27 Aug 2017
Witness to a Travesty
I recently listened to Giant Bomb’s Game of the Year 2016 deliberations for the second time. On this repeat listen, I observed something that I found myself unable to ignore.
On the final day of their weeklong awards ceremony, the staff chose to give an award entitled ‘Overwatch Character of the Year.’
The GB Crew ended up choosing Reinhardt, Pharah, and Lucio as their top 3, with Reinhardt winning the category.
Alex Navarro, a man that I agreed with more often than not during these discussions, gave a spirited defense of Zenyatta for a place on that podium.
It’s self-evident that the list they assembled is uniquely Giant Bomb’s list, and I have no negative things to say about the three characters that they chose.
However.
Zenyatta is the best character in Overwatch, and to not include them in a list of ‘Best Overwatch Characters’ is a heinous oversight.
My case
My case is simple. It comes down to one word.
Balance.
Zenyatta’s philosophy is embedded in their mechanics in a more meaningful way than any other character in the game.
All of Zenyatta’s abilities revolve around their use of Orbs.
Zenyatta’s main method of attack is to use Orbs of Destruction. They can either fire the orbs one at a time or spend some time in focus, charging up their orbs. That charged attack, called an Orb Volley, fires the charged Orbs in rapid succession. If properly directed, the Orb Volley deals a significant amount of burst damage.
In addition, Zenyatta can distribute two special Orbs. One of them, the Orb of Discord, can only be placed on enemy characters.
This Orb amplifies the damage that its recipient takes. It also places a marker above the affected character’s head, giving Zen’s teammates additional vision.
The Orb of Harmony, on the other hand, is intended only for Zenyatta’s team. This Orb provides 30 points of healing per second, and Zen can change the recipient of the Harmony Orb to any teammate within their line of sight with no cooldown.
Transcendence, Zenyatta’s Ultimate, is another beast entirely. When activated, Zenyatta channels a higher state of existence. They cannot use weapons or other abilities, but their movement speed increases dramatically and they provide a 10-meter radius of healing at 300 health per second, ten times the rate of the Orb of Harmony.
On top of all of that, Zenyatta has reached a state of perfect internal balance, allowing them to FLOAT ABOVE THE FRICKIN’ GROUND.
You may be thinking…
“Zenyatta isn’t the most powerful healer in the game, nor are they the most efficient damage dealer.” You’d be right about both of those things.
What makes Zenyatta so great is that they strike a delicate balance between offensive power and defensive utility, providing them with the ability to affect the pace and flow of any encounter.
This also makes them more difficult to play than your average healer. To be a successful Zenyatta, players must maintain this balance, healing teammates, debuffing enemies and doing damage all in equal measure.
Who Zenyatta is as a character is expressed not only in their role as a hybrid DPS/Healer, but that sense of equanimity manifests in the play experience itself!
Zenyatta is the Best Character in Overwatch.
24 Jul 2017
Yakuza 0 has a lot to say about brotherhood, loyalty, and how difficult it can be to be an honorable person in an environment where vice is rewarded and encouraged.
The game conveys the vast majority of its message through beautifully-rendered cutscenes featuring prominent Japanese actors. The cast’s experience combined with incredible motion capture work gives the cutscenes a sense of gravitas that much of modern video game storytelling lacks.
High Contrast
The heavy moral weight of the story of Yakuza 0 is set in stark relief against what the characters do outside of these cutscenes. While under the player’s control, protagonists Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima run roughshod over Kamurocho and Sotenbori. Among other things, they collect telephone cards of notable Japanese porn starlets, play mahjong and shogi, and of course, beat up hundreds and hundreds of dudes.
This contrast makes Yakuza 0 a great game for sinking a lot of time into. Minigames like bowling and billiards are rendered to an intense level of detail. Sidequests are entirely disconnected from the main story but feature some great writing and animation. They also serve to add characters to the main subgames for each character: Kiryu manages and builds a real estate company, while Majima takes a struggling cabaret club under his wing. I spent just over 75 hours in Yakuza 0, and I enjoyed myself greatly.
There is clearly an audience for this kind of game, and the developers know it. A completion percentage is displayed after the final credits, and unlocking more powerful abilities requires the use of Completion Points. CP are gathered by performing different actions in the game; earning money playing roulette and beating up goons with a particular fighting style both aid in unlocking additional tools for the characters to use.
Murder in the Empty Lot
The story of the game revolves around Kiryu being framed for a murder.
The opening cutscene of the game shows our hero beating a man senseless in order to collect on a debt. Later that night, Kiryu and his sworn brother Nishiki overhear a news station reporting the death of the man Kiryu beat up. The only problem is that the murder is by gunshot, not from a beating.
