Game EXP: Last Day of June, SUPERHOT VR, & Fire Emblem: Three Houses (PC, OQ2, NS)
Last Day of June Systems: Windows, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch Release Date: August 31, 2016 Publisher: 505 Games Developer: Ovosonico Time Spent: Unknown
[The Reason: This one was a little hard to write which I actually get to in the body of the article. There was another reason that fundamentally changed the game for me, which is also a spoiler which I will get to below, because it is story related. So that's really it.]
I finished Last Day of June a [few years] back, but I felt like I needed some time to process the traditional game mechanics that made the game a game, the entire story, and the method of storytelling. I previously talked about playing through the first couple of hours in a First Impressions article back in mid-September [2019] where I already briefly covered the general mechanics of the game such as affecting the timelines of the various characters you play, but there is a lot more to it than that and significantly less daunting than I had thought it was going to be.
As I speculated, events that you do with one character's story have an effect on the village when you play a new character. Piles of leaves that previously dotted the walkways disappear when you rake them away using another character. If you collect the rope for the boy to have him fly a kite with the old man, he will no longer be playing with the dog, unless you collect the rope to tie down the boxes on the truck, then the boy will be playing with the dog instead. When I was able to confirm that the mechanics in-game would operate in this way, I was afraid that this method of playing through one storyline to alter another in order to access a new area/item was going to be a mental chore of keeping track of what does what in what timeline in order to do what in another. Thankfully the way that Last Day of June utilizes this is just enough to make it clear that that is how the game works, but not so much that you need a flow chart. Each character that you can play has only two possible paths for them to take in their story and how it affects the two main characters, however, some events in one story will open alternate paths in another, but they always seem to be obvious enough to not induce headaches.
You know what, I think I am talking myself in circles so my advice is to play the game for yourself and you will see what I mean.
~*Spoilers*~
[I also read a while back that as you play as Carl in each of the stages, that he is actually able to go back in time to try and change the events that lead to the car crash killing June. I had played it as him going back in his mind to see how things might have been different. Then at the end of the game, the cannon explanation is that while Carl is able to travel back in time, he manages to switch positions with June right before the accident where he ends up dying instead of June. This was a bit of a shock to me as by the end, I had interpreted that Carl had always been the one to have been injured in the accident and that the actual game was Carl's mind trying to interpret and make sense of what happened. That in the final stage as the world starts crumbling away, that was Carl finally dying. I actually like my head-cannon significantly better because it was what I saw and felt while playing the game, or at least when I was coming to realize that June was not in fact the one who died during the car accident.]
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SUPERHOT VR Systems: Rift, PlayStation VR, Oculus Quest 1/2
Release Date: April 30, 2019 Publisher: Superhot Team Developer: Superhot Team Time Spent: 2H 11M 54S
[The Reason: I waited a while to write about SUPERHOT VR for a couple of reasons, the first being that I was surprised that it only took me just over two hours to go through the main campaign. Granted there are additional modes that you unlock after beating the game that are variations on the levels you already played. The second was that I found out while doing research about the game that the levels in SHVR are drastically different than the ones in the original version of the game and that there was in fact a continuous story that was happening in both versions of the game. If you want to read a semi-more in-depth description of the game and its mechanics, I'd recommend our First Impressions article.]
SUPERHOT VR was an absolute blast to play and I had been wanting to play it since it was first announced for PC probably sometime around seven years ago. I feel like, along with Beat Saber, SHVR is one of those quintessential games for any VR system because of how immersive the game is. Levels play out in 360 degrees and it can be very easy to forget to look behind you for an enemy combatant while slowly trying to dodge another enemy in front of you with a shotgun.
My biggest critique is how the story was reworked in the VR adaptation, in that I was surprised that there was even a narrative connecting all of the different locations and levels together. To me, it just felt like I was in a small apartment (the HUD) and playing through different stages presented as a puzzle. I did not really give much thought as to why the apartment was becoming more degraded with broken equipment as the game progressed, but apparently, that was part of the story I had 100% missed. I had read that some people were upset with the redesigned levels, that one ending where you committed suicide was taken out because the developers thought that that was not the best way for people to experience the game and that there were better ways to construct the narrative and I agree 100% with that statement. Especially in a VR setting, putting a digital representation of a gun to your virtual head and pulling the trigger is a strange mindset to ask the player to go. Granted the whole of the game you have these red enemies shooting at you so that could also be a very real and legitimate reason for not wanting to play this.
You know what, I am just going to include a video I took of a playthrough from the seventh stage, "Corpo Office" which shows a sequence of five stages, most of which I have to playthrough multiple times because I kept getting hit by the Welcoming Committee. Just a quick heads up though (heh), that if you are prone to motion sickness, the video below might make you nauseous as I do a lot of ducking and weaving and even I experienced a little bit of motion sickness and it is my own video.
