Happy Mothers’ Day

It’s not often that I encounter words (or themes) directly related to motherhood in games, so for today, I decided to do the next best thing, and post a word I learned from a game where one of the main antagonists is simply called Mother.

pertinacious, adj. – Obsessively or maddeningly persistent.

Learned from: Iconoclasts (PS4, Mac, PC, Switch, Vita)

Developed by Konjak / Joakim Sandberg

Published by Bifrost Entertainment

On the surface, Iconoclasts appears to be a fairly straightforward platformer with some interesting mechanics, light Metroidvania elements, and some really nice pixel art. Once you get into it, though, you’ll find a story about religious totalitarianism, oppression, backstabbing, sacrifice, and people clinging to their own ideals, no matter the cost. This includes the main character of Robin, an unlicensed mechanic in a world where all technology is controlled by the ruling elite. (At one point, one of the antagonists refers to her as the “pertinacious heroine of House Four,” hence today’s word.)

All in all, Iconoclasts handily lives up to its name (an iconoclast is sort of an anarchist–someone who works to tear down established belief systems or institutions. Yay, two-fer!). It’s a little rough around the edges, and a couple sections are a bit frustrating, but it’s a good game overall, with some boss fights that feel like they came straight out of a Treasure game. Oh, and (to the best of my knowledge), it was entirely developed and the music was composed solely by one man: Joakim Sandberg. Considering how well Iconoclasts came together, that’s quite a noteworthy feat.

iconoclasts

Such a bright, happy game, where assuredly nothing tragic will happen.

I’m surprised this word isn’t used more, these days.

Maybe it’s just my perspective, but in recent years, it seems like everybody is a lot more tense than they used to be. From money issues, to health scares, to concerns about politics, society in general just feels significantly more worried, angry, and fearful than I remember it, even five years ago. Given that, it does seem a bit odd that you don’t hear this word bandied about more often:

anxiolytic, noun – Medication or treatment that reduces anxiety.

Learned from: Enter the Gungeon (PS4, PC, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Dodge Roll

Published by Devolver Digital (2016)

Enter the Gungeon is an odd little game; it’s a roguelike, twin-stick shooter, where almost everything is a gun or something gun-/explosive-related. Many of your standard enemies are anthropomorphic bullets and grenades, copyright-free versions of iconic weapons from other games abound, and there are a ton of D&D references with gun puns worked in (beholders are “beholsters,” medusas are “gorguns,” and the latest update was even called “Advanced Gungeons and Draguns”).

The developers really took this theme to the hilt and ran with it, which gives Enter the Gungeon a lot of heart and personality. But not every item you find entirely fits this tongue-in-cheek mold, as is the case with the Muscle Relaxant. It fits well in the overall theme of intense gunplay, in that it calms your character’s nerves and steadies their aim, but I guess they couldn’t work in a groaner into the item description itself. Instead, they taught me a word.

enter_the_gungeon

If you enjoy roguelikes, this one will blow you away. (See? I can do it, too.)

Happy Easter

As a kid, the whole Easter Bunny thing never made sense to me, because rabbits clearly don’t lay eggs. As I grew older, their roles as symbols of fertility became clearer, which tie strongly into Easter’s pre-Christian roots, so it started to make more sense. But in the spirit of my youthful confusion, here’s a word that references a completely different nonsensical belief regarding what hatches from what.

anatiferous, adj. – Producing ducks or geese.

Learned from: Skullgirls (PS3, Android, iOS, PC, PS4, Switch, XBox 360, XBox One)

Developed by Reverge Labs

Published by Autumn Games, Konami (2012)

Skullgirls has the distinction of being one of the quirkiest fighting games I’ve ever played, from its character designs, to its old-timey theater aesthetic, to the fact that every combo has an associated descriptor. For example, a 7-hit combo is “Lucky,” while an 18-hit combo is “Barely Legal,” and so on. For some reason, a 32-hit combo is “Anatiferous.” It’s inexplicable in the game, and even the history of the word fails to shed any light on the reasons why it’s there.

