Until Dawn (PS4): Making Wrong Decisions Right

*Blows dust off the blog* Oh hey old girl, how you been doing? No, No I haven't forgotten about you. What Laya? No, were just doing a video thing for Youtube is all.. No we're fine, seriously. Come on, quit being like this. It hasn't been that long, know how the summer months are for games. Baby quit being so crazy, can we just do the review please? Thank you.

So as its well documented, I love a good horror game. And as I have said recently, horror games have been on the uptick. Not all of them have been spectacular (See: The Evil Within) but at the very least its a trend I am happy to see. This game got teased at E3 last year, and it immediately grabbed my attention because it looked straight up like horror movie trailer. Needless to say I was excited. But then I watched a game play trailer and it reminded me of games I had less strong feelings for and kinda brought me back to earth. Still, the premise got me going so that was worth the purchase....

UNTIL DAWN (PS4)

Our tale begins with a group of 10 (Josh, Hannah, Beth, Sam, Mike, Jess, Emily, Matt, Ashley, and Chris) friends enjoying their winter getaway at Blackwood Mountain Ski Lodge. During a night of the revelry some of the group drinks to excess and are incapacitated (Chris and Josh). The others get together and decide to use Hannah's crush on Mike to prank her. Mike leaves a note to invite her up to his room, when she meets him, he talks her into taking off some of her clothes to which she willingly complies.

Sam, Hannah's best friend, didn't approve of the prank and tried to find her, but too late as she enters the room as the rest of them show they were hiding, cameras recording and giggling. Humiliated, Hannah rushes out of the lodge into the snowy mountain alone. Beth, Hannah and Josh's sister, catches only the aftermath of the group trying to find her, and infuriated by their prank sets off into the winter to try to find her sister alone.  Neither of them return.

One year later, Josh tries to rally everyone together to continue their tradition and bring everyone back to the lodge. This time meant to be a means of recovery, to try to give themselves a memorable trip and to help (him) get some closure to the tragedy of his sisters' disappearance. There is a great deal of reluctance, but the group gathers again to try to continue their winter fun. But it's very clear that this is uncomfortable for everyone.

Not a great start for me. The group of preps picking on the nerd at her own party?
Seriously, I was ready to make sure all of them died.

So alright, this seems to be pretty typical horror movie fanfare. A group of kids alone on a snowy mountain away from the rest of civilization? Sure, bet NOTHING is going to go wrong with that scenario. As you might imagine, some of the initial story I gave is probably leaving some information out. This is because the prologue to the game is basically the tutorial for the mechanics you need to know to play the game. So there are things you can do with success and failure, but I am not 100% sure if the prologue can affect the rest of the game or not, or if that is held to a single path until the meat of the game starts.

Until Dawn's biggest selling point is that this is a game that focuses strongly on the decisions you make and that path the story unfolds hinges strongly on every little decision you make. Alright, well I have heard that promise before with games like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, Dragon Age, Fable, Infamous and the list continues to go on. But basically what they mean is moral choice: do you want to be the good guy, or the bad guy. That isn't as much the case in Until Dawn.

Sam can loosely be considered the game's protagonist as she seems to be portrayed as an
important character. But she does share screen time pretty evenly with the cast.

As you play through the game you are constantly confronted with little decisions as the narrative rolls on. Some of them are simply conversational decisions that affect your relationships to the other characters, some of the are decisions on what path you take, or how difficult the terrain might be, some of them are timed events where if you don't make a choice an alternative option plays out, and sometimes you have to keep the controller perfectly still. But what I like about Until Dawn is that these come up fairly often, so it didn't really afford me the opportunity to set the controller down and watch something play out. I had to be ready to make a choice.

In the examples I used above, I mentioned both Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain. If I had to decide on a game that this title most felt like, those two come to mind immediately. When I saw the gameplay video released before the game came out, it looked like it controlled in a very similar fashion to these interactive storytelling games that have come before it. I'd say it was an accurate assumption because its pretty much how these games control. Move your character around, interact with the interactables, make your choices, quick time events.

Sometimes you are faced with choices where you have to make a quick decision.
Sometimes there is no right answer, sometimes doing nothing is the way to go.
But it forces you to make instinctual decisions, and I appreciated that.

Yes, there are quick time events. It is annoying and has become somewhat a of a red flag on games. These will be the most common in scenes where you are climbing or being chased. But they also added a nifty one with the light bar which requires to you stay completely still. These I found to be the most difficult to do because even breathing too heavy made my fat belly move the controller enough to get caught. And sometimes when making a decision and there is a timer, you can chose to let it go for a 3rd option

And much like the two games mentioned before that, the controls still somehow manage to be shit. Seriously, is this just some kind of video game rule that I am not aware of that when you make a game that is motion captured by professional actors that the controls need to eat a bag of soggy dildos? This isn't a breakneck paced game, and its not even fast as the Last of Us which had some fantastic motion capture work. But if I am trying to walk down a dimly lit hallway while trying to control my flashlight in Until Dawn, then you can expect me to bang into the walls every step of the way because holding one direction is so finicky I've never been able to walk a straight line the whole game.

God, Jessica. Jessica is SO easy to hate in this game, but god damn it she has
probably the hands down best line in the entire game. You'll know when you hear it.

Thankfully, because of the nature of how you play the game, this isn't a game breaking factor. It's a mild annoyance at best and you can learn to ignore it if you get wrapped up in the story. And thankfully, the story is the best part. Unlike other "interactive storytelling experiences" that I have already mentioned before, this game does a very very good job of making sure its pacing and atmosphere keep pace like how you would expect it to in a traditional horror movie. Considering that this game runs anywhere from 7-10 hours that is actually pretty impressive. Horror movies need to feel oppressive to keep you on the edge of your seat, and to do that for that length of time is not easy.

What I didn't like, is they do they Alan Wake thing between chapters. "Previously on Until Dawn: here's some shit you did literally a few minutes ago". Its annoying because this game isn't long enough to need to remind me what shit that I literally just did. It worked in Final Fantasy 13-2 because its a long game and it reminds me of important points that happened much earlier. So the game either has a poor estimation of my memory, or thinks its not good enough to hold your attention the whole time and expects you to put it down. I understand not letting us skip the actual story elements, but we should have been able to skip this crap if we have been playing continuously.

In between chapters, you'll talk to Dr. Hill with all his creepy facial expressions.
He might be the most terrifying thing in the game. 

I thought the characters models in this game were incredibly appealing. Almost all of them, specifically the girls, had this unbelievably lifelike quality to them that in a lot of points made me feel like I was actually watching a movie in some scenes. So my brain initially thought, this must be motion captured. A correct assumption because not only was the game motion captured for all of the major characters, it also is backed by a handful of professional hollywood actors that appear in both movies and television.  So if people want to start pining that video games aren't a legitimate art from, guess what, you are still wrong. Because the people who contribute to the forms of are you have already accepted are starting to get onto the video game bandwagon.

