So, what is GEAS? It’s not an acronym, for one — I’ve just stylized it in uppercase like the fullwidth font the game uses. In actuality, it’s an Irish word for a taboo or compulsory quest. You might’ve heard of it before from Dungeons & Dragons.
As a game, GEAS is simultaneously an oldschool NES/GameBoy RPG and an exploration of that era’s ideas within a more modern paradigm. It is not a “loveletter” to that generation of games. Though I am old enough to have played them… I didn’t! My first RPG was Final Fantasy X-2, which I played for the first time in front of my homophobic grandfather. Truly, an disasterrific adventure. In many ways, I feel that my absence from the NES and subsequent SNES “golden era” of Japanese RPGs allows me a more critical eye with which to dissect their parts.
That’s not to say that I dislike those eras! I should hope that is obvious given my choice to create GEAS. As painful as some of the earlier entries are, oldschool DQ and FF games have their merits. I’m also fond of titles like Phantasy Star IV, Suikoden II, and Crystalis that broke ground in storytelling and graphical style.
The RPG genre is endlessly evolving and refining itself, but those ideas are in conflict with each other. Where other genres grow symbiotically between games, the design reasons for RPGs’ vestigial parts are ignored or forgotten in favor of new risks or, alternatively, doing things “because that’s what RPGs do.” It feels special and rare when you actually care about inflicting Poison in Final Fantasy X, when in old DQ and FF games it was typically a major early-game hurdle to leap in those games’ wars of attrition. Before FFX’s evolution and after the NES era, Poison was a useless status effect in almost every jRPG. That’s just a small example — let’s not get into a discussion about battle systems and turn-based vs active time combat, please.
Using my own terms, I would suggest that I am trying to refine the gameplay of that time while evolving the storytelling into something more modern. Don’t worry, it’s not meta or “glitchy” like is so easy to do in a post-Undertale world, though UT is a good example of what I mean by evolving the storytelling. I’m not really interested in giving away GEAS’s goose yet. I will say that the game is queer, and that is an exploration of what it means to be a hero. I’m not limited by cart sizes, so it’s easier to gaze at my navel. 🙂
I hope you enjoy GEAS! A small (1-1.5 hour) demo will be out in a day or two, and then I hope to get out a demo of the first major landmass (up until the world opens up with the ship, I guess) in a few months or so. https://rpgmaker.net/games/11570/
…okay, neither of those statements are true. Some manage to be okay despite the psychological pressure points they try to stab, and there are faaaaaar too many to even list every single mobile game that I’ve played. I think I’ve managed to grab most of the actual gachas, though.
I originally said that I’d cover the games I’m still playing at the end of this article. This series got really long however, so I’m just going to give them a shout-out. I’ll likely be covering at least the newer one soon anyway.
I’ve never been an Animal Crossing guy, likely since I’ve never been a Nintendo guy. That said, I’m waiting for next paycheck to buy The Sims 4: Tiny Living and Discover University, so it’s not like I’m not the target audience. Exceeeppppt AC always looked dumb to me. Not that the art style was bad or anything. That’s fine. The actual daily routine looked so rote and mundane, though. At least a game like Stardew Valley has meaningful character growth and lots of self-expression in your farm. If I wanted to punch trees for berries or whatever, I’d play Minecraft. (I don’t like Minecraft.)
This is all to say that Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is rote and mundane, but with microtransactions. I lasted three days, I think. Bonus: it has a monthly loot box pass now! Don’t mind me, this sock is meant for barfing.
If I had to recommend an actual gacha game on this list to somebody who just wanted a little something to play now and then, it’d probably be Dice Hunter: Quest of the Dicemancer (or something like that. It’s a dumb title). The gameplay hook is immediately apparent — rig your dice so that you can roll swords and shields to attack and defend against monsters that are falling down a tetris board of hell at you. Okay, that might sound odd, but just look at the picture. Swords hit hearts, shields stop attacks, it all makes enough sense.
I played this for a few days and then exactly a month. When I bought the monthly reward pass, I knew life was gonna get a lot busier afterward. So, I played and supported the game for that month and then dropped it to go play in the woods for a bit. I think about coming back sometimes, but likely won’t! Not because it’s bad or unfair — it’s not — but because the theme, look, and storytelling of other games grab me more.
Okay, go watch the opening movie for Shin Megami Tensei: Dx2. Back? Alright, really cool intro, right?
The good news is that (most of) the cast is as cool as the intro makes them out to be. Special props to Eileen, the pinwheel hair girl, who is a hilarious lesbian golddigger. The only real flops are the gunner girl and Meat Balloon, the latter of whom didn’t even make it into the intro despite being part of the main story and a playable character.
