Category: Video Games

Just Cause games always have a map that’s about 30-35 kilometers to a side. I think they picked this size because it’s big enough that you can fly a jet across it without breaking the illusion that you are flying across an actual country and not an area smaller than most respectably sized metropolitan areas (that illusion still requires fighter jets to fly about as fast as a Cessna, but that’s still much faster than a helicopter so it still feels like jets are fast and that’s enough to maintain the illusion). Maybe they did it semi-randomly in Just Cause 1, just kind of mindlessly pushing the limits of how big a playspace then-current hardware would allow, and now they don’t want to have a smaller game world in any of the sequels. However they arrived at that number, fact is that they never properly use all that space. Even Just Cause 3, which is easily the best of the series (so far, but word is that Just Cause 4 fell off), struggles to use about half of the map. There’s two archipelagos down south where the first two-thirds of the game take place that have a decent number of towns and villages in them, and then there’s the mainland to the north which has a few more cities on the southern coast and then actual miles of nearly empty land dotted only with military bases and outposts.

They definitely shouldn’t have stamped down any more of the same, because the game’s already getting a bit repetitive as it is, and the new military bases are often prison camps full of mines of the made up resource Bavarium, which is plot-relevant and has some unique doodads to blow up compared to previous areas. They do pack all the Bavarium mines right next to each other which is a bit of a problem, since if I just burn west to east across the map blowing up military bases as I go, I’ll end up doing like four Bavarium mines in a row. There’s a decent bit of gameplay variety between liberating a military base versus liberating a city, so intermixing them is good, which they did on the southern archipelagos but do less of on the northern mainland.

But the real problem with the game’s third act and its corresponding mainland is that there’s something like 3 kilometers between the two nearest points of interest. While there is something to be said for driving through a quiet countryside between assaults, this isn’t a small handful of remote outposts nor is this some kind of STALKER-style immersive experience. It’s half-ish (maybe even two-thirds) of the map with only one-third of the gameplay in it, and the distance made up with a commute. It’s not long enough to get really aggravating, it’s the kind of game where I’m listening to a podcast or talking to a friend or something anyway, but even a minor nuisance sticks out when it could’ve been got rid of by making less. Just take all your military bases and remove two of the three kilometers of empty land between any two of them and now your last act landmass is about the same size as the first and second and has about the same amount of content. And then maybe swap some military outposts out for some villages so they don’t get so repetitive.

Still a great game overall, though. Kind of nervous about Just Cause 4 ruining it somehow. Just Cause 3 nailed the basic formula, all you need to add at this point is new locales to liberate the shit out of. Sure, generating all those assets is expensive, but it’s not like there’s a design puzzle to solve here. Do Just Cause 3 but in Alaska or something, and ideally on a smaller map.

Also, this isn’t related, but I don’t want to make an entire extra post for this one paragraph: This game crashes like once every two hours. Luckily it’s got really good checkpoints and autosaves. It’s very annoying and flowbreaking to be halfway through blowing up an outpost only to crash, reload, and find I’m now half a kilometer away and all the enemy patrols are reset, but all the target objects I need to blow up to clear the outpost remain destroyed, so I don’t lose any progress, just get yanked outside to assault again. Depending on the outpost type, this sometimes makes things easier (some outposts summon continuous reinforcements while others have a fixed but very large pool of troops, and both get reset every time you close the game and reload, so a crash might clear a bunch of reinforcements as often as it will revive a bunch of guards). This might be related to my min-maxed processor and graphics card where my graphics card is awful but my processor is a monster, but Just Cause 3 is a 2015 game which the beastly processor can usually chew through even with minimal assistance from a graphics card, and word on the internet is that JC3 is generally a pretty unstable game. Good job on the autosaving, though, I never would’ve expected a game with crashes this frequent to be a mild nuisance rather than dealbreakingly frustrating, but they pulled it off.

Just Cause 2’s last two story missions really feel like they aren’t done. Honestly, so does the third to last one. That one’s also weirdly brazenly racist. This is a regime change sandbox so it’s not like racial sensitivity was ever going to be one of Just Cause 2’s strengths, but having a set of Chinese, Russian, and Japanese villains with, uh, accents was certainly a choice. The American protagonists aren’t really characterized any better but they are characterized sympathetically, in that it seems like we’re meant to think of them as devilishly charming rather than unhinged psychopaths. Doesn’t really stick the landing for me, though, so maybe that was the point, everyone here is utterly psychotic and we’re only working for the Americans because we started this series in 2006 back when being unironically pro-regime change was a fairly uncontroversial opinion.

But more to the point of the article, you settle up with the three national powers behind the communist Reapers, mafia Roaches, and fascist Ular Boys, who are respectively the Chinese, the Russians, and the Japanese. You might think that the Japanese are a weird choice since they’re a US ally and the protagonists are explicitly American, but don’t worry about it. The Russians and the Chinese were a reach in 2010, too, even if it’s hard to remember that in Current Year. I’m off-track again, the point is that these three international powers are backing three rebel factions you’ve been helping against the rogue state government, and for some reason the protagonists aren’t okay with that even though we’re doing the exact same thing, so we take all three of them out. Luckily for us, they’re all headquartered out of the same hotel.

This seems like it was probably originally supposed to be a thing where once you completed some percentage of a faction’s missions, you would unlock a mission dealing with one of the international benefactors. Maybe the one associated with the faction whose missions you’ve completed, so if you help the commies out they will eventually tell you where to find the Chinese, or maybe there’s a little loop, where the commies point you to the fascist-backing Japaense, the fascists point you to the mafia-backing Russians, and the mafia point you to the communist-backing Chinese. Then after completing all three of those you would unlock the next story mission. But, nah, you take out all three of them in one mission which you unlock by racking up enough chaos points, and completing faction missions is one source of chaos points but you can also ignore them completely to instead blow up oil pipelines and water towers.

