Hey hey! It’s time for another Video Game Round-Up, in which I talk about the games I played in the past month. Some old, some new; some good, some bad; all interesting.
This month I was actually able to finish five different games, which is amazing for me. I don’t get as much time to game as I’d like (all that pesky work and writing keeps getting in the way), but I realized as I was writing this that I actually finished five of the games I played! Three of the games I finished I’d been playing for some time, but the other two I started and finished in one month! And I got to watch a bunch of Star Trek: The Next Generation too! I didn’t read very much, though...
But on to the games!
Yakuza 0 (PS4) - I finally finished the saga of two hard, steely men who are actually soft, mushy men that was Yakuza 0. It ended on a rather bittersweet note, especially when you know what’s ahead for the two characters (Kyriu especially), but I won’t spoil anything specific. The last bit of the game is just a bunch of beating up of a bunch of yakuza for various story reasons, and it’s fun as hell. I was kind of overleveled for this last section (I’ll explain this in a bit), so it was probably easier than it should have been, but it was still really fun.
After the credits, the game told me that I had slightly over 75% completion (which is honestly a lot more than I was expecting) after playing the game for 93+ hours. That 75% completion rate most likely came from finishing both characters’ entire business storylines, and all but two of the substories. In Kyriu’s Real Estate Royale business minigame, I defeated the Five Billionaires, I purchased every property and ranked them all up to their highest levels, and I hired every manager, security guard, and adviser possible. In Majima’s Cabaret Club Czar business minigame, I defeated the Five Stars, partnered with every business possible, hired every hostess possible, and completed every Platinum Hostess training.
The only two substories I didn’t do were the last one for each character, which were these ridiculously difficult fights against supremely overpowered bosses. I tried them, got my ass handed to me, and then didn’t try them again.
When I said “overleveled” before, I didn’t mean in a grindy, JRPG kind of way. There aren’t any levels in this game, per se, but you can buy different skills in each character’s fighting styles with the yen you make in-game, and because I had made so much money in both characters’ businesses, I was able to buy a lot of skills to make them both better fighters.
This was a really fun game, and I look forward to eventually playing Yakuza Kiwami (PS4) and Yakuza Kiwami 2 (PS4). These were the first two games in the series that originally came out in 2005 and 2006 respectively, both for the PS2 and PS3, but these Kiwami versions are remakes with a graphical overhaul and a bunch of added content, including the character of Majima, who didn’t originally appear in either but was so popular in Yakuza 0 they added him in. The first game features Kyriu as the only playable character, but Majima was added in as an NPC you can meet, and the second game does have a bit of Majima as a playable character. Currently, only these three games and the final game in the series, Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PS4), are available in English, but I know remasters of Yakuza 3, 4, and 5 (PS4) are already available in Japan, and we’re just waiting for the English releases. These games aren’t full remakes the way the Kiwami games are, however. They’re basically the same games they were on the PS3 with a little bit of a graphical upgrade. Nevertheless, I look forward to having the complete collection on my PS4, along with its sister title Judgment (PS4).
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order (Switch) - While I had a lot of mindless fun with this game, it was pretty mindless. I never played the previous Ultimate Alliance games, but I did play the X-Men Legends games that preceded them, and they are basically the same kind of game: an isometric action RPG featuring a bunch of Marvel characters that you can use four at a time to beat up a bunch of bad guys. But a lot of the cool stuff from those games was stripped out from this. For example, there’s no hub area where you can talk to the different characters, there are no cool “team bonuses” (e.g. the first X-Men Legends had things like an Age of Apocalypse team when you used four characters with Age of Apocalypse skins), and the alternate costumes are just palette swaps instead of actually different costumes (which is just ridiculous in a game full of superheroes who each have at least 53 costumes each).
