Five Nights at Freddy’s

Well, in the wee small hours of this morning – Hallowe’en, of course – I watched the trailers for the fun-looking Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 and decided to do the famous 4/20 mode, where the AI of all the animatronics is set to maximum. I figured out a working pattern – catching Freddy right outside your door and keeping him there, then checking on Foxy every time Chica comes so you can shut the door on her and Freddy at the same time, going quickly enough not to let Bonnie in – so got my third star.

As just about everyone knows by now, FNAF is a jump-scare game. You play a security employee who is stuck in an office with limited power while four (well, strictly five) creepy animatronic puppets stalk through the corridors. If they catch you, they will forcibly cram you into a puppet suit...only the puppet suits already have animatronic parts in them, so that wouldn’t end very well for you. You can catch them by shutting doors on them, but this takes power, and you only have a limited supply so must balance being vulnerable with being able to last the night.

Now, I don’t care much for scary games, which aren’t exactly my sort of entertainment. Creepiness hasn’t got to me since I was very small and playing The 7^th Guest, which should totally get a remake – that has nothing to do with that terrible 7^th Guest 3 failed kickstarter a year ago today. As an adult, I mostly find creepy games either very daft or enjoyable completely separate from their supposedly creepy parts.

And it was in the latter camp that FNAF fell. I bought the game primarily to watch others play – and it succeeded nicely in that respect, with the friends who had big silly reactions to the scares still making me laugh when I think back to them. But for my part, it got no more out of me than a little jump. But that’s fine. After all, the most well-remembered part of Resident Evil hinged on just such a moment, with dogs smashing through windows.

Besides, the jump-scares aren’t what makes FNAF a scary game. That’s the pay-off, but really it’s about the tension on the higher levels, where you know several enemies are coming to get you and dealing with any one of them stands in the way of dealing with the others. The sound effects build a good atmosphere, and the game is very good at building then releasing tension – once you get past the first couple of nights where the game relies on fear of the unknown. The jump scares ultimately end up irrelevant, nothing but punishment. But for the easily-scared, there’s much more to be enjoyed than just big creepy things jumping out. In other words, the journey ends up better than the destination.

But for all I bought FNAF for the jump-scare gimmick to watch others play, I ended up really enjoying it as a challenging strategy game. It is incredibly simple, and part of the aforementioned tension comes from the fact that you can’t move, you can’t fight back, your defences are highly limited, and the best situation you can be in is doing nothing.

The real fun of it, of course, comes right at the end – the fifth, sixth and custom max-difficulty levels. That’s where you’re not sitting tensely hoping things don’t pop out. You are constantly having to balance controlling four AI programs to win a game. It’s not scary, and you will know when you lose and why, with only Foxy having any capacity for surprising you with a jump scare (and he looks a whole lot less alarming when he appears than the others). The genius of the game is that two enemies must constantly be checked on with the lights, one must be checked on with the camera as much as possible, and one must be looked at occasionally and may just sprint towards your office if you don’t get the chance to check up on him – and you only just have enough power to stop this on the 4/20 mode. I don’t care if arrogant gamers want to call the game gimmicky or boring: the last levels are, plain and simple, a fun and challenging game that I am willing to bet next to none of those who censure the game have beaten. Effectively, most of the people who dismiss it have played the tutorial and decided they beat the game on expert mode.

A few other things make the game impressive. Obviously, there’s the fact it’s a small-scale indie game that one guy made on his own. Then the way the fandom has become so large and so prolific – the super-cutesy fanart being my favourite. There’s the numerous over-the-top theories based on the sparse backstory about five murdered kids, and then there’s the excitement around the sequel.

Definitely worth the meagre price and an enjoyable challenge. And I really wanna go see the creepy animatronics at a Chuck-e-Cheese now! 

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

With the switch to the far more powerful 3DS, sadly I think that the Professor Layton series lost much of its charm. Though the story was relatively strong, I enjoyed playing through Miracle Mask far less than any of the previous titles. Firstly, the attempt to replicate the eccentric sprites in polygons doesn’t work too well, and they simply look a bit clunky and unpleasant compared with their hand-drawn counterparts. Secondly, the desire to use the big top screen for the main action means a rather disjointed control system where the bottom screen is used to control a magnifying glass on the top screen. With an additional press required to bring up that magnifying glass, and then the slight difference in screen sizes meaning precision is often not quite there. Being able to simply tap on the screen where you want to inspect feels so much better – and the simplicity meant the game was much more snappy and fun to play.

Which is a shame, because the actual gameplay part – that is to day, the puzzles themselves – improved in presentation terms. It’s just that the main draw of Layton games are always the story that drives the player from puzzle to puzzle. The story itself is also a good one – after the last game covered Luke’s past, now we have a follow-up that through flashbacks shows us Layton’s. And it’s a lot of fun. It kicks off with Layton fencing his friend Randall (épée of course – he’s a gentleman!), and we soon find out that at this stage, the Professor is a decidedly un-academic young rebel with a big ole head of hair. He and Randall go on an adventure, exploring old ruins, and inevitably disaster strikes and sets up the modern-day story. So we have the fun of a mystery with a masked man (not very mysterious), the fun of Layton reuniting with childhood acquaintances – some of whom are a little awkward with him – and a kind of Kimi ga Nozomu Eien scenario only in the end prizing loyalty that goes almost ad absurdum.

All this takes place in the desert of the UK, which as I know from Million Arthur is in the midlands.  

Fun while the set-up was, though, the game itself was a bit of a grind, especially in what should have been the exciting section of exploring the ruins. The game threw away most of its best gimmicks – like a horse-racing minigame – right at the start and while the bunny mini-game was adorable, getting things wrong on it meant having to watch a whole sequence again and the other mini-games were very tedious. The robot one was both ugly and absolutely no fun. I ended up resorting to a guide to finish the absurd hidden puzzles for that one, too – but I could really have just left them.

 Things end fairly neatly for the story, but ultimately there’s a cliffhanger, and it feels slightly cheap how the good guys just don’t mention Descole again after he slips off.

I’ll certainly be playing the other Layton games, but this one was the first one that was really a disappointment. I hope they’ve refined things for the next one. 

Spec Ops: The Line

I’ve played some terrible games in my time. Honestly and truly, this wasn’t one of them. But it was perhaps the game I’ve enjoyed playing the least. I’ve resented playing a game before, but never before have I had a game resent me playing.

When setting out at the beginning, I didn’t know why a friend had lent me this game (or, in fact, lent me someone else’s copy...!) – this isn’t the kind of game I play. I don’t like macho war games. I’ve never played Call of Duty or Medal of Honor or any of their ilk. I just don’t engage with the characters or find them fun. So what was I doing here?

About halfway through, I got it. This is a military video game that plays with the concept of military video games. I’d expressed admiration for Bioshock and how it played with free will and being impelled to do something because that’s the only way to continue a game, and something similar happens here. But the way this game does it is incredibly irritating, frustrating and smug. First, it pretends you actually have a choice, leading me to waste far too much time attempting an impossible different choice for Walker. But secondly, after it becomes completely foregrounded that you’re playing a game whose main character made the wrong choice and backed the psycho who decided the best course of action was to kill everyone, the game begins beating you over the head with it to a ridiculous degree. ‘Do you feel like a hero yet?’ it asks you in the loading screen, smugness dripping from the words. ‘If you were a better person you wouldn’t be here.’ The only way to win at this game is not to play it. Which is absurd, because having made a purchase (or borrowing from someone who has!) the last thing I want is for game writers to start taunting me for engaging with their product.

