2319: Pass into the Iris

Overwatch is still excellent.

I’m tempted to leave it at that, but I should perhaps qualify my statement.

It’s difficult to pin down a single, truly appealing element of it because there are so many, and that’s perhaps it’s biggest strength: there’s something in there that will appeal to most people who are at least vaguely receptive to the idea of competitive first-person shooters.

For me, the absolute best thing about it is its accessibility. There’s a wide variety of different heroes, some of which are more difficult to use, but all of which are rewarding. Plus some absolutely wonderful balancing has clearly gone into the game’s development, since each hero has a clear “counter” that is eminently suitable for dealing with them when they start giving you grief.

It’s a game with accessibility for casual players, in other words, but one which has sufficient depth to keep competitive players interested in the long term. It will be interesting to see how the community as a whole takes to the ranked competitive games when they launch soon, and whether the game as a whole takes off as an e-sport.

It’s rather enjoyable to be in at the very beginning of what is clearly going to be a thriving game with the longevity of Valve’s classic Team Fortress 2, a game to which Overwatch is often compared, and not unreasonably so. However, where I found Team Fortress 2 to be completely intimidating (due to the fact that by the time I had a computer and Internet connection that could handle running it, everyone else who had been playing for years was infinitely better than me, and it felt impossible to get any better), with Overwatch I’m finding it easy to contribute to a team effort, pick the right heroes for the right situation and help get the job done.

What seems nice about the community as a whole — at least on PC, I can’t speak for the console versions — is that the player base isn’t afraid to have a bit of fun. Earlier tonight, for example, I had a game where the opposing team started out by posting three Winstons (a giant Tesla cannon-wielding gorilla with a rather refined voice and attitude) outside our base, and gradually, as the match progressed, everyone else participating switched to Winston too, until by the end of things we had an absolutely chaotic melee made up of twelve mutant gorillas all going all HULK SMASH on one another at once. The results of that game really didn’t matter in the end, because everyone involved had such a great time, and of course it was followed up with a couple of other matches in which everyone picked the same character again. Six Reinhardts bearing down on you is certainly a sight to behold, though this situation helped me realise Pharah’s value in that she can leap high into the air and rain rocket death down on Reinhardt from above while staying well out of range of his big-ass hammer.

Overwatch is a game that hasn’t forgotten a core reason we play games is, well, to play. It’s a consistently joyful, smile-inducing experience that the vast majority of the community seem to play well and with a good attitude; you get the occasional ragequitter yelling “uninstall the game now” when their team loses, but they are relatively few and far between in my experience so far, and when this happens most people just shrug and move on. Overwatch’s excellent matchmaking coupled with the significant player base means that their team slot will be filled in a matter of seconds anyway, so it’s no great loss to the other players if that person wants to ragequit.

Assuming Blizzard keeps supporting Overwatch as much as it claims it will — we’re promised free new heroes and maps on a fairly regular basis; the only “premium” paid content is the ability to purchase the Loot Boxes containing skins and other customisation items that you acquire for free every time your account levels up anyway — I can see myself playing it for a long time. And it’s a nice feeling to find a multiplayer experience like that: it’s one I can easily share with friends, since there’s none of the MMO issue of you “outlevelling” each other, getting to different stages and being unable to play together due to the disparity in your characters’ power levels, and its 5-10 minute matches make it eminently friendly to the more busy people I know who perhaps only have half an hour here and there to play some games together.

So yes. Overwatch. If you’ve been on the fence about grabbing it but you like the sound of it, stop hesitating and grab it. Then we can go and shoot some fools together.

Cheers luv.

2316: Overwatch is Out, and It’s Awesome

0316_001

Well, it’s here: the only multiplayer-only first-person shooter I think I’ve ever actually been genuinely excited to play and be on board with from day one: Blizzard’s Overwatch.

The servers went live at a little after midnight my time, and aside from one incident where I lost connection from a game, everything seems to be running extremely smoothly. I am happy about this.

Here is a list of reasons why I like Overwatch when I typically haven’t got into other competitive first-person shooters:

It has characters. Call of Duty is boring to me because soldiers are boring. Overwatch has a wide variety of characters that includes cute girls. So that’s a win.
There’s no complicated metagame. No challenges to unlock weapons, no perks to worry about, no loadouts, no higher-level people dominating you through use of higher-level unlocks: everyone is on an equal playing field.
The “you must be this skillful to play” barrier is lower than a lot of other shooters. The thing that puts me off a lot of competitive shooters is the fact that it’s extremely difficult to learn how to play them effectively when some 10-year old can snipe you from halfway across the map before you’ve even got anywhere near the objective. Overwatch’s characters cater to a wide variety of skill and confidence levels, and most don’t require pinpoint accuracy to have a good time with.
The objectives are simple to understand but challenging to complete. The game modes may be straight out of Team Fortress, but they work. The Overtime mechanic makes for some genuinely exciting last-second turnarounds, too.
The weapons are satisfying. Each character only has one or two weapons at most, and they’re all great fun to use. They make good noises and feel powerful.
The game gives excellent feedback. Through the use of sound and HUD elements, Overwatch keeps you nicely informed on what’s going on. If you’re getting shot in the back, a nearby character will tell you. If you’re successfully hitting an enemy from a distance but can’t see it very well, a sound effect lets you know that your shots are on target. And most characters’ HUDs are designed so that you don’t have to take your eyes off the action to know important information.
The abilities give characters unique identities. Not only that, but you need to know the best ways to avoid and/or counter these abilities. That keeps things interesting.
The support characters are more than just healbots. Most of them are more than capable of putting out respectable damage, too, and some even have other interesting abilities to support the team.
D.Va. Say no more.

