2015 Game Review Haiku, #11 – Balloon Diaspora

A foreign culture
Your balloon needs six patches
To fly, to return

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

To the Moon’s Holiday Special Minisode can’t answer whether altering memories is immoral

I waited far too long to actually play To the Moon, which sat in my digital collection for far too long, and so, after beating it and reading up on Kan Gao and his future plans for the series, I discovered that a minisode–that’s a mini episode for those not in the know–was released, for free, back in January 2014. It’s called the To the Moon Holiday Special Minisode, and I’m going to liken it to post-game DLC or a deleted scene from a really solid, well-paced movie. I did not wait far too long to play it.

Lasting around under an hour, this post-game snippet is set at the offices of Sigmund Corp, the organization for which Dr. Neil Watts and Dr. Eva Rosalene work. As you’ll remember from To the Moon, their work involves providing new memories for the dying, so they can see their dreams and desires fulfilled before passing on. It’s the end of the year, and the company is throwing a holiday party, stocked up on alcoholic drinks and cake, as every good party should be. However, there are protesters outside, tossing tomatoes and pumping signs in the air, which is a bit of a downer for everyone, now not sure if their work is immoral and wrong.

To the Moon Holiday Special Minisode does not try to answer that question. They are a business, they provide a service, and some approve more than others. You could easily put memory-tweaking next to hot-button topics like abortion and the death penalty, which is touchy territory, but it’s handled quietly and innocently here. Eva has her doubts and isn’t afraid to speak her mind about them. Personally, I’m okay with messing with a dying soul’s memories, to give them that one burst of triumph before everything goes black–I’d like that myself. There’s some great relationship development here between Eva and Neil, and you get to meet several other employees, who I hope show up in future installments.

Gameplay is mostly the same as To the Moon, but even lesser so. You can walk around the tiny sections of Sigmund Corp’s headquarters as either Neil or Eva, interact with a few things, and speak to people at the Christmas party. You are no longer collecting shards of memory to power a memento and such–in fact, there’s no menus or even save options. You’ll spend a large portion of this minisode playing a retro PC game that Neil made, inspired by Johnny Wyles and his lighthouse. It is a simple maze adventure, starring the disembodied heads of familiar characters. The player controls Neil’s head and needs to collect mementos to open up parts of the maze, all while avoiding zombie versions of Eva that take off one heart with each hit. It’s the most “gamey” To the Moon gets, but not difficult…more of a cute diversion. The maze itself looks like zoomed in puzzles from Pushmo, each inspired by the previous game’s settings.

I’m thinking I need to play A Bird Story sooner than later, as I’m loving these story-driven tales of melancholy from Freebird Games. All I know about it is that it’s a prelude to Finding Paradise, which will be To the Moon‘s true sequel.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #10 – To the Moon Holiday Special Minisode

Company party
Drink, eat, prank. play–reflect on
Unrespected job

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Fulfilling Johnny’s last wish to go to the moon in To the Moon

If thought Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition was a surprising palette cleanser to the lackluster The Incredibles, then I have to imagine this is an even stranger, grander change of direction. Yup, I followed up shooting pig cops in their bacon strip faces and quipping once amusing pop culture quotes with a heavy expedition through an ill man’s mind. In fact, I had wanted to play this last January, as that seemed to be a month where I was experiencing a bunch of those much-discussed indie titles, like Gone Home and Journey. Alas, that never happened, but here we are a year later, ready to give this four-hour tale of a man’s dying wish its due.

Dr. Eva Rosalene and Dr. Neil Watts work for Sigmund Corp. and have unique jobs: by entering patients’ heads and altering memories, they can give people whatever they want, with implemented memories affecting or creating new ones, all on a path to the desired result. Please note, this only happens through the memories, as you are not actually changing what happened in someone’s life. Think of it as…wish fulfillment. As far as I can tell, this service is mostly used for patients on their deathbeds.

In To the Moon, Rosalene and Watts must fulfill the lifelong dream of the dying Johnny Wyles, which is the game’s namesake: he wants to go there, though he’s not sure why. The doctors then insert themselves into an interactive compilation of his memories–think of the shared dreaming idea from Inception–and traverse backwards through his life via mementos to plant the seed of being an astronaut where best. Naturally, there are a few hiccups, along with Johnny’s quickly deteriorating health.

