Clearing The Fog From The Fogden Game

 

Yesterday I mentioned I'd played through the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness but I didn't say much about it, other than that I enjoyed it. Let's fix that.

The episode goes by the name "Fogden Game" and when I saw that I did wonder for a moment whether it was going to be a second game-within-a-game, like 999 Nights. That was a worrying moment. I think they got away with it once but...

Luckily, it's nothing of the kind. The story carries on from exactly where it left off, at the end of Dreamwalk Corridor, almost three months ago. Only, as we learn, in the game not much more than a week has passed. Nanally is still very much not herself, as anyone wouldn't be, if they only had half their soul. It's past time for us to do something about that, instead of playing 3DD&D with Mint!

A note left by Hotori tells us she's going to be away for a while and we should all look after the store while she's gone. Obviously she's up to something and equally obviously she's going to need our help. Otherwise why would it be in the story? 

Do you have trouble keeping your metadata straight in these situations? I know I do. What do I know? What does my character know? What have I read outside the game? It's a narrative minefield.

Luckily, somehow - I forget exactly how - the Appraiser knows just where to find Hotori, who for some equally unknowable reason, Flora (And everyone else.) has suddenly decided to refer to as "The Shopkeeper". This brought me up short the first time it happened. I wondered if I'd missed something but no, apparently it's new to this chapter. 

 

Whether it'll stick remains to be seen. I quite like it. I also like the idea that everyone at Eibon gets a job title. There's the Appraiser, the Shopkeeper, the Butler (Adler), Eibon's Handyman (Taygedo), the Bodyguard (Daffodil) and the Ichi Daimi (Nanally, although that one's very much a self-appointed title rather than something that describes her role in the shop.) 

Edgar could be the Researcher, which just leaves Sakiri. I have no idea what her official title would be. She fights and she sets her pet anomaly, Kiroumaru, on people. Apparently she also posts lists of rules on the fridge. I guess we could call her the Enforcer. 

As it transpires, Hotori is about to go rescue Daffodil from the Scarlet Letter along with a team from BAC, specifically from ETD6. This plays into the part of the game I find the most fascinating - the enmeshed, interlinked networks of professional and personal relationships that suffuse the world with both nuance and confusion. I purely love it when I don't know what's going on but I know it's something.

Hotori has some kind of history with the Director of BAC, Alphard. That's how come the Appraiser, the player character, ends up at Eibon in the first place. Alphard has a very heavy professional rep while Hotori is barely ever sober, so they seem like a total mismatch but they're both exceptionally heavy hitters when it comes to a fight and they go back a long way. Theirs is a history about which we know next to nothing. Catnip laced with cocaine to me.

 

The ETD6 team is Chaos, another character I find increasingly enigmatic and intriguing, Nitsa, who I can't remember much about except she's quite sweet and Linko, who we haven't met before. Linko is a pathfinder of some kind. She has a huge backpack and she gets hunches that the game signals by having a lock of hair on the top of her head wiggle about. She's cartoonish and cute and - surprise, surprise - she's one of the two banner characters in this episode, the other being Zankou, one of the villains.

I'm going to jump out of chronology here to question that last part. We can roll for Zankou right now and if we win her, we can add her to our team. How, exactly, is that supposed to work? I already have enough issues with the way the team-building mechanic allows characters who aren't present and have nothing to do with whatever it is you're doing to magically appear and fight with you, wherever you happen to be, but at least so far they've all been friends or colleagues.

Zankou is an enemy. Granted, she's conflicted in her loyalties but she's very much not any kind of friend or ally. But putting even that aside, at the debriefing at the end, Alphard tells the Appraiser Zankou's crimes are so heinous there's no deal to be cut and she's going away for a long, long time. 

If she's in prison, how does she get to pop up whenever she's called to fight alongside the player? Does she get day release? It's a step too far for any kind of hand-waving lore explanation to wish away. It's just Game Logic and we have to accept it and ignore the implications, the way you can swim in plate armor in every MMORPG ever made, I guess.

Getting back to the plot, the Appraiser invites herself along and because she's universally considered both a wild card no-one knows anything much about and a Good Egg, of course that's fine. I mean, who knows what she mightn't be able to do? Everyone goes into a disused industrial facility out in the woods somewhere and a lengthy puzzle sequence follows. 

I like the puzzles in NTE, for the most part. They're easy enough to understand, not too fiddly to execute and don't outstay their welcome. This one involves a lot of running along derelict corridors and up stairwells, looking for messages and being taunted by Inanna, the really nasty boss of the Scarlet Letter, who appears in television screens all over the place.

This was one of my favorite parts. I could write a whole post about the way every game goes straight to old, boxy cathode-ray television sets whenever they want some way to present a sinister, remote presence. Flat-screen TVs might as well never have existed. 

They all do it but NTE is the first I've ever seen dig into that trope and open it up. There's a whole conversation about how Inanna had to scour second-hand electronics stores all across Hethereau to source enough old but still-working TVs for her dramatics. I think she says she could only find a dozen in the entire city. (Six, in fact...) That's the kind of commitment to the bit that really sells it for me. 

Eventually, we find our way to the top of the building, deactivate the final, taunting TV, get in the elevator and go all the way back down to the lobby and go through the door in the tree. (Didn't I mention there was a tree with a locked door in it? Well, there was and now the door is open.). And on the other side of the door is the Fogden. Where the game happens.

So, what is the Fogden Game? Ah, that's the question. Here's how I remember it without looking it up. It might not be accurate but it'll be an accurate impression of what I got from it. Very much not the same thing. The more important thing.

The Fogden Game is a game that takes place in the Fogden, an anomalous realm under the control of a Rules Anomaly called the Fog Coffin. A Rules Anomaly is an entity that both sets and enforces rules within its sphere of control and is one of the most terrifying concepts I've happened on in the whole of my gaming career. Seriously, these things would give Harlan Ellison nightmares.

Every so often the game starts up. I don't know the cadence  but it's apparently been happening for at least two hundred years. This is telling. It's easy to think of anomalies as only having been in the world for a few decades but the Fifth High-Level Anomaly Outbreak that occurred forty years before the time the game is set was only the trigger for anomalies becoming widely known to the general public. Prior to that they were a government secret, controlled by the agencies. Inanni tells us she has a couple of hundred years history with the Fog Coffin so she's clearly an insider. 

The game itself involves a whole load of people entering the realm and hunting each other until only one is left alive. Whoever wins gets to ask the Fog Coffin for any one thing that's in the Fogden. It can be material or immaterial.  

 

As we learn later, Inanni has set the whole thing up to get Hotori into the game so she can win and ask the Fog Coffin to give her Hotori's esper ability to manipulate time. Inanni believes this will make her truly immortal instead of whatever bargain basement version of living forever she has now. I mean, she's the one who tells us the Fogden Game was happening two hundred years ago, which she knows because she was there, so her current immortality mod can't be that shoddy but arch-villains never will settle.

That's the plot in a nutshell. Obviously, we have to make sure it doesn't happen, especially because only one person can leave the Fogden alive once the game starts and even though we didn't sign up, we're in it now. 

We get introduced, visually at least, to the other competitors, a motley crew ranging from small children to an old guy in a wheelchair. In theory, we're going to have to kill all of them but of course that's never going to happen. They can sure kill each other, though, and they do, although mostly off-camera. 

