Saturday Summaries 2018-06-30: Q3 Preview Edition

Man, the halfway point to another crummy year. What's worse is that, unlike last year, this one doesn't seem to have nearly the same wealth of great games coming out as a distraction from the burning trash fire that is our present reality. Maybe I'm being too harsh (about the games, not reality) and that the third quarter of the year could have some sneaky surprises for us all as we emerge from the unremarkable shadow of an underwhelming E3. I know there's at least five games out over the next three months that I'm aiming to play eventually, and many more that will pique my interest if and when the price is right.

So let's get started with July or, as I like to call it, "Summer Heat Hell Month The Sequel". Despite landing smack dab in the middle of the summer slump, it's surprisingly packed. We start with Red Faction Guerrilla: Re-Mars-tered Edition, a rerelease of one the best open-world games from the previous console generation in how it indulged the player's more destructive side with plenty of fragile environments to bring down via hammer or other means (though the hammer is really the MVP). Next is a cavalcade of JRPGs with Sega's Shining Resonance Refrain, the first Shining game to come to the west in what feels like a decade at least; the PC port of Ys: Memories of Celceta, the only "new" Ys I've not yet had the pleasure of playing due to its status as a Vita exclusive until now; and Octopath Traveler, the fancy-looking 2D scenario-based JRPG exclusive to Switch. Beyond that we also have the Mega Man X Legacy Collection - two of them, in fact - for fans of the slightly more convoluted SNES/PS1 spin-off franchise, and the newest entry in the sadness porn SRPG series that is The Banner Saga 3. I've yet to play The Banner Saga 2, and I'm still not sure I have it in me to suffer through another series of dilemmas with no positive consequences. There's also a handful of worthwhile ports showing up: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for Switch (with that New Donk City level!), No Man's Sky for Xbox One (they had to wait a while, but at least they get the benefit of having a finished version of the game actually worth playing), and Titan Quest for Switch (which sounds weird until you realize it received a much-improved ten-year Anniversary Edition recently, and that's the version getting ported to consoles).

The oft-sweaty August can suck a bag of phallic objects also - I might suggest popsicles, since they're seasonal - but at least there's some darkness at the end of this tunnel of uncomfortably warm light (I'm doing like a summer reversal thing). Only a handful of significant releases here compared to the months that sandwich it, but they're nothing to sneeze at (unless you have my seasonal allergies, which are the one thing that makes summer even better). The big highlights are WarioWare Gold and Yakuza Kiwami 2: not exactly "new" games in the strictest sense, but welcome summertime prospects nonetheless. Speaking of not-quite-new, August will also see the refreshed We Happy Few, which promises to be more like what its trailer promised rather than the uninspired survival crafting game its Early Access version delivered, and there's also Overcooked 2 which will no doubt stick to the original game's manic multiplayer cookery for the most part while adding new stages and recipes to work with. Finally, we have the promising Death's Gambit, which - like Salt and Sanctuary - appears to be a grim 2D spacewhipper/Soulsborne variant with a great pixel aesthetic. (There's also more ports - Yakuza 0 for PC, which should be an exciting franchise debut for those snooty weirdos who refuse to play console games, and Okami HD for Switch, which really feels like the system where it belongs.)

Ah, wonderful, temperate September. Fewer kids around, fewer household objects melting, more TV and video games coming out. A lot more, in fact, as the following list of mostly JRPGs is going to add a whole other page to my back catalogue. Starting with a showstopper, we have Dragon Quest XI, the first big console release in the venerable series since Dragon Quest VIII from 2004. I really like Dragon Quest for its goofy pun monsters and simplicity, but I just can't seem to get into its portable RPGs with all their squinting at small screens and uncomfortable grips that make it difficult for the extended play sessions that the genre demands. Other JRPGs include the Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country standalone expansion (I can safely skip this, since I've yet to play XC2 proper); Metal Max Xeno, another exciting precedent as it belongs to this super-layered series of Mad Max-inspired vehicular-based RPGs that have never been released outside of Japan until now; and Valkyria Chronicles 4, which looks amazing and will be the first VC sequel I'll get to play (VC2 was another Vita exclusive, while English-speaking territories were deprived the fantastic VC3). For the more anime-averse, we have Insomniac's expansive Marvel's Spider-Man, Square Enix's brutally efficient Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the first episode of DONTNOD's weepy magical realism adventure serial Life is Strange 2. There's also Star Control: Origins, which I have mixed feelings about but might just pick up anyway because it's more Star Control, and the Spyro Reignited Trilogy, which could be the excuse I need to get into a 3D platforming powerhouse franchise I missed the first time around.

