Captain Morton's Notes

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...