E3 (I Guess) 2020 Reactions Part 2: The Good

I was very negative with my first "E3" 2020 Reaction post. But, if this summer's scattered mess of game announcements had actually been a proper E3 Show, it would have been a really bad E3. 2020 is the worst "E3" I've even written about. Imagine an E3 with basically no Nintendo, no Call of Duty, and very few games with solid release dates. I said this last time, but I understand why E3 sucked. The whole world in chaos. Some people can't make rent. So if Microsoft has nothing to show with their new Fable game yet, that's fine. There's bigger problems.

Still Halo Infinite looked bad. And I called it, because it has not been a week and Halo Infinite has been delayed to 2021. It was not ready. Neither were a lot of games this year. Be prepared to wait until 2025 for Fable, that appears to be nowhere near even an alternate universe where it might be done soon. But that's reality. Games are getting delayed. Which is weird because we have no consoles, and I have no idea what will even be available to play on them. Cyberpunk 2077 won't have a PS5 version until next year. Control wants $40 for the PS5 upgrade, and fuck you, Remedy. I'm not paying that! Everything is a mess.

Shit, I've ended up being negative again for two paragraphs and this is the "Good" E3 post. HOWEVER, in this horrible time to live, having "E3-like"conferences was one of the few bright spots of this summer. With the way things are, you cannot really make plans. There's no way to look forward to anything because you have no idea if it will even exist. The NFL thinks there will be a season. They sound like lunatic optimists to me. How do you plan a vacation or a party in times like this? So at least with video games, there was something. Something solid, something almost normal, something that I could be sure is coming out and is exciting. Seeing the PlayStation 5 revealed was one of the few moments of actual solid hope I had this summer. It meant the future could have better things in it. What other hope is there? Kamala Harris as Vice President? You fucking kidding me?

E3 to me is about creating hope. Admittedly it's the stupidest form of hope, consumerist hope. But whatever.. Hope and hype are good to have. It's healthy to want things. You cannot live without some dream of the future. I'm almost glad Breath of the Wild 2 probably won't come out this year, because it's something to fantasize about. I can happily happily dream every day about how much fun Breath of the Wild 2 will be. Everyday Nintendo says nothing is another day the I can fool myself into thinking Princess Zelda will be playable.

Anyway, here are the hopes and dreams that actually arrived during the events I'm calling E3 2020:

The Games I Should Have Highlighted, But I Took Too Long and They’re Out Already

The summer of E3 has gone for months and months now. Inevitably, by waiting until August, things were going to come out. I missed my chance to preview these games. That’s why I’m not waiting any longer for you, Batman.

Anyway, that short list:

-Paper Mario: Origami King – A horrifying eldritch dimension of nightmares comes to the Paper Mario universe. Turns out that dimension is very euclidean, it's 3D in the form of papercraft. Princess Peach has been folded into a disgusting creature with not just length and height, but depth. This game also has a really cool-looking turn-based strategy battle system involving turning wheels. I’ll get to it eventually.

-Othercide – Another turn-based strategy RPG. This is a super dark game (visually, I mean) involving monsters. Your units are your “daughters”, these evolving semi-human creatures that can permanently die. It is a RogueLite, which I'm not happy about. But it looks cool.

-Fall Guys – The most popular game of last week. I feel like if I start playing now Fall Guys will be over by the time I get good.

-Carrion – A Metroidvania where you are the monster. Definitely playing this.

Okay, and here's the games I can really talk about:

Everwild

I’m old enough that Rare still means to me “Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, and Goldeneye”. Rare has not made games like that in decades. They’re not a fun platformer company anymore. They’re more like this super experimental Skunkworks facility at Microsoft. You won’t get Banjo-Threeie but you did get Sea of Thieves, a multiplayer pirate playground. That’s less of a traditional MMO and more of an open world toy chest of pirate physics ideas. 

Rare of today is full of ideas, mostly unfinished ones. They toss their ideas into half-complete games, then watch what people do with them. Sea of Thieves only felt like a real game a year after coming out. Meanwhile, No Man's Sky from Hello Games had a similar journey. You never get the perfect form of a game at launch, but Rare is making you part of their experiment. If you don't understand Sea of Thieves at first, don't worry. Rare did not understand the game either. It took them awhile to get it.

