But instead I'll end up talking at length about mostly the same shit that everybody does cause I'm not that special. We'll get to the Final Fantasy VII Remake, you can skip these intro paragraphs if you need.
The rule with these E3 Reaction posts is that whether it is here or not is not a sign of quality. I have one game here that I truly hate. But rather it is here because I can talk about it at length. If all I can say is "it looks like more Ori and the Blind Forest" or "it's DOOM again" that doesn't mean I'm not hyped. Hollow Knight: Silksong is my everything. But it does mean I don't have anything to say, so I'll not waste your time. It also means I can skip things that totally don't interest me on any level like Halo or to be brutally honest, Animal Crossing. Finally turns out I had nothing to say about that Kingdom Hearts III DLC except this: make Kairi playable. We do have dozens of games to talk about though, so don't feel left out.
And just to hold back on your anticipation for just one more moment, let us mourn all those exciting games that didn't make it to the show this year: Ghosts of Tsushima, The Last of Us 2, that Metal Wolf Chaos remake, Bayonetta 3, Metroid Prime 4, The Last Night, Beyond Good and Evil 2, The Pathless, Solar Ash Kingdom, Gears Tactics, Shin Megami Tensei V, whatever Rocksteady is making, Celeste Chapter 9 DLC, that Switch port of Mother 3 that exists in all our hearts, and most tragically, my Game of E3 2018, Tunic.
Anyway, now to talk about that thing you want me to talk about:
Final Fantasy VII Remake
I did a podcast with fellow FFWiki people on this thing, and here it is:
If you prefer my words written rather than spoken, here's your alternative:
Just last year I wrote for my final piece for Fandom that I didn’t want a Final Fantasy VII Remake. I still largely believe that Square Enix would be better off leaving the past behind. Maybe they could finally embrace the clunky and strange Final Fantasy VII I’ve loved for decades with the big Popeye arms and probably unfortunate anti-LGBT jokes in the Wall Market. Maybe we all could move on to Final Fantasy XVI and build something new instead of trying to fix what is not broken. But that isn’t going to happen. So, it is with a lot of reluctance that I admit that Final Fantasy VII Remake actually looks pretty damn good.
My main worry was always going to be the combat. That is where Square Enix failed the most in Final Fantasy XV. That game just wasn’t any fun to play. Admittedly I haven’t played any of this yet, but what they showed at E3 of Final Fantasy VII was a game that looked more like an action game, not an RPG pretending to be an action game. You don’t hold down two buttons to attack or block, you actually move Cloud, actually dodge roll him out of danger, and actually swing his sword. Plus there’s free switching between characters, a time pause system where you pick commands, and the PS1 Limit Breaks are some solid-ass fanservice. This looks like a fun game. It isn’t a turn-based RPG like I want, but as a Kingdom Hearts game with Midgar skin, sure. This could be the culmination of what Square Enix has been trying to do for ten years: make a Final Fantasy feel like an action game.
I still have some worries with this release though. This is still going to be the first episode of an unknown number of sequels. Apparently, this is a full game so big it needs two BluRays. Yet it is only an adaptation of the Midgar intro section of Final Fantasy VII. If you recall, that whole sequence only about 5-7 hours long. Will =that translate into a 40 hour RPG? Can Final Fantasy VII sustain like 300 hours of game across a decade of releases? I’m also worried that being stuck in Midgar for that long without a break from scripted scene after scripted scene might feel like Final Fantasy XIII. It can be just too much tutorializing, not enough freedom. Maybe you’ll spend ten hours in the Wall Market designing Cloud’s dress, who knows?
That said, Tifa looks great in action. I can’t deny I’m a total shill for this kind of thing. HD Marlene! HD Sephiroth! HD Heidegger! Who doesn’t love HD Heidegger? I’m such a big fan of this game I remember who the hell Heidegger even is! So yeah, I’m hyped.
Zelda Breath of the Sequel
Everybody knows that the discourse around who “won E3” is reductive and stupid.