(Honorable mentions go to Underworld Ascendant and Dead Cells, both of which are hinted to have Q3 releases but nothing determined as of writing. The first is something I've only recently decided I must play after completing the two Ultima Underworld games it homages, while the latter is Jason's beloved spacewhipper roguelite that's due to leave Early Access any month now.)

Blog City USA is here, everyone. In our hearts and in our souls. But also below, if we're being a bit more literal:

• The Indie Game of the Week was Guild of Dungeoneering, a 2015 game that has a sort of Rogue Legacy approach to a persistent state roguelite (that is, you buy things outside of adventures that stick around forever) and some smart ideas. As much as I liked the combat - it's simple but not easy, which reminded me of a board game like HeroQuest or something like Paper Mario - I got tired of starting over with an unequipped level 1 character each time. It has a repetitive structure that, while I can empathize with why that decision was made, sort of robbed the game of any vitality for me. One of those unusual cases where I might recommend it to someone who plays games for different reasons than I do.
• The Tuesday revolving slot turned back around to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode XIII: Plok and Marty hits a new low with the disappointing anime-themed licensed game based on the movie of the same name, Super Back to the Future Part II. Great movie, but the developers of the era just couldn't make a good game adaptation happen even though they had hoverboards, flying DeLoreans, and alternative timelines to work with, which baffles me to no end. The second game was Plok, which is another nostalgia kick I'll admit to being more fond of than it perhaps deserves. A ludicrous challenge level and middling gameplay isn't enough to take the sheen off that majestic soundtrack though, which remains one of the system's best.

Addenda

TV: The Expanse (Season 3) + Archer (Season 9 - "Danger Island)

The summer media drought is here, which means all my favorite TV shows are ending and will be replaced with static images of sunshine with the caption "you should go outside and be in this" until September rolls around again. I talked at length about the second season of Legion a couple of weeks ago, and since then two more great TV seasons have concluded: Season three of Syfy's The Expanse and season 9 of FX's Archer.

This season of The Expanse has been phenomenal. To recap the concept of the show, since I already went into a lot of detail with my season 1 & 2 review, it works to establish the current de facto politics and technology of its version of humanity's nascent spacefaring era - in short, there's the complacent Earth, the militaristic and frontier spirit-infused Mars, and the hardscrabble but proud "Belters" that operate in and around the asteroid belt and the moons of the gas giants beyond - and then adds new layers of complications to that fragile balance of peace by introducing an alien organism, the protomolecule, of which its purpose and effects are unknown. Each season, based on a series of novels but not in a way that necessarily correlates to one season per book, has this slightly less stable version of Star Trek's universe try to understand and withstand whatever the protomolecule is up to this week, while a small crew of protagonsits invariably find themselves deeply involved with the current predicament.

Season 1 was a lot of body horror, as we come to understand the protomolecule as being this hostile force that takes over biological and mechanical for its own ends. Season 2 explored it further with the background of an all-out Earth-Mars war, giving it some semblance of sentience by combining it with human beings to create these ghoulish "hybrids", which eventually culminated in a ship-like construct building an enormous ring. Season 3 explores what that ring is and what it was built to do, bringing the protomolecule arc to an end while introducing a whole new realm of possibilities. To put it another way, the show has started as a hard sci-fi universe that's had to accept, gradually, that it's actually more like a fantasy sci-fi universe where constants like physics and gravity aren't as reliable as everyone thought. It's a great idea - and it's still true to its roots, and you'll rarely find near-future space travel as accurately depicted as you do here - but one that takes a semi-stable world and continues to batter at it with a hammer that says "everything you know about science is wrong because aliens". Despite all this, it has a very human center also: the cast is great, though they didn't always start that way, and season 3's guest stars in particular - Lost's Elizabeth Mitchell and Alphas's David Strathairn - have really added a new level of depth to the show.

It's been called a Game of Thrones in space, and not in a reductive way. Both shows have a certain hard layer of grit to them, and neither is squeamish about suddenly killing off a beloved cast member (though The Expanse has eased up on that more recently), but both have this certain addictive serial quality where you want to keep watching to see what happens next partly because of the way it keeps escalating events but also because it's written in such a smart way that it's difficult to predict what's to come, as it'll often eschew clichés or any kind of easy tidy conclusion. I'm so glad Amazon picked it up after Syfy dropped it like the dumbasses they are; I've promised not to make any guillotine jokes about Jeff Bezos for a whole year as thanks.

