Spoiler Post: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

 Before we go any further, I want to preface this article that there will be spoilers for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.  If you have not played the game and you are planning on it or if you are currently playing it and have not reached the end-game and/or not yet unlocked all of the playable characters and still want to be surprised, I would highly recommend not reading any further.  I also want to say that this article is going to be all over the place and will likely come across as some incoherent combination of rant and thoughtful commentary.  Just bear with me if you want and we will meet up again at the end.

The main purpose of this article is to act as an overflow for a lot of what I either did not say in the primary Game EXP article for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.  And while some of what I wanted to bring up/mention/discuss would be spoilers, there are some things that you will probably say something like, "We knew about that from the rumors back in 2019, this isn't a spoiler douche-canoe!"  And to that, I will just ignore it because this is the Internet and I can do that.

The use of time travel as a mechanic for why Age of Calamity exists, as I previously said, I am more or less okay with; leaning heavily towards the more side.  I understand the appeal of the mechanic, allowing the writers of a story to ask "What if things happened a little differently?"  Or in this case, "How can we tell the story about how the Calamity came to pass without Ganon actually winning?" There is the inevitable question though of "If you could go back in time, why did you only stop Tradgety X and not Tradgeties X, Y, Z, β, and щ while you were at it!?"  And my only answer to that question is because that is not the story being told?  You could explain it away that when Terrako made the jump back in time that they only had a split second to decide how far back in time to jump.  "But then why didn't they jump further back in time after they knew they were safe!?"  I hear you shout at your computer/phone screen between sips of [insert your least favorite beverage here] and slobbering bites of [ insert food that other people eat that offends you to your core here].  Maybe it was a use it once ability?  "But then how did they use it again, later on, to pull Yonobu, Sidon, Riju, and Teba into the past to prevent the Champions from being imprisoned in their Divine Beasts!?  And while we're at it, why wasn't..." I'm going to cut you off there because unlike you, I have not dedicated the last four years to these questions so I am going to move on.

And speaking of characters being pulled into the past to help Zelda and Co. with their fight against the Calamity, yeah, okay, I guess that works too narratively.  For me though, at this point in the game, maybe just over halfway through, I felt I was just getting comfortable with the playable characters and now I have four more to navigate.  I guess it makes sense for this type of game where part of the point is bringing together characters who would not have interacted being able to fight together, I get that because it would have been an out of ordinary spin-off if you could only play as Link; which would essentially just be another Legend of Zelda game.  I think the turn-off for me, along with feeling like I already had a good feel for the nine or 10 playable characters at that time, and now I have 13 or 14 to manage.  Weapons to upgrade, and levels to keep track of which could turn any enjoyable 10-minute stage into a 27-minute slog as you die or fail to meet the time objective, again and again, ultimately forcing you to quit when you realize the weapon you have equipped was never upgraded.  This might have happened a time or two with a couple of the characters.

One of the clues that Age of Calamity was not going to be the prequel that I thought it was, and that characters were not going to be consistent with how they were in Breath of the Wild (after the heroes from the future appeared to help out their respective Champions) was when Calamity Ganon's Prophet of Doom Astor, betrayed the Yiga Clan and Master Khoga ended up becoming a playable character.  This plot twist of sorts did make sense in this timeline because, in this timeline, the Blights were driven back from their attacks on the Devine Beasts, so Astor needed a new influx of souls to bring the Blights back and the near limitless members of the Yiga Clan does seem like an excellent source for that purpose.  That being said, I was not really enticed to play as Khoga for several reasons.  First was that his starting weapons were at level 1, so despite him being at a comparable level to the other characters I had spent the last 50+ hours playing with, his attacks did not feel as powerful.  Plus there was a whole new move set to learn and become accustomed to and a brand new power gauge mechanic and specific for him, a stamina gauge to keep track of, that outside of missions where you were required to use Khoga, I mainly left him alone.

I do wish that there had been another way to upgrade your weapons apart from paying gold to have them forged/mashed together.  There were some other services where you could use monster parts and other loot components along with rupees, but weapon forging only took rupees.  And speaking of rupees, I never seemed to have enough, maybe maxing out at 15,000 at one point before blowing it all on weapon upgrades, rare food ingredients, and a mission or two that required you to fork over 5,000 rupees (stupid Great Faerie missions).  I guess part of me did appreciate that this wasn't a game whereby the halfway point you were just collecting money for the rest of the game because you already bought everything, but there were several times that I just ground levels for 30-40 minutes because I needed gold for any of the reasons mentioned above.  Mostly though it was to upgrade weapons

Although I should not blame my inability to keep track of what weapons I had equipped or what level they were as I know that I did not either fully understand or do a good job with the whole weapon seals (which was a part of the weapon forging process) thing until near the end of the game.  Weapon Seals are abilities that you can give your weapons when you take them to the blacksmith, but you are limited to three abilities, with passive skills like "Perfect Dodge Timing Window," "Special Attack Charge Rate" and "Reduced Ice Damage," you could customize and augment how you approach what Ganon's forces throw at you.  Me, I just jammed weapons I did not care about into the forging/leveling-up without looking at what was doing what.  Maybe there was a tutorial that I blazed through but there were times when I did not feel like I knew what I was doing and that the game did not do a good job explaining the whole process.  Again, this is probably on me.  I think the only time I ever switched weapons was if I found what I thought was a better base weapon than the one a character currently had equipped.  For Link, there were a couple of missions that had a requirement where he could only use a two-handed weapon and then I would switch to and Ancient Battle Axe++ (which came with the ++ designation, I did nothing to upgrade it to that).  For Zelda, sure, that Shiekah Slate has an extra part on it, that must mean it's more powerful.  That was literally my thought process.

