Graveoarthgames – Graveoath Games

First 30: Persona 5

my review for the video game persona 5

On paper, I shouldn’t like this game. You spend the year in a life of a Japanese high school student, managing everything from their academics, controlling their social life, getting a weekend/nighttime job for some extra cash, and of course fighting demons who occupy the shadow-filled metaverse. All of this sounds like it would lead to an uninteresting Sims rip-off mixed with battle mechanics from yesteryear.

For some background, this J-RPG from Atlus Studios was something of a breath of fresh air for me personally. I love RPG’s with a particular fondness of J-RPGs, but they often fall into a trope-heavy, cliche-ridden, fan-service vehicles. Now while this game has the things you would expect, an anthropomorphized cat-person, over-sexualized girls, and of course a transplant high school student due to circumstances out of their control. The difference being Persona 5 has incredible heart. I never played any of the previously released Persona games, and I couldn’t believe how much I LOVED this game. It’s easy to forgive the use of cliches when you spend so much time with these characters and the incredible story.

The characters get us into the strength of the game, it’s writing. There are compelling positions taken in this title. Mixed with great social commentary weaved into the story as you progress dungeon to dungeon. I’ve never played a game and as I’m going through it wishing I could have a conversation with its writer. The direction the game goes and the way they get there is incredibly unique, and maybe this applies to all of the Persona games. But the ideas that they choose to cover a range from abuse of power of a teacher, big fish in a little pond, sexual abuse from an authority figure, and artistic honesty mixed with art and commerce. All of this is just in the first 30 hours of game play.

Speaking of game play, it is easy to miss the classic feel of a turn based RPG which this game executes with so much fun and flash and has just enough depth to keep you interested. The studio has mixed in elements of Pokemon with a capture mechanic of the monsters, with a strong elemental alignment of the character which for me means different party compositions will help in various settings.

Everyone keeps saying this game is 100 hours long, and I can’t wait to see what the next 70 brings.

First 30: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

This game is entirely too big. I played something like 8 hours just in the prologue. So instead of playing all the way through and wait then to write a full review, I’m going to break it up. So here we are my thoughts on the first 30ish hours of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

First thought, who is this? As a female character, I was unfamiliar with jumped around in the starting point of the game swinging a sword as Geralt of Rivia (the main character) teases her, or doesn’t it’s your choice about form or something. I was instantly lost. Now a little background, I played The Witcher 2 and beat it, thought it was a pretty great game, it had its faults but overall a very positive experience. So jumping into this title years down the road I expected to be somewhat confused, but mostly able to follow along, not the case.

The lore of the Witcher universe is dark, intense and in a Game of Thrones style overly complicated fantasy mess. I don’t mean that entirely negatively. Sometimes not holding the hands of the audience in these more narratively ambitious games allows the gamer to fall into the world. Running through the forest and coming into a clearing to see a small dragon eating something feels incredible. I was captivated by the surroundings in the game. It’s the games biggest draw. An elaborate world with every little corner to explore.

Let’s start with some basics; The combat is much more action based. The one button heavy attack, one button light attack, parry, and block combat is the flavor. At first, I thought maybe a bit shallow, but with the mix of signs this game’s version of magic (something I never used in the previous installment) the combat blended nicely and I haven’t felt bored or just smashing the light attack button.

This installment is much more wide open. Once through the introduction, you are met with an open world for you to explore something that I was somewhat surprised with as the previous game I played in the series has much more contained segments. This open world has hunts, side missions, more plot and more characters for you to learn about.

So far my biggest complaint about the whole game is the traveling system. The game has a host of fast travel spots you can use to move around quickly, but you have to be at a designated sign post to use it. Maybe this is just spoiled me with Bethesda games fast travel systems but its pretty annoying. Secondly about travel, the horse. Getting on and off is a pain in the ass. Also maybe its because I’m using a controller but switching from galloping to trotting is a struggle and consistently changes if you bump into one little thing. With that being said when the horse works the feel of it is pretty amazing.

Some of you might be asking why so late on this game and the short answer. I knew a game like this would be better served for me if i waited until the full version and all the DLC was out. Lastly, this week at the risk of sounding like a prude can we stop with video game nudity. It feels cheesy. Human sexuality is a complex issue, but no one is into this right? I’ve seen enough digital body parts to last me the rest of the year, and I’m only 30 hours in.

Review: Factorio

As of writing, I have currently 45.5 hours of play time on the game Factorio, now usually with indie games, I have a burnout rate, and that hovers around 30 hours. At this point I usually make a deal with myself saying, hey I only paid 20 bucks for this game, I’ve gotten enough enjoyment out of it and stop playing it. But with this game, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with its potential.

Let’s start with some basics, The best way I can describe this game is as a Red Alert or RTS resource manager. Now that may seem a bit too pithy, but that’s just the bones of the game, the frame if you will. There is a single player campaign but one I didn’t touch other than to get the basics of the game. Where this game truly shines is the multiplayer servers. You and 500 of your closest friends can get together and figure out a way to turn iron ore, coal, and copper wire into electronic circuits.

Now I never played in a game that large, I just played with my one friend, and we managed to bumble our way through, all the way to launching a rocket into space and nuking the local aggressive insectoid population. The beauty of this game is the small things. An overused word in our group call was efficiency. I would be running over the transport belts we had laid just hours before and said, “this isn’t efficient” and proceed to change something to make the whole system run just that much smoother or mess up something my partner had set up deliberately to serve some function.

This game is a brilliant example of an experience that makes you want to go back and use the things you learned to make it better each time you play. For example, How do I get this component to the other side of the track so I can feed one line into the assembling machines? And once you figure it out, you want to go back and change all the work you have done. Now, this example is an easy problem, and one that you solve very quickly, but there are tons of these realizations that you come across that change the way you will play the game next time. Not to mention this game has a great Wiki with tons of information, guides, and tutorials to help you out if you are stuck.

In short, it’s a great game; it’s affectionately known as crackorio. So play it and get lost in the fact that you can never make enough iron plates.

20170614115820_1 — This was an early build of the base we made. Turning all these raw materials into something we could use

Hello, Everyone

Greeting and thanks for visiting my site, just a little background on me. I am a senior at Washington State Vancouver getting a degree in integrated strategic communications. I started this blog as a place to put my thoughts on video games, movies and whatever else I feel like rambling about. The plan for me is about one blog post a week; this post could be a written piece but doesn’t have to be, I do have some ideas for some multimedia projects as well. Lastly, this is mostly for me, a way to strengthen my writing and a way for me to express some creativity.