Gamers truly are the most oppressed people out there. When you are the only consumer base that is ostracized for exercising your right as a customer to get a refund for a poor product out of this notion that you are somehow “entitled”, you cannot think anything other than.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the heartbreak of the entire gaming world. No other single controversy in gaming could match the overwhelming outrage and discourse surrounding this title. 8 years after it’s initial announcement, Cyberpunk was the ultimate hype train that crashed and burned in the most spectacular way imaginable. It was the buggiest game on the face of the earth. Virtually unplayable on all consoles, and even some of the most powerful gaming PC’s known to man. It’s gameplay left many bewildered and disappointed. It’s story left many furious.
And yet still, it was not enough to give gamers any relative pause on hyping up the next potential disaster. Many held on to the glory of patches to hopefully fix the game, only to be met with more game breaking glitches, more crashing, and even more cope. Youtubian pimps who already lambasted the game pre-launch were in full validation, congratulatInG and jerking themselves off with their predictions. Despite all of this, when gamers rightfully demanded a refund, they were excoriated. Cyberpunk was the litmus test that practically all gamers failed. It was deemed that Cyberpunk would be a lesson to all gamers as a means of tempering their expectations and practicing a steady diet of cautious optimism… or pessimism in my case.
Then 2 years later, an anime was produced titled “Cyberpunk Edgerunners”. In massively stark contrast, the anime was considered one of the greatest cartoons of all time if only because the Gurren Lagen studio worked on it. Even I admit I enjoyed the first 6 episodes. Nevermind how the plot is just anime Scarface, or how the main character is an unlikable twat, or how Laura Bailey shows up again, or how they killed off the best character in the most anti-climatic of ways (Rebecca deserved better, you ASSHOLES!!!), for what it was, it was a decent show with some mildly entertaining action sequences here and there.
But the major problem with the show is that it created or reignited interest with the game. The game that we were supposed to forget about, the game that we were supposed to leave in the ash tray of history, as a relic and an example of developer/publisher incompetence, greed, and pure deception. It was to be the ET of the 8th generation akin to the Bomberman Act Zero of the 7th, the Big Rigs of the 6th, the Superman 64 of the 5th, the SNES version of MK1 of the 4th, etc. And yet, because people are easily swayed these days, here we are. People reinstalling their games, logging back in… and even my sister buying a copy of the game.
“It can’t be all that bad! We’ve enjoyed games that people hated before. You liked that Shadow game that everyone hated!” Firstly, how dare she use Sonic against me! “Well we liked Andromeda when everyone hated it over the female MC being ugly” So on, so forth. Like… it’s hard to believe a spinoff cartoon could be based on one of the most reviled games of the generation. Certainly it’s true your tastes won’t match up with the majority from time to time, but when people are talking about how badly the game runs on certain platforms, save data corruption, and the like, it’s best to hold off any pretenses of overreaction and take a hard look at what is being ripped to shreds. Sure, the hype was immense, people literally planned their vacations around the release of the title, and there were many… many promises. To have all of that go unfulfilled ON TOP of being a bug ridden mess at a high price, you’ve got a recipe for righteous indignation.
I never talked about my own experience with the game under the assumption that no one cares. Insert low hanging fruit. Cyberpunk has been discussed to death, and weaponized as the primary example of resisting the urge to hype, and be a call to lower one’s massively inflated and hopelessly optimistic expectations, so anything I discuss would be redundant as it would be playing the angry gamer’s greatest hits. And no, that includes being one of those pseudo-moral/intellectual dinkwads on youtube who try to say “it’s not the bugs that make the game bad, it’s the story or lack of features”. Course, that… already limits what I could talk about.
“So say nothing about it, and move on”.
Now now, hold on. That doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t have a… somewhat unique take on this, that or I’m giving myself too much credit. Uhhhh… first off, I’mma say this. The people that claimed “the bugs weren’t the main problem of the game”… get fucked. Yeah, I’m on the PS4 version which everyone claimed was the worst version along with the XBONE (which was a lie proven by Rippa and is just next gen humpers going around in circles trying to convince people to ditch their old consoles for some bizarre reason), but when the bugs literally prevent you from completing the game (being stuck in Act 1 for some reason because the game decided to go fuck itself), then no matter how bad the story is, you won’t get to experience it because the game literally… won’t… let you. You’re being disingenuous because a bunch of idiots online think that a complaint has to be “original” or “new” just to be thought provoking. No, the bugs have made it impossible for me to progress in a new save. For those who have played the game, it’s the part where you have to put the flathead on the table. The box has to be on the table first so that you can spawn the little robot fuck inside just so you can progress with the story. This happened in my first playthrough as well, but the box spawned on the floor making it impossible to continue, but reloading the save worked after about 5 times. Now, the fucking box wouldn’t spawn at all no matter how many times I reload. This has only worked ONCE for the first playthrough. I cannot start a new game and go through the story again because the game is a piece of unfunctional shit. I’d have to go back and play through my finished file… with all of the quests being finished. We’ve moved beyond “mere annoyance” and gone to full on “Game is just plain broken and won’t goddamn work” right now.
Oh and my first playthrough save is now corrupt, and I can’t play the damn thing anymore, so… to know there are people who still think Sonic 06 is the inferior title here is wild.
I don’t see the logic in denouncing people who constantly point out bugs and glitches. When it gets this bad to where you can’t even play the fucking game anymore past a certain point, there is zero reason to ignore this. This is why the entire concept of videogame patches have completely fucked our perceptions of quality. We will sit on a bad game from release on the hopes that patches will just fix the problem. I applaud the people who demanded a refund, it’s a baby step in trying to enforce some level of standards and quality control. Don’t rush shit out on launch thinking you’ll just patch it later, and not get screwed over for it. That level of arrogance and sloth is unacceptable. Or should be.
So for what I was able to get out of it. I’m gonna be honest. Whatever interest I had in Cyberpunk was eroded years prior to it’s release. The trailers all centered on you being a criminal trying to make it big, getting the best ride, a rich kid’s house, and the baddest bitches to take a dive in your pool.
……………. What!?
………………. What the fuck is this!?
I’m sorry, I thought this was called “Cyberpunk”, not “Grand Theft Auto”. When I think of science fiction shit, I’m thinking stuff on the level of Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, Aeon Flux, Appleseed, Total Recall, Upgrade, Dark City, Johnny Mnemonic, Gattaca, Equilibrium, Demolition Man, Judge Dredd, Robocop, Deus Ex, etc. But most of the promotional material was about… being the best criminal ever, pulling heists and dangerous jobs just to get some… rags to riches lifestyle going. That was a major turnoff. Most of these other cyberpunk media had the main character being a part of an elite organization, or being a regular guy pulled into completely awesome yet fucked up shit. They had characters who were actually interesting. In Cyberpunk, you’re just some asshole with delusions of grandeur who has the vague goal of “becoming a legend in Night City” or… something. Cyberpunk is honestly “in name only” as it just takes the aesthetics of actual cyberpunk fare, and layers it on top of a first person GTA clone. The CP part only accounts for the “features” of the world. The world itself is just modern America, only shittier. Now you want to talk about being redundant, how much dystopian scifi have we consumed where the corporations make life ass for everyone else? But even worse, the main character’s entire goal has nothing to do with changing or even overcoming the status quo because America has been so consumed and influenced by the increasingly heightened glorification of criminality? From Scarface to God Father to Sopranos to Breaking Bad to the Wolf of Wallstreet to GTA to Saints Row to Mafia to Hitman to Fast and Furious to Need for Speed to… to fucking HATRED of all games. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started making games based on school shootings at this point.
Personally, if I play something like Cyberpunk, I want… actual Cyberpunk fare, not the illusion of Cyberpunk aesthetics layered on top of GTA. That was my impression years prior, and going into the game itself. My concerns were… almost levied by the presentation of the… “life paths”. Where you wouldn’t be limited to just this one way of going about the story. Oh how naive I was! I picked Nomad cause… hell, I am a little country. 😛 But these were more of the rustic variety of country on par with Harley Humping Biker gangs. The intro portion seemed par the course. What essentially happens is that your character left a Nomad group, or was banished, for whatever reason, and the only thing you’re doing right now is smuggling Iguanas. Yeah, so even if you didn’t want to, you’re having to go into crime to make some cash. Or “eddies” because we want the life of crime on deez streets to be as Ghetto as possible, forcing lore through jargon slang (like Guns being referred to as “Tin”). All 3 scenarios, you meet Jackie for one reason or another, and it’s always because you’re involved in some activity that involves stealing or attempting assassination of a rival boss. Then for the rest of the game, none of this matters because one way or another, everything goes tits up and you’re going through this trailer sequence of an announcer guy talking your ear off on how to live it big in Night City in the weirdest way imaginable, you and Jackie are already these criminal mercs, you live with his mom and girlfriend, you get into a fight at a night club, a bunch of random shit because for once, the developers didn’t want to inflate the game length by having you do all of these pointless introductions and what not. So you just get these quick flashes off all these different characters which… aren’t even important for later, they only exist for sidequests and shit, and then you’re on your first assignment, rescuing this naked chick named Sandra Dorsett, she only ever comes up in a later sidequest and has nothing to do with the overall plot so… that was worth a tutorial level. You get Jackie to drive you home where you get some sort of introduction to shooting on the highway. This… only ever happens twice in the whole game unless you pursue a romance with Panam (so like… several more times because with an ass like that, you’re bound to do the work). You also get an introduction to Maxtac, the Super SWAT of the game that… never appears again for the entirety of the game as far as I’m aware, so even the game itself gives you false advertising. Showing you things that don’t actually matter to the overall narrative or game aside from sidequest givers. After that, you go to sleep, you go to a ripper doc, find a fixer named Dex Dashaun who’s supposed to be the best fixer in the world (A glorified middleman. Joy). You meet the client who’s a hooker that wants to steal a biochip from the most powerful corporation in America… a fucking hooker, yeah. She’s got this techy waifu named Judy who’s so emotionally unstable, she’ll bark at anyone who’s merely trying to meet her halfway. You go through seizures trying to do these braindances, which are not fun at all to do for several sidequests later on, and it’s the first time I notice that the cutscenes don’t load properly. Like the load screens take longer than the actual loading of the scene, because once that screen disappears, the story already progressed to a certain point, so you’ve likely already missed some key details before you can figure out what these jerkoffs were talking about.
You go through a gang hideout of people called “Maelstrom”, and they’re probably the only ones that look threatening. I didn’t deal with Meredith at all so I don’t know what her deal was. I didn’t have the patience to deal with shit, so I rolled in there and killed everyone, got the damn flathead, and went to a bar called afterlife where this fine ass bartender named Claire took residence… then I find out later on this chick used to have a dick, yikes. We get pointless cutscenes talking about legends like Morgan Blackhand, and fuck me, this game has too many cutscenes. None of this would be bad if you could skip most of it. Back in the day, they’d used to be actual cutscenes, but now they’re these long walking simulators where you control the character, but are forced to sit still until these asshats stop talking to each other about nothing. Then you get to the backroom with Dex and I already talked about having to put the flathead on the table. At first I was confused cause the box was on the ground, and I couldn’t do anything with it. After 5 times of reloading, we continue on to get our tuxes and a fancy taxi for the “biiiiiiiiiiiig major league heist”. You get more cutscenes where Jackie basically foreshadows his own demise, go through some metal gear-esque heist, watch the main villain get killed by the anti-hero because he spoke of that cliche of a nail that gets hammered, the gang finds a biochip, token black hacker gets killed, the heist goes bad, Jackie gets killed, you have to put the biochip in your head because of something to do with having the right temperature, escape, Jackie of course dies and you have the choice of sending his body off to his family or another ripperdoc, then Dex blames you for killing the main villain, and you have… no option to tell him you didn’t do anything but steal the chip. Not that it matters because Dex decides you’re too big a risk to keep around, so he kills you, but that activates the biochip. So after being dumped in the trash, some Asian dude kills Dex and takes you for a ride. Here’s your second car chase. My game was so fucked that every enemy I shot down was in a perpetual T pose, it was hilarious shooting literal rag dolls. Turns out, Asian dude saved your life because you have the biochip, and he wants revenge against the anti-hero because he is still loyal to the main villain. But as it turns out, the Biochip is basically a tumor. The consciousness of the biggest cunt in the whole game is overriding your character’s, so it’s basically the plot of Upgrade and Johnny Mnemonic rolled into one, which is funny because Keanu Reaves is the tumor.
Lets get this out of the way. Reaves is a crap actor. But he’s humble and not a colossal asshat like so many celebrities out there, so lets give him props for being a decent human being. That being said, because he’s a decent bloke, he simply is incapable of portraying an asshole. He’s tried that in Mnemonic, in Constantine, and so much so in this game. Sorry Reaves, you’re too much of a good person to play a dipshit, so you’ll have to forgive me if I find your attempt lacking. Though I will admit… you actually tried here. Johnny Silverhand (keanu Reaves minus the impressive good soul) hijacks the story, and is such an unbearable asshole that I almost considered giving Iron Man an apology. It’s weird because he sounds like Nicholas Cage after about 5 yacs. Reaves’s delivery is about as wooden and flat as most of his performances, but in a strange twist of fate, it actually suits this character! The lacking of empathy, the no fucks giving tone, lacking of enthusiasm… all fits in with this cynical dipshit who does nothing but make people miserable. How weird is that!?
Even weirder is that this character… is basically reliving all of Keanu’s past roles. Rockerboy = Bill and Ted. Terrorist who rages against the machine = Matrix. Piece of data overloading one’s mind = Johnny Mnemonic. Knows how to use his firearms = John Wick. Being a character named “John” = Keanu Reaves. This cannot be a coincidence! This would be pretty cool… if again, this character did not hijack the story. Originally, it was a heist gone wrong, a story about making it big, rags to riches… and it all turned into this race against time to find a means of saving your own life from a computer chip. It’s jarring, it feels sudden, and out of place… which shouldn’t be the case as it is more “Cyberpunk” than the premise of gangbangers trying to get rich. But hey, that’s just the first act of the game! Certainly the rest of the game will be more of what you already know where I’m going with this. Considering that you’ll likely be doing side quests along with story missions, you won’t notice how similarly everything starts to seem. You gotta do extra brain dances, you’re bugged to death with endless requests by fixers to fix their problems, you gotta pull heists and favors, sabotage other gangs, screw over corporate d-bags, a lot of it feels irrelevant to your main goal of trying to find a cure for the Silverhand tumor, honestly. Johnny constantly pops in to remind you that he exists and that you have a city to burn, and I get the feeling that perhaps Warner Bros. had a hand in concocting this out of nowhere narrative.
I mean the original trailer had an elite squad take out a renegade aug-nut who was too fine to be doing crime. Typical for most cyberpunk fare. I know a lot can change in 5 years, and the team was just throwing out ideas at the time, but it seemed like the story would actually revolve around you taking down cyberpsychos, have some discourse about the dangers of overdosing on augments, have an overarching theme about transhumanism while dealing with corporations who deal in augmentation. Fuck me, Claire later in a sidequest actually asks if it’s weird that she doesn’t have any cybernetics in her body, and that conversation doesn’t… go… anywhere else. It should be really disturbing that practically everyone in Night City is augged out the ass, and especially if you’re a Nomad who should be the least, if at all, augged out person in the entire game, should have reservations about how this city flows. Why people need slots in the back of their heads for SD cards, why people have wires in their bodies for connecting to machines, to hack into devices across the world. Why people THINK they need all that mess. Some of this is in the manual, I’m… shocked people still make manuals these days that aren’t 2 page pamphlets (FUCK I miss videogame manuals), but you kinda want the game itself to explore this further. You get mild tidbits of this stuff with a street prophet. Very few to NONE of the sidequests actually touch upon this. The concept of people so comfortable with mutilating their bodies just to perform everyday tasks better should be the most terrifying concept ever. Yet it’s so grotesqly normalized that no one thinks twice about it. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most deranged videogames I’ve ever played, what with sidequests like “Sinnerman” that wanted to have his execution be a televised crucifixion that can be bought and sold as a brain dance because he wants to show humanity how horrible a punishment it is to commit a crime in some effort to discourage people from making the same mistakes he’s made, all the while a corporation wants to make money off of the brain dances produced (Dude…. What the literal shit…). How interesting a concept if this was transhumanism taken to it’s most ludicrous extreme where the people of Night City work day in and day out just to augment their bodies if only to be seen as valuable employees.