See, at one point in time, it was believed that barnacle geese hatched from barnacles on the sides of ships. As if that weren’t weird enough, people somehow got the notion that the barnacles themselves grew on trees, and dropped off into the water, before floating over to ships and attaching themselves. Because geese hatching from barnacles hanging from trees would just be silly. I marvel at what kind of worldview must have prevailed at that time, to not only come up with this idea, but to somehow make it stick.

barnacle_goose

Even the goose is unimpressed by its origin story.

And now for something completely different.

I’m going to take a break from the usual today, and actually review a game I just played. Since (in a way) this blog is about how games can impact our lives, it seems in keeping with the spirit of things–especially when I’m left feeling uncertain of how I should feel at all about a particular title. This will be long, so if you want the tl;dr version, skip to the last paragraph. So, without further ado…

labyrinth_of_refrain

In one of my earlier posts, I mentioned how my early experiences with Dungeon Master shaped my love of the first-person dungeon crawler, and how happy I am that the genre is still alive and well in Japan. So, even though many contemporary releases don’t reach the level of depth and immersion of that old classic, I still tend to pick them up. Some I enjoy more than others, and despite its shortcomings, Labyrinth of Refrain was proving to be a fun example of the genre…until one of the characters was unceremoniously killed in a back alley nearly 60 hours in, and I lost.

This is a problem, because I have no idea what I did to get a bad ending. In, say, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (another dungeon crawler), if you got an ending you didn’t want, the story made it clear that you supported the wrong people. Going a bit further afield, in something like Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, if you got a bad ending, it was because you trusted the wrong people, or split the party into the wrong groups. You might not know exactly what went wrong, but you had an idea of what to try. Even in Silent Hill 2, a game with some of the most subtle elements that influence which ending you get, you at least see a list of statistics at the end, so you have an inkling of what you can do differently the next time around. In Labyrinth of Refrain, I have absolutely no clue what I did wrong, and this is due in large part to how the story is presented.

See, you aren’t the main character. Your role in things is to just venture into the (increasingly inexplicable) dungeons, kill monsters, and answer the occasional yes or no question (or remain silent). The actual plot plays out around you in visual novel-style cutscenes, that happen mainly when you enter a new area, or find a certain item. There’s no way to choose which scenes to watch, so I can’t opt out of the one that gets me the bad ending, and I’m at a complete loss as to what I did that got me to this point. Did I complete a side quest I wasn’t supposed to? Was my karma too high? Too low? Did I not sell enough items at the market, or too many? None of the yes/no questions seemed to pertain to how things ended up, so I don’t think it’s that, but I have no way of knowing, because the game doesn’t communicate my mistakes at all. And after sinking that much time into it, that’s frustrating.

The experience leading up to that point was…more enjoyable than it probably should have been, honestly. In about 95% of the battles, I just ordered my units to attack, and sat back until the enemy was dead. The other 5% was the early game, where you’re a lot more fragile, and thus have to experiment more to stay alive, and during boss fights. Attack magic usually wasn’t worth sacrificing the base attack damage from your units, and it’s fairly easy to get a skill that auto-heals your party after battles, so healing magic is pointless most of the time. What kept me going was the story I wasn’t directly involved in, and the loot…for awhile. I’ll touch more on the story in a bit, but the loot takes some explaining, because even that has issues.

Your adventuring party consists of five slots (called covens) of units. Each coven can hold between one and three individual units, depending on its type, with the possibility of having numerous “support” units attached as well. And each unit has its own set of equipment: left arm, right arm, head, chest, boots, accessory.

Starting to see the issue?

