{"id":25776,"date":"2015-01-23T17:48:36","date_gmt":"2015-01-23T22:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25776"},"modified":"2015-01-26T21:11:28","modified_gmt":"2015-01-27T02:11:28","slug":"five-games-josh-liked-in-2014-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=25776","title":{"rendered":"Five Games Josh Liked in 2014: Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second and final part of my 2014 retrospective. And you thought it was never coming.<\/p>\n

Last time I said I thought 2014 wasn't such a bad year, and then spent most of the post raking two games over the coals for their collective bad design decisions. I think it's only fair I start talking about the games I really liked in 2014. These games would be on this list regardless of how well the AAA market was doing.<\/p>\n

3. The Last of Us Remastered<\/h3>\n

Well the version *I* played came out in 2014.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

In a market that is increasingly dominated by games that seem more interested in being movies, The Last of Us is the most movie-like game I've ever encountered. This is not a compliment. It's not a straight “movie” like Heavy Rain or even the more recent Telltale titles, but the entirety of the narrative, almost all of the character development, and even much of the most important action sequences take place in cutscenes. <\/p>\n

I've always been enamored by the potential of the interactivity of video games. “What unique stories,” I thought, “could be told by taking advantage of the player's input to influence the way the narrative unfolds?” Instead, at least when it comes to big budget AAA titles, everyone's more interested in making a Hollywood blockbuster with the action scenes replaced by poorly justified shooty segments. These often go together about as well as oil and water, and the player ultimately has no more control over the character they're playing or the way the story unfolds than a viewer watching a movie. One almost wonders if it would have been better for them to make a movie from the start. And while I'm not presumptuous enough to say that this is an invalid way to make a game, I'm still a bit bitter that anyone with enough money to actually explore this potential is instead wasting it on vapid action movies with by-the-numbers revenge plots.<\/p>\n

But perhaps the other reason I dislike these “games as movies” is that I never once got the impression that they'd make very good movies. That is, if you were to strip out all of the gameplay segments and replace them with typical movie action scenes and then release them in theaters as movies, I doubt they'd be very well received. I think film critics would generally pan them, and they'd be relegated to “this summer's bombastic-yet-vapid popcorn film,” equally inoffensive and insubstantial. It kind of makes the whole exercise seem a bit pointless, doesn't it? Not only are they often not very good games, with action segments that too often clash with the story they're ostensibly trying to tell, but they can’t even manage to be very good movies, either.<\/p>\n

And yet, The Last of Us is an exception. Indeed, it is exceptional: Joel and Ellie are wonderfully realized characters, and the performances of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson bring them to life in a way you rarely see in either games or movies. It's a moving, tragic story about a man who would sacrifice the world because he doesn't want to be hurt again. It's not absolutely perfect, but I have no doubt that were you to release it as a movie, it would be to just as much acclaim as it's garnered as a game. In fact I think it might be even better received as a movie. And the Left Behind DLC only elevated the qualities that made the story so exceptional, and had one of most skillfully understated, naturally developed inclusions of a homosexual relationship I've seen in either medium.<\/p>\n

God bless whoever greenlit this DLC.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

The gameplay is… significantly less enjoyable, and falls far short<\/a> of what was originally promised. But, perhaps for the first time, that doesn't really bother me. It would have been better if it played tighter, but that's not really the focus. Because it's a movie. A really good one. <\/p>\n

Does that also make it a good video game? I don't know. I want to say no. But I had a lot of fun with it. I really, really liked The Last of Us.<\/p>\n

2. Transistor<\/h3>\n

I lied, this is the pretty one.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

You know you've stumbled upon a gem when a game can give you goosebumps. Transistor absolutely oozes<\/em> style, and would warrant inclusion in this list based on its soundtrack<\/a> alone. I really cannot overstate how good this game looks, both still and in motion. And it was developed on an indie budget; it's not even fully 3D. Breathtaking, hand painted backgrounds of vibrant colors combined with a unique art-deco flair makes Transistor undoubtedly the best looking game of 2014. A game like Far Cry or Dragon Age might be more technically impressive, but Transistor's sheer style beats them all.<\/p>\n

