kittenfemme27

[kittenfemme27]

The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

I don’t know about you, reader, but it’s been actual years since I was able to properly sit down and finish a book. My last one was Lovecraft Country in 2018, and many, many years before that. Reading used to be a big passion of mine, I loved to get lost in the worlds. I loved the movie that played out in my head as I read, as if it was projecting itself into my mind more-so than i was actually reading the words themselves. For a kid who didn’t always grow up with the internet or video games available, Books from my local library were a great escape.

So, having found myself getting more and more into horror around 2019 in all forms of media I consumed, I was more than happy to bookmark a tweet from a horror artist I follow on Twitter who had a list of all the horror books he’d read that year. This would be my chance to get back into reading, finally!

Cue.. 2 years later, and I’ve finally started on that list. The top of that list, “The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires“, was something I found immediately intriguing from the title and cover alone. I’m now regretting that decision so much that I’m not sure I’ll bother with the rest of the list.

(CW: R*pe, Gore, Racism)

“The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires” is an awful book. The only compliment I feel I could accurately give it is that it’s not written incompetently enough, from a purely technical standpoint, as to be unreadable.

The story stars Patricia Campbell, a housewife in the 1980′s-1990′s that is more apology than character, and her rag-tag group of similarly middle-aged, middle-income southern white wine sipping housewives who do, and I cannot stress this enough, almost nothing but test each other’s and the readers patience for nigh on 310 out of 357 pages. They bicker, they fight, they treat Patricia as crazy when she repeatedly shows them evidence that children around them are dying, and most of all they refuse to do absolutely anything, leaning more into pure disbelief until the problem has literally violated one of them. The book club women don’t lead interesting lives, either. They’ve got husbands who are not in love with them, children who hate them, and friendships with each other that can be broken by what feels tantamount to bringing the wrong wine to a meeting. Throughout the story, Patricia is accosted by the resident Vampire-like creature, more akin to a human mosquito than any sort of real “Vampire”, that moves in after his aunt dies. A man named James Harris. He smoothly worms his way into everyone’s lives in the charismatic way a vampire does and convinces everyone that Patricia is more or less insane for ever suspecting him of being a vampire after she watches him feed on a child. This leads to her attempting suicide after being pushed into a corner by her doctor husband who seems to have been ripped straight from the 1950′s and thinks women should be Seen and not Heard. She gives up and more or less goes comatose as a character for roughly 3 years until finally she snaps to her senses after seeing a ghost of her dead mother in law who knew the Vampire when she was a small child, who leads her to one of the bodies he’s got stored in his attic, and convinces everyone else in her book club, who has routine abandoned her at this point, to help her kill James. They do, chopping his body to bits while it taunts them and then throwing the bits into a fire. Patricia divorces her husband at the end and somehow that makes her children lover her, happy-ever-after ending.

That’s the rough synopsis, but it doesn’t really do the grossness of this book any justice. That first child James kills, is a black 9 year old named Destiny who later kills herself as it’s revealed that the Vampire-like creature’s bites feel so good and so sexually pleasurable, that if you are deprived of them after becoming addicted you’re likely to just commit suicide. This is AFTER she’s taken away from her mother by child services because they assume the bite marks are syringe injection marks and that her mother must be a druggie. She’s not the first black child to die this way either. In-fact, by the time Patricia becomes wise to James’ ways, she’s the third. They’re all from a poor black neighborhood that is literally described as shady, dangerous, and being full of “Super Predators” called Six-Mile, which is the de-facto feeding ground of the Vampire for a good 75% of the book, as well as the home of the literally only surviving named black character, Ursula Greene, who herself is nothing more than a “wise old negro” trope along with being a maid to these rich white people who think of her as trash. This is probably the biggest overarching problem in the book. It tries, in the authors words, to explore the relationships between the white, rich women who brag about how their cul-de-sac is so safe and pure that nobody even locks their door, and the poor black characters from Six-Mile. The book thinks its clever, because Mrs. Green constantly points out that the white characters let the black children die callously so that their white children would live, to which they can only reply about how guilty that makes them feel and how they’re sorry. I’m not sure what the author hoped to accomplish by pointing out the institutional racism of the 90′s, but whatever he hoped to accomplish, it fail flat on its face in the most racist way it could.

I wish that was where gross things ended for this book, but its not. At one point, the Vampire-like creature rapes one of the book club members and she is more or less outright stated to be pregnant with a monster from that rape and it is also revealed that the rape gave her an “Auto-Immune Disease” that the characters husband immediately likens to AIDS and that is very quickly killing her. This information causes her to choose to have her body cremated so nothing can spring forth from her corpse when she dies. The implications this has are frankly appalling. The books decision on whether or not a woman who gets pregnant from rape is worthy of life is to resolutely and proudly say no and treat that as if its a feminist answer. That if you’re raped, it’s akin to something like AIDS and life simply isn’t worth living. it’s one of the grossest things I’ve read in a long time.

It’s not even the only shock value the book uses to make it’s events feel real and scary, others include Patricia’s son “Blue” being obsessed with Nazi’s, for genuinely seemingly no reason. He just brings them up to make you, and everyone in the story, uncomfortable. There are constant overwrought descriptions of gore or simply gross scenarios, such as an indepth description of Patricia’s ear-lobe being ripped off, or rats gnawing the flesh off on a old woman, or a cockroach crawling inside someones ear. There is also the repeated child murder or child suicide, which doesn’t really serve a purpose other than to shock the middle-aged mothers this book was meant for, with multiple sentences in which Patricia thinks about how much it would hurt if that were her children, inviting the reader to do the same with their own.

And we couldn’t forget that this book is just unrepentant in its horniness. It’s outright stated that being fed on is the most sexually pleasurable thing one can feel, which makes it all the more awkward when you consider that the Vampire’s first set of victims are children, later Patricia’s teenage daughter who she walks in on in the middle of being fed and who she has to stop from literally masturbating in that moment while attempting to punch the Vampire off of that same teenage daughter. But, of course, it doesn’t end there. It’s a book about almost entirely women written by a Cis Male Author, which means there are constant depiction of female bodies in the nude or in violence. It’s no “She boobed boobily”, thankfully, but it’s not much better than that. Describing pubic hair, breast shape, and even making it so that the Vampire-like creature drinks from a penis-esque proboscis that extends from it’s throat and right into the upper thigh of it’s victim, which is mentioned twice to be right next to the vagina. It even goes so far as to try and sexualize its own rape, aswell as having Patricia tell the rape victim how good it feels with this section between the two. Something I’m including here in its entirety because no amount of words I can write describes how gross this passage is, in context.

   “Grace already... told me,” Slick said, opening her eyes, pulling her mask away from her face to speak. “I made her... give me all the details.”

   “Me too,” Patricia said. “I was out from what he did to me.”

   “How did... it feel?” Slick asked.

   Patricia would never have said this to anyone but Slick. She leaned forward.

   “It felt so good,” she breathed, the immediately remembered what he’d done to Slick and felt selfish and insensitive.

   “Most sin does,” Slick said.

I think the thing that angers me the most about this book is that it’s tricked a lot of people who read it into thinking its a fun, feminist read. All of the main characters are overworked mothers who struggle with being that overworked, and then come out on top anyway because of their motherly intuition and love for their kids. It’s the kind of book that a single struggling mother would read and think “Yeah, I’d do that, that’d be me! I’d save the day!” and it makes them feel good about themselves, and about being a mother, and about how hard it is to make the kids lunches and clean the husbands dirty underwear and make sure the house is clean and dinner is on the table by 6 PM all while looking hashtag fabulous and like a girlboss. A quick trawl through any review site will show roughly the exact type of single mothers this book is written for giving it 5 stars and calling it hilarious and empowering. And y’know, I don’t have a problem inherently with prose written for that demographic. But this book gets away with a ton of racism, sexism, and outright disgusting content by hiding itself under that veneer and I think that’s just awful. It should be held to scrutiny for what it is, for how bad it is, and it clearly never was.

Don’t read this book. It sucks. It sucks so fucking much. I want my night I spent reading it back.

[kittenfemme27]

Bastion: What it means to truly move on.

“Someday, your bird is gonna fly.”

Bastion is the first game released by what is now the critically acclaimed Supergiant Games, makers of other games like Transistor, Pyre, and most recently Hades. But back in 2011 they were a nobody. 7 developers from various backgrounds within the industry came together to make games that could focus on storytelling first and foremost more than any of their previous studios would allow. Bastion was the result of that. Starting out from the idea of a top down isometric RPG, Supergiant realized that they wanted to portray a world that was fractured and broken, and wanted to show the vast and empty sky as a contrast to that destruction, but realized the camera angle wouldn’t allow this. So they came up with the idea that the ground would come up in front of the player as they walked forward, allowing the empty sky to show beneath them since the groundwork would not originally be laid until the player walked towards it. To explain this choice and why the world reacted this way, a destructive event known as “The Calamity” was created in the game's story. Thus, Bastion found its ethos.

Bastion’s a masterpiece. Plain and simple. It's been ported to nearly everything under the sun for a reason, being playable on literally 3 different console generations as well as every OS a PC can run, but coming back to play this game for the first time within the current political and geological climate that we find ourselves within as time goes on only makes it more and more apparent how much the story has to say. Even if you could somehow ignore it’s absolutely incredible music, insanely varied and addictive and yet delightfully simple gameplay, jaw dropping art direction and set pieces, Bastion’s storytelling is at its core and the story it has to tell is one that I think a lot of people didn’t fully appreciate back in 2011. From what I could find online, most people either ignored it in favor of the gameplay, or let the meaning of it glaze over them. And that's really, deeply a shame. Because Bastion is one of the best games I have ever played. And I’d like to talk about why.