Weapons aren’t so bad, because not everyone is going to be using a crossbow, or lance, but for armor, nearly every class and gender can wear any armor in the game. So, whenever you find a new armor piece, you have to go though potentially 15+ units, comparing its stats to what they’re currently wearing. And loot drops ALL THE TIME. Stats are randomized (within a range) for each piece, too, and if you factor in the Diablo-style item prefixes (“breezy” sword, “odorous” traveler’s cape, etc.), there’s no shorthand way of knowing whether an item’s worth checking or not. You can have one piece of gear with four pages of stats you need to consider. Do you sacrifice a bit of illusion resistance for a boost to your guard chance? Is losing some defense worth the increase in charm? It’s micro-managing to the extreme. But for awhile at least, it’s fun chasing higher numbers.

The dungeons themselves are distinct and nicely drawn (as are the enemies), though they’re nonsensical in how they fit together. Maybe it gets explained in the “good ending,” how you go from underground areas, to open-air kingdoms, to towers who knows where, but it wasn’t during my 58 hours of play time. And while there are some puzzles, they’re never terribly complex–find the key, or the switch, or the MacGuffin to move forward.

As for the story itself, it’s very disjointed, but there’s enough of a sense of mystery and foreboding, that I wish I’d been able to see it through to the real ending. The characters aren’t always sympathetic, and some are downright confounding (like the nun who has an immediate and seemingly-inexplicable crush on one of the other characters), but underneath it all, there’s more I wanted to learn. Something is undeniably wrong with the town of refrain, and the people in it, and discovering just what’s going on is a big part of what kept me going…which makes my sudden, unavoidable failure all the more galling.

Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk is a hard game to recommend–or to completely write off. There’s enough tension to the combat (will an attack miss, deal a critical hit, apply a status effect to give your units a breather?), that even just spamming “attack” like I did kept my interest in the battles, more often than not. The maps are huge, with tons of loot to find (for better or worse). And the graphics are quite good for a game of this type. But at the same time, you as a player aren’t a direct actor in the story that unfolds, and whatever impact you do have behind the scenes can lead you down an unwinnable path, and good luck figuring out what you did wrong. Also, your predilection for micromanagement might greatly influence your enjoyment, when you get to the point of having to juggle equipment between upwards of a dozen characters. There are also some, uh…questionable scenes of either a surprisingly violent, or weirdly sexual nature, depending on which ones you get. You never directly see anything overtly gory, or X-rated (at least I didn’t), but reading about someone being mercilessly beaten, or pursued by someone they have no interest in can be uncomfortable. It’s a very mixed bag, but there’s some fun to be had here–just be warned that you can lose a lot of time, if the game decides you deserve a bad ending, for whatever arbitrary and unexplained reason. Best of luck, if you decide to pick this one up. In a very literal sense, you’ll need it.

Happy Pi Day!

Obligatory pie-related post for 3.14, and it’s a bit of a long one.

atelier, noun – A workshop–specifically the workshop of an artisan, artist, or designer.

Learned from: Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland (PS3, PS Vita, Switch)

Developed by Gust

Published by NIS America (2010)

Atelier Rorona isn’t a game about saving the world, or overthrowing an evil empire, or anything like that. Instead, it’s about trying to keep your master’s alchemy shop from going bankrupt. But the small scale of the adventure doesn’t mean it’s any less harrowing.

You’re given a series of tasks to complete for the king, to prove to him that your shop is worth keeping around, and each of these has a time limit. And everything takes time. Going out to collect ingredients eats up time. Making items takes time. Side events? You guessed it: time. It’s a surprisingly tense mechanic for a relatively prosaic concept.

Thankfully, you’re not alone in your quest, as a variety of colorful characters will join you, from a puppeteer, to a ghost, to a journeyman cook…and that bloody cook is what ties this in to Pi Day. Iksel wants to become a famous chef, and his goal is reflected in how he acts in the party–a lot of his moves can heal or provide buffs/recovery for the rest of the characters. Plus, he dishes out (pun fully intended) a good amount of damage, to boot. He was one of my strongest party members…and then I made too many pies.