As a game… for every cool idea DX2 had (which was quite a few!), it was a horrible gacha game taking another step back. I don’t even want to describe how bad this game is. Do not play it. The gacha will absolutely tear you apart and your brain will melt out of your ears.
“But you can fuse almost any demon you want, right — ” No, stop. I told you. Do not engage with this game. “You liked the PVP!” Okay, go upgrade your equipment. Oh, did it fail? Did your equipment upgrade fail? In that clunky-ass, slow and hidden-behind-like-four-submenus upgrade menu? Ready to equip that piece of shit? Better go back to the hidden sub-menus and AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Also, the events were all the literal same incredibly half-assed bullshit each time. Like, they were impressively lightweight and boring. That helped me quit fast.
Story was good, though. Eco-terrorism baddies and such. Lesbian hijinks. If you rolled the super rare demon you wanted, it might not actually have the skill you wanted it to haaaAAAAAVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
While nothing I claimed in the DX2 section was hyperbole, I think readers of this article series will have cottoned on to my abuse of the literary device.
Pokemon: GO is the only good Pokemon game. It is a game where you can catch pocket monsters, get items at specific buildings and monuments, and battle out the churches in your area to turn them all piss yellow. (Team Instinct, btw.) Sometimes, your little electric mice have santa hats! As much as I liked my santa Raichu, I would purposefully place my drag queen Jinx collection into all the nearby churches after walking around defeating them.
I actually downloaded Go simply as a way to encourage me to walk more in winter, which is when my body normally deteriorates (it was zero degrees outside, today). It worked… and I liked the game too much. I didn’t like how much time I was spending on the game, so I finally deleted it in early summer.
Oh, right. FEH. Fire Emblem: Heroes, the game about rubbing your sprites with the good color on the sprites with the bad color. (Each color had a bad color. That was the entire strategy of the game.) Or, you enter one of the Absolute Fuck-Off maps where you paid money to complete. Ah ha ha. I lasted two and a half years, solely for the husbandos and waifus. Plus, it was easy to play or pause at work since it was turn-based.
Or, maybe, I wasted two and a half years. The story is bad. The strategy is… well, I’m sure you could find some if you tried. (I just remembered that I also played Langrisser Mobile, but not for long enough to put it on this list — partially because I lasted two weeks, and partially because if I forgot about it this entire three weeks of writing then it clearly isn’t important enough to add now.)
I’m trying to talk around FEH because wow, do I miss it? That’s a question. I do, I think. I put so much time into this stupid game. And yet, it was never actually that good, was it.
I quit because the fifth (iirc) Hector came out, and he gave you an extra button you could push to deal 20 damage (a lot) to the entire enemy troop. I could just smell the horrors that would need to be created in the name of “difficulty” because limited Halloween Hector existed and immediately uninstalled the game.
Oh, here’s a bonus for you. This is the weapon of Selkie, my favorite pre-Three Houses FE character:
🙂 Goodbye, FEH 🙂
Warlords of Aternum is one of those super cliche-looking games on Google Play. I don’t know why I clicked it, other than being curious about a proper strategy game that wasn’t FEH or Langrisser. Surprisingly and pleasantly, it clicked with me.
The art is generic, but the actual designs stay away from a lot of annoying tropes. If you want women in reasonable outfits and generally realistic armor on everybody, check out the units in this game. The only two units with noticable boobies are a giant orc lady and a pirate queen dressed in rags, and neither are sexualized (no male gaze, no boobie close-ups, etc.).
Oh, the gameplay. It eventually got to be too samey, but as a casual strategy game it works well. Units get one active and one passive skill, and they have actual effects on how you play. Archers that set things on fire (ruining the terrain), knights that have to fight in pastures, raiders that can improve bonuses from attacking lower-elevation or swamped opponents… there’s a lot going on to min/max, and the maps highly encourage that you do.
Sadly, the game was barely ever updated (playing for 3-4 months, I saw one single event occur, adding one character). That wound up killing it for me. Arknights was coming, this had satisfied my post-FEH itch successfully… so, RIP Warlords. May you enjoy the hell on Earth that is being a bland fantasy game on Google Play.
So, what am I playing now? Epic Seven for the excellent story, and Arknights for the excellent gameplay. Going into these is gonna take way too long, and I plan on doing a proper article on Arknights soon anyway, so.. hey, if you want something to play alongside my friends and I, these are the ones.
