Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep HD 2.5 Remix

Okay. So it took me over three years to actually get around to getting the platinum for the HD remake of Birth by Sleep. It was back in March 2015 that I got the KH2 platinum. And frankly, I’ve completely given up on getting the Chain of Memories platinum, because that game is just not very good and having to play it over and over is absolutely no fun. But anyway, yesterday I finally got around to beating No Heart and then the Mysterious Figure with Terra, before anticlimactically having to go and find a heartless I’d missed in Deep Space – finally popping that coveted platinum trophy.

And despite dragging this out over several years, I think I can say with confidence that this is my favourite in the Kingdom Hearts series. The first game is the best conceptually, with the merger of Disney and Square the best-balanced, the story not yet horribly bloated and the overall feeling the most joyful. KHI Sephiroth on Proud Mode is also the best they’ve balanced a hidden boss to be a very hard challenge while also feeling rewarding and fair to fight. KHII is the best player experience, and nothing quite matches the joy of late game Sora destroying everything with a highly intuitive control system. It’s also the best-looking game so far.

But Birth By Sleep has a lot going for it. It has the most emotionally resonant story, quite cleverly balancing a tragic story with a satisfying feeling of having triumphed by beating the game. It has the most pure-hearted of the central boy characters, for much as I love Sora there are a few moments where he borders on psychotic when he talks about the deaths of enemies. It has the most interesting control system in that each of the three wayfinders have their own unique playstyle, so that mastering each of them takes different skills. More than any other factor, though, I think it’s the very serious tone and the dynamic of strained friendships, loss, betrayal and protective instincts that fuel the story that make me like it the most.  

In terms of flaws, there are a few that stand out – a somewhat awkward control system derived from the game’s origins on PSP; poor balance of certain skills and shootlocks that mean that the game stops being vaguely challenging only about a third of the way in; a distinct lack of Final Fantasy elements, represented pretty much entirely by moogles and Zack; and the most ridiculous hidden bosses, all of whom spam attacks over and over that can take you to 1hp so that most of the fight against them is just dodging and healing, and who require you to be more lucky than skilled in taking them down. One quite nice thing was that the platinum necessitated beating them all with every character, and of course my pride necessitated doing so on Proud Mode, which was partly why this process stretched out so long – I hesitated to load up the game when I knew all I’d be doing was trying an unfair boss over and over.

But beat them I finally did, and very much enjoyed watching the ending and extras on a TV screen instead of on a little handheld. And with Kingdom Hearts 3 now only 7 months away and the franchise entering my life every day thanks to Union X, I’m very much in the mood for playing through this game again. When I head back to England in a few weeks I’ll pick up 2.8 as well and fill in the little blanks I haven’t yet familiarised myself with.

I have to say, though, I’m still just a little sore that even with this remaster of the final mix, the original Japan-only expert version of the original three Ice Cream Beat tracks never reappeared.

South Park: The Fractured but Whole DLC – From Dusk Til Casa Bonita

South Park returns with an extra little episode for The Fractured But Whole. It was just right for me to fill the gap left by finishing Ni no Kuni 2, a couple of hours with new content for a familiar old game. And since we're in the middle of a long break from new South Park on TV, it was nice to get this content as a kind of extra episode. 

The plot is nice and simple - Kenny's sister has fallen in with the lame Vamp kids, so there's a superhero mission to save her. This means new powers for our hero and a new character, Henrietta the goth. The goths are some of the most fun characters on the show, so this is a great addition, and it helps that she's a very useful buffer character. 

This DLC recalls a few different episodes of the show, and has a nice surprise boss fight (sadly spoiled for me by a thumbnail in a recommended YouTube video), and happily doesn't make it easy for the player, even when they've finished all the game's major challenges. The puzzles are simple and straightforward, though there was one point I thought I got myself permanently stuck after straying from the intended path, and the battles are all satisfying and enjoyable. There are even a slew of mini-games that are kind of fun. 

No trophies and only a couple of hours' enjoyment, but definitely a fun diversion, with a few laughs and sweet character moments. Oh, and adorable cat ears for my main character, who is definitely not Evan. 

Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom

It's Ni no Kuni 2!

Did I enjoy playing Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom? Absolutely. Did I fall in love with the world far more than I did in the first game? Yes. Do I think that objectively speaking, Ni no Kuni 2 is a good game? To be completely honest, no. 

Evan is adorable. Not sure about cut-price Lisa Simpson

There are many good points and bad points to this game, the sequel to one of the most notable JRPGs of recent years. For me, the good outweighs the bad. But I am under no illusion whatsoever that many people wouldn't feel the same. This game hit a perfect note for me for two reasons - firstly, the overwhelmingly enjoyable nostalgia evoked by what is almost a reimagining of Suikoden; and secondly, because I utterly adore the cute, girlish, angsty adolescent character archetype so common in JRPGs, but not very popular in the West. I am well aware from characters like Hope in Final Fantasy XIII and Genis in Tales of Symphonia and the hate they get in Western fandoms that I'm in a minority for loving that kind of character. A lot of people cannot stand these often whiny adolescents, so I really wouldn't recommend they play a game like this where one is the main character.

While I enjoyed the original Ni no Kuni, I did not love it. I liked it enough to begin grinding out the platinum, but lost my saved game and never felt like going back to replay it. The world-building was nice, Oliver was a likeable kid and of course the Ghibli connection was intriguing, but I felt that the second half of the game was messy, the combat was slow and frustrating - especially when it came to catching and levelling up familiars - and some of the mini games really were not very fun. The idea of going back to replay the game doesn’t appeal very much at this stage. 

Evan's Oliver cosplay

The sequel is an altogether different prospect. I had fun from beginning to end and even grinding out the platinum trophy was mostly enjoyable. I liked Evan much more than Oliver, too. While both are supposed to be the same age, Evan seems at least 3 years older than Oliver, who to me looked 10 and was written like he was 10. Evan was convincingly 13 … though only the Japanese subtitles of the original trailer reveal that’s his age, and since Level-5 are notorious for putting things into trailers that don't make it to the final project – most glaringly in Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright – I'm not sure his age is canon. Though Oliver has a much more detailed backstory and far more emotional depth, I liked Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum far more, as he was adorable from beginning to end. 