So anyway, Nintendo won E3 this year. The right people were added to Smash as DLC, there’s about a dozen awesome-looking JRPGs coming, and three Zelda games. By the end of the Nintendo show I was so drunk on video game #hype I literally had to go into a bathroom in my office and hyperventilate for a few minutes just to function as a human being again. And no single moment was as explosive as Nintendo dropping this bomb right at the end. You knew whatever they had to show was big, and they went for it huge with this teaser.
Breath of the Wild 2 didn’t show much, but just the fact of its existence is such a shot of pure adrenaline into my intrathecal space of my spine that it won E3 for me. Breath of the Wild is one of the best games in the greatest gaming franchise ever, more of that, especially with a darker tone, oh yeah. Let’s Majora’s Mask this thing. And Zelda looks great in short hair.
Yet here’s my worry: this game opens with Link and Zelda together in a cutscene. Knowing Nintendo, after this Zelda will be kidnapped and we won't see her again for the rest of the game. Please do not do that. Make Zelda playable. Or make her Sheik again. And then make her playable.
Adorable Link is Too Small
The Link's Awakening remake is far too goddamned cute. Fuck you, Nintendo for doing this to me. Link eats apples. He fights monsters. He is too small and too precious.
Link's Awakening is a fantastic game and helped me out a few years ago when Skyward Sword really depressed me. It reminded me how good Zelda games could be, and in a larger sense, how good games could be. It was easily one of the best Game Boy games ever made. Of course I'd play this again. I'd pay double or triple Nintendo's asking price if they promise to do this to the Oracle games next. It's also been a real long time since I've played a top-down Zelda game. If you watch the Switch indie scene, there's a top-down Zelda clone coming out every week. It's about time I remembered how good these things could be.
Cadence of Hyrule
I was going to talk more about this one but I just started playing it an hour ago. Feels wrong to talk about E3 predictions and hopes when the game is literally in front of you. So far it is really hard. The only reason I'm not playing it now is that I have to write and edit all this tonight. I'm going to play much more when I'm done. Crypt of the Necrodancer is a really good game, one that overcomes my personal aversion to Rogue Likes. So mixing that with Zelda is a strong statement. I love Nintendo farming out their key franchises to an indie dev. Let's see Mario end up in the hands of the Celeste people. Or Mother given to Toby Fox.
By the way, if you play as Link in this instead of Zelda you are officially the most boring human being on the planet. I may not get playable Zelda in BOTW 2, but I got that here.
Panzer Dragoon
I have wanted to play a Panzer Dragoon game for about twenty years now. This isn’t that dream remake of Panzer Dragoon Saga I’ve been asking for, but it is enough. These games are rare collectors’ items on a terrible console, the Sega Saturn, and very tough to emulate. There hasn’t been a good Star Fox game since 1997, but maybe a remake of Star Fox with dragons can fix that? Bethesda says they like dragons, but how come they aren't making a rail shooter set on dragonback? Do they really like dragons, or just like the idea of dragons?
This has nothing to do with this game, but Panzer Dragoon Saga's end credits is the greatest single musical track in video game history. I really need to share that with you.
Platinum Cops
I am worried about how Platinum Games is doing these days. Between Bayonetta, Nier Automata, and Metal Gear Rising they've made some of the best games I've ever talked about here. But they've always been a big mixed, their name is on Star Fox Zero afterall, and their projects lately seem very truobled. Bayonetta 3 is apparently not doing great in development. Something happened behind the scenes at Granblue Fantasy where Platinum Games had their name taken off the project. Babylon's Fall is... something, I have no idea what. But 2019 has at least one Platinum Game for us, and that's a Switch only B-game in Astral Chain.
Astral Chain had the best trailer music of E3, that's the main reason I want to talk about it. That was some solid Nier Automata dramatic female vocals. Otherwise this is Platinum as you know it. There's monsters, there's action nonsense, there's perfect dodges. You apparently capture aliens or demons that are invading the world, then use them as your allies during battle. There's an evil woman boss who fights very fast. There's a giant boss who attacks very slowly. Platinum is doing what Platinum des.
You do however, actually have to work as a cop though. It appears you can use your monster to arrest people. So if you also want to be an instrument of state violence, that's a thing you can do too. Maybe the imagery of cops dragging around anybody, even weird anime creatures, in chains and enslaving them is a bit much. I dunno.
