May 2018 Catchup

In May, I started playing Divinity: Original Sin again, this time on console because I wanted to try a cooperative playthrough with my girlfriend. I'd finished it when it originally came out on PC with a friend of mine and loved it a lot. It's a tremendously deep traditionally Western PC RPG with tactical, turn-based combat. There's a lot to love about it, but it's by no mean an easy game. I regret that we got distracted by other stuff at the time and never finished it, because I think a replay might be warranted in case I ever want to move on to Original Sin 2. Let's not forget that I want to get back to Pillars of Eternity as well one of these days...

As for what I finished in May, the first game I played all the way through was Dragon Quest Heroes: The World Tree's Woe and the Blight Below. I feel like this was a time in my life that I was trying to branch out and play games that I wouldn't normally consider playing. That's really been a theme for the past year or so, and I'll of course talk about that more as I fill out the rest of this year. Dragon Quest Heroes is yet another in a long line of Dynasty Warriors style games, but of course in this particular case with a cast of characters pulled straight from the Dragon Quest series. At the time I played this, I'd only played the first five Dragon Quest games, so there were a few characters I wasn't totally familiar with, although that was mostly just Terry, since the Dragon Quest VIII characters are culturally relevant even if you haven't played the game.

Dragon Quest Heroes has all the kitschy charm of a mainline Dragon Quest game and features a healthy dose of Koichi Sugiyama's signature music. I've always felt like his music has this very unique quality to it but it reminds me of orchestral music you might hear in 60s and 70s fantasy films. As per usual with this series, there's a lot of humor in the dialogue and plenty of slime-related puns. Just about every traditional Dragon Quest enemy makes an appearance and you'll find yourself vanquishing hundreds upon hundreds of them in pretty plain-Jane hack-and-slash combat. It's a pleasant enough diversion and a really fun bit of fanservice for Dragon Quest devotees, but ultimately not as rewarding as a more fully-developed RPG.

Because I somewhat enjoyed Dragon Quest Heroes for what it was, I decided to also play through Fire Emblem Warriors, a game that plays very similarly but of course features characters from Fire Emblem instead. I'm a casual Dragon Quest fan, but a huge fan of Fire Emblem, so I thought that distinction might be enough to push this particular title over the top in terms of enjoyment. Unfortunately, it felt like a tiring afterthought after already having played a similar Dynasty Warriors clone and even though it featured characters I enjoyed and was invested in, the sheer repetitiveness of the gameplay did it no favors. It doesn't help that my favorite Fire Emblem titles were severely underrepresented in the game, with only Lyn from Fire Emblem: Blazing Sword being represented from the GBA titles and no characters from the Radiance games at all. Despite these complaints, I would probably play a sequel like the sheep I am.

To finish off the month on a high note, I finally finished Super Mario Odyssey, which of course is a tremendously good Mario platformer. At the end of the day, I've always been more a fan of the Mario RPGs but I like the main series too. I tend not to get as immersed in them for whatever reason, even though I've played several. I've spent a decent amount of time with SMB 3, Super Mario World, Mario 64, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Mario 3D Land, New Super Mario Bros. U, and now Odyssey. Out of those, Odyssey is probably the best (even though I have really fond memories of 64 and Galaxy), but even then I didn't have much desire to comb through the game to collect a ton of Power Moons.

I think I really enjoy platformers at the surface level but don't have very much desire to dig much deeper than that. I think there is this sense of progression I really crave in games that I don't usually get from platformers. That might be why I've really enjoyed Metroidvania's recently, because while they can't necessarily be described as RPGs, there's still a very notable sense of progression. You unlock new areas, new abilities, and there's a real sense of your character getting stronger. In the case of Mario and other platformers, this doesn't really happen as much. It's more about collecting and exploring. You might find a new ability that can be used on a certain level but it's not something you have persistent access to for the rest of the game. I really like that feeling of permanently unlocking a new modification to your character and I really miss that when it comes to traditional platformers.

In June, I finished only one game about which I ended up writing a pretty considerable amount. Of course, I never published any of that. Soon, that will be rectified.