Dust: An Elysian Tale (PS4): Another Indie Surprise

I said it before in Mercenary Kings review, but this PS+ subscription I have is more than paying for itself in the number of free games I've been getting. Between two consoles, getting 4 games a month is pretty sweet and considering how much the triple A's have been knocking it out of the park (they haven't) it's really a great deal.

It's allowed me to build quite the little pile of shame of games I've downloaded and maybe sat with for like a hour or two. Today I would like to talk about a recently released title on ps4 (originally on the 360 in 2012) that I downloaded, expected nothing from, and honestly knew nothing about....

DUST: AN ELYSIAN TALE

The game opens up with a narrator recounting the tale of warrior who lays waste to a village, and the power contained within his weapon. It is a brief exposition as the game then cuts to a ronin looking character passed out in the woods. He is awoken by a floating, glowing sword. When the sword introduces himself as the Blade of Ahrah, the ronin is unable to identify himself. The sword tells him that his name is Dust, and that he was it was he who summoned the blade.

Before Dust can make sense of the situation, he is approached by a flying Nimbat who calls herself Fidget. She apparently the sword's guardian. So when it became sentient and floated off, Fidget gave chase. The three make a mutual agreement to figure out who Dust is, the purpose for the sword's summoning, and the eventual returning of the blade to where it belongs so Fidget won't get in trouble. The trio makes for the neighboring town of Aurora, but there is no shortage of monsters trying to impede their progress.

It's funny how my opinions on a game can boomerang on me in a matter of moments simply because of some subtle changes. The game started out and I was pretty impressed with the visual style, but then I was turned off by the characters being anthropomorphic, then I was impressed with the play control and combat engine, then I was turned off by some of the voices, then I was enjoying the tongue and cheek manner of dialog. I'm sure it won't be the last time my opinion changes on it. 

So, the game bills itself as an Action-RPG, but more accurately I would say that is more of Action-Platformer with RPG elements. I would akin the entire games style to that of Odin Sphere or specifically Muramasa: The Demon Blade. You are given a reasonably large 2d map to cover with platforms you can use to scale up and down on, which allows the grid based map to move in multiple directions. Enemies appear on the screen and your job is to hack and slash them as you move along. Sometimes you have to fight, sometimes you don't.

The combat is all very fluid and fast paced, which is a big plus for me in game like this. I like my combat to be fast and frantic. While the combos don't seem overly detailed as to where I've played (say like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta), there is enough variety to it that I don't find myself getting bored or just mashing the attack button. There are essentially a few simple moves to guide you through combat. Obviously, you can run and jump, and there is also a set of dodge buttons to let you quickly roll left or right. You need to not forget those buttons so you don't get wailed on by an a surprisingly tough enemy. Then we have our offensive abilities.

Your basic attack which allows you do a quick but heavily damaging combo, can be done while in the air. Your storm abilities, which is basically your super move button. At a stand you spin the blade furiously for light but continuous damage, but it also pulls enemies and items to you. When done in the air it produces a corkscrew attack that hits multiple times, but can also jump further distances.

Using the Parry is tricky, bigger enemies telegraph their attack but small ones move to fast.

In addition to that there is also a parry mechanic. If you can time your strike right to the moment an enemy swings, they get stunned back for a second or two and take more damage during that time, There are usually too many enemies on screen to really time this right, but there are some that insist you parry before you can do any damage to them. Typically, the game is well designed enough to not stick one of these guys into a horde of other enemies.

There is also a "magic" button that allows Fidget to enter the fray causing her to spray little magic bolts out, but when working in conjunction with Dust's storm abilities, her bolts burst into many and can wail on a baddie for 50+ hits. Low damage, but fun to do. As you play on, you unlock other abilities which allows you to create towers of fire, or chain lightning. And I have to admit, tearing up a group with chain lightning is super satisfying. 

Chain Lightning can really clear out a screen in a hurry,

Now, I've made the comparison to those two wonderful Vanillaware titles I love so much, but another apt comparison to the game are some of the newer 2D Castlevania games like most of the DS titles or Symphony of the Night. The maps as I walk through them give me the distinct signatures that there are locations that I can't access to start, so I am going to need other skills or abilities to find before I can backtrack and continue on such as an ability to slide in tight spaces, or a walk climbing ability.

But unlike a Castlevania or Muramasa its not one one large continuous map for me to travel. There is a world map of the various sections you pass through which allows you to fast travel through them as you need to for huge distances. In this particular case I feel it works better than having one giant world because its cuts down travel time and allows me to bounce around to tackle side quests. Some sections are the map are much larger than others, so it tends to have a good variety about it.

Let's talk characters for a moment. I have to be honest, I have a real real hard time taking anthropomorphs seriously in almost any context. It works in Disney movies but in any other circumstance I just think furries and I become tuned out of the story. Things were not helped much when Fidget became a staple to the story. She's kinda part cat part squirrel with bat wings, big green eyes, and an incredibly squeaky voice. To be totally honest, it almost turned me off to the game completely.

But then something happened. For the most part, all of the dialog in the game is fairly straight laced and serious. It does a good job of painting that I am about to go on some kind of epic adventure. Fidget however doesn't fit that mold. Hilariously, you could almost compare her to Marvel's Deadpool because she has this nearly 4th wall breaking sense of awareness that she's in a video game, and its made for some pretty hilarious exchanges. Sometimes she'll tell you to hit a certain button and the characters won't get what that means, other times she'll reference that enemies didn't save their game.

My favorite exchange so far comes from when you meet the merchant for the first time. He is explaining to you what his wares are and that if you find blacksmiths they can make you new weapons and equipment. He mentions that you need to have specific materials to do so, but if you sell him the materials you find, he can restock them for sale later. Fidget immediately responds in an incredibly raspy version of her voice "Ah! You'll buy them at a high price?!" To which the merchant confusedly says "well yes?". This is was a clearly overt nod the Resident Evil 4 merchant. Once I gathered she was that kind of character, I found myself looking forward to hearing her talk and didn't care about how she sounded anymore. 

