Mechs, Mechanics And Mayhem

By the end of Friday, to my own not inconsiderable surprise, I'd played through all the demos on my Next Fest list. There was I on Wednesday, wondering if I'd have time to get through them all before the event ended and now here I am, all done with three days to go!

Well, all done bar the writing-up, of course, which is going to take quite a bit longer than playing the damn things did but there's no deadline on that. I can feed the remaining five reviews in as and when I feel like it. 

It's not like there's any urgency, after all. None of these games is out yet. Some of them may never be, although I have to say that the completion rate for games I've added to my wishlist following demos I've played in Next Fests comes close to one hundred percent. My follow-through on buying them? We won't talk about that just now.

The only thing left to decide is which demo should I review today. The one I liked the most? The one I spent longest playing? The one I have the most to say about?

It can't be the one I thought was bad because there wasn't one. They were all good, in their way. I did a stellar job this time around, only choosing demos for games that look like they'll be worth buying one day.

And yet, I didn't wishlist them all. They may all be good games but they're not all going to be good games for me. I'd recommend them all, just not necessarily to myself.

Enough with the preamble. Time to pick a demo. And because I have other things I'd like to do this morning, I'll go with the one I probably have the least to say about. There's very little chance I'll be picking this one up when it launches some time this year but I'd be happy to hear more about it if anyone else does.

Nitro Gen Omega

I picked Nitro Gen Omega mostly for the graphics but also because the developers describe it as a turn-based tactical rpg. In my head, that means something like Solasta, Dungeons of Nahelbeuk or one of the several similar titles I've enjoyed in recent times. It also could be closer to the X-Com format and although I didn't get on with X-Com itself, I've had fun with other games that follow that model.

NGO (Unfortunate acronym...) isn't much like any of those. Not from the brief time I spent with it, anyway, which was just under half an hour. What it is, as far as I can tell, is an arena battler with RPG mechanics but nothing you'd call a storyline or a narrative.

Play begins with a highly stylised map, over which you fly in your airship. A tiny model of your airship. You can't land anywhere except certain designated areas. When you fly over those you get the option to land but if you take it all that happens is the view changes to another stylised map with some clickable locations. 

Selecting one takes you to a menu screen. You can recruit team members, effect repairs or buy stuff. I had no idea what I was doing so the first thing I did was buy a whole bunch of new team members. That was a mistake because I needed the money for other things later.

Everything works via static screens and menus. You can move around inside your airship but only by way of floor plans that, once again, let you to open more menus to access more activities, including some mini-games and entertainments.

I'd go into more detail about those but they all required money I'd already spent. There are several currencies, all of which you earn by undertaking missions, that being the core gameplay. Or I think it is. It's hard to be sure. I only took one mission and I failed it.

When I chose this demo from the list, the one thing I didn't pay attention to was the sub-genre. It may be a tactical rpg but it's specifically one in which you pilot giant Mechs. That makes it a first for me. As far as I can remember I have never played a Mech Battler in my life before.

On this slight evidence I'm very bad at them but I'm sure most entries in the genre aren't much like this, either. Combat, like everything in this game, feels extremely stylized and abstracted. There's no lurching around a batlefield, grappling other Mechs and blowing bits off them. Or rather there is but you can't see it happening. 

Combat consists of selecting actions for each of the members of your team and placing them in "Timelines". When you've set them all you affirm your readiness and the battle plays out. You see some very good cut scenes and animations but they all play out with no further intervention from you.

I'm convinced it would be a compelling and satisfying experience - if I had any idea what I was doing. Like everything about the game, the battles are slick, stylish and gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, I never had the least clue what I was supposed to be doing or, if I did, how to do it.

There's no blame attached here to either the game or the demo. It's basically the tutorial as far as I can tell and it does explain everything in considerable detail. I just couldn't follow most of it. Not in the time I was willing to spend on a demo, anyway.

