Category: Video Games

I wrote an article about whether or not Final Fantasy games deliver on the promise of their characters’ and settings’ premises, where frequently the answer was “no.” The idea was that certain characters being playable party members evokes an idea that you get to do or be that character in some meaningful way, but you don’t, particularly. I think Final Fantasy VIII is the best exemplar: The premise is that you are cadets at a mercenary high school that teaches you how to fight wars and hunt monsters. This informs a small handful of early quests that set up the main plot, but once you accept an assassination contract on the main villain your mercenary high school credentials cease to be relevant, and by the 1/3rd-ish mark of the game your original motivation for going after the main villain has been swamped by personal motivations and a weird amnesia backstory. That last part is for the best (well, not the amnesia part), you want the stakes to get more personal and character-driven as the game goes on, but nowhere in the prior parts of the game is the premise of mercenary/monster hunter high school paid off.

I mentioned during the article that one reason some of the games ran into trouble, especially IV and VI, is because they shoved every cool character they could think of into the party, massively exceeding both the maximum size of the party in any given battle and the space they had to really develop those characters’ concepts, with the end result that the protagonists of your Final Fantasy game are like 60% Darkest Dungeon characters: Cool character designs with interesting mechanical functions, but a paper-thin backstory and nothing that evokes that you are playing as them in particular. That works great for Darkest Dungeon, where high turnover in party members is a key part of the premise, but in Final Fantasy games we are supposed to get to know these characters and they should have some opportunity to actually do the things they’re supposed to be about.

I also mentioned that peak character crowding came from Chrono Cross, which has 45 playable characters. Now, expecting Final Fantasy to pay off the premise of its characters was already unreasonable to ask of the developers, since the state of game development as both a technology and an art form just wasn’t that advanced and everyone understood that if you had a pirate captain in your party, that didn’t mean you would get to actually play as a pirate captain. It meant you would get to hang out with a pirate captain while doing the main plot. Not only was that still the state of the art when Chrono Cross came out, Chrono Cross also has such a flabbergastingly large cast list that you can’t plausibly do justice to most of the character premises because there are just too many.

But as a design exercise, I’m gonna try anyway. It should be a doable project when all I’m doing is giving a one-paragraph overview of what kind of side quest could be used to evoke the project, since I don’t actually have to design the damn thing. So the basic premise here is, imagine a version of Chrono Cross with way too much money and development time which creates a unique side quest for every single character’s ultimate weapon, including the ones who already had side quests for ultimate weapons, if I decide those side quests didn’t do the job properly.

We’re also going to be doing these characters in rough order of recruitment, so you can more or less follow along with the main plot along the way, although it may get kind of disjointed especially towards the end, when there’s few new characters to recruit and what ones do first become recruitable that late are usually the bizarre side characters with nothing to do with the A, B, or C plots of the game.

Continue reading “Chrono Cross Character Quests: Arni Villagers” →

One video game I’ve always wanted to see is Dragonball Musou. That is, a Musou fighting game like the Dynasty Warriors series, but in Dragonball.

This is a better fit than it might seem at first glance. The Musou series emerged from fighting games, and while they’ve drifted enough that you couldn’t make a good Dragonball Musou game just by slapping a coat of Dragonball paint on the latest Dynasty Warriors release, the fundamental bones are very much amenable to Dragonball. In the Musou series, there are peons, huge swarms of generic mooks, generic officers, 100+ minor characters who all share one of 3-5 generic models and movesets between them, and face officers, each of whom has a unique moveset and character model. Officers, especially face officers, are so massively more powerful than peons that not only are they expected to take out an average of about 400 of the poor bastards in every battle, they’re not even expected to be at any significant risk when doing so. Peons can do a bit of chip damage to officers, but stand almost no chance of inflicting serious injury on them by themselves.