The Only Good Star Wars Game This Decade
I really don’t understand EA’s marketing in general, so it’s no surprise I don’t understand how they presented Star Wars: Fallen Order either. I don’t get why they bothered going to E3 and putting on an expensive show if they had very little to present. I don’t get why they hid some of their most exciting games like Sea of Solitude away from the presentation that already did not have enough to show. (I want to talk about Sea of Solitude but it was barely at E3, so I can't.) I don’t understand why they aren’t prouder of their Command and Conquer remaster. EA seems committed to a very specific brand image, one that means we can't see the good parts of what they're doing so instead here's FIFA again. And everybody hates that fucking brand image, dump it. Show us Star Wars.
Anyway, Star Wars: Fallen Order was shown with fourteen minutes of gameplay, possibly the worst slice they could have shown too. I hear this is heavily inspired by From Software games like Sekiro, and includes branching paths plus a 3D Metroidvania-map. This trailer instead really wanted to make you think it was just an Uncharted game, being entirely linear and with very simple combat. For whatever reason EA didn’t show the part where you highjack an AT-goddamn-AT, they saved that for the Microsoft show. I don’t know what they’re thinking. I really don’t. Industry insiders are screaming that Fallen Order is really cool. EA instead wants you to think it is just another video game.
Other than the very bland white boi protagonist, Fallen Order looks cool as far as I’m concerned. My dream Star Wars adventure involves an X-Wing not a lightsaber. But this could be a great game to kill in a weekend. I also like the little Famicom droid buddy.
Marvel's "Avengers"
I didn't think the reveal of Avengers was that bad until a coworker today came up to me at lunch and said "man, that Avengers thing sucked ass". And that dude didn't even play video games. This disaster of a reveal had floated down even to him. That's not a good sign.
For everything Square Enix did right with their Final Fantasy VII re-reveal, they did wrong with this Avengers reveal. For a game that is theoretically out next year, they sure are keeping their cards close to their chest. Instead they showed nothing but the opening story and an inexplicable round table with the voice actors who had nothing to say. Then there was maybe the faintest glimmer of gameplay hiding in fast edits. It looks like a third person action game, that’s about all I got. Supposedly this is multiplayer, and the word on the grapevine is that this is going to be the Marvel answer to Destiny or Anthem. But how exactly that is going to work when the game is seemingly limited to just the core Avenger team characters, I don’t know. Looks like you play a single-player campaign and the multiplayer stuff happens separately. Would love to see how that works, but SE won't show that.
I'd also like to question the aesthetic choices here. It appears between this and last year’s Spider-Man that Marvel wants to create their own video game MCU. Spider-Man teased the Avengers were on the West Coast. Now the Avengers now are chilling in San Francisco as part of the Bay Area’s terrible gentrification problem. (I also remember Batman: Arkham Knight teasing a larger DC universe but since then Rocksteady has been stuck in the weeds for five years. We'll never see that.) This game has a similar art style of “almost real”, so it looks kinda like the MCU but just slightly off. However, where Spider-Man’s red suit popped with color like a Ferrari sportscar, the colors in this are muted and dull. It looks good in terms of graphical power, but something still feels cheap.
Clearly Crystal Dynamics is aiming to recreate the color pallet of an MCU movie. Problem is, they don’t have the MCU license, so you end up with all these B-movie replacement faces. That's clearly not Scarlett Johanssen or Chris Hemsworth, and these interpretations do not have the raw star power you remember. Nor does this version have the comic book razzle dazzle that you get in Marvel Ultimate Alliance on Switch. By picking the five core Avengers heroes from the movies minus Hawkeye, they’re asking for the comparison, and that’s a battle they will lose.
Spiritfarer
Microsoft showed off this little indie game during their conference. Maybe you missed it due to the overwhelming hype of Keanu Reeves being Keanu Reeves just a minute before. However, I’m crazy hyped for this, or as hyped as you can be for a calming indie art game. Spiritfarer’s trailer didn’t really explain what was going on too, it just appeared to be Animal Crossing on a boat. But really, your character, Stella, is basically a cartoon version of Chiron, and your friendly deer buddy is dead. You’re ferrying the spirits of the dead over to the afterlife and along the way caring for them with crafting and building a happy purgatory. If sending your friends away in Pyre was too much for you, then Spiritfarer is probably going to make you ugly cry hard. But you’ll ugly cry in a beautiful way.
