2337: Sony Gets It

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I stayed up and watched Sony’s E3 press conference tonight, as it’s usually a good show. This year it perhaps wasn’t their strongest performance compared to some of their other recent efforts — last year in particular being a very memorable highlight — but it was still an enjoyable presentation.

The thing I like about Sony’s presentations in particular is that they never forget why they’re there: for the games, for the players. Sony’s presentation this year was almost minimalist in the amount of explanation and talking there was: rather than hours of Andrew House extolling the virtues of the PlayStation’s OS and additional services, the team instead elected largely to let the game footage and trailers do the talking.

And for sure, Sony certainly seems to have a solid lineup in the coming year. Of particular note were the PlayStation VR titles, which included a surprisingly good-looking Resident Evil VII (which, in the absence of a new Silent Hill game, very much appeared to be going down the “psychological horror” route, a decision that I absolutely endorse) and, of all things, an absolutely gobsmacking-looking new Call of Duty that appeared to feature seamless transitions between wandering around a capital ship, flying a small fighter craft, hopping out in zero gravity to cause mischief, then jumping back in when the mission was complete.

PlayStation VR is probably the most exciting thing Sony has lined up in the near future, and it’s coming relatively soon: it’s set for an October release. At the moment I’m having some difficulty picturing how it will work, particularly after having had a go with the room-scale gameplay of the HTC Vive at my friend Tim’s house (an experience which I will write about at some point soon, since I haven’t already) but I have faith Sony will do something cool with it.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about PlayStation VR, though, is the fact that, as a console VR platform, it’s likely to give VR as a whole a kick up the backside into starting to produce full-scale games rather than the more experimental fare that make up the majority of the Vive and Oculus Rift libraries at present. Its (relatively) affordable price point also puts it within reach of consumer electronics enthusiasts, too, so it’s going to be one of the main ways everyone starts getting VR headsets in their houses, I think. And I’m really excited to have a go on some of the games Sony was showing off.

So while there weren’t any huge bombshells in Sony’s presentation — apart from a release date for The Last Guardian, finally, along with confirmation that Hideo Kojima is indeed working on something that looks both baffling and awesome — it was a solid showing. Not their best, but nothing to be ashamed of either. And once again, while Microsoft, Ubisoft and EA all pander to their investors, Sony proves that they know that without the people who play the games, there wouldn’t be an E3 at all.

2291: Alienation: Loot, Guns and Unobtrusive Multiplayer

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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.

2245: Dungeon Travelers 2: Some Tips and Tricks

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With my post from the other day in mind, I thought I’d do the greater community a favour and compile some observations, tips and tricks that I’ve stumbled across during my time with Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita.

Dungeon Travelers 2 is a surprisingly complex game. Don’t be discouraged if you find yourself struggling in the early game — there are plenty of opportunities to power yourself up and even put right any mistakes you might have made with character advancement. Experiment and find things that work for you; there is no real one “definitive” way to play that works for everyone, which is part of the beauty of the game.

I say this because the tips and tricks I’m about to share with you are based on my own experiences, and your mileage may vary according to how you prefer to play. In other words, these are not definitive strategies; rather, they’re what’s worked for me and the way I play.

So let’s jump in.

Illuminate the situation

Light is your friend. It may not seem important in the early dungeons — largely because it isn’t, for the most part — but the further you progress in the game, the more you’re going to start running into illusionary walls, which are a real pain, since they, well, look like walls, but you can walk through them.

Fortunately, you’re not expected to walk around butting your head into every wall on the off-chance it might lead somewhere. Firstly, you can use your map to determine if there’s likely to be something beyond a wall; if there’s a conspicuous gap, there might be something there, so you could try walking into it — or you could light up the dungeon using either the Flashlight item or the Priestess spell Light.

What does this do? Simple. Not only does it make the field screen brighter — helpful in those pesky Dark Zones — but it also renders all illusionary walls invisible, making formerly hidden passages visible. As such, you’ll want to keep Light pretty much permanently up via one means or another — if you have a Priestess in your party, they can take care of this, otherwise you should make sure you carry a bunch of Flashlights with you.

Don’t be too proud to retreat

Along the same lines, being able to escape quickly is also your friend. Conveniently, there’s both an item and a Priestess spell to help with this too: the item Emergency Exit and the Priestess spell Return both immediately transport you out of the dungeon and back to the world map, allowing you to nip back to the Library to lick your wounds, sell all the crap cluttering up your inventory and restock on any items you might have used up.

Don’t be too proud to do this. If your inventory is full, or your party is struggling, take a step back and return later.

Look out for shortcuts; unlock them before ending an expedition

With the above in mind, you’ll want to keep an eye out for shortcuts, particularly if you were deep inside a dungeon. Shortcuts can usually be spotted by doors that are locked “from the other side” when you first come across them. At some point later in the dungeon, you’ll reach the other side of that door and be able to unlock it, allowing you quick and easy access to the deeper reaches of the dungeon without having to go through the rigmarole you went through first time. Ideally, if you can push far enough through a dungeon to unlock a shortcut before escaping, that will make your life easier when you return.