Gacha games are bad, y’all. Hope you enjoyed all my reasons why! Personally, it was kinda crazy to think of all the other games I’ve played on my phones over the years, in different stages of my life both financially and emotionally. I also realized that I still have pretty strong opinions on a lot of them… rest in piece, Tower of Saviors. But hey, they’re just games, right? Having something be part of your daily life for years isn’t special or anything.
Hey there. I figure that I need to start doing some more informal check-ins on the blog in order to 1) post more often and 2) make sure I actually do what I said I was gonna do. This blog was meant to not just be pretty articles, but rather cover my gam mak and what games I’m playing overall. So, here’s a general summary of my mid-January 2020.
I revisited Blades of Brim. I can’t see myself playing this daily, but it’s a nice little time-waster. Or long time-waster. I mentioned that I was pretty good at these endless runners, right? I’m still getting used to the enemy types again (my first run upon returning ended due to a giant crushing hammer enemy I had forgot about), though I have little doubt I’ll be going for 15+ minute runs soon enough should I desire to. So, yeah, I still recommend it. The cosmetics raise your loot rewards by a bit.. it’s pretty inconsequential outside of looking cool.
Some other games: I also got back into League. Maining Garen, mostly. I’m a simple man. It’s okay, but I wish I was better so that I’d face better opponents. This evening I hope to mess around with today’s Chrono.gg deal, Warstone TD. It’s a blatant rip-off of Kingdom Rush, but what isn’t? I hope it keeps me satiated until Arknights comes out Thursday… so soon…
Ni No Kuni II has, finally, gripped me with one of its plot arcs. So far the game has been incredibly Issue of the Week like a Nick Jr. show, and any poignant scenes are quickly moved on from in order to keep up the breakneck pace of THINGS HAPPENING. I don’t even really know half my party members. They’re just… there.
But oh my god, the Duebill got me. The hero, Evan (that’s King Evan Pettiwhisker Tildrum to you), racks up a couple hundred thousand units of debt and thus has a bird constantly squawking “U O ME!” following him around.
It’s enough to keep me playing for now, even if the gameplay is about as flashy and empty as something like NieR: Automata, the loot system is more annoying than fun, and the pacing dictates that absolutely nothing can be dwelled upon for more than six seconds. If the puzzles keep being good and the story maintains its humor, I’ll keep playing. Slowly. Oh so slowly.
Obviously these are not finished. I’m trying to sketch out a whole town before filling in the nitty-gritty bits.
In a break from KO Cupid, my friend Karsuman and I are working on a… sidequel? to our “classic” non-linear suspense RPG, Visions & Voices. To be honest, we have this massive world with hundreds of stories we want to tell… this is our earnest attempt to sit down and plan out something simple enough to finish while being interesting enough to be worth making. I don’t want to go super in-depth because that’s when I start to get that horrible effect of pre-earning the gratification of doing something… uashfaslhfls.
Art by Karsuman.
For now, I’ll say that we’re calling it Mendelstone. It’s a supernatural mystery with an emphasis on cryptids and world lore. It includes some characters from Visions & Voices, taking place 20-40 years afterward. The party, from left to right: Sheris, an otaku shut-in banshee; Baya, a burger-loving stoner who claims to be the great Baba Yaga; Tutora, a kitsune who’d rather watch bad horror than charm men; Vi, a famous archaeologist doomed to forever be the witty sidekick; Henry, a cop-chasing know-it-all fascinated by the supernatural; and Marlowe, who claims to be a lawyer.
I’m also writing a script for a friend’s contest game on RMN, but eh! I’ll mention that in the future.
Last weekend I began a series of quick analyses on why I quit most gacha or gacha-like games I’ve encountered. This is the middle part of that series, with today’s entry closing out with the gacha game that has likely affected me the most personally.
Crusaders Quest is a game about eating breads. Unfortunately, acquiring breads is a difficult task requiring waiting, money, and power. What do breads give you? More power. I think you can smell the problem here.
CQ has a lot going for it. It’s simple but clever to control, the sprite work is reminiscent of something like Maple Story but good, the character designs are wacky, and the big effects like boss attacks or Goddess spells are awe-inspiring. It’s just so, so grindy.
This is probably the only game where I never beat the main story due to the difficulty spikes. Erk. Maybe try limiting the carbs, bud.
While I never got into (or ever even downloaded) Clash of Clans, I did enjoy Clash Royale for a while… as did my students. I got very used to hearing the game’s boot-up jingle in the mornings and during lunch.
If I had to pick up anything off this series again, it’d either be Shop Heroes (from last week ) or Clash Royale. I have put the game down and come back at least once before that I remember, although it didn’t take as long for me to give up the second time.