Speaking of Zelda, I loved that you could FINALLY control her in combat (although I guess you could already do that in Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition) but I wish her move-set was a little more user-friendly.  Her attacks felt kind of slow and not very powerful compared to Daruk and but I frequently felt like I could not get the timing quite down for her to feel effective.  Her powers and move set did change in maybe the last third of the game after she unlocked her power and instead of using the Sheikah Slate.  I did prefer this form of Zelda as I felt her attacks were a little more straightforward, but there were times when she still felt grossly underpowered compared to the other characters at the same time in the game.  There was a late-stage mission after she awakens her power where you have to kill 1,000 enemies and I must have attempted that stage five times, replaying after failing to reach the 1k kills by the time the timer ran out, before giving up to grind levels to get rupees to upgrade her Sealing Bow of Light because it sounded more powerful than the Sacred Bow that she starts off with after unlocking her power.  

The only other thing that kind of annoyed me about Zelda, and I recognize that this is a fairly petty thing, was her catchphrase of sorts.  Each character has a powerful attack that you can use any time after filling a gauge and when you use it, each character has a different catchphrase that they say as they perform their attacks; although Link just does his grunt/scream.  After Zelda unlocks her power, her power attack is that she can draw from her power gauge and just unleash a strong attack (being more powerful than her other two default attacks), and each time you attack while drawing power from your power gauge, she says her phrase: "I must protect Hyrule, every way I can." (It could also be "anyway I can" but I can hear it either way, depending on what I want to hear).  By that point in the game when she gains this ability, her phrase had already gotten pretty stale, and having her say it five times in the span of fewer than 30 seconds did not help matters.  See, I can be petty too.

The last thing, at least for now, I can think of to talk about one of the characters I just did not care for, for one reason or another.  At 93 hours and after unlocking Calamity Ganon as a playable character, I felt that I had had all the enjoyment I was going to get out of AoC.  I had finished the main campaign.  I had finished all of the post-game missions to reassemble Terrako (which I honestly thought felt cheap just to get another playable character, but like the rest of the game, I was proved wrong and Omega Force again wrote a great sequence justifying this narrative choice) and after playing a couple of the missions where you engaged Astor in a few battles that felt like they should have been used earlier in the game I unlocked Calamity Ganon.  I did play a couple of missions as Ganon and I guess it was fun to use his moveset and take out a semi-large amount of enemies, but this just felt like a level from a game about playing different characters from a franchise, not playing a story.  And again, this was not the reason Age of Calamity interested me in the first place.  

So while I have not fully finished all of Calamity Ganon's missions and unlocked all that there is to unlock I feel like I am done for the time being.  There is the DLC which gives you some new playable characters (see above about feeling overwhelmed with character choice and how they relate to the story at large), new weapons for Link (see above about the Master Sword), the Divine Beast motorcycle for Zelda (maybe when she is sprinting or is it an actual weapon?), and some additional stages and features.  Maybe it is just me, but I feel like this DLC came out too late for me to be interested in it.  Maybe if it was released within the first two or three months after the game was out, but the game was released in November 2020 and the DLC came out in May 2021.  I guess I was still playing the game at that time, but I was already set in my ways with the characters I liked and see the first part of this paragraph again.

That is is folks.  That is all I have got for now.  More than I was planning on putting out there, and I am 98.47% sure that I will come up with something else I could have added when I reread this article in a few weeks, but I may just relegate that to a Twitter thread rather than a full article.  So thank you for joining me on the one-sided semi-coherent journey back through Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and maybe we will visit again sometime after Breath of the Wild 2 is released.  Or after I start and finish playing any of the other Legend of Zelda games that I have yet to play.  Or if I decide to do a chronology playthrough, being when I pick up Spirit Tracks again and just finish that playthrough to call it good because I am not starting that drudgery all over again.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Overlooking Hyrule (After the Calamity)" - Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (NS)

 

"Overlooking Hyrule (After the Calamity)" from Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity on the Nintendo Switch (2020)

Composer(s): Kumi Tanioka, Reo Uratani, Ryotaro Yagi, & Haruki Yamada

Album: No Official Release

Publisher: Nintendo & Koei Tecmo

Developer: Omega Force

I realize that this song is nearly identical in theme to the other MIDI Week Single article we posted back in January for "Overlooking Hyrule - Prelude to Calamity."  The bones are almost the same, but the end result is still different.  In, we will just refer to it as "Prelude," you have the Age of Calamity theme on the piano and only very light, wispy-sounding chords in the background.  Here, there is still the main theme played on a piano, but it now has a string section backing it and the piano is allowed to play beyond the four notes that it could only play in "Prelude."  And then you have additional instruments joining in around the 30 second mark, filling out the sound beyond what was once just a nearly isolated piano.  And then around 1:02, whatever that flute/oboe instrument is plays a motif reminiscent of Zelda's theme.

This version of the Age of Calamity theme plays after having finished the main campaign and during the post-game content, essentially doing what you were doing during the entire game: looking over a map of Hyrule wondering which of the 20+ quests that just popped up you can and should do next.  There is no longer the dread of the impending Calamity, and you do not really have to do anything if you do not want to although (spoilers) if you want to help out your friend then you are more than welcome.  And if you want to finish unlocking all of the playable characters (which always felt odd to me; check out a future article about this bit).

What I love about this variation on "Prelude" is that there is all of the pent-up relief that is just overflowing.  Maybe it is just the context of the game coming through in the way I feel about it, and I cannot be un-biased in that feeling, but I would like to think that it comes across to those unfamiliar with either Breath of the Wild or Age of Calamity.  Maybe part of it is also the last year and-a-half and trying to imagine what the following year will be like and hearing music like this, picturing the After Times, makes me at least hopeful.  And I guess I kinda needed that right now.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

But We Always Made It Through

Game EXP: Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (NS)

 

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

Systems: Nintendo Switch

Release Date: November 20, 2020

Publisher: Nintendo & Koei Tecmo

Developer: Omega Force

My Play Time: 93 Hours 

Before going any further, there are going to be spoilers, of sorts, for both The Legend of Zelda: The Breath of the Wild and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.  Since Age of Calamity is a semi-prequel (I will get into that designation later) to Breath of the Wild, I feel that I could not adequately talk about this game without revealing some level of spoilers.  So y'all've been warned.