Anyway, this newest trailer. Everwild had the most gorgeous showing at "E3". There were a lot of trailers, a lot of them were really damn pretty. Everwild was the prettiest. It was a collection of scenes involving nature wizards and their very adorable animal friends. That one shot of a giant frog monster puking out a school of fish into a pond was the best moment of "E3", no doubt. Everwild seems like a very laid-back, serene kind of game Uniquely for a game trailer, I did not see a single violence verb. Even the most ethereal fantasy indie titles usually resort to you killing one of the majestic creatures. (See The Pathless, which I'll talk about eventually.) In Everwild, you're not conquering the world as much as being a part of it.

Rare has admitted publicly they don’t really know what this is game is yet. “Part of the reason we haven’t talk a lot about Everwild is because we’re still feeling a lot of these things out. We’re still playing around with gameplay ideas.” A few years ago, I would have laughed in their faces with an answer like that. Can you imagine if Disney showed us a trailer for Frozen II then admitted they had no idea what they were doing and no story written? Today, uncertainty is part of game-making. Nothing is “finished” the moment it ships. Everwild is a big pot full of ingredients, Rare does not know what might come out. I hope it's good. Even if it fails on release, sometimes great flavors take time to develop.

I have no idea what Everwild will be anymore than Rare does. I am very interested to see the results. It might be several years until this project is anything solid. We might wait years after that until it reaches its mature form. But I love the idea of this game. I'm tired of killing all the time in games. Can I just make friends and play with deer and commune with nature?

Everwild will release... sometime.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Yakuza is a series that’s been slowly building popularity over here for the last few years. Until just recently this was one of the last Japan-only franchises, with very infrequent releases in the West. Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6 got quite a warm response from critics. As for me, the growing importance of this franchise filled my quivering heart with cold fear.

What if I loved Yakuza? What if this is exactly my shit? Do I have the space in my life to commit 300 hours to play all seven games in the franchise and how many spin-offs? In high school I could devour most of Final Fantasy in under a year. In my late-twenties I think 30-hour games are way too long. I’m scared to play Red Dead Redemption 2 because it is long. I’m way scared of Yakuza. These are huge baroque games which claim to be “action adventure” but are so much more. They're entire towns with a billion side activities from Shogi to Pachinko to fishing, and everything in between.

Luckily for me, Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a series reboot. The long-running protagonist, Kazuma Kiryu is gone. He's replaced with a new guy with an afro, Ichiban Kasuga. Every game in the series was set in a fictional Tokyo neighborhood. Like a Dragon is instead set in the nearby port city of Yokohama. Most importantly for me though, is that these games have traditionally been beat’em’ups. Not this time. Instead Yakuza is moving over to the fresh and vibrant world of... JRPGs??

It is incredible to me that after more than a decade of classic turn-based JRPG battle systems being treated like a stale old relic of the past, Yakuza is making this move. Final Fantasy has spent fifteen years running away from turn-based combat. Like a Dragon will have a Job System, up to six party members, and MP. Plus, this is one of the first JRPGs I’ve ever seen that isn’t set in a fantasy or SciFi world. It’s a crime thriller. A crime thriller with Panchiko and nonsense, but still a crime thriller. I hope this is a new trend. Maybe Grand Theft Auto VI will have random encounters. Is it too late for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla to retool with Guardian Forces and Junctions?

Also, Yakuza: Like a Dragon has a kart racer minigame. I am sold. This is already out in Japan. Will release in the West on November 13th for current gen. Since next-gen is a fucking trashfire, there is no word on when that version will be out.

Shin Megami Tensei V

During Nintendo’s reveal of the Switch, all the way back in January 2017, Shin Megami Tensei V had its very first reveal trailer. Until a few weeks ago we had not heard a damn peep since. That was three years and more of total radio silence on this project. At least the trailer did not come with a release date that would become hilariously optimistic in hindsight. Remember Persona 5’s first teaser promising a “Winter 2014” release date? Atlus only missed their target then by three years. 

