But there is one genre that is perfectly suited for playing in 15 minute spells when you’re in Mexico’s City world-leading horrible traffic and moving at a rate of a metre per minute. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen and inbetween, gacha. This is the year I hit that gacha pipe so hard I can’t ever go back and no, I swear I do not have a problem.

Dishonorable Mention: Atelier Resleriana

Let’s take out the rubbish for a start, I really wanted to like this game. The Atelier games suffer from just about every malady in the JRPG world and yet they have cultivated such a unique identity and atmosphere that each time they cross into my orbit I am happy to have them crash land right into my schedule.

The series has been going through something of an identity crisis ever since the Mysterious series with each new set of titles trying to put their own spin on the 20+ year old formula. I would be remiss to ignore that the main takeaway Koei Tecmo took from the success of the Ryza series was “fanservice, and lots of it”. This isn’t necessarily bad, but I always thought it was a poor fit for this series.

Resleriana is more or less a direct offspring of this line of thinking, in which having your favourite characters all meet up and make nice, and occasionally wear revealing outfits, was supposed to carry a mediocre package through.

This isn’t the first time Atelier ventured into the Gacha space, but their intentions with this one were clear from the start. Resleriana might just be the prettiest game I’ve ever played, with the best looking models, animations, shaders, and even facial expressions I’ve seen in an anime style game. Not through fidelity, but artistry. Even the routine crafting of items was a veritable audiovisual experience that still makes me smile when I think about it. If you were a fan, you were being serviced, even if you weren’t a pervert.

And yet Resleriana could not escape the most basic traps of the Gacha genre: Overly simplistic gameplay, encounters tuned to be cleared with auto-combat, massive grind requirements early on, and a sharp drop on the presentation after the opening chapters.

What’s more, Resleriana stumbled on obstacles that one would imagine were already solved issues in the gacha space, like the lack of a decent monthly pass. As of the time of writing, the global servers of Resleriana have announced an EoS and I am not in the least surprised. I wanted to like this game but it just gave me nothing to hold onto. Don’t jump in before the EOS, but I highly recommend watching the cutscenes on youtube. 

5: Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage

Many years ago when I was a different person altogether, I carefully schemed for this game to be the destruction of my erstwhile past-self. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still installed the JP version on launch night but try as might I could not carry my dekinai ass through the original 8 stories at launch. So Project Sekai, as it was then known, stayed in my pocket as a supplemental piece to the Project Diva releases. I ignored the story, and whenever I felt like playing a song not in the diva series, I would return to it, ignoring all gacha aspects. This relationship remained largely the same when it was released globally as Colorful Stage, apart from me occasionally using the free rolls they give out for events like Christmas, New Years, and Anime Expo of all things.

No routine survives contact with the Mexico City streets, and I quickly found myself in great need of activities that would kill 5 to 15 minutes at a time, so I finally delved into the game quite seriously, and as expected: I fell in love. 

There isn’t that much to say about Project Sekai, because as both a rhythm game and Visual Novel it is perfectly adequate. Superb, even, but there is no masterclass of anything here. I have to confess to my attachment being purely sentimental. I have truly come to love the Sekai Kids, the often derided show-stealers that make this not so much a Hatsune Miku game as a game featuring Hatsune Miku.

Crypton knows their audience, perhaps all too well, and these kids are pretty much all made mould perfect to draw out maximum sympathy from anyone who’s allowed a big part of their life to be occupied by Miku’s songs. Even the white-bread-with-whole-milk band, Leo/Need get a lot more fun to be around when you realise their most defining traits as a unit is just how much they all love Miku. Which is about as relatable as you can get in a game like this.

And once you start dealing with much more immediately grabbing ensembles, like eccentric theatre kids WonderlandsXShowtime, and perpetually-online and mentally-troubled girls Nightcord at 25, it’s hard to imagine a better set of characters to represent a musical scene such as vocaloid. Especially over last year, all these kids have finally taken huge strides and began to evolve past their initial goals to progress onto new stages of their lives. And I’m just so happy for all of them. The Miku Gacha did, in the end, consume my life like I always wanted it to, and I’m very happy for it. 

4: Punishing Grey Raven

Never let it be said I am not perfectly predictable in my eccentricities. Those in the know are already laughing at my transparency, but if you aren’t, let me fill you in: Punishing Grey Raven had a collaboration with Black Rock Shooter last year, at least in the global servers.

I have to say, this game does not make good first impressions. With the first 8 chapters being quite possibly the worst told and most inane storyline I’ve had the displeasure to meet in a game. It looked like butt, it sounded like butt, and it read like butt. 

But I kept trudging through it, because I wanted my Black Rock Shooter, and was surprised to learn that this game does reach much higher peaks than its troubled beginnings might suggest. 

It’s all in the presentation.  The format, tone and simple preferences of the imagery do not lend themselves to particularly heady or complex discussions. It does have some pretty interesting ideas for an action story, and when it pulls its head out of its tacticool camouflaged arse, the presentation can actually be quite stellar. 

Like a lot of gacha, to talk about the combat is fairly difficult because though there are underlying systems, the characters all have their own unique features to incentivise rolling. In my case, I got very lucky. The Home Team player for PGR during the Black Rock Shooter crossover was “Lucia: Crimson Weave” and I have to admit to have absolutely fallen in love with this woman’s sword style.

I could care less how to optimise her damage or do her optimal rotations, but just the very act of switching through her stances, using her dodge-into-riposte at max charge, and firing dozens of sonic blades at my enemies is addicting and dozens of hours later I still take her into every stage with me. Even after rolling a much more powerful DPS character with all her gear, she remains my favourite in this title. And she is one of very few gacha characters I’ve played that translates “having movements that look cool” into movements that actually feel incredibly cool to be in control of. 

And now they’re getting Dante as a collab next year so they got me in good, folks.

3: Wuthering Waves

Kurogames cannot get the beginning of their games right to save their lives. I had been looking forward to this game since roughly 2022 when I first saw gameplay of it, and had it summarised to me as “Genshin Impact with better combat”.  I would posit it’s more like, Genshin Impact with faster, but more conventional combat, but that’s neither here nor there.

At its core, this game is Genshin Impact, so I should have taken to it immediately. And yet the first few hours are so torturously boring, from the dialogue that suffers from both too-much and not-enough explanations, courtesy of too many rewrites, to being saddled with two characters that together roughly make up one whole personality. 

I dropped this game roughly 6 hours in after I felt no compulsion to log in the next day, and forgot about it until the release of Camylla, whom I felt compelled to roll for purely because she kinda looks like my beloved Herscherr of Sentience.

Once I jumped back in and made my way through the 1.0 storyline I found out it does not get better. At all. At most the original package of the game contains a couple of cool but meaningless setpieces, and two conversations that threaten to get interesting and have more to say but never quite get there.

Still, I persevered into the further patches. Onto the area called “Mt. Firmament” where the visual presentation takes a fairly large leap, and the stories actually latch onto and develop a character (albeit with some slightly odd timing). Accompany it with a pretty cool and fairly massive dungeon, a cool ending sequence and some SSX-like sliding action, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Pushing further into the area known as “The Black Shores”, Wuthering Waves was ready to make me feel ridiculous for ever doubting it. Not only taking some really cool set piece and presentation tips from Nier’s constant perspective changes, but refining its visuals even more, and pretty deftly weaving some honest-to-god sci-fi bullshit into what had been a mostly fantasy setting until now. 

The plotline also got a lot more interesting, tackling some pretty basic philosophical questions in an actually grounded and thought-out way. At this point it sort of starts to overplay the trope of the woman who loves you in a way that is more poetic or religious than sexual but of all the ways I’ve seen that play out in anime before, I’ve never seen one quite like the shorekeeper. So while it might be a little on the poor taste side, I can’t deny it’s interesting.  Though it probably says a lot that such an esoteric relationship is kind of just a mainstay of anime tropes now. And even stranger that it appears twice in this game, back to back, and both women have blue hair. 

By the end of the “Black Shores”, my thought was that Wuthering Waves might have exhausted all its ideas for setpieces, as the ending sees a couple of repeats, but also that they had exceeded themselves in almost every way, and by the end my feelings on the game were unrecognisable from that bitter taste at launch.

At time of writing, Wuthering Waves is riding high on critical praise on the back of its “Rinascita” 2.0 patch, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread you can gamble for, and while I think most of the people singing its praises are doing a very poor job, I have no trouble believing Wuthering Waves could push that envelope. I will see for myself soon enough. 

2: Granblue Fantasy: Relink

The older I get the more games reside in my memory and heart more than my hands. Whilst playing it, I did like Granblue Fantasy: Relink but didn’t think it was anything too special. A dungeon crawler, a little clunky, a little unfocused, and a little janky that served as Cygames’ very-troubled first step into traditional gaming. 

And yet with the passing of the months it just makes me smile. I can picture its cities and hills a lot better in my mind than I can locales, real and digital, that I’ve traversed way more, and find a lot of its encounters have such well-designed sets and memorable scores that I can’t forget experiences as mundane as fighting a bunch of goblins in an Arena.

I can’t really recommend this to many people, because in truth, it is incredibly flawed, and it places so much of its stock on back-loaded endgame content that is now virtually impossible to do without a dedicated group of friends, and yet, it made me happy.

If its job was to carry me further into the Skydoms of Granblue, I have successfully been lifted up to those clouds and I’m happy to remain here if CyGames will toss me some more bones. I am not playing that gacha on a browser though, I am just not.

1: Bang Dream: Girls Band Party

I know, I know, I know. Hear me out ok? Alongside my metamorphosis into a cockroach that will eventually be found dead in my room, you know, because of all the gacha I play, I further specialised my bug-like qualities into some rhythm gamer specialisation. The reasons are simple, and go hand-in-hand with the gacha turn: Mobile friendly, and playable in very tiny intervals. After a long day, playing 3 to 5 songs feels like a much more complete game loop than dedicating 15 to 30 minutes to just about any other genre.