In the second to last mission, you pick one of the three factions to help you kill the dictator. It’s implied that this is going to be some kind of important choice, but its only impact is which mooks follow you up the hill to the dictator’s bunker. Then the last mission’s intro voice clip says you need to take out oil tankers from Russia, China, and Japan headed towards Panau’s oil fields so that America can get all the oil for ourselves, but then the dictator turns out to be alive in a nuclear submarine, launches nukes at all four of his enemies, and you disable the nukes headed towards Russia, China, and Japan (all of whom apparently have no air defenses whatsoever and cannot intercept a single missile), then reprogram the missile targeted for America to blow up the oil field and thus eliminate the resource that all the international powers were squabbling over.

The last bit is the best writing the Just Cause series has had so far, which isn’t much of an achievement but hey, it’s something, but these last couple of missions heavily feature picking between the three revolutionary factions and interacting with their international backers and then it swerves into fighting the dictator again (no explanation is given for how he survived the storming of his bunker when he got blown up by a grenade – somehow Panay returned, I guess). The nuclear submarine climax is fine, but why set it up like the finale is gonna be an international free-for-all instead of just saying oh, shit, a nuclear submarine, he’s gonna nuke Tokyo and Beijing and…well, considering the ranges of sub-launched ballistic missiles in 2010, Moscow is a stretch and New York is right out, so Vladivostok and Honolulu, I guess. That’s a really petty nitpick, though, it’s a Just Cause game, the climax involves clinging to the missiles in transit in order disable three of them and reprogram the last one using a keypad attached to the side of the fuselage, it’s fine that there’s a nuke aimed “at America” without worrying about the details. The important point is that everything to do with international backers behind the revolutionary factions comes to nothing and if they didn’t want to have that actually go anywhere (and fair enough, it would’ve required a lot of extra assets to explore that in any kind of detail) then just don’t bring it up. Why are we even trying to defang the international backers behind the revolution? The revolution is on our side! Sure they’re a bunch of shady psychopaths, but so are we!

Just Cause 2 has everything it needs to be a great game, they just didn’t really bother mixing them together at all. It’s got faction missions, which are perfectly fun to do and could’ve formed the main plot of a good sandbox game if they’d had a good sandbox game to put around it. It’s got a big old sandbox map full of places that are fun to travel through or across and have gun fights in. It’s got lots of fun guns and cars and helicopters to do the traveling and gun fighting with. It’s got tons of enemy landmarks full of goodies you can pick up and things you can destroy in order to 100% clear them and then they stop spawning bad guys.

The problem is, they don’t seem to have realized that 100% clearing these towns and military bases would be, like, a goal that people would want to do on a whim. Every single one is a maddening scavenger hunt for that last power transformer you need to blow up to finish things. There’s two ways they could’ve done this better, either 1) instead of requiring you to blow up every enemy target and find every collectible, just require a certain amount of “chaos points” be gotten in the same location all in one go (i.e. the score resets if you get too far away), and you get chaos points from blowing the stuff up or from defeating enemy soldiers and blowing up their vehicles or from finding collectibles or whatever. Or 2) instead of having the player fish around to find every last collectible and destructible themselves, put big glowing dots on the mini-map for it. Just Cause 3 figured this out, and its base clearing missions are gobs of sandbox mayhem fun, and it’s weird to see Just Cause 2 to make all the assets but then fail to put in the weekend’s worth of effort required to make them fun to use.

The guns, similarly, have had all the work put in to give them a good variety without being too finnicky for the Just Cause style gameplay (you don’t want to go the STALKER route of differentiating between AK-74s loading 5.45x39mm bullets as opposed to L-85s which load 5.56x45mm – it’s Just Cause, just give me a fucking assault rifle that’s easy to keep track of and find ammo for regardless of which mooks I’m fighting), but generic ammo drops are so rare, your weapon inventory so limited, and enemies have such a variety of different weapons that running out of ammo is a constant problem, made worse by the fact that you’re expected to hookshot all over the damn place which means you don’t generally advance to the spot where enemies dropped their weapon but rather zipline fifty feet above it, which means I’m constantly running out of bullets (I specifically requested the opposite of this!). They put in all the work to have a variety of guns and then used that to make the game worse than if every enemy always used either an SMG or an assault rifle – that would’ve been very same-y, but at least I could’ve kept my ammo topped off. Similarly, my remote-detonated explosives almost never get refilled unless I order replacements from the black market, which means I have to be super judicious about blowing up enemy radar dishes and cranes and other infrastructure that the game encourages you to attack.

There’s a bunch of cool military vehicles like IFVs and helicopter gunships (haven’t found a plain old tank yet, but they’re probably around here somewhere) but there doesn’t seem to be any way to buy them from a shop or otherwise get reliable access to them, so I only ever have them when I happen to come across them in the world. At least hijacking helicopters with the hookshot has been made way easier. That seems like the intended way to deal with them in Just Cause 1 and 2, but only actually works in Just Cause 2.

Just Cause is one of the biggest games ever made. Although it stands behind procedurally generated games like MineCraft and space games like Elite: Dangerous, it is about the largest game world ever made for a game with a fixed, non-randomized map and which takes place at least partly on human scale rather than in a spaceship that goes four lightyears a minute past totally empty void. Elite: Dangerous does technically model the entire Milky Way galaxy but it does so by only fully rendering the space parts, which means all the computer needs to do is keep track of very big xyz coordinates and not actually fill them in with anything. In Just Cause, there are actual towns, military bases, and geographic features.