This isn’t dark subversion of expectations. I don’t think I’d feel it to be even had I been a big fan of these games anyway. I don’t feel I need a morality lesson from a game, on how I need to stop to think whether killing men made of polygons is right, even if they’re meant to be MURRICANS. I don’t feel I need to feel terrible about having played through a pre-set scenario just because it turns out destructive. When Bioshock did it, I was amused because while I felt manipulated, it was a clever twist and once revealed, it was left to one side. Here, I felt manipulated but it was signposted far too heavily (‘There’s always a choice!’) and once it was revealed I was beaten over the head with it for the rest of the game.

And that’s not even mentioning how completely ridiculous it is that Walker has been hallucinating all the way through.

The story is a pretty snappy one. Three elite soldiers are sent to look for survivors in Dubai after it is devastated by massive sandstorms, a previous entire battalion sent there having vanished. When they arrive, they find that this battalion has taken over the remains of the city, apparently following a coup – and the CIA are now in conflict with them. After having to fight for their lives, Captain Walker and his two men Lt. Walker and Staff Sgt Lugo decide they need to take down this dug-in militia. Which, as I’ve already spoiled, turns out to be incredibly destructive.

The story overall isn’t terrible, other than the smugness towards the end – but I was also made to cringe a lot by how the whole thing is supposed to be a tribute to Heart of Darkness, culminating slightly embarrassingly in the Kurtz substitute being called ‘Konrad’. While darker than many such games, of course, you get to do all sorts of fun things like fire a minigun from a helicopter, shoot everything from RPGs to shotguns and zipline between huge Dubai skyscrapers.

Graphically, it is also good, with locations lovingly rendered. Unfortunately, the characters themselves are a little lacking in this department, especially in the way they move, which is clunky.

All the game’s flaws could have been forgiven if it were really good. If it had been solid fun to play, that would have come first. Unfortunately, it’s pretty terrible. The very basics are fine – the general aiming and shooting is good, the variety of weapons is admirable and the convenient way the terrain always gives you somewhere to hide is good. Unfortunately, there are certain things that ruin it. First, the awful mechanic for taking cover, which is absolutely crucial. I played on the hardest setting available at the start, and if you don’t take cover you die in seconds – and have to suffer looong loading times to respawn, which is something that definitely shouldn’t happen anyway. Unfortunately, once you take cover things get incredibly clunky – getting up again to escape from a grenade takes too long and often you end up facing the wrong way. The prompt to swap from one piece of cover to another often just doesn’t show up. If you’re running for cover from a heavy (a rather absurd idea in and of themselves), woe betide you if you take cover on the side of something, because you won’t be able to slip around the corner. Other things inexplicably won’t let you take cover, and still more you can’t shoot over despite how obviously feasible it is. This, more than anything else, made the game incredibly frustrating.

Several mandatory scenarios are also ridiculously tricky. There was one part where I had to shoot out big windows, and it seemed to take several minutes to do it. At another point, you’re chased by a helicopter and survival is pure luck.

I desperately wanted the game to end 2-3 hours before it did. But I was damned if I was gonna quit before finishing. 

Bioshock 2

I was resistant to playing through Bioshock 2 for a very long time. I bought it when it was going very cheap, but even then it took months, possibly years before I actually played. I had been told it was an inferior sequel, it was deeply disappointing, that it was like a direct-to-video follow-up of a good film. In the end, I quite regret this, because I very much enjoyed Bioshock 2. In every way, I prefer it to Bioshock Infinite.

As to its relationship with the first game, well...the story of the protagonist is certainly nowhere near as interesting. It doesn’t have that wonderful twist that plays with what it means to follow the instructions given to you by a game’s set goals. It also doesn’t benefit from revealing Rapture in all its Art Deco glory – or, indeed, Columbia up in the sky. Its iconic enemy is certainly a long way beneath the Big Daddy or the Motorised Patriot – or the Songbird: the Big Sister is one of the most annoying parts of the gameplay. It feels much more limited, since backtracking is forbidden and the game must be taken chapter-by-chapter. It lacks a genuinely strong ending, though it was wonderful and hilarious to see Rapture as a Little Sister does, and of course we don’t have the fun of the first game’s post-mortem investigation: Rapture has clearly failed and fallen to pieces, but why? That’s all been answered already, replaced by the limited mystery of ‘who is Eleanor?’

However, three critical things made this a real pleasure for me, heightened by the fact that I expected something awful and got something good. The first was that while it wasn’t quite Bioshock in terms of plot and sophistication, it was almost there. The second was that the gameplay was more polished and varied, and there were some quite wonderful ways to fight off the waves of enemies that you have to face – my favourite mostly involving bouncing them about with the wind traps. But the third and most important part was that this game did much more than the first game in exploring the philosophical ideas raised in the original.

The original, you see, is sometimes called a ‘critique of Objectivism’. Now, obviously, there was a big and obvious influence from Ayn Rand: Andrew Ryan is clearly a play on her name, Rapture’s twee early-history ideals are those of Objectivism and all that talk about parasites comes from the Objectivist (and libertarian) views on the State. But I found it a long way from a ‘critique’. Sure, an Objectivist society gets set up, goes wrong and falls apart. But it goes wrong because (a) Ryan isn’t a very good Objectivist, ends up experimenting on human beings to remove their free will, effectively constructs a big utopian prison and spoils his version of the free market by removing the possibility of import and export, and (b) because magically powered sea-slugs are discovered that make society collapse and a civil war erupt, while also creating insane drug addicts and violent superhumans, which frankly isn’t very likely in Galt’s Gulch. It was a story set in a fallen Objectivist utopia, sure, but it wasn’t what you’d call a critique of Objectivism. Rapture didn’t fail because of Objectivist ideas, but because of the ways it deviated from Objectivism – though that can also be said of Animal Farm.  

Which is where Bioshock 2 comes in. By having someone politically opposite from Ryan – Altruist Sofia Lamb – assuming power, there is a chance to explore these political ideas a little better. Despite Sofia Lamb’s bizarre attempts to create a true gestalt collective – in a rather Star Trek sort of sense – this game is also not a critique on Altruism as a political mindset, and also distorts the general concept with outlandish sci-fi, but after all, you need a driving plot for a shooting game. The real result, though, is that the conflicting political views lead to much more discussion. I absolutely loved angry Ryan’s little theme park ride ‘Journey to the Surface’, in which giant hands representing ‘the parasite’ in various acts of large-state theft, starting with the farmer’s possessions and culminating in a child conscripted for war. The obvious clash between Ryan and Lamb over art and its purpose shows a wider argument than the central one about money, and simmering beneath it all is the hint that the solution is between the two extremes...but not where American society landed.

To allow these ideas to be conveyed, a story about a prototype Big Daddy bonded to a little sister who just so happens to be Sofia Lamb’s daughter is developed. The child, Eleanor, was brought up considering the dog-eat-dog world of Objectivism was bizarre and selfish (she calls them ‘dog-eaters’), only to end up in the Little Sister programme after her mother is arrested. After her mother claims her back and undoes her programming, she resurrects her original Daddy, Subject Delta – which is you. Yes, you are a (rather feeble) Big Daddy for the entire game. Suits me!