Secondly, this is a difficult game to write about.  All told, there were 20 massive battle stages which often took upwards of 30 minutes to complete, and 150+ smaller stages that could take as few as 45 seconds to up to 20 minutes.  A lot of the smaller battles were not as story intensive but did contain some level of a story or at least an interesting location so that it did not always feel generic location in Hyrule where you fought monsters.  There are also a lot of points the story hits, from the introduction of each of the Champions to meeting younger versions of characters and visiting known locations in BotW.

I have also decided to break this article up into three sections as opposed to three separate articles, which is what this was slowly turning into.  First, there are my expectations about what I wanted the game to be and what it ended up being.  The second is how it relates to Breath of the Wild as a prequel that takes place 100 years before the events in that first game.  Third, is how the game stands on its own merits and as my first foray into a spin-off game in the Warriors franchise.

Expectations.

If you have not yet read my expectations of this game article that I posted shortly after starting it back in December 2020, I laid out what I thought the story in the game was going to entail, where it was going, and where I fully expected it to end by the time the credits rolled.  I recommend reading that article because there is some important information that I am going to cover and I am going to be referencing some of my assumptions.  Sort of.  First off, I was wrong on several fronts.  The game did not end with Zelda covered in mud and sobbing, and not all of the events that lead up to Link being placed in the Shrine of Resurrection for 100 years would end up occurring.  The Four Champions were not trapped within their respective Divine Beasts and presumably killed by Ganon Blights.  And by the end of the game, with the story that was told and all of the characters that were involved, I was okay with how this story ended.

When you look at the official Legend of Zelda timeline (which we all might need a little help in following) you see that with Ocarina of Time that there is a split in what Link decides to do after defeating Ganon, if Link is even able to defeat Ganon (which leads into the A Link to the Past timeline).  So with this alone, with there being three separate timelines in the official canon of this series, why should I be so dead set with Calamity Ganon taking over Hyrule?  Perhaps in the Breath of the Wild timeline, the diminutive Guardian was destroyed during the attack, which is why it never appeared in BotW?  

The presence of a character that traveled back in time to before Calamity Ganon attacked and took over Hyrule is the first key to coming to terms with a story that diverges from expectations.  But this divergence was not presented in a way that came across as a slap across the face with a molten sledgehammer.  A lot of the story seemed to happen the way that the events leading up to Calamity Ganon's arrival might have happened in the Breath of the Wild timeline (see below for greater clarification), even introducing the new character of Astor who helped to bring about the coming of Calamity Ganon who was never mentioned in BotW (more on Astor below).

How It Relates to Breath of the Wild

Because this game involves a character who travels through time, you could argue that if the Diminutive Guardian (DG) travels to the timeline in Breath of the Wild, then its presence alone alters the timeline that it transported itself to.  The in-game function of the DG is partly to explain how the functions of the Sheikah Slate, the item that Link uses in BotW to create bombs, ice blocks, etc can be used by other characters who do not have a Sheikah Slate.  So giving characters this advantage, no matter how small, will alter the past.  That being said, there are some questions about the timeline in AoC compared with that to BotW even in the events that had taken/were taking place when the DG showed up in the AoC timeline.

For the first half of the game, there felt like there was little consequence of the DG traveling back in time to when before Calamity Ganon took over Hyrule, so the events that were transpiring felt like they could have happened even if the DG had not interfered.  Zelda traveling to the four different regions of Hyrule to conscript the four Champions to pilot the four Divine Beasts against the forces who were intent on bringing about the Calamity was great to witness, seeing how each race and group interpreted what Zelda had to say and how she convinced them to go along with her plan.  During the quests there was plenty of foreshadowing, but not so heavy-handed that it felt like you were getting hit in the face with badly written cheese (looking at you Troy).

One of the highlights was being able to pilot the Divine Beasts, to witness what their intended power against Calamity Ganon's forces would have been.  Each Divine Beast functioned fairly similarly with a standard attack, an area of effect attack, a blocking maneuver, and a charge attack that would instantly kill anything it touched; with the obvious exception of Ganon Blights.  There were a number of "woooaaah" moments for me at least, witnessing the power of these machines and then knowing that in the BotW timeline, that even their power was not enough to repel Calamity Ganon's ruin upon Hyrule.  

And those moments when the Ganon Blights would have won (kind of) happened in the game, but then there were deus-ex machina moments for each Beast brought about by the Diminutive Guardian that I will not mention further, so in a way you did somewhat see what the end of each of the Champions would have been like in that timeline.

Then there was the inclusion of the character of Astor who we are shown might be the one responsible for bringing about Calamity Ganon (back?) into being.  This was a new character created for this game to fill in some of the gaps in the story from BotW, to explain how/why Calamity Ganon was resurrected/brought back/summoned, and for there to be a consistent antagonist who was not the constant threat of Calamity Ganon, especially for the first half of the game.  I actually really liked Astor as the game's antagonist and was sad that there were not as many quests (both big and small) that included him.  

I think what really intrigues me about him as a historical figure, is that no one in BotW mentions him at all, that he was forgotten as the catalyst to Calamity Ganon, which is explained away because the character did not exist until AoC, so it will be interesting to see if they are brought up in Breath of the Wild 2.  In the post-game, after beating the main campaign there were a few battles that included fighting Astor that would have felt more appropriate scattered throughout the game at different points, in an attempt to stop the Calamity from happening.  To me it felt like there were long stretches of the game where you kind of forgot that Astor was even in the game, especially leading into the end game.

The end-game itself, after the main campaign, felt like a mixed bag.  There were a series of quests that were directly related to the end of the story which made sense why some events would continue on past the destruction of Ganon.  There were even skirmishes with some of Ganon's remaining forces and I liked these battles because it felt more real, that peace would return to Hyrule immediately after Calamity Ganon's defeat would have been too clean of an ending.  Then there were battles, some with Astor and others that did not seem to make sense coming after the end of the game, but I can understand from the developer's standpoint needing/wanting to have end-game content with some of the main antagonists.

