Review - Remember Me

The bulk of the reviews out there all say it in a different way, but they all want you to know that Remember Me is 'forgettable' because it's just so perfect that things worked out that way.  The title of "Remember Me" is almost a challenge that is destined to fail and allow me to add to the consensus in saying that it does indeed do that.  I wanted Remember Me to be so much more than it ended up being and it is a little disappointing, but as disappointments go lately, it's a mild one, so unfortunately it is helped along by that.  Regardless, it promises a lot initially and doesn't carry out a single one of those promises, so what we're left with is a game that honestly feels like it was supposed to be far larger than it ended up being.  And it's a damn shame because the world that Remember Me creates is something that you don't want to forget.

goddamnit, I made a pun already

 The game centers around Nilin (no last name given because it might be important later) who starts the game as an amnesiac memory hunter.  "Irony" (the rain on your wedding day flavor) is actually a core theme of Remember Me and plays key to several important plot points over the course of the game.  It's...honestly a little grating after the first one, as is most of the story as it unfolds.  The story is just not very good, because the pacing is all over the place which ruins what is supposed to be dramatic reveals, and while it shoots for a good Moral Ambiguity on everything, it goes a little too far and simply makes everyone unlikable, including your protagonist.  But to explain why involves a little bit of spoiling, so that's what I have to do here in the next paragraph or so.  It's not that bad and it's an early-game thing as well, but still, it's worth mentioning.

So, as a Memory Hunter, Nilin has the ability to steal memories from people and is, well, honestly what she kind of does.  However, Nilin is special because in addition to stealing memories, she can alter them (the game calls it remixing) and the way you're introduced to this is especially horrifying.  A bounty hunter, Olga, drops in on Nilin because she wants the bounty that's on her head.  Having just gotten her gear back, Nilin decides that now is the best time to try it out and you're thrust into the remix scenario which plays out a particular memory and then tasks you to go back through it and change little things that will alter the course of it.  On its face, that's not too bad even if it has the veneer of being an absolutely shitty thing to do coating it.  Or maybe that's just my perception coloring things here.

Now, Olga's memory is of her husband who's suffering from some sort of memory-related illness that is making him sicker than you would expect.  In the original, she is sent Nilin's bounty poster right as the Doctor explains that her husband's treatment is going to be expensive and she says that she will be able to cover it, so go ahead and do whatever because she's going to get the money for it from Nilin's bounty.  This gives the game the easiest opportunity to show off just how twisted this concept is, because the goal of the remix is a rather rough one:  Make the doctor kill her husband.  It's worth noting that you're simply altering memories, not history, and in fact, that makes it a bit worse.  By manipulating a few things as the memory progresses, it goes down different routes due to what was changed (the doctor injects the husband with a stimulant rather than a relaxer, a wrist binding is undone) and the sum effect is that the husband goes crazy which forces the doctor to hit the conveniently placed "Terminate" button, leaving Olga helpless to watch as her husband is lasered to death in a hospital bed.

Because of that memory changing, Olga's entire perception of things changes to the point where she thinks she tracked down Nilin to team up with her against Memorize (the company who runs the facility he was 'killed' in) rather than take her down to pay for her husband's bills.  Her husband who is, by the way, likely still alive and lays forgotten in the hospital for the rest of the game.  All of this is so that Olga can give Nilin a lift in her ship.  Nilin is kind of a Dick.  Later on, she gives you another lift somewhere (far after you've forgotten who this woman is, leaving you to think about it for a few moments after she drops Nilin off) and your constant companion in your ear, Edge (Nilin's 'boss' who gives you instructions through the course of the game) makes a remark along the lines of "I don't know why I didn't make you 'enlist' her a long time ago!".  Edge, too, is kind of a Dick.  Given enough time and space, I could elucidate why more or less every other character in the game is also a Dick.  Everyone is simply that unlikable thanks to an ill-advised attempt to make a 'grey area' for the scenario to exist in.

While the game's world might not be interesting from a narrative point of view, Neo-Paris in 2084 is stunning from an aesthetic one.  Locales are crafted with thought and care and are exceptionally interesting to look at.  There's an underlying style that's honestly on a level higher than the game itself is on which is almost jarring.  Of course, all of that is brought down a little bit by the linear platforming structure of the game, since it turns a lot of these nice areas into places where you are the only person who can get around in because all the blocks and barricades necessitate some sort of wonky parkour that your standard person isn't in possession of.  I want to say that the -thought- of the mechanics are lifted straight out of Uncharted in that there's supposed to be a weighty feel to them, but they're obviously not executed quite as well.  Nor are they all that thought-out since a lot of the platforming sections feel downright silly in how you get to Point B from Point A.

This is further complicated by the fact that every area, linear as it is, has some little nook and/or cranny here and there that's 'cleverly' obfuscated by the camera because they hide the various power-ups that the game has decided to hide everywhere.  Of course, it's not bad enough that you just have to keep an eye out, no, at every area where this happens (well, not with Scaramechs, but fuck Scaramechs) a little screen materializes itself out of nothing and gives you a screenshot from the game (literally, some of them have little UI things, it's silly) for a location where you can find a goodie.  The game tells you to remember that location so you can find it, which makes you go, "Oh, well I'll just memorize every detail of this because it's going to lead me to treasure and I'll want to kn-oh, it's right over there" because yes, these things are generally placed about ten feet away from the area in question.  Some of them require non-linear thinking to get to, but most of the time it's like a signpost with Plot pointing one way and goodies the next.

I like to think that the attention and thought put into every area means a lot more than them simply having a good set designer.  It feels like every area is so good because it was meant to be something a lot more, something bigger at some point in development, and given the fact that the game did indeed have a rocky way of it, perhaps it's true.  It sort of felt like, to me at least, that the game was meant to be a little more open than it ended up being (a couple other things help me think this) and that every area just ended up constrained thanks to the new direction it took.  It would explain a lot and make me feel better about what it was supposed to be, but it doesn't change what it -is- and what it is is just frustrating.  Particularly in the later areas where you're given the tools to manipulate the world in silly ways to nonsensically achieve small feats in transportation.  Like using two cargo carts to get across an area so you can get to the bottom of it so you can push a couple buttons to call more carts that you ride to push -more- buttons...only to have it take you about halfway back so you can ride one of the earlier carts again in a -different- direction.

Remember Me is not about platforming, thankfully, even though that lends a good portion of the gameplay to it.  Remember Me -is- however supposed to be about its combat system which is the main focus of it, but it manages to fall a bit flat itself.  I heard tale of the focus being the 'build-your-own-combo' aspect and was intrigued by that and how it was pulled off, only to be disappointed in the rather round-about way it is accomplished.  Because it's far less than "Build-your-own-combo" and far more "customize this template with special Squares and Triangles" which is a lot less compelling.  It's also a lot less appealing when you realize that there are four combos in the entire game and each one of them is about as uninspiring as the last.  Unless you think Square, Triangle, Triangle, Square, Triangle, Triangle is something that you'll be excited with every time you use it, of course.  (That's the third combo in the game, by the way)

As stated, the combos are little less than templates that you have to fill out with the actual buttons.  In something that is kind of neat, you have four types of buttons - 'Pressens' as the game calls them - that do different things, letting you have your combos be built around specific principles.  The less neat part of it is that you have to buy these pressens individually with keys that you only gain after getting a lot of points that you earn over the course of the game by punching people with combos that you have already filled out.  The four types are:  Power, Regenerate, Cooldown and Chain and while they're fairly self-explanatory, I can expunge any question as to what they do.  Power pressens hit hard obviously, but they also push your foes towards 'Overload' status in which you can finish them off quickly.  Regenerate pressens restore some of your health.  Cooldown pressens reduce the cooldown time that your S-Pressens have after using them and finally Chain pressens are the most important of them at all in that they take whatever the pressen prior to it was and amplifies it for another strike.  Chain a power pressen and you deal some damage.

This is, of course, supposed to introduce the 'strategy' for battles, but it barely does since I'm not about to re-shuffle my goddamn pressens every now and then just because something is different.  Thus, my combos all ended up with a mish-mash of different types that honestly suited my purposes just fine enough.  Because there's just not that much thought needed for it, unfortunately, since everything dies eventually and all you're figuring out is what you want to get in the meantime since you'll likely need to use those Regenerate and Cooldown pressens more often than anything else.  Also, there are few things more frustrating than seeing that you can have three Regenerate Pressens that are Triangle, getting the last combo that is three Triangles in a row to start and only having Square pressens bought and ready to be allocated.  I'm not quite sure why each pressen is its own thing since it doesn't really fit into any narrative somewhere and just stands alone by itself, and I don't think unlocking just -square- pressen for one type to be used however you wish would've broken the game much, given the template nature of the combos.