It is very weird for a game, no less than a flagship title for one of the biggest JRPG franchises of all time to just disappear without a word. Atlus is a weird studio though. You need to learn to deal with a lot of bullshit from them.

Anyway, Shin Megami Tensei V is back. There’s a new trailer. Honestly this one barely tells us more than the first one did. If you’ve played a Shin Megami Tensei game already, you know the basic outline of this series. There are angels, there are demons, there are thousands of obscure mythological figures that serve as your Pokemon, there’s Tokyo, there’s an apocalypse, and there are teenagers out to kill God. It appears this game might be building off of Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse’s storyline. That game ended with (SPOILERS) your character pulling off a plan to #AttackandDethroneGod. God seems to be dead now in Shin Megami Tensei V. Tokyo is ruins but Tokyo is always in ruins. Shin Megami Tensei wrecks Japan's capital more often than Godzilla does.

Neither trailer much detailed the battle system or really much of anything. Shin Megami Tensei IV was a huge improvement over older games thanks to being faster, lighter, and generally less of a pain in the ass than the old-style dungeon crawlers. You can save at any time in that game, where you could not before. Nothing like getting your MC-kun blasted with a Mudo spell, getting an instant GAME OVER, and then losing an hour of progress in a dungeon. That happened to me once in Persona V and I almost never played the game again. 

But even if Shin Megami Tensei V is a step back from Shin Megami Tensei IV, this is absolutely the kind of game to play on your Switch. Old-school JRPGs are just better on a handheld. So in 2021, be gay and kill God. Make that your motto even if Atlus themselves hates the first part.

Paradise Killer

Back during the worst days of the quarantine I finished up the Danganronpa visual novel series. If you're curious what my thoughts are on those games, I'll go real fast now: Danganronpa 2 is the best game. Danganronpa V3 is stupid, and Danganronpa 3 (the anime) is terrible. They're interesting games with a solid concept. Unfortunately, I don't think that concept ever reached its full potential. "Danganronpa", by the way, is a very fun word to say. Try it yourself.

The concept of Danganronpa is that you're an anime high schooler locked in a parlor murder mystery with a bunch of oddball classmates. Every chapter there's a murder. You need to "solve" it in a long mystery case and trial. My main problem with Danganronpa is that you do not solve the cases. It isn't a puzzle to work out. The way the games are written, the mysteries are unsolvable due to lack of information. Instead you and your anime friends argue for an hour, until finally the script reveals who the killer is. This happens usually after three red herrings and some ridiculously convoluted twists. At some point too one of your favorite characters will be the killer, which makes the rest of the game far less fun. Danganronpa V3 ruined itself in the very first case!

Paradise Killer is a first person murder mystery visual novel, just like Danganronpa. But it seems to be correcting the places Danganronpa went wrong. 

It is made by the indie studio Kaizen Game Works and is their first title. Paradise Killer also has a very loud visual style. It is not quite wacky anime teenagers, but every character dresses like a Lady Gaga outfit or a JRPG final boss. Your heroine is named "Lady Love Dies". Some other names include "Yuri Night" and "Carmelina Silence". These are great names for like a band... or a hipster microbrew... or a porn actress. What I mean to say is that Paradise Killer has style. That style extends to the weirdly complicated SciFi premise, to the very jazzy soundtrack, and the impressive hips on Lady Love Dies.

What really sells me on Paradise Killer is that you're choosing the killer. The game gives you the case. But solving the case is your job. You find the evidence. You make the arguments. You choose the guilty. Maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong, maybe you're covering for Carmelina Silence because you have a crush. It appears you'll get multiple attempts at the story. I'm really curious to see where this goes. The best visual novels have absolutely insane third act twists. I'm hoping for that out of Paradise Killer.

The website claims this game will be out "Summer 2020", only for PC so far. It is already mid-August, so Paradise Killer is running out of time. I don't believe they'll make it.

Haven

You know who sucks? People happily in a relationship. Ever hang out with those people? They’re the fucking worst. Such assholes. They’re so in love. So comfortable with each other. So sickening. Who can even stand them? You need socially distance from that shit. Wait until they hate each other like a normal couple. Then you can be friends again.

