General RPG Creator Aldorlea Games's Knack for Gameplay Features

I recently played Laxius Force 1, created by Aldorlea Games, an RPG creator that’s obscure even for an Indie developer, in spite of possessing a startlingly large catalogue.  And I’m not gonna mince words: Laxius Force 1 is a bad game.  It’s not terrible--even has a few moments that are kind of good!--but there’s little about its plot, characters, villain, events, or writing style that’s compelling for more than a moment, and there are a lot of elements within it (and its sequels) that are a strange and off-putting mix of uncomfortable and amateurish.

You know that feeling you get when you stumble into a particular corner of Fanfiction.net, or Deviantart?  Like, you’ve found someone who’s got some weird and vague-but-troubling unhealthy ideas about how love and/or sex works, even though they don’t seem like they have a lot of practical knowledge about the subject, and it’s all somehow made worse because the narrative or visual quality is so hamfistedly basic that it kinda feels like a kid made it?  There’s a lot of stuff in Laxius Force that gives you that same feeling.

Here’s the thing, though: even though I had no emotional investment in the characters (and, in fact, actively disliked the majority of the most important ones), and found the plot as a whole no better than passable...by the end of Laxius Force 1, I actually found a strange compulsion in me not to uninstall the game, beat a hasty retreat, and quietly forget I’d ever played it, as would be sensible, but rather, to keep right on playing into the second game.  A compulsion which, in fact, endured long enough to take me into the third Laxius Force, too, in spite of LF2 having ramped up that uncomfortable feeling I mentioned before.*  I’m not sure I’d say I wanted to keep playing this trilogy through to its end, but I did somehow feel the need to do so.

It’s not an entirely new sensation to me.  Witch Hunt and the Millennium quintology, the other Aldorlea Games works that I’ve played, had a similar draw to me as I played them.  I wasn’t sure what it was, but this Indie RPG developer was doing something right, apparently.  And since it sure as hell wasn’t the writing in Laxius Force’s case (and while I enjoyed Witch Hunt and Millennium while they were going well enough, they weren’t amazing, or anything), I had to assume there was something about the actual gameplay that was doing it.

Certainly it’s not the most noticeable part of an RPG’s gameplay, the battle system.  Aldorlea Games titles seem to inevitably devolve, sooner or later, into a game where you’re either effortlessly breezing by enemies with 1-hit-kills and no damage taken, or getting fucking wrecked by them.  They’re like Sailor Moon: Another Story most of the time: there’s no middle ground between being overpowered or underpowered in each enemy encounter.  Not all that fun even by RPG standards, and while I don’t mind RPG Maker’s engine the way some people do, I can’t say it adds much to the experience.

No, the magic touch of Aldorlea Games is not in the combat, but rather in the slightly more mundane portion of an RPG’s gameplay: the exploration and numbers-management.  It all boils down into a few points:


A: Thorough, and creative, exploration pays.  There is a fuck-ton of stuff to find in an Aldorlea Games title.  More, I think, than any other RPG I’ve ever played can equal.  Any piece of furniture can be hiding a sack of gold.  Any bit of shrubbery might provide a curative leaf.  Any given ice crystal might reward you with a stat booster.  Bookshelves are heavy with Mind-increasing items.  1 sword hanging on the wall might be lootable.  And beyond that, plenty of bits and pieces of the background may not provide an actual item reward, but may increase parameters if examined with the right character.  Examine torches with a Fire Elemental in your party, and she might just get an extra HP or point of Resistance from them.  Check the right bit of vegetation, and your pet might just eat it and gain some experience points.  The vast majority of screens in any given Aldorlea Games RPG have secrets to be found within them.

And it’s not always just straightforward searching, too.  Of course there are tricky little secret passages here and there, as many RPGs employ, but there are plenty of hidden treasures to be found that require more than just a normal check-everything approach.  On the rare occasion, for example, it pays to check a treasure chest more than once--a few of them actually are saving their best contents for persistent robbers.  And occasionally there are tricks to finding stuff that are so unusual and unexpected that it’s a wonder anyone ever finds them--there’s this 1 spot early into Laxius Force 1 where you make a quick hop from a cave exit to a little ledge, and if you hit the opposite direction at just the right moment, the leaping character will hesitate just enough to fall down into the crevice she’s leaping, which leads to you exploring a minor cave area with a few extra goodies within it.  You only get a single chance at this, and the timing has to be quite precise--it’s the sort of secret you’re surprised anyone could ever discover (I only know of it thanks to another player’s strategy guide, and Yveen only knows how he/she found it).  Aldorlea Games has an outright obsession with hidden loot, concealed treasure rooms, and obscure, rewarding easter eggs, and the constant feeling of every location in the journey being a treasure hunt helps keep the otherwise repetitive battle-heavy experience interesting.


B: The rewards of that exploration matter.  Most of the time, when you find stuff in an RPG, be it from a treasure chest or from examining a suspicious piece of pottery or whatever else, it’s a nice, positive experience, but you wouldn’t feel too upset at missing it.  The sword in a dungeon’s treasure chest that you happened to miss would have been handy for 20 minutes or so, but the next area will surely have it or a better weapon available for purchase or discovery.  Healing items found before the endgame are potentially useful, but usually you’ll have a giant stack of them in your inventory by the end that you never had need for.  For most of the game, the stuff you find in chests and through careful searching is a minor convenience and little more, with few exceptions.

In an Aldorlea Games work, though?  The stuff you find has significance.  First of all, a lot of the stuff you find is either a variety of permanent stat-increasing items that you can use on the characters of your choice, or minor events that will increase the abilities of a specific party member.  Every now and then, you may find such an event that teaches a character a new skill, even, or an item that can do so for multiple individuals.  This isn’t just happening to find a potion and thinking, “Eh, I guess that was worth the trouble of pressing the X button, maybe.”  This is stuff that permanently strengthens your team!  If you’re thorough, you easily find enough stat boosters in the course of 1 of these games to equal anywhere from 20 to 50 levels’ worth of growth in a specific parameter!  It’s a min/max player’s dream, and even less obsessive audiences are still going to feel substantially rewarded by it.

Even beyond the stat increases, though, there’s weight to the stuff you find in these games.  You’re gonna need healing a LOT, and inn-styled rest areas aren’t always easily accessible at some points in the story--or they’re expensive enough that you don’t want to be using them too often (more on that in a second).  Further, there’s enough lingering status effects in these games that it’s a real good idea to hoard all the curatives you can get, because you never know when you’re gonna be stuck in a part of the game where your party members don’t have a spell to cure a particular status ailment that indigenous enemies are fond of inflicting.** 

Items that cause temporary beneficial effects are valuable, too--not just for the combat utility, as you might normally think, but also because there are occasions in these games where your characters require a certain stat to be high enough to garner a reward from some event or quest, and beneficial status effects may be the only reasonable way to boost the characters up to that value at that point.  There are similar situations which also give value to items that give beneficial temporary boosts--there are some NPCs in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, who will increase a character’s stats based on the values of a different stat, and you can manipulate this with beneficial conditions to get some amazing results. 

Lastly, items used for attacks in combat sometimes are stronger than what attacks your characters can muster, or possess elements/status effects that you don’t always have access to, making them a handy utility at times.  In fact, there’ve been a good few special boss battles in my time with this developer where the only reliable way to win was to use attack items.  So yeah, even just the act of finding basic items has more weight in an Aldorlea Games adventure than it does in most others.

Next: Money.  In most RPGs, money’s a backburner concern, something that’s rarely so scarce that you need to actively seek it, and even when it’s harder to come by, that usually just means a few minutes of fighting some enemies to get some more.

In an Aldorlea Games title?  Every goddamn cent counts.  There’s some variance of this (money is much tighter in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, than in Millennium or Witch Hunt), but as a general rule, there’s stuff you’ll need a ton of money to buy that you will really want, or that’s required for a quest, or something like that, and you’ll always be scrambling to acquire said funds.  Enemies don’t tend to drop very much of the stuff, and the ones that do aren’t usually ones you can encounter repeatedly.  Limited-time offers on unique equipment are common, quests that require you to fork over large amounts of cash to complete them are common, exchanges of money for services that permanently improve party members are common, and hell, there are even moments where you’ll have a temporary opportunity to buy an expensive piece of equipment for a character you don’t even have yet that will turn out to be the best armor or weapon they can get.  And because money is so scarce, it makes finding it, in any quantity, almost more rewarding at times than the stat-boosts.

And lastly, the equipment.  With the varying needs of stat or elemental resistances for some battles, the utility of certain beneficial effects, the occasional requirements of 1 particular stat to be boosted to high heaven...it all means that whatever equipment you may come across in your explorations may be something that’ll be valuable for you not just now, but later in the game, too.  The best equipment in the game isn’t necessarily the stuff you find at the end of Aldorlea Games titles!  The Alchemist Hat you find somewhere in the middle range of the Millennium quintology has use throughout the series.  Some of the early Relics you can find in Witch Hunt stayed on my characters up to the very end.  The Luck Ring, Key of Heroes, and Legend Sword you can find in the first chapter Laxius Force 1 are all gear that you’ll have use for right to the end of the third game!  Whereas in most games the stuff you can find is pretty much always just scaled to be slightly better than what you’ve already got, and will be sold off shortly after as new gear becomes available, there’s every chance that the equipment you find in Aldorlea Games through careful exploration will be a reward you appreciate for a long stretch of the game, possibly its entirety.


C: The quest system is rewarding.  In most RPGs, doing sidequests leads to rewards of money, experience points, items, stat increases, new abilities, and/or, most preferably, story-related content like lore, character development, and so on.  And that’s usually it...sometimes a game will have sidequests be associated with some kind of jack-of-all-trades guild keeping track of the jobs your characters are taking, so there’s some satisfaction to climbing onto the top of that, but that’s about it.