S-Pressens are Special Attacks, if that wasn't obvious by the name in a way that sort of transcends what a Pressen is, which is a press of a button by you.  There are five S-Pressens in the game that you collect at plot-specific points because... - and they all have wildly varied uses in a sense.  Fury simply upgrades your melee strikes and takes you out of the combo system, allowing you to wail on Square and Triangle for a few seconds and make things fall over.  Logic Bomb places a bomb on one foe who then explodes and takes out mildly damages everything around that foe, including yourself.  Sensen DOS scrambles (most) enemy sensens (the things that govern your body more or less), leaving them vulnerable for a few seconds.  Sensen Camo allows you to be invisible for a short time, letting you get off an instant-kill attack on a foe.  Finally, Rust in Pieces is specific to robot types (of which there are two in the game...and they aren't very common) and scrambles their programming, causing them to become allies for about two seconds before they explode.  Each of them can be used only if you have a Focus bar for it, and they have a cooldown (somewhere around 120-140 seconds) before you can use it again - as stated earlier, you can shave off seconds with cooldown pressens, but outside of boss battles, it doesn't matter a whole lot.

I have one very specific complaint, however, and it's more of a design complaint than anything, since in the game it's not actually all -that- difficult to overcome.  However, it's something that I simply cannot wrap my head around as being considered a good idea.  Now, in a game where you are more or less just hitting things until they die with no real variation, there's pretty much one thing you probably shouldn't do.  Remember Me does it and it's mind-bogglingly stupid.  There exists in the game one enemy type that deals damage to you for every hit you make on it.  Doesn't matter if it's melee or your Spammer (basically a gun), you take damage.  Now you might be thinking that there's a reason for this, that there's some clever way of taking them out.  There is not.  If you want to damage them without being damaged in turn, you use an S-Pressen, specifically a Logic Bomb or the Sensen Camo (possibly Fury, but I didn't test it and why would that work?).  That is...your only option.  I don't think I can overstate how much of a weird, bad design decision that is, and while you can't kill yourself by punching these types, you can lower your health to almost zero, meaning a stiff breeze will finish the job.

Aside from Boss fights, these S-Pressens are quickly forgotten, but their role in Boss fights are almost minimal as well in that you use them because you -have- to, not because it 'just works'.  However, it's an exercise in frustration, as you simply use the S-Pressen so you can drop a combo or so on the boss until they pull back, unleash mooks and leave you to get the cooldown timed out (and build up Focus if you need to) so you can repeat the process over again.  It's in these times where the Dodging feature proves to be your real enemy, since the game tells you that you can dodge over your foe and continue your combo, but in practice this is up for debate.  In almost every case, you cannot continue a combo on another enemy, which means dodging over a guy only to hit him in the back (putting you not that far away from your initial spot) is..not an effective combat strategy.  So if the pressens you -need- to use (your cooldowns and regenerate, mostly) are buried deep in your combos (for better effectiveness, as per the game's instruction), you'll have a hell of a time actually -using- them, thanks to your combos getting broken all the goddamn time from getting hit or dodging and not hitting the right guy or not hitting the right guy soon enough.

It's this 'combo-focused' theory, however, that also makes me think that the game was meant to be a lot more than it ended up being.  In all actuality, a system like this, especially with just four combos, cannot be a finished one.  This can't have been what the developers were envisioning from the start, and if you think about it, a linear platformer is...obviously not the type of game you would expect to find it in.  Maybe it's just a pet dream, but I have thoughts of a Sleeping Dogs-style open-world with a melee-focus adaptation of Remember Me, with the vibrant, cyberpunk Neo-Paris in all its glory and I can't help but think -that- was the initial goal of the game.  Something big and breathing, something wide to let you stretch and let you play around.  There had to be more combos, and a better way to 'build' them, but I fear that a lot of it ended up on the cutting room floor to simply release.  Perhaps I'm simply giving them too much credit since that, -that- would've been an unforgettable game indeed, and it's what everyone would have preferred, but in any case, it's just not what we got.

The Good

• The actual design of the world is wonderful
• There is a good bit of actual style in the game itself, the menus and the feel of it
• While not great, the combat system is good for the most part, if mostly for its ease-of-use
• Some of the music is really good - particularly Fragments, one of the Battle Themes

The Bad

• The story and characters are just unpleasant and unlikable - Moral Ambiguity does not mean Everyone is a Dick
• The whole "Memories as Commodities" angle is more or less mishandled and poorly thought-out from start to finish
• Platforming in a game that didn't need it and isn't made better for it
• Introducing an enemy type that damages you when you attack it - this is not a good idea
• Boss Fights become battles of attrition regrettably quick
• Only four combos in a game all about customizing combos
• Buying Pressens is horribly under-thought and poorly executed
• The game feels like it wanted to be so much more, which makes it all the more disappointing

Mogs Says
Remember Me isn't a bad game, but it's solidly mediocre at best.  The ideas it had were good ones that just didn't get used properly or given enough room to actually grow into what they were meant to be.  What we're left with then is a game that feels half-finished and confined to something much smaller than it should have been.  All the style in the world, and though the game has plenty to spare, can't cure gameplay ills which litter the title from start to finish.  Combined with a few design decisions that are more than questionable and just a general lack of cohesion means Remember Me simply didn't leave with fond memories.

Review - Animal Crossing: New Leaf

The Roost Cafe; truly something to celebrate.

It's an odd thought, trying to review a game that is, by its own design, endless, but it's something that can be done, and more than that, it's simply something I want to do.  At various points before and after its release, I mentioned being in various states of excitement for it and its new additions to the series, some good, some bad, but the fact remains is that not only was I excited enough to get it, but I was excited enough to get a bundle specifically of it, rather than waiting on my must-have title, Rune Factory 4 and seeing if there was something better by then.  That I wanted the game by this method that much means that it was a game that I wanted because of what it promised to be, and more importantly, what it promised not to be - which was just the previous Animal Crossing games over again.  A review then is not only the best measure to say whether or not they actually managed that, but also if they created a game to be excited for.

One thing that remains relatively unchanged is the controls of the game which is not a bad thing.  Animal Crossing has never been an overly complicated game to play, though to ever call it stream-lined would be stretching the truth a bit, if not a lot.  Improvements have been made here and there:  The D-Pad allows you to cycle through your tools without bringing up the inventory screen as previous installments (except for City Folk, I believe, where it was an actual legitimate new feature) and both shoulder buttons can be used for sprinting/text speeding, negating the accidental "No, I don't want to do your easy errand that will score me major points with you" moment with the villagers.  Additionally, both shoulder buttons pressed -together- allows you to take a screenshot of the scene as it is, which is a feature that absolutely every game should have in some form.  Admittedly, this is more just me speaking from my extended time with the Vita, where the screenshot feature is in almost every native-Vita game (Resistance:  Burning Skies is the sole exception I know of), but that exposure has also shown me how great a feature it is, and it's sorely missed when it's not around.

There have also been some very mild Quality-of-Life upgrades that have been made in New Leaf which are appreciated, even if they're not quite numerous.  For one, you can stack common fruit in your inventory now in baskets for up to 9 fruits per basket.  It helps a bit even if 9 is still a bit limiting, all things considered (given that there are at least 12 types of fruit in the game and it's wise to have all of them in your city thanks to 11 of the types, as in all but your native type, sell for a decently high price every time you have them.  Simultaneous harvests means big, big bells) but it's at least a step in the right direction.  You can now also swim around, provided you have the right equipment (a Wet Suit, which can be loaned at a specific area and later bought at the same area, provided you go on a day where it's for sale) which is...not exactly useful for anything, given that your swimming area is rather limited, but it's neat nonetheless and allowed them to add a lot of deep-sea/seafloor finds to the game for you to find, catalog and donate or sell if you're so inclined.

Housing has also been tweaked for the better for the most part, which is definitely something to appreciate.  First off, every player you have (up to four players, I believe) gets their own house rather than just a bed in your attic which is huge and it also brings the validity of having a secondary character into the light as something you might want for reasons I'll expound on later.  Houses can also have a total of six rooms now - Main floor, three side rooms from the main floor, a basement and an upstairs - all of which can be decorated and eventually become 8x8 rooms which is roomy but comes just short of feeling truly...expansive.  Space is extraordinarily precious in Animal Crossing games, so while six 8x8 rooms sounds like a lot of space, it's really -not- considering the ridiculous amount of money you have to spend to get to that point, as well as how much dead space there has to be just so you can get around in said rooms.  One of the nicer things about the game, however, is that you can now customize the exterior of your house as well - the roof, siding/façade, mailbox, fencing and bricks under the building itself - which allows you to truly make your home your own, or at least more your own than previous iterations.

The most wasteful walk-in closet you've ever seen.

Returning fans of Animal Crossing games will probably not be surprised to know that the old enemy, Storage Space, is still around in full-force, perhaps even moreso than previously.  Animal Crossing games like to boast of having thousands of things to collect and whatnot, and it's the definite truth, but actually collecting is something of a pain considering you have a very limiting amount of space to do said collecting with.  To bore you with a bit of math for a moment, each character has access to a single area of storage that's linked between every storage option you have (dressers, cabinets, etc.) and it has a total space allotment of 180 bubbles (three sections labelled A, B and C, ten bubbles a page for six pages of each section, thus six times ten times three equals one-hundred eighty).  Every piece of anything - clothing, furniture, art, insects, fish, tools, etc. - takes up a single bubble.  So you might think it doesn't actually sound bad, but this is where things start getting bad, because you start considering just everything you might want to keep on hand.