So that, in a nutshell, is SUPERHOT VR. There is some pretty far out mechanics later in the game that I wanted to keep hidden for now, and also it was something that I would often forget at times that I could do, especially in stages that I found particularly difficult. But this is a fun game to just come back to for 15-20 minutes.
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Fire Emblem: Three Houses Systems: Nintendo Switch Release Date: July 16, 2019 Publisher: Nintendo Developer: Intelligent Systems, Kuo Shibusawa Time Spent: ~120+ Hours
[The Reason: I actually had an entire article written for this game, or at least the first half since there is a time jump in the game that felt like a natural splitting of the articles. However, I never came back to write Part II because I could not figure out how best to write about this game that from my perspective, had two possible endings through six possible routes; I know now that there are only four routes to the two endings. Because of the choices I made as far as which house I decided to become The Professor for led to a series of possible outcomes, and on top of that, which students if any I recruited away from their starting houses would change possible outcomes for the various characters, and how I decided to take the story leading up to the time jump could ultimately lead to another set of outcomes. It honestly just felt too overwhelming to write about an entire game when I had only played maybe 16.6% of the playable game (and this was before the DLC was released at that) even though I had reached an ending.]
As I stated above, there is so much to this game. I know that I spent just over 120 hours on my first playthrough and that was taking one of four possible paths in the game, before the DLC that added another house to the mix. There are just so many choices, some benign and others that will directly affect the outcome of the game. Do you choose a male or female Byleth to play as? I chose a female because I usually find that more interesting from a fantasy narrative standpoint where more often than not, the protagonist is male. Which house do you choose to be the professor for? The Black Eagles, the Golden Deer, or the Blue Lions? I decided to go with the Black Lions because Dimitri seemed too steeped in willfully blind racism and the members of the Golden Deer seemed a little more aloof.
In the first half of the game, there were a lot of game elements from on-foot exploration, mini-games like tea time, sparing contests, academics, cooking, dining with students (I actually did not do this because the only way to start this was to have dinner with Sylvain and I refused to engage with that pompous piece of trash), fishing, and courting one of the students to be your future romantic partner, which is actually a pretty messed up and problematic power dynamic (although you can also romance any of the applicable school staff as well). I did end up using a guide for both the tea time mini-game to choose the correct questions and responses to help build my relationships with various characters, as well as another guide in knowing what gifts specific characters would prefer to receive. In the end, I recruited Ingrid away from the Blue Eagles and I tried to recruit Leonie (since I brought her along on a couple early training missions) but that ended up not working out. I also chose to recruit Seteth, Flayn, Manuela, and Shamir, but Seteth and Flayn left after I decided to side with Edlegard against the Church of Seiros, because of course, I am going to side with someone who is actively fighting against the bigotry and holy righteousness of a conservative religion. Although, when the choice came up in-game, I actually chose to side against Edelgard at first out of anger for what felt like her betrayal during the fight under the school, then there was the cutscene where I actually saw what it was she was doing and to the extent of why she was doing it, I realized I had actually made the wrong choice and reloaded my save file and decided to remain with the Black Eagles; thereby Seteth and Flayn left and decided to stay with the Church.
I honestly thought that the time-jump mechanic, as to how and why it happened, felt a little cheap, but I understand that the storytellers wanted to get the player deep into the war that followed without all of the hassles of having you play through five years of war. I was also a little surprised at the number of battles against former students there were from previous houses, although it only makes sense that they would exist in this game. As the game progressed and it felt like a war against the other houses was inevitable, I knew that it was going to happen in one form or another, but I was really interested, and impressed, with how these combat encounters were handled. These enemies, former students, felt so much more fleshed out than one-sided bad guys in the bad army. Some battles were particularly tough to get through (emotionally), but they also felt appropriate to the story and the characters involved.
Part of me is torn about replaying the game because I know what the "False Church of Seiros" is and what they represent, so I do not know how I could replay with a different house and knowingly side with them, although I guess the same could be said for people who went up against Edelgard as I know there is a lot of online animosity towards her character. I could just choose the Black Eagles again and choose not to side with her, but at the same time, I am somewhat interested in seeing how the story unfolds with the other houses as well. If only you could choose to still side with Edelgard when she declares war while still choosing either the Golden Deer or the Blue Lions, but that is a path I have already played. . . so many choices. The point is, there is so much content in this game as a result of all of the choices you make, as well as all of the content that you can only see if you choose a particular house at the beginning of the game, with character interactions and where their story leads in the end. I probably will play through this game again. . . maybe after I retire and I have more time on my hands between all of the other games I have not yet played.
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