The Witcher 3. If you move in certain circles, you might believe that CD Projekt Red’s action-RPG is the best game ever made. If you don’t, and I don’t, then you might be vaguely suspicious of the game, turned off by rumors of sexism and by the fact that medieval fantasy games seem to attract the worst scrapings off the bottom of the Internet. I know that I was in this boat.
Well, suspicion aside, when I saw that I could get the game for $8 on a Steam sale, I knew that I couldn’t pass it up. If nothing else, it was supposed to be a hundred hours long — it’s not every day you see that kind of value for money! I‘d also always wanted to review the game, and presented with such a chance, I had no choice but to bite. So what did I think? Here were my top five takeaways:
The presentation is top-notch.
I had seen The Witcher 3 on YouTube and Twitch, of course, but successful content creators typically have great PCs and top-of-the-line gear to really make the games they play shine. I may be a content creator, but a successful one I am not, and my PC is solidly low-mid-range. However, it was able to play the game on nearly maxed settings, with a framerate that dipped only in the rain (although, as with all open world games, it always seemed to be raining or after dark for some reason).
And, despite the fact that The Witcher 3 came out in 2015, which is somehow six years ago, I think it can easily compare with the modern big boys in terms of graphical power. Sure, it’s not photorealistic, but I think photorealism is a waste of effort when it comes to video games; CDPR’s creation is colorful, crisp, and not at all muddy, and that’s the most important part.
Also, the music, to use a technical term, slaps. The medieval-folk-song vibe of the soundtrack was unexpected, but surprisingly great. The Gwent song was, of course, as much a highlight for me as it was for many other players, but there was no track that I actively disliked or even felt was anything less than perfectly fitting. With production values this high, I certainly felt that CDPR had the ambition necessary to make their massive project a reality.
The best story beats are tucked into the sidequests.
This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on your perspective, but I think it was a very intentional decision by The Witcher 3’sdevelopers to beef up the sidequests. Most of the main quests are fun, but packed with a lot of spectacle rather than story — major events like battles and dungeon expeditions take center stage. If you want to get to know the game’s characters, you have to do the sidequests.
Fortunately, unlike in many other RPGs, I found the sidequests very enjoyable. There are a few fetch quests, of course, but they usually take you to interesting locations or reveal the game’s lore while you search for the macguffin. But other quests really dive deep into the game’s characters. You can explore the relationship between Geralt and his various sidepieces, help side characters solve their problems, and even (rarely) get insight into Geralt himself.
That last function of sidequests is especially important. The game’s hero can feel a little bit like a cardboard cutout at times. He kills all the monsters, gets all the girls, wins all his battles against other humans — there’s nothing he can’t do. The game’s villain, Eredin, is revealed in its opening dream sequence, but it’s not initially clear what Geralt thinks about having to fight him. If you didn’t do any sidequests, that ambiguity would remain, and when (spoiler alert) they do meet in battle, it would feel a bit like a small child smashing action figures together; plenty of shouting and noise, but little emotional weight. However, and this really is a mild spoiler, there is a quest in Skellige where it is revealed that Geralt is actually terrified of Eredin, even as he seeks to destroy him. When you have that background, the clash between the two seems more significant.
But sidequests aren’t just good because they flesh out the main story; many aren’t even related to your pursuit of Ciri. Instead, they form coherent experiences on their own, and there are some very weighty and significant events that rely on your choices in these entirely optional missions. You’re presented with decisions that are almost never no-brainers, and it feels good to fret over some of them, which is certainly not the typical sidequest experience.
The game is ambitious with its open world, which is only sometimes successful.
I know I sound like a broken record talking about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it really is my very most favorite video game of all time, so I feel that I can speak from a position of some authority on it. My firm belief is that no game has so thoroughly realized the potential of an open world as Nintendo’s masterpiece has. Despite The Witcher 3’sambition and innovativeness, I found that it just missed the mark.
Some things are great about the game’s world, don’t get me wrong. The simple design innovation of allowing you to summon Roach whenever you feel like it makes riding your trusty steed much less of a pain than riding horses is in most open-world games. Fast-travel points are liberal, but not so liberal that you never have to experience the open road or go trekking off into the wilderness. And exploration has its benefits; I got embarrassingly deep into the Gwent minigame, for example, so every time I found a new village, I’d be rushing to the smiths and the inn to go see what new cards I could score. It made wandering around a real joy.
But other things feel a little hollow. Geralt is hardly nimble, and his jump is nothing worth mentioning, so crossing uneven terrain can be a chore. There’s no ridiculous cliff climbing like there is in Skyrim, but you also have to find staircases or switchbacks to climb even moderate inclines. Worse still is the railroaded sliding animation when you step onto too steep a slope; the resulting “snowboarding” is surprisingly fun if you find a high enough hill to go down, but it’s absurdly awkward when you’re just trying to pick your way over some rocks. In The Witcher 3, you almost always have to stay on the paths.
Similarly, some areas seem wider than they are deep. Novigrad, the game’s largest city, is amazing and intricately realized, but other than quests, there’s really nothing to do there. There are inns, but only four, a bank, a couple of smiths who are never there when you want them to be, generic merchants, a barber shop, and a few collectibles — that’s it. Combine that with the fact that Roach moves at a snail’s pace within the city walls, and that everywhere you go you’re harassed by the same beggar who toothlessly yells at you to save him because he’s “dyin’…of poverty,” Novigrad becomes a bit of a chore to explore once the novelty wears off. To be clear, the quests that take place in the city are great — it’s just that the time between doing them pales a little bit in comparison.
Some characters and plot points feel ill-considered.
It’s very clear that The Witcher 3 wants to be edgy; the grizzled protagonist, the laughably emo villains, and the story filled with foul-mouthed assholes all make that clear enough. In and of itself, this isn’t a bad thing. I’ve recently been playing and enjoying Wolfenstein: The New Order, which also has a grimdark storyline, and that game ends up being entertainingly over-the-top without losing the dramatic edge it gets from its portrayal of robot Nazis.
But “being edgy” on its own is no justification for the choices a game makes. I know that the Bloody Baron questline is a dead horse that’s been beaten into the ground by now, but I feel it’s still worth discussing here. In the questline (one that players will encounter in their first 20ish hours, but watch for spoilers ahead anyway), Philip Strenger, aka The Bloody Baron, is a bandit leader who manages to take over Velen with the help of the Nilfgaardians. He asks you for help in finding his wife and daughter, but it soon becomes clear that his drinking and physical abuse are what drove them away. Later on, he argues that his wife was cheating on him while he was away at war and would scream at him until he hit her. This is all presented as a morally gray situation.
Well, the thing is, it is, but not in the way CD Projekt Red probably intended. In my book, and this might just be me, there is no excuse for domestic abuse. It’s something that’s destroyed countless lives over the years and left innocent people damaged and with nowhere to turn. Alcoholism is also something that people in my family have experience with, and I just don’t have that much sympathy for those who mistreat their loved ones when under the influence. Oh, certainly the situation isn’t clear cut, and the actions of Strenger’s wife are hardly exemplary either, but the situation made me question who at CDPR thought that I could be swayed to sympathize with an abuser simply by his argument that “she started it.” We don’t even get to hear from Anna herself, just her daughter, who was a witness but not a direct victim. I found myself wondering whether the real moral grayness was me giving $8 of my money to these people.
The other thing I objected to was the game’s portrayal of female characters, which verged on the ridiculous. Keira Metz’s shirt, for example, is so revealing as to be laughable, and she’s not even wearing that when the player first encounters her. Yennefer’s clothing is bizarrely skintight, and Triss, while otherwise more normal-looking, still wears the high-heeled boots that every woman in the Northern Realms seems to don habitually. It’s very clear that no one who designed the characters has ever actually had to run around in heels; believe me, it’s not comfortable. Also, there wasn’t a single female character who wasn’t at least vaguely implied to want to sleep with Geralt, even Ciri, which was especially gross because he’s known her since she was a small child. It’s fine if some of them have the hots for him, of course, because it is a power fantasy, but come on! CDPR didn’t seem to account for the fact that some of their game’s playerbase may not be particularly interested in whether Geralt gets to see yet another sorceress naked or not.
The balance was way off.
Honestly, I feel that whatever decisions a game makes or doesn’t make around its characters and story are ultimately not all that relevant to whether it’s an enjoyable experience or not. Just look at The Last of Us Part 2. The game was reviewbombed for killing off Joel, but the effect that had on the actual gameplay was minimal — Ellie can creep around with a silenced pistol just as easily as her adoptive father figure. Instead, I think the most glaring problem with The Witcher 3 is its extremely inconsistent difficulty.
For context, I was playing on Death March, a mode that should theoretically provide nail-biting challenges left and right. In reality, though, all that changed was the amount of damage enemies dealt. While this did mean that Geralt died in three to four hits, it also meant that I could slash and stab my way to victory just as easily as on a lower difficulty, as long as I was careful to avoid attacks. Low-level goons of the kind you fight packs of in Novigrad died in two hits, meaning that they really struggled to present a reasonable challenge. Even large monsters above my level were easy fodder by the late game.
Why was this? First of all, the game provides Geralt with a bevy of tools that are far too easy to abuse. Alchemy, and specifically the game’s powerful decoction system, allows players to combine effects for absolutely broken results. I combined the Ekhidna and Ekimmara decoctions; the former allowed me to heal by casting Signs, the latter gave me the ability to siphon health from enemies I attacked. Combined with my light armor, which allowed me to regain stamina more quickly and thus cast more Signs, and the fact that the Sign I cast was always Quen, I was invincible much of the time and otherwise able to heal much faster than enemies could possibly damage me.
But the equipment I found also contributed to the issue. If you have Witcher Gear, the game’s “trademark” armor and weapons, you’re far better protected and armed than you would be with anything else you can pick up. My Geralt wore the light Cat School set, but even that gave more protection than the majority of the armor (even the heavy armor) that I would find randomly in treasure chests, and the swords did far more damage as well. There was a hilarious moment when Crach an Craite, a ruler in Skellige, gave me his family blade — accompanied by a cutscene with much fanfare — and I immediately sold it because it was far worse than what I had, but worth a lot of money.
In fact, those basic weapons and armor pieces that I picked up were only good for earning money. This ties back into a problem I had with the open world; since exploration usually just netted more useless weapons and armor, what was the point of searching for more treasure in undiscovered locations? If I did need money, usually to pay the eye-watering prices required to upgrade my Witcher Gear, I would just find a dozen or so treasure chests, then sell the loot within and immediately be rolling in upwards of 5,000 gold. Money had been a concern in the early game, but later on the barrier simply became how much cash merchants had on hand to buy my junk. If I didn’t need money, I would often actively avoid picking up loot, just to avoid the hassle of finding merchants who could afford it and of managing my inventory to avoid becoming overencumbered.
These two factors — combat being too easy, even on Death March, and endless amounts of gold from basic treasure chests — led the game to feel like a bit of a chore at times. I liked the story missions, with their weighty plotlines and difficult choices, but if I could just blow through every fight (and I could, very easily), then none of it felt like it mattered very much. That was why I found that Ciri’s sections, which forced you to use a character with a preset level and abilities, were actually just as fun as the rest of the game, even if they were a bit shallow. Because they presented a fixed challenge, they felt much better-balanced and more enjoyable.
So…what did I think? I’ll start by saying that it’s not every game that can keep me engaged for as long as The Witcher 3 did. I was promised 100 hours of gameplay, but I honestly found myself rushing a little bit by the end — enough of a good thing is still enough, after all. In all, I spent 85 hours playing the game, and I mostly enjoyed my experience. The few problems I did have with it didn’t detract from what was, on the whole, a very fun game.
It’s not clear how CDPR moves on from what is unquestionably their magnum opus. After the debacle of Cyberpunk, I would hope that the studio would now be spending more time on bugfixing and playtesting, and also potentially be paring down their ambitions just a bit for whatever comes next in their Witcher series. The Witcher 3 itself is a buggy game that was apparently nearly unplayable on release; it would be a shame if the developers repeated the same mistake a third time.
Whatever happens in the future, though, The Witcher 3 stands as one of the better games of the teens, and maybe even the best thing to emerge from the Eastern European games industry since Tetris. It’s probably not for everyone, but it should please the hardcore action-RPG fans it zeroes in on — as long as they’re not looking for Dark Souls-level difficulty.
I give The Witcher 3 four Gwent spy cards out of five. What can I say? I like to draw my whole deck!
Photo by Ricardo Cruz on Unsplash. Stock photos of copyrighted IPs are unsurprisingly rare.
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity had some awfully big shoes to fill. Coming (quite belatedly) on the heels of Nintendo’s uber-mega-smash-hit, the game had to both illuminate some of the backstory that didn’t appear in Breath of the Wild and be a decent game in its own right; not an easy task. Did it succeed, though? Well…you’re going to have to read the article to find out.
As a side note, I’m changing up the format of my Still Worth Playing articles. Instead of covering everything about a game, which leads to me spending a lot of time and space on things I don’t really have a lot to say about (like, say, graphics), I’m instead going to highlight the five most important points that informed my judgement. Without further ado, then, let’s get into the first one:
The game looks and sounds very Breath of the Wild.
Okay, I know what I said five seconds ago, but I really think graphics are relevant here. Nintendo has a long (and checkered, as the recent Morshu meme explosion on YouTube reminds us) history with farming out its IPs to third parties. But never before have they essentially sent the entirety of a game’s assets over to another company.
That changed with Age of Calamity. Almost everything that could be copy-and-pasted has been, and while some might call that lazy, I actually really appreciated it. Since most of the characters had their exact same models, except Impa (who is, of course, 100 years younger) and a couple of other new additions, they were instantly recognizable and gave me a lot of nostalgia for the first game, if one can really be nostalgic for a game experienced four years before. Also, this meant that Breath of the Wild’s clear, minimalist visuals were, of course, well-preserved. As they say, if it ain’t broke…
The music, on the other hand, does show some welcome innovation. Most of Breath of the Wild’s music isn’t suited to combat with masses of enemies, so while some songs have been carried over verbatim, like the Hinox and Talus themes, many others are brand new. They don’t feel that way, though; everything fits perfectly within the original BotW template, even the more unusual tracks — like the Divine Beast music, which happens to be some of my favorite in the game.
The roster is amazing.
One of the big disappointments of the mainline Legend of Zelda games has always been that you don’t get to play as anyone other than Link. Sure, Link is cool and all, but he can feel a little bland, especially compared to the colorful personalities that inevitably find their way into any Legend of Zelda title. Age of Calamity completely does away with this limitation. There are eighteen playable characters, and while it was pretty obvious that some of them would make it in — the Champions were a given, for instance — there are others that come completely out of nowhere.
But that’s not a bad thing! Gaping at the screen in astonishment that x character is actually playable is usually followed by doing their training mission and marveling at just how complete and fleshed-out their moveset is. The Warriors games have never had some Tekken level of complexity — most combos use two buttons, with ZR thrown into the mix if you want to get flashy — but even within those narrow bounds, different characters feel completely different. Some are giant, some are tiny; some are fast, some are slow; the list goes on, and honestly I think just trying out the different characters, watching their animations and using all of their special moves, is one of the highlights of the entire experience.
The gameplay can feel a little grindy.
Coming from the first Hyrule Warriors game, which I played on the Wii U along with all five other Wii U owners, I can definitely say that things improved dramatically in the grinding department with Age of Calamity. You don’t actually need to grind at all to finish the game — the XP you get from story missions and whatever sidequests you do choose to do is more than enough to meet the recommended level for all the missions, as long as you focus on fewer than three or four characters, which I did. There are even some nice anti-grind features, like being able to pay to level up characters to the level of your most experienced character, which is really nice.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to every aspect of the game. I got a quest early on that required me to get ten ice lizalfos tails. Well, once I beat the story — completed the game, except for some side content that I’m still working on — I still didn’t have ten ice lizalfos tails. I had seven, three of which I’d gotten by grinding. It would probably take an hour or two just to get those other two tails, which isn’t awful by the standards of Japanese video games, but it is by the standard of whether I have anything better to do with my time, which I do.
Also, getting weapon seals is a pain in the rear. Essentially, you can add up to four “seals,” which are little stat boosts, to each of your weapons; there are four types of seals and probably thirty subtypes, each of which has a different effect. These increase in power if they’re all of the same type, and you generally want all the same subtype, too, since the boosts are little things like +3% Attack Range that don’t add up to a lot unless you stack them. But, since most weapons have no seals and those that do are, twenty-nine times out of thirty, going to have the wrong one, getting those weapons together is a real chore. I wish this aspect of the game had been looked at more.
There are some balancing issues.
While I loved the variety of characters, I have to admit that some of them felt a little bit underpowered. For example, Daruk is so large and unwieldy that he soaks up a lot of damage without being able to dish out any extra in return, and his magma-pillar ability is flashy without actually seeming to do all that much. But, honestly, every single character, even otherwise-reliable picks like Link and Mipha, pales in comparison to the Fifth Horsewoman of the Apocalypse herself: Impa.
Impa normally has a pretty underwhelming damage output, but her special ability allows her to summon blue spectral “clones” of herself that mirror her attacks. If you have all six clones up and running — not that hard to do, though you do have to refresh them sometimes — you’re already dishing out more pain than other heavy hitters like Link.
What’s really broken about Impa, though, is the fact that (and don’t quote me on this, but I believe it to be true) each individual hit delivered to an enemy counts towards your special attack gauge. When you have one character, filling up the gauge takes time; when you have seven, though, as Impa does, the gauge can fill in less than a second. Each full gauge represents something like ten percent of a boss’ health, on average, so you can lay the smackdown on your enemies much faster with Impa than with any other character, especially if you then abuse that by getting seals on your weapon to increase your special charge rate further — not that I would know anything about that.
Normally, I have to go on the Internet to learn about broken strategies and cheeses for my favorite video games, but Impa is so broken that I found out about her myself, then Googled to find that thousands of other people had already made the same discovery. After you realize that Impa is literally god-tier, no other character really feels worth playing. That’s a shame, because Age of Calamity’s character variety is, like I said, one of its strong points.
The story is…there.
Psst! The review will contain spoilers from here on out.
