2022 Cleanup
February 1st, 2023I know I said I was going to post on every game I played, but that turned out to be too much work. Some games are worth talking about but don’t operate well as whole post. So lemme hit the four games I didn’t write about
Breath of the Wild
Hey I’m caught up. The problem with writing about this game is everything has been said and it’s very obviously good. I liked it a lot, like most people. Big shocker, BOTW is good. So I just wanna hit two points.
First, Princess Zelda is so bullyable. Like oh my god she’s so pouty. It’s amazing how you could just tease her and she’d cry, even though she’d also be into it…. and how she can withstand combat with Ganon for a century. Truly a duality of womanhood. A true queen.
Second, I was thinking about that whole, awful article about how “Zelda had to be more like Dark Souls” thing and how some people might go “See that was right!!” even though… it isn’t. It does similar things like trust the player, allow the game to be cheesed, and just giving an unusual amount of freedom and that feeling of being trusted by the Dev is something a lot of people felt with DS… But it’s not like DS and never needed to be.
As usual, people who say something should be more like Dark Souls don’t actually know what’s good and special about Dark Souls.
Hardspace Shipbreaker
This game rules so hard. It honestly deserved a whole post. The mechanically fun action of chopping up ships to the brutal depictions of capitalism and the even handed treatment of unions. Like “Yeah, Unions have problems. You have to contend with some of them. But you also know how worse the alternative is. Nothing is perfect.”
Fun story, well told, neat bonuses and just good core mechanics. This game needed a ship editor or something so the community could keep it alive forever. I hope the devs come back at some point to give it an expansion. It’s definitely a concept that’d benefit from just a little bit more meat.
I guess that’s part of why I never wrote a bigger piece. It’s so solidly great, but in a way almost too simple to go into deeply. A simple, tasty treat.
Satisfactory
Not done yet but I wanted to talk about how Satisfactory is fundamentally opposites. Factorio is a game where eventually, macro building gets EASY. Difficulty comes from the unreliability of your input (materials) and from Alien attack. Building is easy and systems must be scalable because input and output will change constantly due to all these factors. Ignore a base for too long and something will surely go wrong. You travel to expand, but also to maintain. Factorio is about growing an unstable system fast enough that it maintains stability.
Satisfactory is different. They added blue prints recently, but even then, this seems to hold true. Outputs are CONSISTENT. You have to build with growth in mind, but future growth is predictable. Nothing breaks the machines. And nothing should break, Satisfactory is a pretty game. It wants you to explore. It wants you to be able to leave for days and come back to a working base. Bases are extremely hand built and building is hard. Modifications are painful and tedious. Fixing a problem feels like taking apart an engine. It rules. Satisfactory is about expanding a stable system and good planning. It gives you time to lounge around, look around, for fuck around with tiny problems. Every factory and machine feels deeply personal. It more has the vibe of like… modded minecraft skyblock.. In fact, I should try Satisfactory Skyblock
It’s amazing how two games so superficially similar are actually so different.
Strive
I like it now. Goldlewis is my dad. I swing the coffin and peoples health disappear. Most previous complaints are still mostly valid but I play Goldlewis now so they’re other peoples problems. Playing a character with no legacy version to compare to was a pro move. 7.5/10.
Armored Core: First and Second Generation
December 28th, 2021I’ve been planning to play though a good portion of the Armored Core library for awhile now and now that the seal is broke, I probably won’t stop until I’m done with AC3 (I want to play AC4 and For Answer but lacking a machine that can do PS3 emulation, I’ll need to track down physical copies so… who knows when that’ll happen). But instead of waiting to finish the 3rd Gen of games (which… might be as many games as I’ve played so far), I figured I’d write about AC1 and 2 as they make up the first “universe” of Armored Core.
So right now I’ll be talking about Armored Core, Master of Arena, Armored Core 2, and Another Age, skipping only Project Phantasm (which seemed good but MoA was the more ‘must play’ entry) and about half of AA.