Now I’d better go to bed before I get tempted to stay up all night blasting fools… doubtless there will be a lot more of this over the next little while, though!

If you’re playing Overwatch on PC, feel free to add AngryJedi#2260 as a friend. If you do so, let me know if it’s on the North American or European servers, because Blizzard inexplicably region-locks its friends lists rather than having one global one.

2305: Fighting Talk

0305_001

I spent a bit of time playing some Dead or Alive 5 Last Round online with a friend from Final Fantasy XIV earlier. (Hi, Neon!) I’ve never really played a fighting game online before — it’s a genre that has something of a reputation as being brutally unforgiving to newcomers, and with good reason, since the fighting game genre is one that attracts significant numbers of people good enough to actually get paid to play these games.

Thankfully, my friend Neon appears to be of a roughly equal level of skill to me, since we had a series of matches and we both came out roughly equal in terms of victories and losses.

So far in Dead or Alive 5 I’d been focusing on the Training mode, attempting to learn some combos and moves for characters I liked the look of, because I’d love to get past the “button mashing” phase that everyone goes through when they first pick up a fighting game. As such, I was a bit hesitant to even jump into the story mode, because I didn’t feel like I knew any characters well enough. But I thought I’d give fighting another person a go — and I’m glad I did.

Fighting Neon gave me a potent reminder of exactly why I’ve always liked the Dead or Alive series in preference to perhaps more established, popular fare like Capcom’s Street Fighter series. It’s kind of hard to describe the exact feeling, but I think it’s best described as the game feels instinctive, almost primal. You can spend hours learning the specific button combinations to pull off specific moves at the right time — and doubtless the really good players do that — but at a fairly rudimentary level, which is where I’d generously put myself, the fighting system works in such a way that you can look at what’s going on on the screen, push directions and attack buttons and have something that “feels” right unfold in front of you. Opponent blocking high blows? Get in there with some low kicks. Taunting you? Charge in and tackle them with a running throw. Knocking you off balance with a flurry of blows? Block, block, block dammit, oh for fuck’s sake. (I never have quite mastered blocking in fighting games; given how important and helpful — and tied to the series’ iconic countering system — it is in Dead or Alive, I should probably do something about that.)

I haven’t yet picked a “main” to play with. I will almost certainly end up going with Kasumi, at least initially, because Kasumi is hot and I vaguely know some of her effective moves. Today I also particularly enjoyed playing as Hitomi (who appears to have wonderful reach with her kicks) and Momiji (though I haven’t done any training with her yet, so I was taking wild stabs at her moves). I also discovered that, as I previously thought, I want to steer clear of slower, heavy-hitting characters, because I very obviously don’t know how to handle them effectively and tend to get my ass handed to me if I try and fight with them in the same way as the Kasumis and company of the world.

My few games today were an eye-opening experience, then. I’m definitely up for playing some more; if you, too, suck at fighting games and would like a punching bag to play with, feel free to hit me up on PSN under the ID Angry_Jedi.

2304: Blizzard’s New Phenomenon

0304_001

I know I wrote about Overwatch the other day, but having been, well, present on the Internet for the past few days I think it’s fairly safe to declare that Blizzard has an honest-to-goodness phenomenon on its hands.

Overwatch’s open beta (read: free demo — the best marketing tool they could have possibly used) ended at the start of this week, but people haven’t stopped talking about it since. They also haven’t stopped producing fan art, incorporating Overwatch characters into memes and cartoon strips, discussing strategies, taking the piss out of people who play nothing but Bastion and admiring Tracer’s admittedly fine posterior.

It’s kind of remarkable, really, because it seems to have come out of nowhere and evolved organically without a trace of interference from the marketing or PR machines. A few weeks ago, I knew very little about Overwatch and had little interest in it; after a couple of days with the beta on both PS4 and PC, I’m well and truly sold and am happily enjoying the wealth of fan-made content that’s been produced seemingly in just the last few days.

