ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 181. monster hunter rise)

[Revier]

Well I was unaware this place had an effortpost on FFTA. I would like a link to it.

[Integrity]

parr can dig it up or not but i'm pretty sure he did a lp that didn't quite complete

[Parrhesia]

I won't dig it up but I did also 100% FFTA1 several years back - this is substantially less legwork than 100%ing FFTA2 because the vast majority are dispatches. My takeaway is basically that it doesn't hold up nearly as well, there's just a lot more pain-in-the-ass stuff (it even has its own needlessly hard-to-beat lategame dispatch!), the Law system and low accuracy and high time-to-kill and taking Ages just to play makes the core gameplay experience kind of a chore.

It's pretty and it's charming, and I prefer it a lot to TO: Knights of Lodis which always felt bizarrely soulless to me. I'm still really fond of it and it'll always have a place close to my heart. It was a Forever Game that could actually keep my attention when I was a hyperactive kid, before epilepsy medication made me permanently mellow out. But I couldn't recommend it.

Though I guess having 100%ed both FFTAs and completed FFT and Fell Seal, and got like to the 3/4 mark of both Tactics Ogres... do I need to go back and clear those, now? Reborn fixed most of the issues with TO Original at least, it seems. Sure as hell won't be 100%ing them, though. Reborn seems to have serious Forever Game aspirations.

[Revier]

TO Reborn is...weird. It makes many improvements over the PSP version. But, at the same time, it still keeps a lot of its mechanical bloat, and also overcorrects in some particularly cruddy ways. I would say it's a good SRPG that was almost great, and the fact that it sabotages itself out of greatness frustrates me plenty.

At least we can mod a decent portion of it now, which means it could, theoretically, achieve greatness someday. When that will happen, though, is anyone's guess.

...I am hoping they will do a better job with the FFT remake, though I understand that there are certain core aspects of it that don't hold up today, and that, being a popular game, it's likely going to come under fire if it attempts any drastic changes. Square Enix could very well surprise us, however. We will see.

Edited September 4 by Revier

[Dayni]

Didn't know DOOM had official releases this recently. Not much to say beyond that as someone who's Doomless.

If I were to take part in checking an old favourite, I'd probably be picking something on PS2 and that's a little limited at the minute. Maybe NFS:U as a pretty straightforward title in terms of length and structure, first thing that came to mind.

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

The Bazaar

Reading this, I'm kinda relieved I didn't get into this beforehand.

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

your sad-clown Wandering Anime Jew

Why do I feel like I need to tug my collar awkwardly reading this?

15 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

FFTA1 is a subversive masterpiece if you are 15 and have just discovered TVTropes and have made this everyone's problem.

Guilty as charged /s

 

[Integrity]

AGE OF WONDERS III (TRIUMPH, 2014)

Finished: 6/9/24 (heh). Playtime: 220.5 hours.

This one has been in the works for a long, long time. I was trying, on-and-off, to 100% Age of Wonders 3 back in 2016, long before the bug truly bit me. We'll get to why, but this is a case of it actually taking me ten years to polish something up, not just a game from 2014 I picked back up for some reason.

Age of Wonders is an interesting little franchise. I've found that the 4X / grand strategy space is generally separable by how much goes into their battle systems, and the strategic gameplay is often the inverse of that. At one extreme, you've got games like Europa Universalis, where combat is completely abstracted and influenced only by your behind-the-scenes numbers and maybe some very light army building. On the other extreme, there's Total War, with a nominal strategic game wrapper to give context to the in-depth real-time batttles. There's steps along this chain, of course, like modern Civilization being a step more tactical in combat than a Paradox game and being a bit lighter on the strategy, and opposite that's where Age of Wonders slots in. The step more strategic from Total War is games that have a bit more empire building to do, a bit less conquest to do, and zoom in for turn-based tactical battles. Heroes of Might and Magic almost typifies this, but plays more like a weird RPG in practice and belongs more with Total War; the proper exemplary forms in my opinion are Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, and Endless Legend. This tends to be my favorite gender of 4X overall, fun fact, so it's nice to finally get a representative on the shelf.

The strategic gameplay of Age of Wonders 3 can be described, without being too uncharitable, as Civilization lite in a fantasy world. You've got a set of races you can be, neutral races you can conquer or befriend, and a bevy of summoning and enchanting spells to augment your cities and armies. City growth is straightforward and based chiefly on in-city and capturable on-map structures rather than having access to rivers or anything like that, and empire growth is largely confined to building cities and connecting them with roads. Exploration involves fighting lots of neutral monsters, including raiding tombs for hard fights and hefty rewards, very much in the vein of 1994's Master of Magic, and those tombs become high-value things to settle cities around. It's a little deeper than Total War, but certainly not the game for you if you preferred Civilization 2 or 4 over 5 or 6.

The tactical combat of Age of Wonders 3 is where the meat of the game lies. Units can be grouped into stacks of up to 6 in the strategic map, and every combat outside of tomb raiding involves the attacker, the defender, and all stacks adjacent to the defender. Quantity can be a substitute for quality, but the game is eternally lurching towards an inevitable endgame of spamming the top tier units into big stacks. It's, regrettably, a game that's often over before it's done, but the midgame is very enjoyable to compensate. I won't get too into the various mechanics of the combat itself, but it's a very satisfying turn-based (player/enemy phase, not per-unit) affair that has a lot of beef to it and deeply rewards mastery. All units can level up very significantly to gain new abilities, higher stats, and sometimes even promote into stronger variants; on top of that, your heroes all have bespoke gear and skill point systems to build up as they level. It's very fair to say that the battles of Age of Wonders 3 feed into each other significantly, but in a way that's usually appropriately satisfying and rarely unfair. Some combinations of factors can get degenerate, but that's a bit part and parcel for this kind of game.

Getting into game modes and getting into achievements go hand in hand here, so we're going to interweave them a bit. Age of Wonders 3 is not a fun game to 100%, but is a very fun game to, say, like 94%. The lion's share of the game's 74 achievements (I'm talking, like, 60 of them) are just stuff you will naturally accumulate by playing literally any mode. There's six classes (Dreadnought, Rogue, Theocrat, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlord) that your leader can be, with a seventh (Necromancer) via DLC, and there's an achievement for winning a full game with each. Over the course of those seven games, there's dozens that will just show up as long as you're exploring the gamespace. Winning a game as each alignment (good, evil, neutral) and summoning the final monster of each type, creating a custom leader in the surprisingly-robust character creator, having an Elite unit, fully equipping a hero, researching everything, making the AI surrender, so on and so on. There's probably 40 achievements like this that you'll hardly have to think about doing. There's a few you'll have to go very slightly out of your way for, like to use Invoke Death (low% chance to kill a unit instantly) to kill an enemy leader or to win a Unifier Victory (basically the game's culture victory, in a game about conquest), but nothing that will take any particular effort if targeted and all fit inside those seven required maps. There's a single secret achievement called Mine Crafted to recruit the random hero Per Notchson, because now-known fascist Notch was a huge financial backer of Age of Wonders 3. That's aged pretty badly, but this was 2014.

Online games are where the fun of Age of Wonders 3 is, and by that I mean co-op compstomps with your buddies and not actual competitive play. I've put a hundred hours or more into this game just playing it with good buddies Jim and Parrhesia, not thinking about any kind of achievements. Before Total Warhammer 3, I'd say the Age of Wonders games were the ultimate hang-with-buddies strategic compstomp games. The title's gone, now, but it's still a respectable second. The achievements do come up here; everything earnable in that first paragraph can come from a multiplayer game just fine, and a total of about five more achievements come from the process of winning 30 online games and 1 play by e-mail game. That hundred hours above only actually constituted ten victorious games, so this is one to get a buddy and pad if you're actually gunning for it. Thanks, as ever, to Parrhesia for this one. I wonder how much of his life he's spent doing banal shit to finish games off for me.

The reason Age of Wonders 3 has taken so long is those last eight achievements. Age of Wonders 3's campaigns take their cues from good old Heroes of Might and Magic, in that they are absolutely oppressive fast-expansion tempo-fests where losing a battle or falling a bit behind can turn the game into an instant and horrible slog. They're exhausting to play, they're not very good, and to top it off beating them isn't enough. The base game shipped with two campaigns, the Elven Court and the Commonwealth, and each of them comes with a binary decision to betray your chosen faction and play an alternative final map. Each path has an achievement, for four across two campaigns. These campaigns are pretty easy, if dull, but that's the baseline going forward.

There's two more campaigns in the two DLCs. The Halfling campaign is the first "for experts" campaign, and I think it's the most reasonable of the four, not least of which because it just requires a single run through. It skews a bit brutal at times, but I nearly enjoyed it overall. Its big problem is that Halflings are the biggest, bullshittest, stupidest fucking race ever added to a strategy game. See, the deal with Age of Wonders is that your roster is determined by a combination of your race and leader class. Every race has the same loose loadout of units - irregular, swordsman, archer, pikeman, support, cavalry, elite - and these can vary hugely. The elves have a traditional archer who attacks three times at long range for heavy damage, while the humans have a lower-powered archer who's wearing actual armor, and the dwarves have a heavy crossbow unit who can only shoot one time but for heavy damage. Your class units vary wildly from class to class and do not map onto each other one bit. Some classes are heavier on the summons, while the Warlord has exclusively mortal units built from cities, for instance. For each of these, a certain racial adjustment is performed. With Human Crusaders as a baseline, Elven Crusaders might have lower health, higher damage, higher resistance, and a weakness to Shock damage; while Goblin Crusaders might have lower health, lower defense, but +1 Blight damage on melee and a resistance to Blight damage. It does create interesting decisions between races and there are absolutely clear winners and losers depending on the combination you're using (Goblin Monster Hunters what's up!) but overall I like it a lot.

Halflings are the wrench in this entire thing. The major Halfling racial adjustment is to take a 20% weakness to Physical damage, which is utterly crippling, and in exchange they get Lucky. Lucky is simple: it's a 10% chance to ignore any attack. The mathematically astute among you may note that this is a simple loss, considering how much damage is physical. The mathematically shrewd among you may be inclined to ask about hits-to-kill thresholds; to the unit with 20 hit points, being hit for 10 and 12 damage is often exactly the same thing, after all, so this could actually be a strict upgrade. Neither is quite right: it's a problem of variance. Given that the campaigns are a hellish tempo war where the AI is always bringing in more money than you possibly could, you cannot afford to play around Lucky at all. This goes back to my big old wall about Fell Seal's accuracy ratings: the chance to "miss" is so low, the pace of combat is so fast, the unit counts are insufficient to have contingency plans, so a lucky set of "misses" from an enemy is usually not something that you can maneuver to exploit, and an unlucky set of "misses" from you is something that can just ruin a fight instantly. Having two lucky procs in a row is only a 1% chance, but given the hundreds and hundreds of attacks you're throwing out in a campaign, you're inevitably going to run into that situation and have blown a third of your army's action economy on a sure kill and gotten nothing from it, and that's a situation that's really hard to recover from. You can't rely on it, and you can't budget around the enemy having it. It just fucks you both ways. Anyway, back to the Halfling campaign: I got through the harder maps by just replacing my Halfling cities with forced Goblin resettlement.

The final DLC, and final campaign, is the Necromancer campaign. This campaign is completely in the tradition of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It is an absolute and total ballbuster. The maps are enormous. You're always either given undead units that require necromancer support or heroes to heal at all and then only given one necromancer hero, or you're given a majority of living units for your living heroes but you still have the necromancer kicking on as your strongest hero and none of his shit works unless you get him some undead units. It never works. It's always hellish multi-front warfare. Worst of all, the early turns of the (even bigger than the last ones) final map presents you two binary choices: ally with the Big Neutrality to destroy the other necromancers, ally with the other necromancers and rule together, or tell both to fuck themselves and go to war with everyone on your own behalf. All three of these forks have their own achievements, and the choice is in the first ten turns of what will turn out to be 100+. It's grueling. The campaigns in general are the reason that this took so long, but this campaign in specific has been the only thing left to do for achievements in this game since May.