Buff up before bosses

You will always get a warning before a boss fight — you’ll “hear someone on the other side of the door” or “sense a strong presence on the other side of the door”. When this happens, save and use any and all buff spells and abilities you have — because many of them can be used outside of combat. If you can go into a boss battle with useful skills like Brave, Protect and Moon Curtain up before you start, that means fewer initial turns wasted getting into a good position — initial turns where the boss may well decimate your party if you’re not careful.

Think about party composition

There’s a certain degree of flexibility in party composition, but you’ll have an easier time of it if you stick to the old faithful “holy trinity” of tank, healer and damage-dealers. One or two tanks can make up your front line, while your back line can be ranged damage-dealers and your healer.

Remember that not everyone has to deal damage to be useful; tanks, for example, are well-served by investing skill points in defensive abilities that help them protect the rest of the party, rather than trying to be a physical damage-dealer class.

Do note that if you want to see all the sub-events in the game, you’ll need to take trips into the dungeons with as many different combinations of characters as possible — and sometimes ensure you have some peculiar items in your inventory.

Know your stats and equip your party accordingly

Tanks want DEF and probably some decent ATK too.

Ranged attackers want ATK, DEX and AGI doesn’t hurt.

Mages want INT, which primarily comes from staves.

Priestesses and other healers want RES, which primarily comes from tomes.

Maids want AGI.

Everyone wants as much physical and elemental resistance as you can possibly get them.

Tank, tank, tank?

I’ve spotted three distinct ways to tank with the characters I have so far in the game.

Alisia is set up to be a damage-resisting tank — she progresses naturally into the Paladin and Valkyrie classes, which are able to equip heavy armour, protect and cover the party and have extremely good defensive capabilities on their own. Alisia works well using the Paladin’s Cover ability, perhaps coupled with the physical damage-nullifying Parry, since this can protect squishy back-liners from powerful single-target attacks. The Valkyrie ability that allows her to reduce damage to the back line if she has a shield equipped is very helpful, too.

Grishna, meanwhile, is set up to soak large amounts of damage through her large pool of HP and her Berserker abilities that allow her to buff her maximum HP still further. She also benefits from a very helpful ability that debuffs enemy stats if they hit her — the more points you throw into this, the more stats are affected when she takes damage. The fact that you essentially want Grishna to be the one getting hit is further compounded by abilities that make her more powerful and faster when she is low on HP — though, obviously, use these with care!

Eltricia, you may be surprised to hear, can also tank to a certain degree if you advance her into the Magical Princess class, even though this class is an offshoot of the Magic User base class. Magical Princess boasts Paladin’s Cover ability as well as a Kunoichi-style ability to absorb damage into illusionary afterimages. In other words, you can use an appropriately set up Eltricia as an evasion tank; as a Magical Princess, she makes a decent front-line fighter even if she’s not tanking, too, particularly with her stat-boosting Magical Change ability, AoE strikes and Circle skills that buff the whole party with Brave and/or Protect.

Maids: the backbone of your party

You’ll want a Maid in your party at all times. Whether it’s Conette or Ist is a matter of preference, though Ist does have a unique passive that gives her a bonus to all her Maid abilities, so once you get her she’s technically “better” in that role.

Why do you need a Maid? Well, because they’re an amazing support class, particularly when you develop them into their later evolutions. Even as a base Maid, though, they’re an essential part of your party due to their completely TP-free skills that heal HP and TP, as well as Generous Heart, arguably the most useful passive in the game, which restores party HP and TP after battle — whether battle was concluded by victory or escaping.

Once Maids develop into Bards, Dancers and their advanced-level counterparts, they become even more formidable, able to buff the party or debuff the enemies while continuing to provide their essential TP battery services. One thing worth noting is that song-based skills are treated as magic — they have a Chant time and are affected by Anti-Magic Zones — while dance skills are physical, and can consequently be used even if the user is Silenced. Freeze will stop a dance in its tracks, though.

Enchant, enchant, enchant

Make sure you step into a dungeon with a bulging coin purse — more on that in a moment — just in case you run into the blacksmith. If you do, be sure to enchant as much equipment as you can; note that you can otherwise defy the laws of the game during this process by using Sealbooks in your Guild storage to perform enchantments, and even bring equipment out of your Guild storage into your party’s inventory by enchanting it.

When you enchant a piece of equipment, its +x value increases by the “tens” digit of the level of the Sealbook used to enchant it. Thus a level 15 Sealbook will increase a piece of equipment by +1, while a level 35 Sealbook will increase it by +3. Try to enchant efficiently; you can only enchant each piece of equipment five times, so that could potentially be the difference between an increase of +5 and an increase of +20 or more depending on the levels of the Sealbooks you use.

The passives that get attached to the piece of equipment aren’t fixed, either; you’ll notice that most equipment is only able to hold two additional characteristics, with further enchantments potentially “overwriting” attributes that you previously attached. However, you can game the system somewhat by choosing a Sealbook, checking the preview of what the new equipment will look like, then cancelling out. When you choose the Sealbook again, there’s a decent chance you’ll get a different combination of attributes. Keep doing this until you get the combination of bonuses that you want.