How the Game Stands on its Own

I had previously never played any of the games in the Warriors series, be it Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition, Fire Emblem Warriors, or any of the Dynasty Warriors on other non-Nintendo systems.  I think it was the basic idea of the series from the outset that did not interest me, in that what if warriors from different time periods (or different games within the same series) all fought together against a common enemy.  What was different about Age of Calamity was that it took place within the story of a single game, involving the player in events that were hinted at in Breath of the Wild.  That for me was the biggest draw, to essentially play one version of history with the characters that were there during a time that was talked about by only a few of the characters in BotW who had lived through it.

I do not know about other Warrior games, but the fighting mechanic here felt like a combination of knowing how the character you chose to fight fights, how well you can button mash, and how well you can remember which button-mashing sequence you are on to execute the specific attack you want to let loose with.  I did a lot of button-mashing by the way.  That is not to say that there was not any technique or skill involved, I would just frequently find myself mashing the Standard Attack button until I decided I should hit the Power Attack button and mash that for a while.

One of the more overwhelming aspects of the game that had nothing to do with the actual battles themselves was the growing roster of characters you could choose to use in a mission.  When you start the game, you have control over Link and partway through the first battle, you gain access to Impa and you learn about switching characters mid-battle while sending off the other character(s) to an area where an objective needs to be completed, like dispatching a mini-boss or retaking an outpost so that you do not have to run your character halfway across a sprawling map.  You gain access to new characters throughout the game and most appear to be at about a similar level with your highest level character so that you do not have to spend an hour grinding them up from level one.  You also have the option of unlocking a training facility where you can pay rupees to raise characters levels, which I did not use at first, but by the last third of the game, it was the only way I could get all my characters to where I wanted them to be without spending over an hour with each one.  By the end of the game, there were 18 playable characters, and with most missions using between one and two characters, leveling took a while (see the previous sentence); chapter missions you could sometimes use up to four characters, but those missions could take upwards of 35 minutes and the tradeoff of time spent to levels earned for only four characters did not feel worth my precious time.  For me, I found that I favored a few characters when I knew that there was going to be a challenge and I ended up focusing a lot of my time with Link, Impa, and Mipha.  My least favorite characters (without getting into spoilers) were probably the Great Faries and Revali; there are an additional three characters who I did not like using, but again, spoilers.

Once you decided which character you were going to use, you could also choose what weapon you would equip them with.  Most characters came with their default weapon and throughout the game, you could modify it by combining it with other equipable weapons for that specific character to improve it at a blacksmith station (I will just say that this mechanic kind of confused me until the last third of the game).  Most characters ended up with three similar weapons they could use while Link had the largest variety of swords, spears, axes, and a wooden spoon.  I think the biggest issue I had with this mechanic, especially for Link, was that once Link gains access to the Master Sword, there was really no reason to switch to another weapon unless there was a side-mission that specifically called for a particular type of weapon, like the Two-Handed Weapon Traning.  True, if I wanted to use a spear I would just use Mipha, if I wanted to use a great sword I would use Daruk, but in place of a weapon durability mechanic like in BotW, I would have liked to have had the option of carrying an additional weapon into battle, that you could switch depending on the specific battle.

One of the best things about this game was the scope of the battles, especially the chapter battles.  in BotW, I would sometimes wonder how there were so many enemies that would respawn throughout the world and AoC helped to explain this when in any of the chapter battles, you would kill upwards of 1,000 enemies, more than 30,000 if you were piloting one of the Divine Beasts in the later stages.  There were a lot of battles where I genuinely felt like a complete bad-ass in the midst of this massive war.

And I feel that the fighting in this game has spoiled me for BotW and I am a little afraid that when I go back into that game, that I am going to want to mow down hordes of Bokoblins and Lizalfos while utilizing the Sheikah Slate as you could in this game.

I do not think I would say that Age of Calamity has sold me on Warriors games for the future, especially if games are created from other IPs like Metroid Warriors, Street Fighter Warriors, or Dragon Quest Warriors.  For me, the story would need to make sense for when the game is taking place, and not just "let's pull in fighters from all over and they can fight together!" kind of sense.  All of the characters apart from the ones specifically created for Age of Calamity like Astor and the Diminutive Guardian were all pulled from the Breath of the Wild universe, not from every other Legend of Zelda game, otherwise, I would have played Hyrule Warriors: Definitive Edition.  There have been other Warriors titles that were created in a similar vein like Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage which follows the story from the manga of the same name (minus the Ken's Rage part).  The point is, while I loved what Omega Force did with the game itself as far as the story is concerned, I am still going to be selective towards additional Warriors titles in the future.

I know for a fact there are a lot of aspects of this game that I have only touched on and others that I have left out completely [cooking mechanic, spoken dialogue, deeper information on fighting mechanics, aspects of characters who I have intentionally left out to limit spoilers, frequently running out of rupees, grinding for animal parts, stupid Korok Seeds, and music (holy hell I fell like I could do multiple Game Scores articles about the music in this game)] and I probably could have taken up one or two more articles of this same size, but I feel that I have already taken up too much time.  

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity was a fun game, and I loved it a lot more than I was expecting.  I went it hoping for one game, was given that game to a certain extent, and then more story beyond that which diverged heavily from what I was expecting.  But everyone involved with this game, especially the writers did an amazing job with one of Nintendo's flagship IPs and I would love to see the same group of writers return for either another Legend of Zelda game or even have them create a new IP with all of the characterization and emotion they wrote into each/most of the scenes.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental

P.S. This was my attempt at a tl;dr and coming in at around 2,800 words, I feel like I managed to pull it off somewhat well.

Monthly Update: August, 2021

 

It's August.  It's 2021.  Over the last week or two, there has been an increase in the number of unvaccinated people in the United States contracting COVID-19, and how many of those new cases are the Delta variant is, at least of this writing, not entirely clear.  I have been debating with myself when I would go back to our original Monthly Update banner up there at the top and I think I will take my cue from the WHO who apparently will say that the pandemic is over when "the worldwide spread of a disease is brought under control to a localized area, we can say that it is no longer a pandemic but, instead, an epidemic[.]"  So there we go.