Another Quality of Life upgrade that has been received in the meanwhile between games is that everyone actually has legs now, rather than bodies that end in stubby little feet.  Thus, pants and socks are now a clothing option.  At any given point in time you can have up to six articles of clothing on:  Hats/Helmets, Face Accessory like Glasses or such, a shirt, pants, socks and shoes.  If you have just three 'outfits' that you like, that's eighteen bubbles right there, but if you're smart (i.e. you read a guide and know that you -need- outfits of specific types) then you are going to have a lot of spare pieces if not separate outfits altogether specifically for that one-day-only event, meaning you need to have them before it happens (and you have no way of knowing beforehand) or else you're out of luck unless your stores are selling them.  So you can very easily fill a single section with just clothing items and still want for space (as you see in the above, I want for space for clothing items).

Then consider furniture options and realize that furniture comes in sets.  Sets can have upwards of eleven or so items in them including flooring and wallpaper.  You can have a maximum of six rooms in your house.  If you have a back-up set for each room in your house (considering you...might actually get bored of your furniture which is a given that might happen and probably will), that's sixty-six bubbles, or more than a single section in your storage.  This is, of course, considering that you're only keeping items from the sets that you actively want (you're not) instead of keeping things that you think are also just cool that you might like to decorate with someday if the mood strikes you.  This is especially so for the Nintendo-themed items you can get through the fortune cookies at the Nooklings store, because I defy anyone who has even a little bit of love for Nintendo to receive a Master Sword decoration and not want to keep it, if not actively display it.  So basically, you're going to have a lot of furniture because a lot of it, if not most of it, is attractive in the right light and unless you know specifically what you want, and sell absolutely everything else, you're going to have a bit of it hanging around.

Of course, you don't have to keep everything on-hand and some argue actively that you shouldn't thanks to the Cataloging option in the game.  You see, if you ever lay hands on a piece of anything and it's saved safely (meaning you don't lose a connection to someone else, exit suddenly without saving or something else) then it's available in a catalog from then on out that you can order from, allowing you to receive items in it the following day.  The caveat of this is that not only are some things not available through the catalog for purchase (a lot, really), but you pay full-retail for them every time you order them.  Full-retail is, obviously, not something you get for selling an item unless you put it up in a Flea Market spot and get lucky (sometimes you can even make a profit off an item, of course) so the answer is pretty obvious - hold onto things you might want or that you know others might want so you don't have to spend extra bells and wait a day for the items.  This brings us full-circle with the original storage complaint, though, so it's a bit strange.

This time around, you can also mitigate the storage concerns with Museum exhibits, should you chose to bastardize the point of having them available at all.  Eventually you can fund a second floor to the museum that brings with it four exhibit rooms, 8x8 spaces that you can rent out and decorate however you wish.  Decorate can mean "throw everything on the floor to take up the maximum amount of space allotted (64 spaces) just because" if you so choose it to mean that, and while I -have- done that with two rooms, it's...just a waste.  My furniture room (appropriately dubbed "The Warehouse") comprises solely of items I've shaken out of trees and received from villagers that I intend to sell through the Flea Market for full-retail rather than a pittance, but given that there are two items in trees everyday, and villagers can be...generous sometimes, compounded with the fact that ReTail only has eight Flea Market spaces (and I'm lucky to clear two a day), it becomes obvious why I have a lot of overspill.  My defense for this is simple: For a full house, you need somewhere around Six Million Bells, which doesn't count anything else whatsoever and goddamnit, I am going to wring every single goddamn bell out of everything I have.

Everything above is simply bandages applied to a problem that has another cure altogether, however.  Put simply:  It's 2013 and this is the 3DS, so are the restrictions even necessary?  The 3DS isn't overflowing with power, but it's not exactly running two gens ago either so -some- upgrades in that area could have been made.  You're still stuck with an inventory of only sixteen bubbles (and three of those are going to be full of tools, specifically the shovel, fishing rod and net at least, but you're gonna want the other tools too) for some reason, as well as the mentioned 180 storage bubbles (I'm not sure off-hand how this stacks up against previous versions, but I'm assuming it's about the same) and it just seems arbitrary.  It also becomes near-infuriating when you realize that fruit doesn't stack automatically nor do bells stack or even go right into your money spot right away (neither of these make any sense) and you have to see the "Oh no! My Pockets are full!  Should I swap this with something?" message over and over and over again because you don't have enough pocket space goddamnit and I have to simply wonder at the why behind it.  The easy answer is likely the online stuff, but even then....I'm not quite sure.

Pictured:  Apparently what spaces are.  Not Pictured:  ANY HELPFUL VISUAL CLUES WHATSOEVER.

Space in the context of infuriating lack of forethought comes in another flavor as well, one that I have already covered in some detail, but will nonetheless talk of here as well now that I have a little more experience with it, though not necessarily more knowledge on it.  One of the bigger things in New Leaf is the fact that you're the Mayor of your town, and being Mayor allows you to populate your town with things like benches and fountains and a Sphinx or a Lighthouse or a Police Station or a Streetlight, all of which are just considered the same thing in terms of the -how- you place them down.  Which is taking a lovely stroll around with Isabelle, your faithful secretary, unto you find a spot that you think might look good for whatever you have in mind to put down.  Most of the time, Isabelle will simply tell you that it's too close to something else (Because it's almost always too close to something), but she'll also inform you of how many spaces you need for whatever the project at hand is.  Pictured above is a 2x3 plot of land (apparently two spaces to the left and right and three spaces back means that instead of...more than two spaces across.  Am I the only person who reads it that way?) which is all well and fine, but if you'll also note, there's also no..grid or anything visually helpful in the picture.  This is not different when you actively seeking a spot for placement.  This is something of a problem, I'm sure you can imagine.

Something else that makes it difficult is that I'm not quite sure where the thing is placed in relation to where you stood when you addressed Isabelle.  The obvious answer seems to be that you were dead in the center of it, but when you're talking square spaces (as I can only assume we are), dead-center of a 2x3 grid is...something that I'm not quite sure how it works.  While I haven't tested it, one solution would likely be plotting out a grid with flowers (assuming flowers only inhabit a single space), digging holes around them as a barrier (equally assuming holes are a single space), pulling up the flowers (to be placed elsewhere) and then pulling Isabelle into that cordoned-off area while managing to get right in where you want and hoping that she doesn't say it's too close to "something else", which in this case means the goddamn holes you dug to try and mitigate this problem.  Knowing how this game operates, this type of thing wouldn't surprise me in the least.  This does eventually lead to simply haphazardly throwing down whatever projects where ever they'll fit with the least amount of effort, rather than at specifically desired locations, which seems a bit counter to the point.

Regardless in the quibbles of the placement and execution of getting it funded and the like, being able to throw down these things in your town is impossibly cool, and does add a lot to the experience, quite frankly.  People with longer attention spans than my own, patience and the ability to plan things with no frame of reference have been able to make some lovely looking towns, and I've even heard tell of 'theme' towns, in which you can go and see a town that plays out with a certain storyline in mind, which just baffles me in a good way.  Even barring that, it basically ensures that no town, even with the same basic layout, will be the same in practice, which is something truly astounding.  The more free-form structure to building placement in general helps with this, of course (previous games had certain 'spots' where villager houses could be located, and nowhere else), but nothing says individuality potential like the ability to throw down a Police Station near a Geyser that's near a Zen Clock.

The buildings go beyond simply what you have in your town, however, thanks to the Main Street shopping district located just beyond the tracks at the top of your town.  The starting locales include a single-floor museum, Nook's Housing store, the post office, the Nooklings store and the Abel Sisters complex.  Eventually as the game progresses, you'll implement a Dream Theater (if only because it's a source of 5,000 bells a day), a second floor to the Museum (covered above), a Nightclub where K.K. Slider DJs and does acoustic sets every Saturday night, better classes of Nookling Stores, a Garden Center, Shampoodle's and a Shoe/Sock store at least.  It's really quite enjoyable to see how malleable and dynamic the Main Street actually is.  It's also an appropriate measure of progress that.....could be argued is present elsewhere (mostly public works projects and your house) but is nonetheless what I judge on.

My secondary character, Dinah, knows how to make a good cup o' joe.

Thankfully, there are a few new bits in New Leaf that offer new kinds of gameplay to shake up the norm when you finally have access to them.  My favorite by far, considering I have a disproportionate like for the Cafe' than I should, is actually getting to -work- at the Cafe', serving up to-go cups of coffee to patrons from your town and elsewhere in the world.  It's strange, being excited to work in a game that's....not about reality at all in that form, but it's refreshing and enjoyable all on its own.  It's a simple mini-game to be sure; three patrons enter one after another and order a cup to their specifications, though you won't always know what -all- the specifications are.  There are four types of coffee beans, four levels of milk and four levels of sugar, and your goal is to, obviously, hit the optimal range for that villager's tastes.  Some folks walk in and order "the usual" and considering there are some 300 villagers in the whole of Animal Crossing, it's...hard to remember everyone's favorite.  Luckily, there's a handy list on the internet that tells for them, but also the 'special' characters (like Tom Nook, K.K. Slider, etc.) who are often a bit pickier. (Normal townies generally want the same amount of milk and sugar, so if you know one, you know the other and that just leaves the question of blend.)