Anyway, Haven, the new title from The Game Bakers, is about exactly this awful bullshit. Also, it is one of my most anticipated games. This is as close as I have to a “game of E3”.

Media in general is rarely about couples. TV shows are traditionally built around the “will they, won’t they?” not the “oh, they did”. Because inevitably it becomes “now what?” and the show is ruined. People want songs about falling in love or breaking up, not as much merely being together. Video games are just as bad. Think about every game you’ve played with a romance option. The writers wrote all these scenes about the relationship starting. But once you max out the Social Links and you’ve banged your teacher in Persona 5, it’s over. Once the courtship ends, the relationship ceases to exist for most games. There are no scenes of you two going on dates on Friday for no reason other than, 'well, this is what we do now'. Ms. Kawakami isn’t leaving clothes at your house or forcing you to go to her sister’s birthday party even though you know literally nobody there and it’s gonna suck.

Haven uniquely is about a young man and a woman who are just boyfriend and girlfriend. Every bit of gameplay I’ve seen from this title implies they have been together for a while. They’re also disgustingly cute, just the worst kind of people. It is the far-off future and they’ve landed on a No Man’s Sky-esque planet. The gameplay loop appears to be rebuilding their ship by gathering materials, fighting JRPG battles(!), and flying around the planet’s surface. (Are JRPGs cool again? Fuck yeah.) Seems like you don’t even kill the monsters in battle, they just run away and drop items. Naturally, since Haven is all about a couple, there is a co-op option. Then the two protagonists cuddle at night. Isn’t it precious?

Meanwhile, I'm gonna die alone, aren't I?

This is a wild swing for The Game Bakers, whose previous game, Furi, was one of the best action games of the decade. Nothing about that was cute or precious at all. Furi had maybe the best game soundtrack of the decade. If Haven can have music half that good, it will be worth playing. Haven claims to be out sometime this year.

Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart

The next gen of gaming is upon us whether you like it or not. But while we’re definitely getting big shiny boxes this fall, I must ask again: what games are we getting that will actually use any of that extra power? Some upcoming games have beefy graphical muscle to flex like Horizon: Forbidden West, Hellblade 2, even Project Not-FFXVI. But they all theoretically could still play on a PS4 with some compromises. What actually makes buying these boxes any better for games? Is it really just so I can see more pores on a character's face?

The big selling point for this next generation is that they are supposed to run much faster. The PlayStation 5 specifically is promising something like “no load times”. I won’t lie to you and say I understand the specifics, but apparently the new SSDs are built in such a way the computer can load much more of the game at once. This current gen, you might have noticed a lot of moments where characters had to duck under walls or shimmy through tight corridors. That was all a subtle way to hide the console loading up the next area. Theoretically the next generation will not need that. Kratos and "BOY!!" can walk right through the world without interruption on the PS5 where they could not on the PS4.

Unfortunately, nothing at this "E3" took advantage of this tech. Games trailers in 2020 look about the same as they did in 2019. How exactly do you sell “fast load times” in a minute-long trailer designed to blow an audiences’ mind? It is much easier to just show off all the action and lush worlds and crazy fun parts of the game. Whatever the PS5's potential is, we still have not seen it. There was only one game this entire conference that felt more than a prettier current-gen title. That was Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart.

Ratchet and Clank is not a series I’ve ever paid much attention to. I didn’t see the movie in 2016. (Do you even remember they had a movie? They did.) There was also a remake of the first game that same year that very quietly kicked a ton of ass. I don’t think it made many people’s Top 10 List for 2016, but Ratchet and Clank reboot was a solidly impressive little game. Rift Apart looks like the biggest and baddest Ratchet and Clank game. Fans have a lot of reason to be happy. But also this appears to be the most technically impressive game of "E3". Horizon: Forbidden West looks pretty, but Rift Apart is an actual revolutionary title.

The whole gimmick involves the heroes bouncing between multiple dimensions. The trailer shows them jumping through portal after portal, seamlessly bouncing between levels and even whole different genres. There’s a pirate world sharing space with a future world. That's all FMV, so I don't know how quickly the game will actually bounce between those worlds. But in the gameplay footage, you can teleport to new parts of levels extremely quickly. It is practically seamless, if not for the dimensions getting torn apart. Rift Apart is no graphical slouch either. This is a great-looking game that could really show the horsepower of the PS5. There is plenty of space for particle effects, enemies, and action all to happen at once.

