River City Ransom: Underground (PC) - A Throwback to the Future

It took a very long time for me to get my first Nintendo. I actually had to wait until my first communion where I started receiving envelopes upon envelopes of money. And young Cannonman counted, and counted, and counted until he hit that magic number to which I went to my mom and asked if I can leave the party to go buy my Nintendo. She made me wait a day.

I made some missteps as I purchased games, but there was no greater achievement than was getting one side scrolling brawler I especially loved. Problem was, the only place that seemed to have a copy of it was our local Blockbuster (if you even remember those). My mom took a shot, asked if it checked out often and if we could buy it from them. Staggeringly, they actually said yes and what would follow would be almost a daily playing of this game for near the remainder of the NES life cycle, and honestly multiple times after the NES became irrelevant.

28 years later, Conatus Creative kickstarted a 4 year development of a true sequel to the Americanized version of said game. And while I didn't kickstart it, I did anxiously follow and watch through its torturous development. It took its time, and there was a lot of delays along the way. But now? It's finally here... 

RIVER CITY RANSOM: UNDERGROUND(PC)

RCR:U starts off with you replaying a condensed version of the final moments of the original River City Ransom: In 19XX Alex and Ryan approach the gates of River City High on a mission to take back Ryan's girlfriend Cyndi and break Slick's control over the gangs of River City. This functions as a tutorial to teach you the new controls of the game and catch you up to speed on the story of the first game if you didn't play it.

The game flashes forward 28 years to the year 19XX where Cross Town High as now be converted to the new River City High, and members of a local gang the Flock are running late for class. But when they reach their lecture, the TV turns on with an announcement from Mr. Merv, the millionaire behind Merv's burger joint (where the smiles are still free). He is irate that someone kidnapped his precious angel, and has security footage implicating the Flock's leader Chris as the culprit.

Merv offers to make the ones who bring vigilante justice to the Flock very very rich, and so begins a wave of attacks against the Flocks remaining members: Glen the Shoutaken fighter, Provie the Breakdancer, Bruno the Luchador, and Paul the Boxer. The gang scrambles to escape by chance come across a much older Alex and Ryan. They suspect Slick is behind this, and join the gang to take the streets to figure out what the hell is actually going on.

From the moment I hit start, I was right back where I left off almost 30 years ago.

First off, I have to appreciate the nod to the original series and how they found a clever way to work in the lore from the previous game. It was a cool way start the game and gave my nostalgia a kick right from the onset. And even if you never played it prior to this one, it essentially gives you all the story from the original in one little bite sized tidbit. The story of this game isn't anything really revolutionary, its basically just a simple framing device of motivation for you to start wandering the city and start wailing on baddies.

But there is one big story line error that I have to address right at the gate: Cyndi is/was RYAN'S girlfriend. It says so in the original game, and is confirmed on the wikipedia page. But this new installment of the game follows along the plot under the impression that Cyndi and Alex were an item. Now, maybe things changed over the 28 years, maybe we are supposed to believe that certain things happened. But left my own thoughts, certain things don't add up. I won't press this further though not to spoil anything.

That being said, it would be a disservice to say that this game has no story. The folks at Conatus Creative did a pretty exceptional job with what little the previous game left us with, and weaved together a handful of stories to flesh out a pretty lengthy campaign. Considering I can beat the original River City Ransom in under 12 minutes, giving me enough story to keep me playing for several nights was excellent. Even hit me with a few surprises along the way.

The biggest difference to the game though is in the fighting engine. Now it keeps somewhat true to its roots that you start off with punches and kicks and you need to learn techniques along the way to give you more moves to trash baddies. But in the old RCR this was basically all done with 2 buttons. RCR:U operates under an 8 button system so no classic controllers for those hoping. It now is a punch, kick, dedicated jump button, grab, manual block, special button, Item Use, item switch, and taunt (on the analog).

It adds a pretty big degree of the complexity to the game because now you just aren't mashing one or two buttons the entire time. You could, but you would be under-utilizing your abilities by late game. Like the previous game it will involve a bit of grinding of enemies to raise money to get new techniques. Before you just needed to be able to afford a book and then use it. RCR:U now has a leveling system in place where you need to reach a certain threshold to be able to purchase the abilities from dojos scattered across the map.

The problem with this is the stores are all limited to just the item and price. It would have been nice if there was some indication of what level I needed to be in order to actually purchase the technique. Or if this attack is later part of a combo that requires me to have another technique in order to actually use. I know this is something they are working on in a patch, but the game really does have a explanation issue.

This is kind of an issue for really all of the items in the game. Flavor text is fine and all but you really don't get it until after you've made the purchase and used the item, so you can effectively be wasting a lot of money learning just what stuff does and even then I forget what things are useful. You could argue that this is keeping in spirit what the original RCR set before it, but just because its how it was before doesn't necessarily mean its good for now. Some of these are constraints of the system limitations back then. There is no reason these items couldn't have explanations as you roll over them.

That being said, once you get your techniques actually unlocked and have the controls down a bit, using your special moves to combo and air juggle is an absolute dream. My first play through I went with Glen the shoutoken fighter and I managed to produce together a quick striking combo that lead into a hurricane kick air juggle that ended with dragon punch that would absolutely mow down anything in my path, regular enemies and bosses alike. It takes time to get there, but when you do it feels fucking awesome.

Once you get combo-ing down, you feel like a skillful badass.

RCR:U tends to follow a somewhat similar progression to its predecessor: Fight a boss, tells you where to go next, fight next boss. How it differs compared to the previous though is that the map of River City is significantly larger and a lot less linear. The objectives are on the map are sometimes unclear as well so it took a little effort to move along in the game, sometimes to the point of frustration.