Bang Dream was not originally a title I had much interest in, with Colorful Stage already having my bases covered on this type of rhythm game. But somewhere last year I discovered the beautiful anime Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! and became a fanatical convert. I installed the game somewhere in the summer, and idly tapped away at challenges and dailies, waiting for the story of the MyGo!!!!! girls to make it into the global release.

Sure enough, it was fantastic all over again, I cried. I’m not ashamed to admit it, this is almost entirely a story pick, but it is a really good story, and one that has breathed new life into Bandori in its native Japan as well as conquered neighbouring China for a good reason.

Story is not all that Bandori has going for it, though. The UI and UX is by far behind ProSeka, and MyGod that optimisation is so bad it will make you cry —seriously, around September this game was being held together by sticky tape and hope— but if you can run this without it crashing at every turn, it’s actually a really good rhythm game.

In some ways, though they are incredibly similar, I think it might be better than Proseka. For once it does demand a hell of a lot more precision with your inputs, which made it pretty humiliating to have to crawl my way through the difficulties all the way back down from “normal” just because my butter fingers couldn’t tap quiiite perfectly in the designated spot.

When it does work it nails that “dancing with your fingers” feeling a lot better than Proseka does, at least for me, and for the settings I settled in for both games. And let us not forget, Bandori has a rehearsal mode, something Guitar Hero had in 2009 but in 2020, android diva Hatsune Miku could not spring for.

For a genre of games so utterly rooted in both repetition, and perfection, the fact that this is not in ProSeka is kind of an outrage, and it makes Bandori just far and away the better choice for anyone that really wants to get good at the rhythm game parts of these titles. And believe me, someone like me needs all the practice they can get.

The post Walker’s Favourite Games in 2024: Oops all Gachas appeared first on Gamesline.

Coming out in the same general period of time for me when gaming was crossing over from lifelong hobby to a genuine passion, and something I sought to understand and master more holistically, Alan Wake touched a raw nerve in me. As I always like to put it, a game about an insomniac stumbling through the woods in the dead of nights, hopped up on coffee, reading scary stories and listening to unsettling music is tailor-made to my sensitivities, and honestly my day-to-day experience. As I’m sure you can deduce, dear reader, I also fancy myself something of a writer, and just like Alan Wake, I find myself constantly at odds with the products of my own creativity.

Remedy sucked up all the oxygen from the collective gaming press a few years ago as they tripped over themselves to shower Alan Wake 2 in praise and accolades. As of the moment of writing, I have not played it despite it being a game that I have been wishing for and eagerly awaiting for over 10 years. The reason is simple, as the poet Tyler once sung: “I don’t want to miss a thing”. Given that I’ve already waited such an extraordinarily long time, and accounting for my dim wit, I didn’t want to be caught off guard by a reference to a game from over a decade ago that “I’m pretty sure I remember well”.

In this small series of articles, I want you all to accompany me on a trip down memory lane, covering the complete “Remedy Connected Universe” as it pertains to Alan Wake, so that I can get a better perspective on the themes and game design of the series before playing its latest instalment. Tonight, we will be talking about the original Alan Wake, so let’s get to it!

Stephen King once wrote th—nah I’m just messing with you. I’m not going to repeat Alan’s silly monologue. But indeed, Alan Wake starts off wearing its influences on its sleeve by quoting them outright, and doing little effort to hide them otherwise. The strange alchemy that makes up this title congeals in an action horror self-described thriller, bearing a light influence on the gameplay from Max Payne, cinematography taken from David Lynch, and narrative style derived from Stephen King. A mixture that proves more cohesive than it might strike initially, with most of its flaws stemming from execution rather than premise.

The monologue, or rather, narration introduces us to our main character, setting, and conflict in a succinct way. Alan Wake is a writer, often ruminating on the demands of story, genre, and the emotions they are meant to induce in the reader. In his nightmares he is often haunted by darkness, sometimes ordered to reach a lighthouse that will give him sanctuary by a reassuring voice that offers him guidance through his dreams, such as teaching him to stave off the forces of darkness using light. Once the player gets through this brief tutorial, Alan wakes up (hehehehehe) gasping for air to the sound of his wife calling him.

Alice Wake is introduced as a reassuring and dependable wife, trying to comfort Alan from his nightmare, and encouraging him to cheer up now that they’ve arrived at Bright Falls, a pacific-northwest town so picture-perfect it’s uncanny. They two have come here as an escape, trying to help Alan with his insomnia and stress, a result of not being able to write a page in years. However, the hopes of a retreat away from the persona of “Alan Wake, writer” are quickly dashed, as the first people in town that Alan interacts with are a local radio host asking for an interview after recognizing him on sight, and a diner waitress so devoted to his works she personally brought a cardboard cutout of him to decorate the place.

After a meeting where a woman by the name of Barbara Jagger hands Alan his keys in the most ominous way, only for his truck to be chased moments later by the man he was actually there to meet, the couple eventually make it to the cabin and the events of the main plot quickly precipitate themselves. As they argue over a typewriter Alice bought for Alan, hoping the idyllic Washington town would grease the wheel of his creativity, the power suddenly goes out. Alan takes the chance to storm out of the conversation, knowing his wife will not follow due to her severe nyctophobia

Alice screams for help only moments later, leading Alan to rush back in looking for her. Finding a broken railing and an open door, he runs to the edge of the water only to see her sinking deeper in. Without hesitation he takes a deep breath and jumps after her. A quick fade to black after, we find him bleeding in a car crash. As he stumbles into the night, he finds a series of pages purportedly written by him as part of a novel called “Departure”. The manuscript narrates him being chased by men taken by darkness, intent on killing him. It only takes a moment for this story to come to life as Alan finds that the same methods for survival taught to him in his dream are now reality, and his only hope to make it through the night.

As the plot progresses it is revealed that the town of Bright Falls, and Cauldron Lake especially, is home to a mysterious energy that can harness creative energy to affect reality. In the past it has had an influence over a local poet, Thomas Zane, and a band of heavy metal musicians called the Old Gods of Asgard. Alan must reconstruct the history of these artist’s battles with the Dark Presence under Cauldron Lake to better understand how to rescue his wife through his own creativity.

The narrative structure of Alan Wake often leaves most of the storytelling in the beginning and end of each chapter, often establishing an objective during the daytime, with the main chunk being the Player controlling the writer’s nightly escapades through the forests of Bright Falls; downing demons and picking up pages on his way to the actual destination. It is during these middle sequences of chapters that the players are finally given a chance to truly familiarize themselves with the intricacies of combat.

The flow of fighting is methodical, slow paced, consisting of a two-step process to kill almost all enemies. The darkness that has taken the people of Bright Palls paints ebony their souls, and bestows them with infernal might. Alan must first blast away this coating of darkness before he can hope to do any actual damage. This is initially done with the flashlight, though later on he will acquire bigger and better tools for the job such as flares which provide a brief deterrent and a safe space upon which the taken dare not tread, or flash-bangs providing such intense luminosity that they take out enemies all by themselves like a traditional video game grenade.

The second step then consists of the all too familiar gunning-them-down which comes as second nature to any veteran gamer. At Sam Lake’s insistence that Alan be unfamiliar, and somewhat inept, to real-life action situations his arsenal is rather conventional and the way he uses them mostly unimpressive. Using only four weapons: a revolver, 2 varieties of shotgun and a hunting rifle, Alan Wake will go onto taking down dozens if not a couple hundred of the taken by the end, in a fashion that is almost diametrically opposite to Max Payne’s.

Where Payne had effortlessly run-walked in that fashion all too familiar to game heroes, Alan’s natural pace is a brisk walk with an optional sprint that his feeble writer constitution can only sustain for a few seconds. The policeman’s best strategy had been to jump straight into the crowd and take them out quickly with his dual pistols, whilst Alan Wake’s best bet is to always fight on the back-foot: Shining the flashlight on the enemies one by one, taking quick and routine pauses to stun enemies trying to encircle you, and securing the kill with a rhythmic one-two-three tap of the trigger.  

There are corollaries to the gameplay, such as Alan’s flashy dodges that will trigger a cool slow-mo if done in the nick of time, or set pieces that essentially turn a car into an armored vehicle on account of its powerful headlights, but the gameplay quickly becomes second nature. Like much of the ambiance, it is not really horrifying but does a good job at fostering tension. Forcing the player to literally zoom in and stare down an enemy slowly walking towards them while a crowd closes in from all angles never quite lets you relax or stop looking to the corners of your vision, even if you are convinced that you can come out on top.

The simplicity and novelty of Alan Wake’s combat is both its best asset and its greatest weakness. All but eliminating the possibility of a quick kill except when using powerful ammunition like flare guns or grenades, makes even the smallest of skirmishes take a moment. What can be a fun and somewhat hypnotic routine with the right framing, can quickly devolve into monotony and repetition should it start to lose you.

It speaks to the limitations of its combat system that when this title needs to really push its action over the top, it does so by putting you in situations that fundamentally bypass at least some elements of it. Whether it be the final sequences of the game pitting you against poltergeists that require you to scramble to generate as much light as quickly as possible, as they take no damage from bullets and are incredibly difficult to dodge; the famous concert set piece with a light show that partly takes cares of enemies’ shields for you; or the DLC’s dreamscapes that have you illuminating ghostly script in the air to materialize tools or environmental hazards.

Alan Wake’s mechanics do not fail at being a horror game, it is very clear that while down paced and tense, this is an action game straight and through. And while it remains satisfying, coming out the other end it is hard to say that any fan of shooters has to experience this combat.  Not to mention, despite ammo being the only thing the forest has to offer besides collectibles and story additions, on a normal difficulty run there will never be enough enemies around for you to worry about your supplies. And even on the hardest difficulty, while you might empty out a couple weapons in an encounter, you can always rest assured you’ll top up and be fully prepared for the next fight.