It also helps that the game plays well and has an intriguing story to boot. Cloudbank is a wonderfully unique setting, a virtual world in which every decision–from whether it should rain tomorrow to where the new bridge should be built–is made through popular vote. Not everyone in Cloudbank is happy with this system, however, and a shadowy group of powerful individuals calling themselves the Camerata seek to wrest control of the city, bringing a guiding hand to the often inscrutable will of an unrestricted democracy.<\/p>\n

They begin quietly taking out other influential or famous figures, and the story kicks off when they go after Red, Cloudbank's most prolific singer. The plan backfires when a bystander jumps in the way of the attack, thwarting the assassination attempt and handing Red the Camerata’s own secret weapon: the Transistor, a sword that has the power to absorb and assimilate other programs. The bystander that saved Red is now trapped in the Transistor himself, which creates an interesting twist on Bastion's narration dynamic. Red's voice was taken in the attack, rendering her a silent protagonist, but the Transistor can talk, and he spends most of the game pontificating on the events that surround them. Unlike Bastion's narrator however, he's very much a part of the world the whole way through. He doesn't know much more than Red or the player does, and in some situations he even knows less. The result is a narrator that feels like a more natural part of the story. It would be nice seeing more games with non-player characters that were so talkative.<\/p>\n

The Camerata have another weapon at their disposal: the virus-like Process that quickly begins rewriting the structure of the city, replacing the colorful, smooth, round lines of Couldbank's art-deco architecture with hard lines and sharp cubes. With the Transistor at her side, Red is uniquely equipped to fight the Process, and her task quickly becomes clear: stop the Camerata before their ambition to control the city destroys it.<\/p>\n

I know these captions are supposed to be silly, but Transistor is really a masterpiece of audio and visual design.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Transistor is an RPG of sorts, and it has a remarkably complex skill system. Each ability can be used directly, but it can also be attached to another ability. This removes the first ability from direct play, but enhances the second ability with some of its properties. Each ability can eventually be upgraded in this fashion by two other abilities, meaning the number of combinations available is staggering. Everyone seems to come up with their own special method of breaking the game with some overpowered combo of skills, and it speaks to the depth of Transistor's system that these combos are rarely the same.<\/p>\n

The game is not entirely without rough spots, mind you. In particular, Transistor's combat is an unusual hybrid of real time and turn based systems. In essence, it's a turn based system where only you get a turn. Time pauses, and you plan out your moves and skills, and then they play out at normal speed while everything else moves in slow motion. Then the game returns to real time, and you wait for your “turn” to cooldown. You can still fire abilities during real time play, although using them in the turn based system puts them on cooldown as well. You could potentially play the game entirely in real time, though it would be very difficult, as things move comparatively quickly at normal speed, and much of the complex combos require planning and precise timing. The whole system works a lot better than it sounds from this description, but it's still a little jarring to experience at first. It almost feels like the game was originally going to be a real time action RPG, a la Bastion, but somewhere along the line, the idea was scrapped in favor of this hybrid system.<\/p>\n

It's not the only issue I have with the game. Cloudbank is such a cool setting, but most of it is quickly destroyed in the course of the story. You never run into any third party, bystander NPCs either, as they're implied to have all fled or, more morbidly, been consumed by the Process. It's difficult to get a feel for what the world was like before it was all ruined, and it would have perhaps made for stronger motivation had there been an introductory chapter set before the Process was unleashed and Red was attacked.<\/p>\n

But these all seem like such minor quibbles when the game does so many things right. Supergiant Games absolutely outdid themselves with this one. Fantastic.<\/p>\n

