I'm not sure exactly what was going on in the early months of 2018 following January, but I really started to finish games less often compared to before. I barely got through five games in three months and some of those games were pretty short. Now that I think about it, I was probably still nursing a pretty unfortunate Final Fantasy Record Keeper addiction around this time, which would have meant I was playing a lot fewer games in general. I'm glad that dark period is now over.
The first game I finished in February was Citizens of Earth, an indie turn-based RPG pretty clearly inspired by Earthbound. It has a lot of weird design decisions but I like the concept of it a lot. It is lacking in polish but I can still honestly say that I liked it, even if reception overall was decidedly mixed. It's unique in that all of the characters you can draft into your party are ostensibly regular people with normal jobs. The characters are defined by their professions, in fact, and their abilities are determined by those roles. The pharmacist has abilities to do with medicine, the baker's deal with food, and the lifeguard has water-themed attacks. There also a lot of off-the-wall characters like the conspiracy guy and the yoga instructor, who each have their own unique and funny movesets.
There's typically a quest that needs to be solved or a set of circumstances met in order to recruit most of these characters, which is an interesting challenge in and of itself. I've said before, though, that I really enjoy games that allow you to assemble a party of your choosing and Citizens of Earth certainly does give you the opportunity to flex your creative muscles. Some characters provide support or healing while others focus primarily on just dealing a lot of damage. Others might soak damage for your team or debuff the enemy.
The concepts are great, but the execution and feel of the combat is really lacking. Despite all the ideas in the game, the game is frequently not very satisfying to actually play. The combat is really slow-paced and the difficulty is uneven. There are tons of annoying map areas with enemies that are difficult to avoid. It's a game that I would have loved to see a sequel for to iron out all the kinks but I think we're past the point where that might become a reality.
The other game I finished in February was Dissidia Final Fantasy NT. I was a huge fan of the Dissidia games on PSP not only because I'm just a huge Final Fantasy fan but because they're really expertly-crafted arena fighters that feature a tremendous amount of customization and progression. They also feature a pretty large cast of characters with interesting movesets and styles that seem distinct from each other. As a result, I was pretty excited to hear about this game coming to consoles because I'd assumed the series was dead for good.
Unfortunately, this iteration of Dissidia was pretty disappointing. Although there is a story mode, there's much less of it this time around and there's no dedicated story mode for each character like there was for the PSP games. The bulk of the gameplay is in the online multiplayer, which is strictly 3v3. The big appeal of the original games was in the 1v1 combat which seemed much less overwhelming. NT is entirely structured around team combat because of the new roles that each characters has been assigned to. Some characters are much more supportive this time around, which means they wouldn't necessarily be suited to solo combat anyway.
Not only does NT ditch the customization almost entirely, it also simplified the gameplay in a lot of ways. Each character's moveset is now less complex. The game is still fun on a surface level but it's not nearly as engaging as the handheld titles. I bought the season pass but haven't returned to the game to try the last three or four characters that came out for it. I doubt future content will fix any of the real issues I have with the game at this point--and judging by the game's reception, I don't think it's competitive community will be taking off anytime soon either.
The next couple of months are even slimmer in terms of games I finished, but I'm going to try to talk about some of the games I was playing that I maybe didn't see to completion as well. I may also combine the next couple of months since I believe I only actually finished one games in March.
No comments:
Post a Comment