Topic: Games You Recently Beat?

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Dogfight 1942 (PC/Steam)

Gameplay:

• Mission based arcade dogfighter that's pretty simple to grasp (especially if you've played anything similar, the controls feel almost exactly the same as those in Sky Gamblers: Storm Raiders, which I played on Switch).
• Missions usually consist of two or three objectives separated by checkpoints, and range from typical "shoot everything down" stuff (sometimes with a defensive objective, as you can see below where you have to destroy all bombers before London's life bar is depleted), to ship bombing runs, landing challenges, and even a stealth segment.
  
• Sometimes a mission will let you choose between a few different planes (usually 2 or 3, though I think the final mission gives you like 6 or so options), though just as often you're required to use a specific plane (like one where you're in a sea plane). Special weapons seem to be pre-determined as well (everything has a machine gun, but mission objective determines whether it's joined by bombs, torpedos, or rockets).
• Played it on Normal and found it to be an extremely easy & short experience (not a complaint mind you, just a head's up). Your plane actually has auto regen (just fly away from the action for a few secs & you're good to go), and even if you do fail the missions tend to be short enough that it'll take you no time at all to get back to where you were (especially considering the aforementioned checkpoints). All in all you can knock this one out in a couple of hours.
• It has a more arcadey focus though, so if you really get into it there's replayability in the form of it's grading system (you earn 1-5 stars upon mission completion depending on score, which you can improve upon by completing optional objectives, taking out non objective required enemies, and chaining together kill streaks) & multiple difficulty settings. There's also online co-op, dogfight, and survival modes which I haven't tried.
• There are also two extra DLC campaigns (Russian & I think African campaigns) which I intended to buy in a bundle (base game is $10, and the bundle with everything is only $12, so it's definitely the way to go if you buy it), but I got a little ahead of myself and just got the base game. I'm sure I'll buy the expansions eventually though, as they're just $3 a pop individually.

Story:

• There's really no overall narrative, you just jump from famous battle to famous battle, either as the US fighting Japan in the Pacific or the UK fighting Germany in western Europe. Unlike other games of the type each side isn't even separated into it's own campaign, you'll just play two missions as the US, two as the UK, so on so forth until it ends. The Battle of Britain, Iwo Jima, Midway, and Okinawa are just some of the battles you'll take part in.
  

Audio/Visual:

• Originating as a 360 game it's not the most advanced looking game, but it still looks relatively modern & clean. I was able to run it in 1080p at max settings, & while the bombing raid over London was the "troublesome" mission dropping to just above 80 fps at times, pretty much every other mission was showing to run with framerates in the multi-hundreds (over 4-500 frames at times, not that I would even be able to perceive that), so I'm sure any relatively modern PC could run it without issue.
• I should also mention that the game is glitched in that it doesn't render trees (they're there, but you can't see them). This isn't a problem 98% of the time, but there is exactly one objective where you have to land next to a plane crashed in a field where you'll be crashing or bouncing off of the things since you don't know where they are. This can apparently be fixed by changing the PC's internal clock to before the year 2012 (the year of the game's release), but I never bothered and still completed the objective after only like 3 tries.
• It's soundtrack consists of generic war music. Hardly anything memorable, but it gets the job done.
• I should also mention that being a WWII game, you're going to hear a certain Japanese racial slur repeated about 5,000 times. Understandable given the context, but it'll probably make some uncomfortable nonetheless in this day & age.

Conclusion:

• I was actually looking to see if Blazing Angels was available (I played it back on the Wii but never finished it at the time), but apparently Ubisoft pulled it & it's sequel from Steam back in 2015 (likely due to expiring plane licences?) so I looked for something similar & found this, and it did the job. Nothing revolutionary, but a nice time for those who like arcade dogfighters. A nice easy transition into PC gaming for me.
  

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Xenoblade Chronicles 2

I don't normally do the long post for these but I have to talk about this game. I have so much to say

deep breath

Let me be fair and start with the positives first. Not all the positives, but the main ones. Because I'm gonna be a bit harsh on this game, so I should state before anything else that I did like this game a lot. The gameplay is excellent, as always. Xenoblade is three for three. I love exploring these worlds, endlessly and I love the battle systems. And this is probably the best battle system yet. Eventually. It took some time, but when I figured things out, the longer battles in this game are absolutely fantastic. Attack cancelling combined with the different combos combined with blade switching etc etc is really enjoyable when you know what you're doing.

