Tales of the Aggronaut

Roguepocalypse

October 29, 2014 by Belghast

Awesome Overload

Yesterday was seriously one of the hardest days to get through I have experienced in a very long time. When I troddled off to work the Final Fantasy XIV servers were up and back from maintenance, and as I worked all day long I would see little tid bits of information here and there about just how great this patch ended up being. For the uninitiated yesterday was the release of Patch 2.4 “Dreams of Ice” which introduced a ton of new content, not the least of which is the Shiva primal encounter that the patch is named for. It is truly staggering to think about the amount of content that has been released for this game since launch. Roughly every quarter players get a major patch the size of 2.4, that generally introduces 1 to 2 new primal fights, 3 new hard mode dungeons, new main story quest chain, new Hildebrand story chain, new gear, new glamour bits, new hair styles and in this one they even introduced a brand new class and job combination in the Rogue and Ninja. On top of that we seem to see at least one minor content patch each month, the last one added personal housing so still no slouch content wise.

So when you contrast that with other games that can go six months to an year without any new content, it is phenomenal. This patch however is not with its controversies. Up until this point everything that has been available in game has either been earned doing in game things, or through subscription rewards. The game has some pretty insane subscription rewards that include tons of interesting mounts, pets and cosmetic items. This patch however introduced the cash shop, and they sprinkled a few really awesome items on it, not the least of which is the Slepnir mount you can see me on in the above picture. There is so much gnashing of teeth over the fact that this mount is $24, and the mini-pets on the store are $5 each. At this point however a cosmetic shop just seems like the status quo. One of the more interesting things they are doing with it is that each year there are unique rewards for completing holiday events. To allow players to get previous items they are putting the older items up on the cash shop for a minimal fee. Thankfully I have managed to pick up most of the holiday items I might want, but it is nice knowing that I could potentially get the items I missed during the Christmas events.

Focused Gameplay

Though out the day yesterday I thought about just what I would try and tackle that night when I got home. My focus was going to be on unlocking the three new hard mode dungeons so I could be ready to run them as the rest of my free company became available. I could always queue for the dungeon finder and take my chances with strangers, but I would really rather experience this content fresh with a guild group. There is something awesome about having to reason your way through the fights for the first time as a team, even if you fail to make the 90 minute timer. Even with my laser focus… there are certain things any proper Lalafell must do. While wandering around Uldah I bumped into Sagacyte Luxaloix and before I knew it we were dancing the manderville as is Lala tradition. Moments later we were joined by a friend of his Lirrianna Darkholme and there in the middle of the streets of Uldah we had an impromptu Lalafell dance party. We were all very busy, but traditions must be observed and social graces administered.

For those looking into unlocking the new content, there is an excellent blog post from a Lalafell blogger I just stumbled onto this morning talking about the start of each of the new content items. After we finished with our customary dance party, I went on about my business of unlocking the dungeons. Both Sastasha Hard and Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard were relatively simple to unlock, with fairly straight forward go and talk to this guy then go to the dungeon style quests that start in Mor Dhona. For Snowcloak however it is yet another quest tied deeply into the main storyline. So I set forth beginning that chain and two and a half hours I had reached a point where I was standing at the gates of the new Snowcloak dungeon. When they put in new story content… they put in a lot of story content. This however is what makes the game so damned phenominal, is that they keep moving the story forward and giving you a reason to care about the characters you meet. As a friend said last night, it is not so much that your character is the “big damned hero” but more that your character is the social glue that keeps all of the good guys working together. You are the one person they trust due to past interactions, and the lubricant to make things happen when something goes wrong.