When Breath of the Wild came out, the biggest complaint from the community, besides the kvetching about weapon durability and sliding down walls in the rain, was about the story. The game was clearly trying to do something no other Zelda title had tried to do: Depicting a world in which the Hero and the Princess had been unsuccessful in sealing the darkness. Because of the relative lack of story content, though, we didn’t really get a full picture of that world, other than what we could see with our own two eyes, which was, admittedly, quite a bit. This was later partially fixed in a DLC, and now we get an even better view of the events leading up to the Great Calamity.
Except…we don’t, not really. The story content is really nothing new — just more of Zelda being a tortured soul and Link being awkwardly silent. Impa now completes the trio, but she doesn’t add much except prompting Zelda to complain more about the weight of her responsibilities, not that Zelda really needed much prompting. There’s a better view of the Champions as well, but we didn’t really see new sides to them or anything. Honestly, I think that the character who most benefited from Age of Calamity was, of all people, Master Kohga, who became much more sympathetic and honestly the most three-dimensional character in all of Breath of the Wild. Really, for all the cutscenes, we don’t get much new stuff.
I also wasn’t sure I liked the brand-new story content. I came into the game expecting to play a tragedy; after all, I knew that the Champions, Link, and Zelda were doomed to fail, and that that failure would lead to the events of the main game. As I played through the game and watched things happen differently — Link picking up the Master Sword before the calamity, the Champions being rescued, the battles of Akkala Citadel and Fort Hateno being won by the Hylians — I kept asking how the story could possibly lead back to the conclusion I knew was coming.
Well, the answer was that it didn’t. Instead, though some incredibly obvious deus ex machina, aka Terrako, the annoying little copyright-safe Aren’t2-D2, it turned out that the fact that the Champion’s successors had traveled back from the future to help them in their quest had turned the tide of battle, and that Age of Calamity takes place in an alternate universe where the Calamity never succeeds.
How lame is that? It would have been incredibly affecting to watch these characters fail, to do our best to save Hyrule but to come up short, and possibly to get to play as the bad guys and kill off some of those irritating Champions, specifically Revali. But no, instead we got a very safe ending that didn’t take any of those narrative risks, and which didn’t illuminate the most pivotal part of the story, when Zelda becomes trapped battling Calamity Ganon and Link nearly dies defending Fort Hateno. I feel like Koei Tecmo was handed something good and turned it into something pretty forgettable.
The verdict is:
Ultimately, I think Age of Calamity did more or less what it said on the tin. This is a good — not just decent, actively good — musou that took the story and characters of Breath of the Wild and expanded on them in a few small, timid ways. I can’t say it’s a masterpiece, and it hardly summoned the magic of my first playthrough of the main game, but it’s more than worth $60 — and, on Very Hard, it’ll kick your teeth in, which is exactly what I like from my action RPGs.
I give Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity four icy lizalfos tails out of five. Buckle up — only an hour of grinding to go until you have them all!
Photo by Mark Decile on Unsplash. This guy is presumably not having an easy time of it.
I recently picked up Nintendo’s Christmas offering, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. As usual, it featured a difficulty setting on launching the game, which I promptly turned up to Very Hard. It ended up being a great choice.
See, the Hyrule Warriors games (and the Dynasty Warriors games they spun off from) have always felt a little mindless. Much like in Assassin’s Creed, you can skate by on lower difficulties simply by mashing the basic attack button, slicing and dicing your way through crowds of enemies without worrying much about taking damage or even missing. Walking forward and pressing Y would probably be a quick ticket to victory on Very Easy, and might even get you most of the way through the game on Medium.
That’s a shame, because the game’s systems are more complex than they seem. In addition to a basic attack, each character has combos they can do (with only two buttons, but it still takes at least a little bit of thought to execute them), a special attack, and a special action that can help chain into further attacks or deal damage to foes in new ways. Also, depleting enemy Weak Point gauges provides a way to deal big chunks of damage to them, which can speed up boss fights dramatically. It’s just that you don’t need to do any of this when you can cut through enemies like a hot knife through butter.
On Very Hard, though…oh boy. The game is far, far more challenging, and I found myself really having to pull out all the stops to win. Basic attacks do almost no damage to bosses, so the only thing that matters is focusing on Weak Point gauges, although it still takes at least five to ten Weak Point Smashes to win a boss battle. And I usually ended up dying in two hits. It’s so intense that I even found myself using consumable items, the magic rods, to take out enemies; every foe has an elemental weakness, and exploiting them makes the Weak Point gauge easier to deplete. As you can see, Age of Calamity is a completely different beast on this difficulty.
And it’s better for it! Having to use all the resources at your disposal, having to go into a boss fight with three hearts left and figure out how to do a perfect run — it’s actually very addictive. Since you spend so much trying the same fights over and over, you have to learn the ins and outs of your chosen characters like in no other game (and to learn that selecting Impa is always the right choice). I wouldn’t enjoy the game nearly as much if I wasn’t pushed to make use of everything available to me.
Age of Calamity on Very Hard isn’t the only game that’s better because it’s difficult. Dark Souls (the first one in particular) is a classic example of a crazily difficult game, but if it were easier, the cracks might start to show. For example, movement outside of combat can be a little janky, and the arcane RPG systems that determine how many hits it takes you to kill a boss are less than self-explanatory. Because the game is so hard, though, you don’t have time to focus on that. Instead, every fight (except for the Capra Demon, and Pinwheel, and Bed of Chaos; there are a few duds) is a nail-biting challenge because you can’t pay attention to anything except dodge, dodge, hit, back off, heal, and so on, building up that feeling of “flow” that only the best video games can deliver.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, too, is famously difficult in the early game. Basic enemies can kill Link in one hit, forcing the player to approach them craftily and use the game’s systems to their advantage. If you could just kill everything by wailing away at it with a tree branch, that need to adapt would vanish, and no one would discover that, for example, giving an enemy a metal weapon during a lightning storm might cause them to be struck by lightning, or that enemies can be tricked into charging up Stasis power on objects that can then be fired back at them. In fact, we know this to be true because later on, when Link has more health and less of a need to improvise, combat starts to drag a little bit. After all, if high-tier enemies have over a thousand HP, clever early-game traps involving, say, bombs that deal 24 damage each are not going to be very effective; instead, you just need to attack with whatever is the strongest weapon in your inventory.
As a final example, the higher difficulties in Civilization give players a completely different experience of the game, and one that really hones their skills. No longer can you accept a horrible start position just because you don’t feel like loading into a new game. No longer can you waste dozens of turns on Wonders you don’t need just because they might look nice next to that mountain. No, the early game instead becomes a bruising experience that forces you to optimize your build order, focus on defense first, and finagle your neighbors into not declaring war on you. If you survive, you’re rewarded with the usual Civ late game, which for me typically involves carpet-bombing my medieval neighbors with thermonuclear missiles, but you had to work so much harder to get there that it’s much more rewarding to finally do so.
In short, high difficulty makes games better. I find that, if a game isn’t testing me and pushing me to develop my skills, I tend to lose interest in it. Easy games sometimes make me feel like they don’t really care if I master their systems, and, after all, if the game itself doesn’t care whether you’re good enough to beat it, why should you? If I could get through Age of Calamity on Very Hard simply by mashing Y, I wouldn’t even have figured out what the Weak Point gauge was — and therefore would have missed out on the satisfaction of emptying it.
All this is not to say that simply making a game hard is enough to make it good. I love Total War: Warhammer — and I’ve written thousands of words about that on this blog — but its Hard, Very Hard and Legendary difficulties are poorly-designed. Yes, the game’s difficulty does increase on these higher settings, but the way in which it increases, which is by making the player’s melee infantry incredibly awful, makes the game less fun. Armies of nothing but archers become viable when you know that you’ll lose any melee engagement and that you need to do as much damage as you can before then.
Similarly, high difficulties on Fire Emblem: Three Houses, my favorite TRPG of all time, tend to add challenge in the wrong way. This is because you level up your characters over the course of several in-game months, so a decision made in, say, March can have repercussions in October. If you make the wrong decision, though, there’s no way to go back, leading to situations where the game is almost softlocked, since you leveled up your characters poorly and are now too weak to face a tough battle. This is based on my experience on Hard — I haven’t played Maddening — but I assume the problem is worse on that difficulty, since, as I described previously, the higher the difficulty, the more important every little choice becomes.
Still, these problems don’t exist because the games I mentioned aredifficult; rather, they exist because that difficulty is implemented poorly. Despite the problems with Very Hard, my favorite difficulty, I would be bored by Total War: Warhammer on Easy, and the same could be said for Three Houses. A perfectly-designed game (whatever that means) would, in almost every case, be more fun on a higher difficulty, at least for me.
I know this isn’t true for everyone. I know that some people don’t want a huge challenge; they just want to turn the console on and their brain off, relaxing after a long day at work with some Kirby or something. And I’m not saying that that’s a bad way to enjoy video games; there is no bad way to enjoy video games. I’m just saying that games in the genres I prefer, strategy games and action RPGs, are almost always intense experiences anyway. You couldn’t stop for a cup of tea in the middle of a Dark Souls boss fight even if the game was half as difficult, and strategy games require you to make the same choices regardless of difficulty; the consequences just vary in severity. Given this fact, I think that that subset of video games — a subset that might be described as “skill test” games rather than “relaxation” games — should strive to make players sweat, not give them an easy ride. After all, why would you ride the merry-go-round when you could go on the roller coaster?
I first played Super Mario Sunshine on the Wii, using the original GameCube disk. I enjoyed the sunny graphics, but it was just too hard for ten-year-old me. I couldn’t get past the first boss fight at Pinna Park or the first shine of Ricco Harbor. So, after a few weeks of trying, I gave up and moved on to other things.
Now, though, I’m back with a vengeance.
Last time, when I reviewed Super Mario 64, I covered a game that everyone loves. This time? Well, it’s not so simple. Super Mario Sunshine is probably the most controversial Mario game ever made. While there are no outright bad Mario games, there are a few that almost no one will really defend — the New Super Mario Bros. series comes to mind, as well as, if we’re willing to go there, Hotel Mario on the CD-i (actually, I take back what I said; that one is a bad Mario game, and it’s why Nintendo doesn’t license its characters anymore). But Super Mario Sunshine is better than those overshadowed younger siblings. It has to be, simply by virtue of being a full-fat 3D Mario experience. The question is whether it can really join the ranks of the big boys, the likes of Galaxy and Odyssey and 64. Some people insist that it should, and some people swear that it couldn’t. My answer? Well…you’ll have to read the review to find out, won’t you?
As always, we’re splitting this review into three sections: Presentation, Mechanics, and Structure. For Super Mario 64, I didn’t follow this format, but I feel that it’s appropriate for Sunshine because I do actually have something to say about the game’s story and the progression of a player through it. So, without further ado, let’s-a-go!
I think mechanics and structure vary in relative importance depending on the game. For example, an RPG with a poor story and bad quest design, but good mechanics, will be more frustrating in the long run than an RPG with clunky mechanics but a good story and passable quest design. For a shooter, though, the opposite would be true; mechanics would reign supreme. However, unless you’re playing a visual novel, the presentation — things like graphics and writing — is never going to be the most crucial part of a game’s experience unless it makes things irredeemably, unplayably awful. So I think it’s best to cover it first.
As far as graphics go, Super Mario Sunshine leaves little to complain about. I’ve been playing the Switch rerelease, and the HD rendering makes the game look genuinely good, even from a modern perspective. It’s bright, colorful, and cheery, and just looking at the game makes me happy. In this day and age, in 2020, what more can we ask for? Even the water looks pretty good, which is impressive for such an old game.
The music is similarly pleasing. The Delfino Plaza theme is obviously a bop, but Ricco Harbor is my personal favorite. Even the secret level theme, an initially-objectionable acapella rendition of the Super Mario Bros. main theme, grows on you over time, even as the levels themselves…don’t. And, while I haven’t mentioned the other songs, they’re all good in their own way — never once did I want to mute the game or find that the soundtrack was making a frustrating level feel even worse, the way I did with some of the Celeste B-sides.
In terms of general tone, Super Mario Sunshine feels much more like a modern Mario game than its elder cousin. Sure, the tropical theme is unusual, but you have all the usual staples: Princess Peach gets kidnapped (though not right at the beginning), there are annoying Toads around, you can ride Yoshi, and the list goes on. Mostly, though, what made me feel at home was the writing. Super Mario 64 felt like it was aimed younger than a typical Mario title, even though I, a player nearly old enough to be the parent of a child of my own, struggled at times to beat it. Super Mario Sunshine, though, invents the Mario series’ consistent E10+-sure-give-it-to-your-kid-but-they’ll-need-to-be-12-to-actually-finish-it packaging, and the dialogue is part of that; it’s not as juvenile as before, although, you know, it’s still Mario.
I think that’s pretty much it for presentation. There is actually one more thing I wanted to discuss in this column, but it weaves into the game’s story as well…so you’ll have to read on to the Structure section to find out what it is. Overall, Super Mario Sunshine doesn’t disappoint in the presentation department. The game looks, and sounds, like it should be one of the greats. It’s the mechanics that would…suggest otherwise.
Mechanics are especially important for a platformer like Mario. If the basic act of jumping doesn’t feel good and work well, then nothing else is going to either. And when a game box says Mario on the front, you know that’s a promise to the player, a promise that the game’s mechanics, at least, will be exactly as desired. Does Sunshine deliver on that promise? Well…read on.
The first thing I’d like to discuss is the camera. My review of Super Mario 64found that the game’s biggest, most glaring issue was that the camera was essentially nonfunctional. So if Super Mario Sunshine were to suffer from the same problems, that would be a great (or, well, not great) indicator of where it fell on the quality spectrum. Fortunately, things are better this time around. Most importantly, there is a functional right stick that allows you to spin the camera largely as desired. Also, you have the ability to center the camera behind Mario, where it damn well belongs, thank you very much, with a quick tap of the left trigger. Between these various improvements, I rarely found myself running into the kind of controller-smashing camera moments I regularly experienced in 64. There are some hiccups, though. Whenever you’re in a small, enclosed area — the Noki Bay ruins level is awful for this — the camera really starts to fail, and you have to battle it as you navigate what’s already a patience-testing maze. One Shine, the Ferris Wheel one in Pinna Park, is needlessly difficult because of the amount of time you have to spend platforming up a cramped vertical tube where the camera is constantly having a seizure, but luckily you can cheat to skip that section, which is what I did. Overall, however, the camera has improved enough from 64 to not be the main source of frustration, and that, at least, is a relief.
The game does tend to suffer in the control department, though. There are no attacks besides jumping, which honestly feels like an oversight; any 3D platformer needs a way to reliably take out enemies without resorting to a jump, which can be unreliable. Mario feels as great as he always has to move, but with the left trigger bound to the camera and the right trigger bound to F.L.U.D.D., nothing is left over for Mario’s signature crouch. You can still ground pound; the left trigger does that, but only when Mario is in the air. The lack of crouching really blows, frankly. My two favorite moves from the 3D Mario games are the long jump and the backflip, but you can’t do either in Sunshine. Instead, you have to rely on the backwards somersault, which can more or less replace the backflip but does nothing to supplement Mario’s normal jump distance the way the long jump can. The best you can do, in terms of clearing wide gaps, is the spin jump. Thespin jump! The spin jump is probably the most niche, difficult-to-execute move in Mario, and now you actually have to use it sometimes. Why, God, why?
I’m not saying that the crouch moves were essential to a Mario title, even if they were my favorites. But the game chooses to replace them with something that is, in my opinion, totally inadequate. Enter F.L.U.D.D. (Dramatic music plays). F.L.U.D.D. is fun at best, clunky and hard-to-use at worst. You could almost beat the whole game without it — I think it’s really only mandatory on a couple of bosses — but since I had it, and since I didn’t have a couple of other tools I had grown used to, I needed something to fill the gaps. And, indeed, that’s what F.L.U.D.D. is supposed to do; its hover nozzle, easily the most important nozzle, is in constant use for everything from stunning enemies to extending jumps. The problem is, using F.L.U.D.D. completely kills your momentum, leaving you crawling through the air at a snail’s pace. My wall-climbing technique — somersault, wall kick, use F.L.U.D.D. to turn around in midair and gain height to be able to grab the ledge — took probably twice as long as if the game had been Super Mario Odyssey and I had had Cappy instead. It also means that gaps you think should be possible to clear often end up being too wide, since running starts don’t really help when F.L.U.D.D. just eats the extra speed.
As for the other main nozzle, the spray nozzle, it felt pretty worthless, to be honest. I was very glad that the muck-cleanup aspect of the game kind of went out the window after the first few levels, because the spray nozzle just doesn’t work that well. If you use the right trigger to spray while running, you only clean a narrow path approximately five feet in front of you, and this technique doesn’t work at all when going down slopes — if there’s goop, you’ll hit it and take damage. On the other hand, using the various stationary-fire modes, which require either holding the right shoulder button or clicking the right stick, looking where you want to aim, and squeezing the trigger, feels clunky. Aiming is always hard — there’s no crosshair and it feels a bit too sensitive — so on boss fights where it was required, particularly Petey Piranha, I ended up missing opportunities to deal damage because I was fighting with the water jet instead. Almost no enemy is actually damaged by the spray nozzle, just stunned or knocked back, so it’s useless as a weapon and can’t replicate, say, Cappy’s role in that respect. Finally, the missions that required you to use it the most — the Shadow Mario levels — were some of the game’s most underwhelming. While I like using F.L.U.D.D., I can’t help but feel like Sunshine might have been better without it.
Lastly for the game’s mechanics, and I guess this goes under Mechanics and not Structure, the use of powerups was a little odd. The few things that might count as “powerups” — Yoshi, the rocket and turbo nozzles — were barely used at all. In 64, what powerups there were were actually required for a few stars, and in Galaxy and Odyssey Nintendo took a more conventional approach to them, but in Sunshine…well, there’s almost nothing. Off the top of my head, you do have to use Yoshi to progress a couple of times, and the alternative nozzles were available sometimes as shortcuts, but they were never mandatory. There’s not even any kind of cutscene or fanfare when you equip them for the first time. Though I don’t object to a Mario game having few or no powerups, I just wonder why they were included at all — they’re just so unimportant.