Instead, peons serve three combat roles: Number one, they hold the line against enemy peons in places where officers aren’t present. The battlefields are big enough that there are times when peons fight other peons with no officers around, and battlefield control has an important impact on reinforcement rate and/or morale, the latter of which makes peons more aggressive, attacking more often and more willing to attack officers instead of enemy peons and therefore dealing more chip damage against officers, as well as allowing them to win fights against other peons. Morale is determined by a combination of battlefield control, defeated officers, and peon casualties, which are mostly under the control of officers, so you can swing a battle your way as an officer by getting a morale advantage, which causes peons to attack more often for a favorable casualty ratio against enemy peons and to steadily advance to claim territory even in locations where no officers are present, which can cause the morale advantage to snowball.

Number two, peons bog down enemy officers. Some peon attacks just about bounce off of officers, but others cause the officers to flinch, which means trying to run past a peon swarm can see you getting knocked off your horse (bear in mind we’re still talking about Dynasty Warriors now, we’ll talk about adapting this to Dragonball later) and potentially surrounded by a dense enough crowd of peons that it takes you a while to get past them. Not only that, but trying to run right past the peon line without defeating them means that, whenever you arrive at your destination, you will have to fight a bunch of peons to clear it out, which is usually what you’d like to do. Ignoring the front line to charge directly to an objective is still a valid strategy because peons still aren’t much of a threat, and even if the fight at your destination will be slower if you have to do it alone instead of bringing your own peons with you, the time saved in getting there without fighting will usually make up for it. You’ll take much more chip damage but it’s still a difference of 10% of your healthbar (total, for the entire attack) the slow way versus 30% the fast way, so it’s not like you’re in great danger of dying from the peons even when surrounded behind enemy lines.

However, it’s still a high-risk strategy, because number three, an officer with peon backup is much, much stronger than an officer alone. This is due to a combination of the flinch mechanic and directional blocking. Peons almost always deliver only 1 or 2 attacks by themselves, maybe 3-4 if they’re a high-ranking NCO (Dynasty Warriors runs firmly on authority = asskicking rules). Difficulty level and morale can affect this, but peon combos are timid enough that flinching from them doesn’t make much difference when fighting other peons. Flinching does, however, prevent you from interrupting the combos of enemy officers, and it works the same way for you: Your attacks cause enemy officers to flinch, which means they cannot interrupt your combos until you’ve reached the end (which is usually at least 6, often 8-9 depending on the character’s moveset – some characters technically have like 19-hit combos but their damage is low to compensate). Some characters have mid-combo attacks that have a fairly long wind-up time, but still not quite long enough for an enemy to recover from the flinch in time to get their block up. As long as each subsequent hit of the combo hits the target officer and causes them to flinch, you will get the entire combo off on them.

Unless an enemy peon hits you mid-combo, causing you to flinch and interrupting the combo. Furthermore, because the game has directional blocking, i.e. when you block you only block attacks from about a 120 degree arc in front of you, and because flinches also interrupt blocks, it’s possible to be in the middle of blocking an enemy combo from the front only to be hit from behind, causing you to flinch, and then the back end of the enemy combo (usually including its most powerful attacks) will hit you in the face. Even though peons do very little damage, the flinches they cause mean that an officer with peon backup is considerably more dangerous than an officer alone. Blitzing right past a peon front line to attack an enemy control point is a risky play because you’ll be in a whole lot of trouble if an enemy officer shows up.

I’m not counting this as a full separate point, more like point 3B because it’s an outgrowth of peons-as-reinforcements, but if a fight with an enemy officer has reduced you to very low health, it’s entirely possible to be finished off by peons. Being scared of enemy peon masses only happens when you’re very badly damaged from an officer, but it does happen.

How do we translate all this to Dragonball?

Continue reading “Dragonball Musou” →

I was worried that the Stronghold series was going to be a one-hit wonder. Stronghold 1 laid a pretty good foundation, Stronghold: Crusader and its Warchest had better scenarios and AI and some good additions to the unit roster, but they were also an expansion pack and a stone age DLC (respectively). Stronghold 2 and its many follow-ups (3, Legends, Warlords, Crusader 2) all had much worse review scores. I speculated it might just be a matter of when the games came out, Stronghold is one of those games that a lot of people played when they were eleven and maybe Stronghold 2’s big weakness is that it came out when its target audience were more discerning fifteen year olds, causing a large perceived drop in quality.