I beat it in about two weeks, but there’s a lot of extra battles to go through in the Infinity system (tears in space that you can go through and fight a lot of the same battles you’ve already fought, but with different conditions attached to them). I probably won’t do too many of them since the rewards are only really various XP items and alternate costumes (which we’ve established aren’t actually that great). There are some characters who you can unlock if you do enough of these things (Elektra, Magneto, Loki, and Thanos), but I’m not sure they’re worth it? A lot of characters show up in the story itself, but aren’t playable for some reason. These include Jessica Jones, Ant-Man (Scott Lang), Cyclops, Colossus, Black Bolt, Medusa, and the Winter Soldier. Maybe they’ll show up in the DLC later? Who knows, but it is annoying that you give me these characters and then don’t let me play with them. A bunch of villains also show up, and while they are equally unplayable, at least there’s a narrative reason for that (though Spider-Man does offer his hand to the Green Goblin after you defeat him, and I really thought that meant everyone would band together keep the Earth from being destroyed, but nope, just another fakeout).
I will play the DLC narrative stuff when it’s released, but I have to admit here and now that this game was really rather underwhelming. I had hoped for something more akin to those early X-Men Legends games, but I didn’t get that. I just got a serviceable brawler with a lot of fanservice, though not nearly enough to properly justify its existence with such lackluster gameplay.
Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (PS4) - To celebrate the release of the new Wolfenstein side mission game Wolfenstein: Youngblood (PS4), I decided to finally play the previous side mission game Wolfenstein: The Old Blood. It’s a prequel to Wolfenstein: The New Order (PS4), the first game in the series, and takes place during an alternate 1946 in which the Nazis are winning World War II (they’ve already won in the alternate 1960s of The New Order). BJ Blazkowicz needs to find Helga von Schabbs and steal the location of Deathshead’s compound (which is how the Allies know where it is at the beginning of The New Order), but gets caught up in some straight-up wizardry.
It turns out Helga von Schabbs is the descendant of King Otto I, a Holy Roman Emperor who uncovered some ancient technology and had to destroy an entire city in order to keep it secret. What kind of technology would require that kind of scorched earth policy? Zombies, of course! The last three chapters all have you killing Nazis, zombies, and Nazi zombies (if you don’t shoot the living Nazis in the head, they come back to life as zombie Nazis, and you get to kill them all over again! what fun!). It’s a fun shooter, and there’s a quick bit in which you can save one of two characters, like at the beginning of The New Order, but you don’t know you’re making a choice when the choice presents itself, and it ultimately doesn’t matter which person you save in terms of gameplay or story (the character you save will end up dying eventually off-camera and possibly after the game is over due to the life decisions they make immediately after you save them), but there are two trophies to ping, one per character.
Though the final boss is some kind of bullshit. It’s a huge, blind golem-like thing that won’t know where you are until you fire a weapon, at which time it will pinpoint the sound and smash you with a big fist. This by itself is fine. It becomes a game of cat and mouse where you have to shoot one bullet (or one three-round burst with the assault rifle) and quickly move so you won’t get smashed. The problem is that Nazi soldiers keep streaming in and instead of shooting the enormous undead golem right in front of them, they shoot at me! Like, what the hell, fellas? I know we’re on opposite sides of the war and all, but if we don’t team up for just a little while, this fucking monster is going to kill us all. And that is exactly what happened more times than I’d care to admit. After quite a long time (and sleeping overnight), I finally realized I could shoot the Nazis with my silenced pistol while the golem smashed them and not me as they were shooting loud weapons and I was not. Once the Nazis were mostly taken care of, I could focus on the golem again. So really, it was like the golem and I teamed up against the Nazis and then I got to win at the very end.
That’s my second Wolfenstein game done and dusted, and I will start Wolfenstein: The New Colossus (PS4), the proper sequel to The New Order, probably after NieR: Automata (PS4), which I started after finishing this (more on that below).
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice for All (Switch) - I finally finished this game! There were only four cases in this game (one less than the first game), but it took a lot longer to play through because each case was so much longer than the ones in the first game. The last case was especially long, and every time I thought it was going to end, something ridiculous would happen and it kept going!