Blizzard has always been a somewhat unconventional developer-publisher, producing wildly popular games that eschew popular conventions — mechanically, aesthetically and even functionally. Their insistence on using their own proprietary client Battle.Net to distribute, update and even sell their latest games initially drew criticism — particularly in the case of Diablo III — but as the world has become more and more comfortable with the idea of being always online and multiplayer-centric titles, these complaints have started to fade into the background until now, Blizzard’s ecosystem allows it to have extremely successful titles without having to rely on the more established distribution channels such as Steam.

Overwatch’s stealth marketing is another example of this. While there have been TV spots, video ads and site takeovers for the game, it has never felt like an aggressive marketing push in the same way that a Call of Duty or a Battlefield sees. Instead, Blizzard chose to rely on the most powerful marketing tool in the world these days: word of mouth. Putting their absolute confidence in their game and releasing it to the public for free for a few days achieved more than any multi-million dollar marketing campaign ever would; it allowed people to try the game for themselves and either confirm that yes, they did want to play it, or, in many cases, sate their curiosity as to what it was all about. In more than one case, the satiation of that curiosity has led to additional sales.

So why is Overwatch such a phenomenon? Well, a lot of it has to do with its striking visual design — it’s immediately recognisable — but I think the biggest contributing factor is its wildly varied selection of playable characters. There’s something for everyone in Overwatch’s cast, whether you’re into moody, dark types; big, stompy robots; hot girls; cute girls; frightening muscle-bound girls who probably have a Tumblr page; Westerns; sci-fi… there’s a bit of everything. And somehow despite this massive variety in its cast, Overwatch feels coherent and none of its characters feel like token inclusions.

This, naturally, leads to people picking favourites — never underestimate the power of the waifus! — which, in turn, leads to people producing fan-created content based on their favourite characters. And, from there, other fans can enjoy this content and express how much they like their favourite character through sharing these fan-made productions or engaging with the artists. Over time, a whole meta-community outside of the game builds up, even bringing in people who don’t actually play the game but just like watching it, or appreciate the art direction, or like the look of the characters.

In short, Blizzard would have to do something absolutely spectacular right now to fuck up Overwatch. I’m really looking forward to giving the full version a go at the end of the month, and if you’re up for a multiplayer rumble in its wonderfully colourful world, be sure to hit me up.

2301: Overwatch

0301

I decided to give the game everyone seems to be talking about — Blizzard’s new first-person shooter Overwatch — a bit of a go this weekend. They were running an open beta, after all, so there was no risk whatsoever involved in downloading it and giving it a shot.

And what do you know — it’s actually pretty good. I’m not sure if I’m sold enough on it to want to pick up a copy when it comes out later in the month, but I certainly enjoyed the time I spent with it over the last couple of days.

For those who have perhaps heard of Overwatch but not found out any more information about it, it is, in many ways, similar to Valve’s classic Team Fortress 2 in that two teams made up of various different characters with different capabilities face off against one another in order to complete an objective of some description. In the game as it stands at the moment, the objectives on offer include a “king of the hill” type affair, where over the best of three rounds, each team has to control a particular area on the map for a certain amount of time; an “attack and defend” situation, where one team has to defend a point against assault from the other team; an “assault” variant, where the attacking team has to escort a slow-moving “payload” vehicle from one end of the map to the other while the other team stops them; and a mode that mixes the “attack and defend” and “assault” objectives together.

Like Team Fortress 2, the different characters have different roles on the team. Offensive characters are nimble but fragile, with their weapons and abilities concentrating on inflicting damage efficiently. Defensive characters have the ability to do things like lay down turrets or, in the case of one particular character, turn themselves into a turret. Tank characters have a huge pool of health points so are designed to act as a distraction for the other team. And support characters generally have some sort of useful ability to help the team out — usually some form of healing, buffing or both.

Where Team Fortress 2 only had one character of each archetype, though, Overwatch has several, each of whom has a unique weapon and loadout of special abilities. Weapons have clips of ammo and have to be reloaded when empty, but you have infinite clips, so there’s no hunting around for ammo or any punishment for spray-and-pray gunplay. You can restore your health by returning to your home base, similar to how Blizzard’s MOBA Heroes of the Storm works. And if you find a hero isn’t working out for you, you can switch either when you die or when you’re in your base.

Overwatch strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and tactical depth. The characters are all easy to learn in terms of mechanics, but applying their weapons and skills to situations throughout a match is the real challenge. That and not blowing yourself up in some instances; my favourite character so far, D.Va, has the ability to self-destruct her mech suit, killing anyone nearby, which is an absolutely devastating skill, but also very likely to take you with it if you don’t immediately run away.

There’s also a fun metagame that doesn’t fall into the Call of Duty trap of excessive challenges and skill levels: you simply have an experience level, which gives you a “loot box” every time you level up, and the items in the loot box are randomly selected skins, animations, spray paint logos and voice clips for the various characters in the game. None of these have any effect on the characters’ abilities — they’re just there as cool collectibles as an incentive for players to keep playing. The choice to make Overwatch a full-price game rather than a free-to-play affair also seems quite sensible, too; while some may balk at paying full whack for a multiplayer-only game, there’s a substantial amount of content in here, both heroes and maps, and Blizzard claim that they’re going to support the game post-launch with new, free add-on content rather than paid DLC. A round of applause for them, then; doubly so since their parent company is Activision, who loves milking the annual Call of Duty installments dry.

