Go! Go! GOTY! 2016: Day Six: Let It Die

Day Six

• Game: Grasshopper/GungHo's Let It Die.
• Release Month: December.
• Quick Look: None at time of posting. I'll edit it in when it shows up.
• Started: 06/12.

Let It Die is the new Suda51/Grasshopper game, albeit one that seems to have had some direction from F2P big shots GungHo - they of Puzzle & Dragons and the Ragnarok MMOs - in that Suda51's usual manic, kitsch pop-culture suffused sensibility has been incorporated into a conventional F2P mold. Or perhaps not, as Let It Die is unlike any F2P game I've seen.

The game has a surfeit of ideas, and might well be the most fascinating game Suda51's ever developed from a sheer mechanical standpoint. Worries that Grasshopper might be beholden to the corporate meddling of parent company GungHo appear to be happily unfounded, which is a relief to those he has enraptured with bizarre, borderline-unmarketable auteur pieces like Killer7, Flower, Sun and Rain and No More Heroes. Functionally, the game is most similar to the last on that list: a 3rd-person character action game that prioritizes timing and evasion and a system of showy special moves that require some room to rev up. The goal of the game is to simply ascend the Tower of Barbs: an immense tower that appeared after the world was wracked by earthquakes that the survivors dubbed "Earth Rage". The tower is meant to contain a priceless treasure at the top, or offers communion with the Gods, but no-one's ever survived long enough to reach it. An enormous tower isn't exactly new to the genre - Shiren the Wanderer and Azure Dreams were climbing absurdly tall structures long before now - but I can only imagine what Suda51 might've squeezed into this one. Consider how crazy Persona 3's Tartarus dungeon became towards its higher floors, and then picture an even more offbeat designer giving that concept the ol' college try.

Naturally for Suda51, the highlight of the game is in its eccentric cast of characters, each providing some mode of service in your "Waiting Room"; a safe zone that the player can retreat to via regular elevators to recuperate, buy new equipment, craft new items, check out the online, or - and this is where the game starts to lose the thread - retreat back out of the world of the Tower of Barbs to an Arcade parlor, where a different version of you is playing Let It Die on the beetle-enabled console Death Drive 128. The game runs the risk of making its peculiar characters feel too familiar, given how often you're retreating back to base and consulting with them for the services they provide, with the one exception of the most prevalent yet most mysterious character of all: Uncle Death. Uncle Death is treated both as an enthusiastic gamer who has coerced you into playing this "Let It Die" game, and as an omnipresent grim reaper who in some way is governing the rules of the game in question. His mystique is compounded by an unusual accent, which I believe is Finnish or some variant of Eastern European, and how he alternates between supportive and flippant with regards to your well-being.

As for the gameplay, it's a lot to fit into in one blog. I sort of want to move on after today, just because I know I'll barely scratch the surface of this game even if I spend three days playing it and I have a handful of others I want to check out. So here's just a quick list of what I consider the most vital elements for the direction the game is going for:

• Item durability. This is a huge factor in the game, to the extent that almost anything you bring with you will break pretty quickly. Armor and weapons both. Anything you find, either on the corpses of those you've slain or in chests, will have very little durability left and will likely break after a handful of battles. Items you bring with you from the outside, purchased from the equipment dealer, will last a bit longer but certainly not long enough for an entire run. However, this aspect - usually a dealbreaker for me - is mitigated by the game's "weapon mastery" skill system.
• Weapon mastery. You don't get to transfer much between "Fighters", as the game dubs the disposable player characters, and XP and carried items are lost once that Fighter dies. Maybe currency too, I haven't actually lost anyone yet. Of the few things that remain, weapon mastery is one: by using a weapon often enough, the player's mastery of that weapon type will increase in level conferring various bonuses such as extra damage, lower stamina drain on use and additional combination attacks. The player can opt to stick with their favorite types, buying new versions of those weapons whenever they start a crawl, or they can simply hop from one type to the next as they break apart in order to build a versatile spread of weapon proficiencies. It's a system that engenders experimentation too, as some of the more unusual weapons have nuance to their usage: a hammer or baseball bat operates exactly how you'd expect, but a fireworks launcher, a steam iron or a drillsaw all offer something new for a genre like this. There's always your fists too if everything else fails, which have mastery bonuses as well.

