2459: Double Wang

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Having finished Shadow Warrior yesterday, I was considering picking up its sequel, which released today. Then someone said some magic words that stopped all consideration and caused me to hit the “buy” button immediately.

But let’s rewind a moment to yesterday evening, while I was playing through the rest of the first game.

Shadow Warrior has a skill system whereby double-tapping a direction and using either the left or right mouse button will perform different special moves. There’s a powerful thrust attack, a “sword beam” type affair, a spin attack, a crowd-controlling stun, a healing spell and a protection spell. Because they’re mapped to controls you’re already using for movement and attacking, weaving them in while you’re avoiding and attacking enemies is pretty straightforward.

Hmm, I thought to myself while I was playing, contemplating the fact that Shadow Warrior had a rudimentary levelling system in place, whereby you could upgrade passive and active skills as well as your weapons by expending various currencies that you acquire through play. I wonder if a first-person Diablo would work?

Some of you may, at this point, wish to raise Borderlands as evidence that yes, a first-person Diablo would indeed work, but I was thinking more focused on the melee angle, since that was a key part of Shadow Warrior’s appeal.

Oh well, I thought. I doubt it’ll ever happen, even if it would probably be really good.

This morning, I Googled Shadow Warrior 2 to see what press and public alike thought of it. One of the first things I saw was “Shadow Warrior 2 is first-person Diablo.”

Magic words. Bought. (And with a nice discount for owning some of developer Flying Wild Hog’s other work!)

It’s not an exaggeration to call Shadow Warrior 2 first-person Diablo, either. It has loot, colour-coded by rarity. It has a variety of different weapons. It has clear ways to “build” your character. It has skill trees that you can beef up as you gain levels. It has quests. It has four-player co-op. It even has a small amount of procedural generation, but it wisely limits this to just parts of levels, so there’s still very much a hand-crafted feel to the whole experience.

So far, I actually think I like it better than Borderlands, for one very simple reason: all your level does is provide you with skill points that you can pump into your various active and passive skills. Enemies don’t level up, and your stats don’t scale with your level, either. This helps prevent the ridiculous situation you sometimes find yourself in in Borderlands where you fire a rocket into someone’s face and it does a miniscule amount of damage. It also prevents “overlevelling”, where you find yourself in a situation where enemies are providing you with so little XP that it’s barely worth killing them.

I’m undecided as to whether I like it more than the first new Shadow Warrior as yet. I’m pretty sure I do. I certainly like it very much indeed — to the degree that if I don’t see it on some Game of the Year lists at year’s end I’ll be very disappointed — but it has quite a different structure that takes a little adjusting to coming from the previous game’s tightly designed “explore, monster arena, repeat” loop, and I can see this being a bit jarring to staunch fans of the original. The levels are sprawling, open affairs more akin to something like a Deus Ex zone, with plenty to explore — and plenty of incentive to wander around even once you’ve completed your mission objective. This means that the pacing is a bit more variable and less controlled by design than in the previous game, though with all that said, there’s still a feeling that you’re moving from encounter to encounter with pressure-free time to explore in between, so that’s good.

There’s also a new hub area with a couple of shops and some questgivers around, giving you a feeling of “coming home” back to base after a successful mission. There are also plenty of sidequests as well as the main story missions, so I get the impression there’s a whole lot to do here.

The game promises 70 weapons, which is more than enough, but each can be further customised by inserting up to three upgrades into them. These have many and varied effects ranging from simply increasing damage to providing elemental affinities to your shots. This is fortunate, as in true Diablo tradition, you’ll often come across Superior and Elite versions of enemies throughout the levels, many of whom have specific strengths and weaknesses with regard to elemental affinities. You can equip up to eight weapons at a time, and there’s nothing stopping you having eight different swords for different purposes if you want to play that way.

Besides the weapons, you can “build” your character through attaching upgrades to your armour and powers, too. These might provide specific buffs to particular types of damage, or increased effectiveness of skills. Pleasingly for the co-op enthusiasts, there’s even a multiplayer-specific equipment slot whose occupants generally buff you and your teammates with an “aura” emanating from your position. These auras can be damage increases, healing over time or defensive in nature, meaning if you really want to get into it, you can build yourself a well-balanced team that minimises its weaknesses — or simply pump as much damage as possible into each other to obliterate enemies in a matter of seconds.

Like the first game, the weapons are solid and satisfying to use, and most of them can be used in dual-wield “akimbo” fashion with the use of an upgrade. They make good noises and they rip through enemies in satisfying fashion; of particular note here are the chainsaws and chainswords, clearly inspired by Warhammer 40,000 — they cut into enemies with such precision it feels like you could carve your name into their guts.

