Phew, the time flies. The start of this month was crazy in uni. Students started hunting for their Bachelor's Thesis supervisors and I've been pretty popular choice. But we quickly run into a problem - I focus on research of teacher's attitudes and competencies towards using digital technologies (and informatics topics like programming) in schools, but the new dean doesn't like the idea of having research as the main focus of BTs. So after few days of fighting, I was able to get some research ideas greenlit and figure out different topics for the rest of the students. But wait, this is gaming journal... I also managed to play a little bit in all this stress. I got Dragon's Dogma 2, a brand new release of 2024. I think it's the first 2024 game I played this year. Good thing - it sets the the bar so low that I don't think I can find a worse game this year. Bad thing - well, actually the same. It took me majority of the month to beat it. So let's talk about this mess.
EDIT: When I started working on this thread, there was still about a half of April left. Now that I'm finishing it, there are only few hours of April left. Yeah, this month was fun...
Dragon's Dogma 2
Where to start with this game? I know about the original and was planning to play it one day. Some of my friends recommended it to me, since it reminded them of Gothic. But since the sequel got released, I decided to go with it instead.
The game starts strong. Like really strong. GOTY contender strong. It drops you in the world fairly quickly and first encounters with goblins and harpies are deadly. There is nice urgency in both the main and side quests. The game showcases that the world evolves around you, even when you don't interact with it. For example, there is a quest to save a guard lost in a woods, but you are put on hidden timer, because the guard fights monsters and you only have time until his HP is depleted. Picking up your first pawns is fun. Finding your first cave to explore is great.
But then... the game stops evolving around 4 hours in. You get stronger, but you still fight the same bunch of goblins and harpies, the story devolves into bunch of incoherent fetch quests, characters become non-existent, there is nothing to explore and you kinda stop to care about everything.
Let's start with the best part of the game - the battle system. The best way to describe it is that it feels like a lite version of MH battle system. At the start of the game, you only have one skill on your picked class and the fights feel hard, yet fair. It feels like every class is needed and you have to make a hard decision of which 4 classes to pick for yourself and your pawns. But as you level up and get better gear, you quickly find out that every class gets a way to deal with every enemy. For example, I started as Thief and struggled with flying enemies, since my pawn's class was Fighter. So I picked Mage and Sorcerer pawns to take care of flying enemies. But as I leveled up my Thief class, I quickly got skills to counter flying enemies. And my Fighter also got skills to bring flyers down. My Thief quickly became unstoppable one-man army. Many battles ended before my pawns could even react. Aside from regular enemies, there is also a bunch of big bosses. And once again, they are fun at first, but you quickly find one universal strategy to kill them all. Again, my Thief basically solo'd them all fairly early in the game.
And here comes the huge problem with the battle system. The lack of enemy variety. There are goblins, lizardmen, harpies, wolves, skeletons, zombies and souls for the regular enemies. And while yeah, there are different kind of goblins, like big goblins, red goblins, green goblins, they all act the same and the only difference is in their HP and power (and maybe their weakness, but the game becomes trivial so quickly that you can just spam regular attacks to kill everything). The same goes for every other enemy type. There are various types of lizardmen, lighting lizardmen, rock lizardmen, and some other that I don't remember, but all of them dies to the same strategy. And while it's cool to cut off their tail a first, you quickly realize that you can do it with every one of them and it becomes less special.
And it comes back to the same problem the game itself has. It's fun for the first few hours, when you're weak and you're discovering what can you do. For example, I managed to catch cyclops's foot with rope, when it puts it up, pull it and make it fall, but it's far from the optimal strategy of just spamming the same combo again and again until the enemy dies. Or I managed to use the rope to pull a harpie down from the sky and straight to the deadly water. When a dragon started flying away from me, I shot it down by breaking one of its wings. It can be fun, but sadly not for long. There is not as much depth to it like for example in MH.
