ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 177. age of wonders 3)

[Integrity]

genuine lol

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

I remember there being some profound discussion (maybe not, I might be fantasizing) about the meaning and intent behind achievements and unless it´s been mentioned already, they probably also exist because developers want you to try out shit in their game (I´ve heard of some stupid set ups and decisions in grand strategy games, that no normal person would otherwise willingly do), as well as a "HAHAHAHA you have found the extremely hidden ultra secret interaction of which only Dave the Intern and his Supervisor knows! Mwahahahahah" - or something along those lines. Not that I´d have any reference for that.

[Integrity]

MEGA MAN ZERO/ZX LEGACY COLLECTION (CAPCOM, VARIOUS)

Finished: 12/7/24. Playtime: 42.6 hours.

Here's a weird one. I had no concept of these games before buying them, but I'm going into them with high hopes on account of how much I generally liked playing as Zero in the X games, even the bad ones, except X6. Literally all I know as of this writing is that I'm pretty sure these games were originally for the Game Boy Advance, and I know you go to cyberspace at some point. Let's get cooking, fellas.

MEGA MAN ZERO (CAPCOM, 2002)
Something happened in the jump to the GBA, and I can't really put my finger on it. Even when the X games were good, there was always a certain retro cruft to how your guy controlled, a little bit of delayed input here and there or poorly laid out (or missing) control options, shit like that. Zero is the first time that I felt like the franchise was shedding all of that and letting the beauty that would become Mega Man 11 shine through. For a handheld title, Zero controls like an absolute dream here, and I want to stress as I transition to a new paragraph that I genuinely had fun with almost all of my time in this game.

I put that up front because Zero is an insane game created by assholes. You create hard saves at your hub, and any time you run out of lives (which are not common) it's back to the load screen. If you, like me, put yourself into a position where you spend your starting two lives early, you're then boned into a situation where whatever stage you pick, you have to do it flawlessly in a single go. Checkpoints are incredibly sparse, possibly only at bosses, and each retry chip is a weighted decision as to whether or not you want to submit to doing the entire stage again. This comes to a head against the final boss, where running out of lives against him means you have to go through the entire boss rush and a short level besides, again with however many lives you had when you made the save, to go for any more attempts. It's shockingly bad, and testament to the game that I powered through it anyway. It's worth noting that the collection includes an optional Checkpoints Mode that you can toggle on from the wrapper menu, but man I ain't used any assistance since the classic games. My toxic pride is in full swing.

Adding extra zest to the asshole flavor is the Cyber-Elves. You get these little beauties from fixed chests in stages as well as pseudo-random drops from enemies, and they are consumable to provide some effect like healing you, stunning enemies, saving you from a single pit, etc. There's two kickers here: first, that by "consumable" I mean when you consume them they're gone permanently from a unique and non-renewable list, and second, that the notably good ones require elf food that drops from enemies like any good shop currency. The good ones turn into shit like your subtanks and life upgrades, making them the only ones that give a permanent effect rather than a quick buff before they face oblivion. The bad news there is the amount of elf food they require. In the run up to the final boss, literally the final stage, I crested 1,000 elf food for the first time. Each of your two subtanks requires 1,200 elf food to activate. Each of your two small life upgrades is 750, and the large one requires in the ballpark of 2,000. You will not be interacting with this system at all unless you purposely sit down and grind it out, which you were pretty clearly meant to do because your basic combos and charge attacks are locked behind weapon proficiency, which only goes up on an individual-weapon basis by doing more successful attacks with that weapon. I think most of the grinding in the X series was due to mismanagement and poor numerical balance; Zero fundamentally asks you to grind to power up. I refused.

Now, then, here's the fucked up thing: despite that, I still think Zero was a really good game. They've made incisive cuts to the fundamental design of the franchise now that the game can focus entirely on Zero's playstyle and doesn't have to account for X. You bring two weapons, each with its own button to attack with, from a pool of four that you can hotswap anytime in stages: sword, spear, shield, and gun. I ran chiefly with the spear and gun and swapped to sword and spear for bosses. Boss weaknesses, when they have one, have been simplified to an elemental rock-paper-scissors, and Zero interacts with this by putting a fire, ice, or thunder chip into his third equipment slot, which will infuse the charged attacks of whatever weapons he has equipped. It works a lot better than the guess-and-check lottery of Mega Man and X for me, since paying attention to a boss's elemental attacks can cue you onto their weaknesses without looking anything up online. It's a far more elegant system, and only one of the bosses across the entire game is really a proper asshole fight (uncoincidentally, one without a weakness whatsoever). Combat's fast, brutal, and flashy - Zero dies in only 5-6 enemy attacks but health drops are plentiful, trash enemies tend to die in 1-3 attacks, and even the chunkiest bosses fall to ten or twelve charged sword slashes. The game's brutal, and occasionally unfair, but it's generally quick to get back up and going once you're attuned to how the game wants you to play. I had a fantastic time overall, and I'm told Zero is the nadir of this pack.

MEGA MAN ZERO 2 (CAPCOM, 2003)
Nearly everything gets improved from Zero to Zero 2. Now that the old days are properly gone, Zero 2 is free to go back to the well of classic Mega Man and extract things that worked. Subtanks as loot, in addition to elves, are back, and the game goes back to take the more traditional intro -> choice of 4 bosses -> intermission stage -> choice of 4 bosses -> endgame progression of days gone by, but still using the elemental weapon triangle of Zero rather than explicit boss weapons. Speaking of, explicit boss weapons are back as well, but in a weird way. We'll get to that in a moment. The improvements from Zero are almost comical overcorrections: weapons level up fast as hell, elves require way less food and you get way more elf food and, on top of that, regular old continues are back which retain the elf food you got before gaming over, all of which combines to completely obliterate the grinding Zero required of you. It's a very welcome change. Besides that, the core of Zero's gameplay loop is all there and slightly refined, touched up in little places here and there.

The mixed bag is the new stuff, and I think I fall on the side of appreciating the idea moreso than the execution. You have two methods of progression that are fresh to Zero 2: boss techniques and forms. Boss techniques sort-of ape the techniques that Zero got from boss kills in the X series, but with a caveat: you only get the boss's technique if your rank is sufficiently high when you kill the boss. Your rank is global and difficult as hell to keep high, and once it's in the pits the way to get it back up involves clearing stages that you're necessarily not getting boss techniques from, because it's low. I never got close to the rank necessary to get any techniques, but there are three consumable fairies (that you have to find) that will overwrite your rank for the stage you're on with an A-rank, giving you the boss technique on completion even if you suck it up. It's not a bad idea, but it needs a lot of tuning that it really didn't get, especially since you have to preload the fairy into your deck before starting the stage and using any fairy, including the permanent upgrades and the rank-up fairies, loses rank points. Strange system.

Forms are possibly even stranger. Zero can gain a number of forms that give him a new paintjob and fundamentally alter his abilities and can be hotswapped anytime the game is paused. Conceptually, I like this one a lot - but it's also got a caveat in how they're earned. Each form has a specific condition, ranging from reasonable ones like "kill 10 enemies with aerial Z-slashes" and "pick up 25 life capsules" to ridiculous ones like "kill 50 enemies with the buster" and "hit 30 enemies with reflected projectiles", each of which must be accomplished within a single stage. Where this begins to fall apart is that these conditions aren't hinted at in-game, and only one form's requirements can be fulfilled per-stage. Got your 50 pistol kills, but also did the pretty easy 25 life capsules? Sorry, bud. What's good about them, though, is that they're both strong and thematic to their unlock condition. The life capsule one (Energy Form) makes you significantly weaker, but doubles enemy drop rates to let you fill up your subtanks faster. The buster one (X Form) makes you into essentially X6 X, with a powerful gun and a backup sword. The one I ran for most of the game, the aerial Z-slashes one, gives you a slightly altered combo with much more vertical reach and speeds Zero up significantly. With just some gentle tweaks, such as allowing multiple forms to be unlocked in a single run and hinting in-game at the requirements, I think this could be a genuinely incredible system.

Now for the bad. Zero 2 commits two fauxs pas, and unfortunately they're both things that target my sensibilities directly. The first is more nebulous: the game's just kind of douchier than Zero. It's all the small things, like enemies placed where you'll fall on them blind, or boss arenas that happily let the boss attack you from offscreen, or jumps that are just a little bit too tight to be polite. It's never enough to directly take the experience down, like in X8, but it hangs over the game like a gentle pall. Zero had the excuse of being raw in many ways; the genuine refinement of Zero 2 makes stuff like this stick out all the worse. The second, and worse, sin is that your kit has been changed. The sword, gun, and shield from Zero all return completely intact. The astute reader may note that my main weapon in Zero was the spear, and that the spear is not in that list. The spear has been replaced by the Chain Rod, and the Chain Rod absolutely fucking sucks and, worse, is intended as a grappling hook mobility tool - a purpose for which it's also terribly designed. They stripped out my favorite weapon, put in some complete trash to replace it, and then created enemies and levels where you're strongly encouraged or required to use it. For this, and little more, it became a discussion with myself as to whether Zero 2 was better overall than its predecessor or not. I came down on the side of yes, but the conversation was there to be had. Onwards!

MEGA MAN ZERO 3 (CAPCOM, 2004)
I've been fairly high on the previous two games, but with some modest caveats to both. Zero 3, finally, irons it all out. I still miss my spear, and my spear is absolutely not back, but Zero 3 feels like it's broken fully out of the specter of classic Mega Man without the roadbumps along the way of its predecessors. Everything has finally come together into a grand package, and genuinely the only negative things I can say about it are that the word parts go on a little too long sometimes, and if you fully engage with the new elf system then you'll steamroll really hard by the end. That's hardly a negative, though. The Chain Rod is gone, praise the Lord, and it's replaced by the Recoil Rod, basically just a tonfa that can be aimed like the previous Rods and which you have to use for mobility periodically. It's not the spear, but I like it a hell of a lot more than the Chain Rod.

Zero 3's primary contribution to the series lies in how you customize Zero himself, taking the form of chips and elves. Chips are straightforward as they come: through fixed stage loot and boss kills, you can variously acquire head, body, and foot chips. One can be equipped in each slot at any time, and they give boosts such as autocharge on your weapons or the ability to doublejump, in addition to the elemental effects from prior games. This fairly well replicates most of the functionality of the Form system from Zero 2, but in a more sensible and accessible way. I still think they should have given that another go, but this is good enough. Elves are changed from Zero 2 in two ways: first that they're cheaper to get up and running, and second that some elves are Satellite Elves which can be equipped to provide a persistent effect (such as dropping health capsules or shooting at enemies like Gradius options) at all times.

Where this gets interesting is Zero 3's approach to difficulty and ranking. Many elves can be switched from consumable to satellite or vice versa, feeding into the ranking system in that your satellites don't penalize your mission score, unlike consumed elves. If you want to romp through the game and just eat every elf you come across, you're welcome to do so, and the resultant Zero becomes absolutely titanic by the end stages. If you want to see those EX Skills and play a higher ranked game, you're not locked entirely out of the elf system like in past games, you just have to engage with it more tactically. I think it's a fantastic balance to strike and does a much better job to encourage thinking about strategy and replaying the game than the previous two games did.

Speaking of the endgame stages, Zero 3 also features a completely unique mission spread in the Mega Man franchise. As opposed to the standard eight bosses, either all together or in two banks of four, Zero 3 has you face four bosses (from which you get your elemental chips), then after an intermission stage has you face three in any order, go through a second intermission stage, and then face four more in any order before going to the endgame stages. It creates an interestingly balanced game, where many other Mega Men were overwhelmingly defined by their robosses or by the endgame stages. I liked the flow a lot, and they do play a bit with some of the extra stages, such as one where you have to raid a library for data and take notes on what you're looking for. It was all just enough to engage the brain without ever being enough to become tedious or take me out of the game. It was just fantastic, end to end, right up to the credits. I can see why this one's held up as the best of the Zero games, and I absolutely don't disagree with that assessment.

MEGA MAN ZERO 4 (CAPCOM, 2005)
I don't know if Mega Man Zero 4 is the best Mega Man there's ever been, but by God, it's my favorite. Everything negative I have to say about this game is picking at nits. I had comprehensive fun through the whole game. I might, in the grand scheme of Mega Men, even put this little plucky handheld title above 11. Holy moly. I guess I do disagree with that prior assessment after all.

To start out, your weapon loadout has shuffled again, and for the first time I'm not mad about losing the spear. The shield and any sort of mobility stick are both gone, replaced by the Zero Knuckle. The Zero Knuckle is fucking fantastic. Its attack is a no-combo short-range punch which you can charge up to increase from "modest" to "pretty good" damage. Punching various stage things, such as switches, causes Zero to interact with them in some way, making it your interaction tool like the tonfa was in Zero 3. Getting the killing blow on a trash enemy with it causes Zero to rip whatever weapon they've got off them, and now instead of punching you get to use that weapon contingent on durability restrictions on some of them. This genuinely never gets old, and even though some of the weapons are total flops, I still found myself constantly ripping guns off of guys and using them instead of my actual blaster, pulling Old Reliable back out for mostly boss fights. For the first time in Mega Man history, it injects a thrill at seeing enemies pop up - perhaps a new one, what can be ripped off of him? Perhaps a reliable foe, like the Wolverine-like claw robot, which I know gives me a hefty damage and range claw stab that I can use almost as a second saber? Even bad weapons and spent guns, or anything you grab, can be thrown with a dedicated Toss button for some pretty good damage in a small explosion. This never gets obsoleted, either; the first phase of the final boss has an attack to drop big knives all over the ground and, you guessed it, punching one will pick up a 1 durability big knife that does a shitload of damage to the boss or clears other knives off the field. I can't stress how much God damn fun the Zero Knuckle was to use.