How cute is he?

It was Evan's introduction trailer that actually made me preorder this game, which until then I had thought I might get sometime in the future on sale. Evan and only Evan convinced me to shell out the cash. He is the most adorable character I've seen in a long while, especially as a lead character. The characters I like tend to be androgynous, optimistic, goofy, shy and uncertain of themselves, but can step forward to meet a challenge when they must. Evan is all of these, with silly cat ears. His appearance fits the archetype to a tee, with that vaguely aristocratic page-boy hairstyle that has come to symbolise the boy prince (and conveniently skirts the question of whether Evan has two pairs of ears or a lot of blank skin on either side of his head). His blue-eyed pretty face would look a lot like Penny from Inspector Gadget with a pair of pigtails. I wasn't disappointed by him, either - he starts adorably diffident and fussy, goes through some angst, but emerges stronger and becomes a capable leader while never stopping being adorable. If the protagonist were the only thing to consider, I'd be delighted with Ni no Kuni 2. The one thing I would have liked to have seen would have been more development, more depth in his reaction to loss, betrayal and sacrifice, which was all kept just a little too light and brisk, even for a game with children as an ostensible target audience. 

Another strength is the visuals, building on the first game's aesthetic to try and make the player feel like they're immersed in a Ghibli world. Natural scenes in particular look fantastic here, mostly in the background of world map battles, and the Chinese-style city of Goldpaw is gorgeous and great fun to explore. 

This just looks beautiful, and fighting dragons is classic fantasy fun

I also enjoyed the combat much more than the first game's turn-based system, even if it's less nostalgic. It's like a simplified Tales game, with lots of hacking and slashing, plus long-range attacks, some of which have to be channelled. The game is certainly easy, though I added to the challenge by insisting on playing as melee Evan, and should probably have had a difficulty slider or at least tougher bosses. By the time there's actually a challenge in combat, the game is more or less over, and there really could have been some Kingdom Hearts-style ridiculous hidden bosses: only one of the post-game bosses was even a little challenging, coincidentally the one you can easily grind levels from as she spawns extra minions, and neither the toughest tainted monster nor the one at the end of the boring post-game dungeon was challenging. The Higgledies also add a small but fun additional layer to the game, and if you take the time to explore the system you do very well. Aesthetically, they’re a great addition, evoking the Kodama from Mononoke-hime, and very cute and entertaining to watch. Though if your brain accidentally interprets the loading screen higgledies as facing towards the camera rather than away from it, you’re gonna have a bad time. But having a summoned Higgledy knight or a huge gravity ball that is then copied by another Higgledy means a huge power spike in battle, which was very rewarding. There probably should have been more of a boost from getting harmonious Higgledy groups, and giving them unison attacks could have been an extra level of fun as well as another throwback to Suikoden, but they were certainly a positive addition. 

Higgledies are just one more part of what makes this such a happy, cute world

Speaking of Suikoden, the core of the game beyond the central storyline was pretty much directly lifted from the classic series. Around the world, various characters can be found who ask you to do different fetch quests, and in return they'll join your cause. Some just ask for cooked dishes, or for you to kill off a boss, but some ask you to do very lengthy tasks or to give them something you won't find until the endgame. They fill up your city and can be set to gathering materials or researching various perks. At first, I absolutely loved this system, but in the end it's executed a little poorly. You only get to a stage where it starts to feel satisfying and you're eager for it to continue when you're about to finish the game, and it's a definite disappointment you can't max out the kingdom before you watch the end credits, four necessary recruits not showing up until afterwards. The city-building should have been more flexible, the rewards more varied, the possibility of levelling up the whole kingdom far more frequent (or automatic) and the Stars of Destiny - erm, I mean the Evermore recruits - able to give more interesting bonuses. 

Uhhhh

I also quite enjoyed the army mini-game. There was one of these in Suikoden, too, which was also oddly cute for such a serious matter (and you could permanently lose allies in those battles!). Here, the same rock-paper-scissors system prevails, only you roam the countryside engaging in battles, taking down structures and occasionally having to chase or escort another unit. A lot of others online hate this mode, especially the necessary number of battles for the trophy. But I liked it, mostly because I imposed a rule on myself not to use the square button. The square button in this mode is the win button. It's so much more fun not to use it and actually having to strategise which troops met which enemies where. Of course, when you can summon a dragon to the middle of the battlefield it becomes a bit moot, but I had a blast with this mode using this condition. At the same time, obviously the mode would have been way better if I didn't have to artificially increase the difficulty. 

All these elements were delightful and I have no complaints about them. For the rest, however, I wasn't so impressed. 

The mysterious look

The story itself is unoriginal and unsatisfying. There was so much potential to explore this world and these characters that was not realised. Everything starts out very well, in classic JRPG style and not a million miles from Suikoden. The young king is overthrown on his coronation day, saved only by a mysterious man from another world who appears in his room and a Seirei no Moribito-style female guardian. In the aftermath, Evan decides to found his own kingdom and unite the world, not by conquest but by alliance. Some have taken his quest to be Hitler-esque but it's really more of a case of starting the United Nations. The rest of the game is spent going between the different nations, finding that luckily they have a huge problem caused by an outside force, saving the day and forging an alliance. Then there's the matter of who is causing all the world's problems. It's nothing new, you soon get tired of Grima Wormtongue scenarios over and over again, and with only five kingdoms, it doesn't take very long to get through and has to be padded out with things like a three-part fetch-quest-cum-minigame-tutorial to get a library card. The ending just isn't very satisfying and the game length is too short, especially when there were so many interesting questions: what about kingdoms who want nothing to do with Evan's system? What about kingdoms who would leave if Evan allied with old enemies? Should Evan's privileged birth really make him the great saviour of the land? Then giving the real triumph of the ending to a character the audience doesn't care about in the least (tied into the story with a bizarre throwaway superpower) irritated me quite a lot. I really hoped for more from the final act of this story, and can only hope future DLC is more satisfying.