Putting the game on hard was a good idea – it seemed just the right difficulty, though there was an overabundance of resources towards the end, making the last couple of levels a breeze, including duelling two Big Sisters and the final defend the flag battle reminiscent of that in Bioshock Infinite. A last boss would have been nice, but the general level of difficulty and the variety of ways it is possible to attack – or defend – made the rather short game immensely playable. That said, I got the good ending – and I doubt I’ll go back and replay the game for the others. I’ll just watch ‘em on Youtube.

Thinking back, as it came out in the period I wasn’t playing many games, Bioshock 2’s large posters were the first time I really knew about the series – though I likely had glimpses of the original game too. I remember it well – someone mentioned that Subject Delta was Bomberman, and I could never unsee it. Goddamn Bomberman. 

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

It’s not an unbroken record...though I might sound like a broken one. I just don’t particularly enjoy Zelda games, even if they seem like exactly my sort of thing. Like so many others, I am a sucker for Link’s design in all its forms. I mained him in Brawl and I have a T-shirt from Qwerty with a cute grumpy picture of him after harassing cuccos and suffering the consequences. This game’s retro design had him looking particularly cute, especially when doing things like running into walls, and though it was divisive, I enjoyed the gameplay mechanic of Link’s merging with walls and the dungeon design possibilities it brought with it.

Yet once again, I just found no connection with the story or Link’s simplistic characterisation.

In A Link Between Worlds, a baddie is on the loose turning important people into statues. The blacksmith’s apprentice seems an unlikely hero, but soon gets involved in the usual quest to gain the Master Sword, free seven Sages and use a piece of the Triforce to rescue Princess Zelda – who it should be noted is still formidable here despite being the damsel in distress. The unique twist here is that Hyrule has been united with an alternate world, fittingly named Lorule, which is a far more dangerous and unpleasant place, and can be entered through tears in the wall in various locations. The princess there, Hilda, assists you in your quest, as does a strange little cowardly merchant in a fun rabbit-themed costume, who towards the end in a twist that may be obvious but actually blindsided me, turns out to have more of a place in this story than might be expected. Padding this out is the side-quest for Maiamais, annoying little baby octopus-hermit-crab-things that make plaintive mewls at you from hidden locations until you save them and take them to their mama.

It took me a while to play through this short game. I put it on hold in favour of Bravely Default, and it hasn’t been tugging me back to it desperately, so that I mostly made progress on public transport. Nothing was really a challenge here, with the dungeons mostly being a case of going through the motions with nothing very devious involved, and the only mechanically challenging part being one optional mini-dungeon where you have to dash through various gates to get a rupee reward. The idea of Streetpass opponents was quite fun, but the computer AI was really too predictable and incapable of dealing with boomerangs from behind. The final boss wasn’t a pushover, either, and his patterns were fun to figure out, which is testament to good game design.

I’ve played a fair few Zelda games, now, though I can’t claim they were part of my childhood, which may account in part for my indifference. But I need a lot more character and plot to engage with a game, even one of the stature of Zelda. Mute characters can have a lot of development, but I feel like Nintendo just treat Link like he’s already fully fleshed-out and doesn’t need new characterisation. Yes, we know the archetypal story, and yes, gameplay comes first, but this was nowhere near enough fun to make up for how dull I find lil’ Link’s collection quests. Yet I’ll probably still keep buying Zelda games and seeing if the next one will engage me more, or the next, or the next. 

Infamous

This has been a long time in coming. I had quite a difficult time getting through Infamous, which I got as one of the free games given as compensation for the 2011 Playstation Network outage. I played it for a few hours but didn’t much like it, and it lay dormant on my hard drive until I decided to start finishing all the PSN games I had. Even then, it took a long time to finish Infamous because I had a hard drive problem resulting in having to replay about two hours of the game, which is a good way to make it unappealing for a while. Still, the prospect of getting a good background in before playing Second Son on PS4 took me back again, though I’m not going to get Second Son until its price comes way down and I’ve finished various other games I have lined up.

Ultimately, Infamous won’t be on my favourite games lists, but it was actually pretty good fun. Every time I played it, I enjoyed it, and there’s something endearing about Cole’s ridiculous Batman voice, the jerky way he climbs buildings as you hammer the jump button, and the funny way his head turns as if he smelled something unpleasant when he heals people.

But I have to say that Infamous feels very old-fashioned at this point. After playing games like The Last of Us, even though I know Infamous is much faster-paced it feels extremely clunky and rather late-PS2 in presentation and play style.

Infamous tells the story of Cole, a normal sort of guy who is given powers by contact with a mysterious ‘Ray Sphere’. A select few people are ‘conduits’, able to receive impressive powers from this strange power source, and as it later turns out through some time-travelling parallel-worlds comic book plotting, Cole being one who would be empowered rather than destroyed in an explosion of the Ray Sphere was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, his hometown, Empire City, is quarantined in the wake of the explosion and soon overrun by different gangs – the Reapers, the Dust Men (probably sounds cooler in the US, where ‘Dustman’ doesn’t commonly used for ‘garbageman’, though this seems to be the intended allusion) and the First Sons, each with their own powerful leaders who soon grow interested in Cole.

The game’s gimmick is that you can choose to make good or evil decisions to affect your ‘karma’. Though this is suggested to be an interesting mechanic, really it’s utterly binary – there’s no advantage to mixing up your decisions, and really you have to place through twice, once as a goodie and once as a total bastard in order to get any benefit at all. I went for good, and I doubt I’ll repeat the experience for the small variations evil decisions will make. Ultimately, I think too much is made of this minor mechanic.

But what really works are the electricity-based powers. Essentially the game plays like the first 3D Grand Theft Auto games, giving you a city to explore and missions you can engage in to move the plot along if you fancy it, but lots of other things to do and random citizens to randomly assault if you so desire. Your path is shaped somewhat by areas only unlocked by plot progression and the rather annoying mechanic of having an area go blurry and unpleasant if the mains electricity is not yet switched on there, but it’s pretty sandbox-like in scale. Cole’s actions are somewhat goofy, especially the scrambling-climbing and the badly-targeted melee, but the electricity-based powers definitely enhance this. There’s something very satisfying about grinding along electric cables, turning on slow-mo precision targeting as you go for some headshots, then leaping off and going into a powerful ground-slam move. I put the game on hard and it seemed a good setting, balanced between Cole’s powers and the grunts’ remarkably good aim, though until the final boss nothing was really much of a challenge – and he was more irritating than anything else.

The story suffers from being badly-acted and the characters being pretty uninteresting, as well as in-game models not suiting cutscenes at all, though I liked the short comic-style sequences for key events. The story is left wide open and I probably will play Second Son, but I consider this very much a second-tier title, even for its time. 

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Similar to Ni no Kuni, I completed FFXIII-2 months ago, but thought I’d see every nook and cranny and get the platinum trophy before I wrote my impressions. The developers of FFXIII-2 seem to have taken on board the criticisms of the first game – that it felt far too linear, like running down endless corridors – and gone too far in the opposite direction. In this game, the player can hop between multiple timelines, altering future events and choosing non-linear paths through the story. The effect, unfortunately, is disorientation and a rather bland world – with another terrible final dungeon.

On the plus side, moving Serah to the spotlight was a great idea, Noel may be stupidly-named but is a great character to look at and in writing terms is an intriguing concept, and seeing Hope grown up is pretty cute. Like its predecessor, the game is incredibly nice to look at, and I actually found the combat system fairly fun.

You also get to chuck moogles about, which is a stroke of genius.