The level of detail is overwhelming. There are so many stats, abilities and options and the developers, not unreasonably, assume a great deal of pre-existing genre knowledge that I don't have. I'm fairly sure I could pick enough up, eventually, to stumble through a few fights to some kind of result but it would take me a lot longer than I'm willing to give it, especially in a demo.

I don't feel as though it would be a good use of my time to play the full game when it arrives, either. Not because I can't imagine enjoying it but because it's clear that a huge amount of the appeal is going to come from building teams, training and gearing characters and generally min-maxing your way to the top. That that takes a lot of time, effort, research and commitment. Some people live for that sort of thing but I'm not one of them.

It's a pity because I absolutely love the visuals. Everything about the game is hyper-stylized, often to the point of incomprehensibility, which is always something I enjoy. The problem with hyper-stylization is, while it may be an aesthetic pleasure, it's not always very practical. One of the reasons I never knew what I was doing was the sheer amount of visual information on screen. The brutal learning curve required to make sense of it all wasn't helping much, either.

Visually, though, I was having a wonderful time. I loved the look of the characters, their idiosyncratic fashion sense, their volatile expressions, their sheer sense of dynamic exuberance. I loved the graphic design, especially the UI and the text, all of which explodes off the screen in a riotous chaos of sharp lines and angles. The color palette is unusual and sophisticated. The whole thing seems to have been design-led to an extraordinary degree and it very definitely works. Providing, in my case at least, that all you want to do is look at it, not play it.

Ironically, perhaps, given my overwhelming incompetence, the best moments of all came during the fights. That's when you get short cutaways to your team members in the cockpits of their mechs. These reminded me hugely of Neon Genesis Evangelion, perhaps the greatest of all mech tales. Especially when my team were losing badly, bouncing around the interiors of their Mechs, clawing their way back to the controls for one more, desparate, do or die try. 

Those scenes really brought back memories of watching Evangelion. Not surprising, I guess, considering develeopers DESTINYbit appear to have "borrowed" most of the title of that famous series for their own game.

There's clearly a whole lot more to Nitro Gen Omega than I was able to see for myself in my brief and unsuccessful run. There are other types of mission than battles, or I think there are, and there's a whole relationship system involving the characters in your team, for a start. I'll have to leave all of that for someone else to explore and post about, though. It's all to much for me. I know my limits. I just got two of my team killed. Best I quit while I'm behind.

Not wishlisted. Recommended, just not for me.

Maybe Some Day

I gave myself the day off blogging yesterday to play Nightingale. I think I'm circling in on the primary reason why I'm finding it so compelling but I'll let that percolate a while longer. In the meantime, I thought I'd make good on a promises I made in a previous post.

I started writing about games Palworld and Nightingale had stopped me from playing but then ended up writing about just one of them, Allods, which I actually had played, a little, somewhat defeating my own argument. I said then I'd do post something about the rest later and here we are. It's later already!

Games I'm Not Playing

Obviously, that could be an extremely long list. If you want to be literal about it, it would be all games ever made except Nightingale. That would be kind of a lengthy post even for me, though, so I'll stick to the handful I quite possibly would have been playing, if it hadn't been for (Insert ironically struck-through reference to meme from ancient Hanna-Barbera cartoon old people still somehow expect anyone who didn't grow up watching Saturday Morning Cartoons to get and then shake their heads wearily when they don't here.) two survival games on Steam.

I'm not even going to bother listing the obvious ones, the ones I was already playing before I got de-railed or, more accurately, ran my own train off the tracks, like both EverQuest titles or the many single-player games I'm in the middle of on Steam. This is just a short list of games I have bookmarked, meaning to try, added over the last few weeks either because they looked interesting or because I thought I might get a post out of them. More likely both.

Eterspire

Syp did a short piece on this one for MassivelyOP back in January and I thought it looked interesting enough to bookmark for possible further investigation. It's a mobile title, available for Android and iOS, which self-describes as "the best mobile MMORPG in the history of the universe!!" Look, they even bolded "best" so it must be true!