A big part of this, to follow up on the Halfling thing, is how Necromancy plays in the game's ecosystem. Necromancers as a class are unique: while they have their own set of class units like all six others, they also modify their base race completely. Every race can be Ghouled (Ghoul Humans, Ghoul Frostlings, Ghoul Halflings, etc.) to turn a city undead. Undead cities are unique in that they don't grow passively at all unless specific buildings are made to make that happen, and they only grow via conquest - a portion of all living units killed gets sent back to the nearest undead city as new citizenry. Undead cities, themselves, produce the same vast variety of racial units as living ones, but Ghouled. Ghouled units take on all the quirks of their living counterparts, but carry precisely the traits you'd think the undead would: immunity to morale and mental effects, a weakness to fire and light damage, a resistance to blight and cold damage, and they don't regenerate at all in the overworld unless there's a necromancer or necromantic support unit attached to the stack. They're fiddlier than the living, but can snowball really horribly, and honestly so far so good.

Bret Devereaux wrote in a blogpost about Game of Thrones' armor that, loosely paraphrased, the next weapon any culture is going to invent is always the weapon that lets them defeat their own armor. This summarizes, with incredible brevity, the problem with Necromancer mirror matches in Age of Wonders 3. Necromancers focus on doing a lot of blight and cold damage, a lot of plagues and diseases to debilitate and destroy the living, and a lot of fear and panic abilities. All of that is resisted or no-sold completely by any Ghouled unit, and all Necromancer units are Ghouled. There are mid-level Necromancer hero abilities to mind control enemy undead, but then there are high-level Necromancer hero abilities to make your undead immune to enemy Necromancer mind control. A top-end Necromancer vs. Necromancer duel is a duel entirely of passive buffs that gets settled by the ordinary numbers of their units. Ghoul Draconians are great at this because they're Ghouled units who contribute a good amount of fire damage to basically everything they do! Ghouled Frostlings are horrible because they get extra cold damage and a bonus to their already-good cold resistance.

Your Necromancer is a Frostling, there is no Draconian faction in most (any?) of the maps, and, to tie it back, all three forks of the final map will throw you into at least one mid-lategame showdown as a Frostling Necromancer against a Halfling Necromancer.

Still, perseverance wins the day! This won't be the last time you see Age of Wonders in this thread, or even the other two pillars of the subgenre I listed earlier. Master of Magic's surprise 2022 reboot was weirdly fantastic, Endless Legend is a long-term stretch goal, and there's two more games after Age of Wonders 3 that are all Steamworksed up. There's a straightforward sequel in 4, which is an updated version of the same concept they've been doing since 1999's Age of Wonders, and there's the franchise's own Alpha Centauri in Planetfall. That's a hell of a lot better than Beyond Earth was, though, thank God.

[lenticular]

  

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

Age of Wonders is an interesting little franchise. I've found that the 4X / grand strategy space is generally separable by how much goes into their battle systems, and the strategic gameplay is often the inverse of that. At one extreme, you've got games like Europa Universalis, where combat is completely abstracted and influenced only by your behind-the-scenes numbers and maybe some very light army building. On the other extreme, there's Total War, with a nominal strategic game wrapper to give context to the in-depth real-time batttles. There's steps along this chain, of course, like modern Civilization being a step more tactical in combat than a Paradox game and being a bit lighter on the strategy, and opposite that's where Age of Wonders slots in. The step more strategic from Total War is games that have a bit more empire building to do, a bit less conquest to do, and zoom in for turn-based tactical battles. Heroes of Might and Magic almost typifies this, but plays more like a weird RPG in practice and belongs more with Total War; the proper exemplary forms in my opinion are Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, and Endless Legend. This tends to be my favorite gender of 4X overall, fun fact, so it's nice to finally get a representative on the shelf.

The strategic gameplay of Age of Wonders 3 can be described, without being too uncharitable, as Civilization lite in a fantasy world. You've got a set of races you can be, neutral races you can conquer or befriend, and a bevy of summoning and enchanting spells to augment your cities and armies. City growth is straightforward and based chiefly on in-city and capturable on-map structures rather than having access to rivers or anything like that, and empire growth is largely confined to building cities and connecting them with roads. Exploration involves fighting lots of neutral monsters, including raiding tombs for hard fights and hefty rewards, very much in the vein of 1994's Master of Magic, and those tombs become high-value things to settle cities around. It's a little deeper than Total War, but certainly not the game for you if you preferred Civilization 2 or 4 over 5 or 6.

Yeah, I find all this stuff fascinating. Especially seeing how different approaches will resonate differently for different people. I definitely tend more towards the abstracted combat end of things, personally. I've been playing a bunch of Victoria 3 recently, which is even further towards that end of the scale than Europa Universalis, and I've been really digging it. EU4, incidentally, can actually have some highly tactical combat if you're willing to slow the pace of the game down to a crawl and pause every day to issue new orders. It's completely unrealistic, degenerate, gamey nonsense, but it is there.

Civ combat is weird and doesn't actually make any sense when you think about it for more than about half a second. Basically because it's operating on multiple different scales at once. We're supposed to see each hex as being hundreds of miles on the map, but also a typical medieval archer can happily shoot their bow two hexes away. It works fine from a pure game mechanics perspective, but is garbage when it comes to flavour and immersion and all that stuff.

The Age of Wonders/Total War way of doing things where you switch down to a smaller scale to resolve the actual combats makes so much more sense, but it generally doesn't work for me for gameplay reasons. Part of it, I think, is just that the constant switching back and forth tends to break up flow, but I think it's also a balance thing. If I do well on the strategic layer then that means that I have an advantage on the tactical layer, which then means that it's... kinda boring? Who wants to play a game where the odds are constantly stacked in your favour? But if you just auto-resolve the combat, it will always do worse than it should. I'm sure it's an absolute blast when the two different game modes feel in sync with each other, but it's never worked for me.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

There's a single secret achievement called Mine Crafted to recruit the random hero Per Notchson, because now-known fascist Notch was a huge financial backer of Age of Wonders 3. That's aged pretty badly, but this was 2014.

Oof. Yeah. That has aged poorly. I both love and hate that this is the second time in a matter of weeks that "Notch is a fascist tool" has naturally come up as part of this thread.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

Bret Devereaux wrote in a blogpost about Game of Thrones' armor that, loosely paraphrased, the next weapon any culture is going to invent is always the weapon that lets them defeat their own armor. This summarizes, with incredible brevity, the problem with Necromancer mirror matches in Age of Wonders 3.

So many games seem to fall into this trap. And yeah, it makes sense that a fire elemental would both deal and resist fire damage, but it makes less sense when it comes to wizards inventing magic spells that would do the same. If I'm a wizard and I'm trying to create a spell that will make me resistant to fire, I'm also going to make it so I can do water damage or cold damage or whatever else fire creatures are weak to in that world.

On 9/6/2024 at 11:56 PM, Integrity said:

There's a straightforward sequel in 4, which is an updated version of the same concept they've been doing since 1999's Age of Wonders, and there's the franchise's own Alpha Centauri in Planetfall. That's a hell of a lot better than Beyond Earth was, though, thank God.

Incidentally, have you seen that actual Alpha Centauri has made it onto Steam now? Sadly, no achievements, or Id' totally take it up for "100% an old favourite and see if it holds up".

On 8/30/2024 at 3:09 AM, Integrity said:

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.

Yeah, it's got to be right up there in terms of most influential games ever. Possibly behind the original Super Mario Bros? Or some of the real foundational games like Pong or Space Invaders? But even as a non-FPS-enjoyer, it's hard to deny just how much Doom has shaped video games. I am tempted to start a separate thread just about this.

[Integrity]

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

But if you just auto-resolve the combat, it will always do worse than it should.

i do agree with a lot of what you said about the balance often not quite working on aggregate, but it's worth pointing out for this that more recent games of this type have done a few neat things to make "just autoresolve the boring ones" a lot more palatable. total warhammer 3 gives you a preview of if you'll lose any unit cards from autoresolve, and as i recall age of wonders planetfall (and 4, i think) actually let you seamlessly rewind and manually play out the battle if you're unhappy with how autoresolve turned out. it's not a perfect solution, mind, but i do think it does a lot towards focusing your attention on The Big, Meaningful Fights that the subgenre is nominally built for

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Incidentally, have you seen that actual Alpha Centauri has made it onto Steam now? Sadly, no achievements, or Id' totally take it up for "100% an old favourite and see if it holds up".

i haven't! a lot of that old microprose fare is there, so i'm not too surprised. it's real interesting to see the ways in which master of orion 2 is still kind of untouched in the genre

[Revier]

I've not played the Age of Wonders, but I have played their great great grandfather, Master of Magic. I greatly enjoy it, and still play it from time to time, but it's definitely not a well calibrated game, lol. Would be interesting to see how they expanded on and mutated the formula into its own thing.

Edited September 10 by Revier

[Integrity]

aow3 is (imo) the single closest game in overall vibe to master of magic (1994, the best game ever) that's ever been made. i don't know what it lands that fallen enchantress, the other age of wonders games, etc. don't, but something is there.

[lenticular]

On 9/8/2024 at 3:10 PM, Integrity said:

i do agree with a lot of what you said about the balance often not quite working on aggregate, but it's worth pointing out for this that more recent games of this type have done a few neat things to make "just autoresolve the boring ones" a lot more palatable. total warhammer 3 gives you a preview of if you'll lose any unit cards from autoresolve, and as i recall age of wonders planetfall (and 4, i think) actually let you seamlessly rewind and manually play out the battle if you're unhappy with how autoresolve turned out. it's not a perfect solution, mind, but i do think it does a lot towards focusing your attention on The Big, Meaningful Fights that the subgenre is nominally built for

Oh, that is good to know! I might have to give the subgenre another look at some point to see if it agrees with me more now than last time I played it. Maybe I'll pick up Planetfall next time it goes on sale or something.

[Integrity]

MECH ARMADA (LIONCODE, 2022)

Finished: 22/9/24. Playtime: 17.9 hours.

Two of my most beloved things are tactics games and mechs. Not just any tactics games and any mechs, mind, I have preferences and standards on both sides of the aisle, but in general these are the two flavors of games I tend to be kindest to even when I'm being critical of them (hello, Aegis Descent). Mech Armada is a cute little mech-based tactics roguelite that isn't super deep, but offers plenty of enjoyment for the fiver you can get it for during sale seasons. The premise is plenty simple: you build little mechs in your little mechlab and then go through a roguelite branched map to get more parts to build your mechs out of and more money with which to maintain a bigger squad. Variety is maintained not only in better parts costing more money but also in that you can only field a limited number of any given part at a time, meaning you do end up having a pretty wide variety of gameplans from run to run, especially when each mech is fielding multiple weapons against those limits. It's a little ugly but it's, in a word, pleasant.

One really neat thing the game does that I think needs to be poached by every other tactics game (including Fire Emblem) immediately is how it handles the enemy phase. Battles are pretty low scale; movement tends to be in the 1-2 square range and firing in the 1-3 range, and you can only field up to 6 bots on a field that's typically somewhere around 8x10. Enemy attacks are telegraphed live in response to your actions a la Into the Breach, but that's not the neat thing, which is the way the game resolves enemy animations. After you hit End Turn, enemy attacks on you are animated and resolved one by one exactly as any one of you would expect. After all enemies who can attack have taken their turns, every single enemy who is just repositioning repositions all at the same time. Put with an example, if you're up against 8 enemies and end turn, you'd watch Enemy A move and resolve its attack, then watch Enemy B move and resolve its attack, and then watch all of Enemies C through H all move around the field simultaneously rather than taking turns. It's such an astonishingly elegant way to save an insane amount of time while still having the player watch all the action that I'm shocked I haven't seen it in anything else before.

The achievements for the game are wearing the skin of a much harder roguelite, but I found them to be pretty breezy to get through. They fall into three categories: exploit a certain interaction of parts and enemies, do a challenge completion, and shit you'll get by accident along the way. The former are pretty straightforward and essentially just boil down to having the right parts to do something silly, like shooting an enemy from 8 squares away requiring a mech built from a [Roller, Ranger, Sniper] with two support mechs with Eagle Eye chassis in support, or having a Mine Launcher-equipped mech fire a mine and then having a Teleporter-locomotion mech swap positions with it. Mech Armada lets you customize what handful of parts you start with and blacklist others from spawning in a run, so these are all pretty trivial to get once you decide to do it.