Lo Wang’s wit is present and correct, too, and in the same way as the previous game his jokes occasionally fall flat, and the character he has “riding along with him”, much like in the first game, has some good chemistry with him, making for some amusing bickering. Plus all the usual “wang” jokes are present and correct.

Shadow Warrior 2 is very good indeed. If you’ve been considering picking it up, stop. Buy it. Play it. Love it. Who wanta some Wang?

2009: Into the Nexus

Up until a few days ago, I thought I hated MOBAs¹. Turns out I just hated Dota 2.

Actually, let me qualify that. I hate playing Dota 2, but I don’t hate it. It’s one of those games that, like Dark Souls or any fighting game released after the original Street Fighter II on Super NES, I feel like I’m doomed to never be any good at, and consequently have reached a point of acceptance where I feel I can and should respect it from afar, but not even attempt to get into it. And that’s fine by me.

Let me qualify that further by saying that I feel there are way too many MOBAs on the market these days, as many developers appear to be seeing it as the new² fad to latch onto in the (usually vain) hope that they will attract a large, world-beating multiplayer community.

With all that in mind, well, Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm is really good.

Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that brings together a series of characters from Blizzard’s various games from over the years — primarily Warcraft, StarCraft³ and Diablo, with a guest appearance from The Lost Vikings — and throws them into battle against one another in the usual 5v5, destroy-the-other-team’s-base-before-they-destroy-yours MOBA gameplay.

Heroes of the Storm has a few little twists on the formula, though. For starters, individual players on your team don’t level up independently of one another; you have a collective pool of experience that you share, so you all level up at the same time. You still need to do your part to make sure your team levels up faster than your opponents, particularly in the early stages of a match, but there’s less feeling “left behind” than there is in stuff like Dota and League of Legends, in my experience anyway.

Tied in with this is the fact that a lot of the stupid arbitrary maybe-skill-maybe-luck-based bullshit that Dota includes — “Last Hit”⁴ being the one that always wound me up the most — is conspicuously absent from Heroes of the Storm, and it’s much more fun as a result. It means you can focus on the overall team strategy rather than micromanaging your character to such a degree that it can become very distracting — if you’re a newcomer, anyway; I’m sure veteran Dota players can Last Hit pretty much at will.

Then there’s the fact that there’s more than one map, and each map has its own little quirks. Some have two lanes to attack down, some have three. Some have objectives you need to defend to gain a temporary advantage, some have special enemies you need to defeat. Some have collectible items to unleash powerful attacks, and one even has an entirely separate “dungeon” map for you to descend into when the time is right. The objectives and the rewards you get from them don’t necessarily make or break a whole battle, but they can make things swing one way or the other — and even provide a means for a struggling team to make a spectacular comeback, rather than being stomped into the ground.

All of this is wrapped up in matches that generally don’t take any longer than twenty minutes to play, as compared to the 30-90 minute slugfests that games of Dota can easily become. It’s simple to understand, accessible and actually enjoyable to me, even as a newcomer and someone who is not generally very good at strategy games.

I haven’t yet dared play a game against human opponents, but I feel much more inclined to give it a shot in this than in the notoriously elitist and short-tempered communities that play a lot of Dota and League of Legends. If you, like me, have been skeptical about MOBAs but like the idea of them, give Heroes of the Storm a shot. It is free, after all.

¹ MOBA: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, a team-based game where two teams compete for dominance of a map by attempting to destroy the other team’s “core” by infiltrating their base.

² Well, not that new any more, I guess.

³ The way they’re capitalised differently has bugged me for years now.

⁴ Last Hit: a mechanic whereby you only get experience points for a kill if you were the last person to deal damage to it. Satisfying to veterans, the most fucking annoying thing in the world for newbies.

Ode to Game Music 2: The Art of the Final Boss

This is going to be a somewhat self-indulgent (and lengthy) gush on one of my favourite topics to do with video games in general, and with their music in particular. But I promise that I won’t mention One Winged Angel at all in this post after this paragraph as I’m sure most people who are familiar with that of which I speak below will be overly familiar with this track already.

Oh, and if you’re reading this on Facebook come and read this on my proper page. It has streaming audio and everything.

Everyone ready? Let’s begin.

So, the final boss confrontation. To me, this can make or break a game. I remember learning very early on at school both when writing essays and preparing for performances that “people remember the beginnings and the ends of things more than anything else”. And it’s true. For me, by far the most memorable parts of many games are the very beginning and the very end. Sure, if the middle is interesting, compelling and/or fun I’ll be more inclined to make it from the beginning to the end, but I’ll be even more inclined to remember a game fondly if its finale is aurally spectacular. Conversely, if a final battle is somewhat underwhelming in terms of presentation, I’ll be less inclined to think of it favourably.