Making money

Enemies don’t drop much gold and gold drops from treasure chests are fairly rare, too. Your main sources of income will likely be equipment drops and making Sealbooks. Be sure to identify equipment and check whether it’s an improvement on your party’s loadout before selling it on, and take a look at each Sealbook’s bonuses before tossing it. Also remember that Sealbooks can be used for enchanting, too, so it’s worth keeping those with particularly useful bonuses in your storage for later use. Those with crap attributes, though — or those that are too low-level to be particularly useful any more — are fair game for selling on. Take a trip to a dungeon where you can clear out enemies easily, rip through them with AoE attacks, make a bunch of Sealbooks, profit. Simple.

Also worth noting: the Treasure Hunter passive Negotiate works even if the Treasure Hunter in question isn’t in your party. If you’re not planning on taking a Treasure Hunter out and about with you, at least pump as many skill points as you can into this skill to get you significantly cheaper prices in both the Libra-Shop and the wandering merchants.

If you’re spamming Attack, you’re doing it wrong

Basic attacks will become more of a last resort later in the game, since with a well-levelled Maid in your group, your party will be considerably more self-sufficient than one without. Even without a Maid, though, most classes have a passive that allows them to regenerate TP to varying degrees, and it’s a very worthy investment. There are also a number of Sealbooks that include TP restoration as one of their bonuses, so either equip one or enchant the effect onto your equipment to make yourself even more self-sufficient.

Once you have a good flow of TP going in the party as a whole, you’ll want to forego the Attack command in favour of your characters’ more specialised abilities. They should play to their strengths, in other words: mages should cast, healers should heal, archers should pelt everything with arrows, tanks should protect themselves and the party. Don’t be shy with your skills; while you might find yourself short on TP in the early game, it doesn’t take long before your party can survive for much longer expeditions without getting exhausted. Once you reach this point, the only time you will probably use the Attack button is if your weapon has a particularly useful “on hit with basic attack” effect attached to it.

In most combats, you’ll want to debuff the enemy group as much as possible while putting yourself in an advantageous position. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to buff yourself in every combat, but debuffing the enemy, preventing them from casting or using skills, is always useful, particularly if you recognise the foe as having unpleasant party-wide attacks. (Beware the Kraken in the Underground Waterway; their party-wide water attack is horrid.)

Gear is more important than levels

The golden rule of dungeon crawlers: equip your party effectively, and they’ll be able to fight effectively. If you’re struggling to overcome a particular challenge, don’t immediately assume you need to grind, particularly if you’re still playing the main story, which is paced quite well in terms of XP gain. Instead, take a look at your equipment and see if there’s anything obvious you can improve. Do each of your classes have optimised primary stats? Can you improve their DEF or resistances at all? Is there a Sealbook or enchantment that might help the situation?

With this in mind, if you have a character you think might be useful but you feel they’re underlevelled, don’t be afraid to bring them along on an expedition, probably in the back row and definitely in as good gear as you can find for them. They’ll get a decent amount more XP for being part of a kill on a monster that is higher level than them — assuming they don’t get knocked out, of course — so be sure to protect them and they’ll catch up with the rest of the party in no time.

2230: A Reminder that Dungeon Travelers 2 is Excellent

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I forget why I paused my playthrough of Dungeon Travelers 2 a while back, but it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t like it. On the contrary, I absolutely love it, and have been really enjoying getting back into it sporadically in the evenings over the last week or so.

For those who missed my previous enthusings on the subject of this game, allow me to explain.

Dungeon Travelers 2 is an old-school “gridder” dungeon crawler for PlayStation Vita, developed by Sting and published by Atlus. Absolutely no-one would have heard of it were it not for Polygon’s Phil Kollar writing an indignant article called “Atlus can do better than this creepy, porn-lite dungeon crawler” a while back, after which everyone who thought Kollar was being a shallow, judgemental douchebag promptly preordered the game and eagerly awaited its arrival. While a lot of this immediate backlash was simply to spite Kollar’s terrible article — which didn’t even make an effort to understand anything about the game beyond “it has somewhat suggestive images in it” — those in the know were quick to point out that developer Sting has an impeccable pedigree when it comes to mechanically solid and interesting role-playing games that are often just a little bit unusual, making them very memorable.

Structurally, Dungeon Travelers 2 is fairly business as usual for the gridder genre; it’s the moment to moment gameplay where it shines, and particularly the variety of ways in which it’s possible to play. Heavily based on party composition and character classes, the frequent combat in the game is not the sort of thing you can get through by mashing the “Attack” button — indeed, this is a game that will happily obliterate your entire party in the very first dungeon if you don’t take appropriate precautions and play cautiously, remembering that in dungeon crawlers, it is usually inadvisable to attempt to clear out an entire dungeon in one single expedition.

No, rather Dungeon Travelers 2‘s combat is based very much on making appropriate use of your party’s abilities, both active and passive. There’s a certain amount of MMO-style conceit in there, too; unlike many turn-based RPGs, it is absolutely possible to have a tank up front maintaining the attention of the enemies as much as possible, while the back row rains down death from a distance.

Timing is absolutely key, too, even though the game is strictly turn-based. Spells and certain abilities don’t cast immediately; they have a period of time during which the caster has to chant the spell or song, and it’s only after this that it activates. Spells can be interrupted by a significant amount of damage or being afflicted with a status effect such as Stun or Silence — see, told you it was MMO-ish.