The other heavily advertised feature of the game was the Island Resort that you get access to after Tortimer (the former Mayor) visits and tells you that you'll have a boat waiting for you whenever you wanna head over.  The Island is a good source of income, considering it plays host to various rare beetles when the sun sets (all year-round, even), but the main attraction it -wants- you to visit for is the "Tours" which are just mini-games to play by yourself or with friends for Medals, the currency accepted on the Island.  If there's an activity in Animal Crossing, there's probably a tour for it.  Navigating a large maze to find particular bits of fruit, beating up a rolling robot with a hammer, fishing and catching bugs (either specific types or just 'a lot'), digging up matching furniture, fossils or gyroids and my personal favorite, the Scavenger Hunt.  In the Scavenger Hunt, you're given a list of four things to find and placed in a map with randomly generated buildings.  You have to rush in, find items from the list in the houses (the difficulty places more and more of the same type/set of item in the buildings, meaning higher difficulties requires you to be particularly discerning) and take them back to Tortimer before time elapses.

The thing is, both of those things I just made mention of are not things that you're going to do every day, multiple times a day, or if they are then they're not particularly involving or long so you're just kicking around in a new situation for five or ten minutes before it becomes old news officially.  None of it re-invents the wheel, so to speak, nor does it invigorate the game beyond its roots of previous Animal Crossing games.  You can dress it up however much you want, with whatever new things that you want, which New Leaf tried, but unless you really dig in and insert something new with force, all it is is window dressings.  Not only are the additions to New Leaf just that, window dressings, but there are still ridiculous Quality of Life changes that still have not been made, perhaps in lieu of a set of furniture made of gingerbread.  New Leaf should have been the biggest, best Animal Crossing game so far, but it only managed half of that.  I'm not surprised, but I am still disappointed.

The Good

• Stacking Fruit is a very nice Quality of Life upgrade
• As is the D-Pad Tool switching
• The Roost Cafe' is so nice and the mini-game offered by it is fun, if simple
• Secondary Characters have their own houses now, rather than just a bed in your shared attic space
• Actually being able to add things to your town in a tangible fashion makes for good things
• The Flea Market allows you to make some good bank and offers some enjoyment from it
• Taking Screenshots is always nice, all games should have it
• Being Mayor is a neat feeling, even if it doesn't mean much mechanically
• It's still Animal Crossing at its core

The Bad

• Fruit and Bells not automatically stacking is a ridiculous oversight
• Storage space is needlessly limited, and the Catalog isn't the best answer to that
• Still a general lack of things to do, depending on what times of day you desire to play the game
• Placing Public Works Projects is an exercise in frustration at best
• Bells are entirely too scarce considering you need Six Million+ to renovate your house fully, -plus- fund the PWPs you want
• The only way to get new things to build (and single-handedly pay for) is by waiting for Villagers to randomly suggest them....meaning it takes a while before you get a new option, and it's likely not one you want
• Honestly, just -too many things- in New Leaf are random, from the days when someone special might visit (and then don't a lot of times, such as Crazy Redd skipping a week) to what they offer when they do visit (such as Crazy Redd selling three fake paintings and the one you just bought last week goddamnit)
• Being Mayor doesn't mean much mechanically, and instead is just a neat feeling
• It's still Animal Crossing at its core

Mogs Says

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is Animal Crossing: City Folk with new stuff which is Animal Crossing: Wild World with new stuff, which is a fairly big departure, for better or worse, from Animal Crossing.  The series has not been re-invented or re-invigorated, despite what you might have thought or what might have been stated to suggest as such.  It's still a fun game, of course, and one that you'll find yourself playing because you want to, and not necessarily because you feel you -have to- out of some sort of responsibility for the town (which admittedly goes to hell without you around).  Still, each iteration is another chance to add a whole new level to the series as it is, and New Leaf simply didn't do that.  I'm not even sure that they honestly tried, but at least there are a few new toys to play around with in the same old sandbox we've come to know and enjoy.

Review - Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation

It's been said that the definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and yet expecting a different result each time.  After playing and beating my fifth 'real' Assassin's Creed game (Bloodlines and the DS one don't count, yes I have them, yes I've played them) and finding myself with the exact same feelings as the last four (or the last three at least, there was a bit of a time gap, admittedly) I'm finding it fairly hard to disagree.  This isn't a wholly negative thing, of course, as there's not really an Assassin's Creed game that I actively dislike, save for 2, but that's mostly because I just really didn't like Ezio prior to Brotherhood, but the issue is that people are absolutely enthralled with these games.  I am not and even worse, I cannot imagine myself considering them the absolute gems that these folks praise them as.  While I may not disagree as vehemently as I do with, say, Final Fantasy XIII-2, because I don't think Assassin's Creed, as a franchise nor any individual game, is a bad thing like FFXIII-2, but I similarly just do not get it.

Perhaps it's the part of me that just really, really dislikes games that are released buggy and summarily never, ever fixed in a satisfactory manner.  If there was ever a complaint you could leverage at the series, that would certainly be it, though moreso in the later titles given their considerably shorter development times.  The idea that you actually cannot run into a gate for the little First-Person mini-games in Assassin's Creed:  Revelations without crashing the game, something that literally will never be fixed for the PS3 version at least, is a ridiculous one in all fashions, but it's a reality.  That's a rather egregious issue, granted, and one of the few larger ones, but its presence would indicate that several smaller problems are present and given the gripes folks had with Assassin's Creed 3 in that department, it's most definitely a thing for the series.  As expected, especially upon considering that AssLib is built on Ass3's engine, the Vita's AC game is rife with little bugs that are quite annoying to be sure.

Possibly the most annoying thing I encountered in the single-player mode was an instance in which I hopped off the roof and lodged my Sugarcane Machete into the chest of a guard, switched to a different weapon for the other one and, following the fight, I noticed that my Machete was gone.  Like, I had an empty inventory slot and everything.  It wasn't still in the guard since, as far as I can tell, your weapons do not leave your person ever (unfortunately, flinging a greataxe in AssBro and AssRev was so goddamn fun) and it wasn't on the ground.  It had just disappeared into the aether.  Or, I suppose, back in the weapon rack at the home base, which I went to to retrieve it from.  It was a little thing to be sure, but after a little googling, it's apparent that it's not an incident isolated to just me, nor just to the machete which is a bit of a problem to say the least.

It was also the stand-out in a sea of audio desynching from attacks (prime example is the "shik-shik-shik-shik-shik-shik from the multi-stab kill that would play....even if the attack wasn't triggered), the game constantly telling me my target was too far away when, in truth, I was not targeting anything, and things appearing on the map that I can only describe as ghost chests because they certainly are not where they're supposed to be, I can tell you that.  Plus, the game had an annoying little habit of putting down my manual checkpoint at a random location in the north after I'd used it to get to a chest and opened it.  Moving it rather than....you know, just taking it off the map, the thing that makes sense to do.  Another issue right at the start of the game in one of the very first missions.  In teaching you how to use Eagle Vision, you're prompted to go to the top of a building and use Eagle Vision to locate your target building.  I'm told it will glow gold with Eagle Vision activated.  I say this because said building looked like every other building and it was only dumb luck that I stumbled onto it and triggered the next scene.  I could go on and on, but I'm sure you get the point.

Also this happened.  A lot.

None of that is really indicative of what AssLib -is-, however, simply being something of an indication of what shape it was in.  (And this is after the patch that fixed the issue with Game Saves randomly erasing themselves as well as fixing some other bugs)  What Assassin's Creed 3:  Liberation -is- is a fully-realized Assasin's Creed title that fits in your hands rather comfortably on the Playstation Vita.  That in itself is rather high praise and bugs aside, I cannot think of a lot of negatives to say about it on the -game- side of things, aside from the normal complaints that I have about like all of the Assassin's Creed games.  When I say that it's an AC game, I'm not really making any caveats aside from that it's perhaps a bit short.  Still, I would assume that it had even less of a development time than any other Assassin's Creed game before it, so that's quite understandable.

AssLib begins by thrusting you directly into the role of Aveline de Grandpré, the Assassin for this go around.  And when I say it thrusts you into the role, I mean -you- as there is not exactly a person on the outside of the Animus.  Instead, the animus of this game is presented as something of a Mass-Market device released, of course, by Abstergo, with the end-goal being taking the Assassins down a peg in public opinion.  (Even though it would be a theoretical public opinion since Assassins and Templars both operate unknown)  I'm not going to tell you how it really attempts this, but that should be fairly obvious enough and regardless, it's a fairly neat touch doing it that way, rather than tying it to DNA memories and this and that.  I'm not really sure of the entire end-goal of this aside from, again, making it public opinion that Assassins kind of suck and the Templars who totally don't exist are righteous, but perhaps that is something for a future game.  Or maybe it was just a hook for AssLib.

Aveline is a pretty good protagonist to have for an Assassin's Creed game even though her backstory isn't nearly as fleshed out as Altair's or Ezio's, purely by nature of having only a single game and a shorter than normal one at that.  The important bits are explained as you go through it, of course and a nifty little feature is Citizen E or Erudito who is somebody that has managed to hack your Animus, showing you extra bits of story here and there when you find one of his marks.  This, of course, takes a little bit away from the Templar's aims, showing you the 'true' nature of things as they were, forgoing the careful editting that has clearly been done by Abstergo agents to control what the public sees.  And as a feature of story-telling, it's also pretty neat since you're generally seeing these bits after-the-fact so you can compare what 'really' happened to what you saw originally.

