Captain Morton's Notes

On the surface, Dragon Quest Builders presents a similar fantasy to other games of it's ilk; that the world is yours to shape as you see fit. But it's approach is far more rigidly structured, tasking you with NPCs to support, setting a boundry for your city, and essentially starting you from ground zero at the end of each chapter, as the Goddess whisks you away to a new land. It put a lot of people off, but through these limits Dragon Quest constructs a thesis on what the New World should look like, and it's vision is far more radical than it's peers' colonialist tendancies would lead you to think.

I'll admit, I passed on Spark the Electric Jester when I first heard of it. Which might seem odd to people that know me, because I'm a MASSIVE Sonic fan, so it should have been right up my alley, right? Thing is, Classic Era isn't really my thing. It holds a place in my heart, I grew up with it after all, but I grew up again in the Adventure era, with the naff PC port of Sonic Adventure 1, and the gamecube version of 2. My unabashed love of Shadow the Hedgehog is well documented. I'll even defend Sonic 06 in a pinch. For me, this is MY era of Sonic. In the same way that Chris Eccleston is MY Doctor Who. So when I found out that Spark the Electric Jester 2 was a Sonic Adventure throwback, my wallet came out faster than a wild west gunslinger.

Here, fancy a quick trip out? Check out some old ruins, maybe stop by that house by the stream? It's a gorgeous day out, might even see some elk if we pass through the forest. We can be back in about 40 minutes or so. You're in? Brill, pack your lamp and camera and lets head off too  Esothe .

The Devil May Cry series has always been defined by one word: Style. Melodramatic anime cutscenes sandwiched between combat that plays like action movie choreography, where you're constantly measured on your ability to look good while kicking ass. And quite frankly, DmC has more style than all it's predecessors. Granted it's not quite the same  style as the rest of the series, but still, it's absolutely got more of it.  And similarly, it's flaws weigh heavier on the whole than they do on the original games.

Devil May Cry V's announcement at E3 2018 was the absolute highlight of the event for me. It's exactly the sort of announcement that keeps me watching and anticipating the self-indulgant advertising hellscape every year, one that gets me to completely lose my mind with raw, unfettered excitement. A new Devil May Cry!? Starring Nero!? Heavily influenced by DmC?! Kickass buttrock in the trailer!? Every second of that trailer kicked me into a new level of existance, cutting through my cynisism about hype culture and press events. Because Devil May Cry was back, baby. And despite some hickups( oh good greif ), it's remained my most anticipated game of 2019 ever since the announcement. So naturally I've been chomping at the bit to get my hands on it, and now the PS4 demo has finally dropped, I can lay down my thoughts on how it's shaping up and weather my hopes are dreams are going to come to pass.

As soon as I opened the " 2018 in Video Gaming " Wikipedia Page I was immediately struck with the feeling of "fuck, that was 2018?" for 3 seperate titles, before I even got past February. Granted it's in part down to a particularly nasty bout of depression a few months back, stretching out time and making life before existential dread ruled my thaughts feel like a forgotten era. But it's also indicative of the sort of games that got me this year. Games that embedded themselves so firmly into my mind that they feel like they've always been there. And also because a lot are rereleases that I've been hearing about for years beforehand, which tends to screw with your memory. Dragon Quest Builders So speaking of rereleases, Builders came out in 2016, but only found it's way to Switch this year, so naturally I had no interest in playing it until it did. It's an incredibly smart game, clearly built by people who played Minecraft, saw EXACTLY w...

Somehow I never clocked that World of Final Fantasy was a Pokemon game until I started playing it. You'd think that knowing it involved stacking little creatures with yourself would lead to the assumption that you'd have to catch them at some point, but nah, it took the introduction of the Definitely Not a Pokeball for me to go "oh huh, so that's what this is". Not that I'm complaining, of course. In fact, World of Final Fantasy actually fixes a lot of what bugged me about Pokemon for years.