Roguepocalpyse

I did not actually intend to start a rogue last night, but I ended up picking up a new quest in Limsa Lominsa near the Aetheryte crystal that just happened to lead me to the guild. I figured while I was there what was the harm of going ahead and unlocking the class. The server has quite literally gone insane for Rogues and Ninjas. The above photo is a scene from inside the Rogues guild in Limsa Lominsa, and there are even more folks milling around outside of the place. The Fisherman’s Guild port has never seen this much activity ever, and really the guild does a pretty piss poor job of disguising itself with all these people swarming around it. So while I picked up the Rogue I had no plans to level it until I got bored waiting around on a group to happen. Last night myself, Tam and Ash hatched a plan to make the guild some money that we could stockpile for our guild airship. Wanderers Palace is the bottleneck for the Relic weapon quest, in that you need a bloody weapon component to craft the precursor weapon for the entire quest chain. For most classes these are common enough that you can pick up a high quality version of the weapon for 20-30k gil and just be on your way.

This means that all of these newly minted rogues will need one eventually so that they can start down the Relic quest chain. As you can see there are only two currently available on the Cactuar market system and they are holding steadily at 300k gil each. The finished weapons are holding steadily at 500k gil a piece and both are in high demand. So we thought we could run Wanderers Palace a few times and if nothing else stockpile some blades for the guild, and at best pick up a bunch to sell on the market while the demand is high. We struggled to find a fourth, as there were a handful of folks available… but they all appeared to be either AFK or in a duty already. So while we waited around for something to happen… I decided to start working on the rogue. Overall the class is really damned fun to play, and in part it is the animations that make it so enjoyable. You feel like a whirlwind of death as pretty much every attack is some sort of a spin move. Additionally the way you hold your daggers… makes me actually kinda like wielding daggers. They feel brutal and swift, instead of awkward stabby weapons like daggers feel in so many games.

The only problem is that everyone is playing a rogue. This is what every fate looks like practically anywhere in the game right now. An army of rogues, their chocobos and a blinding flurry of circular slashes as far as the eye can see. As the second shot shows, some rogues have taken to putting Flash on their bar and run around gathering up all of the fate mobs while the rest of us hopelessly chase after them trying to do as much contribution as possible. I remember fates feeling like this at launch, and in reality it is like we have returned to that post launch period at least a bit. Additionally there are a ton of folks out there doing the fates as well trying to farm their Atma pieces, and it seems that the drop rates are in fact reasonable now. I’ve heard tales of folks completing a full set of atmas in a single evening, but I still feel you need to be lucky to make that happen. While I don’t so much care about my rogue, I plan on riding the FATE gravy train with my monk to see just how many levels I can squeeze out.

Broken Roulette

The influx of rogues has lead to some serious madness. I have not actually tried to queue as one, but I saw this tweeted awhile back with someone being stuck in the queue for over 120 minutes. DPS queues previously were 15 to 20 minutes on my server, and the low level roulette queues last night were reporting around an hour. Thankfully none of this madness has hit Syrcus Tower yet, as my dragoon queue there was still near instant last night. I feel like non-ninja dps will have a better shot at getting into dungeons, especially ranged dps since the game tries to match a ranged and a melee for each four man team. In any case if you have a tank or a healer that you plan on leveling, right now is the ideal time to do it. You will get instant queues and probably get the extreme gratitude of the ninjas inside the instance who have been waiting anxiously to do a dungeon. This reminds me of the way Ifrit and Titan were shortly after launch. My friend Tam used to queue doing “community service” as he called it. One time he ran into a poor black mage who had been sitting waiting on Ifrit for 3 1/2 hours. I am not sure if I will do it tonight, but I plan on working on my White Mage to help with the influx of folks queuing for things.

#FFXIV #Rogue #Ninja

Heavensward Job Speculation

October 28, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Downtime

Yesterday the world mourned as we were unable to play Final Fantasy XIV. While technically at this very moment the servers should be up, I am pretending that they are not so that I don’t get horribly sidetracked this morning. While locked out of the game yesterday, it lead many of us to start speculating about what the classes and jobs that have yet to be identified might be for the Heavensward expansion. Right now there have been extremely scant confirmed details. The Dark Knight being the only class that is 100% verified and confirmed by the Square Enix. However during the events of Las Vegas there was a moment when maybe the Samurai was confirmed. As Soken scrolled around on screen looking for a specific track to play, he scrolled past a folder labeled “Samurai”.

