Overclocked Or Underbaked?

Much as I like many of the Megami Tensei games, it has to be said they can be a bit hit and miss. Here’s a couple of games from the series which got me playing away at them for a good long while, but where I eventually drifted away feeling like it wasn’t quite worth bashing my way through to the very end.

Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor Overclocked

You are the typical sort of personality-less high school student who usually ends up being the protagonist of these games, out about in Tokyo with your best buds, computer hacker Atsuro Kihara, and down-to-earth gal-next-door Yuzu Tanikawa. Unexpectedly, your cousin Naoya – something of a hacker himself – has given you and your two buds devices called COMPs. Before you can get a coherent explanation out of Naoya as to what the deal with these things are, a demon outbreak kicks off within Tokyo, and the downtown area is quarantined by the Self-Defence Force. Soon enough, you and your friends discover that your COMPs include a demon-summoning program, which proves key to you being able to fight back and defend yourselves – and others – against the hordes of unbound demons.

This is essentially a tactical RPG riff on the baseline Shin Megami Tensei concept – you have the same combat system used by the rest of the games in the series, the same emphasis on summoning and fusing demons, and the same basic “some demonic shit happens in modern-day Japan, it all gets a bit apocalyptic, you must choose who you side with in order to face the future” plot that’s been rehashed since the original Megami Tensei, the big difference is that this time in combat you move units around on a grid.

The original Devil Survivor was a Nintendo DS game; Overclocked is the 3DS remake, but aside from adding voice acting and some additional story content the game does not represent that much of an upgrade. In particular, it makes almost no use of the console’s 3D features, and barely uses the dual screen format; one almost wonders if it were originally intended for a different console altogether before being shoehorned into the DS format.

Although it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that the Shin Megami Tensei games don’t really care about deep character development outside of the Persona series, it certainly applies here; though the dialogue is fairly nicely handled, the characters still don’t seem to offer that much in the way of nuanced personalities. Then again, it’s hard to tell because the plot unfolds at a fairly glacial pace. The progress of time in the game is such that you can’t see all the plot events on a single playthrough, and in some respects that’s quite nice – it adds replay value and forces you to prioritise – but it also lays the groundwork for a certain repetitiveness, as plot points are frequently restated.

What made me lose interest in it definitively was a mission which made me think that the game does not play fair. On the mission in question you fail if a single innocent bystander is killed by demons – but the starting placement of characters means that it’s near-impossible to stop one of the strongest demon units in that fight from getting in at least one turn of offence against civilians, and the civilians are squashy enough that a crit from that unit can instakill one of the civilians. You can very viably fail when the mission has barely begun simply through bad luck. (Especially annoyingly, even if you move right up to the unit in question, if you don’t wipe them out they’ll just walk off and attack the civilians rather than going after you, making it impossible to use distraction and aggro as tactical tools – you must kill them, nothing else works.)

Then, towards the end of that mission, an extremely tough foe appears and the party must flee. However, you get a game over if the last friendly unit you have on the screen gets killed – even if other friendly units escaped first. This means that in a playthrough where three of your friendly units escaped and one died, you might succeed the mission, or you might fail at it – having a particular unit die first is acceptable, but having the same unit die last is un-acceptable.

This is both difficult to reconcile with the fiction and kind of unfair, and once you start feeling like a tactics-based game isn’t playing fair it’s hard to maintain interest in it. Challenge me, by all means, but don’t just throw arbitrary bullshit at me.

Shin Megami Tensei V

You are the typical sort of personality-less high school student who usually ends up being the protagonist of these games, out about in Tokyo with your best buds, fastidious snob Yuzuru Atsuta and shambolic dork Ichiro Dazai, when an accident propels you into a strange alternate Tokyo, ruined and overrun with demons. As it turns out, this is the real Tokyo – the one you live in being a mere illusion maintained by the Japanese branch of the Bethel organisation, an international strike force co-ordinated by God attempting to keep humanity alive in the wake of the apocalypse.