A lot of the passive abilities are really interesting, too. There’s one of the Berserker tank abilities that afflicts enemies with some significant stat debuffs when they hit you, and others that counterattack with nasty status effects or even outright damage in return. Certain buffs and debuffs can make these procs (there I go with the MMO lingo again) more or less likely to trigger, so effective combat is a case of judging the situation and making your party handle it in the most efficient manner.

A good example comes from the Girimekhala boss I fought in my last play session. She had a bunch of really unpleasant abilities, including a heavy physical attack on a whole row of party members, another heavy physical attack on characters adjacent in the turn order, a dance that lowered party stats and inflicted damage every round, and an ability similar to the Berserker’s counter-debuff mentioned above.

The first couple of times I fought Girimekhala, I went all-out attack and was quickly obliterated; tanks can’t tank very well if their stats are shot to shit, and once they went down, the back line quickly followed.

What I ended up doing was have Alisia the Valkyrie (defense tank) use her Cover ability for a one-off (until recast) chance to take damage in place of a party member, her Parry ability to completely nullify damage from one physical attack, and her Material Barrier ability to shield the entire party against physical damage. I then activated Grishna’s Blood Rage ability to boost her maximum HP so she could soak up some damage, too; as a Berserker, her defence isn’t anywhere near as good as a Valkyrie, but she makes up for this with her auto-debuff ability and strong offensive abilities which, while not very useful in this battle as they would always be countered, are often a big help.

Meanwhile, the back row got to work. Melvy the Witch (one of the strongest caster classes) repeatedly cast heavy damage single-target spells on Girimekhala, and acted as the main DPS (or DPT if we’re being picky, I guess) of the group. Fiora the Priestess, meanwhile, simply acted as a healbot, throwing out Circle Heal every turn to cure any damage that had managed to get through Alisia’s monstrous physical resistance. And Conette the Diva (support class) sang a song that helped Melvy and Fiora to chant their spells more quickly as well as using her Cook ability from her base Maid class to keep everyone’s TP (needed to use abilities or cast spells) topped up.

Puzzling this out and putting the plan into action was extremely satisfying, and much more interesting than simply throwing attacks out and occasionally healing. This fight simply wasn’t possible to win with an all-out attack strategy; as you’ll see from my description above, only one out of my five party members was inflicting damage on the boss, with the others all simply supporting the group in various ways. Thankfully Melvy’s magic damage as a Witch is absolutely astronomical, so her burst damage more than made up for the relative infrequency of hits on the boss.

To cut a long story short, Phil Kollar could not have been more wrong about Dungeon Travelers 2. While it is filled with suggestive artwork and distinctly ecchi scenes both involving the main characters and when you defeat the monstergirl bosses, that’s certainly not a reason to write it off or wag your finger at publisher Atlus, telling them they “can do better”. In fact, it’s absolutely one of the best examples of the dungeon crawler genre I’ve had the pleasure of playing to date, although be ready for a seriously stiff challenge, particularly once you start getting into the optional dungeons and boss fights.

2224: Megadimension Neptunia: 50 Hour Report

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50 hours deep in Megadimension Neptunia VII and I’m just starting the third and final “episode”, Heart Dimension Neptunia H. So far I haven’t set foot in the titular Heart Dimension, but the plot has been set up; in the meantime I’ve been doing a little bit of questing and grinding with the CPU Candidates, who are the focus of the initial part of the H arc.

The game continues to be the most enjoyable Neptunia game yet. Everything about it is honed and refined to round off the scrappy edges of the previous installments; while the Re;Birth remakes provided small, incremental improvements on the format set in place by Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, MegaNep is, as I’ve previously noted, a complete overhaul of pretty much every system in the game, from the battle mechanics to the way “shares” work.

Perhaps one of the best changes is how unique each character now feels to play in battle. Rather than all essentially working in the same way outside of the SP-powered special skills and super-powerful EXE Drive attacks, now each character very much has their own distinctive feel and circumstances in which they are useful. This is achieved in several ways, largely to do with the weapons and combo attacks they are able to use.

Each weapon in MegaNep not only has the usual stats, but it also has a specific arrangement of combo slots, split into three categories: Rush, Power and Standard. (Break attacks have gone the way of the Guard Points bar that they were used to damage; I can’t say I miss the system, since it became largely irrelevant after a certain power level in the old games.) As in previous games, Rush attacks focus on a high hit count, with less power per individual hit, and also have a more significant impact on the EXE Drive meter, which now, incidentally, resets between every battle rather than carrying over as in the previous games. Power attacks, meanwhile, have fewer hits, hit harder and in many cases carry an elemental affinity, allowing you to exploit weaknesses. And Standard attacks are somewhere in between the two.

Where things get interesting is in trying to arrange these combos optimally. Characters learn new combo moves as they level up, but each can only be put in a single slot. Moreover, the first attack a weapon performs is fixed and not tied to the character’s unlocked skills; this comes into play when considering the individual combo moves’ Combo Traits, which, if fulfilled when you use them in battle, means that the combo move that triggered it will 1) be guaranteed to hit and 2) be guaranteed to crit with every hit, increasing overall damage considerably. Combo Traits vary from “All previous attacks did not use a Combo Trait” to “Haven’t used Power attacks” and numerous others besides. The challenge when customising a character is to give them as many workable combos with Traits as possible, enabling them to respond to different situations in an optimal manner. It seems to be impossible to build the “perfect” combo — every move triggering a Combo Trait — at my current level, but I wonder if it will be an option with later weapons and/or combo moves.