I must say, while the game held sway over me for a while, I never felt it was moving me emotionally, and I grew tired of the various stages that involved rotating little rooms about. Fighting the enemies never ended up with me feeling powerful, as the best RPGs do, and I didn’t honestly care very much about Noel’s ambitions.

As for the ending, well, it only served to make this game seem like a stopgap – and I haven’t rushed out to buy Lightning Returns, I have to admit. It’s on my to-play list...but fairly low down.

Square’s games look great – that’s more or less a given. But they really have to learn to have characters that an audience can identify with again – that can get you in the heart. Sadly, these aren’t them. But this is another I intend to replay some time in the far future. 

二ノ国 白き聖灰の女王 / Second Country: Queen of White Sacred Ash / Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

I finished Ni no Kuni some time ago now. I had decided to hold off until I got the Platinum trophy before writing a review – but then my Playstation had a hissy-fit and I’ve lost most of my save games, and don’t feel like starting again from the beginning any time soon...so I may as well do my review! I was most of the way through the grind trophies, too...bah!

Of course, I was on-board for this game from the start. A console game from Level 5 – of Professor Layton and Inazuma 11 fame – but with design from Ghibli and a very conscious effort to make the game as much like playing a Ghibli film as possible, including music from Joe Hisaishi? Of course I was in.  

The game follows adorable little 13-year-old Oliver from ‘Hotroit’ – a pleasant bit of nostalgic Americana – as he is whisked into another world of fantasy, magic, and Pokémon-esque creature-taming. Through some link with his sadly deceased mother, he becomes intertwined with an evil plot to remake the world and rob the people of their hearts. However, with the help of Sage’s daughter Maru, thief with a hidden past Jairo and the latter’s little brother, noble and handsome Lars, plus the strange little fairy Shizuku, Oliver might just have the magical power to defeat the sinister Jairo and even the White Witch herself.

This pleasantly classic tale takes its characters to strange desert industrial cities and frozen polar landscapes, from resorts that mandate everyone wear beachwear to temples that transform all visitors to frogs – to the belly of the giant mother of all fairies. The game does bittersweet extremely well, with not only Oliver’s memories of his mother and the fact that the whole quest on some level is about seeking closure over her death, but the backgrounds of Pea, Jairo and even the witch herself tugging at the heartstrings. Aesthetically, it is also a triumph, looking utterly gorgeous throughout and ably capturing the look of a Ghibli film, with the collectable creatures in particular nodding back to several of the studio’s bestiary.

As a game...it is just about enough fun to justify its prestige. In many ways, the combat is was Pokémon ought to be – you can control each of the characters in your party, and get them to send out one of three creatures to battle for them, which might emphasise strength, speed, defence or healing. They can be levelled up – usually though feeding them endless chocolate bars or cakes – and a bit more challenge is introduced through the need to quickly respond to calls to defend. Perhaps predictably, the game is a touch too easy, and rather too snowball-y – the few times something became a challenge, one of your allies might die and it becomes absurdly harder to win a battle that might be quite easy to manage as three. I found that using a little creature with high speed and an attack buff made life very, very easy.

Getting the trophies was a grind. Catching some of the creatures was far, far too long-winded, as when killed they may or may not be put into a state where they can be caught. This is the sort of thing that puts me off restarting.

On the other hand, the lovely characters, adorable world and refreshingly old-fashioned values mean that if there’s a remake, I’ll certainly put the effort in, and certainly at some point in a few years, I’ll want to do the whole things again.  

Bravely Default

On the face of it, Bravely Default looks like it will be just my sort of thing. A Squeenix J-RPG with classic turn-based combat, a fantasy epic storyline and cute adolescent characters. It was highly lauded when it came out, with many saying how it felt like a nostalgic return to the kind of game they used to play a decade ago. Perhaps this was my problem - for me, this wasn't a return to something half-forgotten. I only recently finished Tales of the Abyss and not so long before that I was was playing Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, which while based on the Tactics side of the franchise felt far more classic and refreshingly old-fashioned than this. I play J-RPGs all the time, including old-fashioned ones, and beside the best of them, Bravely Default really isn't one of the better iterations. 

As has been widely reported, Bravely Default is in essence part of the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, having begun there conceptually before diverging, but retaining much of the crystal lore as well as the familiar job classes. Rather than Ivalice, Bravely Default takes place in the world of 'Luxendarc'. If that name makes you cringe, be prepared for a whole lot of similar awful names for characters and places. Good guys are called 'Goodman', characters who live to accompany others get names like Vincent S. Court, and of course there's Airy the Fairy. One character's name is a painful anagram of 'Magic Knight', and some names had to be changed from the Japanese because a guy who looks like a rat called 'Ratz' was apparently too far...and, well, it sounds to me like they've totally changed the name of conniving desert country monarch Khamer VIII because his original name was a bit too uncomfortably close to 'Mohammad'. 

The only thing I unreservedly liked about Bravely Default was its music, which was consistently brilliant and often had me nodding along during dungeon runs. Revo is amazing and this is up there with his Attack on Titan intros, and if Linked Horizon toured Europe with their concert I’d definitely go, especially if Marty Friedman from Megadeth was there to reprise his little bit as he did in the Japan live. I only looked the soundtrack up after I saw his name on the credits – and I totally adore the live version, orchestra, choirs and pop singers included! Other than that - well, I have to say that it was a bust. 

The story is not good. The makers learned nothing from the second season of Suzumiya Haruhi I suppose: doing the same thing over and over and over is not even remotely fun. From Pan's Labyrinth to Bioshock, I have loved stories that play with free will and make you stop to question why the impressionable good guys go along with what they're told to do, but this one does it incredibly awkwardly and the ways it contrives to have the heroes not find out what their enemies are really trying to do really stretch credibility (especially over repeated meetings with the same people), and it becomes ridiculous when the game has made it incredibly obvious who the antagonist actually is - long before it starts spelling it out on the goddamn title screen - yet tries to have us believe our characters carry on their path. I’m only grateful that in only concerning a limited, if large, number of worlds, it avoids infinite world paradoxes – though presumably only one Lester of the many on the myriad different worlds had to show up, so there are plenty of others still left. 

The main characters don't appeal to me the way the best RPG characters do. I quite liked Agnes, with her 'Unacceptable!' catchphrase and utter lack of worldly guile, but she was extremely bland. Edea's character was totally ruined by the way they had to keep forcing her into battles before she actually stopped to talk to her former allies. Ringabell was kind of meant to be an annoying bastard, but unlike, say, Luke in Tales of the Abyss, I didn't grow to like him more once the angst got heaped on. He carried on being irritating all the time, and the way the game made it far too obvious who his alter-ego is (they even have him conspicuously leave the scene at just the right time, even though that's not necessary plot-wise, only a massive signpost to the 'twist') even without the hilarious original name 'Anazelle', which for most of the game I heard as 'Annabelle'. 

Then there was Tiz. Ah, Tiz, exactly the kind of character I usually totally fall for. Young, naive, good-hearted Tiz, made to suffer such terrible losses, awkward around his more knowing peers and diffident in matters of the heart, he ought to be adorable. But I really, really cannot get over his scumbag behaviour over his brother. He loses his brother in the intro, which ought to be incredibly harrowing. He then doesn't even mention it for a good few hours of gameplay. Okay, he's in denial. When he begins to finally open up about it, he fixes upon a surrogate of sorts, a little boy called Egil forced to work in the mines. He develops a bond with Egil because of how much he's reminded of his brother Til. He cares for Egil on their adventure, finds him a new family, goes to check on him often and it helps him deal with the loss of his brother.

