review | Superior Realities

There are two pieces of media I’d like to discuss today. There’s no real connection between them, except that they’re both a bit outside my usual wheelhouse in terms of interests, but that’s a good enough excuse to lump them together in my books.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Not to get all hipster, but I stumbled across Expedition 33 well before it launched and blew up like crazy (can’t remember how) and thought it looked interesting enough to keep an eye on. Despite that, and the universally rave reviews it received once it actually launched, I spent quite a few months waffling on if I actually wanted to buy it.

The problem is I don’t enjoy turn-based combat in video games, at all. It’s normally an instant dealbreaker for me. I was intrigued by E33’s introduction of real time mechanics to the formula… but it’s mainly precisely timed parries and quick time events, which are by far my least favourite parts of real time combat.

Still, it seemed like such a unique game I decided to give it a shot.

Sure enough, I didn’t love the combat. Conceptually I think needing to defend yourself in real time is a brilliant way to improve turn-based combat. Usually what kills turn-based for me is the boredom of sitting on my hands and watching the game play itself when it’s not my turn, and the real time avoidance completely eliminates that.

But I don’t enjoy the extreme precision that E33 requires. Bluntly, I’m really bad at it. My reflexes just aren’t that fast. I’ve always been a fan of needing to actively avoid enemy attacks in games, but I’m growing increasingly frustrated with the current trend towards requiring super precise timing for such things. I’m used to just running out of the way or keeping my shield up being good enough. The fact a dodge or block doesn’t count in a lot of recent games unless you do it at the last possible second is irritating.

I struggled to find a comfortable difficulty setting, as the dodge windows on normal were too unforgiving for my sluggish brain, but story mode was so completely bereft of threat that it became boring. I ended up downloading a mod that let me have easier dodge and parry windows without otherwise altering the difficulty (as well as a mini-map mod as the lack of such was frustrating me).

I don’t think I would have finished the game without mods, but with them, I managed to find a decent balance where the combat felt mostly tolerable, and even actually fun sometimes. One upside to this kind of JRPG style combat is the attack animations are truly spectacular (Crystal Crush, my beloved).

I settled on Sciel, Lune, and Verso as my go-to party, with Sciel largely carrying the team. I got her set up such that she could pump out massive heals, keep the entire party buffed with Shell and Powerful at all times, and still dish out huge damage. To the game’s credit, though, I did get the feeling that pretty much any character could end up broken with the right build.

My other major frustration with the game is that I don’t like how it handled open world exploration. While the instanced zones will warn you if you’re underleveled for them, there doesn’t seem to be any way to find out the intended level of open world mobs, so it’s easy (and common) to stumble your way into fights you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. At one point I spent a full hour exploring the map and getting into fights only to get absolutely curbstomped every single time. That was the most mad I’ve been at a game in quite a while.

Act 3 is kind of a mess in terms of game structure, too. There’s one story quest, which ends the game, but there will at that point still be tonnes of optional content left undone (some of which you’ll still be underleveled for, even). Up until that point it’s a very tight and well-paced RPG, but then it turns into this janky pseudo sandbox experience where you can either ignore a huge chunk of content, or completely kill the story’s momentum by ignoring the epic conclusion for another dozen hours or more of random exploration.

I ended up skipping most of the optional stuff and just going straight to the end. I am considering going back for the rest at some point, as you can at least continue exploring after the main story ends, but I’m in no rush to do so.

The story was the main draw of the game for me, and I mostly liked it, but it didn’t entirely meet my expectations, which is maybe on me as those expectations were very high.

I think it’s mostly that I never really felt surprised by anything that happened. I’m not going to claim I predicted the exact twists and turns, but the story clearly telegraphs that there’s more going on than seems apparent at first glance, and I’ve played enough Don’t Nod games to know what to expect from the ending of a French game.

For the record, I’m in the camp that views the Maelle ending as the (marginally) lesser evil.

I did enjoy the characters a lot. They feel very well realized, and Verso and Sciel in particular feel like some of the more authentic depictions of mental illness I’ve seen in media.

To put it more clearly, I enjoyed the combat a lot more than I expected to, but still not that much, and I enjoyed the story a little less than I expected to, but still pretty well. I think it’s fair to say I’m not as awestruck by Expedition 33 as most people seem to be, but it’s still a very good game, and I’m glad I took a chance on it despite it being so far outside my comfort zone. I’d give it about an 8/10.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

With a few minor exceptions, I’ve never been much for anime, but given my obsession with Elves, people kept recommending me Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, and I decided to finally bow to the peer pressure.

Having finished the season, I’m honestly still not sure if I like it or not.

On the one hand, I definitely love the premise. A deep dive on the psychology of an immortal Elf as she struggles to come to terms with the mortality of her companions and the changing world around her is tailor-made for someone like me, and I think the writing mostly does a good job of illustrating Frieren’s alien perspective and genuine struggles to fit in among humans. I would really like to see more sci-fi/fantasy stories that centre non-human perspectives like this.

On the other hand, it’s an incredibly slow series. I think a lot of Western TV these days is too rushed, and I don’t mind a slow burn, but this is so slow I’m not sure it’s burning at all. Most of the time it feels like they’re going out of their way to avoid anything even close to dramatic tension.

I think they also waste the show’s premise a bit by not employing more time skips. The first half dozen episodes or so take place over the course of around eighty years, but after that everything takes place within a year or two. I think it would have been a more interesting series if it was constantly skipping through the years, showing how the world changes even as Frieren stays the same. They could have done a Doctor Who kind of thing and had her get a new set of companions every season, every season a new generation that teaches Frieren something new about the human experience.

