Endgame: The Legend of Zelda, Second Quest

As it turned out, I couldn’t do it.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I actually set out to do the one thing I hadn’t tried in the overworld: I went through each screen — every single one — one by one, and bombed, burned, pushed, and whistled my way through them. I found a small pile of secrets to everybody. I found many more grumpy old men who made me pay to fix their doors. I found a couple of shops, some old ladies selling potions, and a shocking number of money making games.

And yet, I never found the seventh dungeon.

As a fun fellow who calls himself Octopus Prime mentions in this thread, “It lies concealed under a completely innocuous shrub on a screen full of shrubs.” Even as I willed myself the patience of exiting and re-entering each highly forested room to try and burn down every god forsaken tree, I never found it. My suspicion is that I “missed” – that my attempts to burn multiple trees at once in order to reduce the time it took to go through every single one got slightly lazier than it was allowed to; that while I thought I had tried to burn that bush, I never actually did. Once I was done with that room — once I could assure myself that I had tried everything there was to try in that room — I never went back. There was no reason to, unless I wanted to try bombing trees.

Thankfully, I never did try bombing trees. While I did go ahead and force my way through dungeon 8 before I ever found dungeon 7 (something that goes against the pseudo-OCD behaviors I typically display while running through games like this), I never got desperate enough to think that maybe shooting arrows at rocks would help, or anything like that. This is where, long ago, the primitive sort of crowdsourcing was the only way to win; advice from a friend, or a couple of hours of play in the hands of my brother. I can confidently say I never would have found that dungeon, and I’d have put the game down having still (still!) never finished the second quest.

I’m glad even my stubbornness has its limits. If I had spent another 10 hours looking for that dungeon, eventually finding it, and then almost immediately finding the red candle that lives in it, I’d have had to seek a refund for my shattered 3DS on account of “a destructive sense of irony”.

That out of the way, and free to get back to the business of exploring things whose existence I had not yet come to doubt, it didn’t take all that long (comparatively) to finish out the rest of the game. Even finding the red ring and silver arrow didn’t feel like terrible awful trudges through the unknown. Other than a mildly insidious multi-room moving block puzzle in the final dungeon, it was pretty straightforward the rest of the way through. Awful blue wizzrobes here, awful red bubbles there, and a couple of awful triple dodongo rooms later, Ganon showed himself once again, and with no new tricks up his sleeve, he quickly fell to dust once again:

And then, The Legend of Zelda told me I was “great”, for lo, I had only (well, “only”) died 24 times over the course of two separate adventures:

And I thought, “you know what? I am great.” Then I powered down.

There’s a beautiful balance that The Legend of Zelda strikes, between setting a certain set of expectations and rules, and then slowly breaking them down. You see this a bit in the first adventure — figuring out that you can bomb your way into rooms unmarked on a dungeon map is one of the great little secrets that everyone who conquers the first adventure eventually has to come to realize, since finding these unmarked rooms is actually necessary in the final dungeon. The second adventure, however, is full of this — between walls you can walk through, advice whose meaning changes, and whistles that could blow open a staircase pretty much anywhere, the second quest is a tremendous mash of “everything you know is wrong”. There are even old men more ornery than the “door repair charge” guys, old men who demand either 50 coins or a heart container(!) before they allow you to proceed.

The beauty of it is that if you’ve put the time into conquering the first quest, none of the second quest will really feel impossible. It’ll throw you for a loop, sure, but the ways in which the rules break in the second quest are introduced just as gradually as those same rules were set in the first. Throw your assumptions about what you can and can’t do out the window a bit, and you find an open world that’s even more “open” than the first quest even suggests.

Maybe you won’t find everything, but it won’t be because the game cheated. It’ll only be for lack of diligence.

Even as it delayed my progress on other things, taking on the second quest was a pursuit worth doing. Best of all, I can finally claim the mastery of it that should accompany my other Legend of Zelda-related claim: namely, that it is the best game the NES ever saw.

Took long enough.

A Bastion of Emotion: Dénouement

So, this is part three, which means MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD. That’s your warning.

So. Have you played to the end of Bastion? And then, did you play it again?