Then when he goes to what seems like an alternate world, he doesn't even think about or mention Egil once. There is no forced child labour in this world's mines, and Tiz doesn't think 'Hmm, so where has poor Egil who had nobody until we arrived ended up?' He doesn't mention him once - and nor does the game, right up until the secret credits, in which we discover that what we thought was Tiz was just screwing with the kid anyway and has done things that will really mess with him. But mostly he’s just not even brought up. It's bizarre. And then when another world that offers everything the main characters want comes along and Til is alive, Tiz doesn't actually seem particularly bothered and never raises the possibility of fulfilling the quest as he sees it and then going back to Til, or taking this Til along, or any of the other myriad possibilities to stay with his brother. This bond that's supposed to form the core of the character is just completely unconvincing and underdeveloped, and it destroys the character for me entirely – which isn’t even mentioning the unforeseen twist at the very end which was clearly only thought of once Bravely Second was in development and means effectively we know nothing about the real Tiz at all.

Then there is the lauded combat. I can say without hesitation that it is the worst combat system of any RPG I have ever played, though possibly less annoying than the underwater speeds of the first Wild ARMs thanks to the fast-forward mode. The set-up is a conventional four-person turn-based RPG set-up...and then the add-ons to make it unique totally break it. It's not a bad idea - you can 'Default' to defend but also save up turns, up to a maximum of four at once that can be unleashed if you defended enough, or you can 'brave', spending those turns early but then being unable to move until you have repaid your debt. Good concept, right? 

Except that the vast majority of the game - on hard mode, mind - all I did against the very limited varieties of baddies was have everyone brave and then attack. Sixteen attacks in the first turn killed virtually everything I faced, especially once you start getting powerful abilities like the monk's natural talent or the ranger's precision/hawkeye combo. The times you can get problems with this are with enemies that auto-counter physical attacks, but there are various measures to get past that - rampart or utsusemi skills - before you even start thinking about using MP. 

Of course, to counter this bosses get absurdly tough, and the way the designers tackle that is to make some skills completely, utterly broken. The vast majority of enemies can be destroyed without a single chance to hit you back, including most of the optional 'Nemesis' baddies (most of them awesome in design terms, by the way), just by having four fast characters constantly doing the high jump skill with Hasten World ensuring they can do it without interruption. This even works on the hidden boss, apparently, though it being single-target meant it would take forever so I went for the similarly broken combo of a spiritmaster nullifying all damage while a dark knight deals out ridiculous damage and also heals with every dark nebula - a performer meanwhile topping up everyone's brave points. There was no strategy to this game, no reward to beating its toughest bosses - only broken combinations and hoping the semi-random approach to agility stats didn't screw you over or a lapse in concentration make you input the wrong thing and die. The Valkyrie trick also works on the final boss, which at least means you don’t have to look at the game at all, and see the bizarre image of your chin projected onto the sky of the multiverse. Please, Squeenix, let’s leave the front-facing camera out of our serious games.  

On the plus side, the voice acting is pretty solid. I was dumb and didn't see the Japanese-language option (because it's not in the sound menu, which I feel is silly), so was a good couple of hours in before making the switch, and felt the English performers were strong. The enemies were a bit hammy, but that was also true of the Japanese version, and if anything, I prefer the English Ringabel, who doesn't sound like he's way too old for his model and differentiates between his two roles better - even if that means putting on a really, really smug voice for his primary reading. Though I prefer the more ingenuous performances of the three others in the original, the English actors do good jobs, and the Airy in both versions is the right balance of cute and annoying, and fun to hear begging desperately for aid. 

I gave a pretty hefty amount of time to this game, seeing both endings, beating all optional bosses including the full council battle and the amusing surprise boss at the end of Dimension's Hasp, even when consecutive worlds had them doing exactly the same thing. There are parts I will certainly remember fondly, mostly little things like Edea's gluttony and how in one world, Victoria chairs a silly but adorable girl-power group. But I will certainly never replay the game, and much as I liked the ‘secret movie’ and its excellent use of the internal gyro, I will approach the sequel with caution. 

Borderlands 2

Midway through Borderlands 2, I really wanted it to end. I was bored of it. I was bored of it moving maddeningly slowly, and how my sniper rifle had removed almost all of the challenge, except when some ridiculously overpowered Constructor spawned on top of me. I was annoyed at how I was able to finish the story missions easily, but because I was underleveled it wouldn't even let me pick up the guns, locking them with level requirements. I wasn't engaged with the characters and I wasn't having much fun. 

Yet as I realised that the end of Angel's story wasn't the end of the game, and as I accepted that yes, I really did have to go and do the side-quests and level up before I could do a story mission 5 or so levels above where I was, the game finally began to grow on me. By the time I finally reached the end, I was genuinely enjoying myself. 

I'll be honest: Borderlands 2 is exactly the sort of game I normally avoid. I don't like this sort of brawnly FPS, where you go around slaughtering things and laughing about it, picking up bigger and bigger guns and being a macho 'badass' - a term this game loves. I didn't find Claptrap funny and I hadn't even played the first game to know what was going on. But the game had quite some critical acclaim and it was free last month on PSN, so I thought 'Why not?' Besides, I had read people raving about Tiny Tina and was curious to see what she was like. Answer - hilarious, but that twitchy eye of hers freaks me out. 

I'm aware that this isn't really a game to play alone. I'm sure it's more fun with three friends, especially when in the vehicles, but so long after the release date I didn't really want to ask around for others' help or be restricted in the times I could play. If it's really a good game, I reasoned, it has to be fun to play solo. 

And much as it took me a while to get into, ultimately I did enjoy it. It's a game absolutely stuffed with little details. It gleefully refers to everything in pop culture it possibly can, from A Clockwork Orange to Rocko's Modern Life, and pokes fun at itself and at gaming conventions as much as possible. The voice work is fantastic, not only when it comes to the main characters but also with the odd, colourful minor baddies, and though it was meant to annoy, I loved the gun that did nothing but nag at you. Finding little details like hidden shines to the Vault and a man who seems to think he's Batman kept me more interested towards the end, and oddly I found my favourite gun was one that 'lies' to you with its statistics, seeming to be useless until you notice its 5000% bonus damage. That and a corrosive shotgun together took the last boss down with very little trouble. 

The Psycho on the posters, while central to the game's marketing, was not actually anything particularly major in the game, just a recurring low-level enemy. The actual main cast of Vault Hunters aren't very interesting, but the main characters from the first game are a whole lot more engaging and well-defined. Their shady associates are often very funny, and the amoral angle the game goes for provides for some really funny moments. Handsome Jack is also a great antagonist, because you know he totally recognises what a dick he is and yet also how much he loves himself and his image. He works brilliantly as at once extremely strong and extremely weak out there on this space-cowboy planet he's turned upside-down. 

Ultimately, Borderlands 2 wasn't the most fun I've ever had with a game, and indeed took me a very long time to really warm up to. It also didn't feel like as much of a challenge as, perhaps, it should have - with the jump in strength between levels in particular feeling excessive to me and determining how much of a challenge this was. I am glad I got to the end of it...but I have to say I find myself increasingly drawn to at least finding out how much some of that extensive DLC costs...