Indeed, all of the tension in Alan Wake is merely an illusion. A magic trick created by the sound design, environment, and story. This is far from a bad thing, it is not only the intended experience, but also a powerful spell in its own right. Running off into the woods in search of a page, a thermos, or just out of curiosity, can quickly turn the expansive forestry you traverse unnerving as the shadows close on you and demonic hissing and whispering begin to take over the sounds of nature. Whether you are sure in your capacity to take on the oncoming threat or not, it’s hard to shut down the part of your brain just begging you to get the fuck out of there.

The game’s signature visual trick is, of course, its interplay of light and dark. With blindingly white beams so intense they make the darkness beyond its reach seem all the more oppressive, and oily black shadows that writhe and sometimes seem to swallow the very air. A curious trick, tied to the metaphors of the story, is that both light and dark seem to refract unusually in Bright Falls. Refracting and shining more like they do underwater than how they do in everyday life, evoking other comparisons such as the behavior of oil in deep sea, which Alan himself uses in his manuscript.

When not embroiled in the existential battle for light and Dark, the game’s visuals and music remain surprisingly quaint and mundane. Doing its best to portray small-town Americana as learnt from the works of David Lynch, you can expect traditional locations such as the diner with bright red seats, the pier, the gas station and the local church, all alongside an inconspicuous original soundtrack and inoffensive licensed music like Harry Nilson’s “Coconut”.

The small diversions and extra tidbits do wonders for fleshing out the experience and make this seem like a more involved adventure than it actually is. Take away the collectibles, the flavor text and the daylight exploration and there is little that differentiates most of the middle chapters in Alan Wake from each other. Where the final two chapters of the game are dynamic and bombastic, seeing Alan traverse the entire  town as both inhabitants, architecture, and the very lighting try desperately to kill him. And whilst the introductory remains simple and contained due to its place as a first trial, the middle children can all blend together and even a small plot with a man pretending to be Alice’s kidnapper does little more than burn some time establishing some rules about the magic system only to then be cut at the quick and not mentioned again.

A lot of this can largely be attributed to Alan Wake’s famously troubled development, as it was originally conceived as an open-world game with a day and night cycle. In this hypothetical version of the game, you would have to procure supplies during the day to survive each coming night, and this is a big reason why an entire town was modeled and later on only used for linear levels, as this idea was later retooled into the conventional linear experience that was released. 

But it’s after dark when Alan Wake reveals its most fun novelties. Your nightly outings will often be scored by a variety of original and licensed songs, some courtesy of Remedy staples Poets of The Fall and others by beloved artists like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Levels will often see you finding a radio or a television to enjoy the curious local night programming in which you can hear the citizens of Bright Falls muse over the strange happenings of the town with the disregard one might discuss a missing pet, or an episode of Night Springs: Sam Lake’s take on The Twilight Zone as another frame of reference for the curious brand of kooky spooks that the game is going for. These are always a short joke, and none of them are a masterclass of writing, but as fun small vignettes they add a lot of charm to the game, and a couple of them have never left me since I played the original title all the way back in 2010.

The feeling that Night Springs evokes might be the most appropriate summary of Alan Wake’s charm as a whole. A sort of reflexive “hey, look at this, isn’t it neat and weird?” impulse to show it to other people, in part as an effort to solve many of the lingering questions it offers. Because make no mistake, while Alan Wake has a lot in its mind, and it is no sophomore at any of the topics that it tackles, it offers far more questions that it has answers. It is often happier to simply acknowledge complicating factors to its ideas, only to toss the ball back at you in favor of sending Alan tumbling back into the night.

But what are these ideas? Well, for all the jokes about Remedy’s lack of subtlety, its more overt explanations of the story’s themes really only facilitate the game coating itself in even more subtext once it is certain you have picked up on the main allegory.

The game’s central metaphor is restated again through its six chapters and two DLCs. Alan’s creative writing is the light, fighting back against the darkness of uncertainty, self-doubt, and negative impulses. The dark is an oppressive lake or an ocean, whilst the light is sanctuary and a breath of air against it. This is made all but text in the DLCs especially, where a central mechanic is using the flashlight as a metaphorical device to materialize Alan’s words in order to get deeper into the magical dimension known as The Dark Place.

Most of the story’s themes revolve around what the game’s own Emil Hartmann dubs “The Creator’s Dilemma”. Alan’s personal motivations and demons in this entry being both guilt over abandoning his wife in a crucial moment, as well as an immense amount of self-doubt over the effects his writing is currently having on the town, what it might imply for his sanity, and the last two years in which he has not been able to write a word after a failed attempt to branch into different kinds of fiction.

The latter eventually proves to be his defining characteristic. This is no surprise given that his stock introduction is usually “My name is Alan Wake, I’m a writer”. These are themes I found extremely personally resonating, as someone that used to introduce themselves in the same manner many years ago. If the fight with Alice at the beginning of the game did not give it away, later flashbacks shed more light on the extent to which Alan’s personal life had been crumbling due to his frustrated creative endeavors.

Where before Alan used his gift for the word as a way to comfort Alice, passing onto her a family heirloom to help her cope with her nyctophobia, in recent years his character had been mostly irritable and evasive. Looking for inspiration and escape in the bottom of liquor bottles and lashing out at his wife when coming out empty-handed, this only compounded Alan’s guilt. Later sections in the story make it abundantly clear that Alan sees Alice as his muse, the source of his best and most radiant creativity. Whether he sees his failure to write as a failure to her inspiration, or whether he resents what he perceives as a fading of her positive influence, the end result was still an increasingly fraying relationship as a direct result of his troubled writing.

Alan Wake could then best be described as a story about the tribulations and requirements of creativity, and what crafting your identity around your ability to create can do to you. During most of the main game, despite being forced to under various threats, Alan can only bring himself to write while under the influence of the evil only known as the Dark Presence. It is only near the end of the story where Alan, of his own accord and fully lucid, can bring himself to sit in front of a typewriter and try to create an end to his story.

The DLCs pick up exactly after these moments, once Wake has fully immersed himself in The Dark Place and has decided to use its dark magic to his advantage, his creativity is fully unleashed. However, surrounded by demons both inner and very much real, and without guidance in this new style of writing (both the horror genre, and the spooky reality-bending type) Alan’s narrative instincts quickly come unhinged. The DLCs see you battling Alan’s deranged ID seeking nothing but to unleash its frustrations and hate onto its conscious self through its writing. Using his written word only for the purpose of crafting the most horrific scenarios it can throw itself into.

Here is where a lot of Alan Wake’s subtler contemplations on storytelling and creativity tie into themselves to make the whole story more cohesive. One of Alan’s often repeated concerns is the demands of the horror genre. Convinced that the Dark Place will only respond positively to the most airtight story he can create, he often worries about what constitutes “bad magic”.

Alan tries to learn from the failure of Thomas Zane, a poet gone missing in the 70s that once made his abode in Cauldron Lake’s diver’s isle. Most proof of Zane’s existence and life has since been eliminated from existence as a result of his battle with the Dark Presence. Much like Alan, he once lost his lover, Barbara Jagger, to the waters of Cauldron Lake. He tried to use the powers of the Lake to bring her back with magic, but she “came back wrong”, with the darkness only wearing her body as a disguise, his real lover lost to the waters. Zane continued to do his best to fix his mistakes, writing himself a fail safe to leave messages behind and proceeding to write himself out of existence to dive into the Dark Place in search of his wife

This isn’t just backstory to the setting; Zane often guides Alan through the night and provides him with supplies and even magical pathways. Though it is implied that, just like Barbara Jagger, this is merely a “bright presence” intent on battling the darkness and not the real Zane. The parallels between Zane’s story and Wakes are obvious, and serve as a way for the story to offer thoughts on what exactly is an “original story” and the exact boundaries and shapes of influence, and inspiration.

Late in the story it is revealed that Zane’s role in the ongoing battle between Alan and the darkness is larger than he initially let on. Through his fail safe messaging method, which states that any object protected within a shoebox will be immune to any attempts at rewriting reality, Zane left behind a page written specifically for Alan along with a gadget. The page in question describes Alan’s childhood memory of receiving “the clicker” from his mother, an old light switch which he believed had the power to drive away the monsters hiding in the dark, and which he had gifted to Alice for these same reasons.

Whilst Alan tries to question Zane as to whether this means that he himself is a product of Zane’s imagination, the answers he gets are unsatisfying at best. This fear and criticism of a man’s writing can also be seen in minor antagonist Agent Nightingale’s way of mockingly addressing Wake with a different famous writer’s name as to diminish his own achievements.  However, the game’s larger themes and its constant references to other artists, both fictional and real, sheds a light on the idea that all creativity ultimately stems from other creative artwork. That creative endeavors are both imagination and craft put together for singular purposes, but that these at the same time stem from the world and situations that bred them.

These ideas are best exemplified on the other group of artists that Wake receives aid from in his battle against darkness: Retired rockers Old Gods of Asgard. Though initially written as a pair of ailing, borderline senile old men, as the story progresses brothers Tor and Odin Anderson prove to be a lot more than that.

Used as another example, just like Alan, of the dangers of unbridled creativity, the Andersons are initially portrayed as debauchery-loving rock stars way over the hill. Paying the price in old age for a life full of excess and often escaping whenever they can to continue partaking in more. However, later on it is revealed that their poison of choice is none other than the dark waters of cauldron lake brewed as moonshine. Quite literally drinking all of the negative manifestations of their creativity as a way to put them into their music.

The two brothers really did go as far as to legally change their names to Tor and Odin to better embody their image of the “old gods” for the stage, and it is rumored that Odin cut off his eye in a stroke of rock excess and devotion to his persona. But developments in the story quickly begin to suggest that their stage characters may in fact come with some real god-given gifts way beyond those that cauldron lake usually confers to creative types.

Just like the Odin of myth, Anderson has received a wisdom that sees through time and Tor can summon strength mightier than a man far his younger and is perhaps able to command thunder. However, their most interesting aspect is what they imply about the written word specifically.