My biggest question in this game is what is the replayability going to be like. Throughout the entirety of the game it keeps making references to the Butterfly Effect, and that every little decision you make affects the entire story as a whole. And maybe to a degree this is true, but the game notifies you by a flutter of butterflies in the corner when a decision you have made has effected the story. It seemed to happen often enough but I wonder if the game is designed in a way that certain characters can't die until certain points of the game.

For example, there are scenes in the game where you are given a choice when climbing a ledge. There are safe paths to take, and less safe paths. When I wasn't being chased or time wasn't a factor, I opted to choose the path that seemed safer. But if I was being rushed at these same points, I would take the riskier option to save time. Now, botching up one of these QTE's killed my character in one sequence, but I wonder if I were using one of the more important characters, would they just get hurt but the game would continue?

From what I can tell about how the game ended, from what I can see, the ending doesn't grossly change depending on the number of survivors that you get through to the end. I know there are endings where everyone dies and one where everyone survives, but from what I have read this hinges on collecting the right number of items along the playthough. This is kind of frustrating because collectible gathering can destroy the pace of a game like this. And that's a real problem since the pace in a horror movie or game is everything. Sure I can play them again to find all the collectibles, but if I know the story already how many times am I going to play it?

Most annoying of the collectibles are the Totems. When you find them they give you a brief glimpse of something that can happen later in the game depending on the choices you make. On one hand, "ok, cool mechanic". On the other, they are pretty much in game spoilers. If on my first playthrough I knew they wouldn't affect the ending? I would have just skipped getting them so I can be surprised.

The menus for all the clues you uncovered is very intuitive. But
exhausting and intimating. There is a lot of stuff you can miss.

In my first play through I did a pretty good job of keeping mostly everyone alive, having most of the cast make it almost to the end. but then I made some phenomenally bad choices that ended with a number of the cast members dying. Thankfully, the game allows you to pick back up at specific chapters so I was able to replay the last chapter to see how the situation could change. It also seems like doing this allows me maintain the collectibles I have so this might affect my ability to get the other endings.

So ultimately the question is, is it a fun game? I guess it depends on context. As a game is it fun? No, its basically a decisions making simulator in the vein of the usual "cinematic storytelling experience". And typically as far as gameplay goes these are lacking. But what it does right and where it earns its fun appeal is that it keeps you making regular decisions however minute at frequent intervals so you don't really have a moment just set down the controller and watch. From a simple bit of idle banter or a cheeky snowball fight, it keeps you making decisions so you have to be engaged. So on that front it succeeds were others in this genre fail.

I fucked up so many of these "don't move" scenes.

Did I like it? Fuck yeah I liked it. It had all the makings a great horror movie. You have some likeable protagonists, you have some hateable protagonists, you have some good twists in the story, you have some visceral gruesome horror. But more so than that, yes, it does have some replay to it. I have been talking with my roommate and some of my game night friends and its been incredibly interesting to hear how all of our games shook out differently, telling each other about the scenes we missed and giving us motivation to go back and try it the other way.

Look, let's call a spade a spade here. Until Dawn is not really a game. It is an interactive movie, but it's a really good interactive move and it gave me pretty much everything I want in a horror movie experience. I've played through the game once alone, halfway through with friends, and will probably play it again soon. That's at least 15-20 hours of play of the game, and that makes it worth 60 bucks in my book. Until Dawn was a unique and beautifully designed, and earns my recommendation. If you own a PS4, you should own Until Dawn.

I seriously didn't think Josh's face was real person's.

Depression Quest (PC): Hitting a little too close to home.

This one won't be fun to read. But I felt I should talk about it. So like the majority of this blog, I expect it to be ignored.

So a lot of you have read this blog and you've seen when I get fired up about something, I really get fired up. Strings of animated exaggerations and excessive use of expletives. A lot of your know that some of this is by design, because watching someone get worked up can be entertaining and to some extent, this is true. But as some of you who know me personally or say from my facebook, you've seen that sometimes the Rage Quitter just spits rage. That is just who I am. 

I admit, it's hard to stay out of my head sometimes. I'm not saying I hear voices, but I certainly hear suggestions and a lot of them don't get along with me. Sometimes they spurn anger, sometimes they bring me down. I don't feel like I have a lot of outlets, so when I feel I need to relate to something, I fire this game up. I'm no doctor, I haven't been diagnosed with depression. But playing this struck a chord with me, and I really want to share my thoughts on it. 

DEPRESSION QUEST(PC)

You may have heard of this game amidst the whole atrocity that is the GamerGate controversy. Now this isn't an article about that whole movement, because it's been done to death and frankly I'm tired of hearing about it. But at the onset of this whole debacle, it hinged off developer Zoe Quinn allegedly trying to get press for this title. Assumptions aside, it did bring the title to light to me, and I felt I should give it a shot.

Now, I use the term game loosely, because there is a bit of game aspect. You make decisions, and a story plays out, and there is a beginning and end. But more so than a game, I would akin this to a digital version of a Choose Your Own Adventure story from when I was a kid. There isn't a lot you can do other than read along with the narrative, and make decisions as you go.

As far as the story goes, you play a mid 20's personality who is in a stable and exclusive relationship with a partner named Alex. You have a day to day part time job that is covering the bills so you are living comfortably. You have a generally wide social circle consisting of old friend and co-workers but you wished you were doing something more with your life, and your parents are sort of pushing for that too.

But it's a struggle, you tend to struggle with motivation issues, which gives the impression of being lazy, and tend to fixate on things you can't really control.  The narrative writes you as very much internally conflicted, confused. and more than that frustrated because everyone else doesn't seem to have to deal with the problems you have.

When I first played this game, I felt if I were to really understand the experience I would have to make decisions closest to what decisions I would actually make, rather than ones I thought I might affect the game. So this is what I did. I found it a bit surprising how many of the options felt natural depending on the given situation. Granted, this isn't a game where you are going to wind up in a fantastical situation, these are just normal everyday circumstances. 

Now I think the big aspect of this game that really sells it comes into the decision making. Yes, you really are just clicking links along as you read the story, and it does effect the path and the outcome a bit. But where its cleverness lies is how it guides the story. With each click of a link your decisions change, and if you starting making more decisions that line up with the behavior of depression then on the next page a number of the decisions you make will be struck through.

It paints a good picture, or at least it did to me, of how the mind can turn on itself and make would would feel like simple decisions, seemingly impossible to make. If you happen to start to veer down a certain path, it just gets that much harder for you to make decisions that would improve the situation. It spirals down and as the difficulty increases, you find that the other characters will see an increased level of frustration as well.

There is a specific section of this game that stung me in heart as I read through it. It's just a few short paragraphs, but it basically mirrored an issue that I have personally struggled with for what feels like 20 years now. In it, it is 2am on a workday, and you are laying in bed awake. Literally every thought that runs through your head is twisting on you and you are being hammered with anxiety. By this point, most of the decisions you can make will be locked off, but what really makes them brilliant is how they read.