I'll give you some examples, in the early goings there is a mission where it tells you where to fight the next boss. It tells you to go to the factory but you face appears on the same spot on the map for 3 very different areas. He doesn't appear immediately though, you have to get his attention. What this means is you have to continue to beat baddies for a somewhat nondescript amount of time before the boss actually makes an appearance. There is little to tell you that you are actually doing this properly, so you might find yourself running in circles.

There is another section where you have to find an old boss from the previous game, and the story tells you to go to another specific location. But if you aren't paying close enough attention, you might never see that you can actually climb up a fence along the wall that opens you up into a brand new area that is easily missed even though the map shows you are technically in the right area. If you are like me and flew past it multiple times, you will find your progress completely halted. None of them are game-breakingly annoying but a little more direction would have been appreciated.

As you can see from the character design this love letter to the original RCR as everything is painstakingly designed to look like the original game, but its so much more detailed than that. On top of having 8 playable characters, each character unique fighting style that makes them all play differently and meticulously animated to be fast, fluid and detailed. There are very few characters that share animations for any real reason.

You get a more tangible list of where you stats actually are at in this one.
So when you eat food, you know what you can stop buying when you max out.

On top of that, all of the baddies in the game over various gangs, on top of also being uniquely designed, also feature their own unique fighting styles specific to their respective gangs. It certainly explains why the development cycle took so long, because the amount of original moves in this game are mind bending. But I feel the game is much better off for it because everything about them feels original. No palate swap of T-shirts here.

The music... eh.. I'm not sure how to rate this one. Conatus brought in the talents of Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpiece) who has some established credit as a game composer for such games as Fez, BitTrip Runner, and Hyper Light Drifter. As I played through the game the music was fine, I guess. But I wouldn't say any of it was notable. Wasn't even any callbacks to original game. I dunno, it just didn't feel as memorable as it could have been.  For a composer who has some pretty notable soundtracks under his belt, that is a little disappointing.

In addition to being a good single player game, the campaign mode of the game supports up to four player co-op. It doesn't appear to add any more enemies for you to fight along the way, so it might be easier to team up with friends. There is also a battle mode which up to 4 people can duke it out in a smaller area for kind of a Smash Bros mode if you will. And whats really cool about this is almost all the enemies characters and bosses are available for use in this mode so you actually get to try out some of their niftier move sets.

The problem is unfortunately the abilities are not unlocked for this mode and its scales with how you've played. So for example if we jumped into a round of that game, My Glen who I've used most and have all the moves unlocked for, would have a significant advantage over Ryan who I didn't play at all and the majority of his moves are unavailable. Battle mode should just have everything unlocked with all stats maxed out to balance the playing field.

Apparently, the game contains a significant number of secrets buried in the game as well, with one of the developers tweeting out that some of the secrets haven't been found yet. That actually impresses me. When I completed the game on my first run I ended around 85% complete, so there is reason for me to keep coming back to play it so that's always a plus.

Ether gives out a "Notice Me, Senpai" Joke. I Lol'd.

The difficulty curve can be mixed. I would say that this game is significantly harder in the beginning of the game because not having your abilities unlocked will set you back more than actual game difficulty. And the reason for this is because literally on any given map you have 6 enemies coming after you at any given time. And they aren't dumb enemies lining up for punches. Almost always they will be trying to pincer you on two sides and will cheaply knock the shit out of you. It can be incredibly frustrating. But then you will start to unlock your moves, and the game will lull you into thinking it has become too easy as you trash baddies. Until the last few levels are thrown at you which are long arduous slogs where if you die you have to start them all over again. Some consistency would be nice.

This is amplified on a level that has already been patched to be made easier. There is a mission where you have a carry a milk bottle from one end of the map to the other end of the map without it breaking. Taking a hit of any kind would cause you to drop the bottle. It was MERCILESS. Some enemies would dive punch you at the moment of screen transition and cause you to drop the bottle. meaning you have to walk all the way back to pick it up and try again. I couldn't believe I actually managed to do it and it took inside of a few days for the devs to tone that mission down a little.

The last few missions will really put your skills to the test.

There are a lot of little annoyances to game too that pad out the length for unnecessary reasons. For one, there is a pretty useless Day/Night mechanic in the game that doesn't really seem to affect anything other than making bosses appear or not appear if you clear out the right area at various times. Additionally, it also affects certain stores as well as some are open all night, some are only open in the day, and some only open after nightfall. There really is no reason for it.

Fast travel in this game is almost next to impossible. There is a subway system where you have to survive a small 30 second gauntlet to jump to other places on the map, but its not really an efficient system and there really aren't enough drop off points to make it a very expedient option. Near the end of the game they just get locked off completely, which is super annoying.

There are some platforming issues that are a massive pain the ass, Thankfully when you fall off a ledge that can kill you, it will re-spawn you back in the stage but not without taking away a massive chunk of health. But then there are sections with moving platforms where you will keep getting re-spawned over another pit, this can happen 2 or 3 times and if it goes that much, it will probably kill you. the game is not precise enough for that kind of platforming.

Pedestrians still wander around the mall areas, but now you can accidentally hit them or the surrounding area such as parking meters or arcade machines. This runs the risk of giving you a wanted level to deal with. When you have a wanted level, the game will continue to throw police officers to beat you down. There is no reward for beating them, and they only go away if you get back to a hideout or clear an area long enough to hide in a trash can.

I can't think of how many times I accidentally popped a pedestrian who
walked in front of me during mid-combo. Pricks.