Then we have Archer's ninth season, or "Archer: Danger Island", the second season in a row where the real Archer is trapped between life and death after an apparently fatal shooting at the end of season seven and imagines a whole new setting of the show in his dying thoughts. This has really been an excuse for showrunner Adam Reed to experiment with some new genre formats for the last few seasons of the show - he plans to end it after the tenth, or at least walk away as its creative lead - with season eight delving into some classic 1940s noir and season nine following a similar path with some 1930s adventure serial action which riffs on the Tales of the Gold Monkey 1980s TV show (and, I imagine, the somewhat similar 90s Disney cartoon TaleSpin, which was itself based on the manga (Hikoutei Jidai) that eventually lead to the Ghibli movie Porco Rosso. Definitely a rich fiction of animals flying airplanes during or close to WW2).

This season was a lot of fun because of the way Reed could indulge in some genre-apropos ideas with the cast that he's been developing for nearly a decade now. As with last season's noir trappings, the original cast have been tweaked but are still recognizable for the most part. Pam's gone from overweight but still badass HR official to a hulking mechanic side-kick, Cheryl's still an unstable rich woman but one that starts the show having cut herself off from high society and forced to work for Mallory Archer, who now runs a hotel instead of a spy agency. Most drastic has been Krieger's change from amoral scientist and possible Nazi clone to a sapient parrot named Crackers, who is given way more lines as a sort of Greek chorus to whatever Pam and Archer are doing. It's a great chance for Lucky Yates, the voice actor for Krieger, to have a larger role in the proceedings, even if he can't do much to affect the plot as a sarcastic bird. He definitely gets a lot of the best lines in the show, if nothing else. The weaselly Cyril Figgis, meanwhile, becomes a sinister Toht type as the depths of his Nazi depravity become clearer as the show moves towards its final destination of a trapped temple with a priceless idol in its deepest sanctum. It gets very Wolfenstein, somehow.

One benefit of these self-contained seasons is that their stories can start and end in a perfectly planned-out way, with the last few moments of the season spent setting up where season 10 will take place: on a starship, quietly floating in the depths of space with the usual crew just waking up from their stasis sleeps. I'm looking forward to it, though I'm also slightly sad that the show might be over after that. I'll miss how well this cast works together with their humorous back and forths, and the show's great editing and unusually esoteric references.

Movie: Snowpiercer (2013)

I was reminded the other day that I hadn't seen Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer yet; it's somehow been very unobtainable, possibly because of its South Korean co-production origins. My lousy movie streaming service has been very cagey with world cinema, not that I'm necessarily part of the "subs and sobs" clique of serious world drama purveyors but I'd like the occasional eastern action movie to make its way over. Fortunately, it's been out long enough now that finding a digital copy was less of an issue.

As to the movie itself, well... it's like that one GoldenEye train level, only a lot longer and weirder. Speaking of video games (as I frequently do), I actually thought the premise and literary background of Snowpiercer - in which a massive supertrain cuts through the tundra of a post-apocalyptic frozen Earth - may have been shared with an Atari ST game I had named Transarctica. Turns out they're both from French novels produced in the 1980s and based on the same general idea? (Le Transperceneige, 1982 = Snowpiercer and La Compagnie des Glaces, 1980-2005 = Transarctica.) The movie has Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Ewen Bremner, and John Hurt (RIP) collectively make up the "tail section" of the titular train, in which each train compartment is progressively wealthier and more privileged as you approach the engine at the front. The tail section survivors subsist on a weird black gelatinous protein bar and frequently get visited by the forward compartments, only for them to take away children or enact some sort of punishment. The whole movie is essentially the tail survivors coming up with a plan to take over the train, and being increasingly horrified by the ridiculous extravagance of those living closer to the front.

The South Korean representation in the film comes from Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung, a father/daughter pair of technicians who can short circuit the dividing gates between compartments but demand a hallucinogenic drug as payment. The two have their own little side-plot going in the background of Chris Evans's revolution, and it pays off towards the end as the tail section residents dwindle down and more of the train's secrets are revealed. It's a well staged movie, one where there's new revelations and drama with every train compartment explored, and the acting is universally excellent. In addition to the tail section cast, you also have Tilda Swinton as one of the least pleasant "only following orders" unempathetic officious types and Alison Pill as an overenthusiastic teacher instilling in her wards a fanatic fervor for the train and its creator (I've only seen her in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, where her character Kim Pine had almost the exact opposite personality).