So while this isn’t a confirmation by any case it has caused a lot of folks to assume this is the next class. Since Dark Knight is a tank, would this maybe make Samurai a DPS? In any case I plan on playing one whatever it ends up being. There is a thread out on Reddit trying to collect various tidbits of information that Yoshi-P has said during official statements. While this thread predates the Las Vegas Fan Fest, there is still a lot of interesting information in it. Primarily the confirmation that there would be at least one gun glass, and that it would not be the gun classes that we would expect. What I think is meant by that is that there is been a Corsairs guild in Limsa Lominsa for ages, it just isn’t labelled as such formally. Since Merlwyb herself is a Corsair, it has always been assumed that this would be an early expansion class. I feel like Yoshi-P is specifically saying this isn’t the case.

The Agent

So if not the Musketeer/Corsair class then the question becomes what exactly will the gun job be. During the London Fan Fest Yoshi-P took the stage wearing a really awesome Black Mage outfit, however as soon as he stripped down out of the top part of it… he was wearing a black and gold 007 t-shirt. Then he pantomimed the traditional Bond opening sequence with a finger gun seen above. Normally I would think… this is Yoshi… he does all sorts of interesting things, this is pretty much the standard fare. However in Las Vegas the Dark Knight job that was eventually conformed in London… was first introduced with a Batman t-shirt. So this leaves us with what exactly is this job he is trying to tell us. Turns out there is in fact a job from one of the Tactics series games called “The Agent” that is apparently exclusive to that games “Cid” character. In fact the analogy pretty much fits Bond perfectly, considering the Agent is described essentially as a womanizing spy.

The Machinist

There however is a significant contingency that seems to believe that Yoshi might have already told us what the gun class would be. During an interview with MMORPG.com they asked him what his favorite class that is not currently in Final Fantasy XIV. He gave two specific answers, the first being Dark Knight which was confirmed in London. The second one he announced is the Machinist, specifically the version coming from Final Fantasy Tactics. This is traditionally a ranged attacker class, so it could very easily be this gun based class folks are assuming it would be. The version of this class that I am most familiar with is Edgar from Final Fantasy VI, and in that version he wields a wide variety of ranged contraptions, each of which giving him a different unique attack. Having not played much of the Tactics games, mostly because the game play style never really clicked with me… I am not sure exactly how this differs. It would be cool to have a traditional engineer type class, that fights using gadgets. Oddly enough the FFXI Puppet Master class is apparently considered a Machinist according to the wiki, and that is already a class that I would dig seeing in FFXIV.

The Chemist

Another possibility would be the Chemist, as it is one of the few traditional Final Fantasy “healer” jobs that exist but are not already in game. There is a precedent for being a gun class apparently. While I do not know which game this came from, the Wiki lists them as being able to equip guns in at least one game. Hoping that someone can fill in these details in the comments below as to which game they actually used guns. In any case even if this is not a gun glass I think it is a pretty strong candidate for a healer. They would present a unique healing style that isn’t already in the game, and could even do something similar to what they are doing with Ninjutsu to support the “mix” gameplay style from previous games. What if you had a series of commands that represented “ingredients” and then you had a mix command that you pressed afterwards. The combat effect would be based on which three ingredients you combined. Sure this would make for a strange healing style, but you could give them really strong heal over time capabilities to make up for and buffer the fiddly nature of mixing just the right potion in the heat of battle. I think this would be a really interesting game play style for someone looking for a class with an exceptionally high skill cap.