Anyway. Given that each character has their own set of combo skills and their own set of weapons (each of which has its own arrangement of combo slots as well as its own area of effect) there’s a considerable degree of flexibility in how you set up your party, particularly with the sheer number of playable characters on offer in the game. And you’ll want to rotate them around, too; back-line characters no longer gain experience points (with a couple of exceptions) and there are certain circumstances where you’re obliged to use one or more specific characters in a fight, so they better be suitably set up when that time comes! The series’ Lily Rank system is back, too, only this time Lily Ranks are gained by characters fighting together in the front row, making them somewhat easier to gain — at least it feels that way so far — and in order to max these out you’ll need to tweak your party arrangement every so often, particularly if you’re Trophy hunting.

Elsewhere in the combat, while there are a lot of disposable popcorn enemies — particularly on the world map, where after a certain point random battles become more of an inconvenience than an actual hazard in getting to your destination — the highlights of the game are the boss fights. The game knows this, too, presenting you with unique interface elements, including one thing that I oddly like very much and can’t quite explain why: the boss HP meter with multiple bars. Yes, rather than depleting one bar very slowly while battering down a boss-level enemy, MegaNep takes a Final Fantasy XII-esque approach of having a number of “lights” beneath the main HP bar for a boss, with a light dimming each time you empty the bar. Dim all the lights and you’ve won. It’s essentially a variation on the system that was used in titles like Shining Force and Senran Kagura, where different coloured HP bars represented how many “extra” bars a character or enemy had over the maximum possible to display on screen proportionally.

Outside of my rather specific, peculiar tastes in HP meters, though, back to the boss fights themselves: a lot of them are pretty good, and this is largely thanks to a couple of new mechanics introduced in MegaNep. One is the “Parts Break” system, whereby certain enemies have breakable sections with their own durability counts. In order to damage the part, your character needs to be standing in an appropriate place when they either unleash their combo or a special move. Break the part and you get extra XP, credits and a chance at some extra drops. In many cases, breaking the part also has an effect on the boss, either reducing an aspect of its defences or removing the capability for a particular attack. In one particularly memorable confrontation, a boss is completely immune to all damage except Parts damage until you break the cape on his back — to make matters more challenging, the cape can only be damaged by attacks with an elemental affinity. The fight quickly turns into an entertaining dance as you decide whether to try and break his gauntlets and the horn on his head to cripple his special attacks, or whether to focus on trying to get behind him to destroy his cape and be able to deal some real damage.

The new EXE Drive system works well, too; rather than encouraging you to get into a bunch of random fights in a dungeon just to charge it up before a boss fight, the fact it 1) resets at the start of combat and 2) fills much more quickly than in past games means that you’re much more likely to be using the spectacular, entertaining EXE Drive moves, which is good, because there are a lot more of them, including several multi-character ones that necessitate surrounding an enemy in appropriate formations. Transforming the CPUs and their sisters into their HDD (and, later, their Next Form) incarnations also costs a bar of EXE Drive rather than SP, meaning you can pretty much guarantee the ability to transform in every fight if you need it — to discourage spamming this, however, transforming now costs Shares, though getting KO’d costs significantly more Shares, so you’ll want to weigh up the pros and cons before doing anything rash. Shares work like their original intention in the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game: the more shares one of the nations has, the stronger their CPU (and her sister) is. They’re no longer a zero-sum game, however; increasing one nation’s shares no longer means taking them from someone else; it’s possible to have all four nations with maxed-out share bars, all enjoying the benefits of being Top Nep.

Anyway. I’ve waffled on for over 1,300 words on the systems in this game and not even mentioned the story and characters, which are still my favourite bit of the series. I’ll save that for another day, though, perhaps when I’ve finished my first playthrough: there’s a lot to talk about, with this being by far the most interesting Neptunia game story-wise as well as in terms of mechanics.

It’s pretty good, in other words. Very good, in fact. Buy it. Support it. I want to see more Neps. (At this point, I don’t think we have a lot to worry about there.)

2218: Megadimension Neptunia: Report from 21 Hours In

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Good Lord, this game is good.

As I mentioned the other day, Megadimension Neptunia V-II marks something of a watershed moment for the series in that it’s no longer “good, but [insert caveat of your choice here]” and is just plain good. Great, even.

I’m about 21 hours in so far. I’ve finished the first of the three main stories that make up the complete experience — Zerodimension Neptunia Z — and am now in the second, Hyperdimension Neptunia G. This part — at least the first bit of it; I don’t know how long it is in total — is split into four distinct scenarios, each of which focuses on one of the four main goddess characters (and one of the four new “Gold Third” characters, who personify various Japanese game companies from Capcom to Square Enix), and so far I’ve played through Blanc’s route from start to finish.