Evan, you can't just go into people's houses and do that

The game also has a very weak supporting cast. The other party members, for some reason all human, are extremely bland. Compared with the casts of the Tales games, Chrono Trigger, even goddamn Popolocrois, these characters are flat and boring. Batu is just a musclehead. Leander has pretty much no character beyond that he is smart, Bracken has some sparkle but never gets decent development. They try to spark some chemistry with Tani and Evan with a fake romance scene but there's absolutely no connection between them so it falls flat. Only Roland gets a modicum of development, but the chapter devoted to his actions is wasted with next to nothing new revealed about him, his superficial appearance in this world is never explained and only the first game's premise makes him even being in this game anything less than completely bizarre - and given that the first game is referenced largely only in old statues, place names and a single early puzzle (the game's only fun, vaguely challenging traditional RPG puzzle), that doesn't feel like enough. 

Totally blending right in

You might notice that I used all the English names here, whereas I insisted on using the Japanese names for the first game. Actually, yes, I played through the game in English, something I have never done before when given the choice. I even got undubbed roms of older games when I could. But Evan's voice was one of the reasons I fell for the game, and the acting is very good here. I love all the regional accents, with Welsh fairies returning but also plenty of Yorkshire, Scottish, Estuary and even Australian accents rendered (sometimes so thickly I wonder if non-British audiences can understand). That said, sadly there isn't nearly enough voice acting here. Sometimes at very strange moments, recorded speech ends to be replaced by grunts and that bleep-bloop-in-vaguely-the-pitch-of-the-speaking-character familiar from many other RPGs kicks in. The first game had way more recorded speech and animated cutscenes, so lovely as the rendered world is here, this was a real disappointment in a sequel on a next-generation console. Other problems include the speech boxes during army scenes being tiny and disappearing too fast and the effort put into rendering character movements noticeably declining over the course of the game - Evan's final rousing speech is delivered in such a robotic way that you wonder if the scene was meant to be animated and then they couldn't get it done so slapped together a basic scene in the in-game engine. 

Given that one character is canonically an English speaker and Evan has a very British boy-king feel to him, playing in English made sense. Plus to be honest, the Japanese version has really silly names. Tani's Japanese name is 'Shirty'. On the other hand, I wish the main antagonist's name had been kept, as the English version seemed to be designed to spoil a twist for any player who knows how Japanese morae work. Still, when I play it through again, I'll do so in Japanese. 

This guy is such a troll

The world-building also suffers as the game goes on. Ding Dong Dell is a fun classical fantasy city, though the fish theming is pretty hilarious and the Grimalkin must get hungry a lot as they go about their business. Then Goldpaw is absolutely gorgeous - though with Sino-Japanese relations not at their best just now, I question the wisdom of making a city that's clearly based on China and then having it populated by dog-people with names like Fai Do and Bau Wau who love gambling but are suffering because of their leaders' corruption and cheating. Hydropolis is pretty but nothing particularly original. For some reason too many JRPGs have to have a futuristic world amongst all the swords and sorcery, from Chrono Trigger to Tales of Symphonia, and it's always the ugliest and least fun part of the game, and the same happens here. The tone doesn't fit well and fighting robots after all the majestic dragons just isn't very exciting. Much better to keep it simple and high fantasy, and maybe throw in a ninja village or a vampire castle or something. Wait, that's Suikoden again. 

Evan needed more friends

Though Ghibli was not involved this time, key personal stayed on. Momose Yoshiyuki did a great job with the character design, perhaps my favourite element of the game, but I was disappointed by Hisaishi Joe's input. I adore his work, own several of his OSTs and image albums, and the themes that reappear from the first game are great. The rest...is lacking. Most of the city themes are simplistic and repetitive, lifting from Carmen and, of all things, Kraftwerk, and the battle music is unmemorable. I think what extra work was done here was phoned in. 

Go, my knights!

With the game barely marketed and most of the revenue coming from big fans of the first game shelling out for hugely overpriced limited editions, I don't know that the sales here are going to inspire much confidence in a further sequel. I wouldn't be surprised if Level-5 just stick to their safe cash cows like Inazuma 11 and Professor Layton, both of which are about to have new anime adaptations (woo!). Maybe they'll even go back to Dark Cloud. But I would certainly enjoy seeing more from Ni no Kuni, especially with more Evan or perhaps some sort of event where Evan and Oliver can work together. I’m keen for what the DLC will bring. But when I'm being completely honest, I cannot say that this game was well-made or worth returning to over and over again, and the quick, easy platinum is testament to the lack of depth and substance here, even if it's far less frustrating than the first game was. There’s some more endgame content for a 100%, more weapons and outfits to get, but since absolutely all of them are obtainable only by grinding items in the extremely boring final dungeon, I don’t see myself bothering.

Ta-daaa, it's the platinum

I loved Evan and had more fun with the first half of the game than I have with any other game I can think of in years. But ultimately I was left feeling a little unsatisfied, even disappointed. And the honest truth was that if Evan had looked like Kratos I probably wouldn't have cared for the game at all. Still, after finishing off the game I felt like something was missing from my life that no other game can quite fill, so that’s definitely a sign I enjoyed the world. I’m very keen for the DLC and will absolutely buy it. But I categorically wanted more, and I have to say, this game didn’t quite deliver.  

South Park: The Fractured But Whole

I very much enjoyed playing through The Fragmented But Whole. It seems to be doing less well with critics than its predecessor, but I think that’s quite a lot to do with the post-Gamergate obsession with avoiding triggering people meaning that anything edgy or offensive must be docked a few points, no matter how self-aware it may be about that. However, as a game, a story and a role-playing experience, I found it far more satisfying than The Stick of Truth.

There are certainly disappointments. I didn’t find the fart powers of the first game amusing, so it was a bit disappointing to find out that you continue as the same character with the same central ability – even if later there’s a kind of plot explanation for it. There was also a lot in the trailer that didn’t materialise in the game – Mint Berry Crunch is absent, probably not to appear until a later DLC; Mysterion is not the nemesis he was presented as, and is in fact a very minor character here; PC Principal is not the teased berserker boss but in his usual role of spewing social commentary and tacking a random quicktime event move onto the combat system; even though you’re told you can ‘pick a side’, unlike the first game you don’t get to make a decision whether to side for one faction or the other, so there’s never really any sense of picking a side. Well, there is one scene late in the game where you have a choice to make, which I don’t think makes any difference to the game whatsoever, but may be the game’s most harrowing and memorable, with a sudden shift in tone and humour supplied only by its juxtaposition with the other comedic elements around it.