What seems to set Aveline apart from the other protagonists that we've had is one of the main gameplay mechanics in the Persona mechanic.  No, no, not that Persona, but a more tangible, more literal form of it in that you have three guises with which you can use to your advantage through the game.  As the daughter of a wealthy businessman, Aveline is fairly well-to-do and thus can walk about town in the Lady Persona which is for your more clandestine activities.  You cannot free run with it, but you can bribe and charm guards to get by and if you really -need- to, you've always got your Wrist blades and eventually a parasol gun.  Driven by a sense of righteousness, Aveline can also don a Slave's Persona, blending in with other indentured servants to get close to a particular Slave master or something of the sort and end his particular reign.  And of course, you have the Assassin Persona which we all know and love, with all of the normal trappings and such that you're used to.  All three different guises serve a purpose and all three have a nice effect of reflecting part of Aveline's personality, allowing us as the player to get insight into her that is otherwise unspoken.

I never, ever get tired of the death drop.

Because of the Persona mechanic and the new engine from AC3, gameplay mechanics have been changed in fairly noticeable ways, some of them for the better and some...perhaps not quite so much.  Something definitely high up on the awesome list is actually the free-running which saw a marked improvement from previous iterations in my eyes.  It's faster and more fluid, cutting off those moments of hesitation that Ezio seemed to have while climbing a goddamn Borgia Tower seriously just grab the fucking grip Ezio COME ON as well as just being, well, speedier all around.  Getting from the ground to a rooftop takes barely any time as Aveline grabs this and that, moving upwards all the while.  It's not perfect as there's instances, as with all AC games, where it just doesn't work properly, but this saw a pretty nice upgrade from AssBro/Rev which makes it much more useable.  And as we've learned previously, New Orleans is a rather Parkour-friendly place which is certainly just as true for AssLib as it's ever been.

On the flip-side, the combat mechanics have seen a drastic hit in terms of quality and, in a way, it kind of makes perfect sense.  What we're use to with the last three releases is Ezio as it becomes more and more of a honed, fine-tuned murder machine, spending more of his life training in the art of killing than not, he gets pretty goddamn good at it.  Aveline?  Not so much.  Even 'you' as the 'player', as the person who has purchased an Animus and are playing as Aveline to experience this game as it's presented in this weird meta-reality scenario do not have this experience.  So while you cannot kill folks with quite the ease as Ezio or Altair, it actually makes an annoyingly good amount of sense for the reason why, even though I really doubt Ubisoft considered that even a little at any single point in time.  So there you go, Ubisoft, that one is free.

Aveline is still quite proficient in her role, however, which is as welcome as you would assume.  The game does not waste a whole lot of time on tutorials for the series staple method of choice - Wristblades - and that's good because they have never ever been complicated to use and it's nice to know that we all acknowledge this now.  Something a little annoying about them, unfortunately, is that they're not quite the Combat God weapons as they were in Ezio's hands.  Again, it's understandable, but counter-killing with them is...well, we'll put it this way:  in my entire time with AssLib, I did not manage to counter-kill a single person.  As in the earlier days, hitting a blocking enemy meant that, eventually, their guard would drop and you would be able to finish them off, which is...fairly boring.  Of course, there were also foes in the game that seemed to ignore this and, indeed, every other rule of Assassin's Creed combat, requiring special methods to kill them.  (Read:  Shoot them or use the whip to pull them into an instant kill.....if that connects.)

I should touch on that point a little deeper if only because it's a really interesting bit about AssLib in that AssLib doesn't really seem to want you to think it's important.  During the course of the game, you add a whip (like, Indiana Jones whip) to your limited arsenal of ranged weapons and it is, honestly, pretty cool.  You are, however, likely to use it all of four times during the course of the game unless you really really try to work it into your playstyle because after the mission you get it in, and two or three jumps that you use it with, the game never mentions it with any significance.  In all reality, however, the Whip is goddamn broken as hell and you should use it always.  It is a hard weapon to use, however, because I'm pretty sure that the game doesn't even explain how to use it correctly, so I will do that for you now:  When it is blue (meaning you can use it)  hold triangle until something dies.  It is in fact that simple.  If you're on ground level with a foe, Aveline will drag him to her until she finishes him off with some sort of strike depending on her equipped weapon.  If you're on a building or similarly higher ground, she will tug until the enemy has effectively been hanged/strangled.  This latter part is specifically never told to you at all, yet there is a trophy for doing it ten times, so go figure on that.

Fun fact:  After taking this, I tried to Leap of Faith into the water.  It did not end well.

Harkening to the mainline Assassins Creed titles, there is more than one single area to play around in within AssLib's confines, which, after AssBro and AssRev, it is quite nice, even if Rev did kind of sort of offer another area as well.  Specifically, AssLib has three areas - New Orleans City proper, the swampy Bayou where you might just find yourself stabbing a crocodile (or is it an alligator?) to death, and, eventually, a location in Mexico, of which I will say nothing else.  Interestingly enough, the Bayou is -probably- as big as New Orleans' map, a fact made all the more apparent when you realize there is a lot of map that you will not get via the normal Synchronizing points and will have to simply trudge out into it to acquire.  I'm not at all sure why this is, other than the idea that, well, people don't generally chart out swamps, so Aveline couldn't exactly synchronize an entire swamp map to a map that doesn't otherwise exist.  It is, again, something that I'm probably thinking of more than Ubisoft, but it's interesting nonetheless in a kind of annoying "Where the hell is the border, urgh, I have to run all the way around this goddamn swamp, oh great now I have to swim, just wonderful" kind of way.

The Bayou is also where you'll likely run into the bulk of the game's collectibles - a move which also doesn't fail to confuse me, but isn't wholly bothersome in its own right.  Indeed, the Bayou is the only place where you will find Alligator (they're alligators, I checked) Eggs, Mushrooms for medicine (that you never ever make, it's just a collectible), and delirious folks that you have to punch to 'death' ('subdue them') so that you can heal them (seriously, it's kind of messed up - three different patients, I beat up and Aveline snapped their necks...yet they lived to get treated) as well as the bulk of the Diary pages scattered haphazardly around all three locales.  This, coupled with the above point about the lack of a good portion of Bayou mapping is a little distressing, but it's definitely not a big deal, especially now that you can look up things on the Vita's browser whilst playing a game instead of having to close it out.  Or you could just, you know, walk around with Eagle Vision on, which will make the icons display on your map when you come out of it.

If you were one of the folks that was just all about owning property in AssBro/Rev, then I have some rather unfortunate news for you - AssLib offers no such little pleasure.  Sure, you can still buy properties as it were, but you see absolutely nothing from doing so and that's reflected, I believe, in the 500 écu flat cost for every single building you could purchase.  These are Dressing Chambers (locations where the only point is to change your persona), Tailors and Weaponsmiths which operate as normal and, again, there's no cute little meta-game to it that gives you money for owning them or discounts or anything like that - you simply buy them and then you can use them.  It is that simple and indeed that unfortunate.  It is made slightly more interesting in that the Tailors and Weaponsmiths require you to do a "Business Rival" mission which generally involves you killing a corrupt business owner and stealing their deed (and then buying the properties anyway), but it's a band-aid, if anything, on the real problem.

Speaking on buying things, I should throw out a mention for the little 'mini-game' that was included in AssLib, presumably, in the stead of the Brotherhood missions.  Aveline's father is, as stated earlier, a wealthy merchant and, as his daughter, Aveline holds a little bit of power in that.  At least, enough power to have input on the actual importing and exporting of goods, as that is what the Mini-game entails.  You can purchase ships (up to 8) that have different designs, styles and stats and send them from port to port, buying goods where they're offered and selling them where they're demanded.  More ports unlock as the story proceeds, which means more and more goods become available for shipping, eventually becoming a balancing act of risk versus reward since there are dangers along every path and if you're not careful, your 8,000 or so écu ship could turn up missing which is a very bad thing indeed.  It's about as involved as your basic Brotherhood missions, which is to say not very, but it's a very profitable venture if you can handle the waiting that it requires.  It's not quite as engaging as, say, Grand Theft Auto:  Chinatown Wars drug trade, but it's along those lines in a sense and has a similar appeal.

Still, if you haven't noticed, there is quite a bit of game inside AssLib to be played and enjoyed, and I can say with some confidence that you will probably enjoy the bulk of it if you enjoyed the previous iterations of the franchise.  The collectibles will make up a good portion of it, but as I said earlier, you can sort of 'mark' them with eagle vision (just remember to turn it on every now and then and do a camera pan) and run around and get them later on.  Since the free-running has been improved so much even this task, tedious as it could be, isn't so bad.  For one mission, you also get to see a face that may or may not be familiar to you, depending on what other AC games you play, and that is, indeed, a rather cool moment.  (I'm also told that it's part of the whole tie-in with AC3, if that's not a big enough clue for you)  Really, the complaints with the single player portion of the game is solely that there could be more of it, which is fairly positive when you look at it.

Ugh.

The Multi-player portion of the game, on the other hand....

