El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

El Shaddai is an action-platformer for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It is based on Judeo-Christian myth. You play as Enoch and your mission is to track down and purify (kill) some fallen angels who came down to Earth.


Background
Enoch is featured in the book of Genesis and lived for 365 years before he was taken to heaven by God, being one of two humans noted in the Bible that never died. 


There are apocryphal works that indicate Enoch eventually ascended to archangel status, where he was known as the Metatron--"he is appointed guardian of all the celestial treasures, chief of the archangels, and the immediate attendant on God's throne." (wikipedia.org)


Plot (no spoilers)
Enoch eventually tracks them to a tower set amidst a distortion in space-time. This takes him several hundred years. (Although he is human in the game, he is immortal.) Within the tower are various floors, each ruled by a fallen angel and each its own little world. This is the backdrop in which the game takes place.


The plot is largely incoherent, but no worse than many other games--particularly the very "Japanese" ones. (e.g. Devil May Cry, Bayonetta) It somehow works in context, which is the most important thing. Just don't try to explain the entire story in a single go, your brain will commit seppuku rather than be exposed to that experience.  


Art and Soundtrack
This is where the game truly shines. The backgrounds are *gorgeous*. I don't mean just graphically, the art direction itself is astounding. It's obvious a lot of care and attention went into the artwork in the game. 


The soundtrack is also very good, and mesh with the artwork--it creates a synergistic effect that's very engrossing. Just looking at and listening to the game was very enjoyable--and that's not counting the gameplay itself.


However, similar care was not given to the character models for Enoch and his foes. While the art direction was still superb, the graphical implementation was not. They resemble upscaled PS2 characters--full of jagged edges, poor shading, and low-res. 


Unfortunately, the artwork was also intrusive--in action games and platformers both, the background can be pretty, but it must not interfere with the gaming experience. El Shaddai made the backgrounds so busy it became difficult to accurately gauge your position and the position of platforms you were meant to jump to in places.


Combat Basics
There are 3 weapons, with a Rock-Paper-Scissors dynamic. The weapon inflicts more damage to the type it's strong against.
1) Arch: a bladed weapon, it's fast and agile, and is strong against...
2) Veil: a pair of heavy gauntlets. Strong and slow, with strong defense. It's strong against...
3) Gale: a halo that generates and fires projectiles. 


It primarily uses one button for combat. By altering the pacing or combining it with RB or jumps, it makes a variety of moves possible.


1) Basic attack: Hit X. if you mash it, you'll get a combo of several consecutive strikes.
2) Heavy attack: Hold X then release. A strong but slow hit. 
3) Guard break: Hit X, then pause, then hit X. It is what it sounds like, to be used to pierce a guarding enemy's defense.
4) Special Attack: Hit X and RB. It varies by weapon.
5) Aerial attacks: Basic, Heavy, and Special attacks can be performed in the air, Guard breaks cannot. 


Combat 
The rock-paper-scissors mechanic applies to every enemy in the game--even the bosses are strong to one weapon and weak to another. Sometimes this will change mid battle, several times. This adds an element of strategy when fighting groups of foes--you can stun and steal weapons from enemies so defeating them in the proper order is critical. Sometimes it's necessary to continually adapt your weapon and tactics during the course of the fight. This makes combat dynamic and enjoyable. 


Unfortunately, this only true when you have access to all three weapons. In the beginning of the game, you only have access to the Arch. The dueling mechanic on its own is average and you only fight enemies with Arches in the first couple chapters. This makes for an extremely dull experience where you just hammer X until their overly large health pool is depleted. You can use heavy attacks or guard breaks, but there's no real point--it doesn't get them dead faster and serves no purpose unless you absolutely need to stagger or guard break a foe.


The situation doesn't improve noticeably when you get the gale. Then you can dispatch arch-wielding foes quickly, but still have to hammer away at gale-wielding foes.


It's not until the end of the 3rd or 4th chapter (out of 10.5) that you get the final weapon, and they don't explain the RPS mechanic until a chapter after that. So it's very easy to get stuck using a weapon that's weak vs a nameless enemy and having to pummel them for minutes until they finally fall over.