Challenge runs are where the game gets interesting. There's a meta-currency that you can allocate freely to run upgrades and an achievement for deallocating all of your upgrades and winning a run vanilla. I got this one on my very first run before I had spent any in the first place, go me. There's another to beat a run using only the tutorial parts (weak legs, weak tracks, basic chassis, machine gun, and twin-linked machine gun) that lends towards you spamming out cheap guys instead of making big ones. There's another that asks you to win a run without spending money on new part development, but I'm pretty sure getting that one is automatic when getting the previous. There's two really fun opposite ones: win a run without ever fielding more than a single mech, and win a run while fielding 6 mechs with zero duplicate parts used. I found all of these to spark enjoyable changes to how I interacted with the game and liked doing them all. In addition to those is an Ascension mechanic that starts completely unlocked, no need to beat difficulties one by one to unlock the next tier. There's an achievement for maxing that slider out and winning the resulting run, which basically just asks you to find something degenerate that you enjoy and to spam it.

The game's very light plot contributes the next few. When you beat the game, your scientist figures out the next step towards actually beating the invasion, and the option to deploy him alongside your mechs gets added. Deploying him adds a little one health dude (who is comedically tiny) that you have to shepherd through a harder alternative route to get a Thing, then he departs and you have to walk back to the start through a series of really, really long battles. This is an enormous pain in the ass and, unlike the actual challenge runs, was not fun at all. Your reward for this is a new weapon that does nothing to trash enemies but kills the effectively-invincible Fog that can eat your mechs, enabling you to advance to phase 2 of the final boss fight and get the true ending, such as it is. The second phase of the final boss is also enormously tedious to work through, so these were absolutely the worst set of clears I did.

Last up to wrap up the game are two gently pain-in-the-ass achievements. After each boss fight you can select an augment that works passively for the rest of the run, things like giving all your mechs +1 damage or letting walker-type locomotion move on diagonals; one achievement asks you to have picked every one of these at some point in some run. The final achievement asks you to have spawned every single part at least one time, which can easily be accomplished by selecting any parts you've never used to be in your starting lineup and spawning a mech holding them on Turn 1 and then forfeiting the run - note if you follow me on this that starting with a mech doesn't count those parts, you want to start with the cheapest mech possible and then spawn a mech with the parts you want immediately. The thing that makes these two achievements gentle pains in the ass is that the game does not track what parts or augments you have used, so if you don't pick them up through organic play you'll have to make a spreadsheet of what you've spawned or picked to grab them all. I managed to get all of the augments organically, but needed to deploy a handful of weapons to mop everything up.

So ends a nice little package. Like I said, it's a fiver during sale season and there's even a demo so you can try before you buy. If Battletech Lite sounds up your alley and you're not looking for a forever game, I can't recommend Mech Armada more highly at that price point. Go check it out.

[Integrity]

CELESTE (MADDY MAKES GAMES, 2018)

Finished: 26/9/24. Playtime: 38.4 hours.

A funny thing that I've never really talked about on account of all the fucking Sonics is that I do like 2D platformers a fair bit, conceptually. I like a simple mastery loop and practicing precise inputs to surmount an obstacle, but I fall into a weird middle ground. I like to be challenged by my platformers, which has generally categorically ruled Mario out (the last Mario I played was actually Super Mario World), but I don't like the high-end kaizo nonsense like I Wanna Be The Guy. There's a sweet spot of platformers where things are difficult but not absurd that should be filled by Sonic, but I haven't actually enjoyed any 2D Sonic very much. This means that this void, for me, has really only been filled by Super Meat Boy. This is annoying, because I've had to spend 10+ years holding the dual opinions that Super Meat Boy is the best platformer in the world and also that Ed McMillen is kind of a fuckhead who I have a blood feud with for making a whole generation of gamers associate my name with a literal piss baby.

Awesome news, then: I think Celeste is even better than Super Meat Boy.

There's a billion words about the game written by a hundred thousand people who know the genre far better than I do and, frankly, there's very little need to add my voice to the chorus. Celeste is a fantastic game in every element, from the absolute core of how Madeline controls to the level design to the story to the sound design. It's not a perfect game - any time you have to use golden feathers to fly can get the hell out of my house - but any criticisms I have are ultimately very minor in the scheme of things. Celeste has been hailed as a modern masterpiece by a lot of people, and this time I absolutely agree with the consensus.

Platinum Celeste is the mountain that it really ought to be, and contains the majority of my praise for the game's design. There is a constant nearly-linear treadmill of difficulty that always feeds back into itself and always challenges you to be a little bit better. The high-flying wire stunts you need to do by the end of the optional content are completely incomprehensible to the guy you were in the first few worlds and they're hard as hell to do, but Celeste has held your hand every step of the way and encouraged you to do the next harder thing. It's a sublime structure that culminates in some of the hardest shit I have pulled off in a game and I am damn proud of myself for doing it. I think that means I understood Celeste, fundamentally.

What this all entails is actually surprisingly simple and, again, the game constantly leads you by the hand through the next hardest thing. The game's main story is seven levels long and fairly gentle, all told. Each of these levels has a bevy of strawberries to collect and a single crystal heart. The puzzles involved in getting to the crystal hearts are a bit esoteric for my tastes and, cards on the table, I looked up solutions for pretty much all of them. I think this is the one kink in Celeste's structure, since the hearts are required to move on through the final two levels. Each level also has a cassette which unlocks that world's B-side, a remixed and significantly harder version of the stage which gives another heart on completion. With hearts in hand, World 8 opens up. World 8 is a little step back in difficulty from World 7, the original conclusion, but introduces new mechanics for you to get your head around. It also has strawberries, a heart, and a cassette to unlock a B-side. Getting all of these things is required for achievements, naturally.

Once you've finished all 16 hearts from the A- and B-sides of all eight other worlds, the final set of challenges opens up. First for me was World 9. World 9 is a complete bastard, end-to-end, and demands a significant amount of improvement from you to gut through it. It took me about as long to get through World 9 alone as the sum total of the A-sides of the rest of the game. It's a long, long level that ends in a single mammoth screen that lasts several minutes with no checkpoints. Keep that in mind for a minute, by the way. The one grace of World 9 is that it has no collectibles along the main route; it's just a simple and direct platforming and light puzzle solving challenge. Do it.

The other thing that unlocks here is the C-sides for all eight of the initial worlds. While the B-sides are the world's design remixed to be significantly harder, the C-sides are the world's design pushed to the limit. Each C-side is typically two short screens reminding you of that world's features and sometimes showing you how to use them in an unexpected way and then a final screen which is long as hell and relatively brutal for the stage's placement. Even with all my skills at the end of the game, each of these C-sides bled a clean hundred deaths out of me except for one. Befitting its place as the original conclusion to the game, 7-C is a consummate motherfucker, a single long screen which took me multiple days and nearly four hundred deaths to finish on its own. 8-C is, like in the A-sides, a comparative step down, and was actually the final thing that I did in the game so that my last achievement would be called "Thanks For Playing". It felt right.

Celeste's ultimate challenge comes in that final screen of World 9. At the very end of it, you break a box to disable the lightning fields that you've been carefully navigating and then hop off to the game's conclusion. If you break the box and immediately go left, you can platform back through the remnants of this bastard screen - with no checkpoint, mind - and climb up to a whole new part of the stage. Once you're up there and have received a blessed checkpoint after probably 5 minutes since your previous one, you get a new set of brutal platforming challenges as you ascend to the final secret strawberry on the moon and seal the deal except for a cleanup achievement. 1-Up requires you to hold six strawberries at once without redeeming them, which happens automatically when they get close to you on solid ground. This took about half an hour to get on 1-A but was not bad at all. Sayonara, Celeste, and well done cracking into my very top echelon of games.

[Dayni]

Well that's slightly ominous (the difficulty), it's in my library.

On 9/26/2024 at 5:26 PM, Integrity said:

also that Ed McMillen is kind of a fuckhead who I have a blood feud with for making a whole generation of gamers associate my name with a literal piss baby.

!?

[Integrity]

On 9/27/2024 at 2:13 PM, Dayni said:

!?

isaac, of the binding of isaac fame

 

(i did not leave you hanging for several days to make a point helene knocked me completely off the grid)

[Integrity]

XCOM: ENEMY UNKNOWN (FIRAXIS, 2012)

Finished: 2/10/24. Playtime: 158.7 hours.

As of this writing, I'm still without internet thanks to Hurricane Helene. I've had to make do with whatever offline stuff I had installed before the apocalypse while I try to conserve phone data and thank my past self for buying a USB wi-fi dongle for some reason. So, you know, let's talk about XCOM at a bit more length and with a slightly cooler head than I did in the Chimera Squad post.

I've played every game in this franchise (okay, Legends aside) to some degree and feel fairly particular about them all. I played the original way back in the day and never quite jived with it. I was still a child, after all, and there were just a few too many moving parts for my tiny brain to wrap itself around compared to simpler, shittier games like the later Fallout Tactics. My XCOM story really begins in earnest in around 2009, in the same run of looking for new tactics games to sate the urge that would lead me to buy Fire Emblem in a Gamestop on Wright-Patterson. I'd finally, eighteen-ish years old, gotten old enough to get my head around X-COM: UFO Defense, and I found it to be a fantastic (if dated) time. These days, you can get it for a song and OpenXCOM does a hell of a lot of the lifting to get the game more palatable, so take this as a recommendation.

My first attempt at the series as a whole would come as a part of these here forums. If you dig very hard, you can find some very, very old Let's Plays of the original and of Terror from the Deep that I ran around here something like thirteen years ago, including some embarrassingly unedited videos. That was my first experience with Terror from the Deep, and I loved it. Something about shifting the game to the ocean, the starkly weirder enemies, the atmosphere inasmuch as a tactical game from 1995 can evoke atmosphere, it all worked perfectly for me. My biggest regret about the entire XCOM ecosystem is that all the spiritual sequels and successors go full into emulating the first, and absolutely nobody has taken a crack at being Terror from the Deep 2.

The rest of the classic pentych is pretty uninteresting. I have literally nothing to say about Interceptor, though I've nominally played it. Enforcer is an impressively dogshit game, as bad as the reputation implies. Topically, I've actually been spending offline hours playing Command and Conquer: Renegade, which is also pretty bad but plays like what Enforcer would have played like if it didn't suck completely. Apocalypse is the one interesting one, as it shifts focus from the planet to a single megacity, where you have to rent (or seize) properties and play nice with the local corporations and politics and control collateral damage while fighting aliens in the streets and all this shit. It's an extraordinarily ambitious game, and it's easily one of the games I most strongly wish I understood any bit of.

XCOM would famously take a long hiatus after the twin bombs of Interceptor and Enforcer, and then would famously be reannounced to the world as a third-person cover shooter to raucous disapproval. That game would still eventually come out as XCOM: The Bureau, an exceptionally 6/10 game that I've beaten for some reason and occasionally get the bug to 100% just to say I'm the guy who 100%ed XCOM: The Bureau. I have issues. Anyway, after 2K reeled from the blowback to The Bureau, they scrambled Firaxis together to make a "more X-COM-ey" game: XCOM: Enemy Unknown.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown understands what made X-COM what it was and chooses to chart its own parallel course. The simulation of coordinating the defense of the Earth with your legions of faceless marines is replaced with a more recognizable structure of global events and a much smaller scale of guys one interview famously referred to as "your little action figures", which I think is a simply perfect description of Enemy Unknown's entire philosophy. There's certainly reasons to prefer the original over it, and I wish a game that wasn't the completely vapid and soulless Xenonauts would try it, but I like XCOM's smaller scale, flashier plays and progression, and all that. I like it just as much as the original, or maybe a very little bit more, but not as much as either its or the original's sequels. It's still a solid as hell game, though.

The achievements of Enemy Unknown are pretty wrapped up in things I want to say about the expansion, so let's go through them. A large chunk of the achievements are things that are basically (or completely) inevitable to get across the course of one or two campaigns. Plot beats, trivial "interact with this system" type ones, slightly longer "kill X aliens" or "shoot down X UFOs" type ones, etc. There's a few completionist-type ones, for shooting down all types of UFO in a single playthrough and for completing all autopsies/research projects/engineering projects in a single playthrough. There's a few challenge-type ones, like beating a mission with all female soldiers (titled Flight of the Valkyries, for a sensible chuckle), clearing a downed UFO with a single soldier on one of the top difficulties, or clearing an endgame abduction mission very quickly. There's also one for stacking your psionic multipliers as high as they can possibly go in order to mind control one of the enemy psionic leaders, the Ethereals, on a low% chance even taking it as far as you can go.