Completing quests in some Aldorlea Games, however, has an extra dimension of reward to it.  You not only get whatever tangible benefits come with a quest’s completion, but the game also does a little song-and-dance bit when a quest is completed, in which each party member involved says a little line of reaction to the fact that they’ve helped complete X number of quests--dialogue which changes as the number goes up.  It’s cute, and in addition to whatever you got for the quest itself, the characters involved also get an experience bonus that gets larger depending on how many quests they’ve completed so far.

Additionally, some characters will get a bonus stat increase for each quest completed, which provides extra incentive to have them do so--the cockatrice character in the Laxius Force trilogy, for example, gets +1 HP every time he helps complete a quest, and since you get him very early, you can wind up, by the end of the series, with close to 200 extra HP tacked onto him.  Which is a lot, when the range of fully-leveled characters’ HP tends to be between 800 to 1200.  And considering he’s already a tanky character, that’s all the more handy.

Point is, doing sidequests with this little extra quest system in place makes it all the more enjoyable to complete as much of the game’s additional content as possible.  Admittedly, I usually don’t need extra incentive to do that anyway, as I generally want to get the most out of my RPGs, but it’s still a nice little extra to grow my party members’ strength that much more as the adventure goes forward.


D: The enhancements add up.  Sure, you may only get an extra +1 Strength or a couple more HP for a character from each bonus you collect, whether it be through a quest reward, examining the right spot in a dungeon, joining a guild, or whatever.  But these little increases to characters’ stats happen a lot, and as a result, they start seriously adding up after a while, even before you count the stat-boost items you can dole out at your choosing.  It’s not unusual, from what I’ve seen of Aldorlea Games, for the value of some characters’ most important stats to be 20 - 30% derived from the out-of-battle increases they get throughout the game.  Knowing that these little bumps upward will accumulate into a respectable total keeps them feeling rewarding and relevant, even when most of them are very small increases individually.


These points probably don’t sound all that impressive on their own, in text, and to be sure, they’re minor quirks of game design.  But they’re pleasant enough, compelling enough, that they make the experience of playing some of Aldorlea Games’s works stand out.

I like each area of the game having lots of stuff for me to find, rather than just being strictly defined by the obstacles of monsters and traps within it.  I like the fact that what I’ll find while doing this exploration will often have noticeable, lasting value to me.  When I realized that items carried over even when levels and applied upgrades did not from 1 Millennium title to the next, I started hoarding the stat-boosting items I found through the whole series, and I liked the act in Millennium 5 of using 5 games’ worth of parameter increasing items on Marine’s warriors (particularly since the whole point of the series is to find them and make them strong enough to win the tournament, so the extra emphasis on their combat capability gave a special sense of satisfaction).  Had I played on any setting below Hard, I’d have probably had a lot of trouble maintaining enough losses in that game to get the true ending, with how pumped up the heroes were.  And a min/max kind of player would probably have a field day with this stuff.  I like that characters keep track of their parts in the quests of the game’s course and comment on it, and can receive extra benefits from that involvement.  And I like that making characters stronger isn’t solely the domain of leveling up, but of all the parts of playing the game.***

They’re little boons to the act of playing, but they’re frequent, and they’re many.  It adds up to something that, if not fun, exactly, at least has a significant draw to it.

There isn’t a lot about Aldorlea Games that especially stands out (and what does, such as Indinera Falls’s takes on romance and on endings, is not always positive).  But I gotta give the developer credit here: they’ve figured out some ways to enhance the basic grit and glue of the RPG playing experience, and for that fact, it’s kind of a shame that Aldorlea Games is extremely unknown.  Because I think that some of these approaches to exploration rewards, character stat development, the economy and utility of items and money making them feel more valuable to find, and so on are ones that other developers should take notice of, and start implementing into their own works.  As ever, I firmly believe that what actually matters about an RPG is its narrative content...but it never hurts to make the packaging of that content a little easier and more interesting to deal with.
















* Although, in fairness, LF2 also introduces the last of the major 4 characters, and she’s actually kind of a decent character (in spite of the laughably empty and unhealthy romance she gets thrown into), so there’s some marked improvement over the first game, too.


** Granted, this is sort of more a case of finding a way to get around a design flaw than an actual virtue, but still.


*** Not to mention that it’s a little more logical, too.  I mean, it seems to me like it makes more sense that someone would get stronger and more well-rounded in their abilities from a wide variety of actions and experiences, rather than just having repeated the same strategy to kill a fish monster for the hundredth time.

General RPG Lists: Worst Endings

Well, all, you know how it is: it’s been what they call a hot minute since I posted this list rant, and I’ve played enough relevant games since publishing that the time feels right to add onto it, transforming this from a list of 5 to a new list of 10.  A little new, a little old, let’s see what my experience with the crappiest endings in the RPG genre looks like 8 years later.



Never actually intended to do a companion to my Greatest Endings List, but (at the risk of spoiling the below content) Bioware’s works alone more or less necessitate this compilation.

I explored what made a good ending in the other list. But what makes a bad ending, really? Sure, poor writing, stupid ideas, plot holes, these are part of it, but to me, the greatest crime an ending can commit is to disappoint. There are a lot of lousy endings to games out there. The ending to Suikoden 4, for example, is amazingly boring, and provides no particular satisfaction beyond a reassurance that the torment of playing Suikoden 4 is finally over. Yet you won’t see it listed below. Why? Well, it’s not that it’s of better quality than those below, necessarily. It’s that Suikoden 4 is already an insanely boring and unlikable game. You get a lousy ending to a lousy game, you’re not surprised. It’s no worse pain to experience than the rest of the game was until that point.

Sure Final Fantasy 8’s ending makes no goddamn sense at all, but neither did anything else in the game. Its ending is stupid and nonsensical, but not unexpected, so there’s not much reason for disappointment. Sure, Crystareino’s ending is so utterly forgettable that I have, well, utterly forgotten it, but it’s a Kemco game--the entire package makes no single mark upon the player’s sensibilities, not just the ending.  Sure, you can barely call Etrian Odyssey 5’s final events an ending, but then, you can barely call everything that preceded it a story.  Sure, The 7th Saga’s ending boondoggle of time loops/corrections and a cross-species rebirth that was totally unasked for by its recipient is brief, poorly explained, badly conceived, and incredibly frustrating, but, aside from its brevity, that means it’s completely on point with the game as a whole.  It’s when you have a bad ending whose effects are felt upon a game whose quality was better, that the ending truly becomes terrible.

The other major problem I think an ending can have is a lack of closure. Now, I’m not saying that every single detail needs to be wrapped up in a game’s ending. I’m not even necessarily saying most of them have to be. But if you don’t have some feeling of satisfaction, of completeness, after seeing an ending, then that ending has failed utterly. An ending must END a game in at least some significant capacity; it must reflect a closing of the story, or at least, a closing to this part of a story. I don’t necessarily mind an ending that is a transition, such as the ending of Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1. The SMTDDS games are 2 parts of a whole story, and the second picks up where the first left off. But the ending of SMTDDS1 still provides all the closure the gamer needs to enjoy it. Even if it’s not the end of the story (in some ways, it’s just the beginning), it’s still the end of the first major part of the characters’ journey, a turning point in their tale of great significance. It provides closure for how far the characters have come, even as it promises that there will be more trials for them ahead.  If a game has no closure in its ending, then it has no true ending, just a poorly executed stopping point.

Lastly, just as an ending needs to have comparable (or even superior) quality to the product it’s concluding, an ending should also be thematically consistent to everything that’s led to it. You don’t end a standard whimsical Pokemon game with a gritty, blood-soaked gorefest as the Pokemon Champion fights to the violent death against overwhelming odds, for example. A developer should have an ending kept consistent with the ideas, tone, and traits of the product. Otherwise you just get a mess. You’d think this would be patently obvious, but plenty of writers are so obsessed with having their work be edgy, unpredictable, and/or some gross misunderstanding of the word “deep” that they’ll throw such a curveball at the player that said ball loops full circle and winds up hitting them in the ass.

Anyway, that about covers the most major reasons an ending can be bad, at least for me. So let’s see which RPGs have the worst ones, which games trip and fall right at the finish line.

One note: at times, the last part of the game itself is fairly inseparable from the actual ending, so some of these picks may be more a case of the finale being terrible, not strictly just the ending. I doubt the non-distinction really matters to you, but all the same, just gonna state that in advance.

Other note: Spoilers. Duh.

UPDATE 11/17/23: Shin Megami Tensei 5 added; Final Fantasy 7 has been bumped off.  Additionally, Fire Emblem 15 added as Dishonorable Mention; Fallout 3 has been bumped off.



10. Shin Megami Tensei 5

Anyone who thinks that Shin Megami Tensei 5 is a good RPG needs to look into getting a more competent surgeon to handle their lobotomies, but even by this cheap, lazy slop's standards, its stable of endings are pretty shitty.  Nothing about any of its conclusions is any good, as I have detailed previously, but since you expect a shitty, careless game to have a matching ending, what really qualifies SMT5 for this list is the fact that whichever philosophy you chose to stand by, the game spends its final moments making sure that you know either A, You're Stupid, B, You're Wrong, C, Your Efforts Were For Nothing, or D, Any Combination Of The Above.  It's like Atlus wants you to feel like a loser for having played their game, and if you somehow were still feeling good about slogging through SMT5, this was their final resort to make damn sure you regretted the experience.


9. Millennium 5

Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely.  I’ve spent 5 games’ worth of time on this series, gone all in on a quest that fixates itself on the recruitment and participation of its party members, to the goal of a social revolution of upturning class inequality...but yeah, you’re right, Aldorlea Games, completely and totally.  You’re 100% correct that after over 80 hours of my time, being there every step of the way in the herculean effort to form and maintain a team of heroes for the dream of a new and greater society, all I want is a 4.5 minute ending of Marine making an inspirational speech and a little fade-to-black text saying that she succeeded, and everything was good times from then on out.  Not-quite-5-minutes’ payoff for almost 100 hours of my time, that’s the perfect ratio!