The other nice side-effect of it being a full-price game is that everyone has access to everything from day one. Everyone can pick a favourite character and get to grips with them without having to wait for them to come around in a free-to-play rotation; everyone is, in other words, on a level playing field to begin with, with no advantage given to someone who has paid up for characters, boosters or whatever.

As I say, I’m not yet sure if I’m convinced enough by the beta to hand over 50 quid for the full game when it releases later in the month, but I will say it’s the most fun I’ve had in a first-person shooter for a very long time indeed, and I generally don’t go in for competitive first-person shooters. The beta seems to have had some positive attention, too, so hopefully it will enjoy a solid community for some time — long enough for it to be worthwhile for Blizzard to keep adding new content.

If you want to give it a go for yourself, I believe you have until Monday morning to try it out. Better hurry!

2298: Holiday on Zack Island

0298_001

I wasn’t just trying Dead or Alive 5 Last Round out of the blue yesterday; I was inspired to finally pick it up after playing some Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, which I’ve been enjoying a great deal.

For those unfamiliar, the Dead or Alive Xtreme series has very little to do with the fighting game series Dead or Alive save for involving some of the same characters — specifically, kickboxer and playboy Zack, who owns the various tropical paradises the Xtreme games unfold on, and a selection of lovely ladies from the series indulging in various holiday-ish activities.

The first Dead or Alive Xtreme game — Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, which many people thought might be a joke when it was first announced — was released on Xbox and largely focused, as you might expect, on playing volleyball, but there was a curious dating sim metagame attached, too, where you could give gifts to the various girls in the hope of getting them to partner up with you — you can’t play beach volleyball without a partner, after all.

Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 on Xbox 360 was a very similar game but had a couple of additions to the original formula. Most notably, it added jetski racing, which was a hell of a lot of fun, and provided a reliable means of making money for those who weren’t very good at volleyball or some of the smaller activities the game offered.

And so we come to Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 on PlayStation 4, which in many senses is a bit of a step backwards for the series in that it’s closer to the original game in structure, but manages to remain enjoyable regardless. I miss the jetskiing in particular, but I’m enjoying the volleyball and other activities, and the fact that the game is a lot less obtuse about things like what gifts the girls like, what is happening to your relationship levels and suchlike makes it a much more pleasant experience. Couple that with a simple mission and levelling system plus a “grade” given at the end of every 14-day virtual vacation, and despite being pared back in terms of content, Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is, in many regards, the most well-structured game in the series.

The thing I like about Dead or Alive Xtreme — all of them, but most recently 3 in particular — is that it’s just plain relaxing to play. Gentle, chilled out music plays in the background as you engage in various activities ranging from beach volleyball to rock climbing or a tug of war on floating platforms in the swimming pool. As day gives way to night, your chosen girl heads back to her hotel room and has the option to hang out in the casino and play roulette, blackjack or poker. Then the whole process repeats again.

The reason why it’s so relaxing is that it doesn’t put any particular pressure on you to play in a given way. “Mission” pop up every so often, either from the girl you’re controlling or Zack, and these provide rewards for the overall metagame, but they’re strictly optional. In the case of the girls’ missions, they can provide a good indicator of how well you’re doing on this playthrough, though — in order to get the best score at the end of her holiday, you need to have completed 7 of her specifically numbered missions, ending with “Satisfy [girl] by the end of the vacation”.

Aside from that, though, you can tackle the game how you see fit. You can focus on trying to get a complete collection of swimsuits for a favourite character. You can work on trying to satisfy as many of the girls on the island as possible in a single playthrough — pretty difficult when you first start playing, but as you level up their “excitement level” over time, it becomes easier. Or you can switch to “Owner Mode” and just use the game as an attractive software toy, allowing the computer to take control of your chosen girl in various activities while you play with the camera angles and take photographs.

Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is notorious for not getting an official English localisation due to some controversy a while back. There is some debate over whether or not publisher Koei Tecmo really believed that the game would be subject to backlash from social justice types when it was released, but you can bet if the game did see an official Western release, we wouldn’t hear the end of it from the numerous holier-than-thou publications and writers on the market today.

The silly thing is, it’s not offensive in the slightest. It’s sexy, sure, but Dead or Alive has always featured spectacularly beautiful women, and this in itself isn’t offensive. Some of the swimsuits are quite revealing, and some of the minigames cause an entertaining “swimsuit malfunction” for the loser, though the suit in question doesn’t actually fall off or anything — it just comes untied and stays magically attached. In other words, there’s no nipples, no fannies, no bumholes, no fucking, no kissing and definitely no holding hands. It’s just an all-female cast hanging out on the beach, playing games and having fun rather than punching each other in the tits like they do in the mainline Dead or Alive games.