Blue Mage

One of the things that screams Final Fantasy to me is the more interesting classes. Every game has the holy trinity of Tank, Healer and Melee/Range DPS. Final Fantasy however has traditionally had some exceptionally nuanced classes that blur these lines. For me at least the king of the “odd” classes is the Blue Mage, in its various forms. This apparently is another class that there is at least some precedent for being a gun class, based on past games. However even if this never makes it in as a gun class… I still want the class in the game badly. In part because I know this would make a good friend of mine exceptionally happy… and we would likely never find it playing any other job. The Blue Mage game play style would be extremely difficult as compared to the traditional MMO tropes… but I feel like it would be something interesting to add in with a series of intricate quests similar to the “Egi” quests needed to learn the various “lore” spells. I could see getting pulled into a series of dungeon encounters to be able to learn things like “Doom” that are traditionally in their spell list. I could also see it playing out far more organically and you have to actually learn your spells through running dungeons and defeating encounters. In any case I think it would be an extremely interesting addition.

Berserker

Last bit of speculation this morning is one that seems like an absolute no brainer. In Final Fantasy V the Berserker had the ability to Equip Axes, which made them the almost natural choice for these weapons that most job could not use. As a DPS job, this makes them an ideal fit to be paired with the Marauder class and represent their DPS job, much the same way as Scholar and Summoner currently come from the Arcanist class. I have no clue if we will see this happen during the Heavensward expansion, but I think at some point each of the classes will end up getting a second job. It seems like a no brainer to make this happen, since most of the abilities in the marauder class could easily support the Berserker. The only question is how exactly would the game play work. I seriously doubt that they would try and replicate the weird glitchy “berserk” game play where the character just kind of goes off on its own making poor life decisions and getting the party killed. Instead I feel like it would be a traditional melee dps option, something they are of no shortage of currently. if nothing else I think this is a thing that is going to happen sooner or later, and I would welcoming having another class that uses all of the badass looking two handed axes.

Heavensward Job Speculation

Something to remember when reading this… everything but the Dark Knight is pure speculation. Yoshi-P is notoriously poor at keeping secrets, so I feel like he has already given us a bunch of information to figure out what sorts of classes and jobs we will see for the expansion. I also feel over the coming Live Letters he will start leaking more details, and hopefully between all of this we will start to be able to piece together what the final line-up is going to look like. I don’t think we will get much more confirmation however until the December 20-21 Tokyo Fan Fest. There are a ton of jobs that I would love to see in FFXIV. Mostly I feel like we have the strong core classes already in place, and would love for them to start adding in more of the trademarked Final Fantasy “quirk”. There are a ton of jobs that can be inspiration from decades of games, in any case I feel like we will have lots of interesting options this spring. Now I need to wrap this up and get to work… so I can rush home after work and play Patch 2.4.

New Kind of Creepy

October 27, 2014 by Belghast

Extra Life Hangover

Yesterday was a really strange day for me. In part I am simply not used to staying up as late as I ended up doing for my leg of the marathon. When it came time for me to get offline and got to sleep around 2:30 in the morning my time, I found that I couldn’t do it. I tossed and turned trying to calm back down enough to actually sleep. It might have been the monster I had about midnight, or it might have just been the adrenaline of having streamed, but in whatever case it took me until probably 3:30 to finally sleep. When I got back up around 9:30 that morning I was feeling groggy as hell, but also feeling like I should attempt to get up and around for the day. Everything about the day just felt “off”. By the time I got out of the house to get breakfast, they were out of sausage rolls.

I generally edit AggroChat Saturday night and upload it, so instead I had to do all of that yesterday morning. By the time I posted my blog post it was around 1:30 in the afternoon. I started laundry and attempted to chill out playing some Rift, but it seemed before I even turned around that it was time for Walking Dead, and ultimately bedtime. It felt like the day was going in fast forward, or I was stuck in slow motion one of the two. I cannot imagine how yesterday must have felt for the folks who actually did do the entire 25 hours themselves. I feel like I am extremely old at this point, because there was a time not too long ago that staying up til 3:30 in the morning would not have had this sort of massive negative effect. Hell there were many times while playing WoW that I did just this for one reason or another. All of this makes me all the more impressed for everyone who managed to complete the entire thing.