Moving on, they finally nailed progression down. Techniques are back in their X4 form, being your primary form of delivering damage in different directions rather than one-stop boss killers, and you no longer have to maintain a high rank to use them. Instead, every stage has two Weathers that can be active when you select them. These weathers are, essentially, a Normal/Hard mode toggle for each stage, and taking the harder weather makes the stage more difficult in some way and lets the boss use their EX Skill, but if you beat the stage under the harder weather you get that boss's EX Skill for yourself. The Artificial Sun stage, for instance, can be entered under Clouds or Sunshine; entering under Sunshine makes the tremendous heat when you're out of the shade damage you faster and gives the boss a larger explosive attack to launch at you. It's a far better way to encourage a "harder" playthrough that gives you more options to use in battle without the insanity of the ranking systems of the previous three games. I liked it a lot.

Your cyber-elves have received a huge overhaul as well, condensing into one elf. You still feed her food to level her up (from 1 to 7), and each level increases the abilities she can equip, one track for each color of elf from the previous games to always give you a red, a blue, and a green ability active. This also functions as a soft difficulty selector; you can overcharge her to get better abilities from multiple tracks, but at the cost of your rank. On top of that, there's a big jump in cost upgrading her from level 4 to level 5 that you're going to have to grind for if you want it, but the abilities she starts getting from level 5 and on are completely bonkers. In essence, Zero 4 lets you decide to go grind the elf up if the game gets too hard, without ever making it necessary to be able to play with the game's systems. It's a great compromise.
The one mixed bag is the crafting system. You have a set of three body parts - head, chest, foot - that you can equip chips into, just like in Zero 3. This gets shaken up in Zero 4 in that you don't get given any chips at all for free from bosses or stages, you have to make them all from parts that drop from enemies. Each enemy drops themselves as a unique part, and you learn recipes through interacting with the humans in the refugee camp, which might cause you to want to go back to a previous stage to go get some robot parts to make something or another. That said, you don't need a recipe - if you know how to make what you want from a previous run of the game, go ahead and slap the parts into the crafting window and press the button to craft Something Unknown and you'll get your subtank or part you wanted guaranteed. I think this is a fantastic system, with the big caveat (and it's a big one) being that the game doesn't do shit to explain it. It's a great system to know how to utilize, and it benefits a lot from having a shopping list or a guide up, but going into the game without any external resources would end up just making it a huge pain in the ass, and it's too central to the game to be that way. Unfortunate to fumble at the end like this, but it's still not that big a deal in the scheme of things.

Besides all those, the gameplay is Zero 3's. There's no real extra polish on it, and there didn't really need to be. Some of the bosses are asshats, some always are. The stages are generally memorable and largely fun to go through, with the game returning to the intro, your choice of eight robot masters, an intermission stage after you do any four, and endgame stages after you do all eight. There's just not much more to say. Zero 4 was fantastic, and I strongly suspect it's going to end this journey solidly on top of all the Mega Men I'll have gone through. Absolutely fucking wild for a game on the late-stage Game Boy Advance.

MEGA MAN ZX (CAPCOM, 2006)
The wheels came off.

I've never liked Metroidvanias very much, personally. It's probably my most cancelable gaming opinion overall. I've finished only two Metroids and zero Castlesvania, and I've variously bounced off of many of the greats of the genre. Got sick of Cave Story less than two hours in. Stopped playing Hollow Knight before the first real boss. I don't know why they flop and Souls games don't except for some nebulous thing about movement tech being unlocked by completion, and yet I like Kingdom Hearts, for instance. It's very irregular, and I recognize it as a me problem, but here I am. Mega Man ZX incorporates a world map, movement tech, and backtracking into the Mega Man formula. It flops.

The weird thing is that is doesn't at all flop because of the Metroidvania elements. The map for ZX isn't particularly onerous, even though back- and fore-tracking through the city gets tiring. The movement tech essentially boils down to doing the missions for Model Hx and Model Lx to get airdashes and swimming. The backtracking mostly is just looking at the map and figuring out that area H-1 probably comes off of area A-3 from context clues and the layout of the overall map. It's not great, don't get me wrong, but it isn't the issue with the game.

Mega Man ZX takes the Zero formula and expands it. Instead of one Mega Man, you play as an amalgam of five Mega Men and can swap between them at-will. Each has a gimmick - being Zero, having an air dash, having a shitty programmable blaster, swimming, and whatever the hell Px does. The problem is obvious: none of them are as impactful as, say, being Zero. Splitting your kit among forms doesn't accomplish what it did in the Zero games, adding things onto a base kit. It splits fundamental things into other forms, so you never quite feel like you have the full force of your own will at your hands. On top of that, some of them are so niche that it's just binary: are you underwater? Ought to be Lx. Are you not? Eat shit for being Lx. It's a poor system that could have been better turned to making a single, comprehensive kit, like Zero 4 did.
The problem then comes up in the entire rest of the game. The bosses are keyed to be beaten by forms, which combine the Zero and classic forms of the game by having you swap entire movesets to deliver elemental weaknesses. It mixes the worst of the X games into the Zero format for absolutely no gain whatsoever. The bosses themselves are no champs, either, including nothing-ass attacks alongside zero-frame dashes and homing attacks that require consecutive quick hops to avoid. They're messes. The gameplay is sped up, which would ordinarily be a blessing, but ends up being exactly proportional to the screen expansion, meaning ZX has the exact same screen crunch issues that the Zero series had.

The deepest problem comes from the simple format of the game: all levels have to be designed to be gone back and forth through up until the final bits. There's none of the innovation or leaps of faith of the Zero games, no interest at all. You always have to be able to backtrack. Save points are sparse, after all, and only half of them are actual warp bonfires, more akin to Dark Souls than its successors. On top of that, because there are bonfires, ZX can't really have checkpoints. If you wipe out on a mission and get a Game Over, you go back to the last bonfire at best, which can be many screens ago depending on the layout. This comes to a head in the endgame, where you have only your lives and subtanks to get through the obligatory boss rush and final boss all in a group. It's awful.

It's frustrating, because ZX really does have good fundamentals. The basic combat, the running and jumping and slaying of enemies, is as solid as it was in the Zero games, adjusting for the forms. Bosses have a bad tendency to have terrible movesets and also to fold to their elemental weaknesses, and applying those elemental weaknesses occasionally feels like shit, but none of the bosses are anywhere near the worst of the franchise if you attack them at neutral. It's just a sad series of own goals, committed without real reason, many of them because of the format shift to the DS. Sad to see.

MEGA MAN ZX ADVENT (CAPCOM, 2007)
Holy smokes. The wheels may have come off for ZX, but the entire fucking bus fell apart for ZX Advent. I had some grudging praise for ZX and even some things that I didn't love but felt were only gently fumbled rather than being really trashy. ZX Advent is a genuinely shit game. We've successfully plummeted from the best Mega Man has been for me to the worst in only two games. It's honestly shocking just how terrible a game Advent is, and I'm going to try to explain why that is.

The first thing, and biggest shame, is as regrettable as it gets: the fundamentals suck. ZX had the protagonist's kit diluted just a little too much across six forms; Advent gives you a grand total of fourteen, and the dilution is even worse than in its predecessor. Your forms take two, uh, forms: the Mega Men from ZX, and the bosses from Advent. The Mega Men from ZX are as the tin says, but stripped gently down. Overdrive is gone, and kit tweaks have been made, such as nerfing Model Px for some reason even though he was by a distance the worst form in ZX to begin with. Advent with just Model A and the ZX forms is a shallower game than ZX was. The eight boss forms comprise the rest of the roster, and these guys are as one-note as they come. The boss forms exist only to solve a certain environmental puzzle each - Buckfire jumps high, Rospark grabs vines, Bifrost breaks blocks, etc. - and have between little and literally zero combat utility. A special shout goes to Chronoforce, who is given to you as your underwater swimming form and then you proceed through precisely one underwater section at all until you fight Model Lx, the swimming form from the previous game. Model Lx is immune to ice damage. Chronoforce can only do ice damage. Fuck you for thinking to use the swimming form in the underwater boss fight, idiot. Immediately thereafter you're given a corridor of spikes to swim through that Chronoforce is too big to fit through.

Beyond that, the game's just poorly laid-out. I said that the Metroidvania elements of ZX weren't to blame for its lackluster performance, but they're front-and-center of why Advent sucked. The stages that the game is organized into, equivalent to the sectors of ZX, are poorly connected and, bluntly, just bad. It's the worst of all worlds, a disconnected set of traditional Mega Man stages that pretend to be part of an interconnected world that you occasionally have to return to and scout out (read: Google) where the next objective is going to be. The stages themselves are designed to be gone back and forth through, like ZX, but are now chock full of bullshit platforming, douchey enemy placement, and a half-dozen different single sprites that you have to remember that Rospark or Vulturon is the right guy to solve that because you never bring them out unless you're solving that one sprite.

The game also inherits ZX's poor checkpointing. Take your three lives and go forth; a Game Over returns you not to the last interim warp stone that you activated, but rather to the last bonfire you rested at. Bonfires are only at the end of sectors and in the hub, losing the save-only bonfires of ZX, so it's entirely possible that a certain boss or a certain level can take you back a half-hour of progess or more. Nothing's stopping you from farming more lives, though, so it's just a tax on not wanting to waste time to ensure that time isn't wasted later. It's a deeply terrible system strapped onto a deeply terrible game.
This comes to a head in the endgame. ZX required you to go through the entire eight-robot-master boss rush and the final boss in a single set of lives. Advent requires this too, but it throws the single most punishing instant-death platforming stage in between the two. My first time through, I went into the boss rush with five banked lives, left the eight fights with three left, and didn't even make it to the multi-phase final boss. The checkpoint is before the cutscenes that begin the endgame, let alone the stage leading up to the boss rush, let alone the boss rush. This would be bafflingly poor design in the mid-90s. It's 2007. Bioshock is out. If the intent is that the player should show mastery by beating all eight robot masters and a hellish stage and the final boss after all that: why? What was the intent here? I think it's nothing more or less than a lack of foresight and imagined systems not being planned out with any sort of rigor.

I'm also going to be petty and attack something I haven't done since 8: Advent is cringe. The X and Zero games (including ZX) have been on an increasing trend of more story, more cutscenes, more plot overall, and it's been largely for the worse. Advent goes whole hog into that and, worst of all, forces you to always be in Model A for the cutscenes. Not only are you subjected to juvenile writing and (occasionally party-bad) voice acting, but every single thing you interact with restores you to Model A, and sometimes things that you don't interact with do as well. Cross a threshold and there's some plot to be had? You're put back into Model A and you go through the dialogue. Go into a boss room? Chances are pretty good you'll be turned into Model A for the conversation. Want to activate a warp zone? Weirdly, this turns you back into Model A. It's so much stupid wasted time transforming on top of the actual plot, which is so much nothing. It's only an annoyance, but it's an annoyance on top of a terrible game, which makes it all the more notable.

All this combines to make a game that's just never any fun. It's a grueling exercise in getting better at the game to make progress, possibly constantly being thrown back depending on your skill, and having a kit that never seems to have quite the right answers to the enemies being thrown at you unless you happen into the right one (of fourteen). It is, in all honesty, a bad game. I am more than sorry that I played it at all. I will never play it again. God willing, I will never think about it again.

Z-CHASER
This is the Challenge Mode for this pack. Z-Chaser essentially gives you a "normal" and a "hard" stage for each of the six games in the pack and asks you to time attack through each, with the goal being an S-rank time (peculiarly, the middle medal out of five) in every one. The normal stage is taken from the first half and the hard stage from the back half of each game, sometimes even just being the intro and endgame stages themselves. The standard of play demanded isn't terribly exacting, more like the original Legacy Collection sandwiched between the brainlessness of the X Challenge and the brutal rigor of 11's Dr. Light's Trial. One cool thing, at least, is that you can choose to watch the run that each medal's time is based on, so if you want the pro strats to conquer S-rank you can go watch the insane ZZ-rank ghost's run and then try to emulate it.

There isn't much to say about these that wouldn't be reflected by or just pulled directly from the respective game's post, so what I will talk about instead is the wrapper that the challenges are baked into. In a set of astonishingly unnecessary menu nesting, you're given your choice of the three modes (solo, multiplayer, and "leaderboard"), and then given your choice of the six games, and then given your choice of the two difficulties, and then given your choice of the five difficulties of race ghost, and then you get put into a prep screen where you can sort out your equipment and to choose if you want to watch the ghost (and play in a really tiny window) or not. Z-Chaser itself doesn't have an options menu; the options are here separately for each difficulty. That means that, for instance, if you rebind the Zero buttons to map to what you've been using in Mega Man all along, square to shoot and X to jump, you have to rebind them individually for every single one of the twelve stages. It's not a dealbreaker, it's just baffling, especially when the games share the same basic control scheme throughout and even then only add buttons, never taking any away. This system only works for someone who has the very specific muscle memory to want their subweapon on a different button in Zero vs. ZX, and you can't tell me that's a significant subset of people.
In a specific hatecrime targeted against only me, the Zero 4 stages are both really short and easy, and the ZX Advent stages are both really long.

WRAP-UP
As with the previous collections, there's an achievement for looking at concept art and an achievement for listening to music. The concept art one is a little misleading - it says to look at 30 cards "across all six titles" when it really means look at 30 cards for each game, totaling 180. The music one doesn't put a secret track into the music player, but rather bizarrely asks you to listen to three songs per game in the music player and then beat a game and watch its credits through. Strange as hell to do, but I had a backup save I made right before the final boss of Zero 2 for some reason so I just reran that to wrap everything up. On the plus side, that means my last scrap of gameplay was good instead of ZX Advent!

