selenicseas | Entries tagged with video game review

Purchased through: Steam

Hours played: 78.9 (main story complete)

Horizon Forbidden West is a game I was waiting to play since it was released. It's actually the entire reason I upgraded my PC – I looked up the final fight of Burning Shores and realized there was no way my GPU at the time would be able to handle it. Unfortunately, I didn't get to that boss fight, as I only got 1 hour into Burning Shores before burning out on the game entirely.

This game is much bigger than Horizon Zero Dawn. There are more places to explore, more sidequests to complete, and more items to upgrade. It's very easy to get sidetracked by the side content and end up incredibly overleveled by the time you get back to the main quest. And since I'm the sort of person who likes to do all sidequests possible before focusing on the main quest, I was overleveled for most of the game.

It's very easy to level up and gain skill points. Maybe even too easy. I hit level 50 before getting to Thebes, and was level 59 by the beginning of the last main quest, Singularity. Leveling didn't feel like it slowed down in the higher levels, either, despite the experience required increasing for each level.

Combat didn't seem as difficult as it was in Zero Dawn, though that's possibly because I actually took my time to get used to it in this game. In Zero Dawn, I dropped the difficulty down to story mode early on because I was having serious struggles getting used to the combat system. I did end up dropping the difficulty in Forbidden West toward the end of the game, but that was mostly because I wanted to hurry up and finish the game.

The Utaru and Utaru areas feel a little neglected. There isn't much reason to go back to Plainsong once you're done with quest chains in the area, and Utaru don't really appear in other areas of the game. The same goes for the Oseram and their settlements – you do go back to Chainscrape to talk to Petra later in the game, but once you've cleared those starting areas, there's no real incentive to go back.

The story seems to set up Sylens as a major character for the next game. It'll certainly be interesting to see how that goes, given that Guerrilla will have to replace Lance Reddick.

I'm not quite sure I like the Nemesis reveal. Far Zenith was already a serious escalation as far as antagonists go, and now there's a new antagonist that not even Far Zenith could defeat. How could the tribes possibly win against that?

Ultimately, I had the same issue with this game that I had with Jedi Survivor. It's an improvement upon the first game, but now there's way too much content for the me to go for 100% completion (which is something I always try to do) and I ended up burning out on the game towards the end.

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The Lake House is the second and final DLC for Alan Wake II. Kiran Estevez visits the Lake House, an FBC research facility run by Drs. Jules and Diana Marmont. Like with the previous DLC, this one is available through the menu screen. It's also available during a conversation Saga has with Estevez. This is the framing device for the DLC; Estevez provides narration throughout that makes it clear she's telling the story to Saga.

After Control revealed that Emil Hartman's Cauldron Lake Lodge had been seized by the FBC, I expected that this DLC would take place there. What would the Lodge look like 13 years later? What kind of research would the FBC have been doing? Unfortunately, Cauldron Lake Lodge isn't the Lake House. It's a separate place.

Rose looks at a poster on the wall that reads 'Do not contaminate the Lake House with unrelated art'.

There are, however, plenty of similarities between the two places. Like how Hartman exploited artists in an attempt to control the Dark Presence, the Marmonts exploited artists in order to study it. They even mention Hartman, and how they'll do a better job. If you thought what Hartman was doing was bad, then you'll think the Marmonts are much, much worse.

The new enemy introduced is the Painted – spindly humanoid creatures that pop out of paint on the walls and are invulnerable to everything except a weapon you get late in the DLC. They were created by the Painting, which itself was created when Rudolf Lane (who you meet at Cauldron Lake Lodge in the first Alan Wake game) committed suicide by creating a painting using his own blood. It's very obvious that the suicide was a result of the Marmonts constantly pressuring him into creating art.

A potential Painted on a wall.

Diana Marmont's method of study is, essentially, "AI art" generation. She attempts to produce manuscript pages in Alan's writing style by feeding them into an algorithm which then spits out pages en masse. And I mean it – there is a giant room filled with typewriters creating manuscript pages.

An FBC document detailing the automated typewriters.

Right when you enter the lobby of the Lake House, there is a video of the Marmonts, obviously emulating the style of Dr. Darling's videos in Control. They immediately fail to be as charismatic as Darling. In fact, there's quite a bit of resentment from Jules Marmont toward Darling, and both Marmonts toward each other. The manuscript pages written by Alan do describe the Marmonts' failing relationship – is this Alan's clairvoyance in action, or is it him influencing reality through his writing once again?

You learn some things about the FBC in this DLC. The Oldest House has been on lockdown since 2019. The FBC has been operating out of field offices – there's a mention of one in Boston. No one knows about Jesse or the Hiss, and everyone still thinks that Trench is the Director.

There is a completely optional visit to the Oceanview Motel where you travel to the Panopticon in the Oldest House. In the hallway leading to the Panopticon is a painting of the Director on the wall. The painting itself is halfway between Trench and Jesse – pretty odd, as all the paintings of the Director changed to Jesse immediately upon her gaining the Service Weapon. What's going on during the events of Control 2?

Estevez and Dylan have a conversation.

Inside the Panopticon itself is Dylan Faden, who gives a few cryptic comments that are definitely related to Control 2. There are some images (concept art, I imagine) of New York, seemingly confirming that we'll be going outside the Oldest House in Control 2. It's very similar to the conversation between Alan and Tom Zane in Control's AWE DLC, so I imagine we'll be able to see Dylan's perspective on this conversation with Estevez in a couple of years.

The final boss, a Taken version of Diana Marmont, was kind of disappointing. That's a bit of a recurring theme in Remedy's games – great atmosphere, great story, disappointing boss fights. I don't exactly play these games for the combat, so I have no issue with it. The room definitely could have benefited from better lighting; I had trouble telling where Taken Diana was because of how dark it was.

After the boss fight, Estevez sees a vision of Alan at his desk, giving her advice on how to find him – he's in the woods outside Bright Falls. That confirms that the events at the Lake House happened concurrently to Saga and Casey arriving at Bright Falls. I'd been under the impression that it happened earlier and that's why the FBC was already in the area to swoop in and take over Saga's investigation.

I'm now a little confused as to how long the events of Alan Wake II last. It can't be more than a few days, yet Ed Booker managed to get kidnapped by the Marmonts after meeting Saga in the Oh Deer Diner, the Marmonts got Taken, and the Lake House got wrecked beyond repair – and that's all before Estevez entered the Lake House.

I think I'll just have to assume that time works differently in FBC facilities, just like it (presumably) does in the Oldest House.

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Purchased through: Steam

Hours played: 81.7 (all quests complete, regions, chests, & altars 100% discovered)

After finishing my playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition at the end of September, I was left with a wait that was (thankfully) much less than what every other player of the Dragon Age series had experienced: one month, rather than ten years. At that point, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to play the game on release. I typically like to wait months, if not a year, for all the bugs and glitches to get ironed out. I can deal with all sorts of things, but serious performance issues aren’t one of them.

Fortunately, reviews showed that bugs weren’t a problem with this game. That sounded way too good to be true, but it was, in fact, true. I encountered zero bugs in this game. I was baffled. I’m still baffled. I don’t think that’s an experience I’ve ever had before in a video game. All the previous Bioware games I played had bugs, including the other games in the Dragon Age series.

There are spoilers discussed all through this review. Read at your own risk if you haven’t yet played the game.

A screenshot of Rook standing next to a posing skeleton in the Grand Necropolis.

1. Combat

I had little expectations on the combat going into the game (I didn’t watch too many previews) and ended up pleasantly surprised. I like the combat in Veilguard! After the painfully slow combat of Origins, endless spawning waves of enemies in 2, and the weird floaty attacks with no weight behind them in Inquisition, this was like a breath of fresh air. Enjoyable combat in a Dragon Age game? I didn’t think it could happen.

Combat itself was pretty easy once I got used to it. I had a few deaths in the early game and then none later on, unless I was deliberately doing something reckless. By the time my character’s level was in the mid-40s, I was barely getting hit and rarely had to use healing. I never had to lower the difficulty. I probably should have increased it.

I have heard that some people lowered the difficulty to get through combat because the fights got too repetitive. I never got that annoyed with the combat, but I do see why they would do that. Enemy variety isn’t that great – it’s either Venatori, Antaam, and Darkspawn the entire game. Sometimes, you fight demons instead. Or dragons!

After fighting three dragons in a single gaming session, I realized that all dragons follow the same AI pattern. It definitely made the rest of the dragon fights much easier once I could predict what they would do, but it was also honestly kind of boring. If each dragon had its own AI, fights could have been much more interesting!

I did have some reservations on the 3-skill limit. I didn’t like how Inquisition limited each character to 8 skills, and only 3 seemed like it wouldn’t be enough. It ended up being fine. Skills never felt necessary in order to win a fight, though they were definitely a benefit to set up combos and strip an enemy’s armor/barrier faster. I played a warrior and didn’t check out the other classes, so I can’t say how necessary skills would be for a rogue or mage. I can’t imagine it would be too different.

Similarly to Origins, each class gets two different weapon sets that you can freely switch between. Warriors have sword &shield and two-handed weapons, mages have dagger & orb and staff, and rogues get dual swords and a bow & arrow. I never used the two-handed weapons much as I didn’t like how slow they were – they trade speed for greater stagger. And unfortunately, none of those two-handed weapons were greatswords. If they were in the game, that may have tempted me to actually use them more often.

Also similarly to Origins, there are combat takedowns! Seeing one in a pre-release preview video definitely pushed me toward playing a warrior in this game. There are only two unique finishers – one for when an enemy is at low HP vs. high/mid HP – but I’m happy to see them regardless. That was definitely something I missed from Origins.

I have not tried out a rogue, but it doesn’t quite seem feasible to play an archer rogue due to the limited number of (regenerating) arrows. That is a little disappointing; I would have preferred more variety in building a character’s combat setup.

2. Locations and Exploration

The map situation is much improved from Inquisition. There are much fewer of them: one main map for each region, with a few smaller maps that you visit only during missions. The main maps can be explored at any time, but there are areas that are only unlocked later in the game. There’s no risk of suddenly wandering into a high-level area.

Platforming (there is a lot of it) is a lot easier than it was in Inquisition, where it was unnecessarily difficult. There’s no slipping off a rock structure you’ve spent the past few minutes trying to climb. There’s also no getting stuck on rocks in the ground.

Exploration felt rewarding. I didn’t have to go out of my way to find goodies. There was always something in a nook or cranny, whether it was a chest, altar, valuable, or codex entry.

As for the locations themselves...

A tree in Arlathan Forest that has torsos and legs sticking out of it.

Arlathan Forest as a whole seems like it was at least partially inspired by Area X in Annihilation – in particular, the rainbow shimmer and the people merged with trees. It’s one of the most beautiful areas of the game, and it’s revisited a lot, both in main and side quests.

Dock Town is one of the two city maps, and the only part of Minrathous (and Tevinter) you get to explore. It was always raining, which caused no issue with my PC’s performance, but annoyed me greatly when I was taking screenshots. You can see other parts of Minrathous from Dock Town, but you never get to go there.

Which is a huge shame, because I’ve spent three games hearing about the excesses and depravity of the Tevinter elite, and never got to see any of it.

There should have been one map for Rivain, not two. The Rivain Beach is very, very empty. It’s the only map whose hub, the Hall of Valor, is on an entirely different map. In my opinion, the Hall of Valor isn’t large enough to justify being its own map; it could have been merged with the Beach with no issue.

Another problem with the Rivain map being empty is that there’s no real exploration of Rivaini culture like there is with the other areas. Rivain has one of the most unique cultures in all of Thedas, with the peaceful Qunari settlements and seers that allow themselves to be possessed by spirits. Very little of this was explored in the game.

The Grand Necropolis is definitely one of the most interesting areas visited. I’m reminded of the Oldest House in Control – there are a couple of Control references in the game, and the Necropolis shifting its rooms around from time to time does seem to be one of them.

The other part of Nevarra visited is Blackthorne Manor, which is Mourne Watch-adjacent in décor. I’d have liked to see other parts of Nevarra, mostly because I’m curious if the entire country is decorated with skulls and candles that produce green flames. What does Nevarra City look like? Are there skeletons all over the place like there are in the Necropolis?

There are some areas that are only visited once or twice; one of those areas is Kal-Sharok. I was very excited when I learned you could travel to Kal-Sharok. It was finally time for dwarf lore! To my disappointment, you don’t actually visit Kal-Sharok. You visit an outpost, which has a lot of NPCs and what looks like a market. The dwarf-related valuables you find throughout the game, as well as the dwarf-related decorations you can buy (in the Black Emporium, of all places) make me think that there was supposed to be a Kal-Sharok faction that got cut.

Adding to this is Harding, the only companion that doesn’t belong to an in-game faction, who visits Kal-Sharok as part of her personal questline. I have no idea how a Kal-Sharok faction would even work, given how they’ve only recently opened up to outsiders, but it would have been incredibly interesting. Stalgard had some comments on how the Kal-Sharok dwarves had to “become like Darkspawn” in order to survive in isolation – what did that entail, exactly? How is their culture different from that of Orzammar dwarves? What have they discovered in that time?

The emptiness typical of open-world games isn’t present in Veilguard. There’s only one map per region that’s always available, but you visit five separate countries in this game, with one map per country (plus Arlathan, which is part of the Tevinter Imperium, and the Crossroads). I hate to complain that there aren’t enough maps after complaining about too many maps in Inquisition, but I think I have to do it here. What we got in this game isn’t enough to really immerse yourself in any one culture, let alone several.

But that’s the issue with having the game span all of northern Thedas, instead of just one country. If the game had taken place entirely in, say, Tevinter, this problem wouldn’t exist, because you could put all of your resources into fleshing out one culture rather than having to spread yourself thin on several.

