What I'm Playing, Majune '13 (Pt.1)

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Man this one has clearly been sitting for too long - I hardly remember starting PSIV. Months are long, as Chow Tzu once famously claimed (only to land himself in jail - forever). Gonna split it in half (yay even numbers) for ease of reading, and to buy myself an extra day's post.

Oh. I guess I should add that "Majune" is just my little way of saying "the second half of May and the first half of June". Send me an email at comedy.jokes@funnylaffs.com if you would like to purchase the rights to this exciting new neologism.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Anarchy Reigns (Xbox 360)

Yeah, like I was gonna miss this one. A Platinum game and the spiritual successor to MadWorld, one of the three best action games of this generation? So what if the concept is dumb? Vanquish seemed lame too, and that turned out to be Vanquish. Anarchy Reigns is more a fighting game than a brawler (though as we know, those are near-identical genres). Since the online is dead at this point (and I'm not an online gamer anyway), it's nice to see that there's a full Vs. CPU mode that will populate a match with fifteen sim players. The campaign offers up a few time-wasting challenges and large, non-linear Super Mario 64-style levels, providing a gradual introduction to the cast of characters with a few souped-up one-on-ones. The payoff is the expansive roster - 16 characters may not seem like anything incredible for a fighting game, but in a Bayonetta-styled 3D rampage, it's cool to get some variety. It's incredibly out of the ordinary for games like Lords of Shadow or God of War to offer even two playable characters, so Reigns is a bit of an indulgence. How much actual variety is there between characters? I won't tell if you don't. Because not much can undermine the joy of choosing between a double chainsaw and electric hands and gun leg and robo-jet.

Games Started:

Phantasy Star IV (Genesis / Wii VC)

I already pretty much made a first impressions post of Phantasy Star IV. I'm still at it, even if my pace has slowed down as the repeated turn-based battles take their toll. Why can't all RPGs end after 15 hours? I guess it's nice to have more to play later. One comment I didn't make in my prior post is the quality of the dialogue. It's surprisingly great, with a funny, down-to-earth tone. I cannot say I ever expected a 90s JRPG to land this many jokes, and one particular plot twist was that much more effective for it.

SoulCalibur V (Xbox 360)

Can you say "buyer's remorse"? Why on earth would I spend money on this game? "Because I'm a compulsive idiot" is the only answer. I already have SoulCalibur II and IV, and only play them for the single-player modes. So why get V, universally acclaimed as the most pointless and redundant entry in the series? Because I had a craving for SoulCalibur, and something new and shiny is unnecessarily hard for me to resist when I have $20 burning a hole in my pocket. So, yeah, SCV is exactly the same as IV, with all the single-player features and character-building elements excised. I'm only still playing it out of a sense of obligation to punish myself for wasting money. Really it just makes me want to go back to IV and finish the challenge modes I left undone.

I understand that the game is one budget cut away from non-existence, but that doesn't mean it was any cheaper for the consumer. Certain seemingly-minor omissions are simply infuriating. For instance, why can't I set the number of rounds in a match? I don't want to play best-of-five. Why can't I disable time limits? Why are there only 3 difficulty settings? Normal is too easy for me, but Hard is a gigantic step up. The older games had all of these match options (and many more), along with seven or eight difficulty settings. Were they that hard to port over or re-implement? That's the kind of corner amputation that makes me feel genuinely bad to have given Namco money for this. Please, please, please do not buy SoulCalibur V, and think really hard before you buy another Namco game.

Games Finished:

Lollipop Chainsaw (Xbox 360)

Not a long game, but LolliChain is one of the many that's been sitting on my shelf at 9/10 complete for almost a year now. It's got a great score-driven combat system that makes me want to invest time shooting for S rankings in all the stages, but unfortunately undermines its greatest strength with way-too-long levels that don't facilitate this at all. I thought DmC was awfully harsh for tasking me with 100%ing 20 minute levels - Lollipop wants me to perfectly run 30-45 minutes? It has an explicit score challenge mode suggesting this is exactly what Grasshopper was expecting, but why couldn't they break up the stages further?

