Category: Tier One

At 288 hours (plus quite a bit without an internet connection), Skyrim is the most-played game in my Steam library.  It’s also a mess.  But while it’s a fun mess, I’m not sure it’s a good game.  I’ve spent countless hours finding mods and setting them up just so so everything looks just right (I spent at least three hours finding the right rock textures).  I’ve walked back and forth across the whole of Skryim, become the arch-mage, hailed Sithis, raided the library of Hermaeus Mora, and lost myself in the depths of Blackreach.  And still I see things that I didn’t know were in the game on /r/Skyrim.  It’s remarkable fun to get lost in the world of Skyrim, just wandering about and doing the occasional chore out of your limitless quest log.  Once I have some time (and get a good mod order going for the Remastered Edition), I’ll probably spend another few dozen hours doing the same thing.  It’s a fun game to do just that, and I haven’t found quite its equal – though I’ve heard good things about The Witcher 3.  Now, let’s start in on the latest in my series of “Why did I write this much, and why didn’t I get some screenshots to break it up?”

Wide as an Ocean, Deep as a Puddle

You’ve probably seen that saying somewhere in a review of Skyrim once or twice.  But if you haven’t: it refers to how many open-world dungeons, quests, and more there is to explore in Skryim, yet so little that really draws you in as a roleplayer.  On the whole, it provides an immersive experience because so many different things interact – but each piece individually isn’t particularly enthralling (with the possible exception of the Serena/Dawnguard questline, and not just because she’s a vampire.  Get it?  Enthralling?  Vampires?  No?  Stop?  okay).  I feel a little bad leveling this criticism since I can’t really point to any specific thing that would have fixed it entirely.  It’s more a general feeling than anything else; but there are a few specifics I can point out that might help you see what I’m getting at.

The first one is dead simple – and almost a little silly.  There are probably about – oh, actually, according to the wiki – exactly 1,089 NPCs in Skryim.  Bethesda employed 70 voice actors.  That would normally seem like a lot, but as you play the game it really starts to grate that everyone you meet sounds exactly the same.  Guard #347 from Riften sounds exactly the same as Guard #209 from Solitude.  Sound design is a too-often ignored aspect of games, and the results are on clear display here: there’s a reason sweetroll and arrow memes exist.  This problem is compounded by the face-concealing masks worn by every guard in Skryim (though there is a mod to fix that).  I mean, come on – it’s rule #1.  And where do they all live?  Wouldn’t it be more interesting if the guards had lives like the rest of the NPCs?

The next specific feels almost counter-intuitive until you’ve played the game for a couple hundred hours (or, at least, it took me about a hundred).  There are many strange, undiscovered places scattered across Skyrim, right?  Well, not so much.  If you visit the towns, talk to the NPCs, and fill your quest log to overflowing, you’ll start to notice that any place of any significance has a quest associated with it.  People lose their axes, are terrorized by trolls, or have heard tales of great treasure coming from every single place in Skyrim.  This is not unilaterally bad – some of the quests are truly unique and engaging.  The trouble is that Skyrim starts to feel less like a wonder-filled, ancient land where there are countless undiscovered caverns filled with treasure and more like a sequence of quests to be completed.  In other words, once you’re told to go explore, it stops being as much fun as having decided to do it yourself.  It’s far more fun to stumble upon a cavern that no one knows about, clear it of Draugr, and nab the treasure at the end without anyone having told you to do so.  In the end, I just stopped talking to people to feel more like I was actually discovering a place I would stumble across in my journeys.  It would be more fun if not all the quests showed up in your log – and not just because you pick up so many quests.

This might seem like a ridiculous complaint, since it only starts occurring to you after so many hours of play, but it ties in to what I think the true purpose of Skryim is: to wander and explore (which is partly why the fast-travel mechanic makes no sense).  Those things take many, many hours.  The quests should only be there to get you going, teach you the rules, and tell a few interesting stories along the way.  The rest of the world should be a vast, unexplored country for you, the player, to discover on your own.  It should not be a place where the 400 year old unexplored crypt has fresh food and lighting and a lost axe that you need to recover.  Perhaps part of the problem is that there’s a delicate balance for a game developer who wants the player to experience as much as possible while leaving an air of mystery.  It’s hard as a content creator to leave things entirely undiscovered, but I think Skyrim would have benefited from more areas that were only hinted at and not quest-related.  In fact, I think Skyrim would have been improved if most of the game’s questlines were inaccessible in one playthrough.  This, my final specific complaint, is the most immersion-breaking, and it’s immediately obvious: the lack of factioning and player specialization.