And probably worst of all, is there are a decent number of items in the game that don't really have a functional use. Many of the items are expensive to get, so most of the time you buy them hoping for some big buff or payoff. But sometimes, they are just posters or nods to other popular games (there are a lot nods to other game character) that are meant only to decorate your hideout. If you save up like 40 or 50 bucks in the game to basically have it go to waste, that can be real fucking annoying.

There are obviously a handful of glitches and a lot of little problems still throughout the game, but Conatus Creative was really pushed up against the wall because they have already pushed this title back multiple times past their estimated release date. Even right up to the release date they were having issues to work out and just getting it going on steam for the release date seemed to be a chore. It really is an example of how difficult game development can be.

Like I said, all the individual movesets can get really insane.

But for all its flaws and faults, River City Ransom: Underground delivered on almost everything I wanted it to be. The combat is fun and engaging, they managed to prolong a bare bones story and make it interesting, the sprite-work is beautifully designed and animated, it boasts a reasonably long playtime, has some good replay value with the character variants, and the dev team appears to be be still working on more content for the game and hammering out bug fixes as they find them.

It currently goes for 19.99 on steam currently (it launched at a discount of 14.99) and I've pay a significant amount more for games I was finished with a lot sooner. If you the type of person who is nostalgic for the classic sidescrolling beat em up or actually played the original, Underground delivers. It is an incredibly solid play and was well worth the wait.

And yes, everyone still uses the Sauna together.

Salt and Sanctuary (PS4): Soulselvania

A friend had suggested this title to me somewhat of a ways back and I gave it a causal nod, a quick viewing of the video and then pretty much forgot about it. It was pitched me as a game that I should give a try if "I liked games like Dark Souls". Somewhat recently it came across my mind as I had just used my speedway points for a free PSN card and had 20 clams to burn. Looking to mix up the pallet of the stuff I had been playing recently, I decided to take up my friends suggestion.

SALT AND SANCTUARY:(PS4)

Much like its souls-ian predecessor, the story for Salt and Sanctuary is pretty scant, but if you follow along with what you learn from NPCs, you can piece it together. You are one of the worlds many Saltborne (oh yeah, this is unabashed parody). You are stowing away on a ship that is carrying your nation's princess, in transit for a wedding of political alliance. But during the course of the travel, you ship is ransacked by marauders. One of the dying crew pleads for you to find and save the princess.

As you battle through the ship and approach the main deck, you as set upon by mammoth beast called the Unspeakable Deep. It promptly smashes you into paste. The ship is destroyed, but you find yourself washed ashore of a beach. Collecting your resolve you decide to search out the princess, still. Upon meeting a old man on the beach and telling him of your creed, your adventure can then begin.

Good fuckin' luck.

So as my cheekily written title leads in, this game borrows incredibly heavy from the mechanics that made From Software's Souls series so popular. Right down to the menu, sound effects, and fonts used. it functions with a similar combat system, stat structure, equipment system, and inventory mechanics. Even saying it borrows heavily is being pretty generous.

But the biggest shakeup and what sets it apart from Souls similar games like Nioh, Lords of the Fallen, and so on is that this is all done in a hand drawn 2d style of gameplay. So some things change, primarily in the combat of the game. In Dark Souls you could lift your shield and circle while you wait for an opening, using your roll to protect you from swings. In S&S however there is no circling, and you have to bring your shield up to defend, parry, or dodge roll through the attack.

Ska Studios took great care to make the combat feel weighted and intentional.
Weapons and their use all affect how you approach every fight.

However, because of the new layout of the game there are new strategies that present itself. This game is only working on a 4 point axis so now you have ledges and stairs above and below you. So now you have a jump mechanic that comes into play and you can use the stage around you to evade or retreat if necessary.  The people at Ska Studios (bleh on the name) did a very good job of find a way to work all these mechanics into a 2d plane and have them work well.

It also has a familiar feeling to another 2d series of games, now that I think about it. The map is a giant expanse that has locked pathways and shortcuts that manage to loop you back around to checkpoints and previous areas. There are ladders to climb and knock down, leaps of faith to take, you will learn new abilities as you play along the game that open up new areas for you to explore, so its not a linear game. It's kinda like if Metroid and Castlevania had some kinda gamebaby. They really should have word for that.

Unfortunately, this means it also contains one of the most annoying combat features that you get in Castlevania games and that is the knock back. I can't think of how many times I would be fighting some baddie in this game and get hit with an errant shot that would almost always send me off a ledge plummeting down to my death. It almost happened like clockwork. 

Dying too borrows from the Souls convention. Where if you die, you lose all the salt you were carrying, which in this game functions as your XP to level up your character or improve you weapons. When you die, the monster that defeated you will hold it with some smoky mist around them and you have to kill them to get it back. If you die from falling from a ledge without having been hit by an enemy, instead a monster bat will spawn and attack you. Thankfully it is usually very easy to defeat and easy to gain your salt back. Even dying to a boss is somewhat forgiving since you don't actually need to beat them to get it back, just knock down about a 5th of their bar to at least save it for this attempt.

But S&S curiously also has gold that can be spent at shops as well. You can use this to get basic equipment, most of which you will find as you play along the game anyways. But you can us it to get small bags of salt for a little more leveling, or for some of the base level upgrade materials. Every time you die you will lose a portion of this, but I can't think of a single instance where not having gold inconvenienced me in some way. Don't really see why its in here.

You make offerings to add shops and functions, but when you pick they are locked in.