I was trying to think back to the last time the end of a game affected me the way Bastion‘s did, and the only thing I could come up with was the end of Klonoa. Klonoa spent a few stages pretending it was a game for kids, and then it killed off Klonoa’s grandpa and started torturing him in ways that would be cruel in an M-Rated game, never mind an E10. Still, even that game was affecting not because the story was executed well — if I’m being completely honest, it was a little ham-fisted and melodramatic — but because it went in a direction that was pretty much the opposite of my expectations. Klonoa‘s story succeeds not because it’s written well, but because it’s written differently than pretty much any other game of its ilk.

The end of Bastion offers the opposite experience. The ending, really, is projected almost from the very beginning of the game; even its central choice is projected early on: Sure, you can erase the past, but do you really, truly want to?

Bastion succeeds because it manages to make two seemingly simple binary choices feel utterly monumental. Primed by the experience of trying to survive a world in which it’s not clear that you’re the “good guy”, per se, the choice of whether you’re going to carry your once-ally-now-enemy Zulf home after he has been betrayed and left for dead by his people is a big one. It’s confession time: I left him facedown the first time I played, and proceeded to wipe out the rest of his people with my very big stick. I didn’t enjoy it, but Rucks assured me that all of the mayhem and death was okay, given that the goal here was to turn back the clock anyway. It was a means to an end, an end in which presumably all of the dead would be resurrected. Systematic genocide doesn’t seem so bad if there’s an undo button, I suppose.

But then, I didn’t push it. I wiped out an entire race of people, and then, at the urgings of Zia, the singer responsible for the first truly affecting moment in the game, I decided the world was better off without them. Partly, I think, this was to spite Rucks, who I was actually angry at for all but tricking me into systematic genocide; partly, it was the nagging suspicion that by erasing the past, I wouldn’t really be changing anything.

I think I messed things up for myself by doing this; not only did I remove any sympathy or empathy that I felt for my own avatar, but Brendan Keogh’s brilliant little Bastion blog post suggests that by not choosing to “reset the world”, I’ve removed much of the meaning from the New Game Plus mode’s clever little changes.

Still, by turning my character into a selfish git, I motivated myself to burn through the game again so that I could “make it right” the next time around. I have a hard time playing the ass in RPGs; I can’t even bring myself to insult the most ridiculous and irredeemable characters in dialogue-heavy Bioware games. Making the choices I did went completely against my normal mode of play, offering the drive to do it better the next time around. Little did I know how much better things would seem.

Carrying Zulf through the mass of hostile Ura may have been the most beautiful little experience I’ve ever had in a game. That the Ura would eventually stop firing — that an Ura commander would quite literally strike his charge down for firing — all while “Mother, I’m Here” plays, and we continue to hear Rucks’ narration, telling Zia that The Kid was probably in the process of destroying him once and for all…it’s thwarted destiny, it’s humanity, and it’s devastation, all in one convenient two-minute scene. It’s a wrenching scene, one that renders the choice of whether to restore Caeldonia almost meaningless.

I restored it. Only because I hadn’t before. But I sort of wish I hadn’t.

The ending is what we work for in a game. We want to see how the story is resolved by the writers and designers responsible for presenting it to us. Coming up with a satisfying way to close a game is a difficult thing, and a half-hour cutscene, while often interesting, often feels like a letdown, as if the power is being taken out of our hands for the game’s final moments. What Bastion does is give us a small choice that makes all the difference in our perception of what happened over the previous hours of play. Without its endings, Bastion is a good game, one certainly worth killing a few hours with; with its endings, it is a treasure.

Super Meat Boy: Outgrowing the Boundaries

While I certainly have plenty of reasons to love Super Meat Boy — the humor, the challenge, the platforming — it’s not a perfect game. Its endgame (or, at least, the endgame of the “light world” playthrough) falls into the all-too-common trap of eschewing what made the rest of the play experience great for the sake of something meant to feel like an “epic moment” or two. In most games that fall into this trap, this happens via a final boss battle that changes the entire mechanic of the game — a platformer suddenly turning into an on-rails shooter, or Gears of War 2 effectively saying “you know what? let them have this one” — but Super Meat Boy remains a platformer to the very end. Where it falls off a cliff (or runs into a buzzsaw, as it were) is in ditching the very approach to challenge that succeeds so wildly throughout the rest of the game.

This isn't Omega, but it looks pretty intimidating.