Armored Core (PSX)
Why did I not get this game when I was like 14? Bleak yet fun, clunky in the right ways, and so many options I would have played with if I was 20 years youngers. A game almost every AC fan tells new players to skip and foolishly!
I’m going to try to and avoid turning my journals into reviews ago. You probably know how AC works, and if you don’t check elsewhere. I just want to talk about what stuck out to me…
First, the utter bleakness. The first two missions give you the choice between “Eliminate Squatters” and “Eliminate Strikers”. These aren’t “in universe terms”. These are people squatting in a building and striking workers. With mechs, but whatever. The game immediately has the corrupt corporations that run the Earth to partake in unethical and unnecessarily lethal behavior. While the game is never so on the nose after that, it sets the tone and sets you up read between the lines as Murokumo and Chrome bicker about the other while trying to make themselves look innocent. But you’re a mercenary, you don’t care.
I also liked how the subtle priority you give to missions dictates which corporation wins in the end. While the plot leaves no true winners in the end, it adds a lot to the flavor. As does other things like how bits of the plot is revealed in emails, or the ranking system of Ravens, seeing lists of pilots and ACs that you might encounter in future missions.
The Human Plus event is horridly bleak and a great balancing mechanic. If you go into crippling debt, you sell your boy to medical experiments, losing your name but getting superhuman piloting powers. The game even hints that this is how most “volunteers” end up in the program.
The game is kinda ugly, even by PSX standards, but holds up more clearly than King’s Field (which I also love). But it’s ugly in an APPEALING way I wouldn’t want to see changed.
The game ends with a brutal, tedious, awful, save state demanding mission where you realize the top ranked Raven is none other than a Computer AI that is controlling the world. The computer begs you to stop. “Go back…it is not too late… …What is your wish? …Come no closer.“
Once you destroy critically damage it, it accepts it’s fate
“You are to destroy order? Destroy the world? Is that what you want?
We were needed, that is why were born. People cannot live without Order, even if it is a lie.
Go on living, Raven. You or I… which one of us was ultimately right? You have the right and duty to find that out.”
Armored Core: Master of Arena (PSX)
Master of Arena is strange in the original AC continuity. It serves as an alternative retelling of the original Armored Core. The Raven mercenary rank listing has been replaced with an Arena system where you can challenge those above you to reach “Nine Ball/Hustler One” (the AI in the original AC) to get revenge for killing your family.
Despite being a retelling, you can import your save from AC1. This hits into a problem with both AC1 and 2. Once you have what works for you, there isn’t much to tinker with. There could be such a thing as mission specific loadouts, but the game is never clear enough with you what you might want to bring. It also doesn’t help that some bits of equipment seem to just outclass everything. I found myself almost always running Karasawa and Moonlight Blade (Yes, that Moonlight) on a medium mech with only slight tweaks in exact arm and leg models through most of Master of Arena.
Still it was a lot of fun. The missions felt way more diverse. The way the game would suspend your arena license for plot reasons to make you do normal missions worked very well. The game also has an entire second disk of arena matches I Didn’t touch but would have entertained me for hours as a kid. It had arenas operated by weight classes to try and encourage build variety and using every leg type.
The twist (your operator being an AI/Huster One) wasn’t really much of a twist since you assumedly played AC1, but the fight is much much more intense, compared to the almost sad, deflating ending of the original.
The AI’s message to you is a little different, but it drops another line that will be important later.
“Those who wield too much power…those who only bring chaos…they are simply not part of the program.”
Armored Core 2 (PS2)
I loaded up Armored Core 2 thinking ‘wow, finally, I Can use analog sticks’! When that didn’t work, I went googling to find that, to my disbelief, Armored Core didn’t get analog support until deep into AC3!
That said, upon playing the game, the difference in controls were immediately transparent. The camera and aiming reticle just worked nicer and movement felt great. It was still largely the same game. Oddly, it might have actually ended up feeling smaller than AC1. Less big sprawling maps of underground complexes and more almost cramped arenas.