The art direction of the game you could argue is somewhat cartoony I guess? The character creator is somewhat goofy looking and you really don't have a whole lot of freedom other than hairstyle, color, and if you wear lipstick or not (boy or girl). But this is Ska Studios, and the art design is very reminiscent of one of their previously releases Charlie Murder. Stiff and a little janky.  Where the art direction really shines is in its monster design. The washed out color pallet and the stiff, almost old flash-esq animation really lends itself to the game's monster design.

An example where I feel it really shines is one of the earliest bosses in the game, the Queen of Smiles. Basically she is kinda of skeleton queen who can summon swords to throw at you, She's basically got a skull for a head without a bottom jaw, and it appears to be weeping blood. The way the characters are designed it just looks fucking awesome and with the kinda tense operatic boss theme that plays when you fight her, it just frames together a scene for a great moment. The stiff animations make it feel lifeless and creepy, and just lends to her overall design. Many of the bosses and monsters have this effect, and it's great.

I'm not ashamed to admit this fight took me more tries to beat than it probably should have.

One way how this game differs is in relation to cooperative play. Surprisingly, there is very little online play to speak of. You can sometimes find tombs where characters died in a section, break them to see a few after images to see how it happened, you will sometimes see a another playing in your shrines, but that's really about it. You can play this game two player though. Basically as you set up shrines around the world and you can place offerings to basically inhabit your shrines with villagers who provide various services to the player.

For co-op play, you need a sellsword. By talking to them you can summon an additional player for couch co-op. The catch is they have to be on a different account so they can't just use any other characters you have previously made. So if your co-op friend doesn't have the game, you can work around this by making a generic User1 account (on ps4) and make a character that way.

Other than that there doesn't seem to be much else in the way of online. You can't invade other players or be invaded, you don't see after images of players progressing around the same areas you are. You can't drop a sign to be summoned to help someone in an area just before a boss. So one hand I can't actively sunbro in front of a boss and farm salt, but on the other I don't have to worry about trekking for an hour into unfamiliar territory and have to worry about some jackass spawning into my game and ruining my progress, (there is plenty of other shit to do that).

The aforementioned boss fight theme is pretty great, but I find the soundtrack of the game to be rather lacking. Maybe not lacking but unimpressive. I've said the same thing about the Souls games sometimes, or the Tales series. The music or lack there of works for the game, but its not memorable. In many instances you won't even have music, just a couple of notable tracks here and there to punctuate things, such as boss fights or your home base.

S&S features a creed system that operates loosely like the covens of the Souls games, but without the persistent online mechanic, I found very little reason for it. You can't unlock certain items to buy without changing your creed, which causes you to be an apostate. You can change a shrine to your shrine which gives you sin, and doing either of these things will make people hostile to you, but if I am being honest I didn't find very much reason to do it.

Story and questlines are scarce in this game and much like the series it apes, much of it can be found by talking to the NPCs you come across on your adventure and it fleshes the tale out a bit more if you do. There doesn't appear to be a lot of them though. And spoiler alert, the original reason for starting the adventure never really seems to be addressed by the end of the game. I might have missed it, but I honestly don't think that I did.

One complaint with the game is probably to some also one of the game's biggest assets: This game is fucking punishing. I've struggled with difficult games before, Even when I think I'm hot shit at Dark Souls when a sequel comes out I always have that moment of "Fuck this, this game is impossible." Whelp, Salt & Sanctuary that is prevalent as well. This game is going to chew you up and spit you out, and it will do so often. It is particularly rough in the early going when you are still figuring out all the mechanics and the the bosses will usually wreck you before you even get a chance to observe their patterns. This game is an exercise in stubbornness.

Some fights will greatly test your patience.

The difficulty curve was all over the place too. Once I finally got a decent build in place, I would mow through some enemies only to get fucked by one that was way more difficult than everything around it. Some bosses I would approach and bring down on my first attempt, others would just rip me a new one for 50 attempts. It never felt like a gradual build up.

Probably the thing I didn't like the most was the somewhat confusing skill tree system it uses. If you've ever played Path of Exile and looked at their skill tree you would have a good idea of what I'm talking about. This is a game where you kinda want to have an idea of what kind of character you are trying to go for at the onset, and you will want to work your way from there. You earn gems to move a node with each level, and some require multiples to do so. There is also a system of grey gems which let you remove a node and replace it.

The skill tree can be daunting. I just looked what what weapon I wanted to focus
and then followed the line that took me to the highest level of that weapon.

But what it doesn't explain, for example, is when you unlock the skill nodes for say Greatweapon 5 you don't need to have levels in great weapons 1-4 anymore. With enough gray gems I could reset a significant number of skill points, but I never thought to do it because it and respec as I needed. They still provide a stat boost, but really they are meant to fix a fudge up or if you went down a path you didn't want to for the end game of your character.

You can perhaps consider Salt & Sanctuary to be a Souls or Castlevania clone, but I really see it as a love letter to a pair of games that basically invented a pair of genres. The game will drive you to a fury, and make you want to spike your controllers, but it also provides that same level of satisfaction once you actually muscle your way through it. By the time I ended up getting all the way through it I seem to have burned a good 40 hours or more.

For a game that was like only like 18 bucks, I have to say that counts as a pretty worthwhile purchase.

Fuck the stupid Witch of the Swamp.
That fight was impossible.

Attack on Titan (PS4): Simple but Effective.

I wasn't too late to the party when this anime started making some waves. I made the foolish mistake of watching the first episode of it right before bed, so that wasn't a smart move. But like so many people I loved the series and have been ravenously destroying the mangas as they have been released. I am very clearly a fan.