The real star of the movie is the world-building and pacing, however. Sci-fi is a difficult genre to get right because so much of its effectiveness is built on suspension of disbelief; it's not enough to create outlandish sets at great cost or replicate the movement of the train by building a sound stage mounted on gimbals, but to have a world that makes a sick sort of sense in the way Snowpiercer's does but still leave enough mystery in just how everything is assembled that you can surprise and horrify a gradually more invested audience. It's not quite a horror movie, and while it's plenty violent it's not really a gory movie either, but it features a similar degree of tension and suspense as well as an almost overwhelming sense of dread of what is about to happen to these plucky survivors, especially once you realize it's the type of movie where they're going to get picked off one by one.

Director Bong Joon-ho is someone I was familiar with but hadn't seen any of his movies prior to Snowpiercer; he's also known for the horror movie The Host and the bleak family drama Mother, neither of which belong to genres I normally enjoy, but I might check out the movie he directed after this one called Okja, which looks to be a slightly more lighthearted story about a girl and her giant super pig? It features a similarly global cast as this movie and saw rave reviews, so I'll have to pencil it in for later this year or next.

Game: The Last Guardian (2016)

In short, because this week's Saturday Summaries has already gone on long enough, The Last Guardian doesn't quite live up to its potential. I suspect that's because the game's development had to be sped up towards the end, having been in development hell for quite long enough, and some needed gameplay tweaks were missing as a result.

To backtrack a little, The Last Guardian is the newest Fumito Ueda game - the auteur behind ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, whose visual style makes it immediately apparent that you're playing one of his games - and concerns an unnamed boy and a mythological beast called Trico. Forming an initially uneasy alliance that eventually deepens into a strong bond, the duo find a way to escape Trico's vertiginous "Nest" home by moving ever upwards, the reason being that the Nest sits inside a crater and the top of its walls are only accessible from the Nest's highest point, the imposing White Tower at the center. Trico is greatly injured from the outset, his burned wings no longer working, so the pair have to work their way up via walls and bridges and perches in various states of disrepair, contending all the while with hostile suits of magical armor that are determined to cut Trico down and abduct the boy through a magical portal that spells certain doom. It's a little convoluted, but fits well enough within Ueda's fairytale worlds of ancient magic and fantastical creatures.

While the game looks stunning and Trico is a very appealing character in terms of how it's animated and the way you empathize with it like it's a dumb pet that occasionally eats you (we've all been there), there's a mechanic where you have to command it to perform actions in order to continue - say, making it sit down so you can climb its tail down to a lower platform, or having it reach up to a higher location to get up there yourself - that the developers clearly had trouble getting right, and only mostly works in the finished product. It leads to puzzles where you're not sure if you're missing something or that the game just flat out refuses to do what it's supposed to, which is supremely irritating. There's also a lot of button-mashing in QTEs and during combat (you have to wriggle free if one of the armor suits grabs you) that I hate doing to my controller, which is already starting to suffer from a unresponsive left analogue stick. The path forward isn't always apparent either, especially if it requires using Trico to get to some out-of-reach spot in the environment, and the game can drag if you need Trico to perform a lot of long jumps to make progress, because he'll often just sit there and scratch himself instead.

I think the most dispiriting thing for me was the trophies. They're often the game's first impression, if you're like me and want to take a cursory glance at what's required before starting, and many of The Last Guardian's trophies demand speedrunning the game or clearing it without dying (neither of which would be fun if the game's mechanics worked perfectly, let alone the state TLG's in) as well as repetitive tasks like pulling the heads off enemies twenty times instead of just a couple, many of which would need to be grinded out. I ended the game a fair distance from a full trophy set, which doesn't bother me much these days but still symbolised a certain rushed feeling about the game.

I'm totally still of the mind that Ueda should have all the money to develop whatever he wants, and I hope The Last Guardian's lukewarm reception doesn't deter him too much because he's a valuable voice in an industry where too few auteurs are given the resources to realize their visions. He has since left Sony and there's only so much you can do in the Indie tier of game development, but I'm hoping he finds a way to continue building his elaborately beautiful worlds, even if his ambition can evidently get the better of him sometimes.

(Oh right, I've also started Yakuza 5. It's my summer Yakuza playthrough showing up like clockwork. More on that in the Summaries to come; I suspect it won't be a game I complete in just a week.)