Gameplay:

“Kid just rages for a while...”

I want to start first and foremost by talking about the gameplay and how you engage with the world. Combat in Bastion is simple and not exactly groundbreaking. An isometric hack ‘n’ slash with 2 weapon slots and a single ability, with a shield that has a parry mechanic and a dodge roll with fairly lenient invulnerability frames. Player movement is very, very slow which encourages you to very quickly become proficient in dodging and blocking. It’s fun, for sure, if just a little bit easy. But it’s nothing to write home about at first. As you play, though, you’ll begin to uncover Bastion's hidden depth and variety within its combat. A lot of that depth comes from the sheer number of Weapons, Upgrades, Passives, and Skills you can equip in any combination. 

You are given 11 weapons, each of which can be upgraded with collectibles found within the levels for a total of 5 times per weapon, and these upgrades form a loose “trees” of upgrades that you can switch between at will. You can make the Spear better at critical hits and critical damage and faster thrusts, or make it better at throwing with more spears per throw, for example. Every single weapon has a 2 distinctive upgrade “Trees” in this way that clearly make it better at one specific aspect of the weapon, but you are free to mix and match these upgrades as you see fit. Maybe you want the Spear to have a high critical hit rate, but also throw 2 spears per throw, you can do that. It’s also worth mentioning that there are no restrictions placed upon you on what type of weapons you want to take. You can take two melee weapons, or two ranged weapons, whatever combination you desire is up to you. The narrator even has a line for literally every combination you can have that you’ll hear upon exiting the armory. Some compare you to legends of yore from the game worlds past, others point out just how plain silly it is for the Kid to carry both a mortar launcher and a rocket launcher.

Each weapon also comes with two skills that you can use during gameplay, ranging from protective skills like one that makes you block all attacks for a few seconds, to damage based skills such as the Bow’s skill that fires a ricocheting arrow between enemies. Even then, there are other Skills that are tied to no weapons at all which brings the total of skills in the game to 30.

In addition, there’s the Tonic system in which each level up confers a slot that you can equip a drink from the bar, for a total of 10 at max level. These function as passives applied to your character that allow even further customization. Some are basic things you’d expect, such as overall more health, or more restoration or ability potions, a flat 15% damage resistance, and so on. A number of these however offer a very very strong benefit in exchange for a side effect. Werewhiskey, for example, gives you a 100% crit rate but only below 35% health. Doomshine offers a permanent 10% crit but takes away 10% of your health permanently. Or Leechade, which allows you to gain health from striking enemies, but makes your health potions only 1/3rd as effective. These can all be stacked upon each other in any order or combination. You choose and be changed at any point between missions..

All of these systems together enhance the very simple hack ‘n’ slash combat to be something with infinitely more depth than presented to you at first glance, and something that you can experiment with as much as you want, since no choice is permanent. Part of the way it encourages you to experiment are the Weapon Challenge missions that crop up each time you obtain a new weapon. They ask you to complete some sort of challenge related to that weapon with no Skills, no other weapons, and in some of them not even the ability to dodge or block. Besting these will net you 1 of 3 prizes, depending on how well you did, With the first two prizes being upgrade materials and the last being a Skill for the weapon the challenge is based on.

Beating Bastion unlocks a “Score-Attack” version of New Game+ that keeps a running overall score during the whole game and during stage specific score for each mission, with a multiplier and a timer to keep that multiplier up. This effectively turns the game into a leaderboard chasing isometric arcade game. Every enemy adds 1 to the multiplier, and resets the timer, so it's up to you to run through each mission as fast as possible and challenge yourself to see what kind of score you can get, and since it lets you replay any mission you want, you can always find ways to get a higher and higher score. One of my playthroughs of this game was on the PS Vita and even since beating it, I've found myself trying to one-up my own score while i’m just sitting around since each mission only takes about 10-20 minutes. The most challenging content in the game is a set of 4 different repeatable combat arena’s with 20 waves of some of the toughest enemies in the game. You can make this even harder by invoking each God within the games Pantheon and raising the difficulty of every enemy you encounter. Doing this raises how many points you get per kill, and in these combat arena’s I’ve regularly topped a million points in just a single stage from precise gameplay.

I think that’s what I find amazing about Bastion’s combat is that despite 3 playthroughs, I never once found myself bored or annoyed by any of it. All 3 of my playthroughs had me switching up Weapons, Upgrades, Skills, and Tonics between every mission just to experiment and see what crazy builds I could make. Every challenge was always a delight and a real test of skill, every mission a romp where I got to find a new weapon and play with it each time. Often, I would die, but that was fine! Losing in Bastion is fun. It’s part of the experience, because you can always go back and change your build to whatever you desire to try again. In a way, it’s fitting for the entire theme of the game. It’s the End of the world, and there are no more rules. Do whatever you’ve gotta do. Might as well have fun with it, while you do. 

Art & Sound:

“I suppose all that's left... is to try'n remember this moment.”

I think the other reason that I didn’t get bored on any of my 3 playthroughs of Bastion was the absolutely breathtaking art and music the game features. The soundtrack, composed by Darren Korb, clocks in only at an hour and while that does sometimes mean that there are repeats of songs, I'd be lying if I told you there was a single song on that score that I didn’t absolutely love. Or that I thought was out of place during any section of the game. Each and every song is its own radically different soundscape that, in songs like “Brynn the Breaker”, invokes a feeling of complete and utter destruction around you and a sense of leaning into that destruction. It’s fitting that the first time this song plays, you are almost assuredly going to hear the line “Kid just rages for awhile...” as you wreck each and every enemy and object around you after waking up on a floating rock in the sky.  Meanwhile, in other songs such as “Build that Wall”, it's clear that Supergiant was acutely aware of the impact their music could have on a scene. In Caelondia, the games world, “Build that Wall” is a jingoistic anthem meant to inspire the Cael by noting the danger they face from the outside world and from the Ura, a people who live to the east, and implores them to build walls to keep everyone else but keep themselves safe. But the first time you hear that song, you’ll be rolling through the dilapidated ruins of Prosper Bluff, a place overrun by birds ready to rip you apart and barely hanging together by literal boards between each floating island, and not a wall in sight. Guided only by the simultaneously soothing and haunting voice of an Ura girl singing the theme of the people who hate her. In that moment, it sounds much more sorrow and sad than any anthem for a nation ever could.

Darren Korb has stated that the point of Bastions music was meant to invoke a sense of the “American Frontier”, of exploring new and uncharted land, but it’s interwoven with melodic and slow moments of tragedy and despair, featuring lots of slow acoustic guitar and lots of slow vocals when there are any at all. I really cannot praise enough this choice of frontier-ism interwoven into the music itself, as it sells the entire theme of the game perfectly.

The art of the game is just as fantastic, too. Supergiant set out to make sure you could see the sky in a top down game, which sounds a little absurd and like a nearly impossible feat, and yet they succeeded with such aplomb it almost seems like it was easy. Below each stage is a blurred barrage of trees, nature, clouds, sky, sometimes ruins within those things, it reminds you constantly that the world has ended and nature has reclaimed it. Progressing further and further down the set of missions and further away from the Bastion and Caelondia sees you going more and more into what's left of those wilds and away from the ruins of civilization, before reaching the icy peaks in the east of the Ura. It creates this feeling of loss and tragedy at what's lost, a sense of exploration into this new and unknown world, before finally getting to it's cold center as you get closer to the truth of the Calamity.

In general, the art style of Bastion feels like a living breathing oil painting. Features on people are exaggerated with small bodies, yet large heads and eyes and hands or feet. Making them feel like something out of a children's book. Every single thing in the game is full of color and life, down to the animals and the foliage, with the only notable exceptions being the ruins of buildings that are oppressive and gray, and the final cold reaches of the Ura’s leftover ruins. Because of the oil painting aesthetic, the narration, even the surreality of the world coming up before you, Bastion feels a lot more like playing a fairy tale than anything else I've ever played, even things that have tried to emulate that same effect. Bastion reminds us that the presentation of a game, in both its art and its music, tell just as much about the story and the world of a game as the actual story itself does.

Story: (Spoiler Warning)

“Now here’s a kid who’s whole world got twisted, leaving him stranded on a rock in the sky.”

Bastion is a game about a lot of things, but at its heart, it’s a game about Tragedy. A tragedy you can’t prevent no matter what you do, because it has already happened. Setpieces in the game constantly remind you of this, like going through the Hanging Gardens, a place where people used to gather and finding nothing but ashen corpses. Rucks, Bastion’s narrator, will even tell you the names of these people. I remember playing this game in 2011 and being upset at this. I wanted to know about Maude the Tutor, I wanted to hear the life of Percy the Snitch, but I couldn’t. That was the tragedy. It didn’t register with me at the time, but that was the point. I was supposed to be upset I couldn’t know these people, that they died in a tragedy I couldn’t prevent. 

The core story of Bastion revolves around a war that took place some 50 odd years ago. Caelondia and her people, versus the Ura. In the modern day, before the calamity, the war was over. There was an Ura named Zulf who was trying to broker peace, even. But the Caelondian’s military-science division, the “Mancers” had a secret weapon. One they intended to use to get rid of the Ura for good. It would cause a genocide of the very land the Ura lived in and cause it to literally fall into nothing, ripping apart the physical earth where it stood before. Worse yet, this weapon was being created by an Ura inventor that lived within Caelondia named Venn under threat to his daughter, Zia. Venn couldn’t stand to aid the destruction of his people and sabotaged the weapon that ushers in the Calamity with vengeance in his heart, so that it would backfire and take Caelondia down with it. Imagine Venns shock, then, when the mancers asked him to pull the trigger.

