Friday, November 27, 2015
The Witcher 3 is done, and The Old Hunters is too hard. Also, Chibi-Robo!
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Welcome back to Coffeecoloa, and
happy (belated) Thanksgiving!
Before
getting to my usual game stuff, I just want to take a minute to express thanks
for everything that I have - my wonderful family, a source of income, a warm
place to live, enough food to eat… things like these aren’t a given, and not
everyone is fortunate enough to have them. I mean, I know a lot of people who struggle in just getting by, and here I am, lucky enough to spend time
playing videogames and writing about them… It's an absolute luxury to be sure,
and I'm very aware of that. And I am thankful.
Anyway, I
also hope that you have good things
in your life, and I hope this holiday was a happy one for you. Now, on with
the show!
>Witcher 3 The last time I talked about it, I
was just getting back into it after deciding that Bethesda's latest was too boring
to stick with, and in the time that's passed since then, I actually completed
the game. It seemed like it was going to go on for infinity at times, but there
actually is an end to the main
storyline, and after wrapping up the entire game, I can say that I'm genuinely
glad I came back to it.
Overall, I
think the writing was outstanding… Probably the best writing in any game I
played this year. Also, many of the quests were interesting and varied, and so
much work was put into every aspect of the experience that it's just a
monumental effort.
I also
thought that the female characters were particularly well done, and I do think
it's a great example of strong women in games. Although some people who played
the previous Witcher titles said that
the devs did quite poorly with their women (and maybe they did) they’ve clearly
learned some lessons along the way because the ladies here are fantastic. They’re
strong, they have their own motivations, they don't play second fiddle to
Geralt, and they feel like well-rounded characters. Great stuff.
Of course,
the game does have a few issues. The biggest one is that the pacing is a little
insane. The main quest is incredibly long and takes the number of turns. A lot
of interesting things happen -- and that's great -- but these days I find it
hard to buy into the "urgency" of a main quest when a game takes so
many detours. It was also a problem for me because so many of the sidequests
were genuinely good, and I didn't want to miss any of them. I felt compelled to
do as many as possible in order to avoid having any automatically fail by
advancing the story. I realize that there are story events that had to happen
in order to have the finale that the devs wanted, but I think it would have
been possible to restructure the game and make it a little less arduous to get
through.
It's also
worth noting that the game takes a few weird stumbles at the end. @SparkyClarkson
raised this issue in his second opinion at @Gamecritics, and I think he's
absolutely on the money. The game rises to a crescendo with a fantastic battle at
the Witcher home base, and rather than ending things there, there's still quite
a bit left to do afterwards, except none of it is as compelling or as exciting
as that battle. In fact, it even gets a little bit nonsensical, with a
last-minute MacGuffin showing up to lead into some some quest stuff that just
don't make a lot of sense.
Those are
pretty forgivable things when looking at everything else the game gets right,
though, and it gets a hell of a lot right. It's a fantastic experience from
start to finish, and although it is a significant commitment of time, I do
think it's one of the few games that is worth investing in despite how long it
is. The developers have absolutely raised the bar when it comes to writing and
worldbuilding, and we are now living in a post-Witcher world. Any developer wanting to cover the same territory
really needs to bring it.
>Bloodborne: The Old Hunters While I plan on doing the Witcher DLC, I need to take a short
break before pushing on, so I decided to drop back into Bloodborne and give the Old Hunters
DLC a try.
To be fair,
I'm not the biggest Bloodborne fan.
The story is a mess to me, I think some of the systems don't work as well as
they could, and I don’t think much of the aesthetics. The hunters look
great, but the world is too monochromatic and too cluttered with garbage and
statues and all sorts of stuff that just ends up being visual noise. So, while I’m
definitely not one of the hardcore BB
devotees, I am a Fromsoft fan and I was curious to see what they would bring to
the table with this new expansion. Unfortunately, what it looks like they brought
is an insane level of hardcore difficulty.
Look, I'm
not the best player out there, but I think I can generally hold my own and I am
quite experienced when it comes to Fromsoft and the Souls games. And besides, I got through Bloodborne by myself with only a few difficult spots here and
there, so I thought I would be well-equipped to handle this, but the developers
are trolling pretty hard… They've really jacked up the difficulty.
While there
are a few brutal enemies (the shark giants in the Fishing Hamlet are a
nightmare) and there are a few too many ‘GOT YA!’ moments for my taste, the
bosses are the worst offenders. Many do a crazy
amount of damage and they're just straight-up difficult to fight. My friend @MikeSuskie
(in his review) says that there's no real trick to finding these bosses, the
player just has to be good enough to beat them, and I think he's correct.
Unfortunately, I think the devs have taken it a little too far this time.
As for the
rest of it, well, it's just OK, I suppose. It's interesting that they put an
absolute crap-ton of new weapons in
this DLC (clearly in response to complaints that there weren’t enough things to
choose from in the vanilla game) but it's ironic that in order to get these
weapons, players have to be good enough to survive the areas where they are…
which means they have to be high-level…
which means they have to have already been through the game.
Since leveling up weapons takes a lot of resources that
aren't just laying around, most of the weapons people will find won't be any use
unless they do a lot of farming, or start a new game in order to re-harvest resources.
I’d love to try some of these new things out myself, but some of them I just
can't equip because my stats aren't set up properly, and the rest are too low
to do me any good. I ended up collecting them, putting them aside and using my
old standbys. It seems like a missed opportunity here.
Also, a
heads-up to anyone who did what I did and missed the first shortcut that leads
back to the very first lamp in the Hunter’s Nightmare. I have no idea how in
the world I missed it, but I did, and there’s a very important NPC which hangs out in that shortcut… He has quite a
bit of information about the world and ends up giving the player a weapon at
the end, so if you plan to play this DLC, make sure you talk to that person
before moving on. He's at one end of the large bridge spanning the bloody river
that's in the starting area. Once you see the giant flea monsters, go up to the
bridge and go in the hallway at one end… He's down there.
Overall, I'm
feeling pretty mixed about The Old Hunters. On the one hand, I want to keep
supporting From as I've been a fan of theirs for a very, very long time. On the
other hand, I don't think Bloodborne was that great, and this add-on feels like
it's hard for the sake of being hard. I'm pretty sure that a lot of people who
struggled to get through the main game will be absolutely destroyed by the level of difficulty here, and I just don't see the
point of making it so crushing.
>Random Just a couple of quick notes before
I wrap up…
First, I want to give a shout out to Chibi-Robo: Zip Lash! on
3DS. I haven't heard many people talking about it, and the people who have talked about it don't seem to think
very much of it, which is a shame. I'm a fan of the character, and I think that
this is a pretty solid outing for him. It’s certainly better than the last game
he was in.
There are a few weird choices and it's not the sort of thing that
you want to marathon for hours on end, but I think it's a lot better than
people give it credit for, and it's really cute as well. If you're a fan, it's
definitely worth picking up, and if you want some solid platforming action,
this is a good one to check out.
Finally, I
haven't fired my WiiU up for ages, but I've been pretty curious about Xenoblade
Chronicles X, out on December 4, and while I’m not going to cover it
for review, I am going to pick it up to see what it's all about.
It looks like
it has a Phantasy Star Online vibe to it, and I'm a sucker for anything
with giant robots. Some reviewer friends who already have been through the game
have told me that they think I'll hate it -- which is very likely possible --
but it sounds like an interesting project that warrants investigation… I'll
have more to say on it later.
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