This murder coincidentally took place on a prime piece of property called the Empty Lot, which creates a lot of problems for Kiryu’s bosses. Much of the game involves following the involved parties in their efforts to identify the Empty Lot’s owner in order to purchase or steal the property. It’s the last piece of a puzzle that would unlock billions of yen in profits for Kiryu’s yakuza family.
Majima’s story is more muted. He is being forced to stay in Sotenbori, a prosperous neighborhood in Osaka, in order to pay penance to his boss for a past transgression. A year of torture has left Goro with one eye and a bit of madness. Majima’s handler asks him to find and murder someone as his final task before being allowed to rejoin the Tojo Clan, and things move apace from there.
It gets a little convoluted, particularly in the last few chapters. The nature of being at a low level of a criminal organization leads to a large amount of information being withheld from the protagonists. As everything comes together, the pace quickens, leading to what feels like a rapid-fire sequence of revelations.
I loved the cast of characters and their tendency to soliloquize at length about the nature of being a yakuza, of being a man, of being honorable, but overall the story is kind of a mess.
Loyalty
A recurring theme of Yakuza 0 is the unerring loyalty of both men. Majima is fighting to rejoin his family in order to make a place for himself and his sworn brother, Taiga Saejima. Saejima only appears in the game in a flashback, as he is in prison for his part in the incident that led to Goro losing both his stature in the Tojo Clan as well as his left eye.
Kiryu exits the yakuza early in the game, believing that by taking the fall he can prevent his actions from impacting his loved ones. He is mistaken.
The men’s moral compasses lead them through great difficulty while pursuing what is right rather than what is easy. They encounter many who are loyal because they are expected to be, or give the appearance of loyalty while playing a separate game in the shadows.
Crime Stories
In the late 1980s, when the game is set, Kiryu and Majima are anachronisms among yakuza. They believe that power and honor are what make a great man, not wealth. While their superiors are chasing millions, the protagonists are merely chasing the truth.
This is the main juncture where the story missions conflict hilariously with the gameplay loop. Advancing Kiryu and Majima through the skill trees of their fighting styles involves money. Four giant men wander around Kamurocho and Sotenbori looking to beat you up and shake you down for cash. Coins and bills literally spray from your enemies as you defeat them.
For a couple of guys who proclaim eschewing material wealth, they sure do spend a lot of time collecting it.
Conclusion
In the end, Yakuza 0 ends up feeling a bit uneven. The incongruity of chasing the dollar for the entire game combined with long speeches about honor and power trumping wealth left me feeling a little empty.
20 Jul 2017
Today I watched a video on Giant Bomb dot com, my primary source for information about video games and the video games industry. Today they covered a game called Gigantic, a multiplayer action game not dissimilar to Smite or Battleborn.
I was drawn in initially by the minimalist menu design, contrasted with the high-saturation look of the characters. The gameplay resembles a MOBA like Dota or League of Legends but with a much stronger focus on coordinated action, less focus on micromanagement like last hits, item purchase optimization, et cetera.
The game is free to play and I’ve downloaded it from Steam, but have yet to launch it. I worry that the multiplayer nature of the game will prevent me from embracing it fully. Games like this reach their zenith when accompanied by a group of like-minded friends, together as much to have a good time as to actually play the game.
The gaming community I’m the most active in is the fighting game community, and while there are some good folks there, not a ton of them play on the PC or are interested in an experience like this.
I will still be diving into the game and playing with randomly matched ‘pubbies’, but I wonder if it will last.
My other concern is with the longevity of the game. The long tail has affected multiplayer games too, leading to a few massive success stories (Overwatch, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds) and the vast majority of games seeing their servers go silent with frightening speed.
This is not a new phenomenon. How many MMORPGs appeared and died in World of Warcraft’s shadow? How many first person shooters have landed with a wet thud when competing against Call of Duty or Battlefield?
I’m in a weird spot in terms of my relationship with video games. I’ve loved them since I was a child. My earliest memories are playing bad NES games with my brother. Over the last few months, though, I’ve found that I have been coming to video games as an opiate for day to day living.
I don’t approach them with a sense of play or joy or exploration as much as I do obligation, or as a way to pass the time, or catch up on podcasts.
Perhaps this is a result of being unemployed, or being self-taught as a programmer and writer. It’s difficult to overcome feelings of regret and/or guilt when I do things that aren’t immediately or directly applicable to gaining a skill or finding meaningful work.
This is a vein that will require deeper exploration. Enough navelgazing for today.