But… nothing. Every sidequest is an interesting story in and of themselves even if they are inconclusive half the time, but none of them really question the insanity of going through multiple unnecessary surgeries just to become more machine than human. That’d be something, if Johnny Silverhand attacked Arasaka because they were some leading pioneer of body augmentations or something, but… no. There’s nothing. You get a plot that takes you through 3 different scenarios related to 2 romance options, and one “villainous” organization. I put that in quotes because Arasaka doesn’t… really… do anything to show that they’re evil, but more on them later. All 3 of these extended missions cover the most dull and uninteresting aspects of the 3 life paths. Street Kid Judy wants to take down whore houses while you deal with Haitians that can out hack the best hackers in the city, Nomad Panass-erm… Panam has daddy issues and doesn’t like the leader of the Aldecaldos while you deal with the guy who made the biochip that’s killing you, and Corpo Asian dude has you kidnapping the Main Villain’s daughter to help you take down the anti-hero in a good ol’ fashion sibling rivalry. Very little of what you do in all of these scenarios actually help you with your problem, and anytime you do, it’s always “that part comes later when you do me some more favors”. You have this premise where you’ll die in a couple of weeks, and everyone is telling you to wait a little longer when you don’t have the fucking time to wait for them to get their shit sorted out. Yeah I get it, no one owes him anything, but with all the ass busting he had been doing, someone should be throwing him a bone! But as with a LOT of games, a lot of the shit you do are just these time wasters to fill in a disc and make you think you’re getting a full-fledged experience, but what you have is a game that really doesn’t know what it wants to be in the end.
In the Judy scenario, there’s this really cringe conversation on the elevator where Judy, emotional wreck that she is, complains about whore houses being… what they are, and Johnny pops in talking about “Can’t say no to Tits, rest can go fuck itself”. And I’m like… “What, you don’t like tummies? You don’t like Ass? Faces even? Trust me, you can have big titties and a big ass all day long, but all that fine-ness comes crashing down if the face doesn’t match up!” But this presents a problem with Johnny Silverhand as a character trope. He’s the “charismatic asshole who’s merely misunderstood and is actually deep and reflective”. The problem is a lot of his comments are unwarranted and unhelpful. He barges his way into discussions that have nothing to do with him, and does everything he can to be a pain in the ass for absolutely no reason. Yet these asshats try to make him sympathetic later on in the story with his own personal side story and intermission sequences after each of the main 3 mission paths. I don’t care. You’ve been a dick all your life, you’re practically responsible for your girlfriend dying, you lay around too much, and you go out of your way to be a jerkass to everyone you meet, all the while practically demanding people help you be an even bigger pest to one of the most powerful corporations on the face of the planet. You deserve everything you get. And sometimes he just comes off as weird! There’s this one scene in the Panam scenario where he mentions that you are turning into him, minus the charisma… and impressive cock. It’s just random, contrived, and has nothing to do with anything that’s going on in the game. I know that’s what they were shooting for, but writers today are not… good at writing asshole characters. They overdo it and shoot themselves in the foot by making said character 100% unlikable with no chance of being redeemed in the end (IE Twokaiser). They really tried to sell you on his character, and it just.. doesn’t work. By the time you get access to Johnny’s crap, you’ve already been bogged down by other, BETTER side material that you can’t be arsed to deal with Johnny’s personal drama. All the while, your own character takes a backseat. The game is honestly convinced that Johnny is the most endearing character of the bunch, but in reality, he’s often intrusive and feels forced on the plot to make him more important than he should be. And is at the heart of what is wrong with the game’s story. People had every right to be furious with all the false advertising as the game no longer revolves around you. It revolves around Johnny. You’re doing things at the behest of Johnny’s Engram, indirectly and otherwise. Because the story here is that Johnny will unintentionally kill you, you feel this pressure to resolve the issue ASAP lest you risk a poor ending (which isn’t even a thing, ironically enough). You’ll likely ignore most sidequests because of this. If you don’t know none of this matters, you’ll likely rush through the story without a second thought.
Another thing I thought was interesting was how in Panam’s scenario, you have to blow up this flying convoy with some bombs, so we spend several hours going through some nonsense to get her car back, wait a while until she gets ready, sneak into some Militech/Arasaka base to plant some bombs, escape, detonate the bombs… and the convoy is unscathed! But then she pulls out a Rocket Launcher and blows the convoy out of the sky.
Lemme repeat that…
Panam… PULLS OUT A FUCKING ROCKET LAUNCHER, AND BLOWS THAT SHIT OUT OF THE SKY!!!
This game has loads of padding, but back in the day, developers were a little more subtle with it. This here wasn’t even trying! If Panam could just blow the damn Convoy out of the air mid transport, all that shit we were doing didn’t matter in the slightest as the game will take whatever course it wants to progress. That alone is a perfect metaphor for the game’s overall story.
There’s this feeling that there’s waaaay too many subplots going on, too much to think about, too many details to keep track of, and by the end of it, nothing matters. Because hey, once you fix the problem, you still have a problem. By the end of the game, you get Silverass out of your head, but the damage caused by the biochip has progressed too much, and now your own body thinks that your own consciousness is… the foreign body… in… your… body. Yeah sure, because the human body knows how to detect a personality. So you’ll be dead in six months anyway, but you have the choice to give Silverass your body so that you can live on in cyberspace. So… everyone you know is dead, you don’t take down the big corporation, and you’re still going to die. Each ending is just a variation of the same thing. The Nomad ending is probably the best one because the Aldecaldos actually try to help you find a solution to this problem while every other ending is just your guy doing whatever for the last 6 months he or she has left. Or committing suicide, or giving JOhnny your body so the body itself still lives on, but with that asshole in control. This is LOU2 all over again in this neverending spiel of pointlessness. I can’t tell yah how sick I am of the gaming industry’s obsession with Fatalism and Bittersweet endings, it’s like they think the only valid ending is one where your character inevitably dies or gets screwed in some way that makes it impossible for them to resolve or escape. It’s possible this is done for sequels or DLC, but those are terrible reasons that once again denies satisfaction to the player for the developer/publisher’s own selfish reasons.
All of this combined with all the crashes for every 1 or 2 hours, the corruption of save data, and the inability to even make a new character… how the hell is anyone not justified in getting a refund?
I think what’s really frustrating here is the fact… that this game has loads of potential as it is. The sidequests alone tells you that the team has some really fucking good ideas. The problem is that all of it is bogged down by a story that drags you by the balls because they wanted to promote their celebrities. WB is a movie studio, they only understand gimmicks of movies and fully embrace the appeal of star power above all else, and they cripple products for their own wanton greed. All this for a character that is thoroughly unlikable. One would hazard a question of why a story for a game like this would be necessary. Just have it be the player’s playground where they go around and do things for shits and giggles. Have progression be sim-like where you just build up your career/status and go from that rags to riches nonsense since all the promotional material surrounded that, instead of squeezing in a terrible narrative that urges you to complete it in a timely fashion in spite of how it doesn’t matter.
Funny enough, aside from the issues I’ve mentioned, the bugs that people constantly point out (exclusively graphical issues), I’ve only ever experienced buildings not loading properly to the point that the doors remained walled off until 2 mins, some Japanese looking houses having floors you can fall through which makes completing a certain mission impossible, and certain sidequests not registering because a character’s phonecall happening concurrently with another phonecall, lots of shit that literally gets in the way of doing anything, but most of them are rectified easily. I didn’t see potato models as often as everyone else, or the faces not appearing on misty where it looks like some horror show from hell. I did get stuck in a hacking minigame where you had to enter numbers in a certain sequence, so I had to restart the game. At least you have the option to pause anywhere, so there’s that. But no, none of this is justifiable since you have to do more work to get around bullshit. Publishers pushed for a $70 price tag, but shit like this is allowed on a regular basis. I’m damned proud that people demanded refunds. This needs to be set as precedent going forward, that developers cannot constantly release broken products at an outrageous price.
That’s what made that anime so damning, you see. Cause then you can use that as a means of hoodwinking people into buying said broken product without having to really fix said broken product. It really goes without saying that developers and publishers have no consideration for what the gamer has to do to fit that one game on their systems. Console side, you have the main game which is 50gigs, and then additional updates which are 80 to 100 gigs a pop, nevermind the fact that if you uninstall the game, the updates go with it, so you have to be tethered to the internet because for some absolutely insane reason, you can’t just put game updates on your USB device to store for later use because “convenience isn’t profitable”, so when the online service inevitably goes poof, all you have is the broken product, and all anyone can tell you is to buy an external HDD for that one fucking game, nevermind how expensive those are, or that gaming is a business and that publishers are focused on the “now” because they can’t make money on the past or some inane armchair pseudo intellectual business brown nosing logic people can shit out at a moments notice because Amma forbid you have a grievance against a videogame you spent money on.
I think what’s even sadder is that now, you see a lot of games coming out trying to do what Cyberpunk 2077 failed to do… and are still failing to do well. You’ve got “The Ascent” where save data corruption is frequent and discouraging, “They Always Run” has a bugged secondary mission where it’s impossible to progress, it’s like devs smelled opportunities and started rushing out games in some attempt to compete, but they didn’t bother play testing their shit to see if they work properly. Vigilancer 2099 looks good, but I’m not holding my breath for obvious reasons. The best Cyberpunk-esque games came before Cyberpunk’s release, those being Deus Ex, Nex Machina, and the like. And Nex Machina is an arcade twin stick shooter that’s a wee bit too expensive physically.
I think… for the most part… and I know they don’t work so I don’t know why I’m even mentioning it… but I think western games in particular need to be boycotted. Just buy Japanese games going forward. I rarely ever have problems with Japanese games, and if I do, it’s mostly going to be an issue with game design and narrative, not whether the game will be playable and functional. I know they will regardless. Westerners, ESPECIALLY Americans, are fucking terrible at making games. Yes, I know Cyberpunk 2077 is made by the Polish, but fuck it. CDPR never were perfect at making games either. Witcher 3 was a glitch addled fest that youtubers had to lie to your face about it’s quality. Here’s Angry Joe:
“It’s not! It’s not a perfect game”
Also Angry Joe
“10 out of 10, Legendary Status!”
Westerners care more about ugly de-saturated photo-realism and surprise mechanics rather than whether the actual game works. Japan is no better with microtransactions and skinning people toward DLC (Crapcom and Scamco, especially), but the games will actually work. You can enjoy them for a little while before you get bored, not fed up and frustrated with how fucked up the coding is. Unfortunately, gamers are literally too stupid to realize this and will find some way to defend this shit because they’re so addicted to buying videogames, not so much playing them and actually enjoying them, but they just want to mindlessly consume everything. People were genuinely upset that people were demanding refunds for Cyberpiss, can you believe that!? Of course you can, you know how terrible Gamers are! They have no standards, they can’t quit hype culture, and they fall on their swords for the sanctity of gaming. Seeing potential in a game is fine and all, but that is not enough to defend such horrid practices. I can only hope that going forward, the industry will get better about this, and that gamers continue demanding refunds, but I’m too damn pessimistic to know that is a fantasy.
Yeah, I think I’m gonna be one of those guys that swears off western games forever if only for the AAA piss that comes out. That ship is done.
Ok, see!? Now this is what I’m talking about! This is all you had to do!
This is a good ass show! Give me more negroes in space! None of this Black Lightning “cry about being a nigga” BS with all this godlike power to change them conditions, grab a space ship and whoop ass in the stars! The title could use some work, but a small price to pay, I suppose.
For years, I’ve held this belief that Fighting Games depend more on their gameplay rather than content. Took a while to deprogram from that mindset when titles like MVCI failed miserably despite having the backing of the increasingly (and thankfully) de-legitimized FGC. It was clear that Capcom used them as shills for their products because gamers, for the longest time, held this belief that the most skillful gamers have the most authority, ironically adhering to the pecking order that videogames should’ve offered a relief from. It’s one of the rare times that gamers got their acts together and ignored them for once.
I don’t honestly know why I held onto that belief for the longest time. I’ve often delved into fighting games because a particular character looked the most interesting, not because the gameplay looked fantastic. I and everyone’s mother got into Soul Calibur 2 because Link was a playable character. I wanted DOA5 because Momiji became a playable character (among other things). I bought a PS4 for Dragon Ball Fighterz. I’ve never been above the whole “playing fighters for story” notion either. I played (and absolutely LOVED) Bloody Roar because you could turn into a mutant bunny rabbit and kick the shit out of Lions. And yes.. I did buy Tekken Tag 2 because of a boxing raptor.
iirc, my very first post on this blog involved me talking about why I hated Mortal Kombat in the past. The weird commands for special moves, the overall stiff controls and amateurish fighting mechanics, etc. I was hocked up on that gameplay notion for a while. Even then, I was still marginally interested in the series having watched all those old movies, a smidgen of that one show which… looked nothing like the games, and more recently having watched that Defenders of the Realm cartoon (it’s hilarious, honestly). So when MK9 came out being, imho, the first good game in the series, I figured it could only get better from here on out.
Then MKX happened and ruined the franchise. Characters feel stiffer and heavier than in 9, they look rubbery, the color is practically nonexistent because morbid and depressing somehow fits a series with a farting fatality, commands for moves were changed for no reason taking after the illogical thought process behind Soul Calibur games, the characters all look hideous because NRS don’t know how to draw faces or costumes after 9, and frankly, the overbearingly forced focus on Special Forces and the Cage family drama. When you think Mortal Kombat, you don’t think GI Joe. You have all these mystical and magical elements of warriors from different dimensions who can teleport, throw fireballs, conjure spells, and perform necromancy, yet for some reason, WB wants to focus on “regular” ass humans because they’re too hollywood to understand that nobody cares about being able to relate to normal, human characters in a franchise that originally focused on Pyromancer Shaolin Monks fighting to protect their dimension from being conquered by a super powered Body Builder from hell.
In other words, I officially hate Johnny Cage.
MK12 has all but been confirmed with all the teases having come out in the last few months, and considering just how godawful MK11’s story was, I have no doubt it will be a massive clusterfuck. I get the distinct feeling that the creators did NOT like the direction they took with 9 and X and figured they should turn things around and start over once again, lest they have actual consequences that stick for all time. Or because they’ve pissed off every fan they could think of with their completely unnecessary story changes, and had no idea how to fix anything with WB’s demands of nostalgia pandering getting in the way. All of these problems started way back in 2011 when they decided to kill off everyone and turn them into glorified zombies in a manner that could only be described as an astonishingly foolish attempt at raising the stakes, meaning they’d have to jump through a thousand hoops of logic just to retain the same amount of fan favorites for the next entry. But funny enough, that wasn’t what bothered me the most.
Idk what happened between 9 and X, but the massive push for Johnny Cage to be the hero that defeats Shinnok, followed by his own daughter… is just Wrong. I can’t even imagine how anyone could think that Johnny fucking Cage could defeat an Elder God, nevermind how his cunt daughter can beat said Elder God in his “final” form. It really does cheapen the series when the joke characters get shilled this hard merely because their level of popularity becomes excessive. Above all else, it’s cheapens the character of Liu Kang, who was the main character of the series for well over 20 years up until now. MK11’s handling of Liu Kang was a massive overcorrection, certainly, but the damage was already done by that point, and it just felt like baseless and insincere pandering when in reality, they really loved the idea of the Cage family being the heroes. And lets not sugar coat it. This was done purely because Johnny Cage is so gosh darn hilarious and “not as serious” as the rest of the cast.
MK fans, as I’ve come to see them now, are extremely juvenile and immature in regards to their proclivities. They are only interested in the characters that are either funny, hyper violent, or hyper sexualized (IE Scorpion, Cage, Baraka, and Mileena), which of course begs the question of how anyone can find any character appealing outside of this extremely narrow spectrum. Scorpion is a rage fueled ninja with fire powers, Johnny Cage is a wise cracking douchebag, Mileena is sexy freak of nature, and Baraka is… something. I don’t know why people love Baraka so much. He’s just “monster with armblades”, and aside from Cage, he’s one of the few characters that’s done nothing of note for the majority of the series. Then again, he’s one of the few “monsters” you got to play in the series, so perhaps there’s that distinction. That being said, it says something when the team responsible for the reboot shows their contempt for the fans by having their own personal OC kill 3 out of 4 (or 5 barring that cunt Cassie) fan favorites with no repercussions. A fucking bug can kill an experienced soldier, a science project that can teleport, and a Ninja Spectre that can teleport and use pyromancy, a potent weakness of bugs. This alone tells you these guys do not care about the legacy of the series and it’s fans when they can just axe all of your favorite characters in the most unsatisfying of ways just to push for new characters. Something tells me that MK11 was something they were forced to make because MKX’s story infuriated everyone.
