Archive for May, 2018
The Death of Stalin was really great. :D I had so much fun watching this, I had to see it twice. :P Since I kept thinking about it all, I even had to read up on it, because I’m dumb and don’t know anything. :P I was really surprised how much of the movie appeared to be backed up by historic facts. You don’t see that every day. :P And Mr. Pink is in it too!
Hey it’s only been 7 years since this thing has been released and I’ve already played it! Yeah!
I’m not gonna say that Telltale’s BTTF is bad, but… it might be a good example why I was never in favor of continuing BTTF in any way. The game is not a train wreck per se and hardcore BTTF fans might still find something in this, but the limited scope (engine, budget…) doesn’t do much to make this series shine.
The game ends on the “to be continued” screen and since it’s been 7 years, I’m going to guess this is a promise they haven’t kept. Which seems a little bit weird, since supposedly
Back to the Future: The Game was Telltale’s most successful franchise prior to the release of The Walking Dead: The Game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future:_The_Game#Reception
So… What gives? They lost the license? No hot ideas for another season? All we do know, is that they planed doing a Season 2 initially, otherwise they would never have put this screen in at the end.
Chrono Trigger hasn’t just aged well, as they often say, rather: it’s shocking, how many elements in more modern games are seemingly executed in a less sophisticated way. Many great movies or games have this one supercool scene/event everyone remembers and likes – CT easily has a dozen such moments in it. It’s unfathomable. :P But seriously, I wish at least devs would go learn some lessons from this game.
I used to be a fan of a dev who rose to certain fame by making all these party based games, whose characters usually (or eventually?) overshadowed their games’ actual stories (this might even partially be the explanation why they kind of stopped trying to make their stories good in the first place). When I, almost by coincidence, saw the Giant Bomb Chrono Trigger Endurance Run (what was roughly a thousand years ago), I started to feel as if they were just ripping off Chrono Trigger. :D BADLY. :P I felt pretty stupid for not knowing this.
So obviously this endurance run made me want to play it myself and I did start it, but due to a hardware failure my playthrough was ended prematurely. So when CT was put on Steam, my time had finally come. :P The Steam version got a lot of bad press initially, but since they actually started to patch and improve the Steam version, it IMHO doesn’t deserve most criticisms anymore. I hate it myself quite a bit, when companies just dump something like abandonware on such a platform, hoping some assholes will still buy it without reading up on it first, but thanks to 2 substantial patches CT has escaped this fate (and a third one is still being worked on – at the time I wrote this of course). Deservedly so. The game itself is easily worth the money anyway, but due to their continuing efforts, this release is now as well – to me, at least. I don’t know if CT on PC is now maybe even the best version of the game – I leave that decision to the professionals. :P
One could probably write an essay on how good the soundtrack alone is and how it justifies a hall of fame entry all on its own, even if the rest of the game wasn’t any good (which it obviously is). I’m not going to do that here, it’s enough to note that I cannot imagine how the soundtrack could be even better. They nailed the tone of every scenario. There is a piece for every occasion, there is always an overwhelming sense of a scene being sad, happy, intense, hectic or outright heroic. Once the Chrono Trigger fanfare starts blasting, you know what you’ve done. :D Whichever situation it might be, they got a track for everything. There are even extra themes for the major characters. Sometimes I stayed in a room a little while longer, just to listen to the music.
The graphics manage to deliver the same intense energy. They have all the animations necessary, to sell these characters. Whether Lucca moves her glasses or Marle jumps around happily (probably my favorite animation) the details are aplenty. They don’t even use generic animations for walking. While Crono has a typical strut, Frog is literally jumping. And I still can’t watch Magus holding his cape in front of his face without being amused by it.
What is one of the major reasons why even the gameplay works so well for me, is how everything is explained and introduced. The game is actually quite complex and has lots of elements to it, but CT doesn’t dump everything on you in the first 5 minutes. At first Crono has just a sword, so you get used to fighting with it. Later Crono learns further techniques, then other people join him and they learn combos together… And even after this at some point they learn how to use magic. The next step is always only introduced, after the previous one was understood and the player had the time necessary to get used to it. There is no better way to ensure players can easily handle even a dozen different things a game has to offer, without making them hate a tutorial that’s too long or forgetting lessons again because it was too much at once.