So much for Mechanics. Sunshine does feel good to play…most of the time. When it doesn’t, though, it really doesn’t, so much so that you kind of wish that Nintendo had spent more time making everything fit together a little better. It almost seems like some levels were designed without the new F.L.U.D.D. mechanics in mind. Speaking of which…
We’ve arrived at the final part of the review: the one in which I cover the game’s Structure. For Super Mario Sunshine, I feel that that term mostly applies to level design, game progression, and (unusually for a Mario game) cutscenes. I’ll be honest: I feel that this is the worst part of the Sunshine experience. The game’s other foibles — the camera, the limited controls — pale in comparison to some of the crimes against fun that I’ll cover in this section. So, without further ado, let’s get into it, starting with level design.
I don’t know what it is about Super Mario Sunshine. The game is colorful and happy, with cheery music and lighthearted writing. But it also makes me angry. I get madder, faster, playing Sunshine than any other Mario game. Why? Well, I think part of it has to do with the level design. Take Ricco Harbor, for instance. The first shine, Gooper Blooper Breaks Out, has you platforming across the harbor before finally fighting a boss. The problem is that the platforming isn’t the easiest, especially if you’re still unused to F.L.U.D.D., and one misstep means plunging into the ocean, at which point you have to swim all the way back to the beginning. That’s incredibly frustrating, as you can imagine, and the same kind of thing keeps happening throughout the Sunshine experience. Sirena Beach has you fighting the game’s hardest boss in a battle that can take more than ten minutes. The problem is, it’s not a test of skill, but rather of patience, since camping in the surf at the edge of the map guarantees that you’ll be safe enough. One false move, though, and you’re juggled around from enemy to enemy — Mario has no invincibility frames, like this was on the NES — before dying and having to start all over again. Or, again, Ricco Harbor — the second Blooper mission has you rocketing around the harbor collecting red coins, but running into any obstacle means death, and you can’t slow down enough to guarantee your safety. The worst part is that the biggest challenge in that mission is actually jumping back onto the dock to collect the Shine, something that led, for me, to many, many deaths and endless frustration. The game is full of so many missions like that that sometimes it feels like it doesn’t want you to enjoy it.
But the normal missions aren’t the half of it! Every world has at least one “secret” mission, all of which are required to complete the game. You have to platform through a cut-and-paste world of toy blocks and generic baddies, but there are no checkpoints and few 1-ups, and any slip lands you in a bottomless pit. Some of these levels are incredibly difficult; The Hotel Lobby’s Secret, for example, took me two and a half hours of attempts to complete. Partly, this is because Mario’s moveset is very limited without F.L.U.D.D.; he has no way to extend jumps and no way to hang in the air even a bit longer than gravity would allow. That means that the experience is very unforgiving. It’s okay for video game levels to be hard, of course. I really enjoyed the Darker Side in Super Mario Odyssey, even if it did take me dozens upon dozens of attempts. But the secret levels aren’t hard in a way that feels fair, and when I beat them, I didn’t feel like I had achieved something worth achieving, just that I had beaten a game that hated me. The fact that Game Overs are a thing in Sunshine meant that I periodically had to go all the way back through Delfino Plaza and the level the Secret was hidden in to try again, which only added to my rage.
And often, when a Shine isn’t frustratingly difficult to collect, it’s just incredibly cryptic. For example, The Boss of Tricky Ruins in Noki Bay had me wandering the level for upwards of half an hour, searching for the one pathway that would lead me to the place I was trying to go, with near to no guidance as to what, exactly, I was even looking for. Mysterious Hotel Delfino in Sirena Beach forces players to search a hotel top to bottom, trying to find the secret way to grab a pineapple and thus unlock Yoshi and a Shine, with almost no information given to help. There were quite a few missions along those lines, where I didn’t know exactly what I had to do. I’m not saying that everything in a video game has to be exactly clear, but I’d like to at least know what the puzzle is that I’m trying to solve. Before you call me a filthy casual, know that I found that Super Mario 64, an older, worse-designed game, was generally clearer in its directions than Sunshine. Sure, the little hints weren’t always enough, but at least they told you where, generally, you were supposed to be searching.
This crypticness could extend to progression as well. You’re never told what is actually required to beat the game, so I, this time a filthy casual through and through, had to Google it. All you have to do is beat the first seven missions of each level. Bonus stages in Delfino Plaza, like the infamous pachinko machine? Waste of time. Blue coin hunts? No need. And, unlike in Super Mario 64, where you could get any 70 stars you wanted, including secret stars, or Super Mario Galaxy, which had the same system, or Super Mario Odyssey, which required you to get 124 moons out of 999(!), you have to get those 49 Shines to unlock the final level. No other Shines need be collected if all you want to do is see the end credits, and, in fact, trying to get them is a complete waste of time. This leaves you with no alternative ways to progress. I hated those accursed secret levels so much that I would gladly have done the pachinko machine or whatever else instead of them, but I didn’t have that option. Why are there even optional Shines if they don’t count towards progressing through the game? And why are you encouraged to get them all, every single one, if the reward is (spoiler alert) incredibly lame? It’s mystifying, almost as mystifying as those stupid Noki Ruins.
I’ve spent long enough now kvetching about the game’s design that I think it’s time to move on to dialogue and voice acting. The fact that I needed to include a section for this shows just how unusual Super Mario Sunshine is. The game has fully-voiced cutscenes, and honestly…they’re just weird. It’s unsettling to hear Bowser Jr. speaking in complete sentences, or to have Mario be constantly lectured by his sidekick, F.L.U.D.D. Ironically, even though Sunshine usually has too little guidance, F.L.U.D.D. always talked too much, so much so that I found myself laughing out loud when asked if I wanted to hear its explanations again. Besides that one little issue, though, there’s really nothing wrong with the cutscenes. It’s just that they feel like they don’t belong. Mario has never had fully-voice-acted cutscenes since, and I feel like that’s because Nintendo agreed with my take. Breath of the Wild is strange for the same reason; after so many years of Nintendo’s shoestring VA budget, having more effort put is almost unsettling.
I guess that’s about it for Structure. This game drove me bonkers, to be completely honest, and that was always because some of the game design decisions made were completely mystifying. Still, though, things mostly work as expected. You play the levels, beat them, and then go on to a final boss fight; pretty standard for a Mario game. The problems I found were more of a result of my expectations for the Mario series than of the game’s actual quality. So what was the verdict? Well…read on.
Super Mario Sunshine can be aggravating. Despite its sunny presentation and generally tight controls, it can feel like the game doesn’t want you to enjoy it. Reviewers generally agree that this one could have used a little more time in the oven, and I tend to feel the same way. Nintendo’s current strategy of letting games stew for as long as they need, even if they come out painfully behind schedule, stems from the twin disappointments of Sunshine and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker; neither were really bad games, but clearly needed a bit more TLC. It has its fun parts, though, and sometimes, briefly, you really do feel like you’re on vacation. Isn’t that the best we can do in 2020?
I give Super Mario Sunshine three enraged screams out of five. WHY did they put that block there?
Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash. If you think this figurine is low-res, wait until you see Mario ingame.
Everyone knows that Super Mario 64 is the greatest video game of all time. If you ask any game commentator, any blogger, any YouTuber, for their top ten, I guarantee the plumber’s first 3D outing will be on their list. It permeates the Internet, with the famous (if incorrectly quoted) line “So long, gay Bowser” inserted ad nauseam into countless YouTube videos. The game has earned a place at the top of the pile, and it’s common to see it recommended as a first title to someone who’s never picked up a controller in their life.
I’m not sure, though, if anyone can explain exactly why this is.
When I write these articles — all of them bearing nearly identical titles — the question I ask, whether [insert game title here] is still worth playing, is often rhetorical. The fact is, yes, a certain kind of person can enjoy almost any video game. Yes, for that specific kind of person, even something as awful as Rogue Warrior, the infamously horrible first-person shooter based on the heavily-fictionalized exploits of Navy SEAL Dick Marcinko, can be a fun time and well worth the price of admission. So to declare, as a blanket statement, that, no, a game is not still worth playing, period, is going to be incorrect almost every time.
But the question isn’t that simple with Super Mario 64. Video games don’t have a “canon” like, say, literature or film; they’re still immature as an art form, and the kind of old, long-winded academics who bother to decide that kind of thing don’t play anything more involved than Words with Friends. If the medium did have a canon, however, Super Mario 64 would be at the top of the list, at least in most peoples’ book. The arguments for its inclusion abound. While the game wasn’t the first three-dimensional platformer, it was the first to be any good; the Nintendo 64 was specifically designed to cater to Shigeru Miyamoto’s vision for the game; its hubworld inspired a host of other titles, even those outside the platforming genre; and, despite its muddy graphics, it is the one and only game from its console generation to still look passable to the modern eye. It should be a shoo-in.
I should believe this more strongly than anyone. Super Mario 64 was the first real video game I ever played. For my sixth birthday, I received a Nintendo DS and a copy of the game’s remaster for that system. I learned what a video game was from Super Mario 64. I learned how platformers worked. I was so awful at it — totally unable even to defeat King Bob-Omb without my father’s help — that the fact that the DS only had an eight-directional control input couldn’t stop me from enjoying the game.
And I kept coming back. I returned when I was around ten and got a bit further, unlocking Mario (you start with Yoshi in that version of the game), and even defeating Bowser in the Dark World. Later on, I encountered the original version of the game for the first time via emulation, and now, with Nintendo’s rerelease of the title in the 3D All-Stars collection, I’ve finally made it through enough of the game to feel as though I have a decent grasp of it — only three presidential administrations after I first picked up a controller.
And yet, I’m not sure if I buy that Super Mario 64 is everything that everyone says it is, that it really should be listed quite so high up in this imaginary “canon.” I’m not saying it isn’t a good game; Nintendo, more so than any other publisher, is not in the business of making bad games. I’m not saying it doesn’t have historical value, and that, one day, if a World Museum of Video Games opens up, it shouldn’t be displayed more prominently than almost any other title. I’m just saying that I know what I played, what I experienced. And what I experienced…well, you’ll have to read the review to find out, won’t you?
I like to follow my typical structure when writing Still Worth Playing, with the three elements of a video game — Presentation, Mechanics, and Structure — mirroring the reality cooking show Chopped’s three elements of a good dish (Presentation, Taste, and Creativity). But I feel that that doesn’t fit for Super Mario 64. The Structure section is usually given over to discussing the game’s story, such as it is, but Super Mario 64 has almost none. And my usual format is value-neutral, discussing the good and bad parts of a game together, whenever they happen to come up. For a review of a game like Super Mario 64, though, I feel that this isn’t appropriate. This isn’t just a bland report — I’m going to be criticizing (as well as praising) a game many people love, and so I feel that, by starting with the spoonful of sugar, I may help the medicine go down. Therefore, I won’t organize the review in my usual way, but rather based on value judgements; the three sections will be the Good, the Weird (but neutral), and the Bad. Without further ado, let’s get into it, starting with the Good.
The Good section may be a bit shorter than you anticipate, but that’s because this is a review, God dammit, not an ode or a panegyric; that means that, in addition to what I liked, I plan to write about what I didn’t like. While it was easy to sing this game’s praises when it came out, I wasn’t alive then. I’m playing it in 2020, and you’re reading this in 2020, and you want to know whether you should play the game now, in 2020 (or, considering that I’m publishing this close to the end of the year, possibly 2021). I refuse to write about how awesome the game must have been to gamers in 1995 when I wasn’t one of those gamers; it would be dishonest to myself, and, worst of all, to you, my readers.
The thing that I most unequivocally love about Super Mario 64 (now, in 2020) is, without a doubt, the control scheme. This is the one thing about this game that has actually improved with age; the poor fools who had to experience it on the N64’s awful three-handed controller (or on the DS’s woefully insufficient D-pad) were never getting the full experience. On a real thumbstick setup, the game flows incredibly smoothly. Chaining a triple jump into a backwards somersault into a long jump into whatever else you want to do is almost as easy as breathing, as long as you time everything correctly. Swimming isn’t incredibly fluid, but there is no third-person video game in which it is, and I find it odd to criticize a game for failing to meet a standard which, to my knowledge, has never been met. Wall kicks can also be a little bit iffy, but they aren’t a very common move, and everything else about the controls works so well that I feel bad criticizing the game there.
Also in the “love” column is the game’s colorfulness. Is that a word? You know what I mean. Where so many games are, to this day, afraid to use bright colors, Super Mario 64 revels in its almost-psychedelic palette. Other games of the generation, games which were just as impressive, graphically speaking, to gamers in 1995, games like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, suffer terribly now because they rely on dark shades which easily became muddled when textures were compressed. Super Mario 64’s worst-looking level is, in my opinion, Hazy Maze Cave, with its bacon-grease walls in the underground lake section, and even then things are reasonably bright and still pop twenty-five years later. I think it can’t be understated how important this element of Super Mario 64’s design is; graphics may not make a game, but at some point, when they get too gross to look at, many games become much harder to enjoy. Also, the game puts an emphasis on visual clarity, which really pays off for a platformer, especially one which was totally unlike anything most of its players had ever experienced. Overall, while things aren’t always beautiful, it’s amazing how the graphics get the job done, even twenty-five years later.
Lastly for “loves” — as opposed to “likes” — is the music. Bob-omb Battlefield is one of gaming’s biggest bops, and the mellow melody of Dire Dire Docks never fails to bring a tear to my eye after a few months (or years) without hearing it. And, of course, the Slider theme is both the soundtrack to one of gaming’s best secret levels and a song which I associate with pure torture — in other words, the penguin race in Cool, Cool Mountain. While the track list is actually quite small, it’s an all-star lineup. For some reason, the music isn’t quite as iconic as, say, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s tracks, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t great; after all, one of the lessons of this review is that public opinion isn’t everything.
I’m also a big fan of the variety of levels. While you have your mandatory water, ice, lava, and spooky levels (and the first three come with multiple iterations each), there are also some genuinely creative levels, most notably Tiny-Huge Island, which is really two in one, since the challenges play so differently depending on whether you decide to be tiny or huge — proving, beyond a doubt, that it’s not size that matters, it’s how you use it. Even if the Halloween-discount-store Big Boo’s Haunt wasn’t creative in its theme, it certainly was in its design, turning what’s usually a fairly fast-paced action platformer into almost an atmospheric adventure game — a clear precedent to brother Luigi’s adventures six years on.
Lastly in the “likes” column is, of course, the hubworld. While navigating it can take time, and it’s occasionally frustrating when you have to go from the upper levels to the basement in pursuit of a new Star, the cheery music and many hidden secrets make it more than worth the effort to explore. When I was very little, I spent most of my time just running around the main hall of the castle, jumping up and down, backflipping onto the coin ledges next to the staircase, and just generally having a blast. If the game didn’t have this easy, danger-free way to learn the controls, I doubt it would have been nearly as enjoyable; as it is, I would have no qualms about handing the controller to a three-year-old, sure they wouldn’t get frustrated or bored. There aren’t many games I could say that about.
Next up is the Weird section. This is for things that aren’t necessarily bad, but simply represent a decision that might not be made today, or that are hard to translate for modern players — sort of like, say, watching a foreign film for the first time and getting used to reading subtitles. No one would argue that Rashomon wasn’t a good movie just because you needed to be able to read to enjoy it, and subtitled films are just as enjoyable as ones shot in English, but it does make a change. Because of Super Mario 64’s age, there are actually a number of things in this column.
Firstly is the game’s general feel. It’s a little strange, but Super Mario World feels more like a modern Mario game, at least to me, than Super Mario 64. Whether it’s the “Hey kids!” tone of message boxes or the odd storybook vibe of many of the levels, you get the sense that Super Mario 64 was designed for young children — which is strange, considering that it’s way too hard for a person that age to beat. Mario’s aesthetic of brick blocks, pipes, and a predictable roster of enemies wasn’t quite set yet, and things look a bit strange, at least from the perspective of someone who’s played more modern Mario games as well. I’m not saying any of this detracts from the experience, but it’s just weird. And that’s why it’s in this section, right?
Also strange is the setup of the stars. In later 3D Mario games, there started to be a formula for what the player was rewarded for — the first star would be for getting to the end of the level as a whole, the second would be for defeating a boss or finding a secret, and so on, generally increasing in difficulty as you went on. This is not the case in Super Mario 64. Dry Dry Desert, for example, features a ridiculously difficult first star where you have to chase a vulture using the god-awful Wing Cap, then fetch the star you dislodge from the far side of a dangerous pyramid. Compared to a later Star, which merely has you doing a platform challenge inside the pyramid, this is bonkers. I’m not saying it’s bad, but I would have expected it to be the last star, not the first. Obviously, that was a convention that hadn’t been established yet, just like the graphics and theme.
Also on the subject of stars, the difficulty varies hugely based on the hints you receive when selecting which star to pursue. Some stars are pretty tame to actually collect, but require you to find them in a hidden section of the level — and for these stars, the hint given is sometimes woefully insufficient. It’s one thing when you get onto the star-select screen and are hit with “At the Top of the Mountain” or something similar. That makes sense. But sometimes it’s along the lines of “Inside the Secret Room” — which one? Where? Obviously, these stars aren’t meant to be easy to find, and there shouldn’t be a lot of guidance, but I would appreciate more help than literally one vague four- or five-word blurb. For example, this hypothetical Secret Room star could be improved by maybe a sign or a character telling you what part of the level you should look in. I still want to have to search, but spending half an hour running around a vertical maze searching for a hidden door is not really my cup of tea — even if the kids did love it in ’95. Did they, actually?
Another thing in the “weird” column is the difficulty of levels. Things do generally get harder the further you get into the game, and obviously Lethal Lava Land is much harder than Bob-omb Battlefield, but I found, for example, Ice Ice Mountain to actually be quite challenging compared to Hazy Maze Cave or Wet-Dry World, especially that accursed penguin race star. Probably, the game’s designers had little idea how difficult their levels would be, considering that they played them every day — as a writer, I can sympathize with that mystery around the creative process — but it’s obvious that Nintendo figured out the difficulty curve for its 3D platformers later on, since Super Mario Galaxy, for example, doesn’t have the same quirk.
The last thing I would add is that the way the power-ups were incorporated is very unusual. Before Super Mario 64, power-ups had been the lifeblood of the Mario franchise. Playing through a whole game as Small Mario was always nearly impossible, and the Mario title immediately preceding 64, Super Mario World, featured the cape flower, probably the single most powerful power-up in Mario history. So for Nintendo to depart from this design philosophy was very surprising. Instead of a bevy of bread-and-butter power-ups like the Super Mushroom and Fire Flower, Super Mario 64 features only three highly situational and totally optional power-ups, the Wing, Metal and Invisibility Caps. While the Metal and Invisibility Caps essentially give Mario more traversal options, as well as invincibility in the case of the Metal Cap, the Wing Cap totally changes the way you move around the map. They are all quite rare, but when the Wing Cap does appear — well, more on that later. Later 3D Mario games would innovate on this more; Sunshine had its nozzles, Odyssey had its captures, and Galaxy actually had real, traditional power-ups. But, once again, the granddaddy of all 3D Mario games stands out for its strangeness.