I had kept my eye on this one since its release last year. I saw a number of youtuber's stream their own let's plays of it throughout the year and it seemed fairly simple in its concept and really needed to execute on two major fronts. I had it on my xmas list this year but didn't get it, but I did have a good amount of Amazon credit after the holidays, so with a little extra spending money to burn I got myself a copy of....

ATTACK ON TITAN:(PS4)

The campaign mode of this game is generally condensed telling of season one of Attack on Titan but for those of you who do not know: over a century prior to the start of our story, humanity was attack by this species of gigantic humanoid monsters called Titans. They devoured humans on site maliciously and without mercy. Humanity was pushed near the edge of extinction forcing the remaining populous into a city protected by 3 massive walls, With royalty and the wealthy class in the center, and the poorer and downtrodden in the outer ring. For over 100 years, these walls protected humanity.

We take the perspective of Eren Yeager, his adoptive sister Mikasa Ackerman, and their friend Armin Arlert. Eren has a long standing desire to see the world beyond the walls, and quickly gets his wish as a massive 100 meter Titan looms over the walls and smashes through it, allowing smaller titans to invade the city. Thousands of lives are lost, and Eren loses his mother as she is eaten by a titan. Eren swears vengeance to kill all titans and joins the ranks of the military, with Mikasa and Armin in tow.

Five years pass and they work their way to cadets before deciding what sect of the military they are going to station to, with working omni-directional gear that is used to combat titans when the walls are attacked again by the colossal titan. With another opportunity to fight, Eren submits to his bloodlust and takes the fight to the titans.

Armin, Eren, and Mikasa

Now this is somewhat of a simplified summary of the basic events that get the game in motion, but I glossed over quite a bit. The game, in all honesty, kind of does as well as the cut-scenes between missions give us rather brief expositions of the story to transition us to the scenes that take us to the next mission. It's not a bad telling and if you have never seen Attack on Titan it will at least keep you up to speed, but if you are looking for the plot line, you really should watch the show.

Thankfully in my case, I didn't give a shit about the story development because I have seen it before. What I needed from this game was to be successful at two things and only two things. One: is it fun and fluid to fly around the city using the omni directional gear? And Two: is to fun to use said ability to fly around to kill big dumb derpy Titans? If this game succeeded on these two points, I would consider this a worthwhile purchase.

So lets start with moving around. There is a standard run and jump which you will use pretty much never. For some areas like open fields you can ride horseback, but 90% of the game will involve you using the Omni-direction mobility gear (or vertical maneuvering equipment, whatever). It works fairly simply enough, you tap the square/X to fire off an anchor for your gear, It doesn't need to aim so long as you are in high terrain, and it will immediately yank you up into the air. As long as have a visible anchor symbol, you can continue to press the anchor button and you will swing continually as long as the environment allows.

I should stress holding it is all you need to do, I was trying to time my presses and it was slowing me down. You can also use the jump button to fire a burst of gas from your tanks to increase you speed or keep you airborne if you are trying to jump a wide gap or something. For the most part it works pretty easily, and the only real problem comes in sometimes when you smack into the side of a building. It doesn't work exceptionally great for going straight up in the air.

Flying around the map is a joy to do. 

When approaching Titans to fight you will be able to switch from mobility mode to combat mode. Its more or less a lock on, and when you lock in on a target you are able to fire off anchors into them. This allows you to swing around your target, and more importantly allow you to get above them. Titans will usually have 5 targets on their knees, elbows, and nap of the neck. As we know, you can only KILL a titan by attacking the neck, but occasionally there material drops in the arms and legs, so its wise to try to farm that when you have the chance.

Battle is somewhat straightforward as well. Once you are anchored onto your target, you can flip between the targets and re-anchor at will. As long as you are moving the analogs you will continue to shift your position and it will let you know about how far away from the titan you are. If you let go of the analog your ODG will start to reel your in towards the titan. Upon getting in range you can tag the triangle/Y to make an attack. You need to speed to really deal damage so you want to start from far enough away that you can build speed before the strike. Otherwise you'll need to use a burst of gas or you'll fudge the attack.

Flying with the anchors in combat can be finicky when doing it in close quarters or when fighting multiple titans. A titan will never trip up themselves or you on an anchor attacked to them, but if you swing and cross through a tree, building, or another titan the line will snap and you'll need to re-anchor. And these pricks will trip up your line and try to grab you a lot, so be ready for it.

Every single kill you make in the game is immensely satisfying.

Generally, when going through the game either in the story mode or online mode, you will enter a location with a main objective. You could dash right to the objective and take it down, but you will usually get a pretty shitty ranking for that. While traveling the map you will that other characters will be on the map and they may be in trouble. There are various side objectives that these characters are doing (like killing titans, defending a point, escorting someone to saftey) and you can go to help them to keep them alive. If you do, chances are you will gain better materials and they will assist you in the fights for the rest of the level.

Yes, you aren't fighting alone. There are a number of varied survey corps members around as well as main characters. Each of these have a rank of effectiveness so naturally you'll want to help your teammates to get better support. For characters like Armin and Hange, who have the ability to control their teammates attacks, its almost crucial because it basically gives you a series of homing shots. 

Characters have abilities that develop as you level them. I mentioned strategists like Armin and Hange who have abilities that keep them safer in battle from a distance, but then you have heavies like Mikasa or Levi who can pretty much yo-yo themselves for multiple attacks, which allows them to bring down titans faster than other characters, There are also characters who are better at resource collecting. The story mode lets you run through a majority of these characters so you can get a feel for who you like when you go into online mode.

As you might have guessed, Levi is the most busted character in the game.

And for those who watched the show or read the manga before hand? Yes you will have segments where using a titan will be in play. But I'll be 100% honest with you? This is probably the most boring aspect of the game. You can run at speeds and slug it out and throw other titans, but it just feels like it turns into a regular brawler. A regular old brawler is not why I am here.

