Untitled Backlog Check In: Metal Gear Solid and Breath of Death VII

I continue to play video games, and occasionally they get finished. Who knew?

Metal Gear Solid was a game I had always appreciated a distance. I knew it had a crazy plot involving eccentric military personnel, giant death robots, and something about plugging the controller into the second port. My first experience with the series was actually borrowing a copy of Snake Eater from a classmate in sophomore year of high school. I was coming to the series cold, and at that age my console gaming was confined primarily to playing the balls off of Vice City. The pace, clunky feeling controls, and impenetrable reference-laded plot did nothing for me, and that guy got his game back real quick. I always assumed the series was just not going to be a thing I could actually enjoy based on that initial impression.

Fast forward about a decade, and this badass Jonathan Holmes manages to sell me on the MGS series by likening the core gameplay to Pac-Man. I was sitting at the Ms. Pac-Man cocktail machine at my favorite coffee shop/grad study spot as this was said (one whose operation I probably funded for the next few years), and I found myself suddenly quite taken with the idea of giving the series another crack. Listening to the Giant Bomb crew draw comparisons to MGS source material and Akira pushed me right over the damn edge. I bought a copy of the Legacy Collection in July, and completed the first game in the Solid series last week.

It's not all smooth sailing. I maintain the part where you use a controller device to input commands into the game that is Metal Gear Solid is pretty rotten. Control fidelity expectations weren't what they are now in 1998, but I played a good amount of N64 games from this era that didn't feel like the experience was being held back at times by control issues. The curve is high, and eventually I managed to work through most of these issues, but damn if I didn't feel like my execution issues during the Metal Gear Rex fight didn't boil down to the controls not doing what I needed.

Virtually everything else is fucking sublime. From the initial impressive (for their time) underwater opening cinematic, to the cliffhanger bullshit ending, the game is full of moments I cannot get out of my head. It was strange playing a game with such a strong message about nuclear issues, having studied the topic at a graduate student level for a few years. Hell, the last thing I did of note in grad school was attend a Department of Energy sponsored conference on spent nuclear fuel management. Even when this game tried to get esoteric on me, it was speaking my language. Distilled down to a series of boss fights, MGS would stand up to the test of time. Give those bosses personalities, insane intros and dialog sequences, and you've got something very special. Some of the events that transpire are now at the bedrock of gaming culture, such that they were spoiled for me in the same way that the Battle of Thermopylae was also spoiled. In spite of this, my late interest in the series as a whole left me fairly open to be genuinely surprised several times. Trust me, I'm now at the point of stuffing cotton into my ears until I get around the playing Sons of Liberty. I know the Raiden bait and switch gimmick, but my understanding is that game goes places.

If you spoil MGS2 for me I will end you I swear to god

I shouldn't have to recommend this game to anybody by now. It is the pinnacle of games on the PlayStation, making Final Fantasy VII look like a sad joke. It's practically part of our shared heritage, our lexicon. I just wanted to share how damn delightful it was. That Kojima fellow as really onto something, right?

Speaking of role playing games with heptanal suffixes, I completed a game for the IBM compatible Personal Computer platform. Breath of Death VII: The Beginning is a game made to trigger dopamine bumps in my skull. I mean, look at this thing!

I had a baby sitter forget a game at my house when I was maybe six or seven years old. It was a complete copy of Phantasy Star II, one which unfortunately disappeared in one of the half a dozen moves my family made in the ensuing years. I played the first few hours of PSII dozens of times. It blew my mind that a game could just keep going like that. Mario levels were fun, but eventually you hit a flag and that was that. PSII had an entire freaking world to explore, and cool space people to inhabit it. The monsters, music, and even the menu font of that game are etched into me at a BIOS level. Trying to complete it for a Community Endurance Run a year ago was a fun, if occasionally unfun, experience. ahem maybe I'll finish it someday ahem

What I'm saying is as much as I do enjoy Final Fantasy games and other JRPG experiences I've had, Phantasy Star games for the Genesis do something for me that nothing else will ever do. Zeboyd Games understands that, and made two games laser targeted at my demographic. BoDVII and its follow up, Cthulhu Saves the World, are independently developed and published RPGs that owe more to Sega than Square. I bought them both in a bundle some time ago and had started Breath of Death several times, but finally finished it in three sessions this week.

The game is exactly as long as it needed to be, and has a grip of smart "quality of life" features. Random battles are present, but there's a cap on the number which can occur in a given area. What's more, there's a menu option to trigger a battle on the spot. It is a viable strategy to find a save point, grind, and hit the point again cheese your MP back to full. I actually wound up playing this game "straight", but still appreciated seeing the battle counter hit zero so I could safely explore the increasingly labyrinthine dungeons at the tail end of the game. They don't get quite as bad as PSII's bullshit stair and teleport maze horse shit, but they do indulge in some of the "see the exit but require a giant loop to get there" school of dungeon design philosophy. Comes with the territory, I suppose. The battles are also mercifully straightforward, oriented towards fast and brutal fighting instead of slogging away at giant hit point boxes. There's depth there for those who want it, with buff abilities and a combo chain which can be depleted to trigger some proper heavy ammunition. You can also get by a lot of this game by hitting the A button repeatedly. Something for everybody!

Breath of Death VII is solid. I don't know if I'm going to rush to Cthulhu next, but I do know that I've been quietly losing my goddamn mind over what Cosmic Star Heroine could be if Zeboyd keeps up the level of quality exhibited here. Hope that game gets a damn release date some day.

Yoshi's Island is upstairs. I have to go all the way up one entire flight of stairs good christ to play more Yoshi's Island. Think I'll take a three mile walk instead. I'm actively trying not to start anything else before that one gets put to bed. Likewise, I struggle daily with wanting to buy both Dropsy and Undertale. Just had my JRPG jimmies rustled, so erring toward the former. That, and I had a nice exchange with Jay Tholen on Twitter yesterday. We both like Brian Eno!