3. Factions and (Mourn Watch) Reactivity

There are six factions that Rook can belong to in Veilguard, with one party member from each faction. I picked Mourn Watch because the backstory was excessively metal, and was definitely not disappointed. Reactivity was fantastic and it was everywhere – not just with Emmrich and in the Necropolis, but with NPCs from other factions as well. There were Mourn Watch dialogue options I could pick in conversations with the Wardens and Shadow Dragons. Anything that had to do with death, funeral customs, and the undead had a Mourn Watch option to pick.

Despite not being that related to the main story – the Wardens and Veil Jumpers definitely have more plot relevance – I’d definitely have to recommend the Mourn Watch faction if you’re interested in reactivity and learning more about Nevarran culture and everything related to the Grand Necropolis. Mourn Watch Rook definitely feels like a professional; they’re good at their job and don’t need Emmrich to explain things to them.

That was the only faction I’ve played, so I can’t speak to reactivity in the others. I did, however, notice that some of the other factions weren’t utilized as well as they could have been – namely, the Lords of Fortune. There is no Lord of Fortune décor you can buy from the faction vendor. They’re not even the main focus of their associated region. You end up learning more about Warden history than Lord of Fortune history in Rivain, which is actually very weird. They’re an afterthought in their own home.

Mourn Watch Rook approves of having undead at parties. So does Emmrich.

4. The Plot, the Acts, and the Quests

After finishing Inquisition, I assumed that the plot of this game would be stopping Solas from tearing down the Veil and causing mass death. That is actually what Rook & company are trying to do that the beginning of the game, but things go wrong and the remaining two Evanuris are released. They become the main antagonists of the game, while Solas takes a backseat in a Fade prison of his own construction.

I do think that stopping Solas from tearing down the Veil – and dealing with the elves that sided with him, who get zero mention in this game – would have been a stronger story, but... I didn’t care for Solas in Inquisition. I thought he was condescending. I doubt I’d be able to tolerate a game focused primarily on him. Veilguard, thankfully, was not focused on Solas. In addition, I actually liked Solas’s character here! That’s something I definitely was not expecting.

Act 1 is the slowest-paced of all the acts. I was actually going to write my First Impressions review after I’d recruited everyone, but it took me a little more than 10 hours just to recruit Lucanis. It took another ten hours to recruit Emmrich and Taash.

There are some optional fights (the blight Champions) that become available in Act 1 that are probably smarter to do in Act 2 once you’ve leveled up a bit and become used to the combat. I did those fights in Act 1. This definitely contributed to me thinking that the optional content was front-loaded into Act 1.

The Siege of Weisshaupt is definitely the high point of Act 1, and contains the best boss fight of the game. I genuinely don’t think anything else can compare to Razikale.

Act 2 meanders a little. It’s primarily comprised of companion quests, which I prioritized over main quests. As a result, there were several main quests at the end of the act that I had to do one after another, with nothing I between. The second part of act 2 felt strangely paced because of that.

After hearing about the Butcher of Treviso the entire game, he shows up toward the end of act 2 in one quest only. He’s an incredibly underutilized character! The one conversation you have with him is fascinating. He absolutely should have been a reoccurring NPC like the Arishok in Dragon Age 2.

The Act 2 Treviso quest chain felt more disjointed than the quests in Minrathous. I know that the quests in Minrathous and Treviso change depending on which city you choose to save. I saved Treviso, so I’m wondering if the Minrathous quest chain has a better flow to it.

I wish that companions would have made their own decisions at the end of their own questlines instead of the player picking what happens. I know why this was done (so players have more control over what happens in their own game), but I think it’s narratively weaker. I’d prefer if outcomes at the end of questlines were determined by actions during the game rather than a choice at the absolute last minute. That would make me feel more like my decisions actually matter, even if the outcome of those decisions isn’t ideal or something I like.

And this does actually happen a few times in the game, so it isn’t like Bioware hasn’t thought of doing it. Refusing to free the mayor of D’Meta’s Crossing leads him to getting blighted – he comes back as a Darkspawn to fight you in Arlathan Forest later. And punching out the First Warden means that when he shows up later in the Cauldron, he’s too out of it to give you any advice.

All of Act 3 feels appropriately paced. The leadup to the final boss, as well as the final boss himself (Elgar’nan) was done so much better than in Inquisition. I’d say that the final mission of Act 3 is more comparable to Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission. It’s much more extensive than the suicide mission, but the basics are the same. You assign different party members to different tasks, and if you pick wrong, they can die. It’s easier than it was in Mass Effect 2; it’s pretty obvious which party members are the correct options for each task.

5. Miscellaneous Things

There are awkward scene transitions through the entire game, like things got cut and never replaced. Some things that should have been shown on screen were straight up skipped (how did we get down into the Ossuary, for instance?).

I largely didn’t care for the music, but very little of the music in the series has really grabbed or stood out to me, so there’s no significant change there. I do think the background music in the Hossberg Wetlands did a good job of making the place feel unsettling. It provoked a similar feeling in me to the Korcari Wilds BGM in Origins.

I would have liked quicksaving in this game. There are plenty of autosaves, and you can pause and save just about anywhere, but I still want the opportunity to quicksave to my heart’s content.

If Bioware plans on more QOL updates, then I’d like to see something like the Golden Nug or New Game Plus. There’s no reason in particular to keep cosmetic appearances permanently unlocked. I’m not looking forward to re-collecting all those appearances in new playthroughs.

I wish there were outfits that properly showed off body tattoos. I ended up wearing the Antivan Crow casual wear most of the time instead of the Mourn Watch outfit solely because it showed off some of my Rook’s tattoos.

I’m kinda disappointed that the other races just look like humans now, but with horns or pointy ears. I’m aware that this is how elves and Qunari looked in Origins, but...I really liked the art direction for those races in Dragon Age 2! It was so unique! I definitely know why Bioware did it. They’d have to massively limit the character creator for elves and Qunari if they wanted to keep a certain look, and I can’t imagine any player would like that...which is probably why the game where you’re restricted to playing a human has these unique designs.

6. The End

Overall, I enjoyed this game. There’s plenty about it I liked and plenty I didn’t, just like with the other Dragon Age games. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite of the series (that spot will probably always be held by DA2), but it definitely ranks higher than Inquisition – and that was really all I wanted from this game: something I liked better than Inquisition.

Will I play this game again? Of course, but I’ll definitely need a break after marathoning the entire series during the second half of this year.

The Lighthouse during the Eclipse.

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Purchased through: Steam

Hours played: 10.6 (recruited Lucanis)

I’ve played for a bit more than 10 hours – honestly, 9, since I spent about an hour in the character creator – and I think that’s enough time to form some first impressions about this game. I don’t have the time or patience to organize anything into the form of a proper review, so here are my (largely unorganized) thoughts.

Shaders started compiling right upon booting up the game for the first time. It took around 15 minutes, though this apparently is dependent on CPU – and mine is not the best. Every subsequent time I’ve booted up the game, shader compilation has taken less than 1 minute.

I didn’t bother modifying the graphical settings; as it turns out, this means everything defaulted to “high”. I haven’t had to change it at all because everything is running really smoothly. I haven’t experienced any bugs or glitches so far.

I started getting a Dragon Age 2 vibe in the intro mission. I’m not even sure why; it doesn’t quite make sense to me when I think back on it.

I’m liking the combat for the first time in the series! I’ve seen it compared to God of War 2018, but I haven’t played that, so my comparison is the Star Wars Jedi games. I know that the success of Fallen Order is actually the reason that The Veilguard is a single-player game rather than a live service one, but I wasn’t expecting to see any actual similarities to it. Not just in combat, either – I think the level/environment design is also similar. Thankfully, there’s a lot less platforming.

Dialogue seems to be “faster” than in the previous games, but I think it’s due to the amount of autodialogue. There’s more of it than I expected.

Harding’s voice sounds a little different – I’d say it’s bubblier. I never spent that much time talking to her in Inquisition, so I’m not sure how much I’m remembering correctly or incorrectly.

Varric is, well, Varric. Still the narrator. I have no real thoughts on Neve and Lucanis yet.

Bellara has me wondering if Bioware wanted to bring back Merrill, but chose not to, since I believe she can die in Dragon Age 2. There are quite a few similarities between the two of them.

I actually like Solas’s character here, which is quite a shock since I didn’t care for him at all in Inquisition. I’ve only had two conversations with him, and the cinematography of those scenes was really well done. I’m also really enjoying being able to verbally slapfight him. It’s fun.

I wasn’t expecting to see Morrigan so soon. I think her outfit is okay except for the band that makes her look like she has a second pair of boobs. It’s way too broodmother for my liking. Who in the world approved that.

The open world areas I’ve started exploring – Arlathan Forest and Treviso – are so much better than the open world areas in Inquisition. I’m not getting stuck behind rocks every five seconds, so that’s a massive plus.

I’m definitely going to continue playing and will probably write up a full review like I’ve done with the other three games.

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Purchased through: Steam

Hours played: 102.8 (main game, Jaws of Hakkon, The Descent, and Trespasser complete)

Of the three Dragon Age games, Inquisition was the one I’d heard the most about. It was released in 2014, which is coincidentally the year I started using Twitter. I wasn’t involved in any gaming circles at the time, yet I still managed to hear about this guy named Solas, who was some kind of traitor and also bald.

Over the years, I heard plenty of other things – like the choice you make in Here Lies the Abyss and that Morrigan was in the game – but with little to no context. I also learned that Inquisition used a different engine, so things would be different from what I’d gotten used to in Origins and 2. That did not prepare me for just how different this game was.

This review is basically all criticism. While there are plenty of good things about this game (like the environments, which are gorgeous), the previous two games set up standards that Inquisition simply did not meet, in my opinion.

I had my first issue with the game as soon as I got out of the character creator and started playing. The controls themselves were different; the mouse buttons did the exact opposite of what I’d gotten used to in the previous two games. Keyboard shortcuts were also different. “Space” was now a jump button instead of pause. “V”, which had previously been used to turn off the HUD, was now a pulse that scanned the area for interactable items. In previous games, holding down “tab” highlighted objects. “Tab” now switches between enemies. Speaking of the HUD, there was no keyboard shortcut to easily turn that off. I had to go into the settings and do it manually.

All of this made me realize pretty early on that this was a console game ported to PC – and it wasn’t done that well, either. Maybe I’d have had a different experience if I’d played the game with a controller rather than mouse and keyboard, but I’m unable to use a controller for more than an hour without it triggering a massive amount of wrist/hand pain.

Inquisition is an open-world game. The maps are huge and there’s a lot to explore. There are crafting materials and upgrades to collect, people to recruit, rifts to close, and plenty of sidequests. There’s a lot to do, and plenty of it is optional.

That’s not obvious at first. While you gain power (used to unlock main missions through the War Table) though finishing sidequests, recruiting people, etc., there are dozens more opportunities to gain power than there are opportunities to use that power. I gave up on trying to finish 100% of the content in the game, and I still ended up with 100 more power than I needed by the end. I do appreciate there were so many different ways to gain power – so if you didn’t want to do one thing, you could do another and not miss out – but this was a little too much, in my opinion.

Actually, I think the entire game was too much, by around 30%. There were multiple maps (the Fallow Mire and Hissing Wastes, for example) that weren’t visited during any main story quests. And, due to how the story-relevant maps have tons of things to do on them, there’s no actual reason to go to the optional maps, unless you really want to go for completionism.

I have to wonder what Bioware was thinking with creating three (!) separate desert maps – the Western Approach, Hissing Wastes, and Forbidden Oasis. There’s no reason the important part of the Forbidden Oasis (Solasan) couldn’t have been integrated into the Western Approach. The Hissing Wastes could have been part of the Western Approach as well, since it’s got a large amount of nothing in it. Would it have been realistic to have a bunch of elven ruins, dwarven ruins, and Tevinter ruins in such close proximity to each other? No, but it would have been less frustrating to deal with.

I also think the Emerald Graves and Exalted Plains could have been merged into one area, but that’s mostly because the names are so similar that I keep getting them mixed up.

I played a mage in Dragon Age 2 and had so much fun that I thought I’d play a mage in Inquisition as well. Unfortunately, mage combat was a lot less fun here. I couldn’t hit people with my staff like Hawke did. Why, Bioware? Why?

Combat in general felt a little strange. Not just because of the reversed mouse buttons or the greatly reduced skills available, but because of how the game controlled in general, I think. Things felt very floaty, both in and out of combat – like the characters had no weight to them.

Related to this, NPC pathing was odd. Party members would follow you, but once you stopped walking, they wouldn’t stay still – they’d run around like they were trying to get to something and couldn’t. Sometimes this meant they’d jump on and off of the furniture in the environment.

I’ve heard that Inquisition, like Dragon Age 2, was originally designed to only have a human player character. It definitely shows. There were instances where my elf should have known something – like, you know, who Mythal is – and did not. Oddly, there’s also plenty of reactivity in other places (plenty of anti-elf racism, for example, and on a more positive note, Josephine greeting Lavellan in Elven), so I’m thinking this is a case of missing things due to rushed development.

What’s especially weird about this is how hard the game went on the elf lore. It is, as Sera would say, “too elfy”. I don’t think I would mind that so much if so much of the series so far hadn’t focused on elf lore. I’m feeling a little overexposed on it. I want to learn about the dwarves and qunari! The Descent helped scratch that itch a little, but it definitely wasn’t enough.

As an antagonist, Corypheus is kind of half-baked. He doesn’t actually do very much, and since you can take as long as you want between quests, he doesn’t feel like much of a threat. The game may have benefited from some time-critical missions like in Mass Effect 2 and 3, where there were pretty serious consequences if you didn’t complete certain missions in a certain timeframe. That would have made the stakes feel higher, especially if those consequences cut off access to certain areas or ended up with you losing some of the Inquisition’s forces.

The final mission and boss fight were underwhelming. It was much shorter than I expected it would be, and only the current party was involved. That wasn’t the case in Origins or 2; all of your party members were involved, even if they weren’t in your active party. But Inquisition’s final battle was so easy that more allies on your side would have ended the fight much quicker, so it might be for the best that everyone isn’t involved.