In Team Meat’s own blog at supermeatboy.com, the number 1 (number 1!) thing that they list as a design choice for their brand of “hardcore platformer” (chosen as their genre of choice) is: “Keep the levels small.” Being able to see where you start and where your goal is is important for the sake of keeping the player connected to that goal — if you can’t see what you’re trying to get to, and you’ve already died 25 times trying to get past the starting screen, it’s difficult to be motivated enough to keep going.

Most of the levels in Super Meat Boy manage to achieve this, and the longer levels that go beyond a single screen actually tend to have the sense to lower the difficulty just enough to compensate for the length.

But not “Omega”.

“Omega” is the final level in the final world (appropriately titled “The End”), so it makes a certain amount of sense that it might be more difficult than the rest of the game. Still, the jump in difficulty from even the first four levels of “The End” to “Omega” is awfully steep. The point of “Omega” seems to be that the player is applying every skill that has been learned to this point to a single level. In many games, this would work. In Super Meat Boy, it’s too much. First, careful jumping from platform to platform. Then, careful jumping through strategically-placed buzzsaws. Horizontally you go, then vertically up through some buzzsaws, then vertically down through the same buzzsaws, then back and forth a few more times, until you finally reach the goal. When I finally reached that goal, I didn’t feel triumph. I felt relief. “Thank God that’s over”.

Except, it wasn’t.

Super Meat Boy makes the terrible decision to make you go through another terribly long level as a “boss fight”, evading the evil Dr. Fetus as he shoots missiles at you. It’s one thing to make a level too long, though, and it’s a whole other thing to limit the speed at which you can traverse it. This “boss fight” introduces columns of buzzsaws that scroll along with the player. Move too fast, and you’ll hit the buzzsaws on the right. Take your time, and the buzzsaws on the left will chop you into ittybits. The player is confined, forced to spend an entire minute or so on this final boss fight if it’s done right, which wouldn’t seem like much if it didn’t take a solid 30-40 attempts to do so. Sure, there’s a laugh-worthy Mario gag at the end of it, but it’s not worth the trouble, not worth the complete abandonment of what made the game great to this point.

Of course, even after sending Dr. Fetus to his final resting place, there’s one more overlong level to traverse, Metroid-style, as you try to escape Fetus’ crumbling lair with your beloved Bandage Girl. By this point, I had almost given up on the game altogether, as I simply wanted to call shenanigans on developers who had me tricked into thinking that they didn’t like long levels.

Mercifully, Team Meat made that last bit just a little bit easier than the slogs that preceded it, heading off abandonment just in time to make finishing the game seem worth it. But still.

Super Meat Boy remains one of last year’s best games, and this hiccup at the end isn’t going to change that. It may have behooved Team Meat to leave the sadism of long levels that don’t skimp on the game’s trademark difficulty to the game’s Dark World, the “New Game+” style levels that exist as a reward for acing the game’s “normal” levels. By subverting themselves for the last few levels in the primary storyline of their game, Team Meat shows an unfortunate unwillingness to adhere to the convictions of its own design philosophy. It doesn’t break Super Meat Boy, but it does make the game less than it could have been.

Endgame: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

[as ever, "Endgame" posts deal with game endings. there will be spoilers, and in Enslaved, those spoilers are biggies. please don't yell.]

Enslaved badly projects its “twist”.

Pardon me for invoking the name of M. Night Shyamalan for a moment, but he did have a few reasonably decent films before he choked on his own ego. One of the reasons The Sixth Sense was so effective as a film is for the mere fact that it is his debut. We didn’t yet know that he was the M. Night Shyamalan, who never met a twist he didn’t like. While people will tell you now that they could tell that [OMG SPOILER_ALERT] Bruce Willis was a ghost [/OMG] from the fifth minute on, it wasn’t really that clear at the time. The mood of the movie was so somber and desolate that it was just as valid a hypothesis that Bruce Willis’ apparent non-interaction with anyone other than little Haley Joel was simply a stylistic choice. Everyone in the movie is a little detached, even if poor, sensitive Bruce is the only one who’s cut off to that extent.

Monkey, the avatar of Enslaved, is forcibly fitted with a helmet that forces him to do the bidding of Trip, the female lead. Throughout the game, we see flashes not of the world we are playing, but of a world that looks consistent with our own — a 21st century existence with flashes of suburban paradise. At least, it looks something like paradise when we compare it to the broken-down versions of recognizable landmarks (with the constant, looming presence of giant robots) presented in the game.