Though I describe them in fairly dry terms here, all of these oddities of the Anderson brothers are described in-game with the same  prose you have heard a thousand times about other rock stars. Their biographies of their days of youthful excess might as well be a page out of Kiss’s book and their description of becoming different men onstage could just as well be ripped off from reviews of Judas Priest’s latest tour. Right down to the, perhaps a little insulting, remarks that once they take to the stage “they really perform like much younger men”

The Andersons themselves also make use of the ambiguity of language on more than one occasion. Originally portrayed as a fit of senility, they choose to refer to Alan as “Tom” throughout all their conversations. However, once Alan has the opportunity to sit down with them, they explain to him that after understanding all the dark secrets of Cauldron Lake, they willingly gave up any expectations of being perceived as sane by those not-in-the know. They explain to him that they understand he is not Zane, however, as someone occupying the same role as him, they didn’t bother to make a distinction. This casts Alan as someone that, at least for the Anderson’s purposes, is fulfilling his role as “Tom” rather than himself.

The musicians send Wake to retrieve an old song from their homestead, telling him that it contains a message that will help him battle the darkness. This song is the haunting Ballad “The Poet and the Muse” interpreted by Poets of the Fall. While in universe it explicitly tells the tale about Zane and Jagger, it is important to note that almost all of the language in the song could easily be read as actually being about the Wakes without needing to reinterpret any of it.

Perhaps my favorite play on this motif is not one in dialogue, or even one directly tied to the Andersons, but a manuscript page that can be found in this same chapter as Wake makes his way to the farmstead. Having been separated from his manager Barry, both continue to make their way there separately. As Alan continues picking up prophetic manuscript pages, one of them reads as follows:

“Barry turned when he heard the heavy footsteps and saw the movement: the man-shaped shadow lunged at him from the bushes, an axe held high.

Barry screamed and threw up his hand. The world exploded.”

While most of Wake’s prose is usually quite plain and uncolorful, I always thought that description for being hit with an axe in the head was extremely expressive. Being that the obvious reading of the text. However, once you make your way to Barry’s encounter with the taken, you find that in truth the world exploding was nothing but the Andersons’ pyrotechnic display going off right on top of Barry, blasting away the Taken with sheer light and saving his life. Thus, fulfilling the page’s story in a different way. Yes indeed, it is the “No man born of a woman” style of cheating fate all over again.

The final main theme at play is that proposed by the presence of Dr. Hartman, a psychiatrist specializing in treating creative types at his retreat near Cauldron Lake. Portrayed as an antagonist and obstacle from the word go, and later revealed to have collaborated with a criminal to manipulate Wake’s writing under the guise of knowing the location of his wife, there is every reason to think that the game’s opinions on editors, consultants, and otherwise “meddlers” in the authors process is that of a right old prick.

However, it is worth contrasting this with the presence of Alice and Barry in the story. Both are portrayed to be heavy influences in Wake’s writing, and whilst they respect his boundaries and his personal creativity, I think what seems to set them apart from Wake is what they do not do. 

How can money, advantages, and personal gain not be in the mind when creating in a society such as ours? Lest that you were born with a silver spoon in mouth, we all have to struggle in the job market just for the right of continuing to live and be sheltered. A creative endeavor is but an indulgence to those who need it, and one it’s hard to afford. Indeed, even if you make a rejection of money, fame, and other advantages that creativity may win you at the door of your proverbial studio every time you set out to create, you have allowed it to color your vision. It is this frame of mind, of writing as a means, as a way to obtain an objective that I believe Hartman represents.

Where Barry Wheeler is constantly asking Wake whether he’s been able to write another word, his inquiries often stop at that. Whereas Hartman has made a career for himself out of massaging those words, brushstrokes, and notes out of every troubled artist that comes his way. He forces them out by his own means. When faced with the Dark Presence, his reflexive response was to find a way to manipulate other people’s works and feelings to his own advantage. Whilst he, self-admittedly, “is not a creator” he is quite happy to bring as much of a forceful hand as needed into other people’s chest if it means he can get what he desires.

This, in a way, follows nicely after Thomas Zane’s (Hartman’s mentor) story. Where he once inadvertently wielded the powers of Cauldron Lake to wondrous ends, so much that it led him to inhabit Diver’s Isle as his permanent residence, and though it did cost him, the moment he decided to use this magic consciously and transactional, to bring his lover back, was the real turning point that cost him.

Similarly Hartman’s retreat at Cauldron Lake is adorned with paintings, sculptures, and books dedicated to him, offered to him as gifts, or otherwise works in process by his current in-patients that he subtly checks in with as he walks you through its hallways. 

Contrast this with what concerns Wake and the Andersons’ creative processes. Whilst yes, Alan does want desperately to get his wife back, his method is never to just throw himself at the typewriter and create until he can achieve his ends. This is, in fact, exactly what the Dark Presence encourages him to do to further chaos in the town during his missing week. Instead, Alan is constantly worried about what exactly the story demands of him, about what rings true, about the words he should use, about what plot line might create “good magic” to surpass what he calls Zane’s “bad magic” in his attempt to transactionally exchange art for his wife. 

The Andersons, on the other hand, stand at the opposite extreme of Hartman. Being the rockers brought down by excess, they function as the story’s stand-in for an artist that is written entirely out of passion and self-gratification at the expense of the kind of planning and calculation that, say, might prove beneficial when battling evil forces. As such they end up being its only survivors, but also deeply scarred and in a kind of strange dependent relationship with the Darkness in cauldron lake. A sort of addiction to dealing with larger-than-life experiences.

Alan Wake is a story about creation, but it’s also a story about its perils. It’s a story about what creation demands of you, and perhaps more insidiously what you will come to demand of yourself if you decide to become a creator. It is a game about what happens when you allow your creations to take such a center-stage in your mind that they come to control you more than you do them. 

This much is apparent as much as Alan’s “worth” as a creative and as a person is constantly in question, with everyone and their dog feeling free to opine on his personality and output. Alan’s narration of events dealing out insights into his acuity but also showing us his incompetence for the situation in almost equal measure.

It’s a game about breaking free about what you suppose your “creative vision” is. About rejecting those who you’re compared to, and embracing those you’re actually similar to, about taking inspiration from strange places. About coming to find that your work is not as original, nor as unique as you thought it was.

Despite it all, this is a very unique game, for a very unique audience. It doesn’t stand alone, and it doesn’t have to. Games like Yume Nikki speak to the power that dreams hold over us, and it does so in a similarly heterodox and even-handed way that explores both its horrors and its delights.

If you were to ask me, what is art and creation, I’d tell you that it’s a compulsion. I’m a person that’s never quite come to terms with the real world. Though I study and I learn to better understand it, something about reality has never quite been all “there”. Art in comparison, has in the best of time managed to make me feel real in a way that nothing else has.

The emotions in me evoked by a record have, more often than not, been felt more vividly in my own skin than my own reaction to many personal tragedies and achievements. And I vividly remember many passages of my favorite novels because after reading them, my own life made more sense to myself.

So why do I write? Well, I write because I have to. I’ve never had any doubt of that. Though my body of work is not as prolific as I’d like it to be, rest assured that much like Kafka and Pessoa, when I die some unfortunate sod will see themselves up to the task of flipping through hundreds of pages of original novels, and ramblings about David Bowie, Lucky Star, Math Rock and whatever else has caught my eye in this life.

These are questions I struggle with on a daily basis. And the existence of Alan Wake did, back in my teens, give me a lot of solace in knowing that there was another person that could understand all this inner turmoil that I’d accepted as entirely my own. And not only that, but a person that dealt in the same strange, horror imagery, rock music, and cult movies that I also loved. 

I think there is a lot of value in that. And I think having so many particular narrative ambitions, in conjunction with its strange mix of mechanics and iconography continue to make Alan Wake one of the most unique titles to ever hit shelves even this many years after its release. 

In its final moments, Alan Wake embraces a bittersweet tone that sums up the dilemma of creation very well. Alan begins the process of crafting a story that he believes will free everyone from the dark magic afoot, and yet he does this at the price of sacrificing himself. Far from this being a defeat, it is seen as a taking of agency on his part. And yet, at the same time, he can’t help but reflect on the enormity of the task he has set upon. His famous final words of the base game, referring to the dark magic that influences his creativity being “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean”.

The post Alan Wake Retrospective: The Creator’s Dilemma appeared first on Gamesline.

5. Alan Wake 2

Due to editing and scheduling conflicts a massively long piece I wrote for the first two Alan Wakes still remains to be published, but when I wrote them I had not played this. I now have played through this twice and well? I can say I loved it. I can also say there’s a lot about it I can’t stand. It’s one of the few sequels I know that doubles down on the strengths of the original whilst introducing a brand-new set of weaknesses all its own.

I don’t want the next Remedy game to be like Alan Wake 2, but I want the best parts of this game to inform just about every other game out there, and that is a really cool feeling. I’m definitely not a kid anymore; one of my most-loved games (No More Heroes 2) is just as much if not more flawed than Alan Wake 2, for reasons that are so similar that I might one day write a piece about it. This game, though I love it to bits, has not reached such a warm place in my chest as that title. Perhaps with time it will, love comes much harder to the old, but I also have enough of a far sight to see all the things it does right and I like it a lot.

Seeing Alan Wake 2 learn so much from all the triumphs in Control has left me excitedly looking forward to seeing what a Control 2 could learn from this and even the Max Payne remake despite the heavy loss of James McCaffrey. Consider this a thumbs up and a stay-tuned-for-what-will-surely-be-a-10-plus-page-rant-about-this-game!

4. Honkai: Star Rail 

My relationship with this game has been so turbulent I feel tempted to write a new take on it every patch but for the sake of my sanity and some attempt at cool-headedness I am waiting until the end of Penacony to re-emit a judgement.

I think Belobog might easily be the second or third best story Mihyo has ever written, and beginning to end it does a better job of selling you on this adventure than I could have expected. Since then though, the pace has slowed down to unbearable levels. Though this game is cycling 2 versions faster than Genshin Impact to get to its next location, the reality of the situation is that it sees you waiting one or two patches for a single 90 minutes of story and that just gets tedious to deal with. Couple it with a disappointing development and wrap up to the confusing and unfocused story of the Xianzhou Luofu, and  the constant power creep in terms of enemies and superior units,  and come version 1.3 or 1.4 I was already dreading to log in to do my compulsory weekly SU runs.