Mechanical changes were a mixed bag. Overboosting could be fun but felt extremely impractical and I absolutely hated the exact implementation of the heat mechanic, which is like some weird Dark Souls esque poison system. But that all didn’t matter compared to how much nicer the game felt to move in.
Karasawa still dominated the game for me. Apparently this was it’s most powerful incarnation. As such my builds were pretty stagnant, but still fun. The missions, while often simpler, were much punchier. It made it easier to go through missions, knowing I wasn’t going to walk into some massive 20 minute mission like I would sometimes in AC1.
Most of the story didn’t stick with me too much. A much more diverse version of the cooperate rivalry in AC1. But the villain Leos Klein, stood out. Klein is implied to be the your character from AC1. The most striking part of this feeds into how his lines echo Nine Ball.
“We all make mistakes. Don’t you think, Raven? We humans need strict supervision. We cannot live on our own. A state dedicated solely to Ravens… I’m a realist, not some fool. All that I’ve wanted to do was to revive the ways of old…”
When the computer asked the Raven in AC1 “which of us was right?”, Klein’s ultimate answer was that it was Nine Ball. That his actions were a mistake. That he has to… crash… Phobos into Mars to… bring back the old ways with Martian technology? I’m not sure how this was supposed to work but the message was clear.
But upon defeating him, he tells you how to stop Phobos. Nine Ball and Leos, as Ravens, both respect strength as the ultimate authority. You were victorious… so as Nine Ball cedes gracefully to Leos, Leos cedes to you. There is a whole lot of little thematic details in the story about the destabilizing effect of personal strength… that people as strong as you are dangerous for the world… and they’re probably right.
Armored Core 2: Another Age
To keep this short, I didn’t finish Another Age. Another Age is exactly the type of product I would have wanted when AC2 came out. Just an ABSURD amount of content, over 100 missions. Easy structure to see progress with. Missions tend to be more repetitive, but it’s more missions to use with your cool mech! I played abouth a 5th of the way through and decided it was time for AC3.
So if you’re replaying Armored Core now, it might merit a skip, but every missions would have been a precious gift to 18 year old me.
All and all, so far I’m having a ton of fun. AC3 is going slowly but well, and I expect to write stuff up again once I finish it and Silent Line.
Game Journal: Battletech (2018)
July 23rd, 2021Before I get started, lemme say that I have a very deep and personal relation with Battletech. From Mechwarrior 2, to painting figures and playing the table-top, to running campaigns over Megamek. Battletech, and it’s awkward, chunky aesthetic and it’s weird neo feudalism will always deeply appeal to me.
I love Battletech and the 2018 Battletech PC game does a lot to remind me why I love it. It also kinda blows.
Maybe Stylish is Good Enough
Battletech is a cool and stylish game. The great art, presenting Ken Burns style documentary cutscenes, mixed with a great soundtrack and overall just great presentation goes a long way. How space travel feels, how jumpships pop in and out of existance with a gently popping, eerily silent fireworks… so many things feel extremely right.
It’s also fun to see a story presenting in the earlier years of the Inner Spear. The Star League is gone, but the Clan’s aren’t hear yet and the Inner Sphere is still sliding into technological ruin. It’s also charming for a story to happen basically in the middle of nowhere, out in the Periphery.
I’m not going to get into the story. It’s not essential, but at the same time it was good enough for me to finish the Campaign. I liked the characters. I liked the tension. I loved how diverse the representation was (which also totally fits the setting). It was sufficient and then some, but without crossing the threshold into being interesting in its own right, but it helped elevate the whole package. I felt like I was taking a part in the Battletech universe, and that in and of itself is worth a lot. But even during my campaign playthrough, even while getting wrapped up in the Arano Restoration, I kept thinking… this game is kinda BS?
Battletech was Never Actually About the Gameplay
Lets be real. Tabletop Advanced Battletech has never particularly great game. Most tabletop war games aren’t. These games exist as whole hobbies. Minis, painting, lore, scenario re-enactment, PnP RPG add-ons for long term campaigns and enough balance to keep it reasonable. The games are not designed for competitive depth, they’re designed to be representative of a fiction in a fun way. By the standards of a lot of Table Top games, Battletech is actually pretty elegant!