For some of the internal decisions, it shows more of the struggle of the mind trying to rationalize the difficulty of what should be a simple decision. The bargain with oneself, the confusion over the inexplicable difficulty of something that should be simple, and the eventual turn and self defeat as you turn on yourself. This, my dear reader, is probably the thing that hit me closest to home. This is something I personally have struggled with on more than one occasion. This was the point where realized there might be something to the value of this game. 

Throughout the experience, there is a very somber piano tone that continues to play through the experience, it's used as a supplement to bring down mood of they player, help them get into the role of the struggling protagonist, and you can almost hear the rain falling against the window of a dimly lit room as you play it.

It's also complimented visually because at the bottom of each section, it shows you how depressed you are, and if you are currently doing anything to help it. If you continue to spiral downward, its static-y appearance becomes harder and more difficult to read, more scrambled. Not unlike the mind of someone who might be struggling. 

I have mixed feelings on the reactions I have received from the other characters in this. For example, the mother is overbearing and is painted as somewhat difficult to talk to about your negative emotions. Some friends seem to have a 6th sense for noticing you are out of sorts. To a degree, I almost found everyone a bit too understanding. These aren't experiences I've had, so obviously didn't relate to it as much.

However, I understand at this is somewhat of a subjective narrative and might be written from the past experiences of the developers themselves. So perhaps they have tighter knit circles who would notice these things. It's not like when you show signs in the game you should expect to be met with outright aggression, been told to "get over it", or have someone try to belittle the issue by telling you how much worse off they are then you. These are things that can happen, but I am sure they aren't common, so I don't know why I would have expected such a tailor made experience to my own. People are different, and they react different ways. Frustration takes many forms I guess.

But ultimately, as you might expect, there is no "winning" in a game like this. I have played it through many, MANY times. And I have tried to see if I was ever able to figure out what combinations of things you can do to unlock all the options. Honestly, I don't think it's possible. I've tried to make choices that seem like they would result in the most positive outcome, and the best I've done is managed to stop my relationships from breaking up, and gotten myself on the path of wellness (both things I've struggled to do in my actual life). 

It's really a shame that the whole GamerGate thing dragged this in the mud, because while this obviously isn't going to be a 100% depiction of how depression might affect everyone, I feel it could be used as a tool for those who are frustrated with someone they might know who shows signs of it. In my case, it felt like it was a pretty accurate representation of how at least my mind works. Able to present myself with all the available options, realizing which ones might be helpful, but somehow, unable to make those decisions.

It's clear to me that the developers want to help. They provided the game online for free, and strongly feel you should play it at least once. But on top of that they also provide links for places people who are struggling might find help, such as the suicide prevention hotline, or services where you can help contribute to help raise awareness. Not only that but they are also donating a portion of their proceeds that they receive for the game to depression awareness organizations. It's admirable. 

At the very least, for me, It gave me the sense that at least someone out there understands. Someone who's felt the same struggle I've internalized (and sometimes verbalized) for years.  As I play through the words of this were very much in my head. And if you don't feel it's worth a purchase or a contribution that's fine, but I do feel it's something you should play at least once. You might learn something. 

Seriously people. Don't ever tell someone to "get over it".

It might be the least helpful thing you can do. 

Persona Q (3DS): Yo Dawg, I heard you like Mashups.

Alright alright, I know what you are thinking: "Oh wow, CannonMan is going to gush about how much he loves the Persona universe again. Talk about how much he loves the characters, and wishes they were his real friends. Yadda yadda blah blah." 

Damn fucking right I am. Let's do this.

PERSONA Q (3DS)

Depending on which protagonist you start with, the storyline's opening starts off around midway through the points of Persona 3 and Persona 4. For example, if you choose to play the game as Yu Narukami from Persona 4 the game opens up during the Yasogami High Culture festival, and when Yu goes to get his fortune read by Margaret at her fortune telling booth (after the group date cafe bombs), they wind up in a variant of the Velvet room, when they leave they find that an old Clocktower that has long been destroyed now stands tall.

On the Persona 3 side, Mintao Airsato (the P3 hero) has just gotten over a cold and decided to take the team into Tartarus on their mission to discover the what the dark hour is and why it appears over Gekkoukan High. At the base of Tartarus, Minato enters the Velvet room where he finds Elizabeth and Theodore. There is a disturbance, a chime of a tower bell, and the rest of the Persona 3 team finds themselves in the Velvet room as well. The elevator that holds it begins to plummet to a crash, and when they exit they find themselves at some alternate school having a culture festival.

Depending on who you picked, you search your way through a dungeon/exhibit called "You in Wonderland" try to find your way back home where you come across two mysterious students named Zen and Rei. They appear to be trapped in this bizarro school as well and they can't use personas, so they decide to join up with your team to try to escape.

As you fight your way down to the bottom of the first dungeon you get confronted by your first boss, and just before you get overwhelmed by shadows, the other team comes in for the assist. They both realize that way home must be through 2 suspiciously locked doors in the velvet room, and going through the culture festivals dungeons will unlock the locks that hold the door shut. With that, the two classes decide to work together to see this through.

Don't ask me why they felt they needed the dance poses for the assist... I have no idea.

Alright cool, seems like we have a interesting mashup of Persona's two most lovable casts of characters. That'd be great for an interesting one off. But more surprisingly to me, is that according to the developers, this game is supposed to be canon to the story. That just doesn't make sense. the Stories of P3, P4, and the 2 fighting games happen chronologically to each other, so they clearly aren't all the same ages. They also didn't know each other when they met in the fighters, so that wrecks havoc on established story.

I assume this will all be determined as the story plays out and I approach completion, but as someone who has become somewhat obsessed with this universe, its doing a pretty good job of twisting my brain around trying to figure out how this can be considered canon. I'm just hoping it doesn't end up one of those "They don't remember what happened" things at the end of it. It probably will. :(

Now, let's make no mistake here. This game isn't a single mashup. Nope, its not just the mixing of P3 and P4. In addition, its also a fusion of the Persona game franchise, and the Etrian Odyssey (a series I had never played). It mixes aspects of the two game types together so while I have familiarity with some of the aspects, others are completely brand new to me and in some cases a little disorienting.

The biggest change is that game fronted me is the dungeons. This game uses the Etrian system for dungeon crawling which is basically done on first person grid based maps. I, HATE, first person. We all know this, and I was pretty worried that it would turn me off to the game completely. I am very bad at navigating an environment in first person and more than likely will find myself getting lost.

Persona Q tries to assist this by allow you to make a map of the floor on the bottom screen of the 3DS. It gives you a myriad of options to draw walls, place icons for doors, stairs, chests, and other things like place notes that you can type for yourself. To be honest it was a tad overwhelming, and I know at least one person it sort of turned to game off for.

Ugh.

