Captain Morton's Notes

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 ...