But although that was a possibility, I more suspected that actually the Stronghold devs didn’t really have any idea what they were doing and got Stronghold 1 working good by pure dumb luck. Stronghold 2 has borne this possibility out.

Stronghold 2 is now fully 3D and several key structures likes towers, gatehouses, and the central keep can now be entered. This is a cool gimmick but makes very little difference in gameplay. Units have been rebalanced a little, mainly in that swordsmen and knights are now way more powerful, and also there is exactly one new unit, a peasant militia which requires no weapon production, just 5 gold (even less than the 8 gold spearman or 12 gold longbowman, previously the cheapest, most basic units) that you can spam out in an emergency. This is a good addition, although since it’s the only addition it doesn’t really justify a sequel by itself.

Likewise, the religion overhaul is appreciated but not exactly worth making an entire sequel over. In the original Stronghold, when you built chapels, churches, or cathedrals, they would spawn priests who would wander around blessing any worker they bumped into. The blessing lasted a while, and longer if blessed by a priest from a more impressive religious building, and you got a happiness boost based on the percentage of your workers that were blessed. Happiness management is super important in Stronghold, so this is potentially a major effect. This sounds like it’s an interesting placement puzzle but in practice the priests wander in sufficiently unpredictable paths that there’s not really anything to do except stamp down religious buildings wherever they’ll fit and hope for the best. Crusader adds a flat happiness boost for the first church and the first cathedral you build, which at least encouraged you to build those two, but for the most part you’d get that, and then the +2 bonus for having 1-25% of your population blessed, and getting any more than that required such a ludicrous amount of religious buildings that you’d only do it as a gimmick.

In Stronghold 2, your church now works exactly like your tavern: You keep it supplied with a resource (candles for church, ale for tavern) and provides a happiness boost based on the rate at which you instruct them to consume that resource, from +0 if you shut it down (or run out of candles/ale) to +8 if you chew through your stockpile at maximum speed. Kind of lame that the church and the tavern are now basically the same thing, but I don’t have any better ideas and the old system just didn’t work, so whatever.

Then there’s honor and estates, a major gameplay change that I quite like. You can now do various poncy noble things like hosting feasts, making fancy dresses for a royal (or, technically, noble) ball, hosting tournaments, and so forth, which give you honor. Honor is a required resource to recruit certain units, so knights and swordsmen and such will only show up for you if you are a prestigious and well-regarded noble. You can also use honor to buy NPC villages called estates, who will send regular shipments of resources and/or gold to you in little wagons. You can, of course, also yoink villages that have already been claimed by a rival by military force. The NPC villages are completely self-governing so you don’t have to worry about micromanaging their food supply and happiness and so forth, allowing you to stay focused on your main castle, and they’re spread out through the map, so it’s actually worthwhile to have a field army that can run out to confront enemy skirmishers, so you get things like cheap, lightly armored, fast-moving longbows and macemen running around yoinking villages from each other.

It also means the game’s top-end unit, the knight, is now actually worth something because of how fast they are, which means they’re great for village patrol, whereas in the original game they were almost never worth the trouble of creating over the alternative option of demolishing all your stables to build more blacksmiths in order to pump out swordsmen faster. Sure, swordsmen are really slow, but in Stronghold 1, this rarely mattered. In Stronghold 2, your hammer blow on the enemy castle is still probably going to be either a glacial line of swordsmen marching inexorably through a breach in the wall while a giant mob of longbowmen/crossbowmen provide cover or else a giant mob of macemen and/or spearmen Zerging the enemy lord down using a combination of speed and sheer numbers to absorb enemy missiles in the meantime, but knights are much more likely to be involved as a harassing force rather than only being useful on specific maps that go out of their way to make economic harassment viable.