The DLC was much better than the base game. Jaws of Hakkon introduces an entirely new region, but there’s no actual filler in it. The sidequests are tied into the story and lore of the region. It’s also way harder than the base game. I was genuinely not prepared for the difficulty spike.

The Descent is much tighter and goes deep into dwarf lore, which I personally think is the most interesting part of the Dragon Age series. I’d say the only bad thing about it is the gear collection, but that’s entirely optional.

Trespasser is the last DLC. I’ve heard that there was some controversy when it was first released, as it’s the “real” ending to the game and shouldn’t have been unnecessarily cut out. I do agree with this; I’ve never liked cutting out companions and missions (Shale, Return to Ostagar, Sebastian, etc.) and selling them for more money. It’s really something that should be included in the base game, since it sets up The Veilguard. I think that someone who didn’t play Trespasser and then went right into Veilguard would be pretty confused as to why Solas is doing what he’s doing.

My main complaint with this game is that it’s an open-world game with all the faults of an open-world game. There was a time in my life when I would have loved an open-world game – when I was a teenager and would play one game for years at a time – but as I’ve aged, my tolerance for open-world games has gone down. A 100-hour game better have the content to fill 100 hours without resorting to filler or bloat, and that’s unfortunately what Inquisition does.

I do think there’s a good 40-50 hour game in here somewhere. I did like the game enough that I’d replay it again – with more quality-of-life mods – but only while skipping as much of the side content as possible.

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Purchased through: Steam

Hours played: 44.8 (main game + both DLC completed)

Halfway through Dragon Age: Origins, I started thinking about the kind of character I'd like to play in Dragon Age 2. I didn't want to play another warrior, so it was either rogue or mage. I was leaning toward rogue – mostly because I kept running directly into traps – all the way until the late game of Origins. By that time, I'd been impressed enough by Morrigan's high level spells that I settled on playing a mage in Dragon Age 2.

This was without any knowledge of the Mage-Templar conflict that made up most of the game. Needless to say, my roleplay decisions were as affected by playing a mage as they were by playing an elf in Origins. It made for a story that felt very personal.

I don't think I encountered any bugs in my playthrough, unless you count characters getting stuck on the environment and not being able to path their way out of it. Since they end up teleporting to you if you move too far away, it's more of a minor annoyance than anything else. I did experience a few random crashes, but half of them were provoked by a f.lux notification popping up (this has actually crashed a couple of games on my PC, not just Dragon Age 2). I'm not sure what caused the others.

Dragon Age 2 plays largely the same as Origins did. Both games use the same engine and have the same key bindings and controls. Combat is better; it's much faster-paced and easier to follow. Combat animations are greatly improved, especially for mages. A mage will even start hitting an enemy with their staff if the enemy gets into melee range, rather than just using spells. I thought that was a neat touch.

I used tactics maybe twice in both games, so I can't say if there was much of a difference or improvement there. I always found it easier and quicker to micromanage companions rather than create a new tactic.

There aren't as many skills and abilities as there are in Origins, but they feel more manageable here. In that game, it felt like I needed at least one of each class in the party at all times – one mage, one warrior, and one rogue. That felt less important here; there were times where my party was three mages and one rogue, and I didn't feel like I was missing something critical by not having a warrior.

Much to my delight, lockpicking was no longer linked to a skill. It became linked to an attribute (cunning) that you'd be increasing on your rogue characters. Opening locked chests was no longer an issue as long as you had a rogue in the party.

This game has a different companion approval system – rather than approval and disapproval, it's friendship and rivalry. Companions that disagree with you and don't approve of your actions won't leave your party – they'll stay, and their attitude toward you will change. They also get access to different abilities depending on whether you push them toward a friendship or rivalry. I think this contributed towards me liking the companions in 2 more than the ones in Origins.

I thought this was a massive improvement on the regular approval system. It had an actual impact on combat! I hadn't seen that in a game before. Admittedly, I've only been gaming seriously since 2018, so I haven't really had the chance to play that many games. This might not have been a new or novel thing in 2011. I genuinely have no idea. I was impressed by it, though.

Graphically, there are quite a few improvements over Origins. Aside from better textures on just about everything, there's also unique art direction! Elves and Qunari no longer look like humans with pointy ears or gray skin – they actually look like different species. I'm not a fan of non-humans looking exactly like humans except for one or two odd traits, so this was great.

Instead of having a list of dialogue choices, there is now a Mass Effect-style dialogue wheel with three separate options: diplomatic/peaceful (blue), sarcastic/comedic (purple), and violent/aggressive (red). Choosing a majority of one type of dialogue (blue, for instance) will affect Hawke's general personality and comments. Hawke ends up having more of a set personality than the much more blank-slate Warden of Origins, but that's fine with me. I'm not the sort of person who needs a blank slate in order to roleplay a character.

Now on to the negatives. There are a lot of repeating maps – a single cave, for instance, that is used in a lot of missions, with the only changes being that some areas are blocked off – and the game is largely confined to the city of Kirkwall and the surrounding areas. There are fewer "major" decisions you can make, and most of them limited to the endgame.

The third act is much less fleshed out than the other two, with one boss fight (Orsino) not making much sense if you sided with the mages rather than the Templars. The reveal of the final villain (Meredith) is very sudden, and the ending of the game itself is quite abrupt.

Overall, this game felt like it improved on Origins. The scope of the story was much smaller, but much more personal. There are fewer choices, both in character creation and in the game itself, so replay value for the sake of seeing different paths is much lower. It really could have used another year or two in development, but it's a good game even though it was rushed. It introduced mechanics that I thought worked very well, and I was very interested in seeing how those mechanics could evolve in future games.

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Purchased Through: Steam

Hours Played: 62.8 (main game, Awakening, & Witch Hunt completed)

I'd heard plenty of things about the Dragon Age series over the years, but never saw quite enough to get me interested in playing any of the games. Then the previews for Veilguard came out and the games went on sale as part of the Steam Summer Sale, so I figured that now was a good time to get into the series. I'd just finished playing Max Payne and didn't want to go right into Max Payne 2, so why not take a bit of a break with a completely different genre?

I wasn't planning on reviewing each of these games – up until the middle of September, I only had plans on writing up a review for Inquisition, since that was the only game that provoked some actual thoughts that I felt the need to share with others. But I realized that those thoughts don't quite make sense without discussion of the other games, so here I am.

This game came out in 2009. That's not that old, by my perspective, so I didn't think I had anything to worry about. I'd played some previous Bioware games (KOTOR and Mass Effect 1) and never encountered any serious bugs, so I imagined this game would be the same. I booted it up without doing any research whatsoever.

I should have done my research. I experienced my first crash at the Ostagar Bridge, which happened because I was looking around and trying to take screenshots. The crash kept occurring at the same place while I was doing the same thing (looking around and trying to take screenshots), so I just didn't do that and was fine for a while. I got a few more crashes, but they weren't unmanageable until I left Lothering and went to the Brecilian Forest.

That area had crashes and glitches galore. I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and learned that Origins has a serious memory leak issue on PC. I did find a way to fix it, to an extent – by creating a desktop shortcut that forced the game to launch using only one CPU. That lowered the number of crashes by 95%. It wasn't perfect, but it was good enough.

This is the particular text string I had to paste into the "Target" field of the shortcut:

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C start /affinity 1 DAOrigins.exe

shortcut properties image

I'm pretty happy I got that figured out, because I was seriously considering abandoning the game and jumping directly into Dragon Age 2. That's how frustrated I was with the crashes.

Another strange bug I encountered was being unable to take Steam screenshots in Cadash Thaig, and only Cadash Thaig. This occurred not just in the base game, but also in the Witch Hunt DLC. I have no idea what the problem is there.

Before I get into the rest of the review, I have one more complaint: the character creator. Bioware was never the best about putting proper lighting into their character creators, but Origins's stood out as particularly bad – especially in comparison to the following Dragon Age games – because there was no way to fix your character after initial creation. Having minor issues with your character's appearance is one thing, but I genuinely had no idea what colors I was picking for half the options.

I knew nothing of Dragon Age lore when I started the game, so character creation took a while. I settled on a Dalish (I had zero idea what that meant) Elf warrior, with an intent to focus on archery...because an elf should know how to use a bow. Yeah, that was my thought process behind it. Later on, I realized I probably should have gone with a rogue if I wanted to use archery. But that's how first playthroughs go – you make tons of mistakes and don't know what to do to get "ideal" outcomes.

For the most part, the game responded pretty well to my character being an elf. Elf NPCs were friendly to me, and there was a surprisingly large amount of racism from human NPCs, which definitely affected me roleplaying my character. There was only once instance (I unfortunately can't remember what it was) when the writing seemed to default to the player character being a human.

Like in KOTOR, the player character isn't voiced, and like in KOTOR, there are a variety of dialogue options to choose from. Some of the more evil-aligned dialogue options are pretty damn evil, but there aren't nearly as many unhinged evil options as there were in KOTOR. I remember a lot of the dark side-aligned responses being pretty ridiculous and petty (to the point where I couldn't justify picking them because of how ridiculously petty they were), while for the most part, they're a lot more toned down in Origins. I'd have much less of a problem doing an "evil" run in this game, I think.

The combat is a bit...well, I don't exactly want to call it boring, but I didn't find it particularly enticing or fun. My previous experience with the RTwP (real-time-with-pause) system was exclusively limited to the KOTOR games, and I struggled with it there – enough for me to consider RTwP a negative. Here, I had to turn down the difficulty until I got used to it – and thankfully, that didn't take too long! My previous negative opinions are now neutral.

I have some complaints about the abilities (spells for mages and talents for rogues and warriors). There are combat abilities (both active and passive). Included in those combat abilities is...lockpicking. Putting points into lockpicking means you can't put points toward some kind of combat talent. I found that my rogue characters suffered due to this in a way that the mages and warriors did not. Not to mention that it seems like lockpicking should have been a Skill (other skills include things like Herbalism, which allows you to make potions, and Survival, which allows you to detect enemies), not a Talent.

Each companion has a personal quest you can do for them. Some feel more fleshed out than others. Alistair's felt half-baked (even though it can lead to some pretty major consequences later on), while I thought Leliana's and Zevran's quests were done better.

Companions can approve and disapprove of your actions, and higher approval leads to conversations that can allow you to unlock a companion’s personal quest. Lower approval can provoke a companion into leaving the party. I imagine this was more of a problem with the game was first released, but the Ultimate Edition (which I played) has a shop where you can infinitely buy gifts that increase companion approval without consequence. Keeping them happy was never a problem after I learned about that.

There's a good balance between main quests and side quests. Side quests never felt like busy work, and I can remember only one quest chain going on too long for my liking. The DLC that's integrated into the main game (The Stone Prisoner, Return to Ostagar, and Warden's Keep) don't feel like filler – in fact, they feel like areas that were carved out of the game to sell as DLC.

There is plenty of DLC that isn't part of the main game. Of them, I only played Awakening and Witch Hunt. Awakening is better described as an expansion. It's much longer than the other DLC, and has its own unique maps, quests, party members, and plot. It takes place after the main game, and introduces some new skills and talents that I found made gameplay easier.

It also introduces some characters and plot points that I assumed would be more important, but turned out not to be. The Architect, who has quite a few similarities with a character who becomes a major antagonist in Inquisition, becomes much less significant in the following games. There are a few mentions in Dragon Age 2, but zero in Inquisition, which I thought was quite odd. Alas, maybe it will be more relevant in a future game.

Overall, I'd say Origins is a good game that holds up 15 years later. There's plenty of it that's outdated – it's very brown, and some characters' hairstyles are very 2000s – and getting it to run on a modern PC can be genuinely difficult. But with all the choices you can make that affect the game later on, as well as the following games, it has quite a bit of replay value. I already have future playthroughs planned.

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Max Payne is Remedy Entertainment’s second game, released in 2001. It’s old enough that it needs a few mods to run properly; I installed the Complete FixPack. Even then, I still dealt with a couple of issues, most of which were related to the mouse. Every time I started up the game, I had to change the mouse settings or the acceleration went wild. I also had an issue with the camera “snapping” while looking around in certain areas. I never found out how to fix that.

There are no subtitles in the game! The only time dialogue is subtitled is in the comic sections. That was super surprising – all games I’ve played from the turn of the millennium were subtitled, even the ones that had full voice acting.

Max in a bar. A beer sign on the wall says 'Real Men drink Casey

I played both Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 before Max Payne, and it’s been neat to see how both those games incorporated references from Max Payne. There’s Alan’s Alex Casey novel series, which are essentially the Max Payne games using a different name. There’s the use of the number 665, the “neighbor of the beast”. And there’s New York City itself, which reminded me quite a bit of the Dark Place in Alan Wake 2. Max even refers to the city as Noir York City.

A comic section of the game that refers to 'Noir York City

I didn’t realize that this was where Remedy started emphasizing the metafictional aspect of their works. At least, I’m assuming it started here. I’ve never played Death Rally.

A comic section of the game where Max finds a letter telling him that he's in a computer game.

The aforementioned meta aspects, as well as the nightmare levels, feel like the link between Max Payne and Remedy’s later games. Even though Max Payne isn’t part of the Remedy connected universe (Alan Wake & Control), it definitely had influences on them. There’s a part of Control that feels quite similar to the nightmare levels, particularly in the repetition of it. The Norse influences – Woden, Valhalla, etc. – are continued in Alan Wake and Alan Wake 2 – Odin, Thor, Baldur.

Overall, I feel like my attitude on the game was rather mixed. I had my frustrations with the gameplay, but that was mostly due to the game being 23 years old. Though I initially assumed the game would be around 15-20 hours, I’m glad it was shorter. I finished it in less than 9 hours. If it had gone on any longer, I think it would have outstayed its welcome.