Really, when you see a claim like that, you have to check it out, don't you? And there's more...

"With engaging combat, tons of rare items to collect, and no overly complicated systems to slow you down, Eterspire cuts through the fluff and takes you straight to the action."

Good, 'cos I really hate being slowed down by those darn overly complicated systems. That's why I've played fifty-five hours of Nightingale these last two weeks. 

Looking at the screenshots and taking the temperature of the extensive patch notes, I get the feeling this is something along the lines of AdventureQuest 3D. I like AQ3D a lot but I still hardly ever play it, so why I'd think I needed another like it beats me. I'd have to play it through BlueStacks or Nox, too, which is another hurdle it will probably never pass but even so it's on the "Maybe One Day" list now. 

Hello Kitty Around The World

I can't now recall where or why I was reading about this. I didn't bookmark my original source, only the Bluestacks entry for the game, which was as far as I got in my attempt to play it. I do remember seeing something that suggested this was an important title for some reason. If I knew what was important about it, I'd tell you. 

Oh, wait, maybe Google knows...

Aha! Now I remember! Or at least, I remember what started it all. It was something I read at NME, because of course a music site was going to be my go-to for important news about Hello Kitty games.

From the NME, I learned that 2024 is Hello Kitty's fiftieth birthday. She really doesn't look her age, does she? That was how I started looking at at Hello Kitty stuff again, but how I ended up with Around The World specifically, I have no clue. 

It's what I bookmarked, anyway, so I'll have to assume I wanted to check it out for something. Maybe if I ever actually play it I'll find out what it was.

My personal history with Japan's most famous feline (And that's a highly competitive title, let me tell you.) doesn't go back quite as far as half a century but it does stretch all the way to the late 1990s, which is when I bought a Hello Kitty pencil case in the El Corte Ingles department store in Barcelona. A few weeks later, I gave that pencil case to a work colleague as a leaving present, when she decided to go to back to America. 

We were the only two people in the office who knew both who Buffy the Vampire Slayer was and that the show was fit viewing for adults, so a Hello Kitty pencil case seemed to be the obvious choice to give her to remember me by. Plus it was all I happened to have with me at her leaving do in the pub after work. God, remember when we used to do things like that? Another world...

A little bit later, I briefly played the Hello Kitty MMORPG,Hello Kitty Online, mostly out of spite. I wanted to be able to hit back at anyone who used it as a lazy diss to put down any other MMORPG they happened not to like, which was very much a trope of the early 'aughts. 

It's always a more effective put-down if you can open with "Have you actually played HKO? Because I have." 

I don't think I ever did that, by the way, but I always thought I might. I guess it could still happen, but I doubt it. After all, I'm not a hot-tempered kid of forty any more.

Of course, the Hello Kitty game I really want to play is Hello Kitty Island Adventure, which is basically Hello Kitty meets Animal Crosssing as far as I can see. Unfortunately, that one is only available via Apple Arcade, which not only requires an iOS device capable of running the game but also charges a subscription. Never gonna happen.

Embers Adrift

Finally, a game you can play on the PC! Embers Adrift is one of those uphill in the snow both ways, retro "golden age" MMORPGs that were all the rage a few years ago, only it's one that both actually launched and hung around. I'm pretty sure it used to be called something else and there was probably some drama involved at some point but I neither remember the details nor care enough to go look them up.

The important part is that from the start of this month it's getting one of those endless free trials I like. The way I play, those might as well be free games. It's not like I often get much further than the starting zones in most MMORPGs, and anyway those are usually the best bits.

The devs also recently made some changes to the early stages that apparently mean you don't have to get a group before you can even take on a kill ten rats quest any more. Oh, it's still laser-focused on "Group-based Gameplay" with all the usual promises and reasons, but like just about every similar game ever, it has finally occured to someone that players occasionally either want or need to do stuff on their own, if only for the sake of their sanity. 