Factions and Player Specialization

I’m going to take this chance to talk about a relatively unknown but incredible game – Escape Velocity: Nova – the only game I’ve played that’s successfully made a dynamic faction-based quest system (also, check out those system requirements – 400 MHz Pentium processor, yeah!).  In EV:N (and its two predecessors), you only had a random chance at any given quest-line.  The Vell-os, a psychokinetic branch of humans, occasionally find your pilot and let them know that they have fabulous secret powers.  There is only an 8% chance that any of your pilots will ever get that quest.  Additionally, with other quest-lines, you have several chances to defect or switch to a different faction (though explaining this was occasionally done poorly).  To see what I mean, just check out a page or two from this walkthrough.  Though it wasn’t always done perfectly, it made the game feel like your own and made each pilot you create feel like their own person.  It was great.  It felt good.

Fast forward from EV:N nine years, and an incredibly ambitious game called Skyrim comes out.  But in Skyrim, you can be the Archmage of Winterhold, the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, the Dragonborn, Harbinger of the Companions, Master of the Thieves Guild, Champion of Every Daedric Prince, and a dozen other things.  At the same time.  Every time.  In fact, unless you never visit Riften or can stand to have unfinished quests, you are practically forced to become a member of the Thieves’ Guild.  Your character just becomes the most powerful (wo)man in all of Skyrim without even trying.  I could understand that for the main Dragonborn plot, but it just doesn’t make sense for all the rest.  Wouldn’t it be better to introduce these sidequests based on what your character actually does in the game?  If you level up magic, wizards start asking about you.  If you pickpocket enough people and get caught, the Thieves’ Guild might bail you out and offer you a job.  If you do enough of those “take care of so-and-so” jobs, the Dark Brotherhood starts investigating (though that one is close to what actually happens).  Instead, Skyrim doesn’t care if you are the Thane of every hold, but also happen to be a notorious Thief.  Instead, Skyrim was designed with two design assumptions that make it both initially fun and a long-term mess.

Skyrim never asks the player to make sacrifices.  You can be the hero of all Skryim and Solstheim.  You might wonder how anything got done before you showed up.  You can fight legendary dragons off three at a time and not even break a sweat.  I understand that Skyrim wanted to make it possible for a player to just jump in to the game and not have to go through a tedious character creation (well, minus the requisite three and a half hours of facial feature adjustments).  But they could still have accomplished that without letting the player become so unreasonably all-powerful.  There should be a point where you have to decide to make some sort of sacrifice – some sort of trade-off.  It’s only when you are forced to stay within the limits of a system that growth can occur.  From a mechanical standpoint, I’m not saying that you should not be able to become an effective swordsman, archer, and mage at the same time – just that being the best swordsman, archer, and mage of all time is unreasonable.  There should be a point where you might primarily fight things with your fire magic because it has a good DPS rate.  But when things get real, you pull out your unreasonably-sized claymore, throw a quick enchant on it, and go to town.  From a lore standpoint, if I can just cure my vampirism with fifteen minutes of running around (if I don’t fast-travel), then it isn’t a very meaningful choice to become a vampire.  You may have to kill someone to cure it, but that’s barely an issue when bandits attack you at every opportunity.

In Skyrim, you are never asked to make moral choices.  Well… you are, but if you think they actually mean anything then you’d be wrong.  In the end, there are no true consequences for your actions.  When I first picked up Skyrim – oh so long ago – I was asked to find a fugitive and bring them out of the city for justice.  I quicksaved, did the quest, and then reloaded to try the alternate route.  I learned that the outcome of this quest is left intentionally ambiguous no matter what you do.  As a lone event, it’s a great example of how the correctness of your choice is not always clear.  Unfortunately, this single quest becomes the prototype for every moral decision in the game.  It doesn’t really matter what you do, since every choice you make is the right one – you’re still going to be the hero.  And, I suppose, part of the problem is exactly what I did – quicksaved and tried both to find the best route.  What’s the point of making a “bad” route if the player will just reload to get a better outcome?  It’s a concession (like fast travel) that isn’t necessarily a good or sensical thing.  Any opportunities for moral choice are further undermined by the presence of unkillable NPCs, a lack of any notoriety system beyond a trivial fine, a lack of NPC responsiveness, and a unreasonably linear questing system.