However, God has been slain and the Throne of the cosmos stands vacant – which means Bethel’s illusion is about to unravel and all is about to be up for grabs – even for you. For in the real Tokyo you fused with the demon Aogami to become a Nahobino, an entity which mingles human and demon, and only a Nahobino can take the Throne…

Developed for the Nintendo Switch, Shin Megami Tensei V is, as the title implies, the fifth “main” game in the series (if you count it as starting with Shin Megami Tensei and ignore the original Megami Tensei games, whose plots are more tied to the light novel series which inspired the games). As the series more or less always does for its main games, it’s a “take the Throne of the cosmos and decide how the universe is going to be from now on” dealio; the whole Nahobino thing is essentially this game’s riff on the sort of human-demon fusion seen in III: Nocturne (AKA Lucifer’s Call) and IV: Apocalypse. In general, originality is not the priority here.

Still, there’s stuff to like about it. If you enjoy Shin Megami Tensei‘s traditional combat system and the demon negotiation process, it’s about as good here as it is in any of the main-run games; in particular, when it comes to negotiating with demons it feels like special care has been taken with the translation to better convey the tone of the demons’ responses, which helps make the whole process feel a bit less arbitrary as you feel out their personalities.

In addition., there’s some interesting wrinkles added to the usual concept here. The writers are clearly aware that a lot of the demons of traditional demonology are in fact old pagan gods who got, well, demonised by Christian authors, so they roll with it: all of the demons in the game are, it’s revealed, gods with at least the potential of becoming the holder of the Throne, and the Christian God is only the most recent entity to hold the Throne. But after the most recent Throne war, God stripped away the Knowledge of their own divinity from the other gods and hid them in human souls, which would reincarnate over and over and (in theory) keep the Knowledge locked away – but should a demon find the human who contains their Knowledge, they can form a Nahobino by merging with them.

That’s deliciously heretical and fun, but I think the most striking thing the game does to shake up the usual Shin Megami Tensei formula – in concept, if not in execution – is with the various NPCs who advocate for the factions of Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. This alignment system has been part of the series since the beginning, mind you, and there’s always been NPCs who’ve been nudging you in one direction or another, with the Neutral side usually being positioned as the genuinely good guys and Law and Chaos being at best too committed to their ideology to see the faults in it, at worst utter dipshits.

For this entry in the series, the writers seem to have decided to do two things to shake this up a little. The first is to make the advocates of Neutrality thoroughly unlikeable – the main mouthpiece for Neutrality is out to destroy the Throne and purge the world of demons so humans can live in a pure world of fascistic might-makes-right. The advocates of Law and Chaos also have their less likeable aspects, but the Neutrals seem outright villainous. As usual in Shin Megami Tensei, once the player opts for a particular alignment the advocate for that alignment needs to be killed off so they don’t upstage the player in the final act. Whereas in previous games in the series, this might feel like a bummer – you might have chosen that route because you wanted to be buddies with its advocate – here it’s more of a relief, because you get the sense that your own take on Neutrality, Law, or Chaos will likely be a bit better than what the characters are advocating.

The second thing they do, and this is the bit which really surprised me as a Shin Megami Tensei old hand, is that they had the school friend whose personality type seemed to support Law actually be the advocate of Chaos and vice versa. Specifically, Atsuta is this sort of snobby, well-dressed, over-achieving, over-privileged little goody-two-shoes who’s very keen to support the leader of Bethel Japan, who is also the Prime Minister and is also secretly a Japanese deity. His sort of “school prefect”, traditionalist personality you would think would set him up to support Law – ah, but Law is about one single Prime Mover guiding the cosmos, whereas Chaos is about a multiplicity of competing deities and pantheons, and Atsuta and the PM are such traditionalists that they want to cast out monotheism and put the Shinto pantheon fully in charge of Japan.

Likewise, Dazai ends up being the sort of slightly punky, confrontational guy you would think would be all for Chaos, but he’s too horny for his big titty angel senpai to go for that (oh, and also he does make the valid point that having a plurality of competing pantheons sets up a cosmos of war, though the existence of the Throne suggests that a cosmos of regular throne wars is already inevitable).

However, here’s one of the areas where the writing gets very, very silly. I said Dazai “ends up” like that very deliberately, because that is not how he starts out at all. Far from it. For the vast majority of the game, he is a whining, annoying, nebbishly little dork whose main role is to explain how scared he is and how much he sucks, so he’s just going to take care of something which even he can’t fuck up whilst other people do the shit which is actually important and can’t actually dress himself properly. (My dude, either have both your trouser legs rolled down or roll them both up, none of his one-up-one-down shit.) During this phase of the game, he is literally wearing a hat with “SUCKER” written on it, which is so on the nose I can only assume the writers were outright trolling.