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition

With a partner who is a very big fan of Tomb Raider, this was always going to be a game we ended up getting. And indeed, not only did we get the PS3 version, but the PS4 update too - with graphics at least like 10% better than the old version, to paraphrase South Park. Indeed, quite a lot of work obviously went on making this version look that little bit nicer - and certainly Lara's face was reworked, a fact that actually warranted some articles on online gaming news sites - but largely the game stayed more or less the same in all but the cosmetic sense. 

I liked Tomb Raider, even if I'm not a big fan of the series, which I played back when there was only the first game out on the original Playstation but found clunky and frustrating even by the standards of the day. This reboot has a much more likeable, young, vulnerable and believable Lara, a young archaeologist with a hunch rather than some ultra-rich dominatrix type. Contentious as scenes of her narrowly avoiding sexual assault were when the game was in development, this game does well at having a strong female lead by not really paying much attention to the fact that she's a strong female. She simply destroys everyone in her path, going from confused and helpless beginner to bullet-soaking badass much in the same way any other video game protagonist does, and ends up extremely powerful. 

At the same time, though, the game somehow doesn't quite feel like an AAA title, to use the parlance of the day. While I had major problems with Assassin's Creed IV, the only other game I've played in-depth on my PS4 (80 minutes to play through a Metal Gear Solid demo doesn't count), it simply felt on a far greater scale than Tomb Raider - the graphics were more impressive, the variety of actions the character could take, the length of the story and the amount of diversions it was possible to take simply made Tomb Raider seem a bit too light on content. Sure, Lara sometimes ended up sliding down things or having to press buttons with semi-strict timing, but it wasn't like having a variety of mini-games or side-missions. 

The game was also not very satisfying in terms of difficulty. I played it on hard mode, and the difficulty was either extremely easy or very briefly ridiculously difficult. There was no sense of the game gradually getting tougher - in fact, the new skills you gained meant that it felt like you far outscaled your enemies and that the later onslaughts of vast amounts of enemies were actually easier than the ones you had faced earlier in the game. Thus the final encounters in particular had no sense of accomplishment or challenge to them, which is problematic on hard mode. 

So it falls to the story to really carry the piece. And while it's a decent attempt, unfortunately it's not quite there. This was never going to be quite the Game-of-the-Year epic Last-Of-Us rollercoaster of emotions, nor would there be a big Bioshock twist. But again, while this was certainly better than a lot of plots, including everything I've seen for an Uncharted game, it still fell a little short of what I expected. Lara and her team are searching for Yamatai, which Lara hypothesises is actually in the Dragon's Triangle. This hunch turns out to be correct as the crew get wrecked on a small island filled with shrines to the goddess Himiko, which is a neat bit of real-life archaeological mystery for the game to begin with. Himiko's shaman powers have allowed her to live on in a way, her soul transferred between vessels, and her mastery of weather resulting in every vessel in the area being marooned on the island with no way to escape. The Japanese seem to have lived on only as the 'Storm Guard', protecting Himiko and her shrine in masked armour that rather dehumanises them, while the rest of the island is mostly populated by Westerners, who have a strange tribal community, hoping to somehow appease the queen so that they can return home. Rather pleasingly and providing some of the best visuals in the game, there are vessels from hundreds of years of transportation history wrecked about the island, to be explored, climbed on or destroyed. Rather less convincingly, there are thousands and thousands of dead bodies everywhere, be they bones or bits of chopped-up flesh, with Lara at one point surrounded by mountains of bodies, which really strains credulity. 

Lara is hesitant to become a killer at first, but luckily everyone but her small circle of friends is trying to kill her, and she has the uncanny ability to be shot over and over again but get better in a few seconds of hiding, so it's perfectly reasonable for her to protect herself by gunning down a huge number of people. Most of her friends also don't make it home, either giving their lives heroically to save Lara's or betraying her and getting their just deserts, and there is a poorly-developed leader of the local tribal militia called Mathias who finds out that Lara's friend Sam is by pure coincidence (and, I suppose, sheer numbers on a family tree) a descendant of Himiko who can be used for the mumbo-jumbo supernatural rites. 

I am being quite hard on the game - as a matter of fact, it is pretty fun. The combat is somewhat unbalanced, with the assault rifle far outweighing all other weapons for power, but it is also good fun and the way Lara can scramble and roll about is a lot of fun. Some of the setpieces are inventive and extremely fun to get through, and some of the little puzzle-tombs are fiendish but never utterly baffling. Tomb Raider was a fun game that I am glad I got to play through - but it didn't quite satisfy, I'm afraid. It was a decent steak, well-cooked and very tasty - but to really be enjoyable it needed some side-dishes.  

Bioshock Infinite

While I very much enjoyed the first Bioshock, I still haven't played the second one - put off by its terrible reputation. Similarly, Bioshock Infinite, though I very much liked the concepts revealed in the development process, was low-priority. But hey, it was free for PS+ members this week, so why not?

Ultimately, it's not a game I would recommend, especially beside the far better original. There are some fine ideas, and the basic concept of taking a series known for being set underwater and taking it instead up into a floating city is a nice idea. Unfortunately, it also means they swapped claustrophobic, dank, creepy tunnels for wide open spaces and bright colours, noir-ish art deco for idealistic Americana - horror for cartooniness. And a whole lot is lost in terms of atmospherics as a result. 

Bioshock Infinite follows grizzly but heroic Wounded Knee veteran turned potboiler detective Booker DeWitt (geddit? Like Bryce DeWitt?), who has a chance to wipe away his gambling debts by recovering a girl from the floating city of Columbia, run by a prophet in a monumental cult of personality. Along the way, he has to contend with the local law enforcement, including people with bizarre powers that he can then take on himself much like in the first game, plus sentry turrets, goofy-looking 'handymen' and the best idea of the game, the iconic 'Motorized Patriot'. Later, there are also the utterly pointless Boys of Silence, who are supposed to encourage stealth but do nothing more than set weaklings on you anyway, and the game's beefed-up version of the Big Daddies, the massive Songbird, which it is only possible to defeat through the power of plot progression. 

In terms of gameplay, it's like playing the original in the sunshine, only with a lot more limitations on guns. You can only carry two at a time, and ammo is limited - though in massive supply. It was a mistake to put it on 'normal', because it was extremely easy, with no strategy needed except for one annoying ghost battle. My biggest problems came from poor QA - twice I had to restart my game because of bugs, once when Mrs Lin refused to move out of the way and once because I charged at the ghost and got stuck inside a pillar. Great. I suppose that's the trouble with playing the free games - I normally want to get as much time as possible out of a purchase, but free ones I want to rush through. 

Once DeWitt meets Elizabeth, the girl he's been charged to rescue, the main thrust of the plot begins - not only is there the question of why the 'prophet' Comstock has locked her up, but the fact that she has unusual powers. The city floats thanks to advanced quantum engineering, which also hints at multiple worlds. Though the title is 'Infinite' and the story hints at infinite possible universes, that's not the route it goes at all. The plot relies heavily on the idea of constants - there is apparently 'always a man and always a lighthouse', which allows for a nice trip to Rapture that unfortunately is only a keen reminder of how much better the first game was, and though I like the way DeWitt is led to make the decision Elizabeth is leading him to from the start, without some very iffy reasoning on how constants then exclude the possibility for infinite worlds to come about and awful Back to the Future paradoxes with people able to make themselves disappear by altering past events, the ending just doesn't work - and in any case certainly isn't compatible with the idea of infinite universes of the 'quantum tears' crossing time as well as space - which it does. We should be used to bad sci-fi writing on time travel by now, sure, but Bioshock is known for its clever writing and intelligent twists. So the disappointment was far worse.

