All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-08-26

Welcome to the last Saturday Summaries of August. Pretty much the same as saying the last Summaries of summer, or the last summery Summary? At any rate, I'd say I wasn't quite the backlog-crushing force of nature I'd hoped I would be this season, but I probably talk about my backlog way more than is healthy. Can't help but think if I repurposed all the time kvetching and monitoring that backlog, I'd have far less of it to worry about. I digress!

Instead, I want to talk about Giant Bomb's list tools some, since we have a new list to discuss below in the weekly happenings. First off, I just want to say that I really like the list feature on the site. It's actually what drew me here originally back in the day, as I was looking for somewhere to use to track the games I owned and the games I wanted to pick up. Back in 2008/09 around the time I joined up, it was one of the few sites with such a feature that also had a big enough database to account for anything I might throw at it (not strictly true, as I've ended up adding a number of wiki pages for games I possessed). I eventually decided to set up a Backloggery for those purposes and saw Giant Bomb instead for what it truly is: a site that produces great content and has a great community supporting it that I chose to make my "home", for lack of a better term. Despite this pivot, I'm still currently the site leader in number of lists due to a self-enforced writing exercise I gave myself a few years ago of producing a new listicle every week, and in that time I've mused frequently about what I'd like to see from the site's list feature should the engineers fortuitously finish their enormous to-do checklist for everything else that needs tweaking and fixing.

What follows are some ideas I've had in the past for how to enhance the list feature, and I'm really just listing them out here so I can refer back to this blog if the CBSi's Top Men ever come knocking on my door for ideas. There's always a first time?

1. Color-coding. So for example, I could edit an existing ordered list like a GOTY top-ten and include new entries that pushes everything down, and then color-code them to signify their newness similar to how music chart top-tens present themselves week after week. Or, I could use them to create a multi-part list like my current List of Shame where items are separated into "stuff I've yet to play, stuff I want and stuff I've completed" categories and help those categories stick out more. Depending on the range of colors you could choose between to highlight each entry, you could do some fun stuff with that feature alone, like a full color spectrum of video game characters from Mario to Eggplant Wizard.
2. I'd love to get rid of the current 100 item limit on ordered lists. I realize that change was implemented to lessen the detrimental affect those gigantic lists were having on the site, but it's been screwing up some of my older lists, like this JRPG list I can no longer edit. I just have to wonder if there's a more elegant solution than incorporating a hard limit on ordered items, though I'll be darned if I can think of one with what little I know of website memory management.
3. Being able to draw from site videos and articles. Before the big switch to CBSi, some crafty people figured out to create lists that linked not to wiki entries but to videos and other non-wiki pages on the site. It wasn't ever technically part of the list creation process though, and I'm thinking there's a lot of fun stuff you could make if that feature was incorporated more explicitly. A list of great premium videos for new users to check out, for example, or a list of your favorite Quick Looks.
4. The prevention of list creation by bots. Getting a little inside baseball here, but good new lists have been difficult to track from the site's limited search tools for a while. It's not helped by the fact that a lot of banned bots can still make them, filling up the "Recent Lists" and "Most Recommended Lists" categories in the "User Lists" section of the site with randomized junk filled with malware links.

From one list about lists to another list, here's this week's new content:

• The Top Shelf transformed and rolled out with a look at the mediocre sci-fi FPS game Robotech: Invasion, probably the most text anyone's written about that game for over a decade. Robotech wears its influences on its sleeve, from the mech-friendly animated show it hails from to the overwhelming cultural phenomenon that was Halo: Combat Evolved. In some ways it was a big improvement over Medal of Honor: Frontline, which I played a few weeks ago, but it was also far more generic and tedious and, if I'm being honest, poorly checkpointed. It had some cool ideas, but it wasn't enough to elevate the game to something I was interested in seeing through to the end.
• The Indie Game of the Week is the enigmatic Virginia, a highly "directed" adventure game in which the player was largely an observer in a layered, surreal story about a young FBI agent inspired by The X-Files, Twin Peaks and other vaguely supernatural crime procedurals of the 1990s. Video games are still in their nascency as a pure storytelling medium, and while I think Virginia isn't quite as impactful as something like Gone Home or Her Story, it's an indication that there's still clearly a lot of ways a game might spin a narrative and how much agency they're willing to afford the player in the telling of that narrative. In Virginia's case, that agency is almost zero, but all the same it's perhaps still only a story that can be told through a video game lens. It gave me thoughts to think at the very least!
• We also have this new list: GOTY 2013 (Adjusted). It's part of a series of GOTY revisits, where I take my original GOTY list from a specific year, add all the games from that year I've played in the time since writing the list, and then reorder them to reflect my true ranking for that twelve month period. In recent years, we see so many new games from both the big retail publishers and the huge market of smaller Indies that it's impossible (and often prohibitively expensive) to play everything we want in a single year, especially if you have a compulsion to finish everything you start like I do. These Adjusted GOTYs take my "late to the party" nature into account, and my list of completed 2013 releases has pretty much doubled in size since the end of the year in question, with many more games still yet to add.