The trailblaze continuance mission released in 1.4 that takes you back to Belobog has pretty much single-handedly kept me playing, because it reminded me that those early strengths were not imagined, and that the game could once again pull off the trick.

For the moment, Penacony is juggling some interesting ideas with some characteristically glacial pace and trailers that seem to reveal this game might be much more closely tied to Honkai 3^rd than it originally let on keep me playing, but if this game doesn’t shape up and live up to its early promises it might soon be time for me to drop it and only come back for story content every year.

3. Street Fighter 6

IT’S STREET FIGHTER. I love Street Fighter. I have also been playing Street Fighter since I was like 3. I’m so bored of it. But it’s not V. And that is worth its weight in gold, my friends. We have to congratulate our loved ones when they leave unhealthy stages of their lives. Because we will always need them by our side even if we don’t see them as often.

2. Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising

IT’S STREET FIGHTER. I love Str—I mean IT’S STREET FIGHTER. I LOVE GRANBLUE VERSUS. No, but seriously, this is essentially a very light rework on the old game. It is still one of the most basic fighters released since SF2. It is a lot more aggressive, it is faster, it has more options, but it retains the dead-simplicity and accessibility that really made me love its predecessor. 

Other people, more competitively minded than me, are greatly upset at the balance in this game. Personally, I have never cared much; to me, the highest priority has always been that fighting games feel good to press buttons in, and this aces that with flying colours. The hits still retain that fast-flowing, smooth quality to them. There is hardly an “impact” to them, they have a sensation delicate that battles almost feel like choreographed dances. Everything about the flow of a match just invites a very dynamic back-and-forth that I love and find hard to get sick of.

I might not be too interested in pushing my limits in this, but I will always pop it open on a lazy Sunday and waste a couple of hours doing empty jumps into throws. Fighting games are, despite it all, still cool.

1. Hi-Fi Rush

Hey, did you know I like music? I don’t know, I feel like I don’t talk about it enough. But I really really do love music. I knew I would like this game from the moment I heard about its central conceit and it did not disappoint me once I got my hands on it.

I don’t have the best rhythm in the best of circumstances; trying to juggle attacks from opponents and staying on top of a combo meter in addition to keeping the pulse is an extremely challenging task for me. But it’s also incredibly fun! I had a lot of trouble getting used to the idea of the heavy attack as a half note and the parry being able to work in sixteenth notes. And whilst I think some of the UI could be better designed to aid in its main concept, this is the kind of challenge I am always happy to fail and keep retrying again and again.

We’ve had conversations on this site about its presentation, its story, its use of music, its compositional conceits and its cultural influences and I think it’s all there. While I can’t claim to be totally won over by Chai and friends, I also would never claim to dislike them. They are one of the best casts for the kind of light-hearted, cartoon-style adventure that this game is going for, which is in my opinion a tone that games don’t attempt enough these days.I love games that apply rhythm mechanics to other arenas. I loved Crypt of the Necrodancer as soon as I saw its trailers. And I loved this as soon as I heard about it. The path to my heart is as simple as a 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

The post Walker’s Top 5 Games of 2023 appeared first on Gamesline.

The justifications the community for this are usually alongside a posture I tend to subscribe to: in a faithful simulation of a one-on-one fight, it is not only expected but fair that the more experienced fighter takes the victory. Make the skill-gap wide enough, and it should surprise no one that the veteran dominates the bout so definitively as to basically make the other party’s efforts meaningless. But something about this perspective does bug me.

In actuality fighting games are designed assuming both players are of similar, if not necessarily equal, skill so that there can be a meaningful back and forth. Obviously, something has failed if a match is so lopsided that the more experienced player can negate any struggle their opponent puts forward. This is, in most cases, an unintended experience; Usually a product of bad matchmaking and low population that makes finding a proper match difficult. It’s not expected that newcomers will jump straight into the deepest side of the pool and drown lest they laboriously train to stand a chance. 

All the training and practice that is associated with fighting games is not necessarily the meaning of them, but rather the medium through which you can reach the actual point of them. Through practising your offence and defence you will be better prepared to respond or force a response out of your opponent. Even in a fight of complete beginners, whoever can figure out things like standing up to block jumping attacks or teching a throw will meaningfully alter the proverbial “conversation” these two specific players are having, necessarily forcing the opponent to accept a considerable disadvantage or find an equally basic but equally-novel-to-them mechanic that will continue altering the dynamic of the fight. 

At first glance, fighting games are not that different from other competitive games and sports, such as tennis or even chess in this respect. Sure, walking in not knowing anything but the basic rules might work just fine with your friends on a free weekend, but any player with enough practice will quickly dispatch those who mosey in once a month. However, where sports have an overwhelming physical component that makes a truly “fair” fight difficult given the huge advantage that a difference in height or build can be, and where board games take place entirely within turn-based systems that only reward strategy and game-knowledge, fighting games find a happy medium between both. 

Fighting games exist in the moment, in the physical and mental reality of being asked to perform the role of a formidable opponent for another player. Even in titles where the much maligned motion inputs have been done away in favour of supposedly “friendlier” alternatives, the capacity to scramble in moments of high-tension remains a vital skill. Should you let your nerves overwhelm you after a surprise, defeat is sure to follow. And so, we practise. As an apocryphal quote that my atrophied mind always attributes to Call of Duty says: “Beginners train until they can get it right. Professionals train until they can’t get it wrong”.

Theory and strategy are also a vital component. Should a training-mode aficionado that has done nothing but optimise their combos clash with a player that has done nothing but pushing far into online rankings using blocking, sweeping, and throwing, the former is likely to just not be able to show off their training when faced with an opponent that has gotten this far learning to not let themselves be open to a massive combo. Though admittedly, this scenario is far-fetched because in most cases, a player with the skill to pull off the most difficult combos will, in all likelihood, have played enough of the game to know how to open up an opponent somewhat reliably. Because in fighting games, playing is the actual most important way of practising.

Practice modes are a necessary inclusion in fighting games precisely because of how important it is to be able to perform off-the-cuff in incredibly tense situations. You are supposed to step back, slow down, and work on your weaknesses. But the real practice and experience you need will always lie in the actual doing. While zeroing in on problems and polishing them to consistency is vital for any skill that requires dexterity, you can never stitch together enough slow-practices to create a whole skillset. To actually improve, you need to do the task, and in a one-to-one scenario that means fighting against opponents you will be losing to a lot. 

In all of these ways, I find that fighting games are most analogous to playing music. Which might seem like an odd comparison given that it is not generally a competitive endeavour, let alone a game. But it is something that you “play” and a song with an ensemble that refuses to slow down for stragglers does have the same sense of stakes that one might associate with a video game that can be won or lost. When picking up an instrument with the intention to perform a song, the “objective” is to play every note accurately and on the beat, and mistakes really are not forgiven. To put it in terms my fellow gamers will understand: playing real music is like always playing Guitar Hero on expert and aiming for the max score.  It requires both knowledge of the instrument and the piece, as well as an amount of dexterity and engagement with the moment-to-moment changes in the physicality of playing music. 

Music isn’t generally performed in opposition to anything, other than a poetic against this-or-that. Rock music couldn’t actually be performed against Bush because what would that even mean? Finding speakers powerful enough to bring down the White House would probably make every attendant’s eyeballs explode from the sound pressure. But it is performed in reaction to other people. In the same way one would learn to perform perfect blocks about one opponent over a long set in BlazBlue, one learns to play different chords on guitar when you’re playing with a pianist so you don’t drown them out. 

“The pocket” is a mythical and ethereal realm, murmurs of which are passed down by ancient jazz musicians. It refers to the perfect timing in which the bass and the kick drum attack together to create a huge *THUMP* in the piece and really emphasise the beat. Crucially though, this pocket is not exactly synchronous. You can’t just pluck the bass string exactly at the same time as the drum, this often actually leads to a muddy sound. Rather, the task of finding the pocket is individual and personalised for each drummer and bassist and depends on the tone of the latter, the groove of the former, and often even considerations such as what other instruments are in the ensemble. 

The pocket can, very easily, be analogised to adapting to your opponent’s habits over the course of a match, such as learning who you can reliably expect to refuse to block during wake-up for a brutal counter-punishment, or get down to muscle memory when to tech their attempts at a grab. Developing the good instincts for a given opponent, just like finding the pocket, comes down less to a matter of exact science, and more to observational skills, adaptability, and just a dash of psychology and social skills. 

One learns new mechanics in fighting games to stay in the fight for longer, by finding more things you can do in any given situation you just get to play more. As you gain mastery of this, what you will learn is that the moment-to-moment gameplay of a fighting game is little more than throwing out moves, expecting specific responses from your opponent. You wake up with an invincible move when you expect to be attacked, you do not attack right away and instead go for a counter if you expect a wake-up DP, and so on. These exchanges usually last a few seconds at most and either end with the fighters being separated or one of them getting hit. A player can then go into a combo, try and maintain an offensive position if they can’t convert, or just drop the ball altogether and eat a wake-up shoryu to the face like a total stupid idiot. 

Ask any fighting game player and they’ll tell you how fun it is when a fight is so close anyone could have taken it. These close encounters happen when both players have not just a similar amount of skill, but game plans that match each other’s. When one is on the offensive, the other has studied what was needed to keep him out as long as possible. When they are on the defensive, their opponent has studied enough of the game’s defensive options to stay in the offence. This kind of “conversation” through the medium of moves in a video game is, indeed, competitive and will have to yield out a winner in the end. But until such a moment, and remembering that this is still a game (one where even the possibility of a sprained ankle has been eliminated) you have both agreed to do your best to make this match fun for the other. 