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Nights Springs is the first DLC for Alan Wake II. It has three episodes, which are flavored as episodes of the in-universe TV show Night Springs written by Alan Wake himself. Each episode is around 45 minutes-1 hour long, which feels pretty appropriate for an episode of television.

Each episode focuses on a different character. These characters resemble their in-game counterparts, but are not actually the same. They aren’t even referred to by name, just by title: The Waitress (Rose Marigold), the Sibling (Jesse Faden), and the Actor (Tim Breaker). Datamining apparently revealed that there were supposed to be five episodes, with the additional two focusing on Alex Casey and Kiran Estevez. I imagine those were removed after James McCaffrey’s death.

Episodes are available through the main menu screen, but I’ve seen posts on Reddit stating that they can also be accessed in the Dark Place while playing as Alan. I have not tried this myself.

Rose stands in front of a sign pointing toward the correct beach

Episode 1: Number One Fan is one is a Rose Marigold power fantasy. It’s very pink. Everything has this pink tinge to it, including the sky and environment. It essentially has the same tone as Rose’s fanfiction in the base game, which suggests that Alan was aware of Rose’s fanfiction while in the Dark Place.

Jesse standing by a bus stop in front of Coffee World

Episode 2: North Star is Jesse’s episode. It starts off similarly to Control, except instead of the Federal Bureau of Control, Jesse arrives at…Coffee World. This version of Coffee World resembles the Dark Place, with similar lighting, enemies, and Tim Breaker. There are plenty of triangles here, including some that resemble the black inverted triangle from Control.

The first thing I actually noticed in this episode were some oddly low-resolution poster textures. That includes the poster in the image above. Despite fiddling with my graphics settings (which were set to high/ultra from the beginning), I could not get those textures to look better.

This episode felt like it needed a bit more work, like it was a surreal episode of TV that didn’t quite hit the mark. Maybe that’s the point? It’s one of Alan’s failed attempts at leaving the Dark Place. He tried to have Jesse rescue him outright and it didn’t work, so he later “directed” her to the FBC so she could put things in motion to get him out of the Dark Place.

Tim/Shawn stands in front of a Poison Pill Entertainment logo

The third episode is Time Breaker, which is Tim’s episode. Well, the character isn’t actually Tim. It’s an actor named Shawn (Ashmore), who’s being directed by Sam (Lake), who is actually portrayed by Sam Lake, who is apparently very into acronyms.

Remedy Entertainment changed their name on social media to Poison Pill Entertainment before the DLC dropped. I assumed it had something to do with the DLC, but I didn’t realize it would be the name of the in-game studio.

This one is the most creative episode out of all three of them. It starts off in the regular game engine, changes to a side-scrolling shoot ‘em up, turns into a comic, and then ends as a choose-your-own text adventure with multiple paths. It has references to Control and Death Rally, as well as Quantum Break. I think most of the references, including the plot of the episode, are based on Quantum Break. As I haven’t played the game yet, I can’t say for sure.

I wish this episode had been longer. I would have been satisfied if an expanded version of it was the entire DLC.
ASCII art of Alan at his writer's desk

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Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is the sequel to Fallen Order, which I played and reviewed back in 2022. Jedi Survivor released in 2023, and like the previous installment in the series, I didn’t play it on release. One, because I typically wait for games to go on sale before I buy them, and two, because I had no idea how the game would perform on PC, which is where I do the vast majority of my gaming.

As it turned out, the game was pretty janky on release – not just on PC, but on console as well. I waited until January 1^st, 2024 to play it, and by that time, the performance on PC was pretty decent. Not perfect, but decent. I got around 60 FPS while playing the game, and did experience a few visual glitches, including textures taking some time to load. Additionally, small pools of water, including all of the water on Tanalorr, consistently had low-quality textures. The rest of the water was fine, so I’m not sure what was going on there.

One very annoying screen that you’ll be seeing a lot if you play on PC is this:
optimizing game files image

This happens every single time you start up the game. It’s not quick, either – at least, it wasn’t for me. I have no idea if the compile time changes depending on your PC specs.

Like the first game, this one says it’s best played with a controller. It’s not lying. This game is obviously not designed to be used with a mouse and keyboard. I didn’t have to remap any of the key bindings like I did with Fallen Order, but I did spend a lot of time hitting Caps Lock when I wanted to hit Tab or Shift.

Even the menus themselves aren’t meant to be used with a mouse and keyboard! There’s a lot of “scrolling” through menus that’s done with Q and E which I imagine are done with the left and right tabs on a controller.

The game plays similarly to the first one, with improvements. Fast travel was added to Meditation Points. The map is no longer as confusing as it was in Fallen Order. There are more lightsaber styles (a single blade, double-bladed saber, two individual sabers, a crossguard saber, and a single saber/blaster combo). I ended up using the blaster a lot, as one thing I found myself wanting in the first game was a way to hit enemies without having to walk right up to them.

In addition to lightsaber and BD-1 customization, Cal himself can be customized. There are more outfits than just ponchos in this game. On the downside, the Mantis has one paintjob the entire game.

While Fallen Order had four major planets, Survivor only has two: Koboh and Jedha. Most of the game takes place on Koboh. It’s the largest planet with most to do, including:

Recruiting people to the saloon
Getting sidequests from the people you recruited to the saloon
Finding fish for the fishtank in the saloon
Collecting seeds to grow in the garden above the saloon
Petting boglings

the rooftop garden

The other planets are Coruscant (where the game starts), the Shattered Moon (which is exactly what it sounds like), Nova Garon, and Tanalorr. Those four really only need to be visited once unless you’re a completionist. Given that most of the collectibles in the game are entirely cosmetic, there’s no real reason to do a 100% run unless that’s your particular preference.

There are two more things added in this game: Force Tears and Meditation Chambers. Both are optional challenges and given non-cosmetic rewards. I didn’t out of my way to find them, but did at least attempt to complete all the ones I found.

There’s a lot of stuff in this game. It’s a lot! I didn’t take much longer to complete this game in comparison to Fallen Order, but I still feel like I spent a lot of time on things completely unrelated to the main story.

Speaking of the main story, I think it goes on too long. After you defeat the person who seems to be the main antagonist of the game, there’s more! You travel to three different locations afterward. The first of those locations contains a plot twist and introduces the real final antagonist. The second two locations are entirely new to the game and cannot be visited before this point.

I finished the game about 5 hours after defeating the decoy final boss. Honestly, it felt like the final chapter went on for way too long. Even though the two final locations were short levels, I just wanted to be done with the game at that point.

Despite all my complaining, I really did like this game a lot. It was a massive improvement on the first game, and I’m eager to see where Respawn goes with the next game. I just hope there’s a better balance between main story and optional content.

Rick the Door Technician: defeated

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 24 October 2024, backdated to 30 October 2023. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Purchased Through: Epic Games Store
Hours Played: 4.5 hours (first two Saga Anderson chapters completed)

Alan Wake II is a game I've been looking forward to ever since I finished playing Control and Alan Wake earlier this year. I preordered the game so I could play it on release because I did not want to run into any spoilers. I haven't even watched the latest promo videos and trailers that Remedy put out.

When the PC requirements were released, there was a bunch of discourse on the game being unoptimized and how it might not run well on non-current gen graphics cards. I wasn't too worried given that I'd upgraded my GPU earlier this year - and as it turns out, I had no reason to be worried at all.

For reference, my PC specs are RTX 3060 (12GB), i7-9700, and 16GB RAM. The game is installed on an SSD, and I'm running it at 1080p with medium settings and no ray tracing. I am averaging 55-60 FPS, with some areas in the 60s to low 70s. The lowest FPS I've seen is 47, and that didn't last very long.

The audio is quieter than other games I've played recently. Even with all volume sliders set to 90-100%, I still had to adjust the volume on my speakers. There's also an issue with the audio cutting in an out on driving cutscenes; I've seen many other people mention this. Audio in all of the other cutscenes is fine.

By the way, this game is gorgeous.

Saga on the way down to Cauldron Lake.

I've taken so many screenshots. There are times I'm stopping every couple of minutes to take a screenshot. Unfortunately, there is no photo mode, so I'm taking all these screenshots with the Print Screen button.

So far, this game has primarily taken place in the evening. It's pretty dark, which makes it a little difficult to play in the morning or middle of the afternoon. You'd definitely benefit from playing at night, or with all the lights off.

Manual saves happen in break rooms, which are located in certain areas. The game does autosave in certain areas, like before bossfights and at the end of chapters. I don't think I found a break room until chapter 2, so I did spend a few hours thinking the game was going to go off of autosaves alone.

Saga in a break room.

You save with the Oh Deer Diner coffee mugs. The game gives you three save slots - which I suppose is better than one, so you can have backups in case one of your saves gets corrupted somehow.

Given that Control had more than a few references to Alan Wake (as both games take place in the same universe), I was wondering just when I would see the first Control references in Alan Wake II. I actually didn't have to wait very long. There's a mention of the Federal Bureau of Control in the first fifteen minutes, notices from the FBC, and an actual FBC agent who you can talk to briefly in chapter 2.

Saga speaks to an FBC agent and Ilmo Koskela.

Like in the first Alan Wake, there are songs at the end of each chapter. There are also television shows (featuring the Koskela brothers, not Night Springs) and radio shows (featuring Pat Maine) that give you background information on what's going on in Bright Falls and the surrounding area.

Speaking of chapters, the next chapter doesn't start immediately upon the previous one being completed. You can walk around and explore as much as you want after the chapter ends and then chose to go to where the next chapter begins.

I had to tear myself away from playing yesterday. I'd reached what seemed like the end of the intro part of the game and had enough to write up this review. But I didn't want to stop playing! I wanted to learn more about what was going on. And I still do. Alan Wake II is definitely going to take up the night hours I don't spend on NaNoWriMo or sleep.

Saga and Casey drink coffee in unison while Alan Wake facepalms in the background.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 27 October 2024, backdated to 15 September 2023. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Hours Played: 110+

After playing Tears of the Kingdom for about a month and a half, I realized my First Impressions post wasn't quite enough. I had thoughts on just about every aspect of the game. This is a long review - in fact, the longest review I've written so far - and I've separated it into four sections - Game Mechanics, World, Temples, and Story.

There are plenty of unmarked spoilers. Proceed at our own caution if that's something you want to avoid.

Disclaimer: This review was written out-of-order over the period of several months. Some sections were cut out. I probably repeat myself several times. I was even going to include tons of screenshots, but decided against it as it was too annoying to pick screenshots for each section.

1. Game Mechanics

1.1 New Powers

Ultrahand is the power I used the most. It's this game's version of Magnesis, except you can pick up anything with it, not just metallic objects. And you can stick things together. This is the power you use to make vehicles, extremely long bridges, Korok torture devices, and weird contraptions to hold up Addison's signs.

Fuse was something that I genuinely didn't see the point of at first. Yes, I knew that you could use it to fuse weapons together and create a stronger weapon, but it took me a little while to figure out how to make decent weapons - with monster parts. I discuss this in more detail in section 1.3 below.

I genuinely think it's odd that Fuse and Ultrahand are separate powers. You use both powers to stick things to other things. I guess it's because Ultrahand is also used to move things. Perhaps Nintendo thought telekinesis wouldn't be a good enough power on its own.

Ascend is probably my favorite power in Tears of the Kingdom. I no longer have to figure out how to get out of a building or cave or whatever - most of the time, I can just ascend through the ceiling and go on my way. Despite this, I kept forgetting about it for the first couple of weeks. Once I started exploring Hyrule in earnest, I started using Ascend a lot more.

Recall was an incredibly useful power...that is, when I didn't completely forget it existed. It took about a month and a half for me to start using Recall regularly, and even then it was mostly for things like lifting Wings into the air so I could fly from one sky island to another. That, and getting into the sky from the surface of Hyrule by using Recall on those pieces of the sky islands that fall to the ground. I was doing that from the beginning, mostly because I remember it from an early gameplay video. I think.

Autobuild is the last of the new powers you get, and it's the one I used the least. I did use it whenever I encountered one of those vehicle build stations in the depths and found it more convenient to use a Wing to get somewhere instead of walking, but that's basically it. I'm sure this ability was more useful to people who went wild with building things, but I wasn't one of those people.

1.2 Sage Powers

Each temple gives you a Sage Power - the unique power of the characters who accompanied you through the temple - Tulin, Yunobo, Sidon, Riju, and Mineru. These Sages are (with the exception of Tulin, who replaces Teba, and Mineru, who is entirely new) the same characters who helped Link access the Divine Beasts in Breath of the Wild.

You can activate and deactivate these powers at any time after obtaining them, so it's possible to have all Sage powers active at once or none at all.

The spirit avatars of the Sages also help you out in combat. Tulin is especially helpful - most (all?) of his shots are critical hit headshots. These spirit avatars don't do much damage, but they can come in handy when you're being mobbed my enemies.
When you want to use a Sage's power, you have to track down the spirit avatar. Since they regularly run around, disappear and reappear, and attack enemies on their own, this isn't always as easy as it sounds. It can be downright annoying at times.

Tulin

Since I did the Wind Temple first, Tulin's power of wind was the first Sage power I obtained. It's essentially a horizontal version of Revali's gale, which makes it excellent for exploring. It's even necessary to reach some areas (mostly sky islands) that are too far to get to simply by gliding.

Occasionally, you'll try to pick up an item and instead accidentally activate Tulin's power instead, sending whatever you were trying to pick up flying away, sometimes off a cliff. That's the one annoying thing about this power.

Yunobo

Yunobo's power of fire is used to break rocks, boulders, and ore deposits. This means you don't have to waste bombs or rock-breaking weapons, so long as you're willing to wait for the power to recharge.

Sidon

Sidon's power of water creates a water shield. This shield can take 1 attack before dissolving, and can be used as an extension of your weapon when you attack. There's not really much else to say about it.

Riju

Riju's power of lightning allows her to fire a lightning strike at whatever Link shoots an arrow at. From the very moment I saw it, I was a fan. This is a power that's useful primarily in battle. I thought it might also be useful for fishing, but Link's arrow needs to his something solid, not water. What a bummer.