Tales of Zestiria

This will be my last entry on Tales of Zestiria. Come hell or high water, I'm knocking this gargantuan JRPG out by the end of this month to free up September for a whole lot of PS2 shenanigans. I thought I'd spend some time talking about its end game content, and how much of it I intend to consume, because it's always a very curious aspect of JRPG design.

I call this type of situation "Encore Content", or "Encoretent", because its chief purpose is to keep those who have become attached to this world and its characters around for a few extra hours to spend time pursuing non-story critical goals. Ever since, I dunno, let's say the very open second half of Final Fantasy VI, JRPGs have been slowly building up the amount of side-missions and superbosses a player could work their way through once they've become hypothetically powerful enough to beat the final boss and complete the game. A lot of it is meant to provide additional challenges; a way to prove the player has fully mastered the game's mechanics with optional foes that far outpower anything else the player might encounter during the game's critical path and require perfect strategies or some serious grinding to defeat. Sometimes it's more epilogue-like in nature, with side-quests that tie up loose ends and sub-plots that feel relatively minor and low-key compared to the big dramatic finale of the game's story and the ultimate defeat of its primary antagonist.

Obviously, I don't want to spoil too much about Zestiria's story here. I don't need to go into what the end-game actually looks like, only to suggest that it's fairly obvious that the game is about to end once you reach it. If you get to that fateful final save point and are looking for something else to do, it turns out there's quite a lot:

A lot of Zestiria's encoretent (my portmanteau game's a little off today, huh) involves those pesky side-mission bosses I've mentioned in previous rundowns of this game: each one is either found wandering around the field, being super big dick-swinging badasses you're almost always too weak to take on the first time you see them, or they're the conclusion to a side-quest chain. Each one provides a precious Anomalous Orb: items that expand the player characters's maximum hitpoint pool. Because Zestiria declines to provide stat boosts when levelling up, these orbs are the best way to keep your HP totals up to survivable levels, even though it's something of a vicious Catch 22 that you have to defeat the game's toughest enemies to acquire them. There's 36 of these orbs up for grabs, and I think towards the end of the game there are NPCs that tell you where they all are, and finding them all makes the rest of the game's superbosses that much more manageable.

There's also three optional bosses in the world that don't give you Anomalous Orbs, but are still story significant and are some of the most difficult boss fights I've seen yet. In every case I died so quickly at my current level that I'm sure I'll need to take a careful look at my equipment and their attached skills and make a serious effort to give myself every advantage I can stand to grind and farm enough to make happen. I could also drop the difficulty too of course, but I'd prefer to face these foes on the same tier I've been able to defeat everything else on. Matter of pride, I suppose.

To no-one's surprise, Zestiria also has a bonus dungeon. I've done a little bit of poking around and discovered that the final dungeon only becomes accessible on a clear game save: it's added to the list of save point warp destinations once the final boss has been taken down. The actual post-game of Tales generally involves building up a lot of Grade - the currency that purchases new abilities for New Game+, like double the money, XP or item drops - so tossing in a bonus dungeon full of battles seems like a good way to start stacking up the stuff. There's also a host of challenging bosses within, including the always welcome "Cameo Battle" against characters from other Tales games, so I might take a quick look in there before calling it quits.

Finally, there's also the Crucibles. These are the arenas that force one character to fight an army of regular enemies, and the player has to have mastered that character sufficiently enough to know how to survive such a one-sided fight. The later Crucibles allow for two-person teams, but that just means they can throw even tougher foes at you including former bosses. I've been putting it off because I'm not particularly confident in controlling the seraphim characters - they predominantly rely on "seraphic artes", i.e. magic, to deal damage but that also means they're vulnerable to attack while charging them up. Not sure how that's going to work in a small circle with a dozen enemies in it. The one plus side? The Crucibles are the only place in the game that lets you save screenshots via the PS4's share feature. Weird. (When I start playing them, I'll be sure to come back and edit a screenshot in here.)

At some point towards the end of the month I'll probably abandon any of the above I've yet to get around to in order to bash out the final boss and save my NG+ run for another time. With enough Grade to buy NG+ bonuses, the second playthrough is made far easier and would be far more conducive to taking down all the remaining superbosses and any other outstanding trophies I might want to collect. With greatly enhanced characters out of the gate, the game will also move a lot faster on that subsequent run, though I'm also ready to take a break from Tales for a bit. We shall wait and see, but for the purposes of these blogs I'm satisfied to say that I'm done talking about Zestiria in any extended manner. It's been a fine JRPG, if not my favorite Tales in recent memory, but I'll be happy to put it aside after two months and spend my time on something else.