Well, here we are. I know you’ve been waiting for this. You might even have rage-scrolled down to this section, ready to skim and angrily debunk all of my arguments. I’ll be honest; I have a few minor quibbles, but there’s really only one thing that really grinds my gears about Super Mario 64, something so major that it seriously jeopardizes my enjoyment of what should otherwise be a great game. But there are a few other issues too, so we’ll start with those.
Issue Number One is the Wing Cap. This thing is god-awful. It’s a power-up so bad that you die way more often with it than without it, and a method of traversal so risky that nine times out of ten you’re better off simply taking longer routes on the ground rather than jumping into the sky. You can’t gain height, can’t steer, can’t maintain altitude — nothing works about the Wing Cap. The secret star in the castle’s main area which requires you to fly to collect the eight red coins? Almost impossible. I know you could do it, but I’m not willing to put in hours and hours of practice just for one measly star. As far as I’m concerned, the Wing Cap, and whoever designed its controls, can go take a long walk off a short pier.
Speaking of which, Issue Number Two is the swimming controls. I was debating whether to put them in this section, because they’re certainly not as bad as the Wing Cap, but screw it. They’re not horrendous, but the game’s water levels suffer because of them. Turning is not fluid, nor is diving or climbing, so really you have to turn, change your depth, and then pick a direction to swim in. This is frustrating when, for example, you’re unlocking chests in order — you have to unlock chest, turn, dive/climb, swim forward, and get the next one. Even collecting red coins from clams is hard when you don’t have enough control to make sure you won’t be caught when they slam shut. All the other 3D Mario games have the same issue, but they compensate for it in various ways — Sunshine, for example, has FLUDD, which lets you skim over the top of water, Galaxy has more koopa shells that let you motor around at a much higher speed with better control, and Odyssey lets you control Cheep Cheeps to give you more control and remove the air requirement. Super Mario 64, however, just expects you to roll with it.
I sort of already covered this, but Issue Number Three is ridiculous challenges. Not cryptic ones, exactly — I already covered those — but ones that are simply so absurdly frustrating that they shouldn’t be in the game at all. The prime example of this is the Snowman’s Big Head star in Snowman Land. You have to cross a thin, spindly ice bridge, using an apparently drunk and highly unpredictable penguin as cover, and if you’re blown off, not only do you fly all the way to Terre Haute, but your hat falls off, forcing you to collect it again. And the platforming challenge to even reach this point is not easy either, leaving a long interval between attempts that makes it harder to learn the penguin’s pattern and practice following it. This is not a good kind of difficulty. Also on the list is anything involving the Wing Cap, the aforementioned penguin race, and the secret star on the second floor of the lower cabin in Ice Ice Mountain (ice levels are, you’ll note, something of a theme here). For that star, you have to perform a triple jump into a wall jump that allows you to stick a landing on a narrow ledge high above the floor, then shimmy around a corner to grab the goods. I wouldn’t normally complain about such a challenge, since triple jumps aren’t that hard to execute, but…
…but, well, this feeds into Issue Number Four. In Japan, land of Mario’s birth, four is the number of death, and the thing that almost kills Super Mario 64, almost renders it totally unplayable and untranslatable to the modern gamer is (drumroll please): the CAMERA. The camera in Super Mario 64 is the worst camera in any video game I have ever played, barring other early 3D platformers that similarly didn’t know any better. It’s inexcusably awful. When you’re outside, you can’t just smoothly move the camera around — you need to choose between a number of angles, none of which are ever exactly what you’re looking for, often making what should be easy jumps into blind leaps of faith. Inside, meanwhile, the camera adopts a Resident Evil-style fixed angle that makes jumps like the aforementioned cabin triple-wall-jump and the Big Boo’s Haunt wall jump that you have to make to get to the third floor (with a strict time limit if you want to do it with the invisibility cap on). Sometimes things do work, but this seems to be by sheer dumb luck; every camera angle couldn’t be bad unless Nintendo wanted them to be, and that surely was not their intention. Ironically, things are smoothest when you’re platforming through an area where a side-on view is optimal, like in the last part of the Dark World or in the second half of the Invisibility Cap course.
But Skeezix, you say, the game is from 1995! Of course it’s not going to work properly! No one knew what they were doing so long ago. The camera control scheme was designed for a subpar little quasi-D-pad like the left joycon has now, not a proper thumbstick that could smoothly rotate 360 degrees with no issue. To that, I say this: I don’t care that the game is from 1995. That’s its problem, not mine. Other games from that era, like Tomb Raider, Goldeneye or Star Fox (the SNES one, not Star Fox 64), have aged so poorly that no one would ever suggest playing them, and, if you do, you’ll immediately be put off by extremely poor graphics, awful controls, and so on — all things that wouldn’t have been noticeable to a six-year-old picking up a controller after school, but that now make those once-exciting experiences feel like a big frustrating mess. I’m not asking if Super Mario 64 was thought to be good when it came out, because you can just Google that, and the answer, by the way, is yes. I’m asking whether it’s still good now…and, well, my verdict is forthcoming, but the camera is not still good, and not even the most nostalgia-blinded fanboy could seriously argue otherwise.
Speaking of verdicts, I think we’ve reached the point in the article where I should start wrapping things up. We’ve looked at the good aspects of Super Mario 64, of which there were quite a few. We’ve looked at the stuff in the game that strikes a modern player as just weird, and there was plenty of that too. And, of course, we looked at the bad stuff, the stuff that, frankly, in a world blessed with an abundance of good video games, no player should have to deal with. So what’s the judgment?
I know I’ve spent a long time harping on about how I wouldn’t evaluate this game based on how it was received in 1995, but I will note that it is remarkable just for still being playable. Other games, games like those I mentioned, have been completely obliterated by the passing of time. Super Mario 64 has not. Sure, it wouldn’t get very good reviews if it came out today, but the fact that it alone remains playable from among a generation of games that no longer are is a strong testament to its lasting appeal.
And I’ll say this: Most of the time, I was having fun with Super Mario 64. Not as much fun as I had with Super Mario Galaxy, or Super Mario Odyssey, or Super Mario Sunshine, but I did have fun. The thing with Mario games is that we are spoiled with an embarrassment of riches. I wouldn’t recommend 64 as a person’s first video game — that spot would have to go to Super Mario Odyssey, which does everything 64 did, but simply better. Its controls are smoother, its camera less janky, its gameplay more varied, its levels larger and more imaginative. But if you play Super Mario Odyssey and love it, and do the same thing with Galaxy, and then the same with Sunshine…well, I think you’d have no reason not to play 64. Maybe it’s not the plumber’s best outing…but it is still a damn good game. And for a work older than most grad students, that’s really not bad at all.
I give Super Mario 64 three oddly-slippery slopes out of five. Why can’t you just CLIMB it?
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash. If you easily get tired of scenes like this, the game is not for you.
Two armies meet in a yellow wood. One shambles forth, a disorderly crowd of grinning skeletons and rotting zombies, and the other steps proudly ahead, a glittering display of ancient beauty utterly undiminished by the passage of time. Each charging towards the other, they meet with a clash of ringing steel, and soon it becomes apparent that the real question is whether the singing Elven bowstrings will be able to deal enough (re)death to put down the unliving horde before it overwhelms their front line completely.
Once again, Total War: Warhammer asks the age-old question: Who would win…?
Full disclosure: I have already written something that could be considered a review of Total War: Warhammer. That’s available here. But…well, that was never going to be enough. I now have nearly two hundred hours on both games combined. If I had spent that time working out, I would be a monster. If I had spent that time practicing, say, Swedish, jag kunde tala det mycket bra. If I had spent that time writing, I might end up being able to put out a Medium article more than once a month. The waste is incredible, though I have to admit it was highly enjoyable. So I feel that I owe some kind of explanation to myself and my readers as to why, just why, I’ve spent so much time on this one game.
As always, the review will follow my typical format: Presentation, mechanics, and “story,” which, as I’ve covered a number of games without real “story modes,” per se, I’ve realized has merely come to mean any element of the experience which provides some overarching theme or message to justify the player’s actions within the world of the game, whether that’s dialogue, plot, objectives, or even just the general vibe you get as you play. For review purposes, I’m treating the first and second game as the same experience, because functionally they are: You can play the entirety of Warhammer 1 (and then some) as a free add-on to Warhammer 2, provided that you own both titles.
Though I love the game just as much as I did when I wrote my other article on it (and if you haven’t clicked on that link yet, you should be right about now), I’ve realized a number of things in the hundred hours or so I’ve put in since I wrote it. Therefore, I feel better qualified now than before to put out an authoritative review of the title, which is one reason that I’ve decided to do this now. Another reason is that I failed, in my prior review, to properly hype up the Vampire Coast. So, without further ado, let’s get into it, starting with the game’s presentation.
Though the game is a couple of years old now, Warhammer 2 is, especially in the battle mode, about as nice-looking as a strategy game can get. Zoom in on the New World, the game’s verdant equivalent of South America, and you’ll see flying terradons wheeling around majestic jungle cliffs. In Ulthuan, the Atlantis-like island home to the High Elves, divine rays of sunlight shine down from the heavens, allowing glittering rainbows to sparkle above picturesque waterfalls. Even the gross parts of the map look good, from filthy Skaven strongholds to dreary, abandoned-looking Vampiric castle. Units also interact beautifully in battle, barring the odd awkward animation, and every attack they make seems to carry a satisfying weight. Powerful units look powerful, be they huge undead crabs or soaring magical phoenixes, which is not only extremely cool but also a useful guide to figure out what’s a threat and what isn’t, something that the game’s dizzying unit variety might otherwise make rather difficult.
The music is also quite good. It’s mostly ambient and doesn’t ever take center stage, but each faction has its own theme, which I’m always a huge fan of, and some of them are very memorable — I’m not sure I’d ever thought about whether the Skaven would be fans of throat-singing, but now I know that they are. I find that the swelling tracks tend to contribute to my feelings of triumph when the enemy is on the run, but add to my stress when I’m on the back foot, which is exactly what I want from music in a strategy game.
Lastly, I think I should discuss UI and performance, two things that are sort of related to presentation but could arguably fall under “mechanics” as well. The UI is clean and snappy, and I rarely have trouble finding the information that I need. There are a few exceptions, though. For example, melee attack, melee defense and leadership are the three critical stats for a melee unit, and the AI gets buffs to all three on higher difficulty settings — but while the UI tells you how much of a leadership buff they get, you can’t tell how much their melee attack and defense are getting boosted. And when you have a wizard cast a spell that resurrects soldiers in a unit, which is a very common ability for undead factions, there’s no indicator that the spell won’t work on units that arrived at the battle missing part of their strength — so if you have 50 zombies out of 120 initially, and that then falls to 45, you can only resurrect five zombies even though it seems like you should be able to raise 75. Still, little complaints like this aside, the experience is very good.
Performance, unfortunately, tends to struggle. It’s only natural for a game that can see battles with up to five thousand warriors taking part, but the campaign map is also quite slow to process sometimes. I have a computer that I would describe as one solid step up from a potato, firmly in the low- to mid-range category with an AMD RX 570. With that hardware, I’m forced to keep many graphics options on the lowest setting. Obviously, I can’t blame the game for my slow computer, but many readers wondering whether this game is worth playing are also wondering whether they could run it — and the sad truth is, well, not necessarily. The first game does run noticeably better than the second one, however.
Next up, I’d like to cover the game’s mechanics. For Total War: Warhammer, this has to be battle mechanics first and foremost: if they don’t work, then it doesn’t matter whether the game’s grand strategy elements are the best thing since sliced bread. This is Total War, not Crusader Kings; arcane, dysfunctional battles just aren’t going to cut it.
And battles…well, on the bright side, they’re a ton of fun. It’s satisfying to hammer away at enemy units with artillery and missile troops, gratifying to send a huge monster crashing through a spearwall, and exciting to slay just such a monster with gunpowder weapons, which tend to be their Achilles heel. Magic is game-changing when cast well, but a complete waste when cast poorly. Almost everything feels snappy, responsive, and effective.
On the not-so-bright side, balance tends to be kind of wonky. For example, Total War: Warhammer, like all Total War games, has trouble with artillery and ranged units. The game determines who wins via a “balance of power” mechanic — essentially, each army has a “strength rating” coming into the battle that’s then worn away as they take damage, fire off ammunition, use abilities, and so on. When one army loses something like three-quarters of its strength rating, whether through casualties or routing, that’s game over. The thing is, this calculation seems to assume either that ranged units and artillery won’t successfully get off all their shots, or that they’ll get into melee midway through the battle, or both — reasonable assumptions, all, but, if you manage to keep enemy troops away from your ranged line, you can win with substantially fewer casualties than the game thinks you “should” be taking. When playing ranged-heavy factions like Skaven, Dwarfs and High Elves, I find myself going to any length to stop the enemy from ever touching my vulnerable missile troops, including summoning expendable units, arranging my troops into a “box” or “checkerboard” formation, and so on — and, if I pull it off successfully, winning much more easily than seems to have been intended.
Adding to the wonkiness, so-called “single-entity” units — lords, heroes and monsters who operate by themselves — can conspire with the ranged units and artillery to break things further. While melee-focused characters do almost no damage by themselves, putting out just one attack every four seconds that might kill two or three enemies, the AI tends to send large waves of infantry to attack just one of your characters, especially if they are the lord in command of the whole army. The resulting disorderly clump makes an ideal target for ranged units, artillery, and especially wizards using highly-damaging lores of magic like Fire and Heavens, distorting the balance further. And heroes, especially fast ones mounted on horses or pegasi, excel at wasting enemy ammunition. Simply having one ride in a figure-eight in front of the enemy army will result in the hapless foe throwing away all of their arrows shooting at one measly character. Even if they did get the kill — and they don’t even get hits most of the time — it still wouldn’t be a fair trade, as the damage-dealing potential of the enemy force is nearly completely neutralized once their ranged units run out of ammunition.
Lastly for the balance, melee units (except the aforementioned lords and heroes) are absolutely awful. As I mentioned before, higher-difficulty AI gets buffs to its melee stats, which means that it absolutely shreds the player’s own melee units. To reliably win an all-melee engagement on Very Hard, I find that I need three melee units to the AI’s one. This means that dealing out melee damage is more of an impossible dream than a reliable battle tactic that could conceivably produce a victory; even the best melee units, like the High Elven Swordmasters of Hoeth, rarely get more than fifty kills in a battle where a decently-placed artillery piece might come away with three hundred. Instead, the function of melee troops becomes to create “tarpits” — blobs of infantry that the AI can’t get through because their own melee troops, while significantly deadlier than the player’s, aren’t exactly killing machines either, because, no matter the stats, only the, say, forty soldiers at the front of a unit are actually fighting at any one time. Then, artillery and ranged units do all of the actual killing, shooting over (and sometimes through) friendly troops into the mass of enemies. Even on lower difficulties, where the player’s melee units are actually competitive against the AI’s, the opportunity cost of not taking a much deadlier ranged unit is just too great to ignore.
What this all adds up to is that many factions play very similarly to each other, even if, on the surface, they seem like they shouldn’t. Without melee infantry, the player loses the ability to control the pace and shape of a battle, so there’s always a reason to bring some — but most, if not all, can be replaced by heroes instead, or simply forgone. Unless I’m playing a faction that’s very weak at range like Lizardmen or Norsca, I’ll usually bring armies consisting of four or five heroes, most of whom will be capable in melee, two to three units of melee infantry, three to five artillery pieces, and the rest ranged units. The melee infantry I do bring tends to be very cheap, since it usually gets shredded regardless of quality, and I prioritize Melee Defense over everything else — since that stat increases evasion in combat, the unit will last for longer, all else being equal. Other types of melee troops that aren’t infantry, like multi-entity monster units, cavalry, and war hounds (there are a surprising number of different kinds of war hound in the game) are almost never worth bringing more than one or two of; they still lack punch, and the fact that they can’t form a blob and don’t fight well in prolonged combat makes them useless in almost every way. Even the Vampire Counts, who have no ranged units or artillery (I joke with a friend about the Crypt Cannon, but unfortunately that one has yet to make it into the game), end up playing like this; you may not have catapults or crossbows, but you do have magic, so the goal becomes creating a melee mosh pit that will fall victim to deadly Vampiric sorcery. The actual units in the mosh pit don’t matter, and you can roll with extremely cheap skeleton spearmen all the way through to the late game.
And that’s just field battles. Sieges are completely broken as well. When the player is attacking, the AI sits behind the walls and waits to die, watching as artillery (even one piece can be enough) pounds down the towers and then the walls. These towers, while theoretically effective, are vulnerable to the same cheese as normal ranged units — they simply shoot at the closest unit, so you can protect all the more vulnerable units in the back by simply, again, having a character ride in a circle through the inaccurate hail of arrows. They may not run out of ammo, but doing this creates an opening for your artillery pieces to destroy them, rendering them completely pointless. Spells are also hilariously effective when used to attack a fortress, since the AI doesn’t even try to dodge them — a single well-placed attack can score three hundred kills or more. The player is capable of handily winning offensive sieges that the game thinks should be utterly impossible, and it’s much easier to beat an army in a siege than it would be to beat that same army in the field.
On the other hand, defending is harder — defending is always harder in Total War: Warhammer because, on offense, the AI isn’t completely passive — but it’s still very much doable. Holding the walls is pointless. In real life, fortifications worked because building them meant that a much-larger enemy force would be forced to attack across the comparatively narrow front of the walls. In Total War: Warhammer, though, the map is split perfectly down the middle by the city walls, meaning that the defender gains no advantage by holding them — the entire enemy force can attack at once regardless. Towers don’t activate unless there are defenders nearby, but they are too ineffective to bother with. Having to climb up the walls with ladders does drain enemy troops’ stamina, which negatively affects melee stats, but stamina is drained so quickly in melee combat anyway that this hardly matters, and then the player will be in an unfavorable melee engagement — exactly what they must always avoid. Instead, the best strategy is for the player to pack all their troops into the capture point at the back of the fortress, ignoring the walls completely and leaving ranged units free to fire away. This allows for some surprising wins, and it is the fact that the AI never does it that leads to their continual defeats at the hands of the player.