Of course, we know that somehow these flashes are going to figure in to the endgame — we just don’t know how.

[the real spoilers start here, by the way. this is your last chance to flee.]

Look, I liked The Matrix, too. It was a fun movie, but it was not really that deep. Okay, the reality we think we know is different than the real reality, which, when you think about it, could just be part of some computer simulation of reality, programmed in another reality by some indentured servant of a hostile alien being looking for a toy. I mean, if you start imagining this stuff, you go down the wormhole pretty quickly, but the movie itself was not that deep.

That it is repackaged in Enslaved and presented to us as if it’s supposed to make us really think at the end of the game is a little insulting. Once the last wave of evil mechs done be blowed up reeeal good by the suddenly noble Pigsy character, Monkey and Trip invade the big glowing pyramid in the middle of the desert and encounter, um, Pyramid, a sentient being who is apparently making life better for thousands of “slaves” who he is feeding with his memories of a better world. After first enticing Monkey with the appeal of such a world, Pyramid is violently killed by Trip (seems she’s still holding a grudge a few hours after she found out that Pyramid’s charges killed her father and most of her friends). This frees the slaves from their altered realities, inviting the obvious question of whether they’re better off being forced to experience the “true” reality of their situations.

But then, WHAT IS “TRUE”?

Enslaved was a fun little game. Most of it was pretty lightweight, with some nice banter between the two main characters and a teamwork-driven dynamic that supplemented the gameplay more than it took it over. It is a game that wears its influences on its sleeve — Ico, Prince of Persia, God of War, Tomb Raider — and it was easy to get caught up in a narrative that never really got all that much deeper than a revenge tale. Ending the game by turning the whole thing into a too-shallow think piece clouds one’s perception of the rest of the game, which was surely the intent to a point. Still, by projecting for the entire game that there was going to be a reality/time-bending twist, the impact was reduced. Trip forces everyone to take the red pill, and game over.

What would be interesting now is DLC that focuses on the chaos resulting from Trip’s decision. Sure, continuing the story in a case like this is always a risky proposition, but now that the “slaves” are “free”, one could see a Lord of the Flies-style mass character study being an interesting direction for the tale to travel in. Unfortunately, announced DLC so far apparently concentrates on the lightweight, delving into the backstory of Pigsy and leaving the thinky inclinations of the game to its “twist” of a conclusion.

One wishes that the developers could have made a commitment to either a think-piece or a lightweight action romp. By trying to have it both ways (and they do try, valiantly so), they miss their shot at a truly satisfying story.

Endgame: God of War 3

As with all “Endgame” entries, there will be spoilers.

“whuh.”

Or, maybe: “whuh?”

That was the sound I made when the ending of God of War III was done playing on the hotel TV. I had brought the game accidentally, with every intention of spending the three evenings that I’d be alone on the road taking out as much of the gargantuan PSN download Record of Agarest War as I possibly could, but there was Kratos, staring at me, shouting at me for being too weak (or, in full-on Kratos voice, “TOOOO WWEEEEAAAK!”) to finish the game despite having little more than an hour left to tackle.

Well, I showed him.

So, yes, God of War III is exactly as ridiculously violent and hilariously oversexed as you’ve heard and probably assumed since it was announced.

The sex is one thing — just because it’s in HD doesn’t mean that the disconnect of pushing buttons prompted by on-screen visuals to the end of being the most satisfying one-minute-man of all time is at all lessened. Watching Aphrodite’s maidens fondle each other while it’s going on isn’t as distracting as one might think, either — the visual, at least, is less distracting than the admittedly funny tongue-in-cheek dialogue.

Perhaps this would be better explored in its own blog post, but I want to put it here in case I never get to that: Ever since the very first, comparatively subtle sex minigame showed up in the original God of War, that aspect of the game is the one thing that makes me roll my eyes more than any other. I’ve seen all the arguments for their inclusion — Kratos is the embodiment of Id, God of War is a celebration of excess, it furthers Kratos’ development as antihero — and while these are good, valid after-the-fact sorts of arguments, I just don’t buy that those things are why the developers insist on including button-pushing sexytime. This smacks of teenage titillation. It’s pandering to the sexual power fantasies of an overwhelmingly heterosexual male audience. That audience will justify its inclusion up and down, even argue that Kratos’ conquest (because that’s what it is, it’s just another conquest) contributes to the artistic value of the game, but it’s not here for artistic value. It’s here because BOOBIES. God of War would be better off without it.