To the Moon is built on the RPG Maker XP engine, a program used to create 16-bit role-playing games in the classic sprite-based style of Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. That said, To the Moon is not an RPG. There is no inventory system or party system or way to gain experience, though the really quick joke early on about a turn-based battle against a squirrel was amusing. The game’s focus is more on puzzle solving; you do this by finding key memento objects which will allow you to go deeper into Johnny’s memories, and then collecting five pips of energy to break into it. Once you do, there’s a relatively simple yet satisfying tile-flipping puzzle. Later on, there’s a one-off section where you can shoot projectiles and have to avoid traps, but it doesn’t last long and is more cumbersome than anything. It broke a bit of the atmosphere, to say the least.

To the Moon‘s soundtrack, featuring a theme song by Laura Shigihara and the remainder of the piano-driven tunes by Kan Gao, has been praised by many critics. And rightly so. It’s soft when it needs to be, as well as deeply brooding and uplifting. When it swells, I couldn’t help but feel myself inhaling and holding my breath. The soundtrack is its own beast and a special part of the game, dictating the way scenes play out, since you can’t get a ton of facial reactions and such. When I first booted up To the Moon, I sat at its title screen for a few minutes, playing with the moonlight, but really mostly listening. It makes a fantastic first impression and never lets up.

I found To the Moon to be fantastic, and I’m annoyed I dragged my feet on it for so long. I wish I had been able to play it all in one session–it’s around four hours long–but I started it late in the evening and had to return to it the next night. The writing is smart, heartfelt, and funny all at once, save for a Doctor Who joke I didn’t grok, and everything gels together–the music, the graphics, the puzzles, the pacing. Yup, even that horse-riding section. Since I love all things memory-based, such as Remember Me and Inception, I did find the explanations for how the memory implementation works here a little contrived, but I went along anyway; it’s more about the characters than the science.

You really don’t come across that many games willing to tackle the themes of old age, illness, love, regret, sacrifice, and playing god, all while doing it in reverse, which is why To the Moon is exceptional. It’s a story worth seeing unfold.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #9 – To the Moon

Granting dying wish
Means memories must change, twist
To the moon, Johnny

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Turns out, with videogames, you can go home again

I’m not one hundred percent sure who the “they” is, but they often say you can’t go home again. It’s a phrase I think about a lot, with plans to eventually draw a short little comic involving children, forest monsters, and cranky parents about the notion. At 31, with my life going through unexpectedly grand changes and my head occasionally thinking the worst of worst thoughts (a taste), all I truly desire is to go home. For comfort, for repose. My home now, meaning the one where I eat and sleep and sigh and take pictures of my cats, is characteristically cold and full of empty rooms. No, the home I’m talking about is the one I grew up in, the red-bricked, two-story structure that sat square in the middle of a T-cross section in a small, neighborly town. From my bedroom window there, I saw all kinds of traffic: vehicle, foot, animal, love.

The idea of returning somewhere can be both physical and mental. I physically want to go back into that house and sit on my childhood bedroom’s floor, my back against the wall just under the windowsill, the same way I’d sit for hours either on the phone with my high school girlfriend or killing time by playing the guitar and scribbling down mopey song lyrics. This is something my body is calling out for, a hunger pain. I also mentally want that time back, that feeling of safeness and irresponsibility, even if I rarely acted on it, and those voices, the sounds from below. It can’t really be replicated, at least not when it is constructed entirely around emotions and personal experiences, but going back, if I’m to believe A Separate Peace, can be healing.

Turns out, videogames occasionally make a good effort at bringing the player back “home.” I was recently taken aback by this, and the feeling it gave has been stuck in me, just under my skin, for a couple months now, itching to be scratched. I thought I’d write a bit about it, as well as some other games that have attempted to bring things full circle over the years.

Let it be said, and let it be said in red lettering, there be major spoilers ahead for the majority of the listed games. Read at your own risk.

Assassin’s Creed II

Let’s start with the game that gave me this blog post topic to begin with. Again, I’m coming to Assassin’s Creed II late, having only played the bread parts to this meat sandwich of stabbiness. Anyways, after completing some assassination missions and then training in a current day warehouse with Lucy, something goes wonky, and you find yourself back in Acre, the setting for the first game in Ubisoft’s now long-winded series. Not only have you returned to where it all started, you also are in control of Altair, not Ezio. Your mission is to follow a figure running away from you, and that includes climbing up a tall tower and seeing the city for all it is.

I had a moment of hesitation, believing this to be a dream sequence, the sort that you watch unfold, but take no part in. Eventually, I strode ahead, and it was business as usual, but tingling surfaced as I jogged past people from another game, another time period. I wouldn’t say I recognized anyone or any building in particular, but the feeling remained nonetheless–I’ve been here before. Strangely, if I had popped in the game disc for Assassin’s Creed, I might not have felt the same way, and I guess that says something about sleight of hand, of transportation.