But this put the developers of the 2018 Battletech game in a rough spot. How do you take Battletech and make it conducive to a long campaign with lasting consequences, but in a way that fits a modern tastes?
The rules end up like an impression of the classic table top rules and that is probably a good thing. Players like me who hadn’t played in years would have a hard time remembering what was actually different, while allowing them to tailor things for a digital experience. That said, there was only so much they could do without changing the feel of Battletech and some of the decisions they made were questionable.
Battletech has always made it hard to avoid damage. These are big armored tanks that take a lot of damage. Big clusters of missiles are going to slam into you, ignoring LOS and you’re gonna like it, because you’re gonna do it to the other person more! But it gets awkward when you’re trying to play an X-Commy style game of risk management and gets triple fucky when you get to the terrible missions the game has. Every mission has you send in 4 mechs to slug it out with 8-12 enemy mechs. It becomes a game of outcheesing the rather dumb AI, cutting down their firepower as fast as possible. What damage mitigation you do have is powerful (Bulwark gives huge damage reductions) but requires you to basically live in the trees. Mission are designed as if you’re not supposed to kill everyone, but clump enemies so close together and make your escape zone so out of the way that killing everything is usually the safe option.
It honestly feels very immersion breaking for me to just watch waves of mechs crash against me. These valuable, expensive machines that have operated for centuries, just throwing themselves away. In a game that should possibly closer to WW2 fighter pilot kill counts, you have slaughter, and with that slaughter, less changes to play safe. The game asks you to endure, but with no fun ways to endure. And if things go wrong? You can quit the mission at any time, cutting any tension but accepting your loses. It feels hollow. The asymmetry that makes a game like X-Com work is lost here. The only asymmetry is that the AI is dumb, but more numerous, but his equipment, in all its terror, is the same.
Some rule changes make this work. Maps, movement distances and ranges are shorter than in Table Top. This makes things more visibly manageable, but makes making use of terrain harder. Instead of trying to break LoS or use a hill to expose less of you, you’re standing on ‘cover squares’. Instead of scouting and attacking from a distance with long range units, you move in and brawl with your heaviest units. Missions never give you tonnage restrictions or BV value restrictions. You have no reason to take anything lighter than a heavy. Need a fast mobile scout? Use a Grasshopper. Especially in a game where getting hit and critted isn’t a question of if but when.
Repetitive missions with grindy objectives and little room for tactical maneuvering leads to a very dry, monotonous game that is either cruelly hard, or severely easy depending on how cheesy you’re being. I don’t think there is a single thing Battletech does better than any other game in this genre.
… Except for being Battletech.
It’s Kinda Unfair How Cool Battletech is
I should hate this game. I don’t even like Turn Based Strategy games that much. But it’s Battletech and it’s a strong Battletech story, oozing Battletech vibes and I can stomp around in a Marauder, blowing heads off with AC/5s to maximize salvage. Cheesing enemies is fun enough to survive the campaign and it wasn’t until Career where I was finally like “you know what, fuck this game?”
But you know what, that took like 80 hours so you know what? This game is pretty cool I guess, even if I wish the gameplay had just a little bit more going for it.
Battletech as a franchise is just that cool I guess.
Game Journal: Spec Ops: The Line
May 25th, 2021I’m going to start labeling these writeups differently. I feel conflicted, usually, like I should be writing more, that I should almost be writing a review or something. So now games I play and write about be will be labeled as part of my Game Journal. While I’ll try and still give a reasonable amount of context, I am going to write (especially for more well-known game) assuming the reader has at least some familiarity with the game.
Aged But Not Outdated
I’d imagine Spec Ops: The Line can be a challenging game for some people to go back to. Almost approaching a decade old, games have matured a lot in both gameplay and narrative. A big budget game trying to have a message is nothing surprising now (even if the execution is often questionable), and from 2021 eyes, something like Spec Ops: The Line could possibly feel too on the nose, too overwrought and even too obvious. But if you can look back with your brain in 2012 mode, Spec Ops feels well ahead of its time, speaking to the audience an Indie Game type punk attitude, audacious instead of overwrought in its earnestness.