Unfortunately, the gameplay elements from the final case in the first game never reappeared in this second game, and I think that negatively impacted my view of this game. Don’t get me wrong, the stories were still really good, and I still enjoyed myself a lot, but it always felt like the developers could have done more (like they did in that final case in the first game), but they never did. In the final case in this game, they did introduce a new gameplay element having to do with finding sources of electromagnetic disturbances, but it was over just as quickly as it had been introduced, and then wasn’t used again. The Magatama and Psyche-Lock stuff were an interesting addition, but it just made the investigation portions of the game resemble the courtroom portions a little more, making you question and present evidence to witnesses and suspects outside of the courtroom.
The last story did have a very satisfying twist in the middle that turned the whole thing on its head. There was even a “bad ending” that was basically an automatic game over, but it was pretty interesting.
I will play the next game fairly soon, and finish off the trilogy, but I really hope they do bring back all those cool and quirky mechanics in the investigation side of the game to properly differentiate it from the courtroom side.
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Switch) - A new Hero has been introduced, and it’s Hero! The second paid DLC character is called simply Hero, and he is the main character in the Dragon Quest series (even though each Hero in each Dragon Quest game is a different character). More about these characters below, in the character intro section.
As with Joker before, a handful of new spirits and music, as well as a new stage, were introduced with the character. Again, the music and the stage were automatically added to my collection, but I had to go fight a bunch of battles to unlock the spirits (and then level two of them up to get their enhanced versions, which I had completely forgotten I could do and I had to go search online to find out why I was missing two Dragon Quest-inspired spirits). I don’t know very much about the Dragon Quest series, except that, back when SquareSoft and Enix were two different companies, Enix’s Dragon Quest was the biggest competitor to SquareSoft’s Final Fantasy. Now that Square Enix is one company, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest aren’t rivals as much as they are brothers.
There were also some new spirits that had nothing to do with the new character. They were Labo-themed, and included the Toy-Con Robot, the Toy-Con Car, Professor Riggs & Plaise & Lerna, and the Toy-Con VR Goggles, as well as Peachette from New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe (Switch). I got all of them from the Spirit Board. There were also two new Zelda-themed spirits which I had completely forgotten about. I at some point got the Owl from Link’s Awakening (GB), but I am still missing the new chibi Link from the upcoming remake of Link’s Awakening (Switch). I think I have to wait for a Zelda event to happen on some upcoming weekend before I can try to get him, making him the only spirit I am currently missing in my collection (grrr....). But let’s find out a bit more about the newest fighter!
Hero - The main Hero is the Luminary from the latest game in the series, Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (PS4), but his three alternate “costumes” are actually Erdrick from Dragon Quest III: Seeds of Salvation (Famicom/NES), Solo from Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen (Famicom/NES), and Eight from Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (PS2). They are all swordfighters, but the coolest thing about them is that their down special opens a little RPG menu with four options (out of a possible 17; they are random every time), and each one does something totally different. Some are useless, some are suicidal, and some are super powerful, injecting even more chaos into an already incredibly chaotic game. Also, yes, there are 11 games in the main Dragon Quest franchise, compared to the 15 in the main Final Fantasy franchise (but both have a bunch of side games as well, inflating both their numbers to above 20, I’m sure).
NieR: Automata (PS4) - Man, this game is freaking weird.
Let me back up for a second.
I got NieR: Automata over a year ago because I had heard nothing but great things about it, but I also thought it was an open-world JRPG that was going to take me forever to complete, so I kept putting it off (and played a bunch of other super-long open world games instead because logic). I wasn’t going to play this after I finished Yakuza 0 and Wolfenstein: The Old Blood either, but then I had to wait for a 20-minute Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (PS4) update. I decided to give the game a try. Oh man, it is so good.
It’s mostly a third-person action RPG in which your character, 2B, is a badass android fighting for a humanity that had to settle on the moon after an alien invasion caused a machine uprising on Earth (yes, androids versus machines; trust me, it makes sense... sort of). But once in awhile, the camera perspective shifts to top-down and it becomes a bullet hell game. And sometimes, the camera perspective shifts to a side-scroller and it becomes a platforming game. And sometimes you fly a jet thing.