New Kind of Creepy

One of the things that Rift has excelled at over the years is introducing extremely creepy gameplay elements into the MMO genre. Sure Ct’hun was a giant eyeball with tentacles… but it never felt unsettling. So much of the things that you end up fighting against in Rift just feel wrong somehow. Storm Legion for example had all of these strange machinations that looked to be knitted out of mismatched piles of flesh. Even the agents of Crucia in their gleaming storm trooper armor… felt somehow unnatural. So when we move to the Nightmare Tide expansion you see this landscape that should be friendly. Full of pinks, blues and greens in all manner of pastel tones that should signal something relaxing… but trust me that just makes it all the more creepy. Especially as you hear these disembodied siren songs echo across the zone that remind you of the mermaids song from Harry Potter gone horribly wrong.

The storyline of this expansion once again involves multiple threats forcing their way into our world. One of the threats is familiar, the forces of Maelforge are draining the Plane of Water and invading it. As you wander around Goboro Reef you encounter their devastation as large sections of the realm are already dry, and you help the inhabitants deal with the consequences. This however is just the most obvious threat. There is an undercurrent of madness as well as you start to encounter the Akvan, nightmares taken shape and form. They follow the dark god Demogos who appears to be the embodiment of the nightmare. This expansion seems to be taking us past the bloodstorm and into something more sinister, making the players realize that the dragons were far from the worst threat we had to face.

Wandering with Style

The gameplay style seems to have improved greatly over Storm Legion. While they have still stayed far removed from the very quest hub based leveling of the first 50 levels, the replacement this time around feels far less grindy than it did in Storm Legion. All of the Carnage quests have been reduced in number it seems, so instead of having to kill 10 to 20 of a thing, we now only have to kill 4 to 8 to get completion. Right now my focus has not necessarily been on quest completion but on exploration. Goboro Reef is huge, and is full of little nooks and crannies where all sorts of interesting things are hidden. I went up into a fissure under water, that originally I thought might have just been a place where the terrain didn’t quite match. Instead I found that it was very much a purposeful gap, because at the end of it I found a treasure chest of sorts, in the form of a lost clutch.

I like that the zones allow me to wander about without feeling like I have to be focused on this thing or that thing. My focus right now is on getting as much Thalasite as I can, since I have so many tradeskills to level that all require large amounts of it. Thankfully it is fairly plentiful on the reef, but you often times have to leave the immediate clear path to find it. Often times you have to leave dry land and go swimming into the walls of water to snake your way up onto platforms where the ore sits. This is the process I am enjoying, the slower pace of discovery that makes this an enjoyable game to play while going through my most recent netflix binges. Yesterday I wandered around the zone while finishing up the second season of American Horror Story, and I found the whole experience enjoyable… both in the game and in the show.

Addicted to Minions

Part of what is making the piddling so damned enjoyable is the introduction of the Minions mini-game. In essence this works similar to Crew Missions in Star Trek or Crew Skills in Star Wars the Old Republic. You collect these cards, that represent creatures that you can then send out on missions. You start with a single mission slot available, but you can unlock additional slots through the spending of credits. As you can see here on the right hand side of the screen I currently have five minions going at the same time. Each mission takes a fixed amount of time, and costs a certain amount of stamina which is the number shown with the little lightning bolt like icon on the left side of the mission and minion cards. I am uncertain how fast stamina is recovered, but generally speaking I have been able to keep sending out minions while I play. When a mission is completed a little demon head icon appears in your notification pane, next to the time.

Right now I have encountered four basic kinds of missions. The first kind rewards some form of crafting material, and there are multiple flavors of these “Hunting” or “Harvesting” missions. Certain minions have icons on them relating to one of these skills, and if you match a minion with a mission card you have a better chance of success. Similarly there are Diplomacy missions that return items that give you notoriety with the various factions in the game. Some of the missions are searches for Artifacts, and I have had one of these reward as many as a dozen different artifacts from any manner of zones in the game. My personal favorite are the dimension missions, because they reward random dimension goodies, that can be anything from simple building blocks to actual dimension keys. There is another type that is called Assassination, but I have not actually encountered these, so not sure what exactly they reward.