(/soapbox)

That said, perhaps the reason God of War has gotten off so lightly in the post-Hot Coffee era despite having a sequence in which the player controls the intercourse is because the violence is so overwhelmingly brutal. God of War III will ruin players to the other two games, because its level of violence is so far beyond what even the first two entries in the series have even aspired to. Even enemies who aren’t bosses get it bad — grunts can be ripped in half, or curbstomped, or subject to old-fashioned slicing and dicing. Larger recurring enemies get eyeballs and entrails ripped out. And the bosses…

Look, it speaks to a game’s power to desensitize the player to its own level of violence when the camera closes in on the final boss’s demise while Kratos pummels his face in, to the point of the screen literally filling up with sickly opaque red, and it comes off as a little bit disappointing. You cut one guy’s legs off. You rip off another guy’s head (and use it as a flashlight for the rest of the game — seeing the little gangly bits hanging down out the neckhole every time you pull it out is one of the game’s recurring delights). You get a first-person view of one beating that culminates in a double-thumb eye gouge. Perhaps the most brutal of all is the beating that poor Hercules gets — first you rip his arms off, and then you destroy his face with a couple of giant lion-shaped gloves. And you really destroy his face. And then you’re offered multiple opportunities to get a close-up of your brutal handiwork, the last as Hercules floats dead in the water.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fingernail-ripping of a titan, because that actually left me so revolted that I started laughing.

The reason all of this seems so brutal? Almost all of Kratos’ enemies this time around resemble humans. We, as players, cannot empathise with a Hydra — even one that gets speared through the skull. A Hydra — or even a minotaur — dying a bloody death doesn’t force us to relate to what that must feel like. This point is driven home in God of War III by a giant scorpion boss, perhaps the least engaging boss fight in the entire game despite the graphical wonder of the thing. The thing is, you might be smashing off its legs, but you’ll never feel the twinge of remorse that comes with, say, ripping off another human or humanoid’s fingernail or gouging out another human-like creature’s eyeballs. There’s a vague undercurrent of torture to the way Kratos kills the gods, one by one, made all too disturbing by the fact that the torture is not a means to an end; eventually, it’s merely for fun, for Kratos and the player.

But again — that ending.

I think I understand it — I think I understand that there was some meaning to Kratos putting a giant sword-shaped hole in his midsection and releasing the spirits of Pandora’s box to the people rather than granting that power to Athena, who seems not all that dead, really — but that doesn’t make it any less unsatisfying.

By leaving the world in chaos, by ending on a zoom-out over Kratos’ quickly-bleeding corpse, there is confirmation that Kratos’ journey throughout these three games was never for any greater meaning than “KRATOS ANGRY! KRATOS KILL!” While in a sense the ending could be interpreted as Kratos doing the “right thing” for once and not ceding power to yet another god, this is Athena we’re talking about, perhaps his one constant ally, whose death led to so much of his misery. That she would suddenly start barking orders at him for the sake of a purposefully ambiguous ending rung hollow and highly unsatisfying.

But getting there, well, that was a blast, despite and because of the gratuitousness of it all. Time for a trophy hunt.

Endgame: New Super Mario Bros. Wii

The truth is, I beat New Super Mario Bros. Wii a long time ago; I’ve been waiting to write this post until now because like any Mario game since, oh, Super Mario Bros., the true joy lies in the post-game.

Before I get to that, though, I want to talk about something: the multiplayer experience. At the end of last year, despite not having to pick a “game of the year” for any outlet, I’m pretty sure if I had been faced with such a problem I’d have gone with New Super Mario Bros. Wii (and yes, I am going to use the full title every time I have to refer to it, if only to underscore the verbose absurdity of the title). One year removed from Michael Abbott naming “co-op gaming” his “game of the year” to cap off his brilliant holiday podcast series, New Super Mario Bros. Wii redefined what co-op gaming could be. Despite the lack of online capability, playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii with one, two, or even three more people on a single screen is a delight unlike any other multiplayer experience yet developed. Ostensibly a cooperative experience, the sense of competition in such a play session is near-impossible to squash, as using your fellow players as platforms off of which to jump or hoarding powerups never seems to lose its appeal.