Turns out an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Just like that, the Calamity has already happened. The Ura who were discriminated against in every part of Cael society and the racism and cycle of vengeance and violence within the Caels and the Ura reached a boiling point that caused the literal end of the world.. And that’s where you wake up. In a world already torn apart and crumbling before you. On a rock in the sky.

Tragedy permeates everything about the game. In the Hanging Gardens, you find Zulf as he’s about to kill himself after watching his Cael wife crumble to ash right before his eyes. When you meet the second survivor, an Ura singer who just so happens to be Zia, Venns daughter. She’s mournfully singing the tune of Caelondia that was the anthem used to inspire the Caels to oppress her own people, and her sweet voice sounds like the dying breath of an entire nation. Bastion makes it very clear that these people's lives as they knew them are over. But then Bastion asks you a simple question: You have to keep going, so what are you going to do with that world?

Before you get to make that choice, though, you’re asked to decide the fate of a man who hurts you. Zulf at one point reads the journal of Venn that he obtains from Zia and learns everything about the Calamity. He learns about the Mancers plan to genocide his people. He learns about Venns sabotage. Zulf spent his entire life advocating for peace between the two peoples, and this is what he’s met with. Unable to stand it, he attempts to destroy the Bastion and flees after injuring Rucks. As you chase him, he lures you far from the Bastion and sends the signal to an entire army of Ura survivors to attack the Bastion, even persuading Zia to come with him to try and convince her to abandon the Bastion. In the end, though. You chase him all the way to the heart of the Ura nation and as retaliation for bringing someone so powerful who kills so many Ura, the Ura forces attack Zulf and leave him for dead. You come across his body and are given a choice to either leave him and carry on, or take him with you and abandon your weapon. You’re asked right then and there, can you forgive someone who hurt you and your chance at fixing the world and break the cycle of violence? Or will you press on, like Venn, with vengeance in heart. If you choose to save Zulf, you walk forward with zulf on your shoulder through multiple Ura archers shooting you nearly to death. It’s only once they realize that you’re trying to save Zulf do they stop trying to attack you. This moment of compassion, this breaking of the cycle, inspires the Ura to let you pass. If you choose not to save him, you must battle an entire army, which isn’t even hard for you at that point. It’s a bloodbath. You, a Cael kid from nowhere, end the last of the Ura outside of Zia who knows so little of her culture that she can’t even read the journal her father left over. You succeed where the Mancers failed. The cycle of violence remains unbroken within you and within your heart.

You’re given two options upon returning to the Bastion at the end. You can use the power of the Bastion to reset the world to where it was before the Calamity. You’ll lose all your memories, but everyone and everything that died will be okay and alive again. There’s a risk, though. Rucks has no way of knowing if this plan will work. If it will prevent the Calamity in the end. “Problem with a machine that sets things back to a bygone time,”  he says, “Is that you can’t test it.”

Your other option is Zia’s choice, though both her and Rucks support whatever decision you make, they know it’s not an easy choice. Her plan is to turn the Bastion into a floating island ship that can travel anywhere. To forge a new world and look for survivors on other floating islands and carry on in this destroyed world and find hope within that tragedy. Make something new, and beautiful, from the ashes of something dead. Maybe that’s not possible, she thinks, but it’s better than recreating a world with institutional violence, with cycles of hate and vengeance, a world where something like the Calamity could happen in the first place.

Supergiant knew what most people would pick, though. Resetting seems like the only real choice, at first. Maybe the Calamity will happen again, maybe it won’t, but you can’t just let all those people die. The whole game has been building up to fixing the Calamity. Rucks, old and clinging to the past, is sure that resetting it will work and that things will be okay again. He’s a bit like a father figure to you, too. He’s narrated every action you took, made sure you were never truly alone in this ruinous world. So of course you trust him. An overwhelming amount of people chose to reset the world the first time they play. I did, too. I knew that maybe the Calamity would happen again, but I couldn’t just let everyone die. Maybe things would be different, I thought. Maybe this time people won’t let something like a genocide happen again. Maybe Venn won’t pull the trigger. I didn’t know, but it was better than letting everyone die, right? It had to be. I had to hope that I made the right decision. So with trepidation in my heart. I chose to reset everything.

Rucks comforts you when you choose to reset that “No matter what happens next... you done good.” Credits roll. You see pictures of the lives of each character in the reset Caelondia. The lonesome Kid continues his work as a mason on the wall built to keep the Ura out, where he isolated himself after losing everyone in his life. The only person to ever sign up for 2 tours on the Wall. Rucks continues his work on the Bastion, refining it for the future, meaning that there’s still a need for a safeguard like it in the first place. Zia plays a concert on her harp with a mournful look on her face, she found comfort in music but that comfort was equally as isolating and lonely, what with her being an Ura girl in Caelondia. Zulf gets married to his fiancee, blissfully unaware of the impending genocide on his people while he fruitlessly brokers peace. Upon seeing these credits, these images of the lives of these characters, I knew I made a mistake. History is going to repeat itself. Sure they were alive, and so was everyone else, but the cycle of violence remains unbroken and eventually, even if the Calamity that befell the world the first time doesn’t happen again, another will. Rucks final words in this ending are a simple forlorn goodbye. “So long kid... Maybe I'll see you in the next one. Caelondia... We’re coming home.”

Choosing this ending left me feeling anxious at first, and then hollow and empty. I didn’t save anyone, I just clung to the past. I expected things to be different in a world where something like the Calamity could happen in the first place. I knew, then, that for there to be any hope at all I had to move on from the old world. I had to do right by Rucks, by Zia, even by Zulf. They were my friends. They deserved better, they deserved more. They deserved a world without the conflict and violence that Caelondia brings. I understood even more clearly what I had done when, upon starting a new game, Rucks final words echoed over the loading screen. As far as I could tell, the Calamity had happened again. Rucks even makes comments of feeling a sort of deja-vu while retelling the story and is much less confident resetting will work the second go around, for a reason he just can’t quite explain.

Bastion is a story about tragedy, about generational trauma left over from a war, about the cycle of violence and all that it perpetuates. It’s a story about waking up in a world that has already crumbled and fallen apart through no fault of your own and being told there is nothing you can do about that destruction. And there isn’t. Climate change is a bigger problem now in 2020 than it ever was in 2011. People are going to die, it’s just an awful fact at this point. Those in charge continue to ignore that fact and these issues while also continuing to stoke the fires and flames of the impoverished and destitute more and more every day, bleeding them dry for any pennies they might have. 

But that’s not all Bastion has to say. It’s not fair for the next generation just like it wasn’t fair for the Kid, to wake up in a world already destroyed, and yet still, people like the Kid and Zia found hope. Within Bastion, you can save Zulf and end the cycle of violence, you can choose Zia’s option and set out on a world that is better for everyone in the end, as ruined as it is. Even in the end of the world and everything you knew, there is hope. Bastion doesn’t just ask, it begs on hands and knees for the next generation to take up this dying world and make it better. Bastion, and Supergiant, believes in the next generation. that it's possible to move on from the past and make something better, to seize control and make a better world while purposefully never forgetting the cycles of violence that led us to the end of the world in the first place. Our great Calamity is already unfolding before us and there isn’t anything we can do to stop it, only delay it. Bastion tells us that it's okay, that we can make something beautiful, and new, and better from those ashes. 

In the scene for the Evacuation ending, Rucks tells us that he’s not sure how to live in a world like this, but he’s willing to learn. And excitedly offers to help teach you how to fly the Bastion through the skies. The very first image you see during the credits then, is the Kid finally collapsing of exhaustion and resting while Rucks tucks him in. The next is Zia looking forward on the deck of the Bastion, a smile on her face and hope in her heart. You get to see Rucks later teaching the Kid how to fly the Bastion, finally giving the Kid the family that he so desperately needed, and finally you see Zulf. He’s got a frown on his face, he’s still lost everything in the Calamity after all. More than anyone. But he’s chopping food for everyone else still, helping out where he can. I couldn’t help but think upon seeing his expression that he might hate me for the rest of my life, and that was alright. I’d always just be happy he was alive. Seeing the smiling faces of everyone in the Evacuation made something very clear to me. In the Old World, Zia was an outcast, Zulf was a fool, Rucks was nostalgic, and the Kid was alone. In the Calamity, they found friendship, they found happiness, they found love and family in each other, they found adventure and they found hope for the future. Zia’s final words to the Kid echoed in my head:

"Any moment I'd want to live again... happened after the Calamity. Not before."

And I was at peace. I knew I had done the right thing I had chosen to move on, accepting the world for what it was and not looking for miracle solutions to fix it or change it, but to forge on ahead with what I had and make something better. 

Bastion’s story is not directly told to you, especially after the ending. There is no epilogue that tells you exactly what happened, just a few lines of dialogue that you can make of what you will and some pictures of the lives after your choice. it’s never explicitly stated that the Calamity happens again if you choose to reset things. It’s meaning is in between the lines that Rucks has to say. It’s In the subtext. It's in the art, it's in the environment, like the tragedy of finding nothing but ashen corpses around a lone peace talker right before he’s about to jump to his death. It’s in the music, like the haunting melody of an outcast’s voice singing the song of her oppressors while never realizing how much the very city she was raised in tried to exterminate her. But more than anything it's in the feeling you get while you play. Bastion’s story plays out in your heart as much as it plays out in your mind and on the screen in-front of you. What you feel, what you make of it, that’s just as important to the meaning of the story as what you’re hearing and seeing. Obviously this can be said of all stories, but Bastion is maybe the one that’s resonated most in my heart and in my soul more so than any other story. It offers no simple answers, no painless choices, and no easy ways out. Move on, or cling to the past, those are your only two options and Bastion forces you to make a choice.