Take Diablo II, for example – I think most people agree that Diablo is a fantastic game, but for me that final battle with Diablo was utterly underwhelming, and it was the music that killed it completely. Or rather, it was the lack of the music that killed it completely. Diablo has an eerie, ethereal sort of soundtrack that doesn’t have much in the way of memorable tunes. Sure, it’s atmospheric and sure, its production values are higher than for many games (it is a Blizzard title after all) but dammit if I didn’t want something a bit more dramatic for battling the most evil thing in the history of ever!

So it is with this in mind that I want to share with you some of my favourite final boss confrontation soundtracks. The overdramatic climactic music may be something of a cliché to many people but I can’t get enough of it. If it involves “scary choirs”, a phrase a similarly-inclined friend and I coined a while back to describe the chorus in One Wi… I mean that song at the end of Final Fantasy VII… so much the better.

These are presented in no particular order, I should probably say. And if you have any similar examples, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Final Fantasy I (Origins Version): Last Battle (Nobuo Uematsu)

Start as you mean to go on, with a bit of Uematsu. While he is probably one of the first composers that people get interested in when they start looking into video game music, his “mainstream” (for want of a better word) doesn’t mean that his music isn’t worth looking at. On the contrary, in fact – the Final Fantasy series has typically had spectacular finales and a huge amount of this can be attributed to the music.

This piece is from the remake of Final Fantasy I for the PS1. If you’re unfamiliar with the first FF, the battle system consists of your party members standing on one side of the screen wafting their weapons around at a monster or monsters on the other side of the screen. There’s very little apparent physical interaction between them, and said monsters don’t animate at all.

That didn’t stop this piece of music making the final battle with Chaos (incidentally, just how many unimaginative RPG designers have used something as generic as “Chaos” for their final bosses since FFI?) super-dramatic and exciting.

This piece takes in all the JRPG finale clichés. Pipe organ? Check. Tinkly piano breaks? Check. Loosely based on the game’s main battle theme? Check. But I still love it.

Final Fantasy II (Origins Version): Battle Scene 2 (Nobuo Uematsu)

I’ll say now that I’m getting all the FF music out of the way first so those who think it’s been done to death (which, to be fair, it probably has) can happily skip to the later tracks.

Who’s still here? Oh good. This theme is from battling the Emperor at the close of Final Fantasy II, one of the less well-known FF games because many people hate, loathe and despise it with a passion. Me? I enjoyed it, and this music, while simple, was pleasant to experience at finale time.

The interesting thing (well, to me anyway) about this one is that the main motif of the theme also made a reappearance in the final confrontation of Final Fantasy IV when battling Zeromus. This also happened a couple of other times, with the chord sequence for Exdeath’s (still a dumb name) theme in Final Fantasy V bearing more than a passing resemblance to Sephiroth’s theme in Final Fantasy VII.

Talking of which…

Final Fantasy VII (Nobuo Uematsu)

I have two tracks to share for this one for the reason that it does one of the things I love best in a good final confrontation soundtrack – it takes one of the earlier themes in the game and expands on it. The next few tracks in this post revolve around this kind of idea.

So this track (Those Chosen by the Planet)…

…becomes this track (The Birth of a God).

Eventually, anyway. Give it time. At about 1:25 in, we get that Sephiroth theme coming back to kick some ass. I remember the first time I heard this it was one of those moments where you get an involuntary shiver down your spine. I know for a fact this doesn’t happen to anyone, but this one particular musical technique at work here – using a simple motif from an earlier piece of music in a completely different one, particularly if they are of markedly different styles – always has that effect on me, particularly if it’s used at a dramatic moment.

Then, of course, after this track, you get that other one that I’m not mentioning.

Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark (Jeremy Soule)

Mr Soule is very fond of the technique I mention above, as is clearly demonstrated by both his work on Neverwinter Nights and Dungeon Siege (up next). The moody, creepy opening track from Hordes of the Underdark (which, so far as I’m aware at least, has no title other than “x2_title”) sets the scene for a descent into darkness with faint undertones of potential heroism ahead:

Slog your way through to the end of the game through its many traps, challenges and monsters and, musically, you end up almost right back where you started, but in a slightly different key at a slightly faster tempo with more screechy strings and clangy percussion:

There’s even some pipe organ in there. Well done that man.

Dungeon Siege (Jeremy Soule)

Dungeon Siege as a game was, to many people, a relatively forgettable action-RPG. It wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination bad, but most people seemed to think it was a fairly unremarkable game still riding the remnants of the Diablo II wave. Still, I remember it fondly for its music – in this case, both the very first and last tracks of the game providing strong “bookends” to the action.

