I think my first impulse upon composing a new entry for this blog is to bemoan the fact that I haven't been updating as frequently as I'd like. I try to quash that feeling as soon as it comes because this blog isn't supposed to be an obligation for me in the first place. It's a place for me to hone my craft and to exercise my creative muscles so they don't atrophy. Any illusion that it's more than that is harmful. After all, I'm not going to write well if I feel like it's coming from a place of obligation. Okay, well, maybe that's not entirely true because if I were to be paid for writing I'd be writing constantly. I'm backing myself into a monologue corner here.
The month of May on this blog was concerned almost entirely with Bloodborne with a little Etrian Odyssey on the side. There's something about that game and the emotions it inspired in me that really sparked my imagination. I've written a lot more about that game that I have not published. There's a good chance I'll be sharing that at some point soon as well because although the premise of the piece I wrote might seem a little forced to some, it comes from a genuine place.
Since I last published an entry, I've managed to finish both Etrian Odyssey Nexus (just yesterday) and Yakuza 0, two games on which I spent a considerable amount of time. At the end of the day, the amount of time I spent on both was actually similar, but how I perceived that time was very different.
I first started Etrian Odyssey Nexus back in February on release day. I was really excited about it and posted an initial impression after I'd played 5-6 hours. At that time, I was very positive on the game, but as I progressed further and further, the cracks started to show. It became repetitive and frustrating in all the worst ways. There were sparks of fun and innovation here and there, but for the most part, the middle chunk of the game was a slog. As a result, it took me over three months to finish the game, chipping it away at it over the weekends. Looking back, I finished Etrian Odyssey IV in a similar fashion, while V was finished in a tight month.
My final playtime on Etrian Odyssey Nexus was roughly 89 hours, which, don't get me wrong, is a long time to play any game, but I've played a lot of RPGs in that range so it's not entirely unusual. Even so, the process of actually playing through it felt like an eternity. This is mostly because there are so many stretches of that game where nothing really changes. After unlocking my characters' core abilities, the ways fights progressed was almost identical from encounter to encounter for hours and hours of time. Boss fights spiced up the formula a bit, but when you spend 5-6 hours in a dungeon only to spend maybe 10 minutes on the boss fight, it's easy to see where that ratio solves very little.
On the other hand, I spent about 80 hours on Yakuza 0, which is much longer than I expected to spend on it after finishing Yakuza Kiwami in less than half that time. The crucial difference here is that it honestly felt like that 80 hours flew by. It helps that I finished the game in a much shorter timeframe overall, but the more important deciding factor is that it ended up being a game I just enjoyed a whole lot more than Etrian Odyssey.
Yakuza 0 is not a perfect video game by any stretch of the imagination. The structure of the game is entrenched in PS2-era conventions, both in terms of the way your characters interact with NPCs and the environment, and in how you navigate menus. Like many Japanese games, Yakuza 0 has a lot of menus, and they're just as clunky and annoying to navigate as any JRPG, even if this game is a straight-up narrative brawler. The core gameplay itself is not all that engaging either, since it primarily consists of roaming the streets and busting thugs' heads, but like many video games, Yakuza 0 is so much more than the sum of its parts.
I won't do a deep dive on it here, but what really sticks with me about Yakuza 0 is just how much I engaged with the story. It is a ridiculous, hyper-masculine soap opera in which business-suited crime lords spit envenomed words at each other with deadly seriousness. The game treats this story so seriously and gives it so much weight that it wasn't difficult to become invested in it--but then what makes the game so interesting and bizarre is that outside of these narrative sequences, the game is significantly more wacky. You'll find protagonist Kiryu Kazama racing what are essentially RC cars with a bunch of little kids, playing arcade games, chatting up anonymous ladies at a telephone club, and running a real estate business where he faces off against the appropriately named Five Billionaires, a group of increasingly extravagantly wealthy scumbags.
That disconnect between segments where you are free to roam around and participate in side activities and then the intensely structured central narrative is disorienting at first, but the more I played of it, the more I found I really enjoyed it. I was free to mess around and do whatever I wanted most of the time, but when I was ready to buckle down and watch this intense Japanese drama, I could advance the storyline. I really loved it and still wanted more by the time the game wrapped. Its a game with enough variety to sustain you for a very long period of time. I would never have thought I'd spent 80 hours on it. In the case of Etrian Odyssey, I felt it'd been far longer.
No comments:
Post a Comment