But more than that, I find that the dialog in this game is pretty competently done over all. All of the voice actors portray their parts well, and none of it to this point has felt hokey or cheesy (not like say, The Evil Within). When in dialog segments it does sort of the still character RPG exposition, but they aren't just stills. The character images sway, have reactions, have a bunch little tiny movement nuances to them that make the exchanges feel more alive. Mugen Souls did this and it was the only good thing in that game, something I wish Disgaea 4 had picked up on.

Since we are on the topic of sound, lets talk music a bit. I've been a very firm advocate that a perfectly placed and well done score can drastically change a games feel. Some games hit it brilliantly, like Final Fantasy X where every song has its place and fits its mood. Some games miss the mark completely, like Mugen Souls where it feels out of place, or is just grating and annoying. And then you have the games that have music to just have music. Flat, uninspired, and unmemorable.

That's where I feel Dust falls under. Which is a shame because it does so well in all other areas, its all washed over with generic fantasy soundtrack you could hear in any RPG or Movie. A lot of the Tales games have this problem. Its not to say its unfixable, but you really should have one or 2 really strong songs to provide a memorable experience. Sometimes that's all it really takes.

Take Atelier Ayesha for example: like most Atelier games, the music is incredibly flat and generic. But there is one song that one that tends to occur fairly often, enough to the point that I recognized it when it played. Then, for the final battle, it gives me that same song only a more symphonic variation of it complete with vocal accompaniment. Suddenly a song I just recognized had this incredible emotional weight as I played the final boss. There was easily a few places Dust could have really used this to drive the point home on its story elements.

I felt that the combat in this game has that perfect blending point of complexity and simplicity. They give you only a small myriad of attack functions, but using the in different combinations allow for different combos, having multiple styles of magic allow you to play to one that is more your style, and the combat is fast enough that it allows you to dice through enemies at a quick pace without them being complete pushovers. Something like say Bayonetta will give you about 30 billion combos depending on what weapons you have. It can be overwhelming.

The only real major difficulty I had was in the very early goings of the game when I didn't have much in the way of equipment, nor did I have a good enough sense of how to level my character properly. I would find myself going up against of group of enemies and one of the large ones would take out massive chunks of damage. Learning that you can quick key healing items helped, but it took a little bit of grinding before the game of the pace started to pick up for me.

All in all, for a game of zero expectations that I didn't pay a dime for, I got a very good amount of replay value in Dust: an Elysian Tale, at the very least 15-30 hours of time. That's better than a lot of retail releases go. Nothing about the game is going to shatter any molds but it provided an entertaining experience with a twist or two without being predictable. I would say its story kinda fizzles out by the end but all things considered I'd say this one is worth a recommendation.

The amount of Fidget fan art on the Internet is nothing short of ridiculous.

Bayonetta 2 (Wii U): Pole Dancing with a New Partner

As most if not all 5 of my readers know, I've got that big disconnect with Nintendo. One of the biggest reasons that I don't review games from the Nintendo consoles is because I just don't have the format to play them on. I had to download an emulator to try Muramasa: The Demon Blade, and it wasn't until recently I had got a 3DS to finally get at some things I was looking to play.

This recently changed at my home. For the most part I still have had no interest in purchasing a Wii or Wii U for any reason, and it really hasn't changed. But one of my tenants is a ravenous Nintendo fan, and there was no way in hell he was gonna let a Mario Kart get past him. But now that a Wii U in my household (and found a random 40$ dropped on the floor that went unclaimed for a week) I took it as an opportunity to play the one game I was frothing to get my hands on.

BAYONETTA 2

Much like the original Bayonetta the game starts In Medias Res with Bayonetta and another similar looking Umbra witch basically being displayed in erotic bullet time fashion as they are mid combat with angels on a falling piece of building. The opening then begins to tell how the Aesir basically created the eyes of the world, which essentially governs power of the human realm and divided them to the Umbra witches and Lumen Sages to protect them and maintain the balance between the world. 

Not that you would get a moment to actually read that, because the moment he starts speaking the stillness moves and you are battling off waves and enemies from the get go, (pretty much exactly like how the first game started). The actual story takes place with Bayonetta out doing her holiday shopping in what appears to be New York with idiotic dumbass waste of dialog Joe Pesci rip-off Enzo.  In the midst of her shopping however she is attacked by angels again and is quickly accompanied by fellow Umbran witch, Jeanne.

While Jeanne let her hair down, Bayonetta took her hair off. Both look better for it.

They make fairly effortless work of the angels, but something goes wrong with one of Bayonetta's summoned monsters, which turns into an inferno demon. Jeanne is killed trying to save Bayonetta, and her soul is ripped to Inferno. Bayonetta takes care of the demon, and learns from her contacts Rodin and Enzo that if she travels to Fimbulventr to find the gates of hell, she can bring Jeanne back. With both demons and angels after her, Bayonetta confidently sashays off to rescue her Umbran sister.

So, for once, Bayonetta actually has a somewhat coherent plot line. I've played through the first Bayonetta game a couple of times and even after extensively reading the wiki for detailed plot analysis, I still have no idea what the fuck is going on.  This time around it's cut and dry: something went wrong, friend got killed, off to save friend, beat shit up on the way. Alright, got it. Thank you for keeping shit simple this time around.

Let's just get this out of the way to start, I used the Wii U tablet thingy like once the entirety of time i spent with this game, and not one time did I use the touch controls. You know why? Because if I am playing a game where shit is constantly flying around an attacking me, sticking my gigantic hulk fingers in the way of a 6 inch surface area is not going to help me play the game more effectively. The whole time I used the Wii U's pro controller, and aside from the A and B being different functions to the X and O on PlayStation, most of the transition to the new controller was seamless.

Full disclosure: I know practically nothing about the Wii U hardware. I simply assumed that it was grossly underpowered compared to the PS3 and XB360, let alone the PS4 and XB1. So I was actually quite surprise with just how well the game was able to keep up with all of the action that was flying around the screen at any given time. Only in a few rare moments did the frame rate start to chug on me. Most of cut scenes seem to be at 30fps for a more cinematic look, but all of the combat looked much smoother, and seemed to hold a pretty consistently high level if not a flat 60 nearly the whole time.

