I 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.

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.

I’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.

“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.”

“Those who wield too much power…those who only bring chaos…they are simply not part of the program.”

“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.

Before 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 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.

I’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.

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.

Long 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.

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.