As the patch notes from a preparatory update for the free trial last month put it "A new solo loop has been added to the Meadowlands' Noxious Bog Ember Vein." Now, doesn't that sound inviting?

MOP reported back in January that the recent changes were just the beginning of a new approach to solo play in the game:

"“One of our primary goals in 2024 is to deliver more structured gameplay for those who begin their adventures alone,” the studio says. “We hope that by providing more tangible goals with meaningful rewards to solo adventurers they will stick around longer increasing the likelihood of forming a group to tackle a dungeon or complete a quest. To start the year off we are launching three new EV solo loops and our new Bulletin Board System!"

Amazing how every new developer has to re-invent the wheel, isn't it?

I don't know how well Embers Adrift is doing but generally these kinds of changes only come in response to either player demand or demographic decline. It seems the old school B2P + Sub payment model was the first thing to give. That would be a really hard sell in 2024. 

It's still $39.99 for the full game but the subscription is now one of those optional deals that give you perks of various kinds. A change like that wouldn't have moved the dial on my interest but the combination of not having to pay $40 plus the prospect of at least some content I might actually be able to see without having to make a whole bunch of new friends I'd never meet again did at least motivate me to bookmark the game to have a look at later. 

Op success for the Marketing Dept. I guess..

Tower of Fantasy

Aka the game I didn't play when everyone else was playing it because I was too busy playing Noah's Heart. So, if I didn't bother then, why would I consider it now?

This is why. The prospect of meeting Asuka, Shinji, Rai and the rest in a game is enticing - although I notice the promo only mentions Asuka by name. I guess she is everyone's favorite...

The crossover event begins on in exactly a week on 12 March but I'm unclear as to whether it will then become permanent content or if there's a date set after which it goes away. 

If it's the latter, I'll probably never get to try it but if it's staying for good then maybe I'll eventually find a window to take a look at a game I probably should have played already, anyway.

And that's all of them for now.  Not counting the games on my Steam wishlist I almost bought or the Prime games I almost downloaded. 

If I ever get around to trying any of them, I imagine you'll read about it here. Meanwhile, it's back to Nightingale.

Endings And Beginnings

Time for a very quick update on TV shows I've finished. If I leave it any longer I'll have forgotten what I wanted to say about them. 

They're all animated shows. I seem to watch mostly animation these days. It's not so much a preference as it's all I can find that interests me. There's a dearth of live action shows in the styles or genres I like right now, at least on the services I subscribe to. I think I need to sub somewhere else and soon.

Let's begin with a couple I wrote about before, when I was still in the middle of watching them. How did that turn out?

My Daemon

I absolutely loved this. I would say it's one of the best anime I've seen but a) I haven't seen enough for that to carry the weight it needs to be a compliment and b) there seems to be some controversy over whether My Daemon is actually anime or not. 

That really is a pointless debate in my opinion but when I went to read up about the show, after I'd finished watching it, the only things anyone seemed to care about were whether or not it qualified as anime and whether it was a good Pokemon rip-off or just a rip-off. I read more arguments over that than I did any discussion of story, theme or execution. 

Some people didn't want to accept anything made outside Japan into the anime fold (The studio that made My Daemon is based in Thailand.) while some claimed the Japanese setting was enough to give it a pass. Others weren't having any truck with digital animation, insisting anime had to be hand-drawn. 

Semantic literalists repeatedly reminded everyone that "anime" is just the Japanese word for "animation" so any animated content is automatically anime anyway. Cultural gatekeepers weren't having any of that reductive claptrap. It got quite heated at times.

I never read anything about shows while I'm watching them, for fear of spoilers, but if I like a show I almost always go read reviews and opinion pieces about it as soon as I finish it, often literally moments after the closing credits roll on the final episode. I want to see if other people responded to it the way I did and also I'm hoping to postpone, just a little longer, that numbing moment when you realize it's done and you won't be hanging out with this particular set of imaginary friends any more.