Lastly, as I've mentioned there is materials you get during missions. This is what allows you to upgrade your ODG or swords. There isn't a whole world of difference between the main types of gear. For swords do you want range, power, or capacity/durability. For ODG do you want speed, Range, strength, and capacity. Honestly, I found it best to just keep upgrading the standard gear because they were the most balanced, but if you dabble further into the online scout mode, you'll need to tailor your gear for harder missions.

In online, multiple players can use the same character.
So if you wanted 4 titans to play the game in boring mode, you could.

It should also be noted that your gear isn't indefinite. There is degradation to your primary equipment, namely the amount of swords you have to use, how long they last, and how much pressure you have to air dash around. There are scouts littered across the map that you can stop at for a quick re-supply, but with the right equipment I've found that this rarely is an issue. You also have the ability to trigger a decisive battle which will give you increased attack, and small boost to your gear.

The Scout Mode is more or less the online version of the game. You can continue to play increasingly challenging missions for more supplies and experience as well as a mod where you can scout multiple missions in a row. Whats nice about this is you have the freedom to choose what character of the majority of the cast you'd like to use. So when I played online, it was a lot of Eren's, Mikasa's, and Levi's. I was constantly hunting for materials so I often used Christa, which seemed to annoy most of the groups I played with because she is probably the weakest character in the game.

A weird thing about the online mode of the game is I was under the assumption that the party/room leader was who got to selection missions. I had this one asshole invade one of my games, My room was set that I was clearly focusing on missions at this level of difficulty, and after doing one of them this prick would go into the mission NPC, change my mission to a different mode entirely and then ready immediately, thus locking the mission in place and not allowing it to be changed. It was fucking annoying and I had to kick him because it was my room.

Because you are a chump, Armin. Grow a pair and fight like everyone else is.

I find the soundtrack to this game to be simultaneously great and generic at the same time. This is something the Tales Of series tends to struggle with. They managed to produce this epic sounding score that feels great when you are battling titans or flying around, but if you asked me to hum a few notes of my favorites, I couldn't do it because its all utterly forgettable. I honestly don't know how this is possible but its surprisingly common it feels like.

Graphically I guess you could say its got kind of a washed out cell shading to it? I don't know how to describe it but its something about the grittiness of how the characters are animated makes them contrast sharply to the backdrop and environment around them it works to make the characters pop in their otherwise grimy surroundings.

Using your decisive flare can get you out of pinch or give that last push on a hard titan 

The game honestly could have tooled with the upgrade and progression system somewhat. It feels like hunting for supplies is always a chore and if you are playing online good luck trying to get people to help you do it. You have to clear as many as you can as fast as you can to really get A and S ranks on your missions and most people just dash to the finish and kill the boss. You'll get C's for that. It causes you to miss out on a lot of bonus supplies for equipment that honestly is only marginally better than what you are using. Expect to be checking back a lot.

And one can argue that the game is incredibly repetitive. The real meat and potatoes of the game will be you flying around on the ODG in massive open environments around swarms of titans. The only things that break the pace are the few missions where you actually get to control a titan, but as I've said earlier, doing so takes away from what I feel is the fun part of the game. So yeah, not a whole lot of real variance to the game from the start to the finish. The biggest challenge really is learning its somewhat awkward controls. Even once you beat the story, the online missions are basically variants of story missions with slightly changing difficulty.

Not unless you are playing with friends, Hange.

But you know what? I played this game for HOURS. Went completely through the story mode, hopped online and did a bunch of missions with some random strangers, and I almost never got tired of flying around and hacking away at titans. The increasing difficulty of the missions some how did just enough to really keep me engaged with this game for a lot longer than it should of. Leveled up a bunch of characters and pretty much kept playing it till something new came out.

So I consider this worth the purchase I paid for it. It goes on sale often and will probably be looking a price drop sooner than later, so for what its worth I enjoyed Attack on Titan. While it might not be the most developed and fleshed out game to ever come out, I said at the onset that it had to do two things right and on that front it most certainly succeeds. If you are a fan of the series Attack on Titan will provide you with a fun experience, just don't expect to probably come back to it after you've moved on to something else.

I seriously don't get why the show is deviating from the manga for season 2.
That story is so friggen good.

The Witch and the Hundred Knight (PS4): A very Disgaea take on Zelda.

Since I no longer work at Gamestop (thank god), I don't have the luxury of getting to try things before I buy them anymore. I sometimes check redbox to see what they have on hand, but some of the things I spy on aren't available. As luck would have it, some of my my neighboring libraries have much better video game budget than the one I work at and have a pretty new and put to date selection of gamery to pick from.

This one I had seen for a while, but I never jumped on because Nippon Ichi software can be a real hit or miss for any game that isn't Disgaea. Sometimes I've gotten burned on them, sometimes I've found a gem that ended up being underrated. But I'm a sucker for anything kinda anime RPGish so since I had the ability to play this for weeks for free, I took a stab at....

THE WITCH AND THE HUNDRED KNIGHT:(PS4)

(Played in 2016)

In this adventure we are set in the world of Medea, your prototypical fantasy realm that is just on the verge of some technological advancement. In this realm exists a large, but incredibly toxic swampland that is surrounded by forested area. Within this swamp resides Metallia, and arrogant, cocky, and downright mean woman with her robotic servant Arlecchino. 