For its flaws and broken promises, though, I think this game is considerably better than the last one.

Firstly, it’s just much more fun to play. The first game was an extremely simple RPG system which became pretty pointless as soon as you got some teammates with overpowered abilities – all you had to do was get Kyle and one-shot everything with arrows. Here, the Final Fantasy Tactics-style grid battle system with teammates and ranges to consider was much, much more compelling and fun. Yes, I had a team to steamroll the regular enemies I met, but bosses needed some strategy changes. Not only the hidden boss in the burrito shop (who was a fun challenge) but even some of the regular bosses were actually pretty difficult to adjust to, especially the larger ones. Hands down, that makes this a much more enjoyable game to play.

I could forgive the first game being simplistic, though, when the story was fun. Again, I think this game improves on the last. The first may have had a slightly clearer storyline – the MacGuffin has to be retrieved – but it suffered from being heavily fragmented by weird sequences at night and trips away from South Park. This game unfolds like an episode of the show, starting from a mundane adventure that lightly mocks pop culture (Cartman and Co, having squabbled with the other kids who were playing superhero, decide the way to get their superhero franchise started is by getting the reward money for finding a cat) and then spiralling out into something far bigger (a mysterious figure is uniting the crime bosses in the town to cause a crime wave and oust the current mayor). The twists are predictable, especially if you’ve ever seen Unbreakable, but that’s part of the parody, really. It was also a bit more believable in the first game that the whole thing was an exaggeration in the minds of the kids – something the show did some great jokes about in the past – but that’s something the player can quickly accept.

The personal story of the main character is also more satisfying. It builds upon the first game, yes, and you have to look past all that unfunny fart-power humour, but under the guise of ‘filling in your character sheet’ and ‘giving the superhero a tragic backstory’, a lot of this game revolves around figuring out the character’s identity and past. A lot of that is poking fun at current identity politics, where everyone is extremely sensitive about being politically correct about people’s self-identification, and the South Park politics remains centrist and observational – it mocks the bigots who will attack someone’s identity no matter what it is and famously put a joke right that the start that life is easier for white people, but it also revels in classic offensive stereotypes, small-town mentality and the idea that political correctness is all a bit daft and just as brutishly self-righteous as those infamous sexist frats. Through it all, your main character comes over as sympathetic and sweet, even staying mute except for a cute little sigh when he eats dinner as his parents fight.

It’s remarkable, really, how South Park is perhaps the first major game where you can actually customise your 10-year-old character in any number of ways – gay, pansexual, gender-neutral, any nationality you want – regardless of whether it’s tongue-in-cheek or not. I also have to talk about Tweek and Craig. The series started by poking fun at fandom and the tendency for there to be gay porn about any show with a lot of male characters. Neither Tweek nor Craig considered themselves gay, and didn’t get it at all. When the town got depressed when they faked a break-up, they decided to stay together for the sake of others while not really being gay. And yet recent episodes and this game have pushed away from that. It’s actually a major subplot of the story – Tweek leaves with the ‘Freedom Pals’ while Craig stays with Coon and Friends. The schism causes them to break up, where they bicker for a while but adorably keep asking the main character how their ex is getting on in between the bitterness. Finally they go to couples’ counselling, in typical daft South Park-style, and their special attack becomes a hilarious and adorable pastiche of Japanese BL (which, by the way, nobody has called ‘yaoi’ for a very long time). But they begin to express themselves, publically and privately, not as fake boyfriends but with genuine affection. If anything, the relationship is treated with the most respect just about anything has ever been given in South Park. Partly it remains a joke, that the one thing respected in the writing is the forced love affair between two 10-year-old boys pushed together by fangirls, but that doesn’t stop it being strange to see this show of all shows making something incredibly cute and progressive.

A lot of this is built out of a pretty weak season for South Park. Season 20 seems to be known in the fandom – which I’m not really part of – as a very weak one. Parker and Stone never expected Trump to win so a lot of their plans had to be changed. They struggled doing a season-long storyline that was a mess of ideas about trolls, ’member berries and Cartman turning over a new leaf after getting a girlfriend, which ended up with a lot of badly-explored ideas. For example, tensions between the sexes plus protests over the National Anthem (with a touch of Harambe) culminated in Butters’ ‘Wieners Out’ movement. The boys disgusted the girls, got what they wanted and were even protected by the PC Principal approving their right to protest peacefully. Then Butters tried it again, got told it wasn’t the right time by the Principal and the whole plotline vanished with the girls never able to give a decent response, which came over as a bit weird. Some of that unevenness finds its way into this game with very little actual thought going into Wendy’s presence or the actual underlying problems with South Park’s rotten underbelly and extremely uneven power structures.

But primarily the question is whether this is a fun game and a solid tie-in. I think it succeeds at both. Yes, it’s still a bit too short, but it’s longer and more satisfying than its predecessor. It’s also funnier and more human. So I unhesitatingly say that in my opinion, it’s better than The Stick of Truth. 

South Park: The Stick of Truth

I didn’t get the South Park game when it came out, even though I heard a lot of positive things and have been enjoying the show since it first started airing in the US – with a few hiccups here and there as the show went off the rails for a while. The Stick of Truth didn’t appeal for two reasons – firstly, I had a huge backlog of games I wanted to play at that time. But secondly, and more importantly, I refused to spend money on an incomplete game, and in the UK several sequences were cut out because someone somewhere deemed them inappropriate. Total bullshit, especially because one late-game sequence disarming a bomb recalls one of the cut sequences and thus makes very little sense.