1. The Banner Saga<\/h3>\n

Always gotta keep moving.<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

You know how I said that 2014 was “a year without instant classics”? Well I've been kind of miffed about that, because I feel like The Banner Saga really should<\/em> have been one. Of course I feel the same way about Transistor, but at least people are talking about it. I've had to strain myself to find an end of the year post that even mentions this game. Maybe it's because it was released in mid January; it's already been out for over a year as of this piece. Or maybe turn-based tactics doesn't really have a wide appeal. Either way, I don't feel this game really got a fair shake. A shame, because it's such a beautiful work.<\/p>\n

Ragnarok has been done before, and apocalypses have have been done to death, and yet, I don't feel as if any of them quite nailed the feeling of what living through an apocalypse would really be like. There are a lot of games set after the apocalypse, and a few set immediately before, usually with some task to stop it. But the Banner Saga does something different, by placing you in the position of a group of characters who really don't know what’s going on and don't know how to stop it. They're just caught up in the mess, and they’re trying to survive.<\/p>\n

Sure, you start the game as an escort for royalty and nobility, hanging around the big players, but the perspective quickly changes to the game's principal character: Rook, a hunter and woodsman from a small village on the outskirts of civilization. There's nothing particularly special about Rook, he's no chosen one and he's not some prodigious warrior. But he's thrust into a position of leadership when his small village is overrun by the Dredge, and he has no choice but to flee with the survivors.<\/p>\n

Using a woodsman and hunter as the protagonist highlights the thing The Banner Saga does best. It is a master work of atmosphere and world building. It manages to carve out a unique lore and backstory that is still distinctly Viking. But unlike a game like Skyrim, which somehow manages to take that sort of setting and make it as generic as possible, The Banner Saga is able to weave a complex mythology through clever hints and dialogue. Because you see the world principally through the eyes of character that doesn't have a formal education, the game speaks far less about its lore than Skyrim does, and yet it says more. It's just enough to tantalize you, to invoke a sense of mystery, wonder, and dread.<\/p>\n

The Dredge–the creatures Rook and his band are trying to escape–are violent golems of stone and iron. After centuries of uneasy peace, the Dredge have suddenly exploded out of their remote northern settlements, sweeping south across the continent, overwhelming the cities of humans and the Varl, an immortal race of giants. What's more disturbing is that it seems as if the Dredge themselves are fleeing from something even worse. The game communicates this all indirectly, and primarily through dialogue. Never once in the entire game do you get the sense that your caravan has found a safe haven where you can stop running. Even the strongest walls are insufficient against the horde. Rook and his caravan don’t have a choice, they just have to keep moving. It doesn’t beat you over the head with melancholy and hopeless, rather, it's the implications that are horrifying. It's often difficult to manage the needs of your caravan and keep everyone in good spirits and well fed. And there's no end in sight. Can you imagine anything more horrifying than slowly starving to death, always on the run, watching as your friends are slowly picked off by disease, starvation, or your tireless pursuers?<\/p>\n

Fire Emblem with Vikings!<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n

Of special mention is the game's visual style, and it's remarkable I've somehow gone six paragraphs without mentioning it yet. It doesn't have quite the snazz and flair of Transistor,
\nbut it's still a fantastic game to look at. The centerpiece of game is of course it's wonderfully hand-painted landscapes, which serve as the backdrop for much of the gameplay. But of special mention is the game's animation style. Every animation in the game was done by rotoscoping; they actually filmed the animations of the game live and then traced over them digitally. This was done intentionally, to invoke the visual style of those old animated movies from the 70s and 80s, and the game absolutely nails it. It's a delight to watch, and there are even several fully animated movie-style cutscenes that put a cap on the effect that you're playing an old Disney film.<\/p>\n

The actual gameplay is a mix of Fire Emblem-style turn based tactical combat, The Walking Dead's dialogue trees, and an Oregon Trail-esque caravan management meta game. You traverse from one location to the next in these Oregon Trail caravan segments, progressing through days as those wonderful landscapes I mentioned slowly scroll by. As you travel, you may happen upon events either randomly or through triggers. They may offer certain dialogue options that can change the way the story plays out, and they may also trigger combat. You'll eventually come across cities or villages, where much of the main story events that begin and conclude each chapter take place. The dialogue system allows players a good deal of freedom to influence the storyline, and different choices can have significant consequences, up to and including killing off multiple major characters. I’d say it’s at least as responsive to player choice as The Walking Dead is.<\/p>\n

