Analogue: A Hate Story, Dark Souls

Already posted on the usual channels, but I'm always a fan of low-effort ways to mobilize people to make a difference in some form or another, so I'd like to point out https://votefwd.org/ as one of those.

Anyways, I've got a couple games to try and succinctly review.  I don't feel like writing a ton about any of these games so I will be reducing them to a number of bullet points, which will surely discredit all of the nuances as well as the great amount of effort that were put to build these games.  Please do not consider these to be proper critiques or reviews.

First off we've got Analogue: A Hate Story, a visual novel by Christine Love, who has also written several other visual novels.  Honestly, reading some of their descriptions, I wonder if I would like some of those better.  I honestly don't even know why I have this game, other than I heard of it a long time ago and decided to purchase it for some odd reason.  It must have been a =long= time ago.  This game was released in 2012.

- Overall this game for me was enjoyable but not "special" or particularly memorable.

- I didn't find the characters to be particularly interesting, but the writing itself was good.  I would say the main enjoyment I got out of reading this visual novel was getting to read the story unfold.

- The interface was a bit novel but at the same time "clunky", in that I would have honestly preferred to just read through all of the logs one by one as a straight document.  It didn't feel like the order in which I perused through the documents or showed them to the AIs was important at all.

- I feel like one of the strongest points of traditional visual novels (for me at least) is that it provides just enough imagery for you to have a strong mental image and association for each of the characters.  That's not the case in this game because most of the characters you read about aren't actually alive or seen (they're just in the historical log entries).  Combined with the fact that the names are foreign (and thus unfamiliar to me) and the fact that there is no real "intro" to each character, I found it confusing at times to remember who was who.  The provided family tree diagram was neat but I didn't personally find it helpful since there were several names which weren't on the tree (?).

- The story paints an interesting (and bleak) picture of the Joseon dynasty as well as what could be crudely called a "feminist" critique (though that is surely not the right word?) of the gender standards prevalent in that culture.  But I'm not really sure what the "message" here is supposed to be, besides to illustrate.

Ok, next up we've got Dark Souls, which we've finally finished going through (took some practice but once I was able to parry Gwyn a few times he went down pretty quickly).  Dark Souls is a bit of a cult classic and was critically acclaimed in its combat and level design.  Although it had some strange ideas and some really poor execution at points, there's no arguing that it inspired a lot of game designers to take note of the things it did well.

- Dark Souls I think really shines in the first half, and perhaps even the first quarter of the game.  Everything is new, you die a lot, and you've not really learned what it takes to beat enemies.

- In addition, the lore of the game....well, I wouldn't say it's fantastic, but it's certainly =intriguing=.  Some games try to really slap you over the head with their plot and lore -- Dark Souls is certainly not one of them.  Instead the developers try to leave small little breadcrumbs for people to pick up.  Each of the bosses and world areas in particular, has a very particular sense of design that leads you to really wonder why things are the way they are.  For many people, the answer to that question will remain unanswered after playing through the game, but the fact remains that you can tell there is =something= there, and that sense of "wonder" really comes through.

- On the flipside, the latter half of the game really drops off in its enjoyment.  Some of the environments aren't as well thought out, the boss encounters feel less novel, and so on and so forth.

- Two things really stand out about Dark Souls -- encountering a new type of enemy in a new type of environment, and encountering a new boss.  Dark Souls is a game that very heavily rewards knowledge and experience, and I think those first few encounters with an enemy or boss are really the interesting ones, where you try to figure out what sort of danger this new threat poses and how to best deal with it.

- Some of the boss designs =really= do well with this (though others do not).  Each boss tends to have a "gimmick" around it, but not necessarily an "I win" button.  The Taurus Demon, for example, can be attacked by jumping from above using a plunge, but this strategy also carries its own risk.  The Moonlight Butterfly was probably my favorite fight of the game, as it has some haunting music and can't even be hit with melee weapons until it draws close to drink nectar.  This boss was both themed very well and required a very different approach toward combat than normal.

- As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of quirks and awkward spots about Dark Souls where you can see it's....not exactly the smoothest and most refined experience.  Various confusing NPC dialogues, yes/no questions that can affect your material rewards in unexpected ways, and all of the weapon upgrade paths are pretty useless except for one (or MAYBE two).

- So yeah, in summary, I know I already said it before, but I really enjoyed the first half of DS.  But later on when you get into Lost Izalith, Tomb of Giants, etc, that sort of stuff, it starts losing its luster.  But the Undead Burg/Parish was great, New Londo Ruins is pretty cool, etc.  Figuring out those first few bosses was always a really cool experience, especially because the first time you come across them, they basically just stomp you completely, and then you need to slowly figure out how to deal with each of their attacks.  They're often a ton bigger than you too, which just adds to this feeling of "wow how the ^$#@ am I supposed to deal with that??"