Then there's the completion achievements, and this is where the bulk of Enemy Unknown is tied up. Beat the game, beat the game on Classic (third from four), and beat the game on Impossible (fourth from four). Another asks you to beat the game on Classic or Impossible (Classic, let's be real) with Ironman enabled. A third asks you to beat the game on Classic or Impossible without ever buying a squad size upgrade: 4 soldiers per mission all game long. This one's a real doozy, doubly so because I did it on the Impossible run like a chump. Another hard/annoying as hell one, but one without any difficulty requirements, is to deploy a single soldier to every single mission all game long. You have very little wiggle room for mission windows, so you either have to savescum liberally to get one soldier almost never hurt or you have to take massive strategic penalties for passing on missions because your chosen guy is in the hospital. This one's annoying to get even on Easy, do not try it on a harder mode. The final one of these is A Continental Fellow. When you start the game, you get to choose to headquarter XCOM in any of the five continents, which correspond to FIFA's non-Oceania constituent federations. Each comes with a unique bonus, and there are distinct haves and have-nots here, but A Continental Fellow requires you to register a full campaign victory from each starting position. It also does not track which ones you've won from, though there is a mod to check that. Keep this achievement in mind for a bit, though.

Enemy Unknown would be followed up a year later with its expansion pack, XCOM: Enemy Within. If there was one complaint to have about Enemy Unknown, it's that progression was just a bit fixed and linear with very little room to deviate from the ballistics -> lasers -> plasma track except for when you decided to slot armor upgrades in. There wasn't even very much to do in terms of building on your little tank buddy (lovingly, the Super Heavy Infantry Vehicle, or SHIV) or in utility items to give your guys. Enemy Within was constructed from the ground up to address this lack of variety and mostly succeeds. I would say, overall, that Enemy Within is the definitive way to play the game, but it does commit a colossal misstep that sincerely tanks the lategame. We'll get to that. Every new thing Enemy Within added corresponds to an achievement set, which is why I started talking achievements earlier.

Meld is the primary addition to the game's ecosystem. Meld is seeded into most missions as two canisters that are randomly seeded on the map and decay after a certain number of turns unless you manually secure them with a soldier or beat the mission before the timer. The idea here was to get players to break out of a very slow creeping meta way to play the game which was both unassailable by the aliens and boring as hell to do, and it mostly works. Meld is carted home and used in two new buildings, the Genetics Lab and the Cybernetics Lab, to give you an alternative advancement track for your guys besides just "get to plasma faster".

Gene mods are the lesser of the two systems, unfortunately. Most aliens will give access to one of the game's ten gene mods when autopsied, split into pairs for five categories in total. Any soldier sent into the gene pools can be given any combination of one from each pair at a cost of money, Meld, and a processing time. The concept behind them is strong, letting you invest a limited resource into making your guys better at what they're already doing, but the implementation is significantly let down by about 7/10 of the gene mods being deeply underwhelming and the remaining 3/10 being absolutely completely busted. Your two options for skin mods, a microcosm of the whole system, are "the soldier cannot be grabbed by the Stalker, who appears in pairs maybe every second or third mission and is not a significant threat" versus "the soldier is invisible and untargetable when in heavy cover". A leg mod allows the soldier to jump infinitely high, which would be incredible in XCOM 2, but is let down by half or more of XCOM's missions not having significant height to interact with and the second armor you invent being very good and having a grappling hook; the alternative lets the soldier regenerate health up to their unarmored max, which on higher difficulties is "if you're not killed, regenerate up to where you will still be killed by the next shot". Neither is particularly tasty, so why not just save Meld for another instance of Mimetic Skin for literal invisibility? The gene mod-related achievements are pretty lean, fortunately: beat a mission with all soldiers having two or more mods and a handful for using specific ones, like using the psionic feedback brain mod to kill an alien or using the shitty skin mod to reveal and kill a Stalker.

Cybernetics are where the game got the hugest overhaul. In addition to a massive expansion to engineering projects to get new capabilities, utility items, and upgrades for the darling SHIV, you can spend Meld to send a soldier in to the lab to become a torso and head. Doing this lets you spend meld to make a MEC suit, equippable by any torso boy, that turns a soldier into a big old mechanized infantry - think the mech suits in the Matrix sequels. MECs are rad as hell but very expensive to maintain in all facets: you need a lot of money, a lot of Meld, and you need to sacrifice a soldier to the machine gods. However, they do the one thing gene mods failed to do: they give you an alternative place to dump resources that significantly increases the variety in how you can approach squad building, since MECs are powerful but need to be manually upgraded with more money and more Meld to unlock more features. The achievements for cybernetics mirror the gene mod ones: beat a mission with all MECs (at least one from each of the four different base classes) and a variety for using specific features, like blowing up a car with a MEC or punching a Berzerker to death.

Your third and least impactful new system is Medals. Medals are earned when XCOM accomplishes certain things, like stopping a terror mission, and can be given minor bonuses and awarded to any soldier. These are, unfortunately, a complete nothing burger, and the small cutscene you have to sit through every time you award one for what amounts to a trivial gain relegates them to a footnote except for an associated achievement. Your final mission starts when a single psionic soldier Volunteers to lead the assault on the alien mothership, and you have to make sure this guy has all five possible medals. That's it. This involves holding onto a copy of each until you find out who is and isn't psionic, and is only "difficult" in that there is a maximum number of each type of medal you can earn per-campaign which, in one instance, is One.

Besides new progression, Enemy Within implements a bevy of new content in the form of short, lightly-plotted mission sequences. For the Battletech-pilled in the thread, think a rough version of Flashpoints. Operation Slingshot is technically Enemy Unknown DLC, but I'm including it here, and it's a very good three-mission sequence set in Hong Kong that rewards you a unique recruit. It carries the bonus achievement of having to take Mr. Zhang to the final mission, but that's not too bad. Note that in Enemy Unknown it's only required that you start the final mission with him in the squad, while in Enemy Within you have to finish the final mission with him deployed and still living. Operation Progeny is the Enemy Within equivalent, and it's just not that good overall. It rewards you with its own unique recruit, but she's nowhere near as memorable as Zhang and the missions are nowhere near as good. The Newfoundland mission whose name escapes me has you discover a whale carcass that's being used as a nest by the horrifying Alien-inspired Chryssalids, and it's a unique mission where you probe slowly through a fishing town and then plant an airstrike beacon and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as you can. It's probably my single favorite mission in this version of XCOM. Finally, the base defense mission was added to the late-midgame of every campaign. It's a do-or-die assault where your guys are bolstered by the ballcap-wearing XCOM Base Security guys and the aliens are assaulting you from all sides. It's a fantastic idea that oversteps its own abilities and just kind of ends up being a samey slog on replays, though it absolutely does have the magic on the first run.

Enemy Within's new major enemy within humanity is EXALT, a Nod-esque faction devoted to bringing the aliens to Earth and sabotaging XCOM's efforts around the globe. This is, I think, the thing that Enemy Within gets the most right. EXALT fight very differently to the aliens, breathing a lot of life into the midgame, and they're a genuine pain in the ass that you want to root out on the strategic map. You root them out by getting tips on EXALT cells, sending a single guy to infiltrate, and then getting a mission to go extract that guy with a full squad and fight EXALT. Each cell you destroy gives you a single Carmen Sandiego-esque clue ("the headquarters is not in Asia") and, once you have enough evidence, you can accuse a single nation seeded at the beginning of the game of being the secret EXALT-harboring nation. Accuse the wrong nation and they pull out of XCOM; accuse the right nation and you can mount a raid on EXALT headquarters, which turns them off for the rest of the game. It's a fantastic way to add a little more oomph to the midgame without inflating the lategame at all and the EXALT raids are genuinely pretty fun to do. The one downside is that you get EXALT's weapons added to your inventory as a cosmetic equivalent to XCOM ballistics/later lasers, and while they do look nice, they take up a bunch of real estate in the market screen and only sell for like a dollar apiece because you amass so many. This would have been better as an infinite-equippable skin, rather than discrete instances. Anyhow, the achievements related to EXALT basically boil down to taking them down and a few lighter ones, like sniping an EXALT Elite Sniper or trying to mind control a member of EXALT, causing him to commit suicide instead of bow to XCOM. Funny, though: there's an achievement for gathering enough intel to be positive of where EXALT's headquarters is and another for actually assaulting the headquarters and destroying it; the latter is significantly more common than the former. Go off, gunslingers.

The last bit to talk about is the bit changed the least by Enemy Within: the alien force composition. The expansion only adds two units to the aliens and modifies one, but it manages to do so in ways that completely fumble the ball. Stalkers, as mentioned briefly earlier, are the only new enemy before the late midgame. They show up in pairs and immediately go invisible and follow your group, and they'll attack one by one on subsequent turns. The problem with them is that the only way for them to be dangerous is if you ignore them and plow into another group of enemies while they're unaccounted for, which means that the best thing to do is just stop in your tracks and put everyone on Overwatch for two turns to kill them or just fire a rocket at where they went invisible. They're deeply forgettable, existing only to slow you down minorly, and they're the best of the set. Mechtoids (a genuinely pretty funny pun off the basic enemy, Sectoids) are the other addition, showing up in the late midgame to provide a miniboss-type boost to the aliens. These guys can shoot twice from neutral with exceptional accuracy and high damage, have altogether too much health, and can be given a shield by nearby Sectoids. Aside from the fact that they're just overtuned, my major problem with these guys is that they're just a stronger Cyberdisc that shows up exactly when the Cyberdisc is starting to show up as well. They don't really add even as much variety as Stalkers do. They're just a stronger mechanized unit showing up just before you're equipped to deal with them, with no real counters besides "levy your entire firebase at it and hope that's enough". If it isn't, especially on higher difficulties, anticipate a death. They're deeply annoying to deal with, and they're not Enemy Within's primary flop.

Cyberdiscs and Mechtoids, together, represent the lategame enemy mechanical force. You have the weaker Cyberdisc and the stronger Mechtoid. It's straightforward. The problem is that this paradigm already existed in Enemy Unknown. Cyberdiscs showed up in the late midgame and Sectopods showed up in the lategame as the aliens' final unit. Sectopods have a shitload of health, fire twice from neutral, and exist to be an "oh shit I need to send all my bullets this way" enemy whenever they show up - exactly like the Mechtoid. The Mechtoid does everything the Sectopod does from a unit composition standpoint except it shows up earlier and I swear it has higher accuracy, though I haven't checked the numbers. So, then, what do they do with the Sectopod? The answer, unfortunately, is that they halve all incoming damage to the Sectopod, permanently. This makes the Sectopod an absolutely unreasonable brick of health, requiring an effective 60 damage to take care of a single one while being immune to critical hits, having significant evasion of its own, and having a passive form of Overwatch where it will shoot a weaker gun at the first XCOM soldier that moves even if it didn't enter Overwatch on its turn. For reference on that 60 figure: with plasma you're looking at 10-12 damage per shot. You need top end bullshit to deal with these guys, be it upgraded MECs or some form of cheese, and they're just not any fun to deal with. The addition of Mechtoids and the knock-on effects it had end up making the lategame of Enemy Within significantly more of a slog than the lategame of Enemy Unknown, which is such a shame because it improves so much about the midgame. It's worth noting that the final mission has a fixed pair of Sectopods that you have to fight together, and I'm genuinely not sure what the developer-intended solution to tackling them is.

Now, here at the end, is one final major complaint that probably won't apply to you if you're following me up. Remember A Continental Fellow? Progress is tracked separately for Enemy Unknown and Enemy Within. It's all one achievement, but it requires either 5/5 location victories on Unknown or 5/5 location victories on Within, no crossover at all. I've beaten this game at least eight out of the five required times. For anyone coming in later, they're probably going to play exclusively Within and this won't be an issue, but dammit if I didn't want to at least grumble about it here. Speaking of grumbling, I didn't even mention that there's multiplayer. It's rudimentary and really only included because it was 2012, and the achievement set is "to win one match". Oh, yeah, also, it was 2012, there's a God damn viral achievement. I have it now, so if any of you decide to follow my footsteps, absolutely feel free to ask me to send it your way because getting someone to agree to go back to XCOM and give it to you is a fucking nightmare.