No, no, don’t trouble yourself, Millennium 5, I didn’t want to actually SEE the society that this whole goddamn quintology has been about creating for myself.  And don’t concern yourself, Aldorlea Games, because I didn’t expect to get even the slightest idea of what the 12 allies, to whom 90% of the journey was devoted to recruiting and training, wound up doing with their lives after the game’s events--let alone all the other party members who also were major participants in the story.  I mean, I got to know that Marine hooked up with a guy who’s been on screen for about 20 cumulative minutes, what more could I possibly want from the human interest angle?  That’s certainly better than knowing whether her father, whose failing health was the instigating event of this entire adventure, got better or not!

Really, Indinera Falls, don’t worry, I never expected you to put an ending into the conclusion of your game.  That’d just be madness.


8. Deus Ex 4

Hey, SquareEnix!  You think you could maybe deign to use your ending for the purpose of concluding the game, and not just as a fucking ad for the next?  I think I had more closure to the events of Deus Ex 4 before I started playing it!

Just about the only part of DE4’s ending that actually seems more interested in wrapping up the game’s events than being sequel bait is the part that talks about the outcomes of some of the sidequests that you did...and this stupid game can’t even do THAT right, because said outcomes are reported through the Picus News Network, which DE3, 4, and Breach have all gone out of their way to point out is untrustworthy.  So the most closure you can get out of any part of DE4’s ending depends on how well you can read between the lines of a fake news report on some (not all) of the sidequests you completed.  Awesome.


7. Squids Odyssey

There is no ending.  This is an unfinished game marketed and sold as a finished game.

And I don’t mean that it was just the first of a multi-part story, which never got completed because the sequels were never made.  This ain’t Anachronox, or Ash, or Mark Leung: Revenge of the Bitch.  Not every planned multi-part epic can be a successfully completed Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, The Banner Saga, or Millennium, and I don’t count that against a game whose series never took off past its first step...as long as it’s still a finished game.  The Banner Saga 1 and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga 1, for example, ended before their stories were complete, but they were finished works, each reaching a reasonable, organic stopping place in the overall tale to go out on, and await the next game’s continuation.

But Squids Odyssey?  Squids Odyssey isn’t that.  It does not end at a clear, natural stopping place in an overall journey.  There is no moment of transition from this first stage of the adventure to a theoretical second.  There is nothing.  It does not end, it just stops.  This isn’t a fade to black, this is just a succession of moments, 1 moment in which the story is being told, and the next in which it isn’t any more.  I’m not even sure it’s technically accurate to include it in this rant, because to say that Squids Odyssey has 1 of the worst endings in RPG history is still to credit it too highly, to exaggerate that the game possesses something that it simply doesn’t.

Not making the situation any better is the glib, arrogant attitude that the game’s creators, The Game Bakers, seem to have toward the situation.  Besides the fact that they sell the game for $15 without any indication that what you’re purchasing isn’t a complete product--not a huge amount of money, but $15 is still the full price one might expect to pay for a comparable simplistic, shovelware-esque title--their approach to inquiries about the game’s incomplete state leaves maybe just a bit to be desired.  To wit, when asked by myself whether Squids Odyssey would ever be completed, a representative from The Game Bakers responded with, and this is a quote from the actual fucking email,

“What is completed and what is not, that is the question.”

After waxing evasive for a bit on the matter, they concluded the email with a suggestion that maybe if I bummed them a cool $500,000, they might finish the game.  When it comes to customers daring to expect to receive promised goods they’ve paid for, apparently Bethesda isn’t the only developer whose knee-jerk response is, “We’re not planning on doing anything about it.”

So yeah.  An “Incomplete” is different from an “F” only if you actually have the opportunity and intention to turn that incomplete work in, and as it looks like no one at The Game Bakers has any inclination to bother completing what they’re selling as a finished product, the fact that Squids Odyssey’s ending couldn’t make it to the party makes it well worthy of its spot here.


6. Neverwinter Nights 2

You've guided the Kalach-cha through countless dangers on his/her quest, from humble beginnings in a rural swamp town to a crusade against a worlds-threatening being of antiquity. You've seen this protagonist through assaults on evil lichs, assassination attempts by otherworldly cultures, criminal trials by the highest court in the land, adventures both great and small. You've allied and formed friendships with people of many races and walks of life, creating lifelong bonds with many men and women of the greatest integrity and loyalty, and also that drip Qara. You've stood against the King of Shadows, stayed strong and defied the odds and fate itself to defeat him. And so, how does Obsidian decide to end this long, grand adventure? What is the reward for your culminated effort and investment into this story and its characters?

Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies.

Yeah, thankfully Mask of the Betrayer and Storm of Zehir actually do continue the protagonist's story, and clear up a lot of the missing details of the main campaign’s ending (otherwise you can bet that this would’ve taken the fifth spot on this list instead), but like I said with FF7 and its shitty knockoff continuations earlier, the fact that secondary media retroactively fixes a problem doesn’t mean that the original work doesn’t stand on its own as flawed to some significant degree.  And taken by itself, Neverwinter Nights 2 has 1 of the laziest, most dissatisfying endings ever conceived. It feels like the writers at Obsidian were angry with you for playing their game to completion.


5. Witch Hunt

I’m concerned that, in terms of ending its creations, Aldorlea Games may be the Bioware of Indie developers (this will make more sense once you see some of the occupants of the lower spots on this list).  I encourage you to read my rant dedicated to how bad Witch Hunt’s ending is, but I’ll try to summarize here.  Brief, disappointing, thematically contrary to the game as a whole, and utterly baffling as a narrative choice, Witch Hunt is what would happen if “But our princess is in another castle!” was actually just the end of the game.  The ending to Witch Hunt appears to be the result of Mr. Indinera Falls’s enjoyment of low-quality horror movie endings and his misunderstanding that they can be just as functionally applied to any other genre, and/or any other medium.  The creator has said emphatically that the ending to Witch Hunt was not a case of his simply wanting to wash his hands of the game and move quickly onto his next project, and I believe him--but the fact is that if that had been the case, the result would likely not have been very different.  Honestly, if I’d gotten as invested in Witch Hunt’s cast and story as much as I did some of the games below, there’s a very real chance it would have placed even further down on this list.

Indinera Falls, if you ever read this, please try to understand and take this to heart: a decent open ending is the careful building of a story's end around a planned and thematically consistent gap in the audience's knowledge.  It is not simply the absence of material.


4. Wild Arms 4

Now how is it, after all that yakking I did earlier about a bad ending needing to disappoint to be truly bad, that Wild Arms 4’s ending can be on this list? Surely if there is any game terrible enough that its ending cannot possibly disappoint, it is Wild Arms 4. Well, you would think that, logically, but WA4 is the worst RPG in existence for a reason, folks--it manages at every turn to confound your expectations and get worse. As unparalleled as its shittiness may be, WA4 still manages to find a curveball to throw at you with its ending to piss you off.

Basically, this ending is not just wretched in the ways you would expect, given the game. It is even wretched by the game’s own wretched standards. Throughout this shithole of a game, the repulsive little irritation that serves as its protagonist has never, not once, shut his yap about how grownups should be more like kids because kids trust each other and work together and grownups only destroy and blah blah blah SHUT UP JUDE JUST SHUT UP. He has reassured his friends time and time again how they will totally be BFFF (Best Friends Forever Forever) and how unbreakable their bonds of friendship are and so on and so forth. They make pacts to always be friends, to meet up together after the game’s events, to help each other always, and on and ON. It’s safe to say that a major theme of this game by the time of the ending has been that if you are friends with someone then you should HOLD THEIR HAND FOREVER AND NEVER LET GO EVER, NOT EVEN IF ONE OF YOU HAS TO GO TO THE BATHROOM, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND GUYS THE GROWNUPS MIGHT GET YOU IN THE LAVATORY AND MAKE YOU EVIL LIKE THEM USING THE DIABOLICAL MIND-CONTROL MAGIC THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TURN 21.

So what does Mr. Codependent Friendship is Forever wind up doing in the ending? Why, he becomes a forest ranger, living a life of solitude in which he never sees his friends again.

What.

So...so you’re telling me that the game that would not stop harping on the immeasurable value of positive, lasting human connections of childlike innocence and solidarity from start to finish for 50+ hours...has its theme’s poster child become a fucking HERMIT!? Why...what the...how...but...

The.

This game’s ending is not only crappy from the player’s perspective, but it’s completely inconsistent and totally opposed to every annoying, unexamined value the game has held! Jude’s ending throws his character, his outspoken never-shuts-up character, completely out the window! You literally could not have an ending more opposite to everything the game has been trying, in its terrible and idiotic way, to say. Just...words cannot describe how completely unfathomable this decision by the development team is.

Hell.

Also, I hate the ending of WA4 for the fact that, after having had the game more or less promise to the player that Racquel, the one shining light of great characterization and innovation in the whole game, would live, it kills Racquel off, off-screen, using the same method (her illness) to do so as was explicitly stated would be prevented. Thanks a lot, WA4, and fuck you, too.

Wild Arms 4’s ending: it flips you off with one hand, and flips itself off with the other.


3. Mass Effect 3

Originally, Mass Effect 3 had, no exaggeration, the worst ending I had ever seen or conceived of, in any media form. I wasn’t alone in this belief, not by a long shot, and so Bioware released an addendum DLC package to the ending, altering it somewhat to improve it. You can read all about it in the 2 rants I did about it, but in short, they succeeded in improving it, by a LOT, and addressed each of the biggest problems I had with the ending. It's still unacceptably horrible, of course, one of the most spectacular failures in the history of human storytelling that still to this day makes me ill to think about, make no mistake! But, y'know, a little less than it was before.

