Martintox Presents: Disorder Reviews
Rating System
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OFF VS. ONESHOT VS. LISA VS. UNDERTALE
Rating System
I have a new album and a new Disorder Reviews blog. I have recently recovered from a stroke, and I am now in serious debt.
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OFF VS. ONESHOT VS. LISA VS. UNDERTALE
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Excuse the digression, that was my stroke acting up. In the same way that mathematicians have organized bounties to encourage the solving of critical problems such as the relation between P and NP (the Millenium Prize Problems are but one example), video game developers have sought to resolve dilemmas that have eluded the medium since its birth. How do we properly render mirrors in real time? Are glitches a feature of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games? Does anyone genuinely like Dark Souls 2? Perhaps most importantly, is it possible to make an RPG with good turn-based combat? Ever since players had collectively realized that the Final Fantasy games have mediocre gameplay (maybe around the 7th installment or whatever number it is in Japan, XXV or some shit), indie devs have been hard at work on answering this last question. The results thus far have been less than fruitful, as their mission has gone from "making an RPG with good turn-based combat" to "making a good RPG with turn-based combat". Eventually, they must have gotten tired of this as well, as we have experienced a notable uptick in titles that place emphasis on self-aware game design, for better or worse (almost always worse, but you didn't hear it from me). To retrace this evolution in indie RPG design, I have decided to go over four notable games that span this transitory period where developers began to think it was a good idea to show through their work that they browse TV Tropes a lot.
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OFF (2008)
OFF (2008)
Anyone who's watched a film by Luc Besson knows that the French are ahead of everyone else in plenty of ways (source: me) -- cinema, fashion, colonizing Africa, and even video games. OFF is the brainchild of Mortis Ghost (real name Martin Georis), who realized quite in advance that there is pretty much no way to make RPG combat fun, and decided to pull a practical joke on his contemporaries by making battles a complete and utter formality. He didn't even bother to put in some sort of appropriate audio/visual feedback to make attacks anywhere near satisfying. Do you remember that scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex DeLarge, following the Ludovico treatment, tries to grab a woman's breasts only for his body to experience a thorough averse reaction to the prospect? This is what happens when you experience the combat in OFF. Not even Yoko Taro has gone that far to sabotage the quality of his own games (until Nier: Automata, old readers know what's the deal).
That being said, just about everything else is actually very good. The main point of interest is the setting, an abstract collection of ominous pseudo-cities with featureless, brutalist architecture. Being born in France myself, this brings me right back to the many times I went to Paris as a kid; Ghost really captured the vibe of the city to a T with this. Also notable is the dark ambient/hip hop/industrial/swing soundtrack, courtesy of Alias Conrad Coldwood -- Ghost had enough humility to realize he's not a renaissance man like Austin Jorgensen, so he got a patrician composer to do the music for him instead. These two elements work tightly in tandem with the story to provide a bleak experience that will trouble you in a good way, contrasting with the combat that will do the same thing in a bad way. I highly recommend that you play this game, so I won't drop any major spoilers, but I feel the need to address its economic use of meta writing -- so economic, in fact, that it only becomes a component of the story at the very end, and at that point you'll either be so engrossed by the story or so repulsed by the combat that you'll be fine with anything.
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ONESHOT (2014, 2016)
ONESHOT (2014, 2016)
Do you remember all those "revolutionary" flash games on Newgrounds where you only had one chance to play, and after that it was game over for good (until you deleted your cache)? Have you ever wanted to play a permutation of this idea that didn't suck? Boy oh boy, do I have the game for you: OneShot is the story of Niko, a child/cat hybrid of unspecified sex (depending on which sex/gender you actively attribute to this character, you will be put on a different sex offender list, so choose carefully) that must bring a giant lightbulb to the center of a world that is soon to drown in darkness. Your average player will call this an exploration game with puzzle elements, but the enlightened know that this is secretly Tamagotchi: Dark Souls Edition. You don't simply control a character here: you, as the player, are the god of this world. Your main task is to guide Niko through, and much like Neuromancer threatening to have his hardened criminal friend from Florida come and bust my kneecaps if I don't deliver my reviews, the game makes sure you take responsibility. What's that? You want to close the game because you don't want to play any more of it at the moment? You seriously want to leave this feline child to stand there in the middle of an abandoned factory without even finding a bed? Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to grant you custody, Maria?
Needless to say, Eliza Velasquez and Casey Gu have done a splendid job integrating these meta elements into the game, because I do not feel at any point like they are insulting my intelligence -- yes, it does make me a bit uncomfortable to confront my inadequacies as a father, but that's not their fault. In addition, OneShot is more than appealing in its presentation: as nostalgic as I get exploring the harsh, minimalistic environments of OFF, the designs here are splendidly rich, and the music is no slouch either. The biggest compliment I can give, however, is that there's no combat. The devs clearly must have at least double digit IQ, because no other game in this article does that. For that reason alone, it's easily one of the best turn-based RPGs I have ever played. While I'm at it, I should mention that there are two versions of OneShot: a freeware release in 2014 and a paid version in 2016. The advantage of the latter is that there's more content, but the disadvantage is that it allows you to restart the game, which completely misses the point. Shouldn't it be called InfiniteShots, then?
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