The game is also gorgeous. While little minor details can tell you when the game was made (I found myself fixated on one of my partner’s boots, with ‘shoe laces as a texture’) the game has aged remarkably well. Technology may grow old, but artistry survives. Beautiful setpiece shots and vivid colors. Before Mad Max: Fury Road, Spec Ops was the game showing the desert not as shades of brown, but as saturated and vibrant. Even the sand storms and violence cannot surpress the beauty of dubai and the game makes it clear you are in a place that once was and, in a way, still is beautiful.
The game’s almost otherworldly beauty is appropriate when matched up with the hallucinatory and trauma laden nature of the game. Despite constantly descending, you are constantly on top of huge buildings, confronted by scale and depth. It could almost be easy to miss, but the map layout is so unrealistically vertical that it comes off as some kind of mapmaking dutch angle. It’s not accidentally wrong, it’s purposefully uncomfortable. The characters are expressive, and how their bodies and demeanor change throughout the game doesn’t just serve to be immersive, but symbolically representative of the changes they’re feeling.
Third Person and Player Agency
A lot of Spec Ops discourse about the story has been done to death. If you want to know how Spec Ops communicates its distaste for heroic violence, there are many great deep dives you can read. But the thing I kept thinking about was the years of discourse about the game versus how I felt as I experienced the events in the game.
A common complaint is that the game blames you for things it forced upon you. That Spec Ops hates the player. That You Had No Choice. While this is thematically appropriate, my playing of the game didn’t feel so much like the game was forcing me and then rubbing my face into it, but instead like it was subjecting me to dramatic irony. Now don’t get me wrong, I think the game is perfectly excited for the idea that you might buy in in the same way Walker does throughout the game, but it is by no means required. From the first fire fight in the game, the voices in my head echoed ‘this feels wrong’. This wasn’t just an uncomfortable willingness for violence that one would expect from a 3rd Person military shooter. From the very beginning they identify that you are to make contact and then report back. But instead you dig deeper, and respond more violently, killing before asking questions that are clearly obvious to the player.
Do you buy in to Walker’s madness as your avatar or are you watching him, playing him like one would perform a morality play? The 3rd Person nature of the game makes things clear. You are not Walker. You might, for awhile, foolishly share his cause, but you are not him. You are watching his tragedy. How that tragedy reflects on the player is up to them.
As the game progresses and Walker becomes more visibly scarred, as his eyes become emptier, the game forcefully separates him from yourself. His actions grow more violent. Your execution animations, which I avoided for most of the game due to feeling unnecessary, increase in sadism as things progress.. Another fun detail is that ammo is scarce in the game and enemies only drop based on what weapon they have equipped…
… Unless you execute them. This was Doom 2016 years before hand. Execute an enemy and you get ammo for all your equipped weapons. The game doesn’t want to punish you, it wants you to play the part in this tragedy.
White Phosphorus
The White Phosphorus segment is chilling, harrowing and oddly beautiful. Many complain about the lack of choice, that they are forced to practically commit a war crime. The segment is gamified, throwing back to arcadey, indulgent Call of Duty segments, separating you from the violence. But are you separated? I feel this is a sign of how the game isn’t directly trying to judge the player.
The games tells you everything. It shows you what this stuff does. You know it’s horrible. Your subordinates debate the necessity. Walker makes it an order. You are (hopefully) not dropping blasts from the sky in a gleeful, guilt free haze of fun. You are waiting and cringing, fearful of what you’re going to see when you return to reality. The results are worse and then worse again.
The violence you unleashed is shown with an almost painterly artistry. This artistry is called back upon when the player gazes upon Konrad’s (or, as the Picasso quote goes, your) painting.