I still can't believe this thing's not at the top of the list. What kind of species are we, that I cannot objectively say that the ending to Mass Effect 3 is the worst ever created?

Anyway, as it stands now, ME3’s ending is not the absolute worst I’ve ever seen, but it’s disappointing, stupid, out of place (feels like someone shoving a poor imitation of Isaac Asimov into Star Wars), and makes it impossible to achieve a victory that stays true to the ideals of the series and its protagonist. ME3’s ending basically gives you 4 options:

Destroy: You sacrifice an entire race of life, along with a cherished companion and friend of Shepard (the protagonist). Needless to say, this is unacceptable to anyone who ever played a good guy Shepard, who has, on multiple occasions, spoken out against any mindset that sacrifices innocents for a cause.

Control: Everyone but Shepard lives, but only by taking the action endorsed by the game’s main villain. In addition to making the game’s focus on opposing the villain largely meaningless, this option directly opposes a running theme of the Mass Effect series, which is the danger of finding and using advanced technology that your culture is not ready for yet. Major characters in the series like Legion, ones we’re obviously supposed to take seriously, warn against this. Events in the history of the series, like the shortsighted uplift of the Krogan people, warn against this. Hell, using technology that one’s society has not earned through its own discovery is how the bad guys of the series set their trap against the galaxy’s people to begin with! Sovereign, the main bad guy of ME1, says himself that by leaving ultra-advanced technology behind for people to discover, those people’s technological advancement follows the paths that the bad guys want it to. Sorry to go into too much detail, but I want to make my point clear--as attractively death-free as Control is, it is VERY much against this major theme of the Mass Effect universe.

Synthesis: The option that Bioware obviously likes the best and wants us to pick is quite definitely the worst. It’s morally repulsive (Shepard basically violates every sentient being in the galaxy’s right to bodily self-determination, and it implies that the best way to guarantee peace is to make sure everyone is the same), it completely disregards some important character development (Legion’s Geth and Javik would be philosophically and morally opposed to this, EDI claimed to have felt alive through Shepard’s influence in the game, yet in this ending acts as if it’s a new concept to her, and more), and it’s ridiculous and makes no sense in countless ways. It also doesn’t seem to solve the problem it aims to address, since the conflict of the created rising against their creators can be easily recreated by any of the surviving people in this ending who happen to want to build new machines. It also incorporates a very similar instance of the galaxy's people suddenly gaining access to technologies and knowledge they have not yet earned themselves, so it contains the same violation of series themes that Control did. And lastly, if the Reaper-ized beings regain consciousness, as the ending seems to imply in its cinematics, it’s just creepy and horrible--they live now as twisted, sad, freakish abominations. No thanks.

Refusal: This is the only option that allows Shepard to stay true to himself and that upholds the spirit and themes of the Mass Effect series. Unfortunately...everyone dies in it. Fucking hooray.  See above thoughts on Neverwinter Nights 2.

If there was ever a perfect embodiment of the concept of tripping at the finish line, it’s the finale of Mass Effect 3.


2. Dragon Age 2

Dragon Age 2’s finale is the one that put the thought of a list of Worst Endings in my head to start with. Whether or not you liked DA2 (a lot of people did, a lot of people didn’t), the game’s finale is terrible through and through. And I mean, perfectly. If you want a perfect example of how to make a lousy finale to your story, Dragon Age 2’s conclusion is a great guide. I may find Mass Effect 3’s ending to be far more disappointing and a greater betrayal of its game and audience, but objectively speaking, even I have to admit DA2’s ending is a greater storytelling catastrophe. Describing how bad, how utterly inept it is in detail would be a rant in itself. Which is why I already made a rant about it. Go read that if you want the details.


1. Valkyrie Profile 2

I’ve mentioned this one a couple of times, but man. This is so awful as to almost be inconceivable. Valkyrie Profile 1 is a legendary game, one of the most respected RPGs and arguably the biggest feather, artistically, in SquareEnix’s cap prior to the existence of Nier: Automata. On a system remembered for some truly groundbreaking and legendary RPGs, Valkyrie Profile 1 is one of the Playstation 1’s finest, and its original copies are some of the rarest, most sought-after RPGs out there, right up there with Suikoden 1 and 2, or an original copy of The Legend of Zelda. So, what did SquareEnix do in the long-awaited sequel?

Use the finale to kill off half the cast, including Lenneth, the unforgettable protagonist of the 1st game, and then make it so the original beloved, legendary, monumentally artistic piece of gaming history never happened. The ending of VP2 is slash-and-burn storytelling at its worst, its worst, not just eliminating most of the major cast of this game, but even rewriting the history of the VP world to prevent the possibility of the original game’s events from ever happening. Valkyrie Profile 1 was, from an artistic standpoint, one of the proudest moments of the combined history of SquareEnix, and they didn’t just disrespect it with a poor sequel, like they did with Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy 10--they actually decided to erase it altogether. Even Mass Effect 3’s ending only destroyed the intangibles of the ME series, the themes and spirit of its predecessors. This one does all that and more...this ending is not just a lousy ending to Valkyrie Profile 2, it’s also an active murder of Valkyrie Profile 1.


Dishonorable Mention: Fire Emblem 15

“Only one truth is clear: War will come again, when man grows proud and slothful once more, and its flames will devour one and all, raging until the very earth itself lies scorched and bare of life.  For whatever madness lay in the hearts of gods...a darkness deeper still beats wild in the hearts of man...”

..

...Is...is that...really what you want the last lines of this game to be, Nintendo?  

Seriously...?

Yeah, uh, thanks guys, super cool of you to end a 40 - 60 hour game about bringing peace to the continent and saving humanity from a mad god with the statement that a horrific world-destroying war is inevitable because humanity is actually even worse than the villain of the story.  You do a whole song and dance through the game about how important and better it is for humanity to be in control of its own destiny, take us through all the fanfare of Alm and Celica becoming joint rulers of a new united kingdom intent on leading humanity into a bright, cooperative future of self-reliance, and then you make THIS your parting shot?  It reads like Alm got depressed and left this as his suicide note, for Christ’s sake! 

I'm only sticking this in as a Dishonorable Mention, because up until this final passage, the ending of Fire Emblem 15 is...well, "good" would be a HUGE exaggeration, but I think somewhere in the range of "minimally passable" is at least reasonable, and you wouldn't expect much better of this subpar RPG.  But this IS the final, lasting sentiment that Nintendo imparts before dropping you, so yeah, it at least deserves recognition here.  Thanks, assholes, you really know how to leave your audience with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.



And that’s it.  Is there anything to take from this?  I contend that the answer is yes.  There’s a certain, fundamental wisdom to be gleaned here.  Something important, something with meaning and substance.  A truth of the heart and soul which we can take with us from here on out.  I think The Game Bakers put it best when they said, “When

















* Although, given its upper management as a whole, the removal of most of the current higher-ups from Shinra’s decision-making and overall operations could only be good for the company.  With self-important morons like President Shinra, Palmer, Heideggar, Scarlet, and Rufus in charge, all of them letting a thoroughly ineffectual, unfocused idiot like Hojo run wild with their budget while consistently producing no useful results, it’s a wonder they hadn’t folded well before FF7 even opened.


** And after seeing it, you may wish you had gone on not knowing.

The Deus Ex Series's Problem with Endings

The Deus Ex series is by and large a pretty great one, for multiple reasons, but it is by no means perfect.  Its first protagonists didn’t have a particularly engaging or deep personality, for example, and sometimes a hiccup in some of the basics of writing will become an obstacle to the effectiveness of the series’s messages.  But if I had to pick 1 area where Deus Ex really drops the ball in a consistent and damaging way, it’d be the endings to its games.

Now, it’s a funny thing about this: most of the time, the endings to Deus Ex’s games are not, in their own right, bad ones.  DE1 and 3’s endings were actually quite good, in fact, and while it got a bit intangible and cerebral, I rather liked DE2’s conclusion--elements of it felt a bit like something Isaac Asimov might have written.*  Further, while the conclusion to Deus Ex: Breach’s narrative wasn’t exactly amazing, it fit the game’s very small story well enough that I can’t really say I find it objectionable.

Really, the only Deus Ex ending that’s actually bad is that of Deus Ex 4.  DE4’s ending, sadly, is highly dissatisfying, clearly meant to be little more than sequel bait in its resolution of the game’s main quest.  I mean, I’m okay with leaving a small amount of stuff open-ended, but a conclusion’s gotta actually feel like something important was, y’know, concluded, and DE4 did very little on that front.  And even the stuff that did actually have some element of finality, the sidequest-y stuff, was handled badly by DE4’s ending: it’s reported on Picus News, so, since the whole point of Picus is for Deus Ex to show you how completely disingenuous and manipulative major media journalism can be, it’s hard to really glean all that much about the results of your actions through the game’s course past what you already knew from completing the sidequests in the first place.  DE4’s already played up the Don’t Trust the News card all through the game in its inelegant hit-you-over-the-head manner (I miss DE1 and 3’s subtle approach to this), so it’s not like its message is really benefiting at all by this point from more proof of Picus’s dishonesty.  What we needed from the ending was to just get a decently straightforward rundown on how Adam’s actions affected those around him--that would have been a satisfying way to handle it.  And all the more important when the main story of DE4 doesn’t wrap itself up so much as just unravel into sequel bait.

So yeah, Deus Ex 4’s ending sucks, unsatisfactory both in how it doesn’t feel like much of anything was really accomplished in the main story, and in how poorly it reports the results of what smaller side-stories it does deign to finish.  But as I said, when taken strictly on their own, the rest of the series’s endings are good, or at least decent enough.  So what’s the problem?

Well, it’s that the Deus Ex games themselves have a bad habit of retroactively negating the significance of the previous title’s finale and invalidating player choice.