Adorable Japanese Lady Wins E3
Ghostwire: Tokyo is the game that everybody’s newest favorite developer, Ikumi Nakamura announced at the Bethesda show. In a cynical show full of passive aggressive pandering towards gamers, a running dragon joke that didn’t land, and one shill hollering incessantly in the front row, Ikumi Nakamura was genuinely happy and proud of her game, so we all love her now. You do not get a choice in this.
Anywho, Ghostwire: Tokyo is the newest horror game from Tango Gameworks, the makers of The Evil Within series. It features people in Shibuya disappearing, a sad lonely dog, and some disturbingly delicious ramen. There wasn’t any gameplay but the trailer had plenty of ominous J-horror quality, which got my interest. But you don’t get a leap for joy as honest at Nakamura-san’s without some substance behind it. This could be our next Death Stranding, a weird creepy game with a weird style that will keep us guessing for years..
Deathloop
What if Bad Times at the El Royale but Majora’s Mask? Deathloop is the new game from Arkane studios, makers of Prey and Dishonored. It features a man and woman trapped in some timeloop hell with a mission to kill each other. Much like Ghostwire, Deathloop had no gameplay so the trailer was basically all tone. But unlike Ghostwire, I have no idea what this is. Are you playing as both the man and the woman? Is it PvP? What does a Multiplayer Immersive Sim even mean if that's what this is? Just how much Quentin Tarantino-ish riffing on Seventies Blacksploitation can you put in a trailer before it becomes a problem? Can that even be a problem? I've read the reports on this game and I don't still understand. But I don't understand in a good way, I like to not be cynical and have actual wonder at things E3 can show me.
Speaking of...
Death Stranding is Actually a Video Game
I’m choosing to define E3 as any trailer that happened to come out around E3 times. Sony skipped E3 this year but Hideo Kojima didn't want to, so he released a Death Stranding trailer right around that same time. Death Stranding is increasingly looking like a real game with a release date this is frighteningly tangible, just in November. It is not, as I hoped last year, an elaborate con that Kojima was pulling on Sony. I was really hoping that the entire project was just an excuse for him to put Norman Reedus into a tight body suit as part of an elaborate courtship of humiliation and control. Eventually Kojima and Reedus would abandon the studio, embezzle a few million dollars worth of Sony's investment, and live happily ever after in Paris as lovers. That was the best possible ending, but Kojima actually making a game that could be really good is probably the second-best ending.
Turns out Death Stranding is more of a Metal Gear game than I would have ever guessed. It takes place in the fallen United States where walls needs to be torn down to build bridges. (Is this seeming a bit on the nose now?) Norman Reedus' character walks through the very wet wastelands delivering communications cables and avoiding demons and bandits. There's a lot of systems at work that could make for an interesting open world experience. I see things like him laying down a long ladder onto a rocky cliff face and have to wonder how that isn't going to end up with a million glitches. You can wack a guy over the head with a briefcase while running in silly circles around him.
We were also introduced to the entire cast, which consists of actors, directors, and women with unfortunate names like "Fragile". Quiet was the best part of Metal Gear Solid V, but I would rather we not do that again if we don't need to.
New Pokemon Children to Love
I love you, Sobble. I love you, Wooloo. I love you, Yamper. Sheep, dogs, crying lizards, you are all my children.
Pokemon looks open world now. There's kaiju-sized Pokemon. That's all the pitch I need. Giant Sobble will drown my enemies in his sorrows. Legitimately Sword and Shield looks one of the greatest Pokemon games ever. Just the fact that we are forever divorced from random encounters is enough to get me hyped about this game. I've been anti-random encounter in the past. I don't want to say that random encounters can never work, they can for the right game. They do not work in Pokemon, sorry. What Pokemon needs is the freedom and openness that Let's Go Eevee gave us. Don't ever look back. Instead look forward, into the bright glorious future of new sheep friends.