Once you have all three weapons, however, the game is really fun.


The game only uses one attack button, which is a stylistic choice. It's one I don't like, but I won't call it bad design. My issue is mostly using separate buttons can afford more fine-grained control, and they left Y, B, LT, and RT completely unused. Moving guard break to Y and Heavy attack to B would have actually enhanced the ability to generate combos, as it would be easier to perform them on demand. 


Combat _feels_ like it's all connected (and has a so-called flow) because you're varying the pacing of a single button. But much like the Wii's waggle controls, unless you really deeply integrate it into play, it's just another button. Steps 2 and 3 of Tap X, pause, Tap X are the functional equivalent of hitting a different button. It's not deep, it's just _different_. It just feels deep because you expect less from a single button. You're actually just pounding on enemies repeatedly--and they can take quite a few hits.


 You can vary the moves, but for the most part there's no merit to do so--and options for the sake of having options are meaningless. Choices are only meaningful if they have a context in which the choice must be made. There are cases like that in El Shaddai, but for the most part using different abilities is just doing it for the sake of doing something different. 


It shares Fable III's weakness of having a combat system relatively focused on 1v1 combat but mostly throwing one in 1v many combats. It makes many of the tools useless because giving a single foe that much attention invites reaming from his 4 buddies. 


 The fights varied from repetitive to highly original, and while I found myself irritated with fighting 
certain foes over and over, others were so inventive I couldn't help but forgive the game.


Nevertheless, the flaws fall away when you find yourself frenetically dashing into combat, stealing weapons, slashing foes as you jump over their head or rolling between their legs and giving a good punch in the butt.


Voice Acting
I generally hate English voice actors because many of them are talentless hacks, but the voice acting was quite good in El Shaddai and I left the English track on the whole way through. 


Platforming
El Shaddai had 2D and 3D platforming segments.


The 2D platforming segments were quite good--very solidly designed with a fair amount of variety. The 3D platforming segments were moderate to bad, however. The artsy backgrounds, inability to move the camera, peculiar camera angles, and invisible walls in the jump paths made it extremely difficult to gauge the position of yourself relative to the objects you were jumping for.


Overall
The art and sound alone are worth trying this game. While it has a handful of problems from a mechanical standpoint, they're minor irritations and easily overlooked for all of the things they did right. I would highly recommend this game and consider it a good game overall. 


8/10

Dragon Age 2: Plot (2 of 2) SPOILERS!

Dragon Age 2 is a stark contrast to the epic saga of Dragon Age: Origins.

Origins followed the saga of the last Grey Warden as he gathered an army to stop the darkspawn Blight. The story culminated with an epic battle against the Archdemon itself. While the story is formulaic, the implementation was top-notch. The overarching plot was epic in scope, and within that were 3 fleshed-out subplots where you had to win the allegiance of the factions which pledged their aid to the Grey Wardens during a darkspawn Blight. Add a large number of side-quests and some interesting companions, and you have DA:O.

DA2 eschewed the traditional fantasy epic to follow Hawke, a refugee, as he arrives in the city of Kirkwall and ascends to power over the course of a decade. The game focuses on a single city and the politics within that city, rather than the broad view of many factions and cultures that DA:O provided. This is not a bad thing! Not every person can be a world-saving hero, and I'd seriously worry for the world if it needed to be saved with great frequency. With proper implementation, a politically-focused tale can be just as compelling as the epic one.

The problem is, in fact, in the implementation. DA2's narrative is incoherent at best and the closest it comes to political intrigue is MAGE VS. TEMPLAR, PICK ONE!!! This perhaps wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't a blatant rip-off of one of DA:O's subplots. 

Compounding the problem is the fact that neither faction is really sympathetic. In DA:O, every time I chose between factions, I had to think about it. Both sides had valid points, and reasons for doing what they did. In DA2, my decision was only based on which one I hated more. Templars are Nazi bastards who happily lobotomize any mage that looks at them funny. Mages are irresponsible assholes who use blood magic and summon demons every time you turn your back. A disproportionate number of quests involve retrieving runaway mages and deciding what to do with them--which is supposed to link back to the tension between mages and templars, but just makes you hate all of them with an intensity equal to one hundred suns.