What I liked is that you could keep playing, that for a good while the strength of your cards (i.e. money spent) felt less important than your strategies, and that it was quick and colorful. What knocked me out of the game were sudden loss streaks that’d go on for an entire day or two before I’d just quit, hopelessly assuming the game wanted me to just spend some money to raise my ELO. That’s no fun, is it? Clash Royale might be shiny and easy to grab, but it’s insidious. Of course it is. It’s a freaking Clash of Clans spinoff, y’know?
And, uh, here’s the Angry Birds gacha, Angry Birds Epic RPG. It’s an honest-to-god gacha RPG with pvp, equipment, character classes… I was extremely hesitant when my friend kentona (of Hero’s Realm fame) ruthlessly bullied me into trying it, yet I came to appreciate the colorful and wacky game.
I think what ruined EPIC Angry RPG Birds (give or take a word placement there; it doesn’t matter) for me is that it would have been a really, really good $5 RPG. A harder sell, maybe, but worth the price of admission. Instead, it was a gacha game that needed to remind you every so often that you just aren’t strong enough. Oh, and you’re not playing enough. Daphne’s beating you in arena points, so you better play more. Oh, you’re out of energy? Oh, you don’t have great gear for that class? Oh, you’d really like that ability?
I often think about the Angry Birds dress the CEO of whatever company owns the IP made his wife wear. It’s the gaudiest piece of clothing that I’ve ever loved, and I base a large part of my identity on gaudy clothing. Angry Epic BirdsRPG is this dress: colorful capitalism, and a promise that something cool would have come about by having reasonable pricing instead of wanting all the money in the world. Or something.
I don’t know why I remember Unison League. It desperately wanted to be like, Granblue but with an MMO hub world but also this and that and SSRs and combo attacks. I played it for about four days. I did not understand a goddamn thing.
Because I made an account, I still get the occasional email about updates to the game. I have never read them. Unison League!
Blades of Brim might actually be the game I pull out again, instead of Clash Royale or Shop Heroes. A bit of craze history: when I was incredibly depressed around 2013 or so (a seperate depression from the one that produced Wine & Roses (see I’m better now, I’m not afraid to shill)), I got good at Temple Run 2. Really, really good. I thought about streaming my runs for money, but was too depressed to figure out how to set that up.
The awkwardly-abbreviated BoB is an endless runner, but with Things to Do. You swipe at enemies. You hop on your wolf friend. You fight bosses. You jump through portals. You choose high or low paths. Any given endless runner might try a single one of these concepts, but good ol’ Bobby did ’em all. It even had nifty wallrunning! So cool.
I don’t think I have a good reason for putting the game down; I probably just needed a break after a few months of daily runner-ing. In fact, I’m gonna redownload it now. Being an endless runner, spending money wasn’t really about power unless you really gave a damn about some ghost bear that ran a bit faster or something. Whatever. It was mostly cosmetic, at least if I recall correctly, and honestly I just need something to tide me over until Arknights is released on Thursday (spoiler alert for the series finale of these articles).
Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius is proof that you can try to make a traditional jRPG on mobile, make it super bland and extremely grindy (without even any fun way to grind anything, themed events or no), and still rake in an absolutely stupid amount of money. A stupid amount of money. Final Fantasy: Stupid Money: Brave Exvius. Ariana Grande is in this game, and I think Katy Perry too. Short-haired Katy, even. Who likes short-haired Katy? She didn’t realize a single good song in the nine years between “Teenage Dream” and “Small Talk.” (Except “Roar.” And “Dark Horse.” This is now a Katy Perry criticism blog.)
I can’t imagine a more vapid licensed mobile game than FF:BE. I played it for about two months before getting overly irritated by the grinding. The sprites are pretty, though. Props to the sprite artist(s), especially for all the generic units you will literally never use unless you somehow think they’re hotter than Lightning or Yuna (ahahahahaha you won’t draw either, you absolute peon).
…okay I’m taking back “Dark Horse.” Sorry, Katy.
I was originally going to go on about FFRK (Final Fantasy Record Keeper), but I’m now realizing that only one image could truly communicate my love for this game:
Believe it or not, I barely edited the above image. It’s just one of a handful of my jokes and memes that got decent chuckles out of the community I was shoulders-deep in. I was in badly enough to spend over $600 on this fucking thing. I think. I refuse to truly add it all up. That’s like… just not a healthy thing for me to do right now.
I quit FFRK because the events never changed except for the enemy stats going up a bit each time. At least, that’s what I told myself. It still required a bunch of different strategies, fine-tuning my teams, picking perfect accessories and passive abilities…
Maybe I quit FFRK because going free-2-play was too hard to bear. Maybe I quit because I didn’t get the bestest gear for Hope Estheim. But, well, I did — I haven’t played for a year and a half now.