The combat is not perhaps as good as it could be, but it's still quite well executed. In particular, the system manages to strike a very good balance of simple mechanics that are easy to understand, but work together to create a system that is much deeper than it first appears. The only real complaint I have about it is also my primary complaint about the game as a whole. The Banner Saga has a curious way of determining turn order. As long as there's more than one character on either your team or the enemy's, all turns are sequential. In essence, one of your characters gets a turn, and then one of theirs does. This works fine with equal team sizes, but it creates some really odd and unintuitive situations when those numbers are unequal. <\/p>\n

For example, if you try to play the game using the typical turn-based strategy of focusing all of your fire on one enemy to kill him quickly and reduce their numbers, every other enemy will get proportionally more turns. As long as both sides have more than one enemy, you can't have two of your characters take a turn back to back, it always has to be sequential. In effect, as you kill off the enemy team, the remaining enemies get faster<\/em>. This leads to the unsatisfying optimal strategy of weakening most of the enemy team and then killing lots of enemies all at once. It can make the fights drag on longer than they feel like they should, and really diminishes that lovely feeling you get playing these games when you pop a really dangerous enemy before he can do anything to hurt you.<\/p>\n

It would have also probably been nice if Stoic had better advertised that the game was episodic and this was only the first episode. I knew of this going in, but I also know of a lot of people who didn't, and were thus disappointed when the ending didn't resolve much of the overarching story. It's still a great game though, and definitely worthy of your time if any of the past thousand words or so resonate with you. The fantastic world building and atmosphere overshadow the sometimes frustrating combat system, and the art style is just really cool. It's my game of the year for 2014, if indeed such a term has any real meaning.<\/p>\n

In Closing<\/h3>\n

So that's 2014. It was certainly a very strange year. But I just can't get behind the notion that it was a bad one. The AAA market was undeniably a trainwreck, and even the best games that came out of it didn't seem to live up to hype. The two AAA games that people disliked the least were remakes. I even put one of them on this list! I hope that doesn't count as cheating.<\/p>\n

But with the ailing AAA market came a thriving indie one. I said in the first part that there weren't any instant classics this year, and I meant that in the sense that no game so so dominated the conversation for the year that they overshadowed everything else. There were no Papers Please and Gone Homes this year. But instead we had a huge, fantastic, and often overwhelming lineup of very good indie games. Games like Transistor, and The Banner Saga, but also Unrest, Shovel Knight, Never Alone, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Child of Light and Valiant Hearts (if you want to count them as indie), The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, This War of Mine, Divinity: Original Sin, and The Fall, just to name a few. Just about everyone I've talked to has a favorite from this list, or a few, and none of them seem to agree with each other. There aren't more on my list because, frankly, I haven't had the time to play them all.<\/p>\n

If 2013 was “The Year of the Indies”<\/a>, then surely 2014 was “The Year AAA Surrendered to the Indies.” What I took from 2014 wasn't a melancholic disillusionment with video games. What I took from it was a sense of hope. There are ever more varying and interesting games out there. The market is diversifying with unbelievable speed and gusto. AAA isn't going away, and I honestly don't think it ever really will, even if the current way we make big games becomes unsustainable. But what 2014 showed us is that the era of the “garage band game developer,” the era where a small group of friends can get together and not only make a successful, profitable game, but do something with it that nobody else is doing and carve out a unique niche in the market? That era's not just back, it's here to stay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second and final part of my 2014 retrospective. And you thought it was never coming. Last time I said I thought 2014 wasn't such a bad year, and then spent most of the post raking two games over the coals for their collective bad design decisions. I think it's only fair I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[221,467,439,466],"class_list":["post-25776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames","tag-josh","tag-the-banner-saga","tag-the-last-of-us","tag-transistor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}