I'm going to be straight here:  Assassin's Creed 3:  Liberation's Multi-player is terrible.  I tried to like it, I really did, but there is just nothing redeeming, enjoyable or interesting about it at all.  It is different, is something I can say, and if nothing else, Ubisoft has always had a different approach to MP with the AC games, but in this case 'different' is bad.  'Different' in this case means 'Facebook game' and I don't mean the kitschy little -Ville games that are kind of fun if you literally have nothing else to do for like half an hour or something, I mean the harsh reality of what we generally see Facebook games as - exercises in clicking things that produce numbers with absolutely no reason or fanfare.  While also being on a time limit for some reason to force you to come back later on in the day to play it again to continue your 'progress' as it were, even though your 'progress' is simply a bar that fills up by an undetermined amount for every action you take.  

I am not oversimplifying what the MP mode of AC is because it is in fact the thing that has been oversimplified, unfortunately.  Using the above screenshot for reference, I will explain the process of 'playing' Assassin's Creed 3:  Liberation's multi-player because it is a fairly simple process to explain.  With every cycle of the game (this is important) you pick a faction, either the Assassins or the Templars.  And when I saw you pick a faction, I mean everybody picks Assassins like holy shit, so pick Assassins.  Then you pick a Home Node.  I assume if you're on a 3G model, it will use the GPS to select a node close to your location, but it really doesn't matter at all.  At your Home Node you can do three things - Attack (or defend, depending on the state of the node you're Attacking/Defending), set a beacon (which...makes the node shiny.  It's supposed to be used for coordinated attacks, but it is not necessary) or set your agents to guard which will exit the mode and give you some control points the next time you come back.

Now, your 'agents', all named like previous AC MP characters (The Thief, The Gentleman, The Rogue, etc.) are unlocked as you progress through the ranks and everyone starts with three stats at 1s (Attack, Defend and Pilfer) and the last stat, Energy, at 5.  For every attack/defense you make with a character, they use one bit of energy (unless you're attacking stronger foes), but energy is fully replenished half an hour following the first expenditure.  You don't even need to have energy to use them, but the control points you gain for doing so will always be low, possibly always only a single point.  Still you level up their abilities doing so, so it's not a complete waste of time (well, the entire thing -is- a waste of time, I'll explain later, but you know what I mean, within the scope of itself) and when you level up an ability, they gain a bit of energy.  Ultimately the goal is to control all of the Victory Nodes on the map, which you do by first controlling surrounding nodes and then doing much the same to the Victory node of choice.  You click attack, you click a character and you click an enemy (the game always gives you three to select, most of the time they are somebody else's agents) and it does a three-frame animation that ends with you getting Control Points.

That is 95% of the entire Multi-player.  It is a never-ending quest to fill up your bars for no other reason than they are there to be filled and the process of doing so is simply clicking on things with no real feedback.  It's like there was no real effort or thought put into it, even though the base concept is -not- a bad one.  Properly thought out, it could've been something like Risk, but using Assassins and Templars and that?  That could have honestly been pretty neat.  But this is so barebones, by a literal definition, that I simply cannot accept it as a viable option of Multi-Player.  There's no strategy, no depth whatsoever and most importantly there's just no fun to be had.  There's no feedback in any way that would -make- it fun.  Worst of all, when somebody wins the Assassins win, it starts a new cycle which resets all your characters stats to 1s and the 5 energy so that the only reason, really the only reason to play it whatsoever is to get the few MP trophies that AssLib offers.

Still, even that isn't enough to make me consider AssLib a bad game by any means.  Of course, I don't generally care too much about the Multi-player portion of a game unless it's truly amazing, so I'm perhaps not the person to go to for that type of consideration.  The Single-Player portion of AssLib is fairly strong on its own merits and is certainly on par with the other AC titles, for better or worse in that regard.  It's sort of weird to say "Well, yeah, it's like the other games and flawed just like them" in a way that is actually praising the title, but that's pretty much what I'm saying.  For a portable iteration of the series that was likely not given a whole lot of time or resources to work with, that's certainly saying something, and I can only wonder at how much better the game could've been with a couple more months of dev time under its belt.  Still, as a first attempt at Vita AC title, AssLib does its job quite well, and that's nothing if not encouraging.

The Good

• Fully Realized Assassin's Creed title that you can take with you wherever you go
• Aveline is a fairly good character and handled rather well
• The Persona Mechanic is pretty neat in concept at least and, for the most part, execution
• Free-Running has been improved upon a lot and is really fun for it
• The whip, once you realize its potential, is a fantastic weapon
• The shipping Mini-game has a neat appeal to it and is quite profitable
• The Bayou is a fairly interesting area to explore, which is a good thing since you're going to have to explore it
• Really, the design of the game in general is pretty good
• The idea of the game being an Abstergo tool in a sort of meta-reality scenario is honestly kind of cool and further enhanced by the Citizen E stuff

The Bad

• The Multi-Player is an affront to fun and good things
• The single player portion is, unfortunately, a bit short
• The combat system saw a bit of a downgrade which is understandable, but disappointing nonetheless
• By extension, some Full Synchronization tasks are stupidly hard, such as any that require you take no damage
• There's no real ownership meta-game with the various business and such, simply places to buy to little effect
• Even after the big patch, it's still fairly buggy, though the bugs that remain range from 'mildly annoying' to 'are these guards planking in mid-air, what is this even'
• While not mentioned before this, pickpocketing is done entirely with the rear touch pad and is rather poorly thought-out, which bugs me

Mogs Says

Assassin's Creed 3:  Liberation is not a perfect game, much like no Assassin's Creed game is a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination.  The upside is that Liberation is just as flawed as the previous titles, not more, which means if you enjoyed them, you will probably have quite a bit of fun with this.  The story itself is fairly short and not terribly involved with the rest of the overarching story, but in many ways, that's probably a good thing all told.  The draw here is pretty simple - more Assassin's Creed, but wherever you could want to play it at, and that's a very good thing since it does work much the same as the previous titles.  If you're looking for something Action-y to throw into your Vita for a while, AssLib is a fine choice that likely won't leave you feeling disappointed.

An Addendum to the Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review

Something that I really worried about with the Final Fantasy XIII-2 review while I was writing it and while I wasn't writing it, since I did start it and then not get back to it for a while, was the fact that it was, indeed, a wholly negative review.  It's not something that I relished doing, that I particularly -wanted- to do in the sense that I don't like being a complete negative nancy about things as I was.  However, there's absolutely no way I -could- write anything about Final Fantasy XIII-2 other than what the review contains.  The review is simply my opinions, my judgements and my appraisals of the game, just the same as any other review I've done.  The only difference with the other reviews is that, generally, the games I reviewed that aren't Final Fantasy XIII-2 are games that I liked.  Or, in some cases, games that I absolutely adored for the parts that they were compiled of.

That is the sort of pitfall I worried about way back when I considered Reviews being something beyond the scope of what I felt comfortable doing.  Obviously, I'm not going to like every game, and we've all read enough reviews that are negative that we've simply tossed aside without a care.  The reviewer didn't get this, didn't understand that, didn't know the importance of that, the list of reasons that we use to discredit reviewers that don't like the games we like is endless and they come so easily that we don't think about it.  As the reviewer, there's no way you can back up anything you write as a reason for why you dislike a game because that's what it is - a dislike, an opinion, something that's steeped solely in your view of matters which is different from everyone else's.  In the end, I just ended up feeling a little bad about writing so negatively about Final Fantasy XIII-2 is what I'm building up to, because even though I tried to be objective, tried to steep things in objective terms, it's impossible to do that completely.

Of course, when I think about the time I spent with the game, I don't feel anything but wholly and completely justified.  It's a weird balance, I suppose, and it's a weird thing to just honestly dislike the game as much as I do, but that's what it is.  Clearly I'm not writing a review of a hot new game to inspire site hits or anything, as I literally posted the review a year late for that, and I'm not trying to use hyperbole for effect.  I just unfortunately thought the game wasn't good for reasons that exist on a mechanical level, something a little more concrete than not in the wholly wobbly situation regardless.  I would try to be constructive about it, but I already gave all my constructive ideas for Final Fantasy XIII itself - the sequel went completely in the opposite direction, so all I would say is "come back and go the -other- way" which is really kind of an obvious thing.

I guess the point I really wanted to make here is that, in all reality, I'm just bummed that I didn't like Final Fantasy XIII-2.  I was all prepped to do so, and perhaps that was part of the reason why I couldn't, but whatever the reason, my time spent with it was simply miserable and it had no reason to be.  Final Fantasy XIII was a wonderful, if flawed base to make a game from, yet XIII-2 cannibalized only a few parts and not even in complete fashion, making it so that it honestly would have been better if they just hadn't tried it in the first place.  It's rare when a sequel completely and totally underperforms its predecessor, by a measure that's clear and not a difference of opinion over trivial parts.  This was a categorical failure across the board as far as I'm concerned, and unless someone can make me see the 'truth' or inform me of just what I was doing wrong, that's all I can say about the game.  It's not fact - it can't be - but being as objective as I can be, I just can't see it any other way.

That's just a real shame.  I'm not particularly thinking Lightning Returns is going to be the redeemer either.

Review - Final Fantasy XIII-2

I hate Final Fantasy XIII-2.

There.

I said it.