Borderlands 2

The ramshackle town of Fyrestone in the original Borderlands is where it all started for your choice of vault hunter. You return there in Borderlands 2 to find it a changed place. Handsome Jack, everyone’s favorite man to hate, has turned Fyrestone into a slag-soaked junkyard since Hyperion moved into the area. At his orders, the town was renamed to Jackville and preserved to mock the original Vault Hunters, although robots were also sent in to kill any remaining inhabitants. The layout remains very much the same, but it’s darker, drearier, and, most importantly, more dangerous.

You don’t approach Fyrestone the same way you did in the first game, only realizing where you are once you are in the main area where you used to shop for shields and new guns and turn in missions on the job board. It certainly took me by surprise, but I didn’t have much time to stand around in awe as angry robots began to occupy my attention.

Suikoden II

Oops, I already wrote about this moment.

BioShock Infinite

It’s a short, but powerful moment. At the very end of BioShock Infinite, Booker finds himself in Rapture, the underwater utopia-gone-to-Hell from the original game in the series. Having recently replayed the game over the Christmas holidays, the moment did not feel as impactful as it first did, but when you don’t know it’s coming, it packs a doozy. There’s not much to explore or see while in Rapture a second time–it is, after all, just another doorway, and the game is over at this point, so no more combat to be had–but after spending a solid number of hours in the clouds, knowing you are deep underwater, in an oh-so-similar world once more is a thrill.

Chrono Cross

Okay. I’m stretching it here with Chrono Cross, considering it all happens within the same game, but visiting the same location in different, alternate timelines still does give off a nostalgic tingle. Like, it’s both the same and changed, a feeling of being out of place somewhere deeply familiar. There’s Home World, and there’s Another World. I love it. Plus, just before you go off to fight the Time Devourer, you do stumble across the Ghost Children, which are the ghosts of Crono, Marle, and Lucca from Chrono Trigger, so it’s a blast from the past, though a bit somber.

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Got any other examples of returning to locations from previous games? If so, shout ’em out in the comments below. These were all I could think of and have actually experienced thus far, but there’s gotta be more. I can’t be the only one that wants to go home again.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #8 – Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition

Pig cop invasion
Death, destruction, attitude
Duke Nukem hates poems

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH: Grandia II

At this point, I’ve covered twenty-five games I’ve regretted parting with. Of them, the ones that hurt the most are of the RPG ilk. I’m sure you’re super surprised by that. Looking through what I’ve already talked about, that means seven open, still bleeding, albeit slowly, bullet holes: Beyond the Beyond, Star Ocean: The Second Story, Brave Fencer Musashi, SaGa Frontier, Breath of Fire III, Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, and The Granstream Saga. By their nature, RPGs are massive beasts, and I know that younger me did not see everything they had to offer, especially when you consider I barely started the Faerie Village mini-game in Breath of Fire III before trading it in for something else. Might as well pile on more hurt by adding another RPG to the list then.

Grandia II makes no attempt to stray from the traditional Japanese RPG story: Ryudo the Geohound, a mercenary of sorts, along with his bird, Skye, accepts a mission to accompany a songstress of Granas named Elena as she ventures towards Garmia Tower. Naturally, things go awry quickly, and an accident at the tower requires the two to work together to stop a greater evil. I’m a sucker for forced, unlikely team-ups, which is why I immediately think of Dark Cloud 2 and Wild Arms when I read that plot summary and remind myself. Though the naive nun with a demon inside of her does make this adventure a little different. Plus, there’s a lot more cursing than you’d ever expect; imagine if Final Fantasy VII‘s Barret Wallace was the star of his own game, able to freely speak his mind at every scenario. Yeah, like that.

Grandia II‘s battle system is both simple and sophisticated. At the bottom right corner of the screen is a bar with icons representing the characters in your party and the enemies you’re battling. It’s sort of like the Active Time Battle system, but not quite. The bar is divided into two parts: a long waiting period, followed by an arrow indicating when commands may be entered, and a then another waiting period, followed by a second arrow at the end indicating when the entered commands will happen. That second waiting period is where you hope to often get in an extra attack to kill a monster or interrupt whatever command the enemy punched in. Theoretically, if you wanted to, you could devote your characters to executing consecutive canceling moves to repeatedly knock a boss or generic enemy lower on the action bar, basically preventing them from making any moves in that fight. Other standard options include using items, casting magic, evading, which you do by moving to a new pre-picked location on the battlefield, running away, or letting the computer auto-determine your choices.

Something else that I really liked about Grandia II–and this was before my time with any of the Elder Scrolls games–is that characters learned new skills through…reading. They had to read books to learn magic and additional techniques. Clearly, I had found a game that spoke directly to me. The books and skills within even grow in level as your party battles and gains experience points.