The open world isn’t all that open (at least, not yet; that may change after my initial 13 or so hours), but it is kind of empty. I guess that’s on purpose since there are no humans left on earth, and only a few androids and machines to talk to here and there, so I hope the open-world stays compact enough that I don’t have to run across super empty places (that desert area is kind of freaking me out a bit, though).
The story in this game is already weirding me out, like all the best JRPGs, but the weirdness started a lot earlier than it usually does. I won’t spoil story stuff (yet; I reserve the right to change my mind before the next Video Game Round-Up!), but there has been a lot of philosophical talk, some of the visuals have been bizarre as hell, and there has been some pretty twisty plot nonsense! I can only assume it’s going to get even weirder from here on out.
Speaking of the visuals, the character design is excellent. I’m not going to pretend that it’s at all normal for humanity to design a bunch of war androids that look like sex robots, but once you get past that bit of weirdness, both 2B and 9S have excellent designs. They both appeal to me very much, and I’m gonna enjoy having them on my TV for a while.
Apparently, in order to get the true ending to this game, you need to play it three times all the way through, each time as a different character: first as 2B, second as 9S (these two playthroughs are mostly identical, but 9S has some extra game mechanics that 2B doesn’t, and a few sections where he goes off by himself to do some things 2B isn’t involved in), and finally as another android named A2, whose story is entirely different from that of 2B and 9S’s. Once I finish 2B’s story, I will likely play a different game, but maybe I’ll come back to 9S and A2’s story at some point. Maybe.
Cuphead (Switch) - I stopped this game the last time I played because I got stuck on the last two bosses on Inkwell Isle 2. I picked it back up after finishing Justice For All and mopping up the new SSBU spirits, and I was still stuck on those same two bosses (Wally Warbles and Grim Matchstick, for those of you keeping track at home). I just kept dying over and over again, to the point where I was very tempted to try to beat them in Easy mode. But I decided against it, and just get kept slamming my head against them both. And you know what? I totally beat them! I was like, “I beat Celeste and got every dang Strawberry, dammit! I can do this!” And I did do it! Then I went and beat all the bosses on Inkwell Isle 3 (which apparently includes the second and third hardest bosses in the whole game) as well as the last two Run & Gun episodes and the last Mausoleum stage.
(A special note on that last Mausoleum stage: I kept messing up my jumps and parries, and kept failing over and over again, until I suddenly reached this zen stage where every jump and parry was friggin’ perfect and I was parrying 3 or 4 ghosts in a row before landing back on the ground. That last round was so perfect, I don’t think any ghost got within spitting distance of the cup. It was amazing, and it will never happen again.)
And then I went and beat the game after defeating the last two bosses in Inkwell Hell, including King Dice, the hardest boss in the whole game.
Every boss and Run & Gun level is scored, and my highest score was an A+ on the very first Run & Gun level on Inkwell Isle 1, but A- was my highest score on bosses, which I got on four different bosses, including, amazingly, three of the four hardest bosses in the whole game (King Dice, Dr Kahl’s Robot, and The Devil). My lowest score was C on two different bosses (and a C+ on one of the Run & Gun levels). I died a total of 588 times.
Beating it on Normal opened up the Expert difficulty, which I will not be doing :P
And that’s another Video Game Round-Up done and dusted! I will likely start Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations (Switch) and finish off the trilogy, and Baba is You (Switch), a very interesting puzzle game in which sometimes you need to change the rules in order to solve them. I will also continue NieR: Automata, and hopefully finish the first playthrough before 27 August because that’s when Control (PS4) comes out. I will start that as soon as it’s available (which likely means NieR will be set aside if I don’t finish it). Astral Chain (Switch) is also coming out at the end of the month, on 30 August, and it’s made by PlatinumGames, the same folks behind NieR, but I think I’ll wait to pick that one up until after I’ve finished NieR, at least. I’ve also pre-ordered Catherine: Full Body (PS4), which is coming out on 4 September, but I won’t get to that until I finish both NieR and Control, at least. And there’s still that final bit of DLC to do for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (PS4), which I didn’t do this month because of I had to wait for that update and ended up playing NieR instead.
Until next month, play more video games!
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