But even so, people kinda overlooked what I find to be the most glaring problem. Either NRS was too eager to “subvert expectations”, or WB’s tradition of turning the heroes into villains (IE superman) reared it’s ugly head, and thus Liu Kang became this abomination. Liu Kang was the main hero of the series. With the first game being based on Enter the Dragon, and him being based on Bruce Lee, it was only appropriate that he be the hero and champion of Mortal Kombat. I don’t know the general opinion of Liu Kang back in the day since internet wasn’t a thing, and I wasn’t allowed to play the games for obvious reasons. But somehow, I’m not surprised that no one has an issue with Liu Kang being sidelined in favor of the comic relief guy, nor does anyone seem to take issue with Liu Kang being beaten by Goro in Scorpion’s revenge, or the fact that Liu Kang was barely a character in that crappy live action film that came out 2 years back. No one cares about Liu Kang. Forum posts would indicate the obvious that the MK fandom finds him wholly boring because, again, he doesn’t fit in with that narrow spectrum of “acceptable characters”. He’s not hyper violent (or rather he’s not supposed to be), he’s not funny, he’s not fueled by rage, he doesn’t possess bad boy energy, etc. He’s just a stoic goody two shoes Shaolin Monk who just happens to be the most powerful MK fighter of all time. Even this fact seemed to have rubbed the fans wrong. “He’s too boring to be the hero!”
“IGN’s list of top worst fatalities! Aww man, Liu Kang doesn’t even kill his opponent in the first game, he sucks!”
No one seems to notice that Liu Kang was probably the only real change of pace in the series. In a series that promotes and in some tacit way encourages players to murder their opponents in violent and douchey ways, the fact that Liu Kang didn’t murder anyone viciously and instead knocks them out actually shows how human he was. Everyone else had all these violent kills, but with the Bruce Lee inspiration, he doesn’t do this. It humanized him. Made him something of an example to follow to not give in to those violent base instincts. Also, I don’t think Shaolin Monks are encouraged to kill people without remorse, but I could be wrong so don’t quote me on that. So in that sense, Liu Kang should’ve been the most important character in the series in that he didn’t have a dark side, or a soul that could be corrupted by the extremely violent world that is Mortal Kombat. A world dominated by blood thirsty warriors who know nothing but murderous intent.
But naw, fuck all that, Liu Kang is too boring to be the MC! But now Johnny Cage!? Yo dude, “DAT KHARISMA”! OH he’s so funny! Look at him bragging about his awesome skills! Yeah, nut punch! He gets more sex, he’s got his name tattooed to his chest! Aww man, he punched Goro in the nads!
It’s clear that American tastes are as infantile as they always have been. Anytime you have a hero character, people write them off as boring if they aren’t 3 things. Hardcore murderous scumbags, comedy relief douchebags, or blow up dolls with giant knockers. There aren’t a lot of Superman fans, but the whole world loves Batman. Cyclops is the most hated X-Men character (likely written that way by future writers) if only to make Wolverine look better. I don’t need to speak on the MCU’s (mis)handling of Captain America vs Iron Man, we already know the latter got shilled hard. Jason Lee Scott kept getting glossed over in favor of Tommy Oliver to the point that Tommy is the main fucking character of Power Rangers in general… even when he started off as evil! American tastes in characters are beyond shallow, and we’re instantly turned off by goody two shoe do-gooders because they don’t talk a whole lotta shit and instead try to find the righteous path to solving problems, all this because of cultural sensibilities. Americans value degenerate asshole behavior with power to back it up. I guess it’s not too different from Japan considering who their most popular characters tend to be as well. In America, it’s far more pronounced because we’re far too vocal in our distaste for stoic righteousness. Might also have something to do with people claiming Lebron was a better character than Michael Jordan in Space Jam (also hahahaha fucking morons). I suppose I shouldn’t expect more from a nation that practically found success from general douchebagness. It’s practically encouraged since we’re so hyper competitive. Our most popular movies from the 80s featured these killing machines with fitting one-liners to boot (quite literally with Terminator). Even more hilarious, we think the only way to make those goody two shoe characters interesting is to make them “evil”. Whether it be Regime Superman, Post-Schism/Phoenix Cyclops, Captain America being a Hydra agent, Dark Phoenix, and oh look, here’s Liu Kang as the king of the Netherrealm. Wtf, Sharon Carter is the Power Broker in the MCU? Fuck you Kevin! It’s even funnier when people or writers think they’re trying something new when this is a tale as old as time. But back then, it was done for story and drama purposes. These days, they seem to be retcons or some cheap effort to inject interest into the characters with the creators literally believing that this new approach will be a smash hit with people (see Sindel). Because hey, everyone already hates these characters for being goody goods, we can only go up from here!
Sadly for MK, that seems to be the case. No one cared that they turned half the cast into revenents with Liu Kang being the Revenent king, and having him sidelined in favor of Johnny Cage and special forces, merely because he is funny. I don’t know how often I’ve complained about this sick… sick obsession that Americans have for comic relief, but because of how MKX is handled, I believe whole heartedly that just because everyone wants to laugh all the time, we have to deal with clinically bad story telling that just feels out of place and completely inappropriate.
The Mortal Kombat tournament was designed as a sort of safe guard against the merging of realms because if all realms are merged together, the One Being could come back and take revenge on the Elder Gods… which… begs the question of why they’d even have this as an option for douchebags like Shao Khan to take advantage of. I mean… that’s counterintuitive as all hell, if you’re afraid of the One Being being reborn from the merging of realms, why even have this as an option when you can easily intervene and stop these jackoffs from merging realms!? Elder Gods confirmed to be the biggest idiots in media ever.
But in eithercase, Outworld had 9 wins, and just needed 1 more to merge Earthrealm into Outworld. Thus, the stakes are already high. So the characters for MK1 (There was only seven characters, wow) mostly had selfish reasons for entering. Sonya wanted to kill Kano, Kano wanted… money, I guess. Scorpion wanted revenge against Sub-Zero, Raiden (originally) wanted to prove his might as a God (which defeats the purpose of “MORTAL” Kombat), which just leaves us with Liu Kang and Johnny Cage (I don’t know what Subs wanted). Cage merely entered the tournament for his own publicity. People called his fighting skills fake, so he wanted to prove otherwise. Liu Kang, for all intents and purposes, wanted to stop Shang Tsung and defeat their champion in order to save Earthrealm from being destroyed. Or to free the Mortal Kombat Tournament and return power to the Monk Temple. Sometimes I feel like the story in this series changed for the worse.
Every character besides Liu Kang entered the tournament purely for their (selfish) reasons. Johnny Cage cared about his public image as he’s a big time movie star, and his vanity is beyond belief. On the other hand, you’ve got a monk who only cares about saving his home and putting a stop to the tournament. Their goals and intents are clear. Yes, both can fight and are pretty powerful, but their personalities and intents are polar opposites. One enters for the sake of the world, the other enters for his own sake. Completely different values. So why is the latter more popular than the former when the former’s values are more beneficial to the world at large than the latter who’s values only benefit himself? Because a character’s value system is inconsequential in entertainment. All you need is “Charisma”, a nice little buzzword for pseudo intellectual critics to use as a veil for saying “this character isn’t externally belligerent enough! I need more funny!”
So Johnny Cage gets this massively wretched push while Liu Kang gets buried, all because one was less boring than the other.
The problem with this approach to entertainment is that our very American proclivity towards douchey and juvenile humor and action cheapens story telling. We don’t care how our inclinations damage narratives and long established characters so long as we get our “fix”. In that lust, we’ve conflated “Charismatic” with “Compelling“, much like we’ve conflated arrogance with confidence, like comedy relief with good writing. We’ve lost the plot years ago in our mad dash for pure spectacle. This is how Rambo becomes a guest character in Mortal Kombat when the original First Blood was about a man with PTSD from Vietnam is mistreated by douchebag police officers and feels there’s no alternative than to fight for his life. Don’t know what the fuck Stallone was thinking with the last few movies.
Notice, if you will, that in every movie, the comic relief is everyone’s favorite character. Well… except in Star Wars with Jar Jar Binks. No matter what, that fandom has some goddamn standards, I’m impressed. Even so, Han Solo fills in for the “bad boy” trope, and no one hates him so there’s that. Leon is beloved for his appearance in 4 almost exclusively since he’s soooo quippy and meme friendly. People don’t even regard his fighting prowess (which I don’t approve of as it goes against the point of his conception). Kano for MK2021, Johnny for Scorpion’s Revenge, Joker for MKvsDC, Johnny for every NRS release (with people literally complaining that Kung Lao took Johnny’s job for the funny guy… which boggles my fucking mind with how hard his dick gets sucked when people say “DEY TUUK HIS JAWB!”). Yes I get it. Drollery is amusing. Expertly timed zingers or incidents that people wouldn’t expect to happen is often fun and entertaining. But it overlaps with toxic positivity as people assume that the “funny guy” is the only one willing to have a fun and brighter outlook than the other characters who may be “too serious” for other people, which might even expose one’s level of maturity if they simply ignore context in favor of pure self-gratification. A single character who is funny fulfills the role of “Comic Relief”. Relief from what? A relief from tension. That is their job. They’re supposed to make you laugh. They’re the release valve. The fact that everyone automatically latches onto the comic relief as their personal favorite characters, imho, is sort of missing the point of those characters. Yes I know that sentence makes no goddamn sense. Relief from tension should not be used as a template for a “good character” overall. There are reasons why characters would be “serious”. If a situation has characters dying left and right, then OF COURSE characters would be depressing or serious because the situation calls for a sense of urgency. Comic relief would have a light joke about this, but that would be it. That should NEVER mean “this character should have more importance because the audience likes being relieved from tension”. What you end up with is a narrative that goes out of it’s way to make the funny characters far more important than they should ever be. Just because Johnny Cage made you laugh doesn’t mean he should beat a fallen Elder God, s’all.
I’m not saying this out of bitterness. Liu Kang isn’t my favorite character (It’s Kung Lao, Jax, and Reptile, and they all get fucked harder than Liu Kang, trust me). It just feels inappropriate to sideline him in this manner. MKX and 11 to some extent feel LESS like Mortal Kombat with Liu Kang on the bench. It makes the games feel more generic, more by the numbers…. more “DC Injustice styled”. Liu Kang is the glue that holds this series together. Without him, the games are just a collection of violent dipshits who go around expressing their sadism all the while being bogged down with pointless and boring drama. Scorpion is angsty over his family and clan, Sub Zero is just there, Sonya whines about Kano, Johnny whines about his family life, Jax whines about keeping his daughter safe, Raiden is pretentious and keeps crying about the Elder Gods, Kotal Khan’s a genocidal dick, D’Vorah kills everyone’s favorite characters, Erron Black is pointless, the Sindel drama infuriates the fandom, etc. Liu Kang isn’t (or wasn’t) bogged down by any of this bullshit. He just went in and got shit down. Now that he isn’t around to be the hero, we have all this forced drama between characters and factions that reads like a Game of Thrones crossover. Maybe this is just personal preference, but I don’t give any fucks about Scorpion’s angst or Sonya’s revenge against Kano, and all of those plots existed in all 3 games in one form or another, and I just tune the fuck out. I miss the good ol’ days when Scorpion was just a villain who’s ass you kicked and moved on. 😛 It just feels like they’re scrambling for things to write about since they killed off half the cast after MK9, but realized they didn’t have shit to work with, and just made up a bunch of nothing. You’ve got these fanfiction OC’s that they practically force on everyone (Was Kung Jin not born yet to know Kung Lao or something? Just seems like a weird excuse to have JYB in MK). Half of them don’t even come back for 11 to make way for pointless characters like Kollector and Garrus, D’Vorah is allowed to live, and all of the new characters get sidelined for fanservice originals. It just feels like a really bad comic book story with no actual focus.
I know some people will pop in here and say “Well Chad JC was SUPPOSED to be the main character because he was supposed to be played by Jean Claud Van Damme, so he deserves to have MC status if nawt more significance than virgin Liu Krap“. They had every chance in the last 20 years before 2011 to make this change. Now it just feels jarring and cheap. The MCU fandom believes in their logical fallacy that because the first MCU film was Iron Man, he was always intended to be the main character. No such excuse exists for MK fans. They randomly decided to just push him to the side in order to have their power couple Cage and Blade, fanfiction in a stupid and obnoxious daughter that cringingly goes around taking selfies and spouting “Hastag: you’re dead!”, and the fans love this for some reason. This is what we’re willing to put up with because no one knew they wanted Johnny and Sonya as a couple after 20 years. It’s like Vegeta and Bulma all over again, fuck me. But I suppose for a series that’s all about being “darker and edgier”, having a primary hero that is too good to be a bad boy wouldn’t fit. We need someone rude, crude, and all around obnoxious that fits more along the lines of this reboot, and Liu Kang just wouldn’t fit. He’s too much of a polar opposite to our dark and grittier version of MK! Besides, that’s what Boon thought back when he made MKDA, or it’s our cheap excuse because there was technically no main hero for that particular game.
But at the end of the day, I guess it is merely preference. It just feels wrong to hand the MC title over to an obnoxious family drama of GI Joe wannabes rather than let it remain with a Shaolin Monk that fits the core essence of the series more than army brats.
For years, I’ve had often avoided most western games and cartoons for some of the most shallow of reasons. Mainly because for some reason, western entertainment embraces the ugliest of character designs forever. Yet, this wasn’t always the case. Back in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, cartoons and other media have had some of the coolest designs for their characters. Perhaps because before 9/11 (a day that people assume is the cause for this shift), the west still had a sense of childlike awe and/or an artistic soul. Comic Book Superheroes had some of their best character designs during the 90s and early 2000s, but rarely ever meet the same level of quality after the fact. Then there’s the case of videogames.
PS, these still suck.
No one needs to tell you just how ugly a lot of western videogames media are after the mid 2000s. Everything is desaturated to the point of absurdity, to the point that games often didn’t have any semblance of color, and characters themselves have had the least amount of effort ever put into them. This could be attributed to the increasingly industrialized nature of videogame entertainment which puts profit over substance, though I’d sooner attribute this to Hollywood. The Western Film industry was something that the western gaming industry desperately wanted to copy for some time. And as we all know, Hollywood doesn’t think anyone would take costumed superheroes seriously, or that most medieval fantasies had to remove any semblance of “fantasy” and be as colorless and as dull as possible. Hollywood has had this incredibly conceited idea of what would be acceptable to the general public for ages now, and it’s often based on their own disconnect from the regular joe schmuck, something that the MCU should’ve fixed, but has become apparent that this attitude is never going to change if the Power Rangers Film is anything to go by. Hollywood has forever been terrified of allowing their movies to embrace anything outside of what they deem as “childish” or “immature”… while endorsing people like Michael Bay. It is a wonder that Sam Raimi was even able to put Spiderman’s Iconic Costume onto the big screen, and manage it in a way that film goers could take it seriously (Hollywood’s likely thoughts). Yet for the longest time, DC would hold off on doing the same for their characters for years until Shazam. A glorified comedy. Yes it’s a glorified comedy that I liked, but it is a comedy nonetheless. That seems to be a huge problem. Any adaptations they have that have very cartoony designs for their characters, they won’t be allowed to embrace unless the entire production is a glorified comedy as comedy lowers the expectations of anything it has being of dramatic and substansive value. Otherwise, the characters will have more generic looking costumes with desaturated color schemes and boring designs to invoke a false sense of solemnity. If you don’t believe me, you can take a look at the evolution of the MCU’s costume design ethos over the course of a decade. The characters started off looking brighter and more colorful than the average superhero film only to devolve into blander, more colorless costumes for the Endgame that all for some reason have some “T/V-Shape” design on the Torso. It’s because they want the characters to be taken seriously, or because less accuracy to the source material is cost effective. Take your pick. To drive the point even further, the shows Wandavision and Loki both make a mockery of their classic costumes because why not? James Gunn didn’t have a problem doing the same thing for that overrated Suicide Squad sequel.
Imagination LEAPING off the screen here!
But I’m getting off course. What’s the most relevant fantasy film series you can think of that takes place in the middle ages and has orcs, wizards, elves, and demons?
For me, that would be Lord of the Rings, and just look at all the desaturation known to mankind. You’d be hard-pressed to think any of the designs in that movie were any good. But hey, it’s a movie about war and such. Merely having fantasy elements isn’t good enough to warrant a hint of vibrancy and life. War is hell, it’s not pretty at all, so fuck it. If the Lord of the Rings looks 2 steps away from 300, Mad Max, or The Underworld Series, so what? At the very least, the characters do have good costumes, and look distinctive enough that you can tell Aragon and Legolis apart aside from whether or not they were carrying a sword or a bow. The wardrobe still looks bland as shit, but I’ll take a victory where I can get it.