One major win and two minor but welcome improvements, so what’s the problem? Two things: First, Stronghold 2 has abysmal scenario design. They figured this out for Crusader, but I guess the lessons didn’t stick, because in Stronghold 2 they’re back to invasion missions where you have a finite number of troops and have to storm an enemy castle with them, rather than just giving you a castle and the enemy a castle and last castle standing wins, which is how the multiplayer works. Stronghold: Crusader had the Crusade Trail which was just 50 missions like that in a row in (mostly) escalating difficulty and it was great. Add a plot stringing them together (admittedly, you probably don’t want to voice act all 50 missions, but whatever, cut it to 20) and we’re golden.

Even worse, Stronghold 2 now strings multiple missions together on the same map, which is cool except that there’s no checkpoints between missions. If you quit mission 6-2, you have to start over from mission 6-1. If you lose the final invasion on mission 6-2, you either load a save or start over all the way from mission 6-1. There is no autosave system.

This is an unfortunate but manageable problem, except that also they got really excited about sending troops flying with siege weapons and it ruined the game. See, Stronghold 2’s 3D engine means that when a catapult or especially trebuchet stone hits, it blasts all troops in a five yard radius into the air, scattering your formation and killing most/all of the unlucky bastards, especially if they were on a wall, which, y’know, is generally where you want them to be. Scorpions/ballistae now fire a line straight through enemy units, wiping out entire advancing formations if they’re strung out to fit through a narrow path, which they often are just as a result of the shape of the game’s maps and the way the pathfinding works (there’s lots of bridges and mountain paths and even if there aren’t you will be adding some gates, and once your troops get into a column formation they don’t get out of it until they arrive at their destination). This places a much stronger emphasis on unit micro and the exact positioning of your troops and it makes siege engines a major threat to most troop types. And in a viscerally unrealistic way, too.

While the Stronghold series has never been good at historical accuracy, it did a good job of capturing the general vibe of medieval siege warfare. The exact units and resources were all over the place, but you had to bunker down behind walls to defend yourself from a besieging force, and weakening an enemy through starvation was a valid strategy, as is suppressing enemy archers with your own to make way for siege engines to open up the defenses so that your army could storm the place. A lot of the details are off, but the overall vibe is accurate.

Not in Stronghold 2. In Stronghold 2, trebuchets are WW1-style artillery that have a lethal radius measured in meters away from the stone’s actual impact, inaccurate but capable of completely cleaning out a bastion tower or wall of defenders if it’s lucky enough to score a direct hit. This places the emphasis on field battles – siege engines are so powerful against defenders atop walls and towers that you really want to go and confront them where you have room to maneuver. In fairness, real medieval militaries also really wanted to do field battles instead of sieges if they could help it, but the game is called Stronghold and it’s fallen down on historical accuracy in so many other places that it’s weird that it decides that one of the places it needs to stick to history is in making the title of the game less accurate.

Neither of these problems would’ve killed the game by themselves. I could follow a walkthrough beat for beat for the invasion missions to get to the good ones, and I could adapt to the new, far more devastating siege engines despite how much worse they make the game feel and look as a game about defending or attacking strongholds, but taken together it’s too much. This game goes in Regrets, and so does the rest of the series as, from the review scores, they have no chance of catching up.

On the bright side, that clears a lot of games out of the backlog.

Far Cry 2 was, as far as I know, the first video game to have healing animations. When you’re below 20%-ish health, you can press a button and your character will stop what they’re doing and pull some piece of shrapnel out of their body or pull some broken bone back into place or otherwise spend 3-5 seconds doing some gruesome first aid, and it pulls you back up to 20% health. You still need a health kit or whatever for proper healing, but you can get yourself off of death’s door (barely) with just a few seconds. Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction had something similar mechanically, where you automatically heal up to 20% health if you’re knocked below it, but any further requires a health kit, but it didn’t have any animations. Your health score just slowly climbed up to 20 whenever it was below that number. And a lot of older FPS games, like the WW2 era Calls of Duty or Medals of Honor, didn’t give you any automatic healing at all. Your health is recovered if and only if you find a health kit.