Which is incredibly handy considering how smooth the Bayonetta combat is. If there is anything Hideki Kamiya knows about video games, it's how to make a ridiculous over the top action sequence. Sometimes he falls in the trap of it happening in cut scene, but after the game's introduction, you basically control the pace. Much like the Devil May Cry series he is known for, the combat is incredibly fast paced and fluid, all of the weapons you attain in the game have a large myriad of combos that interlink with the weapons Bayonetta uses on her hands and feet that appeal to both the skillful and the button masher. 

There seems to be more variety to the weapons that you can unlock this time around. It didn't take me long to unlock a pair of twin swords which very quickly became my favorite weapons in the game and were my primary hand weapons until I discovered the scythe and whip. Once I had them, the blades shifted to the feet and suddenly I became a twirling, prancing, area of effect monster of destruction. It was fucking awesome. But they also give you some heavier gas cannons that shoot fire and ice which were fun to use, and a Bow that shoots insects at people that was great for fights I was losing hand to hand in. The weapons are infinitely better than the first game.

The torture attacks are back, but the fetishy ones (like the bondage horse) are absent.

There is still no block button in this game, but it is made up for with a dodge move that you can pretty much spam relentlessly. If you dodge at the right moment, you get a few moments of "witch time" where everything but you slows down for you to unload a combo. This was something I somewhat struggled with in the first Bayonetta. Now I can probably make a joke here about how it was dumbed down to be easier for the Wii U audience who wouldn't know a great game if it bit them on the ass, but the reality of it is that enemies have a bit more of a clear indicator of the moment they are going to attack, so it's easier to follow the pace of the fight.

And it certainly does feel like it's scaled back the difficulty somewhat. I went back and played the first Bayonetta after completing Bayonetta 2 and I still tend to struggle with certain enemies as I had before. Yet in Bayonetta 2 there was only one boss fight where I actually had to spend a continue to try again. It actually might be a combination of more telegraphed moves, weapons with wider attack areas, slightly easier difficulty, and so on. Either way, I managed to tear through the game getting gold of silver rankings nearly the whole time.

The bosses in this game follow a kinda Dark Soulsian trope: If boss is closer to your
size, the more dangerous they are. The Lumen sage is an perfect example of this

On top of all the good things I have just prattled on about, probably the smartest visual change this game made was to change Bayonetta's hair. Instead of the ridiculous beehive cone thing she had in the previous game, she has a much simpler short kinda wave instead. She looks normal, it accentuates her face more, and frankly looks a billion times more attractive. It is somewhat marred by the fact that she still has the ridiculous out of proportion giraffe legs that spoil the entirety of her look for me. Some of her other features seem out of proportion too, but the legs are really what stand out to me.

Since I've brought up the topic of her appearance I might as well address the Nintendo themed costumes. Alright, some of them are kinda cool and it's a nice little nod to its new platform. But ultimately they are 100% cosmetic additions that are functionally useless. To be totally honest, a large majority of the costumes you can unlock in the game already I think are infinitely better than the Nintendo skinned ones. It's a moot point I suppose, but that shouldn't be the reason people buy the game because I think its begging the fanboys to try something new, they should buy the game for its own merits.

I used the Daisy alternate for a little, but I couldn't take it seriously.

I really tried to push the original Bayonetta when it first came out. The way I would describe it to customers is that every level of this game, is the final level of another game. It holds true here and possibly even more so. There are very few down moments of the game to give you exposition, and nearly every boss fight does the God of War thing where they are roughly the size of a 20 story building, and uses a lot of grandiose visualizations of scope such as fighting up a building, standing on a chunk of ground that is being swung around by a demon, or quickly moving from platform to platform to continue the fight.

To give a sense of scope, this is just ONE of the bosses you fight in the FIRST LEVEL of the game.

To some people, it could even be exhausting. Almost every single aspect of this game is so straight jacket wearingly over the top I couldn't blame people for constantly pausing the game to reorient themselves. I could probably even draw the comparison to some of the Call of Duty games in how it likes to drop you into a chaotic war zone. While exhausting, it allows the game to keep a somewhat frenetic pace that makes the game very difficult to put down.

But you know what this game is lacking? Angst. Despite the some what erotic presentation of her character, Bayonetta is clearly a confident protagonist who enjoys the fact that she is an attractive woman who can kick serious ass, and can do so effortlessly. At no point does she ever come off as weak or submissive, but she manages to balance it but showing some cracks in the armor and displaying that she's not emotionally stoic. A number of times in the game there are moments of panic that show that her flirtatiously confident appearance might just be a shield. These moments made me find her to be a more entertaining character in Bayonetta 2 than she was in the first.

You rarely see characters in games with the almost smug confidence Bayonetta has these days.

Sadly, my roomies suck and I didn't get to play any of the co-op trials modes or a number of the extras, but depending on what difficulties you beat the game on or what challenges you complete, there are a handful of unlockable characters that can be used in the co-op mode, and Jeanne can be used in story mode. In addition to that, the game just straight up gives you a copy of the first one as well, which is an incredible deal.

If I had to really reach for complaint on this, it sits SOLELY on the Enzo character. Fuck Enzo. He is put in clearly to be a Joe Pesci styled comic relief character to play off Bayonetta's almost regal level of confidence. the problem is, he's not funny. At all, NOT IN THE FUCKING SLIGHTEST. He basically gets an incredibly meaty set of dialog in the first few scenes of the game to rehash some crappy joke from the first scene of the previous game (which wasn't funny then either), it runs entirely too long, and he drops the word fuck more times then I do in years worth of reviews. Enzo sucks and I cannot stand him. You would be completely justified in skipping Bayonetta 2's opening sequence to just get past him.

The only other complaint I can come up with is if you just finished the original Bayonetta, then Bayonetta 2 is going to pretty much feel like the exact same game to you. The controls are mostly unchanged from game to game, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The only major change is the additional use of the magic bar for Umbran Climax, which allows your whole combo to be done with a series of finishing strikes instead of just at the end of the combo (a feature once unlocked by beating the game in the previous title).

Just another Level 1 baddie in the world of Bayonetta. Fought atop a speeding train.