It is a deep, extensive and grand loathing that I have for the game and absolutely nobody is more surprised by this than I am, I assure you.  As with its predecessor I walk away from XIII-2 in a state of utter and complete confusion, but it's not at the paradoxical feeling that I like the unlikable, but rather that I am simply confused at how anyone could claim to like XIII-2.  I am saying this literally and without exaggeration because it is something that I simply cannot comprehend - it is beyond my grasp.  I do try to be objective, I say that a lot, and I have tried and I have tried, but there's just nothing I can pull out and hang on to, hold out and say "This, this is why I think people think it's a good game.  I disagree, but that's that".  I just cannot, for the life of me, say that the game is anything other than objectively bad which is a baffling statement for me and one that I don't take lightly.

The single thing, I think, that confuses me the most about Final Fantasy XIII-2 is that, where Final Fantasy XIII might have had only three real redeeming qualities, XIII-2 doesn't even have those.  All three of XIII's redeeming qualities have been filtered through XIII-2 and came out worse off overall - something that truly astounds me.  I wish I were using some sort of wacky hyperbole, that I was being uncharacteristically harsh on something for comedic value, but I just don't get it.  It eludes me.  Like nothing else has and I just can't help but express my frustration at that because I played the game.  I languished through its 30 hours or however long it took expecting a turning point and it never came.  It was un-enjoyable, mediocre drivel all throughout and perhaps with my admittedly excessive display, I'll be able to find -someone- that can actually quantify just what I'm missing, because clearly I am missing something if I am this far away from fun when it comes to the confines of Final Fantasy XIII-2.

It is for all of those reasons that it's hard to find a spot at which to start at.  Indeed, I'm blessed with a wealth of options here and that's a rather unfortunate thing, something I certainly don't relish.  I guess the best place would be to take Final Fantasy XIII's three points and extrapolate just -how- XIII-2 manages to wobble them so spectacularly, since that's about as good of an idea as any.  It really is impressive to see, which I guess is -one- positive I can say about the game:  It is interesting to watch like a train hitting a monster truck or something similarly strange.

Where Final Fantasy XIII was downright gorgeous for most of it, XIII-2 ended up dragging a little in that department somehow.  I'm not quite sure if it was perhaps just the locals, the smaller areas, or perhaps even the NPCs which might've necessitated a little pull-back, but suffice to say, for the most part it was just "above average" in the graphics versus XIII's real astounding ones.  The lessened amount of FMVs also hurt a little bit, I'm sure since there were about a handful in XIII and they were mind-blowing.  XIII-2's -do- match up here but that's because...well, it's FMV.  It's hard to make a bad looking FMV these days, especially with Squeenix.  If they're good at anything, it's certainly making shiny sparkly FMVs that are damn gorgeous to look at.  I should stress again that the game is definitely above average, and some locales are particularly striking (The Academia that isn't a horrible flatbed of monsters, in particular), but overall it just seems to lack that polish that it really needs to get up to Squeenix standards.

Something else that suffers in the graphics department, in a sense, is the actual identity of the world in which Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place.  Apologies for the spoilers here, but XIII-2 takes place after the events of XIII in which everyone who was on Cocoon must now make a living on Gran Pulse.  You know, that place that had monsters everywhere that were looking for ways to absolutely murder everything in sight.  Australia, in other words.  Except, Gran Pulse in XIII had its own distinct style and Cocoon had its own as well, so you sort of expect something of a blend of the two....yet it's not that at all.  The game starts in New Bodham, a settlement made by Snow and his cohorts and it's on Gran Pulse of course....yet it looks exactly like it did on Cocoon.  (Plus some buildings)  Similarly, some of the later areas look strikingly like Cocoon, yet aren't on Cocoon I guess?  And some places are meant to be -from- Cocoon or something, since nobody went to Gran Pulse before XIII-2 I think?  It gets confusing and, really that is the problem - there's no identity anymore.  You're thrust into locales, told them roughly what they are and you just swallow that because there's no sense in trying to justify them in the same world.New Bodham is established on a beach fairly near to the Crystal Pillar holding the Cocoon shell high above the planet.  Yet....300 years in the future, the Pillar is surrounded by a rainforest.  Inconsistencies that take you out of things completely run amok in the design.

More than that, the character designs, which I actually praised in XIII, got out and out ri-goddamn-diculous in XIII-2 which is par for the course I suppose, but still.  Serah's....weird....bondage get up is so goddamn out of place with everything, Fashion cycles every century or so, so people in 500 AF are wearing what people in 2 AF were wearing because 'it totally came back in style' (and not because Squeenix was too lazy to invent a new look for a new society built on the ashes of Cocoon so to speak) and Caius' outfit is beyond ridiculous.  Hell, Lightning's outfit is beyond ridiculous - fully armored top, absolutely no pants of any sort (not even her XIII shorts) and a feather half-skirt.  Noel is the only player here that isn't an abomination to look at and his style doesn't even make sense either because it's Gran Pulse style (from like a thousand years ago if Vanille/Fang are anything to go on) 600 years into the future (from the starting point of 1 AF or so).  Every other character falls into the mentioned "it's back in style!" trend except for Snow who...took off his shirt and his beanie and got his jacket kind of ripped up, which isn't bad against the other glaring things.

So, one of my main complaints about the battle system in FFXIII was that it just wasn't any fun with less than the full three-man party, and XIII insisted on putting you through about half the game without the luxury of three-man teams.  So when I say that XIII-2 gives you a third party member/slot pretty early in the game, that should mean that it's good, right?  You'd think so, right?  Well, surprise, but it's not.  The third party slot is one filled by a Monster of your choice of which there are an over-ample amount of possibilities.  Through the game, as you fight monsters, sometimes you'll gain their crystal, which allows you to summon one of their ilk to fight with you at your side.  Some monsters don't convert completely - a rather imposing behemoth early on the in game, for example, simply converts into a bog-standard behemoth and other things like that.  However, even though it sounds neat, it's hardly more than a Novelty.

Every monster has but a single class to them of the six available.  Commando, Ravager, Sentinel, Synergist, Saboteur and Medic.  There's all sorts of monsters of each type and as you might figure, some monsters are simply better than others in their class, meaning there is a 'paragon' monster for each class, if you will.  You have to use a Zubat before you can use a Pigeot, if you'll excuse the Pokemon analogy, by which I mean of course the better examples of monsters are only later in the game, and most of them in certain places only.  With a bit of training, by which I mean force-feeding materials down their throats (or equivalent) any monster can theoretically become 'useful' in battle, such as it were, but even at that, it's a little bit of an issue.  Everyone in the game, Serah and Noel and monster alike, is never set up to be a shining example of their class when compared to XIII's cast.  In a sense, I can understand that since XIII's party were basically demigods or avatars granted powers by a supreme being.  XIII-2's explanation is literally "some people were able to use magic after the fall of Cocoon", which means there's as much or as little room there as possible.  They went the latter route for some ghastly reason.

The thing that I hate about XIII-2's use of the battle system is simply that it's....too simple.  XIII's pace is fast, intense and you have to orchestrate your movements carefully for the most part, even in regular battles, if just to get a high score for a five-star rank.  None of this matters in XIII-2 - first off, don't even worry about five-starring, okay?  Or rather, did you get a pre-emptive strike?  You did?  Okay, you might get it.  You didn't?  STOP TRYING.  A majority of battles simply require a pre-emptive strike to grant you a five-star ranking which is bullshit and kills the need for anything resembling strategy, though of course, so do the piss-weak monsters.  And when I say requires a pre-emptive strike, I mean just that.  In one particular area, I was running into groups of monsters that I could defeat in two seconds.  Two.  Pre-emptive strike?  Five star!  Not pre-emptive strike?  Four star!  Same amount of time, same tactics, same damage, same everything, just that extra 2000 points (I think) from PES is all the difference.  That is ridiculous by any standard.

Another casualty to the simplification process is the very core of XIII's battle system - the Paradigm Shift.  In XIII, it was a vital tool to keep and control the flow of battle, making the tides go in your favor and seizing the moment whenever it came.  In XIII-2 it's....something you will use every now and then.  If you roll with Noel/Com, Serah/Rav and a Sentinel or Ravager monster, you will not have to do any shifting for 90% of the battles you'll encounter.  Those last 10% are, of course, boss fights and special encounters where you actually -do- have to fight to survive...sometimes.  Provided you aren't ridiculously over-levelled which only counts every now and then.  I recall vividly recounting my tale of the first encounter with Caius to a friend who played XIII-2 first.  I had accidentally grinded....a little too much in an attempt to make short work of a boss and when I reached Caius, I steamrolled over him, having wondered if it was meant to be difficult at all.  The incredulity in her responses to that knowledge was palpable and offered me a little smugness as I realized only then that it -was- supposed to be an intense, gripping fight, and that was short-lived as I realized the disappointment that creeped in with my knowing that it had been such a non-issue.

The balance that Squeenix so carefully crafted in XIII's corridors and broken doors and points of no return is nowhere to be found in XIII-2 and it's both slightly liberating and incredibly frustrating all at the same time.  That little session of grinding for that one boss encounter effectively ruined the difficulty of literally the rest of the game for me - only when I was trying to gather materials did I ever 'grind' again, which is not to say that it was the goal, but merely the side-effect.  Indeed, I eventually made it to level 99 in every class for Noel and Serah both which means most battles, I can simply let the game do what it will with the standard Com/Rav/Rav paradigm I used for 80% of the game.  Again, however, classes long became unnecessary so long as those classes weren't Synergist or Saboteur since every other class proved to be useful -sometimes- (Com/Rav/Med the most, Sentinel was still limited) but Syn/Sab are useful for precisely two fights all game...if then.  Any other time, they're honestly more of a hassle than not, which means you just won't really need to have them in your paradigm deck whatsoever now, will you?