#ActiBlizzWalkout was a thing that happened this last Wednesday and as of this writing to show support from a lot of people in the video game industry in regards to the the victims of sexual harassment and discrimination as well as Activision/Blizzard's response to the initial filing of the lawsuit.  Aside from the general accusations about there being a frat boy culture at Activision Blizzard and the general disregard for women in the workplace, I am not caught up on the specifics of the alligations so I will leave it at that and do some (more?) research.  Oh except for the whole Cosby Suite thing which was a hotel room at BlizzCon "operated" by Blizzard developer Afrasiabi.

I feel I was somewhat productive over the last month considering (as of this writing) I remain unemployed but have a potential interview lined up for the week before this article comes out.  I did manage to finish a handful of games such as Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (article coming on Friday), Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (article coming sometime not this Friday), The Unholy Society, and Doki Doki Literature Club! (not the new iteration that came out on June 30th) and Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest (although some may say my prolific use of rewind/save states means that I am a n00b sucking piece of trash who should put down the controller and play an age appropriate game like Pinochle or Tiddliwinks).  I am frequently impressed that I was even able to make it this far in the game when The Kid and I played through it the winter it was released; the frequency that I have used saved states and rewind is a bit embarrassing.  Most of the time I will try to at least make it to the checkpoint before using rewind, but I do not have all the time in the world to hone my skills to the levels they were at when I was 15.  And then I started up Call of Cthulhu on the Switch as well as replaying Amnesia: The Dark Descent since it has been eight-and-a-half years since I last played the game on Steam.

Big video game related news last month was that the semi-long running rumors about a Dead Space reboot/remake/HD remaster were finally confirmed during EA's big press event, which you can read more about that here.  My biggest question though coming out of this announcement is if I will upgrade my laptop to something that can play the remake or just buy an Xbox X/S because I do want to play The Elder Scrolls VI because playing that game is going to be in a similar boat.  Because then there is also The Callisto Protocol which has been announced but not if it is going to be an exclusive.  And then there is Negative Atmosphere which I am still a little surprised has not been shut down by EA just because it looks so much like Dead Space even though it uses all originally created assets (at least from what I understand).  We are a year or so out from TCP s release date and no word on NA, and TES VI is probably the furthest away from being released.  So in the meantime, I reinstalled Dead Space 3 to pick that game up from where I left off when I apparently stopped playing two-and-a-half years back.

TV show-wise, Conklederp and I have been somewhat productive.  We started and finished Lupin, a Netflix series made in France about a guy who grew up reading the Lupin novels.  We also finished the first season of Loki on Disney+ and really enjoyed the show, although neither of us are hardcore MCU fans.  It was interesting to see this iteration of Loki since this specific Loki was from right after the attack on New York, from the events in the first The Avengers movie, which was before the two Thor sequels, although those events were brought up in the show.  The finale seemed to open up the next phase of the MCU and had an amazing performance by Jonathan Majors (who we loved in Lovecraft County).  We are also finishing up The Bad Batch, the sequel to The Clone Wars animated series that I was initially unsure about based on the characterizations of Clone Force 99 in Season 7 of The Clone Wars.  The biggest takeaway from the show is that I love seeing the Empire in the days/weeks/months/years following the end of The Clone Wars and the beginning days of the Empire.  And all of these Star Wars series including The Mandalorian as well as the rest coming out on Disney+ really hopes that Disney will see the benefit of releasing all of these series on Blu ray, because I honestly do not see people only keeping their Disney+ subscriptions so that they can rewatch episodes of The Mandalorian.  But I could very well be wrong.

Finally, the other month (June?) I finally admitted that my Kindle Paperwhite was nowhere to be seen in our house after looking for nearly five months, so I picked up a Kindle Fire 8 HD 2020 Edition during Amazon's Prime Day, so now I have access to digital library books, which is a wonderful feature.  So I picked up and started reading Star Wars: Aftermath by Chuck Wendig, and at 13% complete, I am surprised by how well the book is written and just the overall setting so far.  I must have had low expectations going into it because I have found myself looking forward to picking it up to read; the 21 day checkout period probably also has something to do with wanting/needing to read 5% every day, but I am genuinely engaged by the characters, some of which are dealing with PTSD following the Battle of Endor and the fall of the Empire, themes that I feel are not common in a lot of the movies and TV shows.  There will probably be a Book Review article coming, but only after I finish the one I have going for The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.

So that is kind of where I am at right now, or at least where I am/was at the end of July leading into August.  Wait!  How did I miss that SkateBIRD has a potential release date of August 12th!?

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Pulling in a Wave of Thought

Monthly Update: July, 2021

 

On Friday, June 22, 2021, the cop who murdered George Floyd because he was Black and looked guilty of anything was sentenced to 22.5 years in prison.  I do not know if that is a sufficient amount of time for taking the life of a man just because he looked guilty in the eyes of these cops, but at least it is something?  But George Floyd and hundreds of other BIPOC who have been murdered by police officers are not brought back by this sentencing.

Well, it kinda looks like things are opening up again in terms of the state of COVID-19 infection rates, although Delta seems to be doing a number in various parts of the world, part of which is not in the area where we are living.  Conklederp and I are fortunate enough to hang out around people who have been vaccinated otherwise we will still meet with people although it will be outside and with masks on.  I bring this up because, at the end of the month and the beginning of this month (and still currently going on), we decided to road trip down to see our respective friends and families and introduce Goblino to them all, albeit it not all at once because I don't know if Goblino (or us for that matter) would be able to handle that kind of socializing.