You spend a lot of the game without any clear direction. Act 1: Go on an expedition. Act 2: Put down an uprising. Act 3: Kill leader of a nazi state. None of these plots have anything to do with one another, and the last boss doesn't really even become your enemy until 30 minutes before the game ends. Each act would be suitable episodes for backstory DLC, but as the narrative for a game, they're unfocused, disconnected, and entirely inadequate.

DA2 is characterized by minutiae. You're given many choices throughout the game, but ultimately none of the choices mean much. You can choose to take mages back to the circle, or set them free--but either way you end up having to hunt them down in a future chapter after they fled and turned to blood magic. Even when you make choices at major plot points, you're really just reacting to events as they unfold rather than driving them forward. You're a killing machine that happens to be at the right place at the right time. And while your actions do have something of an effect on the world, the simplest way of measuring your influence would be to imagine what things would be like had you not been there.

Act 1: Well, no one gave a rat's ass about your expedition to begin with, so no change to the city at all.
Act 2: You put down the leader of the opposition. Of course, the leader of the templars and the leader of the mages were right fucking behind you and could have put him down had you not been there.
Act 3: Well, thanks to GAYMAGE WHO WILL NOT BE NAMED, the battle that took place would have occurred anyway--you just happen to be there to kill the eventual victor. That IS a change, but the fallout of the events would have happened regardless.

What was the fallout? Mages across the world rebelled against the Templars, plunging everything into chaos. This was told as sort of an afterthought in the epilogue.

I've read once that one key to good story telling is to start the story as late as possible. In this case, that little blurb where the mages rebel and the world falls into chaos? That would be an interesting plot! That's where a hero is really needed.

The story of the DA2? It could have been some blurb about how it all started. In fact, the protagonist wasn't even really all that important, but it would have made for an interesting (short) DLC about the history of the MageWar, or whatever they decide to call it.

Dragon Age 2: Mechanics (1 of 2)

Dragon Age 2 is an enjoyable, if deeply flawed, successor to Dragon Age: Origins. To paraphrase Ron Case (my brother-in-law) "Even if it's one of Bioware's weakest offerings, it's still much better than many other games out there." I whole-heartedly agree. I am personally torn between rating on its own merits and comparing it to its predecessor. As the game is part of a franchise, one most examine both aspects to give the game a balanced review.

As I have a lot of ground to cover, I'll review the mechanics and plot separately. I played DA:O and DA2 on Nightmare difficulty on the PC, so my review will be coming from that perspective. And when I say "review", I mean "list of things I found notable".

Platform: PC
Difficulty: Nightmare


Combat is faster paced--I'm not entirely sure how to quantify pacing in combat, but it certainly feels like things happen quickly. This is a good thing, although it barely affected my experience as I adhere to the pause-then-issue-orders play style. If I had to guess, the change in feel has to do with several factors:

• Movement is faster. In addiction to covering ground faster, melee characters have "dash" moves to close gaps. Less waiting on positioning.
• "Critter" tier enemies. They have 4 tiers of enemies in DA2--Critter, Normal, Lieutenant, and Boss. The critters are the bulk of most encounters and they have very little health. Even though they're essentially cannon-fodder, mowing through those poor bastards makes you feel like you're accomplishing a lot. 
• No Friendly Fire. This is true for every difficulty except Nightmare. This allows you to toss Area-of-Effect powers like there's no tomorrow, which in turn allows you to mow through enemies with alacrity.

Combat is less tactical--There is some debate whether DA2 is more or less tactical. I use the merriam-webster definition of tactics: "The science and art of disposing and maneuvering forces in combat." The game is "streamlined" to put it nicely. Dumbed-down would be the other way of saying it. 