In that respect, when it comes to My Daemon, I seem to be an outlier. No-one else seemed to be pining for more or needing support and affirmation for their loss. The minority who wanted to talk about the content and quality of the show at all seemed underwhelmed by most of it. There seemed to be a sense that it was mostly for kids, not especially well-animated and generally nothing much to get excited about.

I would like to disagree most strongly with all of that. In terms of tone and content I found it not just adult but positively grown up. Thematically it deals with grief, loss, abandonment and betrayal in some very bleak and uncompromising ways. I found much of it hard to handle, emotionally, and some of it actively hard to watch. 

Technically I don't suppose there's anything in there that wouldn't pass the regular checks for content suitable for sub-teens, although the parental advisory site I checked suggested using discretion in letting younger children see it. They recommended it be watched by"older children and teenagers due to the intense themes and animated violence",  to which I'd only add "...yeah, and the rest!"

The thirteen-part series is self-contained, to an extent, and has a satisfying conclusion, although it clearly anticipates a second season, which I regret to say it probably isn't going to get, not having been especially successful or well-reviewed. The first eight episodes are the most harrowing. 

If you can get through those, it does shift tone slightly, towards more traditional action-adventure. There's even a fight on top of a moving train. It was a change of pace that came as a huge relief to me after the claustrophobic, introspective, soul-searching intensity of the earlier narrative.

Even so, it never really lets up on the animal cruelty, some of which I found quite distressing. It was a strange co-incidence that I watched it almost at the same time as playing Palworld. I've never played a Pokemon game but if either of these "inspired by" takes is remotely accurate to that IP's ethos, it has to be a damning indictment of Pokemon itself.  

Together, the two of them have made me re-assess some of my own behavior while gaming. Too many of the things we blithely accept as "just how the game works" simply don't bear close examination.

Overall, I'm very glad I watched My Daemon and would strongly recommend it to anyone who thinks they have the stomach for it. Just be ready to have your assumptions uncomfortably challenged.

Hazbin Hotel

This one ended much sooner than I expected. It seemed like one of those shows that takes most of its time setting up the premise and introducing the characters before suddenly realizing there are only a couple of episodes left to deal with the plot.

That said, I thought it was great. It looked fantastic, made me laugh out loud several times, had me hissing the villains and cheering the heroes, and left me feeling satisfied and sated after the big ending. The songs were pretty good, too.

One thing I will say is that I do seem to have watched an awful lot of shows in the last two or three years with demons or devils as the protagonists. I'd like to write a whole post about it but I need to do a lot more research first. 

A lot of them are generically demonish but this one has actual, named devils and angels from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, something that always feels weird. OK, there's no actual Daughter of Satan in the Bible as far as I remember from my Religious Knowledge O-Level studies, and even if there was I'm pretty sure she wasn't called Charlie, but Hazbin Hotel has roles for Satan himself, not to mention Lilith and Adam. 

As seems to be the norm these days, the devils are the good guys and the angelic crew the villains, only in the case of Hazbin Hotel there's very little in the way of nuance when it comes to the angelic hordes. Satan is a charismatic fop with a suppressed paternal streak you do not want to awake. Adam is a genocidal, carpet-chewing sociopath and all the angels merely his unthinking storm troopers. They're idiosyncratic characterizations, to say the least.

The show was great fun from beginning to end and broke viewing records for Amazon, so I imagine we'll be getting more. I will definitely be watching.

Star Trek: Prodigy

Now this was a complete surprise. I am not much of a Star Trek fan although I am slowly coming to believe that, in the eternal cats vs dogs debate, I'm probably more attuned to the wavelength of the Federation than either the Empire or the Alliance.

Even so, I couldn't even name all of the official Trek shows. I watched the original series in the seventies (Not the sixties, when I don't recall even knowing it existed.) and the first season and a half or so of New Generation in the eighties, quitting out of boredom before, as people like to tell me, it got good. 