There’s a few female Ratchet character for all the furry artists on Twitter to lewd up. That's about all you can do for now, since Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart has no release date.

Goodbye Volcano High

I hate how much even in this very piece I keep having to compare the new and exciting games to older things. I just cannot spot novelty. I'm useless without my frames of reference.

Anyway, I think Goodbye Volcano High looks really cool because it is like Life is Strange and Night in the Woods. It even comes with haunting indie rock on the soundtrack.

I like lesbians. I like dinosaurs. I like angsty coming of age stories. Goodbye Volcano High is basically that. I don’t think you need the power of the PlayStation 5 to create graphics that appear to be hand-drawn animation. That was novel years ago with Cuphead. I feel as though that novelty might have worn out. Goodbye Volcano High is about confused dinosaur teenagers who are about to graduate to college. They seem emotionally vulnerable to this major life change, and maybe a meteor will come and bring them all to extinction. I feel that. That’s a mood I feel in 2020.

This has also all been done before. What can I say? I think doing it again with dinosaurs is a great idea. Goodbye Volcano High seems embarrassingly sincere about what it wants to be. And fuck, you have a lot of emotions in high school. If you don't like sincerity, I don't really know what you want. Bitter irony? That's also pretty high school, to be honest.

You may graduate yourself before this game comes out, which will be sometime in 2021.

Calico

Magical girls have kitties. That’s basically the whole game. The colors are soft watercolors. Every tree appears to be a cherry blossom. There’s a cute song playing over the soundtrack. You ride big cats and bears. You decorate cakes. And sometimes the cats are on your head. That's Calico. You're either sold or you are not.

The trailer for Calico appeared at the Guerilla Collective, one of the dozens of shows that basically rained indie trailers down on your head. I would describe the experience of the Guerilla Collective shows as something like walking through a PAX Hall at noon on a Saturday. Imagine people pushing you in all directions. You're trying to crane your head to see what games are on the floor. Maybe you can watch somebody play something you've never heard of for a minute. But then the crowd pushes forward. Finally the entire day is just this sensory overload where you cannot remember anything. What was that game again with the cat café? It sure looked cute. Can't quite remember it though.

These trailer storms are a terrible way to advertise games. I have no idea how anybody can sell anything considering the overwhelming glut of content. Calico is made by Peachy Keen Games, a two-person studio based in Seattle. This is their first game, and it shows. This trailer is rough. The frame rate is terrible. The camera seems troublesome. This looks like a game that can barely run. Frankly, it isn't Rift Apart, it's only about cats. You should be able to get your frame rate running just doing that. If any game is going to release to instant forgotten death, it will be Calico. A thousand games a day come out on Switch. I don’t know how anybody makes money.

But on the other hand, who cares how rough it is? How many games do you have where you pick up kitties and wander around, while the kitties hang limply from your arms like an adorable sack of potatoes? I hate cats, always have. But I want to play Calico. I do not assume I will finish it. But until I get bored, it looks like a few hours of preciousness.

Calico is slated for a Fall 2020 release date. Maybe it needs more time.

Stray

Speaking of kitties, here’s Stray from Annapurna and a French studio, BlueTwelve. I don’t know much about BlueTwelve, this appears to be their only game. But I can tell you based on the game’s website that Stay has been in production since at least 2015, maybe longer. It started out as just some tech demos of a kitty walking over reflective puddles in dank cyberpunk alleyways. Now, five years later, it was in Sony’s big PS5 reveal event next to Horizon: Forbidden West and the new Spider-Man.

The whole game is set in some far-off future. It appears in Stray mankind has been replaced by robots. Or mankind became robots. Or robots killed mankind, felt bad about it, and have been doing their best pantomime of our dead civilization. (Did you know Nier: Automata was a great game?) Stray looks moody and a bit sad. But while I hate cats, I love robots. I really like this. Even if there is no interaction and this is just a kitty walking simulator in the future, that sounds great.