So, we're all a whole lot more clued in to the nature of Nintendo's latest Mad Science Experiment. And as is tradition for these sorts of events, we're all penning down our Takes™ of various temperatures about how Nintendo is Doomed, a state they've been in perpetually for at least since the Wii was announced, like a lingering debuff that nobody is sure actually does anything and can't be bothered to deal with. According to the internet at least. And I, ever the Cool Human, will be no exception. So here's a proper play-by-play of the whole event, with my thoughts on everything worth thinking about. As an aside, I'll be focusing on the information provided and the trailers, rather than the presentation itself, so forgive me for not mentioning how well put together the whole event was. Or also the Squid Scientist Man. Or the Yakuza-looking guy representing SEGA. Or Immortal Vampire Todd Howard standing in front of the ending sequence Phantom Blood. Or that ado...

Necropolis is a stylish game. It's bold cell-shaded art style is gorgeous, and fits well with the short, snappy dialogue and simple loot system. It's a game that goes for bare minimum in all aspects, and while it does lend itself some class, I wish it had maybe splashed out on stuff to actually DO. It took me a while to get to grips with the basics of Necropolis' combat, which is a bit more involved than what I'm used to in Roguelikes. It's familiar enough that my Dark Souls instincts kicked into full gear, but different enough that said instincts caused me nothing but grief. It's not as meaty as DS, feeling instead like if you cranked the Zelda slider on DS up a tad. Enemies flash red when hit and you don't get to see health bars, and only the heaviest of weapons will stagger them. The animations sometimes feel a little clunky, but I found that less of a problem as I played. The biggest difference comes in managing max stamina, representing exhaustion. You...

As much as Namco would like to believe otherwise, what with it's super-broad marketing and memes on T-shirts, Dark Souls and it's relatives are a pretty niche subgenre. Not a lot of people are into the idea of learning by being beaten around the head with a hammer until you understand every facet of the hammer, it's wielder and it's surroundings. And an even smaller proportion of the people that do would consider themselves willing to deliberately make that experience even harder at any point. But I say to the subset that will listen: consider the following. If you love the series, or even just DS3 specifically, then what better way to get to know it more intimately than a little restriction? Think of it like spicing up your love life, except you're alone and playing a videogame. Screenshots are mine, for once, of my challenge run characters. Shields Only My personal favourite, and a run I've done on every Souls game to date (thrice on DS2, a game I've finis...

Ashes is definitely the shortest of the DLCs Fromsoft has done for any of it's games. It clocked in at about 4 hours for me, and that was with me doing a clean sweep of everything there was to find and/or kill. It's also one of my favourites, not least as it evokes one of my favourite parts of the original Dark Souls. Dark Souls 3 is the most self-referential of the Souls series. Naturally so, coming off the back of two games worth of rich lore with little connective tissue, it's a game that pushes the series' lore forwards rather than outwards, as 2 did, progressing the story of the world as a whole, of each decrepit gear as they turn, rust and break. Ashes of Ariandel is openly drawing from the Painted World of Ariamis in Dark Souls The First, and plucks on the heartstrings of fans in much the same way as the main game did, so if you were one of weird people that thought that somehow made 3 a lesser game this isn't going to do much for you. But for those of us who...

Odin Sphere has no qualms with challenging RPG traditions. Broadly, it still fits pretty well into the "JRPG" box, being a character-driven linear RPG, but it's a game that knows it's priorities well enough that it can work the fundamentals of the genre into something more comfortable for what it's trying to do. It has varying degrees of success, but on the whole it makes for a wonderful experience. Screenshots nicked from Videogamer, which only had 3 screenshots, so not exactly a whole lot of variety, but still, cheers. Odin Sphere is the absolute monarch of twists. That's the one thing that stood out to me the most from it's excellent story. It never seems to run out of surprises and revelations that turn everything on it's head. I can only imagine the lengths Vanillaware must have gone to in structuring this beast. The game's main hook is that it's structured around 5 campaigns with 5 different playable characters, each covering roughly the ...