However, as I played along I realized that some of the icons you can place change automatically depending on how you discover things, and drawing the walls aren't overly important because it will at least shade the squares you have already stepped on.  So if you tend to just focus on doors and portals, and maybe chests or important events, it makes the whole thing a little easier to manage and less time consuming. Mitsuru complained to me it wasn't detailed enough but I seemed to be able to navigate it easier.

The battles are sort of a hybrid of the two games as well and that definitely threw me off. Now, I've played games that have the two rank battle formation system before, Final Fantasy IV specifically comes to mind. Easy enough, heavies up front, weak in back. But what makes it a bit more challenging is I have to remember what characters have ranged weapons and can actually deal better damage from the back rank, the game tells you but I did have to shift my lineups a bit to compensate for it.

So far, the game hasn't made me split up. But I'm leveling a bunch of people just in case they do.

Also, the weakness system changes things a bit too. Normally in a Persona you can just spam whatever elemental weakness someone has and knock everyone down, then crush a massive all out attack. Not so easy to do in Q, because most importantly hitting an enemy with an elemental weakness doesn't always knock them down. It can, but its not guaranteed. Also, if you are slick enough to get everything knocked down, you aren't promised an All-Out Attack either.

If you hit a weakness or critical on a baddie, your character's little icon will glow gold. What this does is gives them an MP free action on their next turn, so long as they haven't been hit. This allows you to maintain your assault without draining your very limited MP without the cost of the expensive casts. But on top of that, you have a chance for an All-Out Attack when people are fired up, and its more likely the more characters are. I've had it happen with at least 3 people fired up, but if you can get all 5, its pretty much guaranteed.

They have also added a feature from Etrian in the form of visible wandering bosses known as FOE's. Each map has a number of them that wander the map in specific paths or are triggered by certain events. Sometimes evading them is part of the puzzle to complete the level, and typically when you first meet them, they are significantly stronger than you are. Most of the time you will be prompted to run away from them if you get locked into an encounter. They are worth some middling experience but you will usually get a decent persona if you beat them, so its good to go back and grind them once they are easy enough.

Some FOE's can be downright infuriating, which makes them satisfying to grind later.

The game remains contained to the school they are trapped in, so there aren't a lot of  NPCs you can interact with outside of the residents of the Velvet room, so there really is no social link system in this game. There are however quests that you can do for rewards, and many of them require "taking a stroll" with your comrades which allow you to get your hilarious persona interactions from the crossing over casts. This is kind of a hit or miss.

On one hand, its great to see some of the personalities of the two casts clash, and see what you could considering the sprouting beginnings of certain characters relationships with each other. But on the other, if you have played and love both Personas 3 and 4 then you pretty much already know what character types they are, and it can make some of the events a little predictable. For example, at one point Yousuke complains about being hungry, and the team gets into the idea of a cookoff. It's a rehash of a Persona 4 joke, but now they add Fuuka to the mix, who was also a bad cook in Persona 3. You can save Yousuke by making the right decisions in prepping the meal, but it still goes bad for him like you would expect it to.

I'm a bad fan. I am so disappointing in myself about it to. As we've heard me say a billion times, one of my favorite characters in this game is Kanji Tatsumi: the tough looking, rough n' tumble, and possibly sexually confused thug with a heart of gold and passion for sewing & cute things. Part of what makes me love this character so much was Troy Baker's performance of him. As I was telling a friend how much I loved how he did in this game, I looked it up to realize that Kanji in Persona Q is actually played by Matt Mercer. But he did such an exceptional job that I didn't even notice the difference. To make matters worse? I learned that he was the voice of Kanji in Persona 4 Arena Ultimax too, and I didn't notice then either.

So this game kind of spells out for you that there are only going to be 4 dungeons for you get through. This at first kind of miffed me. Only 4 dungeons? Tartarus in Persona 3 had well over 100 floors. The TV world in Persona 4 had well over 4 dungeons, so I thought this game was going to be a 20 hour breeze. I was wrong. With just 4 dungeons my first save of the game already has well over 80 hours. Why is that? Because this game is GRIND-TASTIC. I know JRPGs have some degree of grind to them but this is ridiculous. There is no easy way to do it and I'm getting the sense you have be at level 100 to beat the game.

Kanji just wants to wuv a puppy. Quit being a baby about it Koromaru.

They added some nice features to the Velvet room in this game that make fusing personas much easier, and you have the ability to choose what skills you want to transfer over rather than just randomly trying to get them. I found this super helpful. They also added a sacrifice feature which allows you to dump 2 personas for a big XP boost for the one you are leveling. So basically you can just grind for weaker personas and use them to boost your currents, OR you can use the compendium to get similar types for a fee and get a bigger XP boost. These are great features and I hope they appear in the upcoming Persona 5.

The music in these games are so awesome. I don't know why I love it so much but I do. Every song is just some well constructed theme fitting melody, and almost every song uses almost genre of music and meshes them together into something wonderful. The P4 hero's battle music "light up the night" is this mix of Ska, Rock, Hip-hop I'd guess? And as much as I can't stand horns in my music (and trust me, I usually have a visceral reaction to ska) this theme is just perfect. I find myself listening to the boss battle music all the time just because I love the background vocals "WhooaaaYeaaaahhhhh". Persona always gets a gold star on music.

In addition to the music, the game operates in a more "chibi" style art for the characters which gives it a more cute feel to it. And I gotta tell ya, as dumb as I thought it was to start? Inside of a few cutscenes I fell completely in love with it. It felt right at home and in some scenes made the game seem even funnier, (why won't Koromaru let Kanji pet him!?). Combine this with a number of returning voices and it all falls right into step.

So what didn't I like about the game. Grind. Grind is the end all be all problem for me in this game. Yes, I understand that Etrian games have a tendency to be a bit grindy. And I know that Persona is no slouch to doing that either. But there has always been kind of a unspoken rule when it comes to JRPGs in that in the majority of them, unless there is some easy form of level grinding, typically around level 60 is when you can beat the game. Well, I'm pushing my characters past that and I'm still struggling with the last dungeon.

Zen and Rei are the only 2 characters out of place. While they fit right in, they obviously have a few secrets.

The persona level cap is always a point of annoyance for me too. It makes sense that you can't build personas past the level of your main character in the game, so that doesn't bother me all that much. But one of the features of the street pass is that you can share a persona and get ones from other people. The problem is, these are also restricted by the level despite being in your pass book. So I have like 5 different personas locked in my book that would be game changers and help me finish the game, and I can't purchase them because some of them are like 20 levels higher than me. Why bother letting me see them in the first place..

The game can actually be kind of insulting too. Through out the game there are a number of puzzles you find and have to solve. I won't lie to you, a number of them are actually pretty difficult. Hell, one of them in the later stages forced me to use fuck'n algebra to solve it. Guess what Persona Q, I passed algebra with the lowest possible D. I'm not that smart. Some of them, not all, the other characters will solve the puzzle for you. They'll be one I couldn't figure out and Naoto will just step in and do it for me. Not for the fuckin' algebra one though.