The game looks gorgeous. The games always have incredible places to explore, but this is the best yet. Between the HD graphics and art design and just the incredible, vibrant places you visit, it is a delight. And then some of the weather effects make it almost over-the-top with how beautiful it all looks. It's probably not the most technically impressive in places but between how impressive the locations are and the better art style, its always incredible to look at. And that goes double for the character designs. I do agree they're a bit TOO anime in a way, but that's a small problem compared to how much technically better it looks than the original release of Xenoblade one and the far more lifeless art direction for X's characters (also half the cutscenes aren't just you spinning a camera that's too far away from the characters who are talking...good).

And then the music. I don't know if I could say if the music surpasses Xenoblade 1's amazing OST, but its possible. It does feel like they went a similar direction to Xenoblade 1's OST (too similar in a couple of places) and just went even further with it. Right now I would say Xenoblade 1's best songs are better but the average quality is better for 2, but ask me again in a year. Either way, its another brilliant OST.

But with that out of the way, despite being 10/10 in a number of important places, there are a lot of issues I had with this game that kept getting in the way of the masterpiece it could be. Admittedly, there are some things that were my fault on some level, especially the fact that my tv breaking meant I felt obligated to beat this game in a much shorter period of time than previous Xenoblades.

The biggest issue that I had with the game, unquestionably, is specific to Xenoblade as a series. Its the fact that so much of how you play this game's side content, is the following: You get a task, you warp to a place, you walk a minute or two to get to your real destination, you hope its something you can actually do right now. Now, this is not new for open world games necessarily. But its become excessive in this game in particular. Between the actual sidequests, the necessary things to unlock upgrades on the affinity charts and various other reasons to check out a place, its just too much, too often. Particularly with how often, no you can't do a thing. It's ok if sometimes a quest can't be completed as soon as you get it, but the amount of times I was blocked from continuing because of field skills was infuriating.

And that's the next point. Field skills. Great idea, bad execution. So one of the things each of your blade can do are certain skills beyond battles. Sometimes, these skills give you extra materials in places. But a lot of them are dealing with roadblocks to various things. Which is not inherently a bad thing, but they went too far with it. So many of them require higher levels, which usually means you're gonna need more than one blade with it on. At first, this turned into me taking a long time to complete various quests because I'd wait to upgrade certain (often unique) blades (Roc's took forever because of how his level ups are determined by the slooooow leveling up of merc missions). But at some point I realized that if I did this, a lot of these would never get done, as some of them require higher levels of skills than one blade is capable of having. So at that point it became a game of blade management (also more focusing on the affinity charts and leveling up blades). And boy, is swapping blades constantly the least engaging part of this game! It sure is the most boring way to do this mechanic! Basically, they just made Pokemon HMs with extra steps. That's the last thing I would've wanted from this. What a waste. I can imagine tons of cool potential with field skills, but not like this.

Both of these things take an already very long game, and just elongate it to comical degrees. And it just keeps going. Like...why are there pseudo-gatcha mechanics in these games? They're not monetized, but that's...why gatcha exists? To frustrate you into paying money. I'm glad they're not monetizing them, but why are they here? That's maybe a little unfair, because AFAIK the core crystal drops are limited, you won't be stuck in an endless loop of not getting rare blades. Also you can skip the cutscenes activating them. ...which also skips the unique blade introductions? What no, no one wants that! Part of me also feels Merc Missions are also like that, but those were in Assassin's Creed since 2010, so maybe its a bit different.

And not all of these are disasters on their own, but they build up over time. I feel like you could've cut out 20 hours of playtime just by making some QoL changes. Basically what I'm saying is, this is the Skyward Sword of JRPGs. But Skyward Sword needed like 5 or so hours cut, it feels like you could've cut out 20 without even taking away any actual gaming content in this video game. Even Xenoblade 1 made things quicker in places in the remake AFAIK. That game had a lot of similar issues but they went all in on those here.