I miss it, but that’s part of the gacha demon, right? All that investment is still there, just waiting for you to log in again. Then look, you’re a few days into the login rewards cycle. Stay a while, won’t you?
Sorry, demon. I don’t want to sacrifice hours of my Sundays to finishing events before weekly resets, or be tempted to drop another $90 on the biggest gem pack because it’s the most economical. Goodbye, FFRK, and good riddance. Craze is outta there.
Hey y’all. My name is Stephen and I’m a gacha game addict. I’ve been playing gacha games since I first got a smartphone (admittedly at what must seem to be late in life for zoomers; I believe I was 23 or so at the time). I’m only on my third phone now, so… okay, I guess that means my history with gacha games wouldn’t exactly be ancient if that didn’t match up with the real rise of them in America.
Today, I’m going to discuss why I left each game — or why I’m still playing it. While it’s impossible to hit every single gacha I’ve played (some don’t even exist anymore), I’d like to think the following list is fairly comprehensive.
If anybody is interested in a more in-depth look at any particular game, let me know. I’m also planning on a future article about what non-mobile games can and should take away from the best gacha games.
All images are from Google Play unless otherwise noted. I’m also going to attempt to go in as chronological order of quitting as possible, so the third article in this series will talk about games I’m still playing.
I’m immediately breaking my chronological rule, because this is the game that started it all. My friend, alias Karsuman, suggested I play this neat game. Ah… ha. Hah hah. And so began a summer of raging against energy caps.
Puzzle & Dragons is a match-3 game of the “runespinning” type, which is a highly-satisfying method of interacting with a game. When you get good at runespinning, you can make 9+ hit combos with only minimal luck.
PaD lasted me about one and a half years, up until I started the game at the end of today’s article. Ultimately, that game was simply PaD but with art and gameplay that interested me more. There’s a whole article that could be written on how their boss design differs, which is what I’ll say made me quit PaD truly: the bosses were battles of “how many times are you willing to revive because you’re not good enough?” If you wanted to progress lategame, weekly superbosses were your only option, and the task felt too insurmountable when a better game was right there.
Monster Strike is basically Puzzle & Dragons, but pinball-style. It even shares some monster designs! It’s absolutely huge in Japan… and dead in America. RIP, cool game.
While not as skill-based as PaD‘s runespinning, playing pinball with your little monsters feels just as incredible to pull off, if not better. I’ve yet to find an English-language game pull this off without feeling like molasses and causing me to uninstall within seconds.
So why ditch Monster Strike? The grind. Ugh, the grind. Pull that ball back once and it’s fun, pull it back a hundred times and it’s an absolute chore. Progression felt slow and was of the older gacha style of “eat the drops you don’t want for xp” which is a ton of micromanagement. It fell prey to gacha traps then, I suppose.
Oh man, I miss this game. Blood Brothers 2 is what got me into the PVP scene. I had actually tried its predecessor, but bounced off the unpolished look and feel. BB2 got rekt by DeNA in favor of its expensive San Fran offices and Final Fantasy title (we’ll get to that one tomorrow…). That’s why I left — the game shut down. Resquiat in Pacem, BB2. How I loved climbing your ladder and absolutely smiting fools as an almost-F2P.
Dude, it had two different PVP modes. You could fight in real time, or fight player-created maps…okay, I’m moving on before I start looking up videos.
Summoners War is one of the most polished gachas out there. It’s also incredibly fucking dull. Nothing is unique or special — it’s the epitome of soulless cash-grab high fantasy. The battles were kinda fun, I guess… but it was just so much grind, so many useless summons, so much gear upgrading, with nothing to look forward to. Even the higher-level units had four other palette swaps to fit all five elements. Boring! I only lasted about a month, trying to eke enjoyment out of the battle system and bosses.
Sakaguchi’s studio, Mistwalker, has repeatedly attempted (and utterly failed) to recapture the spark he kindled with the original Final Fantasy. Sadly, that even included Terra Battle‘s sequel, which you might have seen advertised in FFXV (who wouldn’t want to get an in-game advert alongside Cup Ramen and Ass Creed!?).
Terra Battle itself was magical. Oh, the gacha was bizarre. Mages were ridiculously overpowered. The battles barely made sense, but felt good enough to play. Every mechanic, story scene, and character was hilariously abstract. It was good though.