There are some bright ideas and lovely visuals here. But the precedent made me want a game that was fun to play, frightening, creepy, intelligent and had a good twist. And it kinda fell short in every one of those aspects. 

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

(Fanart by yami-izumi on deviantART)

I could have expected this acclaimed ‘art game’ to get dark, really. It starts with a child at his mother’s grave, thinking about watching her drown and being unable to help her. But hey, plenty of Disney films have that sort of death scene and mourning afterwards. After the twee first hour or so of this, I was totally unprepared for just how dark things would get. It’s less the larger events, the traumas and the losses, and more the details. No young Disney hero has to choose whether or not to save a grieving father from hanging himself, cause the dead bodies of giants to hack one another’s limbs off so they can get past or bathe in blood to interrupt a cult from sacrificing a young woman. As to that oft-seen trope where a boy becomes tempted sexually, is implied to lose his childhood and then immediately pay a dear price for it…well, there’s a lot psychoanalysts can say about it, I’m sure.

But I was left deeply impressed by Brothers. It is indeed an art game in the same vein as Journey, short in overall length but unhurried, deeply influenced by fantasy writing, mature in presentation and emotionally heavy-hitting. Telling the story of two boys in a world of mythology that draws many comparisons to Fable but with a more Scandinavian twist to it – trolls and all – it intentionally starts with low-key puzzles like chasing off a village bully by setting free a silly little yappy dog and transitions through an episode of wolves and graveyards to the far darker themes of the later chapters…though always with touches of light, usually revolving around making animals happy. One of the good things about trophies and achievements is that a game like this, full of sweet little touches, can guide you to seeing the scenes put in just for fun, and several of them are very rewarding – and one pretty heart-wrenching. If you’ve seen it, I’m pretty certain you know which I mean.

The brothers themselves, despite have Sim-like speech, grow well over the course of the game. The earnest one learns to be a bit less blinkered (though perhaps to his peril) and the younger one, who starts out incredibly obnoxious even for a ‘prankster’, has to mature very fast. The game itself is a pleasure, with simple controls facilitating some ingenious puzzles, all of which are easily figured out but often raise a smile with their cleverness. I wasn’t stuck once, but had to pause to think – and admittedly had to go back for several trophies. And though it seems like the only way to die at first is to fall from a great height or to get attacked by something and fall over, but there are some moderately brutal death scenes here, especially when you first meet the girl and have to escape a mysterious threat. Gameplay-wise, there were several puzzles that reminded me of the co-op in Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, but mostly it reminded me of the old PC puzzle game Gobliiins, another European game with a medieval setting and lots of creatures from mythology wherein a single player controls multiple characters so that when they interact they get through puzzles. This is over 20 years later, though, and things can be done on a more epic scale – and the grandiose view is something this game does very well.

I would like to have seen multiple possible endings, though I guess that if there was a statement to be made, the writer wanted to keep it consistent. Besides, this sort of downloadable game is generally considered a single unified playing experience that may be brief but is affecting. It certainly is that, and I will watch with interest for any sort of follow-up, and beyond a doubt play it through again sometime that I want to be a little moved. 

The Last of Us: Left Behind

It’s only a short DLC, sure – though a 5GB download – but Left Behind is worth a little entry here.

This is the first time I've bought DLC to continue a game, and that's really because what was most striking and enjoyable about The Last of Us was its story and its characters.

Not a whole lot happens in Left Behind, in all honesty - the side-story jumps between two different time periods while drawing parallels between different events in the difficult life that Ellie has led. One part fills in the blank between Joel's injury and Ellie caring for him in the isolated hut - just how did she get him there? The other, perhaps providing more of the heart of the piece, is the flashback to Ellie before she met Joel - and her entirely adorable relationship with another rebellious girl called Riley, who has come back to see her after having become a Firefly, filling in some blanks such as who the dog tags in her backpack from the main game belonged to. 

The actual game portion is really centred on the midquel part - there, Ellie is armed and capable and has to deal with some quite tricky situations, including some incredibly annoying stalkers. On the other hand, I was slightly disappointed because I kept trying to play the game with stealth and finesse, only to keep failing and to realise it was a lot easier to kill one enemy sneakily, then just go ham and shoot everyone very loudly. The parts where you set the infected on the 'Cannibals' was quite enjoyable, but the combat segments were few and far between, and not the focus at all. 

Because this DLC is here to tell a little story, the story of Ellie and her sweet little romance with Riley as they run about a mall, having water gun fights, taking photos together (that, sweetly, get posted onto your real Facebook) and dance to Riley's mix tape up on a counter. Of course, it inevitably ends badly - otherwise how would we get to the story proper? - and there's a definite tear-jerker element, but I have to say that in the tradition of the game, the most harrowing parts are actually left unsaid. 

Incredibly cute, cleverly-done and interspersed with a lot of fun details - especially in the Hallowe'en joke store - this was also a pleasant reminder of just how superb the game looked and how well-crafted its characters are. Great stuff. 

Assassin’s Creed IV

Assassin’s Creed IV is my first Assassin’s Creed game. Well, strictly that’s not true, as I’ve bought a couple of the others but never actually played them. It is the first one I have any experience with beyond seeing various pictures of Ezio and, no doubt, various others I couldn’t name. So the fact that it is apparently quite unlike the other games in the series, as well as a return-to-form for the series is possibly fortunate, but not the reason I got it. That reason, in truth, is that it looked like the PS4 launch title I would enjoy the most, with Knack looking to actually be clunky and uninteresting and the rest being the kind of pseudo-macho brainless FPS regurgitations that seem so in vogue but hold no interest whatever for me.

So how was Assassin’s Creed IV? Well, I’m not sure I would call it a good game, but I certainly enjoyed it. It was exceptionally well-presented, had a decent amount of depth, was enjoyable almost throughout and did a superb job with its angle on a very popular historical period – the years leading up to 1718 and the end of the Golden Era of Piracy. Yes, this is not a game of sneaking about crowded cities killing Templars, but of sailing the high seas, visiting early colonies in the New World and…well, sneaking into camps and mansions and killing some Templars.

Edward Kenway, who has no historical basis but I suppose has some bits and pieces in common with Walter Kennedy and, at least ultimately, with Long Ben. He is a well-spoken Welshman from a poor family who leaves his wife to seek riches on the high seas but ends up largely alone and impetuous. As a crewman on a pirate ship, he is washed ashore along with a mysterious man in what the player knows as an Assassin’s uniform. When the Assassin tries to kill him, Edward retaliates, hunting him down and taking his identity along with his life. Hoping to take on a ‘commission’ this Assassin mentioned, Edward goes to Havana, where he discovers that the man he is imitating was defecting to the Templar cause, and learns of a mysterious and ancient ‘observatory’ that houses the power to see through others’ eyes, just the sort of thing a hidden order wants in order to manipulate the world from behind the scenes. Of course, he doesn’t last long in his false ruse, and is clapped in irons, which of course were fairly easy to escape from, and the ship easy to capture to begin a true pirate career.

A chance encounter with the bumbling Stede Bonnet, just starting out on his quest to become the most middle-class pirate in history, makes it easier to join up with other pirates in Nassau, including Benjamin Hornigold, his one-time protégé Blackbeard and the apparent son of Captain Kidd (from whose mythos also comes a black quartermaster). Through Kidd, he learns more about the Assassins, and eventually of course is tangled up in their power struggle with the Templars and the race to the Observatory, which the ‘sage’ – an imposing Bartholomew Roberts with a wonderful Welsh accent – is key to operating.