What’s interesting is the game gives you decisions. None of them matter, materially. The game doesn’t punish you or reward you. The decisions are either up to you, or up to your interpretation of Walker. Even come the ending, who does Walker blame? Can Walker return to a normal life, or is he consumed by violence, again, playing your part of the morality play. The endings are not a question of what you want to do, but how you contextualize the events you just saw.
Final Thoughts
I had this game sitting in my Steam library for years. It was gifted to me an eternity ago and I’m glad I finally got around to it. While the game is lacking as far as 3rd person shooters go, it’s gorgeous and the story, while heavy handed at times (with a few plot details that struggle under scrutiny), is chilling and memorable. There are many rich stories in games now, so while I won’t recommend it to everyone, it definitely has a lot to give to people who like to explore older titles.
Guilty Gear 2: Overture Is a Very Bad Game That Tried Very Hard and We Should Appreciate the Effort
May 6th, 2021Long nights were spent in the X2 days, wondering when a TRUE Guilty Gear sequel would come out to move the story forward. Even during it’s time though, Overture looked… not terribly promising. As a Guilty Gear fan I still wanted to play it. For years, I wanted to try and enjoy it, jank and all. So here we are, well over 10 years later and gosh I didn’t miss much. But I’m glad I played it now because it is a game that is more interesting as a relic than as a thing to actually play.
Oddly Ahead and Behind the Times
Guilty Gear 2: Overture is a Online Character Action RTS MOBA released in 2007. That is 2 years before League of Legend, back when MOBAs were that “Weird WC3 Custom Map Thing”. Back before MOBA was an acryomn that meant anything.
So before the whole genre was even spreading and spawning clones, Arc System Works was trying to forward a half-born genre about 2 or 3 generations before it even fully came to maturity. All this from a company with all of one 3d game under their belt and whose 3d pipeline was completely unsuited for Overture (Battle Fantasia, for the record, laid a lot of the groundwork for many of the artistic techniques that would be brought to maturity in Guilty Gear Xrd). This is a ridiculous amount of ambition and I will never blame a company for trying to reach for the stars.
Every word in that description matters too. It is a character action game with cancels, combos, and air juggles. It’s a MOBA with towers, lanes, creeps, and hero fights. It’s an RTS. Perhaps not in the Starcraft sense, but in the sense that overture is the bastard child birthed of DOTA, Devil May Cry and fucking Herzog Zwei. You summon units, assign their rally points, pick them up and transfer them, call in backup, summon temporary allies. The systems are rich and intimidatingly dense.
… Sadly I will not be reviewing this part of the game terribly much. As a MOBA hater, the idea of playing this with another human, let alone playing it enough to have real opinions is terrifying. What I know is the online is solid, depth exists, that even people who like it admit it’s a mess but it appeals to a certain, small audience a lot.
Guilty Gear 2: Overture is a Game that is Good at Nothing
Guilty Gear 2: Overture is an ambitious game. It is a clever game. An original game.
But it’s not a good game.
Overture does not look good, even by games of its era. Even by the scope of its gameplay. It’s combat is rough and rude, even compared to its contemporaries. It’s story is incoherent. Even it’s music lags behind games in it’s own series, dragged forward by only by a few exceptionally high points. There is really no single thing about Overture that is good. The assemblage is interesting, but execution only reaches about mediocrity for fleeting seconds.
I have no proof for this, but I feel like the single player campaign for Overture was developed linearly. The game puts it’s worse foot forward and steadily improves. An initial training area that looks like it’s from an old MMO, unclear tutorial instructions detailing mechanics that will take forever to put together. Voice acting that isn’t technically bad, but is so out of tune with the characters and the script as to be painful. I was for real baffled that Sin wasn’t actually supposed to be a pissed off angry man when Xrd came out because until now, I had only been exposed to the Overture dub.
When asked to perform to move by the game, you get to immediately feel how clunky and awkward the game is. Attacks feel soft and unresponsive. Inputs for directional attacks feel alien to anyone used to other character action games. Jump canceling into a weird Guilty Gear style 2d air combo jarring and unreliable… and with all of this, the tutorial feels like it takes twice as long as it needs to, simply because it constantly has to cut back to cutscenes.
