At this point of the year I really slowed down on finishing games. As I mentioned in my last entry, there was a pretty huge gap between the last game I finished in October and the first I finished in November. As it turns out, I only finished one game in November and it wasn't even a full game! It was Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds, the game's DLC expansion.
The Frozen Wilds added a couple of really fearsome new enemy types, a handful of weapons, and a new snowy region, all of which were valid reasons to return to a game I already enjoyed tremendously. Horizon was one of the last games I ever did a video review on and it would have been nice to return to it and maybe do an updated video, but by the time this expansion came out, I was pretty much done making videos entirely. Still, it was a really interesting expansion. The main game featured a pretty nice variety of enemy types already, but the new machines were nice to see. I had many exciting encounters with what I can only describe as a giant mechanical polar bear.
There were a slew of new elemental weapons introduced which were pretty fun to use. Horizon already has a pretty big emphasis on the elements associated with different weapon, whether it be slings that fire ice bullets or bows that fire electric arrows. These particular weapons were more like those elements distilled. The Forgefire for instance is essentially just a flamethrower, and the Icerail an ice variant of it. I would have preferred a little more emphasis on melee combat, though, which is one of the real weak points of the game in the first place. The story of the expansion doesn't have a lot of relevance to the overall narrative arc but it does add some flavor to an already lore-heavy game in learning about the reclusive Banuk tribe inhabiting the snowy north.
Looking back, it starts to become a little clearer why I might have started finishing fewer games at around this time. I'm almost ashamed to even reflect on it now, but I started to harbor a terrible addiction... to a mobile game. I now consider it a learning experience because it has encouraged me to never fall into the same trap again because it ended up eating a lot of my time and I got very little out of it at the end of the day. That game was Final Fantasy Record Keeper.
I don't know why I even decided to play it in the first place and I'm sure that when I started, I had no intention of playing it for more than a few minutes. Somehow, though, it got its hooks in me and I was spending most of my free time on it. It got to the point that playing Record Keeper at home became a banned activity. So, I played it at work or every other free moment I had. I maintained a spreadsheet of the items that I'd found. I started to spend money on the game. I justified it because I was spending a dollar here, a dollar there. I don't know how much I ended up spending in the long run but it's safe to say it's more than the game is worth.
Let me give some context on this here really quick. Record Keeper is what's called a gacha game--which is funny, because that's pronounced like "gotcha" and it kind of feels like that's what the game is doing to you most of the time. Gacha games are from a Japanese tradition in which in-game currency is accrued through completing quests or missions and then spent on what are essentially loot boxes to get new stuff. In the case of Final Fantasy Record Keeper, this new stuff consists of new weapons and armor for your heroes. What drew me in initially is the fact that almost every single Final Fantasy character you can think of is a playable character in the game. Not only that, the graphical style most closely resembles Final Fantasy VI, my favorite main-series Final Fantasy game. The combat system is superficially similar to it as well in that it uses the classic Active Time Battle mechanic in place for every Final Fantasy from IV to VII.
Right out of the gate, Final Fantasy Record Keeper was cashing in on my intense nostalgia for classic Final Fantasy by drawing me in with the prospect of playing as my favorite childhood heroes and reliving experiences from those games. While doing so, I had the opportunity to unlock new pieces of gear and equipment that also pay homage to these games. It all sounds pretty cool on the surface, but the more you play the game, the more the cracks start to show. The amount of grinding and constant playing required to get the amount of currency you need to get new weapons is excessive. I became addicted to it, though, and played hundreds upon hundreds of battles to complete all of the game's static content. New events would release every single week and then that content would go away forever after a certain period of time. In order to make sure I was acquiring as much currency as possible and experiencing all the game had to offer, I had to play enough to make sure I had time to complete whatever content was available before it expired. It started to feel like work--but I kept doing it because I had built up some sort of bizarre obligation to play this game I was no longer even enjoying. I was trying to power up my characters to their fullest extent and fill out their extensive arsenals but rarely stopped to examine why I felt this was still necessary.
In December, I finished all of the available Realm Dungeons, which are essentially just constant battles that loosely retell the events of various Final Fantasy games. There are hundreds of them. It took a considerable amount of time. After I was done with that, I played through the Elite variants of these dungeons as well and also completed other challenges called Nightmare dungeons and then started working on a new tier of challenges called Magicite. The game continued to escalate to higher and higher levels of difficulties that required better and better gear to stay competitive. I realized even at the time that the game was structured in a way that encouraged me to spend money to stay ahead of the curve, but I stubbornly continued to play anyway.
I did finish one more game in December and that was Downwell, an absurdly addictive platformer originally developed for mobile devices. I played it on PS4 and am still a little unsure how well the game might control using a touch screen. It's a really interesting concept though, in that the primary goal of the game is to fall down an endless well and take out enemies by bouncing off of them or shooting them with your gunboots. Falling for long streaks without hitting any surface is rewarded with more money which can of course be used to purchase upgrades from shops you encounter along the way. In an interesting twist, these shops stop time if you fall into them without hitting the ground. When you exit, you can freely continue your combo to make sure you acquire more money.
Downwell was actually one of my favorite games I played that whole year and I never heard anyone talking about it that much. It's extremely difficult and rewarding to master. I still go back to play it sometimes to this day.
That's it for 2017, though! I'll probably do one more entry on this year just to sort of wrap everything up, and then I'll move on to what I missed in 2018!
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