Metallia is a self proclaimed Swamp Witch and although she is not recognized in any official capacity by the realm's other witches, she is fiercely powerful and practically bursting with magical potential. She has been at war with the forest witch at her borders, but Metallia has one major weakness in that she physically cannot leave her swamp without becoming severely weakened. So to combat this, she summons a small familiar she believes to be the Legendary Hundred Knight (you) to swing the battle in her favor. Despite being smaller and weaker than she believed, she sets him out upon the world to find a series a pillars that will allow her to spread her swamp, and thus her ability extend her reach and power upon the world.

So I'm not gonna lie. Despite being a protagonist? Holy shit Metallia might be one of the villainous characters in a game. Now I know that Nippon Ichi does a pretty good job of weaving a tale despite managing to be pretty tongue and cheek with its story, but it was incredibly hard to get into the role of working for Metallia because she quite literally has zero emotional compass. She lashes out with vulgarity, violence, and unfiltered fury, (a girl after my own heart really.).

But you don't actually ever really play as Metallia. You control the Hundred Knight, You are given the option to give your character a name in the onset of the game, but Metallia promptly ignores it. Throughout the story you get the choice to make a couple of decisions to either agree, disagree, ignore or question something you've been told, but from what I understand there are only a few crucial decisions that can really effect the ending of the game. So in my playthrough of the game, I found myself questioning everything I was told because despite being on Metallia's side, I found her reasoning for things questionable.

The visual novel story elements are in place, as is standard for most NIS titles.
From what I know, we never get this question answered.

So I expected this game to be a JRPG or some kind of tactical RPG because that tends to be Nippon Ichi's entire wheelhouse, but surprisingly it ended up being a top down action adventure game. As cheekily described by article title, The gameplay of this game feels reminiscent of the classic of the traditional Legend of Zelda series or the original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Top down, hero center, slash baddies. Generally the objectives are a simple get to the other end of the level. You don't have to do it in one go but the end mission rewards tend to be better if you do. But as you travel you will continually bust open pillars that allow you to return to base and cash in on the XP you've earned to that point.

Now it wouldn't be very Nippon Ichi if they didn't take a relatively simple system and over-complicate it. So generally your weapons follow a kind of rock paper scissors system to them. They vary between slashing weapons, smashing weapons, and magic weapons. Typically these fall swords, hammers, and staves, but the thing to really make a note of while you play is what type of damage the weapons do. For example you might find axes instead of hammers which are still super slow and damaging, but do slashing damage instead of smashing. So if an enemy is completely immune to slashing damage, your shiny new axe amounts to jack shit.

You can equip up to three different weapon sets so you basically get a 5 combo attack based on your varied weapons so you can focus one type of damage, or mix and match if you like. But from my experience most of the baddies of an area usually all have similar damage resistances per area so I found it most effective to set each set to a specific damage type. In addition to this, most items are marked with a 1-5, so as long as you have your weapons placed in numerical order, you will get an increasing damage buff per swing. You are going to be flooded with gear often, so make sure you go through and makes sure you have the best stuff equipped at all times.

But because of the nature of the Hundred Knight's summon, you only get so much time away from Metallia, so every level is timed more or less by this Giga calorie system. How it works is you have a counter on the top of the screen counting down from 100. It decreases faster as you recharge your stamina, use specials, run, or take excessive damage. It constantly depletes to heal you so you have to pay attention to it because if it drops to zero you have significantly reduced stats. There are multiple ways to restore it such as using your bonuses received from smashing baddies to restore it at pillars along the map you uncover, eating food items, or eating baddies on the screen (yes, you can eat enemies).

There is a limited amount of space for the rewards you get, since Hundred Knight isn't the smartest thing in the world, he eats them to keep them safe till he gets back to Metallia. So the loot you collect is stored in his stomach. You only get so much space in your stomach and you lose it even faster if you eat enemies, so when your stomach gets full you have to use a Bowel Dump to get the garbage out of your stomach. (I am not making this up, god I wish I was. -_-)

NIS's knack for hilarious flavor text is prevalent in this game as well.

You also as you play along the game start to gather various familiar summons for you to use in the levels. These vary in use to helping you in battle, destroying obstacles to allow you to continue, triggering far away switches, or utterly decimating bosses. Most of these I found myself not using unless the level required me to use one to proceed. The main exception was the trapper which sometimes net some interesting items of upgrade or sale. It wasn't till the end where I got this massive Tower summon that I could drop two off that fired off homing magic shots. Since magic is the hardest attack attribute to deal damage with, these were game breaking.

There is also a job class system sort of. Hundred knight will unlock about 8 different attack styles or classes that will affect your base stats and also provide different effects. Honestly the one your start off with is your most basic and balanced so I found little reason to switch off of it at any point. You can also set two sub categories for additional boosts at reduced experience, so its always good to have multiple set. I tended to prefer the Ninja class because it basically let me continue to run at incredibly reduced stamina and Gcal depletion. Cap it off with another attack or defense for your 3rd and you have a pretty solid build for most of the game. If it stops working switch them up or go to an older level land grind some of the others.

Ninja and Wonder Knight were staples, The third can fluctuate as needed.

These might have been more effective than I gave credit for, but I rarely used them.

Following its Disgaea lineage, TW&THK also features its own Item world of sorts in some kind of alternate reality rouge-like tower. It features a story of the characters you've met so far but in some form of alternate timeline/reality version of them. It's the only place where you actually get to play as Metallia as some kind of last ditch summon for big damage, but given the item I sacrificed to get in there all of the baddies in there for like 50 floors were completely piss weak. The main reason to go in here is this is the location where you can get materials to upgrade your items and weapons at the shops outside the tower. I literally didn't figure out this out until near the end of the game, and it doesn't really do a whole lot to explain it to you. It would have really come in handy for some of the later stages.