Let’s take the ending of Deus Ex 1, for example.  DE1 evolves into being a rather wild ride as a whole, starting as an exciting narrative of the shadowy, hidden truth of society’s masters being discovered and fought against and evolving into an analysis of humanity as a social animal and what society is, isn’t, could be, and should be.  The ending to the game reflects this gradual transformation into a treatise on the nature and potentials of the social concept, by having the player decide, through the actions of JC Denton, what shape the next age of humanity shall take.  Will the society of our future continue as a means for the privileged and undeserving few to control the many?  Will the notion of nations be retired in favor of a return to a world of city-states?  Will there be the continued order of a flawed but safe system, or the anarchy of a swift and violent transition to a new kind of world, a harsh and difficult change that might ultimately lead to something better for us all?  Deus Ex 1 has, by the time of its conclusion, made its arguments for what society is, what it is meant to be, and what we, as individuals and as cooperative beings, want and require from governance and one another...and having made its points through the course of its tale, DE1 offers the player a handful of very distinct choices, of the highest significance, for how humanity’s future will proceed, and sits back to allow the player to come to their own conclusion about it all.  It’s both philosophical and grounded in reality, and the player fully feels the weight of how much his or her choice matters.

...Except that it doesn’t, as it turns out.

See, Deus Ex 2 is a sequel set several years after DE1’s plot, and it treats the events of DE1 as having ended in 1 way and 1 way only.  So all that stuff about the importance of the player’s decision on the path that human society will venture forth on?  The intelligent and elegant way that Deus Ex 1 said its piece for the purpose of allowing the player to be an informed party that puts his/her understanding to use in the game’s conclusion?  The warring sense of satisfaction and regret at having made a decision that represents what the player believes is best for the affairs of humanity, yet one which carries heavy burdens with its implementation?  All gone!  What you thought was the memorable, distinct conclusion you chose in a great early moment of player agency over a game’s story is now non-canon, just a “what if” that didn’t come to pass.

And the weird thing is what DE2 decided, retroactively, was how the first game ended.  See, in a situation like this, where the demands of a sequel’s story force a single canon into place where before there were multiple, very different options, it usually happens that 1 of said options was the “true” one that actually did happen.  Like how in Fallout 3, the player has the choice to save the Capitol Wasteland with Project Purity and be the expected hero of the game, but you COULD decide to be a complete douchebag and instead poison Project Purity and even further ruin the lives of everyone in the Washington, D.C. area.  2 choices are in the game, but when Fallout 4 rolled around, it was quickly apparent that, canonically, Fallout 3’s Lone Wanderer was not an evil bag of dicks, and did, in fact, properly follow through with Project Purity.  I mean, it’s never implicitly said in Fallout 4 that that’s what happened, but the Brotherhood of Steel wouldn’t have prospered in the region between games and built a new military empire there, as Fallout 3’s post-game events set up, had Project Purity not been successful.  That’s the sort of thing you expect when a sequel canon-locks a predecessor’s ending choice: a selection of 1 of those choices as what did occur.  It makes some basic sense, and if nothing else, at least some of the players are happy, because their choice turned out to be the “right” decision.**

Deus Ex 2, however, made the surprising decision to make no one happy.  Instead of just picking 1 of DE1’s ending options and sticking with that, DE2 decided to instead say that elements of all 3 separate conclusions happened.  As a result, as per Tracer Tong’s plan, the world’s global communication is knocked on its ass and human civilization becomes largely city-state-based--but the goal of definitively destroying shadowy overlords’ secret control over mankind is not achieved.  As per the Illuminati’s plan, Bob Page and Helios are destroyed and the Illuminati have a chance to rebuild and regain control--but the goal of security and structure to society is not achieved, as said society is now fragmented and more chaotic, set back centuries in terms of what methods are available to control it.  And as per Helios’s plan, JC merges with it--but the goal of creating a living benevolent god and ruler to mankind is not achieved, as the merger is not fully successful, and JCelios goes into 1 of those convenient sleepy-time comas that important characters are so damn fond of in RPGs.

So in summary, Deus Ex 2 denies any of DE1’s players the satisfaction of having chosen the true future of humanity, and instead retroactively creates an extremely vague amalgamation ending for DE1 where all the endings happened while accomplishing none of the goals they intended.***  Everyone gets everything, except what they wanted.  If you ever need a (sort of) tangible example of Calvin’s belief that “A good compromise leaves everybody mad,” look no further than what Deus Ex 2 retcons DE1’s ending into.

Although, if you do want to look further than just that single example, you won’t have to look far, because this is not an isolated event.  Deus Ex pulled this shit TWICE!  The ending to DE3, while not quite as grandiose or philosophical, takes a page out of DE1’s playbook and once again offers the player several distinct endings to choose, each one representing a certain view of how humanity should proceed into the future, this time being rooted in the regulation and governance of oneself and to what degree technology factors into that.  They’re all perspectives whose arguments for and against have been witnessed and imparted to the player over the course of the game, much like the case with DE1, and as a bonus this time around, the character of Adam is present and defined enough, and his personal connection to the major questions at hand strong enough, that the choice also relates strongly to him, what has happened to him, what he’s done, who he is.  I like JC Denton and all, but it’s always better to have a protagonist who’s intimately connected to the story that he stars in, so I appreciate Adam Jensen far more.

But just as Deus Ex 3 does a decent job of copying the format and strengths of DE1’s ending, so, too, does Deus Ex 4 do a decent job of copying the manner in which DE2 ruined its predecessor’s conclusion.  Once again, the sequel renders the player’s final decision utterly meaningless, and ignores the weight and significance of the predecessor’s choices by undoing them and forcing the narrative that the sequel wanted.  And it’s once again done in a frustratingly vague fashion, as Deus Ex 4 refuses to provide any detailed commentary on what it’s tyrannically dictating occurred at the end of DE3’s events, since having to actually tell the story of how things occurred is a consequence of retconning, and Cayden Cailean forbid that writers have to actually deal with consequences of their decisions.

Although it’s not a total mimicry of Deus Ex 2’s shitty decisions: where DE2 retroactively cheapened DE1’s endings by saying they all happened and failed to accomplish the goals that were their entire purposes, DE4’s writers play it differently by saying that any of DE3’s endings might, indeed, have happened, but it doesn’t matter at all because no one in the outside world got the message Adam tried to send, regardless of which message it was.  So I guess, in a way, they’re letting the player keep his/her autonomy over the DE3 ending by saying, sure, whatever you chose to have Adam do is totally what he did, but he could just as well have flaked on the entire finale altogether, gone home, binged The Good Place on Netflix, and achieved exactly the same amount of nothing that day.

Actually, The Good Place is great, and pretty enriching as comedies go, so really, it could be argued that he’d have accomplished more by bunking off work that day.

It’s already baffling that otherwise generally competent and even skillful writers would be so incontestably stupid as to, in DE2, destroy a great ending (and in doing so, kind of run against the thematic purpose of Deus Ex in taking all autonomy to determine the course of humanity’s future out of the hand of the player, who in most cases is a representative of the common man that DE generally seems to be trying to empower with knowledge), but it boggles my mind that the series would pull this shit TWICE!  And managed to worsen it the second time around!  As much as saying that all the endings of DE1 happened and all failed to accomplish their goals, at least that results in setting the stage for DE2’s events, thus serving some function, regardless of how poorly.  Deus Ex 4, though, just outright makes DE3’s ending sequence entirely meaningless altogether.  At absolutely most, DE3’s ending is allowed to have factored into the mysterious events between games that have personal relevance to Adam, but since DE4’s so determined to play coy and keep all details of that period strictly confidential, we still get absolutely nothing out of it.

So in summary, let’s look at the Deus Ex series, here.  We’ve got a game with a great ending (DE1), whose sequel retconned all its substance, meaning, and positive qualities into oblivion.  We’ve got a game whose ending is fairly decent and has yet to be worsened (DE2).  We’ve got a game whose ending is really good (DE3), whose sequel pulled the same retcon bullshit, but somehow even worse.  We’ve got a game with an okay ending, but one which doesn’t matter at all and leaves no impact on the player or the series (DE Breach).  And finally, we’ve got an ending that’s just dissatisfying, spiritually empty sequel-bait (DE4).  So 1 positive situation, 1 neutral thing that frankly very few people even care about, and 3 complete disasters.  Yeah, this franchise has got a problem.















* And unlike Mass Effect 3, such an approach to the game’s ending was actually consistent to the game’s theme and storytelling style as a whole.  Yes, I know I find an excuse to mention how shitty ME3’s ending was every half a year or so, but all the same, for the record: Fuck you, Bioware, you incompetent nest of self-important molluscs.


** In fact, I think in the majority of cases, players will be happy about this, since the ending choices that are most useful when establishing foundations for a sequel are ones that most people would choose themselves.  I mean, I know there are plenty of asswipes out there, playing (and, for that matter, developing) Fallout games, but I daresay most would agree that Fallout 3 is a far better story and product overall when the protagonist is generally good.


*** Oh, and if by any chance you’re questioning exactly how, logically and realistically speaking, it would even be possible for the circumstances of Deus Ex 1’s story events and finale to have led to a potentiality where all 3 of these endings could occur, even just partially, then Deus Ex 2 has a big ol’ box of Fuck You ready and waiting for you, because DE2’s writers will be damned if they’re gonna commit to anything but the vaguest possible explanation for their DE1 chimera-ending.  I’ve heard JRPG villain-council conversations about “their plans” for “the object” currently sought by “that guy” which contain more useful, concrete information than DE2 deigns to provide about the patchwork fiasco it insists upon using as its foundation!  So not only did they remove all the value and satisfaction of the ending to DE1, they didn’t even really replace it with anything else; you don’t just lose the ability to decide DE1’s conclusion, you don’t even get to know what it was!