It shut down within a year, if memory serves. (Edit: Turns out it’s still going! Yawn.) Too weird for the mainstream audience, I guess. They doubled-down on the weirdness in the sequel, and it immediately flopped as far as I can tell. (I, for one, uninstalled it within minutes.)
I feel bad for Terra Battle, but not for Sakaguchi. You gotta give the players some sort of bone to grab onto, man. Abstractness does not complexity make, only confusion.
While not exactly a gacha game, Shop Heroes fills the bill as a mobile game with a lot of time-sinking and habit-building elements.
It’s also good. It’s good! I like Shop Heroes a lot! It’s a good game, but one I can only take for a few weeks at a time. Maybe that makes it a bad game.
I actually still play Shop Heroes off and on, but never as long as my initial 4-5 month stretch. You really need to take a break during the lulls in progression, wait for some updates or a generous holiday event, then dive back in.
If you like always being able to fill up a few bars at once, try it out. I’m not joking that it’s a good game — just one I can’t justify eternally.
TOWER OF SAVIORS IS THE GREATEST GAME IN MOBILE HISTORY.
Okay, that’s hyperbole. It’s got flaws, but as runespinners and gacha games go, it was one of the most fair and enjoyable games I’ve ever played. It even had a rubber ducky dungeon! A giant ducky peered over the edge of the bathtub like a Titan in SnK!
The various multiplayer modes were fun and unique, even including a version of Mario Kart were you raced to beat a dungeon and could send buffs/debuffs at other players. Rewards for guild events were huge, the gacha was always updating with fascinating new mechanics to draw… so what could kill such a great game?
I stated earlier that the last game on today’s list would be the one that ended Puzzle & Dragons for me. I fell in love with ToS, dedicating myself to it for over three entire years (when there was a long-time veteran reward sent out during the third anniversary, I was probably in the top 0.1% of players getting the highest reward). And yet, this game committed the exact same sin as PaD: the bosses got to be too much.
Again, I was in the highest percentile of players. I could clear just about anything in the game with a multitude of parties. While not the absolute best runespinner in the world, I was competitive. So if I couldn’t beat some of the weekly superbosses, who was meant to?
I probably never spent more than $100 or so over my three years on ToS, but I still had most units. But I didn’t have all. Since I didn’t have Apollo, I couldn’t clear this one dungeon. If I didn’t want to invest in my Hephaestus, I’d never be able to clear another one. The boss gimmicks were made so that only extremely specific team comps could clear them, which is absolutely bullshit.
You could grind out event rewards on the difficulty one below the superboss tier, but the reward chance was cut down to around 10% instead of 50-100%. Combine that with massive energy costs for entering the stages, and you have an Extremely Bad Time.
Tower of Saviors could still be on my phone today if it wanted people to actually engage with its highest-end content, but it didn’t want that. It wanted to punish you for getting there by saying you haven’t spent enough money, haven’t grinded enough xp, haven’t shoved enough baby harpies down Jackie the Holocaust Igniter’s gullet. (Don’t… don’t worry about it.)
…whew. My next two articles will be continuing this journey up through what I’m playing still today. Craze out!
The past five years have seen major resurgences in some of my favorite genres — city builders, RTS, management sims, and other fiddly bastards — yet what I find most curious is the rise of incredible games with Viking/Nordic settings. Below’s a gallery of some that have really caught my eye. All y’all Playstationers have that Dad of War game I hear, even? And hey, while I’m writing this, let’s throw Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons in there. It’s close enough.
Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Northgard
The Banner Saga
Jotun
All images taken from their games’ respective Steam pages.
But enough about those games. I’m here to babble on about Bad North, which just so happens to be the only good roguelike ever made.
…okay, so I’m being slightly hyperbolic. Or am I? Designers much smarter than I have written essays and videos on the subject of “what makes a roguelike,” and reviewers with more time to play than I have played and criticized a bazillion of the things. So, naturally, Bad North‘s superiority is simply my opinion.
Here’s why, though: Bad North has clear goals, clear failures, simple progression, and tangible atmosphere.
In Bad North, you start with two militia units. You click around the map to tell them where to go… and that’s it. Although not as one-button-y as a commander RTS like Tooth & Tail, the game’s simple control scheme lets you focus on managing the battlefield instead of twenty hotkeys. While there are a few more actions your units can take, such as hiding in a house or stealing a boat to get the fuck outta there, each are performed with chunky buttons that appear while a unit is selected.
All this is in service of killing the black units with creepy skull masks that, like a painting in Scooby Doo, are always turned to face you regardless of the camera positioning. Eugh. To kill the enemy, you move your units near them. Brutal massacres ensue, staining the ground with muddy crimson. Hopefully, your units stay standing in the end.