One of the main gimmick of the game is switching classes, leveling them up and using some of their skills together. As I said, I started as a Thief, which was surprisingly an overpowered glass cannon class. This class gets to use a rope as one of its skills and it is overpowered. You can basically pull anything towards you, stun it on the ground and then deliver a OHKO. Combo this with a skill that makes you invincible and powerful AoE attacks and you just solved all encounters, even with bosses in seconds. When I started to get bored with it, I switched to Ranger, because one quest required it, and stayed as Ranger for a while, until I unlocked Mystic Spearhand, which is pretty good mobile class with bunch of broken skills. It can make your whole party invincible, basically making the whole battle system useless, because you can just cast this over and over again with no drawback and win every fight. And I had no reason to ever switch to another class. Since I automatically won every fight, there was no reason for me to change classes and get the passive bonuses from them. Not that they would bring any meaningful bonuses. Usually just few percent increase that's barely noticable.
The story is... well, there is a little bit of a story. And it makes no sense at all. You start with a simple goal of killing the dragon. Which is something the game immediately forgets and tries to introduce a political plot about getting support in the capital city of the human kingdom. Don't ask me for its name, it doesn't matter. You are then sent on a bunch of stealth missions (with no stealth mechanic in the game), after with the game drops this thread and introduces yet another plot, a fetch quest. And then, suddenly, there is the ending! The final location of the game looks kinda cool, but once again, you just have to do some fetch quests and then the game just ends. The dragon appears randomly at the end and you don't even get to fight it properly.
It's such a disappointing attempt at a story. And the characters don't save it at all. There is an evil queen, that is after you and already tried to kill you at the start of the story, and evil fake Arisen, but you interact with each of them maybe once per the whole story. They are barely characters in the world. You can find them and talk to them, but they will just say some generic stuff and nothing happens. You are supposed to be the public enemy number 1 and they compostela ignore you. And it's not like they don't recognize you, the story tries to make you believe that you have to do everything in secret. The character that tells you this will shout "Your majesty" at you on sight, then tell you to meet him somewhere less crowded, after which you have to meet him in the full inn. There is a force ghost character that helps you all the time, he even gives you the whole fetch quest at the end to get a divine weapon that can break the cycle of the world, but then it's randomly revealed that he is the main villain that doesn't want to break the cycle. And he also appears like 3 times in the whole story. There is a character that will help you in the catpeople kingdom, then help you again in one random sidequest, but then is randomly among the villains and you have to fight him. The game also makes him to be this fearsome warrior, yet the battle with him ended before he could even touch me. And the fake Arisen. You investigate his origin, then you never meet him until the endgame, where he's in the same band of villains the previous character is, you fight him and his fake pawns and he barely even says anything. You kill him and that's it. There is a catgirl on the cover of the game, which is a queen of catpeople. Pretty important charater, right? She has no relevance to the story at all. She appears in maybe two side quests and that's her whole part in the game. I think I could write pages about the nonsense of the story and characters.
Overall, this was one huge disappointment. Good start, but I feel like this game needed at least 2 more years of work to make it at least fun to play for more than 2 hours. 5.5/10.
And actually, before I even managed to write down my thoughts on Dragon's Dogma 2, I managed to beat more games. So let's talk about them.
TELETEXT
Okay, do you know what teletext is? It's quite an old technology used on the old TVs to display various pages of informations. And this game is a homage to this idea.
It's a simple Czech puzzle game with a scent of horror. I managed to finish it in about 40 minutes.
You take a role of someone, who is responsible for making the teletext work. You have to investigate the pages, find passwords and login informations to unlock new parts of the system and slowly piece together what is going on and why are you there. I don't want to spoil it, but it was nice story.
The main gameplay-loop is scrapping the page for something that would help you move forward. And I have to say that some puzzles are pretty hard and convoluted. I got stuck few times and had to use the hints that the game offers you. Sometimes, I was so close, yet to far from the solution. I think the game could telegraph what it wants you to do a little bit better. For example, you can let the game take you to the page you're suppose to do something with, but it usually just took me to a page that had the password on it, which I usually already knew, but I had no idea, where to put it. I also like how it plays with your computer. It makes it all more realistic.