Absolutely love the little Catherine reference used in this scene.
Fun fact, the "Love is Over" end theme appears in the P4 Animated series.

The biggest problem of all though, is that I didn't finish it. I couldn't finish it. Some people love the grind of games, I don't. I want a fun experience that will take up a great amount of time with a good story to go with it. If its designed well and the music is great, so much the better. And while Persona Q seemingly has all the intangibles that would make me give this game a fantastic rating, I hesitate to do so. Why? Because I got bored, and boredom is the kiss o' friggen death in a video game. I've gone on and on this point before, but if I hit the point in the game where I become bored with it, I move on. It's that simple.

I am going to eventually come back to this, but I have to say the amount of excessive grind really took the wind out of my sails personally. But if you are a fan of JRPGs and more specifically the Persona universe then this game is going to be right up your alley. It made me laugh on more than on occasion, the battle system is and interesting hybrid, the music is fun, the puzzles are hard, and I certainly dropped a huge chunk of time on it.

Reviewers have been going batty for this game and giving it scores of 8's, 9's, and I have even seen a few 10s. While I think perfect scores are a bit high for this one, the rest I would say is pretty accurate. While perhaps not the best Persona game I've played, Persona Q: The Shadow of the Labyrinth is a very welcome edition and hold over till the release of Persona 5. I would give this a strong recommendation to any 3DS owner.

And like all persona games, Ken rides the bench.
Because he sucks. 

Bloodborne (PS4): Accessibility is not a Synonym for Easy

So it should come as no surprise how this one is gonna shake out, but humor me. As we all know by now, if the game contains "Souls" in it, and its by From Software, chances are I am completely frothing over it. So sure enough, I squealed like a fan girl when rumblings and screen shots of something called "Beast Souls" started surfacing.

Trailers and game play videos let me know that indeed a new souls game was on the way, albeit under another name. There were some concerns about the game being more accessible to new players, and a growing fear that it might be made easier. Have they dumbed down what I love so much, to make the game more palatable to the every player? We shall see.... Brace yourself, it's a long one.

BLOODBORNE:(PS4)

Our tale takes place in the Gothic inspired Yharnam, a city once known for its potent medical remedies. A place where its inhabitants value the powers that are contained within the blood. Legend of these remedies pass to travelers (like the player) and they come to Yharnam to see its aid.

But upon arrival, you come to find out that the city is completely wracked with a plague of endemic illness, transforming people into bestial like creatures, or just overtaking them with madness. You arrive on the night of "the hunt" and by some unknown means, you are injured and set to receive a blood transfusion. After receiving it and entering the city, you eventually find your way to the Hunters Dream where you learn that the city received its healing abilities from Eldridge beasts called the Great Ones.

However, the Great Ones that provide such healing also are the cause of the plague, and by spreading it they look to foster the growth of a new great one. So you must return to the waking world to take the fight to the Great Ones in the hopes of finding a cure for your own affliction.

Let me get this out of the way at the start. I fuck'n love the monster design in in this game. Yeah the humanoids are still human, but the bosses and beasts in this game are very fucking scary and cool. They fit right in with the entire games dark Gothic aesthetic, and it feels like I'm fighting giant savage beasts. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy, but I was getting a little worn on dudes in armor and massive unfair dragons.

So I gave a pretty decent gloss over of the general gist of the story here, but as  you might come to expect with games from From Software, they have a tendency to try to tell their stories by not actually telling them. They much more prefer the style of just leaving you little snippets of exposition, and letting you find bits of information along the way as you play through the game. It worked in Demon's Souls, it worked fantastically in Dark Souls, and to a lesser extent Dark Souls II. 

Because of the nature of this method of story telling, its is incredibly easy to just completely blow past NPCs that will tell you the story. Especially in this game because a lot of times you don't ever get to see their character models. A lot of them are safely hidden behind locked doors or barred windows. You eventually find locations where you can send them to safety, but knowing where to look is tricky until you've passed through the respective areas a number of times.

Arianna may be a prostitute, but if you follow her events
she might be more important than you realize.

But in that very "Soulsian" way of theirs, it works. As grinding is pretty helpful to keep your supplies up in this game, you are going to patrol a lot of familiar areas over and over again. Between that and dying in the game a lot, like the previous titles you will start to memorize every single nook and cranny of each level as you play through the game, which thus gives you a reason to check on the people's homes you find along the way. Some you can take to safety, some are just lost to madness.

Since we are on the map, I'd venture to say that is kinda of meshes the map layouts of Dark Souls 1 and 2 in certain regards. In the original, nearly the entirety of the map was fairly circular. As you would play along in the game you would start finding paths and unlocking doors that would take you to new areas, or areas you've already been from a another path. In the 2nd installment, the map kind of starts you at a central point and branches you in 4 fairly linear directions, but you have the ability to teleport around them at will.

In Bloodborne you kind of have the option to do both. The game at times feels a little bit linear, but at the same time there are a couple of paths that open up shortcuts as well. I guess to make sense of it, the shortcuts just allow you to travel around this specific section of map more easily. The first area in the city of Yharnam has you following the city in one long winding route, but along the way you will find ladders and unlockable gates to take you back to the spawn point, and back again more easily than the first path you took.

There is always an enemy lying in wait.

Alright, so lets just address the werewolf in the room shall we? During the production of the game prior to its release there was a lot of hubbub about the dev team trying to make the game more accessible to new players. This naturally caused the fan base to fly into a tizzy about them making the game an easier, watered down, dumber experience to draw in the troglodytes who have gotten used to a game basically holding your hand the entire way through it.

Guess what? Accessible does not mean Easy. Game starts off, you make your character and BANG, you are in a fist fight with a werewolf. 2nd surprise, he kicks your flippin' ass. So you go to hunters dream and get you first weapon and gun. Go back, smash the wolf, move on? Great.  Kill a dude with a weapon, awesome. Kill 2? Ok, still no problem but sorta miss my shield. Oh wait now there is 4 of them, let me just back up a bit oh wait now I'm getting shot too. Whoakay slow down a se... Oh, I'm dead again.

BloodBorne is indeed more accessible. But you know what it isn't? Easy, and this is by design. The first level, as is most of these types are games is punishing. It wants to break you, wants you to realize that you aren't Johnny Action Hero, and that diving head first into danger leaves you with your ass properly fucked. It wants you to hang back, assess the danger, get a feel for your controls function before approaching a target.

Parrying in this game is a lot more player friendly.

But does that mean it wants you to be pensive? Fuck no. The game has a interesting life bar mechanic where if you take damages a tick moves down, but the life doesn't actually depreciate for several seconds. If you get aggressive and start dealing damage back, you can recover some of the lost health, if not all of it. Even the flavor text on the only shield in the game tells you not to pussyfoot around. Get aggro, but be safe.