Still, I don’t think there is a more glaring example of terrible character designs than the Bayformers Film franchise. Apart from Bumblebee which only has those good character designs for a mere fraction of the entire goddamn movie, the Bayformers have the ugliest, busiest, and most indistinguishable character designs I have ever seen in any robot movie. I already had no knowledge of the franchise before watching the film back in 2007, and this was an absolutely terrible way of inducting people into it. The only thing I knew of Transformers was the old Beast Wars cartoon that I casually watched, and even then, outside of Optimus Primal, Waspinator, Cheetarah, and T-Rex Megatron (see, I can barely the names of any of these characters), I couldn’t begin to tell you shit about Transformers based on that series. Shit, wasn’t Cheetarah from the Thundercats!? But nevermind that. The design ethos behind Bayformers is an on the nose thought process behind most Hollywood execs, in that Bay didn’t want to make a movie based on a “silly kid’s franchise” as he put it. So to escape that notion, he jacks off to all things army, is so sexually absorbed that a robot humps Megan Fox’s leg, and gave Devastator robo nuts. How in the grandest of all hells has this film series gotten so much money when it pissed all over the legacy of the franchise is beyond me as there were no excuses about the source material not being popular or being too niche, but whatever excuses people had for the bastardization of popular 80s and 90s material should have been null and void with that string of circuses daring to call themselves movies.
But back to my point… what the hell are these robot designs!? Even by “realism” standards, these damn robots have way too many moving parts to even be considered as “functional”. They often looked like a bunch of loose wrenches that were glued together, and the more I think about it, the more these robot parts should’ve gotten jammed mid transformation. There are too many complex parts being used, and I can’t see them not running into any problems because of this. The only characters I could tell apart were Optimus and Bumblebee, and that was almost exclusively because of their distinctive color schemes. I couldn’t even tell Starscream and Megatron apart despite the fact that Starscream has a Red and Black motif in the cartoon whereas here, he and all the Decepticons are grayscale. You know, because “who cares about the Decepticons, they just exist to die in these films!” If they didn’t name drop any of the Decepticons, I wouldn’t even know they were in the movie. Hell, I didn’t even know Soundwave was the satellite in the second movie, and that panther robot was Frenzy. Or is that Rumble? Fuck, I can’t remember those little cassette tapes.
This is supposed to be MODOK. Stab me.
Why people attribute the more Solemn designs of movie adaptations of traditionally cartoon characters to the events of 9/11, I won’t know. Stuff like this was going on in the late 90s with movies such as Blade. Even he had a more colorful costume in the comics, and while I don’t have a problem at all with the costume choice they had in the movie, I get the distinct impression that Blade was used as the excuse. What excuse did they have with 98 TristarZilla?
When it comes to videogames, I can only assume the VG industry took on those bad traits in a desire to be taken seriously. That was something the gaming industry got hung up on for a while up until the 2010s when many of them had stopped giving a shit and moved on to unrestricted profiteering. The industry and gamers in general hinged on this idea of videogames as “art”, not because they actually cared about the passion that went into these games, but much like Anime and Sonic fans, wanted to approval and validation of their peer for their time and investment into these activities when nothing warrants it. The overwhelming acceptance of games like Shadow of the Colossus, flow (or whatever that game was where you controlled the wind to pick up flower petals), and most Final Fantasy games had very little to do with people’s enjoyment of those titles, and more so the desire to be appreciated by the general. Using certain games as proxies for themselves as a means to get over their own insecurities. For the developers, it likely meant that they had to put away all the cool and interesting stuff they had in the 90s in the toy box and move on to making some of the blandest, most uninspired, dull and lifeless videogames to walk the face of the earth. So much so that the only way to make most designs work is to put a hoodie on them.
Because Halo was the only decent launch game on Xbox, and everyone loved commiting crimes in GTA, the western gaming industry was perpetually polluted with a lack of imagination, and any game with a hint of color and cartoony aesthetic was met with pure flattery. God of War, Gears of War, Halo, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause, World of warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Diablo, Skyrim, Witcher, Fable, Fallout, Borderlands, Reboot Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, Uncharted, Last of Us, Cyberpunk, Dying Light, The Playstation trinity of platformers for the 2000s (Ratchet, Jak, and Sly. Yes, I fucking went there), Infamous, Prototype, KillZone, you name it. The last time a western game had a real good design portfolio was… NOT Overwatch, but rather Mortal Kombat 9. That game had some really cool designs for their fighters… even if all the women had the same fashion sense. Then came Mortal Kombat X and 11 to ruin any semblance of good faith I had in the series ever having good designs again as it drifted into right back into generic limbo for Amma knows what reason. Even the first Injustice game had good characters, and they ruined that for the sequel as well.
Most of these games I’ve listed are just a tiny fraction of how boring, by the numbers, and how unimaginative western games are when it comes to designing their characters. Creative Bankruptcy doesn’t even begin to describe it. Aside from wanting to cop Hollywood’s obsession with Solemnity, I think that because the hardware has become so photorealistic, there’s been this massive push to make games look and feel as realistic as possible. Except the west’s idea of realistic is an absence of beauty. The artistic and aesthetic design of most western games are just dull and lifeless, and the west has this sick… sick obsession with having the character’s designs and fashion senses match with their personalities which is both stereotypical and short sighted. “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” should be the argument you guys would use against me for writing off most western games based on a shallow perception of value and beauty, not a concept the gaming industry actively fights against. Hearing that the Bay turtles have a bunch of cluttered designs as a result of this is both disgusting and illogical. How the fuck is Donatello supposed to fight crime with the art of Bojitsu and Ninjitsu when he’s got a goddamn Super Nintendo controller dangling from his forearm?! That’s another problem with western designs. It’s not enough that they’re ugly and boring, they’re overdesigned for no good reason! I’m not going to go into the “SJW” ruination of female character designs as that is a can of worms I’m sick of hearing about, but deserves a passing mention as the justification for it is that real women are commonly ugly. Ironically, I see it as the natural progression of the west’s completely fucked design ethos. Real is ugly, and that’s the way the cookie crumbles.
I often complained about God Eater’s character designs not making sense for being in a post apocalypse series, but nowadays, I can’t help but wonder if that’s just based on common sense, or I had the same problem of thinking logically about character design. Afterall, most of these characters are infused with Aragami cells that put them on super human levels, so their bodies should probably look as good as they do as a result. Afterall, since Vampires are superhuman/demonic entities, it only makes sense that other entities look the way they do as a result of the lore. Plus it’s a Namco game, and Namco puts Tecmo to shame with how overbearingly shallow they are with the concept of beauty (with that 40 limit age cap on women). Even so, one can’t help but admire their adherence to the concept of appealing character designs. They don’t inform you of their own personalities, and they don’t need to. The most beautiful and sexy of all female characters can be the biggest cunt you will ever know (which is honestly truth in television most of the time), and the most hideous beast can be the kindest person you’ll ever know. That’s neither here or there, but the idea is that Asia doesn’t consider how realistic anything is. They go for optics first and foremost because they understand more than anyone in the world that people are drawn to beauty. Not strictly in regards to females, but in regards to the world at large. Even with their super hero costumes, they at least try to emmphasize their cooler aspects even with cheaper production costs. Hell, Super Sentai and Kamen Rider kick the shit out of most Western Superheros in terms of coolness. The west focuses so much on looking physically opposing when all it does is make their characters look like steroid freaks of nature. The average Klonoa is always going to look better than the average Ratchet. The average Chris Redfield is always going to look better than the Average Marcus Phoenix. The Average Jizo Musashi is going to look better than the Average Ezio Auditore. The average Jin Kazama is going to look better than the average Liu Kang… though that gap was thinned down a little in MK9. The reason being is that Asia puts a lot of stock in having good character design, logic and personality be damned. You honestly believe someone as reserved as Sophitia would go out in combat wearing nothing but a see through napkin that leaves nothing to the imagination? Or a noble woman like Ivy to go out in combat wearing nothing at all? Hell no. But very few people care for obvious reasons.
Asia does have their own decay of good design ethos as increasingly bad anime comes out with more exaggerative and busy looking character designs become more commonplace, but even so, most Japanese productions are just going to have better characters than the average Cartoon Network venture. The west honestly believes that the technology will do all the work for them, and that they don’t have to come up with more interesting designs for their characters and worlds. We will continue to get the same bland and colorless worlds, the same bland and overly emphasized character designs and fashion sense, and even the same bland and uninteresting plots, and unfortunately, most of this will be laid at the feat of the money men rather than the people with the job of design. There’s enough guilt to go around and split hairs, don’t get me wrong, but even those with the creative freedom still somehow lack the creative knack. Check out the vast majority of indie games there for a crash course.
Welcome to another edition of 30 something gets mad at video game. 😛
Last year, I came across a little retro collection known as “Klonoa Phantasy Reverie”. I’m pretty sure it comes as a shock that I would pay this any mind, but I actually LOVE Klonoa!
Probably, if only, because of that ending.
Every… goddamn… time… I watch this ending, I get fucked up. No matter if it’s the PSX version, the Wii version, or even this collection version which is just a reskinned Wii version without english voices (or extra costumes because DLC has to be a thing. Would’ve KILLED for the Wiimake design), I can’t keep myself from starting the water works. I try to play this game in private because I desire not to show emotion if only to prove how manly I am, but this game destroys those illusions so easily. I don’t even know why. I should be furious with Huewpow’s deceit. To mindrape a helpless rabbit into believing nothing but blatant lies, living a life that was never his, and then having him whisked out of the world he believed in.. all before those crocodile tears weave up and he basically goes “dear god! What have I done!?”
…Dammit, it’s getting me again.
All this after his grand daddy gets murdered, this game fucks you up. It lures you in with family friendly characters before going Oldschool Disney and destroying them left and right. It’s so sadistic in it’s subtlely woven narrative whiplash. Motivating you to kill that bastard Joka without remorse!
It’s also a halfway decent game. Not the most impressive, but 2D sprites against 3D environments was a niche hotness for a while. It’s an alright game. I don’t know where people got the impression that the series started off as a puzzle platformer. It’s more of a Kirby game in terms of level progression and finding secrets. It’s incredibly basic. 1 or 2 puzzles present doesn’t necessarily = Puzzle game. Unfortunately, the rest of the series fell into that nonsense, making for games that are more boring to play than not. Still for what it’s worth, Empire of Dreams on the GBA was an ok title, if only because I have too much bias for the original to not slight this one. Dream Champ Tournament, though…. I try not to speak of that one.
I only picked up this collection of 2 games because… well ok, not having to plug up the ol’ Wii or go back to PSX emulation just to play the first one again, and because I’ve never played Klonoa 2, owing yet again to the fact that I never owned a PS2. Namco was Playstation’s bitch for all intents and purposes, so being able to play K2 was a huge incentive. Maybe there would be some actual closure to Klonoa 1’s ending! Maybe there’d be some revelations about who and what Klonoa is! Maybe we could come to find his origins!
…You can probably see where I’m going with this.
Yeah… Klonoa 2 is, in my honest opinion, a goddamn travesty of a sequel. A game whom’s vision (pun not intended) is in direct contrast to the first, instead opting for a more pretentious take on the titular Dream Traveler that puts him in the same category as Spyro 2 and 3, turning him into a passive character that does all the work and gets nothing in return.
Klonoa 2… is a glorified anime, and I say this not to be funny. If you zero in on how the dialog is written, you too would come to the same conclusion. The tired cliches, the pretentious symbolism, the lecturing from a villain who’s too stupid to realize her own hypocracy… I’m trying to keep from using the most vulgar of language now, but…. fuck this game. I hate it, I wish I never played it, it damn near ruined Klonoa for me. I wish it was never made, and I hate that I bought this collection just to play it.
Let me try to explain. Before I get to why, I’ll get the gameplay out of the way. The gameplay, at least in the Reverie version, is worse all across the board. I’ve read that this version of the game changes some of the core physics in order to make the game harder than it’s original PS2 release, much like the N*Sane Trilogy doing so by rounding off Crash’s hitbox. I’m not sure of the deets, but as I can tell, Klonoa is stiff and clunky. He’s slower than in K1, and has a lower jump height, making him feel stiff and heavy. Furthermore, using his wind bullet is much… much harder than it should be as the bullet has a much smaller hitbox than in the first. This means that if you shoot a wind bullet before you are aligned with your target, you will MISS your target all the time. You cannot fire a wind bullet mere seconds before hitting your targets anymore, meaning you have to be very precise when it comes to these platforming sections and puzzles. This alone makes the experience MUCH worse than it should be, but because the puzzles and platforming segments demand a significant level of precision, it makes for an often tedious and frustrating experience when it really shouldn’t be.
Furthermore, most have incorrectly hinged on the idea that Klonoa was always a puzzle series. I assume this is because many have played K2 first before K1. K1 is less of a puzzle platformer and more of a straight up obstacle course with some gimmicks here and there, but you don’t really get “puzzles” until the Moon Kingdom, the final world of the game. Not so here. K2 is puzzles, puzzles, and more puzzles. I feel like this is because in K1, since 3D was still relatively new, the mixing of 2D sprites and gameplay with 3D Background and Foreground interaction was the game’s core gimmick. It made the game look surreal and cool in it’s own way, and felt like the developers had some since of dare I say… “creativity” when designing the levels. Well, on the PS2, 3D is normalized, so the gimmick loses steam when most people are expecting all around 3D game. So the developers likely figured they couldn’t just have that gimmick since everyone’s rocking 3D models, meaning they’d have to step up their game and make a better experience. Unfortunately, they went with “puzzles”, and that’s how we get this game. As a result of their puzzles, the levels feel MUCH longer than they actually should be, devolving the game into Aonuma Zelda styled rooms where you have to figure out the best way to get over these obstacles. The absolute WORST thing they came up with are the Likuni Chameleons where you have to use these bastards to absorb enemies to change their color, matching up with the geodes so that they can open the path. The manner in which you do this can be some obnoxious at times that they often border on trial and error gameplay whereby you have to find the correct order of absorbing enemies. The second to last level in the game (which is SUPER LONG) has 3 of these Likuni puzzles in a row, one of which requires you to absorb an enemy, then quickly jump to a high platform to absorb another enemy before dropping down to absorb the last enemy, all of which requires more precision than usual as a result of the game’s altered physics and Wind Bullet mechanics.
Even worse is that the game has some really shabby padding whereby you have to replay certain versions of the levels that have new gimmicks rather than be presented with new levels, making the game feel redundant when it didn’t need to, and brings up some bad memories of DMC4.
On the other hand, you have some snowboarding levels. These are fine, I don’t have an issue with them, they can just be better.
I do like those electric enemies that allow you to double jump higher than before, and even the wall gimmicks where these giant monsters come out to eat you if you just pass by without a care in the world. That’s about it, though. Everything about the game can be boiled down to “the first game did it better”.
So to the reason I despise this game. It’s story.
I absolutely HATE this story. The story, animu as it is, centers on Klonoa being whisked into the world of Lunatea, a world of kingdoms that are… essentially controlled by bells, and are all based on emotions. Tranquility (La-Lakoosha), Joy (Joyliant), Indecision (Mira-Mira, or Mirror Mirror for the non-pretentious), and Discord (Volk). Apparently, there was some sort of war in the past that involved all 4 kingdoms destroying a 5th. The Kingdom of Sorrow, Hyuponia (Notice it sounds like that asshole Huepow). Exactly why they did so isn’t truly elaborated on, and the only real info we get on the matter is that the world of Lunatea wanted to forget Sorrow ever exists or something. The reason for the lack of elaboration is because of a key issue that no other fan of the games will ever seize upon because they’re too thirsty for a 3rd installment to bother criticizing what already doesn’t work. Klonoa 2 lacks interactions with the denizens of Lunatea. With the exception of Momett, some mirror maze… person, and an old beat up tree that only exists to teach pretentious lessons about having sincere reasons to save the friggin world (because preventing them from doing so anyway if they prove insincere would somehow ensure your survival, you FUCKING idiot!), the only people whom Klonoa interacts with are those closely tied to the story, and they’re goddamned clueless on the history of their own world! This is in stark contrast to the first game where you meet denizens of each and every Kingdom, and they know practically every detail of what’s going on in the world. Breezegale had Balue and Grandpa, Jugpot had the little soldier, Karal, Pamela, and the King, Forlock had the tribal people and “Granny”, the Temple of the Sun had Sorere and Soliel, and the leader of the Temple, the Moon Kingdom had that treacherous son of a bitch Huepow, his personal guard, and his mother, AND THEY ALL JOINED IN THE FINAL BATTLE AGAINST NAHATOMB!
Instead of that, you get Lolo who is nothing more than a whiny little waifu that exists for furries to ship with Klonoa who somehow also possesses the same ability as Huepow in becoming a Ring Spirit (this is never explained to my memory), Popka who is the most irritating Sonic OC I’ve ever had the pleasure of hating more than Heuwpow, and the Sky Pirates Leorina and Tat, a magical cat being that can split into 2 people who is ALSO just as irritating as Popka. And oh nice of you guys to use lower tier villains as the main antagonists of the game! Seems like every action platformer from the 90s defaults to using stupid pirates eventually, whether it be Donkey Kong Country, Rayman, Sonic Rush, Ratchet and Clank, and this farce of a game. Lets go from nightmarish baddies like Joka, Ghadius and Nahatomb… to goddamn pirates! BRILLIANT! But back to my main point, none of these characters are knowledgeable of the world and it’s history outside of what they can already gather from the surface.