• No Friendly Fire. This means the most effective method of play is to get your tank, round up as many enemies as possible, and drop fireballs (and other AoEs on his feet) until everything is dead. Friendly fire makes using your most powerful abilities a choice. Proper timing and placement of said abilities can make or break a battle. In this case, combat is reduced to rounding the mobs up and using AoEs on cooldown.
• Cross-class combos replaced combo spells. On one hand, it's great they broadened combos to include classes other than mages. On the other hand, combo spells offered countless tactical options, as they often created entirely new effects. Cross-class combos simply add more damage. While getting 10k damage on a target is giggle-worthy every time, it's not really an additional option--it's something you automatically do whenever you can. 
• Enemies come in waves. By far one of the most annoying features added to DA2. Enemies jump off rooftops, pour out of alleyways, climb out of the ground, or simply materialize out of thin air. This happens every single fight. Any advantage gained from skillful positioning or making use of terrain quickly evaporates as enemies materialize behind your front line and proceed to sodomize your mage. 

Classes are more balanced--I won't say they're balanced now, they aren't. But mages are no longer the powerhouses they were in the first game. I applaud Bioware for accomplishing this by increasing the power of other classes rather than nerfing mages, but in terms of raw damage output, mages can easily get left in the dust. The balance comes at the cost of flexibility. 

• Warriors: They cleave with every swing. Every single one of their attacks does splash or AoE damage, making them the undisputed AoE damage kings in DA2. There is an ability which doubles his damage for 10-15 secs with 20sec cooldown--when it comes to massive burst (independent of combo), it's pretty hard to top the warrior. 
• Rogues: Whether they dual wield or use archery, they're hands down the highest single target damage, especially when you take cross-class combos into account. They're no longer useful as scouts as they cannot stealth indefinitely, and their AoE is fairly poor on the whole. However, my highest crit was over 10k damage by a rogue--no one else ever came near that. 
• Mages: What mages bring to the table are healing, superior crowd control, and wide-range AoE. Unfortunately, they're fairly poor at single target damage, and the required specialization means that no mage will really excel at more than one of these aspects--they might get pretty good at two of them by the end of the game. 

Non-combat elements removed--I assume this is to simplify things. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it removes layers of customization and flavor from the game.

• Stealth is solely a combat mechanic. You can no longer prowl around perma-stealthed while scouting for the group. Stealth lasts seconds at most.
• Crafting is relegated to NPCs only. Effectively it's pretty similar--you order from NPCs the items you may have crafted from previous games. But reagents aren't used up, you don't really save money, and you don't customize characters by which crafts they know.
• Traps were completely removed. Admittedly a minor part of DA:O, stealthing around setting up traps with my rogue was a source of joy for me, especially as I alerted enemies to my presence and watched them stumble into my well-prepared gauntlet of doom.
• Most abilities cannot be used outside of combat at all. Generally not a big deal, most of them have no use outside of combat. But like the aforementioned stealth, it's rather sad to see it go.

Nightmare mode is an afterthought--The changes in nightmare mode, outside of a general increase in health, armor, and damage of enemies, are as follows: Friendly fire turned on, enemies gain elemental immunities.

• Abilities are not designed with friendly fire in mind. I mentioned earlier that all warrior abilities cleave. This means if I wanted my DPS warrior to use an ability, I had to pause the game, run my tank out of melee, and then allow him to use an ability. On top of that, warrior abilities have no targeting reticle so the area of effect is difficult to determine. I've 1 shot various party members more times than I care to count, simply because the area of effect was larger than the weapon arc drawn on the screen.
• Elemental immunities punish mages for no apparent reason. Mages are not a high damage class--they're surpassed by warriors and rogues for single target and AoE. When you consider a mage will have 1-2 elements available to them for much of the game, giving every single enemy invulnerability to an element means your mage's effectiveness will plummet on many encounters. This is especially bizarre when one considers there are no monsters immune to physical damage.
• Assassins steal your healing potions. On nightmare mode, you take enough damage that you MUST have a healer in group at all times. The healer alone is insufficient, and you MUST carry healing potions at all times. Considering Assassins can easily 1-shot or nearly 1-shot any character, allowing them to steal your limited healing potions (effective max 4 on nightmare) is adding insult to injury.