Duelyst makes me angry. Not angry as in, professionally disappointed by sub-par mechanics or imperfect execution, no no no, though I'm glad you think so highly of me. Just in general. Standard Videogame Anger. Good old fashioned "fuck you, fuck this game, fuck everything" table-flipping anger. And I've been having a right good think about why that is and weather or not it's my fault. See, Duelyst is a good game. I can't really deny that. Mechanically, it's a very well designed little thing that, sensibly, nicks it's foundations from Hearthstone and builds that into a set of core mechanics far more interesting than it's predecessor. Check out the lovely Cool Ghosts' video on it if you aren't convinced. But even though it's mechanics are all well and good, I still spend most of my time playing it getting increasingly pissed off. So I spent some time while playing trying to isolate exactly what was gripping my ballsack and when . And aft...

God Eater is determined to hide it's depth behind unassuming facades. In all respects too, even the story seems to be trying it's best to not live up to it's potential. But I feel it succeeds despite it's best efforts to handicap itself, so long as you're like me and are willing and able to look past the problems. Yes, technically the screenshots are from God Eater 2, but they are (supposedly)VERY similar and everything in them is in Resurrection, so they still apply. Leave me alone. Most character creators let you choose a voice these days. You're probably used to being able to select from 20-30 packs of grunts and pain noises. But God Eater takes that a step further, for some reason. Your choice also determines your character's personality in battle. If you've played any Xenoblade game you know what to expect from the soundscape, though it's less about shouting dramatic skill names and more one-liners in response to various conditions. And your sel...

After playing Generations for a sizable about of time, I think the Monster Hunter series peaked somewhere between 3 and 4, in a game we never actually got in this universe. MHGen is the result of a series packing far too much depth into an aspect of the game that nobody actually wants to spend a majority of their time doing. Thankfully, like all things bigger than Jesus, there are plenty of derivatives, and in the case of Monster Hunter at least two of them make a case for being better than their Spirit Dad: Toukiden and God Eater. The Monster Hunter "genre", for lack of a better term, is based around 2 halves, the hunt and the prep. Though calling them "halves" seems generous to the prep side, since it exists as a way of enhancing the hunt rather than as an entity of it's own. You could take the prep half of any of these games out solo and it would still hold up somewhat, it's designed to be engaging in it's own right. But remove the hunts and the entir...

I may or may not have played a lot of Character Action Games the past week or so. Maybe. You can't prove anything. Devil May Cry and Bayonetta are forever entwined, both originally born from the directorial talents of the great Hideki Kamiya, and based around the core philosophy of Being Cool As Heck. They even exist in the same universe, like all Kamiya's games (ask him about it on Twitter! Go on! Do it!). But they also represent two very different approaches to the Character Action genre, enough I feel to be able to write about the two of them in tandem through the lens of the most recent entries in their respective series. And also the first Bayonetta, for reasons. Bayonetta 2 screenshots borrowed from Nintendolife. Cheers. So, lets start with DMC4. I never really understood the common complaint about DMC4, about how the second half of the game had you going backwards through altered versions of the levels you went through in the first half. In a genre that has earned the n...

Mechanically, No Man's Sky isn't the greatest thing. Examining it's workings like any other game will leave you wanting, it contradicts itself, is full of menial tasks feels underdeveloped in areas. But, nonetheless, No Man's Sky is beautiful despite itself, it's own flaws often working to it's favour in strange and delightful ways. No Man's Sky is a game where you make your own goals, but it's also one that has a glowing red ball at the start that can give you a goal, or at least the semblance of a path which you ASSUME will come to a conclusion. Everything is vague in No Man's Sky, so it stands to reason that your own goals should be vague too, lest you end up in a mind-set that will kill your enjoyment. Something like setting out to get a new ship. Nothing specific, each system only has a few designs you'll find anyway, just amass money while asking fellow space farers if they'd like to do swapsies. Those little self-imposed tasks will dri...