Similarly, music is always a response to other players. Humans do not play music perfectly to a metronome, they naturally slow down and speed up. A band that plays well together is not a band of 4 people individually playing perfectly to a click track, it is a band that plays well to each other. To do that, you try to master individual elements, like playing at specific tempos, effect configurations that work well with the other band member’s tones, and even whole parts of a song. You can then get together and use these elements you have all practised apart to respond to each other in a conversation, this time with musical notes instead of video game moves. And you do this expecting certain responses from the other performers. The actual skills lie in adapting your musical vocabulary to the reality of each other’s performance less so than in the rote memorisation.  This is not a competitive endeavour, but in the end, for the next 3 or 4 minutes you have agreed to do your best to make everybody else’s time fun and sound the best together.

Even the nature of the average engagement is similar, fighting game matches take an average of 90 seconds to 3 minutes to play out. Whilst most popular music will have you performing pieces roughly 2 to 4 minutes on average. This means that on a psychological level, they will be processed as similar types of engagement, being highly demanding sets of play that take your full attention for roughly 3 minutes. 

It is through all these similarities in the way one actually engages with fighting games and music that we can use one to understand the appeal of the other.  I think everyone can, to some extent, understand a love of music. Whether it be film soundtracks, anime music (which is often just licensed mainstream Japanese music but that’s a conversation for another time), The Shape of Jazz to Come, or London Calling, everyone has that one piece of music they love to exist in. They enjoy the space of mind it puts them on far past the point of knowing its every part. 

When a lot of people try to make the jump from listener to performer, they sometimes find the activity of performing not as fun. Requiring too much effort for the satisfaction they get out of it. It stands to reason that those who stick with it do it for the simple reason that this activity that requires a lot of effort to engage in is fun in and of itself. It is fun to play. 

This is, of course, the be-all-and-end-all of video games in the popular imagination. That they are something that is fun to engage in, it is a manner of play designed entirely to derive enjoyment. This is of course, somewhat reductive, not to quote the endless works that have been written pondering how much the “fun” can be taken out of game in the service of highly specific artistic statements. Games aren’t always fun, sometimes they can be meditative or somewhat uncomfortable. But the core, the soul of the medium, is always the fun of turning a Goomba into a really gross looking pancake. 

The way people approach fighting games can easily be roughly mapped into these two categories as well. With a large portion of players enjoying watching and engaging with the theory of games, far and above actually playing them, often finding the manual skill or mental load of them too much for their taste. Whilst others cannot get enough of the rush that comes from being given no quarter in a game where, by all rights, they stand just as much of a chance at victory as the other person. 

None of this is meant to imply these two hobbies are especially linked in any way, or that these similarities are unique. The way one would play the same part of a song repeatedly just to practise transitioning from one section to the next is more or less the same way one would program a dummy in a fighting game to do an attack in order to practise its punishment. And these both are very similar to how one would practise the same turn whilst learning to drive. It is an aspect of mastering any skill. Just like music can be incredibly similar to dancing due to the timing and mostly pre-composed nature of both arts with improvisation according to your partners. Just how fighting games will share similarities with actual fighting sports such as fencing.

And of course, all games tend towards optimisation. Just like chess has recorded its centuries of strategies and famous openings, fighting gamers perfect option selects and study frame data, and musicians will study the theory of how some notes go together and how to draw specific strange noises out of their instruments such as prepared piano or double handed guitar tapping. 

Rather the central idea behind this piece is that human experiences are similar to each other. In that similarity we can find ways to understand each experience better as a result. Video game players often stick only to learning and analogising themselves with movies and more traditional styles of games. The former makes sense as they share a myriad of similarities in presentation, and the latter can trace a direct influence in the earliest moments on the medium. 

However, the medium has evolved in such a way that it can encompass games as varied as DDR, Ace Attorney, Minecraft, and Street Fighter without issue. And that requires an extension of our vocabulary to understand these modes of play. Would it be such a controversial example to say that an on-rail-shooter would have much to learn from the actual rides on rails at an amusement park like Disneyland? We even see a direct line of dialogue between the current trend of escape rooms in the real world, and games that simulate the same type of experience such as the Zero Escape franchise. 

With this in mind, the way society engages with fighting games makes a lot of sense. While everyone in the world likes music, not everyone is willing to put up with what is necessary to make music. This makes the amount of people on the spectator end far outnumber those on the performing side. Similarly, while fighting games remain iconic of the medium —take for example the fact that the game awards still feel pressured to have them as a main category for credibility’s sake— player counts are just not that high. While a fightstick remains as visually distinct as a Les Paul guitar to the average person, that same person is likely to only know 1 or 2 people who own either one if that.

And yet, it also makes their persistence through unpopularity and a die-hard fanbase make sense as well. Just like underground music persists through this day, with bands distributing their own CDs and printing pressings of a hundred records at most, fighting game locals with less than a hundred attendants can be found throughout the world. The passion that the fans of these disciplines feel towards getting to actually do these activities sees them pulling off crazy feats of organisation and logistics just to gather the few who would be interested nearby in the same spot. 

But where I think this thesis works best of all is in answering the core question behind all of those guides and instructions of how to break into the genre: Why would you do all of this just to play a video game? And the answer is because it’s really fun to try really hard, to the best of your physical and mental abilities, to not make a single mistake for 3 minutes. If the activity itself is fun, if the result is gratifying, and the process of improvement is kinetically pleasing, people will work for days and weeks just to have a few moments of undisputed greatness. And really, what is the appeal of a real fight if not that same kind of thrill seeking? The argument for this version of fighting is that I would very much like to keep my teeth.

The post Street Fighting Man: On Fighting Games and Music appeared first on Gamesline.

“Why would you include things in a game only for them to go away?” I asked myself “What if I started playing later and I want to get the outfit?” I added, like a kid feeling the sinking realisation that the ticket trading economy at arcades might not be in his favour.  I was, of course, completely missing that evoking these fears is a big part of the draw that developers see in including limited-time events in the first place.

Much like being respected by my peers and responsible financial decisions however, my view on limited time events was seismically changed by my impromptu romance with Hoyoverse’s Genshin Impact. Before I knew it, I’d developed traditions and expectations around the many seasonal flavours that the game had gotten me accustomed to. I was genuinely disappointed when, during the game’s third winter, Albedo didn’t show up to be cryptic as shit and hand me a sword like a shady but better looking Santa Claus. And despite going through one of the worst summers of my life at the time, the second visit to the game’s summer islands was a genuinely nostalgic reprieve to me. It even managed to inject into me some summery vibes that I am usually completely incompatible with as one that detests both the heat and the sun.  

Initially, I thought about writing another gushing piece about how one of my favourite games had managed to get my hyper-individualistic, strange, and reclusive ass to go along with such normal things as seasonal celebrations. But, an eternal social outcast coming around to the holiday spirit when it’s presented in a friendly context and allowed to engage in their own time, while listening to obscure Japanese math rock, is hardly surprising or interesting. 

Part of the big hook of Genshin Impact is that the wonderful world of Teyvat is little more than an Earth coated in its own mythology. Whatever isn’t actually based in the real world is usually borrowed from the myths of the areas it’s drawn inspiration from.  That’s what makes it so appealing to history nerds like myself, and it’s what allows it to use its flavour text to make poignant statements about the real world, while allowing the more explicit storytelling to retain a veneer of lightheartedness and complete fictitiousness.

Given this, it’s also somewhat of a foregone conclusion that if you enjoy Genshin Impact’s core, you will likely enjoy the events. What makes the limited-time events enjoyable in Teyvat is what makes events enjoyable in the real world. It’s a change of pace, an opportunity to visit locales you don’t get to as often as you would like, and to participate in fun and silly activities with people you like for its own sake. And though they do occasionally fumble on the implementation, they are generally a complement to the aesthetic and theming of each area. With the Chinese area being almost entirely  defined by its world-famous new year’s celebration, and the Japanese area having celebrations based on traditional kabuki plays and cultural icons like the Rokkasen. 

But not every game is Genshin Impact and other titles wouldn’t benefit as much for such a simple approach to the idea. Games such as WoW that follow a similar approach of simply replicating real world holidays with a few new ones sprinkled in, Azaroth not being Earth in any kind of explicit or strongly allegorical way does take away some of that charm, and makes the whole idea feel a little bit more like an invasion of the real world into a virtual space, rather than an enrichment of the same. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does exist in a different aesthetic wavelength. Sort of like having the characters of star wars celebrate Halloween –and no I did not mention that other holiday because I didn’t want to load in negative connotations thank you very much. 

The other dominant flavour of time-limited events is the promotional tie-in. This is how I first ran into the idea in a tangible way (video games aren’t actually tangible but you know what I mean) with the Devil May Cry outfits in Monster Hunter: World. The idea is quite simple really, two things you really like in the best of cases, or a thing you like and a thing you hate in the worst of them, briefly come together in the forms of outfits, playable characters, special consumables or other goodies. Examples of this are as plentiful as they are variable in quality: Ranging From the Yo-kai Watch and Final Fantasy XIV collaboration, to Cup Noodles and Final Fantasy XV, Hatsune Miku in Fall Guys, and Asuka Langley Shikinami in Honkai Impact 3^rd.

If you look at games from a more product-like approach as opposed to my pansy artistic lens it could be argued this is the true and original form of the limited time event, taking inspiration from the likes of limited-edition Coke cans and movie-inspired popcorn flavours. And they even share a lineage within video games themselves, as crossovers have been the basis of venerable series such as Super Smash Bros. and Super Robot Wars, as well as a tradition within series like Street Fighter and Soul Calibur.

In the best of cases these, just like the holiday themed events, are a short bit of light-hearted fun that can unite fanbases and introduce new people to both of the participant series. The fact that they often introduce continuity issues and can violate some rules of the setting, timeline, and characterisation of the participating stories often makes rotating them out a sensible option to retain a sense of cohesion within the game at hand. Taking after TV crossovers and non-canonical anime movies, they are best enjoyed as a bit of fun for dyed-in-the-wool fans, but unessential for the casual, and often prejudicial to the work at large should you take them too seriously. 