I suppose this isn’t too much of an issue as this is intentional. The main plot point is the fact that the world “wanted to forget” about Hyuponia because Sorrow is too uncomfortable or something. The problem, however, is that we don’t get any input from the Kingdom’s citizens, so it’s basically an assumed state by the characters we’re allowed to interact with. Normally, I wouldn’t mind this. Having less characters to keep track of would make for better writing and development (just not here), but in order for this story to work properly, you need more context than what the game gives you. That context could be given by characters outside of the core group. K1 had many characters, but they didn’t bog the plot down with their own personal stories or whatever, they existed purely for exposition, giving context to the overall narrative, and it worked just fine. This game intentionally excludes denizens of the world aside from 3, and makes it impossible to gain anymore context outside of mindless theories spouted from the character’s mouths all in an attempt to keep up with a theme. However in doing so, K2 actually destroys any chance of sensible lore that we could get.
The game implies that some sort of war broke out between the 4 kingdoms, but the only kingdom that displays any sort of warlike attributes is Volk. Joyliant is a Kingdom comprised of nothing more than an amusement park. Lalakoosha is just some old ruins and houses, but implies it’s a kingdom of pacifism. Mira-Mira, as we gather from one individual, is a Kingdom of Mirrors in which the people are too caught up in the past to care about the present or future (which brings up a notable plothole of how anyone could forget about Hyuponia when you’ve got a goddamn history museum for a Kingdom, but aside the point). Joyliant is too concerned with having fun, Volk is too concerned with destroying itself, etc. And because we don’t get to see any of the game’s denizens, we have no estimation on their military capabilities. UNLIKE K1 where we actually meet soldiers of other kingdoms, all of which were based on the 4 Elements (Breezegale = Air, Jugpot = Water, Forlock = Earth, Coronia = Fire(?), etc.). If you told me there was a war in Phantomile, I’d believe it! The problem with K2, however, is an issue of story = gameplay segregation. The developers apparently cared more about level themes rather than lore on the same scale that Nintendo would, and designed the kingdoms around specific themes that come into conflict with the game’s narrative. If the 4 kingdoms are so caught up in themselves and their own ideas of happiness, why would they care about going to war with Hyuponia? Sorrow can be too caught up in it’s own depression to care about the other kingdoms. The same exact game talks about how each kingdom cares too much about themselves to bother caring about the state of their own kingdoms. kingdoms. So why would there be any sort of war!?
That’s the problem. There WOULDN’T be one! The overarching metaphors and theme comes into conflict with the narrative. The kingdoms don’t care about anyone else, and there is no sense of governance amongst the kingdoms for any of it to matter. The only “King” is the King of Sorrow himself, so if any kingdom would be in a position or desire to wage a war, it would be him. But again, the problem goes back to the “why”. I don’t believe any of this was important for the development team. The plot is purely an excuse to create a passable motive. It didn’t have to make sense. To most fans and zoomers, this would be a no brainer. Afterall, “the gameplay is most important”. But in that sense, this mindset cheapens the story of the first. I can bet yah that everyone loved the first game more so because of it’s narrative whiplash into crippling depression rather than just “hey, it’s a platformer, therefore it gets love by default”, because being a platformer excludes the importance of all other details besides gameplay, and that’s why Blinx the Cat has a cult following along with Croc, Bubsy, and countless other platformers of the 90s. Piss off with that noise! You’d basically be saying that the death of Klonoa’s Grandfather, and being forced out of Phantomile by way of deception and restoration were just cheap emotional effects done so to motivate you to play through the game, and was not at all important to the game itself, because that justifies spending money on beautifully rendered FMVs that put both the Wiimake and Reverie versions to shame. I suppose the gameplay was the only reason people clamored for a sequel to 2013’s most overrated videogame of all time, only for said sequel to cause massive outrage because of the death of it’s main protagonist in just the first hour of the game.
But back to the point, because of this lack of care, you yourself won’t care about what’s going on in the game. You won’t care that Mira-Mira has no actual kingdom and is literally just a house of mirrors that would fit right in with Joyliant, or how an amusement park constitutes as a kingdom at all, or how Mira-Mira could even fight a war when it has nothing to fight with. These are just backdrops for the levels, and nothing more. It’d be one thing if the level themes actually factored into the gameplay, but you see the same gimmicks over and over, repeated ad nauseum. So even the level themes don’t matter. It’s all rather pointless. They just slapped all this shit together and called it “Klonoa” because of a half-hearted effort to continue the series. Empire of Dreams had more respect for the series than K2!
Anywho, I’ve drifted far off from the plot. Klonoa gets dropped off into the water, the stupid sky pirate finds her and apparently already knows who and what he is, but then runs away when Lolo and Popka appear. Uh… why? Lolo and Popka have no combat abilities that would put them on par with or even make them a threat to Leorina or Tat. They’re both not intelligent enough to match her either, so having her run away from these 2 implies things that are simply not true. But whatever, cliches are gonna cliche. So Klonoa gets thrust onto dry land, somehow wearing an entirely different and inferior set of clothes, and being introduced to Lolo and Popka. Some shit starts happening (nothing really happens, it’s just a bad storm), Lolo shows off the same powers as Huepow and becomes Klonoa’s new ring spirit (wtf?!), Popka is annoying and bossy, and the first level happens. You get to the first bell, Klonoa shoots it with a wind bullet, and Lolo claims credit for it. Apparently ringing a bell proves Lolo is capable of becoming a priestess, and I keep having to go back and try to figure out how Lolo can just become a ring spirit at will, or why this is even necessary. Later on, we find Leorina creating a fake ring that doesn’t require a ring spirit at all, and allows her to fire wind bullets and ring bells or… whatever, so something tells me the developers didn’t pay enough attention to details like this, actually cared about the lore and wanted to find a cheap excuse for why Klonoa could fire Wind Bullets in this game when Huepow isn’t around, or just didn’t care enough to have such nuance be present. Lolo’s powers aren’t elaborated upon, so we never get anything concrete on why she can just do this.
Anywho, they travel to an island to meet Baguji, some wise sage who is actuality the main villain of the game, the King of Sorrow. For some reason, King Sorrow doesn’t tell them that there was a fifth kingdom was destroyed ages ago, and just goes on telling them that they need to ring the 4 bells of the 4 kingdoms to get the 4 elements in order to “save the world” from the 5th bell.
I guess this part of the plot is ok. King Sorrow is playing 2 different people here, Klonoa’s crew and Leorina at the same time. Hedging his bets is actually pretty smart for a villain. Yeah, apparently, he was manipulating Leorina to get the 4 elements as well. The only issue is we don’t actually get any clarity on how she became influenced by KS in specific. It just serves as an explanation on how and why she knows anything about Klonoa. Since KS was the reason Klonoa got whisked into Lunatea in the first place.
There’s another issue that, unsurprisingly, also doesn’t get solved in the game’s plot. Why the bells require powers that aren’t readily available in Lunatea. Yeah, betcha didn’t think about that one. Yeah, for some reason, Lunatea needs Klonoa’s specific ring in order to activate the bells and retreive the elements, but they don’t have rings like his in their world. There’s some implication at the end of the game that tries to handwave this by comparing Klonoa to Lunatea’s own goddess, but that doesn’t even come close to resolving the hole in the plot. Just keep that in mind for how moronic the game’s story is.
Anywho, they go to La-Lakoosha for a bit, have a meet and greet with the villains, fight a boss, pray to a statue, and meet the Priestess of… whatever. She basically talks about the same thing, how the heroes need to ring the bells, like one oldschool song would suggest, and then makes Lolo a Priestess. And this is designated by a leaf on her hat. This is… horribly horribly irresponsible for a number of reasons, but later on, you find out just how vile and idiotic they really. We’ll come back to that later.
For now, they go find a bell, ring it, and get a green element. They go back to Baguji, and he tells them to go to Joyliant (honestly, it just sounds a few syllables close to “toilet”). Well, there’s people there. Is the gang gonna talk to em? Nope? Ok! That’s ok because we’ve got pussy to find! Because the writers didn’t know what kind of scenario to have for Joyliant, we have this random filler nonsense where Tat swipes the Lakoosha element from Lolo, and splits into 2 different forms where she plays a game of “Hide and Seek” where you have to chase her 2 forms in 2 different stages. All the while flirting with Klonoa. If I could gouge the fingers of the geniuses who wrote this BS, I could die happy. This was apparently done so that Leorina could get combat test data from Klonoa’s ring.
Nevermind how out of place this feels in the world of Klonoa, wouldn’t it have been simpler if you had Tat steal Klonoa’s ring instead? I mean I get it. The ring is Klonoa’s main form of attack and interaction with the core gameplay, removing it would be tantamount to spaying the poor little thing, but hell, we’ve already established that Lolo can become a ring spirit out of thin air, I don’t think it would’ve been a stretch to have Klonoa naturally use Wind Bullets. I mean… he came from a land called “Breezegale”, I would’ve assumed the Wind Bullets were some sort of techniques or natural powers indicative of those who reside in the region. Klonoa having to use the rings in the first place is a weird and impractical handicap, but then I’m just criticizing the first game for poor logic.
In either case, they find the next bell and ring it for the Joy Element. Going BACK to Baguji, he tells them to go to Volk for the next element. There’s some discussion of how to get in considering Volk is in a perpetual state of civil war, but this is resolved rather easily, thus the dialog was wasted on it. Volk is, likely unsurprisingly, my favorite of the 4 kingdoms as it feels like there’s some actual detail on the culture of it. Plus the areas look the best out of all the levels. Even so, the only real interaction you get is with the pirate bitch. As soon as the gang arrives, they find Leorina trying to create a copy of Klonoa’s Wind Ring. Again, this just feels out of place using technology and science to create a duplicate “magical” device instead of using some form of spell or sorcery to achieve the same purpose.
“You mean like the magical cannons during the final boss of K1!?”
Quiet you.
Anywho, Leo claims that using all this power to create this ring will take so much power that she’s willing to risk overloading Volk’s reactors to do so, which would destroy the whole kingdom. So Klonoa and crew decide to shut down the reactors to keep her from achieving this.
Yet, after 2 stages of shutting down reactors (one of which only takes a single train ride to get to, which is preposterous, dangerous, irresponsible, and completely moronic), and a decent boss fight, Klonoa somehow gave the bitch exactly what she needed to complete her ring copy despite the shut down of the reactors. What… the absolute… fuck!? Creating a copy of the ring was so taxing on Volk’s power supply… that shutting down the reactors should have prevented her from completing the ring at all! Yet one boss fight later (which could’ve been a couple of minutes, give or take), and during the fight, she already has a completed copy!?
Back when I reviewed FF7R, I noted how irritating the game was that most of what you do in the game did not contribute significantly to the narrative of the game, making you feel as though everything you were doing was a complete waste of time. This is yet another one of those moments. What was the point of doing all of this crap if Leo was going to get her way regardless? There are SEVERAL good excuses for this, however, but the main one is that with Tat’s ability to split into 2 people, she could’ve easily reactivated the reactors after Klonoa and gang left them to pursue Leo (and the pirates are just too smart for our heroes, afterall). The game doesn’t outright state how Leo completed her ring, however, so all we can do is make guesses. Whatever the reason, Leo has her copy ring regardless of Klonoa’s efforts.
This is a problem with how Leo is handled overall in that every encounter she has with Klonoa is often one-sided, going her way on each and every occasion. Klonoa, Lolo, and what not, are not given any tangible means to fight her and beat her at her own game. This is irritating because there shouldn’t be any excuse for this. Klonoa for some reason doesn’t bother to try and take her down or at least knock her out. Contrast with Joka where he was whippin his ass all over the place. I mean the scene where Joka was ranting about King Seadoph not being able to beat Klonoa, he just walks over and smacks him into the water with no fucks given! Why is he just standing there allowing Leorina to brag about being awesome, and using her cloned ring to get herself the third element!? Amma, this is so frustrating! Klonoa would jump into action and try to fight villains in the previous game, but here, he just lets this bitch walk all over him for no reason other than Namco’s inability to make pseudo-mary sues. You’d have to watch the whole scene, these guys literally refuse to lift a finger when they find that Leo has a copy ring! Popka, this mouthy bitch who, throughout the entire game, was all about taking action, also refuses to lift a claw to this whore. She’s the Zhuge Liang of Klonoa!
Anywho, she uses her copy ring… without any Ring Spirits, mind you, rings the bell, gets the third element, and the reactors are going haywire. As a result, the city will have a massive meltdown, destroying the whole kingdom. Leo figures “meh, Volk was destroying itself anyway” so she doesn’t care. She also talks to Lolo saying that “She will be the one to save the world”. This is throwaway dialog meant to foreshadow Leo’s past, but it makes her a complete liar as well. Or she being ironic considering her past.
So Leo escapes, Popka suggests getting out of the city as fast as possible, to which Klonoa agrees. But then Lolo thinks about the good people of Volk and decides its better to shut down the reactors and save the kingdom… to which Klonoa also agrees. As you can already guess, there’s 3 problems here, the most glaring being that Klonoa literally has no agency as a character, and is super passive, bending to whatever direction the other characters deem necessary. The other is that it makes Popka look like a goddamn hypocrite when they get to the next Kingdom. But even less conspicuous is Lolo. I’ll get to that in Mira-Mira.
Anywho, this is the first of many retread levels, this being a harder version of the city block stage that is covered in fire. I also like how they only needed to shut down 1 reactor rather than both of them this time, and somehow that prevents an entire kingdom wide meltdown, but whatever. Back to Baguji’s punk ass. Oh wait a minute…
Uh… no, this isn’t true at all. The ring that Klonoa has came from Cress, the Moon Kingdom of Phantomile, by way of Huepow. K1 didn’t exactly give an explanation for the ring’s origins or functions, so all we can infer is that Huepow’s power alone was necessary for the ring to function. He’s not a priest or priestess, he’s a deceptive little dinkwad that can morph to and from his humanoid and ball forms at will. You can’t just travel to a completely different dimension and have people there know exactly what it is when the origins of the ring have nothing to do with it’s world! If these rings were necessary for Priestesses to ring bells, Lunatea should’ve had their own versions of the rings for those same priestesses. Leo wouldn’t be going out of her way to clone the damn ring if that was the case. See, if the dev team actually cared about lore, they would probably try to establish something about the rings and where they came from in order to give some context for why Lolo and Leo can use them or power them up. Instead, they just made up their own rules for the rings without taking the prior game into account. If K2 was intended to be it’s own alternate universe of Klonoa, then there’d be no problem, but apparently there’s a timeline that establishes that both K1 and K2 are connected, so we just have devs that simply did not care about consistency.
So now we get to Mira-Mira’s portion, which I consider to be the second worse part of the game. And it all starts with one of the longest goddamn levels. Ishra’s Ark! Apparently, getting to Mira-Mira is just too hard for our heroes because of some notion that Mira-Mira is too isolationist or something. Something something excuse for why Leo won’t bother trying to go there, so we at least get a break from her sue-isms. So instead, they have to repair Ishra’s Ark, a mystical flying boat that used to fly around the world eons ago. Why? We don’t know, we don’t care, it’s just more throwaway lore that means nothing!
After what feels like an eternity of tedium, we get to the second of several snowboarding levels… and these geniuses thought it would be a fine opportunity to put in some goddamn J-Pop nonsense!
Ohhhh dear lord, my ears were bleeding through this whole level, and any indication that this game wasn’t a glorified anime went out of the window! Btw, K1’s music was better in every way, that isn’t even a contest.
Anywho, after the ear bleeding marathon, the gang finds a house of mirrors, and goes inside to find the only citizen there who couldn’t give 2 damns about the world and just wants to live in the past. Oh and btw, this is the kingdom of indecision. How exactly does the desire to live in the past relate to indecision? Wouldn’t “Nostalgia” be more appropiate? How do you focus so much on symbolism when the symbols don’t mix?
Anywho, after yet another tedious and lengthy level, the crew stops upon a single mirror that, for absolutely no reason, decides to invade Lolo’s privacy and show the gang memories of her life as a buttmonkey. Priestesses have, for years, bagged on her for being useless and incapable of anything more than failure. Thus, the only reason she desires saving the world is to prove to everyone that she isn’t worthless.
Needless to say, Lolo has an emotional break down over this as it’s embarrassing to have your quote “darkest secrets” come up out of nowhere. To be perfectly honest, I don’t have an issue with this scene. It just contradicts the scenes prior. Not as much as the horseshit coming up next, but if Lolo is only trying to save the world in order to gain everyone’s approval, where the hell did she get the motivation to save Volk from being blown up!? That seemed waaaay too genuine to be her way of just trying to gain validation considering that both Popka and Klonoa were literally on board with just letting the kingdom get wasted. It’s as though different parts of the game were written by different people, and no one bothered to pass each other some notes on consistent characterization.