So what exactly did they change to make the game more accessible? Quite a few things actually. One of the first things I noticed is there is no more equipment load in the game. No more piling up gaggles of ridiculously heavy armor to just flop like an overturned turtle in battle. Now you are free to mix and match your gear interchangeably and load up with all the weapons you can carry. The counter balance to that is all the clothes you can get, are pretty much just clothes. There are subtle differences to what they can defend, but for the most part from what I have seen the changes are fairly minimal.

There are also a number of less statistics too. There are still a various number of defense statistics: Physical, blunt, thrust, blood, arcane, poison, frenzy, fire, and bolt. But a lot of these are adjusted by a much smaller number of core statistics. Ask me to slow down if this gets too complicated: You have your health, which raises your health. You have your Strength, which raises your damage. You have your skill, which allows you to use speedier weapons. You have endurance, which allows you to attack with more swings. You have your Arcane, which raises your fire and bolt damage.... Am I going to fast?

The only real wild card for a while was something called "Bloodtinge". But even that ends up being simple. It affects your gun, so you could have called it accuracy since I haven't noticed it doing more damage. Gone are the days of needing Vitality to raise you equipment load. No more need for "adaptability" which to this day I don't really have any idea how it affected my character. Magic stats like Faith, Intelligence, and Attunement are now all rolled into one singular stat, and if you are aren't using a fire or bolt mod on your weapon, its a useless stat anyways.

Going back to stuff you can equip? Accessories like rings and amulets are gone too, so those subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) little things you could add to your character just aren't there anymore. No rings to decrease equipment load, give you the cartwheel dodge, raise health, walk fast in water. All that stuff is gone. So while it now makes it a snap to build a character in the game, it kinda feels like its taken away pretty much all of the variety from the game on what kind of characters you can build.

Example, first time through I just built up my character to just kinda be powerhouse. Strong weapon, high Endurance, Health, and Strength. and for the build it pretty much allowed me to bully my way through most of the situations I was in. I made a 2nd character during this, this time trying to focus more on Skill and Arcane rather than Strength. I started it off and played for a couple of hours with a different weapon, and after a while I just felt that I liked my original better, and it didn't see immediate affects of the build. I get the sense that a lot of the effects to where you put your skill points happen more in the late game than the early going. But the problem with that is it makes it feel samey.

I about shit my pants when I saw that thing for the first time. It wasn't always there.

Anyone who has played a Souls title before isn't going to be overly lost here, but there are some changes to get used to. For the most part, locking on, movement, and right handed melee combat feels unchanged and right at home. If anything it feels faster, probably to keep up a more frantic pace of the game. The southpaw, however, has some changes to get used to.

As mentioned before, shields are pretty much gone in this one. So the button you would usually use to raise your shield (typically L1) now becomes your weapons "trick" button. All of the weapons in this game take multiple forms. Some of them, like the axe and cleaver get extended range if you change its form. Others like the cane, turn into a whip and change the dynamic entirely. Then you have the Holy Sword and the Kirkhammer, which gives you a nimble long sword in one form, and a massive greatsword or maul with the other. There is a pretty decent variety of weapons in Bloodborne, but there are significantly less than the previous games, so its easy to just fall into the routine of just one or 2 favorites.

The other button (L2), typically the parry button I guess in some sense is still actually the parry. This is the button that fires the gun that you selected should you have one equipped. You will quickly notice that this game is not designed to be a shooter, and using the gun as a primary weapon more than likely is just not going to happen. It takes too long between shots, and doesn't do enough damage to really be a significant weapon. But then why bother to use it?

Because this is where the aggressive version of the parry comes into play. Depending on the weapon if you can place a well timed shot before an enemy goes to attack, there will be a gong sound and they will drop to a knee (or prone, if quadrupedal) where you can charge ahead with a light attack and gut them for a big Visceral attack. This works for a lot of enemies and many bosses, so learning this is crucial. I found it a lot easier to get then hang of than trying to parry with my shield and with all honesty it makes you feel pretty bad ass to walk around a gut baddies at a whim.

But there are weapons that change the shooting game, I haven't experimented with them all yet so shame on me. The back stab is also still here but it significantly harder to pull off. It lends into a new mechanic with the heavy attacks. In addition to just your normal slower heavier attack, you can charge it for bigger damage. If you can land a fully charged attack behind an enemy, they will drop for a visceral attack. This does massive damage but its significantly harder to do.. and uh, it can make for some awkward situations.....

Uh... Ok.. I know what that's supposed to be and what is happening here.
But that totally looks like what it looks like.... Eww.

Another subtle change to the combat are the healing mechanics and the buttons involved. Our character is very much not undead in this game, so our endlessly refilling estus flasks are gone too. But in its place are now the much more readily available blood vials. You can hold up to 20, and once you are full more you pick up go to storage so that rules. But they are a finite item, so if you are struggling against a particularly frustrating boss (Rom, comes to mind), then you might find yourself in a position where you have to go back to an old level and grind to get more of it. This happens with bullets too.

So as I've said a billion times, no game is perfect and Bloodborne is no exception to the rule. For one, there is a bit of lack of explanation in the game. Sure, it doesn't tell you where to go, that never bothered me. But it also doesn't tell you anything about this curious Insight stat you have. Apparently, having lots of it can make the game harder, and you can use it as currency.

But the most important thing about it is, you need at least 1 to open up the character that allows you to level. That's a pretty important thing to miss. You can get insight from an item, but otherwise it happens when you go to fight a boss. So if you if you are like me, you can go through the whole first level and find that first boss, and if you lose? Bang, back to the start of the freak'n level, all your blood echoes (souls) are gone, and I'm still level 1. I can level now that I have insight, but its very aggravating to have lost all that progress. So do yourself a favor: the very second you find the "madman's knowledge" item, use it, then go back to hunters dream and level.

You need at least 1 Insight to get the doll to awaken. So make sure to do that quickly.

The gear was kind of a let down. As I mentioned a lot of the gear that I have found seemed to have some very marginal differences about them, so really there was little handicap about just mixing whatever Ab Fab outfit I wanted to put together, rather than gearing up for my situations. Just to stand out Lady Velfir ended up wearing a Noble's dress and tiny top hat so she wasn't just another leather jacket asshole with a mask and pointy hat. Same deal with the weapons. The trick features seemed cool, but it didn't reel like there was as much variety this time around. I used my starting weapon the whole game, and I can't think of many games where that happens ever.

And by making it more "accessible" by reducing the statistics, you really kinda took away what made Demon's and Dark Souls special. When I would finish a game, I'd rebuild my character and use different build types and gear, and it would make a brand new experience for me. In Bloodborne it kinda feels like no matter how I adjust my stats, it still felt like I was playing my character the same way, and that is a real shame about it. Because if it starts to feel the same, it starts to feel boring. And when a game feels boring, you don't play it anymore.