Mineru

Mineru's power is a little strange. She's the sage of spirit, and has put her spirit into a Zonai construct. This construct can equip weapons and even a rocket to its back so it can fly up into the air a little. Link can ride on its shoulder and avoid obstacles on the ground like Gloom.

I unlocked Mineru's power so late in the game that I didn't get to use it very often. When I did, I found it frustrating, especially in combat. The construct walks slower when you're riding on it than when it runs around on its own, and there's enough of a delay between pressing the attack button and the attack happen that combat can be pretty difficult.

1.3 Weapons

The weapons you find in the overworld are fairly low-damage and most of them are also "decayed" - I believe this is simply a cosmetic thing that doesn't affect the durability of the weapon. Instead of finding weapons with higher base damage like in Breath of the Wild, you must instead use the Fuse power to create better weapons.

When I first started the game I was fusing weapons to weapons; this really wasn't a good way to do things. The better way to create high-damage weapons is to fuse monster parts to weapons. That's what all the new monster parts are for. Higher-level monsters drop higher-level parts that can be used to create higher-damage weapons.

In Breath of the Wild, I kept running out of inventory slots for weapons. This wasn't a problem in Tears of the Kingdom, probably because it's so easy to make good weapons. The durability and weapon breaking issue, which still exists in Tears of the Kingdom, was much less of a problem here - in fact, I would say it's not a problem at all. Rather than searching around Hyrule for a good weapon, I could just make one at any time, provided I had the right monster parts. And I always had an abundance of monster parts.

1.4 Enemy Variation

Enemies are largely the same as in Breath of the Wild. All enemies now drop parts that you can use to create weapons, so there is a small visual change - for instance, Bokoblins now have horns.

The most noticeable new enemies are the various Constructs, which are the first enemies encountered in the game. There are some new overworld bosses - the Gleeoks, Flux Constructs, and Frox, to name a few - and a new variation on the Talus - the Battle Talus.

While there are different version of enemies - fire-type Lizalfos around Death Mountain, ice-type Lizalfos in the snowy Rito areas, and lightning-type Lizalfos in the desert - none of those enemies are limited to a certain part of Hyrule. No matter where you go, you know you're going to find some version of Lizalfos, Keese, or Talus. This is how it was in Breath of the Wild, but I personally think it would have been more interesting to limit certain enemies to certain areas, like how some of the animals are. Eldin Ostrich are only found in the Eldin Region, so why aren't there any enemies (not the fire versions!) specific to the Eldin Region? I think that would have made the regions feel more distinct.

Enemies seem to "level up" much faster in this game. The progression from Red->Blue->Black Bokoblins and Moblins happened fairly quickly - within a week of playing, I believe. That may have been because I was already used to the control scheme of the game and got right back into things while I had to learn everything from scratch in Breath of the Wild.

This was a little tough to deal with at first, especially since the enemies hit pretty hard when you don't have upgrade armor. It pretty quickly became a non-issue, since higher-level monsters give access to higher-level monster parts which means it becomes easier to create higher-damage weapons.

1.5 Koroks

Koroks didn't seem nearly as necessary as in Breath of the Wild. In that game, I went through the trouble of finding over half of the 900 available Korok seeds so I could fully expand all three inventories. Meanwhile in Tears of the Kingdom, I was fine with only a few inventory upgrades, and didn't go out of my way to get them. If I found an easy Korok seed, I'd do it right then. Otherwise, I'd mark it on my map and then never come back to it.

1.6 Clothing Upgrades/Great Fairies

The quests to unlock the Great Fairies are fine. You no longer have to give them rupees; instead, you end up reuniting the members of a band who play music for the fairies, and this is what convinces them to leave their flower bud.
The clothing upgrades the Fairies give out, on the other hand...

They've gotten more complicated. There are a lot more materials required for an upgrade, and each upgrade also costs 50 rupees. For example, a lot of the upgrades require 20-30 amber for a single piece of clothing. While amber is the most abundant gemstone in the game, you still end up needing 150 pieces of amber to upgrade the Hylian Set fully. And that's just one set. The Soldier's Set requires 90 amber, the Amber Earrings require 125 amber (yes, for a single piece of equipment), and the Hero of Time Set requires 300 amber.

Yes, that's 665 amber to upgrade all that equipment fully. That's a lot. And I know it isn't necessary to upgrade everything fully, especially since I only use a few sets, but the problem is that even upgrading the Hylian Set fully was a struggle. It took much longer than I would have liked it to.

And maybe that wouldn't have been a bad thing if the enemies didn't hit so hard in this game. But they do. It's easy to die if your armor isn't upgraded.

2. World

There are three levels to the world: The Kingdom of Hyrule (the Overworld), the Sky Islands, and the Depths. Hyrule is (mostly) the same as it was in the previous game, while the Sky Islands and the Depths are new additions.

2.1 The Sky

You start out in the Sky, on the largest island - the Great Sky Island. It's largely the equivalent of the Great Plateau from Breath of the Wild, complete with four shrines that you need to visit in order to get new powers. Okay, three shrines give you new powers, and the fourth tests your ability of the Recall power that you get in the Temple of Time. But you get the picture - the Great Sky Island and Great Plateau serve the same exact purpose in each game.

Each region of the game has sky islands. Some of those islands have more to do on them than others, but most of the islands are fairly small. There are (I believe) a shrine, a gachapon machine Zonai Device Dispenser, an overworld boss, and a flower-shaped sky island (relevant to the Messages from an Ancient Era sidequest) in each region.

The sky is peaceful, except for the bosses, but those are easy to avoid. The Construct enemies, for the most part, are fairly low-level. When you want to look for shrines, lookout towers, or geoglyphs, the sky is a good place to start. You can see most things from there and reach a large amount of the Overworld from the sky, especially after you've unlocked Tulin's power.

I would say that the sky is underutilized. There isn't nearly as much to do there as there is on the Overworld and in the Depths. When I saw the first reveal of the sky islands, years ago, my thought was that Nintendo wanted to create a better version of the sky from Skyward Sword. I don't know that they actually succeeded in doing this.

2.2 Overworld

Most of the game takes place on the surface, so it's the "layer" with the most things to do. Most of the Korok seeds, shrines, and quests are on the surface. It's largely the same as it was in Breath of the Wild, with the addition of a couple of new things - Lookout Landing, caves and wells, and Zonai ruins all over the place.

Caves are essentially mini dungeons, each with a Bubbulfrog that provides a gem that can be traded to an NPC for items. I found them to be a genuinely great addition to the game; they reminded me a lot of the overworld caves in Twilight Princess. They're fun and a good source of resources, especially ores.

Each village/town has a quest chain. Hateno's is about an election and whether or not the town should stick to tradition or embrace new things, Lurelin's is about ridding the town of pirates (which are regular monsters, much to my disappointment) and rebuilding, Tarrey Town's is about Hudson and Rhondson's daughter Mattison, and Kakariko's is about the Ring Ruins that have fallen in/on the town. Of these four, Kakariko's quest chain is the only one that's integrated into the main plot. The others can be skipped without missing anything other than the house in Tarrey Town.

The regions of Hyrule are the same, as is the weather and weather effects. It doesn't seem to rain nearly as much as it did in Breath of the Wild, and it isn't as much of a problem as it was in the previous game. There's an armor set you get that prevents you from slipping when climbing in the rain, which is obtained from a quest chain that takes place at Hyrule's stables. You assist Penn, a reporter, who's investigating rumors involving the missing Princess Zelda. Along with the armor, you end up getting a ton of money out of it. Penn is a great character, so I never minded doing any of these quests.

There are a few things "missing" from the overworld that were in Breath of the Wild. The rhinoceros that lived in the Tabantha region has seemingly been hunted to extinction, and large game is rarer to find in general. This, combined with the fact that there are still tons of ruins from the Calamity a hundred years ago along with the new Zonai ruins, give the feeling that Hyrule isn't exactly doing all that well with regards to rebuilding. I get the feeling that this really isn't what Nintendo was going for.

2.3 The Depths

The Depths are this game's version of the Dark World - an inverted version of Hyrule where mountains are deep pits, valleys are plateaus, and rivers are impassible stone walls. There are puddles of gloom all over the place, which make traversing the Depths difficult at times.

There are ancient mines scattered throughout the Depths where you find zonaite. There are also plenty of Yiga hideouts and a questline that culminates in the defeat of Master Kohga. Each of those Yiga hideouts and Kohga fights give you a schema stone, so they aren't particularly worth it if you aren't interested in using schematics for Autobuild.

Chests are scattered throughout the Depths. They give you armor and weapons that were previously only obtainable by Amiibo in Breath of the Wild. They're typically locked behind a monster fight of some sort and cost tons of amber to upgrade. They're entirely optional and don't really add anything to the game - the weapons aren't better than weapons you can create on your own, and the armor is really only necessary if you're a completionist.

Speaking of monsters, there are only two unique monsters in the Depths - the Frox and the Little Frox. All other monsters are just gloom-covered counterparts of the overworld monsters. They don't even have separate compendium photos. Dungeon bosses do respawn in certain places, but they're fairly easy to avoid, with the exception of Colgera. Colgera also happens to be the only boss I've run into more than once.

Disappointingly, the terrain in the Depths is largely uniform. There are a couple of areas with lava where you need fireproof potions, but no other status effects exist. There are no cold or rainy/stormy areas. All parts of the Depths are essentially identical; there are no regions with unique, distinguishing features other than the aforementioned lava areas underneath Death Mountain.
The Depths are entirely dark when you first enter them. In order to light up areas, you activate Lightroots. Getting to some of the Lightroots, especially those located on the side/top of steep cliffs, is often harder than reaching the corresponding overworld shrine. There were plenty of places I didn't bother activating Lightroots because they were so annoying to reach.

Overall, I think the Depths were about as well-utilized as the Sky - not at all. While the Sky suffered from being too small, the Depths have the opposite problem. Aside from the dungeons and the camera rune, there's no reason to go to most of it unless you're a completionist. And with it being the same size as Hyrule itself, it's simply too big for the lack of things to do down there.

2.4 Shrines

The Shrines of Light are very similar to the Ancient Shrines. There are shrines that teach you game mechanics and shrines that teach you how to use the new powers. There are also shrines (Proving Grounds) where you have to defeat the enemies with only what the shrine gives you - similar to Eventide Island in Breath of the Wild. You can think of them as this game's equivalent to the Test of Strength shrines.

With some shrines, you have to complete a series of events before they're available - such as bringing the green crystal to the stone foundation or snowboarding through a series of rings in a certain time period. Each shrine provides a Light of Blessing, which you give to a Goddess Statue in order to increase your heart containers or stamina wheel.

While all shrines in Breath of the Wild were on the surface, some in Tears of the Kingdom are in caves and in the sky. Some of the cave shrines can be difficult to find even with the Purah Pad's sensor upgrade, but there is fortunately an easy way to find out where each shrine is located on the surface.

Lightroots in the depths correspond to shrines on the surface. If you find a lightroot - and it's often easier to find lightroots, since they do glow - you can mark the corresponding location on the surface and look around for the shrine later. This has helped me find so many shrines I'd otherwise spend literal hours searching for.

There are 152 shrines in Tears of the Kingdom, divided between 120 on the ground and 32 in the sky. Breath of the Wild only had 120, all on the ground. It's a lot of shrines, honestly, and even if you know where all the shrines are and how to complete them, you're still going to spend hours running around getting to them.

It gets repetitive, mostly because of the cutscenes. The cutscene when you activate a shrine, when you walk in (leaving the overworld, and then entering the shrine), activating the final platform before you receive the Blessing of Light, the cutscene afterward...

Some of those cutscenes are skippable. Some are not. They're essentially the same cutscene as in Breath of the Wild, just with different images. But there are SO MANY, just for the shrines, and they take up time that you could be doing something else! I don't want to know how many minutes I've wasted watching those same unskippable cutscenes!

2.5 Labyrinths

The labyrinths from Breath of the Wild are back in Tears of the Kingdom. This time, they have equivalents in the sky and the depths. There is a quest involved with each labyrinth. It starts on the ground, moves to the sky, and then you dive from the sky all the way to the labyrinth in the depths.

I did Lomei Labyrinth Island first and thought it was really cool. It made me wonder just what the other labyrinths would be like. Unfortunately, the process is the same with all three.

3. Temples

3.1 Wind Temple

In order to get to the Wind Temple, you have to traverse the Rising Island Chain with the help of Tulin. There are two shrines along the way: one that teaches you how to use the floating boats you encounter in the Island Chain, and a blessing shrine right outside the Wind Temple. Personally, I found the entire series of events to be much more interesting/fascinating than the Wind Temple itself.

The Wind Temple is the Stormwind Ark, a ship from Rito legend. It functions similarly to a Divine Beast from Breath of the Wild - activate five terminals to get to the room with the boss fight. The entire dungeon only took around an hour to complete, which feels fairly short. It also felt more like a traditional Zelda dungeon than any of the Divine Beasts did.

What really made the Wind Temple feel like a traditional Zelda dungeon was the boss - Colgera. You don't need to use any weapons to defeat it. The Rising Island Chain has some sheets of ice that you can glide above and then dive into in order to break the ice. That's exactly how you defeat Colgera.

It's apparently possible to break the ice with arrows, something I didn't realize until I looked up what other people were saying about the dungeon.

While the Wind Temple itself was ultimately not too impressive, the Rising Island Chain and Colgera boss fight made quite an impression on me and gave me expectations that the next dungeon couldn't really live up to.

3.2 Fire Temple

The leadup to the Fire Temple takes place on Death Mountain. You climb to the summit of the mountain with minecarts, and at the top you find Moragia, a miniboss you must first defeat by flying around on Zonai decides and launching Yunobo at them. After that's done, a chasm opens up and you're able to jump into the Depths.

In the depths is the lost Goron city of Gorondia, the Fire Temple. Like the Wind Temple, you activate five terminals with Yunobo's power in order to get to the boss fight. I found this dungeon to be more difficult than the previous one; I couldn't quite get the timing right on the minecarts and mostly resorted to climbing, gliding, and ascend to get to where I needed to go.

Yunobo's power was more incorporated into the boss fight than Tulin's was in the Wind Temple. It's used to stun the boss (Marbled Gohma) which allows you to easily attack Marbled Gohma's eye with a regular weapon. It's a pretty easy boss, and for that reason, I though it didn't feel like a real boss - more like a mid-dungeon boss that previous Zelda games had.

The Fire Temple being in the Depths is super cool, especially since you can see the surrounding Depths from inside the temple itself. I just wish Marbled Gohma had been more impressive and the dungeon itself hadn't been so difficult (for me) to traverse.

3.3 Water Temple

Similarly to the Wind Temple, the Water Temple is in the sky. It originally seems like the Water Temple is going to be underwater, due to you having to dive into a whirlpool in one of the lakes. I am not really sure what Nintendo was thinking here, having a Water Temple in the sky instead of in the water. How cool would it have been to have a dungeon in the Ancient Zora Waterworks? We could have learned more about the history of the Zora.

There are a few new mechanics introduced in the leadup to the temple - water bubble travel and low-gravity - and both are used in the temple itself. There are only four terminals in this one, and I felt like this temple was much easier to traverse than the Fire Temple. The low gravity does get annoying at times, as it caused me to misjudge a few jumps.

I didn't like the boss. Mucktorok is exceptionally annoying, especially in the second phase of the fight. Sidon's power is barely useful with all the mud that ends up on the floor of the boss arena. As a result, the boss fight took much longer than the fights with Colgera and Marbled Gohma. Also...Mucktorok looks like a silly balloon, not a real boss.

My feelings on this dungeon are similar to those on the Fire Temple: cool dungeon, boss could be better.

3.4 Lightning Temple

When you get to the Kara Kara Bazaar, you learn that most of the Gerudo Desert is under a permanent sand storm, including Gerudo Town. There are also Gibdos in the town, so everyone's hiding in a shelter. With Riju's help, you defend both Kara Kara Bazaar and Gerudo Town. Riju's power is used to destroy the tall mushroom towers that spawn Gibdos. Then you do a small puzzle using mirrors to shine light in a triangle around the Gerudo Desert. This points the way to the Lightning Temple.

The entrance to the Lightning Temple has a glowing purple "button" on it, similar to the Gibdo-spawning mushrooms, and when you use Riju's power to destroy it, the boss of the dungeon appears and you have to fight it. At first, I thought I'd found a way to cheese the entire temple, but then I realized that there was no way Nintendo would do that. This game isn't that open-world.
Although I did skip a good amount of the beginning of the temple by ascending through the ceiling into the main room (The Room of Ascension) rather than going through the bottom floor. And then I couldn't get back in and wondered why there was a gate blocking me from going into a particular hall.

There are four switches to find in this temple, and you use Riju's power to activate them, just like in the other temples. There's a lot of shining light around the place with mirrors, and this even carries into the boss fight - sort of. The boss is the Queen Gibdo you fought at the beginning of the temple, and there are four Gibdo-spawning mushrooms in the boss arena. Destroying those mushrooms allows light into the boss arena, which actually kills the Gibdos for you, allowing you to focus entirely on the Queen Gibdo.

I liked the idea of this dungeon more than the dungeon itself. It was a little too easy and took a surprisingly short amount of time to complete, although that may have been because I accidentally skipped part of it. The boss fights were definitely the high point.

3.5 Spirit Temple

I accidentally found this temple when I was wandering around in the Depths, looking for Lightroots. Once the words "Spirit Temple" showed up on screen, I realized I didn't want to wander into the temple with zero knowledge of what I was supposed to be doing, so I left and decided to figure out which quest would give me some backstory and properly lead me to this location.

Turns out it was a couple of quests. You're properly notified of the existence of a fifth sage after competing all four of the Regional Phenomena and investigating the Princess Zelda sightings in Hyrule Castle. Then you start a series of events that lead you from the Ring Ruins in Kakariko Village, to the Dracozu River in Faron, to the Thunderhead Isles in the sky, and then down a chasm and into the Construct Factory in the Depths.

At this construct factory, you have to build a new Zonai construct body for Mineru's spirit. Each limb is obtained in a different area and you complete a series of puzzles to bring it back to the Construct Factory. Then once that's done, Mineru's construct body is complete and you can finally head over to the Spirit Temple to get Mineru's secret stone.

The Spirit Temple itself is just a boss fight, probably because everything else you did was equivalent to completing a dungeon. I actually found it pretty interesting until you had to go into the Depths. That part was annoying. Not so much the boss - the Seized Construct - but having to use Mineru's power to defeat it was awful, and building Mineru's construct itself was annoying. I would have preferred a more traditional dungeon in the Depths.

3.6 Final Boss

This isn't a temple or a dungeon, but it definitely deserves to be in this section.

Getting to Ganondorf actually takes quite a bit of time. You jump down the chasm under Hyrule castle into the depths, traverse a dangerous, stressful area filled with high-level monsters, and reach an area where you receive a notice saying that the Sages' powers cannot reach you. Ominous.

Then you continue on a little more until you reach an area that's surprisingly familiar - the very beginning of the game. Continuing a little further takes you to the Imprisoning Chamber. I put a travel medallion down on the cliff and returned to the surface, because at this point I'd lost half of my hearts to the gloom.

Past the Imprisoning Chamber is Gloom's Lair, and past that is the point of no return where you can no longer teleport out. Before facing Ganondorf, you fight four waves of monsters with the help of the Sages - the actual Sages, not the spirit avatars. It was a surprisingly easy fight with dropped a ton of weapons, so you can restock if you broke all/most of yours just getting here.

Then the dungeon bosses show up and the Sages hold them off. If you didn't do the dungeons, you apparently have to face them all in a row. If you did, then you go right in to fight Ganondorf while the Sages are occupied. At this point I was wondering if maybe reaching Ganondorf was going to end up being more difficult than actually fighting Ganondorf, but this wasn't the case at all.

There are three phases to the Ganondorf fight. In phase 1, you're entirely on your own. The sages help you in the first part of phase 2, and the Light Dragon herself assists you in phase 3. In addition to "disabling" your hearts with Gloom, Ganondorf can delete them entirely, which took me a little while to realize because I had 32 at the time. On my first attempt of the fight, I made it 2/3 of the way through phase 2 before I realized it was better to reload an earlier save and prepare properly.

This boss was actually difficult! It was made more difficult by two things: I'm bad at things like flurry rushes, which are probably the best way to reduce Ganondorf's HP, and I'm bad at using controllers in general. But it's an appropriately difficult boss. The entire game had hyped up Ganondorf as a serious menace and he really felt like one.

4. Story

The story in this game is pretty lackluster, but it's still better than Breath of the Wild's story. Memories return, and just like in the previous game, they all take place in the past. They partially tell the story of Zelda after she's been teleported to the past. And just like in the previous game, you can get them out of order. Unlike in Breath of the Wild, this really isn't ideal. They aren't random events; there's a definite order to those memories that they should be viewed. I know Nintendo wanted to lock certain memories to certain geoglyphs, but I think the memories should have been available in order.

In the Regional Phenomena quests, you travel to four different regions of Hyrule to deal with the things that have been going on since the upheaval. After completing each temple, you receive what is essentially the same cutscene, showing events that happened in the past that Zelda was sent back to. These cutscenes don't really tell you anything, just that there was a fight against Ganondorf in the past. You learn that through memories and other quests, so seeing the same cutscene four times in the temples and then again elsewhere gets old pretty fast.

After those Regional Phenomena quests are done, you travel to Hyrule Castle to check out the Zelda sightings. That Zelda turns out to be an impostor, which you'll know already if you completed the tear memories and learned that Zelda turned herself into the Light Dragon that's been flying around Hyrule's skies...or just paid attention to the beginning of the game, where she used her time power to send herself into the past. And then again at the end of the tutorial area where Link sends the Master Sword into the past where Zelda receives it.

As a last comment, I can't possibly be the only one who thinks Secret Stone is a bizarre name. Shouldn't it have been Sacred Stone? I have to wonder why this decision was made.

Final Thoughts

I didn't cover everything in this game. I wanted to, but that probably would have added another 6000 words to this review, and I wanted to be done with it - and the game - this year so I could move on to something else.
My main problem with this game is the same problem I had in Breath of the Wild. While the game is huge with tons of things to do, those things aren't integrated very well. There are lots of interesting places to visit and things to see, but you'll really have to go out of your way to find them. There's a shrine in the sky (Ga-Ahisas Shrine on Lightcast Island) that I think is a good example of this. The puzzle to unlock the shrine is super interesting and uses some new mechanics introduced in Tears of the Kingdom, but there's no reason to go there.

And that's another problem I had with this game - that the optional side content often better used the new game mechanics than the main quests. The main quests taught you how to use the new stuff, but it's like it was just a tutorial for the things you weren't required to do. I imagine this was for people who just wanted to get through the main game without having to learn too many new things, but I think it would have been better if the new mechanics had been expanded in the main game, not side content.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 24 October 2024, backdated to 16 June 2023. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Purchased Through: Epic Games store (base game obtained through the weekly game giveaway, paid for DLC)
Hours Played: 28.5 (entire game complete except for Jukebox missions)

I became aware of this game a couple of years ago after watching a stream play through the beginning on Twitch. I actually closed the stream because I was so interested that I wanted to experience things for myself. I didn’t get to play the game until December 2021, but I didn’t get too far into the game before I set it to the side and moved on to other things. It wasn’t until February 2023 that I had the time to pick up the game fully.

I finished playing the game in late April and decided to wait a couple of weeks to write this blog post. I knew that if I wrote it then, I’d do nothing but gush over the game. I loved Control! I’ve since had some time to actually think over things, so I’m hoping this post will be more subjective and less uncritically positive.

Jesse stands in front of a light switch hanging from the ceiling. The hotline is visible in the background.

First things first: this is an incredibly pretty game. It takes place almost entirely in a brutalist building, with a couple of trips to a few other distinct areas (the Astral Plane, the Quarry, and the Oceanview Motel, to name a few). Before playing Control, I thought brutalism was hideous. This game single-handedly changed my opinions on an entire architectural style.

I played through most of the game on low graphics (I genuinely thought I'd had them set to medium until the endgame, where I encountered a blurry texture), getting around 30-40 FPS and with a render latency of 110ms. At the time, I didn't have access to a graphics card that had ray tracing. I even encountered a glitch that happens when your NVIDIA GPU drivers are a couple of months out of date:

GPU glitch.

None of this negatively affected my experience. If anything, the glitches added to it. The Oldest House is, after all, a constantly shifting eldritch location where all kinds of weird things happen - like, for instance, a sticky note deciding to duplicate itself and cover an entire room.

An office room covered in sticky notes.

This has, however, left me wondering just how many glitches and bugs I experienced without even realizing what was happening.

Wait. How have I gotten this far into the review without even explaining what the game is about?

Jesse stands at the entrance to Central Research.

Jesse Faden arrives at the Federal Bureau of Control, an obscure government agency headquartered in New York in a building called the Oldest House. The Bureau contains and studies paranatural phenomena and events while keeping the general public ignorant. She's there to find her brother, Dylan, who was taken by Foundation Agents when the two of them were kids after an event in their hometown, Ordinary. Upon arriving to the Bureau, she finds that it's under lockdown due to an invasion by an extradimensional entity called the Hiss. Very soon after that, Jesse becomes the new Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, gains a shapeshifting gun called the Service Weapon, and sets off to end the Hiss invasion. And find her brother.

Despite finding Dylan being Jesse's entire reason for going to the Bureau, he isn't actually utilized very much. You don't actually get to meet him until over halfway through the main story of the game, and he doesn't do very much after that. You have a couple of conversations with him, cleanse him of Hiss possession, and then he spends the rest of the game in a coma. Dylan is spoken of as a threat, and definitely comes across that way in collectibles you can find, but in the actual game? He doesn't really do anything.

Jesse is predominantly preoccupied with clearing the Oldest House of the Hiss. Aside from a few (all internal, never vocalized) token protests that she wouldn't do a good job as the director of a federal agency and would instead be better off as a janitor, she doesn't seem to be particularly bothered by what's just happened to her. In fact, at one point she realizes that she's happy to be at the Bureau and that she doesn't want to leave.

Later she learns that the Bureau has been tracking her movements (confirming the suspicions that she's had for most of her life) but this doesn't seem to change her opinions much. She's still fine with being the Director, but definitely wants to make changes and reforms so that none of this ever happens again.

A whiteboard with notes on Jesse's life.

I'm not convinced that Jesse wanting to stay in the Oldest House is a want of her own, and not some kind of (subtle?) influence of the Service Weapon, or Board, or Oldest House itself. It just seems strange/suspicious that it happens so quickly, and that she spends more time thinking about how to keep the Bureau safe than her own little brother. You know, the entire reason she's there.

The Merry-Go-Round Horse.

The abilities in this game are obtained through Objects of Power - items like the Merry-Go-Round Horse above. One of those OoPs, the Floppy Disk, gives you "Launch". Launch is probably the best implementation of telekinesis I've ever seen in a video game. It's also the most overpowered of all the abilities, especially when fully upgraded. I'll admit that after obtaining Launch, it was what I primarily used in combat. I rarely bothered using the Service Weapon before running out of energy to use Launch.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the Shield power. You can obtain it fairly early in the game, but I found the task annoying enough that I put it off until I'd finished the main game and was doing the Foundation DLC. And then I never used the power, because I had no reason to.

Jesse stands in front of the NSC monitoring station.

There are a couple of areas in Control that are easy to miss - not official Hidden Locations, but places that are simply easy to walk past and never look twice at. One of those is the Mold Threshold. I looked at the hole in the floor of the Research Sector that led to it early in the game and then completely forgot about it because I didn't have any reason to go back to that one part of the building. It wasn't until I was almost done with the main game that I found out there was an entire area with a chain of quests down a broken elevator shaft.

The screenshot above is neither a Hidden Location nor an area that's easy to walk past. In fact, it's a little difficult to get to. I just like the screenshot and think it's appropriate for this section.

The Foundation.

There are two DLC for Control - Altered World Events (AWE) and The Foundation. AWE can be started during the main story, while the Foundation can only be started after you finish the base game.

The Foundation DLC takes place in the Foundation, the lowest levels of the Oldest House. It's a completely new environment, different from anything else in the game - with the exception of the Astral Plane, which is leaking into the Foundation. It's an incredibly aesthetically pleasing area with new, high-level-incredibly frustrating varieties of the Hiss. I never had any trouble with the Hiss (outside of boss fights) until I did the Foundation DLC. They're probably the worst part about the DLC.

The Rangers in the base game had the durability of wet tissue paper for the most part, but this was much better in the Foundation DLC. They were actually useful every time I called one for help clearing an area.

There are two new abilities gained in the Foundation, and they can only be used in the Foundation. What's interesting is how they're obtained - not by binding Objects of Power, but one is given by the Board, and the other is given by Former. Former is heavily implied to be a Former member of the Board, and this isn't the first time you meet it. Those other times, Former was hostile; now, it's much friendlier.

Overall, the Foundation DLC was pretty good. You get to learn quite a bit about the history of the Oldest House, and there's possibly a tiny bit of setup toward Control 2. My main complaints are the new Hiss and the final boss fight. It was way too red - literally, everything about it is red, from the environments to the enemies. That made it genuinely difficult to tell what was happening at times.

Fra's head.

The second DLC is the AWE DLC. It introduces the Investigations Sector, a sector of the Oldest House that was sealed off a couple of years prior. There are no new powers in this DLC, and the environments are more similar to other sections of the Bureau. Along with learning about various Altered World Events and what the Investigations Sector studies, you also learn why the sector was abandoned in the first place.

One of the antagonists in Alan Wake, Dr. Hartman, was brought to the Bureau after the Bright Falls AWE. He escaped confinement and killed a large amount of the staff of the Investigations Sector. This DLC is what confirms that Alan Wake and Control take place in the same universe, after a couple of hints in the base game.

At the end of the AWE DLC, there is a boss fight with Hartman. It's one of the more irritating fights, and I found myself more annoyed by it than any other boss fight in the game, even the 1st Tommasi fight. Not even the Foundation final boss annoyed me this much.

One of the criticisms of this game I've seen is that there wasn't a final boss at the end of the main story. Considering the boss fights in both DLCs were more annoying than enjoyable, perhaps this was a good thing.

A very red Astral Plane.

Overall, this is a good game. The combat does get repetitive and it's got some incredibly annoying enemies, but it's fun enough that I didn't care. The story kept me interested the whole time, but some things weren't quite followed up on or fleshed out as much as I would like. I'll definitely be paying close attention to Control 2's development and I'm sure I'll also review it when it comes out.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 26 October 2024, backdated to 15 May 2023. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Purchased Through: (Physical purchase)
Hours Played: ~7.5 (just talked to Impa for the First Time)

I took a lot of care to avoid spoilers for this game. I didn't look at any of the leaks; all I watched were the official trailers and gameplay footage videos from Nintendo. I didn't even read any of the reviews once the embargo was up. I wanted to go into Tears of the Kingdom completely fresh in order to see how well it built (or didn't) on Breath of the Wild.

I preordered this game, which I typically don't do. Most games go on sale a couple of months to a year after release and I can pick them up for cheap while I chip away at all the games on my backlog. However, I'm 99.9% sure main series Zelda games don't go on sale, so preordering was a way to make sure I could actually pick up a physical copy. And Nintendo games tend not to have the bugs and issues that plague so many new games nowadays, so I wouldn't have to wait for bugfixes to make the game playable. Also I didn't want spoilers, which would get increasingly more likely the longer I waited to play the game.

Now on to actually reviewing the game...

Zelda thinks the ruins were made by the Zonai.

Zonai confirmed, in case you missed Aonuma's gameplay video back in March.

You're thrown into the plot immediately. Breath of the Wild didn't have much of a plot in comparison to other Zelda games, which was one of the major criticisms of the game. I liked Breath of the Wild overall, but the lack of plot was probably the biggest flaw I had with the game. I'm still very early into Tears of the Kingdom, but it already seems like the story will be a larger part of the game than in Breath of the Wild.

The controls are largely the same as Breath of the Wild...except for one thing. In Breath of the Wild, the "Up" arrow on the D-pad allowed you to access the runes on the Sheikah slate. The equivalent abilities in Tears of the Kingdom are accessed with the Left button. I don't think I've gotten this correct on the first try yet. I haven't played Breath of the Wild since 2019, but the controls are still ingrained into my muscle memory.

A cave on the starting sky island.

Yes, I'm making this mistake constantly even though it says "L" right there on the screen.

Visually, the game isn't too different. It's a sequel using the same engine and reusing a lot of assets, so this is to be expected. That isn't to say that Hyrule looks the same as in Breath of the Wild. It doesn't! I've haven't explored very much of the overworld, but there's a lot that's changed. Not to mention that there are islands in the sky (one being the tutorial area) and an underworld. There's a lot of new stuff to look at and explore. I've only experienced a little bit of lag, and it was limited to the tutorial area.

Also, arrows. There are so many arrows in this game! I keep getting arrows from everything! I remember arrows being hard to get in Breath of the Wild, so this is something I'm quite happy about.

The inventory system is massively improved...with the exception of one thing. You used to be able to hold down the right or left buttons and scroll through each category. You can't do that anymore; you have to press the button for each category to get to the one you want.

A potential missing poster for Zelda.

I think this is a missing poster for Zelda.

Just like in Breath of the Wild, there are shrines in this game, and they allow you to get more hearts or expand the stamina wheel. I've only done 11 of the shrines, but they seem to be easier and less obnoxious than the ones in Breath of the Wild. Maybe I've simply gotten better at puzzles these past few years.

When you bring a wild horse to a stable to register it, something I didn't expect happens: you can import the horses from your Breath of the Wild save - if you played Breath of the Wild on the same Switch.

Imported horses from Breath of the Wild.

My old horses! And Sable, which is the horse I caught in Tears of the Kingdom.

Like I mentioned before, I'm in the very early parts of the game. There is so much I've encountered so far that wasn't in any of the trailers or gameplay videos. Did you know that there are wells all over the place that you can explore? And poes in the underground that you can trade to a shopkeeper for rewards? And an underground that's quite extensive and different from anything I've seen in a Zelda game before? And trees that uproot themselves and walk around and make me jump every time I see them? I could go on and on for another 800 words and not be done.

I am definitely going to have fun playing this game and discovering what else there is.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 23 October 2024, backdated to 3 May 2023. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Purchased Through: Epic Games Store
Hours Played: 3.75 (first two chapters completed)

I never played the original version of this game. It came out in 2010 as an Xbox exclusive, and I didn't get into gaming seriously until 2018. It took playing Control - which takes place in the same universe and has quite a few references to Alan Wake - for me to become interested in playing the game.

The first day I played, I thought the game was oddly janky, especially in comparison to Control - which I felt ran smoothly. I didn't run into any glitches, bugs, or crashes, but the game felt a little clunky in general. None of it interfered with me playing the game, but it seemed like things weren't running quite the way they should.

As it turns out, this really was just a feeling I had. Alan Wake runs at a pretty consistent 58-60 FPS (and 200 FPS in cutscenes) with a render latency around 30 ms, while Control ran at around 40 FPS with a render latency of 110ms. So Control was running worse on my PC than Alan Wake does, but I was able to ignore it entirely when I was playing Control because I was having way too much fun.

Or...maybe the clunky controls were a deliberate choice. The protagonist is a writer, and writers aren't exactly known for being good at things that aren't sitting at desks and writing.

I do wish the game had a dedicated photo mode. Having to take screenshots by hitting the screenshot button and then pasting the images into Microsoft paint is fairly awkward.

Also, there's a Leeroy Jenkins reference right in the opening:

L. Jenkins Smoked Fish Co.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 21 October 2024, backdated to 15 July 2022. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a game that came out in 2019. I saw a few things about it over the years, but not enough to pique my attention. Then I watched a few videos of a let's play of the game, saw that there was a trailer for a sequel, and found out that the game was on sale.

The plot of the game is, basically, following the notes of an old Jedi master, Eno Cordova, (who was also an archaeologist who studied the Zeffo civilization) to find a holocron that contains a list of force-sensitive children. I cared less about this and more about the archaeology part of it, because what isn't cool about a Jedi archaeologist?

I waffled back and forth on whether I wanted to 100% the whole game, and then did it anyway. I fully explored each planet, got all databank entries, found all collectibles, unlocked all force powers, and got most of the achievements. Overall, it took around 33 hours.

First of all, some notes/thoughts on the gameplay:

The controls on PC are kind of wonky if you're playing with a mouse and keyboard like I do. The game recommends you use a controller when it first starts up, and it's probably a good idea to do that (I never did). Most of the key bindings are ok, but I had to remap doge to "V" because it was too awkward to hit initially.
There are a lot of force powers/upgrades you can get. I only ever used a few and forgot about the more complex ones.
The map is good and bad. It shows which areas you haven't visited and which doors and pathways are available and which you can't get through. However, everything turns the same kind of blue color after it's been interacted with, which can make it hard to tell what you're looking at.
You have the opportunity to choose an answer to questions you're asked about...four different times. I doubt this has much of an effect on anything aside from a few lines of dialogue, so I'm wondering why it was there to begin with.
You can change the difficulty at any point in the game. There is no penalty for doing so, and there is nothing locked behind a certain difficulty.

I'm going to review each of the four major planets - so no Bracca, Ordo Eris, Ilum, or Nur. I honestly don't have enough thoughts on any of those to bother writing them down.

Bogano

A bogling on Bogano.

This is a Bogling, one of the native species of Bogano. You can get one on your ship, but you can't interact with it.

Bogano is the "starter" planet. It's the smallest and easiest to get around, and aside from Oggdo Bogdo (and the regular Bogdos), there's nothing there that's a serious threat. I will admit that my first encounter with Oggdo Bogdo happened when I fell into the cave and died immediately. I didn't come back to fight it until almost the end of the game.

The other planets are separated into different sections; the loading screens are disguised as things like elevators or gaps in the walls that you go through. There is none of this on Bogano. The entire planet loads at the same time - you can literally see all of it from the landing area. This did cause a little bit of lag at times.

Bogano is populated entirely by animals, both hostile and non-hostile, until the very end of the game when the Empire gets there (then there are stormtroopers). There's stuff left over from a Jedi archaeologist who lived there for a while plenty of remnants of the ancient Zeffo civilization, and some giant animal bones.

Some kind of fossilized Star Wars dinosaur.

Overall, Bogano feels empty in a way that the other planets don't. It's much smaller and there aren't nearly as many enemies as on other planets. This isn't really a bad thing for a video game - it can be good to have a relatively safe, peaceful place to hang out in between stressful missions.

Zeffo

An area of Zeffo.

There is way too much stuff on Zeffo. There are 43 chests on this planet alone, while Bogano has 16, Kashyyyk has 27, and Dathomir has 16. Zeffo also has two ancient Zeffo tombs, ice caves that connect most regions of the map (which is actually good when you want to travel from one place to another in a short amount of time), an Imperial base, and a gigantic crashed ship.

The crashed venator.

It genuinely feels like most of the effort went into this planet. Bogano and Kashyyyk have zero tombs. Dathomir has one, but it's used solely for a boss fight. I don't think anything really would have been lost by moving one of the tombs to another planet.

There are a couple of areas on Zeffo - the ice caves, the Venator crash site, in particular - that are apparently easy to miss (not to me because I always explore everything) because the story doesn't require you to go there. There really isn't anything like this on the other planets. You're forced to visit all or most of the areas on Kashyyyk and Dathomir.

It's definitely a pity that the Venator is so easy to miss, since it (along with the Tomb of Miktrull) is one of the coolest parts of the planet.

Ultimately, Zeffo has way too much going on. It does, however, have some pretty cool visuals.

Part of the Tomb of Miktrull.

Kashyyyk

A large tree on Kashyyyk.

Kashyyyk is...a planet. It has giant trees, giant spiders, giant fireflies, giant slugs, Wookiees, and a bunch of stormtroopers. It's the planet that I think is most disconnected from the main plot. In the end, all you really learn is that you actually need to go to Dathomir. It feels like Kashyyyk is in the game mainly to take up space. It does show how the Empire is impacting people's lives and how they're rebelling, but not really much else.

You also visited Kashyyyk in Knights of the Old Republic, and much to my surprise, some of the enemies were the same. There are also tachs in the game, but thankfully they don't make any sounds like they did in KotOR.

A tach on Kashyyyk.

This is what tachs look like now.

Dathomir

The landscape of Dathomir.

Dathomir is very pretty, but also very intimidating at first. I went there early in the game to check it out, and ended up leaving after a couple of minutes because I realized I was quite underleveled.

"Desolate" would be a good word to describe Dathomir - if it wasn't full of giant spiders, Nightbrothers, and eventually undead Nightsisters. It's a pretty barren world, but feels a lot less empty than Bogano because there are actual people there, living and undead.

This planet is more annoying than the other planets, mostly because there aren't nearly as many shortcuts as there are on the other planets. You can't skip entire areas like on Zeffo. And dealing with the undead Nightsisters became such a pain that I had to actually lower the difficulty because I was sick of being mobbed by enemies and just wanted to get through the place.

There is a tomb on Dathomir, but it consists solely of a boss fight. After the huge detour you have to go through to get to the tomb, I'm not sure I would have liked to explore an entire area, so that's fine with me.