What there’s not is a whole lot of gameplay, and what there is hasn’t been used well. Now, when I say there’s not a whole lot of gameplay, I’m speaking relative to the map’s size. There’s plenty enough gameplay in here for a perfectly good game and while I think Just Cause is an also-ran to Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction in the realm of regime-change sandboxes of the PS2 era (which you’d expect would be a very small genre, but Far Cry and Just Cause compete over it to this day) and stands far behind Just Cause 3 and maybe also 4 but I haven’t played that one yet, it’s still fun to play and I don’t mind getting through it just to see how the series has evolved. But one of its flaws is unmistakably that the map is much bigger than what they had content for.

Just Cause has three mission types: Story missions, settlements, and side missions. Story missions are introduced with a brief cut scene, give you a unique goal like assassinating a specific dude on a yacht or blowing up oil tanks on a train, and when you complete them, a region of the map is destabilized.

Destabilizing a region unlocks settlement liberation missions, in which you have to do some combination of killing enemy troops, blowing up blockades, killing a specific enemy officer, and running up to a flag to press the E key. This unlocks new safehouses, which are the primary means of restoring health and fast travel (they also let you replace ammo and vehicles, but they’re not the most effective way of doing so). Liberating settlements also converts the local patrols to friendlies and turns the map a lovely shade of…well, actually a kind of bland shade of green, because the authorities are blue since their early-game troops are cops, and the guerillas all wear camo and hide out in the jungle so they’re green, I guess. Could’ve just made red team the good guys, Star Wars did it and it was fine. But map painting is still fun and liberating settlements is how you do that.

Side missions can be taken from a friendly settlement or from a settlement in a stable enemy region. These have random goals like stealing a specific vehicle, picking up an object guarded by enemies, killing a specific enemy, and so forth. They reward favor points with friendly factions which helps you upgrade your safehouses to have better weapons and vehicles, although settlement liberation does, too.

The issue is that side missions are more fun but less effective, while settlement liberation is less fun but more effective. And this plays into the size of the map because what makes settlement liberation less fun is not that there’s anything wrong with it, but that it gets repetitive. The map has something like 40 or 50 settlement liberation missions (although some of them are keyed to multiple settlements – liberate one and two others nearby flip to your side, and I wonder if that was thrown in near the end when they realized how tedious liberating all the settlements was and threw in a quick fix that made it go three times faster) and they’re all nearly the same. On the other hand, the side missions are reasonably varied, but there’s very little reward for doing them and they regenerate infinitely so it doesn’t feel like I’m getting anything done. They’d be fine as a quick distraction, but due to the staggering size of the map, reaching an NPC who gives out side quests can be a three or four minute trip. Settlement liberation is even worse, because those are the missions that unlock your fast travel points, which necessarily means you don’t have any fast travel nearby when you’re on your way to liberate a settlement.

A smaller map in which side missions were mixed in with settlement liberation, so there were fewer “kill guys, blow up blockade, kill officer” missions and the empty space was filled in with more variety, would’ve served Just Cause much better.

Also, this is only slightly related, but the ceiling on the settlement liberation missions before the mission fails because you’re out of bounds is really low compared to the effective range of helicopter weapons, and also you die instantly if you’re in a helicopter when it explodes rather than just losing some amount of health and being flung out of the vehicle to parachute to the ground. The Just Cause series has a huge emphasis on crazy stunts in a sort of Pierce Brosnan-era James Bond kind of style (and sort of Mission Impossible style, but Mission Impossible stunts are often done by basically just pointing a camera at Tom Cruise while he actually does the stunt in real life – in a controlled environment, but still, they are fundamentally within human abilities in a way that Just Cause stunts often are not), so you can jump out of a helicopter and parachute to the ground and it’s generally safer to do so than landing it because you attract significantly less enemy fire on the descent, but then if your helicopter explodes, that’s it. I guess the idea is to encourage you to ditch the helicopter before an enemy rocket connects in a stunt that is both more spectacular in general and also more rewarding because it requires some skill to pull off, but if that’s the case then there really should be some health indicator for the vehicle you’re piloting like in Mercenaries so that I know when I’m just one more missile away from instant death and need to ditch when I see one incoming.

Between the low ceiling of settlement missions and the fact that the only effective way to use a helicopter is to either complete an entire mission without losing it or memorize its HP and keep track in your head, they end up mostly useless, despite being treated by the game as a high-end reward for racking up a ton of reputation points.

By an accident of history, Serge wound up DNA locked to the security system of the time-displaced supercity of Chronopolis as part of a chess match between the rival AI overlords of the city, FATE and the Prometheus Circuit. Unfortunately, he only discovered this after he’d been bodyswapped with Lynx, an agent of FATE seeking to get his body back into Chronopolis to unlock the security system and access the full power of the legendary artifact known as the Frozen Flame. Miguel, who agreed to be FATE’s guardian of the Dead Sea in exchange for safeguarding the life of his daughter Leena, had successfully killed the Acacia Dragoons who brought the Astral Amulet with them to the Dead Sea, but failed to kill cat!Serge and his allies, who retrieved the Astral Amulet. Without Miguel, the Dead Sea becomes unstable and collapses into a time vortex leaving nothing but still water behind. Cat!Serge and his allies escape the collapse when the Sky Dragon, one of the six dragon gods of El Nido, rescues him.