They won’t, though. That’s your failure and absolutely your fault: your poor commands led to the death of a unit, signified by a crushing sound effect and short slow-mo blow. (Rhymes help me deal with Virgil’s death.) Technically, there’s another failure, the loss of a coin-granting house due to enemy fire, but you won’t actually lose the game because of that. Still, fitting with my criteria for ‘best roguelike,’ burning or destroyed houses are very clear indicators of Wrong.
That’s why Bad North is so ideal, I think. It’s perfectly clear about whether you win or lose, instead of letting you drag yourself forward praying for an overpowered shrine or wand to appear. The best roguelikes have enough tests — and thus, a wavy difficult curve — to kick you while you’re down. Will everybody agree with me on that? Maybe not. I find roguelike fanatics to either be stubbornly caught on The Oldest Oldschool (press Q to Quaff), or otherwise so infatuated with ~progression~ that they’ll praise poorly-constructed roguelights like Rogue Legacy for wasting their time, gradually creeping their way toward having enough training wheels to carry them through the game. (Run-on opinions are my right on my own blog, just so you know.)
Speaking of progression, there is a tiny bit of that “roguelight” idea where you get to keep stuff, but the actual benefits cap off very quickly. As soon as you’ve discovered two starting items and two starting traits, you’re set. Anything after that is simply more choice rather than real power gains. This keeps the focus on tracking your FTL-like path through the seas, plotting a murderous course toward allies and treasure.
What makes Bad North truly special, however, is the atmosphere and how it connects to gameplay. As a veteran of the RPG Maker community, I’ve come to realize that a lot of people believe atmosphere is just “a foggy overlay” or some really poor lighting effects. Bad North does so much more, though it does have omnipresent fog surrounding the play space. What caught my eye immediately was how your soldiers, full of trepidation, take tiny steps backward before a ship slams into their tile. What a loading screen tip helped me learn is that this is actually a gameplay mechanic — your freaked-out soldiers won’t attack as quickly, being stunned by the ship’s charge. It’s best to micromanage them one or two tiles away from the impact so they can jump down onto the enemies or charge and cut off the route to the houses. Alas, such micromanagement means you’re not giving your full attention elsewhere. As maps grow more and more chaotic, minimizing the “human” error of your scared little soldiers becomes more and more difficult. It’s perfect.
Additional props go toward the music, maybe better described as the soundscape of Bad North. You’ll rarely hear more than one or two instruments playing stacatto notes, piercing your skull with the tension your armies feel. Thankfully, a few tracks have more sweeping sounds to soothe you (just don’t get so swept-up that you ignore that valkyrie… oh, RIP Moira. Guess we need a new pike unit).
Bad North
Bad North
ISLANDERS (screenshot from Steam)
ISLANDERS (screenshot from Steam)
Finally, I’d like to point out the gorgeous islands. They remind me of ISLANDERS, a much more chill indie game about building a city with various social classes as carefully as possible. It’s more of a puzzle game than a true city builder, though I recommend it all the same.
So, Bad North is my ultimate ideal of a roguelike: clear, brutal, and gripping. Others will have their preferences, which is, naturally, fine. Still, if you like anything I said above, I highly recommend picking it up. I got it for free off of the Epic store last month, but you can currently grab it on sale for $8.24 at Steam.
Hey, look. It’s the screen I got the title hook from!
Last night — or rather, very early this morning — I sat down and played the entirety of Ben Esposito’s Donut County. DC is a very short game, clocking in at two hours for me (but I, sick and weary, fell asleep twice during the final missions; I would guess it’s about an hour and a half for realsies), yet it uses every single second of that time to push the game’s themes of digging a hole for yourself, enjoying the trashy moment, and then reaching out a hand to fix your problems with an ally.
How perfect, then, that my biggest piece of advice for creators is to always look toward your project’s theme(s). Thus, my first proper blog post shall be about Donut County and how it never strays from its thematic intentions!
If you’re unaware of how Donut County plays, the above screenshots show the game’s entire conceit: you start off as a little hole, swallowing up grass and cacti. As you consume, you grow larger and more insatiable until you’re devouring the scenery whole, teetering it at its fulcrum so that it comes tumbling down your voracious gullet. The hole is both the player’s instrument and an unsubtle symbol of the central character BK’s wanton capitalist nature. He wants to unlock the next level of entrepreneur perks for his so-called donut shop, y’see, and he’ll do anything to quench that thirst for trash. And you, the chaotic being that you are, will gleefully aid him in this pursuit. (Connections could be made here to House House’s indie darling Untitled Goose Game, though my knowledge of it is limited so I will refrain from further synthesis.)