From the sounds of it, Grandia II is not terribly long, somewhere are the 30 hours completion mark. I don’t think I ever hit double digits though, as I remember picking up the title for fairly cheap along with a few other big RPGs, like Dark Cloud 2 and Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, meaning my attention was easily taken away from me, more for the former than the latter, of course. Looking over the rest of the series on good ol’ Wikipedia, I have this strange, flimsy feeling that I also either played or owned Grandia Xtreme at some time in my life, but it no longer sits in my collection today. That could be my mind just trying to come up with an excuse to write about the game’s hero, Evann, a young ranger, voiced by none other than Superman himself–Dean Cain. Lisa Loeb is also in it. Hmm, we’ll see.

Grandia II originally came out on the Sega Dreamcast, but my copy was a port for the PlayStation 2. I don’t recall it looking amazing, though it was certainly colorful, like a bigger, better Star Ocean: The Second Story, bursting with polygons, but it was more the battle system and kooky characters that had me hooked. I wish I can remember when and for what I traded this in for. Hopefully not for that copy of Godai: Elemental Force. Gah. The shame.

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GAMES I REGRET PARTING WITH is a regular feature here at Grinding Down where I reminisce about videogames I either sold or traded in when I was young and dumb. To read up on other games I parted with, follow the tag.

Coma means to feel nothing and still get full credit for being alive

It’s interesting to see what an impact 2010’s Limbo from developer Playdead had on the gaming industry. It’s been almost five full years since the world got to take control of a young boy, wreathed in silhouette, on the hunt to find his missing sister. Since the world got to watch in horror as horror happened to this young boy for every misstep and mistake he–a.k.a. you–made. Coma doesn’t punish you in the same trial and error way as Limbo did, but it still evokes a somber, almost futile sense of dread with every jump and change of scenery. I dug it, but there’s problems. Also, questions.

What’s a coma? An extended state of unconsciousness. I’ve never been in one and hope to never experience it, but you never know what way life will go. More pertinent to the topic at hand–what’s Coma with a capital c? It’s a light exploration and adventure game by Thomas Brush, playable in your browser over at Adult Swim’s games section. Probably a bajillion other sites, too, but this is where I first stumbled across it, my new go-to site for small, bite-sized gaming experiences, like Insidia and Winnose from last year. It’s a casual platformer, with no fail state that I could find and a running time of maybe fifteen to twenty minutes, depending if you get stuck trying to figure out how to make it across that one big gap.

Coma‘s story is purposefully obtuse. You play as a tiny boy-thing, drowning in shadows. You are searching for your sister who, according to a bird-thing you befriend, is trapped in a secret basement. Along the way you’ll run into other strange critter-things who may or may not help you. There’s writing on the walls that maybe clue you in on the state of this realm and Pete’s abusive father, but again, it’s not really for the game to say. Is this boy in a coma? Is he trying to rescue his sister, who is the one in a coma? Is that big blobby queen creature a tumor? Not really sure. I both like that and don’t, as the game’s world is perhaps too ethereal and foreign to feel grounded in, so I have nowhere to even begin basing anything off of.

The controls are thus: use the arrow keys to move left and right, as well as the up arrow to jump. Personally, I’m not a fan of this, as I like my jump command to be binded to a different button than the movement keys as it can sometimes be tricky to press both in one direction and then up to leap over an obstacle. You use the mouse to advance dialogue by clicking on it. That’s it, which is more than enough for an exploratory platformer. Unfortunately, the fluidity of the jumping takes some getting used to and is not very accurate when you need it, such as jumping large gaps or from ledge to ledge. Plus, given that there is maybe one or two choices to make, dialogue should’ve scrolled automatically, with no input needed by the player.

A platformer with poor platforming controls should not be played. That’s a pretty obvious call, really. However, Coma is so gorgeous to look at and listen to that I urge everyone to push past the lackluster leaping to see the next screen, hear the next tune. I’m a sucker for fields where the grass sways and flowers bob as you brush past them, and that happens a lot here. There’s also a beautifully picturesque sequence involving a trampoline and clouds that I won’t say any more about. When Coma gets dark, it gets dark, and that’s fine, given the subject matter, but I much more preferred wandering around above ground than in the giant worm-infested darkness below.

Coma will most likely mean something different to everyone that plays it. For a short, relatively simple adventure gameplay-wise, reading a bunch of various interpretations about what Peter’s sister’s song means and the point of Mama Gomgossa’s ball game is nonetheless stimulating. Play, don’t trust the bird, and see what you see.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #7 – Coma

Don’t ring the doorbell
Some comas are eternal
The bird’s a liar

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From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.