The Sky Dragon gives some bullshit alibi about how he’s been watching Serge’s struggle with FATE and wants to see how this plays out and what his destiny is and stuff, using the mysticism built up around him by the El Nido people to play it off as a sort of “gods work in mysterious ways” thing. Cat!Serge now knows how Team FATE works and what they’re after, but he doesn’t know anything about Team Dragon (including the fact that Harle works for them), and Team Dragon likes it that way, because their endgame is the eradication of humanity and cat!Serge probably wouldn’t be so eager to help them out if he knew that.

Astral Amulet in hand, cat!Serge can now return to Another World. When last Serge checked, Lynx had swapped into his body, and since all of FATE’s defenses will just open up for him, that means Dark Serge can just sail on into the Sea of Eden (the Another World timeline’s equivalent of the Dead Sea), unlock the Frozen Flame, and FATE will once again be in total control of El Nido Archipelago. Since then, cat!Serge has investigated a rigged casino, gone on expedition to a haunted island, ventured into the Dead Sea, and probably completed some character side quests along the way – Dark Serge has had days if not weeks to accomplish this very simple task. In the game as it is, there is no explanation for why he hasn’t done this (especially since he has instead gone around terrorizing El Nido).

In this version, it’s because the Acacia Dragoons aren’t taking this shit lying down. Another Radius, sensing a disturbance in the Force, has come out of retirement to help rally the dragoons against Dark Serge. As far as the dragoons know, Dark Serge is regular Serge, some kind of criminal or terrorist or something. Radius convinces his old friend Fargo to maintain a pirate blockade on the Sea of Eden to keep Dark Serge from getting in. Fargo doesn’t have a ton of resources, but it’s enough to keep one kid on a stolen fishing boat out, so he goes to Plan B: get in touch with his contacts in the Porre Military, claim to be working on behalf of Lynx (technically true), and bring them in as muscle to break the blockade.

General Viper, leader of the Dragoons, never particularly disliked Serge and had tried to have him arrested and brought in for questioning largely as a favor to Lynx, but never had any intention of holding him long term or doing him any harm. Lynx just wanted to talk to the kid and Viper promised to bend the rules a little make it happen – but then Serge resisted arrest, raided Viper Manor for answers, stormed Fort Dragonia, and (as Dark Serge) is now in league with the Porre Military leading a fullscale invasion of the entire archipelago.

Cat!Serge is, as far as the Dragoons know, Lynx, their mysterious and entirely non-treacherous advisor from Zenan who has some unknown vendetta with the Porre Military and had been helping them prepare to fend off the invasion before he disappeared during Serge’s attack on Fort Dragonia. Lynx had been written off as a loss of the sack, but now cat!Serge is back in Lynx’s body, he becomes the presumptive leader of the Acacia Dragoons’ resistance against the Porre Military, as General Viper is still unconscious from the grievous injuries he suffered at Serge’s hands in Fort Dragonia (that wasn’t even Dark Serge, that was original flavor Serge – sorry). There’s just one problem: When the Porre Military captured Termina and Viper Manor, they took Lady Riddel hostage. Fargo doesn’t give a damn, but without the Dragoons’ backup, he isn’t able to hold out against Porre long – they’ve captured and imprisoned him in the Viper Manor dungeons and while his crew got away with the Invincible, they won’t last long as Porre brings in more reinforcements. So the first order of business is to rescue Lady Riddel and Fargo from Viper Manor, then to defeat the Porre Military and keep Dark Serge out of the Sea of Eden indefinitely.

Orcha is a Guldovan who was sent to Viper Manor as a chef but also to safeguard the Dragon Tear when they had it on loan from the village of Guldove at the request of Lynx. Lynx used it to bodyswap with Serge and then immediately shattered it, so Orcha kind of dropped the ball, there. The Porre Military has recruited him after their takeover of Viper Manor, and have figured out how to unlock his demonic dark chef side, who they use as a torturer. Cat!Serge bursts in on the Viper Manor dungeon just as dark!Orcha’s about to get to work and saves Riddel. Orcha joins the party afterwards in gratitude for keeping him from crossing any moral event horizons. He’s a chef, so his side quest is a combination of collecting recipes and then perfecting those recipes in a minigame that is basically Cooking Mama.

Grobyc is a cyborg of dubious loyalty to the Porre Military. He follows them because of their apparent strength and remains on their side because they’re defeating the Acacia Dragoons. As such, he attempts to thwart cat!Serge’s rescue of Lady Riddel, but is defeated. In the aftermath, he defects to cat!Serge’s team. In the game as it is, Grobyc’s ultimate technique is found in a secret location in Chronopolis – this is as good a place for it as any, honestly. Grobyc looks cool but has a paper-thin character.

Having successfully saved Riddel, cat!Serge escapes to Fargo’s pirate allies. Fargo’s minigame is piracy against the Porre Military, which is basically Sid Meier’s pirates. Pillage enough gold from Porre ships and you get his ultimate weapon/technique.

You can also use the booty from Fargo’s piracy to equip military units, used for General Viper and Zoah’s side quest. General Viper awakens from his wounds and joins the party along with Zoah and a bunch of other dragoons who we’ll get to later after Lady Riddel is rescued. General Viper and Zoah’s side quests are carried by a tactical combat minigame against the Porre Military, something similar to the land battles in Sid Meier’s Pirates. I’m thinking three sets of battles: First at the very fringes in Hydra Marsh, Mount Pyre, the Isle of the Damned, and Earth Dragon Isle, fringe locations where the Porre Military is setting up outposts. Then smaller villages Sky Dragon Isle, Marbule, Guldove, and Fossil Valley (which connects Termina to Arni Village). Finally, a half-size set of final battles for Termina and Viper Manor. There might also be a tutorial battle with the Porre Military assaulting the Dragoons’ final stronghold in Fort Dragonia. You only have to finish two of each set to unlock the next, you get General Viper’s ultimate weapon/technique for retaking Viper Manor specifically, and you get Zoah’s for completing every single battle.

