Child of Light (PC): Wait, Ubisoft made this? There must be something amiss.

Sometimes I need to trust my instincts better. This game showed up on the Playstation Store fairly early in the life cycle of me owning a PS4. It had a downloadable demo and a cute aesthetic to it. And the demo had a cool battle system. I thought was an interesting demo, but in my head I was like "That's not bad. If that comes out on the PS+ freebies I'll snag that one." It never did.

Almost 2 years finally passed and I realized I could get PSN cards from my gas station with points. So I did, fully prepared to pay the 15 dollars they were asking for it since it was summer and there weren't a lot of PS4 releases. But as I was doing this, the Steam summer sale happened, and I'll be damned if that very game didn't drop to 3 bucks. There was no reason not to jump on that deal. So I did. I took my sweet ass time getting to it, but now that I have I am glad that I did. 

CHILD OF LIGHT(PC)

The tale of Child of Light opens with a limerick telling us that in Austria, there is a place called Five Hills that is ruled by a beloved Duke, and his wife. They bore a daughter named Aurora, but while Aurora was still very young, her mother passed. The Duke raised Aurora alone, but was still very happy. He fell in love a 2nd time and remarried to a mysterious duchess. On the Friday before Easter however, Aurora went cold in her slumber and was found dead by morning. The Duke was utterly distraught and became bed ridden.

However, Aurora found herself waking up in a curious place called Lumeria. Thinking to be in a nightmare she is found by a firefly named Igniculus who guides her to an alter where a Sword lies. She frees the sword and challenges the guardian there and rescues and old sage who informs her Lumeria was once bright, but a dark queen named Umbra has take over and banished the light. She has a mirror that can return her home, but can only do so if she returns the light of the sun, moon and stars. Aurora is reluctant, but has no other choice.

Sounds kind of like a children's story book doesn't it? That is probably the most apt comparison for Child of Light when comparing most of the aspects of this game. Its entire design is meant to emulate that of the children's story book from the language, to the character and art design, the presentation, and honestly even how the story plays out. 

At it's heart the game is a JRPG. But I hesitate to rush the comparison because it blends a number of elements of different styles. For example, My brain wants to say it reminds me of classic Final Fantasy, but if I wanted to be accurate, it would say its more akin to the 2D MMO Maple Story. All of the maps are 2D sidescroller, but very early on you gain the ability to fly on the map, so it actually blows up the various locations pretty significantly. It sometimes suffers from invisible wall syndrome but it the maps never lock you in a box.

Enemies are scattered around the map so encounters aren't random, but you will need to do some minor grinding. This is where the game really shines because I loved this combat system. So you fight either alone or with a teammate and it follows your pretty typical timed battle system, but instead everyone shares the same wait bar. Depending on character or monster speed they move up the wait timer at varied rates, but when you reach 10% left you get to choose your action. This section of the timer is the Casting bar and your action affects your speed for the remainder of your wait before wailing with that attack or spell.

But this is where fights get interesting, because if you manage to attack an enemy when they are in the cast timer, they get interrupted and knocked back down the wait timer. So depending on your attacks and how fast they cast, you can constantly prevent your enemies from attacking you. However, this is a double edged sword because the enemies can do the very same thing to you, and nothing can swing the momentum of a fight than having one or both of your actions interrupted and allowing the rest of the baddies free shots at you.

This is where your firefly buddy comes into play. You can control him with the mouse, 2nd thumbstick, or additional controller (so yes, this could technically be played co-op). All he can do is fly around and flash but he is more useful than you think. In Battle, if you hold your flash on an enemy, it slows down his wait timer and allows you to play catch up, which can be incredibly handy in interrupting an enemy's attack. For many boss fights, this is pivotal. You can also use him to hover over one of your party members, and if you hold his flash on them, they recover a small amount of HP every second or so.

This is not infinite however, so on each battle you will find two plants with "wishes" on them. You can collect these to give your characters a small HP and MP boost, and completely refill Igniculus' flash. It forces you to be strategic about manipulating the time in your favor and using your free healing opportunities at the right moment to not be wasteful. In some of the boss fights proper time manipulation is almost a necessity because a poorly timed interruption can result in a massive chain that paralyze and damage you, allowing them to land even more free hits.

Inniculus' flash is also usable in the map as well. You can use him to stun enemies you pass to prevent them from harming you, or if you wait you can get behind them and set them up for a surprise attack. This usually will give one of your characters a free action to start, and your teammate not that far behind. It also can be used to collect hard to reach treasure chests and items that Aurora cannot reach on the map, and he is also used for a handful of locked door puzzles. 

So let's just get the biggest flaw of the game out of the way now, because its a pretty persistent issue and will probably turn a number of people off to the game. The prose in this game is not great. When you make the decision to do the entirety of the games story and dialog in limericks, you are truly handcuffing yourself to conversations that do not flow naturally.

In some cases it can get tiresome, but as people who watched me steam it noticed, there is a significant number of instances where they either use the same word twice to make it rhyme, or they use two words that sound similar but don't actually rhyme. I may be an English major, but I wasn't good at it and even I know that isn't how it works. The geniuses who write Critical Miss touched on this beautifully.

But if you can look past some of the rough prose in this game, almost everything else about it shines beautifully. I mentioned the art style emulates children's story books, which gives it a nice watercolor pallet that compliments the overall design. This also allows it to give you a pretty diverse cast of characters. Which might I add, has an insane number of characters for an RPG that plays as short as this one. On top of Aurora, other playable characters include Rubella the jester, Finn who is kind of a gnomish mage, Genovefa the.... lizard, swamp thing, and a massive daruma-like ogre called Oengus just to name a couple.