Cyberpunk 2077
Keanu Reeves said we were breathtaking! See, Bethesda and other game companies, they love you because you’re a gamer. Keanu Reeves loves you because you’re you, not as a category, not as a profitable consumer, he loves the true you. Learn to love the you that Keanu Reeves loves.
Anyway, let’s actually talk about this game. Keanu Reeves was breathtaking, the trailer leading up to him was not. Cyberpunk 2077 like so many games at E3 had no actual gameplay, just a short vignette of how things can go bad. The closer this game gets to being an actual real product, much like Death Stranding, the less interesting it can only become. I might be repeating myself from last year, but what made The Witcher 3 such a fantastic story was Geralt’s internal sense of honor and love for Ciri. You weren’t just some sleezy asshole being sleezy, you were trying to uphold a hilariously out of touch sense of morals in a world without them. The nameless Cyberpunk scumbag that CD Projekt Red keeps showing in the trailers is not somebody I want to be.
Now, this is a proper role-playing game, so you can be anybody if you so choose. The options are so dense you can even do a full pacifist run. Yet I have to wonder what the appeal is here on a certain level. Really great cyberpunk stories are about breaking out of that world and finding humanity in them. VA11-HALL-A is a cyberpunk game, but it’s really about the strength of found family and friendship in the midst of a disaster of a future. This game instead is like "yeah, everything has turned to shit, time to make some MON-AY! $$CHA-CHING$$". At a point it isn't really a warning about how bad cyberpunk can be, but an embrace of everything it seemingly is opposing. Will you actually fix the world or just exploit it and become 2077 Jeff fucking Bezos? It isn't that the game gives you a choice in this that makes it interesting to me, what worries me is that the deck seems to be stacked towards cyberpunk Bezos, not Jill the bartender.
Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be the biggest game of next year whether I like it or not, so I’m going to need to find something to be excited about. It will be inescapable. So hopefully there’s enough options to build myself what I want out of this game. I’m just worried that for most players this will just be GTA with circuit boards in your head. Meanwhile the real world turns into the one CD Projekt Red are creating here, and this is preparing us in a very dark way to accept what our lives are going to be once the corporations take over.
Watch Dogs: Legion
“These ladies fucking invented hacking!” Uch, Ubisoft, you suck so much.
I really do hate how cool this looks. I can write off all the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon shit easily (and I will in a moment), since that’s all macho military fetish crap and probably really bad for you. But Watch Dogs: Legion actually is promising cool enough ideas to make me stop and pause. I’ve been somewhat interested in Watch Dogs since the original but the mediocre reviews scared me off. Maybe this could be the one that scratches that stealthy hacker itch I have. I really want a game where you move as non-violently as possible, taking down fascists with your cyber skills.
Plus, you can play as an old lady, that’s wonderful. The promise that you can play as anybody, like literally roll up a random character as in a tabletop RPG way, is fascinating. That a AAA game could come out with no main character at all is pretty bold too. I love that permadeath is a thing, which is a strong choice for games now that seem to be about nothing more than endless collecting with no repercussions. You could end up creating really interesting stories to share, as your favorite PC dies in a heroic way. Or grandma gets electrocuted and that will be hilarious too.
My worry though is that Ubisoft really has no interest in the politics of what this game is going for. A cyber fascist future isn’t even that hard to imagine anymore. I appreciate the optimism that anybody can be turned towards good, that generally the populace wants to oppose evil, but I’m too cynical to believe that. I also like that this game seems to be moving towards fixing the world rather than relishing its failures. However Ubisoft as compnay actually believes “not having politics” (read: just accepting things the way they are) is a “mature statement”. So, at some point this game is going to turn with the revolutionaries being just as evil as the Nazis, and the real moral will be “maybe we just needed a compromise between fascism and freedom”.
Hopefully not. I want to enjoy things, maybe I could enjoy this.
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint
I will never enjoy this, meanwhile.