With that, I've now beaten twenty-five Mega Men for achievements and an extra one for some reason. Am I a Mega Fan? Not especially, there's a whole lot of chaff in the franchise, but the quality of the games generally went up with time, even though it was always a bit all over the place. When Mega Man 12 inevitably happens I'll definitely give it a try, why not. I'm finally out of Mega Men. I've got no plans to play Battle Network, and there's no way I'm going to play the gacha, so there's quite literally nothing left for me on Steam. Sayonara, Mega Man. Hell, if I'm being honest: sayonara, Zero. You gave me some great goddamn times.

Here's the final ranking:

Z4 > 11 > Z3 > Z2 > X4-0 > Z > 4 > X2 > X1 > 9 > X5 > 7 > ZX > 6 > 2 > 10 > X4-X > X7 > X8 > 5 > X3 > 8 > 1 > & Bass > 3 > X6 > Advent

Edited July 12 by Integrity

[Integrity]

On 4/13/2024 at 12:15 PM, Integrity said:

I'm actively excited to gut through the X Legacy Collection 2 games now and get to the Zero collection, because there's a real chance I actively like those games. Fucked up.

lmao

[Zapp Branniglenn]

I've got some hangups on Mega Man Zero. Probably owed in no small part to not having the Collection's added checkpoints back on GBA. I'm stunned that you turned those off and came away from the experience on a positive note. It couldn't be me, because I literally did walk away from Zero 1 under those conditions. 

But beyond Kick in the Face Difficulty, there's some core design of this sub-series that I didn't jive with. Permanently missable moves tied to a ranking system. Getting penalized for using Elves, and making it quite clear these are living creatures you're eating. Why so bleak? Ranking systems should encourage the player to practice and perfect their play, but all they seem to want from you is doing it perfectly on your first try with no upgrades. And if you want the upgrades you successfully found, you gotta grind for them. I have no patience for that.

The following games backpedaled hard on a lot of what makes Zero different from the X series. Some might call it refinement, others would call it homogenization of design. I'm a little concerned at myself for being so sure the sequels get better, because I hate coming down on the side of "stop innovating, dial it back". Surely that shift in direction came at a cost that extends past just the Spear

Since there's no mention of achievements on a game to game basis, I'm guessing those went smoothly? Googling the list, I don't see any demands regarding S ranks or grinding enough to feed every Elf. Praise be to Capcom. 🙏

[Integrity]

yeah the achievements were genuinely smooth as anything. a small handful caused any trouble at all, off the top of my head the only notable one being seeing leviathan's EX skill in z1 which requires you to have a high rank. on the other hand, you can face her as the ...third or fourth? mission of the game, so it's not like it's particularly hard to keep your rank up that long on casual mode. getting all Item B chips in zx was a little obtuse but not missable, you can just swing through a list of poorly-documented sidequests at the end of the game. most of the games i ended up getting 3 or 4 of the 5 achievements before even beating the game and just had to reload a late save / start a new run to get a single quick one. zx advent had the "worst" set but i'm honestly not sure if they were the worst because they were difficult or because i hated zx advent, and even they took me like an hour and a half to clean up all of.

e: to the rest of your stuff - i honestly can't argue with any of that lmao. zero was absolutely an insane game made by assholes (as a smart guy once said) and i can see it putting someone off very quickly and never encouraging them to come back. it worked for me, though

Edited July 13 by Integrity

[Integrity]

STARSHIP TROOPERS: TERRAN COMMAND (THE ARISTOCRATS, 2022)

Finished: 16/7/24. Playtime: 35.3 hours.

Slitherine are a funky publishing house, and one that's near to my heart for no real concrete reason. Founded in 2000, they've maneuvered into the popcorn wargaming space pretty solidly by this point; games that have a bit more rigor to them than your Advance Wars and your Fire Emblems, but aren't quite to the level of depth of a Gary Grigsby's game. They also have computerized versions of the Gary Grigsby's games, though, if you want something with more heft to it than even I can stomach. Notably, if you've seen some of the kinda comical Real Battle Simulators from the 2000s History Channel or from Deadliest Warrior, there's a good chance (a guarantee in the latter case) that it was Slitherine's work. They have a peculiar flavor of eurojank to their general outings, despite being English themselves, due to doing a lot of publishing for various continental studios, including today's specimen, Belgium-based The Aristocrats.

I wrote pretty lovingly about Infested Planet a few years ago as a non-micro-intensive nice introductory kind of RTS compared to something like Starcraft or another of the more traditional RTSes. Terran Command is the next step along the ladder from Infested Planet to Starcraft, and it even shares quite a few fundamental gameplay similarities to Infested Planet, such as your positioning and force composition being far more important than any in-fight micro and a focus on gradual tightening of the noose around enemies rather than aggression being overly rewarded. If you picked up that one and vibed with it at all, I absolutely recommend this one as well.

Terran Command is a campaign-only game, essentially. There are user-created scenarios if you want, but there's no co-op, no competitive multiplayer, nothing of the sort. Fortunately, the campaign is quite good for what it is, even if it has a bit of a slow ramp-up. Unit matchups and counters are carefully considered enough that none of the roster ever really gets obsoleted, and the missions give you diverse enough setups and objectives to let the whole (hefty) roster variously shine. It stands fairly uniquely among RTSkind in that my default "I have the space for one more unit but no real needs" pick was generally the Tier 1 Generalist rifle squad rather than anything fancy, because they actually do a reliable job at many different tasks. I'm a big fan of that kind of fundamentally sound design. Out of the whole campaign, I'd say only one mission was a proper ballbuster (a late defensive mission) and, while there were certainly a good few forgettable filler maps, most made a pretty good case for being included in the campaign.

Then there's two DLCs. These two DLC campaigns are butt ass hard. Each includes about half the maps of the main campaign and a handful of new player and bug units, and both pick right up around the difficulty the main campaign left off on. I think I liked the first one, the mercenary campaign, generally more than the second, the cop campaign. Both have kinda-silly unit balance issues (the Shredder Merc and the Riot Shield Squad respectively) but both are reasonably designed around the stronger units without getting ridiculous about it, with the exception of the mercenary campaign's Immolator bug. Fuck that dude. I'd absolutely recommend buying Terran Command and playing it and then considering picking up the DLCs if you're hungry for more. They add nothing to the base campaign.

The achievements here are pretty straightforward, charmingly. Every mission (18 base, 7 mercenary, 9 cop) has two associated achievements for doing secondary objectives or some other specific thing. The quality of these are a bit all over the place, unfortunately. Early on, they're almost all really good, being things like shooting a bunch of the ranged bugs with snipers, stretching to clear a whole map that you don't have to, or spending half of a 10-minute multi-tier defense mission at the first line that's intended to collapse. By the time you make it to the DLC campaigns, there's far more cases of having you use a very specific unit at maximum veterancy to do a specific thing, which generally leads to finding a nice spot to sit down and farm unit experience. The worst cases of these are late in the main campaign and late in the cop campaign, both cases asking you to have three simultaneous copies of a specific max veterancy unit that you're going to have to go deeply out of your way to farm up. Pretty much all of the DLC missions have at least one "use this specific max veterancy ability on this specific unit" achievement, unfortunately. It does taint the batch.

Two of the achievements, outside of those, stand out as being particularly poorly thought out. The first, Self-Preservation, comes from the midgame of the cop campaign. The mission it's attached to gives you a small squad (a rifle squad, a cop squad, and an officer) and is split into discrete segments as you clear a huge building. The second of these segments is the storage room, and Self-Preservation tasks you with getting through the storage room without taking any casualties. Enemy resistance isn't terribly strong, but the problem with this requires that I explain the cop squad to you. The cop squad, being good fascist state cops, have submachine guns and "detainment drones" which shock enemies to slow them down. The detainment drones are automatically sent out, die pretty easily, and are automatically rebuilt by the squad for free, letting them function as a very effective ablative shield for your army. Their veteran abilities allow them to summon one of two kinds of drone that are various ways to deliver explosions to the bugs. If any of the ability drones explode, that's a casualty; if any of the detainment drones, which are designed to die, die, that's a casualty. Even with those constraints, the achievement isn't too hard to do - I did it four times in less than an hour trying to figure out why it wasn't unlocking - but the real vs. perceived criteria makes it way more frustrating than it needed to be. The last, and far simpler, is Anti-Tanker III. It asks you to kill 200 Tanker bugs. At the end of all three campaigns, I had killed 119. This one was easy to finish up by making a quicksave right before a Tanker died, quickloading after it died for +1 kill, and repeating for about 15 minutes while watching a video. Scaling's off, but not the worst.

All that said, if you go into this without going for achievements at all, there's only two or three questionable missions (one per campaign, weirdly) out of the entire bunch. Terran Command is a fantastic second RTS for someone to try getting into, particularly at the typical Steam sale price of ~$15. Interestingly, The Aristocrats' other work for Slitherine was already in the works before I even picked this one up, so look forward to them coming back with an actual popcorn wargame after I introduced and then didn't talk about Slitherine's popcorn wargame library for a whole post.

[Dr. Tarrasque]

Man forgot to brag about the fact that he miraculously beat MMZ1's final boss on his first try.

[lenticular]

BALATRO (LOCALTHUNK, 2024)

Finished: 25 July, 2024. Playtime: 250 hours.

Yeah. I said this one was coming. It's a bit of a doozy.

First, the game. It's a poker-based roguelike deckbuilder and does pretty much what you'd expect from that description. You get dealt 8 cards, try to form them into a poker hand, discard and redraw a few times if you need them, and score based on the poker hand that you play. Each poker hand (pair, straight, full house, etc.) scores a base number of chips and a base multiplier (mult). You take this base amount of chips, then you add the face values of the cards that you played (ten for face cards, eleven for aces), then multiply by the mult. So, for instance, let's say you play a flush of AH JH 9H 6H 4H. A full house has base chips of 35 and base mult of 4. So your final score for that hand is (35 + 11 + 10 + 9 + 6 + 4) x4 = 300. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly the total score that you need to beat the very first round of the game. After 250 hours, I have become remarkably proficient in doing that particular calculation in my head.

From this starting goal of 300, your target ramps up pretty quickly. Beating the final "boss" of the game on the base difficulty requires a score of 100,000. The highest target you'll ever see as part of the regular game is 2,400,000 (this is for gold stake, plasma deck, versus violet vessel, which you can completely ignore, but I include for the benefit of anyone who is more familiar with the game and wants to know where I got that number). If you choose to do so, you can carry on playing in endless mode after winning a run, where the required scores will ramp up higher and higher, but you also get more time to put together the most ridiculous decks and synergies. My personal record in endless is somewhere around about 1e39, but I know that there are people out there who have managed to exceed the limit of whatever data type Balatro uses to store score and just hit NaN and break the game. Point is, you can get some very high scores in this game.

There are basically three different ways that you can do this. First, you can level up your poker hands. If you level up flush to level 2, it scores as 50x6 instead of 35x4, for instance. Next, you can manipulate your deck of cards. This might mean adding and removing cards to make it easier to draw the specific hand that you want to play (drawing a four of a kind in a regular 52 card deck is hard; doing so when you've fixed your deck so that over half of your cards are queens is not) or it might be adding modifiers to your cards to make them score more. Maybe your queens aren't just ordinary queens, they're holographic bonus queens and give an extra +10 to mult and +30 to chips whenever you score them.

And finally, there are your jokers. These are comparable to relics in Slay the Spire, in that they're always active and modify every hand that you play without you having to draw them, and they can do some pretty powerful things that you can really build your run around. The big difference here is that you are only allowed to have five jokers at a time (with a couple of exceptions that can break this rule, naturally). If you already have 5 jokers and you want to pick up a new one, you have to sell one of your existing ones. This means that jokers tend to be easy come, easy go. They're available in abundance, but a big part of the game is picking out which ones you want, and gradually refining your build as your run progresses.

It's a fantastic game, and I would easily recommend it to anyone who is into roguelike deckbuilders...

...unless you happen to be a pathological completionist with limited free time.

Because yeah, the achievements on this one are pretty brutal. Definitely the hardest 100% that I've personally completed on any Steam game, and the 250 hours feel entirely justified.

There are basically three things that can make achievements difficult. They can require you to actually attain a high degree of mastery in the game, they can require you to do a lot of grinding, or they can rely on luck. Balatro's developer clearly took the option of "¿Por qué no los tres?"

Most of the achievements are largely what you'd expect from this sort of game. Win a run, win a run on the highest difficulty, have a deck below a certain number of cards, accumulate so much money, score so many points in a single hand, and so on. Then the real fun comes with the completionist achievements. There are three of these: Completionist, Completionist+, and Completionist++. Completionist is basically "do everything there is to do in the game and unlock everything there is to unlock". It's pretty tricky and pretty time consuming, but it's what you'd expect from a completionist achievement in this sort of game. But then things start to get nutty.

Completionist+ requires you to beat gold stake with every deck. "Stake" here being the name for the game's difficulty levels, sort of like Ascension in Slay the Spire. There are 8 different stakes, each named for their colour, going from the lowest white stake up to the highest gold stake. "Decks" meanwhile are possibly more akin to characters in other games. Except not really. They're less like the difference between the Ironclad and the Silent and more like the difference between Cain and Abel (the Fire Emblem versions, not the Biblical ones). They have -- mostly fairly minor -- starting modifiers that make them play slightly differently, but once you get a run going they generally end up playing fairly similarly. There are 15 different decks in total. Now, the thing here is that progression is applied separately for each deck. You unlock each new stake one at a time for each deck. So beating gold stake with every deck means you have to play every deck at least 8 times. If you are a god gamer and a Balatro savant (you are not) and you win every run that you start (you will not) and you don't need any other runs to unlock the various mini challenges required for other achievements and unlocks (you will do) then you need to play at least 120 games of Balatro to get this achievement. And winning at high stakes is far from free. As a point of comparison, just 9.5% of players have the achievement for getting even one win on gold stake. Compare this with the 7.0% of players who have beaten Slay the Spire at Ascension 20 or the 8.6% of players who have beaten Monster Train at Covenant 25. Completionist+ is nutty.