Final Fantasy 6's Enemies' Magic

Note: Blogger tells me that it's discontinuing the feature of updating followers through email whenever a blog is updated.  Which seems ludicrous to me, and I can't really see how it benefits Blogger to take away this feature--what are they gonna save, 4 millionths of a cent per email?--but it's neither the first time Blogger has made an incredibly stupid decision with its mechanics, nor is it likely to be the last.  The point is, if any of y'all depend on emails to let you know when a new rant's up, you can't depend on that any more, and I just wanted to let you know, so you don't miss any rants by accident because you were waiting for the email.

After all, certainly it would be a tragedy if you were to miss out on me nitpicking a tiny gameplay detail of a game that's approaching 30 years old, or reviewing DLC packages so ancient that they just automatically come with the game now, or enthusing about some AMVs.  Right?



As is often the case, this rant owes a great deal of its existence to that most amiable and erudite of chaps, Ecclesiastes.  Thanks for so frequently being such a good conversationalist about meaningless RPG drivel that any given discourse between us can become a tidy little rant, sir!



Magic. Specifically, who has it and who wants it.  More specifically than that, the fact that magic is a unique ability gifted to the Espers which humans have no way to naturally access.  This is the founding, most crucial plot point around which the entirety of Final Fantasy 6’s story is built.

The creation of life on FF6’s world?  It’s all about the fact that Espers were created to be beings of magic by a trio of goddesses.  The distant history of the world?  A war between Espers and humans based upon the fact that Espers had magic and humans didn’t, but wanted it at any cost.  The recent history of the world?  A power-hungry emperor finding and abducting Espers because he wants to possess magic as a weapon to take over the world.  The major events of the first couple thirds of the game?  A conflict between the magic-wielding empire and the rest of the world, wherein the heroes of the latter pursue every ethical means possible to attain magic with which to fight back.  The first and arguably more important protagonist of the game?  A woman whose significance to the plot and characterization for the majority of the game is defined by the fact that she’s half-human and half-esper, and thus both possesses magic and is a symbol that there can be peace between those who naturally have magic and those who naturally do not.  The second protagonist?  A woman whose character development is defined in significant part by her having been a member of the Empire, a result of which is having been gifted the ability to use magic.  The major villains?  The guy obsessed with acquiring magic with the intent of ruling the world, and another guy who went crazy as a result of the process of being artificially given the ability to use magic.

The game opens with a mission to acquire a frozen Esper for the purpose of using its magic--the same Esper, because of its magic, becomes a central plot device to both defend from the bad guys and to discover more about the primary protagonist.  Party members whose significance is largely defined by their being descendants of humans with magic, a town of such people in hiding, divine statues whose magic can grant godlike power...it’s absolutely, utterly inarguable to assert that the facts of who can and can’t use magic naturally is an inextricably vital part of the substantial (and better) majority of Final Fantasy 6’s plot.  In its every major part, this story of ambitions to power beyond what one was meant to possess is built upon the concrete lore of magic’s accessibility.

So I have to wonder why the hell so many enemies in the game’s first half are able to use magic.

Like, okay.  Imperial troops?  Sure, it makes sense for them to be able to use magic, because the Empire’s been injecting magical science (or scientific magic, in this case) into its troops for a while; that’s the Empire’s whole thing, after all.  The weird wheel mutants that chase you during the escape from the Magitek Lab?  Yeah, alright, if you’re gonna make a weird force of mutant roadsters to zoom around in your minecart tunnels as security (I guess?), may as well give’em offensive magic to get their job done.  The little guy using a parasol to fly somehow on the Imperial continent?  Uh...I guess he could be an Imperial military agent from a branch of Vector’s army that happens to have a very relaxed dress code, and no better orders for him than “run around in the fields all day and harass any rando you come across,” thus explaining his access to lightning magic.  Seems a little unlikely...but then again, the Empire sent its most valuable and unstable asset into the absolute furthest point of enemy territory with only 2 basic and largely uninformed goons to watch over her, maintains a strict policy that all its highest-ranking generals must possess ethics or ambitions completely incompatible with the tenets of their job, and keeps its most dangerous prisoners incarcerated in a basement closet under the watchful eye of a single narcoleptic soldier.  So really, “Rule 63 Mary Poppins with lightning powers and wanderlust” would be relatively low on the list of Gestahl’s questionable military practices.

But how the fuck do the random vagrants and ne’er-do-wells of Zozo have the ability to sling spells at you?  If the entirety of Final Fantasy 6’s story is based around the idea that humans cannot, under natural circumstances, use magic, then why, exactly, are there a couple random-ass basically-town-NPCs-turned-hostile running around in Zozo who use outright spells in battle?

Gobbledygooks, for starters, can use the spell Vanish on themselves.  And that’s a magic spell.  This isn’t 1 of those halfhearted copycat “spells” the game sometimes pulls, like Blaze and Megavolt, abilities that are functionally and visually close to identical to actual magic spells but technically don’t exist in the Magic combat ability category so they somehow don’t count.  No, Gobbledygook just outright uses the Vanish spell, the same one that’s learned from the Phantom magicite.  Yeah, Gobbledygook, an enemy type living in Zozo, the town famous for and filled to the brim with lying pieces of shit that no one else in the world wants anything to do with, least of all the Empire...can use Vanish.  To repeat, that’s a human foe, a mechanic wearing a bomber pilot cap with a hell of a hunchback, living in what I have to assume is the hometown of Pete Hines, a settlement far, far outside the Empire, who can use the magic spell Vanish.

Terra's pivotal role as the protagonist is laid out and defined in a battle during which her gameplay convention of using magic is utilized.  And then you get this little random enemy dude able to throw a spell of his own around.  Unless there was, in Final Fantasy 6’s early stages, a planned second story path about a homely little aircraft greasemonkey living in poverty with big dreams of seeing the world, whose dad was an Esper milkman with a route that happened to include Maduin and Madonna’s happy little cave back in the day, I think something’s wrong here.

But surely we could rationalize it away.  Okay, Vanish is a magic spell, but maybe it’s just FF6 doing the best it can to impart an idea of battle actions with its limited means.  Like, when another enemy in Zozo, the giant Hill Gigas, dies, he may use 8.0 on the good guys in his dying moments.  As my buddy Ecclesiastes pointed out to me, this is probably meant to symbolize the idea that this giant just collapsed so heavily onto the ground in his death that he created an earthquake, which the party has to suffer through since they’re at ground 0.  There’s a bit of difference in that 8.0 is strictly an enemy ability rather than what’s considered actual magic (not that there really is much of any functional difference, but whatever), while Vanish IS just a damn spell, but still--perhaps Gobbledygook using Vanish is meant just to symbolize that he’s gone into hiding, and is very stealthy about it, rather than that he’s actually using magic to turn invisible.  Not great, but surely acceptable, right?

Sure.  Cool.  No problem.  Now explain how the Dancer enemy in Zozo can use Fire 2, Ice 2, and Bolt 2.

Also, I object to the fact that several regular monster enemies can frequently use magic attacks--like, official magic, beyond just identical enemy skills.  I mean, once the whole World of Ruin part of the story starts, okay, sure, whatever, everything’s chaos and mutants and unsealed demons and whatnot anyway, so that’s par for the course.  But regular, everyday monsters in Final Fantasy 6’s world as it was before Kefka’s nonsense should not have been using magic.

Sure, the significance of magic to the plot of FF6 is really only centered around humans and Espers; nothing’s outright said that would indicate that monsters can’t have some limited magic access.  But I nonetheless contend that ANY standard enemy not associated with the Empire or directly with Espers and whatnot using magic is a mistake.  Because the fact is that even if FF6’s lore never outright takes a stance on the matter of monsters, it nonetheless creates an undeniable understanding that magic is the dominion of the goddess and the Espers, and that’s it.  It’s regarded as such a rare and wonderful thing, the kind of thing that to dare to possess it oneself is an act of hubris, that adding on the footnote “oh also theres a random eel that can use Aqua Rake* and some chicken-lizards that can cast Quake and this weird vulture man who’s packing that sweet White Wind* lol” kinda lessens the weight and awe.

Additionally, magic as a concept is outright mythical to most people of Final Fantasy 6’s world, to the point that they’ve never seen it nor have any expectation of seeing it.  Locke himself doesn’t even know what it is when he sees Terra using it in front of him, for Gorum’s sake!  And Locke’s been around the block a few times--the parts of his adventurer’s profile that actually are related to treasure-hunting like he says give every indication of a guy who’s traveled far and wide.  The fact that even a seasoned traveler like him has never witnessed a magical spell in action before makes the idea that there are random monsters across the globe who can sling spells just like an Esper a logical inconsistency to the world.

And I don’t even know where to begin with all the Rages Gau gets from copying enemies that inexplicably let him cast all manner of magic spells.

Is this a big deal?  Contrary to what my act of carrying on for a whole 3 pages about this matter would imply, it is not.  This is such a small problem that it barely warrants complaint; if there were something between an observation and a criticism, that’s where FF6’s enemies’ lore-inconsistent use of magic would be.  Still, the ability of several monsters in the World of Balance of FF6 to cast spells is definitely an oversight, and the same ability of certain non-Imperial human enemies to do so is an outright plot hole.  A small one, to be sure, in the sense that it’s not going to actually negatively affect your playthrough and very well may not even be noticed by most players...but a mistake all the same, for the ability to use magic, specifically Black, White, Gray, and Blue magic, is inseparably, indelibly tied to, entangled with, branded onto the core premise of the entire plot of Final Fantasy 6, and the existence of several enemy monsters, and especially of a couple human foes in Zozo, is a contradiction to that upon which the game stakes its full story.











* Yes, Blue Magic counts.  The whole thing about Strago and his village is that he has access to magical abilities because he’s descended from the humans who first stole magic from Espers.  A step removed from traditional White, Black, and Gray magic though it may be, Blue Magic is still far more firmly in the realm of Magic than Vague Supposedly Non-Magic Enemy Skill.