The moment that nearly broke me was when I spent 4 hours on one play session. In that time, I merely did 1/3 of a single blade quest and one room of the main quest. That's it. 4 hours. That quest was the peak of "walk 2 minutes and hope you accomplish something", the design of that is utterly awful until you level up that specific field skill. And that main quest room was another issue. It's in chapter 8 I believe. Monolith Soft, please stop putting stealth sections in your games. Yes, dying to the level 90 enemy in the early grassland area is a funny running gag, but that doesn't mean I want to go through whole areas having to sneak around in your game that doesn't have real stealth mechanics. Thankfully its not as bad as parts of X were, but the handful of times it came up. It was cool to finally sneak around, kill all those enemies before killing the big one, admittedly, but it was not cool enough to make up for all the time I spent failing that. Also because the checkpoints add even more "let's run for a minute or two to a place we've already been" sections...even though there are other places that are marked on the map and could've been better and more convenient checkpoints after you die. Ok yeah, they totally rushed this out to meet a 2017 deadline, I'm convinced.

The tutorial system also sucks. This is so weird, why did tutorials become so much worse after the original? You'd think they'd learn from past games not...make new mistakes for no reason. I shouldn't have to look up youtube videos to look up how to do things in this game like this. It should be the easiest thing just to re-read tutorials, especially when the first game already did this. Why would this be left out? I'm so confused. (also I wouldn't have realized how important pouch items really are without those videos, those numbers make them seem worse than they are)

Ok but then there's the story. So...I would say the story is...good enough in this game. It's a 7/10 JRPG story. Which again, I feel like it could've been better. It's rarely bad but its rarely amazing. And much of the 2nd half of the first Xenoblade, I love as a story, so its a downgrade. My main issues is that I just feel a combination of the direction with the dialogue and at times voice acting did not hit the same levels the first game did. Also, I just don't think it built up to nearly as strong a story in general, barring maybe the last chapter. Most of the time the dialogue is fine. It works for what its going for. But it doesn't hit the same dramatic high points that Xenoblade 1 was often so good at. When it tries to...a lot of the time it just falls kinda flat for me.

It feels too much like shonen anime to me. And specifically the kind that feels like would be deeply moving to 13 year olds who have just discovered stories can have depth and meaning. It's hard to describe, but that's what I get from a lot of this. There's stories made for this type of audience I can still fully appreciate as is, as an adult, and I just don't feel that way about this one, is the best way I can put it. I mean, Rex unironically says "power of friendship". That gives away what this is going for. And enough of the time, I just can't get into it. Also it feels like they needed to expand some parts, no wonder there's a Torna expansion.

That's not to say there weren't some real highlights. I feel some of the most dramatic and serious moments can be great story moments. I like some of the themes, especially the consistent ones about literal connections between blades and drivers and the questions about memories and immortality. A lot of that stuff is pretty compelling, I especially liked in chapter 8 when they just stopped to talk about those sort of things for a bit. And there's enough dramatic scenes that do work like the first game, especially when things do get dramatic and you can tell the actors are putting their all into it (end of chapter 5 and beginning of chapter 7 come to mind). It also ended on a really good, emotional high point, the whole final chapter worked really well. So that's nice to see. Also, while it is technically a problem, sometimes the story scenes and dialogue would just be...awkward to the point of making me laugh. Most of the intentional humor doesn't do much for me, but I did enjoy some of the more unintentional comedy at least.

Shame the voice acting was hit or miss as well. I love most of the voice acting in the original game and was thrilled to see them go back to UK VAs this time. But maybe the direction wasn't as good, because a lot of the characters are bit off. Maybe its the style of acting they were going for, but especially for early appearances for characters, it just seems like they're likely to not even sound like they care much about what's happening. There's been anime where the VAs have improved over the duration of it, I've never seen this happen in a video game before. But most of the main characters do have their moments, so I don't think its the actors. The gameplay dialogue is still as great as always in particular.

So right now, for me, there's been two almost masterpieces that failed to follow up an actual masterpiece. Both have similar but different issues. I would say I like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 more than X, but I definitely respect X more. X is a wildly different game from maybe any JRPG I've ever played. How it did storytelling went so far against what I expect from the genre, and while I'm mixed on how that worked out, I respect the attempt. This felt too much like a new take on Xenoblade 1, but with more problems for no reason. Which is a shame.

There was a Twitter thread I saw of "which games do you like that you wouldn't recommend to others?" And the first reply I saw was Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Correct. That sums it up for me. It's a pretty great game, you probably shouldn't bother over other great games unless its specifically your thing.