There is also a karma mechanic in the game as well that primarily comes from trying to take over NPCs homes for bonus items. If the karma meter gets too high NPCs will get hostile and try to kill you. They never do much damage, but you can't harm them so you'll need to go back to base to reduce your karma. It's not really a difficult thing to manage so there is little real effect to it that I found.

At the level of difficulty the tower I was in, I never really needed to summon Lia.

That is more or less of the core mechanics of the game. Despite all the additional mechanics this game tends to throw at you, its play tends to be pretty straight forward for the most part and the mild confusion at new controls are worked through relatively quickly. There is one level where you can smash baddies in groups of 6, so grinding for levels never really ended up being a problem, and the game as a meaty play to time to it. For most of its primary functions it has solid mechanics.

Graphically, and this comes as somewhat of a surprise to me, TW&THK is rendered with 3d models which I've found Nippon Ichi to rarely do. They aren't really fantastically rendered models and this was PS3 game so I'm willing to give somewhat of a pass on it, but they still don't look too great. usually though the camera is so far away from the models that you really don't get a sense of the level of detail for them anyways.  Story segments are done in the traditional visual novel style of gameplay this producer has stuck to for most of their games.

Sad this is, this isn't even as close to as bad as this game can get.

Speaking of, MAN some of the story segments of this game can get fucking wordy. Because of the very tongue and cheek nature of the writing, some of it can be pretty hilarious but some of the exposition seems to drag on for what feels like forever. This is exceptionally bad at the onset of new chapters. I have had live streams where if I let the dialogue run until it was completely spoken no joke some of these segments can go up to 30 minutes.

Another ridiculous thing TW&THK does is for some stupid reason, the game rolls the credits after you complete each individual chapter of the game. Thankfully its skippable, but for the life of me I cannot understand whey the developers felt that I needed to see it between each chapter. Perhaps they felt that this game was going to bomb so they wanted to make sure the credits got seen at least once before the player eventually quit. Or perhaps they felt they did such a great job with that text roll they thought it was the most enjoyable experience of the game. It's completely stupid and I have no idea why they did it this way.

The cast of characters for the most part generally likable. Although admittedly it might take a little warming up to some of them, I don't think there was a character I liked from the moment they were introduced in the game but as I played through a chapter or two I needed up liking them a little more as I understood them. The only character who I really struggled to like through a good portion of the game was Metallia herself because she's such a rotten bitch. For an early spoiler, in the 2nd chapter f the game she does defeat the forest witch, but as she's weakened the forest witch exclaims not to kill her because she is actually Metallia's mother.

Metallia's response to this basically equivalates to a "So fucking what? Who cares?" and places a hex on her. Not just a normal hex though, she felt the best way to curse her mother was to turn her into a mouse, jack up her pheromone production to 11 and the summon 3 large horny rats so her mother can give her "lots of brothers and sisters." God fucking damn, Metallia, jeeze... To be fair, the game does have that moment where it boomerangs and I suddenly wanted Metallia to get her way and fucking kill everyone, and I felt it does an adequate job of explaining her selfish nature. I give Nippon Ichi this, they are always good at weaving a tale.

Remember kids, this is the story's "heroine". Not the villain... maybe.

The hands down biggest complaint I have with this game is that the camera and its controls suck an entire bushel of weewees. The camera spin is incredibly slow, and you can only raise and lower the angle of it so much, so it always feels like the camera is too close to the action and is never really positioned in a way that you can easily see what is coming. On top of that, the fucking environments are always in the fucking way. So if you are going to be exploring a set of forest or a town with really tight alleyways? You get to eat shit. Enjoy looking at the tops of trees or buildings as enemies you can't see wail on you. Its retarded. There should be no reason I can't pan the camera higher up to get a better lay of the land in this style of play.

One last niggling complaint that I have is this game is very unclear about the process of getting the proper endings. There are 3 possible ones. One of them is Meh and its made by a very simple decision near the end of the game, where you basically have deny a mission 3 times to which you get a pretty shitty monologue. I youtube'd that one. The next ending is the "true ending" which might have been one of the shittest unfulfilling things I've ever seen. I was legitimately pissed because while it is an ending epilogue, its a real "Ha ha, fuck you". To get the best experience, you have to get the "bad ending" which is done by finding and defeating 3 optional bosses in levels you have previously gone through. The game does little to indicate this so I ended up missing them completely. There is a surprisingly little amount of online guide for this game.

That being said, after I was done with initial checkout of this game, I looked around to see that it was dropped to 20 bucks new at some stores. This is because its out of print so I had a agent further out into the state get me a copy of the game because I prefer the physical. I enjoyed it that much that I felt I needed to own it so I can finish it at my leisure. I still haven't completed the bad ending yet but I do intend to. I could absolutely sit down with this game for another 20 hours or so, but it is possible to get all 3 endings if you saved in the right places on a single run. It's not a very difficult game.

Every so often, one of these prolific companies that pump out games will release an underrated nugget that is worth playing. I definitely feel that The Witch and the Hundred Knight falls under that category. It's certainly not a game without its flaws and I wouldn't blame anyone who put this game down because of the tone of the narrative or wonkiness of some of the mechanics. It doesn't do anything to break the mold but it was a enjoyable game to play and it did enough to make me feel I needed to own it. From what I've heard there is a sequel in the works so perhaps they can polish this up somewhat. This one is hard to find physically but is still available digitally so if you are looking for something that's a little different yet familiar with a story that doesn't take itself too seriously, I would say its worth a play.

Seriously, Metallia should have killed everyone at Walpurgis.