To put it another way, Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, like its predecessors, is a game that it’s just nice to play. It’s not a deep game, it’s not a complicated game (unless you want to optimise your playthrough strategies for the fastest progress) and it’s not a difficult game, but it is a game that it’s just thoroughly pleasant to spend time with, and I predict it’s one I’ll keep coming back to when I just want to chill out and enjoy myself without thinking too hard about anything.

The perfect virtual holiday, in other words.

2291: Alienation: Loot, Guns and Unobtrusive Multiplayer

0291_001

I’d been umming and ahhing over whether or not to give Housemarque’s latest PS4 game Alienation a go, but I eventually decided to take the plunge and try it out this evening, even feeling the trepidation I already did that it would have too great a focus on online multiplayer for my liking.

Thankfully, it turns out to be an excellent game that looks to have a decent amount of depth — and best of all, while it does have an emphasis on online co-op (as well as optional Dark Souls-style “invasions”) it can be played solo or with friends only if you so desire, though I don’t doubt that soloing the game will prove to be an exercise in frustration.

But what is it? Well, it’s basically Diablo with guns, with a touch of competitive arcadey high-score systems added for good measure. It’s not an out-and-out arcade game like previous Housemarque titles Resogun and Super Stardust in that there’s a persistent campaign with character levelling, skill trees and all that good stuff, but it does feature mechanics such as score multipliers, powerups, bonuses and the like. Plus apparently once you finish the main campaign there’s a whole host of more arcadey stuff to enjoy — randomised levels, harder difficulties, special mission types — and so there’s clearly a fine pair of legs on this game.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying. The guns feel suitably powerful, and the interface reflects your interactions well, with health bars being chipped away, damage numbers flying around and overdramatic pyrotechnics punctuating every firefight. The destructible environments are both impressive and hazardous, and there’s a good variety of both enemies to contend with and weapons with which to dispatch them. Objectives are simple and straightforward — usually “go here and interact with this” or “go here and blow up these things”, at least in the first few levels — but allow for game sessions to run smoothly with minimal aimless wandering and backtracking, and minimal need for voice communication, for that matter, which is the aspect of the online multiplayer I was most concerned with. (I hate voice chatting with strangers.)

Thankfully, in the few games I played this evening, no-one was using voice chat; everyone was instead making use of the three preset stock phrases “Over here!”, “Wait!” and “Nice!” assigned to the D-pad. This was all that was needed for effective teamwork and coordination, and because the game doesn’t particularly reward lone wolves or trolls — it is a purely cooperative affair, after all, unless you enable the Invasion feature, which is strictly optional — there’s no real reason for someone to jump into a game and spoil the experience for everyone else. Consequently, while there wasn’t much in the way of socialising between me and the players I teamed up with for a few missions, I don’t mind that at all; it was a pleasant enough experience just fighting alongside them, and I don’t actually really need the social element to feel like playing with others is worthwhile.

This is what I mean by the game having “unobtrusive multiplayer”. The multiplayer is drop-in, drop-out, meaning that you can start playing without having to wait for hours in a lobby for three other people to be on the same mission as you, and once the other players are in there are no interruptions; they appear in your game seamlessly, and the action isn’t interrupted any time they want to access the menus to level up or change their gear. In a way it’s kind of just like playing with computer-controlled squadmates, only it’s actual humans from all over the world controlling them. You may wonder what the point of this is, but it just works, okay? And speaking as someone who is generally terrified of playing online games with other people — particularly cooperative ones, which, oddly, seem to foster some of the most aggressively perfectionist assholes in all of gaming — I found my brief foray into Alienation this evening to be most satisfying and enjoyable.

I’ll definitely be playing some more; the combination of loot whoring (with variable rarity items a la Diablo), upgrading weapons, cooperative blasting and high score chasing — with your “score” here doubling as the experience points you earn in a mission — makes for an addictive formula that I’m pleased and happy I decided to take a chance on.

2287: Deep Dungeon is Exactly What FFXIV Needs

0287_001

I got burnt out on Final Fantasy XIV a little while back and haven’t felt particularly tempted to go back since — especially since my Free Company had been less than conversational for the last few months, making even the social aspect of the game less worth logging in for than it had been.

At PAX East this week, Square Enix announced an exciting new plan for some future content that has me clamouring to get back to the game once it releases: a new type of activity called Deep Dungeon, which will be familiar to fans of both Final Fantasy Tactics’ Midlight’s Deep optional dungeon and Final Fantasy XI’s Nyzul Isle.

It sounds as if Deep Dungeon is going to be a discrete type of activity for players to participate in, with the eventual plan presumably being to have a number of different dungeons for players to challenge. Initially, there will be just one, called Palace of the Dead.

