May Maturity 04: Jagged Alliance 2 (Outro)

I really tried.

It's not just that Jagged Alliance 2 is wilfully obtuse, to the extent that I have to stop, save, quit the game, look up an important function like "how to rest" or "how to combine squads together" online (there is a button to bring up an in-game list of key bindings, H, but it only covers about half of them) and then restart the game, wait for it to load and resume from where I left off. (Alt-tabbing will immediately break everything, because why wouldn't it?) That I can deal with, even after a dozen times in one hour. It's more that the game has no clear directives, at least nothing it deigns to explain to you beyond an occasional "hey, go here".

One early quest, which I discussed in the Intro article, is to restore the food supply chain between the intact town of Drassen and the starting town, Omerta, which has been bombed out and has a rebel cell huddling together in a basement desperate for supplies. After arranging everything with the priest guy I was supposed to meet in Drassen, I tried walking back to Omerta to see if the rebels had another objective for my team. They wouldn't talk to us. I figured it might be because the food hadn't arrived, so I went to sleep in between the two locations in case I was needed in either - it was also early AM and members of the squad were getting exhausted and antsy regardless. So I did that, and I woke up to find out the enemy soldiers had retaken both Drassen and Omerta with a force easily three or four times bigger than was previously stationed there. I'd lost all my progress, my one source of income (the Drassen mine) was gone, still had nowhere to sell all the weaker weapons and equipment I'd been stockpiling from fallen enemies, and no clear goal for what to do next besides repeat the last five hours of gameplay by moving through the two towns and taking down all the guards again. The combat's good but it's not that good. There's no reloading to before the rest period for a better outcome either; eventually, your fatigued mercs refuse to leave the zone they're in until they've had their 40 winks. Any motivation to continue had evaporated completely at this juncture.

If the game had a better UI or a smarter way to relay information to the player as to what they ought to be doing or maybe what needs to be done in order to prevent, say, the reigning despot's forces waltzing into liberated territory and retaking it, I could see this game being worth the long haul. The combat's tense and tactical without the highly stressful juggling act of a real-time format - it's more like the original two Fallout games, which I'm way into - and I definitely respect the ambition of the game's hundreds of moving parts. That developer Sir-Tech and the fan community that worked on the 1.13 mod have packed so many clever mechanics and features into the game is nothing short of breathtaking. Until now, I'd always considered Final Fantasy Tactics to be the most mechanically-elaborate strategy RPG I'd ever played with regards to aspects like weather and physics and gravity and turn orders and elemental resistances; an underrated aspect of that game that the "Advance" follow-ups badly fumbled, given the memory limitations of the handheld consoles on which they appeared. It's fair to say that Jagged Alliance 2 has it beat, to an almost mind-bending degree. Again, it wouldn't have been an issue if the game had been a little more plainspoken. I suppose most of that can be blamed on its age; before the recent big PC gaming boom that Steam helped foster, those who enjoyed PC games - along with ol' Jack Burton - were not put on this Earth to "get it". They sat with their dictionary-sized manuals beside them, painstakingly figuring out every facet of their incredibly dense strategy games.

I don't mind saying that I'm throwing in the towel. I can see the appeal, but... well, as tempting as it would be to do so I can't claim in good faith that I've grown too soft and stupid to handle this one due to all the babyproofing that new games go through. You look at earlier games of a similar tactical bent, like Civilization II or Baldur's Gate or X-COM: UFO Defense (1996, 1998 and 1994, respectively), and those games had the wherewithal to realize that they have one heck of a learning curve to impart and do everything in their power to compensate for it, with huge in-game encyclopedias and full lists of key bindings as well as lots of advice if you need it. Heck, even Sir-Tech's later Wizardry 8 tried to be as transparent as possible with its archaic rules and strategic turn-based combat. Jagged Alliance 2's dearth of tutorials and its unintuitive and complex UI seem more like an obnoxious anomaly of its era than the norm. But hey, like I stated when I started playing the damn thing: I already knew about its fearsome reputation, and the lack of hand-holding is a large part of the reason why so many like it. Unfortunately, I cannot count myself among their number.

(I feel like I could've saved a lot of time writing this Outro if I just reposted that dril tweet that goes "I'm not owned! I'm not owned!" and called it a day.)

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