But I’ve been a lot more into South Park since the new season began and The Fractured But Whole seems a lot of fun. Plus if I preorder, I get The Stick of Truth for free. So that’s what I did, and knowing that it was a very short game, played it through. The censorship, repetitive combat and simple story mean I’m happy to play it through just once and forget it (I sided with Kyle and the elves, for the record), but I actually rather enjoyed the 8 or 9 hours I gave this game. Ordinarily I don’t feel like I’ve really finished a game and can write my review until I’ve seen everything it has to offer and usually gotten the platinum, but in this case just a single run was adequate. Which isn’t to say it was a cursory speed-run: I finished all the side-quests but one (didn’t find the last hobo) and did pretty well on the collection and completion sidequests too. But I don’t think I’ll be going back for more.

The game was fun. Visually, it is of course just like an episode of the TV show. That isn’t the greatest of feats, given the show’s famously simplistic style. The acting is of course delivered by the show’s main cast, and probably the main draw, with the same crude humour, occasionally clever satirical parts and lots of nods to the show’s past – even right back to the beginning at times, with callbacks to very old episodes through elements like the stuffed and mounted Scuzzlebutt. And the gameplay is a satisfying rendition of classic turn-based RPGs, with combat revolving mostly around status ailments. Honestly, the game was far, far too easy. There was only one fight that I found challenging, which was against Al Gore and his bodyguards, which I had to concentrate for because if I didn’t defend against the enemy’s attacks with perfect timing I lost. But that was the one and only time that the game presented anything even a little difficult, and once Kyle joins the party his most powerful attack just wiped everyone out like the Magus Sisters in Final Fantasy X.

So with the presentation as would be expected from modern games, and the gameplay not so great, what about the story? Well, that’s certainly the saving grace of the game and what keeps the player coming back, though it’s not exactly the best story ever. The charm is that the boys are playing at being fantasy characters, from the Black Friday episodes of the show. They have split into two factions, the humans – led by Cartman – and the elves – led by Kyle.

The player, as a new kid, meets Butters and through him joins Cartman’s faction. He learns to fight, and in a parody of Skyrim that goes way too far and dominates too much of the game despite not being funny, he uses magical farts to get an advantage in battle. Thus he goes around town beating up bullies, rats and homeless people and making friends on Facebook. After causing disaster on an alien spaceship that abducts him for a bit of anal probing – censored in Europe – our hero ends up having to contend with an alien virus that has disastrous and very South Park-ish effects on the town’s population, as well as the secret government agents who want to hush the whole thing up.

The parodies of classic games are certainly enjoyable. While the turn-based combat evokes Final Fantasy, the mute main character is more like Link and there’s a whole section that’s essentially a tribute to Zelda. The show’s climax with betrayals and revelations and big firey battles with recognisable old faces is satisfying, too.

South Park may be puerile and at times push a joke too far when it’s not actually that entertaining, but generally it’s the added layers that a joke gets that are amusing. Gross-out humour about Mr. Slave’s butt isn’t very funny, but seeing an old face long missing from the show in an unexpected place gets a laugh. The edgy humour of fighting through an abortion clinic isn’t so amusing, but getting cornered into having to pretend to do an abortion on Randy Marsh by your cover story makes it much funnier (though again gets censored). The game also did the fashionable thing of playing with the notion of free will, like Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line, but for a funny sequence with a very creepy photographer.

Initially satisfying to explore with lots of combat to learn, it’s a shame there isn’t a mode that’s much more challenging, and that there couldn’t be considerably more variety in the battles – and a lot less farting. We’ll see how game 2 measures up tomorrow!

Gone Home

A nice little game, very simple to play with a slowly-unfolding story. It’s nice that it starts hinting at horror, at murder and the occult and weird creepy secret passages, but eventually resolves into a very normal story of adolescent rebellion. Ultimately, the story wasn’t a very clever or inventive one, but it was sweet and the way it gradually resolved made this a fun short game to play – for free. 

Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright

I feel like it has been years and years since I first heard of this game. I remember very much liking the look of the trailer when it was released – which was also the first time I found out that in Japan, Phoenix Wright has the somewhat hilarious name of ‘Mr. Naruhodo’. In the eventuality, very little of what was in that original trailer made it into the final game intact, but the general concept remained, including the excellent central prospect of making the game about witch trials, including a setting very much recalling The Crucible.

The general idea of melding these two series was a good one. The gameplay of both has always been fairly similar, especially in the early DS games: static (or almost static) scenes could be searched on the touchscreen to advance the story. The crucial differences, of course, being that in Phoenix Wright this led to a trial and in Professor Layton it led to puzzles. The game does the obvious and satisfying thing of having both: as you search for clues to the next trial, you are given numerous puzzles. As I enjoyed every Layton game and the first Phoenix Wright games, this suited me well.

Yes, the character designs between the two games are very different. Layton recalls cutesy European comic book art while Phoenix Wright is more typically anime-style. But the fact that the two kind of clash is actually quite charming, and I like the way the characters from each world have a different ‘speech noise’ for the lines that aren’t read by the actors.

The story is fairly predictable but well-executed. Professor Layton receives a letter telling him about the mysterious city of Labyrinthia and how one girl has escaped – but is on the run from witches with formidable powers. Professor Layton attempts to keep the girl safe but after various magical events (that aren’t actually explained in the main story and then handwaved a bit in an omake sequence) she is taken back to Labyrinthia – as are Layton and Luke.

The girl manages to get caught up in a trial, and is defended by Phoenix Wright and Maya, who also manage to get themselves caught and taken to Labyrinthia. Thus begins an adventure that largely features dramatic witch trials and a mysterious ‘Storyteller’ who distributes pages to the citizens of the town that unfailingly tell the future.

Now, every Layton game since the first has essentially relied on the twist that the inexplicable events happening in the story are in fact explained by imaginary technology (indistinguishable from magic…), so the way this story unfolds ought to be no great shocker to anyone. And also may bring to mind a minor M. Night Shyamalan film. But there were a few things in the big unveil at the end I didn’t see coming, mostly to do with relationships between different characters.