A few years ago, I was emphatically “fuck this” about Ghost Recon: Wildlands. That game was so jingoistic that the government of Bolivia issued an official complaint about their country’s depiction as a lawless playground for violent gun fantasies. Tom Clancy lately games so badly want to be Metal Gear Solid without the rough points that make Metal Gear Solid great: that being hammy B-movie personality and a clear thesis that US imperialism sucks ass.
Breakpoint is another one of those AAA video games that want to have their cake and eat it too. It wants to be this “war is hell” narrative about how turning humans into special ops killing machines breaks their mind and their values. But it also wants you to think that “Tier 1 Operators” are cool as fuck. This isn’t a game telling you to stop invading other countries because of the moral compromises. It wants you to accept the moral compromises of invading countries so you can keep invading countries. It’s like how Zero Dark Thirty showed awful and illegal torture, and audiences left thinking torture was pretty okay. Jon Bernthal is playing monster (with a cute dog) in this game, but he’s also a hyper cool antihero. At a certain point if you surround yourself with antiheroes long enough, the antiheroes become the heroes. It's what worries me with Cyberpunk 2077 again.
I think this looks like absolute depressing trash in a pretty horrible way. I haven’t played this game or seen the story, maybe things will be different than I suspect. But I see Ubisoft aiming for Spec Ops: The Line but really want they’ve made is American Sniper.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
This all got a little angrier than I wanted it to. So how about something I enjoy without reservations?
The thing with Fire Emblem battles is that in my head I always pictured them as more skirmishes than full staged army encounters. Turns out in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, your units are field officers, and actually they’re commanding columns of your forces. You still get the traditional overhead grid, but when battles start, it is not just one Cavalier rushing with his spear. It’s actually a whole mounted charge of heavy cavalry. That small stylistic change is massive for this series.
Beyond that, Fire Emblem: Three Houses looks an impressively beefy experience both in terms of story and mechanics they’ve added. You’re not just a handsome prince or princess ruling a kingdom, you’re a teacher commanding a class of the world’s top students. Think FFVIII but you’re Quistis, not Squall. There’s a large of element of non-combat interactions between battles that the series has been building since Awakening. You can give students special attention or just show interest in them, and their stats will grow. It’s a very maternal view of these characters who aren’t just “your army”, they’re your children, which appeals to me a lot as a failed teacher. (When you cannot do, teach, but when you cannot teach, write, and when you cannot write, blog.)
It will be really tough to see a student you've invested time into die in battle. The story also really catches my eye not just because you’re just working a JRPG West Point simulator. There’s also a time skip where the students you taught and connected with grow into adults, often very edgy adults with eyepatches. It looks like the main trio of student heroes actually will end up fighting against each other. How your hero reacts is a big question for me. Somehow friendships will collapse and my heart will be broken.
Control
We actually learned nothing new about this game at E3 this year. But it still looks incredible. The art design is next level, a whole category above everything else here. Remedy is making what looks like an SCP Foundation video game. There's a lot of oily rainbows effects that remind me a lot of Annihilation, the best movie of 2018. They're definitely aiming for a kind of bureaucratic Lovecraft. By juxtaposing the mundane with the nightmares, that only makes the cosmic horror more horrifying. Control is a third-person action game where you are an agent of a sinister government agency that has been overwhelmed by whatever supernatural secrets it is holding in the basement. You're trapped in an office building where bland meeting rooms mix in with dimensions of complete psychedelic insanity. This is such my shit.
Graphics-wise Nvidia is loving this thing for how it works shadows and colors. As a third-person action game it looks more like a satisfying Jedi experience than Fallen Order. You can hover and you can fling stuff across the room as a true psychic badass.
Remedy in the past has done action really well with Max Payne. And they've done horror well with Alan Wake. But Control looks like that magical mixture of a great power fantasy still overwhelmed by horror beyond your imagination. The rules of his world do not work as they should. You cannot file away the darkness in a drawer and categorize it. Control is out in August and could very well be my Game of the Year.
But no matter what Control will be, now it is my Game of E3 2019.
yer a good feller eric
ReplyDeleteAww, thx.
ReplyDeleteWith Final Fantasy VII remake Square may finally succeed in their 2 decades long journey to marry action and turns combat into something tolerable. Like the ATB.
ReplyDelete