Honestly, this is a more exciting tech dystopia for me than Cyberpunk 2077. Stray comes out sometime in 2021.

The Pathless

An open world is only as fun as the way of traveling through it. (I can't remember if I wrote that or if I'm subconsciously stealing it from Waypoint Vice.) If I don't enjoy moving in your space, the space is going to be miserable. I always think about Breath of the Wild versus Horizon: Zero Dawn. They were the perfect case study in the difference between a really good game and one of the greatest games of all time. Horizon's world was big, it was pretty, and it had far better combat than Breath of the Wild. But Breath of the Wild had that just endlessly fun mountain climbing mechanic that turned the entire world into a self-directed adventure. In Horizon you traveled the map to complete quests and chores. The moments between were boring filler. In Breath of the Wild, the whole game was moments between. It was climbing the mountains just because they were there and climbing was fun.

The Pathless looks like a great game just to explore in. It is another indie artsy fantasy game. There are about a billion of them. I'm highlighting this one because first off, it is from Giant Squid Studios who made Abzu, a really great little game. But more importantly, I love the way you move in this game. You're an archer with a bird friend. But you run as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog.

It is not quite a running mechanic as much as skating on the grass. It is an effortless, almost balletic push forward. You need to shoot these floating icons with your bow to keep up the momentum. I don't know if that's quite busy work or a kind of rhythmic flow. Think rowing in a boat or flapping your wings while gliding. Your bird friend can also help you traverse the land, giving you access to heights and high mountains. The developers have told us to please remember to pet your bird.

I look at The Pathless and I don't really care about the world, or the story, or even the very good bird friend. I just want to be in this space and move. I want to glide on the grasslands and rush around, light and free.

What really reminds me of Breath of the Wild though are the enemies in The Pathless. The combat looks great in this game. But at first, you can't fight back. Enemies are these terrifying red creatures of immense size. You either hide or you die. It reminds me a lot of the humbling experience of getting caught by Guardians in Hyrule. You can run fast in The Pathless, but that does not mean you are the master of this world.

The Pathless is supposed to release this year. No date, nothing has a date.

Deathloop

I thought Deathloop looked great last year as merely a visual concept. It was this big jazzy B-movie. It was pulp right down to its color pallet, which mostly is made of shades of orange. This is going to sound really sad, but it is something I need to mention. Deathloop was one of the very few games to star a Black protagonist last E3. That's still the case in 2020. I think the only way Arkane Studios even managed to get people of color into their game was through the Blackspoitation aesthetic. Otherwise this would star some White guy.

Deathloop, unlike GhostWire: Tokyo, actually looks like the same game Bethesda advertised last year. In 2019 they won me over by style. In 2020 they're wooing me with concept. You play as Colt, an Assassin stuck in an endless time loop on this party island. Your job is to kill eight targets in the course of one day before midnight. Otherwise the loop resets and you lose. Hopefully you learned your lesson because you're doing it again.

So really this game is like one giant Hitman level. The entire world is a big clockwork of characters moving around the space on set paths. You need to learn their behavior and solve the "murder puzzle". It reminds me of an indie game, The Sexy Brutale, which also had a smoking hot art style. There you were stopping murders. In this, you're pulling them off with FPS action. Maybe you're stealthy, maybe you're loud. Maybe you use some of the crazy superpowers that every Arkane game eventually delivers on. Eventually though, with enough trial and error, you'll conquer the Deathloop.

Or will you? There is an optional side game. People can break into your loop playing a character called Julianna (the lady from the first trailer). Their job is to ruin your run. So even when you're like Nyles from Palm Springs, a bored god with perfect knowledge of the world, there can be surprises in Deathloop. Somebody might just appear out of nowhere like JK Simmons with a bow and arrow. Gonna be honest, I'll probably turn this feature off.

I suppose I'll find out how good it actually is in the future. Late 2020 is the release window.

And that is E3, folks. There are tons of other games that look cool, I don't have much to say about them. There's probably a ton of stuff I'm missing or have forgotten. Too many games. 

Anyway, be patient. Enjoy yourselves in the mean time. Because the wait for these games... might be longer than you think. May E3 2021 actually happen and have a more solid schedule for everything.