Karsh, Glenn, and Riddel have a multi-part side quest from the original game about finding Dario, Karsh’s rival, Glenn’s older brother, and Riddel’s fiance. Karsh’s side quest involves being confronted by Solt and Peppor at the Isle of the Damned where it is revealed that he and Dario found the Masamune and Einlanzer here where Radius and Garai had left it (Radius and Garai’s conflict happened before the timeline split and is common to both worlds, but the retrieval of the Masamune by Lynx happened only in Home World – in Another World, Karsh and Dario went after it instead). Karsh was nearly overpowered by Masamune just like Radius was, but ultimately rejected it, refusing to pursue his rivalry with Dario to the point of murder. Dario, however, succumbed to the Masamune’s paranoia and tried to kill Karsh. Karsh’s ultimate technique is unlocked after this all gets revealed on the Isle of the Damned – the Masamune isn’t here not because Karsh still has it, but because Dario fell off a cliff into the sea with it, and Karsh presumes they’re both at the bottom of the ocean.

Turns out that surprise! Dario is on a hidden island and if you bring Lady Riddel to him, it cures his amnesia and then, unfortunately, he is immediately re-possessed by Masamune. If you beat the tar out of him, though, the curse breaks. The evil power of Masamune is destroyed, or else Einlanzer triumphs over it, or something, and Glenn ends up with a cool new sword and Riddel gets her ultimate technique.

Our final dragoon is Marcy. Marcy is an eleven-year old child who somehow became a Dragoon deva. You fight her in Viper Manor and she’s one of the only boss fights there that can potentially give you trouble, particularly if you’re not keeping up with equipment upgrades (which can be tricky if you don’t know where to find the materials). Her personality gimmick is that she’s a spoiled brat. She’s also the secret younger sister to Nikki, the rock star, which means she’s the secret daughter of Fargo the pirate captain and the secret niece of Irenes the mermaid. The only purpose of the family connection is to give Nikki an excuse to want to break into Viper Manor, so that plot point is dead and buried by the time we’re recruiting the Dragoons.

Luckily I have an ace in the hole, a totally generic but technically unique side quest that can be applied to almost any character: The pure gold sink. Marcy impudently demands you buy her a lollipop and a pony and stuff, and if you check off all the items on her wishlist, she gets her ultimate technique.

There is another option, but I don’t want to flesh out the details. See, Nikki’s whole subplot is in part about reconciliation between humans and demihumans. Fargo and Irenes’ sister whose name I’ve forgotten crossed that boundary to start a family together, but then the mermaid died and Fargo abandoned his kids to run either a pirate ship or a luxury cruise ship. Nikki, especially Home Nikki, hopes to complete the task his parents began, being half-human and half-demihuman (semidemihuman?). Marcy could play off that by being performatively racist against demihumans to conceal her own demihuman heritage, and unlocking her ultimate technique could involve a side quest about making peace with her parentage. I have no idea what to do with that besides the premise, though.

Also now you’ve got a boat and unlimited access to Another World so you can gather up all the different parts of Skelly. Skelly’s side quest is just that you have to gather up all his bones scattered across Another World to reassemble him, because he is a skeleton. And also a clown. If I could think of mechanics for it, I’d also give him, Janice, and Guile a circus minigame – a clown, an animal trainer, and a magician. I’d do a circus tycoon kind of thing, but I already did tycoon gameplay with Van, whose premise needs that much more than Skelly or Janice do (and Guile’s got other things going for him), so making another one means it would be incumbent upon me to differentiate them.

Orlha is the kung fu bartender from Guldove, because Chrono Cross got tired of copying Chrono Trigger characters and decided to copy a Final Fantasy VII character instead. In the game as it is, you recruit her by helping her fight off some Porre troops trying to seize her bar. In this version, this vignette happens after recapturing Guldove in the battle minigame for General Viper and Zoah. In the game as it is, you get Orlha’s ultimate technique by traveling to Home World (the Orlha you recruit is Another Orlha). Orlha and her sister Tia’s parents split up, and in Home World, it was Orlha who accompanied the departing parent (I forget which) to the Zenan mainland while Tia stayed in Guldove. Tia’s fallen into a coma in Home World, and when Orlha visits her, she dies, but her spirit says she’ll always be with her and Orlha gets a special kung fu/ghost tag-team attack.

Orlha also talks to Doc about how he can’t cure anyone when he comes to her bar to drink after he realizes he can’t heal Kid because there’s no hydra humour left in El Nido Archipelago and the currents prevent travel to the mainland this time of year.

There’s interesting ideas in there, but this post has been in limbo for over a month while I try to figure out something to do with them, so instead I’m rewriting it in two ways: First, Orlha’s sister didn’t move away in Another World, she died because they got sick, there was only enough medicine for one of them, and somehow Serge’s survival on Opassa Beach affected the outcome of this Sophian choice.

And second I’m giving Orlha a bartending minigame that works like Diner Dash. Chrono Cross already has a minigame kinda like this except that it’s about feeding dragon-horses in a stable, and only reaches the very minimum amount of gameplay. Diner Dash gets considerably more complex and that’s what we’d want for a character mini-game, although as usual this would be a terrible investment of resources justified in this case only because this is a thought experiment with no meaningful production costs.