See, in Atelier Rorona, you have two kinds of leveling: character levels, and your alchemy skill level. You need this latter to be high enough to make certain items, so you’ll occasionally have to grind lesser items to get there. A good way through the game, I had a lot of ingredients for making pies on-hand, and decided to use some of my time churning those out like nobody’s business (alchemy can make damn near anything in Japanese RPGs). So, I’m going about my business, when one day, Iksel bursts into my shop, sees what I’m doing, and thinks I’m trying to upstage him. He then challenges me to a pie-making contest a week later, storms out of my shop, and leaves my party. I still hadn’t gathered the ingredients I needed for whatever the king was asking for, and without him in my lineup, I was left with some severely under-leveled alternatives, to fill the gap.

Looking back on it, years later, I’m actually rather impressed that Gust put in such an obscure Easter egg. It adds a layer to the character, and makes me wonder what other events I could’ve unlocked by accident. But at the time, I’d lost one of my best characters, and I was pissed. Some time later, my PS3 bit the dust, and I lost my save files, so I still haven’t beaten this game. I really should revisit it at some point, because the series is huge, and I did enjoy my time with Rorona up until this point.

iksel

Look at this smug bastard.

The worm turns

I have a long history with the first Dark Souls. When the game first came out, I made it to the Four Kings, got stuck, and had my PS3 die before I had a chance to get any further. Later, when I’d replaced my system, I bought the DLC, and got frustrated when I couldn’t figure out how to access this thing I paid extra money for. So I put it down again. Later still, I looked up what I had to do to get into the new content, got to the point where you free Dusk of Oolacile…and accidentally killed her, when I set my controller down, and the R2 trigger registered that as being pressed.

Long story short, I loved the game, but it kept frustrating me for the wrong reasons. Just recently, I picked it up again and finally beat it. Since it’s fresh in my mind, here’s one of the words I learned from it.

vermifuge, noun – A medicine that kills or expels parasitic worms from the body.

Learned from: Dark Souls (PS3, PC, PS4, Switch, XBox 360, XBox One)

Developed by From Software

Published by From Software (2011)

Once you’ve finally fought your way through the horrible frame rate of Blighttown, you enter the realm of Quelaag, one of the Daughters of Chaos. She, herself, can be a tricky fight, but her minions are pretty pathetic: regular humans who are infested with giant maggots. As long as you just run past them, they can’t do much to you, but if you kill them, their parasites burst free, and they’re more of a pain to deal with. Happily, they do sometimes drop the vermifuge needed to end your own infection, if you’re unlucky enough to be bested by the worms. Though, it’s still easier to just avoid them.

vermifuge

“Do you have a moment to talk about our lady and savior, Quelaag?”

%#)@!

Multiplayer console games that require memberships to services other than the platform-specific subscription you pay for to play online drive me up the wall. The Anthem demo has shown me that I can apparently never play another EA game online on my PS4, or any other iteration of the Playstation brand. Because at some point, I created an EA account, linked to an email address that literally does not exist anymore, and there seems to be no way to change it. (I think it may have been way back with Dead Space 2 on my PS3.)

I’d been cautiously looking forward to Anthem, so EA’s stubborn insistence on making Bioware shackle the game to its own online service (and rendering it unplayable for me), has me rather livid. So, after that lead-in, here’s today’s word:

coprolalia, noun – Uncontrollable swearing.

Learned from: Rogue Legacy (PS4, PC, PS3, PS Vita, Switch, XBox One)

Developed by Cellar Door Games

Published by Cellar Door Games (2013)

Rogue Legacy is a roguelike platformer, where the gimmick is that once your character dies, you start over as his/her child, come to avenge the long line of ancestors who came before. You’re given a little choice over what traits you want each descendant to have, from gigantism to color blindness–there are dozens of attributes. It’s a quirky little feature that can affect gameplay in a lot of ways….

…or not, as in the case of a descendant with coprolalia. The only thing this really does (as far as I can tell), is cause a cartoon text bubble filled with gobbledegook swearing to appear, every time your character takes damage. Neither helpful nor harmful, it is at least worth a bit of a chuckle.

Q*bert: Gaming’s first foul mouth.