Speaking of, the Paradigm Deck is still as limited as it was in XIII, literally one of the only hold-overs, and it's further complicated with the inclusion of the monsters.  In XIII, most characters were only useful in three particular classes, with the other three being merely tertiary.  This is something I lamented, but understood.  Thus when you were making your paradigms, you usually built around those strengths.  Those strengths don't exist in XIII-2 because there are no clear advantages for Serah and Noel in any classes (beyond, again, Commando and Ravager) so you'll probably just stick with those.  The Paradigm Pack allows you to include up to three monsters for distribution within those paradigms which means that you are technically still only working with one 'person' who is strong in only three classes.  Yet the whole thing is further complicated by every monsters individual stats which give you an extra facet to consider in your planning and the only six slots for paradigms becomes all the more limiting.  Of course, since shifting is such a non-issue, this is also not that big of a deal in theory, but as someone who wanted to at least pretend it was still good, it was incredibly infuriating.

XIII's last strong point, the characterization, is similarly wasted in XIII-2 and possibly the most spectacularly of everything here.  There is perhaps an hour of content in XIII in which Serah is not a giant crystal lawn gnome statue, and that single hour provides Serah with a much better characterization than XIII-2's entirety.  In XIII-2, she is no longer the slightly tragic, tortured soul struggling to figure out her way, but is instead a vapid, incredulous upstart who cannot retain anything and is constantly amazed by the theory that Lightning is alive in Valhalla which is a theory that she herself propagated in the first place.  She has a memory of Lightning being alive, well and certainly not a crystal at the end of XIII's events, however she is the only one with said memory as everyone else thinks Lightning is trapped inside the crystal pillar.  She knows she's right in her heart and wants nothing more than to be able to prove it.  Then....she has a dream about it being true and cannot believe it.  THEN, Noel comes out of a goddamn time gate, hands her a moogle and says "Hey, I just got this from Lightning, your sister in a place called Valhalla and I was there with Lightning and Lightning said she was your sister and that it was in Valhalla AND LIGHTNING WAS IN VALHALLA, THE PLACE I JUST WAS."

Serah doesn't know what the fuck to make of that.

That is not the last instance.  Oh lord, it is not by a large margin and it becomes more and more annoying with every time it comes up.  Eventually it culminates in a meeting with Serah and Lightning herself as you might guess.  After covering in just about every manner possible (Having the memory herself, being told by Noel who literally saw Lightning and was there with her, being told by Snow that Lightning talked to him a dream and helped him time travel, seeing fucking video footage of Lightning in Valhalla, plus others) there is Lightning, fresh from Valhalla to speak to her sister who has been looking for her all game.  Looking for a way to get to Valhalla to find Lightning.  In Valhalla.  Where Lightning is and is established to be several times in the game.

So the first thing Serah says is "You're alive?!  Where were you?!"

I understand that is a spoiler.  I am not sorry.

Noel is certainly not much better, nor is...well any character in the game.  The only other real stand-out is Caius Ballad who only transcends the rest of the cast by default and because he is voiced by Liam O'Brien who is one of the best VA dudes out there.  Caius, at the very least, has a very clear purpose all game.  Caius, at least, knows exactly how the hell to accomplish his goals.  And Caius, at least, isn't prone to asking the same goddamn questions over and over again, nor is he confused when the wind blows east or similarly insignificant things that apparently prevented the main characters from retaining very vital information for hours at a clip.  Of course, Caius is the villain of the game.  This isn't a spoiler - he is literally shown fighting Lightning (in fucking Valhalla) in the intro of the game, and is made very apparent as the antagonist from every point thereon.  He's the best character, by far, in the entire game and that's not saying much since his competition, in all reality, is only Noel and Serah who are dumb as goddamn bricks if I haven't made that abundantly clear.

"B-b-b-b-b-but at least it's not completely linear!", you say.  "You have different areas and you can go explore them at will!  For funsies!"  That is, of course, true.  I hope you enjoy the random battles you'll run into on every square inch of those wide open areas, though.  Oh?  You didn't know?  About the random battles?  Well, yes, gone are the on-field battles of XIII, replaced by a system that is so stupid I cannot even really understand it in my head now, much less when I was playing.  Apparently, monsters only show up for Serah and Noel under the guise of temporal distortions (in 98% of the cases at least) which are picked up by Mog, the ever helpful magical Moogle Macguffin and he shows up as a Mog clock that displays their time in Serah and Noel's plane of existence.  Or....shows how dizzy they are after being transported to this plane.  Or something.  I forget - it's simply a thing to explain that things show up, you hit them with your sword before they hit you with their body and you get a pre-emptive strike.  Or if you get far enough away fast enough, you can force them back to the aether from whence they came.

Worth noting is that there are maybe a dozen unique locations in the game, only their instances are copy/pasted and altered to match other timelines, sometimes in dramatic ways and sometimes not quite so much.  So, I hope you enjoy hoofing the same exact terrain three or four times over simply because this version of it is supposedly 100 years in the future and the only difference is that it's dusk and there are less barriers and for some reason different monsters entirely.  Except the monsters only show up from temporal distortions?  So who else is fighting monsters unless monsters are just constantly appearing from distortions and - okay nevermind.  Of course, some -are- dramatically different in layout and such and those are the refreshing ones.  They are also the rare ones.  They also don't stand out very much in the grand scheme of things.

This 'free-roam' concept is further exploited with a 'quest' system that literally only exists as a vessel through which the player is handed useless Macguffin collectibles that will in turn grant you other Macguffin collectibles eventually.  And most of the quests boil down to "Talk to someone, find the area they talked about and open the floating cube that has only since spawned there to get item, take back to person" affairs which, again, have you contend with the random encounters that show up out of nowhere for no discernible reason.  That you have to fight using a severely hampered battle system that offers nothing in terms of enjoyment nor reward unless you hit a Pre-Emptive strike.  Which you won't have because most of the time you'll have just tried to run away from the fight because the battle system is no fun.  Problems compounding problems compounding problems - that is the name of the game in XIII-2.

No matter what, as is the order of things, you are still rail-roaded into different time periods and alternate histories eventually regardless.  And should you go anywhere beyond those areas, your only reasons are to grind or to work on quests, meaning there's not a whole lot of worth in that free-roaming.  Unless you're going to Serendipity, the Casino resort on the outside of time's constraints in which you can play slot machines and race chocobos....and play a card game if you buy some DLC.  Literally, attempting to play at the card tables will instruct you to keep your eyes out for Downloadable Content that will unlock that feature.  It's more than a little on-the-nose.  And slot machines are just as frustrating as they are in literally every other game that includes them for reasons that are beyond my comprehension since gambling in video games is as fruitless, if not more, as real life.  So of course, 100% completion -and- a separate trophy (for 100% trophy list) relies solely on winning at the slot machines.  Which relies on chance - giving you absolutely nothing to tip the scales in your favor.

That...is pretty much everything, I should say.  I covered why the story sucks, why the characterization sucks, why the battle system sucks and why the game has literally -not- improved on XIII in any way.  I understand that, to a point, it's merely my opinion, but even objectively, I can't see it.  The battle system has been nerfed considerably - there's no argument there.  It would be like if Dark Souls 2 suddenly let you block endlessly, never taking your stamina for the pleasure.  It is a subtle change but it would completely wreck the entirety of the fun of the game as XIII-2's lack of emphasis on Paradigm Shifts has done.  Gone also are the concepts of fal'Cie and l'Cie in XIII-2, taking out the singular interesting, non-character-related story element from XIII.  What's left is a silly time travel story that makes absolutely no sense at any single point in time (ha!) with characters that would have more depth if they were printed out on a sheet of paper.  That is Final Fantasy XIII-2.

The Good

• Caius Ballad is a pretty good character
• Caius Ballad is voiced by Liam O'Brien
• ...
• Caius.  Liam O'Brien

The Bad

• The story is nonsensical and poorly told
• The characterization is flimsy and barely even attempted
• The Battle system has been made less fun by making Paradigm Shifting a tertiary tactic, rather than a core mechanic
• Monster collecting should be fun, but instead it's tedious and reliant entirely on luck
• Serendipity.  'Nuff said
• Seriously, Serah is like the worst character in anything
• One area, Academia 400 AF, I believe, plays party to the literal worst section in any RPG ever thanks to the stupid Random Encounters and narrow, terrible map design
• The entire Caius arc hinges on Serah and Noel being too stupid to use common sense (Spoiler: it works)
• Random Encounters
• Did you read the review?  Literally like everything about the game

Mogs Says

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a shallow, vapid romp through forgettable scenery with terrible protagonists playing out a stupid story that never gets off the ground and simultaneously never makes sense.  I can only fathom a guess as to how anyone found it enjoyable, and that guess would be that it is a fairly easy game with above average graphics that lets you collect monsters for seemingly no reason.  There is, however, nothing that screams 'quality' from the title, no matter how hard I really, truly tried to hear it.  'Disappointing' is not the word to use, but it conveys the gist well enough.