Grimm's Hollow

Today I’m going to do something pretty damn easy.  Easier than usual, I mean, because let’s face it, just spewing passionate opinions about very minor and unimportant details of video games is not  exactly a strenuous activity to begin with.  Today, however, it’s even more facile than ever, because I’m going to recommend something that is totally free.

Although, I suppose that in the gaming industry, even that which is free usually comes with caveats, sometimes even dangerous ones.  After all, free-to-play models are notoriously laced with predatory microtransactions, which can subtly and all too easily lead you to spend more on the “free” game than you would have a fully priced title.  So let’s have no ambiguity:

Grimm’s Hollow is a small, entirely free Indie RPG.  There’s no microtransactions or anything else; this is just a game which doesn’t cost anything.  You CAN pay something for it if you want, but you can also just have it.  You CAN pay something for the soundtrack if you want, but you can also just have that, too.  While I’m sure that the game’s creator has made a little money from voluntary donations of this nature, it’s clear that the intent of Grimm’s Hollow is to share a story with the world, not specifically to profit from that story.  Which is nice!  I’m not going to begrudge any creator the right and necessity to charge a reasonable fee for their work, of course, but I can’t deny that there’s a special pleasure in knowing that there are those in the world who, presumably having enough money already not to need a new source of income, are content to share their labors out of love and without asking for more.

Of course, just being free isn’t by itself a particularly strong cause for endorsement.  You can play Connect 4 online for free, too, but I’m not likely to type up a rant about that any time soon, save possibly for a diatribe on how badly I suck at it.  Even that which costs you nothing in dollars must still be worth its cost in time, after all.

And Grimm’s Hollow most certainly is worth your time, and then some.  Granted, that’s an easy accomplishment, in this case, for this RPG is only 2 - 3 hours long, short even by Indie standards.  But Grimm’s Hollow overshoots that bar like someone hopping a fence by using a space shuttle.  Endearing in that simple, friendly Undertale/Steven Universe way, the game gently draws you into its cute-spooky aesthetic and concept just long enough to make you properly comfortable.  And then it starts laying on a hearty helping of that sweet, sweet emotional weight and turmoil, as it deftly tells a small but weighty story of the love of family, and the way loss can tear us apart, both overtly and subtly.  It’s a moving tale, and what it accomplishes in a mere couple of hours is easily the equal or even better of what most other games manage with more than 5 times that duration.  So yeah, this one’s definitely worth the time to play, no question in my mind.

And honestly, that’s kind of all I really know to say about it.  I know that with most Indie RPGs, I launch into a description of the specific virtue that not only makes them solid titles overall, but also that makes them stand out from all others...but it’s hard to do that here, because being a cute, weighty little tale of emotional significance is the sum of what Grimm’s Hollow accomplishes, which isn’t unique, and its approach is likewise of a style I’ve seen before in titles like Rakuen and Undertale.  But that’s not a bad thing; if anything, it pleases me, because seeing well-crafted, passionate appeals to the pathos of the human condition is my jam, and there’s a very engaging, disarming quality to the simple, friendly narrative approaches of these modern RPGs that I appreciate and welcome as a new narrative standard.

Bottom line, Grimm’s Hollow is a heartfelt, sincere creative work, as Indie RPGs so happily often are.  It provides a touching story of the unconditional (and conditional) love of family, and of the damage that loss can inflict upon us, which will leave you feeling bittersweet satisfaction at its end.  And Grimm’s Hollow gives this tale to its player freely, costing not a cent and confining itself to merely the span of time that some movies occupy.  It’s a high quality story that demands nothing in return from its audience save their enjoyment, so there’s no reason in the world for me to do anything but strongly, happily recommend Grimm’s Hollow to any gamer on a budget, without much free time, or simply in the mood for something cute, innocent, and heartfelt.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker Unfairly Punishes You for Romancing Regongar or Octavia

I’ve made the claim before on multiple occasions that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a great RPG for a number of reasons, and I will damn sure stand by that statement.  And I’ll also stand by the statement I made in an Annual Summary rant that the polyamorous romance that PK’s protagonist can engage in with Regongar and Octavia is well-written, romantic, sincere, and touching.  I genuinely applaud Owlcat Games for their accomplishments with their first Pathfinder RPG--their first RPG, period, even--and I’m looking forward to experiencing this level of storytelling quality in their next Pathfinder title with great excitement.

At the same time, though, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that there’s nothing significantly and distressingly wrong with the love interest situation regarding Regongar and Octavia.  And it would be hypocritical of me to criticize Fire Emblem 16 on its lack of gay romantic equality, and not complain about the same problem afflicting another game just because I happen to like the latter more.  So today, let’s talk about how incredibly shitty it is of Owlcat Games to punish players for romancing Reg or Octavia, rather than Reg and Octavia.

So here’s the deal: male or female, the protagonist of Pathfinder: Kingmaker can engage in a romantic relationship with Regongar, Octavia, or both of them at once.  And if you opt to be involved with them both at once, it actually shapes up to be a really great love story.  I said it best in that Annual Summary, so I’m gonna just quote myself because I’m super lazy:

“Not only is the romance that the Queen/King pursues with both Octavia and Regongar pretty solid on both sides of the relationship, but Pathfinder: Kingmaker manages to make it feel like an authentic case of three people finding one another to be mutual soulmates--Octavia and Regongar’s relationship can function without the protagonist’s presence (thankfully, since there are other romantic options and it wouldn’t be fair to hold these characters’ happiness hostage), but it’s only once the Queen/King gets involved, develops feelings for each of them, that both Octavia and Regongar come to terms with certain aspects of their own relationship by seeing it through the eyes of another who equally loves them. I’m reminded of Aika, Fina, and Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, in that any combination of 2 of them would work very well as a romantic couple, but none of them feel like they’re truly complete in love without both the others. Except whereas SoA’s trio just sort of naturally and almost surely accidentally developed that way and thus the game doesn’t ever overtly confirm (or even recognize) this, Pathfinder: Kingmaker has knowingly created such a situation. And it’s done it quite well!”

But here’s the other side of the coin with Reg and Octavia: if you only want to romance 1 of them, the other will die.

Yeah, for real.  At the end of the game, there comes a time in which you’re separated from all your party members, and things get real hairy for each and every 1 of them.  Depending on how you’ve treated them through the game to that point, they may or may not survive the individual trials that Nerissa has put before them.  Regongar and Octavia share 1 of these trials, and if you haven’t fully earned the trust of either of them, done all you can for him or her to be a friend and leader, then he or she likewise will perish.  But, if you’ve been a true ally and helped them each with their issues, both separate and shared, then both will survive, and rejoin you.

...Unless you romanced one, and not the other.  Then, regardless of all else you may have done for her or him, the un-romanced one is gonna up and croak.*

In and of itself, that’s kind of a lousy thing of Owlcat Games to do.  It’s absolutely true that Regongar and Octavia work best and are at their happiest as a package deal, there’s no denying that.  At the same time, though, I can fully understand and sympathize with a player who clearly finds Octavia more charming than Regongar, and doesn’t really find the aggressive self-esteem issues he brings to a relationship compelling.  And on the flip-side, I can fully understand and sympathize with a player who feels a strong connection to the way Regongar needs an open, understanding heart to help him work through his personal problems and be able to give and receive love on the terms of the one he cares about, not just his own limited ones, and doesn’t really care all that much for Octavia’s outgoing and sassy style.  It is very understandable that a player of Pathfinder: Kingmaker would want to romance 1 and not the other of this duo...and yet most of those players also don’t outright dislike Reg or Octavia enough to actually wish harm on them, so the fact that they’re punished with the death of the one not romanced regardless of any other factors is unfair and dismaying, and it comes across as mean-spirited on Owlcat Games’s part.

That’s honestly bad enough already that I would feel compelled to point out that it’s rotten, but that’s not where this ends.  In fact, I’m far more irritated by the next part.  To me, this is the part where what Owlcat’s done gets really shitty.

See, if you want to play a gay male protagonist in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Regongar is your only love interest.

This is already annoying, and represents an unfortunate trend in games that include homosexual love interest options: there’s always noticeably more lesbian options than gay male options.  I mentioned the inequity in my recent rant on Fire Emblem 16’s romances, and it’s an unfortunate tradition stretching as far back as the days of Knights of the Old Republic 1, which technically allowed the possibility of a female Revan and Juhani falling in love, but no possibilities of a male Revan and any of the male party members doing so.**  And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see multiple options in a game for female characters to fall in love with other women, and I don’t want any less of that--I want substantially more, in fact.  But where possible, I want to see an equal number of options for male characters to fall in love with other men, too.  I mean, within narrative reason, at least.  If, say, Dust from Dust: An Elysian Tail had a gay romantic interest, I wouldn’t demand that the game also include an option for Dust to be a played as a woman, and subsequently able to romance a woman, because DAET is specifically set up as a story to be the personal journey of Dust himself, a character specifically designed to be, among other things, a man, so going to such extremes would be silly and detrimental to the story’s integrity.  But for a game like KotOR1, FE16, or Pathfinder: Kingmaker, in which the game’s entirety, including its love interests, is written around the possibility of its protagonist being of either gender, there’s no defensible reason to have such romantic imbalance.***

It doesn’t even make sense in PK!  Why in the world would Tristian not also be an option for a man to romance, when he’s a love interest for a woman protagonist?  The entirety of Tristian’s romantic subplot is his discovering what non-religious love even is, and how mortals go about it.  The concept of romance and passion are not just new to Tristian, they’re utterly alien to him, a function of mortality that he has to understand and feel from the ground up.  It ain’t like, say, Valerie, who’s a regular human with enough self-experience to know she prefers men.  Tristian is a romantic and sexual tabula rasa, a being who has to actively choose to pursue an understanding of mortal love in order to feel it.  His starting point is one at which romantically loving anyone is a completely foreign concept to him, so the fact that you can inspire and guide him to do so at all should, logically, mean that you can do so as a woman or a man.