This kind of thinking is then consequently applied to all aspects of the game. Things are elevated after a while, even after I thought this is how it was going to be for the rest of the game. It would have been for this way for countless other games, but not here. The player believes the party can only be lead by Crono and this well never change? Wrong! The player has gotten the hang of traveling through time by using gates? Great, but now you get your own time machine making these gates kind of obsolete! The time machine can only be used to travel through time? No, you’ll find out it can also fly! […] Chrono Trigger isn’t a short game, but because of all those tricks it pulls, it manages to stay surprisingly fresh, even many hours in. Again, without dumping options on the player, they will forget about and never use. There are a ton of good games available now (rather too many than too few), but in most of them one has to do nothing but learn 2-3 tricks and then repeat those until the ending credits start rolling.
CT doesn’t make it this predictable – for example the great, memorable boss fights in this game offer enemies who have usually unique immunities and vulnerabilities, which therefore require the player to learn a different strategy each time. Simply unloading the seemingly most powerful ability over and over again might even heal the foe. Not being able to fall into a routine of mere brainless button mashing, also helps with appreciating the story more. I had to learn to pay attention again.
I was so impressed when Crono is put on trial and all the player behavior from earlier in the game is taken into account. With flashbacks! Wow! You are being tested without even being aware of it. So damn cool. Did I mention that this game has like ~13 endings? I think?
And all of this doesn’t even begin to cover how satisfying it is to travel through time and see the outcome of all the changes made by Crono and his friends. Many possible changes await – the maps as well as the characters dialogs are reactive. And those are unique for every NPC in this game anyway… I imagine this is what some other games tried to pull off, which had the player play a character who moved through time, but failed to deliver at the same level for whatever reason.
Since I long to mention that this Steam version also includes all the stuff that wasn’t in the original SNES version, like the quite good anime FMVs and several additional areas (Lost Sanctum/Dimensional Vortex)… I’ll just do that here/now.
So this was a first time for me, seeing all these additions, since the mentioned endurance run was done on an original SNES – not that I still could remember everything from a vid I saw 6 years before playing it myself… The Lost Sanctum has a lot of painful backtracking, but otherwise it’s quite good too.
Ultimately, what we have here, is a bunch of various pieces, which are all great on their own already and end up creating an even better whole after being put together (which might be the most impressive feat of them all).
Chrono Trigger is essentially the ultimate adventure. You travel through time, experience lots of crazy stuff, find friends from various time periods, save the world (depending on your ending) and live to tell the tale (unless you die). :D There is little more anyone could ask for in a game. I have a very hard time thinking of any game I had more fun with (the best games I can come up with right now are as good, not better). Playing this back in 1995 must have totally blown peoples minds. There had never been anything like it at that point.
After all this, I still haven’t even really mentioned the characters. They fit well into the world and the story, they even have their own sidequests (sounds familiar? :P). What’s done so well here, is that they even have their own homes etc… Lucca has a house and the player can just go there and visit it and her parents are there too. This game really goes the full distance. Even the newest games usually have the characters just pop up without much of an explanation and that’s it. They are obviously only there for the PC to have some companions. That feels so cheap in comparison. CT offers much more immersion than that.
PS: This pretty much marks the end of my space on wordpress.com. There are like ~20 MB left now. Don’t know yet how to proceed best from here.
PPS: How often did I use the word even this time? :P
//Edit
Well, well… Obviously “inspired” by my entry here :P, Kotaku now decided to do their own Chrono Trigger write-up. I’ll add it here, because it has some nice behind the scenes info. :) I just hate the sentence “that Chrono Trigger turned out to be an evolutionary dead end”. Haven’t they played all the countless other games like Cosmic Star Heroine? I haven’t, but I will (I seriously just bought it on Steam and am going to start it any day now) and guess why – that’s right, because of Chrono Trigger! :P And more stuff is on the way like CrossCode. Dead end my ass! :P
All Spoilers:
1. So… we learn that even the wheel is just something build by the Engwithans. And without the wheel there is no distribution of souls back to bodies = no life. So how could there have been any life in the first place? [1] Which directly leads to
2. Eothas destroys the wheel at the end of the game in Ukaizo and then the game ends without mentioning this once. Who cares what whatever trading company does, if all of Eora is now facing a global hollowborn crisis? This is obviously the most burning issue and it’s also the only one not addressed at all. We are just so assume… what?
[1] JS kind of reacted to a very similar question and acted as if they did think about this, but decided to leave this part of the world shrouded in mystery anyway. https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/173973262826/pillars-of-eternity-2-spoilers-as-i-understand
[2] “What about the assertion that without the Wheel, all of Eora would die?” https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/174058952291/so-is-the-idea-that-before-the-wheel#_
Yay, just finished. Or :( rather. Loved it again. Almost everything was actually improved upon (and not just claimed in the ads). The list would be long. I especially liked how enchantment works now. I hated how the enchantment in Pillars I made everything feel bland and generic. It didn’t matter what item the player found, the same stuff could be slapped on everything. Terrible! Now, only unique items can be enchanted, nothing else and even those come with actual unique enchantments! ENCHANTMENT!