It's strange that the game gives me so many characters to pick from considering I can only have two in the party. You can switch them on the fly, and the game doesn't require you to have Aurora actually in the fray. But I tend to dump all my stat raising items onto the hero, so she seldom left the front line. And once I got Oengus, I basically was shredding through fights. But to be fair, all of the characters have pretty varied skill sets so you can use them as the situation arises.

In addition to each character having a pretty deep skill tree (generally 3 paths you can fill out), you also collect gemstones called occuli that give you various stat boosts. These can be combined to make bigger gems, or new types of gems. Once I realized that a diamond gave you an experience boost, I pretty much dumped everything into making a the largest diamond I could so I was raking in 25% bonus experience for Aurora all game. I also loaded her up with increased dodge when casting and high powered Light attacks (since little seems to be immune to light).

If you manipulate your crafting right, you can make something called a
Princess Stone. I never did, and it didn't seem to affect me finishing the game.

But out of everything that I loved about this game, I think the music is what hit me the hardest. The game's score was produced by the lovely and extremely talented Cœur de Pirate. Again fitting for the stage it has set, much of the game is accompanied by chime, flute, string, and piano melodies. Most of them are primarily a variant of the "Theme of Aurora" which pretty much had me hooked at the opening title screen, and this style worked well for me when I played Atelier Ayesha because the song was fresh in my head, so when it changed in feel to match the scene at hand, that subtle difference felt powerful.

And standing tall amongst the soundtrack to this game, is a song that didn't even get sold on the OST. The battle music is appropriate and there are various different battle tracks throughout the game, but there is one boss theme in particular that feels truly epic. I don't mean that in the slang,"holy shit that's awesome" style of epic. I mean how the orchestral music raises and falls, accompanied by an operatic chorus that remains uptempo. This song pretty much constantly kept the heart rate up and made each boss fight where I heard it feel truly important, and when they started to go bad, it felt that much better when I overcame it. I am a huge advocate of proper score to compliment a game and on this one Ubisoft nailed it.

Wait, Ubisoft? The same people who pump about a billion Assassin's Creed games? Far Cry, Rainbow Six and every other Tom Clancy game? I didn't believe it either. Ubisoft Montreal put this game together and asked famed Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to produce a promotional piece for the game that was equally gorgeous. Who would have thought they could break away from the Triple-A money generating machine to make something different and beautiful. Honestly, I was shocked. 

So if I have to nitpick some complaints about the game outside of the excessive use of limericks, it'd have to say I was disappointed by the length. It took me only 10 hours to level up to 50+ and completely shred to the ending. And after a bit of necessary questing, the game moves kinda breakneck to the finish basically skipping having one last final dungeon and tosses you into the final boss fight. To be honest I wasn't ready to leave that world yet. I wanted there to be more.

You get Rubella first. Her Tumble ability isn't strong, but her sheer speed and cast
time basically lets you control the timeline. She is an invaluable teammate.

They provide you a new game plus so you can play it again on a harder difficulty and keep your levels, items, and occuli but the game really doesn't change. So unless you love gathering collectibles (you weirdos), you probably won't feel the need to go through it a 2nd time soon. I tried to and inside a couple of fights I didn't really feel the need to continue. Gathering collectibles sucks.

And honestly, items in this game seem pretty pointless too. Throughout the adventure you will constantly find yourself picking up potions with various effects. Some restore health, magic, some cure status affects, boost your attack or defense, hasten you up the timeline, give you immunity to things. And every single one of them means exactly dick. Unless I needed to revive a party member (which happened rarely in my case), every other item in the game didn't seem as a important as knocking  a baddie down the timeline was to me. So for a large portion of the game, the items went completely unused.

At least Quicker and Bicker rhyme.

There is a degree of sidequesting to do in the game, but I hesitate to call it "sidequesting" since most of them seem to be able to be done as you continue on with the main story of the game. There were only a few of them I actually had to backtrack for, and only one them I actually missed (which would have given me another party member, but that dounk would have just ridden the bench anyways).

And this is nitpicky, but I wish I had a clearer explanation of the crafting system when I started because had I known I could use my small stones to make bigger stones, I wouldn't have wasted time mixing things early. I use 3 difference colored stones to make a diamond. I use 3 diamonds to make a bigger diamond. But had I known I coulda just mashed all my colored stones together to make bigger ones, I probably would have saved a lot more resources making big valuable stones faster.

But ultimately, as I said prior these are pretty nitpicky complaints to a game that I thoroughly enjoyed. To say I blew through this game wouldn't be an exaggeration. I played it in like 2 or 3 hour chunks but honestly if I probably could have smashed this game in a sitting if I had the day off. Everything about it kept me totally immersed in this world and I loved pretty much every moment of it.

To that regard, I am disappointed that I had waited so long to give this game its proper chance. Among a slew of mediocre reviews, lukewarm responses, and complaints about the language used I fell victim to hearsay instead of just getting it when I enjoyed the demo. I wish I had sooner. Child of Light isn't going to shatter the gaming industry and revolutionize how RPGs are played, but it gave me a wonderful 10 hours of a children's story to get lost in. It would have been nice to be my PS+ freebie, but it is absolutely worth the 15 bucks they are asking for it.

I wished I wasn't right about Norah...

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.