Like Compile Heart’s previous game Omega Quintet, MegaNep spreads out its mechanics over the course of quite a few hours. 20 hours in, I’m still getting tutorial messages when I’m afflicted with a status effect I haven’t suffered before, though I think that most of the main core mechanics of the game have now been introduced by this point. Unlike Final Fantasy XIII, which often draws the ire of commentators for taking a similar approach to spreading out its new mechanics, MegaNep never feels like it’s artificially constraining you, though; the new systems I’ve seen so far were all introduced at the changeover between Zerodimension Neptunia Z and Hyperdimension Neptunia G, which was an eminently sensible way to do things, since it allows Z to stand by itself as a complete-feeling experience, then G to move on and feel distinctive in its own right thanks to the additional things you have to juggle.

What of those additional things, though? Well, aside from the things that Z already shook up — the world map is now node-based a la Final Fantasy Tactics, and you can have random encounters while moving from place to place; the battle system has been completely revamped from previous installments — G introduces (and, in some cases, reintroduces) a number of new systems.

First is the Scout system originally seen in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. Essentially, this is a small army of chibi characters (series veterans will recognise them as the “Chirper” characters who fulfil the role of incidental NPCs) that you can send out to dungeons, and they will then report back with what they find. Whereas Victory’s Scout system simply required you to enter and leave locations a certain number of times before the Scouts would return, MegaNep’s Scouts head out in real time and then report back with items, money, new dungeon features (boss monsters or clues to hidden treasure) or whole new dungeons. There’s still a heavy degree of RNG involved, but it’s a fairly painless process, and the real-time element means you can easily leave it running while you’re doing other errands in-game. Scouts also provide passive bonuses to you if you’re exploring the same dungeon they’re deployed to, so they’re helpful in ways other than just finding stuff, too.

Next is the Investment system, which allows you to develop towns by spending your hard-earned Credits in three areas: Commercial, Industrial and Public Relations. Upgrading Commercial increases the stock in the shops; upgrading Industrial gives you access to new crafting recipes; upgrading Public Relations triggers events that can reward you with items, new Scouts or simply an entertaining scene. That’s pretty straightforward.

Then you have the Route Building system, which is also reasonably straightforward. Discover a new dungeon and you can’t just click on it on the map like in the older games; you have to build a node-based pathway to it first, which costs money.

Then you have the Hidden Treasure system for each dungeon, which replaces the old games’ spamming the “sonar”-type ability to find invisible items. Here, to find a hidden treasure, first of all you have to have a Scout discover a clue to its location, then fulfil the conditions in the clue, then collect the treasure. Sometimes dungeons have more than one treasure, which means you have to do the process twice, though the conditions are usually different. The conditions make the dungeon-crawling a bit more interesting, because they have a decent amount of variety in them: some require you to collect all the regular treasures in a dungeon (some of which may be in awkward places or behind barriers that require the “Breaker” ability to smash) while others require you to execute 8 “Symbol Attacks” in a row without getting spotted by any enemies, which challenges your stealth and pattern-spotting skills. Others still require you to defeat each and every enemy symbol in the whole dungeon at least once — they don’t all have to be dead at the same time, but you do have to keep track of what you’ve already killed and what you haven’t.

In Blanc’s route, we get a number of different characters to play with, each of whom handles rather differently, fixing the issue from the older games where most of the characters felt rather interchangeable with the exception of their special skills. Blanc herself has a marked disparity between her physical and magic defense, for example, while her sisters Rom and Ram have half of Blanc’s HP but much stronger magic resistance and the ability to attack both at range and over a wider area. The brief time you get to play with Capcom personification C-Sha is a ton of fun, too; her combo skills are all named after fighting game terminology, and it’s more fun than it should be triggering Rush attacks called simply “PPPK” then seeing her doing a punch-punch-punch-kick combo on the enemy.

The story is proving to be surprisingly compelling so far, too. The Zerodimension episode had a mixture of lightheartedness and post-apocalyptic bleakness and worked well. Blanc’s route of the Hyperdimension story deals with a plausible view of a dystopian society where everything and everyone is controlled by the state, and how revolutionaries fighting against this sort of regime aren’t always in it for the right reasons. Neptunia’s stories have always been far more clever than most reviewers give them credit for, being heavily allegorical for the most part, but so far MegaNep seems to have taken things to a new level. The writing and localisation is good (aside from a few easily ignored typos here and there) and, crucially, the new characters — of whom there are quite a few — fit right in to the world without breaking a sweat.

It does feel very different to previous Neptunia games, but after the three Re;Births that all had the same basic mechanics, it’s refreshing to have a game that feels both comfortingly familiar and fresh at the same time. I’m delighted with the experience so far, and am looking forward to playing it to death over the course of the next few weeks. Expect further reports to follow.

2052: Platinum Grind

I’m coming up on the Platinum trophy for Hyperdevotion Noire on Vita, and I’ve asked myself more than once why I was doing it, given that it’s completely unnecessary to fully appreciate the game, and has extended what would probably be a 40-50 hour game well over the 100 hour mark.

Despite questioning my motivation a few times, I’ve never found myself resenting the game, somehow — this is partly because I undertook the most grindy of grinds for the Platinum trophy while watching several seasons of Community on Netflix (#teamhandheld) and consequently wasn’t just staring at a screen repeating the same actions over and over again, which is essentially what I was required to do to get 20+ of the trophies in the list.