You might think of Lollipop as No More Heroes minus the bullshit. I guess where "bullshit" means "satire". The result is a succinct and lively romp in line with lesser Platinum games like God Hand. It doesn't have the production quality or sheer sense of scale to rival Platinum's finest work, but its idiosyncratic combat dichotomy (between dance and chainsaw moves, predictably enough) gives it a nice strategic core that will leave you itching for the next battle just to perfect your moves. The boss showdowns are probably a bit too thinly spread, leaving them feeling like an insubstantial element of the experience - they're at a complexity level comparable to No More Heroes or Treasure, but you also only get six of them. 

Anarchy Reigns: To be damned by optimism

Before I get any further, let me clarify that I have NOT played Anarchy Reigns. It merely represents the latest in an unfortunate trend of games: those with good ideas reliant on community support.

Let me give you the ice cream on Anarchy Reigns, since no one has heard of it. You should have, since it's the pseudo-sequel to MadWorld, one of the best action games of this generation, and since that of course means it's developed by Platinum Games, developers responsible (sometimes by different names) for everything from Devil May Cry to Okami to Bayonetta. MadWorld was basically a modernized Streets of Rage - sizable open-ended stages without linear guidance were stocked with respawning goons, mid-bosses, death-traps, and mini-games. Anarchy Reigns expands this into a giant continuous open-world brawl. Since it's just a big city full of hostile brawlers, why not fill it with human combatants? Because, after all, the Internet is a place of magic and wonder.

This is a pretty good idea. It's less ambitious (i.e. more reasonable) in scope than an MMO, but still dense enough to offer a repeatably unique challenge. You just can't replicate human behavior and unpredictability, even with today's high-tech technological advances in technology. This comes with an inherent risk: every role needs an actor, and they need to be present at all times for the show to go on. Without players fully populating matches, all you're left with is an idea on a drawing board. A great idea, but gamers can't play an idea. Only ghosts can do that.

That's a risk that any multiplayer-centric game takes, but it's a much smaller barrier to overcome in, for instance, a 1v1 fighting game that only requires you to have one friend and allows you to sit in the same room and share a copy of the game. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom had no reason to be successful, but since I could always find at least one person online, or just get a friend to swing by, all was well. Hinging your entire concept on the notion that there will always be like hundreds of people playing requires A.) a giant budget and marketing campaign (Call of Duty, WoW) or B.) a heart full of hopes, dreams, butterflies, and optimism. Sometimes someone strikes gold. Other times it's Anarchy Reigns.

The thing that bugs me is that Sega, Platinum, and everyone involved had to know that the game wasn't going to be popular enough to sustain an online community. MadWorld sold like 35 copies. It's full of weird subject matter, super-mature content, poor graphics, and was launched at a terrible time for this type of title, against the likes of Capcom's gargantuan Devil may Cry and Platinum's own (for a different publisher of course) Metal Gear Rising: Revengreances. That's not a recipe for success. So is this a case where we can say the game is genuinely bad for hedging a bet that definitely wasn't going to pay off? Platinum knew there wasn't going to be community support, but they propped up the game with it anyway. Isn't that the same as developing an offline single-player platformer where there's a 95% chance the game will crash after stage 1? Even if stages 2 and on are the most brilliantly designed levels in history, it doesn't matter if you don't get to play them.

Americans completely eat up weird shit like this, right? Wait, I forgot my "not a completely moronic thing to say" hat this morning.

Yeah, Anarchy Reigns has the token single-player mode, and I guess that ought to be fun. It's almost enough to get me to buy the game, just because I can't get enough Platinum combat. But that's clearly a patch on the giant gaping damned-from-the-start black hole of the would-be multiplayer beat-'em-up. In the analogy above, the single-player is the equivalent of a stage 1.

Anarchy Reigns is far from the only offender. Look at Castlevania: Harmony of Despair or the thankfully canceled Mega Man Universe. It's good to experiment, but sticking a power-drill into your pupil isn't an experiment. As a gamer I just shake my head - this is Sega's mistake and their loss, not mine. As to an alternative solution, how we could make that great idea actually come to life... well that would take the genuine commitment of a company with a genuine budget. That discussion is the territory of marketing, not game design, and one that seems could use a heaping dose of common sense.