So much for the battles. While they’re a lot of fun, they often end up feeling more than a little broken and unbalanced, and by the time the player has a proper army recruited, which happens as early as turn 50, it’s really all over but the shouting. What about the campaign?
Well, it’s significantly better. You won’t generally find the complexity of a Paradox game or even Civilization, but that’s okay; everything you really need in a strategy game is there. The settlements are much improved from previous Total War titles, with a major/minor settlement system that would later be ripped off by Total War: Three Kingdoms, and buildings vary between factions enough to change the way you play significantly. You’ll generally find yourself building walls, economy buildings, and recruitment buildings in every campaign, but beyond that, whether you want to, say, spread corruption, increase your hero capacity, or improve public order really depends on the race you pick.
Public order is actually a little bit broken. Having high public order seems like a good thing, and it is, but on higher difficulties it’s very difficult to maintain in the early game. Instead, you have a perverse incentive to let rebels pop up and squash them just as they begin to gather strength, which, if they aren’t interrupted, takes several turns. Each battle you win levels up your lords and heroes, making them easier to cheese with, and gives experience to your units, which does a lot to counteract the advantages the AI naturally has. In fact, I often find myself enabling taxation in rebellious areas, which reduces public order further, so that I can get more frequent rebellions and thus more easy XP. If you do allow them to gather strength, rebels can pack a punch, but there’s absolutely no need to do that. Later on in the campaign, public order does become an issue — it’s the number one thing limiting your expansion — so public order modifiers, especially faction-wide public order modifiers, start to be crucial.
Each faction has different mechanics that appear in a special menu tab, as well as a completely different tech tree. This adds further variety; the realm politics mechanic for the Empire completely changed how they played when it was introduced, and the Waaagh! mechanic for the Greenskins gives them a temporary, maintenance-free second army that’s incredibly powerful in the early game. The DLC factions expand further on this, so, for example, as Grom the Paunch, the fattest goblin of all time, you can cook special dishes that boost him, his army, and his entire faction all at the same time, and as Clan Skryre, leaders in Skaven mad science, you can buy permanent upgrades to your best units in the Forbidden Laboratory. While sometimes the mechanics these factions provide feel a little overtuned, you certainly can’t say that they’re not interesting and fun.
Some aspects of the campaign as a whole are a bit frustrating. The corruption mechanic I mentioned before is usually most relevant as undead or chaos factions, but having the wrong form of corruption in a province can really eat into public order. The penalty only goes away when the province has one hundred percent correct corruption, which is nearly impossible if you’re next door to, say, the Vampire Counts. This can create a terrible choice: Should you go to war and root out the source of your problems, or sit passively by and have to deal with huge unrest? The solution is obvious if the corruption generator is a faction that you’re going to fight anyway, but if it isn’t — if you’re Grimgor Ironhide and you run up against the Vampire Counts — then you face a real dilemma, because an unnecessary war would be both difficult to win and ultimately damaging. After all, if you take out Mannfred von Carstein, who will hold back the Empire? In situations like this, you just have to live with it, which isn’t ideal.
Also, the AI has a huge advantage when it comes to generating money and recruiting units, which leads to situations where you’ll come up against insane numbers of armies. Normally, things are fine, since the AI has to make the same choices as the player about allocating resources, and they’ll mostly be at war with other AI factions, so the hordes cancel each other out. However, when you run into a relatively isolated and not-very-busy AI faction — say, a Cult of Pleasure that has conquered all of Naggaroth — attacking can mean you’re instantly swarmed by as many as eight armies. And large battles just aren’t much fun; they’re chaotic, giving the computer a considerable advantage, and they absolutely murder the game’s frame rate. Obviously, the moral of that story is that it’s just not a good idea to attack Naggaroth in that situation, but the same thing can happen when the AI declares war on you as well, and in that case there’s much less that can be done to avoid it. The resulting mess can take hours to clean up, which hardly makes for a very fun experience.
Lastly, there’s a general issue with the results of decisions not being entirely clear. For example, as the Vampire Coast, you’ll periodically get an event asking you to choose between four enemy armies to fight, granting varying rewards for each. I picked the one with the biggest reward — only to have it spawn right next to my territory, far away from the army that could have dealt with it, which was busy raiding on an entirely different continent. Sure, I should have kept some force at home, but I was at peace with all my neighbors, so I didn’t expect to have to immediately defend myself; it felt unfair that the game should suddenly throw a massive, scary army at me without giving me any chance to prepare. Needless to say, I had to reload that save. There are a number of “surprise” events like this throughout the game, and you pretty much just have to play your faction of choice through a couple of times to figure out when they’re going to happen.
Still, despite its issues, the Total War: Warhammer campaign works quite well, especially by the standards of other Total War games. The AI doesn’t generally attack you for no reason at all, and when they do they tend to break treaties a few turns in advance to avoid diplomatic penalties, which gives you some advance warning. The enemy armies you face may not be commanded by a stellar AI, but they’re at least filled with strong units, which makes a change from Shogun 2, where you often encounter stacks of basic chaff well into the late game. And all the mechanics — income, trade, campaign movement and stances — gel together and make sense, making for an experience that, ninety percent of the time, works quite smoothly. Usually, if you get into an impossible situation in Total War: Warhammer, it’s your fault. Isn’t that beautiful?
Speaking of the campaign, we’ve now come to the final part of the review: the “story” segment, where I cover the “quest” and “lore”-type aspects of the game. I have to confess that I’ve never played tabletop Warhammer, and so I have no knowledge of the backstory of any of the factions. It’s therefore kind of tough for me to draw the line between what the game devs had to work with going in and what the results of their efforts ended up being. I do wonder, though: How do people who do play tabletop get their lore? Do they actually buy those Warhammer books at Barnes & Noble? Do they spend hours flipping through the campaign booklets, devouring every little tidbit of information about what Reiksemperor Karl Franz eats for breakfast? I’m not judging; I can be just as bad, but I’m not as much of a Warhammer person.
Speculation aside, I will say this: I know that most of what’s in the game is from the canonical Warhammer universe, and I also know that most of what’s in the game is extremely silly. Most story elements and side plots — Ikit Claw’s New World adventure, Skeggi’s colonization of Lustria, the Dark Elf expeditions to the southern oceans — simply amount to excuses for the different factions to fight each other. For tabletop Warhammer, that presumably served the purpose of allowing a new player with only one race to be able to take on any other opponent without upsetting lore-hungry neckbeards, and for the video game version it gives welcome variety and more exciting gameplay, but it does leave me rolling my eyes occasionally, because the narrative gymnastics such side plots require can be very impressive.
What passes for a central “plot,” the End Times, is utterly ridiculous. Archaon the Everchosen, Chaos Champion and, judging by his personal style, a rejected thrash metal singer, gets together a band of crazy, horned-helmet-wearing misfits in an attempt to destroy the entire Warhammer world, as well as presumably raiding its rich supplies of eyeliner. They travel the Old World, fighting every faction at least once, and then, at least in the lore, they ultimately win, plunging everything into primordial Chaos and restarting the eternal cycle of the Warhammer universe.
The thing is, that’s a terrible plot to base an entire game around. It made more sense in the first game, which included just the Old World map, but for the Mortal Empires campaign in Warhammer 2, three quarters of the factions will never even encounter Archaon. The solution the game developers ultimately adopted was to sprinkle the seas with random Chaos fleets, forcing the player, wherever they are, to deal with the forces of disorder — but this just adds to the problem of huge, unexpected armies that I discussed before. There’s no easy way to know when Chaos will strike, and if you start in Ulthuan, which is in the map’s exact center, it could come from almost any direction. This is, to say the least, a bit frustrating.
Adding insult to injury, Archaon (as well as his early-game buddies, the Beastmen) are utterly atrocious at sowing chaos and destruction. They’re supposed to win, obviously, but that doesn’t actually happen ninety-five percent of the time — instead, they’re crushed like bugs by waves of fifteen or twenty Ordertide armies almost the instant they spawn in. Even as the player, Chaos isn’t much of a threat, since you usually face them as the Empire or the Dwarfs, both of which have good ranged and artillery options that can see off a melee-focused Chaos army easily. Chaos is a playable DLC faction, but I haven’t purchased them — supposedly, they’re even worse in the hands of the player. For a faction that’s supposed to be the game’s final boss, they’re pretty weak, to say the least.
Also falling under the category of “plot” are quest battles. These are a lot of fun, usually with a voiced speech from your lord at the beginning, and give a great impression of their personalities, beyond just being killing machines decked out in shiny gold armor. Azhag the Slaughterer’s unstable but brilliant ranting really drew me to the character, as did Ikit Claw’s manic glee at getting the opportunity to test new “kill-devices.” Some characters, like the cranky-but-just Thorgrim Grudgebearer and the large-chinned yet bland Karl Franz, don’t really do it for me, but I feel like these short episodes give players a more digestible picture of who they are playing as than they would receive by playing the tabletop game. It doesn’t hurt that most of the quest items are really good and worth having, pairing a sweet reward with the exposition.
The Eye of the Vortex campaign, which is what’s available to players who own only Warhammer 2, throws out much of the wonky Mortal Empires stuff and creates an experience that feels much more tightly-designed and well-structured. Instead of just trying to blob and then potentially handle a threat that will probably be dead on arrival, players have a number of different things to achieve, and many more quest battles and structured experiences than could be found in Mortal Empires. It’s not too restrictive to be enjoyable, though, and the fat is all but completely trimmed; there’s no unpredictable Chaos Invasion, factions are much more straightforward in how they behave (after all, they’re trying to achieve goals too, not just blob), and you generally have a sense of being driven forward to achieve something rather than just play until you get bored. It’s wonderfully gratifying. I have to confess that I play Mortal Empires most of the time, since it’s “canon” and because of the greater faction variety you can encounter, but if you forced me to pick which of the two was “better,” I would choose Eye of the Vortex.
Speaking of winning, the Eye of the Vortex campaign has a number of interesting victory conditions that vary by faction, but the Mortal Empires campaign…does not. Usually, you’ll be required to eliminate a main enemy faction (usually much more straightforward than it sounds, because if, say, you never manage to eliminate Karaz-a-Karak as Grimgor Ironhide, you’re really just doing it wrong), build a couple of key landmark buildings (easy enough, once you have the provinces and the money), and hold a certain number of large, important settlements from a long list of possible choices. Sometimes these make sense — for Settra the Imperishable’s campaign victory, you have to conquer all of the arid Southlands — but sometimes not. The lists of “important settlements” vary by faction, but many of them are based on a “master list” that includes world cities like Altdorf, Lothern, Hexoatl and Karaz-a-Karak as well as a sprinkling of targets that are nearer at hand to the faction you’re actually playing. Since I usually get bored when I’m approximately three quarters of the way done with this checklist, the last part of every campaign always seems to become a Carmen Sandiego-like race around the world, trying to grab whichever of the targets are the most poorly-defended and easiest to capture, all so I can wrap things up as quickly as possible. This is hardly an ideal gameplay experience, and I suppose I could give up at any time, but I’ve always had an achievement-hunting streak, and securing at least the short campaign victory is required to get those sweet Steam icons. If a game presents you with an objective, I feel that it’s reasonable to expect to complete it before starting a new campaign.
So that’s Total War: Warhammer. Creative Assembly was standing on the shoulders of giants — Games Workshop is among the richest and most successful companies in the nerd-stuff business, so much so that, earlier this year, they sent back the coronavirus relief money supplied to them by the British government. This union of Total War and Warhammer was always destined for success.
Ironically, the game has been more successful than tabletop Warhammer as of late. While that property continues to make money hand over fist, Games Workshop has never figured out how to make its rebooted Age of Sigmar work as well as the original Warhammer once did, and 40K is having similar issues. One almost wonders whether the tabletop formula, while successful, may be trapped in the past; after all, it was born in an era before video games, attempting to simulate via math and dice rolling exactly what Total War: Warhammer can show much more smoothly and realistically. Of course, board games will always have a place in nerd-dom, but I think that Total War: Warhammer is a better-produced Warhammer experience than tabletop Warhammer, at least for the time being.
Adding to this impression, one of Total War: Warhammer’s best factions is inarguably the Vampire Coast. An undead faction like the Tomb Kings and Vampire Counts, the “vampirates,” as they are affectionately known by the community, are a ranged-heavy faction that relies on undead marksmen as well as fearsome beasts summoned from under the waves. One of the lords, Cylostra Direfin, is possibly my favorite Warhammer character, with her self-absorbed histrionics punctuated by snobbish putdowns of her rotting soldiers and lowly surroundings; when encamped in a forest, she sniffily observes that there’s “too much wood.” And the faction’s mechanics are fun as well; Pirate Coves let you leech off of the AI’s success, and the fact that some armies are hordes gives you that horde gameplay (replenishing in enemy territory, being able to recruit anywhere) without depriving you of the ability to occupy settlements, which I honestly think all horde factions should be able to do, lore be damned. It doesn’t quite feel overtuned, since you have to spread vampiric corruption, which can be very difficult, and because your heavy reliance on gunpowder units can create huge problems in hilly terrain and in ambushes, but it is incredibly fun, and, I mean, come on, zombie pirates! For a game with no naval combat, they fit in surprisingly well.
The thing is, the Vampire Coast doesn’t appear in the Warhammer canon, except for a brief cameo by one of its lords, Luther Harkon. It’s far more original and memorable than most of what Games Workshop has created, though, and it leaves me excited for Total War: Warhammer 3; there’s a lot of blank space on the map in Warhammer’s version of Asia, and I’m thrilled to see what Creative Assembly comes up with to fill that space. It makes one wonder whether the Warhammer property might have finally found the home it deserves — and whether that home isn’t on the tabletop at all. Regardless, though, Creative Assembly’s production may have its issues, but it’s clearly a masterpiece in the making, and, once the third game comes out, it will be one of the greatest strategy-game series of all time.
I give Total War: Warhammer five whiffed Winds of Death out of five. Aw, man, I really though it would hit that time!
Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash. Looks like a great place to put a car factory.
Call me a nerd, but I love development economics. It’s a fascinating field! What makes a poor country rich? Why does it happen so rarely, and almost exclusively in the global North? And how can developing countries today pull such a transition off?
Of course, I also love strategy games, as you know, so when Kalypso announced that they were putting out a title (developed by Limbic Entertainment) that combined two of my interests, I was sold! The game seemed to allow for complex management (with each citizen individually simulated), while at the same time including the kind of ridiculous dictator-y stuff that makes any banana republic simulator memorable, like arbitrarily arresting your citizens and stealing the Eiffel Tower.
It’s now been a year and a half since the game released, and since I’ve recently returned to it, I thought I would do a review. So I’ll pose the question again: Is Tropico 6 still worth playing?
As always in my reviews, I’d like to start by covering the game’s presentation. I find that things like the graphical quality and music don’t directly impact my enjoyment of the gameplay, but they do affect my impression of the game overall; I’ll feel like I enjoyed a game more when they were well-done. On the other hand, I rarely find myself feeling that an otherwise-good game was made unplayable by poor graphics or music. That means that presentation isn’t quite as important as the other aspects of a game, so it makes sense to cover first.
While Tropico 6’s graphics aren’t stunning, I have to say that I really like the way the game looks. While I’ve never played the other five Tropico titles, some of them seem (based on screenshots) to tend towards the muddy and dark — hardly suitable for an island paradise. 6, on the other hand, is bright and colorful, and if some of the models (especially for boats) aren’t particularly fancy-looking, well, that’s hardly going to be a deal-breaker. Unlike in some other management games, a well-run island in Tropico really looks well-run — the game encourages you to maintain an orderly, compact layout through its mechanics (because citizens can’t travel very far to fill their needs), which leads to satisfying visual feedback as well. Imagine Factorio, but with more crocodiles.
The music is nice as well, giving you an idea of what might play on the radio in Tropico, but the track list is, I find, a bit short. Games with a more “active” soundtrack (i.e. music with lyrics that you listen to as opposed to more ambient tracks that play in the background and establish a mood) need more variety, because the more the music draws for the player’s attention, the more easily it can bore them. While Tropico’s soundtrack never quite gets annoying, it certainly could do with a few more songs.
The game’s writing, though, is sharp and funny. While some of the characters (mostly the faction leaders) are based on pure stereotypes, they liven up the game quite a bit and make it that much easier to love. Penultimo gets all the best lines, particularly with his characterization of the Second World War (which I won’t spoil here). While some of the gags get less funny with time (particularly the ones tied to common tasks), they were clearly written with heart, and they do so much to set Tropico apart from its many rivals in the crowded management genre.
Next, let’s move on to Tropico’s mechanics, the nuts and bolts of gameplay. This includes things like UI (honestly, for a management sim, it’s mostly the UI), alerts, and how well the game “scales,” which I’ll explain in a bit. If these pieces don’t fall into place, a game with intricate, fascinating systems and otherwise well-designed gameplay quickly becomes a grind, as you, for example, have to check through all of Europe looking for suitable marriage candidates in Crusader Kings 2. So does Tropico get this right?
Well…mostly. The UI is decent, but at launch it was missing a lot of information, like what was affecting the efficiency of a building, where to place buildings to grant them the best bonuses, and what exactly would affect citizens’ needs. Much of this has been fixed, but problems still come up sometimes; as an example, it’s often difficult to tell why you are making or losing money, because the Revenue screen in the menus only describes the last 12 months. Since almost all revenue is from exports, and ships only arrive once every four to six months, this can vary wildly and not provide useful information. There will be, ah, more on this later. Still, though, things are mostly functional, and as long as players don’t want to get into the nitty-gritty of how, exactly, things are working.
Alerts are fine. There’s a noticeable sound, and they don’t stack up so you don’t know what’s important and what’s not (which is a crime Paradox often commits). Alert windows generally give you all the information you need to make a decision — there are relatively few instances where you click something without knowing what, exactly, it’s going to do. You do tend to get bombarded with notices whenever a ship comes in, since so many tasks are tied to importing or exporting things, but that’s fairly standard for the management genre — and besides, if you didn’t want to deal with alerts, why are you playing a strategy game?