What’s weird is that Far Cry’s mechanic is called “more realistic.” Even granting that it’s called “more realistic” and nobody’s trying to claim that a real human being could pull their own bones back into alignment as a regular response to injury, this still isn’t true. Effective healing of combat injuries in the field is almost never possible. Stories of people who pull their broken finger bones straight or pull a piece of shrapnel out of their leg, wrap some bandages around it, and then keep going, these stories get retold because they’re rare. A lot of combat wounds render you permanently incapable of effective combat duty, and even when you can be stitched back together as good as new, you aren’t generally in any condition to fight for hours or days afterwards. It’s not just a matter of gritting your teeth and toughing it out – you will tear your wound back open and when your body runs out of blood you will die no matter how many push-ups you can do.

The most realistic healing system of these is the one from the old late 90s to early 00s WW2 shooters, where once you were injured, you remained at exactly that level of injury until you found medical supplies. Sure, it’s unrealistic that your injury doesn’t get any worse no matter how long it takes to get treatment, and it’s unrealistic that you can always be healed back to full health no matter how bad the injury was, and it’s very unrealistic that the recovery is an instantaneous exchange of medical supplies for hit points with the battlefield situation changing not at all rather than the situation shifting radically as you’re laid up for six weeks. But the “realistic” healing animations allowing you to claw your way back to 20% health with no healing supplies at all only make this process less realistic.

Partly, this is because the system of partial recovery used in Mercenaries is good for gameplay, and Far Cry 2’s healing animations add an appearance of realism to that mechanic. Being able to recover to 20% health means you will never be in a situation where a single errant bullet can kill you, which means one plain old grunt of a bad guy with a half-functional assault rifle can never finish you off from fifty yards away because of pure dumb luck and the fact that you have exactly one hit point left. Provided weapon damage is balanced properly, that one guy with an AK that last saw maintenance under the Kim Il-Sung regime can take you from 20% to nothing if he unloads an entire magazine at close enough range that most of the bullets hit you, but that’ll only happen if you stare slack-jawed at him for the 2-3 seconds it takes to unload. You have time to dive for cover or shoot him first or something, and if you don’t, it feels like you still could’ve won if you were better at the game, as opposed to feeling like you really lost back when you got reduced down to 3% health in the previous gunfight, and everything after that was just marking time. Recovery to 20% is a good mechanic.

But Far Cry 2’s healing animations don’t just feel more realistic than Mercenary’s regenerating health. It feels more realistic than the Medal of Honor health kits. And I think that’s because the best way to make a video game feel verisimilitudinous is not to effectively simulate the thing the game is about, but to find excuses to show off things that happen in that situation. When someone is fighting in a third-world war zone (or, it turns out, the zero line of a peer conflict between advanced militaries, but we didn’t have any personal accounts to base video games off of that until recently), pulling shrapnel out of their own leg because there’s no medics nearby and then having to carry on the fight because the enemy will not stop shooting at you just because you’re having a bad time is a real thing that happens.

The actual effects of that are terrible for gameplay: You move at a frustratingly slow speed for the remainder of the fight, you will need days if not weeks to recover from the wound, and you may not be combat capable ever again. Pulling the shrapnel out and bandaging up the wound doesn’t usually recover your wound at all, it just stops it from getting worse. In fact, pulling the shrapnel out will probably cause more damage, and deciding when to take a spike of damage removing the shrapnel so you can apply bandages to stop the bleeding is much closer to the decision that you’d actually make in that situation. The bloodloss will kill you quickly so you still want to remove the shrapnel and bandage the wound ASAP, but the reasons for that have basically nothing to do with recovering health.

But all of that would be terrible gameplay. The healing animations instead take self-administered field first aid, a real thing that is a compelling part of the experience Far Cry (especially Far Cry 2) was selling, and add it into the gameplay in a way that makes it unmissable.