It gets worse before it gets better.
I’m not going to recap the story, which is better done by checking here, but it’s thin, made up of grandiose smoke and mirrors, supported jargon and layers of mcguffin. A lot of video game stories do this and using these tools to stitch together a coherent story. Overture lacks this. Things happen for reasons that feel like they will become clear later, but they never do. Why are you fighting with crazy ghost army magic, what the heck is “the cube for” and why does anyone want it? What does Valentine and “mother” actually want to do? WHERE THE HECK DID IZUNA COME FROM LIKE HE JUST COMES IN ON STAGE 2 LIKE YO I GUESS WE’RE WORKING TOGETHER NOW LIKE IT AIN’T NOTHIN’ like this game is a confusing mess.
Like not just the story, the whole game, because as soon as Izuna comes to help you out and pulls out that Ghost/Servant stuff and you’re fighting with armies, you’re just FLOODED with mechanics, items, things to micromanage. It’s potentially interesting but completely overwhelming. Also the game needs to teach you how to drift. Not the Strive “RC Drift” type thing (though as a side note, Roman Cancels in Overture are called “Modern Cancels” which is almost charmingly… confident?). Like you gotta Tokyo Drift. Oh god it feels bad it feels so bad. The mechanic, which allows you to do sharp turns on this crazy mega dash the game lets you do, is TECHICALLY FUNCTIONAL and is something you could definitely get good at to be a skill differentiator in online matches, but it feels so bad, so unresponsive, and a slightly mistimed input either has you do something else completely, or has you smashing into a wall and sitting through a long recovery animation. It’s a mechanic I can imagine people who’ve mastered it liking, but is so miserable feeling early as to be seen as nothing but a failure.
Despite all this, you start to see a lot of the artistic creativity of the game. Valentine’s army of EGL gasmask troops, Sol’s weird mech army, fueled by a giant muscle bound bara man bound to gears, powering two giant lighters. They were clearly trying, and invested in what they were making.
The missions continue to get worse though. As you understand the mechanics more, the game begins to cheat, or change rules on the fly. Oh, you lose when you masterghost is destroyed, but Dr. Paradigm simply getting knocked out ends the missions? You tactically capture ghosts, only for those sensible moves to betray you when random enemies teleport in? Not only does the game not actually teach you how to play it’s multiplayer, it actively makes the experience miserable. Eventually the game realizes this isn’t what the campaign should be and it slowly transforms into a… very small scale and awkward Musou game. Sure, there is pain along the way, like an ill conceived ‘stealth item finding’ mission, but you also just get to simply fuck up a lotta dudes as Ky The plot, while never sensical or clear, leads to fun moments like Valentine’s weird fake ghost troops contemplating their existence and assured death, or finally getting to confront and fight That Man. Sin and Ky even get to have a heart to heart until you go together into a giant brawl where it’s impossible to see who anyone is and kinda sucks. It sucks, but it sucks in a cool way.
The seemingly linear development means by the end of the game, the devs have kinda figured out what they’re doing. It’s clunky, but pretty fun. The last mission opens with ASW finally understanding their 3d presentation. The shots are weird and gorgeous, the writing is delightfully grandiose and nonsensical and the music fucking whips. Is it a good game now? Absolutely not, but at this point, Overture is a fun and stylish bad game. Little about the final fight with Valentine makes sense, but it’s cool and since Guilty Gear is supposed to be cool, this is a win.
Let it be said that after this point, ASW never struggles with 3d presentation ever again. Well, mostly.
Some of Xrd’s Early IKs were… not the best.
So I can’t recommend Overture like I can a lot of weird, quirky games. It’s not as lot of fun and of the whole package, only 4 missions really seem to really click. But I won’t stop you. Honestly, even though I didn’t play it, playing the Multiplayer might be the most interesting thing to try out. Still, despite all it’s failings, it’s fucked up to think ASW tried to do something this nutty and almost succeeded. I respect it.