Camera is console-ified

• Camera is attached to the characters.  You can no longer slide the camera across the battlefield, panning around to get a good view of the terrain. You are anchored to a specific character, which can be a problem if you're trying to drop an AoE on the back of an enemy line. I've spent more time than I like wiggling the camera back and forth trying to get an angle to drop a fireball. 
• Camera lacks a top-down option. This is fairly annoying as a PC gamer, as the top-down view is ideal for a strategic view of the battlefield. The camera as it is is more of a 3rd person over the shoulder view, which isn't bad in and of itself, but I spent a lot of time staring at little red dots on the mini map to gain the knowledge I could have easily gained from a free-floating top-down camera.
• Targetting is console-ified. If you bring your cursor within an inch of a target, the target reticle immediately snaps to the center of that target. This is extremely annoying. I cannot stress this enough. While I'm sure it's very useful for console gamers, part of the PC experience is the ability to precisely place our cursors where ever we damn well please. When friendly fire is turned on, I need to be able to precisely place the center behind enemy lines so I don't flambee my meleers. Unfortunately, this "snapping" of the reticle prevents such precision, and I often couldn't use mage aoe due to the combination of camera drawbacks and friendly fire. 

Combat mechanics are largely unchanged--For the most part, the underlying mechanics of DA2 are fairly similar to DAO, and it's a pretty easy transition from one to the other. 

Talent Trees are simplified, sort of--Instead of making a linear series of talents you need to buy in a row, they broke down the talent trees into sort of circles, where you eventually want to buy everything in that tree--but you have flexibility as to the order you choose them. The simplification comes from the fact that each "half" of a tree would have been an independent tree in its own right in DAO--so every DA2 tree has a bit of a split personality. When you first buy abilities, you get a stripped down version of that ability--you have to spend further talent points to unlock the full potential of the ability. On one hand, that level of tweaking can be fun, but you end up having to spend 2-3 talents to buy the "true" version of a power, which ends up being sort of annoying.

Companions cannot use armor--They have their own armor, which never changes. You can get up to 4 upgrades throughout the course of the game, but this is by and large the extent you'll be able to customize them. This means you get piles and piles of interesting armor / weapons that go to waste because they can only be used by Hawke. 

Items are generic--Most of the items you find are generated diablo style, and only have a couple randomly generated properties on them. However, they don't do you the courtesy of labeling them according to their properties. Oh no. A "Ring" might be +4% fire damage or +6 health. And you find a LOT of "ring"s. 

Runes make the game stupidly easy--Customization via runes instead of armor seems like a good idea, if INCREDIBLY FUCKING BORING, but it may actually be a bit too much customization in the end. You don't need to craft a set of dragonscale armor to fight the high dragon--just load everyone up with runes of fire resistance and they're 90-95% fire resistant. Challenge for DA2 high dragon? Non existent.

Overall, Bioware went to a lot of trouble to streamline (dumb down) DA2 to appeal to the console market. They tried to make it more active, like Fable 3 or Oblivion and remove some of the more "clunky" non-combat elements. While they did preserve the core tactical play, it's deeply buried under a pile of changes which seem to say "Tactical RPers need not apply". 

DAO was called the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate by the CEO of Bioware. We didn't want another Fable 3 or Oblivion. Those games already fill the active hack and slash niche of video game roleplaying. We wanted another Baldurs Gate 2, or heck, another Dragon Age: Origins--there are no other games like them at the present. We liked the deep levels of customization, we liked being able to explore, and craft. DA2 is a good game, complaints aside. It's better than many games on the market. It just alienates the original DA audience to try to appeal to those who didn't care for the genre to begin with.

Fable III

I've been playing Fable 3 recently. As with previous iterations of the game, I don't know what to make of it. It's a game loaded with potential, but with a clunky implementation which makes it fall short of being something truly great. As it is, it's a fun game that doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's a fairly good implementation of a sandbox game--they have a fleshed out main story and impart a sufficient sense of urgency to keep you chugging along the primary plot line. At the same time, at any given time, you're typically provided access to a middling range of side-quests that you can take or ignore as you please.