There are a ton of reviews giving this game perfect to near perfect scores. Nearly any complaint I could have came up with on the previous Bayonetta game were effectively fixed in nearly every way on this one. The load times are minimal, the game shows excellence in combat design, the story doesn't take itself too seriously and neither do the characters, and it comes bundled with the first game free of charge. It's almost like a game was designed to be fun first, and artistic second. Who'd of thought?

Upon finishing the title I immediately messaged my Nintendo fanboy cousin who is currently frothing at the bit to play the new Smash Brothers and I messaged him with the same message I am about to tell you: If you own a Wii U and you do not have Bayonetta 2, you are fucking doing it wrong. This title has a serious case for Rage Quitter's game of the year. All of the first party fans can shut their yaps about Smash, Mario Kart, Captain Toad's nobody gives a fuck adventure because Bayonetta 2 is the best thing to happen to Nintendo in the past 20 years.

Now hopefully Sony and Microsoft learned their lesson and beg for this series to come back.

The Evil Within: Mo' like the Anger Within.

I've been pretty stoked with the upcoming horizon for releases. For years I was starting to wonder if the horror genre was just dying a slow painful death, but in recent months and past conferences, it seems like the horror genre is experiencing some kind of resurgence. With games like Outlast, Amenisa: The Dark Descent, and Dreadout making waves, developers have finally realized there is a itch that needs to be scratched in the horror niche.

Almost a year ago, around the time the new consoles were just getting released, I was seeing snippets from a game by Resident Evil luminary Shinji Mikami which often followed by concepts about him wanting to get back to his true horror roots. Initial impressions were good. Terrifying gore, frightening imagery, difficulty and desperation. All these things sound great. It's been almost a full year coming but I can't wait to sink my barbed teeth into....

THE EVIL WITHIN

The story starts of with detective Sebastian Castellanos and two of his partners Joseph Oda and Julie Kidman are picked up by a squad car after just getting off a case. However, it doesn't appear that they are going home because a gruesome mass murder has taken place at a nearby psychiatric hospital.

The scene inside is brutal as there is blood smeared everywhere and the floor is littered with corpses. They find a doctor who is still alive, and as Joseph tends to him, Sebastian checks the security footage to try to see what happens. He finds a tape of 3 of his fellow officers opening fire on a figure in a white hood, that seems to be able to teleport in a flash, slashing the officers throats. The figure seems to catch the camera on him. When Sebastian turns around the figure is behind him, jamming him with a syringe and sending him into darkness.

Initial appearance was rough. At game onset, nobody was really "likable".

Sebastian comes to in a bad situation, he is hung upside down and a monstrous person is just hacking up bodies, and clearly his turn is coming. Sebastian is able to escape and flee the hospital to find a ride from the beat cop, the doctor, one of his patients, and detective Kidman. They try escape in an ambulance but not without the hooded figure seemingly laying waste to the entire city in an attempt to stop them. They manage to escape the city, but the ambulance crashes during the escape.

So as I played this opening sequence with my roomie watching, the constant question that kept popping up while I played was "Do you have any idea what the fuck is going on?" I wouldn't call this in medias res because we clearly start at the beginning here, but 3 chapters in there isn't a lot of exposition to go on. At about 8 hours in and it's sort of explaining what is happening, but even then I'd say it's a jumbled mess of a story. It's not particularly good. If it threw in more penis references and the word fuck a dozen more times, I'd think this was a Suda 51 game.

Yep, sure nothing evil is happening here. Looks totally like a hospital.

But Shinji Mikami's influence here is absolute unmistakable. Just the overall feel of how this entire game plays like on of his games. It uses the over the shoulder 3rd person style you might know from a Resident Evil 4, but if I had to compare it to other games, I would say it borrows more influence from say Shadows of the Damned feel and play, with a Resident Evil 5 inventory system (but better).

I do find that this game makes some pretty bad mistakes, specially for one that pushed on next gen consoles. Games like Beyond: Two Souls and Last of Us show some of the incredible things you can do with motion capture for animating games. Yet for some reason, none of the character models in this game looks all that great, especially when talking. Everything looks so hokey and roughly done. It's bad enough that I've noticed it at each cutscene. Things are made worse with the washed over grainy brown grindhouse sort of filter it puts the game through. It doesn't make the game look better, stylized, or more scary. Even worse, the textures don't load before the scene does sometimes. It just looks like crap.

The presentation will feel familiar to you if you've played a Mikami game in the past 10 years.

Honestly, for games like these I shouldn't be surprised by this anymore. But as you might have figured, the voice acting is crap. Lines of dialog seem forced, out of place, or not matching the scenario they are in. It's strange because I thought we finally got past that point of bad voice acting in games. It's been a very long time since I can't think of the last game where I thought, "ugh, this voice acting is bad." Even some games where I think they are bad at the onset, I start to warm up to it later. Not so much in this case.

Movement is pretty direct and simple the analog makes you move where you want to go, and the other spins the camera. Not that it will help much, the developers on this one were exceptionally proud about how tight the camera is and how it adds to the horror experience, but from what I've played, it doesn't enhance the experience, it just gives me less visible room. There have been more than one occasion when I am trying to sneak and move the camera to see my attacker just to have the camera zoom in on the back of my head or right into the cover I am trying to see around.

Ruvik is a massive asshole. He can basically teleport and can one hit kill you.
Sections he is in will usually result in some trial and error.

For the most part, the controls aren't going to throw you a curve ball. If you've played a 3rd person shooter in the past few years most of this will feel familiar. One trigger aims, the other shoots. One bumper sneaks, the other sprints. Square (on playstation) reloads the gun. The only hangup I occasionally have is when I'm trying to melee someone. as it works both with the trigger and the Triangle button. Neither of them really feel all that natural to me, and on more than one occasion I've tried to scramble for a melee strike and stood in place because I was hitting the wrong button.

Not that it would have helped. Melee in this game is about as effective as cutting a log with a feather duster. The first punch might send a baddie reeling, but the 2nd one they will blow through and take a chunk a damage out of you. If you don't have your hands on a weapon like a torch or a hand axe you are going to get your ass handed to you. Sadly, most weapons are only good at killing one enemy.

Sometimes one well placed match will save you a significant number of bullets.