All these things combine to make a sprawling game filled with fascinating places, but a world where none of it captures you for very long.  When it does capture you, it sets up a neat experience that really does seem to capture the essence of a fun game – but around every corner is something to take you out of it again.  Those things are sometimes cleverly and remarkably hidden, but they are still there to wear you down over a long period of time.  The great moments in Skyrim are some of the best in video gaming, but they are too often the exceptions to the tedium of the plot and quests.  But enough about that.  Let’s move on to something Skyrim did right.

Lore and the True Depth of Skyrim

I have to give Skyrim’s developers credit: an almost unfathomable amount of lore and backstory is scattered around every Elder Scrolls game.  Just in Skyrim alone, there are 307 books that do nothing but talk about some piece of lore – not including letters, journals, or books that also increase your skill.  There are long, drawn-out conversations on /r/teslore that prove just how incredibly detailed the world-building of the Elder Scrolls is.  Beyond that, there are stories hidden throughout the Elder Scrolls games – like a burned-out shack with some journals about a young wizard experimenting with fire magic.  In Oblivion, there’s a wizard that falls out of the sky, seemingly at random.  But if you loot his body and read his journal, it tells a story of a failed magical flight experiment.  That same theme is continued in Skyrim.  It’s fantastic, and it is part of what makes faffing about so much fun.  Every book and location tells a story that adds to the lore, and I try to read and explore as many as possible – it’s a tradition I started after finding an appropriate mod.  There’s a story everywhere waiting to be discovered.

For book nerds (and if you are, ask me about The Night Circus sometime!) or anybody that enjoys immersing themselves in a fictional world, this is certainly part of the draw.  For everyone else, this is just another part of the game that can keep you coming back to wander about and have something to do when you are level 120 and have every title available in Skyrim except High King – and only because you assassinated the last one and people tend to frown on that.  Not that you couldn’t be the High King, though; everything is possible through mods.  Which brings me to the best and worst aspect of Skyrim: modding.

Mods

Mods are the best.  Through modding, you can customize literally every aspect of your Skyrim experience. That pillow breaking your immersion?  Replace it!  A weird bug causing framedrops?  Fix it!  Want to kill all the children?  Mod it!  You can even download full-blown DLC or decide that you didn’t actually want to play an Elder Scrolls game after all.  Modding games is PC gaming at its best, and in Skyrim this is on full display.  But not all of this is a good thing.

Mods are the worst.  I’m not complaining that I spent so much time modding – in fact, it’s fun.  Mod load order is taken care of as well – through LOOT – and you know a game is the modding king when there are well-designed GUIs for your mod load order tools.  What I am complaining about is Bethesda’s reliance on mods.  Skyrim is still quite buggy and didn’t look that good until the Special Edition came out…which made it look slightly less good than a simply-modded version and didn’t fix the bugs (though it did move Skyrim to a 64-bit architecture, allowing for NPC craziness).  This point has been belabored by many others, so I won’t say more on this topic.

But is it Fun?  Is it a Good Game?

I’ve complained a lot about Skyrim.  Most of my complaints are, I hope, reasonable.  They don’t make Skyrim a bad game – they just make a game that did not live up to its potential.  Still, the combat system is simplistic – especially in view of games like Dark Souls.  There are no real consequences for your actions, especially when games like Dragon Age exist.  There is no option to play the bad guy.  The people slated to fight you will always fight you, even after surrendering.  Maven Black-briar will never die, no matter how often you kill her.  The large-scale “battles” are laughably small due to an outdated engine.  Exploration is really Skyrim’s only redeeming mechanic, but even that is dampened by the lack of a truly unexplored world.