And once you finally get through Completionist+, there's still Completionist++ sitting and waiting for you. Completionist++ requires you to get a gold sticker on every single joker in the game. Getting a gold sticker on a joker requires that you win on gold stake while using that joker. To be more specific, you have to be using that joker at the instant that you beat the final boss. If you use it for a while and then sell it before the end, no sticker for you. Now, remember that you are typically limited to 5 jokers at once. And there are a total of 150 jokers in the game. So you could say that you need to win at least 30 games on gold stake to get this achievement, but that's such a massive understatement. You need to win with the really bad jokers, with the jokers that literally don't do anything until you sell them, with the ones that are designed to be decent in the early game but then fall off hard, with the five "legendary" jokers that you can easily go over a dozen runs without ever seeing any of them, and so on. In practice, I guess I maybe managed to average about two new gold stickers per completed run (obviously, with higher numbers early on and lower numbers when I had only a very few left). And doing these is typically quite a bit more difficult than just winning on gold stake, since you have to distort the way that you play to accommodate all these jokers that you wouldn't usually take. It is frankly a brutal achievement, requiring a combination of skill, luck, and extreme persistence. At 0.2% completion rate, it is easily the rarest Steam achievement that I have.

But here's the kicker. Despite all of this, and despite the 250 hour play time, it very rarely felt like a slog. It's just a very good game and I genuinely had fun through almost all of it. Which is genuinely saying something.

[Integrity]

i kneel to you. my crown is yours, for now.

[Integrity]

the good place was right, the most effective hells are the ones of our own making

[Original Alear]

On 8/1/2024 at 1:16 PM, Integrity said:

the good place was right, the most effective hells are the ones of our own making

I speculate that the true good place in the good place is actually limbo in dante's inferno prior to the death door. Though I can't know whether you have a good fate when you go through the death door or just another chance or some sort of strange experience or what.

[Integrity]

It's been almost a month. I have undertaken some terrible plans, and they're coming to slow fruition, but we can finally take a little win here.

 

SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE (IRONCLAD, 2008)

Finished: 13/8/24. Playtime: 44.8 hours.

This is one of those games with a bit of a playtime lie. The original box-set Sins of a Solar Empire came out right before I left to start the rest of my life in Ohio, and I got it off the shelves as soon as I saw it. It looked rad as hell, and it was. I sunk hundreds and hundreds of hours into it across two expansion packs before it would finally be all packaged together and released on Steam as Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, there to get further DLC and Steamworks support. I'd take it out for the occasional spin, but I had thoroughly wrung the blood from the stone years prior and never really got around to grabbing all the achievements as a vanity project - plus, we were still years away from that brain worm eating me up. Out of, at least to me, absolutely nowhere, Sins of a Solar Empire would have a sequel announced this year, and it would finally get a release date of August 15th last week. I knew then that the time had come. I had to polish off this old giant.

Sins of a Solar Empire is a slow real-time space 4X game that, despite scanning perfectly to a description of a game like Stellaris or a real-time Galactic Civilizations, takes its cues more from a very large Warcraft 3 than anything else. Over the course of hours even for relatively small games, you'll build up economies and defenses around discrete planets around one or several star systems, anchored by fleets of generic ships led by named capital ships that earn experience, level up, and buy abilities exactly like your favorite MOBA champion. Where it differs, primarily, is in scope. Each of the three factions has four tech trees that each take real-life hours to research fully if you dedicate all your time and cash to that. Instead of the one-to-three heroes of a typical RTS, you could end up with up to sixteen capital ships. A frigate takes up three or four fleet capacity of a potential final two thousand. Every planet can sustain a small pile of cheap and upkeep-free defensive platforms, fortresses, mines, etc. The game's large but slow, helping it feel controllable. It's not a perfect game, it certainly has its balancing issues among other things, but the vibes are tight enough to let one look over all of that.

I don't usually shout this out in these threads, since I play things for this thread totally unmodded with incredibly rare exceptions, but Sins of a Solar Empire has an absolutely phenomenal mod scene. Any space science fiction property with more than about thirty fans has a bespoke conquest mod for the game at this point. If you want a framework for the space 4X RTS of your dreams starring your favorite television show, grab Rebellion on sale for $10 one summer or Christmas and feast, my friend.

The achievements here are just about as easy or hard as you want them to be. Playing normally, games with friends, against AI, or a mix of the two, you'll eventually gather the lion's share of them. If you really want to knuckle down and grind them out, it amounts to three 1v1 skirmishes and one large and long game. To illustrate, I'll go over what I think is the absolute minimum effort required to get all this, starting with the large and long game. There's one achievement to beat at least four Hard AI opponents in a single game, and there's a bunch of achievements to interact at length with every facet of the game. Spend a lot of money on everything possible, kill a ton of everything, have a really big empire, sell a lot of resources to people, buy a lot of resources from people, give a lot of resources to people, max out your fleet, go through a wormhole, so on and so on. Most of these are pretty much inevitable in one session of the largest map possible, and if you go a little out of your way to get the others then that single match (10 hours long though it be) will end up giving you about 60% of the game's achievements.

Subsequently, you'll do three 1v1 skirmishes, one as each faction. There's three achievements for a victory as each faction and one as a random one, hence the minimum of four games. For each of three three, you'll pick the minimum size map (Point Blank, fittingly) and an easy opponent and pin them in immediately, build up an economy, and make a save. Each faction has an achievement to fully research its Warfare tree without researching a single Economy tech, and to fully research Economy without a single Warfare. This is the boring bit, since even at 8X speed and going fully idle, a full tech tree takes something to the tune of an hour to research. On the other hand, Sins of a Solar Empire is still a game from 2008 at heart and isn't particularly taxing to run. I fished in Final Fantasy XIV while these ticked down. While you do this, there's an achievement to win without building capital ships and by building only capital ships that are easy to grab, and one to not build any strike craft and another to build no defenses that are equally trivial to pile in with the others. At this point, you'll probably be at 65/68 achievements.

One of the last three is a coin toss whether you got it during the big game: Space Ponies! Worlds can randomly have bonuses you discover when you explore them, and one particularly rare one is Space Ponies! [sic], which does absolutely nothing but give you the achievement. The second, which is less likely but still possible during the big game, is to own one of each of the 12 artifacts that you can find even more rarely when exploring planets. The problem here is that there's no guarantee that all twelve artifacts are in any given galaxy, and there's no guarantee that you won't get duplicates even if you get twelve or more. The solution to both of these is a little simple map editing: pick a really big map, go into the files, and set its artifact spawn chance to 100%. Then set yourself up in a 1v1 and then colonize until you have them all. Repeat with world bonuses set to 100% for Space Ponies!, and you're at 67.

The final one, for me, was to do 30 missions for other empires during a single game. The AI will offer these to you periodically, and you can absolutely farm a long enough game without taking any enemy factions out to maximize your opportunities to get missions in this way, but not conquering and waiting got really boring. Good old Wyatt came in clutch, having never played the game before, to start a 1v1 against me and to demand that I give him money 30 times. That counts as a mission! I acquiesced, and that was the ballgame. Two days to the sequel, and it's up on the shelf. I have a good feeling about the next game for absolutely no real reason, so we'll see if that pops up here.

Edited August 14 by Integrity

[Darros]

In addition to the 1v1 that we played that counted as a mission, Ike left the lobby before me, which counted as a win & left me with a slew of achievements:

I'm batting a perfect record without even having to build anything. What can I say, I'm a tactical genius (allegedly).

 

 

[Integrity]

SNIPER ELITE 4 (REBELLION, 2017)
Finished: 16/8/24. Playtime: 86.6 hours.

Sniper Elite is a franchise that is particularly dear to me and I'm not totally sure how to justify it. It's a bit janky, it's a bit bad, it is kind of just the "shoot-Hitler-in-the-ball game", but I keep going back. It's a kind of comfort food, I guess. I commented in the Sniper Elite V2 post that the game was the ideal 7/10 action game, but I've realized it's far more than that. Sniper Elite, minus the sniper rifle the game is literally named for, is a perfect 7/10 action game on its own. The rifle elevates it to some sort of 7/10 action game nirvana. Sniper Elite 4 is, I think, the perfection of all the systems that have gone into the franchise. The others, bar 1 due to its lack of achievements and also its not being very good, will show up in this thread at various points, but I think 4 is where they got it just right.

I wrote a lot in my Metal Gear Solid 5 Ground Zeroes bit about how I liked how the island felt like a sandbox that I needed to approach repeatedly in different ways to finish the game, and that feeling writ large is the entirety of Sniper Elite 4. Each map is a little clockwork puzzle, where any disruption will have effects ranging variously throughout the whole thing. The fascists only react to the information they have, so you can use traps, distractions, and misdirection to corrall and misdirect them as you like. Go loud with a variety of machine guns, a semi-automatic rifle, and careful cover play like you're in the best of Gears of War, or go quiet with subsonic ammo that reduces your shot sound profile but carries significantly worse ballistic performance. Or go quiet by just going really far away such that they can't pinpoint where your rifle is cracking from. Or go quiet by using explosions and other environmental things to disguise your fire. There's an obscene number of ways to approach any given encounter, and how you approach each is likely to impact how you're going to approach its neighbors. There's a thousand ways for things to go wrong, but a thousand ways for you to extricate yourself. Hell, being quiet is still useful after going loud, because the enemies have imperfect information about your location that's purely based on their sight- and sound-lines to you and between each other. It's the perfect fascist-killing sandbox.

Sniper Elite 4's achievement set is one of those absolute bastards that demands a huge breadth of experience and also total depth of mastery to complete. First up is the eight-mission campaign, all of which are pretty fantastic 40-60 minute affairs that stand up perfectly on replays, offering multiple paths and a wealth of side objectives to complete. Getting through this campaign, including all side objectives, is one big chunk of achievements. Each map also has fifteen letters to be collected which are fixed to either a location or, less commonly, on a particular soldier you need to kill and loot. The dynamic nature of the enemies in the game means that soldiers can end up patrolling around where you don't expect them or flushed out by your activity to strange places, so getting the latter can be a little bit of a pain in the ass. Every enemy sniper you duel also has a report detailing their activities that you can find on their body (for the ones whose perches you can get to) or on the ground close by (for the ones you can't), and you need all of those. Each level also has three stone eagles to snipe. It's lightly exhausting work to get all the collectibles, but the game does offer you two niceties: first, that they're all named and numbered in the collectible menu, accessible anytime in or out of missions; and second, that you can reset your collectible progress for a mission if you want to just turn your brain off and follow a video guide without checking what you accidentally scavenged the first time through. This will also come up later.

After you beat a mission, you unlock its five Challenges. Challenges are all over the place, from tasking you with killing a specific enemy in a specific way to asking you to kill a certain number of generic enemies with a certain weapon or tra to speedrun trials to completing a mission without healing, the list goes on and on. The challenges are logged immediately on completion, so you're free to completely scuff a run getting one and then immediately quitting out without finishing the mission again. The achievement, fortunately, only asks you to get all five challenges done for any single mission, so you can pick your favorite and grind it out. I chose the code-breaking facility, which asks you to: kill 20 enemies with stealth takedowns in one playthrough, finish the mission within 15 minutes, finish the mission without killing any vehicles, melee kill the final enemy sniper at the far back of the map, and kill two patrolling boats with a single shot. The last is a little bugged, not counting if your bullet destroys one boat which then explodes and destroys the other boat; the single bullet has to pierce both boats' fuel tanks. It was nasty. There's also a pair of level-inspecific achievement challenges, to complete any level without healing and to complete any level with only rifle kills. The latter is a little annoying because any environmental kill (such as shooting a grenade on an enemy's belt) that you make with your rifle doesn't count as a rifle kill, but it's not too bad to do once you know that.

There is also a series of progression achievements to fulfill while you're going through all of this. Most are just incrementing a number, like getting 100 target informations or getting 100 trap kills, and none are particularly unreasonable. The one notable item-based one is to get 5 kills with a single artillery strike you steal from an enemy, but there's ample places to get that if you're clever. This section is more notable for the weapon-based ones. Every weapon has three upgradeable categories that require doing a certain task a certain number of times, like 15 richochet kills or 50 eye shots or 10 double kills. Once you complete these three for a gun, a fourth and longer Mastery track unlocks, and finishing that track gets you a gold skin for that gun. You need to fully Master one gun of each category (rifle, submachine gun, pistol) for an achievement, and furthermore get a single kill (direct, not environmental) with every weapon you can purchase or loot for a second one. My Mastered set ended up being the M1 Garand, the M3 Grease Gun, and the HPM, for the curious.

All of this is leading up to the true bastard of Sniper Elite 4's achievement set. The game's difficulty ramps up in a number of ways. Each step up the difficulty slider makes enemies smarter and quicker to react, though they never get to laser-focused unfair reflexes even at the top-end, and makes you more fragile. Each step up the ladder also introduces more ballistic hurdles, with level 2 introducing gravity, 3 introducing static wind, and 4 letting the wind change during a level, as well as scope sway and hipfire spread increasing as you go up. Each step up the ladder also makes individual on-off changes, such as reloading past a certain difficulty dropping the partial magazine instead of loading Call of Duty style, locking scopes and binoculars to a single zoom level with no scrolling, turning off the regenerating-segment feature of the health bar, or making silenced rifle shots quieter rather than silent. This is also maybe the only game where I ever made a custom difficulty for achievement grinding, setting ballistics to maximum difficulty, enemies to normal intelligence, and my toughness to easy mode to create a playground where my primary enemy was making my shots. Lovely time.