The game’s “scalability” is good as well. What do I mean by that? Many strategy games have a problem where, even if things work smoothly at first, whenever the player expands their settlement/conquers more territory/buys more property (whatever it is you do in the game in question), they become overwhelmed with little decisions to make. A good example is the aforementioned CK2 marriages, or Hearts of Iron IV frontline management; both fun at first, but less fun when you’ve been doing it for minutes and minutes on end because there continue to be more and more problems to solve. Tropico’s decisions all come in at the top level (politics, diplomacy, the constitution, what buildings to build), and since the population only grows marginally faster at the end compared to the beginning, you don’t have tons and tons of new unemployed citizens to find jobs for. If you’re into manually arresting criminals to fill jails with forced labor, thus generating wealth (not that I would know anything about that), you can run into some issues where the police aren’t fast enough to arrest all the Tropicans you tell them to, but that’s pretty much an edge case.
All in all, the minute-to-minute gameplay of Tropico feels smooth without being frustrating. While occasional issues do crop up, it’s incredibly easy to get sucked into the game’s complex sandbox, making little decisions that don’t weigh on you, trying to figure out whether it would be better to invest in your military or maybe add another couple of coal mines. That addictive feeling of managing money, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and designing the city is what makes Tropico work for me.
This is normally the part of the review where I would discuss the story, but, honestly, there isn’t any, so instead I’m going to zoom out and take apart the game’s longer-term aspect: Missions, advancement through eras, and the strange, hard-to-solve problems that you run into as you get into the later stages of the sandbox. Many strategy games run into problems in this area; the minute-to-minute gameplay may be fun, but the longer you play, the more boring the grind, or the less functional the game’s systems. Does Tropico do a good job of evening things out? Well…read on.
Previous Tropico games did have a Story Mode, but for 6 they decided instead to do a selection of missions, which all sort of tie into an overarching story but can easily be played by themselves. I suspect this took quite a bit less development time, and that that was why it was the strategy chosen by Limbic Entertainment, but I think that it was a good choice for other reasons; I spend most of my time in Sandbox, but missions provide a change of pace without (usually) being frustratingly difficult or overly confusing. Your goal is usually self-explanatory (exporting chocolate in Chocolate Factory, having a large population without building houses in Shackland), and it feels straightforward enough to achieve them, although you do sometimes have to get a little creative. They’re more of a nice diversion than a full-fat experience on their own, but playing through all of them could take on the order of twenty to thirty hours — certainly nothing to sniff at.
In Sandbox mode, the main form of long-term progression is advancement through eras. Each of the four brings new things to manage, new problems to solve, and more factors to juggle as you try to chart a course forwards. My issue with the system is that, often, moving to the next era creates more problems than it solves. The jump from the Colonial Era to World Wars feels especially jarring — advancing because you want to unlock the cigar factory can land you in a lot of trouble when you suddenly have to manage elections, the constitution, international relations, healthcare, fire prevention, crime safety, rebels, and so on. Your citizens’ political leanings are partly determined by happiness in the Caribbean as a whole (having low relative happiness in Tropico makes them less likely to support you), and Caribbean happiness starts to go up very quickly in World Wars and beyond, making elections difficult to win if you don’t plan properly. This all means that you want to accumulate a large nest egg before you move on to World Wars, since you’ll immediately want to build large numbers of buildings — but it’s hard to stack up cash when your best money-maker is the humble rum distillery. Strangely, subsequent era transitions don’t bring these problems, since they introduce fewer new mechanics. It would have been good if more time was spent ensuring that Sandbox mode didn’t include these difficulty spikes.
Speaking of difficulty, it seems we’ve come to the single weakest part of the Tropico 6 experience — the random, unexplained catastrophes that can sink a Tropico campaign almost without warning. These happen both in Sandbox mode and during missions, but they are more frustrating in Sandbox, since you’ll usually have spent much more time on a Sandbox campaign before things start to fall apart. Every Tropico player has run into it at least once; essentially, when your buildings are making less money than they pay their workers in wages, you start to have huge financial problems that can’t be easily resolved. Finding the buildings that are losing money is impossibly difficult, because from the UI it looks like every building is generating a surplus, except for particularly unproductive plantations; in fact, though, the cost of transporting the goods they produce to the docks, combined with the cost of providing services like housing, education, defense, and healthcare to the workers within, may well add up to more than the industry is producing. And there’s absolutely no way to tell whether that’s the case. Workers are even being paid as they walk to work, so if they live far away you’re losing money — but there’s no way to see average commute times in the UI. To solve these money issues, you have to either guess at what’s not making money and demolish it (which is a dangerous game to play), or take the game’s one available loan, which is for the very insufficient sum of $50,000, and try to use the cash to juice your economy by building what you think should be more profitable industries — although, of course, you don’t know.
And money is only one side of the story. The other thing that can sink you without warning is political unrest, caused by low happiness and therefore low approval. As I outlined before, happiness can quickly spiral out of control, leaving you desperately building social services and trying to improve your citizens’ lives. This can lead to money problems, even if it does solve your political issues, which isn’t guaranteed. Once approval gets low enough, you start to be in danger of losing elections, which can cause a death spiral; sometimes, the only way to win an election is to falsify the results, which guarantees victory, but (as Alexander Lukashenko could tell you), people who voted against you will be, shall we say, miffed. If you were very unpopular, that drives these people into the opposition, even to rebellion, which makes further elections impossible to win democratically and forces you to rule with an iron fist; there’s no way back up from the basement of martial law. That would be annoying rather than game-ruining — if martial law didn’t also kill your tourism industry, potentially gutting a Tropico that relies heavily on foreign visitors. And, of course, rebellions can eventually get so big that you can’t repress them, no matter how many soldiers you deploy. And getting dragged out onto the street and shot is actually even worse than losing reelection.
So…is Tropico 6 still worth playing? It’s a fun, colorful, engaging sandbox with witty writing and an addictive feeling of progress — a feeling of progress that’s occasionally derailed by factors completely out of the player’s control. It’s a shame that more thought wasn’t put into the UI, since most modern games do a much better job than Tropico at giving information to the player.
Still, though, the game really makes you feel like a cigar-smoking, narcissistic dictator. After twenty hours of playing it, I feel like I’m almost ready to run for President. I would recommend trying other, slightly more polished offerings first — Cities: Skylines and Rimworld come to mind as stellar management sims — but if you’re a fan of the genre, you really shouldn’t miss Tropico 6. ¡Viva El Presidente!
I give Tropico 6 three mysteriously-unprofitable canned-goods factories out of five.
Has it committed crimes against Skyrim and her people?
Photo by Sean Thomas on Unsplash. Spoiler alert: You’ll be seeing, um, a lot of these.
My rule for reviewing games is usually that I have to complete all of the main content and a good number of sidequests before forming an opinion. Since I’m not covering them as they come out, I’m not under time pressure, so I owe it to my readers to put out a complete, thorough review.
Obviously, there’s no way I could have followed that rule for Skyrim.
I did my best. I finished the main quest and a few of the bigger side questlines. I explored a number of dungeons that weren’t required for anything else, and I generally tried to cast a wide net, sampling different kinds of content from all over the map. I even got a couple of skills to level 100. But it was an exercise in futility; I could have spent a hundred more hours with the game and still not done everything there is to do.
I came late to Skyrim, the same way I came late to Grand Theft Auto V, getting it for Switch just a couple of years ago. Since then, I’ve been playing it on and off before I finally sunk my teeth in fully around a month ago. In light of that, I felt it was time to write a review. As I mentioned in my review of Rockstar’s golden boy, I believe that the four essential elements of a successful video game (in reverse order of how interesting they are to discuss in a review) are presentation, mechanics, structure, and story. There won’t be any spoilers in the coverage of the first three sections. Without any further ado, let’s get into it, starting with the game’s presentation.
I wasn’t playing big-budget video games in 2011. At the time, my idea of good graphics was Wii Sports Resort. This is another way of saying that I have no idea whether Skyrim’s graphics would have been impressive when it came out, but, hoo boy, they sure aren’t now. Textures are muddy and gross, characters look like they’ve been doing Nord meth, and the lighting is all over the place. The game is pretty enough when you find a nice vantage point and get a good view, but not at night (and it always seems to be night); then, everything turns into an undefined gray-blue-black mess. Even the food is unappealing, and it’s really hard for a video game to get food wrong.
I’d like to say more about the characters than just that one snippy off-color jibe. It’s kind of ridiculous just how ugly they are. The designers seemed to believe that they could simply paste realistic textures onto a cartoony model and get results, but in fact they couldn’t. For some reason, the various varieties of elves, who are supposed to be the most beautiful inhabitants of Skyrim, got the worst of it; I think it’s the eyes.
Still, it’s not all bad. Even if the textures aren’t all there, they are at least fairly brightly colored, which keeps Skyrim out of the ugly-brown-game trap that a lot of “serious” games of that era fell into. The artstyle is also highly consistent, and because nothing looks out of place, your immersion is rarely broken by a strangely high-definition sweetroll or something. Lastly, the enemy designs are pretty good; even if the game isn’t good at representing, say, Jarl Elisif “the fair,” it does a serviceable job of knocking together a hideous troll or dessicated draugr.
If the graphics aren’t quite up to scratch, the sound design certainly is. Dungeons are moody and atmospheric, leaving players with a genuine feeling of apprehension. It’s far from a horror game, but I was definitely relieved to finally escape the game’s darkest caverns and return to the world above. This also sounds great; the wind and weather is highly immersive, and the music is good as well. I personally liked the lighter touch of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild more as far as the soundtrack goes — it’s hard to feel particularly heroic when you’re just slogging through a swamp looking for nirnroot — but you certainly can’t fault its quality, and it gives you a great sense of adventure. Modern video games need to be made with an artistic eye, and, overall, I would say that Skyrim meets that bar.
As I’ve explained before, “mechanics” is a broad category. Essentially, it reflects the moment-to-moment gameplay experience, things like movement, combat, and the game’s UI, but not larger gameplay elements like quests, which fall under “structure.” When it comes to its mechanics, Skyrim can be a mixed bag; while I could go long periods of time without encountering any issues, they all tended to strike at once, breaking my immersion and leaving me figuring out how to play the game in a way it was clearly not intended to be played just so I could get past whatever the roadblock was that I faced.
One of the major problem areas was movement. On flat ground, things work as intended, but it’s easy to get stuck on roots and rocks. The fact that you can’t jump while sprinting exacerbates this issue, since you’re sprinting almost all of the time, at least when your stamina isn’t recharging. Once you start getting into slopes, things get worse and worse. Most games stop the player from climbing even a moderate incline, forcing them to keep to roads and paths; this is inelegant, but effective. Breath of the Wild allows players to climb vertical surfaces, which is fun and removes a lot of hitches that could otherwise result from wonky geometry. But Skyrim seems to want to strike an unhappy medium between the two. The player can climb steep slopes, but it really doesn’t seem like they’re supposed to be able to. That’s because the “climbing” mechanic consists of glitchily jumping up nearly 90-degree surfaces, and then, when the slope gets too steep, magically gliding horizontally along its surface until you can find a place where you are again allowed to ascend. Almost any incline in the game is eventually conquerable in this way, and it can lead to unintended results, like the ability to skip straight to High Hrothgar — which doesn’t really give you anything, but it clearly unintended.
Horses, the game’s only other mode of transport, feel completely backwards, resolving none of the issues around horizontal movement (they can’t jump while sprinting either), but somehow able to climb slopes even steeper than what the player is able to conquer. They’re also slow as molasses, which means that I only ever considered using one when I had to head up an extremely steep slope for whatever reason, a decision that would no doubt puzzle any real-world equestrian. Fighting from horseback is also completely awful, which brings us to the next area of examination: the combat.
Skyrim, as an action RPG, really needed to get the combat system right. The addictive feeling of leveling up and grabbing new perks would all be for naught if it didn’t feel like what you had unlocked transferred well into the gameplay. Luckily, with a few exceptions, that’s not the case.
Hand-to-hand combat of any description is extremely satisfying. Blows are weighty, and I really felt like I was doing damage, especially when I pulled out a greatsword or a warhammer. The downside is that, particularly in first person, things can feel very chaotic. Unlike in most games, enemies don’t “take turns” attacking you in melee, which amps up the difficulty but also makes it extremely hard to keep track of who has how much health left. Ideally, you’d want to kill the lowest-health enemies first, but that’s just not possible when you can barely even figure out who you’re hitting.
Backing up helps a bit. Bow attacks and archery are a great way to slow the pace of the game down in the player’s favor, and it’s much easier to see who you’re fighting, but if the enemy AI decides to be particularly aggressive, you can easily end up in a moshpit once again, only now without nearly the melee damage output you had before. Ranged attackers are meant to be weaker up close, though, so I suppose that feels fair enough; it’s just that it’s more difficult for the wrong reasons.
The game’s UI is all right, but nothing special. You can find everything reasonably quickly, but sometimes I ran into small issues. For example, I really think the armor and weapons you have equipped should be at the top of the list; once you’re carrying around a lot, it’s a pain to have to scroll up and down looking for anything you want to swap out. Also, spells can be a bit of a hassle to find, since it’s not always immediately clear which of the four schools of magic they fall into. Magelight, for example, is “Alteration,” but it really seems like it could be “Illusion” as well. Lastly, the map is a bit lackluster; it looks amazing, even now, but between the clouds, the shadows, and the muddy textures, you can’t really tell what the terrain around you looks like from it. The fact that you can’t see the roads, which are the main way you get around, feels like a head-scratching oversight.
At the end of the day, Skyrim’s mechanics are serviceable. Combat can feel very satisfying in the right conditions, and movement works correctly even if it can sometimes be a bit janky. Triple-A game mechanics have to meet a high bar to be received warmly by players, and Skyrim’s mechanics do — if sometimes only barely.
Next, I’d like to examine the game’s structure. Essentially, “structure” refers to how a game keeps a player busy. In Skyrim terms, that’s mostly quests. Obviously, not having played through every last one, I can’t speak to the quality of all of them, but I think I experienced a representative cross-section of what the game had to offer. I would divide them into categories, which we’ll discuss individually: “Dark hole” quests, where you go down into a dark hole, like a cave or a mine, to fetch something, “hunt” quests, where you kill something in the overworld, and “murder and mayhem” quests, where you go to a town and do something illegal.
The “dark hole” quests are by far the most numerous; after all, what would an RPG be without dungeons? They are clearly what Skyrim was built around, and it shows; the cycle of kill-enemies-loot-room never really stops being satisfying. You’re always on the lookout for better gear than what you have equipped, and since the game’s loot levels with you, there’s always a chance you’ll find something good, even in the smallest, most unassuming bandit lair.
There are sometimes some issues that do crop up, though. Some enemy factions (particularly Forsworn and Falmer) have gear that’s just plain awful, no matter what fancy enchantments it has, and many caves are inhabited by trolls or giant bugs that drop no usable loot at all, unless you really like alchemy ingredients. When this happens, the dungeon quickly loses its luster, since the promise of something shiny at the end of the tunnel is obviously a hollow one.
Also, it seemed to me that many of the dark holes looked very similar. If I headed into a Draugr barrow, I knew that I could expect cramped tunnels overgrown by mysterious roots (odd, considering that many of them were not covered in forest), corpses that would get out of their nooks on the walls to attack me, “traps” with poisonous darts that never seemed to do any damage, even at the beginning of the game, and approximately ten thousand iterations of that same stupid puzzle with the spinning blocks. In a Dwemer fortress, on the other hand, I could count on a difficult first section, navigating twisting, indistinct stone passageways and fighting incredibly tanky automata, and an easier but frustrating second section once I reached the Falmer area further on. Some dungeons did depart from these predictable formulae, but the bulk of them felt a little bit less than innovative. Still, they were mostly a good time.
“Hunt” quests are a very broad category, but generally involve either a mini-dungeon (i.e. a bandit or giant camp), a battle (like the Civil War quests), or a literal hunt for something out in the woods or mountains. Often, they were over more quickly than “dark hole”-type quests, which was refreshing, but that also meant they felt a bit less meaningful. And there’s no prospect for good loot in the snowy, pathless wastes of Skyrim. Usually, these felt like filler, but it was nice to see the sun and feel the wind on my virtual face. They could be shallow — the Civil War battles were usually over as soon as they’d begun, and finding objects was as easy as following the quest arrow — but they weren’t trying to be revolutionary, just to provide a change in pace, and they did this admirably.
I have mixed feelings about the “murder and mayhem” quests. The average player may not do very many of these over the course of a playthrough, since they were tied to the Dark Brotherhood, Thieves’ Guild, and Daedric questlines and really found nowhere else. But since I played a chaotic-neutral thief character, I ended up doing quite a few of them. On the one hand, it’s thrilling to break the rules the game sets for you, to break into buildings, pickpocket, and murder. That feeling of exhilaration alone carried me through most of the Thieves’ Guild questline. But, after a while, the missions started to feel a little bit samey. Killing NPCs is really easy compared to killing actual enemies, and robbing someone is as simple as sneaking into their house at around noon (when they’ll likely be gone), taking what you want, and getting out. Honestly, I felt like I was spending as much time going in and out of the Thieves’ Guild (four long loading screens) as I was committing actual crimes. Doing both the Thieves’ Guild and the Dark Brotherhood was, I think, too much of a good thing; they really aren’t that distinct from one another. Still, I appreciate that they made an appearance in the game, because it gave me a chance to try out a new playstyle that I really ended up enjoying.
If you twisted my arm and made me choose, I’d say that the game’s RPG systems also fell under “structure” rather than “mechanics.” So…how are they? In a word, nice! The fact that you gain “experience” by actually doing things, rather than just investing points into an abstract system that doesn’t make very much sense, is very satisfying, and the points that you do invest create interesting new possibilities. While some of the perks feel a little on the weak side (for example Light Foot in Sneak; not activating pressure plates isn’t much of a benefit if the traps they trigger don’t do any damage), most of them are strong without being broken. The fact that you can level up everything just by practicing does create an issue for some players: Since enemies scale to your level, if you level up skills you don’t need, like, say, Block as a stealth archer character, then your foes will get tougher even though you’ll be no better equipped to face them. This creates a perverse incentive for players to avoid activities they might otherwise do because they’ll level up unwanted skills. Overall, though, the system is liberating, and it was a relief to rid myself of one of the worn-out hallmarks of traditional RPGs.