Sour ending note aside, neo-XCOM was still a complete paradigm shift in the genre and it's still absolutely worth playing in either its Enemy Unknown or Enemy Within forms. I think it's the least of the new trilogy, but in a way that's very much the worst of these three delicious $80 gins you've given me. I still love it, and it's still an easy recommendation. It's actually three dollars right now and for the next week, as are 2 and Chimera Squad, so hey. Splash in, try them out if you haven't. They're all good.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

Funny, though: there's an achievement for gathering enough intel to be positive of where EXALT's headquarters is and another for actually assaulting the headquarters and destroying it; the latter is significantly more common than the former. Go off, gunslingers.

Ha. I'm guessing you can just plant a save at base and go down the list accusing everyone. Considering the answer is seeded when you start the game.

[lenticular]

3 hours ago, Integrity said:

My biggest regret about the entire XCOM ecosystem is that all the spiritual sequels and successors go full into emulating the first, and absolutely nobody has taken a crack at being Terror from the Deep 2.

After the ending of XCOM 2, I thought for sure that XCOM 3 was going to be a Terror from the Deep remake. Except it's been over 8 years now, and it's becoming increasingly less and less likely that we'll actually get another new XCOM game any time soon. Sigh. I want to play XCOM now.

[Integrity]

4 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Ha. I'm guessing you can just plant a save at base and go down the list accusing everyone. Considering the answer is seeded when you start the game.

you do need "some amount" of intel (2-3 raids) before you can J'Accuse! just anyone but yeah, you absolutely do not need to narrow it all the way down before throwing out accusations and reloading if you were wrong

 

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

After the ending of XCOM 2, I thought for sure that XCOM 3 was going to be a Terror from the Deep remake. Except it's been over 8 years now, and it's becoming increasingly less and less likely that we'll actually get another new XCOM game any time soon.

keep the faith. I Want To Believe. honestly, though, firaxis has never been huge so i think it's still fine to anticipate it in the middle future given as they made chimera squad four years ago and obviously dedicated a ton of internal resources to midnight suns + have civ 7 on the horizon

e: 'it' being a new xcom game, that is, not necessarily TftD 2. we can but dream.

Edited Thursday at 01:00 AM by Integrity

[lenticular]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

keep the faith. I Want To Believe. honestly, though, firaxis has never been huge so i think it's still fine to anticipate it in the middle future given as they made chimera squad four years ago and obviously dedicated a ton of internal resources to midnight suns + have civ 7 on the horizon

e: 'it' being a new xcom game, that is, not necessarily TftD 2. we can but dream.

I want to believe, but I don't think that I do. Given that neither Chimera Squad nor Midnight Suns were particularly commercially successful, it's far too easy to imagine the suits at Take-Two deciding that turn based tactics games just don't sell. Add onto that Jake Solomon having left the company last year, and the way that Civ seems to be moving more and more towards the endless DLC model, and it just doesn't paint a very rosy picture. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong! And I do acknowledge that I'm a pessimist by nature, so I'm more likely to see the glass half empty, but it just doesn't look good to me.

[Parrhesia]

Nu-XCOM is one of my favourite games of all time. As is X-hyphen-COM! I've logged 120 hours in nu-COM myself but am no-fucking-where near full completion, and I suspect it'll never happen.

I do massively agree with the rec to go play the original X-COM using OpenXCOM, and I want to put a caveat on that: there's a patch to force psionics to use line of sight. Enable this immediately. Vanilla X-COM's midgame consists of being mind controlled seven ways to Sunday, and then you get psionics, and the game is simply over then because there is no counterplay. It's a pity, because the actual firing-squad mechanics are fantastic to play with. So slam that on. There's also an option to have accuracy fall off at range for non-aimed shots, which encourages tactics other than 'auto shot from max range', which is probably healthy. And a shitload of QoL, of course.

Now I kind of want to play OpenXCOM again...

[Integrity]

MONSTER HUNTER RISE (CAPCOM, 2021)
Finished: 7/10/24. Playtime: 284.6 hours.

There are precisely two reasons that I start pre-writing a post for this thread. There's the innocuous one, which is that I'm playing an anthology-type game like Phoenix Wright, Mega Man, or Total Warhammer, where keeping my thoughts discrete and organized is useful. Then there's the bad one: that I thought the game was not good and needed to take significant time to unpack why. Monster Hunter Rise is not an anthology.

HAVE SOME BACKGROUND ON THE HOUSE
I typed up the World post before I had quite the handle on this process as I do now, and I also just tend to write stream of consciousness shit off the top of my head about games I really like. Let me get far deeper into my feelings on the Monster Hunters, because there's a through line that I need to establish to carry into this one.

I started my Monster Hunting life with Tri, for the Wii. Great game, utterly opaque, completely powercrept by 3 Ultimate. This was a trend for Monster Hunters for quite a while: to have a release and then have an updated rerelease with a shitload more content (often an entire extra tier of difficulty) as the "definitive edition". These days, I reckon it would be super frowned upon by players, but it's how it was back then. More recently, they've been going the route of game, gap, massive paid DLC "definitive edition" release. It's more familiar, because it's more how things are done now. I'm not here to make value judgments. I'm here to introduce how it is so that I can talk about games in the <Game> / <Proper Game> format going forward.

Monster Hunter Tri / 3U was interesting because it was the last time for a significant while that the Monster Hunter franchise would be on home consoles, and therefore on big ol' televisions. I bring this up because I don't think I have been entirely fair to the followup, Monster Hunter 4 / 4U, entirely on account of it being on a tiny handheld screen and not the big one. Perhaps there is a Monster Hunter 4, mechanically identical to the one we got but on the Wii U, that I loved. We will never know. I bring this up, in turn, because I want to distinguish it from its successor.

Monster Hunter Generations / GU followed up 4U for the 3DS, and then later (I did not play this) for the Switch. I did not mislike Generations for being on a handheld. I misliked it on its own merits. Generations' primary contribution to the franchise was Arts and Styles. Styles, kinda-regrettably, died in the crucible of Generations. The idea was that you would drop in, essentially, Power stance or Aerial stance or Agility stance, and this would fundamentally modify the moveset of whatever weapon you were using, changing numbers and moves entirely. Arts, regrettably, survived.

In every Monster Hunter pre-Generations, the singular ability that was on any sort of a cooldown was the gunlance's Wyvern Fire, a massive shotgun blast for huge damage that put your gunlance into a heat-venting cooldown state. None of the other up-to thirteen weapon types had any other time-limited abilities, though they'd flirt with abilities that changed stances or applied temporary buffs or worked off a meter you built up or things like that. Generations was a paradigm shift: every single type of weapon had a set of Arts that were, essentially, spells that you could cast from a limited mana pool that would let you execute a fully sick anime attack or a crushing counterblow or put a buff on yourself, et cetera.

It ought to be said that I am not against weapon skills as a concept, even for a grounded fighting system (which Monster Hunter patently is not). I'm going to leap into talking about Lies of P presently, and adding Fable onto Dark Souls' combat did not take me out of it at all. My problem with the Arts of Generations was much deeper, and I really could not articulate it for years, but the proof is in the pudding: I played 3U for about 700 hours, World for 800, and 4U, a game I generally disrespect, for 207, in addition to the ~300 hours you see here on Rise.

I played Generations for 30 hours.

THE LIES OF P CONNECTION
When I first saw Rise in trailers, I said to my wife and others listening that it looked too much like Generations, and that I thought I would have the same issues with it as I did with Generations. I didn't play Rise until Sunbreak, and the first few hours of it actually assuaged my concerns pretty well. As I've said before, though, cracks get papered over when you don't really have to engage with a system too deeply - I've grumbled about this with respect to several Final Fantasies recently, and more games before that besides. It's fine for a system to work well enough at easier difficulties, but that doesn't exempt it from criticisms when you push the limits of the system as put forth by the makers of the system, you know? ATB can still be a bad game system even though it works fine in Final Fantasy X-2, where nothing demands you stress it in any real way.

Lies of P finally gave me the language I was missing to talk about why Generations was a colossal disappointment, and by extension why I found Rise post-Low Rank to be particularly unfulfilling. To get into this, we need to get back into the Dark Soulses. At a high level, Dark Souls' combat is about i-frame dodging through big enemy attacks and punishing with strikes of your own. If you block, you give up the initiative, which can be fine in certain circumstances but is not a sustainable strategy in general. If you take the offensive, you're always at risk of having the boss shrug off your attack and respond in kind and dumpster you deeply disproportionately, unless you already know the fight and its patterns, in which case you fill the gaps you know exist with your own strikes. I would confidently describe Soulsian combat as a counterattack-focused style, across all the games in which it exists, and I don't think this is particularly controversial.

There are two primary forks from this system that compete inelegantly but are both relevant: Dark Souls 3 and Lies of P. Both of these games seek to take the core Dark Souls combat formula and to speed it up, and both take different approaches to the task at hand. Dark Souls 3 simply speeds it up, making control snappier and enemies and you faster, but changing nothing fundamentally. Lies of P speeds it up by making massive fundamental changes: quicker attacks and a higher emphasis on blocking over dodging means that you're far more incentivized to take the offensive, especially since you can create your own staggers far more reliably via organic play. Dark Souls 3 fails, and Lies of P succeeds.

It's easy to fall into a trap of saying well, clearly you can go on the offense in Dark Souls 3 and you can stagger bosses and such and such, but that's missing the point. All of these games' systems can be optimized to the point that the player knows they are hitting stagger thresholds and will be able to follow up with more attacks and that ranges can be manipulated to know that the boss will always throw out this attack, etc. From that perspective - from a speedrunner's perspective - Dark Souls 3 is barely different from Lies of P, or Demon's Souls, or Sekiro, or Nioh. The point is, rather, that when you're playing Dark Souls 3 for the first or even second time, you will never have any idea where the stagger thresholds are. You might never have the confidence to launch an attack from neutral, because the gain is small and the potential punishment is huge. The game has been sped up, because you have been sped up, but the game is the same.

Flip the script to Lies of P. You don't actually move any more - and I would think even less - than you do in Dark Souls 3. The game is sped up by encouraging you to keep attacking, by rewarding you for staggering even particularly chufty trash enemies, and by conferring your stagger onto the boss as you continually parry attacks. You can play the game by i-frame dodging and punishing, like Dark Souls, but to do so is to fundamentally misunderstand the game, even though the basic systems are largely the same. You'll be rewarded for your dodges with fewer opportunities to attack, less stamina to push your advantages, fewer boss staggers for ripostes, and not even particularly safer positioning compared to engaging the game as it wants you to. It's still Dark Souls at its core in most meaningful ways, but it has changed elements to speed the game up rather than simply speeding the game up on the face of it.

THE MYTH OF "BALANCE": ISN'T THERE SOMEONE YOU FORGOT TO ASK?
Let's flip back to Monster Hunter as a concept before, I promise, talking about Rise. Monster Hunter's got melee and ranged (or blademaster and gunner) weapons, and at a very high level, they are essentially just choose-your-way to apply damage to a monster. One can quibble over cutting versus impact damage and the support applications of status sword-n-board or hunting horns, but at the end of the day all weapons exist to facilitate putting damage onto a big monster until it falls over / into a trap. They're not supposed to all be equally effective at this, but rather to come with their own tradeoffs. Generally, higher-DPS weapons are going to be more "unsafe", for lack of a better word. Safer weapons, which do lower DPS, come with the benefits of having defensive abilities like proper shields, less animation lock, or increased mobility with the weapon out. Note that I'm talking the overall design of these weapons over time, not any specific (e.g. Generations, World) implementation.

Lance and Gunlance can feasibly be built around using the shield, and they're traditionally on the lower end of the DPS scale, with the Lance being a solid candidate for the safest weapon in the franchise. You get a big shield, short animations, and solid counters, and you pay for them by doing lower DPS and walking around the battlefield like an oversized tortoise. The Gunlance is the offensively-specialized Lance, trading the counters for longer animations and significantly higher DPS while still giving you a big shield to hide behind.