This culminates in Authentic Plus. Authentic Plus ratchets all of the above to their maximum level, turns off all passive HUD elements except for the "nearby objective" indicator and contextual button prompts, removes the hold-breath shot preview marker, removes all in-mission checkpoints, removes your current position and objective markers on the map when you bring it up, and on top of all of that forces all enemies to speak their native German or Italian with no courtesy translation. Furthermore, it disables all permanent upgrades that you've bought and earned, both to yourself and to your guns. Everyone plays at the same level. Authentic Plus is, and I do not say this lightly, a complete motherfucker, but it plays by all the rules of the lower difficulties. Everything still works, it's just all harder to pull off. You can still land 200+ meter shots if you dial in your scope correctly, but you have to dial in your scope and estimate the wind factor yourself using the notches on your crosshair of choice. Most people recommend going in with the permanently-silenced Welrod and finding spots to trick the enemy AI with rocks until you can kill them all there and agonizingly creeping on afterwards. I did not do this. I tackled Authentic Plus as the total proof of mastery that it represents. I went through many different loadouts, I killed dozens or hundreds of enemies on some map and played others fast and stealthy, trying to keep to strict timings. I reset dozens of times and spent entire days stuck on single maps. Authentic Plus asked me to get good at Sniper Elite, and by God, I'm one of the best to have ever done it.

Braggadocio aside, the game isn't over. There are two co-op exclusive Overwatch maps that require a friend and pit the two of you as Sniper and Spotter. The map is strictly divided with no crossover, and the Spotter lacks a rifle while the Sniper lacks binoculars and a submachine gun. These are an exceptionally good time, and I'd love to see Rebellion make a game out of them. They also have their own sets of sniper reports, fifteen letters, and three stone eagles to shoot which are also part of the collectibles achievements for the base game, in addition to having their own achievements for completion. A friend is mandatory for this game. The collectibles are split roughly two-thirds on the Spotter and one-third on the Sniper, and this is relevant because collectibles get collected for both players, but collectibles you've collected don't show up. This is where the option to reset comes in really handy; without it, I wouldn't be able to help someone else out down the line, for instance. While your friend is still with you, there's six competitive modes and an achievement to play a round of each, plus one to snatch a capture from the jaws of defeat on one specific mode. The rounds are 15 minutes each and you can pub them (if anyone's playing) or just get a friend to idle them with you.

That's the base game dusted, but there's DLC. Four maps, to be precise, each of which requires completion including all side objectives, completion of all five challenges after beating the map once, and completion of a smattering of achievements besides that. Deathstorm is a series of three and, assuming you play through them once without trying to get anything, you'll have to complete each about three times to get everything done. Inception is the first and most straightforward of the three. The hard achievement is to sneak all the way across the map to the main objective without getting spotted, a process which took me over an hour of careful save-loading to pull off. Most of the rest are accomplished by getting a bunch of various trap kills and being thorough in completing the map. The remaining trio, which I did all together, are to melee kill all four snipers, beat the map without tagging enemies with your binoculars, and beat the map in 15 minutes. I set off at a dead sprint and hooted and hollered my way through the whole mission, rushing straight up to snipers to shank them in the face all the way to the bank. That was a fun one.

I went through the whole list for Inception because it's pretty indicative of most of the achievements for the others, and now I'll only go through the exceptions. Assume that, in addition to what I say about these next two maps, there's a smattering of generic ones along the vein of Inception's. Infiltration follows, and it's got two notable bastard ones. At the very start of the map, five officers are en route to a secret conference in a university auditorium. They'll only be there for a few minutes, so you have to absolutely hustle to that auditorium through the entire width of the map without raising the alarm, which will spook them, so that you can shoot the chandelier they'll all be discussing their Nazi shit under and crush them all at once. The other sort-of nasty one is to complete the map without being shot at by any of the map's seven snipers, some static in towers and some patrolling. Be extra careful not to do the side objective here, because that summons two extra snipers to deal with.

Obliteration comes third, and it's a doozy. Befitting a map called Obliteration, one achievement tasks you to Obliterate every enemy. Depending on reinforcements getting called in, there's around two hundred and ten enemies spread across three phases of map that all need to be killed. It's a hell of a slog and it's capped off by the meanest little gotcha - there's an island about 350 meters off the southwest end of the map with three guys milling about on it. They have no way to threaten you or interact with you in any way, but they count for the achievement. There's another achievement you can get alongside this to kill all of the map's eleven enemy snipers with explosives. On the opposite end, an achievement asks you to complete the mission while organ-shotting (i.e. a fatal non-headshot) an enemy at least every two minutes. Another asks you to make the final thunder run from the exploding bunker to evacuation without firing a single shot. One that's good to do alongside one of those two is one to complete the map with only subsonic ammunition kills. Another pair are tied to the map's side objective: there are three scientists who have research papers in safes nearby, and you have to abduct one for the objective. For the achievements, you have to secure all three research papers within ten minutes, and you have to abduct all three scientists in a single run that you then also complete. Obliteration stands out from the others because it not only has some complete fuckers for achievements, but many of them require the mission to be completed after doing them rather than being ones you can gun for and then quit out. I had to beat Obliteration 4.5 times to get everything, making a manual save with subsonic kills only and an organ-shot streak running at the point where I blew the bunker up and then doing the thunder run with organ shots and then with no shots for those three achievements.

Obliteration does also have a really funny joke, though. Every single enemy in the game is pre-seeded with a name and an Allied Intelligence Fact about the specific warcrimes they've committed or when they were conscripted. Five guys in Obliteration stationed across the map are surnamed Reiner, and there's an achievement to extract without killing any of the five, which I got alongside the organ-shot thunder run.

The achievement is called Saving Private Reiner.

The final DLC map is, well, it's Sniper Elite. It's the Hitler map. You go to a submarine base to kill the commander and find him dead, executed on order of the Führer for treason. Big Adi is now inspecting the base himself, and you have a whole Hitman-ass level to fuck with to deal with him. Assuming you kill Hitler for no achievement the first time by just shooting him in his little dumb mustache, you have to kill Hitler ten times to finish out Sniper Elite 4. The remaining nine are:

• Drop a sea mine in the path of Hitler's escape boat so that he runs into it while fleeing your unsuccessful assassination attempt
• Shoot the clasp holding up a submarine while Hitler is under it, crushing him with an entire U-boat
• Shoot the hook holding up a magnificent stone eagle commissioned to impress Hitler while he's giving a speech under it, crushing him and symbolically shattering the Reichsadler
• Melee kill Hitler without having prior blown your cover, but it doesn't matter if you literally do it in front of his entire entourage by lurking at a corner until Hitler walks around it first and you die instantly after the kill animation
• Shoot Hitler in the ball, duh
• Just blow up the entire base with Hitler inside it via a little sabotage
• Blow up a torpedo rack while Hitler's inspecting it
• Get the special engraved 1911 that the executed guy was going to give Hitler as a present (named Eternal Struggle) and use it to introduce a new yet very brief struggle to Hitler's skull
• Finally, the first thing Hitler does upon visiting the base is to sample a casserole; you can put a grenade in the casserole and wire it to the ladle so the meal explodes when he tastes it, but you have to be really fast and distract Hitler with a rock before he gets there

You also have to do any one of these and extract without getting spotted, but that's pretty easy to do with either the sabotage or the casserole. After all this, you're finally done. Sniper Elite 4 is packed away, breadth and depth. What a hell of a game, one of my sleeper favorites of all time somehow. Wild.

And hey, for a sleeper fave, I aced it out on my thirty-third birthday. Happy birthday to me!

[Integrity]

oh yeah there was a second dredge dlc it was exactly like the first, it took me like five hours and i had an absolutely lovely time doing it

[Dayni]

Interesting to hear Sniper Elite be described in similar ways to the newer Hitmans, with the sandbox nature of how you can approach a big strength. I can presume the enemy AI might be tougher here?

17 hours ago, Integrity said:

This is also maybe the only game where I ever made a custom difficulty for achievement grinding, setting ballistics to maximum difficulty, enemies to normal intelligence, and my toughness to easy mode to create a playground where my primary enemy was making my shots. Lovely time.

This however is very nice for that.

9 hours ago, Integrity said:

it is kind of just the "shoot-Hitler-in-the-ball game",

To be fair, this is a good point for the back of the box.

17 hours ago, Integrity said:

Authentic Plus

Legit skill to learn from what you're telling us about it.

17 hours ago, Integrity said:

Assuming you kill Hitler for no achievement the first time by just shooting him in his little dumb mustache, you have to kill Hitler ten times to finish out Sniper Elite 4.

That sounds like someone's weekend in and of itself, not even the rest of the game.

Considering you went near 90 hours, that's a lot of game I see.

17 hours ago, Integrity said:

And hey, for a sleeper fave, I aced it out on my thirty-third birthday. Happy birthday to me!

Belated happy birthday to you.

On 8/14/2024 at 1:20 AM, Integrity said:

Good old Wyatt came in clutch, having never played the game before, to start a 1v1 against me and to demand that I give him money 30 times. That counts as a mission!

Ah, what fun.

[Integrity]

3 hours ago, Dayni said:

Interesting to hear Sniper Elite be described in similar ways to the newer Hitmans, with the sandbox nature of how you can approach a big strength. I can presume the enemy AI might be tougher here?

parrhesia has actually described it as the game he wishes hitman were on more than one occasion. the enemy ai offers significant resistance (especially on higher difficulties) but each individual guy can kill you quite quickly and keeps a last known position of you that can only be updated by seeing or hearing you, or having another guy "tell" him a more recent position. this is awesome because you can write yourself into fantastic corners where enemies are deadly and a guy you forgot or didn't notice you alerted five minutes ago sees you with his buddies he got and everything goes to hell instantly. it also means that after you go loud the game doesn't just become a cover shooter - you can lob a grenade thirty feat away and crawl away and redirect attention there. it is quite a bit like a hitman where everyone is your target

3 hours ago, Dayni said:

That sounds like someone's weekend in and of itself, not even the rest of the game.

Adolf Hitler took me about four hours of killing so depending on how much time you sink in, yeah

3 hours ago, Dayni said:

Belated happy birthday to you.

thank you!

[Integrity]

LAST CALL BBS (ZACHTRONICS, 2022)

Finished: 20/8/24. Playtime: 18.3 hours.

Last Call BBS is kind of an autoeulogy for Zachtronics, and it shows. Zach himself has said that he wants to branch out from the Zachtronics brand of a certain kind of puzzle game onto other pursuits, and has laid it to rest at least for the time being. Last Call BBS carries a lot of the weight behind that decision, a collection of minigames on a faux-'80s PC that you complete to get little messages from the previous owner about the way things used to be. Your mysterious partner tells you about the game designers of the day, how they got tired, dropped out, or were priced out of the sector. It's all very melancholic, as much as a game where you build circuits to jaunty music can be, and far better written than it would seem at first glance. Since it's a minigame collection, I'll go over them individually in the order I tackled them. The nine achievements are for "finishing" each of the eight minigames plus one for fucking around hard enough to get a secret credits sequence.

You start out with just Sawayama Solitaire, which is just Klondike solitaire and thus is just pretty good. Three-card draw, no reshuffle, nothing fancy. Since you have to "connect" to a BBS to "download" the other games, which takes time and puts you into a download quota timeout, this isn't one you master so much as just do. Win ten games to get all the messages and move on.

Kabufuda Solitaire is an attempt to make a solitaire game using kabufuda cards, which astute viewers will know as the other kind of traditional Japanese playing cards for games like oicho-kabu. You have all your cards dealt face-up FreeCell style into a rectangular tableau and can stack any number of the same card together. There's four foundations that also function as free spaces you can put a single card each into. When you stack all four of a given kind of card together, you can plonk them all face down into either a free space in the tableau or into one of the foundations. Melding all the cards in this way wins the game and unlocks the next difficulty level, which removes one of the foundation spaces to make the game just a bit tighter. Expert gives you only a single foundation as swap space, and melding into a tableau column unlocks another foundation slot, making every move incredibly tight. I found this one to be super fun and might just adapt it for use with hanafuda cards as an offline timekiller, since I have a set of the latter but not the former. Win a game on Expert to get all the messages and move on.

Dungeons & Diagrams is basically Picross+. You're given an 8x8 grid with monsters and treasure pre-placed and each row and column has a number for how many walls are contained therein. You have four simple rules: every dead end must have a monster and every monster must be at a dead end, every treasure room is a 3x3 square with only one entrance, there are no other 2x2 squares of free space in the dungeon, and the entire dungeon path must be contiguous. This one was absolutely lovely to play, and I'd love to see an expanded version with more puzzles that have extra rules, more visual flair, stuff like that. I'd pay an easy $10 for an expanded version of this in a heartbeat. Complete all 64 puzzles to get all the messages and move on.

X'BPGH: The Forbidden Path is another great one, but one that coasts hard on its vibes. You start with a single cell of blood and set up a series of rules for it to algorithmically follow, splitting and merging and morphing into other fleshy substances in order to attain a desired final form, like Conway's Game of Life but expanded on. While I found it really quite fun, what helps this one out hugely is that it's got an astonishingly good late-80s biopunk horror aesthetic, like someone got home from a double showing of Tetsuo: The Iron Man and Akira in 1990 and crowbarred it all together into a light narrative about growing a machine god. Everything down to the interface is just a bit unsettling, and this is one I was absolutely sad to see go. Complete all 15 puzzles to be subsumed by your new god and get all the messages and move on.

Steed Force Hobby Studio is, of all things, a gunpla simulator. You get tape, spray paint, tweezers, a knife, and absolutely dogshit instructions with one or two pictures, and you cut out and build and paint plastic robots. There's no time pressure, there's no way to stick the wrong pieces together, absolutely no frills put on it. You have a board on which you place runners, cut pieces out, and put them together. That's it. It's enjoyable. I might try my hand at the real thing someday when I have more money. Assemble three models and paint them as badly (or not at all) as you like to get all the messages and move on.