Over the last month, I realized something about the Game EXP articles I have been posting for the last X number of years.  First off, what I like about this series of articles is that the range between full-on reviews that go into mechanics, gameplay, music, and everything else about the game, and/or they cover how I played the game with only a little bit of background to keep the reader from being completely lost.  What I realized I had not been doing, was including basic game information, which is what I usually look for in articles and oftentimes have to resort to a Wikipedia article about the game to find out when it was originally released, or what systems the game was released on.  So I have decided that preceding my usual ramblings, I will be including the following:

• The title of the game with a hyperlink to where I purchased/acquired the game and the system I played it on.  So if I played Metro 2033 Redux through GOG Galaxy, I will link to the store page over on GOG and if I played The Sinking City on the Nintendo Switch, I will link to the page on Nintendo's eShop.
• I will list all the known available platforms the game is released on, but I will not be hyperlinking to those pages because I do not have the chutzpah to do all of that linking.
• I will post the release date, which I know can vary especially when it comes to NES and SNES games which can have different release dates for different regions.  Then it can get additionally complicated when you have release dates for the original game and more recent release date for the HD remaster or the re-re-re-release.  I am just going to list the release date for whatever version I played.
• Publisher:  In recent years I have been paying more attention to the publishers who release games and not just to the developers (see below).  And since I sometimes find that information helpful or if I am just interested in seeing other games a developer has published, I will hyperlink to whatever I can find in terms of a company page, which is sometimes a Facebook page, a Twitter account, or an actual real-life purchased URL.
• Listing the developer made sense too because knowing which company developed a game can sometimes be confused with the publisher.  Such was the case for me with the original Dragon Warrior which I always associated with Enix, but was developed by ChunSoft and published by Nintendo in North America, but was published by Enix in Japan.
  

I feel like this is something that I should have been doing all the time since it is similar information for the MIDI Week Single articles, but I stopped there with that information instead of including writers, directors, producers, and best boys because all of that information is either not readily available, or it is readily over of Wikipedia and I would rather not copy verbatim everything from there.

I did not actually finish too many games in June, just Metro 2033 Redux which you can already read about, two playthroughs of Bad Dream: Coma (and it may be a few playthroughs of the last chapter more to see if I can get the final ending), and then finished Doki Doki Literature Club close to the end of the month.  I may be close to finishing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity as there are some missions that show your percentage of completed missions in that particular region and in at least one, I am only at 60%, so there might be more game, or they are just accounting for the new missions that will come out with the Expansions Pass.  I am probably very close to finishing The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks if I can just pull myself to start playing again.  I think part of it is that I just have not been enjoying, for the most part, a lot of what was supposed to make Spirit Tracks a unique Zelda experience with the DS hardware.  Instead, I have a game that I have put 20+ hours into and not overly thrilled with the experience, which is sad because I really enjoyed Phantom Hourglass.

E3 was also a big'un, or at least for when I was paying attention.  There was actually a lot that I ended up not seeing during that weeklong event and I could list all of the things that piqued my interest but then I would just be rehashing that article, so I will leave it at that.

The current buzz that I am both excited and skeptical about actually lands on two fronts.  The first is that Amazon is creating a second season for Good Omens, which was a six-episode adaptation of the book by the late Terry Pratchett and still living Neil Gaiman.  As far as adaptations go, I thought Amazon did a pretty good job.  I remain skeptical about season two because the main plot in the book was already covered in the first six episodes, but I have read that Neil Gaiman is going to be the showrunner so that at least is a good thing.  The other thing is that there have been rumors going around for some time and then really picked up in the last couple of months that EA is planning on doing something with Dead Space, be it either a remaster or an entire reboot.  If you are familiar with me, you will know that Dead Space is one of my favorite IPs both in terms of primary video games and spinoffs and the two published books (by B.K. Evenson) as well as the graphic novels.  I was told that the rumor mill is saying that EA Motive (Star Wars Battlefront II & Star Wars: Squadrons) is the studio headed to develop whatever EA decides to do with Dead Space.  I hope that EA has learned that they need to leave the development of a game, specifically a survival horror game, to the developers and not try to put their whole fist in the pie.  And on the similar hand, EA Motive has only created sci-fi action oriented games, which is not survival horror (but I also personally don't consider Dead Space 2 or Dead Space 3 survival horror either, just Survival Action; They should have gotten people from IronMonkey Stuidos to work on this, but that is just my opinion because I loved Dead Space: Mobile.  The main thing that I am afraid of is that it is going to be a console exclusive (PlayStation or Xbox) which I honestly do not see happening, or that it will only be released on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC but the PC requirements will be far surpassing what my meager little acer can accomplish, so I will have to wait a number of years before I can actually play anything that ends up being released.

Okay, that ended up being longer than I had anticipated.

For July, let us make this quick.

I am considering cancelling my pre-order for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword mainly because I am still out searching for a job, I do not know if I can justify slapping down $59.99 for a remastered Zelda game that I have not played.  I want to, and part of me is saying that the price is only going to go up because of asshat collectors who buy so many multiple copies of the same game and because of the hype for the sequel to Breath of the Wild.  I am also not happy about Nintendo's decision to release the Zelda & Loftwing amiibo which offers an ability that you cannot acquire in the game unless you have this specific amiibo.  I do not like that and I am not really wanting to support that decision.  You know, I think I will cancel my pre-order since the game comes out on July 16th and I can wait a couple more months.  Thanks for walking with me through this constructive journey.  We will see you Monday.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Burden of the Evidence Grows

Monthly Update: June, 2021

 

As of May 26th, I became another fully vaccinated person in the United States, being two weeks after my second COVID-19 vaccine.  In the US, we are almost under 100 deaths per day, but then again, the weekends have typically been days with either underreported, undercounted deaths, so 131 deaths on Saturday, May 29th may just be an anomaly.

On a more somber note, the independent commission proposed to investigate the insurrection of the United States Capitol building on January 6th, 2021 failed to reach the necessary number of votes for the commission to be created because senate republicans blocked the vote with a filibuster that was unable to be unblocked.  Also, everyone who voted against the creation of the commission in the House of Representatives and all the senators who voted to uphold filibuster to prevent a vote on the creation and adoption of the January 6th Commission are cowards, along with anyone who votes re re-elect any of these cowards are deemed cowards forthwith.