Sword and Shield also occupies the high end of the safety scale, and also traditionally occupies the low spot of the DPS race. It does have a nominal shield for blocking in emergencies (that's more useful than you might think), but Sword and Shield gets its damage through many tiny discrete attack animations leaving you tons of opportunities to break a combo to dodge. On top of that, you move significantly faster with a Sword and Shield out than you do with almost any other weapon, and it's also got the unique niche of being able to use items (like potions) without first sheathing your weapon. If you want to play safe but don't want to hunker down behind a wall of iron, this is your boy.

Let's go to the opposite end of the scale: the big dick DPS weapons. Longsword, Dual Blades, Switch Axe, and Hammer are all traditionally on the higher end of the DPS scale, and they notably have two defensive tools among all of them: Dual Blades gets faster dodges while in its powered up state, and the Longsword and Switch Axe share a pretty anemic reposition slash that has no i-frames. Hammer's a weirder edge case - the actual playstyle is pretty safe, based around a single big hit that's easy to animation cancel and having pretty good mobility otherwise, but making effective use of the hammer means smacking the monster right in its big dumb face, and it's kind of a flop anywhere else. All of these guys are higher DPS weapons and all of them, for some reason or another, are more unsafe to fight with.

Greatsword is an interesting case here because it's hugely flexible in playstyle, with massive DPS if you know exactly what you're doing but in possession of a quick and mobile playstyle where you largely keep the sword sheathed and dodge around unarmed. The Greatsword is largely based around commitment to your attacks: act decisively and even predictively and you're going to get huge results, but overcommit or whiff and you're locked into long animations at worst and, at best, you've got the slowest walk speed of all weapons and only an anemic shield (the sword itself, and you lose sharpness if you block with it) to compensate. It's less inherently unsafe, but similar to the hammer, getting good performance out of it requires crisp and risky play.

Obviously, I'm leaving out a lot of complexities of Monster Hunter balance to make the backdrop to a point. I'm not talking, for instance, about the balance between the three ranged weapons, and I'm leaving out some weirder ones like the Charge Blade and the Hunting Horn. The throughline is there, though. All weapons are usually competitive with one another, but the more defensive tools and higher mobility a weapon permits, generally the lower damage it's going to put out to compensate for the fact that you're getting more windows in which to do that damage. The Lance is the ultimate form of this: in exchange for lower damage overall, you're much more easily able to simply never stop attacking the monster until it walks away, chaining infinite combos with counters and repositioning with shield dashes.

ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT RISE'S GAMEPLAY
I said many paragraphs ago that Arts survived, and here they are. We're finally talking about Rise specifically. Rise's big shakeup to the formula is the Wirebug. The Wirebug is... well, I'll get into it later, but suffice it to say that it's a spellbook. It's your traversal, recovery, defensive, and offensive mechanic all in one, and I'm going to focus on those last two here. You see, you have two charges of Wirebug (and can contextually have three) and a set of swappable weapon-specific skills and moves, some of which pull from the Wirebug pool. Some of these are fundamental move swaps, like one that changes the Greatsword's entire core moveset to something more flowing; some of them are big Wirebug-fuelled hits, like firing every single one of the Gunlance's three types of ammunition in a single alpha strike; some of these are more defensive in nature, like spending a Wirebug to get a dash or a counter.

Therein lies one of my problems with the whole system. Since so many weapons have access to dashes and counters through Wirebugs and move swaps, an entire traditional axis of weapon balance is kind of completely gone. Gunlance is no longer a slow, plodding weapon, and can now be capable of absolutely explosive repositioning at a moment's notice. Greatsword gets a skill that trades a Wirebug for a hefty dash and a free sword sheath, leaving you in the highly mobile unarmed state for essentially free and buffing your next attack on top of that. Hammer gets a dodge that can be executed while charging the superpound without interrupting the charge. Switch Axe gets an on-demand counter, of all weapons. Because this entire facet of weapon choice is deeply homogenized, the DPS curve among weapons also needs necessarily flattened to compensate. It becomes a far more transparent "choose your method of applying DPS" than it was before, with quick Greatswords and mobile Gunlances and all sorts of other deliberate cracks in weapon toolkits papered over by Wirebugs. Any weapon can be close to anything, just pick the one you like the core moveset on the most.

There's room for this to be a game's deliberate design, certainly. I'll be the first to say that this is a paradigm that annoys me far more than one that is objectively poor design - but god damn does it get under my skin. I've always been a multi-weapon user, with some picks I like to pull out for certain fights over others, and even certain weapons that I would progress through as I became more comfortable with a fight. World's Raging Brachydios was a great example. I made the stupid decision to make every piece of his armor and all fourteen of his weapons, representing a stupid amount of grinding the fight. Since I don't like playing with randoms, I'd fight him generally solo. As I fought him, I progressed from learning the fight using Greatsword, with a build focused on unsheathe attacks and evasion, taking forever to kill him; to Lance, with a counter-heavy build because I was becoming confident in his patterns and could kill him a lot faster; finally to Hammer, because I'd learned his patterns and I was punishing everything with a superpound for reasonably quick (if intense) fights. Rise has caused me to swap from the Gunlance for any serious reason one time: the final boss of High Rank has some fuckular hitboxes and unblockable attacks and fighting him with a shield is genuine torture, so I Greatsworded him instead. Hundreds of hours, and that's the only time I swapped weapons for purpose rather than for variety.

Adding onto this general dissatisfaction with the Wirebug skills is the Wirebug mobility. You can move in three dimensions with the Wirebug, dash out of the air, and even climb up many surfaces. This all combines to make traversal utterly frictionless; you simply point your Wirebug cursor where you want to go and R2 a few times. This, in combination with reusing old maps that have not aged gracefully, makes Rise's maps feel super sterile and arcadey, especially in the wake of World's luscious (and occasionally nightmarish) maps. The Sandy Plains were already the weak point of Tri's set of maps, and Tri was fully fifteen years ago. It absolutely doesn't cut the mustard now. Weird decision to port the Flooded Forest, a map comprehensively designed around how much of it was swimmable, to a game without swimming - though, to be fair, Portable 3rd did that long ago already.

The Wirebug mobility also creeps significantly into combat, and here we're finally going to get back to the Lies of P connection and bring everything together. Rise, despite all the stuff I've said above, doesn't fundamentally change the Monster Hunter core loop. You still i-frame through attacks and fish for and exploit punish windows, same as World, same as Tri. All this Wirebug shit only means that you can do essentially the same things, except faster and more flexibly. To top it off, because players are significantly more mobile, monsters also must have significantly better tracking or better mobility of their own to keep up, otherwise they risk being trivialized - and some of the older monsters absolutely do not keep up in this new calculus. What results is a situation that's faster simply as a result of mobility creep, not because anything has been altered in the fundamental combat loop. It's an arcade Monster Hunter, faster paced because it expects you to do the same things but more crisply, as you and the monster simply threaten larger areas than before. Rise wants to be P, but it's Dark Souls 3 at its core; faster, but without a reason.

"BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CLUTCH CLAW LMAO" SOMEONE IS GONNA SAY
This comes up a lot in the World vs. Rise discourse, so I'm going to devote a little bit of time to it. Somewhat controversially, I really liked World's slinger/clutch claw combination arm tool (hereafter just "clutch claw"), and I think Wirebugs suck. On the face of it, that seems like a contradictory stance to hold - the clutch claw and Wirebugs are both systems strapped onto the top of the core gameplay loop that dictate it more than they actually interact fluidly with it, after all. There are a lot of similarities to draw. My lack of vitriol for the clutch claw stems from the differences, though, so let me try to talk through how I perceive them.

Firstly, and definitely most importantly, is the scope of the two. The clutch claw is a frankly ridiculous premise, but all of its interactions with the world are based on very simple principles. It is a grabby grappling hook, and you can load various dangerous flora into it. That's it. There's plenty of room to argue over whether hitting a monster in the cheek with it should toss them around like a ragdoll when they shrug off normal blows, or why otherwise-pathetic water pods fired point-blank cause thousands of pounds of monster to fly into the distance (but only when they're not angry), but all of those are exaggerated consequences of one of the two things the clutch claw can do. Even the goofier claw attacks that are integrated into weapon kits, like the Lance's funny as hell counter claw, follow off this clearly - you get thrown away instead of standing your ground, and then you have a grabby grappling hook to get back. There's one exception to this, in tenderization, but I want to get more deeply into that in a little bit.

Taking Wirebugs as the opposite number, there is no scope at all. Whatever flimsy rationale the game tries to put onto them, for all practical purposes, they are simply sorcery. The clutch claw gave you silly or exaggerated skills you could use, but they were all following the basic two actions that the clutch claw could do: it was a grabby grappling hook, and you could load dangerous flora into it. Wirebugs allow you to ninja dash in a sphere around your character as part of an attack or just for fun or as a fall breaker when you eat shit, and they also reinforce your armor and weapons temporarily, and they can be used to anchor your character to the ground to take no damage from an attack, and they can be used to puppeteer a giant monster into fighting other giant monsters, and they can be used to pin a giant monster to the ground with multiple huge strands in a net, and they can slow down your bullets to make them do more damage (?), and and and. There is no practical limitation to what a Wirebug can accomplish outside of game balance. They are simply spells that your hunter can cast with a vague handwave thereupon so that the game doesn't literally have magic in it.

To top that off, having them be time-recharged mana points makes them unnecessarily centralizing. They cease to be elements of your kit that you can integrate and exploit when able, or even spam the life out of like the Hammer grapple followup in World, and they become a resource that I, at least, feel like I need to keep burning so that I keep it recharging. Anytime the Wirebugs are full, the audience should be asking "how should I burn my Wirebugs". Monster Hunter's surely no stranger to this - the Heavy Bowgun's special ammo meter from World comes to mind - but those were integral parts of kits that were part and parcel of picking that weapon. Wirebugs are universal, and I'll get back to that in a moment.

You may say now to yourself a-ha! I have caught you in a contradiction, Isaac! Tenderization from World was also a very centralizing mechanic, and is the main reason that I did not enjoy late-stage World! I can't disagree with that in good faith, but the difference to me is a difference of scope and necessity. Tenderizing was disproportionately rewarded for how easy it was to pull off, and there's a fair argument that it becomes a tedious chore to keep parts tenderized, especially on harder monsters. My disagreements with the comparison are as such: for scope, even at its worst, someone in your hunting party had to go smash the part/s that the team was focusing every three minutes, which is a far cry from every single person getting a skill point shit into them every ten seconds. For necessity: you can get through every large monster in World without interacting with tenderization or even the clutch claw at all, except for maybe some of the post-patch ones, and your penalty for doing so was that you'd give up 15% damage output on tenderized areas and you'd give up 2-3 punish windows per monster from a wallbang - and that's if you're playing solo and don't just have a buddy who likes wallbanging doing it for you.

I mean it sincerely when I say that you cannot play Rise without interacting with Wirebugs. One can argue that being more integral to the game and less strapped-on to existing systems is good design, actually, and I can't really argue. Even ignoring that I'm just a dweeby hater who doesn't like Wirebugs, my problem creeps in that the speed of the game is fundamentally altered because you have access to them. In most Monster Hunters, if you get knocked on your ass, you have a short getting-up animation where you're invincible but helpless. In Rise, you can use the Wirebug to break your fall and instantly be back in the fight, but if you don't use the Wirebug, the animation for getting up without one is longer than in previous games, because it's also punishing you for improper Wirebug management. When large monsters transition between areas, they tend to roar and then hustle off a bit faster than you can go, giving you opportunities to punch extra damage in if you're clever or even, for some flying monsters, get ahead of them if you can intuit where they're going. In Rise, because every player is so much faster on the ground due to Wirebugs, all large monsters have to absolutely fucking haul ass during every area transition, because anything less than a dead sprint would be slower than the players. Even the dog it gives you as a fast movement option ends up being slower than just spamming Wirebugs if there's any intervening terrain, which there pretty often is.

And that's the crux of it, really. I initially said that Rise looked like I was going to have the same problems with it as I did with Generations, and Wirebugs turned out to be all of the vices that Generations had but writ much larger. I'm sure that this was a plus for some people - Generations obviously has its fans, after all - but it's not what I want out of a Monster Hunter, and Rise making it such an unignorable facet of the game in and out of combat meant that Rise was always facing an uphill battle to win my favor.

