I ended March with some mild back pain that evolved into a monster that left me literally on my back for two weeks and counting. Back pain is a great teacher and economizer in that movement becomes a planned endeavor and none is wasted on frivolous things. Unfortunately this means my apartment is as dirty as it'll ever be, and getting down and doing back stretches last week had me seeing the gross underside of my electronics setup that is in DESPERATE NEED of cleaning. It makes the pain worse!
The PS5 had it's long-awaited firmware update that fixed almost all of my gripes: the friends/party system is easier to navigate, though Game Base still kinda sucks. You can hide titles you never want to play again from your library, like demos or dare-to-download titles that turned out to suck. My biggest worry was fixed in the disc spin-up doesn't go full blast every 30 minutes, even while playing other titles. That was concerning for the unnecessary wear-and-tear on a console that is extremely hard to repair and replace because of the supply chain issues. Even the DualSense got a controller firmware update! The controller charger icon now shows which quarter of battery you're closest to (instead of generic flashing), and rumble on PS4 titles is better. HDR is no longer forced, and it made me realize how much more colorful Overwatch is as a result. You can store your PS5 titles on external drives, which is great for data caps and people who struggle with the 667GB space limit. Lastly, you can now screen share between PS5 and PS4, so you can finally have backseat players or younger siblings voice chat with you and watch all your newest-generation endeavors. This feature is especially important with the PS5s still being hard to get!
As far as gaming goes, I've spent half of the month playing Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Ubisoft games tend to drop 30% below retail cost within a month of release. I think the extremely low supply of PS5s made games even harder to sell, so this title dropped below 50% of its original price only a few months after release. The last AC game I played was 10 titles and 2 console generations ago (AC 2 on PS3). Between the title's loss-of-value and the studio's perceived reluctance to innovate, I wasn't expecting much, but $30 for a AAA PS5 title is a damn good deal. I have been pleasantly surprised, with my saved game approaching 70 hours, at how much I'm enjoying ACV! The writing is good and the voice acting is better. The map has about 20 regions with a ~2 hour main story segment as your character Eivor builds loyalty with whoever runs that region. I chose the female version of Eivor and she's got this sexy husky voice performed by a Danish actress speaking UK English and her accent is just blissful to hear. The Assassin's Creed games are known for researching their locales and adding a bit more authenticity than you'd get from a Hollywood film. Around the game world, you hear NPCs chatting in Modern English when it's relevant, but in Old Norse in the background in Norway and Old English in England.
The AC games are also known for having a ridiculous amount of repetitive content in 100+ hour trophy paths. This game has 782 collectibles in various forms. While they all show up on the map, half of them are items that require some climbing or pushing around objects to access. Climbing and traversal are huge parts of AC, and that works fine. Other collectibles require special vantage points to see a pattern. I haven't run into any mechanical puzzles, though 25% of the collectibles are called Mysteries. These can be anything from a 30-sec conversation with a character to flyting, which is basically a rap battle where you insult each other as you rhyme. Other mysteries involve doing or finding what a character asks you for, and this is where I run into one complaint: the game doesn't acknowlege that a Mystery has started, and there's no way to explicitly reset it so that you hear the dialogue again. I had to look up a handful of them online by region and description to find out what to do. My least favorite collectible are flying tattoo designs. They're usually placed on rooftops and you have to chase after them, making sure not to fall off, and the reward is one of the game's 100+ tattoos. I personally just don't care about tattoos. I have one, but I just don't find other people's tattoos particularly interesting, and even less so in a game.
The surprise to me is that a game that explores themes of killing, death, violence and power, the combat suuuuuuuucks. All that item finding and there are only a few different weapon types and moves. A series about stealth and power and politics violently clashes with the fact that you're supposed to be a viking and vikings don't play that way. Ghost of Tsushima bakes the stealth vs face-to-face dynamic into the story, but AC just struggles with it out in the open without really confronting the fact that it doesn't work. So you get a LOT of you-vs-groups combat that's pretty lackluster in a game series that didn't reconfigure itself from stealth kills that the series is known for. That is, until you fight bosses in one-on-one. Final Fantasy XV's combat system was awesome against mobs, where your buddies are making quips and bantering while taking out their own targets. Then you get to all the one-on-one fights in the DLCs and the combat system rears its ugly head: the camera is too far away and moves awkwardly, and block/parry feels strange because the game was built for mob combat. I will die on this hill! ACV is the opposite. I've raided way more compounds and fought endless mobs with jerky, chunky combat. Eivor also doesn't have many crowd control abilities, and the stamina bar is something more suitable to a one-on-one game. Also, the ACV games are known for having tons of glitches and abysmally dumb AI, and these battle scenes make it stick out pretty badly.
The pathing is bad; characters will walk into things and get stuck; I had to reset twice for this. Their gestures will be all over the place or not match their dialogue. Sometimes in combat, you'll want to move and stick to climbable objects. These are all things that are impossible to quality control when the game has 1000 events. I think a grand total of zero people would complain if Ubisoft launched a 70-hours-to-completion game with better QC than their usual 100-hour games. Fenyx did exactly this and was great! All that said, the main story content and its many arcs and the voice acting are what keep me going. The variety for non-story is nice, though I would love not having to fish or chase tattoos.
I did an entire platinum trophy run for Guacamelee 2, which consists of beating the entire game on easy getting all upgrades and beating it again on hard and skipping some of the bigger pains in the ass. I was absolutely enamored with the first game just a few weeks ago, and the second game builds on everything the first game started. There are slight graphical improvements in the complexity of background textures, and the chicken form gets a lot more Pollo Powers, earned by completing Pollo dungeons. Guacamelee 2 has some really unique challenges, a handful of which had me swearing up a storm while attempting, and then hooting like a madman when completing.
The Guacamelee 2 soundtrack has some bangers in it. Badlands has a moment at 1:40 where it just kinda chills for a beat and it's a great piece of music. In the game, you get an ability to flip between World of the Living and World of the Dead on the fly, which also becomes a mechanic that you have to use mid-jump and mid-battle. Each track has two versions to reflect this, and usually the Dead-World version sounds more ethereal and has a different set of instruments. Infierno (Hell) is a sexy dance track that flips to the Dead-World version at 1:30.
The game still radiates a crapload of charm, using cutscenes and dialogue to tell jokes while also keeping Juan on the path to confront his main enemy, luchador Salvador. Salvador is from an alternate timeline where the original Juan loses the final battle in the first Guacamelee. He's a hero who picks up dead-Juan's luchador mask and saves the world. While the first game's timeline goes on with Juan and Lupita having a family, Salvador is corrupted in his timeline and ultimately chases power that leads him to cross timelines collecting relics to make...'the sacred guacamole,' which unites all timelines but ultimately can destroy them too. It's clear the writers are being flagrant about the MacGuffin and just calling this plot-spurring item whatever the hell they want to because it really doesn't matter. The game is fun as hell and all the parts are well done. The platforming is really dynamic and the puzzles can be extremely frustrating, but are also mercifully short. A lot of them are clever and you can just marvel at how many scenarios the developers made out of a few different mechanics.
I gotta close this out! I played other games this month, but the back injury put me down for so long and this post was so delayed in coming. See you next entry!
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