Hello all you happy people! Josh Stoodley back with another post. This time, I wanted to share with you my thoughts on the new games that came out this October: Digimon Story Time Stranger, Pokémon Legends A-Z, and Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2. Some of these games are controversial, but worry not! I’m not here to start a fight. I just thought you guys might be interested in some of my thoughts on the subjects.

First, some housekeeping though. As long time followers of this blog know, my first attempt at Dragon City fell through. The art was bad, but worse I had no plan for how I was going to develop that story or even what the issues would be! So I’m pleased to announce that Dragon City is getting a second chance. This time, I’m actually going to plan it out, all the way through, and thus avoid getting stuck with nowhere to go after the second page. Like last time.

As I’ve talked about before, The Standard Tech Case Files is also getting a reboot of sorts. I’m also going to turn it into a webcomic, and it should update at the same time as Dragon City. That’s two webcomics for the price of one, you lucky saps! The goal will be to update once a week at first. As my art gets better, I will update more often.

Which brings me to point three: my art. It has improved massively over the last couple of years, as long time followers of this blog will notice. I hope you all appreciated the art dump last week! There will be more of that coming, too. The current plan is to post pin-ups, concept art, and other goodies once a week as well. These will be for paying supporters only, either on the main blog or on my Patreon. This will include concept art for Legends of Faerie: Infernia, as well.

Which yes, I am still working on. I will have an update on my progress for Legends of Faerie next week. I’m pretty excited; my coding skills are still somewhat lacklustre but I think I’ve got a solid base and a good tutorial to work from. The plan thus far is to assemble the basic gameplay loop, then outline the story and work on the art. I don’t want to run into the same problem Bloodlines 2 ran into, which I’m pretty sure was partly because HSL outlined the story first without making sure they could, you know, actually make the game they were planning to make.

This is a common Chris Avellone problem, and guess who one of the writers of the HSL version of the game was?

Speaking of…

Bloodlines 2: A Much Better Game Than It Has Any Right To Be

Let’s get the elephant out of the room right away: Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines 2 had one of the worst dev cycles I have ever seen for a video game. When Paradox Interactive bought White Wolf from CCP, most of us were naively excited. CCP was a piss poor manager of White Wolf, doing little to nothing with the company or the broader IPs. The only bright side to that whole era was Onyx Path Publishing, which was mostly independent and publishing the excellent Chronicles of Darkness line.

So, Paradox had to be better right? I mean, surely they wouldn’t waste our time with a dead on arrival MMO, right?

Well…

PDX’s stewardship of White Wolf has been mixed at best. They abandoned the Chronicles of Darkness, the World of Darkness’s (generally superior) successor in favour of blatant nostalgia bait in the form of V: 20th Anniversary and, later on, 5th edition of Vampire: The Masquerade. V20 wasn’t so bad, being written by the experienced pros of Onyx Path Publishing and we could generally assume it was a one-off.

V5, on the other hand, had a disastrous launch. Faced with innumerable controversies that had nothing to do with game mechanics, PDX made the understandable if irritating decision to shut down White Wolf as an independent entity and fold it in to PDX proper. Then they would license out the IP, but not to Onyx Path. That decision would bite them in the ass later, something we will talk about in a different post.

Around this time, Hardsuit Labs jumps in with a pitch for Bloodlines 2. I’m going to be generous and assume everyone here was very naive, because a small time developer with no RPG experience pitching an RPG on spec is a ludicrously bad decision. And, to what it should have been no one’s surprise, the game was delayed. And delayed. And then Hardsuit Labs was fired because, lo and behold, they couldn’t make the game work.

PDX, at that point, was about to cancel the game. It probably would have been the right decision. But, as if the universe wanted to proof insanity was a universal trait, another developer with limited experience in developing RPG’s jumped in: The Chinese Room! Which is, um, an interesting name for a western company.

Anyway, it kind of worked? Bloodlines 2 is an odd game. On the one hand, it’s a game that goes from strength to strength… but that’s cause TCR cut the game down to the bone. There’s a tiny, tiny handful of side quests, which is good because the main story should be the main draw of the game but also? Like, there’s nothing there. It’s the bare minimum of side content to fill a run-time (or whatever the game equivalent is). Don’t get me wrong, I much prefer side quests to be relegated to the sides as much as possible but… this feels a bit too far in that direction.

Combat is much, much better than the first game or Elder Scrolls. Which isn’t saying much: first person melee combat is cursed. But I was pleasantly surprised. I want to compare it to Cyberpunk’s combat, but we run into the same problem as with the side quests: the melee combat is way better than Cyberpunk’s, which is good because there’s almost no ranged combat whatsoever. Cyberpunk definitely has more options, even if the those options don’t ever work quite right.

Fabien is a much, much better partner and character than Johnny Silverhand. He just is. Johnny is a walking, talking, sack of bullshit who never shuts up, takes over the story and whom you never get the personal pleasure of killing with your barehands. Fabien, on the other hand, is a delightfully insane Malkavian detective who enhances the story without ever taking the focus away from its main character.