Penny Arcade gets it right, though — the rage that inevitably results from a player’s mushroomy feast doesn’t seem to lessen the fun of playing; rather, it’s motivation for revenge. And thus the drive to play, and play well, is heightened.

That said, unless you are paired with a player that is approximately the same skill level as yourself, multiplayer play is mostly a transient experience. Most players who are interested in actually winning the game will eventually peel off and play the game by themselves. Of course, when I say “most players”, I mean “me”, but it’s difficult to imagine the difficulty and frustration of the later levels translating to the competitive inclinations of the multiplayer experience. Multiplayer works best when the imminent dangers of the levels being played are easily taken care of; later levels, with things like double-digit simultaneous bullet bills and fireball-spitting “hammer” brothers would essentially become single-player levels with extra, human-controlled obstacles anyway.

I was simultaneously pleased and disappointed with the difficulty curve of New Super Mario Bros. Wii when I first beat it — while it certainly got harder at a nice, gentle pace, allowing the player to feel challenged even as losing didn’t happen all that often, there was never a controller-throwing moment, a bit of platforming that felt so impossible that I’d never beat it (only to overcome it after a few days of cooling off). Much of it felt rote, as if the game was upping the illusion of difficulty while never really getting all that much harder. This is especially true for the final boss “fight”, which feels appropriately epic, but shouldn’t be all that difficult for anyone who fought through the rest of the game that comes before it.

When you’re trying to get all of the game’s gold coins, however, this is where the controller-throwing really begins.

Most of my New Super Mario Bros. Wii experience was done while at least one of my kids was watching, so I couldn’t do all that much actual controller throwing. Still, particularly when trying to pick off the coins on the gleefully difficult World 9 (the bonus “star world” in which mid-level checkpoints become a thing of the past), the difficulty goes through the roof when you’re trying to make your way to places in the levels that aren’t apparent (or, aren’t apparently possible) on the first playthrough. When I gave in at one point and used a hint movie to figure out how to get one of the coins, and the hint movie told me that in order to do so, I’d have to jump, throw an iceball to freeze a piranha plant, and then land on the newly frozen piranha plant to enter a pipe, my first instinct was to say “no, there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that”.

In reality, it only took me two tries, but it still felt hard, as if I’d done something that a million other people hadn’t already accomplished. Even that was nothing compared to the two “below the ice” coins in World 9, Stage 7, the last two I picked up. Those were true controller breakers.

The funny thing is, many of the hardest coins in the game are, conceivably, easier with multiple players, since one player could theoretically pick up a coin and plummet to their death while the other player(s) concentrated on staying alive through the rest of the stage. It would still count as having picked up the coin, unless both players died. Would that have felt like a cop-out? I’m not sure.

Maybe it’s worth picking up the two controllers and trying to find out. Maybe I’m not as done with New Super Mario Bros. Wii as I thought when I started writing this blog. That can’t possibly be a bad thing.

Endgame: Torchlight

In a beautifully thought out and reasoned post for his own blog, the probably-way-smarter-than-me fellow known as gatmog writes of Torchlight:

The praise [in the enthusiast press] for Torchlight becomes highly suspect when there are no heavy references to Fate, because the similarities are obvious throughout the game’s proceedings…Torchlight limits itself to improving Fate‘s groundwork to make a game based on randomly generated content feel like a game, instead of the transient experience it actually is.

It’s true, too — I reviewed Torchlight for PopMatters and for the N&O, and there is but a single offhanded reference to Fate in each review — both of them likely inspired by the gentle scolding of the above blog post (I didn’t get a hold of Torchlight until its box release, hence the late reviews).

This is Fate...

gatmog points out that Fate also landed on a number of year-end best-ofs when it came out, for mostly the same reasons that Torchlight did last year, which involve ways in which the former game refined the genre: a pet that will run to town and sell your stuff, a “shared stash” which allows multiple characters to share particularly powerful items, and fishing holes that allow you to kick back and find food for your pet were among the most obvious. Also like Fate, one of the most serious knocks against it is a lack of multiplayer. The huge similarity does beg the question — how did so many of us miss this?

I think the answer lies in the function of games like Fate and Torchlight: that of stopgap. It’s been well-publicized that Torchlight serves best as a stopgap on the way to the long-coming release of Diablo III, a way to scratch the action RPG itch until the undoubtedly more full-featured big boy of the genre finally decides to show itself.