So much for the game’s quests. What about its story? If you know me, you know this is where I really dig in in my reviews — and also start spoiling plot points, so if you haven’t played the game yet, read no further. But for Skyrim…well, it’s harder. The thing is, the main story questline may be the game’s longest, but not by much. You’ll spend far more time doing other questlines, and no one would consider a playthrough complete after just the main story. So, while I’ll by all means review the main storyline, I’ll also discuss the Civil War (which feels sort of “main”-ish). Beyond that, most of the sidequests honestly felt a little light on “story” content, but I’ll mention a few of them.
Still, I think we should start with the main quest, which is, after all, the game’s centerpiece. The thing is, I don’t think that this is the best questline by any means. Fighting dragons, which you have to do a lot of, isn’t really a lot of fun; it’s more spamming Dragonrend (if you have it) or running around waiting for the thing to land (if you don’t), then wailing away with your strongest attack. They’re big and almost stationary, and it’s really just a contest to see which will happen first, the dragon running out of health or you running out of health potions (hint: it’s always the former). You’re also sent down into a large number of absolutely huge dungeons. I think that two hours is the longest a dungeon should really take to complete in a game like Skyrim, and some, especially Blackreach, which is obscenely massive and impossible to get your head around, go way past that limit. Others, like Bleak Falls Barrow right at the beginning of the game, don’t really do anything new; Bleak Falls is just another draugr tomb that happens to take a little longer to clear out. And there are, of course, the obligatory quests that involve simply going to a location and talking to someone, like the one where you capture a dragon in Whiterun.
The story was kind of fun, though. I particularly enjoyed the Thalmor embassy infiltration mission — it felt like medieval James Bond, which I was not at all expecting. The characters are all right, though it’s hard to feel that they’re lively and interesting when mostly they just talk to you woodenly in a standing position. The Blades feel oddly demanding, especially when they tell you to kill Paarthurnax, who is probably my favorite character of the lot (kind, thoughtful, and voiced by Charles Martinet). Mostly, the main quest pushes you to explore Skyrim and find other side activities to do, which is a purpose it serves admirably, so it doesn’t really need to be anything special on its own. The grand finale, the battle against Alduin, is incredibly anticlimactic; while Sovngarde is cool on its own, the fact that you have three meatshields to help you meant that I never even took any damage during the fight. Anticlimactic fights are…something of a theme with Skyrim, actually. The game just doesn’t really do a good job of setting up the encounters as something important; instead, the intense music starts, a health bar appears, and you start wailing away, just as if you were fighting bandits. This is universal, across all questlines.
The main quest certainly doesn’t disappoint like the Civil War questline, which seems like it should serve as an extension to the story; after all, you’re introduced to it first, before you ever learn a Shout. Instead, though, it’s a boring, repetitive slog. I chose the Empire (since “Skyrim belongs to the nords” has aged poorly as a battlecry), but my impression is that it wouldn’t have been any better as a Stormcloak. All you have to do is go to far-flung forts and have incredibly awkward, anticlimactic battles with enemies who are inevitably far weaker than you are by the point you reach them. And it’s all pointless; characters continue to refer to “the war” long after its ostensible end, and the rewards are just not worth the effort.
As far as side quests go, I really liked the Dark Brotherhood storyline. It felt deliciously evil, and Cicero was a fairly interesting character, who I chose to kill off because his voice was annoying. While the betrayal “twist” was pretty predictable, it was still fun to go up against the Penitus Occultatus, although it was a little jarring considering that I was aligned with the Empire for the rest of the game. The whole experience certainly had a bit more story meat on its bones than the Thieves Guild, which I was into more for the robbery than for the ho-hum plot.
This is a weird little tangent, but I loved finding the archaeological notes in the Dwemer ruins (I think it was the Tower of Mzark?). Even though I knew the team had met a grisly end, I was thinking, as I descended, about what could have killed them, and what secrets the ruin hid that they might have found. Since the story beat was tied to a risk (whatever got them could have gotten me), and a reward (treasure was constantly mentioned), it was really engaging and kept me moving forward, even as the quest dragged on and on.
I wouldn’t say Skyrim’s story was anything special, but it was good enough to keep me engaged in the rich, fascinating world the game provides, which is an achievement in and of itself. The voice acting (which I suppose really falls under presentation) is good enough to bring some otherwise fairly standard dialogue to life, especially that for Paarthurnax, who I mentioned, and Arngeir, who’s voiced by Christopher Plummer. Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with Skyrim’s story, and I would have liked if it had had some more meat on its bones.
So…it seems like we’ve covered everything. That could only mean it’s time for the answer to the question: Is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim still worth playing?
Honestly, how could I say no? The game is a ton of fun. It has its issues, with Bethesda bugs and other weirdness, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s an experience you can sink thousands of hours into. Even better, most of the problems I did mention are all fixable with mods, a whole other rabbit hole you can go down that has the potential to turn Skyrim into a completely different game. It can be anything you want — a harsh survival experience, a business-management game, even a dating sim. Some people say that Bethesda stopped being a good developer after Skyrim. Very well, but you have to admit that they used to be very good.
I give The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim four illegally punched chickens out of five.
Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash. You’ll be seeing a lot of these if you pick up the game.
I have a confession to make: I had not, until approximately three weeks ago, played Rockstar’s mega-ultra-hit Grand Theft Auto V. I know, I know. Where was I, under a rock? The game took the world by storm seven years ago, scandalizing parents everywhere, and it hasn’t really climbed down from the top since. Last week, the game was sixth by playtime on Steam, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive; pretty impressive for a creation that’s older than this year’s first graders.
But if there’s one thing that can be said about human culture, it is this: What is popular is not necessarily good. In the early 60s, baby boomers unironically enjoyed music that beseeched them to “boogie.” Modern art — art that sells for millions of dollars — often consists of garbage stuck together with duct tape. And there are still, despite everything, girls with crushes on Justin Bieber. So the question remains to be answered: Is Grand Theft Auto V still worth playing?
I got the game for free on the Epic store a few months back. It was my duty, I felt, to experience something so influential, so controversial, so extraordinary. In middle school, despite not owning the game or even a device that could play it, I was a religious viewer of Xpertthief and Kwebbelkop on YouTube. Later, I moved on to Jerma985 and then Videogamedunkey, and while neither of them were focused on GTAV in particular, they made videos about the game; who didn’t? So, even though I’d never touched Rockstar’s creation, I knew quite a bit about it going in.
I think the best way to do a review is to go over presentation first, since that’s important but ultimately superficial, and then to move on to basic mechanics, to see whether the game functions properly and feels good to play. After that, I’ll be covering the game’s missions and world — its “structure” — before finally diving into its story and characters. Accordingly, the first part of this review will be spoiler-free, and I will provide a warning for those of you who haven’t picked up GTAV (you laugh, but I am living proof that those people exist) when we start to get into spoiler territory. There’s a lot to cover, so buckle up and get your vegan cheese balls ready; this is gonna be a long one.
As I said, I’d like to start with examining the game’s presentation. There’s nothing to complain about as far as graphics go; sure, the game may be seven years old, but it’s still impressive, and even though the developers were aiming for hyperrealism, which is a trap many games fall into, the look of the final product is just cartoony enough that it has aged better than many games from around the same time period. I played GTAV on a potato computer, and even still, I could enjoy San Andreas’ expansive views. The performance didn’t even suffer! I only got stuttering in the rain, but that’s a problem common with many games on my computer, so I think it would be silly to fault this one in particular for it.
The music is also decent. I think game soundtracks are often weaker when they incorporate a lot of licensed music (as GTAV’s does), since that deprives them of the chance to establish their own identity. There are a few original tracks from the game that I did enjoy, though, like the helicopter theme, which was very fitting for a night flight over the city. The licensed music mostly ended up being an irritation — I doubt anyone wants to jump into a car while being pursued by police and be assaulted by a blast of reggae — but in addition to eleven rap stations, the radio did have one good song, “Highwayman” by the Highwaymen, so I’ll give it a pass. Usually, I just ended up turning it off right away, but if I were to be roleplaying, as I know many players like to do, it would be a welcome addition. And it was always funny to pull people out of cars, get a look at them, and then hear what’d they’d been listening to — it gave you a hint as to these anonymous NPCs’ personalities. Overall, I think the presentation was top-notch, as befits a triple-A game from a well-established studio.
It’s now time to move on to the nuts and bolts of GTAV’s gameplay. The three things I think deserve a mention are driving, combat, and movement, since these activities take up a good ninety-five percent of a player’s time (at least). While they don’t define a classic by themselves, a game will fail miserably if it falls short in its basic mechanics. Luckily, in GTAV, players will find little to complain about.
The heart of GTAV is driving, and this is, mechanically, the best part of the game by far. The feeling of flooring the gas and roaring down the freeway, either slowing down time and weaving through traffic (as Franklin) or simply getting into horrible accidents (as Michael and Trevor), will never not be satisfying. While I’ve never been to Los Angeles, my impression is that Rockstar’s version is much more fun to get around than the real thing. The game takes advantage of this; every mission involves driving in some way, and the best ones all have visceral car chases, escapes from the police, high-speed races, and thrilling stunts. I have played racing games that have felt a little better, but then, who would want to play racing games (other than Mario Kart)? Driving in GTAV is much more fun.
Flying and boating also feel fairly good. Helicopters are a joy to fly around in, once you get the hang of them, which can be hairy. I found planes to be fairly pointless, since the map only has three airstrips (two of which are right next to each other) and just handful of other large, flat spaces that could be used to land them. This means that their higher top speed is pretty much negated by the inconvenience factor. Once you get into one, though, even big, lumbering cargo planes are satisfying to maneuver around, and when you do pull off a landing — not always an easy feat — you feel like you’ve really achieved something. Boats can be a good time, mainly because they let you see areas of the coastline that you’d never otherwise pass, but San Andreas’ shape as a large, round island means that they’re never going to be the fastest way to get anywhere, unless you’re crossing the Alamo Sea. They’re also nearly impossible to use for escapes from the police. Combine this with the fact that, in the thirty-some hours of story missions that GTAV provides, there’s only two or three brief sections where you have to drive boats, and I didn’t find myself spending very much time out on the water — not that I really wish that I had.
The gunplay is quite satisfying. I played on a controller, so the experience was not quite as smooth as if I had been using keyboard controls, but even still I was able to give a good account of myself in the many, many gunfights the game offers. Shotguns are satisfying enough to use and have quite a bit of killing power, and, at the other end of the spectrum, sniper rifles are a little broken because enemies will realize you are shooting at them from far away, get into cover, and proceed to take ineffective potshots at you with underpowered firearms as you take them out one by one. I did find, though, that there was sort of a “donut” in between the extremes where things didn’t feel quite as good. The assault rifles are fairly weak unless you get headshots, which can be difficult without a scope, and this means that fights can take a very long time to win when they’re taking place in roughly the 10–50m range. Enemies also tend to fall down after getting hit the first time, often behind cover, so you have to wait for them to get back up before trying for another headshot, which adds to the frustration (SMGs are even worse when it comes to this because of their lower damage per bullet). It wasn’t that bad — it just made me wish that a shooter would come out one of these days which didn’t take the assault rifle as its default weapon. Melee combat is a little rigid, and fistfights can be won purely by mashing the right trigger, but it does the job, and you hardly need to do it very much.
When melee does get janky, the game’s movement system is largely to blame. Obviously, as a game that was trying to be “realistic”, GTAV could never have had the hyper-fluid movement system of a Mario title, but it could at least have done as well as a game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which aimed for the same semi-realistic movement (at least most of the time), but which felt much smoother and more responsive. One of the issues I encountered was navigating stairwells, particularly indoors; the janky camera and the player character’s wide turning radius while running often meant that I spent as much time running into walls as I did actually going up or down. Running is fine, although the stamina system feels a little pointless, since you never really run out when it matters, and climbing is tolerable enough. Movement just wasn’t a priority for Rockstar, and, unfortunately, it shows. Still, overall, GTAV feels pretty good to play, and I was rarely frustrated with the game’s basic mechanics. It’s always a relief when a triple-A title manages to nail the fundamentals like this.
Things go slightly downhill when it comes to what I’d refer to as the game’s “structure.” Its world and objectives are just not quite what I had expected them to be. Before you get the pitchforks, hear me out.
Firstly, the game’s mission structure is clearly something the developers took for granted. After all, every Rockstar game has missions; why change it up? For starters, because the mission system is ancient. Sure, some type of incremental objective system is mandatory for a game. You have levels in Mario, encounters in The Last of Us, Starites in Scribblenauts. But it just seems like we should be able to come up with…something better.
Why? Well, maybe it was just me, but the mission system made it feel at times like Rockstar didn’t want to be making an open-world game. You rarely interact with the world at all during the missions; the roadways of San Andreas are only there to let you drive to the mission. Often, you go to the mission and then immediately have to drive somewhere else. At one point, I started a mission at Trevor’s trailer that required me to go all the way to Michael’s house, come all the way back, get in a plane, fly across half the map, get in a gunfight, then fly back the same way I came, land at Trevor’s airstrip, and then drive all the way back to Michael’s house to start the next mission. I was on the go for probably twice as long as I spent shooting at enemies. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that GTAV wasn’t an open-world game; this particular mission would actually have been a far smoother experience. Sometimes, there are vaguely interesting activities that do integrate the open world, like a mission that has you finding a certain make and model of car based on aerial pictures, but mostly they’re just go to the location, then shoot your way out.
Speaking of shooting, the main story missions seemed like they often couldn’t decide how intense they were supposed to be. Sometimes, you have a mission where you have to steal a vehicle, and you’d maybe have to kill one or two people, then drive away scot-free. Other times, you get one where you’re doing essentially the same thing, except now it’s part of a heist, so instead of one or two people, you have to kill one or two hundred. There was a mission which really challenged my suspension of disbelief when it required me to steal something from an armored truck and then, with the help of two AI companions, to hold off a literal army of cops. In free play, I’d learned that taking that kind of fight is rarely a good idea, so I failed the mission the first time when I simply snuck into a cop car and drove away. After a longish gunfight, one of my companions declared that it was safe to go because they were “thinning out.” What? Cops never “thin out” in free play; the game was breaking the rules that it had established for me. Sure, if, in real life, three men somehow managed to kill two hundred cops, law enforcement might well begin to “thin out” while the National Guard got called up or whatever — but three men would never manage to do that in real life. It all felt incredibly arbitrary.
Also, many missions feel tacked-on. This is especially true of the Strangers and Freaks side missions: the “Pulling a Favor” tow truck missions are an especially low point, requiring you to drive a tow truck — slowly — to random parkings lots around Los Santos while Franklin bickers with his irritating ex-hookup from high school. But even some of the main story missions feel pointless, particularly the heist setup missions, which often require stealing a vehicle from an unguarded lot and driving it across the city. Another setup mission involves stacking cargo containers, which is boring and achieves nothing as far as making the heist happen goes. Rockstar seems to be under the impression that they can make any mundane activity interesting by slapping “Mission Passed” on the screen afterwards, but oh, they are sorely mistaken.
What about the open world itself? Well, as I said before, missions rarely interact with the open-world aspect of the game, and even those that do don’t take advantage of most of the space available. The world is richly detailed and beautiful, and I wanted to get to see every corner of it, but a good quarter of my map was still blank when the credits rolled. Sure, the parts I hadn’t visited were mostly barren hillsides, but why would you put barren hillsides in a game if you didn’t intend to use them for something? Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild features a smaller map than GTAV, but, until a quick Google search a few minutes ago, I believed that the opposite was true; content makes an area feel more expansive than it really is, and GTAV’s world just isn’t densely-packed enough to feel fleshed-out. Of the interesting areas on the map, some, like the state prison, the wind farm, and the hippie commune in the north, are never used for anything meaningful during the game’s story missions. What was the point of adding them?
Adding to the feeling of disconnect, you have no way of interacting with the open world. In Breath of the Wild, you were constantly foraging for ingredients, having impromptu monster battles, climbing to high ground to see what was ahead, marking shrines — in GTAV, you can only shoot people, steal cars, and escape the police. If you’re not doing a mission, there is nothing meaningful to do with your time. The activities that are on offer, like stealing from armored trucks and robbing convenience stores, are pointless when the take is so much lower than the cost in medical bills if you happen to get wasted. Sure, you can try to climb Mount Chiliad (yet another thing you never do as part of a story mission), but why would you, when all there is at the top is a view (admittedly a nice one) and maybe $40 worth of pedestrians’ money? There are letter scraps and stunt jumps scattered around the map, but the scraps help you solve a murder, which feels very dissonant given the number of people you kill over the course of the game, and the marked stunt jumps are often no better than the unmarked ones that you create yourself as you try to escape police. Overall, GTAV’s structure is solid, but not particularly impressive. I understand why people went bananas over it when it came out, but in 2020…eh.
GTAV is old now as far as video games go, so it makes sense that maybe the world and missions aren’t quite up to modern standards, but one thing that never ages is a game’s story and characters. I’ll tell you right now: this was by far the worst part of the experience for me. For all my kvetching about the missions and the structure of San Andreas, I was having fun most of the time as I completed objectives and navigated the map. The only time I really felt turned off was during cutscenes, when the people who I was playing as were cast in sharp relief. A warning — THERE WILL BE SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT.
I think the game’s real problems begin with its protagonists. The fact that there are three of them shows an admirable ambition from Rockstar, but it’s not clear that them all being playable really helps the game much.
Even if GTAV is supposed to have three main characters, it only has one main-main character, and that’s Michael Townley/de Santa. Everything in the storyline revolves around him: his support of Franklin, his troubled relationship with Trevor caused by the events at North Yankton, his entanglement with the FIB — all of the plot events in the game come back to him. And yet…it’s not really clear that Rockstar made the right decision in focusing on Michael. He’s hardly very sympathetic, with his “oh-no-I’m-rich-and-sad” act, and he causes all his own problems. It’s hard to believe, in retrospect, but all of the game’s events were set in motion by his decision to try to get revenge on his wife’s tennis coach. Trevor is supposedly the impulsive one, but Michael is actually just as bad, just as violent, unstable, and reckless. His special ability is also the worst of the three, if that’s at all relevant.