Or maybe they don't. It gets very confusing from here on in. Up to the point where the actual game begins, I'd been able to stay on top of the plot quite comfortably but once it all starts, it's everyone for themselves and it's hard to know just where you are. 

Or who, because Fogden Game is one of those episodes where you spend a lot of time not playing your own character. I used to dread those in MMORPGs but they make a lot more sense in gacha games, where you play a gestalt a lot of the time anyway. And I'd have to say that, in the gacha games I've played, which is, like, three, so I'm no expert, the whole body-swap deal is much better-handled than in any MMORPG I ever played. 

 

In this episode you get to play as the Appraiser, as Daffodil and as Linko. I think that was all. There's not a huge amount of fighting although there are several boss and sub-boss fights. Mostly it's talking, running, collecting and puzzles.

Anyone can do all of those. Doesn't matter if you never saw the character before. You can run, talk, pick stuff up and figure out puzzles just as well as if you were on your main. Usually the problem with having to play unfamiliar characters is having no chance to figure out what their abilities are, something that matters a lot in most MMORPGs. In gacha games, though, there's a good chance you'll have the character on your team already so you'll know what they do and even if you don't, button mashing is going to get you through. At least, it will in NTE.

It got me through just fine, anyway. Daffodil felt overpowered and Linko and Nitsa did more running away than they did fighting. In their big, set-piece fight with a giant, flying, skeletal snake, I barely ever managed to target the damn thing, let alone hit it and we still won. 

In fact, I never died once in the whole thing. Didn't even come close. Some of the fights looked hard going in but turned out not to be. I don't think they're actually scripted so you can't lose but there seems to be a big margin for error and a lot of "sit back and watch and let the characters show you what they can do" moments. I found it all very well-paced. 

 

Daffodil's segment mostly involves her travelling through a seemingly endless series of bleak, wet caverns, taking Lumen Circles from the petrified corpses of failed competitors from previous games. I never did figure out what the Lumen Circles were or why Daffodil wanted them, except that they somehow figured in getting her to where she needed to be, namely facing down Inanni.

Along the way, Daffodil fights a pair of siblings or lovers or friends or business partners (Missed the relationship but they're a couple.) and the guy in the wheelchair. The couple are bittersweet. The old guy is obnoxious. Both were memorable. She also spends some time talking to a girl who, I think, is a contestant in the game who's given up to protect her injured sister. Then Daffodil meets her own "sister", Zankou.

Daffodil's history with the Scarlet Letter is fascinating. I don't believe she and her sisters are blood-related. Ananni adopted them, presumably without benefit of paperwork, and brought them up to be assassins, murderers and all-round villains. Daffodil escaped. Zankou and Poinsette stayed. 

Zankou is not happy about Daffodil's defection. Poinsette is conflicted. I found both their stories quite affecting. I was pulling hard for Poinsette to switch sides and eventually she kind of does. It was very satisfying.

While all that's going on, Chaos, his team and the Appraiser and Hotori are heading through a different part of the Fogden. Chaos, the Appraiser, Hotori and Thyme, the enemy-turned ally from the Dreamwalk Corridor episode, who's also turned up somewhere along the line, all get separated from Linko and Nitsa, who spend most of their time trying not to be squashed by falling boulders and edging along narrow ledges with their backs to the cliffs as the entire part of the Fogden they're in tries to kill them. It's intense!

Eventually, after a great deal of exploring, emoting and fighting, everyone ends up in the same place for the final battle. But I think that's enough for one post. 

Let's make it a two-parter.

If In Doubt, Run Like Hell or How To Say No And Get Away With It

Who's up for another round of "Yesterday In Baldur's Gate"? No-one? Tough! It's all I've got.

My played time now stands at a terrifying fifty-five hours, of which I very much doubt even as much as an hour was idle time. It also appears that I'm still in "Act 1" which, if true, and if the acts were all to be of roughly equal length, would suggest a final running length of somewhere around a hundred and fifty hours.  

I'm guessing what it means is either that I'm spending a huge proportion of my time doing things I probably don't need to be doing, or that the three acts are not of equal length. Possibly both. 

How Long To Beat has a "Completionist" run coming in at 179 hours, with a brisk trot through just the main storyline taking a little less than half that long. They also show something called "Main + Extra" at 115 hours although what that means, exactly, is anyone's guess.

Is this a good thing? Should a single video game take up that much of anyone's time? It certainly isn't necessary to take that long for a game to feel like something special. I completed Disco Elysium in forty hours and that felt like a major event. Broken Sword 5 lasted sixteen hours and Cloudpunk, which I found very absorbing, took me just eleven hours. Quality over quantity, I guess, although I suppose it's a bit rich to balk at both together.

Games eat each other, though. Since I started playing BG3, I've put in far more hours than I'd been used to doing for months, if not years, but I've also played nothing else. Regular readers may remember I was quite happily trundling along in EverQuest II, with vague plans of taking several characters through the new expansion over the rest of the winter. Well, that's not happening.

Of course, EQII will still be there when I finish Baldur's Gate 3. Probably. We hope. If anything's going on there now that I ought to know about, though, I'm missing it. 

I'm not completely wrapped up in Faerun. I got an email from Artix about a giveaway in AdventureQuest 3D that was tempting enough to get me to log in, even though I really don't play that game much at the best of times. When someone offers to give you a bunch of cash shop money just for logging in, though, it's rude to ignore them. 

But that only took five minutes. Other than that, it's been BG3, all day, every day. It's compelling but also confusing, which is quite a strong combo for me. I do like not really knowing what's going on in a game.

Take that three-act structure for a start. I'm not sure it exists, formally, inside the game but it's referenced everywhere outside it and I have clearly misunderstood how it works until very recently. I was sure there was a hard transition between the "Mountain" zone and the "Wilderness" and I think there probably is but the transition evidently isn't where I thought it was.

I've spent a very great deal of time in the area in and around the Githyanki Creche and the semi-ruined temple where it's hidden. I thought that was in Act 2 but it's not. I thought it was on the other side of the mountain pass, too, but it's not that, either. And I thought it was going to be the end of my game but it turned out I was mistaken. Bloody close call, though!

As I almost always do in RPGs that let you form a party as you go along, I'm sticking with the first characters I  met. I know you're supposed to swap them in and out but I almost never do that. I stay loyal to the ones I've got, even if they're useless. I only really drop someone if I find them too offensive in some way to put up with.

My team has been Gale the Wizard, Lae'zel the Fighter and Shadowheart the Cleric from the start. I have a bunch of would-be companions in camp but they never get to come adventuring with me. I'm comfortable with the team I've got.

It's almost mutual. I like all three of my team and two of them like me. Shadowheart isn't so sure, mostly because I friend-zoned her. Twice.

That bit at the start of the game, where you can toggle off Sex and Violence, doesn't go far enough in my opinion. I was hoping it would mean no shenanigans in camp but my character has been propositioned several times, which is not my idea of an adventure.And I'm not having any of it. So to speak.

A refusal often offends, as the oh-so-witty sign in too many gift shops likes to warn us, but luckily a firm "No" doesn't seem to have offended Shadowheart enough to make her pack her hammer and leave. In a way it wouldn't be so bad if she did because she's certainly the weak link in the squad. I though clerics were supposed to be good at healing but she seems more like a trained first-aider than a battlefield medic. She also can't hit the side of a barn door with that hammer...

I like her, though. And I like Gale. But I like Lae'zel best of all, which is why, when we found ourselves unexpectedly embroiled in a long sub-plot involving her opportunity to Do The Right Thing by her Queen-Goddess, I backed her all the way. Another reason for Shadowheart to take against me, now I come to think of it.

Anyway, I cheered Lae'zel on while the crazy doctor tried to get the tadpole out with her organic crab machine and we broke it, which led to a fight that did not go well for the doctor. Then I backed Lae'zel in her obviously doomed but very proper attempt to tell the Creche Boss the doctor had been a wrong 'un and that's why we killed her. He didn't buy it so we had to kill him, too. 

Well, we were in it up to our necks by then. The others would have made a run for it but no, I stuck by Lae'zel, when she thought the Inquisitor was bound to understand. Clue is in the name, I'd have thought, but I agreed to give it a try and to give Lea'zel credit, he did listen. 

He wanted the Artefact that was keeping us all alive and which is something super-important to Shadowheart for... reasons... so I gave it to him. 

Hmm. I'm beginning to see why Shadowheart's going off me now...

He called the Queen, who made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Well, we could have but she'd have killed us. 

Of course, she was always going to kill us anyway, that was obvious, but you try to spin it out, don't you? I kept backing every play Lae'zel made, right up to the very end, when we got sent into the Planes to kill the Mysterious Presence who's been saving us every so often and instead of fighting back, she bared her neck and said we could kill her if that's what we wanted and that finally turned out to be the line I wouldn't cross, even for Lae'zel (Who also wanted to sleep with me, by the way, but who took my refusal a lot better than Shadowheart.).

We went back to the Creche and told the Queen. She was Not Happy. She told the Inquisitor and his gang to kill us and then vanished. At this point none of us had many spells left and we were all quite badly injured so, obviously, I thought that was it. 

Except it wasn't. By the simple expedient of using every speed-increasing option available and running like hell, I managed to get far enough back into the main part of the Creche for Instant Travel to start working again, then I ported back to camp. 

Just me. Everyone else was dead.

I was considering whether to load an earlier save or just recruit a whole new team, when I remembered that leather-faced ghoul who hangs around at the back of the camp. Didn't he say something about bringing my people back from the dead, for a fee?

Yes he did and it wasn't even a lot. 600 gold and he rezzed all three of them in the camp and it was like the whole thing had never happened. The script made a vague attempt at dealing with the anomaly but it wasn't convincing. It wasn't until we all went back the next day, at full health, and killed the Inquisitor like the script assumed we'd already done that the dialog started making sense again.

Then, since we were there anyway, we cleared out the entire Creche and looted everything. That took a while. Lae'zel, who seems to be an absolute mistress of self-deception, somehow squared all of that with her upbringing and religion and now she loves me more than ever. Even Shadowheart is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, since we still have the Artefact and no-one stayed dead.

And now, as far as I can tell, we really have done everything there is to do in Act I, or at least everything any of us cares much about, so after I post this we'll be going through the Real Mountain Pass and into the Real Act 2. Probably. 

I imagine things will only get more confusing from there.

Strolling Through The Void - Rage of Cthurath On EZ-Mode

I haven't exactly finished the latest EverQuest II expansion, Rage of Cthurath. In many ways I've barely started. But I have finished the two Signature Questlines for both Crafters and Adventurers. It's enough, I think, for me to give some kind of appraisal, even if it's not enough for a full review.

The first thing I'd say is that I like this expansion a lot. It's been fun. I'll get to why that is in a bit but I'll say up front that I'm speaking very specifically from the perspective of a fairly casual solo player. What it's been like for group-oriented players or raiders I have no idea.

It's also been pretty good value, I'd say, although it's incredibly hard to judge whether any expansion for any MMORPG offers a good return on however much you paid for it. With single-player games you can get to the end and do that "hours-per-dollar" calculation. On top of that, especially if it's one of those multiple ending deals, you might make some allowances for replayability.

With an MMORPG, the expansion provides a springboard for other content as much as it represents anything complete in itself. And then there's the question of alts. If you play a number of characters, as many people do, it's likely you'll take more than one of them through the expansion and also that other characters on your account will benefit from hand-me-downs and account-level flags and unlocks.

In my case, I've started three characters on the two Signatures already. Eventually I'll probably take as many as half a dozen through both. Does that mean I should multiply the value by the number of characters who complete one or the other or both?

Probably not but it does suggest any hours-per-dollar calculation shouldn't just work off a single run. And even if it did, I'm most likely already getting close to the traditional dollar-an-hour break-even.

So, I'm very happy with the quality and the quantity, then, am I? It certainly sounds like it, the way I'm talking. 

Yeah, no, maybe not really... I'm not sure...

The Signature quests are definitely getting shorter. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. There was a time when it took me longer to to finish one instance than it takes me now to do the entire thing. Or it felt like it, anyway. And there were those couple of expansions where absolutely everything seemed to revolve around raising multiple factions before you could even get anyone to give you the damn quests.

Is that what I want? No, it's not. What that did was put me right off the idea of taking multiple characters through the storyline. It took ages, it felt like a grind, it didn't seem to get any faster with experience and it wasn't anything I'd want to repeat. I was mostly just glad to have gotten it done at all..

That's not the case here. It's fast and entertaining, even though the storyline in Rage of Cthurath is thin, there's no denying it. And obviously, it makes no sense. That's a given. No EQII expansion's storyline has made sense for years. It's fine. It's expected. This tale, though, seems perfunctory even by recent standards. 

Here's my best attempt at a spoiler, based on what I can remember, without looking anything up. 

Lord Lucan, in his never-ending search for a means of world-domination, has gotten his hands on a McGuffin that's turned out to be more than he bargained for. Somehow, it attracted the attention of a Lovecraftian Elder God and now he's a puppet.

Meanwhile Lady Najena, who used to be a villain, has somehow gotten involved, only this time she's on our side. A whole load of spooky portals have popped up all around Norrath, spewing out Void entities we're all familiar with from previous invasions. She's trying to put a stop to it because I have no idea why. I guess she's just annoyed it's not her that's doing it.

She recruits the Player Character because of course she does or there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? She sends the PC on a mission through a portal of her own and some space-goats hijack it and divert the PC into the Void so they can get some help to escape.

This inevitably leads to a big, exciting adventure... Hahaha! I'm kidding! No, it doesn't! It leads to a bunch of trivial errands, things like pulling up weeds and making dinner for a dog (Alright, a wolf. Does that make it any better?) before Najena herself arrives in The Void and gets things back on track.

From then on it's mostly a series of dungeons instances in which the PC has to plant a whole load of runes so as to... erm... I don't know. Protect something? I think I drifted off when Najena was explaining that part.

Anyway, it's all very important (And repetitive.) and means you have to kill a lot of named mobs, all of whom drop gear better than what you got out of the Tishan's Box at the start, so there's plenty in it for you even if you're not entirely clear on why you're doing it.

Eventually you stick the final rune where it's supposed to go and that severs the connection between Lucan and the Consumer, which is the really rather ill-considered name someone chose to give the Big Bad. There's one final confrontation in which the PC gets to fight The Consumer and Najena gets to summon some big rocks for the PC to hide behind when it all gets a bit much.

The Consumer disappears back to whatever nether-hell he came from, issuing dire threats of retribution, and Lucan is a free sociopath again. Except apparently he's had some kind of existential experience while under the influence because instead of getting straight back to the world domination, he announces he can't go back in case The Consumer has another go at him, mentally weakened as he is. Like he ever cared about Norrath before. other than to be in charge of it all.

The PC wonders, not unreasonably, what that means for Freeport, which Lucan has ruled with an iron fist inside an iron glove since at least 2004, Earth time. Najena tells them not to worry their pretty little head about it because she'll sort it all out and it'll all be fine, which isn't anything like as reassuring to hear as she thinks it is.

Credits roll. End of Episode One. To be continued in next expansion, probably. Oh, except do just pop off to the Unknown and see if you can find this other McGuffin, would you? You weren't doing anything important, right now, were you?

It was just as well there was a post-credit sequence because the main questline only took Mordita to level 133. There are two more levels to go so any quests are welcome, however trivial. No other way to get the xp, these days.

The Tradeskill Signature line is basically the same only without nearly everything I just said. If the Adventure Sig is thin, the Crafting one is positively skeletal. Mostly it's gathering mats, making stuff out of them and waiting several hours until you can do it again. 

What do you want from a crafting questline, though? Narrative? I just want the recipes for the five new levels, mostly. And I have them now, so I'm happy.

And I'm happy about the Adventure timeline, too, because the fighting was actually fun for once! How many expansions are there where I would have been able to say that with a straight face? Not very many.

Why was it fun? Because it was very, very easy, that's why. And I like easy. If you like challenge, you are not going to be anything like as happy as I was. There isn't any.

Okay, a slight caveat. I have never taken a Necromancer through the Sig Line of an expansion before. Not first up, anyway. I don't have a benchmark for how easy that would usually be.

And it's true that the main reason I wanted to swap from my Berserker was to make things easier for myself. I totally did not expect it to be this much easier, though, and I can't help but think there's more going on than better DPS.

Midnight : tiny but mighty.

There's one thing I noticed that I find very hard to explain: Mordita's combat pet never seemed to take any damage. None at all. Ever. 

A Necro has excellent healing options. I also had a healer mercenary ready to heal both Mordita and her pet. Neither I nor the NPC needed to heal the pet at all.

After a while I started to wonder what was going on so I began paying close attention to the pet's health bar. It didn't move. Not a pixel. 

It was 100% all the time. I never saw it drop even one per cent. I moused over it to see the numbers. I never saw them change. Not on huge overpulls. Not on bosses. Not if I just stood back and watched to see what would happen. The pet seemed to be effectively invulnerable throughout the entire Signature line. It was also extremely good at getting and holding aggro, allowing Mordita to chain-cast every damage spell in her artillery without a pause.

It's not like the mobs weren't putting out the damage, either. Mordita needed plenty of healing when adds got onto her before the pet grabbed them. The Mercenary even managed to get himself killed a couple of times. The pet, though? Didn't take the tiniest scratch that I ever saw.

So that can't be working as intended, surely. Maybe it's one of those good bugs. I've had invulnerable pets before. Just for a session, though, not for weeks on end. 

Even without the invulnerable pet, though, the whole thing seemed much easier than usual. For one thing, none of the bosses had any really irritating tricks. No mana drain, either, which is a huge improvement, although it's been a few expansions since that was in fashion.

Even the tricks they did have mostly involved running about, standing in certain spots or clicking on things. Nothing that wasn't immediately easy to understand and simple to do. 

Who are you and what have you done
with the real Lucan?

Bosses didn't have ludicrous health pools, either. They took damage at a very satisfying rate. I don't think any boss fight took more than a couple of minutes. I remember expansions where the trash took longer than that and the bosses took more like a quarter of an hour. As for the regular mobs, TTK was two or three seconds for most of them. 

All of that made me actively look forward to every instance, something I very rarely do. When I messed
something up in one of them (Only for a side-quest.) the thought of having to do the whole instance again didn't make me want to give up and play something else instead - it made feel like that might be fun.

All the instances are also quite compact and easy to navigate. There are lots of teleports and portals so you don't need to slog through miles of empty corridors to get anywhere. And visually the whole thing is spectacular. It doesn't come over in screenshots but in game there's a huge amount of three-dimensionality, lots of particle effects and movement. It's a pleasure to spend time there. 

There have been complaints about the pacing, particularly the way players have been left to cobble together a path to the cap involving side quests and repeatables but I'm quite happy to meander through those final two levels. It'll give me a chance to gather enough rares to upgrade Mordita's spells. 

Not that there's much sign of her needing the extra power. She went into the expansion with almost every spell at Expert level from the tier below and it seemed to give her more than enough firepower, not just to get the job done but to get it done quickly and easily. 

Rather than try to race through the last two levels with her, I think I might take a couple more characters through both the Adventure and Tradeskill Signatures first. The crafters should have a very easy time of it, what with every capped character giving a 20% xp bonus to those coming after and those also getting a reduction in waiting-time on the gatekeeping quests.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Rage of Cthurath so far. I think it might be my favorite expansion for quite a while. But then I always say that, don't I? I'm a cheap date when it comes to expansions.

Blue Protocol: Star Resonance - Death And Fractures

The elderly PC I'm limping along with until Black Friday arrives and I buy myself a new one is surprisingly happy to play most games I've tried, including a few I didn't expect it to be able to run. Most surprising of all is Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, a game that only came to the West a few weeks ago and which I thought would be well ouside my old PC's comfort range.

Instead, it runs beautifully. Smooth as ice cream and as cool. The fans don't even start up. Which is a good thing because BP:SR is my go-to game just now.

Not that that's saying much. My gaming time is still way down, although I expect that to change as soon as I get a new computer. But when I do decide to play something, Blue Protocol is what I choose.

There are a few reasons. One is indeed that it runs well but that's kind of a passive buff. It wouldn't be enough on its own. 

Another passive is that the world is very nice to look at. Better than I realised at first, when I thought the visuals looked a bit under-cooked compared to similar titles like Genshin Impact or Wuthering Waves. I still think there's less detail but the slightly washed-out, pastel color palette has grown on me and now I think it looks subtle and sophisticated rather than bland.

A third, more active reason I'm enjoying BP:SR is the gameplay. It's engaging but very low-key, a combination that suits me perfectly at the moment. 

I've noticed in recent times, when I'm doing First Impressions posts or generally recounting my experiences with newer games, that I quite often make mention of there not being all that much combat in them. I'm not sitting here with a stop-watch and an abacus, counting and timing the fights I have in every session, but my strong feeling is that since I started the game I've hardly had to do any fighting at all.

That leads me on to the main reason I'm playing and enjoying Blue Protocol, which is the story. It isn't original or even particularly compelling but it makes sense and it's linear, meaning I can follow it both literally and metaphorically. And while it may not be a great story, it's entertaining enough for me to want to know what happens next.

The narrative also takes some unexpected turns once in a while. Disturbingly enough in one case that there probably ought to be a trigger warning.

This next part is going to get pretty spoilery so it might be time to quit reading if you plan on playing and care about plot twists and the like. Also, I wouldn't even look at the screenshots in the rest of the post if I was you. Just in case.

Okay, now those folks have left us, let's get to it.

Fairly early on in the plot, as the player character, you run into a brash and mouthy kid called Narulo, who claims to be a hero. He challenges you to a competition and gets roundly beaten because you are a hero and he's just a kid but he still claims you ought to be his sidekick rather than the other way around.

This goes on for a while, with the kid popping up numerous times to make brash or outrageous claims, but as the story moves along he starts to realize how outclassed he is and what a mistake he made by thinking he could match up to you in the first place. The two of you then start to develop a very comfortable kind of big sister/little brother relationship, aided and abetted by some of the other NPCs, and the whole thing gets to feel very cosy.

Then some bad stuff happens and, as they say, shit gets real. A war starts and the part of town where the kid lives gets reduced to rubble. He steps up and becomes the hero he pretended to be, helping the refugees to safety, which is what he's doing when you arrive.

You makes several attempts to persuade him to get somewhere safe himself, while you go off to deal with the crisis, what with you being a true and actual hero and all, and he tells you he will. But then, of course, he doesn't. He finishef getting everyone out of the danger area, then doubles back and tags along behind you, keeping out of sight until eventually you discover him, hiding in a barrel.

By this time it's too late for him to get out of the combat area. You're too deep in and it would be more dangerous for him to go back on his own than to stay, so you very reluctantly agree to let him stick around, so long as he stays close, does what he's told and keeps out of trouble.

And he kind of does. At least, he's well back when the big fight with the boss starts. Just not far back enough. 

I wasn't even sure what happened, to be honest. It was very fast. I think he heroically but idiotically rushed in to save me from being struck  by lightning from behind, only to be burned to a crisp himself but some of the dialog later suggested he was just too close and got hit by sheer bad luck. 

Either way, he's dead. Which was a shock. I certainly wasn't expecting it.  And it had some impact. The narrative tends to be thin, as in there isn't a great wealth of detail and discussion the way there is in Wuthering Waves, but what there is absolutely hits all the nodal points it needs to establish an emotional reaction. The writers do the work and the effect they're going for lands.

It's not unusual in a game like this. Setting up a sympathetic character to reap the emotional payoff when you kill them is Storytelling 101 for RPGs. 

What doesn't tend to happen is having to deal with the fallout. It felt a lot less like a cliche when I met a middle-aged couple later a short while later, in the course of what seemed like an entirely unrelated sequence, and found out in the course of a conversation about something else that they were the kid's parents. 

And that they didn't know he was dead. And that I had to decide whether or not to tell them. It didn't help that the parents had just been talking about how their son was late and how worried they were about him. 

It occurred to me about then that the slightly etiolated nature of the prose was a good thing. It offered some protection against getting too emotionally evolved. Otherwise that part really might not have been much fun at all.

All of which is just an example of why I'm finding the story worth paying some attention. When something like that crops up it does make you wonder what might be coming next. 

Although what actually did come next, or pretty soon after, was a comedy moment that made me laugh out loud. It also worked well as a counterpoint to the tragedy the PC and her friends had just witnessed, which was clearly the writers' intention. 

What happens is that there's another big fight, during which another of your new friends gets crushed by the boss, rushing in to save you. He ends up flat on his back on the grass. He's lying there, saying his last emotional goodbyes and making something of a meal of it, when another of your pals points out  he's just broken a bone or two and  he's going to be fine as soon as the healers get their hands on him. Bathos as catharsis. Clever writing.

I bet it works even better in the original Japanese. The translations in BP:SR are decent but not entirely idiomatic. I've seen much, much worse, though. Whoever's behind these is doing more than enough to bring the emotional weight across. Still, I bet it's better in the ur-text.

So much for the quality of the story, which I would describe as being consistently at least as good as it needs to be and frequently quite a lot better. How's it for quantity, though?

Pretty good. There's a lot more story than I was expecting. I seem to remember reading it was short but it's not feeling that way. Steam says I have more than eleven hours played and I can't actually remember doing anything other than following the MSQ.  

I really haven't done any exploring other than what I've had to do to get from one story location to the next. I haven't done any crafting. I learned how to fish but I doubt I've spent more than ten minutes doing it. 

I haven't even spent any significant time on upgrading my gear or spending my talent points. As I said earlier, combat has featured so rarely up to now that I've not felt the need to improve anything. The few fights there have been seem either to be with trash mobs that pose no challenge or with bosses where the result is scripted anyway. Why bother upgrading when you don't need to?

There's a boatload of other things I could be doing, as in all these sorts of games, but so far I've found more than enough to keep me occupied just following the plot. I'm happy to carry on like that for now, although at some point I'm sure the game will have other ideas.

When I last logged out I left Floradelle standing outside a pair of huge gates, disguised as a member of an isolated, secretive tribe, waiting  to go through them into a Forbidden Zone. Maybe that'll be a dungeon with a lot of fighting and I'll finally have to sort out her gear and spend her talent points.

I'm betting it won't, though. I bet it'll be a lot more chatting and maybe some sneaking and eavesdropping, with a little light puzzle-solving on the side. 

And that will suit me just fine.

It Changes Nothing : Phrolova Said So, So It Must Be True

Every post I write these days seems to begin with me talking about some "plan" or other that's either fallen apart or been abandoned or had to be changed to fit in with new circumstances. Once in a while I even open by saying I had a plan and now here it is, made real. When or why I started making all these plans escapes me, although I bet it had something to do with Blaugust...

And yes, I did have a plan for today. I mean, I didn't have it for long... Not that it's gone wrong, for once. No, it has come to fruition, which is something plans do according to convention, albeit not many of mine.

When I say I didn't have it for long, I don't mean I had it for a while then gave up on it. I'm back-projecting. I only came up with it a day and a half ago and now I'm done with it, so... I didn't have it for long. English is hard.

Although not as hard as biology. If you're a may-fly, I had that plan for a lifetime and then some. Any may-flies out there, reading this? No? Thought not.

So, what was this plan, then? I'm embarassed to tell you, now I've made all this fuss about it. It doesn't deserve to be dignified with the name "plan". It was just that I knew on Monday what I was going to post about on Wednesday, or at least what I wanted to post about then. Now. Whatever. Tenses are slippery.

Almost three weeks ago, I posted something about the latest update in Wuthering Waves. A week later I posted again to say I was finally, actually, for real this time, up to date with the storyline and ready for the next chapter. And now I'm posting to say I've done it. 

Well, I think I have. I got the "Quest Complete" screen for Rinascitta II: Act VIII, anyway. There's probably a coda or an afterword I haven't done yet and for all I know there might be a second installment coming before the next full update, like there was last time. But I've definitely finished the big storyline segment in the current update.

It took me over three hours, broken into three unequal session, and it was fricking amazing! Seriously, it was so good. Even though I kept getting interrupted by dogs and people at the door and Mrs Bhagpuss telling me lunch was ready and all kinds of real-world responsibilities, I was so deep into it it didn't break the spell. And what a spell it cast.

For once, I pretty nearly understood what was going on. Might be the first time since the original questline back in Jinzhou. I just about understand who everyone is now. I recognize all the factions and I have a general impression how each of them stands with the others.  I'm comfortable with the jargon and I get most of the lore references without having to look them up (Something you can do through in-game hyperlinks, an innovation I don't recall seeing anywhere else.)

Better yet, I'm finding I can follow the motivations of the characters, more often than not, which has certainly not always been the case. That's never been because their reasons for doing what they're doing are poorly explained. It's because most of them have secret agendas or multiple agendas, some of which they're keeping secret from some people but not others, or agendas they, the characters, do not fully understand or aren't even aware they have. Plus some of them are being mind-controlled, sometimes but not all the time, because of course they are.

To say there's some nuance involved would be like saying there's some vodka involved in a Russian wedding. (I don't know. I'm assuming? Anyone been to a Russian wedding? My first simile involved Ozzy Osbourne but I thought better of it. (It was complimentary so don't @ me!)) It's basically all nuance. Remember when we thought The Secret World had some elliptical writing? Bears and rats compared to this stuff.

After the current chapter, I think I do finally have some idea who The Fractsidus are. Is. Again, whatever. What they're up to still isn't entirely clear and neither do I know "who" they are as individuals yet, except for this episode's Guest Star - Phrolova.

Oh, I love Phrolova! It's not saying much because I love most of the characters in Wuthering Waves. Well, a lot of them. But Phrolova is especially wonderful because of her nihilistically monomaniacal dedication to a purely romantic cause. She's just... she'd burn down the world to have what she wants and all she wants is what she had when she had nothing. Nothing but love and a home, so, everything.

She gets some truly great lines and Rae Lim, the voice actor behind the English dub, delivers every one of them to absolute perfection. It's such a difficult read, too. Phrolova says things that on the page look to have "lack of affect" or "ennui" written all over them but which come freighted with a subtext of loss, defeat, depression and despair. 

Best I can figure it, Phrolova is a sociopathic empath. Or an empathic sociopath. She feels nothing except everything and none of it matters except at the core where it all matters too much. I screen-shotted some of her bleakest lines but I couldn't screenshot the delivery. 

Okay, I could have videoed it. But I didn't. I figured I'd steal a compilation of the best ones from YouTube. Only there aren't any. There are plenty of comps of her battle cries and lots of cut scenes and videos explaining why "JP VTubers can't stop crying during Phrolova's story" (Who can blame them?) and a ton of other stuff but nothing like I would have focused on. 

So you'll have to imagine the voicees for yourselves when you read her saying things like

or 

or maybe 

Or my absolute favorite

Phrolova stares into the void and the void won't make eye contact. Don't you just love it? 

Yes, well, maybe you don't. I'd have to admit it requires a certain sensibility. The whole game does.  One snarky YouTuber posted a nine-second video that sums up the WW gestalt very nicely:

And yes, there is an awful lot of that - the player-character standing very close to the guest star as they gaze meaningfully at - or more often past - each other. Also a very great deal of flirting on the part of the guest star, almost always received with complete incomprehension or just straight-up ignored by the PC. Except, to misquote Fcukers - Fuck, No. Phrolova Don't Flirt.

There's also a fair smattering of this:

The PC desperately and all too often unsuccessfully lunging towards the Guest Star as the Guest Star falls or sinks or vanishes into some portal.

And then there's the ever-popular 

Meaningful Hand-Clasp. 

Sometimes it's the Rassuring Hand on the Shoulder but the Clasp is More Meaningful.

I can see it might not be to everyone's taste but it is to mine, probably because, as Mrs Bhagpuss has so often informed me, I'm basically a teenage girl. Emotionally, anyway.

So much for the story and characters which are all A+ as usual. Plot, too, for a change. Also, for the record, my character made choices in this one that I wouldn't have made. And said things. Boy, she can be harsh, sometimes...

Gameplay continues to be all but non-existent although there were some good mini-games this time. All very easy but I found them entertaining. Less walking-and-talking than usual, more standing around and lots and lots of flashbacks, dream sequences, still images with voice-overs and various other engaging ways of presenting a passive narrative as if you had some say in the outcome.

As for combat, it genuinely does get less and less every time now. A handful of tiny fights with trash mobs, for which I always used the extremely OP Phrolova, so they lasted mere seconds. One final boss fight that came with a load of instructions about special abilities and how to counter them but which I aced on the first try, using nothing more skilled than some slightly enhanced button-mashing. I watched my cooldowns and swapped characters a few times to get some heals but other than that, no tactics used or required.

And that, I imagine, except for cleaning up whatever decompression and debriefing mini-quests may remain, will be it until the next, big content drop in a few weeks. I feel emotionally drained. I'll need that long to recover. 

As for the Gacha elements... there are none. Seriously, I don't even use the free draws. I did ding Union 40 today, which got me some message about having to do a quest before I can level up any more but I'm not convinced even that will be needed for the story. If it is, I'll handle it when I have to but no money will change hands.

I mean, I would pay for this game. It's totally worth paying for. But so far I haven't needed to and I'm sure Kuro can manage just fine without my contribution. In Phrolova's words (Or nearly...), Gacha rolls "aren't of concern to someone like me".

Wouldn't mind having her on my team, all the same. Maybe I'll at least have a few free pulls and see if I can get her...

It's Beautiful... But What Does It Mean?

I had a very simple plan for today. I was going to patch up Wuthering Waves, log in and do as much of the new story content as I could cope with, then stop and have lunch. After lunch, I was going to write a post about it. The story, not the lunch.

And that's still the plan, except for one very slight variation. I won't be writing about the new story any more. I'll be writing about the old one.

I thought I'd finished the main story quest last time. I thought I was ready to jump straight into whatever came next as soon as it appeared. I even said so in print. Confidently. Definitively. 

And as I also said then, I even had the screenshot to prove it. A screenshot that read 

"No Content. No New Quest". 

I'm just going to have to take your word for that, Lupa.

Under the Main Quests category in the quest journal.

I don't know... seems pretty conclusive, doesn't it?

Except for one thing I'd missed...

Kuro, in their wisdom, decided to split the story content in Update 2.4 into two parts. I had indeed finished the first one but there was a Part Two I didn't even know about. 

Chapter II Act VI - Flames of Heart dropped on 3 July. 

I didn't spot it because I haven't logged in since I finished Chapter II Act V - Shadow of Glory back in June. I also didn't read anything about it in any of my gaming feeds, which is a bit worrying. I imagine it was covered, WW being a very popular game, but either I just didn't see it or I didn't bother to read past the headline.

Luckily, it only took me a few seconds to figure out I still had another chapter to do before I could take a look at the new stuff. And anyway, the old stuff was still new stuff to me, so I was fine with having to take a bit of a run-up to get to the current chapter, Dreamcatchers in the Secret Gardens. 

Looking at some of the commentary around Kuro's decision to split the last drop into two episodes, I see there was speculation that the second part might be more combat-focused, presumably fueled by the fact that the first part very much wasn't. If anyone was hoping that prediction would turn out to be correct, they'll have been disappointed.

I can't remember exactly how long the first installment took me back in June but today's session, in which I did nothing but the aforementioned Flames of Heart, lasted a couple of hours. I did have to stop once to play with a very insistent Beryl, so maybe it was about an hour and a half to an hour and three-quarters of actual gameplay.

Don't mind us, We just live here.

Or, to be more accurate, about fifteen minutes of pressing buttons. The rest of the time I was watching a movie. 

A very absorbing and enjoyable movie with some excellent acting, skilled direction and superb set design but also with a plot that was very hard to follow. 

I mentioned last time, how the plot in Wuthering Waves is generally "so arcane and abstruse I can barely follow it". It's really not getting any easier, even now more of the mysteries have been revealed.

In fact, forget the plot... I couldn't even claim I understand the setting. I imagine we're all used to games and books and movies and TV that relies heavily on the audience's preconceptions and prior experience and which draws extensively from a huge corpus of long-established tropes, symbols and devices? Well, Wuthering Waves doesn't do a lot of that.

It's not a Western fantasy with dwarves and gnomes and elves and orcs but it's not strictly an Eastern fantasy with dragons and demons and spirits either, although there are a few dragons or dragon-like creatures, now and then. 

It's not science fiction in the familiar aliens, rayguns and spaceships mode, but there are plenty of robots and one hell of a lot of advanced technology. It sometimes has an urban-fantasy or cyberpunk moment but mostly its just hard to place, exactly.

I guess it might fit uncomfortably within the ill-defined parameters of science-fantasy but then doesn't everything? That's a tag that never feels like it's telling you much, anyway. 

Oh, right... that makes everything clear...

It's post-apocalyptic in a  sense, in that there was some sort of catastrophe called The Lament in the near-past, but that seems like it must have been either a very metaphysical event or longer ago than you'd think from the way everyone talks about it because there's very little sign of devastation in the urban areas and not much in the hinterlands. You have to go a fair way into the boondocks to see the remnants of the disaster, whatever it was.

There are superior beings in the world but they aren't gods or deities per se. They're "Sentinels" or "Guardians", usually tied to a locale like some kind of genius loci. There's an evil version called the Threnodian but your guess is as good as mine what sort of entity that is.

There are Tacit Discords,  aggressive mobs that come in industrial quantities. They're the grunts of the game, filling the roles orcs or demons might take in other settings.  And then there are Echoes, which are like the TDs but on your side. Mostly. Except when they're trying to kill you.

Somewhere behind all of this is some network of what I can only take to be AIs: sentient supercomputers that run everything but frequently have issues or need assistance for reasons I could not begin to explain. They seem to be fairly universal in a world made up of city states, each with its own form of government - monarchies, technocracies, theocracies and so on.  

And everything is sound or music-themed, from the Resonators and Echoes to the Frequencies that make up everything in the entire world. That's not confusing at all...

How all of this ever came to be I have no clue, although I'm more than willing to believe it's explained somewhere in the narrative. That's part of the problem - everything is explained in the narrative. So much is explained so often, in such detail and by so many characters, many of whom are written to novelistic standards, meaning there are unreliable narrators and limited narrators and subjective narrators and first-person and third-person and omniscient... that in the end the sheer wealth of information isn't just confusing but overwhelming and, I find, impossible to remember, even if I feel like I understood it at the time.

The game also uses any number of visual and gameplay devices to tell its story. I tend to dwell on the cinematic elements but there are sections told in stained-glass panels, in picture-books, by holograms and malfunctioning robots, in pages torn out of notebooks, on computer screens, in flowcharts and over com-links. Significant plot and narrative elements are sometimes conveyed by way of mini-games, where the whole game becomes a 2D scroller or a platformer, something that really doesn't add to my ability to follow what's going on in the story.

And of course there's the ever-popular developers favorite - key speeches on major plot points delivered by significant NPCs in the middle of a pitched battle. Always fun, that one.

Somewhere in the back of all of this lies one of the most meta-fictional devices I've ever encountered, namely the ability of some of the characters to place other characters and even the player-character, inside a fictional reality within the game-world, sometimes without the game giving any indication it's happened. Awareness is then leaked in ways that are familiar from novels and movies but even when the artifice is revealed it persists, stubbornly, as though just knowing something isn't real isn't enough to stop it being real.

And there's a lot more besides. Not least, The Fractsidus.

The Fractsidus might be the real arch-villains. Or they might be just another faction. At one point I thought they might be anti-heroes or even The Good Guys.  And maybe some of them are. Who's to say they all have the same agenda?

The Fractsidus have been in it almost from the start and they keep coming back. In the next chapter it looks like we might find out something more material about the mysterious organization or at least one of its members, Phrolova, because she's set to be the next playable Resonator and therefore is presumably the player's ally for the meanwhile, at least.

I was very keen to find out more when I logged in this morning but now I guess I'll have to wait a little longer. I have a full slate of things to do through into the middle of next week so it's going to be a while before I can clear the necessary morning or afternoon to watch the next Wuthering Waves movie. 

Pretty sure I won't be any the wiser about what's really going on by the end. But that's how I like it.

Marvel's Midnight Suns - First Impressions

One of the more interesting psychological phenomena surrounding gaming is the way multiple options so often collapse into one. It's common to hear people, myself very much included, complaining of choice overload or even choice paralysis but when it comes to gaming, at least, I find the choices mostly make themselves.

For example, I've been droning on about the number of games I've picked up for free and cheap lately, side-eying the much larger collection of freebies I've claimed and never even installed, yet as soon as I got my claws on Marvel's Midnight Suns I knew I was going to play it right away.

Or that was my plan. It didn't quite come off because the download from Epic Games turned out to be  i  n  c  r  e  d  i  b  l  y  slow. Maybe I've been spoiled by Steam and all those F2P gacha games but ninety minutes for a 57Gb download? That's about three times longer than it normally takes me.

Consequently, by the time the thing had squeezed itself down the pipe and gotten itself settled in, it was time for Beryl's late-evening walk and then for bed. I put off playing until this morning and right after breakfast, there I was... stuck in Epic's super-irritating log-in process.

At this point you should have been enjoying a couple of paragraphs of quality ranting as I complained volubly about having to fill in all the same details I filled in twelve hours ago and complete a Captcha puzzle, just to get to the point where I could see the game in my Epic library. I'd written most of it, too, but before I finished, in a spirit of journalistic integrity I thought I'd better log in again to see if I'd remembered all the steps correctly. And stap me if this time it didn't skip the lot and take me straight into the game!

So I guess all the delay was a first-time log-in check and everything I did yesterday must have been a "We see you haven't been here for a while" security check. Or something. Whatever. I'll give them a grudging pass but if it turns out to be a daily identity check after all I'm gonna be pissed.

Moving on, what abut the game? 

Couldn't tell you. Haven't played it yet. I have, however, played through the Tutorial and the following pre-game introduction. It took me seventy-five minutes, give or take. More than enough for a First Impression post. 

Let's do it old school with sub-sections. 

Graphics And Design 

Hmm. Start with a tough one, why not? Good? Bad? Indifferent? As the wits on YouTube like to say in the comments: "Yes".

The character animations are mediocre at best. Some are downright bad. Iron Man (For it is he...) walks bow-legged, like his armor doesn't fit him properly. I had a more scatological phrase in mind to describe what it looks like but I'll spare you. It's unconvincing as articulation and unbecoming of a super-hero, anyway. None of the others are as bad but few, if any, are good. They all look stiff and awkward.

But then, I find myself having a generic problem with the western game animation Firaxis is offering. It looks clunky and old-fashioned compared to everything I've become used to in the anime-style games I mostly seem to have been playing of late. It falls heavily between cinematic realism and cartoon animation, having weight and solidity but precious little fluidity or grace. I mean, it's not terrible and after a while I found myself getting used to it but it's definitely not something you'd gosh-wow over, which is a bar very many games easily leap over nowadays.