In the end, I chose a new world. A better world. A world with my friends that would never let the cycles of violence and the generational trauma that caused the Calamity to happen again. Sure, resetting technically brings everyone back to life, but it wasn’t until I chose to move on and move forward that I felt I could even say in my heart that I’d saved anyone at all. 

Conclusion: 

“I dig my hole, you build a wall.”

“Build that wall, and build it strong, Cause we’ll be there before too long.”

Bastion is, and I'm not saying this lightly, a perfect game. The gameplay loop and combat is phenomenal and addicting, the music and art and aesthetics are so top notch you could honestly create an entire art style out of them all on their own, the storytelling is amazing and has so much to say that I cannot believe something this important was just thrown out by an indie studio nobody had ever heard of while it was only 7 people strong, and how many people slept on it or completely missed the point of the tragedy of Caelondia and the Ura. 

This game will live in my heart for a very, very long time and its music and messages it conveyed will stick with me even longer. My only regret with Bastion is that I’ll never get to experience it for the first time again. But, even with the spoilers here, you can. Play it, Kid. You won’t regret it.

“We can't go back no more. But I suppose we could go... wherever we please.”

#Bastion #Review #Played on: PC #Played on: PS Vita

[kittenfemme27]

Magrunner: Dark Pulse

"That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die." 

That’s the often misquoted line written by H.P. Lovecraft and spoken by his fictional “mad poet” Abdul Ahazred in “The Call of Cthulhu”, a short story written by the very same author. It’s meant to symbolize the same thing that almost all of Lovecraft’s work was meant to symbolize: That there are things that view us the same way we’d view a simple speck of dust, or an ant. As so tiny and insignificant that we’re practically unnoticed in the eyes of this massive and overwhelming force. Lovecraft had an intense fear and at the same time an intense fascination with the idea of being insignificant, of being forgotten and unworthy, of being completely and utterly impotent in the face of power that was greater than himself. Every “Old God” that he wrote about is so far reaching above humanity and so incomprehensible that even the act of knowing of their existence was incomprehensible for the human mind, and would oft drive those with that forbidden knowledge to complete and utter insanity. This isn’t really a disputed interpretation of Lovecraft's work, it's barely an interpretation at all. It’s considered a simple set of facts of the universe that he created.

So imagine my surprise when I started playing “Magrunner: Dark Pulse”, a fairly mundane and simple futuristic sci-fi puzzle game marketed to have a “Lovecraftian Twist” and the final nine levels have good ol’ Cthulhu himself checking in on me from the skies above, literally one hundred thousand times my size, and simply observing me like I’m his personal favourite little human. As he communicates with me and makes it clear that I am in-fact, his personal favourite little human and he just can’t wait for me to ascend to his level. As far as a piece of lovecraftian work goes, this game was a doozy. But we’ll get back to that. Before we even get there, I’d first like to talk about the game itself.

Gameplay:

Magrunner is a first person physics based puzzle game featuring magnetism as its element in which you interact with the puzzles in each room. Your goal in each puzzle room is to use various platforms, blocks, and other bits of very clearly marked tech in each room that may be magnetized with either a positive polarity or a negative polarity, and combine that with the physics of the Unreal 3 engine to solve challenges and make it to the next room. To be blunt, the game is squarely a Portal rip-off from its design ideals. Your makeshift magnet glove-gun hybrid can fire 2 colors, one being a negative polarity and one being a positive. Like-colors are attracted to themselves, whereas opposite colors reflect each other. The idea of using magnets in a physics based first person puzzler isn’t an awful one, and neither is the fact it clearly wants to ape Portal’s ideas. Where it fails, unfortunately, is execution. The physics aren’t up to snuff with what you do most of the time and it leads a lot of the puzzles to be confusing or simply frustrating, as even when you know what you’re doing you still have to rely on the physics system of the engine to cooperate with you. Early on, you are tasked with getting 4 small magnetizable cubes together to form into a large one. What this actually has you end up doing is fighting with the cubes and the level as they fling themselves wildly off of each other and into unreachable parts of the level itself. The entire game functions this way and it really removes any sense of challenge or control you have over each puzzle, often feeling like you lucked your way into a solution rather than figured out the puzzle yourself in any meaningful way.

Buggy physics in the Unreal engine are not the developers fault entirely though, the game is an indie project that was kickstarted and for that alone i’m willing to give them a pass on engine problems that they likely did not have the programmers to fix. But, unfortunately, I can’t give a pass on the game failing to iteratively teach you how the mechanics work level by level. Whenever you magnetize an object, it creates a field, and you can see this field thankfully by pressing a key. Anything in that field will automatically interact with anything else that is magnetized in it. In general, these fields are wildly inconsistent in how they operate. Usually, they’re spheres centered around the magnetized object and cause objects within the sphere to either attract or repel. On occasion though you’ll find pads that create a cone of magnetism going the direction that it faces, up to what is an arbitrary height. Later on, you’re given the ability to place your own fields on any flat surface, allowing the levels to become more bare-bones as you have to create the magnetism points yourself. All of this combined means that  If you learn that something works in a previous level, there is no guarantee that it will work in the next level the exact same way. Experimentation in this game is often fraught with a frustrating sigh of not knowing if the game intended for something to work that way, or if you just broke the physics again. Don’t even get me started on the fact there are multiple combat sections inside a puzzle game, ugh.

Art & Sound:

Magrunners similarities to Portal do not end with the gameplay and design, however. Aesthetically, the first and second half of the three act game are ripped directly from Portal and Portal 2. The first half of the game features sleek interiors inside of a testing facility for yourself and other “Magrunners” where everything is cleanly lit, sparse on color and detail, as space-age and sci-fi as you could imagine. These first set of aperture inspired levels lack any sort of hard edge or detail, with every single element in the room being curved and well lit and as minimalist as possible. The second half of the game takes places in facilities “underneath” the one you were in prior and are dilapidated grey and brown ruins of previous testing facilities, complete with all the same tools and magnetizable pads and tech that you had seen previously but this time a much older and “70’s” style of sci-fi aesthetic, but covered in grime and dirt and dust from the years of abandonment and rot. I cannot understate how unsubtle this is. The first third of the game is Aperture Science bonafide and part right after is Old Aperture from Portal 2. Magrunner’s aesthetic inspirations are worn very clearly on their sleeve, and it makes the game feel very boring and bland by comparison. It’s impossible to play Magrunner: Dark Pulse and not feel as though it was simply a junior developer exclaiming: “What if Portal/Portal 2, but Magnets?!” while the rest of the developers collectively lose their minds from excitement.

The music of the game was provided, as far as i can tell by the credits, by Incomptech AKA Kevin Macleod. A musician known for releasing thousands of free songs for use in any creative project. This isn’t, by default, a bad thing. Most of the music was not things I had heard from his library before and thus I didn’t immediately twig that it was his library, but unfortunately the music selection isn’t enough. As in, there are not enough tracks to fit the game. There are 39 levels in total and each level features a music track, but often and especially in the later parts, the music tracks are entirely re-used. This is most apparent when one of the tracks is a rising piercing noise, like the type you’d hear in a horror movie right before the slasher stabs into someone, but it never ends or pays off. It just loops upon itself and becomes this droning nightmare of a track for however long the physics force you to stay in a level. I counted 6 times this happened and each time it was so loud and obnoxious and frustrating that I had to simply turn off the game audio to be able to bare the level at all. 

None of the other sound effects are worth writing home about, either, unfortunately. In something like Portal, there are pretty iconic sounds within its soundscape. The sound of the portal gun firing and portals being created, the soft and child-like speech of the turrets, the chiding and derogatory AI voice of GLaDOS, yet Dark Pulse lacks anything even half as memorable. Aside from the repetitive music, you are only given small bits of dialogue between each level and that’s really it. There’s a lot of character they could have created here, for example: When you gain the ability to create your own magnetic fields at will, the center of them is a dog-robot that your player character created in his spare time as a child. Creating one of these points could’ve been met with an adorable puppy squeak or bark, anything like that. Your character or the various ones that speak to you could’ve chimed in at any point in levels outside of the beginning or end of them, and yet they do not. It’s a big missed opportunity.

Story:

Speaking of characters, whew boy, are there a lot of them

Magrunner takes place in the distant future where a corporation that is effectively Facebook has taken over the planet by connecting every single person to its service essentially from birth and making it as essential to daily life as possible. Because of this, this corporation has become the de-facto richest company in the world. Its founder, Xander Gruckzeber, whose last name is literally an anagram of Zuckerberg, has started a contest in which 7 contestants can compete to become “Magrunners” and take a trip to outer space in a ship that is being powered on experimental magnetic based technology. The contest involves each contestant going through a series of puzzles that prove their aptitude with the magnetic tech that Xander’s company has developed. 

Your character, an orphan named Dax C. Ward, is the only one of the 7 contestants that does not have a corporate sponsor. Instead, he’s a boy genius who built his own robotic puppy at age 10 and at age 21 built his own magnetic glove that interacts with the magnetic technology and allows him to compete. Ever the underdog, you’re helped along by your adoptive uncle Gamaji who himself is a six-armed mutant and an outcast among humanity for it.

Sound a little on the nose? Like it may be lacking subtlety in any form? Yeah, the entire game is like that. From Xander’s last name anagram to the fact that your own character’s name is itself a reference to “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” which was a short horror novel written by Lovecraft, the game never really had a chance at subtlety in the first place. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but in between the re-hashed artstyle and the immediate and obvious references, and the fact that It tries to throw a very by the numbers cyber punk aesthetic ripped straight out of Blade Runner at you in an opening cutscene that it immediately abandons afterwards. It all just feels tired from the moment you hit New Game and incredibly confused about its own direction. It can’t decide if it’s a Lovecraftian setting, a Sci-fi setting, if it’s trying to say something about Facebook or if it's just going to be Portal: The Magnetic Spin-off.