I had never played Fate — all I know of it is what I’ve read. Truth is, I hadn’t played a Diablo-style hack-slash-’n-loot game with any sort of regularity since, well, Diablo. The first one. This made me a prime target for Torchlight, and the buzz around it combined with an incredibly cheap price (I bought it during one of Steam’s ridiculous holiday sales) was enough for me to pick it up and fall in love with the charms it brought to the genre. It was easy to play, a casual game dressed up as a hardcore-ish dungeon crawler, and it made me remember just how much I loved Diablo so many years ago.

...and this is Torchlight. Would you know which was which if I didn't tell you?

If I had played Fate, I can’t imagine being nearly as drawn to Torchlight, low price or not. The scratch would have been itched. Despite Torchlight‘s superiority to Fate in terms of narrative drive and presentation (a superiority that gatmog himself acknowledges), I probably would have spent that $2.99 on, oh, a couple of Rock Band tracks or something.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to everybody. The types of people who managed to pull off some of Torchlight‘s more obsessive Steam achievements (100 levels in the post-game dungeon? 50 Hatch quests? Golly, it’s a fine line between dungeon crawling and S&M sometimes.) are the same people who might get into both Fate and Torchlight. There just aren’t all that many of those people — people for whom the hacking and slashing never loses its appeal — out there, and as such, those who missed Fate are the ones most drawn to Torchlight.

[mild spoilers to follow.]

How do I know I’m not one of these people? Because I beat Torchlight. Do you know how Torchlight ends? You beat the final boss — a boss that you sit there and hack at for what seems like years before he actually keels over and dies — and you’re rewarded with…the knowledge that things still suck. Hooray, you beat the living embodiment of evil in the mines, but hey, look over here, there’s all this OTHER evil for you to deal with. HAVE FUN, SUCKER.

When I beat Torchlight, I was convinced I was going to be one of those people, the ones who picked up all those obscure Steam achievements and played Torchlight intermittently for the entire length of time until Diablo III arrived. Then, once I beat the game, I played two levels of the new, unlimited-depth dungeon that opened up, and then proceeded to never play the thing ever again. It’s only been a month and a half or so since I last played it, but it may as well have been a year ago; truth is, it’s hard to find the motivation for dungeon crawling when there’s no defined goal other than whatever I make up, and I have plenty of great games with actual goals left to accomplish that I could play instead. My itch has been scratched. Bring on Diablo III.

Endgame: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but yesterday marks the first time I’ve ever beaten a Final Fantasy game.

Granted, that game was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. This could be the shortest game ever to wield the Final Fantasy name. The timer on my save game said that I’d played it for just under 14 hours when I beat it, and that was after ample experimentation with the strange-but-fun combat system, a number of side quests, and even a few bouts of getting hopelessly lost. Say what you will about the reliability of forum dwellers, but a few posts over at GameFAQs indicate that the primary narrative can be beaten in under seven hours. Ludicrous as that may seem for a Final Fantasy game, it sounds about right given my own experience.

The brevity of the primary narrative only underscores a suspicion that permeated the first playthrough: The Crystal Bearers is not by any means a game to be beaten; rather, it is a game to be played. The narrative is secondary to the ability to live in the open world drawn up by Square Enix. If you choose not to follow the lure of the sidequests, there are parts of that world that you will never explore. Victory Monument and the Royal Stadium have nothing to do with the game’s narrative, but there are things to do. Why do them? For the “medals”, of course.

Perhaps sensing that there wasn’t a heck of a lot of motivation to run around and do these tasks (the rewards are generally pretty chintzy), Square Enix implemented a “medal system”, which is essentially a huge set of in-game achievements. Pick up an item for the first time, you get a medal. Defeat a group of baddies for the first time, you get a medal. Take out the trash, you get a medal. Win a game of “kickerbaul”, you get a medal. Catch a few fish at a fishing hole, you get a medal. If you manage to do something particularly well (or a whole bunch of times), you can even upgrade your bronze medals for gold ones. Picking up medals unlocks them on a “medal table”, which in turn opens up hints as to how to open more medals. The primary narrative of The Crystal Bearers may only last for seven hours or so, but picking up all of the gold medals in the game could well be a 100+ hour experience.