There were a few things that don’t make a whole lot of sense. There’s no good reason the Storyteller doesn’t just remove Layton and Luke from Labyrinthia as soon as he becomes aware of them. One trial – featuring a very appealing girl-disguised-as-a-boy character – doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny well once all the secrets are revealed, making the player wonder how someone could have known to ‘stop time’ and, presumably, disassemble part of a wall. It also kind of skips over the fact that a very real attempt at murder happened, and was averted only by chance. Then there’s the way nobody really has any objections to the way they’ve been made to live, even the ones who have had years of suffering.

Nonetheless, the game is interesting throughout and has a wonderfully atmospheric setting and very entertaining characters, especially all the crazy witnesses and the quirky librarian. Overall, I felt the game was markedly easier than any previous title in either series I’ve played, and graphically Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy had much nicer-looking polygon models, but the novelty of this game, its interesting setting and engaging characters, make it a whole lot of fun. I also very much enjoyed the little omake episodes included as DLC, each with an easy little puzzle.

I would love more of this idea, really. I guess I’d just love another full Layton game, not a weird smartphone vampire game. I’m also not at all sure that Youkai Watch will be a satisfactory substitute. I guess I’ll just have to patiently wait to see what I get!

And you know what? I’d really love a feature-length animation of this crossover! That’s something I’m pretty certain I’ll never see, though. Alas! 

Final Fantasy Type-0 HD

I play quite a lot of Square Enix’s remakes. I still need to pour more hours into both Kingdom Hearts updated versions and I’ll almost certainly get the updates for Final Fantasy VII and XII. But this one was not only a disappointment, but by far the game I’ve enjoyed least in the Final Fantasy series. Yes, less than XIII or XIII-2.

I probably should have researched the game a little more before I bought it. I didn’t really know anything about it other than that it had an extremely pretty protagonist and was set in the Fabula Nova Crystallis universe. Because, you know, after FFXIII everyone just loves all that vague and poorly-explained lore about l’Cie and Black Tortoise Crystals. Not satisfied with how vague and unnecessarily complex this world is, the game infodumps a complex political situation about warring nations on you, introduces artificially-created life forms in an academy where if a person dies, all memories of them are erased from the minds of those who knew them and a backstory about the events your playing having been repeated millions of times already that you have to trawl through text entries in a library book to uncover.

All this I could forgive if it had framed a good game that was fun to play and full of engaging characters on an interesting journey. Sadly, the failure of these elements are where the game really became my least favourite in the entire series.

First, the game was horribly clunky and at no point became fun as a gaming experience. This may have been a fairly decent game for the PSP, but contained many of the drawbacks of Crisis Core without the advantages of a compelling atmosphere and engaging characters. The limitations of the system mean the main structure of the game is awful – the action parts are very repetitive and linear fights occasionally mixed up with some vaguely more strategic segments in the world map, but far worse is the way the game is divided into missions. This means that between combat sections, you are in a very basic school with a clunky portal teleporting you to different locations, where you can complete pointless and often very long-winded tasks for very little advantage and next to no character development. Things like the characters’ running animations and the straight edges of many locations betray the simplicity of the source, and the lazy update means not only have only textures been updated rather than entire models – resulting in very jagged or simplistic vehicles and buildings – but several minor characters have only very lazily been updated. It’s embarrassing when some old councilwoman comes to see the main characters – who have actually been updated to look current-gen – and she looks like she’s arrived from the wrong game altogether.  

The game design is also poor. Apparently by intention, you can pick members for your team that make it impossible for you to complete some missions. For example, you can choose characters who have no long-range attacks for missions that require them, or not equip any magic and go into a restricted section that automatically kills you for using any physical attacks. And then you have to go back to a save point ages before. Apparently the idea is to become familiar with your team, but it’s absurd not to even forewarn you that some choices make the game impossible. This isn’t what playing very difficult old games was like: back then, you knew you had to develop skills to win. Here, skill is not involved.

The balance is also terrible. I levelled characters evenly for a while, but then just decided to train only Cater, and she soon stomped everyone and the game was stupidly easy – unless you are surprised by a level 99 monster on the map, in which case you just have to watch your character die. Not once did I find a boss battle a satisfying challenge.

There is also an option to start the game with all enemies 30 levels above you, which I chose and regretted because it meant I kept dying in one hit and had to spend ages killing even basic enemies. There’s giving players a challenge, and then there’s just making them endure tedium until they finally match the enemy levels, at which point the difficulty ends up the same as it would have been normally in any case.

So the game wasn’t fun and the world-building was complex and confusing. How about the overall story? Unfortunately it’s clumsy too, unfolds in a very dull manner and keeps every character at arm’s length. There’s very little to find interesting in the battles between the armies of different nations or the self-sacrifice of some major players, none of whom are actually interesting. There’s really no reason to care who becomes ‘Agito’ in a quest for some vague extra powers, or stopping the incredibly uninteresting Cid. And the way that the story is delivered not through surprises and quests and discoveries, but dumped on you like clockwork after each mission is a pain. Especially since leading up to the mission has been the extremely boring school day where you desperately look around for ways to pass the time, and hope chocobo breeding will actually become interesting at some point (it doesn’t, even if the babies are incredibly cute).

Which only leaves the main characters of Class 0. Twelve of them are artificially-created warriors with impressive fighting prowess and the ability to resist magic jammers and be brought back to life if they fall in battle. In a naming scheme that wasn’t even cool when Gundam Wing did it, they each have a name based on a number, or more specifically a playing card. Thus, you have names like Cinque and Trey, plus Ace, Jack, Queen and King – though inexplicably no number 10. Essentially, they are Organisation XIII, but instead of having clichéd bad-guy personalities they have clichéd anime high school character personalities (there’s the rough-speaking one, the know-it-all one, the Iinchou, the class clown, the air-head etc etc), and instead of looking flamboyant and distinct, they all look like very pretty pop stars with amazing hair. Added to this are the incredibly uninteresting Machina and Rem. Machina is basically Riku, embracing his dark side for the power to protect others, and Rem is basically a plot device who – cough! cough! – has an incurable disease slowly killing her but that she can keep secret.