And somewhat related to the failed insurrection on January 6th, was an episode of The Daily's new series, Day X looks at the prevalence of far-right and extremist groups (as in neo-nazis with small penis') not only in the US military but in Germany's armed forces as well.

AND STOP RESTRICTING ACCESS TO VOTING BECAUSE YOUR POLITICAL PARTY LOST THE ELECTION.

And stop killing Black people, Asian people, Mexican people, or any other people because they're a different skin color than the police officer who pulled the trigger.

FUCK.

Moving on to our own first-world problems.

We had a bit of a scare a couple of weeks ago.  While accessing our site, I was greeted with a bright right page with a scary red exclamation mark in a white triangle on a red field along with a warning on Google Chrome that I could not access Stage Select Start because, and I quote:

Attackers on stageselectstart.blogspot.com may trick you into doing something dangerous like installing software or revealing your personal information (for example, passwords, phone number, or credit cards).

This came as a bit of a shock because neither Dr. Potts nor I are online attackers, hackers, trackers, or smackers trying to trick anyone other than large game developers that our daily page views are upwards of 10,250.  They are actually higher.  I did do a bit or quick research on how to resolve the issue and what I kept coming across was not specific towards Blogger and involved manually removing the offending "thing" on your website and submit a fixed report to Google for them to remove the warning.  But, if you submit the report too early, before whatever it was that caused the site to be flagged, then you could have the warning on your page for much longer.  And this was happening for every article we have written including our previous page, Two Boys and their Blog.  I eventually went to Twitter to voice my frustration to the ether and ended up finding a handful of other Blogger users who had the same thing happen to them, so it seemed more like an issue on Blogger's side than something specific with our site.  A few minutes (~20 minutes) the issue resolved somewhere and our site was back up.  So crisis averted.  Thank you for sticking with me through that long winded and pointless description of a near catastrophic event.

Now that our site was back up an running, let us get back to talking about video games.

I found May to be a rather productive month, finishing at least four games (Biolab Wars, Donut County, Journey of the Broken Circle, and Long Ago: A Puzzle Tale) and making progress on four others (Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Metro 2033: Redux, and New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe) while starting two others (Bad Dream: Coma, and Doki Doki Literature Club).  I know I have not written/published an article for Journey of the Broken Circle but I have one in the works that will come out in the coming weeks.   I still feel like I am on the verge of completing Metro 2033, but I have felt that way for a while and I have not been able to find the time to sit down at my laptop to play a game, let alone finding the time to write and proof articles.  I cannot guarantee that I will have First Impressions articles for either Bad Dream: Coma or Doki Doki Literature Club, but I might because one is a point-and-a-click psychological horror game and the other is a romance interactive novel akin to Audition. 

So June.  

Once again I am debating if I want to participate in the next upcoming season of Fortnite, specifically Chapter 2 Season 7.  I guess it will depend on their presentation and what the Battle Pass has to offer as I have more than enough V-Bucks (in-game currency) to buy the Battle Pass without using real money.  Last season I decided to play to show support for Epic Games' decision to have a single player end-of-season/beginning-of-season event which typically had always been on a specific day at a specific time otherwise you had to watch on YouTube or Twitch to fine out what was happening in the storyline (yeah, there is a storyline in Fortnite).  Anyway, June 8th is the when Season 7 comes out, so we will see in the coming days what happens.

I had nearly forgotten about the existence of E3, but I am thankful that they have decided again to not have an in-person event and a number of the AAA developers/publishers are doing their own video presentations.  Nintendo's E3 Direct is slated to come out on June 15th. Because Bethesda was recently purchased by Microsoft it looks like Xbox and Bethesda are doing a joint presentation on Sunday June 13th?  And the last I heard was that Sony was not doing anything and instead will probably do another one of their queue-to-get-in-to-watch-our-presentation-event the following week, or maybe tomorrow?

Lastly, in the realm of games that I started a while ago and came back to are Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Mario's Super Picross.  Back in December, Donkey Country 3: Dixie's Double Trouble was released on the SNES Switch app and it got me thinking about the series and how I do not think that I ever beat DKC2 so I restarted the series and after playing through the first Donkey Kong Country, I moved on to #2.  So now I am facing King Zing, the boss of the fourth stage, Krazy Kremland.  In Mario's Super Picross, I had put the game down after hitting a wall of difficulty in Wario's puzzles; Mario's puzzles have a time limit but corrects your mistakes while penalizing you with negative time, while Wario's puzzles have no time limit but do not correct any of your mistakes.  So on Wario's Stage 9 puzzles, I was unable to complete six of the 15 puzzles after multiple attempts and that is where I have been for a couple of months; I already finished all of Mario's puzzles.  Then yesterday evening, I realized that I had also unlocked Stage 10 of Wario's puzzles so I decided to give them a try and completed the first two semi-large puzzles (they are sized 20 x 25) which was quite the confidence boost.

So that is really it, although there may be more that I am just forgetting about.  Finding time to write is occasionally difficult and I know every so often I feel like I have to reiterate that there may be times I skip days (like I did on Friday May, 28th) but that may be happening more frequently in the coming month(s).  So yeah.  Thanks for reading this far and have yourself another cup of coffee, because you deserve it!

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Monthly Update: April, 2021

 

Happy April everyone out there!

March was an interesting month on a couple of levels, as I mentioned at the start of last month's article.  I had been tracking the daily death toll from COVID-19 from about May 2020 through February 2021, but because I no longer have access to that computer and I did not have a cloud-saved copy, I have stopped tracking the daily counts.  But I just checked again and it looks like the United States is still averaging just around 1,000 people dying every day, with the frequent dips down to 400-600 on Sunday and Monday.  But I see that we are about 47,000 away from a death count of 600,000.  I know that this is a touch morbid and not really our standard fare as far as video games and board games go, but it is what has been on my mind for the last month so this is where those thoughts or at least some of them are going.  I am still not eligible for any of the COVID-19 vaccines in my county, but the current word is that hopefully they will be opened up to my age/health/occupation group starting May 1st.  So let us hope for that at least.