THE BIRDS AND THE BUGS
Wirebugs are only the most forward-facing of a whole suite of creatures that represent Rise's take on World's Endemic Life. Endemic Life in World was a set of critters that, generally, you could capture with a net and take home to your house to display in aquaria or let roam your garden to give things a little bit of flavor. Some Endemic Life functioned as small stage hazards - Sleep- (and various other aliment-) -toads just vibed in the world until they were struck, either deliberately by you or accidentally by a monster, and then they'd create a zone that rapidly afflicted anything within with their status effect. A handful of critters like the Bomb Beetle could be kicked to reveal a quick emergency ration of a high quality Slinger ammo, like a bomb or piercing pod, but these were deeply forgettable in the grand scheme of things. Rounding out the list, Wedge Beetles just kinda lived their lives out in the world and could be used to do big swings on the grappling hook if you remembered where they were, but I'm not going to focus on those at all here.

Rise's take on Endemic Life is also twofold: buffs and combat consumables, and I dislike the implementation of both. To talk about the buff bugs, I've first got to describe Rise's new piece of kit: the Petalace. The Petalace is presented poorly and seems really complicated, but in essence it lets you focus which stats out of health/stamina/attack/defense are important to you. Each stat corresponds with a Spiribird of a particular color which can be found all over any of Rise's maps and which will provide a small buff to that stat for the rest of the current quest, with the amount buffed and the maximum buff determined by your Petalace. This isn't nearly as personal as it might sound, with Petalaces pretty quickly reducing to "do you want the health or the stamina one", but at least it provides a little expression.

Because Spiribirds can provide max health and stamina, you no longer have "maximum" health and stamina just from eating a hearty meal and going into a quest. As you hunt in Monster Hunter, your monster hunter will get hungry, reducing their maximum stamina. You can refill your maximum stamina by eating rations and other food in the field. Typically, your maximum stamina would be 100 if you went into a quest hungry (and then you could top it up with rations) or 150 if you went into a quest after eating, and would decrease in increments over time. In Rise, you can go up to 150 stamina from eating a hearty meal, and your maximum stamina will decrease in increments from 150, but your actual true maximum stamina is 250 now, with that extra hundred only gatherable in the field from Spiribirds.

This might sound a little petty, but my problem here is that this is the first time in Monster Hunter where preparation is no longer the sole focus. If you wanted to go in at peak condition, you ate a large meal or brought max/ancient potions and/or meat to feast on. If you wanted extra attack, you had the chef serve you attack food and brought demondrugs, and the same for defense and armordrugs. With the Petalace, this is no longer the case. You can never deploy at peak condition anymore, there's always an amount of stat buff on the field that you have to go scrounge up, and the actual scrounging is just grinding Rise's super frictionless platforming to get 10 incremental buff bugs of a given color. Getting a bug doesn't feel impactful enough to go out of your way for, but the sum total of maxing a stat out is a hefty enough buff over your base self that you do feel gently punished for not taking a minute or three to do a circuit and grab a bunch of them. It's free stats that exist to waste your time, and keep that in your brain for a few minutes. There's also temporary buff bug clusters that you can pop to increase attack (or another stat) even beyond this max, but it feels wrong to slight Rise for trying to be an arcadey Monster Hunter and having arcadey floating stat powerups to pick up. There's other fish to fry.

The other half of the Endemic Life paradigm is combat consumables. These are little guys that you just pick up, they go into a free sub-inventory, and you can use them like any other item one time. If they're not consumed by the end of the quest, they aren't brought back with you, and you cannot deploy with them. I'm not as down on these as I am on Spiribirds, but I've still got enough to complain about. One thing I liked about the toads in World is that they rewarded map knowledge in a very non-straightforward way. Knowing there's a Paratoad on the big ramp in the Elder's Recess is the first half of the equation, but actually wielding it is going to depend very much on what you're fighting and what they're up to. Rise nixes both halves of that; you simply pick up the toad and, when you need it, you press a single button to set it like a trap wherever you like. Other bugs cause elemental blights to monsters or give you a free wallbang World-style or put a monster into the mountable state.

While the biggest sin these guys commit is really just being disappointing, the thing that puzzles me about them is kind of fundamental: they feel out of time. Time once was in Monster Hunter that replenishing your resources in the field was punishing or even completely infeasible, and back then having ad hoc healing like the Escuregot or Antidobra or being able to cobble a little extra damage or a blight or a trap from the local fauna could compensate for a missed trap. In Rise (and World, and I don't think this is a bad thing), resources are very easy to replenish in the field. Combinations are simpler and can even be set to happen automatically, like gathered Herbs turning instantly into Potions if you're not full of them, and on top of that no longer have a chance to fail like they used to. You can go back to your base camp, step into your tent for tea, and resupply completely from your item box. There was a time when Monster Hunter could absolutely have used juryrigged in-field resources, and it's long passed. Because of that, the juryrigged in-field resources kind of necessarily have to be unique or better in some way than their permanent equivalents. Because of that, the question necessarily follows as to why I can't bring a Mudbeetle back to the base and make a water bomb out of it, unlike every other kind of flora and fauna I've done this with in Monster Hunter so far. The reason for that, ultimately, boils back down to the same problem I've had with Rise all along: it's not meant to be immersive or to make sense, Endemic Life are simply one-shot spell scrolls to augment your spellbook.

THE FUNDAMENTAL FRICTION OF PLAYING MONSTER HUNTER RISE
I mentioned that Spiribirds kind of just exist to waste time, but this is an endemic issue in Rise in different ways to how Monster Hunter typically introduces friction to your gameplay loop. Monster Hunter's no stranger to tedium and repetition - hell, the core loop of the franchise is literally repeating fights you've done multiple times - but Rise has a bunch of timewasting that doesn't feel like it was properly intended. The most fundamental of these is that the game autosaves after absolutely everything that you do, and I mean everything. Close the item box? Autosave. Talk to a guy? Autosave. Accept a quest? Autosave. Cancel a quest? Autosave. Change town area? You better believe it, autosave. This wouldn't be an issue except for that the autosave takes about two seconds and, during that time, you cannot interact with anything else. Sit down to eat a succulent meal and accidentally cancel it? You just have to stand there for about two seconds while the autosave goes off before you can sit back down to eat. Moment-to-moment this isn't such a big deal, but over the length of actually playing through the game it becomes crushing. Once you know where everything is and move between things quickly, you're easily going to end up at your next waypoint while the save is still going off pretty reliably, and then you wait. Just a second, sure, but you wait.

Another place where this comes up is the endgame. Monster Hunter's deepest endgame progressions have always been... spotty, to say the least. Some have been the absolute pits, like 3 Ultimate's endgame of fishing for charms being potentially impossible based on what time you made your save file at. World's endgame was certainly not exempt from this, but I'd say it was among the less-awful of endgame Monster Hunter grinds. Rise's, on the face of it, isn't too bad until it commits a single crippling error for no reason, like so much of Rise. Essentially, you grind harder versions of all the same monsters with their stats massively scaled up (they're bad fights and far too long) in order to get Afflicted bits. Afflicted bits are semi-generic drops that serve to enable Qurious crafting on any maxed out weapon or armor. This follows the pattern of Augmentation from World, letting you limit break your stats to a small degree.

Qurious crafting's edge is that it lets you put entirely new skills on your maxed-out armor, and herein lies the rub. Every time you qraft something, you get a randomized set of skills and you're asked if you want to keep what's on it or replace. That's it. Your endgame, essentially, is rerolling the skill slot machine indefinitely to try to get an extra free level of Evade Extender or whatever, often a massively impactful free skill at a low rate. Even engaging with it at a casual level doesn't work great, since you're not even guaranteed to get Blademaster or Gunner skills when you do it. It's just a crapshoot where you have to spam the button for 5 or 10 minutes per piece of armor to get a set of skills that you reckon is good enough, and where optimizing it sucks the hugest of ass.

This also leads into the issue of repetition. Obviously, no Monster Hunter is without it, but Rise has it to an impressive degree. For an all-rank monster, say Arzuros, you'll have a Low Rank quest, a High Rank quest, a Rampage involving it, a Master Rank quest, then also an Afflicted version with immensely boosted stats and no new moves, not to mention any alternate versions or multi-hunt quests it'll be a part of and not even talking about the Arena, which is still here for some reason. I'm not even done, either, because many of these will also have a Support quest at Master Rank (quests made to be done with your NPC allies) and also a Follower quest at Master Rank (literally the same thing, but you can't choose which allies), and on top of those two the base game monsters will often have separate on- and offline versions of what's essentially the same quest. The Afflicted versions scale up through hundreds of meaningless levels as well, a third leveling track you also get to do strictly after leveling Master Rank strictly after leveling Hunter Rank, with all its own rewards for fighting the same monsters but they take twice as long to die. It isn't even like previous games where you'd get super subspecies like Lucent Nargacuga or Furious Rajang as the endgame, though those guys are here too, it's just a Lagombi with the same health and damage as an Elder Dragon and no other meaningful changes.

FUMBLING OUT THE ENDZONE FOR A TOUCHBACK
All this amounts to Rise's biggest crime: it's just a little bit disappointing a lot of the time, and rarely in a particularly gamebreaking way. The achievements are to blame for a lot of this, and I'll talk about the various chores you need to do for those later, but suffice it to say for now that there are significant chores you need to do for those. Multiplayer is a strange step back in accessibility and functionality from World, and quests have been reseparated into offline and online tracks to no particular benefit. The feasts are gone, replaced by a really disappointing plate of dango, always dango, only dango, even when you go to France.

It's at its worst when Rise has or imports legitimately great ideas and then just drops the bag for no reason. Rampages are a fun idea, getting the town together to do a defense mission against waves of large monsters, and then they get really tedious and samey long before you're done with them, and they flopped so hard they didn't even come back for Sunbreak. Afflicted progression is a fun idea, letting all monsters be "competitive" even late on, and it's just dragged down by not updating anything and going for a very 2003 FPS Hard Mode scaling. You're able to permanently alter the maps by unlocking recon points and stationing extra Palicoes at them, but the actual effect is that you can choose one of two fast travel points to be allowed to pay to fast travel to once per quest. Wedge Beetles are back in the form of Great Wirebugs, but you're just shown the specific places you can put them, also you have to pre-place them yourself, and you have to do other quests to get Great Wirebugs to even place them from a stock, which will eventually encompass all the points anyway.

This comes to a head for me with the Hunter's Notes, in two ways. First is what it imports from World. In World, fighting a monster and gathering its poop would increase your knowledge of the monster, resulting in a breakdown of hit zones and breakable parts, then a star rating list of vulnerability to elements and afflictions, then a breakdown of its drops based on rarity. Rise dispenses with all of this. Meeting a monster unlocks perfect information about it instantly, with numeric damage coefficients and exact drop percentages from every break and carve in a huge table as soon as you've met the monster. There's a philosophical discussion to be had about how much information to give to vs. withhold from the player, and I generally fall on the side of giving the player more to work with, but this is somehow a bridge too far for me. It's not bad, it's just disappointing. I'd rather have vibes-based (but accurate) information available in-game rather than a readout of the Kiranico page.

Second, and far worse, is the tutorials. Rise decided that information should actually be seeable in game and created a genuinely comprehensive set of tutorials regarding absolutely every mechanic and interaction in the game, and I think it should be lauded for that. You unlock tutorials for any mechanic the first time you're hit with it or interact with it in any way, which retains the feeling of discovery while also giving you the tools to figure out what happened when everything calms down. With this excellent system in place, they made it so that tutorials do not unlock while you're playing multiplayer. In Monster Hunter. That's running the ball 75 yards just to fumble out the endzone for a touchback. It's such a colossally unforced error that I struggle to articulate it.

And absolutely worst of all, this is the first fucking game Brachydios hasn't been in since he was invented! No taste!

HEARTBREAKING:
The horrible thing, though, is that if I had just hated Rise, I would have put 30 hours into it like Generations, never bought Sunbreak, and made a grumpy review post somewhere. The true tragedy of Rise is that it does a lot of things that I really like, and some that I hope become permanent fixtures in Monster Hunter going forward. While they butchered Lance in my opinion (partly the fault of Rise just being so sped-up), I genuinely like the Gunlance moveset in Rise more than I ever have before, and gunnery in particular has gotten some glow-ups that have led to me gunning for fun sometimes, which I almost never did before.