So as I quest around and hunt for ore I keep sending my pack of critters out on missions, and every few minutes I get rewarded with all sorts of random goodies. One of the things about me is that I love RNG elements, especially ones that have a potentially awesome payout. I love sending out my retainers in FFXIV on ventures because of the random and interesting things they bring back. Minions are like this on steroids, because the payoff can be extreme. There are 1 minute, 5 minute, 15 minute, 8 hour and 10 hour missions that I have encountered so far. The 10 hour missions require that you either spend adventurine or credits as well as the normal minion stamina cost. Right now I don’t have a clue how to get adventurine other than the small amount that I have gotten from purchasing the expansion, or buying a minion starter kit. In any case this definitely fuels my “Faff” and gives every little bit of aimless wandering more purpose, because I am letting my minions go find goodies for me. I really hope the minion game ends up getting added to the mobile application.

#Rift #ExtraLife

Extra Life Results

October 26, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat #28 – Server Nightmares and Spycraft

Last night we recorded another episode of the AggroChat podcast, which is something that was a bit up in the air a few weeks back. Because of all of the excitement going on with Extra Life streams and Team Alliance of Awesome… I had wondered at one point if we should just skip the week. Thankfully we had plenty of stuff to talk about and the normal cast of characters were all in attendance. Last night we were joined by Ashgar, Kodra, Rae and Tam as we discuss all sorts of stuff going on. It was a weird lead up for me, since I was out and about all day long, and didn’t really have much time to catch up on the news until right before we started recording.

We talked about the latest round of FFXIV announcements coming out of the London Fanfest. Unfortunately the announcement that we got in Vegas of the Job information coming in London… was a bit of a tease. We also talk about what we are looking forward to Tuesday when the 2.4 patch lands. I talk about my experiences with Rift Nightmare Tide launch and the fairly catastrophic server rollback that caused me to loose essentially one entire days worth of playtime and a bunch of other stuff that came with that. Tam and Kodra talk about their experiences playing Civilization Beyond Earth as a co-operative team. Finally Rae fills us in on some of the craziness that is happening in the post season League. It seems like there is a ton of “horse trading” going on as players are swapping teams left and right.

Extra Life Results

I have to say I am really damned proud of Team Alliance of Awesome. We opted to do the 25 hour marathon relay style where each of us would pass the baton to the next leg of the stream. I personally chose to take the 11pm EST to 3am EST slot thinking I could just stay up after we record the podcast and push through it. I did however take a nap in preparation but I have to thank all of the folks that showed up during the middle of the night to cheer me on. You guys kept me awake and responsive. During that last hour after Pazz logged out of voice chat I got more than a tiny bit quiet. All told we had 9 total participants and as you can see from the image on the right side we raised $1728 for the Extra Life charity. So I want to thank everyone that participated by taking a leg of the stream, and everyone who tuned in to cheer us on. It was an awesome experience and I am hoping next year we can maybe even make it bigger somehow. I know as we neared go time folks came out of the woodwork wanting to participate but we had already assigned all of the slots.

One of the things that I thought was awesome was just how varied the group was in what all they streamed. Sure there were a few games that got duplicated but there was a ton of variety from Single Player to MMOs to even Classic Console games. There seemed to be a little bit for everyone. I know Ashgar even managed to completely beat the Kirby game he was playing during his stream, which is pretty awesome. I originally planned on playing The Secret World, Trove, FFXIV and Destiny… but I ended up mixing that up a bit. I started off rolling a brand new Illuminati character in The Secret World, but having not played in awhile I did not make it terribly far into the game before I hit the hour threshold where I had intended to swap games. After that I popped into FFXIV and threw myself at the Mercy of the Duty Roulette, healing an Ifrit and a Tam-Tara Deep Croft run. After another hour had passed I flipped over to Rift and spent the rest of the night working my way through Goboro Reef in the Nightmare Tide content. After two hours of play I managed to finally get back to roughly the same place I was before the server rollback the other day.

The folks I am immensely proud of though are the individuals who took it upon themselves to do the entire 25 hour stream. For me I found four hours late at night a challenge, but I know Braxwolf, Stargrace and Liore all took it upon themselves to do the entire stream. So seriously raise your hands and give all the folks that managed to complete the full 25 hour marathon a huge round of applause. This is an awesome cause and it was great to actually be part of it this year. Like I said before I am hoping to maybe do a better job of assigning slots and getting as many folks participating as we can next year around. For the most part I believe the covered all 25 hours of the marathon, and some streams ran a bit long but it was awesome to have multiple folks streaming at the same time. I really like the team construct in Hitbox, and I just wish Twitch would extend that functionality to mere mortals instead of having it walled up behind being a partner. I will never have the kind of numbers needed to become a partner in any site… but it is awesome to still be able to have a team of friends streaming. You can watch my entire 4 1/2 hours of streaming in the embedded video above.

Valdis Story

This morning I am cheating a bit with my Steampowered Sunday game, in part because I started playing this last week. I have gotten in the habit of picking up almost every Humble Bundle package that comes out, because I know sooner or later I will want to play one of the games in it. Ashgar actually tipped me off to this game, because of the horribly long name I mostly ignored it when I noticed it in the bundle. However he thought I would definitely be interested in it as it is a Metroidvania of a sort. More so than a Metroidvania, it is very much a game in the feel of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night… and if you have been around my blog for very long you will recognize that as most likely my favorite game. I own copies on the PSP, Vita, PS3 and even still have my original Playstation disc around here even though I don’t actually have a functional PSX any longer.

You have a series of characters to choose but initially your only options are Wyatt a emo haired youth with a big sword (see cloud) or Reina a female monk that is labeled for “advanced” players. I of course went for the guy with the big sword… because slashing things with a big sword is fun. At some point I plan on going back through and trying out Reina, especially since during Wyatts play through of the game you encounter her early on… and she seems like a badass. The storyline of the game is a little odd. You are in a world where heaven and hell have both come to the material plain to duke it out for the surface. As one of the last remaining humans you seem to have the ability to use the attacks of either side. There is a lot of this that I don’t quite understand yet, but the devils are reddish hue and the angels tend to have blue color palettes.

The story doesn’t really matter much to me to be honest. Why I am playing this game is that mechanically it is really fun. You wander about and collect new abilities that open up new areas to explore just like the traditional Metroidvania style. For example one of the first abilities you get is a wall jump, allowing you to explore new areas and reach places that you haven’t been before. Today during my stream I managed to find a new ability that allowed me to erect a pillar of ice, allowing me to jump on it to reach areas I couldn’t before. If you are used to Metroidvanias none of this will seem out of the ordinary. There is a basic crafting system that allows you to upgrade your gear in towns, and that aspect actually reminds me a bit of Simon’s Quest the second Castlevania game.

This is the sort of game that you either really like Metroidvania games or you dislike them. You can check out my entire stream from this morning above. I play the area between two towns and end up fighting two bosses… both of which I barely made it through. The boss fights are fairly tough in part because often times the environment conspires against you. The first boss I made it through I literally have no clue quite how I did it. In part I feel like I just lucked into that one. The second boss was difficult because the floor was icy, and the wind would blow you to the side making it super hard to stay on the platforms and time the jumps to avoid the ice beams. In any case it is worth a look. The game is pretty much $15 wherever you go for it and available DRM free through the developer or on Steam. Good game, and I play on playing it some more… I just wish I had it on the Vita to be honest. This seems like the perfect type of game to play before falling asleep.