But anyway, this case of only a single gay male love interest is especially problematic for Pathfinder: Kingmaker.  You want the queen of the Stolen Lands to be a lesbian?  Cool!  You can have her pursue romance with Octavia, but if you don’t want Regongar to die as a result, the queen has the option to find love with Kalikke and Kanerrah, or, if you’re up for a challenge, with the antagonist Nerissa herself.  Yeah, K+K are DLC characters and Nerissa’s very tricky, so it actually is still a bit of a problem that the most accessible lesbian romance option inevitably leads to another character’s death, but tricky or not, those options are there, at least.  But if you want the king of the Stolen Lands to be a gay man?  Cool!  Octavia is doomed.  Because Regongar is the only romantic option for such, Pathfinder: Kingmaker punishes you for being a homosexual man with the death of 1 of your team members.

And that’s pretty fucking shitty.

Look, as a whole, I applaud Pathfinder: Kingmaker for a variety of reasons, and far from the least of them is the fact that it makes a serious effort to include a polyamorous romance, and in doing so, also provides an opportunity for a player to very distinctly embrace and showcase his or her bisexuality.  That is unequivocally good, and it’s even better that the love story Owlcat Games created for it is of great quality, arguably the best the game has to offer.  And I applaud that they’re forthright about this being an actual polyamorous relationship--a few RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 and Fallout 4 allow for the protagonist to court multiple characters, but only do so by largely having all the main character’s love interests ignore this fact; you’re never gonna see MacCready, Preston, Danse, and Hancock all sit down and discuss the fact that their shared husbando Nate may, in fact, have an addiction problem with man-meat.  That Queen/King x Octavia x Regongar is there, and that Owlcat Games isn’t afraid of the fact that it’s there, is great.

But the the way they handled romancing Octavia or Regongar individually, punishing you with the death of the other no matter what else you’ve done, is just plain wrong, especially so in that it punishes any player who wants to play as a homosexual man.  I’m willing to accept that this was an oversight, rather than a malicious act, but I sincerely hope we don’t see a repeat of a situation like this in the next game.



EDIT, FROM THE WORLD OF TOMORROW: We did not see a repeat of a situation like this in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Owlcat Games did, in fact, seem to make sure that there would be multiple romantic options of both (main) genders available to a protagonist of either (main) gender.  So while my disapproval and complaints within this rant were and are still, in my view, fully justified, I do want to to make an observable note here that the developer learned from this misstep and corrected their future actions appropriately.

Dear Desna in Elysium do I ever wish that could be said about the average video game company.














* Actually, apparently there IS a very slight work-around for this?  From what I've been able to figure out with the assistance of reader Corelion777, you can sort of trick the game by initiating a polyamorous relationship with Octavia and Regongar, but not following through on it.  The way Corelion777 worked it, he/she got the point that his/her character shacked up with both Octavia and Regongar at the same time, but after that point, he/she only pursued the relationship any further with Octavia, and not Regongar.  As best as we can figure, this sort of tricked the game into thinking the polyamorous romance was still in progress, and thus the game didn't decide to arbitrarily kill off Regongar during the end-game, even though the only actual romance that was followed to its conclusion was with Octavia alone.

This is the only way I've ever heard of getting the game to allow both Reg and Octavia to live through a romance with only 1 of them, so I think it's fair to say that it's a case of gaming the system, not actually an intentional option created by the developers.  So my points in this rant are, I think, still fully valid and justified.  And even if it were a fully premeditated allowance on the part of Owlcat Games, it's still a work-around that requires the player to compromise a monogamous attraction to Regongar or to Octavia, which may be objectionable to how the player views and values Octavia's or Regongar's romance.  Additionally, it may also force a player to compromise the sexuality that the player desires for his/her protagonist, since this workaround puts the protagonist into a situation, early on, of being attracted to both Regongar and Octavia, even though the player may want their protagonist to very distinctly be gay or straight.

So yeah, even if there's a cheat to get around this problem, I think my problems with this situation are no less substantial than they would have been had it truly been, as the developers clearly intended, impossible to romance Octavia or Regongar separately without the other dying.  MAJOR thanks to Corelion777 for letting me know about this, though!


** I say “technically” because a glitch in dialogue flags made this gay Juhani romance very difficult to achieve.  I didn’t even know it was a possibility until over a decade later, in fact.


*** Yes, I know that canonically, regardless of how the player wants it to be, KotOR1’s Revan is meant to be male.  But if anything, that just makes it more questionable that the female version has more romantic autonomy, doesn’t it?

Shadowrun: Hong Kong's Downloadable Content

You know, thinking about it, Indie RPGs like Shadowrun, West of Loathing, and Celestian Tales might represent the few times where a DLC rant of mine might actually make a difference to someone’s purchase decisions.  I mean, a game like Fire Emblem 16 comes out with an add-on, and you don’t need to wait for me to tell you why it’s a load of crap, because there’s already a buttload of Youtubers and what few fools like me remain who actually commit their opinions to text who can tell you all about the subject.  But an Indie game?  Far fewer other resources to compete with.  As long as I can get it out in a kinda-sorta timely manner, a DLC rant from me about an Indie RPG might actually influence a reader.  I could actually make a bit of difference, guys!

Unless I were to do something dumb like play a game’s DLC and then just not bother writing a rant about it for over 5 years.



Shadows of Hong Kong: Purchasing the Extended Edition of Shadowrun: Hong Kong, or purchasing the upgrade to said edition if you already have the game normally, gives you a few little extras for the game, and most notably, a post-game adventure to continue the story after the main plot is all over and done with, called Shadows of Hong Kong.

It’s alright.

See, that’s why making this rant has just continued to be pushed further and further out on my schedule, again and again: I don’t really have much of anything to say about this DLC.  It’s okay.  Fine.  Decent, even.  Nothing worse than that.  And certainly nothing more.

What’s the plot like?  It’s okay.  It’s more of a return to social conflicts, and after the heavy focus on all the supernatural stuff that was Shadowrun: Hong Kong’s primary plot, that’s a positive.  But there’s not really much gravity to this story, either; it’s just sort of there.  Like, if this were an actual tabletop Shadowrun session, this would clearly be 1 of those pre-generated basic adventures that come with the whole kit to give you the fundamentals of the franchise.  There’s nothing wrong with it, but it lacks the personal touch of themes of family and obligation found in Shadowrun: Hong Kong, the underlying questions of anarchy vs. the imprisonment of corporatism and the great focus on community and personal legacies found in Shadowrun: Dragonfall, or the spectacular stories, messages, philosophies, and themes of society and personal connection to be found in the fan-made Calfree Trilogy.  Shadows of Hong Kong is enjoyable, but it doesn’t say much of anything.

What’re the characters like?  Again, they’re okay.  Nothing wrong with Gobbet, Kindly Cheng, Is0bel, and all the rest.  Their character development extends into this new adventure well enough.  But then, most of them weren’t all that compelling to begin with; while Rachter is a very interesting character, and Gaichu and Duncan have their moments, this isn’t a cast with the heart and personal draw that the Shadowrun: Dragonfall crew had.  It’s nice to see more of them, but not to the point that it’s gratifying.

I guess I can express actual discontent with 2 parts of it.  A: It’s an adventure that takes between 6 - 8 hours to play, and is sold for $10, so it’s not a good value of time to money spent.  You know my rule of thumb: unless the quality is truly noteworthy, an add-on should give you an hour per dollar spent on it.  And B: the hook to the whole story relies on an enmity that I don’t think many players really felt towards the antagonist.

See, Shadows of Hong Kong is basically about getting all up in the business of and putting a stop to a corrupt and antagonistic police administrator who was a bit of a pain in the ass to the heroes during the main game.  While corporate masters pull her strings (this is Shadowrun, after all), the story and premise of this DLC seems to stake itself heavily on a player’s having formed a personal enmity toward her during the main campaign, and I just don’t think that happened for a lot of people.  Certainly it didn’t for me.  I disliked her and wouldn’t have said no to seeing her get her comeuppance, but I never picked up on any strong, personal hostility there that demanded a follow-up adventure to give her her due.  Frankly, I had much stronger negative feelings toward that dumbass cop in Shadowrun Returns who you can get canned during the game’s ending.

So that doesn’t really help the DLC’s plot.  While it doesn’t stand out in general, it might have been a little more memorable and gripping had its major villain been as dislikable and revenge-worthy as the developers seemed to assume we’d find her.  As it is, it feels like a story all about finally getting full vengeance on some random mid-boss.

I will say that 1 of the most common complaints I see about this DLC, the ending, didn’t really bother me.  The general consensus seems to be annoyance that the player’s actions ultimately don’t change the way major events regarding Ares’s presence in Hong Kong go down, which I guess is too bad, but on the other hand, Harebrained Schemes is just trying to work within the actual canon of the Shadowrun universe.  I didn’t see such complaints about Shadowrun: Dragonfall’s ending, with the anarchy of Germany falling to corporate invaders regardless of your relevant choices, and that was much the same case--the game’s characters may certainly have made an impact in how things went during such major events, but the overall outcome remains the same.  I also, if you remember, generally liked the personal ending choice offered that allows the protagonist and Duncan to get out of their indentured servitude to Kindly Cheng, and that feels like the more important angle of the ending, anyway.

Anyway, I’ve dragged this out long enough.  Bottom line: Shadows of Hong Kong is fun and engaging enough as you’re playing it, but will leave very little impact on you, and does have a few flaws.  It’s neither long nor good enough to justify the difference between it and the regular edition of the game, but if you see it on sale for, like, 50% or more off, then you could do worse than continue your Shadowrun: Hong Kong adventure with this add-on.  Hell, it’s still in the upper half of DLCs I’ve seen overall--even a strictly middling Shadowrun adventure is still reasonably fun, after all.