It’s certainly a fun game, due in no small part to the remarkable community of players willing to spend time modding things they find need improvement.  In fact, there are mods to counter many of the issues I just mentioned.  Which brings us to a problem.  By itself, Skyrim is a mechanically terrible game.  With mods, it is more fun and a better game.  Do I judge Skyrim based on what it is or what people have made it?  Should a game as open-ended as Skyrim be judged so harshly on its mechanics?

Conclusion

Open-world RPGs are just hard to make.  It’s a great deal harder than most people – game developers included – seem to think.  I’m fairly sure there has never been a “perfect” open-world game, though I haven’t played The Witcher 3 (and I have hopes for an upcoming one).  Skyrim far surpasses many when taken on the whole, but almost any good RPG has elements in which it far surpass Skyrim.  And that’s what I think makes Skyrim so hard to judge – it tries to be so many things, but doesn’t really do any of them perfectly.  There are few things in life that can do more than a couple things perfectly – that’s why the sentiment of “doing one thing well” is so successful and so many programs that try to do everything fail so spectacularly.  It’s why the “perfect” games I can think of are simple ones.

But in the end, Skyrim is fun.  You can get lost.  And sometimes, that’s enough.

It’s Tier One.  I mean, it’s widely accepted that it’s the best RPG for the SNES and one of the best RPGs ever, so what did you expect?  This review is going to be on the short side (Edit: actually, having finished writing this, maybe it won’t), since almost anything I could say has probably been said before.

Chrono Trigger is a time-traveling adventure that seems to start as a cliched “save the princess”, but quickly becomes “save the world” with the help of that self-same princess.  I actually started this game twice.  The first time I got stuck on a fairly tough boss fight (The Golem Twins) and never finished.  About a year later I picked it up again, but had to start from the beginning because I’d forgotten almost everything.  (If you care, my party both times was Crono, Marle, and Ayla until I got to the Black Omen – where I replaced Ayla with another, spoilerific character)  Here are just a few of the many amazing things about Chrono Trigger:

• The characters are lovable and distinct.  They start to feel like “your” party as you level them up, and they feel like good friends (for me, like the characters in Wheel of Time do).
• The plot is interesting and sprawling (in a good way).
• The world slowly opens up as you progress, giving you both a feeling of wonder and excitement and a sense of growth.
• There are twelve different endings (depending on how you count).  This is the grandfather of what it meant to have a reactive world.  And it did it successfully – unlike many games today that have a “good” and “bad” (and if you’re lucky, a “neutral”) ending.
• Meaningful choices are represented through action rather than description.  It’s one thing to be sentenced to death because the game asked you if you wanted to steal a guy’s lunch.  It’s quite another to steal that guy’s lunch because it’s an RPG and that’s just what you do – and then have a character in the game call you on it. (though during my second run I was found 100% Not Guilty)
• The music is fantastic – this is the only game I have ever not gotten tired of the battle music.  I could listen to every track on this soundtrack for a very long time.  And I didn’t even know you could get the SNES to sound like an electric guitar.

In fact, I have only three real complaints – though two are significant.  From least to most bothersome: some of the quests are obtuse (which happens in practically every RPG).  As an example: there was a quest item I needed to place somewhere for 65 million years.  It get stolen, and you need to find it – but there’s no hint of where to look.  In Chrono Trigger’s favor, talking to NPCs in other circumstances is almost always helpful and the game does a great job of using your past knowledge to help you in future areas.

Inventory management is a real problem, though.  It is both difficult to figure out what something does and difficult to manage a quickly-growing list of items that spirals out of control by the end.  There are advantages to having the right equipment in the right places, but you quickly get tired of keeping such an extensive inventory.  Some screens show you item comparisons for each of your characters, but there is no way to equip an item in those screens or to see what special properties an item has.  It’s a small annoyance, but one that comes up frequently enough to merit mention.