ChipWizard Professional is a circuit builder game. You get two layers of silicon from which to make PNP and NPN transistors, and you have to turn an input signal into a desired set of outputs with it. It's very fun, but the challenge comes from the absolutely tiny board you have to work with. I literally taught a semester of undergraduate circuits at college and knowing what I had to do and figuring out how to get it to fit in this obscenely tiny window were often too much at odds for me to really enjoy it. It's a brutal fucker of a game, and I shudder to think of how bad it would have been if I didn't have a basic knowledge of its underpinnings. Great game, but absolutely unreasonably difficult. Finish all of the, uh, ah hell I uninstalled it already and can't remember and there isn't a Steam guide to help, there's 24ish circuits. Get all the messages and move on.

20th Century Food Court has you set up a totally automated production line for various foodstuffs using various conveyer belts, logic routers, and wiring. I didn't think it was very good, honestly. This was the big miss of the pack. The very first few puzzles take an unfortunate amount of time to implement their solutions even after you figure out what you need to do from an algorithmic standpoint, and it only ramps up in complexity from there without getting too much harder. Later puzzles are just bigger nests of wires based on very similar logic to the earlier ones, and they're such a fuckin' pain to set up. I made it about a fourth of the way through the puzzles before giving up and just copying solutions from a guide, and even that took three sessions and a total of about eighty minutes because everything is so fiddly to work with. Solve all 21 puzzles to get all the messages and move on.

Last up, HACK*MATCH is a match-4 game where all the tiles are descending towards you and you can swap two tiles vertically and grab and move a single one at a time. If the descending wall of tiles crosses your little grabber machine, you lose instantly. You cause damage to your opponent by making matches of 5+ tiles and, primarily, via combos, and periodically your opponent will cause something nasty to happen to you in return. It's simple but brutal, and there's no real way around it. You just have to get good enough to beat it and also get a good enough tableau that you can win the damage race before your opponent invalidates too much of your shit. Nominally you "just" have to beat all four opponents in a row to claim victory, get all the messages, and move on, but this took me a hell of a lot of tries to get through.

So closes the door on Zachtronics. Strange studio, hell of a run. Their story is kind of aped in the annals of Last Call BBS, though it lasted much longer. Whatever Zach does next, I wish him all the best. We need more guys and more studios like that.

[lenticular]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

So closes the door on Zachtronics. Strange studio, hell of a run. Their story is kind of aped in the annals of Last Call BBS, though it lasted much longer. Whatever Zach does next, I wish him all the best. We need more guys and more studios like that.

Yeah, nothing but respect for them for going out on their own terms like that. They made some really fun games, and I'm glad they didn't keep on churning out stuff that their heart wasn't really into just for the sake of it. And it can't be easy to make a game that gets ripped-off by an alt-right conspiracy-theorist and see his version of the game go on to become the best selling game in history. That's got to sting, but I don't ever recall seeing Zach being bitter about it. So good on him.

Also: I really need to pick up Last Call BBS at some point.

[Dayni]

On 8/20/2024 at 11:48 PM, lenticular said:

And it can't be easy to make a game that gets ripped-off by an alt-right conspiracy-theorist and see his version of the game go on to become the best selling game in history. That's got to sting, but I don't ever recall seeing Zach being bitter about it.

Huh?

Looks it up

Ah.

RIP Infinihammer.

On 8/20/2024 at 10:05 PM, Integrity said:

Last Call BBS is kind of an autoeulogy for Zachtronics, and it shows. Zach himself has said that he wants to branch out from the Zachtronics brand of a certain kind of puzzle game onto other pursuits, and has laid it to rest at least for the time being. Last Call BBS carries a lot of the weight behind that decision, a collection of minigames on a faux-'80s PC that you complete to get little messages from the previous owner about the way things used to be. Your mysterious partner tells you about the game designers of the day, how they got tired, dropped out, or were priced out of the sector. It's all very melancholic, as much as a game where you build circuits to jaunty music can be, and far better written than it would seem at first glance.

I feel like somehow there's an intent of calling back to reality in the story of this one. Just a feeling.

(Looked at a trailer, got a sense of how it'd feel to play, neat that it's not Windows locked)

[Integrity]

DOOM + DOOM II (VARIOUS, VARIOUS)
Finished: 29/8/24. Playtime: 41.3 hours.

Sometimes a game is so huge that you just, like, what the fuck do you say about Doom? This is a high that players and designers alike have been chasing for over thirty years. Hell, some of the guys who made Doom haven't really moved on from Doom. It's difficult to conceive of a game this influential even with all the evidence staring you right in the face. It's insane. Anyway, Bethesda packed up Doom, its sequel, and a good six map packs into a Steamworks-enabled port/remaster similar to what they did with Quake, and handed it out for free to people who owned Doom already. It's a little jarring how good their stewardship of the old Id franchises has been, frankly. Let's see what the fuck I have to say about Doom, I guess. Ahead of time: I'm going through all of these on Hurt Me Plenty, the third from five (four, reasonably) difficulties. The achievements, besides one each to complete each pack, are shared among all games and I'll go over them at the end.

DOOM (ID, 1993)
It's Doom. You know what it is. It's on every system known to man or mer, and probably 30% of the world has played it at some point. This is Ultimate Doom, from 1995; the original release never made it to retail shelves and contained three episodes: Knee-Deep in the Dead (the legendary shareware version), The Shores of Hell, and Inferno. After the retail success of Doom 2 in 1994, Doom would have a fourth episode (Thy Flesh Consumed) put together by some of the Doom 2 level team to tie the two games together and would be repackaged as Ultimate Doom for stores. I've played Doom several times before. One of my very formative memories at age 5 or so was playing Doom 2 co-op with my dad and him showing me the chainsaw secret right behind you in MAP01, but I also played the first around then and a few times since. This is the first time I've played it since turning 30, though, when I started thinking more critically about things.

What's really interesting for me about playing Doom this time is how well it holds up. I honestly think that Doom is a flawless game. That's not to say it's one of my favorites, or a perfect game, mind. It certainly lacks the highs of some of its sequels. Critically, though, the closest thing that Doom has to a flaw is that sometimes Sandy Petersen was allowed to cook a little bit too much and a map gets a little bit too twisty, and if that's the worst thing I can say about a game that's more than thirty years old, good heavens. This would still be a pretty great outing in the boomer shooter genre if it were released today, and it was made entirely without any standards of level or game design or even a genre to adhere to. It's fascinating. Everyone should at least play through Knee-Deep in the Dead sometime just to experience it, even if they bounce off and don't go through the rest of the game.

Speaking of Knee-Deep in the Dead, another really interesting thing is how much the level designers' voices come out in the individual episodes. Doom's three episodes were famously designed mostly by individuals, with John Romero making almost the entirety of Knee-Deep in the Dead (E1) and Tom Hall starting most of The Shores of Hell (E2) before parting with Id Software. Sandy Petersen would take over finishing The Shores of Hell and put his own stamp on Inferno (E3). The difference between these three guys shows starkly. E1 is action-forward and sprawling, but never particularly labyrinthine. E2 and especially E3 aren't afraid to be weird, twisty, and often strangely quiet considering Doom's reputation. Impressively for the game that made the FPS, the only one of these maps I'd consider particularly poor is E3M6, with the worst of the 23 others still being a fairly enjoyable time. Sandy Petersen's reach does occasionally exceed his grasp, though, which I think is going to be an interesting predictor of Doom 2's higher highs and lower lows.

I've separated these three out from Thy Flesh Consumed (E4) because that one bucks two important trends from the first three. While E1 through E3 were produced with no real experience or standards in this style of game, E4 was made after Doom's initial success and after Doom 2's wild breakout. Similarly, Doom 2 did not follow the episodic format of Doom, with levels by various designers (including newcomer American McGee) mixed into a line; E4 follows this philosophy rather than that of Doom, so it doesn't really have the same authorial voice that the first three episodes do. I make all these distinctions in large part because E4 kinda sucks ass. The shared elements of the episode are a higher difficulty and significantly higher emphasis on what we'd consider puzzles now, though they're fairly simplistic befitting the era. They're also jankily implemented, poorly signposted, and in one case a freak of nature from Romero where you can interact with the four sides of a pillar to make them come down like elevators and whichever side you ride up feeds you into the same teleporter, but teleports you to a different place. The higher difficulty isn't bad on the face of it, but a lot of the episode feels like it was designed as a set of Doom 2 maps first and then ported back into Doom without any real thought for how the player plays significantly worse in close-range combat without the newfangled super shotgun. It's just all-in-all a nasty time, and I think it's telling that Sandy Petersen didn't work on any of the maps for this one.

Still, a poor-to-mediocre expansion pack tacked on two years after the fact doesn't tarnish my initial thoughts about Doom. The comprehensive E1 through E3 package represents something absolutely mindshattering for 1993, and it's absurdly clear why Doom caught on like the wildfire it did. Hell, without anything to compare it to besides Doom 2 and the very first snippets of Apogee fodder, even E4 isn't that bad as a challenge to people who had had two years to play Doom and its sequel.

DOOM II: HELL ON EARTH (ID, 1994)
Doom 2 is a bold and confident game. From the second you hit Start, the action is ramped up massively from its predecessor, with larger maps, higher enemy density, significantly higher enemy variety, and a brand-new double-barreled sawn-off break-action twelve-gauge shot-gun to round out your weapon loadout. The maps themselves are designed with bolder strokes, harsher punishments, and more roundabout puzzles, while also assuming that you the player understand Doom's quirks significantly better than you did for the first game. It's a comprehensive sequel in just about every sense of the word. It's brilliant.  ...but I prefer the first. I'm about to espouse what's, frankly, possibly the single most wrong opinion that you have ever heard someone type onto the internet. This is wrongthink. This is incorrect. I think I have a point, though. Doom 2's problems all come back to the legendary super shotgun, and I think that, while it's a great weapon in itself, it was a huge misstep in a sequel to Doom.

Let's get into this element-by-element. The super shotgun costs two shells to fire, has an absolutely iconic reload animation, and then comes back up a second or so later. For those two shells, you get an instant screen-clearing burst of damage equivalent to about three shotgun shells, crushing smaller enemies at distance by sheer weight of probability, crossing the hitstun thresholds for many larger enemies, and obliterating mid-threat enemies like the Pinky at close range. It becomes an instant workhorse the second you pick one up, and it will probably never rotate out of being the weapon you default to when ammo is plentiful. It is objectively a fantastic gun statistically, and subjectively feels superb to wield.

Having done nothing but praise it, what's the problem? The problem is multifaceted and I'm going to go over a few semi-related things before tying it all together, so bear with me. The first is a simple addition to the playstyle: jousting. Doom's Marine was the most mobile thing on the map but crucially lacked in burst damage compared to his sustained DPS. If you wanted to apply huge damage to an enemy you necessarily had to keep your face at least somewhat exposed while the chaingun or plasma rifle worked its wonder. Even the rocket launcher and shotgun had fairly significant rates of fire, so if you were peeking out from cover to land a shot and ducking back, you were hampering your performance enormously for safety. The super shotgun frontloading so much damage with such a huge refractory period enables a safer level of play that really just wasn't present in the first game, and while this isn't bad on the face of it, I'm bringing it up now to establish it.

The sheer power and ability of the super shotgun has an immediate knock-on effect in the map design. Enemy counts can get away with being enormously higher, ambushes can be far nastier, and corridors can have much less room for maneuvering when you can assume that the player has access to on-demand insane burst. The worst bits of Doom 2's map design end up gently papered over by the simple existence of the super shotgun, and the same goes for its new enemies. The Archvile shrimply annihilates you if you don't hug him with the BFG or have the plasma rifle already firing when you spot him... unless you just cover-peek with the super shotgun. Chaingunners, already the worst part of the game, become absolutely untenable if you don't have a reliable way to take them out before their damage piles up. Pain Elementals are already terrible as-is, but if you didn't have the ability to oneshot a Lost Soul, they'd be an every-time mandatory cell burn event. Doom 2 just doesn't work without the super shotgun to a centralizing degree that I think the game ends up suffering from, rather than benefiting.

Now, I'll admit, this is not all to say something deranged like I think Doom 2 is a bad game. Doom 2 is still very enjoyable and has some legitimately fantastic maps, including weirdly some of the too-intricate back-end Hell ones. I derided half of the enemies added in the previous paragraph, but the decision to flesh out the middle tier of demons with the mini-Baron of Hell and the mini-Spiderdemon was an incredible one, and Revenants are just the campiest and coolest little fucking freaks in FPS history. Mancubi came too. My feelings about Doom 2 are more ones of gentle disappointment; Doom was shockingly good in its quieter moments, and Doom 2 made the decision to throw that all away in favor of full-bore action. It clearly worked, history very obviously proved Id right not only here but in the high-octane energy of Quake two years later. Maybe that's why I just didn't like it quite as much as I wanted to. It's not quite the strangely moody and adventurous Doom, and it's not quite the shockingly tight action of Quake. So it goes.

MASTER LEVELS FOR DOOM II (ID, SORTA; 1995)
Speaking of Quake, the developmental run up to the Quake Engine was a period of slight famine for Id, and John Romero had a cool idea: what if Id contracted a small pile of the best Doom fanmappers to make a little paid expansion pack for Doom 2? Five community members, plus new hire Tim Willits who had been brought on to make maps for The Ultimate Doom, were contracted to make a total of 20 maps (plus a secret one) that were slapped together as a showcase of the Doom community's talents and sold on retail shelves. These maps were completely disconnected from one another, to the point where the original release shunted you back to DOS after each instead of continuing to the next map with your loadout intact. In one of the many rereleases they were sorta-arbitrarily numbered and slapped into a line as a minicampaign. Out of respect for that original vision, I turned pistol start on so all the maps would start me off like the original design.