Ominous statues in the Tomb of Kujet

Other Miscellaneous Things

The whole Ordo Eris sequence comes out of nowhere, even if you do listen to your crewmates' conversations. It genuinely doesn't seem like there's enough to support that part of the game existing. It also seems pretty strange that a bounty hunter could track down and kidnap a Jedi while the entire Empire, for some reason, can't do the same. It doesn't really add anything to the game, either.

You have multiple crewmembers - Greeze, Cere, and eventually Merrin - but they don't really do anything outside of cutscenes. They stand around the ship when you're on a planet and sometimes have dialogue that relates to that particular planet. I would have liked more crewmember conversations.

In Conclusion

I liked the game! There are definitely things I would have fixed, but overall it's pretty good. I am definitely going to play the sequel when it comes out (or, most likely, when it goes on sale) and it's likely I'll end up reviewing that one, too.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 22 October 2024, backdated to 17 May 2021. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Purchased Through: Origin
Hours Played: 9.5 (Therum Completed)

I've been waiting for this remaster since it was announced! At the time, I was thinking about replaying the Mass Effect trilogy, and this was the perfect excuse for a replay. And a couple of reviews, since I'm doing that now.

First of all, the graphics are gorgeous:

A reaper on Eden Prime.

All the low-resolution textures in the original version of Mass Effect 1 are gone!

Eyes are way shinier than they used to be - to an almost distracting degree. It's almost too pretty. Characters' faces have actual detail to them: not just scars, but pores, freckles, and other marks on their skin. A lot of Asari and Turian NPCs have some kind of facepaint/makeup, and it's a lot more noticeable now.

Talking to Nelyna.

Nelyna's facepaint (makeup?) was not nearly as bold or noticeable in the original version of the game. Neither were her underboobs.

I used to wonder what the blurry green lines on the Volus' suits were. Now I can see that they are actual green lines on the fabric, not part of Volus anatomy like I originally thought (I used to think the Volus were spindly plant people).

A volus on the Citadel.

Due to loading times being decreased, elevator dialogue starts immediately. There's also an option to skip it entirely, but I don't know why you would want to do that. The squad banter is pretty great.

Combat is improved in general. It's still based on the original combat system of Mass Effect 1, but it is definitely better than it used to be.

The Mako handles a lot better. It's not nearly as wonky as it used to be and actually feels...heavier? There's a speed boost option now. The sound effects for the guns are different. And there isn't an XP penalty for killing enemies from the Mako anymore!

The Bring Down the Sky DLC is part of the base game now. It was actually the first mission I did after leaving the Citadel - I had zero idea what Asteroid X57 was since I didn't have the DLC in the original game.

Photo mode is pretty great! There are tons of options. There's even options to remove the party members or Shepard from view. Also, the photos are saved...as bitmap files. I genuinely did not think anyone used bitmap files anymore.

And here's some bugs I've encountered:

With dialogue, the last word or half a word gets skipped at the end of a sentence sometimes. It seems to be random.
The biotic & tech color bars on the party member selection screen are swapped. Tech is now blue and biotics are now purple.
The disappearing Turian C-Sec Officer bug is still in the Presidium Prophet sidequest.
My computer crashed once during the X57 mission. I have zero idea what it was caused by, but I could only exit the game by using CTRL-ALT-DELETE and trying to switch user accounts. That shut down Origin entirely.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 18 October 2024, backdated to 3 May 2021. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is an RPG game by Bioware, released in 2003. I, however, didn't know this game existed until a couple of years ago. I didn't really get into PC gaming until mid-2019, and the first time I played KotOR was in early 2020.

I'd just finished playing Mass Effect 2, so I genuinely wasn't impressed by the game at first. KotOR is rather clunky in comparison - since, you know, it's from 2003 and ME2 is from 2010. It took a while for me to get used to the controls and I genuinely couldn't get into the game. I have zero idea why, since I've played older games and had zero problems with them.

For some reason, in February of this year I thought about replaying KotOR. The thing is, I don't particularly like replaying video games. If there's achievements I've missed or some kind of New Game+, I'll do it, but otherwise? There's no justifiable reason to replay a game when I already own so many unplayed ones.

I actually considered doing a screenshot & text Let's Play of a new KoTOR playthrough. I even wrote a blog post as a test to see what it would look like, but decided against it as it would take way too long. Something like that would take more than 10 blog posts.

So I decided on a review. Perfect justification for replaying a game.

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Playthrough 1: Scout/Jedi Sentinel, Light-side male, 44 hours
Playthrough 2: Scout/Jedi Consular, Light-side female, 31.5 hours

Stat screen for Seraya Dral, the player character.

First things first: this game, like every game, has some bugs.

When a video plays, the game window sometimes minimizes. This is much more of a problem when there are two or three videos back-to-back.
Characters sometimes get stuck after combat. This is something that never happened when I played on my laptop, but happened frequently on my desktop. It's not too much of a problem since most of the time you can just switch to another character and have them lead the party instead, but sometimes all three party characters get stuck, which is a pain. However, this isn't too much of a bad bug because...you can save the game right there and reload the save, which makes it possible for the character to move again.
Party members occasionally get stuck behind part of the geometry and have a hard time getting to you. This has resulted in me trying to exit an area only to be told that I need to gather my party, checking the map, and seeing that a character is halfway across the map. Usually, you have to wait for the character to catch up.
A bug I only encountered on my laptop: the grass can cause a weird graphical glitch in the sky. This can be fixed by turning off the grass in the options menu.

For my second playthrough, I installed the Kotor 1 Community Patch, so I have no idea how many other glitches and bugs there are in the base game.

Secondly, I'm going to review each planet. I think that's the easiest way to start things off. And I'm going to skip talking about the tutorial level (the Endar Spire), because it's pretty much just an introduction to the game mechanics & controls.

Taris

Taris upper city.

Taris is the first planet you end up on. I know a lot of people don't like the planet because it takes up a lot of time and you don't get to become a Jedi until you get to Dantooine (you usually end up at level 8 out of 20 total levels), but I personally think the planet is fine.

You get most of your party members here - Carth, Mission, Zaalbar, Bastila, T3-M4, and Canderous. You can talk to all of those party members and each of them has their own personal quest you can do...except for T3-M4. This droid is obtained for the single purpose of...opening the door to the Sith Base.

One door. You can use T3 to open all the other locked doors in the game, but there are other characters who can do that, too. T3 isn't good in combat, has no personality, you can't have conversations, and it has no personal mission. There is literally no reason for T3 to exist other than as an obligatory droid character. I don't even have any screenshots of this droid.

There are a ton of sidequests on Taris, and you can help a ton of people...which ultimately ends up not mattering at all (except for the experience you get for completing them) since the planet gets destroyed when you leave it.

Dantooine

Dantooine is where you actually get to become a Jedi!

Jedi training.

Dantooine is also the first planet where the grass glitch pops up, since the planet is covered in grass. The planet has quite a few sidequests - mostly stuff that you're tasked to resolve as a Jedi - and the seventh party member: Juhani.

Juhani is one of the two optional party members - rather than persuading her away from the dark side, you can straight up kill her once you meet her. I genuinely don't know why you'd want to do this. Juhani is one of the more useful party members in combat.

There are ruins on Dantooine that are 20,000 years old, because it wouldn't be Star Wars without lots of improbably old things. This is where you learn the main objective of the game: travel to four planets - Tattooine, Kashyyyk, Manaan, and Korriban - and use the star maps on those planets to find the Star Forge.

A conversation with Bastila in the ruins.

This is where the game finally opens up. You can travel to any of the four planets in any order you want. You can come back to Dantooine at any time you want before you complete your third planet. You can complete a sidequest on one planet, go to another, complete a few more quests, and go back and forth without penalty - unless you include the docking fees on Manaan as a penalty.

I did actually do a little bit of that in my second playthrough, but primarily stuck to the recommended order of Tatooine -> Kashyyyk -> Manaan -> Korriban.

Tattooine

Maybe it's because Tatooine is the first planet I chose to go to, but I think it's the best planet in the game. Three characters have their personal quests here: Mission, Bastila, and Canderous. You can make a lot of money through swoop racing. You can get your second optional party member, HK-47. And if you do things correctly, you can learn a lot about the backstory of Tatooine.

Also, this is where you first start getting attacked by groups of Dark Jedi.

A conversation with a Dark Jedi.

This isn't really a bad thing, because you get lightsabers from them. Extra lightsabers are always good to have and they sell for quite a bit of money if you don't want to keep them.

HK-47 is the eighth party member you can obtain. He's necessary for negotiating with the Sand People, so if you don't plan on doing that, then it isn't actually necessary to buy him. HK-47 doesn't have a personal quest, but you can repair him (using your Repair skill) over the game to learn more about his backstory.

A conversation wtih HK-47.

I really have to recommend bringing HK-47 along to talk to the Sand People. You will learn a lot about the history of Tatooine and how it relates to things you learn later in the game.

Kashyyyk

For some reason, it feels like there isn't much to do on this planet. It may be because Zaalbar's personal quest takes place here and it's non-optional. A lot of the sidequests here are more integrated into the main story than on other planets.

Kashyyyk is where you meet Jolee Bindo, an old Jedi who apparently doesn't follow the dark or light side of the Force.

A conversation with Jolee Bindo.

Jolee is, in my opinion, the most interesting character in the game. You learn a lot about the Jedi and wars from years ago. And since he's a grey Jedi, he can use both light and dark-side force powers without penalty. This makes Jolee - also in my opinion - another really good combat-oriented character. There's really no reason not to bring him everywhere.

Manaan

Of all the planets, I like Manaan the least. The planet is genuinely too big - four maps for Alto City, one of the Sith base, and a couple for the Hrakert Rift (underwater) sections.

Jolee's personal quest takes place here. His friend, Sunry, is on trial for murder and you're asked to help prove that Sunry is innocent, because Jedi apparently do that sort of thing. I didn't think much of it on my first playthrough, but when I looked up the possible outcomes of the trial, I realized that I had missed a lot of information. On my second playthrough, I made sure to find every piece of information I could and got an entirely different outcome from the trial.

The Hrakert Rift section of Manaan is the shortest section on the planet, but it's the most tedious, because you move extremely slowly while wearing the environment suit.

The sea floor of Manaan.

I think this is what most people hate about the Manaan. I definitely hated it in my first playthrough, but found it not so bad in my second.

Also, what's kind of hilarious is that you can get attacked by Sith when you're at the bottom of the ocean:

A conversation with the Sith at Hrakert Rift.

Yep, you can even ask them how they got down there.

Korriban

Korriban is under control of the Sith. There's even a Sith training academy there, which you have to get into in order to find the location of the planet's star map.

There are also a bunch of Sith archaeologists looking through tombs in the Valley of the Dark Lords, something I thought was more interesting than most things in this game. Maybe it's because I like archaeology?

Talking to a Sith archaeologist.

Carth's personal quest takes place on Korriban, and Juhani can run into an ex-Jedi (now Sith) who she used to know. This only happens if you have her in your party, so I had no idea about it until my second planthrough.

The Unknown World

So after you've gone to all four planets and obtained all four star maps, you find the location of the Star Forge. Then, when you try to go there, you crash-land on another planet. This planet has sidequests, and you can also get money, even though you're past the point where you can buy anything.

I don't want to say much about this planet because it would be going too far into spoiler territory, but it is quite a pretty place.

Looking towards the sea on the Unknown World.

Star Forge

Eventually you actually get to the Star Forge, which is the only place in the game that has respawning enemies. While there's a cutscene where Malak says that all available troops are sent out against you, there's no indication that this means that the waves of enemies do not end. This makes a couple of areas pretty difficult to get past.

Except, of course, if you go into solo mode and move each character from one safe area to another. That pretty much lets you bypass all the fighting. Since you're at level 20 by the time you get to the Star Forge, there's no actual reason to level up any longer.

Here is one frustrating thing that I did not know before going into the final boss the first time: it's just about impossible to defeat the boss if you don't have one out of a couple of specific force powers. In my second playthrough, I made sure I had at least one, and was actually able to defeat the boss.

Additional Things

There are plenty of ridiculous dialogue choices you can make, most of which are dark-aligned. Most of them came across as way too unreasonable for me to consider - like responding to a request for help with threatening to kill people.

You can ask each character about each planet, and all of them have a unique thing to say. You can also have conversations with each character and learn more about them as the story progresses, but the trigger is different with each character. New dialogue appears after the player character levels up, the party members level up, or after you find a new star map. There's no way to know which applies to which character without checking a guide.

Overview

This is a pretty good role-playing game, even if the controls are rather clunky and outdated. Just look up a guide if you want to make sure you don't miss something or build your character in the wrong way. You'll probably want to be able to defeat the final boss on your first playthrough.

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Posted to Dreamwidth on 16 October 2024, backdated to 17 March 2021. Originally posted on Wordpress.

Purchased through: GOG.com
Hours played: 8.5 (level 77, main story complete

Cat Quest is an open-world RPG (role-playing game) where everyone is a cat. It's really adorable and light-hearted, and it's something I've been spending time on here and there on the weekends.

It's also full of cat puns. There are so many cat puns.

In-game screenshot containing a cat pun: Impawster.

Like with other RPGs, there are enemies wandering the overworld and in instanced dungeons. There are some boss fights in the overworld - mostly dragons - and tons of sidequests. It's very easy to get sidetracked by sidequests to the point that I'm overleveled by the time I get back to the main storyline quests, which probably makes them a bit too easy.

Not that I'm complaining! It's super easy to level up just by doing sidequests and everything associated with them. There is essentially no grinding in this game, which is something that I am supper happy about.

There is one thing in particular that I don't like: not being able to choose which weapon or piece of armor to upgrade. It's completely randomized as to what item gets an upgrade and to what extent the stats are boosted.

Overall, this is a nice little game that can be completed in 6-8 hours. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a no-stress RPG to play for 30 minutes to half an hour here and there.

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