The real problem is the combat.  For the first two-thirds of the game, fights are mostly well-balanced.  But as enemies get more and more special abilities, fights become increasingly based on luck rather than skill.  Late in the game, fights are either a chore that poses no real threat or a fight that may very well kill you multiple times with little warning.  The perfect example of this is the final boss, which incorporates all these problems with the combat.  The final boss has 12 stages.  The first nine are trivial and make you wonder why you had to fight them at all (partly due to stat re-use, rather than stat scaling).  The next two are fairly easy, but are a good challenge.  The final boss stage took me an incredibly long time to beat – through very little fault of my own.  On my first run, I spent half an hour doing absolutely no damage – without realizing it.  Worse, the last save point was before the previous two bosses.  Since I was low on items at that point, I needed to fight them again to even have a chance at beating the final boss stage.

I would trace these problems to two sources: first, percentage-based attacks.  There are several enemies (including the last boss stage) that have magical attacks that deal 50% of a characters current HP.  Some are even worse and deal damage equal to your current HP minus one.  Combine one of these enemies with another high damage one, and it’s entirely possible to get wiped out in a single turn before you have a chance to react.  These attacks make you wonder why the late-game bosses don’t just have a minion do that last HP of damage to kill your entire party.

The second source, related to the first, is gimmicky fights.  Some fights that require unusual tactics are fine – Chrono Trigger does a great job of drawing on past experiences to clue you in on how to fight a new enemy, and can give you a few turns to figure out how to fight it….mostly.  There are just a few too many fights where this breaks down – with the last boss stage, there is no indication that attacking two of the three onscreen enemies is entirely counterproductive most of the time.

By far the worst culprit of this is a side-quest boss called the Son of Sun, which will counter any direct hit with a powerful fire attack.  Instead, you are supposed to attack one of the five flames rotating around the boss, and all but the “right” one will cause a similar fire counterattack.  There is no indication or hint for this.  To top it off, you have about fifteen seconds before the boss shuffles the flames and you again have to guess which flame is the “right” one.  It’s entirely a matter of chance, and is incredibly frustrating to fight.  I willingly admit I only beat this boss through save-scumming.

All in all, though, Chrono Trigger is a fantastic game that I’ll likely come back to for New Game+ (and the other eleven endings).  It does many, many things right – things that even modern games have a hard time replicating.  This game is one of those rare confluences of talent, hard work, and a bit of luck that makes for a fantastically good time.

Steam link.  Oh how I wish.

You can get it on Android or iOS, or rip your cartridge to play in RetroArch on anything, including Android.

I might be cheating a bit here.  I’ve played through and beaten Legend of Grimrock 2 long ago.  Well, at least a year and a half.  But writing about it now gives me an excuse to write my first actual review, gush a bit about one of my favorite games, and talk about what makes a good sequel.  And if I haven’t gotten you to listen to what I believe to be one of the best theme songs of all time, well…get to it.  And watch the prologue, while you’re at it.

As for the specifics on the game: It’s a puzzle/grid fighter/exploration game where you are shipwrecked on and must explore an island ruled over by the mysterious Island Master (definitely no D&D overtones there!).  There are 12 distinct ground-level areas, almost all of which have at least one or two floors of dungeon.  All told, there are 34 (well, 33 plus a secret) map sections you will encounter on your quest to solve the mystery of the island.  You travel the island in a party of four, selected from 8 classes and 5 races that allow for such combinations as rat farmer.  Being a rat farmer, by the way, would mean that you level up by eating – and if you eat cheese enough (because you are a rat), you gain stats.

Your only real objective is to solve the mystery of the island, which you think may have something to do with the glowing rocks (no, not those glowing rocks – the other ones) you’ve been picking up.  While finding all the glowing rocks might seem like just a giant fetch quest, the glowing rocks are more incidental to your exploration of the island, and you don’t actually need all of them to finish the game.  Communicating your goals is mostly done through gameplay and the expectation that you are here to play a game – plus a note or two from the mysterious Island Master.  And some talking heads.

Before I get into what I liked, I should probably start with the things I didn’t like – and there’s really only one complaint.  Some of the puzzles are just too difficult.  Thankfully, there’s a website that will prove quite helpful if you have this problem.  This doesn’t knock it from being a perfect game in my book for two reasons: insanely difficult puzzles are part of the charm of puzzle games evocative of the ’90s, and, when you do solve them on your own, you feel like a genius.