I talk about video game openings a lot, and booting up Just Cause, two things leap out at me. First, the writing in this game aspires to mediocrity. I mean, Christ, the cut scene at the end of the opening mission has a hot tsundere slapping our protagonist over some unstated romantic slight from the past. A bald-faced cliche delivered unironically.

But despite the fact that this is clearly not a game you play for the story, it still opens up with a cut scene that establishes in less than two minutes that fictional Caribbean nation San Esperito is ruled by President Salvador Mendoza, Medoza is a bastard for vague reasons, and Rico Rodriguez is going to go and topple his regime on behalf of “the Agency,” which will probably work fine because this is an American game from 2006 and is therefore a universe carefully crafted to ensure that self-awareness and humility will never be beneficial traits. Then bam you are parachuting out of a plane and onto the beach to fight off government enforcers on the way to a safehouse. Not only are you playing the video game almost instantly, you also get out of the prologue and into the open world inside of fifteen minutes, the vast majority of which are spent in cool gunfights.

Getting the opening pace right used to be something that even poorly written video games got nearly perfect (Hades is even faster so there is room for improvement, but we’re under two minutes either way) without even really thinking about it. I think Half-Life was probably the start of the shift, here. Half-Life’s tram ride and Half-Life 2’s redux were both long periods of setting the mood before you got your crowbar and had at it. These were both really good, but it gave rise to much worse imitators which slowly morphed into failed film directors delivering two-hour long prologues whose only gameplay is a railroaded tutorial, dominated by cut scenes scripted and blocked by people that Netflix said no to.

Autonauts vs. Piratebots is a programming game where you program robots to gather resources and then process those resources into weapons so you can equip warbots and defeat the piratebots. It’s a decent take on the concept, but it’s got several annoying flaws.

First of all, and this one is completely subjective but it bugged me the whole game, your bots’ main armament are swords and bows, only unlocking “hand cannons” near the end, and even then they look like black powder. The tech tree is kind of ridiculous anyway, in that the only metal resource is generic “metal” so it’s not like we’re alloying copper and tin together to make bronze until we can get forges hot enough to melt hematite into iron or anything, and if I’m commanding a bot swarm, I want little treaded rovers with tiny and adorable miniguns on the back.

Secondly, every single recipe is just slightly more complex than it should be, mainly in how it always requires earlier techs as inputs even when that doesn’t make sense. Military units require gold, gold is obtained from selling food, so at first you can toss raw wheat into the spaceport for peanuts, but then you can unlock kitchen tables and ovens to bake bread. At first you grind wheat into crude flour to make crude bread. Later you upgrade your millstone to something that requires electricity and a wind farm and now you can grind up wheat into good flour to make good bread. Except actually you also need some crude flour as part of the good bread recipe, so in addition to your windfarm powered awesome mill, you also need a bot-muscle powered lame mill. Sure, this means the good bread recipe is more complex and thus requires either more bots or more cleverly programmed bots, but since there’s no cost to getting more bots besides the hassle of programming them – or just copying their programs if it’s to harvest more of a resource you’ve already set up a production line for – this doesn’t really make it any more challenging than if the good bread line was identical to the crude bread line except that it required better mills powered by a windfarm. Adding the windfarm is the part of the upgrade which isn’t just busywork, cut the rest.

And thirdly, directing armies is too automated to be intuitive as an RTS but not automated enough to be satisfying. Towards the endgame my (active) defencebot cap was 25, so my standard army was 10 knights, 10 archers, and 5 sappers, each of which had slightly different programs: WarBot, ArcBot, and SiegeBot. I never fully explored the programming options, so it’s possible there was an unexplained method whereby I could set my production facilities to automatically download the appropriate program from the database into units as they’re completed, and to do so until there are 10 active bots running WarBot, 10 running ArcBot, and 5 running SiegeBot, so the fact that I had to set each bot manually as it came off the production line might be my fault for not bothering to explore all the options. But definitely there’s no way to then write an Overmind program that waits until WarBot, ArcBot, and SiegeBot are all topped off before telling them to attack the nearest pirate outpost. Having them attack outposts based entirely on proximity rather than picking targets based on the strength of my army versus the strength of the target outpost would’ve been slightly inefficient, but a lot of automation is like that: You lose some finesse in exchange for the ability to turn it on and then forget about it.

On the other hand, this could lead to a point where you’ve got new production lines taking advantage of all the new tech already up and running, and now you need new tech from powerful pirate outposts, and you’re just kind of waiting for the army to finish threshing through all the pirate outposts between you and the target outpost because you’ve automated their attacks. But if you want directing the army to be more engaging, then the interface of reprogramming bots to target a new outpost (which you can, fortunately, do en masse so you only have to rewrite the program once per command issued) is way clunkier and less satisfying than the standard right-click tile to move, right-click enemy to attack.

It was also terrible for my productivity because its only obvious stopping points are when pirate bosses are defeated, which took me like six hours each. This is definitely a personal issue, but I found it hard to break the game into smaller chunks. The pirate bosses aren’t the only outposts with new technology, but the use for one new technology is often vague until you find another new technology that uses the resources gathered by the first new tech in order to produce something directly useful, which means the smart thing to do is to ignore all your new tech until a pirate boss is defeated, then look at all of it at once in order to set up a production line in a more efficient manner rather than creating workshops blindly and hoping they aren’t on the other side of the map from the resources they turn out to need as inputs.