The reason this excites me so much is because it shakes up the established formula of Final Fantasy XIV — which, don’t get me wrong, I like very much, but just needed a break from, thanks to the necessity of grinding the same content week after week in order to obtain the next incremental upgrade. Unlike the current substantial array of static content available in the game, Deep Dungeon has a strong random element, plus a great deal more flexibility than the rest of the game’s reliance on the MMO “Holy Trinity” of tank, healer and DPS.

Deep Dungeon sees you and up to three friends tackling a randomly generated dungeon. It also has its own progression system separate from the main game’s experience and item levels, mitigating the issue the game currently has of a significant proportion of players outgearing the majority of the current content. The in-game reasons for this are that the dungeon saps your character’s strength, and in order to power back up again you’ll have to make use of items you find within the dungeon itself, progressing and regaining your strength as you proceed.

If it’s anything like Final Fantasy XI’s Nyzul Isle — which FFXI veterans inform me, it sounds very much like — then each floor of the dungeon will not only be randomly generated, but it will also have various objectives to complete, as well as challenging boss fights every so often. It sounds like a lot of fun — and I really like the fact that it’s seemingly flexible enough to cater to any party makeup from 1-4 players, hopefully leading to some interesting combinations of classes exploring the depths. All-tank runs? Bring it on!

I have questions that will hopefully be answered in the coming months: firstly, what will the point of Deep Dungeon be? Will it be another means of acquiring progression currency, or will it be a completely separate activity? My main concern with it is that it ends up being a Diadem, which sounded awesome in concept but turned out to be a bit toss when it was actually released. Part of this was down to player attitudes, admittedly, rather than any real fault with the content itself, but hopefully the smaller scale of Deep Dungeon will mitigate this risk somewhat.

To be honest, if Deep Dungeon proves to be a significant enough challenge with enough variation on each run, I can see it becoming one of my main activities in Final Fantasy XIV, particularly if I have the option of running it either solo or with friends. And with the promise of score rankings coming in a future update, there’s the distinct possibility of some friendly competition, too.

The first Deep Dungeon, Palace of the Dead, is due to arrive in the game as part of Patch 3.35. I’m planning on jumping back into the game around Patch 3.3 to find out what happens next in the main scenario quest — the story is getting very interesting — but if Deep Dungeon lives up to its potential, 3.35 will see me getting back into things in a big way.

Please don’t mess it up, Yoshi-P and co. I have faith in you!

2284: Nights of Azure: Encounter in the Abyss

0284_001

I only have a couple of trophies left before I have the Platinum on Gust’s action RPG Nights of Azure, and I’m coming away from the game very impressed. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it to begin with — though I adored its aesthetic and narrative — but once I got my head around its unconventional systems and subversions of standard RPG mechanics, I was well and truly enraptured.

The game has excellent combat. I was concerned that it would be a little hack-and-slashy when I first started playing, but as it progresses and you open up more and more systems and options for yourself, it becomes really interesting. In fact, oddly enough, one game that I’m constantly reminded of while I’m playing Nights of Azure is Final Fantasy XIV, of all things; while the two games may not appear to have much in common initially, one being an action RPG and one being a hotbar-and-cooldown-based MMO, I maintain that Nights of Azure is what Final Fantasy XIV would play like if it was a single-player action game.

Perhaps I should clarify that. Both are based on making good use of a gradually expanding roster of abilities that you unlock bit by bit as you progress through the game, rather than outright customisation (though Nights of Azure has considerably more customisation when it comes to equipment than FFXIV, with up to four items being equippable, each having both an effect on Arnice’s stats and some sort of special effect). Both are based on a combination of open world adventuring (albeit in Nights of Azure’s case, said “world” being just one town) and linear dungeons with boss encounters. And in both cases, said boss encounters are based heavily on learning the boss’ attacks, how to avoid them, making sure you don’t stand in area of effect markers, and recognising when it’s safe to attack.

This latter aspect is particularly apparent in the later hours of the game and especially the “epilogue” chapter after you beat the final boss for the first time. The “epilogue” is actually a retread of the last chapter with some additional content and the ability to raise Arnice to the level cap of 11 rather than the previous 10; she also gains the ability to transform into Nightmare form as well as her previous Demon, Moon Rabbit, Phantom and Armour forms. More importantly, totally completing this final chapter unlocks the “true” ending, which I haven’t seen yet, since I’m cleaning up the last few trophies first.

Throughout the game, there are a number of boss battles. These are all very good and have a nice amount of variety between them, but for me, the absolute highlight of the game’s battles has been the optional “Abyss” battle in the Arena. The Arena is initially designed as a place to practice the various techniques you’ll need to use in the game, ranging from chaining long combos to defeating enemies using only your summoned Servans. “Abyss”, meanwhile, is the culmination of everything you’ve learned, in theory, pitting you against the toughest individual foe in the game over the course of several phases; a fight that rivals some of Final Fantasy XIV’s raid bosses in its complexity.