Now I’m approaching the end of that epic grind, I’m glad that I’ve done it. It hasn’t been difficult in the sense of the game being difficult to complete — on the contrary, once all the characters are level 99 you can steamroller pretty much everything in the game with a few exceptions — but it has been challenging from the perspective of committing to the long-term goal and seeing it through to its conclusion.

This raises an interesting point about the nature of “challenge”. When we talk about “challenge” in games we’re normally referring to something along the lines of Dark Souls, which requires you to understand its systems thoroughly, otherwise it will punish you until you mend your ways and play better. But “challenge” can exist in other ways, too. It can refer to subject matter that makes you uncomfortable — not generally a problem with the Neptunia series, though mk2 does some interesting things with the squick factor and some people still won’t check the series out because of assumptions about fanservice. It can also refer to the challenge of making it through something lengthy and weighty, or holding out in a test of endurance, such as I’ve been doing with Hyperdevotion Noire.

And that, I think, is why I’ve been doing the Platinum grind. The challenge factor. Overcoming challenges is satisfying, even if they’re more endurance than skill. Endurance and patience are worthwhile traits, and I’ve noted on a number of past occasions that I feel my experiences with role-playing games over the years — and my willingness to see them through to the end, even if they have a three- or four-digit hour count — have helped me train these particular abilities in myself. And these abilities are something that transfers across to life at large; it can be difficult to wait for things, or hold out against something that is proving to be an obstacle, but with patience and endurance in spades, you can usually overcome most challenges.

Anyway. After all that, I will say that I will be glad to finally see that Platinum trophy pop in Hyperdevotion Noire, because it means I’ll finally be able to put that game to bed and move on to something else without feeling like I need to try and get anything else out of it. And, as I’ve noted before, it feels good to know that trophies are used as metrics by developers and publishers — unlikely though it might be, someone might see my Platinum trophy in the game and recognise that it is something only achieved by people who have truly engaged with it and want to see everything it has to offer.

Also I can’t break my streak of Platinum trophies on Neptunia games now, can I?

2050: Three Hours Until Dawn

I’ve been really enjoying Until Dawn so far. Not only is it one of the most impressive-looking games I’ve seen for a very long time — the lighting, character models, animation (particularly facial expressions) and overall cinematography are all gobsmacking — it’s also one of the best “interactive movies” I’ve ever played, outdoing all of David Cage’s work in terms of coherence, tension and emotional impact. (And I’m one of the people who actually likes Cage’s work!)

I’m really pleased with how well it balances the interactivity of a game with the storytelling of a movie. Choices you make throughout are meaningful, and are often referred to later through conversations or consequences. Plus, even though everyone knows the worst possible thing you can do in a horror movie is “just go and see what that was”, the game encourages and rewards exploration with hidden collectible items aplenty, each of which contribute to your clue database and help to unravel the several mysteries at the heart of the narrative.

One of the most interesting things about the game is how your choices affect the characters themselves. Each character has a series of “stats” reflecting things like how honest, brave, romantic and funny they are, and the way you choose to have them behave throughout the game affects these stats, which in turn determines how they behave in certain other situations. Alongside these stats are relationship values that increase and decrease according to your choices throughout the game — again, with consequences at certain junctures according to how much the characters like each other.

The game makes effective use of its multiple characters as a means of presenting the player with different perspectives on the story. Individual characters by themselves might not know exactly what is going on, but by seeing what is happening to each of them, you can start to put the pieces together yourself. Like a visual novel, the game also encourages repeat playthroughs to discover all the collectible clues and piece together what happened, and I can already see a number of obvious branching points based on decisions I’ve made — with some of the more drastic choices resulting in the (apparent) death of one or more of the characters. (I say “apparent” because the game has pulled the “that person couldn’t have survived that… unless…” thing more than once so far — plus it’s apparently possible to get through the whole thing with everyone surviving.)

It makes nice use of timed decisions and quick-time events, too. Quick-time events are loathed and detested by an awful lot of people, but I’ve actually rather liked them since the phrase was coined way back in Shenmue. Until Dawn makes relatively sparing use of them throughout, and they help add a great deal of tension to already nerve-wracking scenes that have made my palms sweaty more than once. Perhaps the best part of the game’s use of quick-time events, however, is the fact that the game occasionally requires you to not do anything at all — literally. “DON’T MOVE!” urges the screen, and the game begins tracking your real-life movement through the motion sensors in the controller. It’s hyper-sensitive, too, so the slightest movement and you’ll be discovered. (You can, of course, cheat the system by resting your controller on something, but it’s more fun to grip it tightly in your hands and hold your breath.)

On that note, it’s also gratifying that in a number of situations, not making a choice is also a valid choice. I liked this when I saw it in visual novel/interactive anime School Days HQ; I liked it when Telltale used it in some of its games; and I like it very much here. Until Dawn takes School Days’ approach on a number of occasions — presenting you with a single (rather than binary) choice on screen and giving you a few seconds to decide whether or not to do it. These choices usually involve choosing whether or not to use violence to solve a situation and have tight timers, so you have to think fast about what the consequences might be — or simply throw caution to the wind and try to deal with whatever happens a bit later.