The gang ignores Lolo’s whining and just move on to find an old beat up tree that is somehow even dumber than the main cast. They ask to ring the 4th bell on top of it in order to save the world, but this imbecilic tree questions them on their sincerity. Popka rightfully questions why they need a good reason to save the world, and the tree cites Lolo being the insincere one because.. I guess this tree can see the memories of the Mirror house remotely?
Pardon me while I comment on just how stupid this is. You have the 4th and final bell being a tree that talks, these idiot heroes basically asking the tree for permission to save the world, likely giving Aonuma bad ideas for Skyward Sword, and the tree… where the hell did this tree come from!? Why is there suddenly a trial to retrieve the 4th elements?! They’ve barged their way into the other 3 kingdoms to take elements with no care in the world WITHOUT the need for a trial, but this contrived shitbag figures it’s best for these guys to entertain it, so it throws out a random boss battle because… well, they have to keep up the pattern of “everytime you get to a bell, there is boss battle”. They’re not even giving you a good reason for why you have to fight a boss. This random, faceless tree is just sitting around bored out of it’s mind, finds some people coming toward it, and decides to throw a boss battle at them. Why the hell do I all of a sudden have to do a trial by combat!? What the hell does any of this have to do with saving the world!? What the hell does any of this have to do with the concept of indecision!? Or sincerity!?
The point… was to put in the absolute worst scene in the entire game.
This is literally Tales of Arise all over again. The main character (lets stop beating around the bush, Lolo is the MC in all but titular name) has to get over herself in order to help save the world. In this case, Lolo has to get over herself in order to help Klonoa in a fight that… never… needed… to happen. Because despite the fact that Leo’s ring doesn’t require a Ring Spirit to work (unless we assume that Tat is her Ring Spirit which… still wouldn’t make anymore sense than Lolo herself, but eh), Klonoa himself is unable to fight the snow chicken… boss thing because Lolo didn’t arm herself in the Ring. No wonder Leo decided to make a copy, the REAL ring is useless without a host Ring Spirit! Goddamn this game is infuriating! So this animu cliche plays about as cring as you can see. Lolo sees Klonoa getting his ass kicked (allegedly since I cleared the first part without a scratch), but doesn’t move an inch because she doesn’t feel as though she’s qualified to save the world. Popka then has to be the voice of reason (Fuck this game for pulling THAT one!) and use Klonoa as an example of someone who chooses to save the world. But the writing is so mind boggling terrible because of how Popka puts it. Look at the word salad he uses and tell me if any of it makes any goddamn sense! “Klonoa isn’t saving the world because he wants to, he’s doing so because he’s a fool that keeps trying! You’re a fool too, so keep trying!” What the fuck does any of that mean!? Popka chastises Lolo for just standing around despite the fact that he himself could help out with the boss fight, and prove that he’s actually a useful character instead of some dickhead who constantly talks trash and criticizes everyone else for the most basic of reasons. He literally chastises Lolo for wanting to save Volk! “Fine time to grow a conscience!” What the fuck kind of perspective is that!? It might just be Japan’s incredibly bad habit of forcing characterization purely through dialog (or poor localization), and in this case, they want to convey that Popka is the comic relief smart ass, but this paints the picture that he has no problem letting the people of Volk die if it means getting the 3rd Element from Leo’s hands. It makes him seem selfish, inconsiderate, and unnecessarily cruel to other people. He says “DAMN the people of Volk, Leo has the Element, we gotta get it back at all costs!” And for the record, no, there was no reason to rush out and find the element. For the time being, Leo can’t do anything with it. You need 4 elements to do something with. Klonoa has 2, Leo only has 1, and she didn’t bother to take the other 2 from them! They HAVE all the time in the world to save Volk. Popka doesn’t care, we need to get that Emerald back!
This is NOT helped by Popka’s misguided pep talk to Lolo by labeling her and Klonoa as fools for trying to save the world. What a horribly warped sense of morality. What an unlikable dickhead!
Even worse is the fact that he clearly misinterprets the situation! Again, he laments that Klonoa isn’t saving the world because he wants to, but because he is a fool… but that simply isn’t the case! Klonoa is helping to save the world out of obligation to the girl that saved his life! When Baguji asks him to help Lolo, he goes “Well sure… I guess” like some uncaring asshole, but mentions “I mean, she saved me afterall!” Klonoa is doing all of this for her sake, and that’s probably the only consistency he has with his K1 counterpart in that he does things for the sake of other people close to him. In other words, yes, he “WANTS” to save the world! Not for his own personal sake, but because of his friends! This just shows you that Popka is a terrible friend to have. He doesn’t understand other people and just makes up his own mind about them based on the smallest of details. That’s why his pep talk doesn’t work! Lolo’s funk is over the idea that she doesn’t deserve to save the world due to her own personal reasons. She’s conveying that perhaps she really doesn’t care about the world at all, and was only trying to save it for her own personal gain. She was incredibly selfish in undertaking this journey only for the sake of validation, to prove that she isn’t a failure. This by itself is a can of worms that I’ll get to in a minute, but the thing is Popka completely failed to read ANY of this! Klonoa WANTS to save the world out of obligation to his friends. Lolo wanted to save the world to prove her critics wrong. She was exposed for this in the last level as being a fraud! If Popka actually understood Lolo’s dilemma, and if the writers actually cared to pay attention to details, then Popka trying to use Klonoa as an example to follow would actually make her feel WORSE! Because Klonoa’s desire to save the world is honest and genuine, whereas hers are insincere and selfish. That’s why she refuses to fight. She’s embarrassed and feels guilty over her reasons for trying to save the world. The dumb tree basically called her out on this! This creates an overwhelming sense of insecurity in her that cripples her into inaction. This stupid dog looks at her and goes “who cares what your reasons are!?” Her REASONS are the main reason the Tree decided NOT to give you guys the element! The TREE called attention to her reasoning! The tree is a bell of harmony relating to her quest to save the world. If the trial was more than some stupid boss fight and actually involved her sincerity, she would likely fail because of this.
I think the truth is that there is no way around the actual problem here. It was wrong of Lolo to pursue this objective because she was completely selfish in the end. Her reasons are completely indefensible outside of the fact that it really shouldn’t matter why she wants to save the world. She faced nothing but gaslighting by other Priestess based on her strength and usefulness, and because of that, she embarked on a quest purely for validation. This honestly makes for a complex dilemma and is probably the only reason Lolo is the only decent character in the game, but is completely screwed up due to a prior scene, and Popka’s nonsense. “You’re a fool like Klonoa, so just jump in there and fight with him!” That is NOT how you resolve this problem at all! You’d likely have to go back to the cause of her motives, them being th asshole Priestesses who mocked her for wanting to be one. Then maybe compare them to Klonoa. Suggest that “hey, Klonoa doesn’t think this way about you! Look at him fighting on your behalf! Coming to your defense when the dickbag tree try to dump on yah for your reasons of saving the world! He thinks you are of value, so why not do him a solid and help him in this fight!? You might not fight for the world, but at the very least, you can fight for him”. Or SOMETHING, goddammit! Not this nonsense of “Well you’re both fools, so just keep trying like the fool you are!”. I can’t imagine why Lolo is friends with Popka. He’s just as judgemental as those Priestesses and would likely be too annoyed with Lolo to want to be around her at all.
I can’t convey how much this scene infuriates me. It has all the makings of an overused trope that I despise in Japanese entertainment because all it does is give characters a reason to lecture the audience. But it’s even worse when it feels contrived and inconsistent with prior characterization in order to meet this quota. This idea that Popka is actually a good friend with good advice despite being an asshole throughout the entire game is frustrating to deal with, but even worse when his words ring hollow. He doesn’t understand other people, mainly his own friend that he’s been with for a long time, and is always eager to bag on other people for the tiniest of mistakes. He’s an arrogant and self-centered know-it-all who literally does nothing that contributes to the plot in any meaningful way. Oh I’m sorry, he steals a snowboard for Klonoa to use in certain levels. Fuck Popka and the people who wrote him. I like how in the same scene, Lolo basically zeroes in on the fact that Popka called her a fool and thought it was a silly way to try and cheer her up, like she knows just how stupid he is for thinking that insults would be the best way to get her out of a funk. It honestly makes her more relatable as a character because even she knows how terrible the writing is.
I mean goddammit. Klonoa chooses to save people because he’s a fool, but he was all but willing to leave Volk to it’s fate at the behest of Popka without a second thought. Popka talks about having to help people, but literally criticized Lolo for growing a conscience in wanting to save Volk. And Lolo herself just looks worse because in Volk, she had a very genuine desire to save the kingdom regardless of this one key detail. Lolo became a priestess and desired to save the world because she wanted to prove to a bunch of assholes that she was worth a damn. And throughout the intermission to Ishra’s Ark, Lolo’s going on and on about needing to rush and beat Leo to the punch of saving the world first… but back in Volk, she LITERALLY did not give a damn about that!? She looked back, saw a Kingdom’s people about to be wiped out, and told her 2 friends “No! We are not leaving these people to die! We HAVE to help them!”. This extremely genuine moment of concern and desire to save lives took priority over any desire she had to gain the approval and validation of others. The writers are simply going to sit here and then tell me that this entire scene that they spent time and money writing and animating… was all just some contrived outlier to move the plot forward and introduce the concept of repeat levels!? Where Popka is a massive hypocrite? Where Klonoa is now the example when he himself had to be convinced to save the Kingdom of Volk!? The Mira-Mira scene would’ve worked a lot better if it was Klonoa who wanted to save Volk and had to convince Lolo and Popka to join HIM in doing so. That way, Popka’s words would have some weight to them instead of empty and misguided platitudes that are ultimately meaningless, and do nothing more than make him look worse as a character. The Volk scene just makes this scene terrible all around.
This scene just blows my mind with how terrible it is. It took NOTHING into account from the events of Volk, makes up it’s own headcanon regarding characterization, and makes all three of these characters woefully inconsistent with themselves, and for some strange reason, all the people dry humping the Reverie collection did not catch this!?
But whatever, Lolo gets back in the ring and makes the boss fight winnable.
Oh Amma, Shut The Fuck Up! Where did THIS come from all of a sudden!? What makes you, a goddamn tree, so indecisive!? You didn’t have any trouble deciding NOT to give the guys the 4th element! You had no trouble deciding to throw a trial in their faces, but now you want to fart out some empty platitudes about their determination!? What the fuck!? People had to come to terms with their doubt!? The writers were just spouting nonsense! They clearly knew that this entire segment had NOTHING to do with the overall theme of Mira-Mira, or the actual problems befalling Lolo, so they’re trying to salvage the poor logic and irrelevance by having the tree claim that the trial he put forth had something to do with overcoming doubt! Trying to save what little face the tree has! The level of confidence these hackjobs had in putting this random saving face dialog is overwhelming, all the while being pretentious with no good cause! Goddammit, this whole segment just destroys the game for me! It is absolutely terrible and nonsensical, the characterization nosedives into oblivion, and the writers were treating the whole thing like some groundbreaking moral to live by! It’s so goddamn stupid, I can’t believe they thought this was good writing! I’m trying to keep my composure, but this segment is so frustrating to deal with. The level of unwarranted ostentation and pretention is so overwhelming and overpowering that I can’t help but to rail against it. But whatever, right? It’s for kids, no one’s gonna care about details like this because the intricate puzzle platforming allows internet people to feel unique about their choices in gaming.
So they get the 4th element, go back to Baguji, and hands them all over. But wait! Baguji wasn’t actually there! Instead, Leorina disguised herself as Baguji this entire time, and deceived Klonoa into giving her all 4 elements! So… instead of Klonoa using a wind bullet to knock her out like he did to Joka when he was ranting and monologging after the Seadoph boss fight, he just stands there, 3 centimeters from her personal space, and lets her talk and use the 4 elements to warp the land and space around them. Again, why are Klonoa and friends so passive!? Why aren’t they allowed to fight this!? Leo’s level of success is at the mercy of the writers and nothing else!
Leo also mentions that she will use the elements to take revenge on all those that abandoned her, which was not her original stated goal from Volk, but we can already gather that she’s being mindfucked right now. Primarily because of the next scene. After another retread level, we go back to the mother priestess who explains that Leo used to be of their priestly order, with their flashback showing that Leo was just too impatient when it came to gaining power. So the bitch leaves the priestly order to gain power for herself.
It’s at this point that you really start to question the overall vetting process of this priestess. Too many examples show that the priestesses they have onboard are solely there for personal gain, or are so vindictive and spiteful as to discourage and gaslight certain people as being too weak to be one of their member. Clearly, she is a TERRIBLE judge of character, and should be removed from her position as soon as possible. But because these kingdoms have consistently been characterized as cultures of inaction and lacking of empathy, she’s allowed to keep her post. Unlike Phantomile, I would be down with destroying Lunatea if that is the case.
While they reminesce, Leo awakens the 5th bell with the 4 elements by…. breaking down a statue that had hidden the 5th bell (couldn’t you just use a cannon ball? You ARE a pirate, don’t you have some weapons that could tear it down?). So you do another retread level of the demo stage. Klonoa finds Leo at the bell (Don’t know why I thought “Taco Bell” for a moment. Maybe I’m just hungry), but yet again, BECAUSE Klonoa is an idiot and Leo is a Mary-Sue, Klonoa AGAIN DOESN’T DO ANYTHING TO STOP HER FROM RINGING THE DAMN BELL! Everytime Klonoa gets near this bitch, he gets cold feet and refuses to take action! Leo is going to destroy the world, and you’re sitting on your goddamn hands! I don’t understand this! Amma, it’s so frustrating!
But whatever, we need some artificial means of raising the stakes so Leo rings the bell, and recreates Ishra’s Ark. There’s… 2 Arks. You have the one that is stuck in the water, and one that came out of thin air with a bird motif. I… I don’t care anymore, you just have a cloned Ark to have yet another Retread level later on. At this point, the plot moves a little too fast, but apparently the Ark has to be… “connected to the world” in order to raise Hyuponia or… something. They’re just making up shit at this point, they don’t even care how long winded this plan is, or how any of this makes sense. It’s like they wanted to cram more levels into the game to make it seem longer than it actually is, so they’re just making up all these new rules in place as excuse plots to pad the game out.
You go through another snowboarding level (or sand boarding), and you get to the top of Ishra’s new Ark to confront Leo… again. Leo again talks about a plan that isn’t her own, her desire to create a land of Sorrow. That’s 4 separate (though not mutually exclusive) goals, jeez. You want to save the world (or was she just mocking Lolo and the Priests?), you want revenge on those that abandoned you, you wanted power so you abandoned your priestly order, and you want to create a world of Sorrow! I’d sooner call this absolutely terrible writing, but it’s… actually sort of clever. It’s clear her mind is so fucked by King Sorrow that she’s spouting random nonsense as though she’s not in control of her body and speech. So nothing she says is actually supposed to make sense. Meaning that her primary goal must’ve been nothing more than some power hungry cunt that was too impatient to get that power, thus she sought out the power of Sorrow as a shortcut. In doing so, she’s likely been possessed.
That’s purely my own interpretation of what’s going on here because it’s not directly stated, implied, or even foreshadowed by the game. That’s kind of the problem with K2. The writing is so terrible that you’d literally have to make up your own mind about it, which would be fine if the story was actually open-ended. This game possesses so much contradictory lore and logic that you can’t help but feel that the team responsible for making it simply did not care at all for the implications of the game, but proceeded to make it because they really wanted to make another Klonoa game. That’s all well and good, but the end result needed to be better! Empire of Dreams was a more appropriate sequel with inferior gameplay, that is not a good sign when a portable spinoff does a better job with it’s story than the console release.
Leo tries to attack Klonoa with her powers, and this cowardly fool stands there covering his face in fear of Leo’s unrevealed level of power. Fuck this game. But luckily, because tropes are Japan’s specialty, Leo cannot handle the power of sorrow and morphs into a boss. While it’s as easy as the other ones, I actually really did like this fight with it’s usage of those electric enemies to attack Digivolved Leomon in middair. That’s one point I’ll give it. The boss fights are actually an improvement. They’re not long winded or prone to multitasking nonsense like in the first game. That said, they still have worse music. But credit where it’s due, I guess.
Leo is fixed, and she starts crying about how she’s a fraud and is unable to control Sorrow Power. Kick rocks, bitch! Then she proclaims that Klonoa has to stop the Ark from connecting the world. Now I gotta clean up your mess!? Ugh, whatever. Padding.
So we play the second worse level in the game again, Ishra’s Ark. It’s actually much faster than last time, but it’s still a pain in the ass to play. Leo and Tat at least help out here by transporting Klonoa to each and every engine, but the dialog that goes on between Tat and Popka is maximum cringe. The game honestly thinks these 2 cocksuckers are so endearing that we have to listen to their annoying banter after each engine is destroyed.
