Age of Mythology: Retold has already announced their next expansion, Heavenly Spear. It adds the Japanese civilization, and it’s once again time for me to be disappointed by Retold.

I don’t hate it or anything, but going for another east Asian civilization immediately after the Chinese feels a bit tiresome. While I understand that Chinese and Japanese culture are very different, and especially their mythologies are wildly distinct, there is still a lot of overlap in terms of things like architecture, art design, and map biomes.

It also ties into my growing frustration with the Age franchise’s current hyper-fixation with Europe and Asia. I periodically see unsavoury members of the community say that we can’t have more content from Africa or the Americas because the people there have always been nothing but savages with no culture or achievements to worth mentioning, and it’s getting harder not to feel like the developers are tacitly agreeing with that on some level.

The other problem is that this is probably the last DLC they’ll make. Given the poor player counts on Steam and the game’s other stumbles, it’s hard to see it having much of a future once they’ve met their obligation to premium edition buyers, who were always promised two DLCs. If this is to be the end, I’d rather have seen something with no thematic overlap with any existing civilizations.

The community is also continuing to add to my frustration. The toxic positivity brigade is already out in full force on social media to shout down even the mildest criticism of Heavenly Spear.

I don’t like this attitude that we can’t ever criticism the game because we’re lucky it’s still getting support at all. The same arguments came out during AoE2’s recent Three Kingdoms controversy, but at least it’s much less prevalent in AoE2’s community, which seems more mature generally.

Personally I would rather no content than bad content. Not that I think Heavenly Spear is bad, but I don’t think its very existence should place it above criticism, either. I don’t think that’s healthy for a game, and I’m sure the developers would agree. As a sometimes developer myself, I wouldn’t want my players to hold back on legitimate critiques; I want the opportunity to grow.

There are a few things about Heavenly Spear that seem promising, but each comes with a caveat. The campaign focusing on an ordinary farmer’s daughter sounds like a great hook for a classical heroic journey… but Immortal Pillars’ story was so bad it’s hard to have hope for this one.

That the campaign is longer than Immortal Pillars’ is welcome and could be a sign the game’s development is winding up rather than winding down… but the fact they haven’t done any god packs since Freyr reinforces the idea that they’re just meeting their obligation to premium buyers before dropping the game.

There’s talk of improving Arena of the Gods… but its current state is so poor it’s hard to see them ever getting to anything approaching a good state.

That said, Japanese mythology is very rich, and we’ve already seen what look like some incredibly cool myth units. I’m sure this DLC will add a lot of positive things to game, even if it’s not what I would have chosen.

It’s not that adding the Japanese to the game is a bad idea. It’s just the timing that’s wrong. If they did Mayans or Sumerians (or ideally both) and then Japanese, I’d be celebrating.