A Perfect Sequel

Legend of Grimrock 2 is both a perfect game and a perfect sequel.  Let’s start with what makes it a perfect sequel.  Legend of Grimrock (the first one) was a ten level dungeon crawl.  Grimrock 2 expands on this by making the game about three times as large and adding several new environments.  Between the fantastic art and level design, each area feels new and unique enough that you never get bored – and every inch is packed with secrets, monsters, and items.  It’s this consistently high content density that makes it a good sequel.  Going bigger can often lead to the game feeling emptier – if Portal 2 had any failings, it would be this – but Legend of Grimrock 2 avoids this entirely.

Another problem with sequels is making a second game that’s just more of the first.  Or possibly several games.  While that can be acceptable (or at least tolerated) in a multi-title story, a mechanics-driven game needs a compelling reason to be more than just DLC.  And Legend of Grimrock 2 delivers here as well.  Between vastly improved AI (the first Grimrock had an issue with sidestepping to avoid damage) and a remarkably improved engine that allowed for interconnected maps and external environments, Grimrock 2 took everything Grimrock 1 did, fixed the problems, and made everything else better.  This is especially impressive when you look at how well and tightly-crafted Grimrock 1 felt.

Finally, though a sequel needs to feel different than the first, it also needs to feel like it is part of the same story or world.  While Grimrock 1 was a claustrophobic and grim dungeon crawl, Grimrock 2 is a vast island of high mystery.  But even so, there are times when you are crawling around in catacombs or pyramids in Grimrock 2 that feel unmistakably like Grimrock (even though the actual Mount Grimrock is nowhere to be seen).  There’s a distinct tone shift from the first game, but it keeps enough of it around to still feel like the game I fell in love with – and somehow makes it even better.

A Perfect Game

There aren’t any tutorials in Grimrock 2.  From the first moment, you just do what makes sense realistically and within the confines of the game world rules as you learn them.  There are some signs that give you hints, a few scrolls that teach you how to cast magic spells, and recipes that teach you how to make potions – but all these are incidental.  The primary method of interacting with the game is just WASDQE and the left and right mouse buttons.  When something happens, it’s clear why it happened and what caused it.  Overburdened characters have a snail in their portraits and a darker outline.  Injured characters have a bright red glow and blood stain.  In both cases, you make a distinctly different walking noise to tell you something is wrong.  New mechanics are introduced slowly and deliberately, giving you time to adjust.  You never feel lost or helpless – at least as far as the mechanics go.  Each class is distinct and well-defined, and the skills all have helpful explanations that are there when you need them and ignorable when they aren’t.  All this goes back to giving the player more information and keeping that information helpful – and here at least, everything in Grimrock 2 wants you to succeed.

That isn’t to say the game is mechanically simple or easy.  Far from it – later in the game and on harder difficulties, managing health and attacks while moving can be difficult and fast-paced.  Having a wizard in your party is useful, but requires good management of resources.  The spellcasting system involves drawing patterns in nine runes.  The first spells you learn are simple, one-glyph standards like fireball – but later spells can use all nine (in fact, the one “unfair” enemy requires the use of a nine-rune spell to defeat).  Even better, the runes all have a meaning that can allow you to intuit new spells (and there’s nothing stopping you from trying the hardest spells as soon as you have the stats).  Having an alchemist lets you keep an almost endless supply of potions around as long as you have the know how, so you never truly have to worry about running low on health potions or resurrections.  The best part of all of this is that you don’t need to use a wizard or alchemist or fighter or rogue.  You could go through the game with a party of farmers, if you wanted.

That being said, a party of farmers might be a bad idea – though still doable.  There are no unfixable mistakes – even throwing yourself down a pit can lead to good fortune (and in the case of Chezni, he made a point of throwing himself down every pit he found).  The game rewards exploration in every form, and lets you make mistakes that inconvenience rather than kill you: few things are immediately fatal.

I love Legend of Grimrock 2.  It may be that my review is overly-biased because the combination of exploration, grid-based combat, and dungeon crawling reminds me a lot of D&D, and I love D&D.  But I think you should still give Grimrock and its sequel Grimrock 2 a shot, keeping in mind that it’s a game about mechanics, balance, and that je ne sais quoi that made that second edition of D&D great.

Steam link