The current reviews are decidedly mixed and yeah? Like I said, it’s kind of a weird game, and given it’s dev cycle ‘mixed’ was better than we could have hoped for.

Pokémon Legends Z-A: Not My Cup Of Tea, But Generally An Improvement Over Arceus

All right, lets start this off right away: I am not an action game fan. As I get older, the more I prefer the sedate, predictable pace of good, old-fashioned turn-based combat. It’s why I love Pokémon (and Digimon Story) and why I’m stuck on Donkey Kong Bananza.

Which is sort of a problem when it comes to Pokémon Legends, whose entire selling point is that it’s an action-y version of Pokémon. For the most part, this is fine. However, during the battles with the Rogue Mega Pokémon, it becomes a major pain in the butt. Enemy Pokémon can and will target you, which gets mighty frustrating when you die and all your Pokémon are still at full health. It feels like you have no control over the battle, which is the last thing you want your players to feel,

Of course, people who are better at action games will have an easier time of it. Some people will probably even find the combat too easy, which is baffling to me but there you have it. Though I do agree that the enemy trainers are too easy. They really should have a full team by mid game, both because the current trainer battles are too short and also because it would really help train your Pokémon up.

Of the three games I’m going to discuss today, Legends definitely has the best and most character customization. Both Bloodlines 2 and Time Stranger have better character customization than their predecessors, but that’s not hard. In Bloodlines 1, appearances were completely clan-locked and ranged from accurate to the tabletop to the epically inappropriate (ah, pimp coat and Dr. Seuss hat, I miss you). Cyber Sleuth, on the other hand, was pretty much limited to different t-shirts. Legends Z-A, on the other hand, has a wide range of outfits you can buy, including actual trench coats! Along with a decent variety of hair styles, makeup and eye shapes. Money is easier to come by than in Arceus, too.

In general, Legends Z-A is just a bit better than Arceus. It’s not complete break the same way Arceus was, more of a refinement of the concept. The map is smaller, more focused and more condensed. Money is easier to come by and there’s no. fucking. crafting. Character customization is better, as we discussed, fast travel is better and while the café’s don’t make up for the loss of ScarVi’s picnics, at least it’s easier to increase your Pokémon’s affection than in Arceus. Alphas remain a pain the ass and that is one place where the smaller, more focused map works against Legends Z-A: Alphas are much harder to dodge or escape than in Arceus. And like I said, they target you, which is a might frustrating.

Overall, the game runs much better than ScarVi did, which just contributes to my thesis that you shouldn’t develop games during a pandemic. That’s a big part of what bit Bloodlines 2 in the ass too.

Overall, I prefer the more traditional Pokémon titles. But I can see why people might like the Legends sub-series better, too. I haven’t beaten the story yet (Mega Barbaracle is currently using me as a punching bag) but I’m enjoying it so far. It’s kind of nice and low-key, but with some bittersweet moments. Mostly involving Az himself.

Digimon Story: Time Stranger: Holy Shit, What An Upgrade

I saved the best for last. For a quick bit of context, I had fallen out of the Digimon fandom for probably a decade or more when I suddenly got the urge to check if somebody had remastered the original Digimon World. This was back in 2018 or so. To my immense surprise, I discovered Digimon World: Next Order. Not a remake or a remaster of the first Digimon game, but a whole new sequel.

I was once more down the digital rabbit whole, so to speak. Further searching turned up Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth, a game much more like a traditional JRPG. I was hooked. I have the original PS4 version on my PS4 and the Complete Edition on my Switch. It remains one of my favourite games.

However, Cyber Sleuth has a lot of flaws. The lack of English audio, for one. I can’t speak Japanese, despite my best efforts on Duolingo, so the Japanese audio track is just distracting. It’s also one of the grindiest games I’ve ever played. You have to grind to catch Digimon, you then have to grind to level them up, then you have to de-digivolve them and start all over again to get the Digimon you want.

Hoo boy.

Time Stranger fixes all of that. The grind isn’t gone (and it’s still substantially more grindy than Pokémon, a notoriously grindy series), but it is substantially reduced. You can raise all your Digimon at once (though Digimon in reserve and the box gain substantially less exp and they don’t gain bond), the number of enemy spawns is greatly increased (and fixed on the open world, meaning no more random encounters!), scan rates are greatly increased and all you have to do is get a Digimon’s stats up to a certain level to digivolve them, making getting the mons you want much faster.

Also, this game was shelved during Covid, which helped. Games that were developed during Covid generally had… problems (hi, Cyberpunk) while Time Stranger runs beautifully. The art is a major upgrade too.

The story is epic and heartbreaking, but also kind of annoying. Digimon has this deeply irritating cliche where, after all is said and done, the Digimon and their humans are separated. And, you guessed it, Time Stranger does the exact same thing. For all the problems Adventure 02’s epilogue had, and it had a lot, the idea of Digimon and humans coexisting was a much better one than the world getting reset at the end of every game or season.

There is one fatal flaw in the game however: you cannot romance Inori. It is… extremely frustrating, especially as the game does nothing but ship tease the two of you. Also the female agent looks like a freaking bellhop and it bugs me, it bugs me like nothing else.

See you next week, guys.