So weapons finally retain their individuality and it matters again which weapon someone has equipped. It’s also fun again to find something.
Being able to retarget spells during casting is another one of these sorely missed improvements. Finally a game is improved in an aspect that players actually want! Crazy!
Another new favorite of mine is definitely sneaking. I never switched to scout mode in Pillars I, I saw no reason to walk slower (honestly this is primarily what it did…), since even hidden objects can be spotted without it. Pillars II on the other hand made it so useful, that I sneak in every dungeon. All characters/monsters now have a vision cone and quests can change depending on how stealthy they were handled. It’s quite extreme how this morphed for me from never on in the original, to always on in the sequel.
The character models are also much prettier now, not that it matters all that much in comparison to these other high level changes (which enable a better gameplay). You see these characters only from way above… What does help the graphics tremendously though, are all these light/shadow effects and birds and moving trees. This is extremely effective in making the world feel more alive. It’s surprising almost, how much this helps against the game looking dead and sterile (which Pillars I does now in comparison). The mere quality of the maps was always very high, so it’s not surprising that it was almost impossible to raise the bar here since Pillars I. This isn’t to say the ones in Pillars II aren’t great, rather that the quality of such a 2D background can only be this high.
Rain and day/night cycle weren’t as great as I hoped they would be though. In Witcher 1, way back in 2007, people would run in houses/avoid getting wet when it started raining, they did nothing fun like that here.
What didn’t change again, is the characters/companions/party members. I never thought they were actually bad, like too many jerks claim, but there weren’t any “stars” among them, is what I’m saying. This hasn’t changed. In Pillars II, there are (again) no characters like Morte or… let’s say Varric. They play it very safe (probably too safe – at least for my taste), which results in characters that are almost bland. They are serviceable/okay, but that’s it.
What they did with their relationship system has a lot of potential though. Characters can now have a relationship which each other and not just the PC. Which makes it almost more interesting to me than the tired “wanna bang” BioWare routine. Companions can also start hating each other. Pallegina and Xoti were clashing every now and then, because one of them loves and the other one hates religion. So naturally I would always put them together. This doesn’t lead to either of them leaving however, this much still only happens if the relation to the PC is bad. I genuinely hope they won’t drop this and only refine it for future games.
It definitely could need some polish here and there. Aloth never had any opinion on my PC, his value firmly stayed at 0 for the entire game. His likes and dislikes are so few/exotic, that nothing I ever did pushed him in any direction.
What I liked very much, was how I was allowed to choose the class (out of 3 choices which made sense for the respective character) of every character joining me. I didn’t get too exotic with it, I thought Eder really should be a fighter, but it was great to have the option. There is always another playthrough.
I never had the sidekicks in my party. Not even once, outside of leveling them up. There were just too many characters. Especially with slots for only 4 of them. I do understand the rationale behind having/needing them. It’s possible to piss off all the main ones and they could leave. Or they could be permanently killed. And then the PC could end up all alone. :D Okay there is the adventure hall, but not everyone likes to make their own characters. Icewind Dale never fully gripped me for this very reason. There are also no stronghold adventures this time, so there’s no need for extra characters just for those.
This is really neither a good nor a bad thing, but not having party members frequently in the active party has them further behind as before. Suddenly they have 20.000 XP less and Pallegina was level 18 all of a sudden while everyone else was already at 20. It’s not a big deal, because I reached 20 (=max level) a while before the end (if one does everything), it’s just that Pillars I always had party members one level behind max. This might only matter to people who play at highest difficulty. I didn’t.
Which brings me to the ship combat. I honestly expected to dislike it after seeing it in some videos, but boy was it fun to me. I did all the ship-bounty quests for all factions and attacked every single slaver ship. At the end it’s possible to enter a sea battle personally or just sail on (for the people who hate it) and that was just ideal, I would have been so disappointed if there wouldn’t have been another opportunity to have a ship battle. Naturally I got myself the best ship with all the upgrades and my crew was just awesome. Maybe I should just go ahead and get myself Nantucket (which was kind of an inspiration for this AFAIK). :)
My ending came without a big bang or anything, it was just okay (actually the central question I had wasn’t even answered, which is kind of a letdown). It wasn’t great nor bad, just like most of the characters. But it’s hard to ask for more, if there already are thousands of ending slides, for all the possible combinations.