After that, I think the next Trek show I watched was Lower Decks, which I loved. That positive experience was why I thought I'd give this one a go and I'm very glad I did. It's not as sharp and clever as Lower Decks and it's much more tuned for a tween-teen audience but it's fast, funny, exciting and very coherently plotted. I enjoyed it a good deal.

As usual, the best thing about it was the characters, all of whom are nicely individuated, recognizable types without actually being stereotypical. The voice acting is solid, not spectacular, with no-one really standing out as particularly impressive or annoying. That makes perfect sense with such an ensemble cast and such a focus on camaraderie and teamwork.

I assume the show is canon, if only because one of the main characters is Capt. Janeway from Voyager, of whom I had heard, even though I never watched the show. She seems very dry. I'd be interested in watching an episode or two of Voyager now, just on the basis that she's probably pretty good in it.

The animation is not stellar (Ha!) but it does a job. The visuals are at their best when the team visit various planets. The interior of the ship really doesn't give the animators a lot to work with. 

The plot, while consistent and tightly-focused, doesn't make a whole lot of sense but that's nothing new. Most SciFi shows don't make sense if you think about them too hard. This one involves time-travel, which is always a big red flag to logic, anyway. It also features any number of call-backs to other Trek shows and series, which may delight or infuriate, depending on your tolerance for fan service.

The show has a fractured past. Originally commissioned by Paramount and shown on Nickelodeon in two, ten-episode half-seasons, it was then cancelled after a second season had already been approved and work on it had begun. Netflix picked up both the first and second season, the latter of which is supposed to air later this year. 

Once again, I will be watching.

Neon Genesis: Evangelion

I knew the name from the manga we sell at work but I never thought it looked particularly interesting. Then one day I was chatting to one of my managers, the one who games and watches anime, and she recommended it in the strongest terms so I thought, since it was right there on Netflix, I'd give it a go.

O. M. G! This is one of those "What did I just watch?" shows, pretty much from start to finish. It's an acknowledged classic (Did not know that.) from the nineties (Didn't know that either.) with an infamously weird and divisive ending. 

The show runs 26 episodes but they ran out of money for the animation towards the end so the last two are basically slide-shows. The show then became a cult as the director, Hideaki Anno, spent the next two decades trying to get the story told the way he wanted. 

There are a bunch of Evangelion movies, all dealing with the same plot as the show, most of them on Netflix, all of which I still need to watch. My manager, whose opinions are sound, tells me they're all better than the TV show, which means they must be damn good because the show is wonderful.

Visually, it's stunning, in large part because of the direction rather than the animation. Shot selection is incredible. It looks like an art-house movie from the eighties or nineties done in animation.

Characterization and voice acting in the American dub are good to very good. (I'm not even going to get into the Netflix vs ADV vs Japanese original arguments. I saw this version first  so it's always going to be the version to me.) I'm guessing the levels of hysteria in some scenes would be orders of magnitude more intense in the original so I'm happy to be missing that. I don't think I could cope with a full-strength, anime-style Asuka.

The world-building is off the charts but also very hard to credit. For a start, the timescale, fifteen years after a global catastrophe, doesn't seem to be anywhere near long enough to allow for the rebuilding that's taken place and the technology level is probably hundreds of years ahead of ours although everyone behaves like it's still the nineties.

None of that matters, of course. It's a full-on, sensual, intellectual and emotional assault that can feel quite overwhelming at times. Fortunately, there are also huge swathes of teen drama, adult soap opera and slapstick comedy to get you through the tough-to-follow parts. I never did figure out where the cyborg penguin fitted into it all.

Now I need to find time to watch the four, essential movies that supposedly make sense of the whole thing. That's going to be a trip, I bet!

And The Rest Will Have To Wait

I'm pretty sure I've watched other stuff through to the end as well but I can't off the top of my head remember what it was and anyway that's enough for one post. Next time I write about TV, I'll go through the several shows I started then dropped, something I find very interesting when other people do it. 

If only I can remember what those shows were, that is...