Something similar from the Yakuza games: In Yakuza games, you eat food to recover. You’re on a small, walkable map of a specific neighborhood of Tokyo (or sometimes another location of similar scale in a different part of Japan), and there are a few restaurants scattered around. There is an achievement for eating every restaurant meal available in the game, and the interface for ordering food keeps track of which ones you’ve had. You can’t order food when you’re at full health. So, whenever you’re low on health, you pop open your map and figure out where to eat, and the process for doing so feels exactly like finding a nearby restaurant in real life, despite the fact that the system for getting you here was a bunch of 100% completionist achievements and recovering from stab wounds by eating shrimp tempura. Yakuza wanted to add restaurants into the game in a way that felt like eating at restaurants in a real neighborhood of real Tokyo, and they made it work not with a constantly depleting hunger bar and satiation penalties that discourage or prevent you from eating the same thing too many times in a row, but with a bunch of mechanics that are totally unhinged from reality but which are nevertheless fun to play and still deliver the experience of saying “nah, I don’t want to eat at Akaushimaru, I’ve been there like six times already. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Fuji Soba, though, I’ll go try them out.”

When you’re trying to deliver an immersive experience, I think it’s best to take this approach: Focus on the experience you want the player to be immersed in, and don’t worry if the mechanics you use to set that experience up involve pulling your fingerbones straight because you got shot three times in the chest or deciding you need a big dinner tonight because you just got clobbered with a baseball bat.

Each mainline Final Fantasy game stars a different set of protagonists in a different setting (some of the games, especially the more recent ones, get spin-offs which are direct sequels, but we’re not talking about any of those today). These protagonists often have super cool roles in these settings, things like ecoterrorists, mercenaries, mercenaries but in high school, sky pirates, necromancer priests, and sky pirates again. Sometimes the game actually fulfills the promise of the premise: There is an arc or side quest or something where you get to actually be a mercenary or sky pirate or whatever. Sometimes the protagonists’ cool job is purely an informed attribute, something we never have the chance to actually do in gameplay.

This post is an examination of which Final Fantasy games nail the promise of the premise of its characters and setting and which ones fail. The basic idea is that if the game says “you play as Balthier and he is a sky pirate” then there had better be a part of the game where I do sky piracy. Final Fantasy games are basically never primarily about doing the job the characters already have when they join the party, but if I wasn’t going to do any sky piracy then you should not have included a playable sky pirate. Slightly related, although this one comes up less often, if it seems like the setting revolves around one or a small handful of really cool people or roles, then I had better get to actually do those at some point. Like, it’s fine if we never get to do any sky piracy in a game where there’s a single airship full of sky pirates who serve as antagonists in a specific location and don’t come up before or after, but if the setting is a bunch of floating islands and the main tension of the setting is the Imperial Sky Navy chasing down rebellious sky pirates then I had better get to do some sky piracy even if none of my characters start as sky pirates.

It doesn’t matter if the game has a mandatory plot arc or a skippable side quest that explores the premise, but I do have to make a subjective assessment of whether or not the premise is “fully” explored or not (except sometimes I don’t because the game helps me out by featuring no gameplay relevant to the backstory whatsoever). Also, particularly in later games, each character often has a wildly different backstory and place in the world, so the game might nail some of them and fail others.

Final Fantasy’s cast size expanded much faster than its gameplay diversity, and this was a common trend throughout the JRPG genre at the time, so a lot of this post is basically just deducting points from very old games for not being 15 years ahead of their time (although the later games are contemporaries of the Yakuza series which puts a lot of emphasis on its main plot and still absolutely stuffs itself with all kinds of minigames that evoke experiences which have absolutely nothing to do with being a Yakuza, which was a weird design choice but also lots of fun and proves that this kind of thing is possible in principle). The point here isn’t really to ask whether the assorted dev teams did a good job, though, but rather to ask the question: Do you really get to play as a gambler king in Final Fantasy VI (no)?

Continue reading “Does Final Fantasy Fulfill Its Premises?” →

“Cool Japan” is a tourist marketing and international relations soft power term used by Japan to refer to how they benefit when people from other countries think Japan is cool, so they try to push the Cool Japan image. The idea that Japan is a nerd wonderland where anime and video games are born emerged on its own in the 90s, but it’s since become, like, an officially supported project of the Japanese government. As far as I know, Sega doesn’t work with the Japanese government at all when making the Yakuza games, and I’m positive the government would not have chosen to put so much emphasis on red light districts and organized crime if they were commissioning the game from scratch, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn if Sega, like, accepted grant money in exchange for having a guy from the tourism board be part of the project’s leadership, because the fundamental premise of the Yakuza series is basically that it is a digital vacation to Cool Japan.