Rise's major accomplishment, as of Sunbreak, is making the singleplayer experience not an objective misery for the first time in Monster Hunter history. Rise lets you take full-on NPC allies out as hunting companions, in addition to your preferred dog and/or cat, to make an offline hunting party. They're not as good as most other players will be, sure, but they inject a little flavor into your hunts with personalized banter based on the ones you bring, they distract monsters so you're not always the one being focused, and they do their own things to support you as the primary hunter. Each NPC also uses a small pool of weapons that you can choose between, so if you're gunning but you really like the gunner, you're not dooming yourself into just having no frontline. You can just ask her to swap to one of her melee options. Topically, the whole system makes solo gunning feasible and even fun, which it really has never been before outside of super powergamer strats. It's an amazing system, and I'm not too big to give credit to Rise where it has earned it.

Besides that, at its core, it's still Monster Hunter, The loop is still there, and despite all my grousing about it earlier, the combat is still competent and can be quite fun. I don't think Rise is bad, I think Rise is disappointing, and I think that's an important distinction to make here. It's not the worst Monster Hunter has been, but it's very obviously somebody else's game, and off the back of the best Monster Hunter has ever been for me, it's hard to look at it without a cynical eye. I'm still keeping my hopes up for Wilds, but they're definitely tempered now that Rise is behind me, so we'll see. Hope springs eternal. World followed Generations, after all.

THE REQUISITE REPETITION OF PLAYING MONSTER HUNTER RISE
Rise and World were once summed up by some guy on the Steam forums as grinding bars vs. grinding RNG. I don't think this is completely true, there's a good chunk of both in each, but I think the ultimate legacy falls that way. Central to both is the grind for crowns. You'll maybe recall from the World writeup that the final grind for World was to get a gold large and a gold small crown of pretty much every monster in the game at deplorable odds. Rise has the same thing, but the rates are significantly higher for Monsters Of Size across the board, and there are a shitload more quests to guarantee a large and/or a small crown, variously, for a lot more monsters. Getting all crowns in Rise is nowhere near the headache it was in World. Rise still has its points of RNG, though, particularly in the form of the lottery, which I'll get into under an enumeration of chores later.

What this means is that Rise's achievement grind is essentially completely tied to making a series of really long bars go up, and even getting the gold crowns is a sub-task of getting through the bars. The simplest place to look is the quests themselves. In World, you had three sets of quests that you had to complete every single one of a single time: Low Rank and High Rank (from the base game) and Master Rank (from Iceborne). Rise has a complete set of seven difficulty stars of offline (Village) quests as well as a complete set of Low- and High-Rank online (Hub) quests where many are shared targets but not shared completion, and all of both the Village and the Hub must be completed. On top of that, the Arena is back (please! kill! it!) and every Arena quest has to be completed once, though in a rare favor Rise doesn't require you to grind out dozens of the same Arena quest.

That's just the base game, though. Sunbreak adds a whole pile of Master Rank quests as expected, but then also as detailed in the previous section this section is named for, adds Support Quests, Follower Quests, and Anomaly Quests, each of which must be fully checklisted out and none of which offer any new content. There's a Master Rank Zinogre solo hunt quest and it is identical to both the Support Quest version of the Zinogre solo hunt quest and the Follower Quest version of the Zinogre solo hunt quest, and these are all identical except in raw stat numbers to the Zinogre Anomaly Quest. Each of the four is a separate checkmark, and all must be checkmarked to sate the bloodthirsty gods. Glory to Zurvan. The Arena is back for Sunbreak too, with the same stipulations as base Rise, but is hardly worth mentioning in light of these, except to note that some of those fight-em-four-times monsters will also have an Arena quest on top of that.

I bring this massive set of repetitive quests up first to use it as a jumping-off point: this gets you nowhere close to where you need to be. Another task that needs to be filled out is acquiring all of the room decorations in the game. There's two sets of these: one from the Argosy and one from the Merchant, and I'm saving the latter for later. For the Argosy, every monster has a wall scroll depicting them you can get from our favorite trading ship in exchange for proof that you've hunted that monster ten times. At, give or take, seventy monsters as of when the achievement was finalized, the math becomes pretty trivial: nonregardless of luck in hunting for crowns or how many times you have to hunt them for the quest listing, you must hunt every single monster in the game at least ten times. Seven hundred kills and captures, and no leaning on just the monsters you want to fight.

Of course, you'll get a bunch of these just going through all of the quests you have to do from the nine different quest listings, and I think you're guaranteed to get some of them just by clearing that, so let's go into another sub-grind you're grinding while you grind this grind. The Anomaly Lab is your center for endgame stuff, and the gist of it is that your hot little twunk elf Bahari gives a rotating bounty on one monster at a time, changing every few quests. Any Anomaly hunt will give a handful (two to twelve, give or take) Anomaly Coins you can spend at him, while every tenth time you fulfill his bounty requirements he'll give you a little booster pack of coins, going up by 50s every few times you get more of them. One further achievement, in addition to hunting 100 Afflicted Monsters which you're literally guaranteed to get along the way, is to spend 3,000 Anomaly Coins in his shop. Saddle up for another two hundred monsters or so presuming you're perfectly doing what he wants you to. I've hardly even touched on the fact that the monster he requests is random, which is important because your individual quest targets level up, and it's entirely possible he requests a monster you haven't seen in yonks and cannot possibly level them up enough to get you bonus credit before the target changes. It's a mess. It's worth noting that monsters in Anomaly quests, both targets and incidental invaders, spawn with zero size deviation, so this is actually completely detached from the crowns grind even though it's all the same monsters.

Somehow, then, at the end of the bars section, it seems almost petty to point out that you probably won't even finish the overarching grind while grinding all these sub-grinds. One thousand each of any large monster (from Rise) and any Master Rank large monster (from Sunbreak) sits on top of that pile. The latter necessarily includes the former, since all monsters that count for the latter count for the former but not vice versa. Once everything else is done, there's a kickass Master Rank quest that pits you up against four of the shittest enemies in the game in a tiny arena, and I can bang out a kill every about two minutes in that environment. It would be a far more unreasonable number if everything else about Rise's grinds weren't as unreasonable as it already is. It's still a bit of an insult to put on top, though.

I did say that the Arena grind was gone, but the bad news is that it's replaced. The Rampage takes its place, a decent tower defense horde mode (??) that stays novel for three or five runs before it gets tedious. Naturally, then, you have to do fifty of them. Better yet, these monsters do not count for the actual monster hunt metrics, so you can't even use them as a cheap buffer to get the numbers up. Once you're fully geared out, doing the lowest-grade ones you can, it's still about ten minutes a run. The Arena was just placed under new management all along.

DO YOUR CHORES, SON
If you're following in my footsteps, read the shit out of this section. Rise is also deeply in love with what I'm calling chore achievements, because they're things you just have to remember to do between quests while grinding out other things and there's no way to really focus them down. I mentioned there were two halves to the decoration grind earlier, and the other half is the Lottery. Every so often, when you come back from a quest, you'll be informed that the Lottery is running. You go talk to the Merchant, you press the Lottery button, and you probably get nothing. Probably, but every so often you get a jackpot, and every time you get a jackpot you might get a room decoration out of it. There's twenty-seven in total that you need to get from the Lottery, and there's no real way to reroll besides going out and doing more quests. Get the grind up early and often; if you save this one for last, not planning your way through the achievement process, just absolutely fuck yourself I guess. I started this very, very early in the achievement process and I still didn't have all of the furniture needed by the time I finished all of the preposterous grinding, and had to go spam the quickest quest I could just to roll the dice more. Regrettably, the patches added more possible furniture to the jackpot pool but it isn't required for the achievement, which is a mixed blessing because you don't need all of the extra stuff but torturous because you can get a jackpot furniture that isn't on the list. Nobody wins. On a more minor, but not achievement-related, note: this feeds back into the fundamental friction of Monster Hunter Rise. The lottery is only one of five potential guys you can call your attention with a (!) between hunts for a minor reward, with the buddy handler, the Admiral for Master Rank quests, Bahari for Anomaly quests, and Fugen back in the Village for Low/High Rank quests periodically giving you the "Somebody in Kamura/Elgado wants to speak with you!" popup.

Your buddies also fall in here, regrettably. Your cats and dogs are your constant companions, and you make one of each when you roll your guy in minute one of the game. You can also hire extra ones, largely created by other hunters, if you want to mess with different aesthetics or skillsets that the cats can possess, as well as for a few other support functions like sending them out to buy things from other continents to make a resource renewal system. You've eventually got to hire fifty of them, but that's just a menu tax more than anything. The real meat of that is that you have to level one of every type of cat (five skillsets) to max level, and unlock the maximum skill slots for ten total cats plus dogs. Unlocking the skill slots involves leveling up the buddies and getting a bunch of consumables from sending buddy squads to the continents. This takes a while, but nowhere close to the overall grind - and as with the previous, the only way to ratchet that clock forward is to keep doing quests. Get the grind going early, and keep at it.

There's a few other, smaller, shorter things that you gotta just remember to do between quests. You gotta eat the Weird Dango that Sunbreak unlocks a certain number of times - one meal per quest. You gotta talk to the sailor at the docks in Elgado to get a certain number of things from him - you get one roll per quest. You gotta, at some point, talk to everyone in both towns once each - some randomly rotate, so when you remember to do this, gotta reroll a few times to get 'em. Once you get to the new hub in Sunbreak, you can parkour up a little fortress to find a nest at the very top. You can interact with this nest a few dozen times (once per quest, of course) and eventually an owl will pop out and you get an achievement. You're nominally rewarded for this with trivialities, but they're absolutely not worth the trip at any point.

IT'S NOT JUST BETWEEN QUESTS NEITHER
World's cat trading subquest was a pain in the ass, I won't lie. Love the game, but that sucked. So did the rare endemic life hunts, for that matter. Those aren't back in Rise, but Rise has its own issue - say it with me! Chores. You'll recall the bit about Endemic Life many, many paragraphs ago. The combat consumables - Hunting Helpers - carry an achievement to pick up five hundred of them. Not difficult to do, obviously, since you have to hunt at least a thousand monsters, but it's easy to get into ruts where you're just cranking through monsters and not really going out of your way to grab them. Keep paying attention. Similarly, if you recall the birds half of that post, there's a secret fifth kind of bird that you can pick up for 20 points (utterly worthless) and no other reason. This, and not the useful birds, is the kind of bird you need to gather an entire thousand of. These birds are less common than other ones, and typically occupy alternate paths that you're not going to take all too often. You can expect zero to three per quest, which still puts this chore beneath the overarching grind. As long as you keep paying attention, of course.

We've got more checklists here too, though. Every map has ten collectibles in hard to reach places, recreating the cat trading subquest in spirit if not practice, and all are required for another achievement. There's twenty or so fish you have to catch, nothing more than an hour total as long as you know where to look for them. There's subcamps and sub-subcamps and Great Wirebug points that you have to comb every map to find all of. Rare endemic life are actually back - sorry I lied - but are far easier to find than in World, only requiring a maximum of ten or so minutes of waiting at a specific spot each to get a picture of them before you move on.

Speaking of photography, one more requires that you photograph every single Endemic Life in the game. All the different colors of Spiribirds, all the different frogs and bugs and other nonsense you throw at monsters, many relegated to single maps or very few locations, and some rare. We're back to the previous section again. There are two Rare Hunting Helpers that can spawn very uncommonly during a quest, and if they don't spawn, your only recourse is to go do another quest. You need pictures of both, so get them done as soon as you can before you get stuck on, say, a streak of the Felicicrow spawning seven consecutive times before the Fortune Owl deigns to show up a single frickin' time. No specific reason I chose that number, none at all.

THE DENOUEMENT, OR: DO NOT 100% MONSTER HUNTER RISE
Do not 100% Monster Hunter Rise. That said, don't take the words of this old grumbler as gospel. While this isn't my Monster Hunter, it does a lot to carve up even the accessibility barrier that World still had. If you're on the fence about Monster Hunter as a concept, absolutely give Rise a run. A lot of the things that I dislike about it might exactly address things that would stop you from getting into the crunchier games in the series. Or, even if it doesn't, the wow! factor might last just a little longer for you, enough to get through the game and put it down satisfied, a 30-40 hour action RPG with some cool tech to learn. I genuinely do not think that Rise is a bad game, even after all of this. It may still be worth your time. It's got a demo, what have you got to lose? See you in Wilds, God willing.