I have a few more chapters of the game still to go, and the story has thrown up some interesting twists that I sort of half-saw coming but wasn’t sure about — I’m generally not all that great at spotting twists ahead of time, I must confess — so I’m intrigued to see where it all ends up, and who, if anyone, is going to walk away from that mountain retreat.

It’s been a great experience so far, and I can heartily recommend it to anyone looking for something a bit different from the usual “run and gun” nature of triple-A spectacles.

2047: Until Dawn, Some First Impressions

I grabbed a copy of new PS4 game Until Dawn today. I haven’t been following the development of this game at all, but what little I had heard of it sounded enormously intriguing, so I decided to give it a shot.

For those as yet unfamiliar, Until Dawn is an interactive movie-type game in the vein of David Cage’s works Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls in that it’s heavily story-based, extremely linear and the decisions you make throughout are extremely important to how the whole thing concludes. Like Cage’s work, too, there’s absolutely no guarantee that all the cast are going to make it to the end, either.

Unlike Cage’s work, however, which draw influences from noir and a few other sources, Until Dawn is very much designed in the mould of ’90s-era teen slasher horror films. This type of movie is something of a lost art these days, with modern horror films tending to adopt more of a “horrorporn” approach with lots of gore and sadism, whereas teen slasher films were often witty and incisive as much as they were scary and horrific. (This isn’t to say that modern horrorporn films don’t have anything to say, of course — quite the contrary — but teen slasher films were very much their own distinct subgenre.)

The game opens with a bunch of teenagers spending a winter retreat up at a cabin in the mountains. Before long, Bad Shit starts happening and two of the party are dead — though their bodies are never found by either the authorities or their friends. The story then jumps forward to a year later, where the same group are revisiting the cabin on the anniversary of the two girls’ disappearance, and it’s clear that something odd is going on — though the early hours of the game are somewhat slow-paced, with only a few cheesy jump scares to keep you on your toes.

One interesting aspect of Until Dawn is its structure. While largely chronological and episodic in nature — each episode even starts with a “Previously on Until Dawn” recap — the game is punctuated by some interesting fourth wall-breaking sections in which a psychoanalyst appears to be speaking directly to the player. Whether or not this is actually the case remains to be seen, but in the same way that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories made use of the psychoanalysis session as a narrative framing device, so too does Until Dawn use your answers to the frankly rather creepy shrink’s questions to subtly tweak and tailor the experience. Often, these changes aren’t even commented on, leaving you in the distinctly uneasy position of wondering if you were imagining how you thought you remembered things from before, or if the game is just messing with you.

To say too much more would be to spoil it — and anyway, I’m only up to the third chapter so far — but I’m very, very impressed so far. It’s by far the most “next-gen” game I’ve seen so far with regard to graphical fidelity and particularly facial animation. It’s also nice to see other developers experimenting with the interactive movie format as David Cage has done in the past; Cage’s work often draws heavy criticism (though I’m very fond of both Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls) but the underlying principles of making meaningful narrative choices and interacting with the on-screen action are sound. I’m very intrigued to see where it all goes, and can confidently already recommend the game to anyone out there with a PS4 who enjoys a strongly narrative-driven experience.

2024: Galak-Zed

Been playing some Galak-Z on PS4 today. This is a game I’ve had my eye on for a while, and it’s finally been released.

Galak-Z, for the uninitiated, is a “roguelite” — that is, it incorporates some aspects of roguelikes (most notably permadeath and randomly generated elements) while adding some persistent elements and making the overall experience a bit more friendly and accessible to the average person who gets frightened by ASCII.

It’s actually got quite a bit in common with the indie darling Rogue Legacy from a while back, in that there’s a constant sense of “progression” even when you’re fucking things up repeatedly, because even when you mess up, you’ll be unlocking stuff that might make future playthroughs a bit easier. Make no mistake, though, Galak-Z is a challenging game that is not afraid to kick your arse.

At heart, it’s a top-down space shooter in which you complete various missions that usually boil down to “find dungeon, find thing in dungeon, destroy/collect thing, escape”. This simple structure works in the game’s favour, as it keeps missions short and snappy with the possibility of variations along the way according to map layouts and the enemies you’ll encounter. And treasure, of course; one of the most fun aspects of Galak-Z is gradually outfitting your ship with all manner of death-dealing machinery and hoping it will save your life when one of those bastard Hammerhead ships starts chasing you.

Rather than simply tasking you with surviving as long as possible, Galak-Z is mission-based. To be specific, it’s split into five “seasons”, each of which requires you to complete five episodes in a row without dying in order to progress to the next. In a charming nod to ’80s era Saturday morning cartoons — which the game’s whole aesthetic is based on — each episode has a randomly generated title and writer, plus some enjoyable banter between the playable protagonist A-Tak and the heroine Beam.

I’m not sure what the game’s longevity will be like as, having not yet finished the first season, I can’t say with confidence whether the later missions are more adventurous and complex. It’s certainly holding my interest right now, but I feel it may need a bit more to keep me playing in the long term. It remains to be seen whether it will provide that for me, I guess — count on a situation report when the time comes!

In the meantime, I made another video with ShareFactory detailing the game, how it works and what it’s all about. Take a look!