Like other digital vacations (principally Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed), a healthy heaping of bad guys in need of violence is dolloped generously across the place you’re vacationing in to give you cool things to do while you’re walking around downtown Tokyo (or, in some of the games, other cities throughout Japan), and the game’s main plot focuses on giving you a reason why all these guys are trying to beat you up while you’re trying to find the arcade. The main plot for these vacation-y type games often grates badly against the vacation vibes, with Far Cry 4 in particular (and from what I recall, Far Cry 5 as well, although I don’t want to commit to that when I haven’t played it in years and never finished it) feeling like its main plot is a completely different game from its open world.

Yakuza skirts around this because it’s called Yakuza, and its setting is not just Tokyo generally, but specifically Kamurocho, a fictionalized version of the Tokyo red light district of Kabukicho. Its main plots are certainly not accurate depictions of the Yakuza, but they do feel like pretty much exactly the kinds of stories I would expect to hear while taking a walking tour advertised as “legends of the Yakuza” through Kabukicho. The stories are embellished to the point where only a very gullible person would take them at face value, but they do have some connection to real history and sub-cultures and they tie themselves heavily to the people and places you’re walking through. They’re not concerned with accuracy, but they are concerned with being here, in the place you are taking the tour, walking the same streets, using the same buildings, and a degree of authenticity is imposed on them by that gimmick.

The game’s side quests (or “substories”) feel even more like stories from a walking tour in that they trigger semi-randomly while you’re walking around and are usually a brief vignette of an interesting thing that might happen in Japan. Some of them are things that would only happen in Japan, and some of them are just an interesting thing that could’ve happened anywhere but actually did happen on the specific street we’re walking on now, so the guide is telling you about it real quick because it’s like a five minute walk from the site of the famous “Empty Lot” that different Yakuza families fought a small war over in the 80s to the office building where Kazuma Kiryu beat up thirty people in what was allegedly an attempt to break up an embezzling scheme within the Tojo Clan of the Yakuza, and the guide needs something to keep those five minutes from dragging too much so they tell you a story about how we’re now walking past the restaurant where Goro Majima pretended to be dating a young woman he had never met because he happened to fit the fairly outlandish appearance she had made up to convince her father that she wasn’t single and she had persuaded Goro to help her keep up the bluff for one night while her father was visiting.

And Yakuza’s open world mechanics emphasize the vacation even more strongly. You recover health by eating food. You can go into convenience stores to buy snacks and the Japanese equivalent of 7/11 hot dogs to carry around for health regeneration mid-battle, and you can also go to various street stalls and sit down restaurants to eat food for a larger health boost at a specific location. The game tracks which menu items you have and haven’t ordered at each shop and encourages you to try them all. The eating animation is exactly the same no matter what you buy, which is a disappointment, but the game struggles as hard as it can to convince you to treat these restaurants not as a way to exchange in-game yen for health, but to instead view them as simulated dining experiences with the restaurant design, the way waiters or stall owners interact with you being reasonably verisimilitudinous, and by building a tracker for 100% completion into the interface for choosing a meal and thus encouraging you to actually look at the menu instead of just hammering the first item over and over until you’re maxed out.

The game has a dozen-odd weird minigames scattered about. There are arcades where you can play games or try to win something from a claw machine, casinos where you can play card games, bars where you can play pool or darts, karaoke places where you can play rhythm games that display all the button prompts for the XBox controller even though mine is Playstation, and people to play traditional Japanese board games like Shogi and Mahjong with.

None of these things have anything to do with being a Yakuza and many of them seem out of place with the personality of the character you’re playing, to the point where part of what makes the main plot and substories feel like things you’re hearing about in a walking tour is that the protagonist of the main plot feels like a totally different person from the easily distracted guy walking around helping little kids get the new Dragon Quest game on release day and playing Shogi with old men on the side of the road. This is probably the biggest weakness of the Yakuza games.

