Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC

Were it not for the package deal, I am not sure I would have played the second chapter of Trails in the Sky. It sits in a difficult position being mechanically little more than an expansion to the first chapter, but longer by a good amount. Now, I like it a lot better than I liked the first game but to some extent this might be due to growing familiar – a sort of completionist Stockholm-syndrome, if you will. SC does not add any mechanics that notably make the combat deeper, and it looks more or less the same with more than half of the areas being lifted straight from the prequel.

The big shift is in the story though – SC abandons the pretense of intrigue and goes straight for the lost ancient civilization and the superpowered Illuminati investigating it – this brings it closer to Grandia in terms of tone. The first chapter made the mistake of trying to tell a mundane story with characters that weren’t serious, so whatever believability the narrative got from being down-to-earth was lost to over-earnest campy characters. SC goes all-in with the fantastical and is the more coherent and better game for it – it’s still annoying to see characters exchanging platitudes about love and friendship every few minutes but the impending destruction of the world doesn’t suffer much from being unrealistic. And speaking of the characters, while most are still laughably sincere anime clichees, SC does also have some genuine growth in a few characters and unlike most JRPGs they go a long way to explain just why a teenage girl becomes entrusted with saving the world.

It feels a bit too long still, and I am not sure if the quality increase in SC is enough to warrant a recommendation after the long build-up in the first game. Still, it’s always nice to see a series improving.

Posted on May 29/17 by Saint and filed under Reflections | No Comments »

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Horizon Zero Dawn

I did say that I wasn’t going to delve into any more long-form games for a while, but I ended up needing something to focus on and take my mind off of other things. Normally I would just play more Destiny, but the Age of Triumph had been out for almost a month, I had finished the last list of tasks the game was going to give me, and Horizon came warmly recommended.

To get the obvious out of the way, Horizon has received acclaim not for being particularly original but a very well crafted sandbox, and it is hard not to agree with that. None of the elements feel particularly fresh or executed in especially interesting ways, even, but it’s polished to a mirror shine and playing Horizon is a joy. Sandbox games, Lifestyle games and more or less any game with large amounts of content quickly get repetitive missions as the structure makes itself increasingly clear, so the core gameplay has to be good enough that you do not mind. Much like in Destiny, moving around and fighting in the world of Horizon is amazing – you always have interesting options as for how to proceed and you are never stuck in a sticky situation.

It is a bit of a shame that the upgrade tree is so short and that there are no really high-level challenges in the game, and there are a few other small caveats I had with it but honestly it is hard to say much about a game that is so polished and yet playing it kind of safe. Still, well worth playing. Also…

Little Nightmares

One of my favorite scenes in Pan’s Labyrinth is the one were Ofelia is hiding in the office, even with the fantastical elements in the movie this realistic scene is set up to be the belly of the whale-moment and the buildup makes it incredibly tense. I thought about that scene a lot when playing Little Nightmares, it tries to invoke a similar sense of suspense and horror but somewhat shifty precision on the collision on the side of the enemies and a complete lack of explanation of what makes your hiding place successful makes failure very likely. This failure kind of ruins the mood – Little Nightmares is beautiful and unnerving and you instinctively want to hide from the horrors it throws at you even before you can judge their intent, but failing and restarting takes a lot of that suspense right out.

There are certainly ways around this – a couple of things Little Nightmares could be doing better is gently nudge the player away from making silly mistakes like falling off ledges and give them more breathing room while caught in a chase scene – but it seems inherently problematic to make a work that revels in fear of the unknown when there is no penalty for exploring that unknown. And I am wondering what the point of a game like Little Nightmares is when that is gone, its puzzles are mostly hidden-object style finding the one thing in the room you need to interact with, or using trial-and-error to find the correct path that will get you through a room quickly enough. It really is fantastically beautiful and heavily atmospheric, but the tuning of the gameplay works against it. INSIDE and Alan Wake placed the dread in the long-term quest rather than in the immediate threat which I feel made them more successful, but I am wondering if there is a way to do the kind of thing Little Nightmares wants to do without sacrificing either gameplay or gravitas.

Posted on May 07/17 by Saint and filed under Reflections | No Comments »