The reason I mention melee first is because it's going to be a situation you will probably find yourself in often. Ammo in this game is STUPIDLY scarce. Like, worse than Dead Space scarce. at the early goings of the game you can only carry like 6-10 shots for a weapon at any given time, and it sometimes will take a perfectly squared head shot to hit 3 or 4 times before an enemy goes down. In Evil Within it is often smarter to run if you can (especially if you are a magnificently awful shot like I am). I did find out near the end of the game you can shoot them in the leg and then burn them with a match. This would have made a lot of the game much easier.

Or, if the situation allows, you can stealth kill. This is actually pretty hard to do because it's difficult to tell what environments actually provide cover. If you are sneaking you can get behind people and they can't see you, but they provide covers like low walls or tall grass. Sometimes I can get right up on a guy for a kill, other times they notice me immediately. I haven't figured out it's nuances yet, but I hope to soon because every bullet counts, (as again, I am an awful shot). You will often find yourself either scrambling to hide, or strategically burning bodies to try to take enemies out.

While the inventory doesn't pause the game, it slows it down for you to pick what you need.
The crossbow you can build bolts for, but even that is pretty quick.

Now, something I hadn't noticed when I bought the game was the stamp of one my arch-nemesis' on the cover, Bethesda. Now back in my Skyrim review I used a Love/Hate analogy about my feelings towards western RPGS, but I really can apply to Bethesda as a whole: They love to Suck, and I hate playing their games. So I shouldn't have been surprised when they put their stamp in the game with a skill system. Now, there have been a number of action games that do this very thing and I've never complained about it before. So why do I bring it up now?

Because they tried to crowbar in the "Accuracy" skill again. This isn't Fallout, shit is coming at me and it's coming at me fast, so if I have the natural ability to line up my reticle for a perfect head shot while they are running at me, then I should be rewarded as such and not miss because an arbitrary statistic said I did. Otherwise most of the skills are pretty simplistic and cut and dry. More health, longer sprint, faster reload, more damage, etc etc.  You level up your skills by picking up green jars of what I've been calling "Brain Juice". You can find them scattered around the level and sometimes enemies drop it. I suppose it's cool to have customization, but it all feels pretty pointless. Max health and ammo capacity.

The longer I play the less it seems I'm going to be able to max my abilities.

In addition to the bullets being scarce, the recovery equipment is equally difficult to come by. You can pick up syringes along the way for a minor and modest health boost (I quickly leveled the number of them I can carry and how much it heals) and there are also large health kits that recover you fully. But even those have draw backs as you get momentarily dazed when you use it, so you can't even use them in the heat of combat or you will be a sitting duck. Since they extend your health bar they are important to use, but I'd be lying if I said I found them particularly effective.

I won't lie, the game is fucking difficult. There is no way to sugar coat it. I don't know if this was an attempt to raise the level of desperation while you played or not. To use an already tired example, Dead Space did this by making ammo relatively scarce, and when that happens you don't have much to protect yourself, and thus raises the tension because every single shot fired matters.

Laura will mess you up. If she gets a hold of you, chances are it's going
to be a one hit kill. Until you HAVE to fight her, you don't. Period.

The difference here is despite the difficulty, I could make it out of that situation alive. You will die in Evil Within a lot. This is the problem I had with Outlast: when you are protected by a relatively frequent checkpoint system and you don't lose the equipment you've expired when you die in a confrontation, suddenly the desperation that is supposed to make a fight so tense suddenly isn't there anymore. It's not like say in Dark Souls or Demon Souls where if I've been plodding along for an hour, desperately trying to find my checkpoint and I get killed I've lost all that progress and have to start over. That is desperation.

There is a scene in chapter 3 where you are going toe to toe with a large guy with a chainsaw (you really need a new thing Shiji, you've done this to death). The context of the scenario told me I needed to confront this guy, but I wasn't sure if I had to fight him or not. So after the first few rounds resulted in me getting my ass handed to me, I tried other things. Because the checkpoint would drop me off right before the fight started. So if I have no progress to make up, I wasn't afraid of losing, so I'd try different things and if I got killed no big deal. It's frustrating, but it's not scary.

Later, the baddies get shotguns, machine guns, riot armor, and bullet proof masks.
And it's fucking bullshit.

And that ultimately is the biggest problem with The Evil Within: it's not scary. I heard that in reviews and previews going into the game, but I sort of shrugged it off. Yeah, monsters are fucked up looking, and all the enemies are dangerous. It does an excellent job of letting me know almost anything in this game can ruin my day. But the pacing never feels tense enough, I find the tight camera more frustrating than unnerving. Since I don't have limited saves of Resident Evil or the long spaced checkpoints of Demon's Souls, I have pretty limited tension to do well.

Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that ruins the experience as much as you might think. But it is a problem when Mikami says he's going back to his horror roots, but then sort of misses the point on what it is that makes a game scary. I've talked about it on hashtagnerd.com but P.T. is a great example of understanding fear. Scary looking and fucked up monsters help, but it's a truly terrifying atmosphere complimented by an equally horrifying ambiance are really what gets under your skin. A threat you know is there but can't often see or protect yourself again.

I've found "Nurse Joy" to be a cryptic snot, and I have no idea what connection she
even has to the story aside from passive aggressively mocking me for saving often. 

What does ruin the experience for me however, is the controller shattering frustration I have felt while playing it. Make no mistake about it, this game is punishing and not in the fun way. I've already mentioned how Dark Souls is incredibly difficult but on the same hand it's fair. The Evil Within is not. There are multiple sections where the game will pull a cheap kill out of nowhere, or pit you against a boss that can instantly kill you while you try to find the contextual things you need to hit to progress. It's frustrating to infuriating levels. It's not challenging, and it's not making the game any more fun for me. Next to the game not being scary, this is the next biggest issue.

At the time of writing, I haven't finished the game yet. I find myself hard pressed to rate this game because I don't feel it's a bad game. But it's certainly not great.  Despite it being an entirely new I.P. with new characters, new story, new monsters, and new mechanics, I can't help but feel like I've already played this before. It pushes no boundaries, and brings virtually nothing new to the table. Which is fine I guess, a lot of games do just that and still manage to be pretty good.

But given how amped I was to play it, I gotta say that I'm let down. The game's most remarkable feat is how average it is across the board. I'm a fan of Shinji Mikami's work but it's really about that time he developed a new game engine. Because while it was a blast in Resident Evil 4, every game that  plays similarly to this is going to just feel like a watered down rehash of his previous games.

The game is fun at times but aggrivation is more prevalent. I got more than 10+ hours of "entertainment" for it so I can't say it was a wasted purchase, just ended up being more hollow than I expected. I could give it a recommendation as a solid 6 or 7/10, but I couldn't blame you if you wanted to wait for a used one or for the price to come down on it.

Seriously Shinji? Dude with Chainsaw? That's like 4 games now.
Get a new thing. 

Tales of Xillia 2 (PS3): Too much, too soon.

In my previous Tales of review, I made an open challenge to people who miss the "good Final Fantasies" and went as far to say that I think the Tales series has started to get better than the iconic JRPG franchise from Square Enix. I made this claim based on the track record that pretty much every Tales of game that played dating back to Tales of Symphonia back on the gamecube has been an example of excellence in the active battle JRPG genre. 

Although, I did have a little bit of trepidation going into this one because the turn around from Tales of Xillia to its direct sequel was only about a year. That seemed awfully fast for a series of games that boast 60+ hour play times. I began to wonder if Tales was starting to go the Assassin's Creed route on me. I certainly hope not. Let's find out...

TALES OF XILLIA 2 (PS3)

Xillia 2 is much like its predecessor in the regard that it weaves the story of 2 majors characters. But instead of giving their own perspectives, the two of them make more or less make up one whole character. Elle Mel Marta is a young girl, running from suited thugs with her father. As they are cornered, he gives Elle a watch and tells her to go to the Land of Canaan, where she can receive a wish.

Elle manages to board a hijacked train by distracting a guard after scapegoating Ludger Kresnik, a not so simple chef at the train station on Elympios. Ludger is actually a highly capable fighter due to his training to become an agent of the Spirius Corporation, but after failing his examination (monitored and sabotaged by his brother, Julius), he was forced to pursue a simpler way of living. The day of the hijacking, Ludger crosses paths with Jude Mathis who is on Elympios from Reiza Maxia for a medical conference.

After giving pursuit to Elle, the group of three find that they are able to enter a fractured alternate dimension, which allows Ludger to transform with power and allows him to destroy the catalysts that make them different. The resulting crash of the train finds Ludger in massive debt, and he takes Elle with him to pay off his loans with Jude offering his assistance.  With his brother considered a terrorist for the crash and light of Ludger's new ability, Spirius hires Ludger as an agent and is tasked with finding his brother and destroying shattered dimensions, all the while trying to get Elle to the land of Canaan.

It looks like 3 characters, but Elle and Ludger really should just count as one.

So, this game pulled a pretty devious switcheroo on me right from the beginning, and I gotta be honest I didn't like it. At the start of the opening cutscene, the game leads you to think that Ludger is the main protagonist here and ultimately the character we will be following during the course of the adventure. This is true for the most part, but it starts with him exclaiming "CRAP" because he's late to start his agent exam.

The problem comes in after when you make your first couple of decisions. It seemed a little bit odd to me that when you play though the game, lots of people are addressing him and having lots dialog with him. He never really responds though. At most you will get like a grunt, a sigh, a nod, or head shake, or if you are lucky a generic one or two would response to the situation. Alright, seems a bit weird considering how weighty the dialog in Tales games tends to be. But its got a choice system that plays a factor, so surely he has some lines of dialog to exchange right?

The fact that they gave him a voice, but virtually no lines of dialog continues to bug me.

Nope. When faced with a decision you are given your two options and a moment to pick them. Sometimes there is a timer to pressure you into making a decision, but most of the time the options are pretty night and day. The problem I have with it is that after you make your selection, I expect the hero to say something (like say how it happens in Mass Effect). But no, the other person just continues as if you already responded, and it always just feels off when it.

Someone has mentioned to me that this is exactly how things worked in Dragon Age and that I loved that game. I suppose this is true, but Tales has always been been pretty competently voice acted so it was kind of surprising for them to focus so strongly on interacting with a silent protagonist. They do the same thing in the skits as you walk along the world map too. People talk to him and all he does is sigh or grunt, or give something like "I agree". If you are gonna give him a voice, give him some lines to read.

Now I mentioned that I had some concerns about how quickly this installment of Tales of Xillia came out. The main reasons for this is either a: the game would have been too rushed or been of shoddy quality, or b: the game recycled a lot of old assets. Well the latter is the case here. The characters have gone through a few makeovers in the year that has passed, but to the point I have played now, this is nearly an identical retreading of the maps from the previous game. It makes sense because its the same world and same universe, but I was hoping they'd mix in a few new dungeons a little more frequently. Perhaps that will change in later stages.

The combat is also greatly recycled as well. For the most part, it is functionally unchanged from most Tales games and specifically so from the last one, but there are some subtle differences. For example, the link system is still the same from Xillia 1 but you can't switch into your reserve party members anymore in 2. Instead, Ludger can now flip through various weapon types on the fly to make up for resistances and weaknesses. A lot of the returning cast members move sets appear unchanged, so I wasted no time getting back to stomping faces with Jude's high speed hand to hand.

The other big addition is Ludger's ability to transform into some kinda half demony thing. In this moment the party vanishes and basically you get unlimited HP and BP. As you wail on enemies with a high speed combo you can hit your special move button for different effects within the combo. Once you unlock Mystic Artes they really turn the tide of a fight and can save your ass. Honestly to the point I've played its already been a game changer as the only restriction is the cooldown time to load it. They have also added team Mystic Artes so now the fights can get really over the top as you pile on damage.

Surprise! The music is your regular old Tales bland entourage of uninspired and unmemorable tunes. This to me is one of the most baffling things about the series because it is consistently fun to play and has reasonably good stories, and yet in each installment not one of them managed to produce any kind of really notable soundtrack. You might recognize a song or two from the previous game but not much more than that. Somebody at Bandai Namco really should take the time to interview someone with a real knack for music.  Nobuo Uematsu and Akira Yamaoka have shown time an time again that a brilliantly composed score can carry a game a long way. This is an area where I feel the Tales Of series has most often hurt, and they really don't seem to be making any effort to improve here.