I wonder how they are going to throw the DLC into this game. I don’t think it’s known yet, if it’s going to be thrown into the game again like Pillars I did it, or if it’s going to be AFTER the main events. It’s probably going to be the former.
Before I fall asleep completely, I guess I could also mention the eternal Steam/GOG struggle a little bit. What weirds me out the most here isn’t any more, how Steam is always the better supported platform, it’s that the devs act like they want it this way. From my perspective, it should be more desirable for a company, if they have the option to sell their games in more than just one single store. It seems so short-sighted, to care only about the one store, when this can lead longterm to nothing but a higher and higher margin for that store. They obviously won’t take a lower cut, once their competition is gone.
So yeah, GOG generally gets the patches later (I can’t tell whose fault that is), all the promo stuff like this scavenger hunt they did for Pillars II on Steam is… only on Steam. :P And was the backer beta (I didn’t have access) again Steam only this time? I heard a rumor the items from the scavenger hunt would materialize on GOG too at some point, but that hasn’t happened yet. None of this stuff might be too important, but it still feels weird to buy the same game and yet get less for no good reason. It’s not like Steam costs more after all. If anything, they earn less on Steam because their fee is higher (I’m making this up, I have no idea how much Steam takes for each game sold).
The game had only very few glitches during my playthrough. All quests worked, it never crashed – which is obviously the most important part. Several times icons were missing and only displayed a placeholder. No biggie, with hundreds of different items in the game, this can happen. They should probably fix the scrolling in the game. It happens all the time, that the “continue” option is out of the visible area and scrolling is necessary to see it. When ENCHANTING items it also always usually happens, that stuff jumps around in the left pane. Everything works though, it’s just a visual glitch. The only real bug I encountered, was after loading a save, almost all my gold was gone because the game thought for some reason dozens of days had passed, so it was spend for wages (for the ship crew). Luckily all I had to do, was to load the same save again and the bug didn’t surface anew.
It took me around 80 hours to finish this (I played all quests I could find, went to every island and did a lot of ship battles), which is about the same time completing Pillars I took – but I only remembered the time including White March and obviously the Pillars II DLC isn’t out yet. So once they have their complete edition out, it will definitely be longer than the first game.
JS mentioned a few times (he didn’t promise) that it could be a thing to port the fist game into the more advanced engine and I genuinely hope this is going to happen at some point.
What should be mentioned, is how horrible the loading times were in Pillars I and how they got longer, the longer the game ran. Pillars II was supposed to have this new/better streaming system to cut down loading times, but honestly, it hasn’t changed much. There is definitely an improvement, the loading times haven’t gotten longer despite better graphics (and so on) AND they seem to have fixed some of the mem leaks (or whatever the cause for the ever-increasing loading times was) and yet the loading screens still are way too time consuming. There still are these quests too, which make this impossible to overlook. The Huana Queen is on the third floor of her palace, which means that every stage of a quest that involves her, sends the player over 3 loading screens in and 3 out… I dreaded every visit.
Naturally I imported my save from the prequel instead of just clicking a legend together. I can’t tell what’s the effective difference. I only noticed that one of the conditions for Maneha were missing in the questionnaire. It’s possible to make her forget, or learn to live with her memories. The latter option is missing and can thus only be obtained by importing a save with this decision. It’s not a big deal, again, because it’s only used for one scene in the game (as far as I know), I’m just curious why they left it out. Or could they simply have forgotten about it?
Other than that, the effect of the imported save is minimal. At least for my character, there weren’t any groundbreaking effects. I ran into Wirtan at some point and quite frankly, I had to think hard for a moment who that even was. He’s a character who only very briefly appears during a minor quest in Gilded Vale.
The most noticeable effect of the import must be the 3 returning characters Edér/Aloth/Pallegina. That was easily enough to appease me.
My favorite effect of the import must be the letter from Aufra though. Her fate was one of the reasons why I picked the Hylea ending in the first game. So I couldn’t have been happier to learn that it worked out the way I only hoped it would. Often it’s really the little things.
Which reminds me of Whispers of Yenwood. I really liked this sword, it being “the official weapon” of the ruler of Caed Nua and all. I didn’t even expect to see it again, so it was supercool to get it back along the blade of the endless paths. Of course I ENCHANTED the sword to legendary status as soon as possible. :) This sword seemingly always shows up (even if no save is imported), the blade of the endless paths however, doesn’t (even if this sword was set to forged in the questionnaire). :)
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