Open world games gravitate somewhat in the direction of being a digital vacation to a place because that’s basically what an open world is, but where the Assassin’s Creed series feels like vacations to periods of history, the Just Cause series feels like vacations to action movies, and the Far Cry series muddies its vacation vibes with main plots that emphasize how the country you have come to is a horrible and depressing place best avoided, Yakuza feels like its actual goal is to be a simulated vacation to a specific Tokyo neighborhood.

It’s hard to say much about the Case of the Golden Idol, because it’s a really good mystery game, so this might be kind of a short post. The basic premise is that you are a disembodied observer investigating a tableau in which someone is about to or has recently died, sometimes accidentally, usually from a murder. You examine the scene for clues and a bunch of words go into a little word inventory, and then you use those words to fill out some mad libs to demonstrate you’ve figured out what happened. The mad libs turn green if you got it exactly right, yellow if just one or two blank spots are wrong, or red if three or more are wrong, so you can’t brute force the solution but if you’ve got exactly one name or murder weapon or whatever out of place, you’ll know that you need to make a small tweak rather than throwing your whole theory out to start from scratch. Because you’re looking at a tableau where everyone has just one or two lines of dialogue from a single moment in time, often step one is finding out who all these bickering assholes even are, and then you can start piecing together who killed who and why.

The game takes place in an 18th century Strangereal-type setting, recognizably similar to the real world but with the exact geography and nations and so forth altered slightly so that it’s not beholden to real history at all. The game takes place in Albion, which is exactly like 18th century England except in that it’s not at all weird that one of the local aristocrats went on an expedition to Lemuria to retrieve the titular golden idol, which is going to be relevant to eleven different untimely deaths for reasons that probably have nothing to do with a curse. The tableaus are only loosely connected at first, but about three or four tableaus in, consistent characters start to emerge and a greater mystery of conspiracy and occultism starts to tie all the murder scenes together.

Mechanically speaking, I found the game to be a very good level of difficulty for mystery solving. Untangling what had happened in several of the tableaus was quite difficult, but I was able to finish the entire game without giving into the temptation to ask for hints. The first tableau is so trivially easy that I don’t even consider it a spoiler to describe: One character is shoving another off a cliff, with the tableau frozen at the moment the victim is plummeting to his death. You rifle through the effects of the characters (which, because you are a disembodied observer in a tableau frozen in time, has no impact on the scene) to find a contract with both their names on it and some clues as to which one’s the doctor and, by process of elimination, which one’s the other guy, and bam, you successfully solved the mystery of who shoved the doctor off the cliff. It was the guy who was shoving the doctor off the cliff. Then in the second tableau it’s straightforward but non-obvious and you’ll probably fall for a red herring before figuring it out, and from the third tableau on things start to get properly challenging. I never felt like I had to resort to cheap game-y tricks like cycling every possible remaining word through a single empty spot or similar, and instead all of the mysteries were solved by examining clues.

Very strongly recommended game, the Case of the Golden Idol is pretty much perfect at being what it is, if you have any interest in a mystery-solving game about 18th century occult murders, then this game absolutely nails it.

The Borderlands series keeps bouncing around what exactly it looks like when a psion communicates with you telepathically. In the first game, it didn’t even seem like it was supposed to be telepathy, more like Angel (a psion who also has access to some amount of techno-gadgetry and uses the latter to pretend she’s an AI) has hacked into your space phone. Although Angel does first contact you before you get your space phone, but that’s the same scene where she tells you to get off the bus while it’s still in motion, so I’d chalked that up to another writing oversight – Angel’s lines seem to be written and delivered with only a very vague idea of what part of the game they’re going in. But then in Borderlands 2 they retcon that dialogue mistake by having Angel deliver a line word-for-word under Handsome Jack’s instructions, and Jack can’t see what the player is up to.

By Borderlands 3 it’s unambiguous that the effect used is supposed to indicate psion telepathy, because friendly telepath Lilith uses it without access to any of the techno-gadgetry that Angel was using in the first and second games.

Here’s what Angel’s telepathy looks like in the original Borderlands 1:

Continue reading “Lilith’s Telepathy Looks Terrible In Borderlands 3” →