Finally, I did find the attempts at humour quite grating. It feels like it has to have been a mandate from some studio executive to include X jokes in Y style, because it’s always totally out of the blue and wildly mismatched with the tone of the show. “This is a thoughtful, introspective series about processing grief and learning to be grateful in the here and now, but also here’s a random gag about how some dude has a tiny dick.”

I’d consider watching the second season when it shows up, but I wouldn’t be in any hurry about it.

Unknown 9: Awakening first came to my attention when I saw the trailer at Summer Games Fest while waiting for the New World: Aeternum announcement. It looked interesting, but I would come to find the buzz around the game was very negative.

Because we live in the worst timeline, the overwhelming majority of this was people having meltdowns over the fact the protagonist is an Indian woman. But in amongst all the weirdos wetting their pants in terror over being reminded that brown people exist, there were some legitimate concerns about what seemed to be some fairly janky gameplay.

Overall, it seemed like the sort of ambitious yet messy double-A title that usually proves a commercial failure but which I often end up enjoying, and in the end, that’s more or less what it was.

Unknown 9: Awakening is a highly linear action game set in the early 20th century. You play as Haroona. Haroona is a quaestor, a kind of supernatural investigator who can access an alternate dimension known as the Fold. This grants her a variety of psychic and telekinetic powers that are crucial to both the story and the gameplay. Haroona finds herself caught up in a civil war between different factions of a secret society, and looming over it all is the legacy of the Unknown 9, a group of immortal once-humans who seek to halt the cycles of destruction that have dogged the human race since long before the history that we know.

Definitely there are problems with this game. My biggest disappointment with U9A was the story, despite a promising start. The voice acting is pretty solid, and I think the underlying backstory around the Unknown 9 and the cycles of history is very compelling. Fans of The Secret World will find much familiar here, though the horror and Lovecraftian elements aren’t as prominent.

However, the meat and potatoes of U9A’s plot are very tropey and predictable, and I found the ending quite eye-roll worthy. There seems to be a real trend in our media these days of trying to force big character moments without doing anything to justify them. Whatever happened to “show, don’t tell”?

There’s some other, small issues with the game as well. For one thing, I regularly encountered a bug where Haroona half-fell through the floor in cutscenes, leaving close-ups to only show the top of her head. This definitely has that janky AA feel I know and have learned to live with.

However, despite how it looked in the previews I did find the core gameplay quite a strength, and that carries the game despite its other flaws.

I was concerned going that the game was going to be very stealth-heavy, and it is, but I found it didn’t bother me. The stealth mechanics are quite forgiving, and you have a lot of fun tools to let you stay one step ahead of your foes, from on-demand invisibility to the ability to see through walls by “peeking” into the Fold.

What really makes this game special, though, is the stepping mechanic. Haroona has the ability to “step into” enemies, briefly possessing them. When you step into someone, the game’s action temporarily freezes, allowing you a moment to think through your next action. You can only make one attack before stepping out of an enemy, but with careful planning, that can still be devastating.

Early on, I found myself pinned down by two ranged enemies on a ledge. One was standing next to an explosive canister, but the other was a safe distance away from it. I stepped into the farther one, made him stand next to the canister, and had him fire his gun at it. When my step ended, the resulting explosion took both enemies out in an instant.

It was incredibly satisfying, and that barely scratches the surface of what you can do by stepping into enemies, especially later in the game when you can possess multiple enemies in a single stepping sequence.

It adds a very interesting new dynamic to the game because every new enemy type you encounter is not just a new challenge to overcome, but also potentially a new weapon in your arsenal. There’s nothing quite like walking into a room full of elite late game enemies and thinking, “All right, showtime!”

There’s lots of other cool things you can do, too, like telekinetically shoving enemies off ledges to their deaths, but in the majority of cases stepping is the best choice, in terms of both power level and fun factor.

My only major criticism on the gameplay front is that the boss fights are a total letdown. They’re simple 1v1 encounters where the stealth and stepping mechanics aren’t available, so you’re playing without most of your toolkit, and there’s nothing to do but very slowly chew your way through their massive health bars between spamming the dodge and heal buttons.

The good news is that there’s very few of these encounters in the game, but it is quite the unforced error. Why not simply include some respawning waves of mooks for you to step into? Why remove all the mechanics that make your game fun and unique during its most climactic moments?

I will also note that it is a fairly short game. It took me about thirteen hours to finish it, and I’m usually slower than most people. This didn’t bother me; I rather appreciate when games don’t overstay their welcome. But I know for some people it might make them think twice about buying.

Taken together, Unknown 9: Awakening is a game I would recommend, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for waiting until the next Steam sale to grab a copy. It’s got some very original and enjoyable game mechanics, but it also has some very significant stumbles.

Overall rating: 7/10 Worth the price of admission for the stepping mechanic alone.

I won’t factor it into my review, but one other thing I want to mention before I go is that the creators saw this game as helping to launch a vast multimedia franchise. Given its poor reception, that plan seems unlikely to continue, but there’s already a lot of tie-in material out there, including novels, comic books, an audio drama, and a web series.

I’m on the fence as to whether I want to check this stuff out. The premise of the setting is very good, so the potential is there, but the plot of the game itself was pretty weak, which doesn’t inspire optimism. The prospect of some actually good stories in this universe remains tempting, though.

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: review

Out of the Comfort Zone: Frieren and Expedition 33

Unknown 9: Awakening Review

Share this:

Share this: