August 2018 Catchup

In August, I was still very much in the mindset of attempting to finish off my PS4 backlog. There were games I'd purchased right around the time I first got a PS4 that for whatever reason I just never finished. In the case of Tales of Zestiria, it was because it wasn't a stellar entry in that series at all. I also feel like I've become somewhat less interested in Japanese RPGs in general, even though there are a lot of them out there that I still like. Zestiria is so packed to the brim with anime clichés and isn't redeemed by its gameplay whatsoever. Disgaea 5 was another example of a very Japanese game that features those same anime tropes, but when it comes to gameplay, it fares better. What made it difficult for me to progress in originally had more to do with how fatigued I was at the time with Disgaea gameplay in general.

Disgaea is of course a series of Japanese strategy RPGs that started out on the PS2. Most people recognize them as the wacky games with knife-wielding penguins and absurd levels of grinding. It's more than possible to hit the quadruple digits in terms of level, and for post-game, it's typically encouraged. Disgaea 5 is sort of the culmination of this mentality in that it's built around a series of complex system that all encourage grinding for experience. Your characters level, but so do your skills and abilities, your items, and the items themselves have unique entities that exist within them that have their own separate levels. It's even possible to enter procedurally generated dungeons for each specific item you come across in the game. These dungeons, called Item Worlds, can bestow additional levels to the item in question, depending on the number of floors you progress through.

There's a huge emphasis on stat management and leveling in Disgaea, but there's also typically a pretty wide variety of things you can do in combat, which is the main appeal of the games to me. Each type of weapon you equip has access to a unique set of skills, all of which function pretty differently. It's not just about each skill differing in damage output, but it's also about what range they have, what area they effect on the grid-based battlefield, and how they provoke movement for the character in question. The sword skill Blade Rush attacks several squares in front of you, for instance, but you end up blinking to the other side as well. This can be used as a form of traversal and for damage simultaneously, but it's important you don't inadvertently damage allies and that you ensure there's an empty space to land in after you use the skill.

Each game in the series typically retains mechanics from previous entries but also doesn't change up the overall gameplay very much. As a result, it's difficult to play multiple entries in the series too soon after another, since playing through one of them is fatiguing enough. Sure, Disgaea 5 introduced a couple of new things, but it also has a lot of the same stuff as before, so it doesn't feel very new at the end of the day. Combine that with a cast of really sort of annoying and childish characters, and it's easy to see why I didn't engage with it initially. That's not to say it's not a fun game, of course. There's a ton to do and a huge sandbox of mechanics with which to experiment--but it's also overwhelming and frequently annoying on top of that.

The other game I finished in August was Risk of Rain, a 2D action roguelike game that I actually ended up liking a lot. I dismissed it initially because it seemed a little simplistic and not totally my thing, but after giving it a bit more time I came to find it really addicting. It's the kind of game that really escalates as you progress further in a given playthrough and the random nature of the powerups you find as you go gives it a lot of replay value. It reminded me a bit of Downwell in that you're always hoping for just the right sequence of upgrades in order to ensure a good run.