Overall, I'd say there are 3 main issues that prevent the game from being great.

1) The game is stupidly easy. 

• They have an achievement for never getting knocked out. This is not hard. The only way you could fail to get this achievement is by being bad, through inattention, or lack of knowledge of game mechanics. This is in large part because...
• Potions are cheap and the only limitation to their use is the number you're carrying. You can also carry food that heals you. This pretty  much means you have infinite life. Of course, you don't really need them most of the time, as...
• You are invulnerable while dodging. This means you can spam dodges infinitely to avoid any big hit and you don't lose combat effectiveness because...
• Guns are overpowered. They do just as much damage as melee attacks, but they can't be blocked or dodged. You can fire from a decent range so you are at very low risk of taking significant damage. The only drawback is you have to reload every 4 or 5 shots. This is offset by the ability to dodge while reloading. As you probably needed to gain some distance anyway, this isn't really an issue. 

2) Combat options are not well-implemented. 

• Melee combat is clunky and pointless. Guarding and attacking was decently done, but the charged attacks, or "flourishes" are in practice clunky and difficult to use effectively. Switching between offense and defense effectively is a little awkward at best, and the fact that enemies dodge and parry would be nice, except you always engage foes in large groups. This means that any real duel-type action is impossible because you'll get reamed by your enemy's five buddies as soon as you try to do anything fancy. The only real reason to use melee attacks is because shooting a gun all the time gets dull.
• Guns are overpowered. I know I mentioned it before, but it can't be overstated. Unlike melee attacks, they can't be avoided in any way. They're done at range, so you don't have to worry about engaging groups and getting surrounded. (just roll away) You can defeat anything in the game by mashing Y until you need space or to reload, then you hit A for a little bit. 
• Magic is only effective if charged. When it is, it's frighteningly good--I beat the last boss with 4 or 5 spell casts, tops. However, enemies usually don't allow you the luxury of standing there, completely vulnerable, charging a spell. You're usually only going to get low power spells off--which wouldn't be bad except they don't increase in damage as quickly as weapons do. It's at best a niche attack for certain effects or for hitting a large group of weak enemies with an area attack. 

3) Choice in the game is illusory.

• Good and Evil makes almost no difference. There are certain cosmetic effects--you look pale and gothy if you're very good and dark if you're very evil, but by and large your decisions to be good or evil doesn't really change much in the world. There are a few big choices after you become king, but your actual morality almost never comes into play. You could make the "evil" choices as a ruler and still be "good" from a moral standpoint. The only thing most choices affect are the random comments people make when you pass by. 
• I actually remained perfectly good while marrying 7 women and then killing off 6 of them. No one said ANYTHING about it. I re-adopted the 6 children from those marriages and set them all up in a row of houses. 
• Money is mostly useless past the beginning of the game. You have no real expenses! Okay, you have potions, but those are cheap. The only other things to buy are cosmetic items, weapons (which you don't need because the game is easy!), and real estate. So of course you're a real-estate tycoon. Everyone is. What the hell else is there to do with your gold? And that naturally leads to an excess influx of gold because real estate is profitable. 
• Gold is actually the key component to "victory" in the game. But really, since all you can really do with it is buy more profit making land, you'll have no issue meeting the final quota, unless you haven't been paying attention. So even though Lionhead intends you to make tough decisions (welfare of people vs. their survival) it's really a non-issue due to unlimited funds. 
• Quests are repetitive. They basically fall into your MMO staples: Kill Quest, Escort Quest, Mail Quest. They're engaging after a fashion, but it's just a question of where and when. Some of the fluff is fairly amusing, but actually doing the quests is pretty boring. MMOs do it better, IMO.

So the game is easy, the combat is clunky, and the non-combat choices don't really matter. Its saving grace is despite its flaws, it's somehow still fun. It could have been a great game if they had implemented those aspects better. As it stands, it's a diverting time sink.