Overall, the game's biggest strength is its setting and graphics. Puzzles are fun, but sometimes way too hard. 8.5/10.
The Many Pieces of Mr. Coo
This game is a charming old-school inspired P&C adventure. Well, maybe more of an interactive movie.
It reminds me of the old animated movies and shorts. You follow a character of Mr. Coo on his quest to open a mysterious gift. The world of Mr. Coo is dream-like, a magical ever-changing landscape that is fought upon by two eldritch deities, who can reshape the fabric of the universe itself, even change the flow of time. Or at least this is my interpretation of it, because the game has no dialogue or text that would help you understand what is going on. It employs the visual storytelling and it's up to you to make it all make sense.
It's fairly straightforward in its gameplay. The game switches between linear parts and puzzles and it the game only opens up a little bit at the very end. Which is a little disappointing, especially since the game ends kinda abruptly and on a cliffhanger. Even the whole "many pieces" bit is there for the very end of the game. Not that the game is long, it took me about an hour to finish it, but I can't imagine how much work it had to take to animate all of this.
Overall, I think this is really showcase of the animators, a little bit less of a game tho. 8/10.
Persona 4 Golden
Phew, where do I start with this one? Coming from the third entry, I thought what I was getting into. But it just completely broke any expectations I had for it. In a good way.
The game works pretty much the same as the P3P, but is better in every regard. It's like they took my critic of the P3P and made a game specifically for me.
Let's start with the battle system. I hated how mind-numbingly boring, long and unnecessary the grinding was. Like completing ~50 identical floors per boss was just such a weird design choice. Thankfully, P4G solves this quite effectively. Now the dungeons have unique designs and only have around 10 floors. There are puzzles and gimmicks in dungeons. They all feel so fun to get throught. On top of that, dungeons are now actual part of the story. It's such a weird thing to say, but P3P dungeons were just so disconnected from the rest of the game. There is also fewer of them and I think that's just enough. There is a small change following this. Now, you don't have much options on how to restore your SP, so taking down enemies effectively is more important. That meant that items were more important, because healing using skills could cost you a good amount of SP. I like this change, but it sometimes meant I just hit auto-battle and let the game beat the encounter using only regular attacks. Which is a shame.
As I mentioned before, the dungeons are now closely tied to characters. And I quite enjoy the cast of P4G. I think I also like the main cast more than P3P cast. Especially since you could start their Social Links right from the start of the game. And progressing the SL also gave them new skills and power-ups, even new Persona evolutions. I really enjoyed this change.
On the other hand, I didn't really care for the side characters that much. For some at least. I didn't really care for the two women adults - the stepmother and the nurse, and for some students, which I don't even remember their name. The one that skipped classes and the brother of the second murder victim. On the other hand, I like the sport bros.
Aside from better Social Links, I like activities you can do. Work opportunities have bigger depth, including their own Social Links, you really feel like you're getting better and unlocking new opportunities all the time. But it also gives you new ways to optimize your time around them. Especially since now you have to spend a whole day going to the dungeons and out, not just a night like in P3P.
I also can't stress how much I love the settings and the atmosphere of the game. It gives me slice of life anime feeling. It kinda reminds me of Kokoro Connect. The main mystery was delivered perfectly. It always kept me on my toes. And the ending also sticked the landing. I'm a little disappointed that it turned into "save the world" trope, but up until that point, it was great detective story.
Overall, this was awesome sequel that answered all my criticism of P3P. I can't wait to play the next one. 9/10.
So, that was pretty interesting month. I'm glad I found a fine for shorter indie gems alongside long AAA production. For the next month, I plan on playing yet another 2024 release - Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden. I started it and it looks like a well done action adventure game. Nothing mind-blowing, but it looks like it could be fun for few hours. I also plan on playing the last Persona game, Persona 5 Royal. But I'll probably first throw in some shorter indie title, for example DARQ or Don't touch this painting.