I know a lot of Souls players outright didn't like magic, didn't feel it was the "right" way to play the game, but you know it really did at a lot of variety and change to the game's overall play style. I didn't have to charge in and bang if I didn't want to. I could hang back and sling spells from a distance, changed the whole dynamic of boss fights and PVP. I would be lying if I said I didn't miss it.

There is no shame in summoning help for tough fights.

One of the biggest problems was its completely unforgivable load time. For deaths or checkpoint teleports, load times could reach an arduous 35 seconds. This doesn't seem like a lot in type but when you are waiting, it feels like it goes on forever. Thankfully, this as already been address and repaired in a patch, and now the load times are as low as 4 seconds and as long as 11. This is a significant improvement.

I appreciate the efforts to make the Online mode a little more workable. You get a series of bells to offer help, ask for help, or invade a player. It makes the game a little easier since it uses a queue system instead of everyone pouncing on a soul sign, but it doesn't really give an idea who's available to help, and from what I hear, completely changes how invading worked which has made a lot of trolls very unhappy, (poor them, fuck invaders).

Accessible is fine, you always want to expand your audience, but I didn't think things In Dark Souls 1 were overly complex, you could have tightened it up just a little and that would have been more than sufficient. By cutting down so much of it, I think that Bloodborne is going to hurt in the replayablity area just because there appear to be only so many ways you can play the game.

And if I am being truly honest with myself, Bloodborne can be accused of being the same kind of cut and paste job I complain about in something like Madden, Assassin's Creed, or Call of Duty. Sure, the story changes, the location changes, some of the mechanics are different. But right down at its core? Its pretty much the same as Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II. I think the reason you don't hear people complaining about that is because there is usually a pretty significant gap between releases. Just enough time to pass for you to have moved on or grown tired with the previous game.

Complaints aside, this was a game that the Playstation 4 had sorely needed. Triple A titles like Watch Dogs and The Order: 1886 have been some pretty awful swings and misses, and despite the PS4 doing pretty well, it really didn't have a lot of stand out games. Now it does. From Software knows what they are doing, and even though they keep putting games out in the same engine, it is an incredibly solid one every time.

I hate calling shots for things like "Game of the Year" in the middle of the first quarter, and I certainly feel sheepish that 2 of their games have been my game of the year of 2 of 4 years, but you have to call a spade a spade. Bloodborne, despite its new accessibility, is every bit as good as I had hoped it was.

If From Software wanted to pump out another game like this every 2 or 3 years I would be completely OK with that. It's one of the best engines I have ever played in game and it delivers on pretty much everything want as a gamer. Great control, awesome design, big intimidating monsters, a steep but fair difficulty, and a big meaty chunk of time to sink into it. I don't know what else I can say.

Bloodborne fucking rules.

And fuck you Rom, and fuck your baby spiders too.

Smite (PC): Downright Smite-ten

Man I am getting lazy putting my reviews out, This working adult thing kinda sucks. You could tell back in that second Rage Quitter omniderp I did that although I played DOTA 2, I really had an incredibly loose understanding of MOBAs in general. I played them a bit longer and while I got marginally better, it never really clicked for me as a genre. However, I am a somewhat active consumer of "Let's Plays" on the ole YouTube.

I had seen this game before and it looked pretty average to me at a first glance, but when a specific production company I frequently mention held and inter-office tournament of this game, it gave myself and a friend motivation to download it and give it a try. This was a mistake because now I have been playing it for months and it's very hard to stop. 

SMITE

Smite is a MOBA, so there really isn't much in the way of a story. I guess if I wanted to make one up from their game types, we can say that this is Ragnarok and the gods are warring to mark the end of times, or during a drunken god party an argument broke out to see who's mythology is the best which ultimately erupted into violence. Or even better, all of the gods across the span of their mythos have all gotten into a dispute of who gets to be my best friend, and fighting is the only way to settle it (Come onnnnn Freya and Aphrodite!). There, good enough?

At first glance, Smite appears to be just another MOBA in the vein of League of Legends or Dota 2. You assemble of team of 5 players online, you are placed on a large conquest map with 2 bases, 3 lanes, jungles to dash and hide through, NPC monsters for buffs and experience, and the goal is to use your minions (creeps) to push forward and take down the opposing teams defense towers and eventually storm their base for the win.

But really, that's where the game's similarities stop. Unlike most of the MOBAs that I have seen, Smite's biggest difference comes into the fact that its not a traditional top down map view like most games of this genre are. Instead, this game swings the camera directly behind the hero into a rear 3rd person, and instead of the tradition point and click movement commands that have often plagued me in Dota 2 we now go to a more PC standard WASD controls.

So how does this change the combat? Significantly. With the controls now in line with a standard PC play system, attacks are no long point and click, which means they are more precise with their control. For example, when you click one of your character abilities with the 1-4 keys if it doesn't have an effect immediately, you will be given a transparent gold circle, aim reticle, beam, or arc to show you the trajectory of the attack, and where the affected area will hit. You follow it up with a mouse click to activate it.

What this effectively does is it takes away the auto attacks that I remember from DOTA2 and requires a bit more skill and dexterity to actually connect with your attacks. Which in my case, means I miss a whole fuck'n lot more. However, I have to say that I ended up liking this system better, because it feels way more satisfying when I actually get a kill, and when I do so its because I was good enough to do it. I'm not belittling those who enjoy the top-down style better, I just think this is way more conducive to my play style. It reminds me of the Neverwinter MMO I played for a while, the one MMO I actually kinda liked.

The recently added Medusa makes me very happy. Hi-Rez Studios has been
really pushing out the characters releases on this roster.

Allow me to share a secret with you: I am a stupid. I know, its a hard thing to believe after the 4+ years of completely flawless game journalism that I provide here but its true. I'm not as smart as a I lead on to be. The reason I mention this is because I'm probably not the best person to explain why the character selection is more intricate than in other MOBAs. I know some of the basic terminology used in the right context when playing something like Dota 2, but its never affected my decision making. I know I like Carry style players, and don't generally like support roles.

While discussing this game with a friend, he was explaining to me while watching the Smite World Championships that the game has a surprising level of detail to the roles and job classes and their respective functions when playing a traditional conquest game. Between the Mid-laners (which I suck at but always end up doing for some reason), Solos, Hunters, Junglers, and Support characters the bevvy of skill sets for the games roster ends up pretty diverse, it also mixes things up as well by having a good mix of melee and ranged users over physical and magical skill sets.

I love the arena mode. No lanes, no jungles, no needing to know my complex job
based on what character I stumbled on. Just go in and raise some fucking hell. 

ON TOP OF THAT nonsense, all of the characters also have various job classes like Assassin, Mage, Guardian, Warrior and Hunter. So naturally because there are so many different character variants, the game itself supports a pretty beefy roster around 62 different characters over various mythologies, each with their own skill sets, abilities, and weaknesses, it's enough to make my head spin.  So as you might expect, especially if you have never played a MOBA before, there is a bit of learning curve involved.