There is no penalty to using the overdrive, and it refills pretty quickly,
so don't be afraid to use it, because it can turn the tide of fights,

I will say that the game tugs at me the way the Atelier series tends to do, because its fun to see how the characters have changed and grown up in a years time. Some have been better, such as Elize: Who basically grew up locked in a cellar with her only friend being a stuffed toy, to a older looking more confident and sociable school kid. Some have been worse, like Leia: who switches from being a nurse and martial artist to becoming a journalist in impromptu of really nothing it appears. She's got a dopey outfit and the jump really hasn't made much sense to me yet.

Special mention goes to Milla because to where I have played, she's so radically different from the previous title. She isn't poised, graceful, or wise. She's almost bratty and stubborn, the way she picks fights with a little kid the whole time, but it goes to remember that in this one, its not the same Milla, as she's from a different reality. It actually opens up for some interesting and fun dialogs and I have to admit, I've laughed more than once at some of the exchanges.

Milla really has been my favorite in both games. Even though she's so
 different in this one, its just impossible not to love her banter. 

Some of the characters don't feel like they have changed all that much. Rowan is pretty much the same grandfather figure he was in the last game, and Jude while being much more advanced in his field, is still kinda the wishy washy ho hum dounk he was in the previous game, (which is strange considering the amount of ass he kicks in battle). There is a liberal sprinkling of new characters but some of the other familiar faces do make an appearance. Those who weren't playable before seem to be playable now (or at least two of them are).

While I am on the topic of characters, this one suffers from what I call "Anime Villain Syndrome". Like a good deal of animes, you can pretty much pick out who a villain is from the moment you see them. But in case the narrow, evil looking eyes weren't enough hint, you will usually hear some kind of ominous music when you are conversing with them. It is something I have always hated with anime because when someone turns out to be evil, it is never, ever a surprise.

Yep, Bet this guy totally isn't going to turn out to be evil.

This specific title has taken a bit longer to grab me than the previous installment did, but I finally hit a point where I was hitting my stride with the game, but I wish it followed more of a logical progression as I played through it. Having to stop between story segments to arbitrarily raise money to spend to unlock the next section doesn't nothing but impede my progress for no real reason. The way the story is unfolding I can't imagine this is how it is going to lay out the entire time but for the most part its kind of an annoyance.

It gets even worse because some of the side quests you have to do require "Cat Dispatch". Basically you have to find cats on the world map. When you do, you can dispatch cats to that area and they will come back with items. Sometimes rare that you can only get through this process. The problem is, some of the side missions require you to get them, so they are literally missions that just make you wait on the chance you might get what you need. I don't like them, but at least the timer moves when you are paused or turn the game off. 

I have to give Xillia 2 some credit with their choice system though. While they sort of dropped the ball with the voice actor thing, they certainly picked up the slack by giving me some pretty tough choices to make. Very early on they basically lock you in debt to a very, very shady character. And as you go through the progress of the game, you have to make some decisions to work with equally shady people, or make choices that have some pretty shitty outcomes. There have been a pretty significant number of times where I couldn't just easily pick a decision because they were varied shades of grey rather than black and white. The only hangup to it is that I am not sure my decisions are really playing that big of a factor to the story at all. 

Some of the victory commentary is cringe-worthy, and the selfie one is one of the worst.

And its taking fucking forever for me to plod through, which is always one of the inherent problems of the mission system. But forcing me to do a multitude of side quests, I start to get easily distracted. The ability to fast travel my way through the maps help expediate the process, but on more than one occasion I have been putting off doing the main quests to bang out the side quests. It grinds the overarching story to an absolute halt. And for games as story centric as the tales universe tends to be, this is a pretty big issue. 

I don't really know what else I can really add to it here. I suppose if I had to rate this I'd say its not as good as the others because its taking me so long to get though. Perhaps its because there wasn't enough gap between the last one, perhaps I didn't like the changes they made, perhaps because it feels like more of the same.

Rollo is Fat.

But the combat is still fun, the characters are well voice acted, and if you played the last Xillia you will recognize the locations and music somewhat. The thing with Tales games is the adventure they weave you on, and if I was able to streamline this one more without having to constantly stop to raise money, I might have been farther along in it. I have about 30-40 hours into my save file and I barely feel like I've scratched the surface of this one, and honestly, I already feel like I'm ready to move on to my next game.

I don't know, I still intend to finish this but can't help but feel a little cheated and disappointed in this one because I come to expect so much better from this franchise. I don't have a Vita so I might not get to play Tales of Hearts but I am hoping that Tales of Zestria next year comes out better and learns from its mistakes.

Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale (PS3): Super Sony Brothers Brawl

My disconnection with Nintendo is pretty well documented at this point. Just after the SNES they really started to let me down on a pretty consistent basis. I'd get a few things I'd really like but for the most part I bought all that much. But one game that would sort of bring me back was Smash Brothers. I didn't own it or often play it, but I'll be fucking damned if my friends are going to be better than me at a game. So I got good with one or 2 characters and if a friend fired it up I wouldn't be totally lost.

So I had to laugh when Sony decided to throw their hat in the ring with, let's be honest, a complete knock off of the concept so long after Smash Brothers had already become the standard. Reviews were lukewarm, the price kept dropping, but I never bit on this one. I don't have friends over so it never seemed worth it. But it finally got marked as a PSN freebie so might as well download it to see what it has to offer.

PLAYSTATION ALL-STARS BATTLE ROYALE

As you might expect, this game doesn't have much of a story. Games that tend to be mash-ups usually don't and when they do they are typically pretty abysmal, (honestly Cross Edge still gives me nightmares). But to best summarize the stories of the game, you basically get a miniature telling of the story or something akin to it from the protagonist of that game. So when I first fired the game up I instantly gravitated to Nariko of Heavenly Sword.