As the game progresses and Act 1 ends, you find the corpse of another Magrunner being eaten by an anthropomorphic fish person. You are then told by Gamaji that he’s going to help you escape the facility, but this will require you to go through the older parts of the facility as he slowly hacks into the mainframe and tries to get you out via service elevators. Inside these older puzzle rooms are repeated writings on the wall, ravings of someone gone mad with the knowledge of the Old Ones, and giant sculptures depicting various Cthulhu-esque monsters. This would be bad and scary enough on its own, but Gamaji is quick to let you know that portals to some unknown dimension and fish monsters are being spotted in cities all over the world causing havoc and terror. 

About halfway through Act 2, Gamaji drops the bombshell on Dax that his parents didn’t actually die in a car crash like he’s told him all his life, but that they were Old God worshipping cultists and that Dax’s birth in and of itself may somehow be related to that cult and its actions. This tracks, then, because Dax continually receives strange visions in the form of uncovered memories of “The Seven” attempting some ritual to seal off some force from beyond. Act 2 ends with the revelation that Xanders assistant, Kram, is actually behind all the ritual sacrifice and is attempting to summon Cthulhu himself to our world from the Great Beyond. So far, Act 1 and 2 have been rather cliche but haven’t been anything i’d call unremarkable or strange in a Lovecraftian inspired story.

And then Act 3 happens.

Act 3 sees you flung into the far reaches of Actually Literally Space, with various bits of the test chambers around that you must use to get to portals that are marked by a cute little icon of Cthulhu himself that transport you further into space and to the next level. You can quite literally see our pale blue dot to your side if you look, including a gigantic eldritch device that seems to be either siphoning souls to it, or depositing monsters onto the planet. The fact you can breathe in space is just handwaved as “Something Kram must be doing.” and is never brought up again. What really struck me more than anything in these levels, though, is that Cthulhu himself literally appears before you every 2 minutes in each level and simply watches you while repeating “Cthulhu... Fhtagn... R'lyeh...” over and over and over. This was the moment the game honestly lost any credibility from me. Simply seeing a statue in Act 2 caused Dax to go into a screaming panic as he was able to perceive how a human may be turned into a fish person. But seeing the literal Old God himself doesn’t bother him? And why is Cthulhu so interested in you in the first place? Unfortunately, we get an answer to both of those questions and it might be the most insane thing i’ve ever seen in a piece of Lovecraft inspired media.

Dax, somehow through the work of the cult that his parents were part of, is the chosen one. Cthulhu not only cares about him and wants to see him succeed, but even helps him to literally ascend and become an Old God himself. But not, of course, before letting Dax have a heart to heart with Gamaji wherein he tells him that he has seen through Cthulhu’s eyes himself and must now ascend, as he has no other option. Because Cthulhu is a big softie on adoptive relationships, I guess. The game’s final level has you face off against Kram in a boss battle where you fling explosive cubes at each other and attempt to destroy the esoteric relay connected to Earth. During their fight, Dax taunts Kram who tells him that what he is doing is the will of his Master, Cthulhu, and Dax knowingly retorts that what Kram is doing is “Not what He wants.” As if he has a direct line into the Old Gods mind itself. 

I cannot overstate how much of an absolute failure of the mythos itself that this entire story arc is. The Lovecraft mythos was not, and never has been, made for “Chosen One” stories. If you survive an encounter in the first place, you’re often left with horrible scars that never truly leave you because Cthulhu and the Old Gods are in some ways meant to be representative of trauma and a fear of your own trauma. Making Dax suddenly an Old One and a special Chosen One is a complete and utter failure on a scale I've never, ever seen before. It’s been days and I'm honestly still reeling from the fact that was a design decision someone agreed on.

Conclusion:

Magrunner: Dark Pulse is a confusing and often frustrating game with a story that utterly fails its mythos and setting in just about every way possible. But I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t have any fun playing it. I did, and it’s not the worst game I've ever played. It’s not even so much a “so bad it’s good” game, but it’s more of an indie game that clearly tried its hardest and for that I can’t fault it. It’s developers clearly love the Cthulhu and Lovecraftian mythos and really, really, really loved the Portal series and wanted to combine those things into their own spin on it and in that respect, it’s competent enough that I could recommend it to someone who really enjoys those sort of puzzle platformer based games. But... man. That ending. Yikes. 

#Magrunner: Dark Pulse #Review #Played on: PC

[kittenfemme27]

Archive Post: Final Fantasy 1: 20th Anniversary Edition

Final Fantasy 1: Anniversary Edition is a great reminder why games of the past should, probably, stay in the past. It's fun to get inspiration from them and re-visit them, but the truth is that your nostalgia will often make you forget that these games are ridiculously hard, obtuse, and outright unfun at times because they didn't want you to beat it too quickly, and be able to just rent it from a DVD Store (Remember those?) for the weekend and get your fill. Being a relative newbie to the FF series of games, and having recently sunk my teeth very deeply into Final Fantasy XIV, I decided to do a retrospective of the series. Start from the first game and play up to 14, just for the fun of it. At times, with FF1, I regretted that decision immensely. The game is as tedious as it can possibly be quite often. Frequently requesting that you decipher dialogue from NPC's that won't be relevant until 10+ hours later, if you even remember it. Or asking you to simply find the one single NPC in the entire game world that can do the thing that you need to progress. This was most frustratingly shown to me by a circle of Wizards in the 4th town you're likely to visit, in which one of the Wizards has a Canoe, for some reason. This Canoe is something you can use to traverse rivers, which your Regular Ship cannot, for some reason. Not that this matters really, because you will be abandoning both of these methods of travel very shortly later when you find a seemingly unexplained Airship in the desert. That is, if you remember the NPC roughly 6-7 hours ago telling you where to go to find that, once you have the item that simply tells you it can make things float. Confusion cannot begin to explain the half of it. However, despite its faults, I really did enjoy my time with Final Fantasy. At times, it would feel as though I were part of a group of adventurers in a strange land with no help or guiding light, and that could be a fun and rewarding feeling if I were to figure something out on my own, which happened early on quite frequently! The music, sprite art, and backgrounds of the Anniversary Edition never failed to impress either. Frequently I'd stop to take a picture just to show it to my friends, as the art was just outstanding. The heroes as well retain their charm, being cute chibi versions of their old pixel art selves. Beating the final boss was actually an almost cinematic final fight, if not a little frustrating from time to time. And I felt genuine elation and pride at seeing the scrolling text tell me how my Warriors of Light had saved the realm and brought the crystals back to full power. But given those positives, it's a real shame how often the game's tedium and confusing design seem to outright fight you and fight giving you that feeling. It's made even more frustrating when you realize that this isn't simply a port of Dawn of Souls, its a re-made game. It didn't have to be this way, they could have improved upon the game in many ways. Its not as if they're opposed to adding more content, there are 5 separate challenge dungeons that don't follow the rules of previous dungeons and do not give you a game-over when you die, and are made for insanely high leveled characters. Adding an amazing secret final Super Boss that is a lovecraftian amalgamation of all the other bosses and has no less than 12 health bars, in total, each one with double or more of the health of the final boss! Clearly, new content and changing the game in some respects was not off the table, but they did nothing to fix this tedium, presumably to make it "just like you remember." Which, while a fine idea, means the series first ever entry is just as hostile to new players as it ever was back in the 80's. It's a damn shame. Overall, I'd have to give this a 2 out of 5 stars. JRPG Addicts and Final Fantasy die-hards may love this game immensely, but it's flaws and intentionally confusing design make it really hard to recommend in the modern age, despite being available on iOS, Android, and even the PSP and 3DS.

(This review could originally be found here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/KittenFemme/review/7792/)

#Final Fantasy #Review #Archive from Backlogg'd #Played on: PS Vita

[kittenfemme27]

Archive Post: Wintermoor Tactics Club

Wintermoor Tactics Club is a game I'm going to be remembering for a long time. Despite having a relatively short campaign, one that I beat in 10 hours despite going out of my way to do all side quests, unlock all optional upgrades, and generally see as much content as I could, this game really left a mark on me and reminded me very clearly that indie games are some of the best hopes we can have for the future of gaming as a medium. 