My personal biggest problem of the game, is one of the biggest problems of the MOBA scene in general. The trash talking shit suckers that plague these styles of games is a constant problem. People constantly running their mouth and shitting on their own team. Doing everything in their power to absolutely ruin the experience for you so you will never play it again. It got me to quit after one game of League of Legends, and has relegated me to nearly strictly offline play of Dota 2. It is such a problem that devs like Riot are constantly purging LoL players to try to curtail the issue to some small degree.

I find Assault to be one of the hardest to win. One lane, no Jungles. It's challenge comes
in because its random draw. So its a good way to try new characters, but it can be rough.

Smite however, and thankfully, actually doesn't have as big of a problem with this (yet). For the most part, You don't hear a whole lot of chatter coming from the text box, probably because you have to give up movement to do it. You will occasionally get one guy who will try to fight everyone else, then shit talk the team for not doing his commands that he never gave. Or you will get the asshat who will want to metagame your teams roster, trying to push you to play someone you've never used before for a role. It might be helpful to the team, but no amount of strategy will make me a better Ymir player.

But usually, if you are honest right from the gate, there will usually be someone willing to give instructions. Any time I wind up in a conquest game, I say straight off "I am not great at this, where do you want me?" and which I'll usually be directed to what lane I should be in or who I should follow and from there I can hold my own. Conquest is where you will usually find the most active, vocal players, because this is where the competitive gaming really takes place.

Thankfully, Smite also provides a sampling of different game types. They are all generally the same thing, but the subtle differences give the games different feel and strategies, which I definitely preferred over the single map of Dota 2. Arena mode is one big open map where you can wail on the opposing team. Assault is one single lane where you can't return to base until you've been killed, Joust is basically Conquest Lite with only one lane and 2 jungle lanes and is 3v3. They also do a special game type that changes daily with different rule types, most of them are crazy fun too.

So as I mentioned, this game has an incredibly beefy roster of characters spanning over 7 different mythological pantheons. What I really like about them is how interesting and diverse they all look, many of them somewhat portraying what you would expect them to be. Zeus is white haired in his toga, Thor is heavily armored with flowing blonde hair. I will say that as they always end up being in fantasy, the ladies have the short end of the stick. While many of their designs are very stylish, an incredibly large number of them fall to the scantily clad warrior women you expect of fantasy art. I think Artemis, Nox, and now Bellona are like the only one's who appear fully clothed.

Thanks Smite, because Caramelldansen wasn't hard enough to get out my head as it is.

Now, since this is essentially a freemium game, not all of the characters are unlocked from the word go. Typically there are five base characters that are permanently available from the moment you download the game, and then there is a rolling 5 that are alternated to allow you to try different characters. As you play through the game you unlock favor, which allows you to purchase new gods. Or if you are impatient (like me) you can shill the 30 bucks, and it unlocks all of the gods available, and that are released in the future. For the amount I played the game, it was a really good deal.

You can also purchase gems for the various costume skins that are available for your characters, a lot of them are pretty cool looking, and they don't have stat adjustments so they don't break the games balancing, (some of the characters do a good enough job of that on their own).

So what didn't I like about Smite? Well, I would say its chief offender in the eyes of the heavy PC gamers is that its not really the most visually stunning game. Make no mistake, this isn't a Triple-A title. The maps have some cool back set pieces and the character designs are all distinct and different, but there is a kind of.... Roughness I guess I would say, to the art style that makes this seem like its a game older than it really is. It's not bad by any means, but I guess when you zoom in closer on models that were typically viewed from high above a map, you notice a lot of little things.

Musically, there isn't all that much. Basically the same song if you can call it that plays over every single game type you play, with an increasing variant of the song when one team starts to push their way to a final victory. It can get somewhat repetitive. I also noted that they added voice chat to the game it appears, or at least the little speaker icon I see in the leader board when I play seems to indicated that. If this ends up being the case, I certainly hope there is an option to mute all voice, because the last thing I want when I am forced to play a multiplayer game is hearing people shit talk me while I play.

And I suppose probably the biggest flaw as is with most multiplayer games, is that it loses a bit of steam when you are playing it single player. I am never having more fun with this game when I am playing it with a group of my friends. The fact that I was able to get almost 5 of them to play was stunning to me as it was. The games where there is at least three of us are just that much better because I know I am playing with people I enjoy instead of random trolls. When I play by myself, I more often find myself willing to forfeit a match because someone on my team is an asshole.

Lag sometimes can absolutely ruin the experience for you too. The worst offenders for me is when I am marching after an enemy and then my character jumps like 20 feet away from where I was supposed to be. Or more recently, some of my inputs would just stop working right. Like I could click and attack with my mouse, but moving the mouse wouldn't shift my camera like I need it to. Or I would use my WASD controls to try to move, but it'd only go forward or backwards. Which is no help to me in the slightest.

I have also heard a lot of complaints about balancing issues in the game as well. Naturally with MOBA's there are tier lists of strong characters and weak characters. But ultimately I think it boils down to the skill of the player that really determines how good a character is. Prime example, a scorpion lady from Egyptian mythology called Serqet is roundly considered to be an S+ to A rank character, yet whenever I play her or even in the Smite World Championships she was practically a non-factor in the matches despite how broken she is considered to be.

Man, if you can use Scylla well, you are be a thorn in a lot of players sides...

But then you have characters like Artemis from Greek mythology, and she has been on tier lists from S rank to low C. Yet when I play her, I end performing fantastically on the team and seems way to strong for a C ranking. So the validity of the fan produced tier ranks is really something that is constantly up for debate. I just try to find characters that I am naturally good with and roll with those instead of how the team should be built. (which is probably why my teammates always hate me.)

The last big complaint I have I've already covered a million times. Online gamers are assholes. Despite the fact that here is less of it on Smite than other MOBAs, I still hate fighting with them and I hate the toxic attitude. I just wanna play the game. If you have a problem with how someone plays on the team, tell them before or tell them how to fix it. Don't fucking run off into the enemy by yourself, get killed, then fucking bitch about how bad we suck because nobody was there to support you, and then try to report us for it. People like you ruin video games.

I really like Smite. When I write a review, I try to be as unbiased as possible, trying to go over what makes the game good, and what makes it bad. But typically when I go through the bads, that will determine what makes or breaks a game for me. With Smite that appears to be less of the case. It's a fresh way of playing a MOBA that moves quickly, has intuitive controls, and a lot less of the toxic nature that is such a problem in games like these.

It feels like by its design it might transfer over to the Xbox One fairly easily so I am interested to see how that is going to play out. Hopefully, it might transfer over to PS4 as well. Of the various MOBAs I have played, Smite was easily the one I enjoyed the most. Its not too taxing on the computer and is free to play, so if you are looking for something a little different in your MOBA, I'd say give Smite a shot.

Seriously, Fuck Loki.