Monthly Roundup, January 2014

January turned out to be a pretty solid “catch up” month for me, which is not a bad way to start the year. I managed to polish off practically all of 2013’s overflow, played the lone new release I was interested in for the month, and even shaved a little off my backlog while I was at it. I feel it was a successful gaming month, and one where I have quite a bit to talk about. Two games I played but won’t talk about in detail (to save time and space) are Tearaway and Risk of Rain. Tearaway is absolutely as charming as everyone says, and put a constant smile on my face; I really enjoyed it. Risk of Rain is kind of neat (and has a killer soundtrack), but I ultimately have the same problems with its randomness that I do with similar games, which I’ve talked about at length before. I don’t feel a big need to say much more about either game than that, so let’s dive into the rest of it!

Path of Exile

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Diablo inspired RPGs, and yet I’ve found myself playing a fair number of them over the past few years; they can be decently fun time-wasters when played with friends. Path of Exile follows Diablo III and Torchlight II in this trend, and while I don’t think it’s the best game of the type, it has enough interesting ideas to be worth checking out. The best reason to check it out may be the fact that it’s 100% free, no strings attached. Anything you can spend money on in the game is purely cosmetic, with all gameplay relevant content open to everyone from the start; it’s a nice example of the model used positively. That said, Path of Exile doesn’t feel as polished as Torchlight II, which itself doesn’t feel nearly as polished as Diablo III. The combat feels less responsive, the general performance isn’t up to par, and the audiovisual presentation lacks both variety and punch. It’s all certainly playable, but it’s also impossible not to feel the rough edges by comparison, and I wonder if creating it for free gave the team less room to smooth over some of those edges. That may or may not be fair criticism of a legitimately free game, where its competitors are not, but it’s worth considering.

Fundamentally though, Path of Exile is very much like the plethora of other games that attempt to chase Diablo’s addictive loot driven design. Path of Exile does its best to follow that mold, with the general action and progression adhering to the blueprint dutifully. The one area where Path of Exile attempts to leave its own mark is on the way it handles stats and skills. Every time you level up you earn a skill point that you can place in the game’s ridiculously large passive skill tree. The tree is reminiscent of Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid, except that here it’s almost entirely passive stat buffs rather than active skills. Your active skills instead come from skill gems, items you find as drops or quest rewards that slot into your gear. I think both the passive and active skills are incredibly interesting in concept, but aren’t that exciting in practice. Just looking over the passive skill tree hints at a world of possibilities, and if you put in enough time it might be possible to come up with something really creative. But during a full playthrough of the game I primarily acquired static stat buffs that offer no change in functionality, such as increased dexterity or bow damage (I played an archer). These things make the numbers go up to make your character strictly more powerful, but otherwise don’t have any real impact. The active skills do give you different moves to use, such as fire or ice arrows in my case, but again I didn’t find there to be enough variety in functionality for any given character build. Most archer skills I found were just slightly more powerful versions of my basic attack, and I ended up only using two or three different skills during the entire game. All of this led to a game that didn’t see much change or evolution during the course of play, making it a more straight-forward and plain entry to the genre. For my money there are more polished and more ambitious games in this style, but perhaps the point is that Path of Exile doesn’t cost any money at all. It’s an impressive feat as a genuinely free game if nothing else, and if cost is your highest priority then you’d be hard pressed to find a better option than Path of Exile.

Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen

Dragon’s Dogma is one of those games that, despite modest initial reviews, seems to have connected with people in a lasting, substantial way that’s kept them talking about it passionately well after its release. That made me think it’s probably a weirdly flawed gem that, love it or hate it, I should play for myself to see what it’s all about, which I did this past month (via the Dark Arisen version). The result? I think it’s a weirdly flawed gem, a game with plenty of ups and downs that is ultimately worth playing despite having its fair share of frustrations. Easily my favorite thing about it is that it makes you feel like you’re on an expedition in the truest sense of the word. There are plenty of games that value adventure, exploration or journey, but I can’t think of another game that embodies the particular nuances of an expedition (which itself can include those other aspects) quite like Dragon’s Dogma. You frequently gather up your loyal band of soldiers (called “pawns”) to set out on long treks with the explicit purpose of reaching some far off destination and/or slaying some giant creature. You rarely have any chance for rest along the way, and have to be mindful of all sorts of details. It’s the kind of game that makes you respect the need to carry and manage a well oiled lamp because it gets too dark at night to see without one. These kinds of details are abundant, and make the act of setting out on a quest feel daunting and involved in a way that games rarely do. That most of these quests are punctuated by some exhilarating fights against some large foes is a worthy payoff as well. It’s a big, oppressive world that requires you to pay attention, and you often have nothing more than your companions and your wit to help you survive.