Then the most incredible cut scene I have ever seen in a Shin Megami Tensei game happens.

Oh wait, I got the link wrong! But wait, just watch that ProZD sketch and then watch the actual cut scene (just in case YouTube break the way they do link-to-a-specific-moment links in future, it’s at 47:52 in Bunnytails’ video) and tell me, with a straight face, whether it’s not just as ridiculous as the parody is. You can’t, can you? Kudos to Atlus, I guess, for having the courage to depict a “dorky guy removes an accessory and suddenly becomes a badass” scene just as ridiculous as all of those “mousy girl removes her glasses and is suddenly a hottie” scenes Hollywood has subjected us to, but maybe not doing silly shit which makes a mockery of a thing which isn’t pitched as comedy from the start would be a better plan.

I can’t say I flat-out disliked SMTV – I played some 70 hours of it, in fact – but I gave up before the last boss fight once I realised that the cast of characters I’d become used to had been largely whittled away and all that was left was the same Shin Megami Tensei “go punch God and take the Throne” quest Atlus keep giving us. In addition, though the game takes a good long time to get through, it has to be said that much of the content involved is a big repetitive. Rather than doing lots of dungeons in this game, there’s only a small number, and most of the gameplay takes place in four large, expansive overland sections, with the upshot that even though there’s lots of places to go and see it still feels emptier than other games in the series because a lot of the places you visit are a bit samey.

In addition, the “bimbling around Tokyo living your life” sections seem very desultory – to the point where they could have happily been cut entirely – which makes me think Atlus were planning more content to take place in Tokyo which then got hacked back. This is a very pretty Shin Megami Tensei to look at, for sure, but it’s also a game which hacks down the experience of the series to its bare bones in many respects.

A Blade Resharpened

Shulk and his friends live in Colony 9, one of the few settlements of Homs (basically humans) known to exist. Their world consists of a vast, apparently endless ocean, in which two world-sized entities stand frozen mid-blow. There’s the Bionis, home to biological life (including Homs), and the Mechonis. The only things known to come from the Mechonis are the Mechons. A year ago, the Mechons invaded the Bionis, travelling over the sword of the Mechonis (which, in the frozen pose of the two titans, has struck a blow in the side of the Bionis), and the Homs were able to save themselves from extinction only from the use of the Monado – a bizarre sword-like energy weapon which was discovered in the same ancient chamber that the infant Shulk was discovered in.

The problem was that the Monado is a temperamental thing. Of all the Homs warriors, only the revered Dunban was able to get the thing to work at all, and even then only with great difficulty and risk to himself; in the climactic battle against the Mechon, Dunban was able to turn the tide, but the Monado ravaged his body and left his right arm paralysed.

In the intervening year, Dunban has recuperated under the care of his younger sister Fiora, whilst Shulk has studied the blade. Not in the meme way, I mean Shulk’s had the Monado in a lab in Colony 9 and is trying to figure out how it actually works. When the Mechon unexpectedly attack, Shulk, Fiora, and their buddy Reyn must spring into action to defend the colony; amidst the tragedies of the day, there is also hope, because Shulk discovers a hitherto-unsuspected ability to use the Monado and uncover functions that even Dunban had never expected. But with a new line of Mechons with metal faces (and, apparently, individual personalities behind them) take the field, it’s apparent that the colony has never faced a greater threat.

Intent on finding answers, countering this brand new threat, and avenging the losses of the attack on Colony 9 – Fiora being one of them, the party head out into the wilds of the Bionis. Little do they know what is in store for them. Why is Shulk so adept at using the Monado? Who is behind the Mechon, and why are they intent on wiping out all life on the Bionis? And where did the Mechonis and Bionis come from in the first place?

Super Meow-rio!

“Obscure Mario games” is something of a contradiction in terms – after all, Mario’s the long-serving corporate mascot of one of the biggest players in the videogame industry (and the one who has spent by far the longest at the top table), any project which actually sees release can expect to be at least remembered. It’s a term which it feels even stranger to apply to any of the franchise’s platformer titles; after all, weird oddities like Mario Teaches Typing didn’t exactly play to the series’ core strengths, and even though some spin-off series like the Super Mario RPG line have their dedicated fanbases it’s the platforming releases which have always been the tentpoles of the series.