It’s a very good question.
Esposito is willing to forgive you, the player, for engaging in the destruction of an entire town by giving BK a moral arc. Here’s where Donut County succeeds as both a game and a fable: instead of being judgmental or pithy, BK gets to revel in his shenanigans. Yeah, sure, he brings back the status quo in the end, and he has to defeat the personification of neoliberal capitalism to do so (a raccon mob boss with his hand unable to escape a pickle jar, for he refuses to let go of the pickle inside… again, subtlety is not this game’s purview). The entire time, despite the clearly negative ramifications of dropping entire houses down a nine hundred and ninety-nine foot hole, BK insists that he’s helping out. Yeah, your ranger outpost is gone, but so are all the snakes you hated! Your house might be upside-down in a pit, sir, but we got you down from that tree! Surprisingly, BK’s not actually wrong about most of his deflective excuses. Because of that, the player can also relinquish any guilt they might feel about being an awful person for destroying the town. If you’re gonna mess something up, you might as well enjoy it, right?
Character growth!
Thankfully, it’s not just words that excuse BK; his friend Mira is there as a twisted moral compass, forcing BK to spend his entrepreneur perk points on a catapult for the hole. The idea is that it will help people escape the hole, which the catapult eventually does, making the purchase of it the beginning of BK’s redemption. But this is a silly game, and BK is a mischievous raccoon. By expanding BK’s morality and beginning to accept Mira’s help to become a better person, the puzzles grow more complex now that you can launch previously-swallowed items back out of the hole. While the game is never a head-scratcher, the catapult is a welcome change of pace. Instead of just going further down the capitalism hole, we can begin launching ourselves (or at least some fish and raccoons) out of purgatory. Mira’s suggestion lets BK climb out of his mess and, eventually, save the day from above ground. While I won’t spoil the incredible finale, the idea of blowing upwards being an opposite force to capitalism’s downward push is fully captured by the mechanics of the endgame.
The catapult allows you to send raccoon officers into the skies.
Donut County is only an hour and a half long, but it could have easily been a very samey and ultimately flat (you’re welcome, Possum) experience — more of a hole-based tech demo than the Aesop that Ben Esposito crafted. With only a few methods of interacting with the game world, it’s ensured that every action ties into the game’s themes and BK’s development into a slightly-less-materialistic disaster raccoon. All in all, it’s an impressively fluid game thanks to how well the mechanics and messages tie together.
I purchased Donut County on Steam during this week’s half-off sale ($6.49 USD). While I have no need to play it again, I’m very glad I finally got around to it!
Howdy. I’m Stephen, although you probably know me as “Craze” or “Crazetex.” Welcome to Cydrel, my new blog about game design, my personal game development, and probably a few other random things along the way.
I’ve been doing Ye Olde Gam Mak for fifteen years or so now. My earliest childhood was spent in the woods, avoiding the ‘golden era’ of SNES and Super Nintendo games — thank goodness, in my opinion, because I get to make people upset when I criticize them! Don’t worry, I love Chrono Trigger. Anyway, I like to make RPGs and have been doing so for over half my lifetime.
KO Cupid is a game about making a home for yourself.
I’m currently working on a small handful of projects, although the main one is KO Cupid. It’s a queer adventure about making a home for yourself, even if that means abandoning or reestablishing the parameters of relationships you thought you loved. I really hope I can see it to completion, and I’m hoping this blog will help give me the drive to do so.
There’s a January event at RMN I might enter, and my friend Karsuman and I are working on a short game, so we’ll see how those play out, too. Busy busy busy.
Currently I’m playing Ni No Kuni II, which will likely be the topic of my first real blog post. I’m currently in a like/disbelief relationship with the game… it has the potential to be great, but the pacing is absolutely atrocious. Falling asleep while playing is another problem, but that’s likely more due to my current illness. How fun.
Yes, Border Coin is weak right now. I recently swapped it out from Chaos & Destruction because I don’t do raid much nowadays and need her for guild wars instead. The EXE is +12% and the barrier-on-S2 one. She’s my AVril killer.
Epic Seven is my current vice of choice, although I’m torn on whether I want to cover it or not. The reddit community for E7 is somewhat horrifying (okay, drop the qualifier — they’re horrifying) and I really don’t want that energy here. Krau banner will likely cause me to make a post about gacha in general though. I’ll have to mentally steel myself for that.
My goals for this blog are to become comfortably wealthy and reasonably well-known, somehow. I figure putting myself out there is the first step, right?
Cydrel 