In all of these situations, I still think it’s quite —to use an academic term— sucky, if event-themed rewards and goodies are impossible to attain going forward. It’s especially atrocious if event plotlines or gameplay mechanics are removed entirely to never be seen again. Though this is a problem with all aspects of ongoing games, in a virtual world with no scarcity or shelf space to worry about, there is little excuse to not make these events return during the appropriate season, or at specific times of the year dedicated for event reruns. And titles like Honkai: Star Rail show how easy it is to allow you to simply access events from a menu when you so choose.

Though the permanent loss of any of these events would be a great fault, at least with tie-in events there is an argument to be made that many games would be made less effective and overall worse in their storytelling were the events freely accessible all the time alongside the normal story. Plus brand management being what it is, and contracts of collaboration being so complicated often cause keeping these around to be unfeasible from a legal standpoint.

The final variant of limited time events are those that by their very construction would be detrimental as a permanent fixture. These can be anything from XP bonuses which would mess up progression; to the addition of game modes that the developers have no intention of keeping for a brief time, like the spontaneous inclusion of Grifball in older Halo titles; and anything else you can come up with. These often tend to be pretty insubstantial and for the most part function as a way for hardcore players to get some extra goodies and catch-up mechanics for more casual players, or a way to have casual fun within the game’s mechanics without committing to long-term maintenance and balance. Though it can sound cynical, they can actually make a gaming experience a lot more fun. Not all player-retention strategies are macabre. 

When I first started playing Dead by Daylight somewhat actively, it was undergoing its fifth anniversary celebrations and as a result, I got stocked on a bunch of diverse perks for all the killers I wanted to try right away. Consumables that would have taken me weeks or months to get at my low level were in plentiful supply, which allowed me to play the game with a lot more freedom than I otherwise would have. 

Due to how light on substance these events can be, there are often no requests to keep them around, and no pain is felt once they disappear. Though it does avoid the bad feelings associated with more engaging limited time events, they also rarely tend to be that curated or memorable to begin with.

Like all art, the best way to make a limited-time event is by asking yourself how the format of your work enhances the experience. In this case, what sort of experiences can your games deliver that would be improved by being tied to a temporal component? 

Shaking up the status quo of your title for a while only to bring it back once the timer expires is a simple solution. Small, mould-breaking changes and additions that won’t upset anyone due to being temporary are an easy and intuitive response. If you don’t want to see Yo-kai in your Eorzea, fret not because soon enough they’ll largely disappear from the world again. 

The seasons, meant to pass by definition, bringing specific celebrations and activities with them just makes sense. There is a reason why every culture on earth has seasonal celebrations and why it was one of the first things we thought to include into our video games once we could actually spend meaningful amounts of time in virtual worlds. 

Working in time as a limitation seems like the other immediate answer. Giving players a limited amount of time to reach an objective as a collective or allocating specific time slots during which the missions of an event can be undertaken to give appropriate pacing.  However, this approach would double down on all the downsides of a time-limited event as a gamble on the potential for a more powerful experience, and I just don’t think most developers would want to risk it going wrong. 

Pokemon Sun and Moon actually tried making time a mechanic for its events, albeit with very low stakes, by implementing “global missions”. However, the first two ended in failure and saw plenty of headlines calling attention to that. A little bit more research taught me that they were eventually tuned and from the third global mission onwards they were all a success, but I still find it a difficult gamble for a developer to take. If nothing else it shows that pulling it off requires a lot of finesse and careful consideration of players’ behaviour. 

The impermanence of events also makes them colour the experience in a way that other kinds of activities simply don’t. While there are those wild souls that will ignore anything but the options that catch their interest, most of us will see ourselves drawn to the little icons with a clock ticking down and at least allow it to inform our use of time in-game even if it’s not an active pursuit. And there is something kind of sad and annoying about allowing these hectic time-constraints to become ever more present in a medium that used to run almost completely on the consumer’s clock and not the provider’s.

I also do worry, like always, about events becoming an accepted patch to failures of a game at launch. While Genshin Impact’s story can be understood perfectly without all the events that are lost, the reality is that more than a few members of the cast remain ancillary additions without the characterisation provided by events. Which just makes it feel inelegant and more rough around the edges than it really should when that creative work has already been done and released. What is more, getting accustomed to a lack of permanency in our games does open the gate to more developers simply locking away entire pieces of their game once they decide the time has come like Bungie has with Destiny. Which has left us in a ridiculous reality where content that people have actually paid for before is just not around anymore on the whims of the developers.

But I would like to temper my criticisms somewhat. Games-preservation is important. I believe that wholeheartedly. And though I felt tempted to write sentences like “it is inexcusable when events can’t be replayed” the reality of the matter is that, though important, they are still just games. While my beloved Genshin Impact has a bad habit of making incredibly important elements of the setting only available in time-limited events, it remains a coherent experience without them. And though preserving our cherished memories and making gaming history available to all remains a meaningful endeavour, there is not that much that is actually lost when you aren’t able to partake in time-limited events long gone. 

While we have a voice and a way to make developers hear us, we should keep asking for ways to preserve these experiences if they are valuable to us. But just like spending an entire season in the hospital, or skipping out on Halloween during a year when you didn’t feel up to it, life continues on unimpeded without them. Games, like holidays, and like the colours of leaves in autumn, can make our lives a lot more enjoyable even if they aren’t permanent. Let’s not forget that even our very earth won’t be around forever. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun while it lasts.

The post The Number Won’t Stop Ticking Down! – Limited Time Events in Games appeared first on Gamesline.

The dinner-table pitch for the game is quite simple, though not enough to tell you if the game might be up your alley. The story is sold to you as a crazy new dating reality show where failing to find a partner will see you end up dead. “Most men would kill to trade places with you,” says the host of the show as she tries to sell you on the fantasy of having the freedom to choose from and socialise with five beautiful young women much as the Steam description does. 

Initial impressions were extremely disappointing, with host-and-producer Kat being so crass and nonchalant about the whole ordeal, including your own death.  Hand-behind-it-all, Damian, brings some even more choice vocabulary and imagery to the point that 10 minutes in I was already regretting my choice to give this game an opportunity and thinking I had been suckered into playing someone’s bad, trashy, and completely average sexual fantasy disguised as something more unique. Thankfully these fears were off the mark, as the whole repulsive first scene is meant to put you on edge about this reality-show tirade, and the characters’ disregard for good taste is completely deliberate. 

As I worked my way through greeting the main cast for the first time, I found my curiosity won over by Scarlett. During a brief sequence in the library, you can find her hiding a book behind a magazine and making an attempt to play the ditzy bombshell type for the cameras. However, after making a seemingly honest connection and having her offer to show you the book she’s actually reading, her clumsiness gets the better of her and she drops both it and the magazine only to reveal a third magazine underneath and running away in shame. 

This simple spin on a common trope got a good laugh out of me and garnered enough goodwill to keep me playing —at least long enough to get me speaking with Scarlett again and understand why she would pull such a ridiculous trick. This experience can describe the charm of Find Love or Die Trying in microcosm. Though it’s not revolutionary, and it won’t blow anyone’s minds, it never plays out quite like you’d expect, or goes for the low-hanging fruits, knowing just what kind of new spin to use in order to get a good laugh or a concerned gasp out of you. 

While I would not like to spoil a fairly tight and well-paced 5-hour experience by revealing all of its secrets in a few paragraphs, be aware that everything is not quite as it appears. References to the current state of the world and nightmares hinting at the past behind your requisite visual-novel-main-character amnesia have more substance to them than you might initially think, and most things that seem odd about your housemates do so for a reason. Most. 

The writing really is where Find Love or Die Trying shines. Being such a DIY project, most of the music comes from incompetech’s venerable and bountiful royalty free library. And though the in-game sprites look really good, a couple (and I do mean a couple) of the CGs look a little off-model. Even though the main illustration that you’ll see everywhere from the title-screen to its little promotion on steam and social media looks quite good, you can easily see it bears designs that would still be altered a tad as the rest of the game continued development.

Technically, there is not much to discuss on the gameplay side as it is a pretty by-the-books VN with minimal choice. But I do have to commend with extreme emphasis Find Love or Die Trying’s robust accessibility features. From text-to-speech for the visually impaired, to colour fixing for the colourblind —of which I suppose I am one, but I never feel a need to use those options— to the most important to me: A fine tuning bar to set the exact speed of the auto scroll for the text. GOD, believe me that it is completely out of my endless mercy that I will not subject you to a whole paragraph of me throwing praises upon it, dear reader. But this is the only visual novel where I have been able to set my ideal auto speed, and never felt a need to press a button to make things go faster for the entirety of the experience. 

Find Love or Die Trying is everything you would want out of a debutant in any art-form. Strong on the fundamentals, very literate on the tropes of its medium, plays to its strengths, doesn’t neglect its weaknesses, and though this game doesn’t make a particularly consequential statement there is enough there to let you know that Cho-Wong is a thoughtful person who writes from a human perspective. It’s easy to digest popcorn entertainment, with more than a couple surprises thrown in and it left enough of a good impression on me to want to write something on it and let more people know about it as a way to give something back for those five hours of fun.

The post Ready for Prime Time – Find Love or Die Trying Review appeared first on Gamesline.

No, you don’t have to play the previous titles to understand anything going on here, and in fact I wouldn’t recommend you try to do any background research. Not only because no one should try to fit more than two gacha titles in their life – do as I say not as I do, kids – but also because this game’s gear and progression systems take so much after Genshin Impact that it might get a little bit tiring unless you are just enamoured by that game’s design. Damage equations, gear systems, general build structures, and even the kind of flavour text you can expect each unit and piece of gear to have all follow the studio’s previous title to a T.

The biggest difference between these two is, of course, setting and genre. Honkai: Star Rail is a space-faring adventure by way of the truest and most tested genre of all: the JRPG. Taking on a classic odyssey format, you will visit small sections of frozen planets, research stations, and even entire societies that now live amidst giant space-faring vessels. All the while standing with three of your friends in a row and respectfully taking turns smacking enemies.