The fact they’re almost aggressively a collection of stock characters, as well as not having any real past, makes them very hard to identify with or like. They’re put on a pedestal from the start, but it doesn’t make them insecure or vulnerable or anything else that might humanise them. They just plod through their missions and spout occasional lines that keep their personalities completely on the straight and narrow. And though most of the weapons are what you’d expect – guns and swords and spears – when you get to the flute and the mace and the main character with zappy playing cards, it feels a bit desperate. And I felt bad for poor Eight, the small cute one with only his fists to use.

I did start to like them – at the very, very end in the one scene where they actually show some development. But that was in the ending sequence and far too late. And yes, I’ll happily concede that they’re gorgeous and I love the aesthetic Square have developed of incredibly pretty characters who look like the prettiest biracial kids you ever could see with lovely floppy hair. But I wish what they had done with them had made them likeable and interesting. Instead, the only thing I can say was a success here was the designs of this specific group in this game – not overall character design. In all other aspects, I felt that Type-0 fell badly short, and most assuredly had no place being on a current-gen console. 

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy

Not counting the alternate-world Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright, this game is the last in the Professor Layton series that has so far been released. It’s also the last in the ambitious prequel series, which also includes the Eternal Diva film and follows the impact of the uncovering of various sites built by the Azran, an ancient and technologically advanced race reminiscent of how the people of Mu are often depicted in Japanese media.

Though it seems a little odd that none of the monumental, world-shaking events of this game are referenced by Luke and Layton in the games that chronologically follow it, and the people close to the characters’ hearts aren’t so much as mentioned again, such is the nature of prequels and I don’t have any real complaints about that. There are some fun things done here, too, like the frequent appearance of Inspector Chelmey as a background figure, usually facing away from the camera, off on a grand tour with his wife.

The Azran Legacy was certainly my favourite of the series on the 3DS. While the polygonal characters still lack the charm of the hand-drawn sprites, they’re rather better-done and closer to the original than in Miracle Mask. The interface was a little less clunky and the animations were a little more versatile. On the downside, the game had by far the least fun collection of minigames of the entire series – none of the three were remotely enjoyable, being an ugly nut-rolling game, a frustrating and dull flower-blooming game and a rather arbitrary and charmless dress-up game. There’s also a small Streetpass game that was largely about memorizing the locations of random things, but in effect was mostly about waiting for the nice people who’d set challenges that could be completed on one or two screens.

But the game itself is what matters, and it was an entertaining and fun one. Unlike the other games, it doesn’t restrict its location, but takes place in multiple countries around the world, all of which are very cliche in the most charming way. It starts in an oddly slow and dull way, unlike the grand goings-on that open Miracle Mask, but after the prologue in a frozen town and a rather dismal fishing village are out of the way (plus another visit to London), the entertainment level goes up drastically and is sustained better than any of the previous games through variety.

The games have always showed a fun, highly romanticised view of England, but this time Layton, Luke and Emmy travel the world – and the worlds they visit are all just as fanciful and over-the-top. There’s a wonderfully classic Western town full of cowboys, where the local problems are sadly solved thanks in large part to Luke’s talking-to-animals magic powers, one of the elements of this series I like the least. There’s a hidden village in a rainforest, where the funny-looking mushroom-haired denizens are pointedly light-skinned. There’s a funny creepy rural town in thrall to the local priest and archaic traditions, a slightly Wicker Man­­-esque community I honestly didn’t expect from Professor Layton. There’s a sunny vaguely Spanish resort town packed with touristy goods. And quite interestingly, there’s a pseudo-Arab town with headscarves and turbans aplenty.

This time, more than a mystery, there’s a straightforward adventure with a shadowy, heavily-armed organization competing with our heroes on a collection quest. Of course, the organization is largely represented by a manzai comedy duo who are completely incompetent, because after all if a small army with machine guns just cornered our heroes there wouldn’t be much of a story. Things never feel very high-stakes, but then, the usual charm of Layton games is that they’re quite restful.

At the end, things do come to a head and there are such dramatic episodes as a fellow scientist seemingly getting shot in the arm and Layton hang-gliding off the top of a huge building, but what really makes the story satisfy is an extended sequence of twists. I was feeling clever for figuring some of them out – but the sheer profusion of them meant I was surprised! For example, I saw the truth behind Sycamore coming from the start, but didn’t expect the truth behind Descolé. The flashback of the defining moment in his life was cliché but satisfying. I also didn’t see Emmy’s decisions coming, nor the origins of Bronev, even if I knew what to expect with Aurora. Oh, there’s something that’s always satisfying about representatives of an ancient, mysterious civilization speaking in a lilting Irish brogue.

In terms of the puzzles, nothing felt very innovative here, but there were some very fun ones to solve and nothing was ever too hard, except of course the usual absurd (optional) final hidden puzzles.

I don’t know how much more Layton we’re going to see. I don’t know if most of Level-5’s resources are now going to be diverted to the monstrously popular Youkai Watch series – pun intended. But I’ll certainly be having fun with Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright and hoping for plenty more to come. 

Kingdom Hearts II.5: Kingdom Hearts II

I haven’t written about the HD remake of Chain of Memories yet because...well, it got very dull trying to get the platinum, and when the sequel came out, that’s what I wanted to play. I haven’t stormed through Kingdom Hearts 2 quite like I thought I would, but in the last couple of weeks I got back to it, and yesterday I got the platinum trophy. Happily, unlike Chain of Memories, this can all be done in one play-through, as the difficulty trophies stack. And let’s face it, I wouldn’t feel satisfied only beating the tough hidden bosses on an easier mode.

I draw the line at doing it with zero experience points, though. That’s not a challenge I need to go through!

I have a degree of ambivalence towards KH2. Until the true sequel comes out, it’s the best-looking of the games, and despite the over-reliance on ‘reaction commands’, it’s got the most enjoyable gameplay. Yes, at easier difficulties you can just mash the attack button and have very few problems, but that’s not going to get you far in critical mode, especially with the likes of data Xemnas or the Lingering Will, both of whom were vastly harder than the relatively easy Sephiroth in this game.

This game is also where Sora goes from adorable, pudgy little fella to an attractive adolescent who can be taken much more seriously. Well, when he’s not singing. Sora’s still childlike in that classic shounen-protagonist mode, but I find him emotionally believable and engaging. In this game, he actually suffers in several ways, and it makes me believe in him.