There’s no point rewriting Dungeons II. I say that, but actually looking at the mechanics of the missions and writing a plot to go with them from the ground up sounds like something I might do sometime. But a Dungeons III rewrite is much less an exercise in creating an entire story from whole cloth. While Dungeons II had a bunch of references to other games’ protagonists and told you that they were a party of heroes who had wronged you so you should go stop them, Dungeons III has an actual plot. Unfortunately, it’s a plot with one beat that it repeats over and over again.

The one beat the plot has is that Thalya the dark elf is an evil creature but has been raised to be good by the paladin Tanos. The Absolute Evil – the disembodied hand of evil that you play as – sends a shadow to corrupt her, and she instantly becomes the general of the Absolute Evil’s armies. Thalya does a Gollum and Smeagol thing with her good and evil halves arguing with each other, and Tanos beams in to tell her she must return to the light, and evil Thalya tells him to fuck off while good Thalya bemoans that she is not in control.

This is a perfectly serviceable premise, but the problem is that there’s twenty missions, voice acted dialogue for every single one, and we’ve gotten these beats out of the way by the end of mission three, leaving nothing to do but repeat them seventeen more times. But the game does have something else going for it: A total of four heroes rule the realms you’re sacking, with Tanos as the ultimate king/hero but with three allied rulers, who pace the game out, with the first five missions ending with a fight with Grimli the dwarf, the next five ending with a fight with Yaina Overproud the sorceress, and so on. And these could be used to shine a lot on the reasons Thalya has for choosing evil over good. Even in the game as it exists, the good side of Thalya does slowly get won over to evil, but it seems to be more out of exhaustion than actually reconsidering just how heroic these heroes are. They went this way with Grimli, so the lack of it for any of the others to instead repeat Thalya’s rebellion against Tanos over and over again was a huge missed opportunity.

The Grimli arc barely needs revision. Its first three missions are dedicated to setting up who Thalya, Tanos, and Grimli the dwarf king are, as well as that Grimli is racist against Thalya once for being an elf and twice for being a dark elf. Even in the existing game, evil Thalya brings up that Tanos never defended her against his dwarf friend’s insults, so it’s really only in the next arc with Yaina Overproud that the ball gets dropped.

Yaina Overproud’s schtick is that she is vaguely capitalist, and this game released in 2017 when Bernie Sanders was at about the peak of his popularity. It’s not super clear how exactly she is being capitalist in any kind of hypocritcally evil way, the game just mumbles something about banks and then has Yaina carry a bunch of completely unrelated Sailor Moon references for no reason. I always wonder if there’s some WoW meme (or worse, in-studio) in-joke that would explain the connection. In any case, Thalya opens the game by opening up an orphanage, which she then burns down after being possessed by the shadow of the Absolute Evil, and you could make something of that by having Thalya be angry that she wasted so much time putting a pretty face on Tanos’ regime while Yaina raked in all the gold to lead a life of champagne dinners and glamorous excess.

Elric the Pretty is a narcissistic paladin. Doubling up on paladins since main antagonist Tanos is also one, but whatever. In the game as it is, Thalya’s good half falls entirely silent for this arc, which I guess might count as a second beat in her character arc if you’re generous, but rather than just going quiet, I’d have her actually get won over. Elric is vain, selfish, and self-aggrandazing, and good Thalya can wonder aloud how she ever thought of him as heroic. Put under the pressure of the Absolute Evil’s invasion, all of Tanos’ heroic companions have revealed themselves to be selfish cowards, throwing wave after wave of their own men at the Horde hoping to find their programmed kill limit and never fighting themselves until the dark armies have smashed through the gates, torn down the walls, and scattered all the defenders.

Other than desperately needing line-by-line editing to remove all the redundant lines and give Thalya more than one joke (she has a bit where she gives commands to do three evil things, where the first two are some kind of cartoon mayhem and the last is some kind of nonsense, which isn’t particularly funny the first time and then gets repeated on an almost per-level basis), the last arc basically works as-is: Thalya has a confrontation with her adoptive father Tanos, and put under pressure, Tanos goes full authoritarian psychopath.

There is one mission in particular that needs to be pretty much completely rewritten, where the premise is that you summon the Absolute Evil by sacrificing lots of captured heroes and then it beats up Tanos, which is bad for two reasons, first, this isn’t even close to the final mission so they have to contrive a reason why the Absolute Evil doesn’t just do that again in future confrontations with Tanos, and second, I’m supposed to be the Absolute Evil, the disembodied presence running the dungeon and directing the minions. Sure, it’s not a 1:1 representation, Thalya is implied to be taking on way more of a leadership role than the game depicts directly, but mostly the Absolute Evil is the player character, and when you get summoned, the subsequent battle is entirely in a cut scene, so it doesn’t at all feel like you’ve taken a more hands-on approach to the fight than before. Did the game just think the players would be disappointed if not reassured that they could totally beat Tanos up?

Spiritfarer is a saily-aroundy game like Merchant of the Skies, but it doesn’t have the base building mechanic that Merchant of the Skies sold itself on (no surprise there), still doesn’t have any combat, and also there is almost no trading. Instead, while you do sail around places exploring a map of the world and unlocking prows that can break through increasingly implausible barriers is a major game mechanic, the gameplay rests almost entirely on resource and time management. Your boat is sort of a Stardew Valley farm that floats, and while certain resources are only gotten from specific locations – you can’t grow extra wood or ore from your boat, so you’ll need to visit islands for them – others, like fish and farm crops, come mainly from messing around on your boat while waiting to sail from one place to another.