Let me explain how I beat the fight and you’ll see.

Your opponent is a demon girl fiend — Yfritte, I believe, though don’t quote me on that. She’s a level 11 opponent — enemies in the game go up to level 15, and your Servans can level this high with an appropriate ability, though Arnice herself can only level to 11. Unlike similar-looking enemies you might have encountered elsewhere in the game, Yfritte (as we’ll call her, even if she isn’t) has about a bazillion HP and, it becomes clear immediately after engaging her, isn’t going to go down without one hell of a fight.

You start across the Arena from Yfritte with no Servans summoned. I summoned all my Servans immediately — my main party consisting of Alraune (healer), Plumie (ranged damage dealer), Toy Trooper (group of damage dealers) and Toy Sentinel (single damage dealer, hits lots of times) — and straight away set off Toy Trooper and Toy Sentinel’s Burst attacks to deal some initial damage to Yfritte.

Using Arnice’s Blood Sword, I alternated between using the Special attack, which knocks Yfritte down for a couple of seconds, and the Weak attack, which, with the Vlad’s Crest item I had equipped, restored Arnice’s SP quickly enough to perform Special attacks almost indefinitely, effectively stun-locking Yfritte. This process repeats until about 80% of her HP, at which point she summons two Manticores.

The Manticores can Paralyse you and your Servans, so it’s a good idea to have status-repelling abilities or equipment on at least Arnice and your healer. They also have a nasty multi-hit fire breath attack, so staying behind or to the side of them is a good idea. Continue alternating Weak and Special attacks to repeatedly knock them down until Arnice’s Transformation bar fills, at which point the combination of Servans I had equipped allowed me to transform into the speedy Moon Rabbit form.

Moon Rabbit’s Special attack needs 100SP, but it’s a huge area-effect attack that hits lots of times — and, with Vlad’s Crest equipped, this means that 100SP is regenerated almost immediately if you hit more than one target with it. It also inflicts Bleed for some damage over time, so it’s good for upping your average damage per second. I repeatedly triggered Moon Rabbit’s Special Attack, taking care to catch Yfritte and the two Manticores in the AoE, until the transformation ran out, by which point the Manticores were dead and Yfritte had a chunk of life missing.

There now follows a short phase where Yfritte is by herself. She flings missiles at you from a distance, some of which home in on you, and sets off close-range area effect abilities when you’re up close, some of which are powerful enough to one-shot Arnice. Distract her with your Servans — use Alraune’s Mega Heal to top up their HP if necessary — and return to the Weak-Special combo to keep her off-balance.

After a while, she’ll summon a huge number of level 1 Shadows. Move away from Yfritte and hack and slash through the Shadows to build up both SP and the Transformation bar. It’s potentially worth unsummoning your Servans at this point, as the Shadows don’t hit hard and if you keep clear of Yfritte (and avoid her missiles) you won’t take a lot of damage. Plus when you re-summon the Servans, they’ll have full SP again, although their HP will be where you left it, so be ready to heal if necessary.

I had a second deck of Servans set up to transform Arnice into Nightmare form, so I took the opportunity to use this powerful transformation once the bar was full. Nightmare form has a wide arc ranged attack that hits multiple times as its default weak attack, so spamming this and avoiding Yfritte’s missiles does a significant amount of damage in a short space of time. Once I was safely in Nightmare form, I switched back to my initial deck, summoned Alraune for healing purposes just in case a shot got through, and prepared for the next phase.

The next phase comes when Yfritte summons a huge blue area of effect marker on the ground. This inflicts poison and is also slippery ice, so having status resist abilities or equipment is a good idea, particularly on Alraune. The Mermaid’s Tear item completely nullifies any area-effect abilities, so this effectively allows Alraune to shrug it off and continue healing you. Don’t summon any other Servans until the AoE disappears, since they’re dumb enough to blindly charge straight into it, get poisoned and die straight away. Once it goes away, however, go nuts; return to the Weak-Special combo to knock Yfritte off balance until the next phase starts.

Next up, Yfritte summons a doll who chucks toys at you, which can be easily avoided, and a spirit-type who we’ll affectionately refer to as the “bullet hell fairy”. Kill the doll first, since it’s not got many HP and will go down quickly. The bullet hell fairy is a little more troublesome, since she repeatedly summons large groups of bullets which then explode for significant damage. You can see where they’re going to appear and get out of the way of them; use the Follow command on Servans to get them out of harm’s way. They’re always in the same formation: one at “twelve o’clock”, then two more at “eight” and “four”. Take care to continue dodging Yfritte’s bullets and close-range AoEs while you deal with the fairy.

By now we’re getting close to the end, but there’s still a couple of phases to go. Yfritte will do another big AoE — red this time — so deal with it the same way: unsummon everything except an immune Alraune and perhaps pelt Yfritte from afar with the Blitz Shooter if she refuses to come out of her little safe space. When the AoE disappears, you’re on the home straight.