But KH2 suffers from having a story that feels inconsequential, stays too shallow morally and gets downright messy. This was the objection I had when I finished the game on the PS2, which must have been about ten years ago now (reposted here). It’s unfortunate that Chain of Memories introduces Organization XIII but doesn’t finish them, because they come to dominate this game and the fact is that they’re neither very interesting nor very threatening.

I remember that I hadn’t played CoM the first time I played through this game, and not only is that a bad idea in terms of understanding the plot, it also means that the first fight with an Organization member is against Demyx. And when a plot tries to build up a malevolent and powerful organization Sora will have to truly struggle to defeat, when their battle prowess is first represented by goddamn Demyx, you know there are problems – even if he does make it clear he’s not a fighter. Organization XIII never feel like a tangible threat, absurdly decide to take on Sora one by one, and though there’s an attempt to give them some depth, it never really works. It’s quite clever that Xemnas has been using Sora as a heart harvesting machine, giving him a moment to question whether he’s doing the right thing, but his ultimate plot is vague and never even comes close to fruition. He wants to make an imitation Kingdom Hearts, suggesting that if he does, the nobodies will regain what they feel they have lost, but actually he wants to use it to become godlike, probably destroying the universe to remake it as he sees fit. But he never gets very close to this, with Ansem the Wise sabotaging things, and then tries to merge with his false Kingdom Hearts anyway, becoming only powerful enough to be a typical big blobby final boss who can be defeated by being hit a lot. As the antagonists’ plot is so vague and never becomes a tangible threat, the whole overarching story becomes weak.

We also have to deal with the bland and overlong prologue, where the player has to control Roxas and do very boring things in Twilight Town. Roxas unfortunately is not very engaging or likeable, especially compared with Sora, being rather less concerned with other people and having to be made sympathetic with artificial angst – when looked at from a bit of a distance, the things DiZ does to Roxas in the simulation are totally unnecessary and meaningless, other than to be cruel.

I have to say that I felt more charitable to Axel on this playthrough. He puts up an irritating, cocky front, but he is suffering, unlike the others probably actually does regain something of his heart through contact with Roxas, and does act nobly towards the end. I don’t think he was redeemed, but I didn’t find him wholly objectionable this time.

But of course he brings a level of moral complication to the concept of Nobodies. Sora is taught that they are not real people, cannot feel and should not exist. Thus, his killing of the various members who attack him does not affect him like killing a person – though the way he talks (mistakenly) about taking care of Maleficent is just a little psychopathic. But Axel shows that these nobodies have the potential to be drawn back towards becoming whole people, even if in very limited circumstances. That potential surely changes the morality of snuffing out their existences, even when attacked. But Sora – as with his parents back home who we hear nothing about in this game – doesn’t even consider that.

The mess that is the story of the Nobodies isn’t done yet, though it’s really their ‘Somebodies’ that are looking to be foregrounded a little more. It looks like we’re to have an Organization made up of different forms of Xehanort, but Lea has joined the fold (please stay away from Ventus, Lea) and I don’t think we’ve seen quite the end of Braig, who was made much more interesting with his expanded role in Birth By Sleep. But the truth is, the Organization made the plot far sloppier and far less interesting than it should have been, and I suspect all the series’ notorious problems with complexity of plot derive from half-baked ideas being put into awesome-looking secret endings and portable spin-offs.

Sora’s story, however, certainly kept me engaged. There are some well-chosen new Disney worlds, like Mulan’s Land of Dragons and the rather brilliant one based on 1920s black-and-white short cartoons. The Tron world works as a bit of variety, but I have to say that the Pirates of the Caribbean world is a bit jarring. This playthrough reminded me how clunky the Lion King world is, too – I love The Lion King and am very happy it got included, especially with adorable cub Sora, but it’s just not very well-done. The attempts to recreate scenes from the film are awkwardly mechanical in a way the rest of the game isn’t, and the way the animals’ jaws just flap looks much worse than when humanoid characters are talking – or even the Disney mascot characters. Plus even if they managed to get Ernie Sabella and even James Earl Jones reprising their roles, the lack of Jeremy Irons and Matthew Broderick really hurts the English version.

I also will not accept that the writing is not intentionally homoerotic. Only Dream Drop Distance is more obvious. In the first game, Sora genuinely seems to have puppy-love affection for Kairi. But here, as famously pointed out by VG Cats, his reaction to Kairi is almost dismissive while being reunited with Riku is presented with far more significance. Yes, he knows Kairi is safe whereas it’s not clear with Riku, but he also has faith in Riku’s ability to take care of himself – yet still ends up on his knees pouring out his heart – appropriately enough. At every point, he seems to have far more emotional investment in what is happening with Riku, and treats Kairi almost cursorily.

As a game, though, I think this one is the best-designed yet, and the most fun to play. Birth By Sleep would be a very strong contender if not for Shoot Lock being almost comically overpowered for most of the game, and Dream Drop Distance is ruined by the ‘free flow’ mechanics, which made it far too easy. Though some were very frustrating (goddamn data Xaldin), I found the extra boss challenges of this game a lot of fun to get through and puzzle out – as well as the silly Mushroom XIII who added a bit of extra flavour to the final mix. I’m quite proud that I didn’t beat Lingering Will or Data Xemnas in the way that seems to be common on Youtube: for Lingering Will I absolutely relied on Stitch, and abused Limit Form as much as Session for Data Xemnas. The fights were challenging without seeming impossible, as opposed to the Vanitas Remnant who gets beaten by relying on gimmicks.

Kingdom Hearts 2 is a great story with great characters and worlds slightly let down by the main story being pretty lacklustre. And that same story will affect Kingdom Hearts 3. Will that game be able to build on the convoluted and overwrought backstory to tell a satisfying tale? It’s been a very long time coming, so I certainly hope so. And one thing’s for sure, I’m in this series for the long haul, and very much enjoying it. Next: watching the silly Re:Coded cutscenes in HD as I play through Birth By Sleep again – which is by far my favourite in the series in story terms. 

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!