Here’s the track you get for setting out on your journey:

This being Jeremy Soule, there’s more than a passing resemblance to the “sound” of Neverwinter Nights – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, eh? – but to me, the main theme of Dungeon Siege is much more memorable. I know of people who have restarted the game many times simply to hear this music again. I was also delighted to discover that Dungeon Siege II also started with an alternative version of this theme.

Get to the end of the game (assuming it holds your attention, of course – and I maintain that it’s actually an entertaining experience worth playing through) and your battle with the final boss is accompanied by this stirring soundtrack:

Scary choirs, clangy percussion, a hurdy-gurdy break and… there it is, lurking around the 1:08 mark, that opening theme. Once I heard that, any trace of gaming fatigue I had was immediately gone and I had to finish this game to do justice to the excellent soundtrack. It’s strange. The adrenaline rush of the simple re-use of a musical motif – I often wonder if I’m the only one that this particular technique has an effect on. But then I think about how many composers out there do it and I know it can’t just be me.

Space Channel 5 (Hataya, Tokoi, Nanba, Ohtani featuring Ken Woodman and His Orchestra)

My love for Space Channel 5 has, of course, been well documented in the past but I feel it’s worth mentioning here simply because it’s a completely different soundtrack to what we’ve heard above – and yet it still uses that same technique, and it has that same effect on me.

Space Channel 5’s main theme, Mexican Flyer, is the basis for much of the rest of the game’s soundtrack – if not in terms of reusing motifs then at least stylistically, with the blaring horns and Sixties stylings providing a backdrop to many scenes in the two games in the series. It’s certainly a memorable, toe-tapping theme that sums up the “Gays In Space!” aesthetic nicely. So when I got to the end of Space Channel 5 Part 2 after, oh, the mighty 45 minutes of game that preceded it, I was immensely gratified to be dealing with the extremely bizarre and surreal finale accompanied by this piece:

This piece has everything I want from a finale – a bit of drama (0:33), a bit of cheesy false-hope “Yay! You did it!” (1:03) and cap it all with an ending that takes the main theme and builds on it from a simple vocal (1:20) up to everyone in the galaxy singing along with you (2:15). This is the kind of piece that makes you feel rotten if you fuck it up halfway through.

Persona 3 (Shoji Meguro)

There’s just one more example of what you have probably surmised is one of my favourite musical clichés to fall back on, and that is the great and brilliant Persona 3. I’m not sure much more needs to be said about this at this time other than the fact that The Poem for Everyone’s Souls…

…becomes, after 90+ hours, The Battle for Everyone’s Souls.

It, of course, is them followed by the final battle mix of Burn My Dread featuring, in Beige‘s own words, some Japanese guy “rapping the fuck out”.

Beyond Good and Evil (Christophe Heral)

Just two more, you’ll be pleased to know. First up is the spectacular soundtrack of Beyond Good and Evil which I want to draw attention to simply for its high production values and the great “bookending” of the game that these two tracks achieve.

Shortly after starting the game, you are thrust right into combat with a mysterious enemy you don’t know much about. During said battle, you are accompanied by this incredible piece of music that everyone who has played Beyond Good and Evil seems to comment on when describing the game’s amazingly strong opening sequence. Dancing with Domz certainly sets the scene for an epic battle.

The return to this style at the end of the game with the piece Sins of the Father is made all the more effective by the fact that much of the music in the middle of the game has been either of a somewhat “gentler” style, or when things did get hectic, a more “electronic”, “technological” sound. A return to the orchestral/choral stylings of the opening for the final confrontation helped, for me at least, to diminish the “Umm… what the fuck happened at the end of this game?” nonsense.

Trauma Center: New Blood (Atsushi Kitajoh)

I draw particular attention to Trauma Center here because I still find it utterly bizarre. I mean, we’re talking about a surgical action/puzzle/shooter game here. And let’s not forget the fact that the first Trauma Center game ended with you battling an illness that was “a form of Death itself” that had wrapped itself around the human heart.

I don’t know about you, but when I think about doctors, nurses and surgeons, pipe organs and scary choirs (there they are again) don’t spring immediately to mind. Neither do electric guitars. But what the hey. If you’ve played Trauma Center, you’ll know that it’s a sweaty-palmed and utterly terrifying experience, which these two pieces, heard during the final “battle” with the Cardia disease, reflect perfectly.

And on that note, it’s good night from me. Congratulations if you made it through all that, and I hope you’ve enjoyed some of my picks. If you have any other final boss musics that you’d like to share, please post ’em in the comments.

My next post on game music (which will happen when it happens and not before, dammit!) will likely revolve around the art of the end credits music.