This game features not only a quirky shy black female protagonist, it also features a diverse cast of side characters including a non-binary person who uses they/them pronouns, a lesbian couple with an adorable side-quest of passing their love notes between each other, and even someone who at minimum is a furry, and most charitably could be called otherkin. None of these character traits are ignored, yet simultaneously they do not feel out of place in the games world. For its diverse cast and perspectives alone, its a breath of fresh air. RPG's have long since featured queer coded or otherwise "outcast" or "abnormal" characters in their games as stand-in for real world minorities and identities, but to see it so plainly put forth in this game as not obfuscated but indeed the real thing makes it a much more enjoyable experience. This game is a legitimate indie masterpiece. That's not a term I use lightly, but it really is. Wintermoor Tactics Club is a game I knew I'd like going in, however once I started playing, I found it hard to stop for any reason. Work, friends, hobbies, most commitments fell to the wayside as I just wanted to get to the next chapter or unlock the next upgrade for my characters, or continue the fantastically written story.   The story operates inside the prestigious Wintermoor Academy during the winter months of the 1980's. The protagonists are part of a "Tactics Club" at this school, which is a fancy way of saying they play a legally distinct D&D Clone in one of the schools club rooms. Near the beginning, the principal of the Academy decides to host a tournament to pit club against club in a series of snowball fights in the goal of finding the "Ultimate Club", for some mysterious reason. Whichever club loses has their club disbanded. This puts you and your friend's hobby at odds with every other student club around you in a brawl to the club-death. Thankfully, your skills from the tabletop RPG carry over, allowing you to have a fighting chance within this tournament. Gameplay in WTC is half a Tactics RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, XCOM, and Fire Emblem, and half a Visual Novel. It's no slouch in this department either. Every combat encounter felt incredibly fun and rewarding and the game has a difficulty slider to give yourself, or the enemies, a handicap at any point so that you can experience even tougher battles or simply go through the story. There are a total of 7 unlockable characters, each specializing in different forms of combat, and you may only have 3 on the battlefield at any given time. This, plus the various challenges within the game and the mechanics of the fights make an incredibly engaging experience. Each fight is rated aswell through various stats such as amount of turns taken, amount of damage taken, etc. This allows you to go back and challenge yourself to obtain all the medals in the game for each fight. Something I was eager to do. It's simply for bragging rights, but the combat was so fun and so interesting that I really couldn't help myself. There's so much more to be said about the game. It's art is fantastic and evokes a calming school life, the idea that all of the combat encounters are these D&D based fights because all of the protagonists are nerds, and each snowball fight is characterized as one of these tactical RPG fights, the relaxing music that, while only being having a fairly short number of tracks, never grated on me or overstayed its welcome. I've done nothing but heap praise on the game, but that's only because it feels so polished, well written, and fun, that I struggle to think of anything I didn't really enjoy in it. Even minor quality of life features that you could think of that you might want during a playthrough are there and available to you. I never ran into a single bug during my playthrough either. It's a phenomenally well polished and easy to pick up and play game. Wintermoor Tactics Club earns a 5 star perfect rating for me, not because its a perfect game that I think every single other game should strive to be, but because it was one of the best and most wholesome and fun gaming experiences I've had in 2020, and even within 2019. I implore you to pick up this game and play it, you'd just be missing out if you didn't.

(This review could originally be found here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/KittenFemme/review/8557/)

#Wintermoor Tactics Club #Review #Archive from Backlogg'd #Played on: PC

[kittenfemme27]

Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate

So, at this point, its a pretty cold take to say that Batman could address the crime related problems of Gotham City by funding development programs, education, and other social programs that would help "criminals" get on the right path. That Gotham Citys notorious Villains wouldn't even be motivated to be such huge and over the top personalities if it wasn't for the fact they had an equally huge personality with which to combat each others Narcissistic Personality Disorders against. That Gotham City, for all its faults, would be a better place without Batman ever having stepped foot in it, and that Batman is honestly just a little bit of a crypto fascist. Everyone's said it, or at least thought it, and everyone's pretty much in agreement that it's true to some extent or another.

Except DC, of course, who continue to make millions pushing Batman as the one true and only good savior of the ailing city. Who continues to make comic after comic showcasing the various villains become near caricatures of themselves as they get more and more cartoonishly evil to foil batmans plans, while bruce himself gets more and more wise to the point of being a near omnipotent God who has accounted for each and every possibility in the entire universe. This personification of the Dark Knight is very important to DC, and while they attempt to sometimes show Bruces "philanthropy" within the comics, they often somehow exacerbate just how much of a problem it is that Bruce and Waynecorp effectively own Gotham, and why the concept of The Batman is a problem in and of itself.

So it was pretty par for the course then that, for a short time between 2009 to 2015, DC Comics teamed up with Rocksteady Studios and Warner Brothers Montreal to create the Batman: Arkham video game series that featured the exact same crypto fash Bat that fans have come to know and love. The Arkham series was a western take on the popular Japenese game genre that we know today as "Character Action". It's a bit of a hard genre to describe, but its typically distinguishable by being a Third Person game in where your character takes on hordes of enemies and is very, very powerful right from the get go. Where you have combo meters that break on the slightest bit of damage and the combat revolves just as much around being stylish and impressive to look at, as it is engaging and outrageously difficult. From a gameplay perspective, DC and Rocksteady couldn't have picked a better superhero to go with when adapting the Character Action genre to the west. Batman has no powers, and relies entirely on his gadgets and martial arts training to effectively subdue those in front of him. This allowed the Arkham series to shine as a half Character Action, half Stealth Puzzle game, creating what was effectively a 3D Third Person Metroidvania Brawler. It was a match made in Heaven. The end result of the Arkham Series popularity created an entire genre of combat and gameplay styles that have majorly impacted and outlived the Arkham series, with pretty much any super hero game afterwards being simply an Arkham game with a skin. It also meant that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the publisher, had an effective cash cow they could milk for everything it was worth. Immediately after the publication of the first game, Batman: Arkham Aslyum, production began on a second game titled Batman: Arkham City that was much larger in scope. Set to be an open world that took place in all of Gotham as the inmates of the Aslyum escaped and overtook the city. Batman: Arkham City was released in 2011 to absolute critical praise and from that point on, the Arkham Series of games was here to stay and here to become a franchise with yearly release Al-a Call of Duty. A mobile game came out the same year as the second game, and every year after following you had at least 2 games in the Arkham-verse release thereafter. Rocksteady, bless their overworked and creatively burnt out hearts, could not keep up with this demand while they developed a sequel to Arkham City that was meant to be even larger in scope. Warner Brothers instead then tapped an in-house development team, WB Games Montreal, for a prequel game that took place as the Batman was finding his footing and dealing with his first major crime outbreak.

This prequel came to be known as Batman: Arkham Origins and was released in 2013. It's widely considered by fans of the series to be the black sheep of the series. Having none of the original charm or excitement of the first games, as it was made to be a yearly entry into the series rather than with the care and attention that Rocksteady put into the previous two entries. Warner Brothers Interactive however were very, very sure that they wanted to put all their eggs in this new Arkham prequel themed basket and developed not just one, not just two, but three separate spin offs! These spinoffs were as follows:

- An iOS mobile fighting game that had the same name as the original game developed by the Mortal Kombat developers Netherrealm Studios(Fun fact: This is the 2nd iOS Arkham fighting game they had made at that point.)

-An animated direct to video sequel-to-the-prequel titled "Batman: Assault on Arkham" that ultimately bombed pretty hard.

-And finally the game I'll be writing about today, a Playstation Vita/Nintendo 3DS (And later PC/Xbox 360/Playstation 3 release with updated textures) side game that was also sequel-to-the-prequel known as Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate.

Even reading this back in 2020, I cannot fathom why they had such confidence in this series as to fund this many projects in this specific prequel time period of the Arkham Universe. Needless to say, all of these were critical failures. But being one of the 6 people left in the world who still excitedly owns a Playstation Vita in 2020, I was goaded by the other 5 to give the final spin-off game a shot.

And so I did.

I want my 8 hours of life it took to complete it back.

Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate is a 2.5D Metroidvania that tries really, really hard to be a mainline Arkham game despite being designed primarily as a Metroidvania. For those unaware, a metroidvania is a genre of game that features a large map with procedural upgrades that allow you to access more and more of the map, often requiring you to remember locations so that you can backtrack to them and try out new upgrades to see if they let you into these new areas. Blackgate follows this formula and does it very, very, very poorly.

You might be feeling a bit of confusion here, though, as earlier within this article I described the Arkham main line series as essentially a 3D Metroidvania style of games. And given this earlier comparison, when going into Blackgate I honestly expected this combination of an Arkham game that was more focused on being a Metroidvania to be really good! Metroidvanias are one of my favorite types of genres and I'm regrettably a fan of the Arkham games, so I was all set and ready to settle into what I was hoping would be a good game, or at least a decent one.

The issues with the genre this game has decided to cram itself awkwardly into are immediate and apparent the moment you boot the game. Being 2.5D, which in every other instance I've ever seen means "Plays exactly like a 2D game in every way, but is just done in 3d and thus uses 3D Models" Blackgate decides that sort of consistency is beneath it and constantly shifts its own perspective. Its never not a sidescrolling camera view, but its levels also have you make turns in L-Shaped corridors that mean your map screen is entirely useless. In Metroid: Zero Mission, for example, your map is a side on view of the chambers. It has long sections that go up and down in what is effectively the Y axis, and long corridors that go left and right in the X axis. This is how every single Metroidvania does its Map screen, including other 2.5D Metroidvanias I have played in the past. To do so otherwise would destroy any sense of understanding of verticality that exists within the game world. No Metroidvania ever "turns" in the middle of a corridor into another corridor that suddenly goes forwards and backwards on what would be the Z axis.

In Blackgate, however, your map screen is a top-down view of Arkham Aslyum that has corridors that go forwards and backwards, left and right, and does noting to denote any verticality in any of the areas. What this effectively means is that  you're going to spend an annoying amount of time moving forward into a corridor and then hitting your map button to try and discern exactly where the hell you are in relation to the rest of the world. It doesn't help then that the facility of Arkham Aslyum is not traversed normally, as almost all doors and elevators and any set of stairs are non-existent and the ones that are there do not work or are not accessible. The Facility is in ruins due to the events of the game and that means you will constantly be working your way through crawlspaces and vents or even simply holes in the floor or cieling that allow you to progress around the map. Again, this betrays a core tenat of any Metroidvania, as backtracking to locations is a huge and important part of the core gameplay loop. Doing so in Blackgate is like pulling teeth trying to remember which vent took you where and what specific level of verticality you need to be on that takes you where you want to go.