• Enemies. The game's lexicon takes some getting used to, but characters you meet in the dungeons essentially fall into three categories: Screamers, which are NPCs that resemble the player but have zombified to an extent and don't fight with a great deal of tactical wherewithal; Haters, which are the reanimated corpses of player characters - your own deceased characters included - and are considerably stronger than Screamers; and Tubers, which are mechanical enemies that are weaker than Screamers but appear in all kinds of variants. Haters present the most curious foe: some players have taken to power-leveling their characters and dying on earlier levels to give newbies a hard time, as a Hater fights with whatever it had equipped and its current level when it died. They'll also fight NPC enemies near to wherever they happen to spawn, giving the two of you some space. They're not so much player-controlled characters, however, but player-created characters consigned to AI control: imagine something like the Drivatars of the Forza series, or the Pawns of Dragon's Dogma. The player is also able to create a stable of Fighters which they can then turn into Hunters: a variant of Hater that seeks out and destroys other players and returns with a portion of their spoils.
• Beasts and mushrooms. These work sort of like the potions in roguelikes, though the game is kind enough to tell you what they do as soon as you find them (again, so far). Mushrooms can be eaten or thrown; each has a specific bonus or malus attached to it, though you can still eat the deadly ones if you'd like. Beasts are the same, but need to be caught first: this requires going into crouch mode and then quickly grabbing them. Some beasts are harder to catch than others, and it's rarely a good idea to try and catch one while there's enemies around. Beasts are also your most reliable source of healing at this stage of the game, however, so it's worth taking the time to corner them. If you decide to kill a beast instead, mushrooms specific to that beast type will sprout from its corpse and can be collected in lieu of the beast itself. Get ready to pull a Big Boss, because you'll be eating a lot of frogs and rats.

• Limited inventory. The game pulls the classic roguelike move of giving you plenty of items to find, some more useful than others, but a very limited amount of space to carry them. Elevators back to the hub are plentiful in the early stages of the game - I'm on floor 4, and there's been an elevator for every floor bar the second - but I'm not sure it'll stay that way. I'm also not sure if there's any way to expand your carrying capacity; I've only been able to expand my storage facility back at the hub. You'll discover that money is plentiful enough and fleeting at the best of times, so the items to prioritize seem to be the blueprints and the crafting materials needed to create or upgrade those same blueprints. You'll get duplicate blueprints too, but they're the most valuable items I've found so... it's win-win if you find one.
• The F2P elements. They've actually not been too intrusive as of yet - from what I can tell so far the only benefits buying in are special "Death Metal" tokens that can be converted into the game's regular "kill coins" currency, "insurance" that revives you if you happen to die, and a VIP membership pass that opens up the free elevator and a few other benefits. You spend Death Metals for anything premium-related, and operate in a similar fashion as MGSV's Mother Base coins: you get a small amount for a daily log-in bonus, occasionally, but you'll need to spend real money to receive a sizable stock. Doesn't look like the folks paying their way get too much of a benefit over those that don't in PvP terms - seems to be convenience/quality of life stuff so far.

There are some miscellaneous features I appreciate too, like when you exit a level and the game quickly shows you the path you took, the items you found and the enemies you killed. The overhead map filling with icons with a running text commentary on the side recalls the ASCII-based dungeon crawlers the game is loosely basing itself on. The game's been great about giving you stuff to do: reaching new floors opens up more quests, often involving going back to the ones you've cleared and completing them in a different way. The rewards are largely just rare items and money, though there's a few Death Metals to be earned too. Any quest can be taken again, but the reward is much smaller the subsequent time(s) - still, if you're going to be heading through that area again anyway, every little helps.

For the purposes of this daily feature I'm going to move onto something else tomorrow, but I'd recommend trying Let It Die out for a bit, especially since it won't cost you a dime. It has yet to badger me with any panhandling, though I've yet to reach "the wall" common to a number of F2P games. You know, that turning point where playing as a freeloader no longer becomes tenable. Pokemon Picross did the same thing with how it gated off new areas with increasingly larger tolls while making it much harder to earn the game's currency, and it was aggravating as heck. If I play more of Let It Die and reach that juncture, I'll be sure to let you all know.

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