Speaking of Trevor…wow. It may be a legitimate decision for a work of fiction to feature a completely irredeemable, atrocious scumbag as one of its characters, but Trevor is really hard to stomach, even in a game about stealing cars and killing people. He murders randomly, behaves creepily towards women, and just generally seems to be incapable of existing in human society. I guess my issue with Trevor isn’t so much the character himself — as I said, his inclusion is legitimate — it’s that he never had to answer for his actions. The entire second half of the game revolved around Trevor learning of Michael’s betrayal in North Yankton. Fair enough; that was a pretty scummy thing for Michael to have done. But, even if I said that Michael was as bad as Trevor, I don’t believe he was worse. Trevor does various things over the course of the game — torturing that one guy, killing Floyd and his girlfriend, killing Wade’s friends, perpetrating multiple mass shootings — that are actually far, far more evil than anything Michael did in Ludendorff, yet he never faced consequences for his actions. Maybe if Patricia Madrazo had broken up with him because he was too inhumanly evil, taking him out of himself for a moment and making him reconsider his life decisions, then his representation would feel fairer to me? But hey, I’m just spitballing here. As it is, he just seems like another version of the Joker effect, an objectively evil man getting a pass for his evil deeds because he is “troubled” — and white. I agreed to a certain amount of scarring, over-the-top, offensive content when I picked up the controller to play GTAV, but I feel like Trevor crossed a line. I felt ill when I had to play as him.
How did Rockstar try to redeem themselves? Oh, with a Black protagonist, of course! Unfortunately, Franklin just reinforced the bad taste in my mouth that I got from Trevor. He started out strong, as the “good” protagonist who constantly pulls the other two back from the brink of physical violence, but as the game goes on, he gets fewer and fewer lines. Eventually, he becomes a cardboard cutout whose only contribution to the story is saying “I got you, dog,” whenever Michael tells him to do something. He has no agency. Obviously, the final decision you make, about which ending you want, is made when playing as Franklin, but you make that choice, not him. He does have a dry sense of humor that I appreciated, but besides that, it feels like he doesn’t need to be there. No, just think about it: What if the game were just Trevor and Michael? Nothing that happens would go down in a fundamentally different way. All the pivotal story beats — the North Yankton incident, the jewel store job, the work for and against the FIB, the other North Yankton incident, and the final assassinations — would happen exactly the same way if Franklin Clinton were to simply drop off the face of the earth. The game is about Trevor and Michael; that’s who Rockstar cared about, and that’s who they focused on.
Also, while the choice to increase the diversity of the cast was admirable, it seems like maybe it would also have been good to add a writer of color (and maybe even a woman, too) to the team of white male writers. Why? Well, nothing that happens in Franklin’s life would really be out of place in a Top 40 rap single. Except for his aunt, who is delightfully weird, he felt like a walking stereotype, stealing cars, selling drugs, and popping anyone who got in his way. I’m not Black, so I feel like it would be wrong of me to comment at length on this, but I don’t believe that the writing team as it was was any better qualified to flesh him out as a character than I am to comment on their work. At one point, the three protagonists are talking, and Trevor is going over the merits of their partnership. Pointing at Franklin, he says, “hey, we got diversity,” and that feels like it was the writers’ attitude as well.
When asked in an interview why GTAV didn’t feature a female protagonist, one of the game’s writers, Dan Houser, explained that “that just wasn’t the story they wanted to tell” and that “being masculine was so key to this story.” I think it is fruitful to examine the game’s side characters with this in mind. Who comes up frequently? Well, there’s Lamar, Molly, Franklin’s aunt, and Michael’s family, but while these characters are important to various side plots, they rarely affect the flow of the game’s main events. As far as the ones that are go, you have Lester Crest, Dave Norton, Steve Haines, Devin Weston, Floyd, Solomon Richards…notice a pattern here? All of the characters with big-time speaking roles, except Franklin, are middle-aged white men. It’s almost as if the writers were also middle-aged white men. Really, what Mr. Houser should have said in his interview was this: “being white, middle-aged, and masculine was so key to this story.” The worst part about all this is that being masculine, let alone white and middle-aged, wasn’t all that relevant to the story. If I were to read the game’s script and couldn’t see the characters’ names, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell that they were men at all. Sure, there’s some machista chest-thumping and sex talk, but beyond that, the game doesn’t discuss masculinity in any meaningful way.
In fact, it doesn’t discuss anything in any meaningful way. Everything in GTAV’s game world, from oversexualized billboards to overmilitarized police, is a caricature of a problem that exists in real-life American society, but it doesn’t use any of that brilliant world-building to make a point. The game feels like a long, florid sentence without a verb at the end to create a coherent thought. There were a million directions the writers could have gone. They could have made a statement about police brutality, showing how the harsh way the LSPD, the FIB, and Merryweather treat citizens makes problems worse and not better. They could have made a statement about crime, showing how it can often be a symptom of other issues in society even as it also constitutes one itself. They could even, as they claimed to want to do, have made a statement about masculinity, showing how American men often behave in self-destructive ways for stupid reasons. They chose not to do any of that. The reason you make a provocative, uncomfortable work of fiction like GTAV is to take players out of their comfort zone and force them to look at something in the real world more critically, but the game falls far short of doing that.
The worldview that the game does present is also deeply objectionable. There’s no moral of the story, no lesson to be learned. Instead, players come away with a general attitude of deep cynicism. GTAV is so cynical that sometimes it even turned me off, despite the fact that I’m one of the most cynical people I know. And if it does make a statement, it’s a bizarrely Baby Boomerish one, a tirade against governmental waste, fraud, and abuse. Characters are constantly joking about how their “tax dollars are being put to work” in stupid ways, as if that was at all the most pressing concern for people living in the world of GTA, and not, you know, being gunned down in the street by a madman in a golf cart? If that kind of incongruous, head-scratching, irrelevant cliché is the best that Rockstar could do, I’d rather they didn’t do anything at all.
The problem with GTAV is this: No one at Rockstar seemed to be quite sure what they wanted the game to be. Was it going to be revolutionary? Well, yes, in some ways, but they had to make sure that it was traditional, too, hence the decision to make it a basic shooter with the same mission structure as ever, and not integrate stealth elements, or squad-based strategy, or anything else that could help to flesh out a game about heists. Was it going to have interesting and flawed protagonists? Yes, but they also had to make sure not to interrogate those flaws, which would have led to uncomfortable questions about the diversity of the Rockstar workplace. Was it going to be funny? Well, there would be some funny parts, but it had to be a serious game with serious (i.e. white male) characters too. Was it going to tell a story that had never been told before? Well, in a way, but any kernel of originality was going to have to be so couched in trope and stereotype that it would be hard to detect at all. Compromises were made on almost everything, and in doing so, I feel like Rockstar compromised their game’s soul as well.
I have to admit something: The answer to my initial question was never going to be no. If you play video games, if you have the cash and a platform to play it on, you should play Grand Theft Auto V. It has flaws, yes, flaws sometimes so compromising that they’re hard to forgive, but isn’t that exactly the same as American society in general? We live in a nation of screwups. Time after time, we’ve tried to confront the problems that threaten the very core of who we are, come up with solutions — and then screwed it all up. Rockstar might have screwed up GTAV, but the fact that they did makes it all the more perfect of a mirror for players to hold up to real-life American culture. Remember how I said I was cynical? Yeah.
If you can look past the clichéd storyline, the stereotyped characters, and the outdated world design and mission structure, there’s some nuggets of gold in GTAV. Rockstar got the basics right, and even if I wasn’t the biggest fan by the end, I happily played through the whole game.
I give Grand Theft Auto V three instances of gratuitous sexual innuendo out of five.
How do you build a nation? It’s a deceptively simple question, one which many thousands of philosophers and political theorists have struggled with over the millennia. Unfortunately, they made one crucial mistake: Not asking me. I have all the answers, and so, without further ado, I will reveal to you the secrets of planting your flag in some far-flung corner of the world.
Step one: Find a nation to build
This sounds a lot easier than it is. All of the good nations, such as Canada, already exist, so you will likely have to settle for a second-rate pick. There is very little (but not no, as I’ll outline in a moment) unclaimed land in the world, which means that it will be much easier to carve a chunk out of a country that already exists.
The best place to look is likely going to be Africa. The continent’s borders were drawn in 1952 as a piece of modern art, so they are almost entirely meaningless. This means that you are free to go ahead and draw a random shape somewhere in the middle of the Congo, then fly there and see who your new citizens are. You can hardly do a worse job than the Belgians at governing them!
Nowadays, though, following the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the general consensus is that most nations must exist to represent an ethnic group within their borders. There are exceptions to this rule, i.e. the United States and India, but even those countries find some common value amongst their citizens to stand for. So, for example, India represents the notion of unity in diversity and many different groups coming together towards a common goal, while the United States represents the interests of 630 billionaires.
But if you want to found a nation, you might have to fudge things a little. Europe’s nations largely already represent the continent’s ethnicities, as do Asia’s, and while there are certainly some unrepresented minorities, these are usually too small and unimportant to constitute their own political entity. Instead, you should create an ethnic group. This is probably easier than you are expecting. The ideas of “ethnicity” and “nationality” date only from the nineteenth century, after all. It’s not as if who belongs in which group is set in stone. For example (and with apologies to Ukrainians), while the Ukrainian language has existed for a millennium or more, the idea that there was a Ukrainian nationality originated largely with Taras Shevchenko, a poet who died in 1861. Similarly, the idea of Pakistan (that the Muslim-majority areas of what was then India should be independent) was percolating for a few decades late in the 1800s, but the name was coined only in 1933, fourteen years before nationhood. This is not to say that Ukraine and Pakistan are somehow illegitimate, just that the concept of nationality is fluid.
This means that if you pick a group of people who don’t form an ethnic group per se, but differ from the majority culture of their nation in a few distinct ways, and occupy a geographically defined area, you can make them into a nation with a few decades of cultural pressure and intellectual debate. For example, Minnesotans share an awful accent and a love of the disgusting “hot dish” tater tot casserole. These would seem to be thin grounds for nationhood, but then so are $3 cheeseburgers and a callous disregard for intrinsic human worth, and that’s what the rest of the country is running on right now. You could go to Minnesota and found, say, an Institute for Minnesotan Studies, and describe how the Minnesotan language differed from American English, and promote Minnesotan literature. Once you’ve converted the literati, the rest of the population will naturally follow — America is famous for its respect for intellectuals. (Ha ha)
If you don’t want to follow this difficult path (after all, other people are involved, and other people make everything more difficult), you could also just go to the one spot of unclaimed land on Earth. Due to a complex border dispute between Egypt and Sudan, claiming Bir Tawil (meaning “water well,” clearly an Arabic joke since there is no water there, or anything else) would mean losing the Hala’ib triangle, a much larger and more populous piece of land nearby. Neither nation wants to lose Hala’ib, so Bir Tawil is the only land in the world that no flag flies over. It also looks like Tatooine and regularly bakes at a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit, but don’t let that stop you. Just be warned that many other intrepid individuals have claimed the territory over the Internet — so when you do get there, be ready for a fight.
Step two: Name your nation (and design its flag)
Bear in mind that most nations don’t get to name themselves. You may never have heard the name “Sakartvelo,” but you probably have heard of the country — we in English use the easier-to-pronounce and very natural short form, “Georgia.” (Anger at this injustice is known to have produced Stalin and Beria).
So you won’t get to choose what your country is called. People in Belgium or Thailand or someplace will give it an insulting nickname, and you’ll just have to grin and bear it (alternatively, refer to Step Three, “Start a war”). You can give them a nudge, though. Pick a really snappy name that everyone can get behind. For example, Comoros is called “Comoros” or something very similar in nearly every language, because the name is short and sweet and sounds like a wizard in a fantasy novel or something. A good rule of thumb is, the fewer people have heard of your country, the fewer silly nicknames it will collect.
Another way to give everyone a nudge is to change up your country’s flag. Some may see it as a bit too on-the-nose, but really, as a way of preventing errors, it’s hard to beat. The great state of Illinois understands this perfectly:
See? Perfectly clear. In case you wanted more writing, the ribbon coming from the eagle’s mouth has random words on it, and the dates on the rock and the setting sun (which looks like it was drawn by a kindergarten student) really complete the picture. It’s sort of an official state mood board for Illinois. Really, you can’t go wrong with American state flags. Take Delaware’s:
There is a cow. There is a ship floating above a mysterious blue bar. There are two clones of the same man, representing the two people who live in Delaware (the Bidens). There is a date, prominently displayed in Times New Roman font, that leaves an unanswered question for the casual viewer: What could it mean? It is, in fact, the date on which Delaware ratified the United States Constitution, the first state to do so. Another more important question the flag fails to answer is: Why should we care?
Step three: Start a war
The bloody business of, well, bloodshed is a subject that everyone would like to gloss over, but no serious student of state-building can afford to skip this step. The fact is, all successful nations (and many unsuccessful ones as well, but that’s a matter for another day) have had wars — big, bloody wars — within a few years of independence. Often, the cause was the declaration of independence. If this is the case for you, congratulations! You’ve skipped a lot of difficult details (i.e., who to declare war on, where you’ll acquire arms and munitions, how you’ll convince a few thousand random Minnesotans to fight and die for you), and you can get straight to the fun part of winning the war and writing a national anthem about it.
Wars are crucial for nation-building. They contribute to a national myth, convince your citizens that they are special, and have worth, and dignity, and don’t have to keep going back to their toxic ex, god dammit, and can provide a cover for getting rid of your state’s undesirable elements (i.e. French persons). New regimes in existing states must rely on this tactic as well. For example, the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s provided the Islamic regime in Teheran with a rock-solid argument for why the Iranian people should get behind them: Saddam Hussein was clearly far crazier. Similarly, the Mexican War of Independence has provided common ground for Mexicans of all political leanings, even though the only other thing they could agree on, for a solid hundred years following independence and intermittently after that, was wearing large hats and shooting each other with rifles.
So if you have a war (provided that you win), you’re set. The problem is when (heavens forbid) you come to power peacefully. Without a war, your people will begin to question their nationhood, and their system of government, and maybe even why they agreed to have a rando from the Internet as their first president at all. You’ll be inundated by a sea of problems that you can’t solve (i.e. how to tax people without making them angry, how to run a government without drowning in debt, how to choose a National Tree and National Flowering Shrub), and soon you’ll be overthrown, your fledgling nation most likely reincorporated into the country it split off from. That would be a crushing blow to Minnesotan nationalism.
No, you have to start a war. The trouble is that it can be difficult to pick a target. A neighbor makes a good choice; it’s easier for people to get behind a war if they feel personally threatened by the nation you choose to attack. But sometimes your options are limited. For example, in the case of Minnesota, the new nation would be surrounded by just two sovereign neighbors, the United States and Canada. The United States is too big to fight and even Canada (and I’m sorry to say this, because it’s pretty sad) would beat the hell out of them. Fortunately, Minnesota would have access to the sea via the Great Lakes, expanding the list of potential targets to practically every nation on Earth. Unfortunately, many of the easiest victims (such as Bolivia) are landlocked and therefore invulnerable to aquatic invasion, but the selection is still quite wide. The people of Minnesota would simply need to pick somewhere reasonably close by — Grenada will do nicely, a fact first discovered by the U.S. Marines — and go to town. A few thousand dead later, and you’ll probably have some nice poetry and patriotic songs written, as well as quite a bit of practice for your nation’s health service.
Step four: Build your government
The hardest question to answer, when it comes to creating a government for your nation, is who should be in charge. Just kidding! That’s easy: YOU, of course! Who could be more qualified to run a country than you, a random person with no experience who may not even be from the place you’re trying to govern? Of course, the country will not actually be run by you; it will be run by lizard people. But you’ll have some say in some things.
One of those things is economic policy. The lizard people will probably push for a free-trade approach, and for good reason; practically the entire world follows such a policy, and you must admit that some select parts of it are quite rich as a result. However, if you are in charge of a newly-independent developing country (i.e. Wales), you would do well to note that the success rate of this strategy in bringing wealth to poor countries is, well…mixed. In fact, you could say it was actually fairly low. Okay, fine, it’s zero percent. Maybe the lizard people know something we don’t?
Alternatively, you could go for protectionism. Every single developed economy, except for Switzerland and Singapore, which don’t count because they are tiny and easy to confuse for one another, pursued protectionism until they were fairly well-off, when they switched to free trade. This decision will, however, make you internationally unpopular, because it won’t be quite as easy for Firestone Rubber to enslave your nation’s children, and you will make the World Bank pretty angry. The choice is yours.
Another action item is figuring out what rights your citizens will have. It’s easiest if you simply don’t give them any, since then you can do whatever you want, including making them dress up in costumes and do the Fortnite default dance for four hours every Friday night (not that I would know anything about this). But if you do that, people will probably try to leave, and policing the borders is difficult when the guards break and run at any opportunity as well. Instead, you should guarantee some basic freedoms (speech, press, religion, and assembly), then erode those freedoms through confusingly-named bills that you will push through the legislature. One word of advice: You should be very careful with LGBTQ+ rights. If you let these people be themselves, your nation’s children will probably catch The Gay. Be especially oppressive to trans people, who have an unfortunate tendency to write irreverent satire on the Internet.
Lastly, it’s good to figure out what form your government will take. Will you be a monarch? A president? A prime minister under another monarch who lives in a country on the other side of the world and has visited your nation precisely twice (hello, Papua New Guinea)? And the legislature as well. Should it be organized under the English model, where a bunch of men with ridiculous accents yell at each other, or the American model, which also has the men with ridiculous accents, except now they’re split up into just two parties? Both ways are absolutely terrible, but you get bonus points if you have an unelected or indirectly-elected upper house that can invalidate everything that the lower house does. Now that’s efficiency.
Step five: Celebrate!
Yay! You founded your nation, designed your flag, won your war, and built your government. Now you can take it easy! The day-to-day running of your country can be left to your bureaucracy and the lizard people, leaving you free to explore your interests, such as collecting thousands of luxury cars (as in Brunei) or forcing all of the schoolchildren in your nation to weed your fields (as in eSwatini). Being president (or king, whatever) of a country is basically the best thing that can happen to a person. All you need to do is make sure that none of your subjects get angry enough that they actually rise up to overthrow you. People forget that things were ever good if they weren’t alive at that point, so simply wait twenty or thirty years before doing anything overly oppressive. Just sit back and enjoy your new life of sending the waitress to federal prison if your food is late at a restaurant!
Oh, and watch out for budding nationalist movements in the far-flung corners of your domain. Those can be pretty dangerous.
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