What I got in return for my respect was the biggest monkey's paw ever curled. The good news is that the thing I missed from Doom, a distinct authorial voice, is back. Six, actually, but the maps are largely grouped by author and it's pretty obvious when the mapmaker du jour changes. The better news is that two of these guys are (were, RIP Dr. Sleep) legitimately talented, and their maps were among the better in Doom 2's overall roster, so let's shout out the good first. Dr. Sleep's maps were generally just great, and Willits put together some really solid if tame maps to open out the pack. That's seven total maps.

The mixed bag's name is Christen David Kile. Kile's reach occasionally exceeded his grasp, like a souped-up version of an early Petersen, but I'd say I generally enjoyed his six contributions to the pack. They were occasionally frustrating, usually interesting pieces of work. Thanks, Kile. Tom Mustaine did a single level. It was okay. I don't remember anything about it anymore.

The rest come from two sources, and these six maps were all intensely memorable in precisely the wrong way. Jim Flynn is the lesser sinner, seemingly convinced that Doom 2 lended itself well to precision puzzle platforming in his first outing and to... I don't know how the hell to describe Trapped on Titan except to say that the first thing that happens is you take three steps and pick up a shotgun, and a chaingunner appears on either side of you, and the map does not get less tedious or more interesting from there over the course of the near-hour it took me to complete. For reference, my clock time with significant reloading and dying was 28 minutes; a typical level of Doom 2 runs in the high-single or low-double digits clock time and probably 10-20 minutes of real time. An hour is preposterous.

Our spotlight tonight goes onto Cranium, who contributed four maps to the pack. I could go on about all three of Black Tower, Bloodsea Keep, and especially Mephisto's Mausoleum, but the indicative story has to go to Express Elevator to Hell. You see, for those of you who haven't experienced it, Doom is infamously not really a 3D game. It does have "height" and there does exist a Z-axis of sorts, but your controls are strictly limited to a two-dimensional plane, all upwards or downwards aiming is handled automatically, and mobile entities are infinity high for the purposes of collision. It's a very fancy 2D shooter for all intents and purposes. Express Elevator to Hell asks a very simple question: what if we focused a level in this engine entirely on verticality? I will leave it to the viewer to decide how well that went.

Overall, I'm not displeased I played the Master Levels, but damn if they didn't put their best foot forward. The funny thing is that I nearly listed the authors to you in the order the game gives them - Willits first, then Kile and Mustaine, then Dr. Sleep, Flynn, Cranium. If you flipped the Kile and Sleep blocs it would be nearly a straight downward line of quality. Fascinating.

FINAL DOOM (TNT, 1996)
Romero didn't stop there. Final Doom would be his last contribution to the franchise for a very, very long while, and it would consist of him landing community involvement to swing together two more cohesive campaigns than the Master Levels represented. TeamTNT had a fan campaign they were going to release for free that Romero successfully (and controversially at the time, but I say get that bread kings) lobbied for them to license officially and get sold through Id. Simultaneously, two members of TeamTNT, Dario and Milo Casali, had impressed American McGee with a little campaign they'd made as a sort of application, and he and Romero asked them to put together a second campaign to package with TeamTNT's other work while the rest of the team did some Id-mandated revisions. The two campaigns would be titled TNT: Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment, and they would be sold on retail shelves as Final Doom. Man, that title is almost as ironic as Final Fantasy anymore, huh.

Anyhow, both of these are included in this pack, and there's an achievement for each, so let's start out with TNT: Evilution. I'm just going to call it Evilution from here on out to avoid mixing it up with the studio. Evilution is, overall, quite good. It hits a really good "I want more Doom 2, but harder" stride for its entire midgame, and it takes a good while for it to properly start overreaching and making maps that are way too big and way too obtuse. Regrettably, it does hit that point eventually, and the back third or so of the 30-map pack serves up some exceptional slogs to get through. The authorial voice coalesces into a single chorus for most of the maps - more Doom 2 than Doom - except for one standout designer. Drake O'Brien made three maps, all in the back third, and every time I made it through one of his maps I went "wow that was the worst map in the pack, I wonder who made it" and it was him every time. Fascinating. Still, there's at least a good 20 solid maps in Evilution, and it was definitely worth my time overall.

The Plutonia Experiment (henceforth Plutonia) is the other half of Final Doom, and it has a reputation as a ballbuster. It has this reputation because it is. Plutonia is faintly exhausting to play from the very first map, and it never calms down. Part of me wants to say that it's kind of crap, but it was literally designed as a challenge for people who were finding Ultraviolence mundane in the base game, so how much of it is bad and how much of it is unenjoyable for me but fulfilling its purpose? I thought the worst maps of TNT were bad in large part because they seemed incongruous with the rest of the map set, but if I began exhausted by Plutonia and remained, level by level, exhausted by Plutonia, did it succeed or did it fail? Curious questions. It wasn't all bad, at least; when Plutonia is firing on all cylinders, it's a legitimate joy to play. It's a shame that's a stark minority of maps overall.

NO REST FOR THE LIVING (NERVE, 2010)
So here's a weird one. Doom came fairly early and unceremoniously to the XBox Live Arcade in its Ultimate Doom form - after all, Doom runs on everything, eh? In 2010, Bethesda would commission a Doom 2 port from Nerve Software, a studio made of chiefly Rogue alumni, a name you'll probably not remember from the Quake 2 expansion packs. In what might be the first herald of what was to come from their stewardship, Bethesda would allow Nerve to add their own episode to the game as part of the port. This weird little packet of levels was then only available within Doom 3's final rerelease, of all things, before eventually showing up in this repackage. One of the goals of Doom 1 + 2 was to simplify how the classic Doom games were accessed; I think you can guess why this was a priority by now.

No Rest for the Living is quite a good extra episode. One of its stated goals was to show off how many more enemies you could put on screen with how much computers had evolved since 1996, but it doesn't go overboard doing this. Crucially, it also does this through spamming the hell out of the basic projectile enemies - Imps, Hellknights, Cacodemons, etc. - rather than Plutonia's tons of Revenants and Chaingunners, creating a much more enjoyable time when open areas are involved. It's a nice de-escalation from the Master Levels and Final Doom, and had a few nice and memorable setpieces like the tower in MAP07 to think back fondly on. Most of it is just going to fade into the background slush of positive memories I have of Doom, though, and that's fine. Honestly, if I were to decide to practice a Doom speedrun, I'd probably speedrun this episode.

SIGIL (JOHN ROMERO, 2019)
Romero's back, baby. The last episode he had primary design credit for was E1: Knee Deep in the Dead, the shareware version of the original Doom, and the last involvement he had with Doom was organizing Final Doom more than twenty years before this. Sigil represents a semi-official E5, released for Doom's 25th birthday by one of the original minds behind it all. It aims for a tone closer to the original three episodes of Doom rather than what came afterwards, eschewing all of the new monsters and the super shotgun to retvrn to how it was before.

Sigil represents nothing less than the steady hand of a master showing off his craft. Romero has only matured as a designer since the 90s, and it shows in endless ways all over Sigil, from its instant and perfect tutorializing of a new mechanic to its consistent design language throughout. All eight levels are memorable and well-made, and the only times I got stuck were because I was an idiot who didn't look left or forgot about a door I had passed a minute prior. Each level has a beautiful way of wrapping back around on itself after key moments, pressing a switch or getting a keycard, in a way that allows levels to be large but not aimless. I feel like I have less to say about Sigil than other packs because my thoughts are so simple: Sigil is the best content in this pack, hands-down, unless Legacy of Rust thoroughly impresses me.

LEGACY OF RUST (NIGHTDIVE, 2024)
So we come to the present. Nightdive and MachineGames, Bethesda's current pet studios for handling classic FPS franchises, were invited to create a two-episode new addition to this port of Doom, as Nerve did for Doom 2, as MachineGames did for Quake and Quake 2. Legacy of Rust bucks the trend by adding new content for the first time since Doom 2 itself, both weapons and demons. The new weapons are a particularly odd duck: Legacy of Rust simply does not have cells at all. It has fuel, which is used to power the Incinerator and the Calamity Blade, replacing the Plasma Rifle and the BFG. The Incinerator is a weird replacement, because while it does quite a load of damage, it does quite a load of damage to everything with finicky fire. The Plasma Rifle was emergency DPS to get something out of your face; doing this with the Incinerator kills you basically instantly. On top of that, anytime you're playing with ledges, the Incinerator is just as likely to clip them with its fat projectiles as the Plasma Rifle was, but with the added problem that these clipped projectiles are spawning finicky flames that are likely as anything to melt you. On top of that, the Plasma Rifle was the only pressure outlet that even compared to the super shotgun, so with it gone the game turns even more into the Super Shotgun Show as long as shells are around. It's a poor weapon overall that I never got the hang of using, and I acutely felt the loss of the stalwart Plasma Rifle all game long. On top of that, the Rocket Launcher and BFG have a sort of safety trigger where if you're holding fire and autoswap to one (because you ran out of ammo, for instance), they won't fire until you unpress and repress the button. The Incinerator does not. The Calamity Blade is alright, firing a wave projectile straight ahead that does pretty good damage and can be charged to do loads more, but it suffers from two problems. First, that it's not the BFG, and similarly to the Incinerator, that emergency damage is just absent from your toolkit. Second, that it doesn't aim vertically at all and can happily pass over the heads of enemies or doink into a low wall. What the hell?

The new enemies are... a choice, and I think they all make the game uniquely worse in their own ways. There's two new kinds of flying skull (the Lost Soul wasn't obnoxious enough?), one which flies around quickly and fires a single Arachnotron laser at a time and one which flies around slowly screaming fucking constantly and explodes on death or contact, like an even more annoying version of the suicide guys from Serious Sam. There's a new human enemy who uses the multiplayer sprite and fires bursts of Plasma Rifle fire at you - rubbing salt in the wound, are we - that do absolutely fucking insane damage. I'm talking 20-40 damage per hit. They absolutely juice you. There's big old Baphomet boys who throw persistent fire that has a hitbox about three meters larger than its sprite and who have unbelievable amounts of health. Possibly-worst of all, they decided that the chaingunner needed a sequel, and made a new mid-tier spider with the Mastermind's chaingun, so if you thought that chaingunners needed less auditory feedback and to have about three times the health, this is your hack.

Ultimately, all this combines to make a pair of episodes that are just kind of miserable to play. Everything is far too sprawling, far too full of enemies, far too intricate. Many of these maps were 15-30 minute endeavors, which is just too much for a map of Doom. The final, also, is just absolute wank - giving you the ever-so-cool Calamity Blade and tossing you up against rooms of double-digit Archviles and dozens of downsized Cyberdemons. It's goofy in a way that isn't fun, and it was a poor cap to this pack.

THE REST
There's a small handful of cleanup achievements in the pack. Many you'll get naturally through playing. Some are all but unmissable, like getting multikills with the shotgun and rocket launcher. Some require either a certain playstyle or foreknowledge, like punching 25 enemies to death in a single level or firing 200 chaingun bullets without letting up on the trigger. Finding a secret level in any of the games is one, and finishing off a Cyberdemon with the pistol is another. There's two achievements specific to Legacy of Rust's new weapons that aren't too bad to get but it's easy to miss one if you're not looking. One requires you to kill 50 enemies in a single Calamity Blade; the game practically feeds you this on E2M6. The other is to kill 30 spider-type enemies (the new one and both base types) with the Incinerator. I found the Incinerator to be uniquely unsuited for this compared to other weapons, so had to go out of my way to farm it, but it didn't take long.

Doom's entire achievement set bar four is difficulty-agnostic, and they're spread across the top three difficulties. For Hurt Me Plenty, clean a level out with 100% kills. For Nightmare, just finish any level at all. Ultraviolence has two: one to complete a level with 100% kills while taking no damage, and one to complete eight consecutive maps under par time without dying. By the time you've done Plutonia and shit like that, Doom or Doom 2 on Ultraviolence will seem pedestrian in comparison, so these absolutely aren't bad at all. The first one is a little buggy when saves get involved, fair warning. You can save at the end of the level with full health and leave the map, reload, and re-leave the map to get it at least.

And that's Doom packed up. Eight campaigns of varying lengths and quality, more Doom than anyone could reasonably ask for. It's a legend for a reason.

Edited August 30 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

So the challenge was recently posed to me, by Ike, to go revisit an old fave, 100% it, and see how it holds up.

And the answer, in Final Fantasy Tactics A2's case, is a resounding sort of.

My receipt.

FFTA2 is a TBS RPG in the Tactics Ogre isometric mould, the third and last of the FFTs. It's for the DS but the stylus and in-built microphone basically never come up, making it unique; the second screen is generally used pretty well to store info. The usual gameplay loop is that you run around the map. There are 300 unique (well, basically unique) quests to complete, many of them are (usually 6v6) skirmishes, but there's a good bit of variety. Final save file count was 76 hours; call it an 80 if you factor in time lost to resets and the fact that the final mission and the true final mission don't get saved to it. I think playing it normally is a 20-30 hour endeavour, depending on how much side shit you feel inclined to get.

FFTA2, being a DS game, doesn't have achievements, but it does give you a pretty star for clearing all 300 quests and unlocks a mission literally called The Final Quest. There's also three dungeons, the Brightmoon Tor; I only did two of them, because late-stage FFTA2 isn't that interesting. I guess you can also say that you don't have to 

Gameplay

A significant issue in the super-lategame (that, again, I don't think a normal, sane player should reach) is that it becomes pure rocket tag. By the time my status guys got set up, 

(This XP system isn't picked up by Fell Seal, which otherwise generally knows to cherry-pick the best aspects of each FFT entry. I don't know why. It's far better than 'do action to get XP'.)

FFTA2 has a far better approach to facing than FFT (basically never matters) and FFTA (tied to accuracy). Instead, backstabbing does more damage and frontstabbing does less; a backstab's worth two frontstabs. But accuracy doesn't shift. There's an inexplicably Kagapilled 99% cap, and evasion rarely goes higher than 5% or especially over 10%, basically just if you're stacking it past that point; FFTA2 would have benefited from a thresholding system where over 90% accuracy just Was 100%. As it stands, the misses are really, really annoying. But it's still way better than the terrible hit rates and massive time-to-kill of FFTA1.