Tied up with this is the modern-day storyline, apparently running through the games, of the struggle between Templars and Assassins continuing in now – or in the very near future. There is a company that can use a person’s DNA to view the memories of their ancestors, which they use to create interactive experiences – but of course the Templars want to use the technology to locate things like the Observatory, and to bring back the ghostly techno-organic creature called Juno…or something like that. It’s frankly horribly lame and the low point of the gameplay, with cringy ‘hacking’ minigames and a stupid subplot about getting manipulated by some nutcase from IT. The game would be far better without this guff.

But it does allow some things to make more sense. It makes more sense of some of the challenges – there’s no reason otherwise that a game should end if you fail to overhear an entire conversation of it you are spotted by people you can very easily dispatch anyway. The idea of ‘desynchronisation’ means some of this makes sense, as does limiting parts of the otherwise open-ended world so that you can’t go off exploring them too early. It also allows for some acknowledged historically inaccurate buildings and suchlike for the sake of an impressive setting, though the little email discussions included in the building descriptions also inspire some cringing. On the other hand, without introduction I didn’t know what on earth ‘synchronising’ did at the start of the game (lovely though it looks) and there never was any material point to collecting ‘animus fragments’, a miniature collection quest that pads out the things to do in any given (beautiful) location.

The main game is flawed but fun. Like so many similar games, it’s a stealth/action game in which you can quietly dispatch your adversaries, creep around them to your main target or just attempt to kill everyone at once, which frankly was usually the quickest and easiest option. Indeed, the game was sadly much too easy, never challenging and often with laughable AI, the very final task nothing more than timing when to climb and jump. Thankfully, the sailing is rather brilliant – it’s extremely satisfying to duel with other ships, cripple and board them for loot and repairs, and taking forts is even better. It’s also where things actually get challenging with the rather ridiculous legendary ships. Shanties were annoying and got shut off every time, but largely travelling from place to place was easy and the simplistic whaling minigame was also strangely addictive.

The story began very well, but fizzled out. The pirate fantasy is strong, and they do a brilliant job with making Blackbeard both fearsome and intelligent. Though it gets a little annoying when ‘James Kidd’ is supposed to be convincingly a young man, with all the characters failing to notice that this is very obviously a woman – made worse by the fact that (at least for 99% of it) this game only has adults, which would make ‘Kidd’ the only adolescent in the entire game universe. Nobody is surprised when she turns out to be Mary Read, with Ann Bonny and Calico Jack soon showing up too. The problem then is that Kenway sort of drifts, the Templar threat is very distant, and then all of a sudden, with a feeling of ‘there must be more to see’, it all ends.

There was a lot I didn’t do. I lost interest in getting the platinum when I saw multiplayer trophies were required. I only found a few buried treasures and a handful of alternate outfits (some of which mess up hood animations). But I bought the game to wow me until there were PS4 games I really wanted, and in that capacity, actually enjoyed it more than expected. 

Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 Remix (Part 1 – Kingdom Hearts Final Mix HD Remix)

Well, I had to replay it three times to get the pesky platinum trophy, so I feel I can say this with certainty: everything bad that happens in the story of the first Kingdom Hearts is the fault of Donald Duck.

Why? Because when Riku and Sora are reunited, Sora asks him to take Riku into their gummi ship. For no reason other than that he’s a goddurn stubborn nitwit (that IS what he called Daffy in Roger Rabbit, right?), Donald Duck flat-out refuses. When Riku slinks away and Sora doesn’t flat-out abandon his new friends, Maleficent is able to use this apparent betrayal as the leverage she needs to start manipulating her new protégé. If Riku had gone with Sora and co, it would have been far harder for the incompetent baddies to kidnap the princesses, Ansem wouldn’t have had his access to the world and any alternate plans could have been easily foiled by Riku and Sora together. So…well, yes, it’s mostly Riku’s fault for being a sensitive little priss who has such a hissy fit over not getting his way that he ends up doing the bidding of evil-doers, but without Donald acting the way he did, none of what happened would have happened – at least not in a way so difficult to stop. That darn duck.

Anyway, yes, I was very happy that Square decided that to mark 10 years since the release of the original game, they would re-release these HD remixes. I have the original Final Mix – and the second game’s – but never got around to playing in Japanese, and now I don’t have to!

It’s true that this is quite a lazy port, despite the protestations from Square that they had to rebuild a lot from scratch and used models from the other games. There have been pretty comprehensive lists of the things that they should have done – put the more complicated, far better-looking hi-res models into all cutscenes rather than keeping the original game’s usage of the in-game model when they could get away with it, chiefly. But also they should've added a theatre mode to watch all the extra-good-looking cutscenes – including good ole Another side, another story, the lovely CG animation they made as a fun contrast to the colourful game and then had to painfully spend 3 more games trying to force into the actual story.

Yes, it’s a story that gets incredibly convoluted, so it’s quite nice to go back for a refresher. Even leaving aside the things we know from future games – that there have been countless keyblade masters, many hundreds of them at once; that within Sora’s heart there’s already the fragment of Ventus’, stuck in there fast enough that it didn’t show when Kairi’s heart came out along with the six other fragments apparently in Riku’s keyblade; that Ansem isn’t Ansem after all – it’s worth recapping what actually goes on in this game, before things get really convoluted. And also to remember some of the things that have never really been resolved – what do Sora and Riku’s parents think about their absence of a year or longer? What exactly is Kairi’s background in Hollow Bastion? What exactly were Maleficent and ‘Ansem’ planning to do with their power from Kingdom Hearts, given that it would essentially rip apart everything else in existence? Given what happened when the Door to Darkness was actually opened, was there any point at all to Sora’s quest? Since the same result would have come about given the true nature of Kingdom Hearts…

Beyond the untangling of the of the overcomplicated plot, though, this is a simple story of a sweet young boy named Sora – somewhat jarringly little in this game compared with his KH2 incarnation – who when his world comes to an end is chosen by a mysterious ‘keyblade’ to seal locks through which monsters come, and to defeat the evil masterminds behind the plot. Usually by hitting them a lot. The real hook was that his adventures brought him into contact with not only Disney characters, but also characters from Square’s Final Fantasy series. The choices are somewhat limited – the Disney films are mostly old-classic or renaissance, emblematic or from way back at the start of Disney’s feature film production, and except with Vivi in Kingdom Hearts 2, the only FF characters we get are ones Nomura designed, limiting us to VII, VIII and X, which is a real shame. I’d love to see more obscure Disney and a much wider Final Fantasy net. I’d be thrilled to see Sora fight with Taran, and hey, in a future KH we could see Hope tagging along with a bossy Larsa, hooking up with Bartz and the Dissidia Onion Knight to take on a rampaging Kefka. But I suspect these things are all a pipe dream.

Yet I will continue to suck up anything Squeenix gives me under this banner, because the games are not only fun, but challenging. Honour binds me to get the challenge trophies on Proud Mode rather than beginner, and I wouldn’t rest until I got 100 hits on the Pink Agaricus despite now having to get Donald and Goofy stuck somewhere. Plus I saw things I’d never seen in the original to get this platinum – largely because I’d never otherwise bother with Gummi missions and completing Synthesis. And hey – I’d until this run-through never even noticed Gepetto opens a workshop in Traverse Town.

Nostalgia, affection for the characters and a fun world made this a game I was very happy to replay in HD.