The backgrounds are much better and the character designs are very solid, although given they're virtually all specific looks taken verbatim from licensed characters in a very well-known IP it would be more than a little embarrassing if they weren't.  

The overall design aesthetic I liked a lot more. The UI is absolutely minimal, leaving nearly the entire screen clear for the graphics, which makes it even more of a pity they aren't better, I guess, but which is very welcome all the same. Every time a new major character appears the game pauses and a flash card appears to tell you who they are, along with sarcastic or amusing comment. I found that rather more entertaining than it probably should have been but then I've known most of these characters a very long time.

Character And Plot

Since it's come up... In my long experience of Marvel comics, the writers only really have two settings: portentous and overblown or snarky and flip. Back in the days when I kept up, it was fairly simple to sort the entire roster of heroes - and most of their supporting casts - into one or other of those bins. Of course, one of the company's supposed USPs was always crossing those streams, often in the same story and sometimes with the same character, but almost everyone and everything reverted to one or other as a default.

The MCU, by and large, followed the same formula, back when I was paying attention, from the first Iron Man movie to Avengers: Endgame, which came out in 2019 (God... really? Seems like it was about six months ago...). Marvel's Midnight Suns (The prefix is part of the official name, by the way.) came out in 2022 but it feels like it's cut from the same spandex. If the tone of the movies has changed in the last few years, I wouldn't know but there's no sign of it here.

The movies were characterized by a never-ending torrent of one-liners and this game is the same. Tony Stark is particularly prone to bad dad jokes and Stephen Strange constantly sends himself up with a series of very pretentious pronouncements that neither the rest of the cast nor the player could possibly take at face value. It's all quite meta and post-modern in a way that I thought went out of fashion a decade or more ago but it plays to my sense of humor so I'm fine with it. I imagine it would drive some people to want to throw the monitor out the window, though.

The plot, what little I've seen of it so far, is one of those standard Some Bad Guys Just Summoned An Even Badder Guy And The World Will Come To An End Unless You Do Something About It affairs. In this case the bad guys are HYDRA, which has to be one of the most generic bad guy organizations in the history of comics; the badder guy is Lilith, who I think comes from Ghost Rider/Blade/Morbius continuity and is little more than a name to me. Other than that, not much of a storyline has developed yet, beyond needing to stop things getting worse.

 

The cast is interesting, to me anyway. As a long-time reader, I knew who most of them were immediately. Iron Man and Dr. Strange, obviously, but also The Scarlet Witch, Ms. Marvel, Blade, Magik; all characters I know either very well or well-enough. 

More intriguing were the ones I thought I ought to know but couldn't quite place - Nico Minoru and Robbie Reyes in particular. I had to look them both up and it turns out I was fifty per cent right - I knew one of them, not the other. Nico is a graduate of The Runaways - not the band, sadly, but the teen supergroup, whose TV show I watched and several of whose comic collections I own. Should have been able to peg her.

The other turns out to be an incarnation of Ghost Rider. I have never been a fan of the skull-headed biker and I certainly don't know this alternate version. Even if I did, I might not have realized who he was because the original Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze, features prominently in the introductory sequence. Why (And indeed how.) the both of them are in the same reality is, I assume, a plot point yet to be revealed.

All of which tells you a good deal about who this game is meant to appeal to: people already steeped in the mythology and the backstory. Everything refers back to something else. It's all lore and history from the opening scene and I'm betting that won't stop until the closing credits. If you're not at least curious to figure out how it all fits together then I'm guessing it's not the game for you. Obviously, it works for me, even though I'm much more of a DC fan than Marvel.

Character Creation

I was surprised to find there was any. It hadn't even occurred to me I'd be asked to make a character. I assumed I'd be playing the regulars. And indeed I will - there are a dozen playable heroes plus another four in DLC - but you do get to do some minimal cosmetic work on a character I'd never heard of before - The Hunter. 

The rationale for that is quite clever. Dr Strange, The Caretaker (Another new one on me - I had to look her up and among other things she was Agatha Harkness's lover so she might even have been in Wandavision...) and Nico between them manage to resurrect Lilith's daughter (Stop me if you're lost...) but before they really get into the necromantic action The Caretaker suggests it might be a good idea to know what she looks like. 

That's when the game drops you into Character Creation. It was about forty minutes in for me. There's very little to it - Body Type, Skin Tone, Hair Color and Style and I think that's about all. I did manage to get someone I didn't mind looking at so that was fine. It's not as if I get to "play" her in any meaningful sense anyway. She's just another scripted character as far as I can tell, so far, anyway.

Gameplay: Combat

This is where it gets good. Not the rest of it is bad but what I was looking for was a compelling-yet-simple tactical RPG and that looks to be what I'm going to get. It's a card-based system. I keep seeing comparisons to Slay The Spire and similar titles, none of which I've played so I can't comment on whether those are valid. To me, it feels quite similar to Wizard 101 or maybe even more so to Pirate 101.

Everything is turn-based and represented by a bunch of three-dimensional characters, none of whom move or do anything until it's their go, which immediately removes all immersion and turns the whole thing into almost a virtual table-top game. Exactly what I was looking for. 

The tutorial is very good. How refreshing to be able to say that. The interface is intuitive, the controls are obvious and the necessary details on what each action does are there in front of you. It helps that I already know what most of these characters are good at but for those that I don't know, all the information needed is close to hand.

Since it's a superhero game, there needs must be lots of explosions, force rays and people punching other people through walls, all of which there certainly is. One of the generic problems with turn-based games is that you end up having to watch the same animations hundreds of times, so things that seemed spectacular at the start make you want to put your fist through the screen by the end. Where this stands on that spectrum it's far too early to say but I'd already seen more than enough of Iron Man's repulsor blasts by the end of the Tutorial.

Fortunately, with so many playable characters, it should at least be possible to take a break from the most annoying ones. I hope. I'm certainly looking forward to finding out because the combat is pretty much exactly what I was looking for.

Gameplay: Out Of Combat

Can't really say. This was apparently what scuppered the game on release, when a lot of people took quite strongly against whatever it is you have to do to get from one set-piece fight to the next. 

So far, I've watched a lot of cut scenes, most of which were okay but nothing special, and had to pick a handful of dialog options, all of which looked like flavor to me. There's also an element of not-very-open world play, where you walk from one part of a non-combat instance to another to find someone you have to talk to or to go through a portal to somewhere else. Again, that seemed fine, nothing special but nothing awful either.

There's a big castle where everyone either lives or is staying for the duration of the crisis. You can pick your missions there although so far I've had a selection of exactly one so choice didn't really come into it. I believe you can also wander around and do... something. No idea what, yet, although the Wikipedia entry mentions sparring, upgrading cards and other practicalities.

I'm guessing the problematic part comes at night, when "players can interact with other heroes, or participate in a "Hangout" or a "club meeting". Sounds good until you learn it involves finessing how much other characters like you by giving them gifts and talking morality with them. That was literally the mechanic that made me stop playing the original Dragon Age mid-story and never go back to the franchise, so I can see what the problem might be. 

But that's a problem for another day. Haven't even got through the first yet. I'll update my thoughts on the "social elements" when I get to see them. As for the fighting - which is what I came for - looking good so far!