Status accuracy is thornier. Unfortunately, it tends to hover around the 35-60% accuracy range. And unfortunately, it winds up not really being a useful use of a turn, most of the time. At least, not on its own; abilities that do full damage and might inflict a status are some of the second- or third-best in the game (we'll get to the best later). They made the intelligent decision to ramp up 10 mana a turn from a base of zero; it's one of those systems that makes the game better, but also makes circumventing it a high priority. The laws are a shitload less asinine than FFTA; it's just per-mission, just One Thing To Not Do, sometimes it's annoying (a law against knockback, when crits knock back) but it's just 'you lose your clan buff and can't revive anyone if you break it', so it's fine.

Unit customisation is at a good level. Five item slots, four skill slots - whatever job you're in, one sub-class, a reaction skill (think counterattacks, or 'evades all magic') and a passive buff. Along with half your active skills, job dictates your stat growths, movement and equipment lists, which tend to be fairly rigid. It doesn't get too complicated and it leads to different units feeling, well, different. A significant issue is that the difference between skill utility is... um... massive. There will end up some you basically just never use, some that are very situational, and then you'll often end up with one super-skill for a given unit they use 95% of the time. There's good combination potential I don't have the capacity to get into.

Skills are tied to weapons, and different jobs. This means that sometimes your unit will basically be crippled while learning something they need to get to the place they have to go, but helpfully, in a fantastic design decision, while only attending units get XP, everyone gets AP (ability points). If you need a physical unit to learn some magic for a bit for Reasons, and so they don't really function and you don't want them to grow in that class, you can bench them for awhile. For this and for a few reasons, I recommend a party size of a rotating 12-18... 12, if you want to 100%, which you shouldn't. So long as everyone's around the level of your protagonist, level doesn't really matter because of scaling, until the super-endgame.

It's not all gravy. AI is really bad, and that's a frustrating thing. Enemies will seemingly just use things at random, to the point where challenge maps generally have enemies with very limited skillsets, to ensure they're using the right stuff. Often they'll attack when there's 0% chance of success due to abilities, or otherwise just do dumb shit which doesn't really make it feel too adversarial; dumb AI can be a positive, but when it's generally 6v6 and there's no permadeath, they should be on a more level footing in terms of decision-making. Guests are, somehow, even dumber, and will more than happily attack using elements that their enemies will absorb, or whatever. Also, there's a really stupid decision to put traps around. If you step in a trap, your move ends and you lose half your HP or get charmed or Something. It's stupid and adds quite literally nothing, and I did lose a lot of progress at one point to having complacently not saved in a while, and then in a story mission, a guest stepped into a trap and got eviscerated, then finished off by an enemy backstab, before I could reasonably do anything.

Still, the game's good. But it can be annoying, sometimes.

The Bazaar

I was something like 260 missions into the game before I unlocked Firaga.

That should be enough, right? I don't even need to describe the bazaar. Just the result.

But I will, anyway.

FFTA1 and 2 tie skill acquisition to carrying the right equipment, usually weapon, as the right class. If you have Dave pick up the Nirvana staff while a White Mage, he can use Curaga; if he acquires 300 AP (10 missions), he can now use Curaga permanently, so long as White Magic is slotted in. I didn't think this was that bad, and I'm not sure why, but having now re-experienced the shitness of the Bazaar I'm finally ready to concede that FFT was right on this point, at least; just have skills be a thing you can buy through a second type of experience (though FFT was very wrong on the pace of skill acquisition). This is basically alright in FFTA1 at least, but in 2, you are reliant on the Bazaar for new skills and it sucks ass.

So you get a dropdown list of vague descriptions, with potential entries A through E. Sometimes it's obvious what these will be ('Lethal Knives' are all daggers!), sometimes it's not ('Grab Bag'.) There'll be two different entries under a single description and you just kinda have to vibe out which. You get item icons, but only names if you already have one. Oh, and rare items and accessories, you only unlock one copy. Which you can buy and then have to unlock again at the bazaar. This is fine, if you have a photographic memory, which I do not.

The concept of the bazaar is actually quite good. It makes for a more organic way of growing your armoury than FFTA1 had (which was just, after X amount of missions you get more stuff). But in practice, there's so much loot, and so many different items, and, critically, some items are just hugely significant for a build. My bangaa's ranged options all suffered because I was really late to unlock the Godhand and thus Aurablast, an absolutely pivotal ability for them, an ability which I'd unlocked for humans through the right blade dozens of hours ago. And fucking Firaga because it turned out I needed fucking Fire Sigils which I could've got all along from a mission called Bug Hunt which I put off for ages because it was a largely flavourless mission that needed three individual missions. Only after clearing Bug Hunt did I start getting a shitload of Fire Sigils off loot.

It's also a fucking pain to navigate, and it really didn't have to be! There's so much loot and you have to scan through the full lists of every type of the three that make up the potential thing. Dozens each, we're talking. No reason that, at minimum, it couldn't have just cut all the ineligible ones off the list. But nooo. It also, obviously, is one of the few mechanics to discourage building wide instead of tall. For my part, there were entire weapon categories I cut out of my composition just so I could safely ignore, like, the Firearms and Sabres categories. Now go back and imagine basically having to go through the Bazaar between every few missions, and testing out the same fucking combinations again because you don't remember exactly what they are, and knowing that maybe the one B Pole that doesn't matter because you have no Geomancer is not the same as the other which is really important to your Monk... and again, the swinginess of how pivotal these can be, because they're linked to skills!

All this and I'm still confident I'm not doing justice to how bad and, moreover, annoying the Bazaar is. It's a serious detriment.

Writing

In my head, I always had FFTA2 down as having those weird kind of compellingly melancholy vibes under the surface. And now, on the revisit...

... yeah, I don't actually know where that came from. It isn't really present, outside of flickers here and there in sidequests that largely have relatively palatable young adult resolutions. And, I mean, it's literally an isekai. I didn't know isekai was like, a whole thing until relatively recently.

And it's palatable young adult writing, in general. What I had slept on was that the core cast members play off each other really well. You get your cheerful idiot kid who knows he's a cheerful idiot kid and is happy to lean into it and charge into problems, and your jaded veteran and your sad-clown Wandering Anime Jew who clearly need a rocket up them that This Kid provides. They just have a nice chemistry with each other. It's fun. Also, when missions start, you generally get a few lines of banter with whoever's first in the party, and actually, there's a lot of variety in the lines (though there's a limit to how much they can really change, given the same outcome). The highlight is easily Generic Viera, who responds to often absurd stimuli with a gravity and an occasional dry wit that's just a really nice contrast. And, you know, the blurbs to missions are cute. It's just nice.

  

The standard of moment-to-moment dialogue is pretty high. The plot is extremely whatever, with a lot of campaign missions taken up by filler. There's basically a mafia, and Cid was a part of it, but now he's not, and they've got a Scheme, and you have to stop it. It actually does have a couple of moments that legitimately do go hard. There's a guy with a unique face who shoots Cid and menaces you in a glacier and then, when he's a side goon after you meet the real boss, and you murder him (easily, because he has a million move and terrible durability), he pleads for his boss to save him and just gets stonewalled. RIP! But ultimately it's just not a Khamja story consistently enough, I'd say.

But the campaign doesn't hugely matter, either.

The actual real storylines aren't Khamja (though there's also sidestories expanding on them). I think the Duelhorn storyline is pretty whatever, too; it's actually a significantly longer single thread than the campaign. It's a foreign mafia. But really, that story's a little tawdry and a little Whatever and you're best off saying 'fuck it, this is about Vibing with the Boys'.

It's a very good Vibing with the Boys game. Your core cast are solid, as mentioned, but Adelle and Cid also have their own sidequest chains. But mostly it's the continuity of the dozen or so other clans that keep cropping up, or little chains that are little stories, or finishing out the logs of the world's shittest journalist and... look, it's just nice. There's no hidden melancholy. But isn't it just as valuable to sit down after a long day at work (or, let's be realistic about the target audience, high school) and vibe for an hour and a half with a persistent ensemble cast? Sometimes given excuses to go beat them up?

I do think it is the best written of the three FFTs, and that it isn't particularly close. FFT is a shitshow. FFTA1 is a subversive masterpiece if you are 15 and have just discovered TVTropes and have made this everyone's problem. FFTA2's just a chill time with the lads.

In summary, I think most TBS enthusiasts should play FFTA2, but, you know, normally. Gun through the campaign with a revolving cast of 12-18, do whatever sidequests seem interesting, get to credits, call it a day. 

The Final Grind

The true final boss isn't the Neukhia or whatever. It's this asshole.

The Earnest whatever quests have a simple concept. Some asshole, Marnot, has double-booked a date, so you have to find and entertain the woman he's standing up. This becomes triple-, quadruple- and finally quintuple-booking. For the last two, as you mathematically cannot hit up all the different spots in six days, you Must send off goons to handle the ladies that your brave leader cannot.

A significant issue with the lategame grind is that you do eventually get access to proper rocket tag abilities and combinations, and ultimately, other units just feel like handicaps.

I'd been playing on Hard, which makes enemies tougher and hit harder, and overall I don't regret it. Absolutely I recommend it for if you're playing it yourself, and not 100%ing it, which you shouldn't. But it wildly ramps up the required level to clear dispatches, where you send out goons to do missions for you, to a point that makes them all but pointless. And here's one you have to do...

It took me ages to clear the mainline campaign since I knew I was angling for 100%, but a normal playthrough using 12-18 units (this feels the right amount, rotation is good) probably finishes up the campaign around level 25-30. By the time I dropped a few units, they were level 40; by the time I dropped all but my final six, they were level 47-50.

If your units are not level 77 when they dispatch on An Earnest Delight, they will fail.

You get 60 XP for finishing a mission, if you aren't overlevelled, and there are only so many missions that scale up so far. Generic road encounters, most obviously, but why put yourself through that? Just go run dispatches over and over again, in order to clear this one dispatch. You have ways of skipping time, at least, but it's still really annoying.

The issue is that at this point, since you have the super-abilities, anyone who doesn't feels like they're just getting in the way. If you don't have a way to deal like 4x or 5x regular damage, or offer great support, you're probably left behind. And it's less interesting, in gameplay terms, when you have five units who all just want to use the Big Thing and a sixth who spent 65 hours being a cool versatile mage with a varied skillset you used to use a lot of and is now basically here because she can revive all fallen units in one action.

In general with 300 missions there's a few conditionals which are just kind of annoying, but you know, that's probably inevitable. This was the only real ball-breaker of the final run, though. There's some, though, which do at least have you face level 99 enemies, instead of the usual (which seems to be 'protagonist's level UP TO a by-mission cap'). Brightmoon Tor, notably; then Cinqueleur, which is just fighting five level 99 enemies with gimmicky but effective skillsets and gear, one of each colour of mage; Red, Blue, Green, Black, White. Hilariously, because enemy faction colours are mirrored red-blue and green-purple, in practice the Red King wears blue, the Blue King wears red...

Anyway, fighting a souped-up version of this is the first of the five back-to-back battles that make up The Final Quest.

This took me two tries. In a clever move, you level up between rounds; this means you actually get a fair bit out of it if you fail (losing a non-story mission just fails it and you can retry; you only Game Over if you lose a story mission), but also a levelup means that your HP goes back to full and your MP goes back to empty, meaning you don't have to like fully prime up after each fight, after you've almost won.

The first three are just strong level 99 enemies with cool compositions, and it does feel like a proper challenge. They're fun fights, they feel like proper challenges, there's an ebb and flow, at least if you go in badly underlevelled as you probably should.

Then there's the fourth.

The fourth is two tonberries who have juiced movement on a tiny arena - movement being the only thing that stops them, usually - and three support units, one of whom has Haste and Quicken. They have insane overkill speed so they just flex all over you in the opening turns. Angel Rings all around are necessary; this was the difference for me between my first run, which just got aced, and my second, where action economy meant we could barely cling to life long enough for Orinella to revive five people in one action. Which felt like pretty great value, at least.

The fifth and final set of enemies, the last foes I will ever kill in FFTA2, are the easiest of the lot. Pay some attention to the weirdly shrimpy gladiator in the crowd, who has like half the frames of anyone else and looks like the 'at home' version of the real deal, in the green on the field. I love that guy, especially when he deos his janky little cheer.

   

But I'm still glad I did.

The reward for beating The Final Quest is that the camera pans into the sky and blacks out, and then you get bumped to credits. It really is just bragging rights. But that's okay.

Fuck, what else?

Music's pretty good. Salikawood remix is weirdly fantastic.

I'm sure there's more I'm missing and probably sentences I've forgotten to expand on but I've been posting this for an hour and I want to hit send. I used to love FFTA2. I think I still do. But it isn't quite as good as I thought. You should still play it, though! But don't 100% it. It becomes a forever game, and it just isn't quite robust enough.

Final Squad:

Spoiler

       

 

Edited Tuesday at 07:01 AM by Parrhesia

[Revier]

TBH, I do find it weird how both of the FFTAs decided to take place in an explicitly fantastic "made up" world and largely go for a structure of "random", loosely tied missions in contrast to FFT. I'm not sure why they chose this direction, but it probably had something to do with the games being on handhelds, and those consoles largely being aimed at a young audience.

I do wonder if FFT will ever get a new notable entry, and if it will be worth playing. I'm sure people will be expecting something like FFT, and it will definitely have modern sensibilities, but I'm not sure Square Enix will see the value in it. Maybe if the purported FFT remake comes out and is received well, I guess.

[Integrity]

so far the three guys who took me up on that challenge have played ffta2, baten kaitos, and ff5; one of those guys picked right

 

hey that means you've got big effortposts on all three ffts on sf now, how's that feel