The combat is copy/pasted directly from any other arkham game, where you magnetically snap between enemies and have a combo meter that is broken if you're hit as well as a parry system for incoming attacks. This system, in short, does not work in the slightest in a side scrolling perspective. Not only are enemies often grouped up in a way that makes keeping a combo impossible, but for some reason you are almost always unable to counter someone who is about to hit you if you're not directly facing them. Effectively this turns every fight into a chore where you are just trying to get through it as quickly as possible while trying your best to maintain a combo. In the mainline arkham series, they eventually start adding enemies that have to be taken out in special ways, such as stunning them with your cape or jumping over them as they have armor on their front. Blackgate tries to do the same thing, but effectively gives up after 2 unique enemies as the system just doesn't allow for anything else. The combat isn't absolutely the worst i've ever played, but its definitely the worst version of the Arkham combat system's that i've ever seen. To top it off, the Boss fights within the game are all "Puzzles" of a kind where you must navigate a room in a specific way to hit a Boss 3 times. The frustrating aspect of these puzzle based boss fights is that they may only be solved one way, with no room for experimentation with the Batmans various arsenal of Gadgets and Tools, and also that any mistake will instantly kill you and reset your progress to the start of the fight. These are, in a word, frustrating. More often than not they become a trial of repetition to try and find whatever way the game wants you to subdue the Boss.

An example of one of these incompetent boss fights that irked me the most would be the Black Mask fight. Within this fight, you come in from the left side and use a batarang to take out a single light out of a row of them. This may lead you to believe that you must take out all the lights and take out Black Mask in complete darkness. This is not the case. Instead, you must take out one single light and then duck into the crawl space under the masked Villain, then come out of the end of the vent below him, and hit an alarm on the side you used to be on. This causes him to start shooting in that direction at the sound. At this point, you may think you sneak up behind him and take him out while he's distracted. Unfortunately, you'd still be wrong! Trying this will result in him immediately realizing you're behind him and turn around, filling you with bullets and instantly killing you. What you must do instead is to go back into the grates while he moves towards the center of the arena. At this point, you must jump up from the grates when prompted to one-hit KO him, being one of the few bosses you do not have to hit 3 times. A fun fact about this fight however, is that if you miss that opportunity then the fight soft locks and you have to let him kill you to restart. Every fight is like this, with this much incompetence abound.

You may have noticed at this point that I have neglected to mention any of the Bats arsenal or Toolkit that you use during the course of the game. That is because, frankly, it does not matter. The upgrades you get simply allow you to go into different doors or different vents or break holes into walls but that's it. They serve no other gameplay purpose, no other combat role, nothing. A common trend within Metroidvanias is that the upgrades you get are dual purpose. An example being the Ice Beam from literally any Metroid game. This is both a damage up and allows you to stunlock difficult enemies, it also allows you to freeze enemies and turn them into platforms with which to progress the further into the map. No gadget within Blackgate serves this dual purpose, and as such there's barely any point to even bring them up other to lament their boring design.

The problem with Gadgets is moreso just a part of a much larger pacing problem that the entire game suffers from. Blackgate is divided into three maps, wherein you must search different wings of Arkham Aslyum to find The Joker, Penguin, and Black Mask as they have all escaped and cordoned off each zone into a headquarters for their respective gang of thugs. Something quite common within Metroidvanias is non-linearity, wherein you can get to an objective in any way that you have access to via your upgrades. There are numerous methods where you may even "Sequence break" the game, or do something earlier than you are intended to do so by the natural flow of the game. This is not a design oversight, it is an intentional part of the formula. I can only assume then that splitting up the game into these 3 chunks was an attempt at recreating this non-linearity. But it effectively does not matter. At a certain point in any of the maps, you will be stopped and told to go to another to procure an upgrade to proceed. There are no other options. There is no sequence breaking. There isn't even a point to explore anywhere else. You cannot progress the game until you do exactly what it asks of you. No matter what order you'd actually like to do it in, you will take on Penguin, then Black Mask, then The Joker. You are not allowed to deviate from this path. The fact that this linearity is forced onto you just makes me wish the ability to pick and choose your map had just been taken out and the charade of non-linearity taken away, as it feels more like a slap in the face that everytime I tried to explore somewhere, the game halted me and told me I wasn't allowed to do that.

So, at this point all I have left to cover is the story. As it is, its bare bones. Prisoners have escaped, you need to go chase them back into their cells and restore peace in Arkham, meanwhile Catwoman is helping you out over comms and guiding you to where you need to go next. The opening of the game actually has you spend about 10 minutes chasing catwoman, only to be stopped by literal police when you catch her, to which Bruce simply tells them that the law is actually in his hands as the Batman, and then proceeds to beat up and subdue these police while letting Catwoman escape, who then secretly triggers the entire charade within Arkham so that she may escape with Bane who is hidden within a literal fucking panopticon inside the lowest bowels of the Aslyum. Standard Batman story, very by the book.

But there is something much, much more interesting at play within Blackgate. Something I'm not entirely sure the developers intended. I started this article with a preamble about the latent fascism of Bruce Wayne and the reason for that is because the game seemingly understands that these things are a problem. Within the game, you often can hear the low level grunts that you can fight around the various maps long before they see you. If you simply wait a moment and listen to some of their idle dialogue, they have a surprising amount of complaints about their crazed villainous bosses, but they've also got quite a lot to say about the state of Gotham itself. These citizens of the disastrous city will often lament that they have no other choice than to work for one of these absolute lunatics. They often state they know they will likely die on this job, and that they know they are disposable to their bosses, and generally that they do not like the positions they are in job-wise. However they're very clear in stating that they no choice. No education, being a convicted felon, and most of all with Batman patrolling the streets? A life of crime that leads directly into a stint on Arkham Aslyum is the life of a good 80% of Gothams population. They even talk at times about forming unions before laughing off the idea as they know they will be outright murdered by one of their respective bosses.

So Blackgate is aware of the issues of Batman, right? Its grunts repeatedly belt out the same problems that any easy criticism of Batman has. The problem, however, is that because these are grunts of a gang and because Batman is supposed to be Cool and The Good Guy, these are meant to be treated as jokes. Not legitimate criticisms, not actual problems, just stupid things that stupid criminals are saying. Blackgate is obsessed with maintaining the image that Batman is actually in the right morally for everything he does. An image it only struggles to maintain as its revealed later that Bruce's corporation, Waynecorp, FUNDS Arkham Aslyum. Those upgrades you get? they are various upgrades left around by Bruce's construction teams ON PURPOSE in case a prison riot ever happened. Meanwhile, a minor bossfight early on has a, and I wish I was joking here, black man in prison for a crime he didn't commit directly tell Batman that not only does he not want to hurt him(Penguin has him at gunpoint and forces him to fight you, thus the boss battle) but that he did not commit the crime he was thrown in jail for, and that if batman was at gunpoint with no other option he'd do the same things. Batman simply responds that he, being the rich white man that he is, would never be in the same position as his enemy. Subtle racism, I guess, is another one of Batmans infinite gadgets on his toolkit.

I cannot stress enough how deeply fucked up this all is. Bruce spends his days funding a what is essentially a private prison that he controls in a city that is so poor he is the de-facto owner of it, only to spend his nights putting whoever he decides is a bad person into these prisons while creating the conditions that lead to so many people following a life of crime. The game is explicit about this. It does not do like the rest of Batman media and shy away from the criticisms of Bruces latent fascism, it lays them completely bare. But it expects that you will think Batman is actually morally justified for creating this prison pipeline he directly profits from while he gets to LARP at night as a spectre of justice. It's despicable and while I don't think it was done on purpose, it was clearly a rushed game made very quickly for handhelds so that there'd be a yearly Arkham game, it says a lot about our consumption of superhero related media which already has many problematic aspects that the creators of this game expected, and were likely right to expect, that we would find this latent fascism and prison pipeline inherently understandable and even morally justified and badass. It's one of the reasons I couldn't wait to simply put the game down and never think about it again. Something I'll be glad to do as soon as I finish this article.

So, final words then.

Blackgate is a shit game. Its a shit metroidvania, with a shit upgrade system, a boring story, WILDLY problematic politics and a take on Batman. It doesn’t work as an Arkham game, it doesn’t work as a Metroidvania, it barely functions as anything even remotely interesting to put your time into, I don't know why Warner Brothers was so invested in this world. I don't know why they put so much money into the Origins timeline. But we're all better off with the fact that it failed and that after Arkham Knight, the final of the Arkham Trilogy(from Rocksteady), they planned to end the series.

Oh wait, they're making a Suicide Squad game set in the Arkham-verse due to release in 2021, apparently.

Fucking hell.

#Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate #Review #Played on: PS Vita

[kittenfemme27]

Genshin Impact

Breath of the Wild was a game I wanted to love. I love the Zelda games, always have, and I eat up open world games like candy. Yet, BoTW has sat on my digital shelf collecting digital dust for ages. Why is that? Well, to put it simply, I don't want to play as Link. BoTW has a beautiful world, rich combat and game play puzzles, tons to see and do and experience, it's a sandbox for the ages. But it's hampered so heavily for me by the fact that I have to play this very boring and to be honest kind of forgettable boy named Link during the game play. That may sound petty, but if I'm in an open world game I want to fully immerse myself into that and video games are where we all go to escape anyway. If I wanted to be misgendered, I'd simply forget to shave and go outside.

I don't mind playing other Zelda games because in those, Link is a self contained character in the world and they're relatively short and self contained games. But BoTW is a sandbox. And for a large majority of it, you're not going to be doing the story or being addressed as link. The size of the world and the sheer amount of hours you're going to put into it mean that for almost all intents and purposes, Link isn't Link, he's a faceless avatar that you're supposed to put yourself into. The game offers so much freedom in so many avenues and yet, in your choice of how to explore the world as someone you'd actually like to be, you're not allowed. You have to be a skinny blonde twink.