But all those mechanics are basically just to give you stuff to do so that your boat will feel like a community with a daily routine and errands to run and stuff, which is vital, because the basic premise of the game is that you are Charon’s replacement ferrying souls to the afterlife and these souls hang out on your boat between when you pick them up and when you resolve their subplot so that they’re ready to pass on. Since you’ve got things to do on the boat, watering crops, sawing wood at the mill, weaving thread into cloth and so forth, you see them wandering around. You’re in charge of handing out food for them and there is a dedicated hug button, both of which improve their mood (among other, more character-specific things that help give them individual personality), and if their mood is high enough they’ll do certain things automatically. For example, the union leader lioness (oh, all the departed spirits become animals on your boat for some reason – they were clearly human in life, though, so I think it’s just an excuse to have a giant cartoon toad hopping around the game) will harvest ore on her own when you visit an ore island, then process it into ingots, and then give you the result, so long as she’s not in a depressive funk. So you wander around the boat processing raw materials into whatever resources you need more of for whatever quest you’re focused on right now, and you bump into a couple of people who are busy contributing in their own way or just wandering around talking to each other or interacting with objects on the ship like a lazy lion (the lionesses’ husband) who likes to lounge on a couch.

I dimly recall that this game made Yahtzee cry, so I went into it with pretty high expectations. It’s good, but not that good. Yahtzee’s literally-cried moment was with the aging hedgehog named Alice. She died of old age and develops dementia over the course of the game. Now, I wasn’t totally unmoved by this. The tangled snarl of memories in her shattered mind is pretty realistic to how dementia works, and that’s a real thing that happens to real people which means Alice was an effective reminder of what it looks like when someone’s body and mind are slowly worn away until, when I finally led the gibbering corpse to eternal rest, I felt like it was probably for the best. She didn’t deserve to die, but she deserved to go on like that even less, so lesser of two evils, I guess.

I like these characters, but it doesn’t particularly feel like anything is getting resolved. They don’t seem to come to a personal realization about their backstories, they just share them with me and then move on through the Everdoor to whatever lies beyond. It does a good job converting the ship slowly but steadily into a floating graveyard of empty houses that were once occupied by people I knew and cared about, but the emotional climax falls flat. Gwen reaches the Evergate and is bitter about her awful father, but I already knew that. She also talks about how lucky she is to know Stella, the protagonist (they knew each other before Gwen died), but it feels kind of hollow because I was just ticking quest objectives off. Alice awakens from her dementia for half a second at the Everdoor, but only half a second, and barely has time to focus before the fog is back. Summer worked for a major agribusiness and the chemicals she used gave her cancer, which ultimately killed her, symbolized by a giant dragon. The one that made the most impact on me by far was Atul, who simply vanishes after you finish his last quest, in the way of an abrupt death that you didn’t see coming (although even then, only partly – I very much expected that Atul’s final quest would be his last unique quest, and the last one would be the visit to the Everdoor).

All of these characters work well before their emotional climax at the Evergate, and their absence afterwards is felt, but the actual Evergate text feels like aimless rumination on things they’ve already told me. I enjoy the game’s vibe but its emotional climaxes are the part that fall flat for me, and nowhere is this more true than the game’s actual ending, where it turns out it was all just a dream. This is not as hackneyed as it usually would be, because the whole game is about coming to terms with death, so it’s not thematically out of left field when it turns out that the whole thing is a dying dream and the death you’re coming to terms with is your own.

But that still leaves the problem that none of what you’re doing actually matters. The whole magic trick of fictional narrative is that we pretend to believe something we know is false in order to feel emotions about it. Strip away the false reality and make Spiritfarer a purely abstract game and it’s interminably dull – the gameplay is there to provide space for your boat full of departed spirits to feel like a community, because giving you things to do means there are things you do with other characters. The gameplay on its own is extremely basic platforming, usually of the babby’s first Unity game variety. It’s the animation and the characters that make the game engaging, but then half-ish way through it’s revealed there are actually exactly two characters: Stella, the protagonist, who is every single character except Lily, her sister, whose words from reality occasionally penetrate the dream. In that context, the only thing that matters at all are those conversations and the rare occasions when Stella is having a conversation that advances her own arc. Gwen and Atul and Astrid are all just mirages who matter only to the extent they influence Stella, and while each of them do, they do so very rarely.

The game is also just not as good at being a metaphor for accepting your own death as it is a metaphor for dealing with the loss of others. In large part this is because you are (I assume) a conscious, thinking being who is going to react to death in some sort of way, but corpses are not and do not. The game is very good at depicting life going on without the jovial toad man who taught you how to saw wood or the cynical deer woman who taught you how to weave cloth, gating progression through newer spirits’ stories and higher tier upgrades behind upgrades that require spirit flowers, a resource acquired exclusively from spirits passing through the Everdoor. You can choose exactly when Gwen passes on, but you can’t get through the ice barrier into the winter parts of the map with her still on board.

For your own death, though, the point when you pass on is the point when you’re done playing this video game. You choose to die when you’re all alone (there is, for some reason, one spirit who never passes through the Everdoor, but he still runs out of unique dialogue pretty quickly and fades into the background, so he may as well have left) and have nothing left to do. That’s not how most people experience death at all! That’s the experience of a biologically immortal being who’s outlived the entire human species!

On the other hand, if you completely ignore that frame and pretend the game never abandons its original premise, then it matters a lot whether the departed spirits have a mediocre versus ecstatic time on your boat in the couple of weeks they spend between this life and whatever lies beyond. I spent a lot of time with and had a lot of fun in Spiritfarer, but only by ignoring the twist and pretending the game was really, genuinely about faring spirits, that Stella isn’t dying, she’s dead, and Charon, an actual magical god of passage from this life to the next, selected her departed spirit to take over his job.