There is no real science to this gameplay, however, for the most part the only concern during a battle is to appropriately time your healing and to manage your skill points that are shared across the whole party. Much like in Persona, most of the time you will find yourself doing nothing but hammering away with the most effective move while using supports to stay alive turn after turn.. While it is flashy, and even the most complex JRPG combat systems don’t tend to be much more sophisticated, it is still only one step above barebones.

Perhaps the greatest strategizing required of you is building a proper team with the short move list of each unit, and following the game’s strict requirement that you engage with its elemental weakness system to break the enemies’ guards, lest each encounter last a lifetime. This is unfortunately where the gacha system might make it so some players have an incredibly tough time with certain encounters if you just don’t have a good fire, or ice, or spaghetti and rice damage dealer. It is fun to play around with creative team lineups if you get some good guys and gals like I have, but it is easy to imagine how their absence might make even some story encounters a bit of a pain.

The real charm of Hoyoverse’s titles is in the writing, the visual design and the music however, and I’m happy to say this game brings all their usual strengths in spades. Thanks to more sophisticated rigging for every model, and a larger variety of builds among these, even the most casual conversations in this game are more dynamic and flow more smoothly than Genshin Impact’s.

The sound design is outstanding. The music, as is customary, draws from a dozen different traditions and styles, albeit with more of a metal spice this time around which is quite welcome. Though as usual the soundtrack ranges from Canon in D, to folksy pop once you board the train with Take the Journey and the usual dozen arpeggiator synths that every Japanese game has to use any time machinery is shown on-screen by law.  And true to the usual Honkai Impact 3rd style quite a few of these actually have lyrics. For its part the voice acting is extremely solid, within the ranges of anime style games. If you can’t stand English-language speakers overacting in this manner I see little that should change your opinion, especially given that a lot of these fine folks are being put to the task of pronouncing Mandarin semi-convincingly for the first time in their careers. It is a nice silver lining however, that the improved lip syncing for every language does help it mesh much better with the models’ performances. 

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of the writing it’s hard to ever feel like you really get to know any of the locales you arrive at. From the Herta Space Station where the geniuses of the galaxy conduct their research, to the Luofu ship of the nomadic Xianzhou Alliance, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you are doing the galactic equivalent of popping in for a couple of days to ride the touristic buses and then continue on your way. The usual order of operations is: you arrive, solve a local problem while blazing through a couple locales, then leave without looking back. The fact that these are self-contained areas connected by elevators in the best of cases and just a loading screen at worst makes it so these places exist more as their own highlight reels (albeit very beautiful and memorable ones) than as fully breathing worlds along your journey.

In all other aspects the writing is surprisingly thoughtful as is characteristic of Hoyoverse, indulging in all their usual topics such as academic malpractice, the role of deities in a world of ever-advancing science, and the many ways in which humans decide to interpret the wills of those who came before. All the while, it’s doing the Genshin trick of leaving the more heady stuff on papers scattered throughout every nook and cranny. Meanwhile, cutscenes keep it light, fun, and accessible, in part thanks to not trying to adopt a time-appropriate affectation as they do in Genshin, which gives the dialogue a snappy and irreverent tone that makes this game genuinely funny more often than not. And of course, the main plot sees you convoluting a way to come to blows with a monster the size of a mountain by the end of each world because this is a JRPG.

This title’s relationship with Honkai Impact 3^rd seems to be mostly informed by the same core ideas of societies’ response to seismic adversity and what being at the forefront of such a response does to individuals, how those left out of the coordinated response form lifes at the periphery and so on. To fit that motif, many of that game’s cast has been imported into this new universe, living in different circumstances whilst largely retaining their core traits. It’s an interesting idea, but until these versions are more developed it’s hard to say if this is a little more than a party trick to make you smile when your favourite 3^rd character shows up in a new form in Star Rail.

Hoyoverse’s titles tend to start slow. No matter how they start, it usually takes two or three years for their more interesting ideas and best design to come to light. This was incredibly clear after Honkai Impact’s massive leap in every regard, and Genshin’s storytelling has only begun to get more focused as it finally begins to acknowledge all the things it teased back in its 1.0 patch.

But experience and my increasing forays into honest-to-god adult responsibilities have taught me that one can’t actually just review a Gacha game like one would a regular game. Just like MMOs or Fighting Games there are genre-specific considerations that one has to take in mind. Throughout most of this review I have adopted a tone of voice that obviates and tries to work around the gacha as an inconvenience, but by doing that I’m not only doing a disservice to you the reader, but ignoring large parts of the games both virtues and flaws. Games with a gacha model are games you are supposed to play daily, or close to it, if you are to make the most of them. To pick one up and end up really falling in love with it is picking up a long-term task in a way that’s fairly different from other ongoing titles. 

I still remember a conversation I had with a stranger while making small-talk over phone games wherein he tried to sell me on Blue Archive. Gracefully ignoring the ten-ton side-eye I shot his way upon the mention, his opening salvo was “You barely have to play it at all” which made me write him off as a crab person for the remainder of the conversation. I bring up this anecdote not to humiliate this anonymous man in a public venue but so that you may flay my prostrated figure with the appropriate force when I tell you, with no hint of irony, that I was relieved to find out that in a pinch, keeping up with Star Rail most days is a matter of clicking 3 or 4 buttons and letting the game’s autobattling feature take over for 8 to 20 minutes depending on your build. And at the weekly level all that’s required of you is a few playthroughs of the bonus mode Simulated Universe if you want to keep up with a modicum of rolling currency and equipment rewards. These additional playthroughs should all in all add up to 90 minutes every week most of which can also be done automatically.

Though this man was actually a crustacean masquerading as a human, it wasn’t for those reasons. The plain and simple truth is sometimes you don’t want to play the same game you’ve been playing for months for 20 minutes to do your dailies. And the harsher truth is that sometimes you can’t afford to sit out for 20 minutes. In those moments features like Honkai: Star Rail’s autobattling and easy to fulfill objectives, or the fact that most days you can simply click on buttons to have the game spend all your stamina for you in Honkai Impact 3rd is are quality of live features I thanked the heavens for like no other when I had to travel out of my home for a week for personal reasons or when I had to cram hard for semester finals. And the flipside to this is, of course, you are free to take charge and play all these instances if you so desire. Star Rail even includes completely optional daily missions if you feel like spending 4 to 6 minutes reading through a joke-of-the-day storyline instead of leaving it all to the AI. 

Though the daily obligation of gachas is born from the need to log in to keep up with upgrades and premium currency to obtain new characters, it’s easy to see how such a format would appeal to more writerly types such as Fate’s own Kinonoko Nasu or Mihoyo’s whole oeuvre. Let us not forget that works like The Portrait of Dorian Grey or The Count of Monte Cristo were originally written as serials before being compiled into their novel forms in which they can be read today. A story read over time is a very different experience than one read in a few sessions. But it’s also keeping in mind that a large majority of the story, in fact what will end up being the bulk of it, does not currently exist and you need to decide for yourself whether to take on such a long-term-commitment with such an uncertain outcome.

As of the time of writing the game is smack-dab in the middle of its 1.1 version, with events doing a pretty poor job of varying up the gameplay but a formidable one at fleshing out locations and characters with new storylines. Already addressing some complaints like allowing you to explore new locations in places already visited and showing more interactions between the cast when not in the middle of a JRPG crisis.  But, like any gacha event, each one of these is at most 2 hours of drip fed entertainment before you are returned to the wasteland of stamina management and material grinding. It comes with the territory.

I was initially skeptical of the idea of a turn-based JRPG in the format of a gacha game, but this has proven to be a winning formula for titles such as the monolithic Fate/Grand Order and Granblue Fantasy games, and now that the studio that first eased me into the format has thrown their hat in the ring, I can safely say I understand the appeal. Though it might not do anything as unique as Genshin Impact to set itself apart from the rest of the mobile and gacha scene, leading to many endemic annoyances being more apparent, what is here is high quality and in many ways more refined. 

Honkai: Star Rail’s initial versions are an incredibly solid foundation for what might come ahead, though it also seems to leave little ground to grow much more beyond the realm of a traditional JRPG. By now you should know what you’re getting into when you pick up one of these. As for myself, I need to stop writing this review and go do my dailies, thank you very much.   

The post Old Genres, Modern Formats, & Futuristic Travels – Honkai: Star Rail Review appeared first on Gamesline.

We have an indepth conversation to finally close the book on Bayonetta 3, John imported a copy of Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher which leads to an interested discussion of regional differences in titles. Signalis is a game about girls that are robots and also Zombies and Solon has a lot of good things to say about it! We talk about recent developments in the tech industry, and consider Kojima’s disclosure that several companies have been trying to acquire Kojima Productions.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo,  @john_michonski, @ChorbySP, and @Mavsplainiamania

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, Hipcast, direct download, or listen below!

The post VGCC Episode 418: Sonic and Amy Talk About Death appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a John and Maverick show for episode 412 of the podcast! We talk stupid news, GTA 6 leaks, Splatoon 3, Splatfest, John continues to enjoy Xenoblade 3, has mixed thoughts on Soul Hackers 2, Among Us and Hololive have a new collaboration out, GameStop is giving out copies of Babylon’s Fall, Deltarune’s Spamton makes some noise, EVGA and Nvidia split, Maverick takes us deeper into the world of Honkai Impact, and Twitch is now regulating gambling content.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo,  @john_michonski, and @mavsplaniamania

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, Hipcast, direct download, or listen below!

The post VGCC Episode 412: Vtubers are Sus appeared first on Gamesline.

As always, you can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on Twitter @VGChooChoo,  @Mavsplaniamania, and @john_michonski

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on iTunes, and tell a friend about the show! If you want to send in questions send them to our ask box at videogamechoochoo.tumblr.com/ask.

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Subscribe via iTunes, Hipcast, direct download, or listen below!

The post VGCC Episode 405: The Evo Show appeared first on Gamesline.