She gives a small monologue and some stills of introspection about her and the power of the Heavenly Sword, much like she did in between the chapters of the actual game.  It runs for about a minute or two and then plunks you right into the game. You get an animated cutscene between her and another character near the end of the game (in my case, Dante from DmC: Devil May Cry {which confused me, Kratos would have made more sense.}). After which you fight some floating digital head things for a final boss, which rings a little familiar to Smash Brothers giant hand. The closing is a few more stills and another monologue. It's nothing flashy but I suppose it works.

Sorry longtime DMC fans. It's the skinny andro-prettyboy Dante.

I was curious to see if this was the norm for the game's standard, so I fired up a 2nd game this time picked Nathan Drake of Uncharted. Much like the previous playthough, I was treated to a handful of stills of Drake and Sully sitting at a table on a beach discussing a map that Drake has found, and that how a map this detailed has to lead to something. I'm curious how that will work for characters like the Big Daddy or Sackboy, but I guess to give the single player mode some substance it works.

I guess the first thing that I noted about the game is how......unpolished, it felt. The opening menu is just a flat background with some menu options. It's functional, but boring. The music that plays during the menu also just felt kind of uninspired and generic. I don't think I could hum the Smash Bros. menu to use, but I know it has a very boisterous and dramatic feel to it, and it's notable enough that I distinctly remember it. Even the character select menu has a boredom about it. Two lines of portraits with a bigger selected one on the bottom. Again, it's functional but lacking a bit of pizzazz.

Not a whole lot to it.

Then we have the actual game, and it functions in that same kind of platform fightery way you would come to expect. You are placed on some notable level from the of the character's respective games and you are to duke it out with one to three other characters on screen at any given time. The story mode seems to be the same each time so it usually opens up with Chop-Chop Master Onionhead's dojo from Parappa the Rapper. This will eventually fall apart to have I believe a metal gear firing rockets at you from the distance. 

This brought me to my next point of contention. The controls of the game felt very loose, nothing ever seem to react for me as immediately as I wanted it to. Now, this might be something that is kind of the norm for Smash Bros. players, but it never felt right to me. I assume the control schemes are similar: You have three attack buttons and jump button, each of them providing different attacks depending on the direction you are pressing when you attack, and item to pick up items, and your "super" button. 

How the game works differently to Smash Bros is in Playstation All-Stars is you don't have the running percentage of damage taken. In this, the more damaging your attacks are the faster it fills up your super gauge. You can still score kills for knocking somebody off the stage, but the fastest way to do so is to rack up specialty kills. Admittedly, this takes away some of the feeling of danger and might make you more likely to dive headfirst into combat because if nobody has a super charged, you are not in a lot of danger to be killed.

To give you context, I started playing my story mode with Nariko and much like her original game, the Heavenly Sword breaks apart for fast chain blade combos. So it was very easy to wailing on the square button and let her start to liquefy anything in her path. But these are light attacks so my little gauge would bump up in increments to 5 or 7. If I ventured over to the other buttons they would do slightly more damage depending on the move.

By concept alone, some characters are just more fun to play than others.

Once I would hit one full bar, I could trigger a special where Nariko summons Kai and blows up a barrel. If enemies are caught in the blast I am awarded a kill. At level 2, Nariko produces a cannon like on the castle battlements and can fire off shots at the other players. The aim is minimal but you get a few shots and any that connect score a kill. At level 3, gets that heavenly glow, and her chains extend to full range and enemies who are caught are quickly ended.

It was an interesting way to try to have the same feel of a Smash game but without directly copying the system. The problem I have with it is I don't feel that it really emphasizes the tension you get when the battle sways. When you see that percentage staring to climb, you really get the weight that you can be blasted of at any moment. In Playstation All-Stars I might have occasionally checked to see if some else had a charge up. I barely touched the dodge/block button because I never saw the need to. I never had some eminent feeling of being threatened.

The only time things really kicked up was a later stage matchup where I noticed one of the computer players actually ringing up a number of kills, and there was concern that it might take the round. Due to some last minute heroics on a level 3 special I managed to pull that one away, but it was the only time in the entire play though where I felt things got a little a tense.

Is there no truly notable villain to be the final boss of this mess? Is just random
geometric face the best they can do? It's pointless and stupid. 

I think one of the other drawbacks to this title (and probably why it took so long for it to be produced) is the overall roster. Some of these characters make sense to me, but some of them don't. If we are looking at legitimate stars exclusive to the console, then guys like Nathan Drake, Kratos, or Jak & Daxter make sense. But people like Raiden, the Big Daddy, or Dante don't make sense to me because their games cross platform. Sure some got their start on PlayStation but hell, Bioshock came to the PS systems last.

And then you have the reaches, Kat from Gravity Rush was in a single game on a console that didn't sell well. Fat Princess you play a character who is ultimately nonfunctional in her own series and is more or less offensive to an entire gender. I would argue that Cole McGrath from Infamous absolutely deserves to be in this lineup, but putting in both an evil and good version of him feels like you are padding out space because you just don't have enough "branded" characters to put in the game. Although in Sony's defense, Nintendo has pulled this shit too. (Looking at you Star Wolf and Lucas). The bottom line here that Sony doesn't really have enough independent notable properties to really flesh out a roster like this.

This roster forced me to give credit to Nintendo. They may just put out the same few
games every year, but they managed to flesh out a pretty meaty roster for Smash.

There are a smattering of other game modes such as a training mode, a challenge mode, and naturally a multiplayer mode. None of them are remarkable or interesting enough to even bother to comment on other than "hey look, there they are"

I'll give credit that the alternate costumes are kind of cool. I don't know why but I have always been a fan of alternate costumes in games and love to try to unlock them, but absolutely started to loathe it once they started putting DLC tags on them. They really should be rewards, not costly extras.

Ultimately, Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale pretty much was exactly as I expected it to be: a flat, uninspired knock off of an immensely popular game that has been done already more competently in previous installments. I'd be hard pressed to say it's a bad game because it's at the very least functional, but I personally didn't have much fun with it. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I played it with friends but I honestly don't think it will be in my memory enough to even bother to try it.

The game is currently free on PSN for PS+ users and I've seen it for 20 bucks otherwise. If you need to get Smash out of your system without owning a Nintendo console this is probably a reasonable sub, but honestly I wouldn't blame you for skipping this one. Free was fine, I wouldn't pay 20 for this.