposedly acting out of character, I felt that there was some justification for nearly everything that happened. If there’s one theme in Persona 3, it’s that Trauma Be Crazy. More than a simple postscript, I felt that The Answer was an important coda that puts a bow on the story at large. It’s too bad that the preceding 15 hours are so throwaway.

It never fails - every time I finish a Persona game, I just want more Persona. My plan is to clean up the entire rest of the series. Maybe I’ll burn myself out and be able to think about something else for a change? I hopped back into the very first Persona game, which is very different from the newer entries. I think I’ll save those thoughts for another time, though.

Hold It!

Props to them for finally making redrawn art that looks better than the sprites.

Finally, I jumped into the Ace Attorney Investigations Collection. This pair of games are the last entries in the series I’ve yet to finish, and it’s a little bittersweet coming to the end. On the third episode of the original Investigations, I can give it a thumbs up so far.

Going into Investigations, I was expecting these spin-offs to be a lot more… spin-off-y than they actually are. In the main Ace Attorney games, you poke around a crime scene for evidence, then use it to expose contradictions in testimony. Well, guess what? You do the same thing in Investigations! The only difference is the pacing. Miles Edgeworth will flip more regularly between these two modes of gameplay, while a Phoenix Wright game has them more siloed off. So far, I’ve got hung up on a few leaps in logic, but I was always able to figure it out before too long. Edgeworth has a big health bar that lets you make plenty of mistakes, and you can always save and reload if you need to.

The biggest surprise to me is the near constant cavalcade of call-backs and cameos. For every new character, two old ones come back from the original trilogy. I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, this is something I’ve wanted in the past. I always thought it weird that the series produced so many characters that fill the same roles. And I missed that connecting material in the Apollo Justice series. Now that I have my wish, though, the game’s world feels smaller. The newcomers don’t have space to breathe, and again, the product doesn’t feel like much of a spin-off.

So Investigations may not be the best place to start, but if you’re a fan of the series, you should go for it. This release has nice redrawn artwork and orchestral arrangements that are way better than necessary for the fourth collection of Ace Attorney games. Really, you can’t go wrong no matter which bundle you pick up. And even the crossover with Professor Layton, if you can track it down, is great. Capcom continues to be laudable in putting out collections of their old titles. Ironically, that may be the biggest hurdle to those series actually continuing. Why make a new Ace Attorney when there are 10 of them available for anyone to buy right now? Best to not let it bother you and enjoy the mountain of gaming goodness.