And the murder trial for Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd finished up its fourth day and going into Day 5 today, although I admittedly have not been following it as closely as I am not in my car as much listening to daily reports on NPR on a regular basis.  I am finding that I am only able to get snippets of news scattered throughout the day whenever I am running errands or if it is covered in what else I need toknowtoday.

On the video game side of things, there is some of the usual and some not.  I guess?  Fortnite Chapter 2 Season 6 with the subtitle of Primal came out in March.  I decided to "buy" the Battle Pass, mainly because Epic Games decided to have their big end-of-season event at the start of Season 6 and be a solo experience instead of on a specific day at a specific time and if you missed it then you could only watch it on YouTube or an archived Twitch stream.  *Breath*  I just love that Epic decided upon a single-player option, which is pretty big in my opinion for a game multiplayer/co-op game and I wanted to support that decision.  And secondly, because I had ~1,400 V-Bucks just sitting there earned from past seasons, I decided to continue playing my usual 30-45 minutes every morning.  I also jumped back into Rocket League for their Llama-Rama crossover event and discovered that while I am still not good per se, I am definitely still not bad.

I am firmly 29 hours into Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on the Switch, and if my calculations are correct, based off of the last time I played back in 2007, I still have around 96 hours to go.  Maybe?  That first time, I did focus a lot of time taking down marks, going on hunts, and trying to complete every side quest I came into contact with.  This time around, armed with the 2x and 4x game-speed-increase, I could see some time shaved off of that 96 hours, but I do still like to experience the massiveness that a lot of the cities have in this game.  That being said when I am in the Tomb of Raithwall and have convinced myself that I need to have the right combination of gear/spells/abilities so that I can defeat the Demon Wall and I travel back to Rabanstre through the Nam-Yensa Sandsea and Ogir-Yensa Sandsea and Westersand, then take an airship to the Sky City of Bhujerba, then back to Rabanastre, then another ship to Nalbina and then back to Rabanastre, then back across the Westersand and both Sandseas to the Tomb, you bet your boot skins that I used a combination of 2x and 4x just to discover that I had already purchased the spell but that I did not have anyone who could actually cast the spell.  

About midway through the month, I came back to Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity because I realized that once I put FF XII in the Switch, I had tunnel vision with that game and had not come back at all.  Kind of like what I had been referring to in my article towards the beginning of the month about buying digital versus physical games, and the frequency that physical games are played and switched out.  I am now finding myself in the opposite position though that I am playing a lot of Hyrule Warriors instead of Final Fantasy XII.  I impressed myself a bit in jumping right back into Hyrule Warriors and not forgetting (too much) the move sets for each of the characters, but now I am a little afraid that I might have forgotten some of the finer story-points in FF XII once I dive back in.  But I did just finish the Raithwall Tomb section, and I know why that quest was happening in the first place, so I think I might be on good mental footing.

In the second half of March, I pre-ordered Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace on the Switch.  Being an avid fan of Mansions of Madness, a board game in the Arkham Horror universe, I feel that I bring a different perspective to the game compared to someone unfamiliar with the setting and how the board game plays might experience the game.  Granted I have only played Mansions of Madness (both first and second editions) and Elder Sign, but have not played Arkham Horror or Eldritch Horror, so I am not sure how this video game adaptation of that universe compares to those games.  I have been tempted to Tweet out various moments in the game since I started, but I had been playing and Tweeting about an #IndieSelect game during that time (Chess Knights: Viking Lands) and I felt that my online presence for that needed to take precedent.  But now, four chapters into the game, I feel that I could Tweet some of the pictures and videos I took, but that would take too long and I would just end up not playing just so that I could catch up.  So maybe?

And when I started playing Arkham Horror: Mother's Embrace, I did put The Runaway Kid's run from the DLC portion of Little Nightmares on hold, although I have returned three times to the section involving the Janitor and have failed to figure out how to get past him.  Or at least, how to operate the puzzle so that I can escape, or if there is another piece entirely that I am just not seeing.  I have also progressed a bit in Metro 2033 Redux and am thinking that I might actually be getting close to the end of the game.  And while at the DMV today (as well as earlier in the week) I pulled out The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, but had to put it down because I was wearing a mask and I came across a puzzle that might have needed the Whirlwind ability as well as being able to play the Spirit Flute, both of which require you to blow into the microphone on the 3DS, an activity that would be frowned upon in a room with a number of other socially distanced people.

I also received a board game, Sagrada from The Kid for my birthday.  I have looked over the rules and while it is a drafting game and plays best with more than one person, I think I could play a few rounds by myself to work out the general kinks before Conklederp and I start in.  I have seen the game around, mentioned on some of the board game accounts I follow on Instagram so I am looking forward to seeing how the game actually plays and how any of the pictures I take of a game that is based around constructing beautiful stained glass windows will end up turning out blurry and washed out.

I see April progressing with all of these games, and I would not be surprised if I managed to finish Spirit Tracks, Metro 2033 Redux, and even Hyrule Warriors.  Maybe even Arkham Horror, but I only am able to put in about 30 minutes each night while Conklederp and I are in bed because I have the brightness down low, and there is a fair amount of reading on the small Switch screen which tends to tire my eyes out and make me sleepy.  If I do finish any of those games, I know that I will probably start up Dragon Quest IX on the 3DS (although it being a DS game), and will continue with Final Fantasy XII on the Switch, and maybe starting Blair Witch also on the Switch as our evening game.  I do not know what I will do PC game-wise, but bloody lord knows there is a massive queue between Steam, GOG, Epic, and now Amazon Games (being different than Amazon's Luna client and there is already an article in the works comparing those two services).

So hopefully April weather does not get you too down, or anything for that matter, and we will see you next week where there will be at the very least, your usual MIDI Week Single article.  Probably.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Put Your Helmets On Back There!