After that noise, we go underground to find the lost kingdom of Hyrule. No, wait, wrong cel-shaded game. Hyuponia, damn they both start off with H and Y! Leo still tries to act cool even though the bitch is out of breath, but talks about not being underestimated. Hard to believe it, the game didn’t exactly give us a boss fight with you not having lost your mind so I wouldn’t know. Anywho, we get the absolute worst level in the whole game, this long… long climb to the top of a tower that is crammed to the brim with platforming puzzles that are so much worse with these crummy physics. It is the most tedious in the entire game, and it’s not even the last one!
After that, we get the last snowboarding level, and then… we come… to probably the most interesting character in the entire game!
The Cousin of Dark Force Bomber!
No? I thought it was funny.
But in all seriousness, he’s the most interesting because there are several possibilities to who he actually is. Judging from his design, there’s heavy implication that he might in fact be the Klonoa from the first game who gave into his own despair after the events of K1, and the kingdom’s name might imply a heavy and unhealthy attachment to the bastard that brainwashed him. Given that the most tedious second to last level had a few jingles of Phantomillian music, this might infact be the case. Other fans go on the idea that he’s merely the dark reflection of the Klonoa from K2, or the sorrow he felt from K1 manifesting into it’s own form, but pardon me if I consider those possibilities a little more pretentious. Why? Well, it’s about how people interpret the Klonoa from this game as being more “grown up”, which I 100% disagree with considering how he lacks agency and independence, being easily swayed by others, and smiles like an idiot when Tat gives him compliments. But what people consider grown up about him is the idea that “he’s gotten over his sorrow from K1, and learned to accept… something”. Thus, the game appeals to artsy dipshit fans who are easily pleased by symbolic metaphors than anything else. Also because this supposed “development” takes place off screen or in some supplemental comics that no one knows about. People have fully embraced this ideal of Klonoa growing up when there is zero indication of such taking place, and when this growing up is 100% unwarranted. Guys, Klonoa was BRAINWASHED into believing this lie about his life, being with his grandfather, and all. He was traumatized by the death of his grandfather, and was told that his BFF actually lied to him, told him his entire life is a complete lie, and that he doesn’t actually belong in the world that he believed he lived in all his life. And as soon as he learns all of this, he is forcibly removed as he “doesn’t belong in this world”, with zero time to reflect upon or even get over this. This is NOT something you “grow out of”, at least not so easily. This is TRAUMATIZING! This is Devastating! To imply that this was something he had to get over shows a fundimental lack of understanding people, and lacking of empathy. Klonoa “growing up”and “getting over his trauma” is terrible writing on all fronts because we would be suggesting that Klonoa as a character doesn’t have or deserve to have a soul. To have feelings, to have emotions, to be a living, breathing entity. Huepow toyed with his emotions in the hopes that he could be used as a TOOL to save his world, and when it’s all over, he’s basically told to gtfo.
I personally believe my version of this, that K1 Klonoa morphed into this entity of Sorrow after the events of the 1st game, fit much better as it would be a more natural, if not completely depressing, development of his character, and even open up more possibilities within the series lore. That perhaps Klonoa is one of many different Dream Travelers. It would even explain why K2 Klonoa doesn’t recall any events from the previous game outside of the more common yet less interesting theory of “amnesia”, that tired fucking animu cliche which is a cheap plot device for when you lack any sort of imagination to tell your story, and when you want to create a blank slate character where you don’t have to put in any work to characterize anyone, you can make him do anything and wouldn’t conflict with anything because what are you gonna do? He or she’s got amnesia, so there’s nothing wrong! K2 Klonoa’s has nothing to say about his previous experiences that you could make up your mind about who and what he is since the writers didn’t think giving Klonoa a tangible and consistent personality was actually important.
Which the intro already implied. Ugh…
Anywho, King Sorrow bitches about how the world went to war with his kingdom, and figures he could sacrifice Klonoa to spread sorrow throughout the world or… something, idk. He did talk about forcing Klonoa to atone for Lunatea’s sins, so that’s awesome. Then he morphs into a boss fight that… closely resembles the final boss from Starfox Assault?
Huh… and Namco made Assault. That can’t be coincidence.
After getting his ass kicked, Sorrow whines about the world not wanting Sorrow to be a part of it. And then that red headed cunt Leo comes down to lecture Sorrow about himself.
Thanks alot, Leorina, you’ve completely RUINED what could’ve been one of the better parts of this game by being a pretentious and self-centered jack-off! Again, it’s an old and tired animu trope of the heroes basically “zeroing in” on the villains flaws and telling them why they suck… except here, like with Popka, Leo simply wasn’t paying attention and decided to make up her own mind about Sorrow. Hyuponia was struck down by the other 4 kingdoms in some war that took place in the past, sinking it to the bottom of the ocean. Where did she get “isolationism” from!? Unless.. we go back to my own theory about Sorrow being K1 Klonoa, and perhaps he isolated himself in Lunatea. Oh shit… what if this “war” came about because K1onoa was the “strange dream” in Lunatea, and the other kingdoms snuffed his crib off the map… nah, too good of a plot for Namco.
And bitch? “Show him what the real world is about!?” Leo just says whatever sounds pretentious enough for the situation. Nothing she says has anything to do with reality itself. I think Leo’s just pissy because Sorrow got one over her, and her pride is too fragile to let that slight go, so she’s spouting off anything she can to make him look mentally and emotionally weaker than her. “Don’t flatter yourself” is a notion that makes no sense. Sorrow is wallowing in self-pity, praise requires him to think highly of himself. That’s a no brainer, but the writing… oh Amma, that writing. I’m willing to accept poor localization and translation as the reason for why the writing is shit, but the end product shows they still didn’t care after 2 decades.
After the “final” final boss, Sorrow still cries out for help, and Klonoa… essentially puts him out of his misery. Yikes. If this were the K1onoa, this would be a rather tragic and dark ending for the guy who didn’t deserve any of this crap, but would also fit with how the first game worked in being depressing as all hell. On the other hand, since I know they didn’t care all that much, ding dong the villain is dead. Popka makes some half-baked comparison between Klonoa and the Goddess Claire (empty calories), and then it’s back to the surface. Leorina is now flying to Hyuponia to rebuild it…
I’m sorry, what!? Leorina is helping to rebuild… Oh my ra… guys. Help me out here. I know… people are probably gonna use the excuse of “well it’s a kid’s game! There can’t be any major consequences” uh.. no. Fuck that noise. The last game had Klonoa’s Grandfather MURDERED BY A CLOWN! Klonoa finds out that he was brainwashed, Professor X style, into being Huepow’s friend AND to save Phantomile from Ghadius, all the while being forcefully removed from the only home he’s ever known as the result of the mind rape, giving way to, imo, the single depressing videogame ending in the history of gaming ever, fuck LOU2 and MGS4… and you guys don’t have the balls to adequately punish the harbinger of all the woes of Lunatea!? Leorina, this diabolical bitch, left her priestly order for the sake of getting power! She was willing to comment LITERAL GENOCIDE of Volk in order to copy a ring! She was willing to destroy the whole world for the sake of satiating her thirst for power! Leorina was nothing more than a selfish and irredeemable creature of self-interest who did absolutely nothing but cause strife for everyone who got in her way, but the bitch is allowed to walk freely despite being solely responsible for trying to bring about the apocalypse?! What is this, Wandavision!? She should be in purgatory for everything she’s done! Leo deserves no reward for her part in the game’s plot!
Lolo and Klonoa have more shipping where Lolo reveals that she gave up being a priestess and decided to… become one on her own without anyone else’s help… meaning she learned nothing, really. Lolo only wanted to be a priestess just to prove she was useful to people. Being a Priestess was not the end goal for her. She’s still hung on the people who gaslit her. She has her pride and ego to contend with. Wanting to become a priestess on her own merits is fine by itself, but it still seems to be motivated by the assholes who bitched her out for being so useless in the first place. What is so special about being a Priestess in Lunatea? What kind of special privileges do they get that makes it so desirable? For Leo, she joined for power, and left because she was impatient with them. All Lolo wants is validation. Because being a Priestess means you can ring some bells? That is not a worth while goal. And again, for some reason, you need a ring that is exclusive to Dream Travelers. They don’t exist in Lunatea, Leo had to make a copy just to use it’s power. Goddamn, this lore is a big mess!
Anywho, she ascertains that Klonoa can’t stay in this world because it’s not his home. But… I’d like to know why not. In K1, AGAIN, this made sense because Huepow pulled K1onoa into Phantomile, thus he was branded a strange dream, a foreign entity in that world. So when Lephise sang her song of rebirth, he was forcibly removed. No such rules apply to Lunatea, and the inhabitants seem just fine with strange monsters prowling the lands, so there is zero reason for why Klonoa has to leave. He just does to keep pace with how the first game’s ending went, minus the emotional avalanche because these writers are hacks.
But whatever, Lolo has an emotional breakdown over this despite the fact that Klonoa really doesn’t have to leave, Klonoa says his goodbyes, and that’s the game… oh wait a minute, post credits screenies!
We see some denizens of Lunatea going about their lives, we see King Sorrow being reincarnated (Yay, K1onoa might have a happy ending afterall!)
TLDR, this is Plot Contrivance: The Video Game. The End!
*sighs*.
I’m not trying to say that the first game was perfect. Hell, there’s plenty of cases that could be made to suggest that the second game improved on. Having memorable characters is one of them. Outside of the main characters, Klonoa and Huepow, K1 doesn’t have memorable characters. They are all mostly throw aways that exist for no other reason than to advance the plot. Hell, I’ve played this game on 3 separate systems in 3 separate forms, and I STILL have trouble remembering Ghadius’s name, probably because he only shows up for 3 out of 12 levels, so he doesn’t have much of a presence. But hell, King Sorrow only appears at the end of the game, and for some reason, he leaves more of an impression than Ghadius. Probably because of those creepy ass eyes of his. So if anything, K2 trimmed the fat and focused on characters they knew were actually going to have some screen time instead of wasting time and money drawing, animating, writing, and voicing a bunch of one offs that people likely wouldn’t remember at all. The problem is that the characters they DID bother with are poorly written and obnoxious. Leo’s motivations and overall character do not lean into having any sort of genuine redemption arc, Lolo’s character is boring, Popka is just there to be a dick, Tat is annoying and ONLY ever annoying, and King Sorrow is completely wasted potential. If all they were going to do with these characters was make a mess of them all, then they should’ve stuck with the one offs. At least the one offs of the last game were useful for something and didn’t give me a headache. Ghadius’s motivations for being a villain are completely one dimensional, but at least they make tangible sense. Leorina is so poorly written that you don’t know whether or not she wants to destroy the world, gain power, or is 100% being mind controlled by Sorrow to do the horrible things she’s done. Where context should be given, you only get contrivance, and as a result, you have a story so cheaply and thinly woven together that all you can do is wonder how anyone can claim K2 is the superior game. Not just because of it’s plot. It’s gameplay is worse than K1, I will argue that till the cows come home. It’s boring and tedious for the vast majority of it, the levels are TOO goddamn long, and it’s emphasis on puzzles with poor physics and Wind Bullet Mechanics destroys any semblence of replayability it might’ve had. It’s simply not a fun game to play. The few improvements it has are outweighed by all the negatives.
I played Klonoa 1 on a PSX emulator back in high school. At first, I didn’t think much of it given that it was just another platformer. It wasn’t until Klonoa’s Grandfather was murdered in cold blood that I started to pay attention. All for it come crashing down on my emotional fortitude when that ending hit. I was so desperate for a happy ending that I went through all the trouble of finding those stupid Phantomillians in order to get the secret level… which was some random filler content of climbing Balue’s Tower, with the reward being a soundtest. I was honestly furious. I felt robbed of a better ending for Klonoa’s character as he’d already been through some shit. So I pondered and pondered for years about what Klonoa 2 actually did. Because for some reason, I never bothered to watch the cutscenes of that game on youtube. Bad memory and priorities, I guess. Even so, I played the Wii remake that everyone hates for some strange reason. Because it was on Wii, and gamers have some sort of religious doctrine that demands they bemoan everything Wii regardless of it’s actual quality. I get inferior and downright ugly redesigns, and poor english voices that includes Laura Bailey, that overrated voice hacktress portraying Huepow (somehow fitting because fuck Huepow),and Eric Stitt sounding too old for Klonoa. Even so, the game had the regular Phantomillian language setting, so there shouldn’t have been that much of an issue. Plus it had unlockable costumes, that was a treat, and fuck this Reverie collection for removing that in favor DLC costumes. Even with the GBA games having better endings, I still wanted a proper resolution to the story of Klonoa 1. The trauma he endured, the loss of his home and family, and dealing with the fact that his best friend was nothing more than a liar that used him as a tool to save his own kingdom. I wanted context as to what the hell was going on, why things went the way they did, where Klonoa himself came from, what he is, something that would at the very least soften the blow from K1. Some actual explanation as to the world that Klonoa resided or traveled. You know that feeling when you play a game or watch a movie that is the first installment, something that feels so small time, but leaves such an impact on you that you can’t hope for anything more than a sequel? This title that’s brimming with so much potential that a sequel could do no more than to bring it all out? But then the sequel comes out and it’s… a slap in the face?
Klonoa 2 represents, for me, the biggest wasted opportunity to fully explore the character of Klonoa, the universe he resides in, and adding proper context to everything that happened in the first game. Instead, we get this incredibly hollow and shallow game with worthless and annoying characters, extremely terrible writing, and a wholly contrived plot that does everything in it’s power to be as metaphorical and symbolic as possible, all the while lacking the foresight and talent necessary to make any of it work. It is a pretentious and audacious game that is all about preaching the ideal of accepting and embracing your imperfections, all the while destroying narrative as well as any connections it could have to the previous game. The biggest sign of this is in Klonoa himself. Everything that happened to him in the first game has no bearing on his character in this game. He is a blank slate with no personality to speak of. He feels empty, hollow, soulless. Going with the flow of whatever the story and characters will it. And then he just leaves without a care in the world. If I didn’t know any better, I’d sooner attribute this to trauma, having a loss of emotion and remaining impassive. He doesn’t seem to feel anything. He doesn’t seem to care. When Baguji asks him to help Lolo, he’s like “Well sure, I guess”. You guess!? What the hell!? K1, he would be happy to help anyone in trouble. No second guessing, no lack of empathy or enthusiasm. Here, he’s just dead inside. If that’s what the writers were going for, then the ending of K1 did way more to him than I gave him credit for. He doesn’t reflect on anything, doesn’t recall anything, he’s just… there. Emotionally numb. Again, if this was what they were going with for his character, then it’d be fine. But because of how poorly written the game is, I don’t think that’s the case. It’s depressing, but not for the right reasons. It gives the impression that K2 was it’s own standalone alternate universe with no ties to the first game, which wouldn’t make sense because the first game gave explanations to where Klonoa got his ring, how he even got into Lunatea, etc. It’s disingenuous to continue the story and resolve nothing from the first. Even more, you create an inferior game with inferior gameplay, story, and music.
The unfortunate thing is Namco has a bad habit of leaving stories unresolved. Fans of Tekken and Soul Calibur can attest to this with the amount of characters and plotlines that are trapped in perpetual limbo because of their comical level of disinterest in finishing what they started. Where’s Asuka Kazama’s relationship to Jin Kazama and the suppression of his Devil gene, you hacks!? Oh nice of you guys to bring back Julia Chang if only to turn her into a Twitch Thot because restoring the forest is too boring for you.
I despise Klonoa 2 because like many sequels before and after, like Mass Effect, it is a game that completely sqanders all the potential it has in favor of artistic pursuits. It wasted Klonoa’s character development, it wasted any real world building that didn’t bullshit you every step of the way with rules that contradict the first game. I know this entire rant was purely comparative interest, but even if you judged the game on it’s own merits, it’s still crap. The characters are fundamentally unlikable and pretentious. All for the sake of preachy art. The first game was just a boy and his pet liar going on this adventure to save the land from a deadly warlock and his minions. There’s no poorly contrived events to try and preach to the player about accepting their imperfections or showing people what the real world is about. There’s only the adventure, the heroes, and the villains. Because the writers of that game understood that they didn’t need to teach you anything. It’s a game, it’s meant to entertain you. Not lecture you. K2’s writers missed the plot so horribly that they have a pirate villain that doesn’t really know what she wants, and is so petty and egomaniacal as to bark and scream platitudes at a person who is clearly depressed and crying for help. I hate these characters so much. If I were to be a metaphorical bastard, I’d say Ghadius succeeded in creating a world purely of nightmares. You have kingdoms that are self-destructive, priesthoods that bully others, and a world that lacks complete and total empathy. The “foolish dream” of a world where everyone does everything they can to help each other overcome impossible odds, to the point that the representative of each kingdom bands together to destroy the ultimate nightmare… this is the result of a hypothetical bad ending. This is the “real world” that Leorina speaks of. A world that chooses to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and pretends that everything is fine, when the reality is that Ghadius had won in the end. Klonoa’s efforts meant nothing, and he himself becomes a shallow husk of a disillusioned dreamer, trapped beneath the waves and drowning in his own sorrows.