Is the world of The Crystal Bearers worth all of that revisiting? Well, some of the tasks are pretty entertaining, and I must admit that my own curiosity is piqued as to how best to conquer some of the more challenging telekinetic battles. Still, the utter lack of dialogue amongst the majority of townspeople takes something away from the sense that the world you’re in is a living and breathing one — again, it’s more like a playground with a bunch of toys to play with. Once you play with most of the toys, though, you can’t help but want to go somewhere else.

A couple of notes on the game’s final act (and that’s the closest thing you’re going to get to a SPOILER WARNING): It is yet another example of a game that decides it needs to completely change its play style for the game’s final sequence. Suddenly, our protagonist, Layle, becomes superpowered by the same energy that powers up the final boss, and the entire final sequence is done while, uh, air-surfing on a crystal or something. You’re still playing your telekinetic game of tossing things at other things, but you’re doing it while flying through the air. While the setting seems exciting, this sequence actually removes most of what makes most of the game fun: the puzzle aspect of combat that involves throwing things at other things and making wacky combinations of enemies and enemies, or enemies and inanimate objects. It’s big and epic as it should be, but the gameplay feels stripped down, almost an afterthought to the setpiece.

On the flipside, the ending is appropriately long and satisfying. There’s a happily ever after component, an unsolved mystery component, and a boat to nowhere. The story, as short as it was, was pretty interesting, and it’s nice to see so much attention paid to the dénouement despite the narrative simplicity.

All of that said, it’s also nice to have finally beaten a Final Fantasy game, even if it was a short one. Maybe XIII will be next.

Endgame: Gunstar Heroes

Gunstar Heroes to this day remains one of the only games I’ve bothered to take the time to master on its hardest difficulty level. This week, I decided that I had let enough time pass between my obsession with the game in the mid-’90s and now to give it another run-through, this time via Xbox Live Arcade.

Playing it again brought back all of the memories one would expect, but a playthrough in 2009 reveals a hole in the game’s design that might not have been nearly as apparent in 1993.

Specifically: The uneven choice of weapons is almost shocking. Back in ’93, it was easy to chalk up my affinity for a free-shot (that is, the ability to move while shooting) chaser (homing) to a matter of personal preference, especially given that my brother always went for the flame (exactly what it sounds like). Playing the game on the Xbox and retreating to my old standby, I realized that the chaser, especially when superpowered with another chaser pickup, was the option for those of us who didn’t want to do any of the work. In every area that isn’t a boss battle, you can quite literally anchor the fire button and run. I beat the game on the normal difficulty level in just under two hours.

One of the achievements in the Xbox Live version of Gunstar Heroes asks the player to “start the game with all weapon types”, and given the ease of the rest of the achievements (you can nab the other 11 on your first playthrough of any skill level if you’re lucky), it seemed worth finishing off the game by giving the other weapon types a try.

Imagine my shock when I used the force (disappointingly, it’s a machine gun rather than MIND BULLETS) and died halfway through the level.

Slowly, as I tried the other weapons and found myself fumbling through the easiest of levels, a humbling realization hit: I did not beat Gunstar Heroes. My gun did.

On one hand, this rather diminishes the pride I once had in my 1337 skillz at Gunstar Heroes. I was a hack, as it turns out. On the other hand, this gives me the chance to revisit the game in a way that offers a challenge, by resolving to beat the game with a weapon that doesn’t do all the work for me. After all, any excuse to play more Gunstar Heroes, no matter how specious, is an utterly valid one.

A modern runthrough of Gunstar Heroes affirmed something that I remembered from 1993 as well: Seven Force is an incredible boss fight. That it shows up so early in the game is almost criminal, although it does provide an almost instant setpiece that allows the player to demonstrate why Gunstar Heroes was one of the greatest games of the 16-bit era. Besides, placing it so early in the game allows enough time to pass between its initial appearance and its second boss-fight appearance later in the game to evoke a sense of nostalgia, enough such that its role (as driven by a now contrite, no-longer mind controlled fellow Gunstar) in the game’s conclusion feels legitimately melancholy.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the game’s sense of humor: yes, “Melon Bread” still makes me laugh out loud.

With a growing pile of unplayed games sitting on my shelf, will I return to Gunstar Heroes to try and blast all the way through it with a new weapon anytime soon? Probably not — once you’ve played through it, you almost have to let it sit for a while to freshen your next experience with it. Even so, it’s nice to know it’s still fun, and it’s just as nice to know that it’ll be waiting on my Xbox the next time I need it.

Seven Force!