But if it ever made sense to apply the term “obscure Mario game” to a Super Mario platformer released on a mainline Nintendo system (who’d remember the Phillips CD-i games if they hadn’t been so meme-tastic?), it’d make sense to do it to the original version of Super Mario 3D World, whose existence had completely passed me by until its recent Nintendo Switch rerelease.

This is the other significant Mario platformer released for the Wii U, which might go some way to explain why it passed me by: I didn’t get a Wii U, and the sales figures suggest that not a whole lot of other people did either. It probably didn’t help that the Wii U-era Mario release which made the most impact was, in retrospect, probably Super Mario Maker, thanks to the way it harnessed community creativity. New Super Mario Bros. U was a launch title for the system and also, as a 2D Mario game, was harvested for content for Super Mario Maker, which has probably helped its reputation. Between those two, Super Mario 3D World seems to have somewhat slipped between the cracks.

That’s a shame, because it’s a fun concept – like Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS, whose ideas it builds on, it’s a fascinating mashup of 3D Mario presentation and controls with 2D Mario game mechanics – combining the platforming, powerups, level-concluding flagpoles and other major signature features of the 2D games with the free-roaming controls of the 3D games in a blend which probably would not have worked nearly as well as it does were it not for some neat level design underpinning it. Some of the levels do have more free-roaming sections, but for much of the game what you’re dealing with is a linear 2D-style Mario course but with a certain amount of depth (not figurative depth, you get an actual extra spatial dimension to play with).

Finding the Novelty In Nostalgia

Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is the latest mainline Dragon Quest game, and perhaps the first sign you are in for a big old nostalgia trip is the title. As well as the subtitle carrying a note of wistful remembrance about it, there’s also the fact that it’s a numbered Dragon Quest game, and whilst spin-offs like Rocket Slime or The World Tree’s Woe and the Blight Below have taken the Dragon Quest schtick in some very different directions, the mainline Dragon Quest series is very much the nostalgia franchise of the main JRPG series.

That’s quite something to say considering that long-running JRPG franchises like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Megami Tensei are very much the sort of videogame properties where you expect slow, gradual evolution rather than radical changes from game to game much of the time. And it’s not like the Dragon Quest games all go for an 8-bit retro presentation style: in fact, their graphics and music have generally kept pace with industry standards, not least because if you have Akira Toriyama doing all the character and monster designs, after all, you’re going to want to show those off the best you can.

Still, Dragon Quest has retained the classic, old-school JRPG mechanics the original game in the series pioneered as the fundamental foundation of its series from the beginning. Whilst individual entries might add embellishments or experiments here and there, these are all overlaid over the foundation of the basic gameplay and few such tweaks if any have become long-term elements of the series as a whole.

For Whom the Goose Honks

Untitled Goose Game is a release on PC and Switch (the Nintendo Switch version is the one reviewed here) which generated a ton of buzz from early trailer footage, which combined an endearing animation style with a delightfully simple premise: “It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.”

As a goose your activities are limited to waddling about at various levels of speed and sneakiness, gracefully swimming on water, waving your wings about and going “honk”. With these limited capabilities, you are set loose in a charming English village divided into a number of zones – the allotments where a gardener toils away growing vegetables, the village market square, a pair of neighbouring back gardens, the local pub and the skillfully-executed model village – each of which has an associated task list. Complete more tasks, access more of the map, make more mischief; it’s that simple.

Bricking It On the Go

There’s some types of videogames which struggle to make a transition to a handheld format and some where, once they make the leap, feel like it’s almost their natural home. I’d include traditional, old-school platform games like the 2D Mario games in the latter category. Their clear, cartoonish graphics translate to smaller screens nicely, the gameplay is simple enough to not require particularly complex controls whilst having enough wrinkles to stay challenging, whilst at the same time the level structure means you can pick up or put down the game at a moment’s notice.

All this makes it rather weird why it took so long to get the handheld versions of the Super Mario Maker games right. The full-fat console versions (released on the Wii U for the first game and the Switch for the second game) provided a nice system for designing homebrew Mario levels based on the gameplay and physics of several different Mario games (Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, New Super Mario Bros. U), publish them to the Internet, and download and play other people’s levels. Should be simple, right?