The Reverie collection has given fans some hope that a Klonoa 3 will be made, and there are many who support it. Me included. Despite how terrible K2 was, this is a series that deserves some more titles under it’s belt. However, considering that so many people put K2 over K1, I have no such optimism for the sequel as Namco would likely take after the second title. That, I feel, is the most depressing fact of all. If K2 is simply Klonoa growing up, then I wish he never did.
I think it goes without saying that I am not a patient man. When it comes to entertainment, I am of the mind of instant gratification. It’s one of the reasons I enjoyed Sonic the Hedgehog so much, it’s (formerly) a series of fast paced action games with an emphasis on playing how you wish, so long as you are having fun. I grew up in an era where games allowed you to start having fun the moment you press start on the title screen. Hell, that’s literally how games began in the good ol days of the arcade. You put a quarter in, push start, and just start playing.
So it also goes without saying that most RPGs irritate me for this very reason. RPGs, especially modern ones, are hideously notorious for not allowing you to have fun as soon as you boot up the game. Some would say it’s the nature of the genre, but as I see it, it’s little more than the developers thinking that RPGs “have” to be this way, whether by means of adhering to the tenents of tabletop RPGs, or via means of generating more money, the games are tremendously slow for a multitude of reasons.
Unfortunately for these days, I could only wish that was the only problem with the Modern RPG.
After suffering through Cyberpunk 2020 last year, I decided to go back to playing Diablo 3, an RPG I enjoyed prior to the Monk Nerf. One of the main reasons is that it is much faster paced, and steady leveling is incentivised as you are rewarded with new skills every time you level, making the experience far better than most others as you feel as though you are getting new customization options for every single level. And grinding in and of itself is actually pretty fast granted that you are geared towards gaining XP. It’s one of the few things that puts Diablo 3 above every other RPG in existence with it’s insistence on speed and fun before anything else.
The problems don’t start until you actually explore those skills that you have. Or rather you come to realize that the class you have is rather shit. I decided to start a new Crusader class because thanks to Soul Calibur, I’ve been hardpressed to play a heavy Knight with a giant sword. Unfortunately, those are a dime a dozen, and those Giant Swords (Two-Handed weapons) actually do more harm to the Crusader than not. The Crusader was voted the worst class overall by most Diablo players, and it’s easy to see why. While as expected, most voted in regards to DPS (because why play a character if they can’t mop up mobs fast enough), there were plenty of actual good reasons. Skills aren’t very practical, poor speed overall (understandable given all the armor), horrible cooldowns on most skills, certain skills being restricted to certain gear (like a shield), high MP cost of all skills, and even as a support character, is severely outclassed by a class that was nerfed to uselessness imo (Monk). In other words, if I want to have fun, I’d have to roll another class or go back to my Witch Doctor, racy as he is.
Luckily because Diablo 3 is so fast paced, this isn’t a problem. But for RPGs like Borderlands, this is a nightmare scenario. I’ve mentioned before how much I despised Borderlands 2 purely because of it’s mechanics. But then I realized it’s because I played Zer0. Zer0 is a character that is only really good for the first 2 difficulty levels, but is absolutely useless for the 3rd and most broken UVHM. He’s also pretty useless for 2 of the game’s DLC campaigns, Hammerlock and Dragon’s Keep. Of course, that’s “depending on how you build his skill trees”. I intended for Zer0 to be a Sniper Class, and found that’s actually quite worthless in the long run as it means you’d have no other means of engagement against certain enemies. And by the balls of Ra, it showed. I was getting destroyed left and right by endless waves of enemies who had no chinks in their armor for me to expose, and it felt like a constant uphill battle to do anything meaningful without chucking my build out of the window and respecing to a new one. However, that would require I have a better understanding of the other skill trees and knowing the ins and outs of their exploits.
I have to reiterate that I am not a patient man.
I know a few of you reading are seizing on that one aspect and, as expected, are determined to write off my entire critique as being a flaw of my own person. Well, someone else was determined to “prove me wrong” on my assertions that Borderlands 2 is shit. That being my sister, the annoying fangirl that she is of BL2 specifically. It should be noted that her main character is Maya. Those who have played BL2 should be able to understand why her experience with the game was so vastly superior to mine, but to the unintiated (and fortunate), lets just say that Maya is the most OP character in the entire game. As she decided to play Zer0, I decided to play Gaige, a character that has can summon a murderous robot, and emphasizes some elemental damage here and there.
Needless to say, she ate her own words.
It was so strange! As soon as we got to the Dragon’s Keep DLC, she wasn’t having fun at all! She blamed her weapons and gear, thinking that she needed a better gun to have a better time. But the strange thing is she had the Unkempt Herald, a pistol that does insane damage already, and the lady fist, a pistol with %800 crit damage, a damage category that Zer0 overspecializes in. And yet, she was still getting destroyed. Mainly because Crits in Borderlands often requires you to hit a weakspot on enemies. Hammerlock and Dragon’s Keep enemies don’t typically have those.
So what was the difference? I had a character with more appropiate advantages for the Campaign in question. So she’s seeing all of these problems and thinking (a little too hard) about how she can mitigate these issues. By why bother? Why not just roll a Gaige or yet another Maya when those characters have to worry about far less?
This is an issue that a lot of RPGs seem to have. The horribly imbalanced viability in the classes present. The idea that “some classes/characters are just going to be better than others” is a notion that needs to go the way of the dodo. RPGs are nothing more than endless work, work that requires an unhealthy addiction to be extremely proficient at. There’s a lot of number crunching, a lot of tedious research and memorization, overlapping systems, and gear loadouts that you have to take meticulous detail of in order to build the ultimate character. There’s nothing worse than putting in all that work, time, and effort… than to feel completely worthless by the endgame. Then you start researching what you’ve done wrong, and all the answers start pointing to “the character you picked just sucks overall. The mistake was choosing them over another”.
I’ve often said that the character’s abilities have to be adequate for the challenges present in the game. RPGs have often lacked this fundamental detail for some reason. Perhaps it’s because the developers feel that, because RPGs have all these customization features, they don’t have to worry about whether or not each and every class is adequate for the challenges they present because they have the tediously convenient excuse that “it’s up to the player to make the class work for them”. They often forget that the class’s abilities are fixed, and whatever builds you can make have to revolve around what those abilities are. Thus you have limitations regardless of the customizations you have at hand, thus we come back to square one. The characters abilities still have to be adequate for the challenges at hand. Add to it some unhealthy RNG, and you’re in for a painfully tedious grind just to compensate for your class’s shortcomings.
What happens is that you’re left wondering what the best class is, and just using that one class for the whole game because the alternative is just a headache inducing nightmare of tedious number crunches to get over one or two hurdles. What’s the best class in Diablo 3? Wizard/Necromancer. What’s the best character in any Borderlands game? The Sirens. You notice in every RPG, the MAGIC people are the most powerful? What’s the point of wasting time trying to build up Knights/Fighters when magic is so useful, or Rogues because of the Crit Damage alone? There’s less work, less headache, and more reward. Summoner classes allow you to kick back and watch some minions do all the work for you. You’re getting a raw deal playing anyone else. It’s cute when developers try to “balance” this out by making all the magic people physically weaker than everyone else, or make magic casting more difficult, tedious, and slower, but in the end, they still pay off by being far more powerful than the alternatives.
Western RPGs make this worse with oftentimes tedious skill trees and lists that require you to take even longer trying to build up your character when most skills don’t even sound useful, or sound more tedious to work into a build. Again, with the Crusader, there’s a primary skill called “Punish” which, while you attack, you activate something known as “Hardened Senses” which activates a certain bonus when your Crusader blocks an attack. The bonus depends on the rune you have equipped to the skill. Blocking is RNG based, so you need to increase your block chances in order to activate the skill more frequently. One rune gives you a boost in Attack Speed to compensate for a weapon’s supposedly lower attack speed, so theoretically, a slow weapon can become adequate allowing you to deal higher damage at a much faster rate.
That’s too damn much work for one skill alone, and the payoff simply isn’t there. Why not just equip a weapon with already decent attack speed, use a different primary skill (like the Hammers with long range) and shoot enemies from afar? Ah, better! Except it gets a little boring as you tickle their health down, and try to avoid getting mobbed up… or just pick a Barbarian and chuck this noise out of the goddamn window. And then deal with Barbarian’s skills revolving around having to constantly attack enemies just to remain viable since Barb’s MP drains if you’re not constantly attacking, along with a skill called “Frenzy” to get around any poor attack speed you have, again requiring you to be constantly attacking… and then chucking that noise out of the window and going to Wizard, kick back, and roast mobs with ease. Or pick Witch Doctor and let the dogs out. Witch Doctor even has a rune that actually says “Does not drain MP, and even makes this attack MORE EFFECTIVE!” How… in the grandest… of all hells… does this even remotely translate to “Balance”!?
These are just a few examples, purely from Western RPGs because they tend to be just a wee bit more convoluted than your typical jRPG. jRPGs, despite their numerous flaws, cut all of the tedium out, so you can simply focus on the characters and strategies involved with them. Of course, this runs into the problem with characters and/or classes being over specialized in certain cases. It makes more sense for turn-based nonsense as everyone has a specific purpose that’s readily obvious to all involved. But for the more action oriented jRPG, these notions get lost in translation as melee combat tends to be over-emphasized over every other aspect. So if you have the option of playing other characters in jRPG, Japan doesn’t actually change this way of thinking, and you’re kinda expected to deal with these over-specialized classes in an environment where they become useless outside of the CPU. I speak mostly in regards to the Tales of series as that’s where the majority of my jRPG experience lies, but hell, even in FF7R and that PS3 Star Ocean game, that problem persisted. Playing anyone other than the main character (who is often Melee oriented) lends itself to a less than stellar experience as developers don’t bother making those other characters fun to play. They are often slower when attacking, or have these massive restrictions placed on them to keep pace with their “intended purpose”. Kisara from Tales of Arise is an aggro tank. Everything she is capable of doing involves a shield and a massive amount of defense so that she can defend against massive attacks. She also has a short ranged mace and can attack with her shield which would give you the impression that she’s more than just a shield. Unfortunately, her attacks are goddamned awful and more often than not leave her open to attacks, so her only utility is to block ramming attacks to make sure the party doesn’t die quickly. The Tales games allow you to play every character, but missed the part about making every character fun and viable to play on their own, so you just default to the MC or secondary available melee character that doesn’t have slow or awkward attacks. I think only the Xillia games managed to get around this issue.
It’s just annoying when you have RPGs “promising” all these notions of customization, but when you have specific classes present, then you have all these restrictions placed on customization to keep them within their job descriptions. Crusaders are all about defense, so everything they do has to revolve around tanking attacks and requiring a shield, and yes, I know the Crusader does more than just swing a sword, But those other aspects are pretty ass in comparison to everyone else. Assasins in Borderlands are all about crit damage, and are proper fucked when you find enemies have no weak points (only a problem for Zer0 and Nisha, apparently, since Mordecai and F1AK have pets to abuse). I get why these characters are designed like this, for the sake of variety and all, and because multiplayer and other shit, but if combat is a big emphasis of the game, you’re hindering characters by restricting their gameplay to certain portions of combat. In that sense, combat needs to take ALL of those handicaps into account. Otherwise, you just create an imbalanced RPG with classes that border from OP to shit tier, and nothing but circular arguments about whether or not the player is at fault for “not preparing” adequately for challenges that the games (literally) do not train you for.
I reiterate, I am not a patient man. And again, I know people will seize upon that one notion and completely disregard my arguments as just a guy who doesn’t want to put forth the work. And that’s… partially true. I don’t like the idea of “work” in any video game, be it puzzles, fetch quests, constant backtracking, farming, or grinding. Elements of a game that detract from any semblance of enjoyability. I’m willing to bet the vast majority of people, however, also do not approve of these elements as the vast majority of people tend to piss and moan about them in almost all of their reviews. No one enjoys doing work in any realm, be it games or life. Work is just something you do to sustain yourself or achieve something, it is not “fun” or entertaining. Now some people won’t MIND doing the work if they feel there is worth in doing so. Myself included. I put up with the nonsense in Monster Hunter World because I enjoyed it, AND I felt like my work actually mattered… until Iceborne where the Crutch Claw fucked any semblance of progression. Most of the time, the work you put into RPGs don’t matter simply because the game, for some reason, doesn’t care. Whether it be the useless useful spell that can never hit it’s target thanks to RNG, or the absolute bullshit concept of level scaling in any sense of the word, you tend to feel as though RPGs are a waste of time in the end. Turn-Based or otherwise. They don’t operate on rationality. They operate on handicaps and restrictions with sometimes false promises of greater things to come if only you work harder, run faster, and jump higher. It’s a carrot on a stick in all but name.
The best analogy I can come up with is Yu Yu Hakusho. You know how the show hyped up Genkai’s Spirit Wave Orb as being the key to defeating Toguro, and that Yusuke had to endure a torturous process of absorbing the orb into his body, blood pouring out from all his sides, and him having to bash his head against a stone wall to distract from the pain? All so that in the end, all that work, all that effort… comes crashing down as soon as Toguro goes 100% and basically says “fuck you and your Spirit Orb” and proceeds to kick his lily ass all over the stadium? That’s how RPGs tend to feel. The time and effort spent to get stronger feels meaningless, especially when the games try to resort to gimmicks to say “well these enemies or this boss can only be hurt by this one technique you might’ve neglected because the game in it’s entirety had no use for it until now”.
I suppose a better analogy would be that RPGs operate on Shonen logic. You know how in most western media, cartoon or otherwise, the villains can be cartoonishly overpowered, but the heroes can beat them despite being so weak simply by outsmarting them, being resourceful and using the environment to their advantage, or just anything to win? Shonen shows often never do this, and operate on the notion of “I cannot ever beat this guy over here unless I train really hard, or practice this one technique over and over as it will be the key to victory”. It’s kinda how other gaming genres as opposed to RPGs which are always operating like Shonen nonsense. Action games like Shinobi or Ganryu 2 has your character being outclassed on every conceivable level by these opponents, but with a little skill and ingenuity, they can dominate the competition. Kinda how you have Chris Redfield beating Albert Wesker despite not having superhuman abilities. It’s basically teaching you that power isn’t everything. Why else would Batman have any chance of beating Superman? RPGs teach the exact opposite. That you need Power to beat Power. Some people would probably say “They teach you there are no shortcuts in life” or some other pretentious nonsense, but that would require the notion to be equalized for the majority of the population.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that “not all RPGs are like this”, but that should go without saying. The issue is that most of them already do, and the few that don’t will, in my opinion, go unnoticed because of petty issues like the female characters not being hot enough (Andromeda). The best RPGs tend to be the ones that do not have any concept of “classes”, and you could have a fully customized character with any abilities you wish (within reasonable limitations, of course). That way, there’s no illusion of choice and everything can truly be “your fault” if something goes wrong. So far, it feels as though most of the Monster Hunter genre gets this right as every monster, despite their difficulty, can be beaten with most builds you could come up with… except Iceborne.
Then again, I suppose it’s that the level of customization for games like Diablo 3 and Borderlands General are screwy simply as a a result of being loot based grinds. The games are designed to push you into some OCD laden craze in collecting pieces of gear that may or may not have the stats you want, and have you thinking that you have to have the right gear, so you keep burning through loot over and over and over again until you find yourself with a videogame addiction, but there won’t ever be any sense of satisfaction because, again, the characters are designed to be played a certain way, and no amount of gear is going to push them out of their intended play styles.
It’s honestly all tedious and frustrating, really. I recently came off of Scarlet Nexus with a wide-eyed smile on my face. The God Eater people know how to make some good stuff every once in a while, but it is a game that understands “hey, we know you have better things to do in your life than to get muddled in mindless customization features. So here’s a bone, a skill tree, and some simple equipment, go nuts”. So going back to stuff like Diablo and Borderlands feels underwhelming as you spend more time in the menu screen desperately trying to find that one piece of equipment in your inventory that may or may not stave off whatever is killing you at the moment, and finding out you have no other alternative than to grind to get over this one or two hurdles. Perhaps you do need RPGs to exclude the idea of “classes” altogether in order to have a better experience. Become jacks of all trades rather a person who is only good at one thing. It’s a better experience, and a life lesson all in one.
I miss my Battlemage from PSO for this very reason. 😛
Conflicting Views 