Yfritte will summon some Shadows again — level 7 this time, so they don’t go down so easily. Re-summon your Servans and get them to hack and slash their way through the hordes, though keep an eye on where Yfritte is so you don’t get caught out by a one-shot AoE at this late stage in the fight. Build up SP with Weak attacks and clear an area with a Special from the Blood Sword, preferably catching Yfritte on the outside of it so you can knock her down for a bit of damage. Repeat until you charge up another transformation; it’s a good idea to pick Moon Rabbit for this one for the large Special AoE, though Nightmare works too, since its ranged attack covers a wide area. Basically you want to rip through as many Shadows as possible while still hitting Yfritte in order to keep your SP topped up.

Towards the end of the fight, Yfritte will summon a Stone Hellion — the same really annoying ones that were in earlier Arena battles, equipped entirely with nothing but one-shot abilities with huge AoEs. Fortunately this one goes down a little easier than the boss-class ones in earlier battles, so catch him in a Moon Rabbit Special if you can while continuing to hit Yfritte. Take care to avoid all his big AoEs — Moon Rabbit’s speed is really helpful here — and continue pelting Yfritte with everything you’ve got while making sure to stay clear of her bullets and AoEs as well as ensuring you don’t get overwhelmed by shadows… and eventually, hopefully, you will prevail with time to spare.

2274: Holding Back the Night(s) of Azure

0274_001

The more I play Nights of Azure, Gust’s latest game, the more I like it.

It’s a slow burn, though, I must admit; although the setup and premise is intriguing, mechanically it feels a little obtuse to begin with — or perhaps I’m just overthinking it and trying to play it like a conventional grind-heavy RPG, which it emphatically isn’t.

There are a whole bunch of unconventional aspects to the game, most notably its progression system. The level cap is just 11, for one thing, and unusually, the protagonist’s level progression isn’t a case of grinding for experience; rather, you collect “Blood” from fallen enemies, and then make use of this in increasingly large quantities to gain a level. Levelling up increases your base stats, unlocks new skills to purchase using the four different types of skill points, and sometimes gives you access to new weapons or abilities.

However, there’s a more noteworthy aspect to levelling up, which is that it gives you access to a story scene between the protagonist Arnice and the “Maiden of Jorth”, a mysterious young woman who looks awfully like Arnice’s ladyfriend Lilysse and hangs out in a dream world. During these scenes, you generally have the option to either find out a bit more about the background lore of the world or a bit more about the relationship between Arnice and Lilysse.

It’s interesting to see level progression and narrative progression intertwined so closely, as this isn’t something that happens very often. In fact, outside of level-locked quests in MMOs, the last time I remember it happening in a single-player RPG is The Granstream Saga on PlayStation 1, though this came at it from the other angle in that you levelled up at predefined moments in the story rather than levelling up triggering story scenes.

There’s a more conventional levelling system in there too in the form of the “Servans” system that forms the main basis for the battle mechanics. During the game’s action sequences, Arnice can take one or more “decks” of Servans with her, and summon them in exchange for her SP. She can have up to four Servans out at once, and each of them have a combination of passive, automatically activated and manually activated “Burst” abilities. They all act independently of Arnice; while you can give them some rudimentary orders such as “Follow me” and “Attack my target”, they mostly do their own thing according to their personality — some loyally attack your target without question; others hang back and attack if they feel like it; others still don’t like fighting at all and would rather dig up items for you.

There was the potential for the lack of direct control of the Servans to be enormously frustrating, but it seems to work pretty well. Arnice isn’t an especially strong combatant by herself, but wading into the melee yourself generally sends a clear message to your Servans as to which enemies you want to focus on. And the more you use them, the more they level up; after an action scene, they gain experience points in a more “normal RPG” style, levelling up and unlocking abilities of their own.

Each of the Servans seems to have a very different use; I have what feels like a good party right now, but I’m sure it won’t be ideal for every situation. Of particular note in this system is the fact that each Servan has a coloured affinity, and the combination of affinities in your deck (or, rather, which affinity has a clear majority) determines what weird and wonderful demonic form Arnice can transform into after charging up through battle. These demon forms are enormously powerful in various ways — some hit hard, some are very fast, some can take a beating. They’re particularly useful when it comes to the bosses in the game, which are interesting, challenging battles that demand successful juggling of Arnice’s attacks, your Servans’ attacks, positioning and well-timed transformations.

I don’t feel I quite have my head around all the mechanics in Nights of Azure just yet, but I’m enjoying it a lot. The story and characters are compelling, and the game doesn’t waste a lot of time with endless dialogue sequences; it’s pretty pacy, moving from one episode to the next in short order, and the action sequences are cut into short, 5-15 minute chunks, making it an easy game to dip into.

There’s a whole bunch of interesting stuff going on in this game, in other words, and I feel it’s probably a strong contender to spend a month on over at MoeGamer in the near future. So I think I’d probably better start taking notes!