Those highs are surprisingly high, but Dragon’s Dogma doesn’t deliver them quite frequently or consistently enough, and a lot of the time in between is filled with needless tedium. For much of the game, and especially early on, this comes from fiddling in menus. Dragon’s Dogma has a lot of unintuitive systems that aren’t explained well (pawns, crafting, vocations, etc.), and you have to dig through layers and layers of menus to not only get a handle on it all, but to continually manage them throughout the game. This is on top of tons of item management, which I found to be a constant annoyance. For a game that excels at the grandiose, too much of my time was spent on menial tasks. Running errands around town, escort quests and “kill 20 goblins” style quests only serve to distract from the game’s strengths; I think Dragon’s Dogma would be much better served by cutting out a lot of that fat to focus on those expedition style quests it does so well. All of that said, even on those premier quests I did eventually find the combat and enemy variety to get tiresome. I played as a sorcerer, and after a while I wasn’t getting much enjoyment out of roasting my 100th goblin or wolf... though my pawns never got tired of telling me that they were weak to fire; those little chatterboxes never stop talking. Even the larger monsters got old after a while, but to be fair, some of my combat fatigue may have been due to my class. I almost never had a reason to climb on things, and combat was more about waiting for meters to fill up than engaging in any real action, which makes me think that other classes might be more exciting. Finally, while I did have an easy time nuking everything that got in my way through the vast majority of the game, I occasionally ran into these weird difficulty spikes. Basically, there are a few enemies that resist magic to the point where I was essentially useless. These fights required me to rely heavily on my pawns, which exposed their unreliable AI, and made those fights incredibly long and tedious.

I could go on about some other nitpicky things, but the main point is that Dragon’s Dogma is a weird game with a lot of weird issues (which can also make it kind of hard to talk about clearly and succinctly). Perhaps the single best word I can use to describe it is sloppy. Dragon’s Dogma has plenty of grand, ambitious ideas, and I think it tackles enough of them with enough gusto to be worth playing for anyone interested. But it’s also messy in a number of ways that make the overall game kind of frustrating, to the point where I’m not sure how much I actually like it. Either way, I’m glad I played it for myself, and if anything I would like to see a sequel that tries to smooth over the game’s many rough edges.

The Banner Saga

I’m really digging this resurgence of turn-based tactical RPGs, and the best part about it is that I feel like we’re seeing the genre expand and experiment more than ever. The Banner Saga is a great example of this, as it implements its own twist on the format by wrapping its turn-based battles in an interesting series of almost Oregon Trail-like events. As your group travels across this rough and desperate land, situations regularly pop up requiring you to make decisions that can have all sorts of effects. Through them you may engage in or avoid battles, raise or lower your morale and/or supplies (two resources that govern your performance both in and out of battle), or even impact which characters live or die. Those life and death situations aren’t particularly common, but they do highlight some of the game’s most dramatic moments. For the most part I really like the way you’re asked to make tough decisions, as it imparts an extra layer of gravitas to proceedings; it’s like adding The Walking Dead’s tough choices to Fire Emblem’s tough battles. On the flipside, the results of your decisions can sometimes feel a bit arbitrary. You rarely have any tangible information to base your decisions on, so you’re often making them blindly. That can sometimes be a little off-putting, and left me less invested in my choices than I could have been.

Otherwise, you spend most of your time in The Banner Saga fighting turn-based tactical battles, which also have their own twists. First, a unit’s health and strength are the same thing, meaning that it deals damage equal to its health. Thus, getting hurt reduces a unit’s damage output (similar to something like Advance Wars). Secondly, and more importantly, rather than have each side alternate moving all of their units at the same time, as is the genre norm, each side alternates moving a single unit at a time. This happens regardless of how many units each side has left (until one side only has one unit at least). These two subtle changes produce an interesting dynamic that took me a few battles to get used to. Namely, it’s much better to have a few healthy units than it is to have a large number of weaker units. Having less units means that each one moves more frequently, and weak units are more or less dead weight; you want as many of your moves as possible to be taken by strong, healthy units. This is also true for your opponent, however. It was initially counter-intuitive to me, but it’s better to leave weak enemy units alive rather than finish them off, as they will essentially become wasted turns for your opponent. All of this took some getting used to, but it ultimately produces an interesting battle system that requires a different way of thinking than most turn-based tactical games I’ve played. I don’t know that I like it better or worse, but it’s different in a refreshing way. That freshness extends to the game’s gorgeous art style, lovely music and grim story, which come together to create a gripping world I’m eager to see more of. The Banner Saga a wonderful turn-based tactical RPG in any number of ways, and one that fits into the genre nicely while also offering enough worthwhile twists to create an identity of its own.

Looking Ahead to February

February will likely be spent trying to polish off whatever games I can before March’s now annual end-of-fiscal-year-dump, which looks to be as big as ever in 2014. I’ve been dabbling with some competitive team building in Pokemon X/Y, which won’t get underway in earnest until the Pokemon Bank is up and running, but I’ve been able to lay some of the groundwork. I’ve also starting replaying Skyrim solely for the DLC/expansions, which I’ve never played before, and I have a few other backlog candidates that I might try to squeeze in during the month as well. Finally, there are two February releases than I’m genuinely interested in: Bravely Default and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. There’s a good chance I’ll dive into one or both of those during the month, but as always, no promises!