So, in late 2019, in comes a trailer for Genshin Impact. It's making its rounds on the Internet as a "PC Free to Play Gacha Breath of the Wild Clone" which, while a mouthful, was something I initially wrote off. Didn't see a point in checking it out, as I really don't like Gacha games very much. But in late September 2020, MiHoYo the developers released the public 1.0 build of the game to everyone. Multi-platform, too. iOS/Android, PC, PS4, and even a switch release down the line. And maybe its the pandemic, or maybe the Internet was simply too lured in by the cute anime girls, but it took the many by storm. It took me personally over 12+ hours to download the 11 gigs of the game because the servers were so swamped with people.

Now I do want to be clear: Genshin Impact borrows many things from BoTW, but it isn't a clone. It's not a sandbox in the same way BoTW is and aside from some general game play things such as gliders, stamina/wall climbing system, and general aesthetic, the games are massively different. Still, though, playing it has highlighted to me why I never felt quite right playing BoTW, and its that lack of freedom. That lack of ability to play the game on my own terms and explore the beautiful handcrafted world the way I want to. 

Despite appearances, Genshin Impact is a lot more like a single player MMO than it is anything else. Requiring tons of farming and grinding to create high level powerful characters in a world that gets increasingly more powerful and hostile as you do. The core game play loop of Genshin Impact is pretty phenomenal, essentially giving you a massive world to explore with literally thousands upon thousands of chests and rewards to find. Either by clearing out enemies, doing random in world puzzles, or even just sitting around. Being inside of and exploring the world of Teyvat is as rewarding as it is beautiful. The art and animation design of the game are stellar and do a lot to make you forget how much time has passed since you booted up the game in the first place. There's tons of different lore books to find, NPC's to talk to, quests to complete, the world is chock-full of lore and world building even down to simple weapon and material descriptions. Teyvat is a wonderful place to be and the developers MiHoYo deserve a pat on the back for how good the world of Genshin Impact is. The other side of game play is a simple system of Character Progression where you farm materials to make your characters/weapons/abilities better so that you can farm even more materials from harder enemies, much like an MMO, and you also acquire gear called Artifacts with randomly rolled stats much like an ARPG. In that regard, Genshin Impact is highly addictive. There are a myriad of weapons, talents, artifacts, and characters all to level up and build up over the course of your play, and every character can be made viable very very easily. The game also lets you keep a party of 4 characters that you can swap between at any point, as well as each character being attuned to a specific Elemental Type that reacts to other Elements. This causes the end-game to be centered around doing some of the hardest dungeons the game has to offer by theory crafting incredibly powerful teams that work off of each other and cause Elemental Reactions in enemies. It’s some of the most fun i’ve had in a game in ages.

All of that is fantastic but unfortunately its all also held back by one simple, huge problem: Original Resin. The game uses a currency called Original Resin that you use to challenge the harder content in the game. Dungeons, World Bosses, Elite Weekly Bosses, you name it and if its end-game content, it likely costs Resin. And not in insignificant amounts either. Dungeons are 20, Bosses are 40, and Weekly Bosses are 60. So, how do you obtain this material? Time. You start with, and are capped, at 120(Later 160 in patch 1.1). 1 resin takes 8 minutes to get back. If you spend it all, it takes 16 hours to get back. Given the rates you spend it, you can go from 120 to 0 in roughly 10-15 minutes. With no way to increase the resin cap, and the incredibly slow acquisition rate, that frequently means you only have about that much playtime a day of the game in the endgame. And that's, needless to say, incredibly frustrating. Thankfully its not an entire stamina system that means you can't play the game at all when you're out of resin, but it does mean that character progression itself is gated as all upgrade/progression materials are locked behind these dungeons and bosses that you must use Original Resin to face. Effecitvely, this means single characters will become weeks and weeks of work, with weapons and artifacts being only slightly less time consuming. I can only hope MiHoYo is looking to change this system in a way that isn't just increasing the cap as the feedback they've received has been very negative regarding it, but only time will tell.

Unfortunately, this isn't the games only problem with its players either. The game is a Gacha, there is no getting around that, but despite the fact that pretty much any character can become massively overpowered and viable in the endgame, people are going to want the rarest characters that exist. This is by design and unfortunately is more or less a glorified gambling system. And while the game is quite nice with its premium currency and how often it gives it, what isn't nice is that the rarest “5-star”characters cost a minimum of 200$ to get through money. With no guarantee you're getting the one you want.

Worse still, outside of a guaranteed 5-star drop at 90 rolls on the gacha wheel, the chance for a 5-star weapon or character is 0.6%. Not even a whole rounded up 1%. This is frankly ridiculous, as is the cost of real money to premium currency. For reference, most other popular Gacha’s doing well offer their rarest characters at anywhere between a 1-6% rate. In general, gacha's aren't known to be kind in their rates. That’s the point, they want you to gamble with real money. Genshin Impact, however, is so unkind and unfair that even other regular players of gacha gamers are very, very vocally upset. If it wasn't for the game play loop and the world, I'm not sure this would fly. And its certainly not flying in the west with the crowd that doesn't play Gacha's nearly as much. Neither is the resin system, as gamers in the west typically want to play for hours and hours at a time.

I’d be remiss if i didn’t bring up the story in Genshin Impact, as it’s genuinely fantastic. As previously stated, the world has a metric tonne of hidden lore in books, weapon/item/artifact descriptions, character stories you unlock as you use a playable character, etc. But the main story you can currently play from start to finish in the 1.0 release is the prologue.

This prologue stars very simply: Your character, the “Traveler” is an alien from another world. Not much is known about them so far, other than that the Traveler and their sibling were people with the ability to hop between worlds at will. In the opening moments of the game this power, along with your sibling, are stolen from you by an unnamed assailant. Thus trapping you in Teyvat and leaving you to begin a journey to find the Seven Gods of Teyvat, simply known as “The Seven” and seek their power and wisdom to find your sibling and potentially leave. This journey is how you meet Venti, one of the Seven in disguise as a simple human bard, and his best friend Dvalin. The events that follow have you help this strange bard, as well as the people of Mondstat, defeat the dragon Dvalin. Previously, he protected the lands of Mondstat for hundreds of years. However, as you meet both Dvalin and Venti, he has had his mind corrupted and been lied to by an order of evil mages known as the Abyss Order, and its caused him to go on the offensive against Mondstat and her people.

It's a fair bit emotional, humorous at times thanks to Venti, and overall very engaging. Mondstat is a city built on freedom, to the point that its own god Barbatos(Venti) refuses to rule over it and allows himself to be the weakest of the seven gods, as that would take away some of the cities freedom. Within this prologue, there is a huge focus on Mondstat being a city of Freedom, the prologue quite literally ends with Venti telling Dvalin after you have saved him from the corruption that even though he is "meant" to be the protector of Mondstat, he hopes Dvalin chooses whatever life he wants, even if that's not Mondstats protector, and that Venti simply wants him to be happy. Venti's own personal story quest goes further in depth about the foundation of Mondstat and its origins as a rebel city founded after the citizens overthrew the oppressive rule of an awful tyrant God and killed him. In a very pretty hand drawn "cathedral window" style cutscene, you get to see the end of this war and why Barbatos chose the form he currently inhabits and took up being a bard, which was to honor a dead friend from this very same war. This explains why Mondstat and Barbatos value its freedom so highly. I cried at this moment both times I played it.

For a free game, the storytelling here is off the charts. As i said before, Venti and many other characters have personal stories that both introduce you to a trial version of the playable character, thus letting you see how they work and play, and also giving you either more info on the world or an introduction to the character in question, or both. They're fantastic little stories and are up there with the main story in quality. One of my favorite parts of the game and something that will only be expanded with time. Each one takes you on a journey of discovery or even simple fun with a character and it all feels very personal and touching, as all of the main stories and character quests are very well voice acted.

The prologue being so focused on freedom makes it all the more awkward, then, that MiHoYo is a game developer based out of China, and as such has to follow China's censorship rules. Taiwan and Hong Kong both are censored in-game chat and if you're reported for saying them, you'll be banned for daring to speak the words. These aren't the only censorship decisions in the game, but they're by far the ones that struck me the most. I understand that the company is based out of China and thus has to follow the censorship rules, as they are the actual law of the land and they could be fined or even shut down if they refused. But the disconnect of knowing there are actual human rights atrocities being committed in China with the Uygher Genocide and Re-Education camps, the human rights violations in Hong Kong, the breakdown of democracy and the treatment of Taiwan, while this game that comes out of China boasts on and on about Freedom and the Human right to self actualize and choose their future is... troubling. It's one that I don't really know how to reconcile, if it can be reconciled at all. I'd like to believe that the developers really believe in their own story and secretly oppose those sorts of atrocities. But at the same time, banning players who mention Hong Kong or Taiwan isn't in the law. That’s a decision MiHoYo is making. Right now, China doesn’t have the freedom that Venti and Mondstat and Genshin Impact try to instill in you so hard as important and a human right. And knowing that and knowing the censorship is in the game make it very difficult to get a read on what the game actually wants you to feel.

Overall,i think Genshin Impact is a fantastic game. Its updates plan to bring in not only more story, as there are meant to be 7 Acts and currently the game features the Prologue and half of Act 1, but in those acts it plans to explain the playable areas and bring in new Events, Characters, Weapons, etc. And that makes me excited for the future of Genshin Impact! It’s a beautiful game of genuinely Triple AAA quality completely for free. But. Its also a Gacha game and by far one of the least rewarding Gachas you could play right now. Maybe that will change with time. I certainly hope it does. But it feels hard to recommend something that, once you beat it, disrespects your time so much and so badly. I hope Genshin Impact has a bright future, I really do, and I’m definitely going to continue playing it. But right now, I can’t say for certain that I feel confident in the developers to make it the game it clearly wants to be if it wasn’t shackled down by its Gacha.

#Genshin Impact #Review #Played on: PC #Played on: iOS